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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   34008 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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In 1994, Ukraine, Russia, the UK and the US signed the Budapest Memorandum. The short version is that Ukraine destroyed its Soviet nukes, and in return, the signatories pledged to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine and support actions in the Security Council if it should ever be threatened by nukes.

In 1994, this seemed like a good deal. The cold war was over, Ukraine likely did have more urgent spending priorities than a nuclear weapon program and the rest of the world, both the nuclear powers and the others were glad to keep the number of nuclear powers limited. Wars of conquest seemed a thing of the past. While the US engaged in some regime change operations (most of which turned out rather terrible, tbh), in the 1990s the idea to expand your territory through war seemed basically dead.

The rule-based world order was a higher, better equilibrium, just like most people would prefer to live in a country where weapons of war are controlled only by a small group of mostly decent people to living in some failed state where many people carry an assault weapon for the simple reason that many other people carry an assault weapon.

Putin's invasion made some serious cracks in that vision of a rule-based world order (which was always perceived to be strong in Europe), but Trump II basically broke it. Under Trump, the US can not be relied to punish defectors from the rule based system, and might not even relied to provide nuclear retaliation for nuclear attacks on NATO members.

The best time for Ukraine to restart their nuclear weapons program would have been when Russia defected from the Budapest Memorandum by annexing Crimea in 2014, before Russia was ready for a full scale invasion. I think it would have been technically feasible. An experienced Soviet nuclear weapons engineer who was 40 in 1990 would have been 64 in 2014. Ukraine also runs a lot of civilian nuclear reactor and has its own Uranium deposits (which would come in handy once they quit the NPT, because this might make acquiring fuel on the world market difficult). WP claims they even have enrichment plants.

In general, figuring out how to make nuclear weapons is something which took a good fraction of the world's geniuses in the 1940s, but has become much simpler since then. Getting an implosion device to work just right is something which would likely be helped a lot by high speed cameras and microelectronics, and a few decades of Moore's law likely makes a hell of a difference for simulations. Delivery systems might be a bit harder, but at the end of the day you don't need 100% reliability for deterrence to work. Even if your enemy is 50% confident that they can intercept the delivery, that still leaves the expected outcome of a nuclear exchange highly negative for them. Attacking a launch site -- conventionally or otherwise -- is forcing your enemy to either use or lose his nukes, and few think it wise to do so.

On a more personal note, I really hate nuclear weapons, and very much prefer the rule-based world order. I very much preferred the 2010s when Putin was mostly known for riding topless, as well as the odd murder of a journalist or dissident, the US was fine playing world police (which included some ill-advised military adventures, but also providing nuclear deterrence for NATO) and I was comfortably regarding nukes, NATO and large scale wars with the same distant horror I might have for medieval healthcare.

Even besides Ukraine, in the future Europe can not rely on the US for defense, and the UK and France arsenals might not be judged sufficient for deterrence, and some EU nuke might be called for. I am not sure how it would work. Classical EU commission manner, where 27 member states have to push the launch button and Orban can veto if he feels like it? Or give Mrs van-der-Leyen launch authority? Or simply have a common weapon program and distribute the spoils to 27 members?

Hard agreed on this. Nuclear weapons are a classic prisoner's dilemma, where it's better for nobody to have them, but if one side gets them then that's really really bad if the other side doesn't have them. It was America that underpinned most antiprolif efforts since the end of the Cold War, partially through providing its nuclear umbrella, and partially by strongarming those who thought of getting nukes themselves away from doing so. This has led to the dictatorships of the world playing defect-bot, where no democracies have gotten nukes since the 90s, but Russia and China have increased their stockpiles while North Korea has nukes now, and Iran isn't far behind. Russia's has effectively been using nuclear blackmail in Ukraine as well, breaking the previous norm of nukes giving a strong defense-only shield. Now, anyone with nukes apparently has more right than other nations to offensively invade their neighbors too

It's a sad fate, but Poland, Japan, and South Korea all need nukes now. If Taiwan and Ukraine had nukes, then it's likely they wouldn't face anywhere near the level of insecurity they do. They probably wouldn't be able to get them now since China/Russia would freak out.

I don't think it's clear that American foreign policy has been, in the long run, to reduce nuclear proliferation.

If I were a leader of a country contemplating a nuclear weapons program I'd look at the examples of Kim and Qadaffi.

America made a bunch of noises against North Korea acquiring nuclear weapons, and has imposed sanctions in response to its success. But in the end this appears to have secured North Korea against military intervention.

Contrast with Qadaffi, who on his own accord negotiated to end his WMD programs in consideration for normalizing diplomatic relations and lifting of sanctions. He was rewarded with what was a likely color revolution that resulted in a knife in his ass.

So do you want to be Kim or Qadaffi? The winning move seems to be to develop your nuclear program in secret, or under very heavy fortification, so that it can't be preemptively destroyed. Then once you have your nukes, the West will leave you alone.

The US certainly sparked some prolif itself with foreign policy (mostly Iraq + Afghanistan, Libya was more of a European-led conflict). But on net, the US has been the biggest leader of antiprolif by far. Very few middle powers had nukes under American unipolarity, but that's almost certainly going to change over the coming decades.

Russia and China have increased their stockpiles

I'm pretty sure the opposite actually happened, at least in the case of Russia.

I don't know what's happened to Russian nuke numbers in the short term (i.e. since Ukraine), but they've reneged on arms talks which indicates they'll almost certainly build a lot more once the war is over. So I guess I could have been technically incorrect when I was talking about Russia having increased stockpiles already, they've just signaled they want to in the medium-long term.

It was actually the US that withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2001 and the INF Treaty in 2019. Which arms talks are you referring to?

Russia is only decreasing theirs because their Cold War stockpiles were insanely large, something like 45,000 warheads. They still have 7000 in active service or available to be put into active service, giving them the largest stockpile on the planet. Russia has spent trillions of dollars in the last couple of decades modernizing their delivery systems, which I think is what @Botond173 is referring to. China has never actually had that many nuclear warheads, and they are working on increasing their stockpiles to give them more strategic flexibility.

Russia is only decreasing theirs because their Cold War stockpiles were insanely large

Didn't the same apply to the US as well though?

Yes, the United States is down to about 4000 warheads in active service compared to about 30,000 during the Cold War

The problem with Team America: World Police is that it requires America to be vastly more powerful than anyone else, forever. Not only is playing world police unpopular in large chunks of America, but it's pretty unpopular with anyone who isn't in direct need of its protection because it requires that America stomp down any potential rivals.

  • The non-American western countries is well aware that the balance of power has shifted and that they are, at best, only nominal makers of the Rules. They resent being sidelined and are aware than American foreign policy is at least partly designed to make sure that none of them ever regain their former status as a Power.
  • Up-and-coming Powers like China are well aware that America will never willingly allow them to reach peer status unless America is absolutely sure they will be meek followers of the Rules as they stand. Which really just means submitting to American soft power instead of hard power.
  • All the little countries like American protection but don't have the power to help in any meaningful way.
  • The non-American western countries is well aware that the balance of power has shifted and that they are, at best, only nominal makers of the Rules. They resent being sidelined and are aware than American foreign policy is at least partly designed to make sure that none of them ever regain their former status as a Power.

Speaking as a (west) German here, the past eighty years under the hegemony of the US were by far the best we had in our history, anywhere in terms of peace and prosperity. Losing WW2 was the only good thing Hitler ever did for Germany. Anyone can see that large colonial empires have become a net negative. Sure, one requires resources such as rare earth elements for the tech stuff, but the real money is in building the tech, not in mining minerals.

I think that the other European former superpowers are mostly on the same page with us, there. "Hey, remember our glory days when we ruled a colonial empire and our men were always fighting in some war far away or even in Europe or dying of malaria so we could have cheap cotton and rum and tea?"

  • Up-and-coming Powers like China are well aware that America will never willingly allow them to reach peer status unless America is absolutely sure they will be meek followers of the Rules as they stand. Which really just means submitting to American soft power instead of hard power.

What exactly is the US doing to prevent China from becoming a peer power? The CHIPS act? Allying with other SE Asian countries to prevent China from invading? These seem strategies for delaying China becoming a peer power rather than preventing it, and don't seem very objectionable to me as far as side effects are concerned.

The strategies the US could employ to prevent them from becoming a peer power, such as invading or nuking them are thankfully far out of the Overton window (or at least were under Biden).

If your argument is that a unified German state, which has never existed before 1871, cannot be counted on to uphold peace and prosperity for her citizenry and European neighbours in the long term, what is your assessment of Berlin's current political line, namely that Germany should become the center of a new rearming European alliance which is decidedly anti-Russian and also freed from American influence? Because if my assumption is correct, you should be 100% against it.

I think that the idea of an Europe united under German military leadership has been tried and found wanting.

I also did not say that Germany can not be counted to uphold peace and prosperity for her citizenry, but merely pointed out the fact that the pax americana was better for the thriving of Western Europe (and large sways of Eastern Europe, after the fall of the Iron Curtain) than pretty much anything we had had before.

If the US is not willing to fill their role any more, then we should work with other European nations on a common defense strategy. Personally, I am not keen for us to become a de-facto leader in that role, though, and would much prefer an European army or the Brits or the French to lead this time. Their military forces have more combat experience than the Bundeswehr (though not as much as Ukraine).

I think that completely dissolving our military ties to the US would be premature until Trump invades Canada or Greenland (which I think unlikely), the US seems to have a knack for getting back on track even if you think this time they have finally gone completely off the rails. I am also deeply personally offended by Putin bringing large scale warfare back to Europe and forcing us to spend on defense. As Eisenhower pointed out, [e]very gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

While I am personally disgusted by nukes, I also recognize that their deterrence value is likely higher than that of conventional weapons. I have not done the math, but I think that the expected loss of QALYs from a nuclear defense strategy might be lower than that from a conventional defense strategy (because the former is more likely not to result in a war).

A conventional army, navy and air force require a ton of different weapon systems for all kind of circumstances, to deliver an appropriate tat for any tit the opponent might play. This is essential for offensive wars.

Think of some self defense enthusiast who knows multiple martial arts and techniques which widely vary in lethality, who could hold his own in a bar fight, a ring, a street fight or (possibly) a knife fight. I don't want to be that guy because I don't find fighting very purposeful. If I felt threatened, I would get a gun instead. This does not allow for a very nuanced response, but I don't really care too much to uphold bar fight culture. If you defect from the rules of civilization, I will not meet you at your chosen level of un-civilization. Instead, I will either tolerate your defection or escalate to the level where at least one of us will die.

Likewise, if you attack a country with conventional weapons, civilization is going to die. It does not matter to me much if it dies slowly in the trenches over the years as the QALY costs accumulate of if it dies in a few minutes of nuclear fire because my only tool is a big red button labeled "DEFECT". This branch of the decision tree is lost either way, the only thing it is fit now is to improve the prior probability of now counterfactual branches, so let's get it over with.

Germany should become the center of a new rearming European alliance

This is decidedly hard to credit though. Germany is, without hyperbole and measuring it by the standards of the US, France or Ukraine, militarily incompetent. Our military-industrial complex works mostly on the industry side, and that pretty much only because of the export market. The Bundeswehr is barely even a paper tiger and anything touched by the ministry of defence is a bottomless hole of graft.

The current rearmament rhetorics are driven by a political desire to capitalize on anti-Trump and pro-Ukraine sentiments, not by any desire to actually increase the ability of Germany or Europe to wage war. The politicians involved in this latest trend have no interest in, stomach for or indeed resources to spend on rearmament. To be sure they might shake loose a few billion euros in new debt to burn in the name of defence, but that'll be the end of it.

Most Germans still consider anything remotely military distasteful if not utterly immoral, and would rather sabotage rearmament than support it if ignoring the topic is no longer an option.

Germany cannot be relied on to handle defence; neither its own nor anybody elses.

The current rearmament rhetorics are driven by a political desire to capitalize on anti-Trump and pro-Ukraine sentiments, not by any desire to actually increase the ability of Germany or Europe to wage war.

So what if the Americans or the Ukrainians or the Russians call their bluff?

Americans and Ukrainians: We promise to shovel more money at the problem and maybe even do that, but without any determination to make a material difference.

Russians: We shrug and point at Poland. Their problem, if any. Russians are usually bluffing themselves.

cheap cotton and rum and tea

Sometimes I'm amused that many commodities that launched empires --- spices, tea, sugar --- are largely now available cheaply at my local grocery store. A box of tea bags is a couple bucks, and pepper is put out freely on restaurant tables. Sugar is abundant enough to cause health risks from excess!

Not the only things like this- Napoleon III gave his most important guests aluminum utensils while lesser ones had to be content with mere gold. Pineapples were so expensive in the 18th century that even quite wealthy people would rent them to display to guests. The modern world gives us such unimaginable affluence that going to all the effort of taking things when we could just buy them instead doesn’t seem worth it.

Losing WW2 was the only good thing Hitler ever did for Germany.

Its not clear how high the risks of communist takeover were without him, but that might count too.

Sure, one requires resources such as rare earth elements for the tech stuff, but the real money is in building the tech, not in mining minerals.

You dont need to mine them, but you do need to have control over your own supply. China, hardly known for environmentalism, invests significantly into solar, because having it increases your ability to tell both oil states and the global maritime power to suck it. I suspect this contributes to the US/Europe differences on green energy as well.

I think that the other European former superpowers are mostly on the same page with us, there.

Non. Absolument pas.

If anything, Germany's complacent servility towards the United States is viewed with deep incomprehension in Paris, because we have this delusion that the "Franco-German couple" has a unique relationship and every American fighter plane that the Germans buy is a personal slight to the French arms industry which reconfigured itself to avoid competing against the German one on small arms. Macron's constant saber rattling must be understood in that light.

With due respect, I don't think Germans understand how much of a loss in influence decolonization has been for the French and the English because you never really had a Colonial Empire to begin with.

And even saying that, France has never willingly given up any of it, it still tries to hang on to large parts of it through treaties and agreements and currency unions and other such artifice. We have silently continued to fight far away wars, which is how we managed to maintain a semi-decent military in the first place.

And you don't even mention the interest of the American people here, whom despite getting some benefits out of the arrangement (such as the ability to print infinity dollars for ressources) also get all the drawbacks of maintaining imperial hegemony (such as the need to print infinity dollars for ressources).

The International Rules Based Order was always fiction. It was code for “the West has several times as many soldiers, rockets, tanks, and navy vessels than you, and can kick your ass just by thinking about it. What’s changed generally is the global perception of that military might.

We are much more causality adverse than we were. The D-Day invasion alone cost something like 5,000 men, and that was a single battle in a four year war effort. We wouldn’t tolerate such losses today. When 2,000 died over the course of a year in the occupation of Iraq, people in congress started calling for an end to the war. A large scale war like WW2 would mean an Iraq war level of causalities twice a day.

And we are much much more adverse to “bad images on TV syndrome”. Show the leaders pictures of sad children, flattened buildings, or crying women, and we lose sight if the objective. It’s why the Hamas tactics were so effective. If you can hide among civilians, forcing your enemies to destroy civilians and houses, temples, and city streets, the west will take your side. Knowing this, you effectively can neutralize the enemy’s ability to defeat you by causing the BITV syndrome— they won’t fight if it means that people at home will be seeing women cry, because the civilians running the military won’t stand for it. So you either go in with small teams and hope you get lucky, or they win.

The International Rules Based Order was always fiction. It was code for “the West has several times as many soldiers, rockets, tanks, and navy vessels than you, and can kick your ass just by thinking about it. What’s changed generally is the global perception of that military might.

Even if that were true (and it could be argued) does it matter? The Pax Romana was clearly a matter of military domination no matter how the Emperors justified it, and it clearly led to practical benefits for as long as it lasted.

The American-led, rules-based liberal international order was a better deal either way.

And we are much much more adverse to “bad images on TV syndrome”. Show the leaders pictures of sad children, flattened buildings, or crying women, and we lose sight if the objective. It’s why the Hamas tactics were so effective.

Yes. It's actually lawless, contrary to what the supporters of this status quo claim. They are actively providing law-breakers an incentive to violate the actual laws of war because they don't want to feel mean.

This may apply elsewhere.

That said, some US wars were just stupid and that doesn't help. The sense of a lack of legitimacy doesn't make people want to jump into the meat grinder.

It matters because at some point, Western countries drank the kool-aid. They seem to actually believe that the rules themselves create the order, rather than understand that the rules exist as a fig leaf over what could be called an empire in some sense. But if the empire forgets that it is an empire it forgets that the perception matters. It forgets that it cannot maintain the order without imposing it. Furthermore, allowing people to get around the laws without consequences (and given the number of countries that have started recognizing Palestine after 10/7) it’s a tactic that lays bare the fiction. If you can get your way by causing civilians to die, and simply goad the people you don’t like into attacking you and you can force them to make “sad images on TV”, you get what you want.

The Pax Romana was clearly a matter of military domination no matter how the Emperors justified it, and it clearly led to practical benefits for as long as it lasted.

Many people who "benefited" from this domination felt otherwise at the time. The Jewish-Roman wars don't exactly paint the picture of consensual integration that you may get from late Gaul or the like.

You'd think Americans of all people would understand not wanting to be a province of a foreign empire, given their origins.

These plunderers of the world, after exhausting the land by their devastations, are rifling the ocean: stimulated by avarice, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor; unsatiated by the East and by the West: the only people who behold wealth and indigence with equal avidity. To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

The International Rules Based Order was always fiction

The phrase itself reminds me of a legal maxim "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; If you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table". It seems that blaming your opponents for violating Rules is at least a bit of a fall-back when realpolitik doesn't get your desired outcome --- say, being unwilling or unable to directly force your desired political outcome through kinetic or other means.

The International Rules Based Order was always fiction. It was code for “the West has several times as many soldiers, rockets, tanks, and navy vessels than you, and can kick your ass just by thinking about it. What’s changed generally is the global perception of that military might.

I'd push back slightly on this, because the IRBO/LIO was very much in force even during the Cold War, when the West absolutely didn't have total military dominance. The IRBO/LIO was more of a memetic package than a hegemonic post-WW2 settlement, and it was a pitch to to the developing world and even to a lesser extent the Communist bloc. Though its ideals very much came out of Anglo liberal ideals (e.g., rights of small countries), it was an appealing package for many countries around the world: strong norms against annexation and invasion, disputes to be settled in multilateral fora, freedom of navigation, and a suite of economic institutions like the IWT and World Bank. In an era of ideological competition with Communism, the IRBO was an important part of the West's brand.

The legitimacy of the IRBO/LIO was fatally undermined by the Kosovo War. What was left of it was then further undermined by the Libyan War. This damage cannot be undone at this point.

The rules-based international order was codified in the UN Charter and both sides broke it without consequence during the Cold War. I suppose it was in force inasmuch as you could accuse the other side credibly of breaking it, but it wasn't in force in the sense that it was respected in practice.

It really made sense after WWII when the US was 50% of the world's GDP, had fighter jets while most of the world was technologically barely in the 1800s and had nukes.

The US portion of global GDP and population has steadily been falling as the rest of the world has been catching up. China has greater industrial output than the US and are not a century behind the US in tech, in fact they are a head in certain fields. Other countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Saudi Arabia etc have developed at a far faster rate than the US. In 1950 the US was the sole supplier of many industrial goods, today the reliance on American products is reduced as there are alternative suppliers for most products.

Invading countries is substantially harder today than it was in the past. Britain could take a quarter of the world, no country could hold that much territory today. Defensive technology is simply too good. Even Houthi rebels have ballistic anti ship missiles.

The US won't be able to maintain its status as an exceptional unipolar hegemon in a world in which the US isn't as exceptional. The US might be more powerful than a specific country but isn't powerful enough to be everywhere at once. They simply can't enforce a world order globally. They can enforce it in a subset of the world but the US would be stretched thin trying to enforce it everywhere at once.

Defensive technology is simply too good. Even Houthi rebels have ballistic anti ship missiles.

I agree with your overall point but I think you have this mixed up slightly - the problem is not that defensive technology is too good but precisely the opposite. Anti-missile technology hasn't advanced to the same degree as missile technology, and there's now a significant advantage on the offensive side. There are only hypothetical defence systems against the newest round of hypersonics (which the US doesn't even have), and this is going to cause a major shift in wars - it means that incredibly expensive floating targets protected by sophisticated anti-missile systems can be taken down and defeated by far less expensive offensive technologies.

What makes this even worse for any nations who invested vast sums of money into expensive and now obsolete-against-peer-competitor technologies is that those expensive technologies now have political constituencies who will aggressively advocate for more money to be poured into them, preventing any kind of adaptation or shift until serious consequences have already shown up.

There are only hypothetical defence systems against the newest round of hypersonics (which the US doesn't even have)

I think this is a little overstated. All ICBMs are "hypersonic" but we've had defenses against them for decades. And I think you can [technically speaking] shoot down hypersonic glide vehicles (the newest and coolest thing) in the boost phase fairly easily, and probably in the terminal phase as well, and the US has pretty good methods for achieving this (basically, airborne radars that can guide Standard missiles from ships or planes to hit targets over the horizon).

There's also no reason to think that soft-kill systems wouldn't work on hypersonics that I can think of.

My point here isn't that hypersonics aren't pretty scary, but I think they degrade existing missile defenses rather than render them futile.

I think this is a little overstated. All ICBMs are "hypersonic" but we've had defenses against them for decades

That's why I said newest round of hypersonics. Yes, we have defences against the older version of the technology - but I don't think asking the Russians to only use the old missiles that we can intercept instead of the new ones we can't is going to work terribly well.

There's also no reason to think that soft-kill systems wouldn't work on hypersonics that I can think of.

Depends on the type of system to be quite honest. Maybe there's some classified technology that will do the job, but there's nothing publicly available to the best of my knowledge.

My point here isn't that hypersonics aren't pretty scary, but I think they degrade existing missile defenses rather than render them futile.

Existing missile defenses are also vulnerable to spoofing attacks and large numbers of decoy missiles - this is just another nail in the coffin.

Yes, we have defences against the older version of the technology

Here, here's the head of the US Missile Defense Agency saying that we can use the SM-6 (in production since 2013) against the new maneuvering hypersonics.

I don't think (and I think Admiral Hill would agree with me) that it's a comfortable capability, and the US is working on other tech to better handle the threat. But as I said, I think it's an overstatement to say there's zero defense against even the newest hypersonics.

Depends on the type of system to be quite honest. Maybe there's some classified technology that will do the job, but there's nothing publicly available to the best of my knowledge.

Well, if you're just trying to strike a land target, you can just use inertial or celestial navigation and it will likely work fairly well and you might not need to worry about soft-kill systems. But if you are trying to hit a ship or other maneuvering object (which is part of the attraction of hypersonics, they are fast), you usually use radar or IR/visual guidance, all of which can be soft-killed.

Here, here's the head of the US Missile Defense Agency saying that we can use the SM-6 (in production since 2013) against the new maneuvering hypersonics.

Posted on Feb 3, 2022

You mean against the OLD maneuvering hypersonics. There's two years and change between this announcement and the demonstration of the Oreshnik.

I don't think (and I think Admiral Hill would agree with me) that it's a comfortable capability, and the US is working on other tech to better handle the threat.

The SM6, to the best of my knowledge, was used to defend Israeli shipping efforts from the Houthi's rocket attacks, and the result is that Israel's most prominent port went bankrupt because the US was unable to deter the Houthis from blowing up and attacking shipping vessels. If it can't stop the Houthis I have significant doubts about its ability to stop the far more advanced Russians. I'm sure the US is working on other tech to better handle the threat, and I'm sure that one day the technology will be capable of stopping what the Russians can do right now. That's not going to be much use in a conflict that takes place before the US manages to catch up, and who knows how long that will take?

But if you are trying to hit a ship or other maneuvering object (which is part of the attraction of hypersonics, they are fast), you usually use radar or IR/visual guidance, all of which can be soft-killed.

I freely admit ignorance as to how a soft-kill system would work here, so I'll just take your word for it that they'd be able to stop some missiles - but I don't think they'll be able to stop enough missiles to make strikes with large enough numbers to get through uneconomical.

Oreshnik

Seems inferior to the Avengard in capabilities to me (lower reported top speed, right, and apparently not a maneuvering hypersonic glide vehicle but rather "just" a MIRV), do you think otherwise?

If it can't stop the Houthis

We've been discussing the technical capabilities of interception. My understanding is that the US Navy intercepted quite a few of the Houthis' rockets. I believe the Houthis' success over the US military is not in the technical realm but rather in the fact that they are using cheap weapons in great quantities. Similarly, the Russians are overwhelming Ukrainian air-defense right now using, basically, mass-produced flying lawnmowers. All of this has little bearing on the technical feasibility of an intercept (but is obviously extremely important when it comes to the question of how to economically wage a war.)

I freely admit ignorance as to how a soft-kill system would work here, so I'll just take your word for it that they'd be able to stop some missiles - but I don't think they'll be able to stop enough missiles to make strikes with large enough numbers to get through uneconomical.

Yes, soft-kill is interesting because it could fail entirely or it could work nearly 100% of the time. Against a radar-guided weapon you could jam it or you could use decoys and chaff that either mimic or mask the ship. Against a visual/IR weapon you could steam into a fogbank or, if no fogbank is available, you could attempt to blind the seekerhead with a laser weapon. These are deployed en masse on helicopters but I don't think onboard ships. I imagine the reason for this is because most anti-ship seekerheads are radar-guided, although some of the newer Western systems (like the LRASM and NSM) have visual/IR sensors.

It's anybody's guess how effective these systems are but it's hard to hit what you can't see.

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This is why the U.S. needs powerful allies. Japan, France, Britain, etc have the capacity to be major powers and have interests generally aligned with the U.S.

We are much more causality adverse than we were. The D-Day invasion alone cost something like 5,000 men, and that was a single battle in a four year war effort. We wouldn’t tolerate such losses today. When 2,000 died over the course of a year in the occupation of Iraq, people in congress started calling for an end to the war. A large scale war like WW2 would mean an Iraq war level of causalities twice a day.

It's not about casualty tolerance, it's about a sense of purpose. If the US managed to turn Iraq and Afghanistan into Israel-except-Muslim, not only would Americans take these, and many more casualties on the chin, it would quite likely kick off a holy crusade of liberalism.

Ukraine is not a member of NATO and is not entitled to the protection of the US nor is Europe entitled to dollars to do so. If an actual ally is attacked, article 5 it. If Europe wants to defend Ukraine and poke the most nuclear armed bear in the world, have at it. If Russia uses tactical nukes or glasses Kiev, let’s not pretend that at France or Germany would respond in kind, either. It would be suicide.

This is the most important point. You can't appeal to a "Rules-based order" by handwaving the rules, which explicitly do not guarantee Ukraine's territory against Russian perfidy.

To be fair, when people say "Rules Based International Order", they usually don't mean military alliances, but rather the idea that it's forbidden to change borders through war unless you get the UN's permission first.

Of course we have seen that this doesn't seem to apply to the US, so it's ultimately just finger wagging by the Western Bloc, but you can't really go for "it's legal for me to invade this country because you didn't formally ally with it" since within the framework you're not supposed to invade people in the first place.

Of course we have seen that this doesn't seem to apply to the US

When did the US ever try to change borders through war? The US engaged in a lot of regime change, but it wasn't the only one doing so (look at Russian interventions in Georgia and elsewhere).

Yugoslavia, clearly. Where the borders were changed so much that the country doesn't exist anymore and were imposed by a regional military alliance in the name of ideological principles. Claims that "human rights" override national sovereignty and international law don't seem to work when Russia makes them despite similar claims of trying to stop sectarian violence.

But there's been so many unsanctioned US offensive wars you can take your pick. I find Lybia to be one of the most egregious, but Irak is probably the most famous example of the US bucking the "rules based order" and going instead with the "coalition of the willing".

I am however going to point out that your argument here amounts to "it's okay when we do it".

Well yes, it is, because you got the bigger stick. And for no other reason.

Yugoslavia was an example of an intervention in a civil war, the ground troops involved were those of not-yet-a-NATO-member Croatia and Yugoslavia was already breaking up.

No word of this doesn't apply to Ukraine.

You can maybe squint and see Russia's Crimea adventure in 2014 as being somewhat similar to Yugoslavia, with having a simmering civil war and all. But their 2022 invasion was in no way similar since they went after the entire country, not just the parts that were in a civil conflict.

Plus there's the big difference that Russia was seeking to annex the land directly to itself in both cases. This might seem like goalpost-moving from my previous response, but it was more an issue of me not properly articulating in the first place.

When people talk about changing borders through war they are almost always talking about a country expanding its territory through war. Yugoslavia is not that. The rest of your examples don't even involve border changes of any kind.

When people talk about changing borders through war they are almost always talking about a country expanding its territory through war.

That is not what international law defines it as. Which is what we're talking about here. I invoked the phrase in a particular context.

I'm quite ready to talk about the real world and its spheres of influence. But that requires giving up the idea of a "rules based international order".

On what basis do you figure that Russia did not invade Ukraine in 2014 due to "not being ready", as opposed to still holding out hope that they could achieve their objectives for it (at the time, they openly angled for a reintegration of the DPR/LPR with the rest of Ukraine under a federal model that would give them a veto over any future attempts to realign Ukraine with EU/NATO and away from Russia) in a cheaper way? If that was the case, Ukraine rushing to go nuclear would have surely just expedited the invasion before Ukraine was ready to defend itself (per the European assessment), and moreover might even have resulted in much more limited Western support as the narrative work to make general populations accepting of proliferation had not been put in yet.

rule-based world order

Rather than using the propaganda term that has a flexible interpretation, could you explain what the specific type of world order you are wishing for is? Is it just the "US playing world police"/pax americana model, where major wars are only to be started with US approval (under threat of US support for the defender) and we have to trust that the US will mostly remain sensible enough to not approve of wars that create too much trouble for us Western forum-goers? As far as I'm concerned, that trust had been long eroded by the wave of terrorism splashing everywhere from their own Middle Eastern misadventures.

The best time for Ukraine to restart their nuclear weapons program would have been when Russia defected from the Budapest Memorandum by annexing Crimea

What would the Russian reaction to this be? Would Russia sit around idly while a neighbour with a hostile government nuclearizes? Or would they go in hard and pre-empt nuclearization? One of Zelensky's many bizarre pre-war diplomatic maneuvers was making strange threats about nuclearization. Big nuclear powers tend to get hysterical when hostile neighbours nuclearize or are nuclearized. See the Cuban Missile Crisis for example. The US was hours away from launching a disarming strike on Cuba, they were dropping dummy depth charges on Russian submarines.

Furthermore, the Ukraine war is if anything much less a war of conquest than our Middle East wars. Ukraine is full of Russians and Russian speakers. The commander of the Ukrainian army is Russian, Russian family, educated in Moscow. A significant number of the forces Russia has were drawn from Donetsk and Luhansk which were provinces of Ukraine. Many of the territories in question were part of Novorossiya: Catherine the Great founded Dnipropetrovsk, for instance. Both sides appeal to common historical concepts, calling each other Nazis. The majority of fighting is conventional, between uniformed soldiers.

In Iraq and Afghanistan there was a much clearer division between 'us' and 'them'. Nobody ever found any historical claim for the US to be involved in running Afghanistan or Iraq, such an idea is ludicrous. They're on the other side of the world! The wars were justified via broader universal liberal principles, the need to reshape the Middle East...

At no point was the commander of the Taliban American or British, it was a war between Muslim Afghans/Arabs vs secular European/Americans. There were some auxiliaries drawn from the locals but these proved to be extremely low-quality troops and caused considerable green-on-blue attacks. Western-trained auxiliaries usually disintegrated the moment they ran into any motivated local force (like the Taliban or ISIS) without Western backup. The local population was not really aligned with Western forces and much of the fighting was unconventional with guerrilla tactics and suicide bombings. There was a massive ideological clash in all respects, the forces of Islam vs the forces of secular liberal democracy.

If an alien race shows up and conquers the world, installing strange values like mandatory veganism and bestiality, that's a war of conquest. They can't say 'oh we're just installing a new regime not conquering anything!' when they have no legitimate claim to Earth and only a bunch of perverts and weirdoes collaborating for them.

My point is that we should not conclude that because Russia invaded Ukraine, they will also try and invade Poland or Sweden or Azerbaijan. Ukraine-Russia is a special case where there are a wide range of justifications for Russia beyond 'Russia must grow larger'. The naval base in Crimea, the Novorussia territories, laws regarding the Russian language, potential NATO expansion...

Nor should the rules-based order be held up as this golden age because there was no conquest. The 'rules-based order' directly led to the situation today. Putin has complained repeatedly about the invasion of Iraq, various unilateral actions from the West. China wasn't keen on it either. What were the rules of the rules based order, are they listed anywhere? If we lack the strength to enforce the 'only we can invade countries' equilibrium because we abused it (and failed to even reap any gains from abusing it), then it's time to abandon it and move on without any nostalgia. Rebuilding this equilibrium is not desirable! Lessons must sink in.

They weren't dropping dummy depth charges - they were dropping live ones, but refraining from dropping nuclear depth charges.

Russia invaded Ukraine, they will also try and invade Poland or Sweden or Azerbaijan.

They might, however, try to invade the Baltics, which seems to be the much more common claim.

The Baltics are full NATO members.

After Ukraine, 'full NATO member' is not enough by itself - which member makes all the difference. US would do nothing, Western Europe would do nothing, Poland wouldn't move without US moving first, and if we did, it would be a criminal mistake.

What are the gains from invading the Baltics relative to the risks? It doesn't make sense from Russia's perspective unless NATO dissolves. The botched handling of the Russia-Ukraine war seems to have done a lot of damage to NATO unity but NATO isn't totally broken right now.

Fears about the Baltics from Ukraine are rehashed domino syndrome that makes even less sense.

What are the gains from invading the Baltics relative to the risks?

There are two obvious benefits: Russian minorities (1/4 of Estonia and Latvia) and land bridge to Kaliningrad via Lithuania (Suwalki Gap) that can be also carved through Poland. Both would be cheered by Russian population. Now about the risks: if NATO replies in full force, Russia is screwed. If NATO is fractured (isolationist USA, indecisive Germany and France, token help from other countries), then invasion of the Baltics will be a piece of cake. The latter situation would permanently shatter NATO credibility which would be a huge Russia gain. Therefore, the likelihood of Russia invasion of the Baltics is inversely proportional to NATO cohesion.

Fears about the Baltics from Ukraine are rehashed domino syndrome that makes even less sense.

There is one aspect that is rarely discussed in this context that is extremely important. Currently, these countries face Russia alone (+ Belarus). If Russia conquers Ukraine, they will face Russia+Belarus+Ukraine. Russia will utilize strategic location, resources, industry, and population of Ukraine for further expansion.

Why were the Baltics even added to NATO? They seem more like a liability to the alliance than anything.

On the basic level, they applied, presented a path to have NATO-quality military, and after getting ready, whey were accepted unanimously by all other NATO members. On the more abstract level, peace in Europe leads to prosperity. On a deeper level, the only path for small countries to be protected from aggressive neighbors is to join an alliance or develop nuclear weapons. We are all better when they choose the former than the latter.

NATO isn't totally broken right now

NATO is, in fact, larger than it was at the start of the war.

And substantially less militarily equipped. Vast sums of arms and ammunition (and plenty of "trainers") were sent to Ukraine to be destroyed or sold on the black market. Sure, there are more nations in NATO, but the USA is making loud noises about leaving and the military investment just isn't there. NATO being larger doesn't even rise to the level of a refutation of RandomRanger's point - bigger is not always better.

I mean one of Russia's stated aims, halting NATO expansion at its borders, has resoundingly failed.

Those NATO arms also erased vast quantities of Russian invaders and their hardware, making Russia even less of a threat to NATO than they were before the war. I do agree with RandomRanger that Russia is unlikely to try invading the Baltics. Not because they don't want to, but because we and they now know they're completely incapable of such a feat.

Those NATO arms also erased vast quantities of Russian invaders and their hardware, making Russia even less of a threat to NATO than they were before the war.

It is generally agreed that the Russian army is stronger than it was before the war started. A lot of the corruption and dead weight was forcibly cleaned out by actual combat, and they've made multiple advances in weapon technology in the same timeframe. Their missile technology has advanced to the point that it is superior to NATO technology (there's no NATO equivalent to the Oreshnik) and their soldiers have substantially more experience on modern battlefields than NATO troops, and against NATO weaponry to boot. Even on the manufacturing side, they're producing substantially more shells and ammunition than NATO is, especially if you include all their other allies. If Russia wanted to invade and take over the entirety of Western Europe the only way to stop them would be nuclear. Have you seen the pathetic size and readiness of most NATO militaries?

Before we engage in fantasies of mighty Russian army reaching the English channel like the last three years never happened, how long would you estimate it would take them to reach Zaporizhzhia & Odessa, let alone Lviv?

The current situation is the equivalent of the entire US army being halted in Tijuana during an attempted invasion of Mexico (and indeed, having to fight the Mexicans in Arizona two years into the war).

All of Russia's "superpower" credentials are gone.

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I don't think a total invasion of Ukraine made a great deal of sense either. Nonetheless, I don't think it's necessarily likely Russia would simply invade the Baltics. More likely is that they would practice 'hybrid warfare', attacking pipelines and shipping, conducting political interference in Baltic countries and probing for weaknesses, positioning themselves to take advantage of any fracture in NATO's resolve as and when the time comes.

Russia's historical claims on Ukraine don't justify invasion. Territorial sovereignty isn't negated by shared cultural history. This principle has been foundational to post-WW2 order.

The Cuban Missile Crisis comparison falls apart because Ukraine wasn't pursuing offensive capabilities against Russia. NATO membership is defensive.

While Western interventions have questionable legality, Russia's annexation of territory represents a different category of violation. Iraq wasn't annexed, whatever other flaws that campaign had.

Ukraine in the '94 borders is an ahistorical construct. Much of the east was desert before Moscow's soldiers secured it and colonized it. Crimea was settled by slabé trading mortal enemies of Europe, and incorporated into Russia after a century of warfare.

Claiming Crimea and Novorussia has anything to do with the historical Ukraine is crazy. Both of these areas were transferred to Ukraine by Soviet politicians. These transfers directly lead to the Ukrainian civil war, as Russians in them had markedly different preferences compare to those in historical Ukraine lands.

It seems a lot less destabilizing if "I deserve this territory because our leader founded the cities" and "my nationality inhabits the place" is preferred to "I have this ideology and I want to spread it".

The former cedes Taipei to China. The latter cedes the world to China.

The former cedes Eastern Ukraine to Russia or accepts that it's vaguely contestable (Germany would have a similar claim on Kaliningrad for instance). The latter cedes the world to Russia, or as much as they can get their hands on.

We can't go around attacking random countries around the world for the most abstract, random reasons and then complain when other people do the same thing to their neighbours for much more reasonable causes. The territorial sovereignty of Afghanistan or Iraq or Libya (or Pakistan for that matter, the US freely bombs and sends special forces in there) is totally worthless. We wield arbitrary power over much of the world because we're rich and strong. But others are rich and strong, they can do the same thing as us.

Who made the rule that 'annexing territory is uniquely bad'? Where was it agreed that you can have a war to install a puppet government but not annex? Would it be OK if Putin just set up more puppet governments, more people's republics like Donetsk and Luhansk? No, obviously not. The exact same people were bitching before Russia annexed those people's republics and after, they'd just find different words.

"I deserve this territory because our leader founded the cities"

Ah, I see we have a new contender: "All cities named Alexandria rightfully belong to Greece except maybe the one in Virginia." Maybe the US should have handed Afghanistan and Iraq over to them.

ETA: Sarcasm, if unclear.

Macedonia, surely.

Alexander's birthplace is in modern Greece, but we've probably stumbled into two deep, opposing wells of nationalism: It's now "North Macedonia" which was IIRC a requirement to get Greece to agree to it's joining NATO.

And the EU, I believe.

It seems a lot less destabilizing if "I deserve this territory because our leader founded the cities" and "my nationality inhabits the place" is preferred to "I have this ideology and I want to spread it".

That's as may be, but it was destabilising enough to cause World War II, where Hitler's stated casus belli was precisely protecting the rights of ethnic Germans outside the internationally recognised borders of Germany.

You do not want to reopen all the historical grievances over European borders.

Who made the rule that 'annexing territory is uniquely bad'?

The victorious Allies at the end of WW2 (notionally including the USSR, although they partially ratted). At the time we made this rule, our armies and those of our client states controlled essentially the whole world except China (which was a failed state).

Where was it agreed that you can have a war to install a puppet government but not annex? Would it be OK if Putin just set up more puppet governments, more people's republics like Donetsk and Luhansk? No, obviously not.

The rules don't allow you to have a war to install a puppet government - although arguably they did allow you to have a war to reinstall a pre-existing puppet government that had been overthrown by its own people. The US invasion of Iraq was against the rules - this was not controversial at the time. The people claiming it was within the rules were lying about WMDs in order to protect Tony Blair's domestic position, but the key players in the Bush administration wanted to set a precedent that the rules no longer applied and the US could use its superior military power to do what it wanted.

The exact same people were bitching before Russia annexed those people's republics and after, they'd just find different words.

Russia has been establishing client states inside the internationally recognised borders of other countries since long before the Euromaiden and DPR/LPR. Transnistria was carved out of Moldova in 1990, Artsakh out of Azerbijan (by Armenia with Russian support, rather than Russia directly) in 1991, South Ossetia out of Georgia in 1992, and Abkhazia out of Georgia in 199. The 2008 Russo-Georgian war was triggered by a Georgian attempt to reconquer South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which is why "Who was the aggressor?" is a scissor.

If "We respect the currently-existing internationally recognised boundaries of sovereign states" is a foundational principle of the so-called rules-based international order (and it is - it is essential to the peace of Europe given the artificial nature of borders in eastern Europe) then Russia has been violating it since as soon as post-Soviet Russia was a functioning state.

That's as may be, but it was destabilising enough to cause World War II, where Hitler's stated casus belli was precisely protecting the rights of ethnic Germans outside the internationally recognised borders of Germany.

What was destabilising about it was that a Germany that did control all the majority german areas was too powerful for France and Britain. By that criterion, most any process of border drawing other than the Vienna congress will be "destablising" sometimes.

The primary cause of WW2, as opposed to a German-Polish or German-Soviet war. was British and French leaders being terminally stupid and lacking basic concepts of strategic thought such as 'do not start major wars without offensive capabilities' or 'make alliances with the strongest nearby powers before starting a war'. For some reason they believed that the borders they'd drawn up in 1919 at Versailles were sacred, precious, perfect creations that had to be defended at all costs. Nobody who lived in Eastern Europe liked those borders and they were nearly all later revised by Germany and then the Soviet Union. Poland was very happy to rip some land off Czechoslovakia, Ukraine did the same to Poland later on... It was a feeding frenzy.

The 'Czechoslovakians' didn't even like Czechoslovakia. The country broke up once Germany took the Sudetenland and it broke up again in the 1990s.

And as the cherry on top, European leaders have now totally dissolved the normal meaning of borders with mass migration. The population of London is something like 30% British! It's bizarre to go to so much effort defending Ukraine's borders when it is apparently impossible for the British government to prevent random people coming over the channel and living in their country.

The result of artificially creating and defending this weird equilibrium isn't that it stays perfect and static forever. It's that change happens suddenly and chaotically in a vast storm surge that smashes every bulwark and barrier established against it. WW2 is one example. No static system can survive a dynamic world.

armies and those of our client states controlled essentially the whole world except China (which was a failed state).

China was a victorious ally.

It was also a failed state and didn't control its territory - Chiang and Mao are fighting each other before the Japanese surrender.

You do not want to reopen all the historical grievances over European borders.

Why not?

Europe is the hospice of nations. There's not a single country there today not ruled by senile boomers and their senile preferences for dying in front of the idiot box.

You could reopen every single historical grievance and absolutely nothing would happen.

so the issue wasn't murdering a million Iraqis, wrecking the country for generations and level the countries infrastructure. The great crime would have been giving them two senators, social the protection provided by the US constitution? If anything the crime was not giving them some form of citizenship. The British empires had tiers of citizenship which granted colonials some basic rights and a basic status. Why aren't people in occupied parts of eastern Syria given any recognition by the US government?

Afghanistan was colonized for 20 years yet no Afghan had access to the US legal system or bill of rights. Veterans of a de facto US military can't get access to the VA.

Typically, when a state annexes some territory, they do not give full citizenship to the people they conquered. At best, the conquered are second class citizens, at worst they are driven off the land or outright murdered. Also, the states that tend to favor imperialistic expansion are often not the states that put a lot of stock on citizen rights. If Hitler had extended German citizenship to the French, that would have improved their situation somewhat, but not greatly. Being treated by the Nazis as they treated e.g. German socialists would not have been a great improvement.

Afghanistan was colonized for 20 years

If Afghanistan is an example of colonization, it is a non-central example.

Normally, colonizers extract resources from their colony, their motivations are fundamentally economic.

We could debate if that was the case for Iraq (which has oil), but the occupation of Afghanistan was a net loss for the US taxpayer. I am sure that some PMCs and military industrial companies made a killing, but for the US as a whole it was a very expensive misadventure, which is why Biden pulled out.

The British Empire allowed any colonial the right to move to the UK and even to vote in British elections (a right commonwealth citizens still have), but because travel was very expensive, there was no welfare state, and the condition of the domestic poor in the UK was very poor (by 1870ish perhaps somewhat better than for the Indian urban poor, but not enough to be a huge pull factor) very few made the move until after WW2, and those who did were usually rich aristocrats and some merchants and academics.

Today, the only result of granting the Afghans citizenship would have been that all of them moved to the US. The same thing can’t really work. The crime in Iraq, by the way, was siding with the Shias, something many intelligent analysts warned Cheney and Rumsfeld about. It was possible to purge the Baathists and yet maintain a minority-rule Sunni power structure (they tend to be more competent than Shiites in Iraq, certainly militarily) with some token Shiite representation, and that’s what should have been done. (Not that I supported that war, but if it had to happen…)

Today, the only result of granting the Afghans citizenship would have been that all of them moved to the US. The same thing can’t really work. The crime in Iraq, by the way, was siding with the Shias, something many intelligent analysts warned Cheney and Rumsfeld about. It was possible to purge the Baathists and yet maintain a minority-rule Sunni power structure (they tend to be more competent than Shiites in Iraq, certainly militarily) with some token Shiite representation, and that’s what should have been done. (Not that I supported that war, but if it had to happen…)

Siding with the Shia turned out to be necessary to create an Iraq that would not tolerate Al-Quaeda (or ISIS) operating in its territory. Baathism was living on borrowed time by 2001 (it was originally a product of the Cold War) and even if you could have found a more compliant Baathist strongman to replace Saddam, the US lacked the skills to do so. The only other Sunni-aligned political faction that was able and willing to violently suppress the Shia were the jihadis.

The fundamental strategic stupidity of the Iraq war was that there were three anti-American factions in the Middle East (Baathism, Salafi jihadism, and the Shia fundamentalism of Iran). But they weren't an Axis of Evil - they hated (and still hate) each other more than they hated America (but not as much as they hated Israel). Invading Iraq involved taking on all three simultaneously instead of defeating them in detail.

The idea that this would have been some great injustice towards the Iraqis and Afghans doesn't make sense. There is no moral superiority in not annexing territory and granting citizenship.

This principle has been foundational to post-WW2 order.

In this context, "justifications" work to some extent just by being restricted. It is in fact possible to have ambitions which are neither in line with international norms nor unlimited conquest, and thats what hes arguing.

While Western interventions have questionable legality, Russia's annexation of territory represents a different category of violation. Iraq wasn't annexed, whatever other flaws that campaign had.

Russian goals from here may be achieved by instating a puppet government in Ukraine that they support against enemies internal and external. I think this wouldnt make an important difference, and hasnt been raised as an option largely because everyone agrees with me. In fact, Russia only annexed the northern parts of their defacto 2014 conquest sometime into 2022 - which seems to me like they calculated better odds of keeping it from doing so at that point.

There is a difference between that and Iraq, which can be seen from how quickly the US let their client collapse again among other things, but Afghanistan seems like its getting there. Whats the difference between indefinite occupation and annexation, especially for a non-democratic state?

The Cuban Missile Crisis comparison falls apart because Ukraine wasn't pursuing offensive capabilities against Russia. NATO membership is defensive.

What was NATO defending when they attacked Serbia? I believe the answer that is usually given is "the Albanians of Kosovo", so it seems to be defensive only in a sense that includes non-state entities that are not part of NATO itself. This is a basically meaningless condition, which is moreover also met by Russia's "defensive" campaign in Ukraine.

Conversely, in what way was Cuba pursuing "offensive capabilities" against the US? I'll quote directly from the Wikipedia article:

In December 1959, under the Eisenhower administration and less than twelve months after the Cuban Revolution, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) developed a plan for paramilitary action against Cuba. The CIA recruited operatives on the island to carry out terrorism and sabotage, kill civilians, and cause economic damage.

(...)

In February 1962, the US launched an embargo against Cuba,[26] and Lansdale presented a 26-page, top-secret timetable for implementation of the overthrow of the Cuban government, mandating guerrilla operations to begin in August and September. "Open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime" was hoped by the planners to occur in the first two weeks of October.[15]

The terrorism campaign and the threat of invasion were crucial factors in the Soviet decision to place nuclear missiles on Cuba, and in the Cuban government's decision to accept.[31] The US government was aware at the time, as reported to the president in a National Intelligence Estimate, that the invasion threat was a key reason for Cuban acceptance of the missiles.

It's also worth taking into account that Clinton actually made suggestive noises to draw parallels between Kosovo (which NATO "defended") and Chechnya, and that NATO is deploying nuclear bombs and missile defense systems in countries that are as close to Russia as Cuba is to the US, but unlike Cuba during the crisis are not regularly being attacked by the respective adversary.

Underappreciated in the narratives about the Cuban missile crisis is, as I recall, that the Soviets only withdrew their missiles after the US pulled comparable missiles from Turkey.

I mean, if the aliens are here to have sex with us, then I'd be fine with a vegan diet. Are they attractive?

This is a crude metaphor for Americans supporting homosexuality around the globe(and notably, the U.S. occupational governments in Iraq and Afghanistan were not pro-gay), not for war rape(which, for all the US military’s faults, it did not do in those wars).

I think by "bestiality" I think RandomRanger meant the aliens genuinely have some inscrutable moral code that makes them want to force us to have sex with ordinary Earth animals, not with the aliens.

So nothing will change in the remote shepherding areas of the world.

More attractive than anything we can imagine. But their version of kink looks like Event Horizon and the Kama Sutra if it was written by the Dark Eldar.

There are many errors in the common retellings:

  • in 1990 Ukraine's declaration of sovereignty rejected nuclear weapons
  • in 1991 Ukraine signed away any rights to Soviet nuclear weapons
  • in 1992 Ukraine signed Start I pledging no proliferation etc.
  • Ukraine never had launch codes, command over the soldiers and equipment (the Russian and Ukrainian were still the same and working directly together under the CIS framework until perhaps 97) not that it had money to maintain it either

The Budapest Memorandum helped implement this, but contained no security guarantees just promises to vaguely help or not to attack.

I would argue that a security guarantee (e.g. NATO article 5) is also just a promise.

You are correct that the signatories are under no obligation to help Ukraine against an attacker (merely to call the Security Council if nukes are involved -- and a lot of good that would do). As you say, Russia rather explicitly promised not to attack Ukraine though:

  1. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

I'd also just add that the Budapest Memorandum was legally non-binding as per the US State Department.

Security guarantees are how we got WWII and likely how we will get WWIII. You basically outsource your decision making power to wage war to foreign states, that’s idiotic. Especially when the foreign state is (was) regarded as the most corrupt westernized state in the world (Ukraine).

I also wouldn’t support EU nuke program. It will lead to major proliferation of nuclear bombs when the EU inevitably breaks up; now all the random countries in that union get a few bombs each? Yikes…

Isn’t security guarantees also how we got WW1?

We got WWI because of warmongering from the great powers.

Nope. How we got WWI was that nobody bothered to stop the war. Blackadder nailed it on the head:

I think you mean it started when the Archduke of Austro-Hungary got shot. Private Baldrick: Nah, there was definitely an ostrich involved, sir. Captain Blackadder: Well, possibly. But the real reason for the whole thing was that it was too much effort not to have a war.

Kissinger's analysis of what went down in his Diplomacy is pretty good. Everybody was warmongering for no reason that aligned with their interests. The generals were drunk with new technologies, and the last deadly wars were either long ago (the US civil war) or far away (russio-japanese). i don't think that anyone realized how deadly the new war will be. And when the corpses piled up it was impossible to stop.

Also both Russia and Germany had recently (in the last few years before the conflict) been in unfortunate situations that made them look like they had sold out their Slavic and Austrio-Hungarian allies, respectively. So when 1914 came around both had to act a lot tougher to compensate for their recent failures, leading to Russia’s maximalist demands and Germany’s “blank check” to Austria-Hungary.

Also both Russia and Germany had recently (in the last few years before the conflict) been in unfortunate situations that made them look like they had sold out their Slavic and Austro-Hungarian allies, respectively.

I'm not sure what you're referring to here.

the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. Russia was humiliated when it was unable to to help its Slavic allies against the Turks, and Germany looked weak by providing only lukewarm support to Austria and preventing them from moving against Serbia.

either long ago (the US civil war) or far away (russio-japanese)

From the perspective of the Europeans making the decisions that led to WW1, the US civil war was further away than the Russo-Japanese war - losing the Russo-Japanese war had been a real threat to the regime in a European Great Power, which is the sort of thing that attracts attention.

I meant in the context of the carnage that the then modern technologies can inflict when in peer to peer conflict.

Ukraine and Russia both knew what a meatgrinder is when they decided to follow that course. The WWI powers didn't.

In practice, nuclear weapons have some tactical uses, but as a strategic weapon they have one use and one use only- forcing an enemy already defeated on the battlefield into harsher surrender terms than he would have otherwise agreed to without a costly invasion. They also have some value as a deterrent etc, but this is a standoff effect between peers. A world where Germany, Poland, Turkey, etc have nukes is a world not appreciably different from ours. The nuclear taboo would be developed regardless for the same reason great powers happily use land mines and cluster munitions but won't use chemical weapons.

I'd also like to point out that America's withdrawal from the world police role was in the cards already; China's economic strength finally gave us a peer competitor(which we hadn't had since some time in the late eighties), middle eastern fuckups gave middle powers a sandbox to play in, and the EU was always exploitably decentralized in a way which would make US hegemony fray. Like seriously Turkish ventures in Syria aren't because of the US abdicating its responsibility- rather the opposite.

In practice, nuclear weapons have some tactical uses, but as a strategic weapon they have one use and one use only- forcing an enemy already defeated on the battlefield into harsher surrender terms than he would have otherwise agreed to without a costly invasion.

You mean historically, i.e. Japan? Arguably, speeding along the surrender of Japan is just a footnote in how nuclear weapons have shaped the world since they were invented.

In general, nukes can not replace an invasion for any power which is concerned with its diplomatic standing. If GWB had threatened to nuke Kabul unless the Taliban surrendered, he would just have made either a fool or a mass murderer out of himself.

What nukes generally do is that they make your opponents much more reluctant to go to war with you. If your opponent has nukes, threatening their continued existence is off the table. (Of course, this is a game of chicken between the Nuclear Powers, "I will start WW3 unless the US/USSR surrenders and embraces communism/democracy" is unlikely to work. But it is an insurance against being wiped off the map the way Saddam's regime was.) This is why North Korea and Iran want them, and why Ukraine would likely have wanted them as well if they knew what was in store for them.

The fact that we had a cold war where both sides were trying to thwart each other while also tiptoeing around the other's red lines is a direct consequence of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons would be extremely useful on the battlefield. The only reason they aren’t used is because of the taboo, the threat of escalation, and squeamishness over civilian casualties. If nuclear weapons had been used in Korea, Vietnam or the present Ukraine conflict, those wars would have lasted between a day and three weeks.

It’s entirely possible that glassing China would have led to a U.S. victory in Korea. And since Ukraine is losing badly nuclear strikes could convince them to surrender(which they don’t want to do). But Vietnam?

Vietnam

Take my opinion with a fistful of salt, since I'm just going off of half-remembered documentaries (anyone else watched "The Ten Thousand Day War"?), but that seems a bit dependent on the details. I don't think the tactical use of nukes would have done America a ton of good here, unless they were willing and indeed physically capable of completely deforesting North Vietnam with them. Of course, if the use of nuclear weapons here also implies a generally greater and less compromising commitment up to a total war mindset, that might do the trick...militarily. But woe betide the US' foreign relations and civil peace then.

But I'm probably wrong. Someone tell me how using nuclear weapons would have allowed the US to win militarily in Vietnam, all else being equal to history.

I agree that nukes are not very useful in a jungle war. A credible commitment to nuke North Vietnamese cities if the Vietcong crossed some line (e.g. giving South Vietnam the control over the nukes) might have prevented the fall of Saigon, but would not have been enough to convince the VC to surrender.

I think you use the nuclear weapons, in this scenario, to cut the flow of foreign aid to the North Vietnamese by hitting their facilities and trade routes.

In practice, nuclear weapons have some tactical uses,

In practice, no one knows.

On both sides of iron curtain, thousands of books were written about tactics and strategy of nuclear warfare, but it is all, so far, only theory. It would not be surprising if real WWIII proves all of it as useful as was pre-1914 military science shown useful in WWI.

Maybe with the advent of high-quality cameras being at hand for every civilian and soldier, the reduction of the 'fog of war' would permit the use of tactical nuclear weapons insomuch is that it is clear that the target is military formations and not indiscriminately nuking enemy cities.

Still, probably the grimmest prospect imaginable.

And if you go to war again, who is it going to be against? Your "ability to fight a Two-ocean War" against who? Sweden and Togo? Who you sitting here to Go To War Against? That time has passed. It's passed. It's over. The war of the future is nuclear terrorism. It is and it will be against a small group of dissidents who, unbeknownst, perhaps, to their own governments, have blah blah blah.

It is interesting that even pre-9/11 but after 1991 a huge proportion of geopolitical and nuclear risk analysts / researchers considered it pretty much 100% inevitable that terrorists would get their hands on some lost Soviet nukes by 2000 at the latest.

Spooks at the time took the threat seriously and special groups, task forces and laws were setup to make sure that the Soviet Collapse didn't see the legit attempts by various terrorist organizations to get nuclear capabilities succeed.

But the whole idea of a ragtag group getting access to the ultimate weapon was so fascinating that basically any work of fiction relating to espionnage of the time features it from Rogue Spear to Metal Gear Solid to Wag the Dog.

I'm not sure what to make of the fact that it didn't happen. Did the spooks just do their job well or was the threat exaggerated? It's hard to know.

Also The Peacemaker and Sum Of All Fears.

I think the answer was ‘nukes are doable with 1940’s tech and state level resources, but you need to have the resources to remanufacture the bombs and terrorists don’t’.

It’s like the Y2K bug, there will forever be a controversy over whether the threat was overstated or if it was real and just avoided through the hard work of many. That said, I think it’s still a serious issue given that more and more rogue states are acquiring nuclear weapons and more states that have them are approaching political instability.

military formations

Give such warfare three days, and "formations" will cease to be identifiable as squaky clean targets no matter how many cameras are nearby. If the limiting factor on what you can do to the enemy is how many civilians they strap to their tanks or force to live in their camps...

In 1994, Ukraine, Russia, the UK and the US signed the Budapest Memorandum.

Important note that almost everyone who brings up the Budapest Memorandum always seems to forget (or even intentionally omit): it was never ratified by the US Senate. In the US, the constitution requires all treaties to be ratified by the senate. Without being ratified, any treaties are not legally binding and aren't good for much more than toilet paper.

This phenomenon also seems to happen in literally any discussion about the Paris Climate Accords.

The memorandum does not contain a provision to defend Ukraine against attackers, so the fact that the US did not ratify it would only matter if the US invaded Ukraine. And if they did, I would not be saying "oh, they did not ratify it, so they are a-ok" but rather accuse them of doing long term damage to states ability to coordinate and breaking international norms.

It doesn't matter whether it was binding or not because we haven't broken it in any case: in the Budapest Memorandum we promised not to invade Ukraine ourselves, and complain to the UN Security council if someone else did. That's it. We never promised to protect them, just to leave them alone.

It makes sense. A memorandum, by its own nature, does not need to be ratified, because it's never binding.

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