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Last week there was a conversation on here about a potential peace deal in Ukraine. I claimed that the peace deal seemed fake since if you knew the background on peace efforts, you'd know that both Putin and Zelenskyy were playing a goofy game trying to pin the other one as the one who "doesn't want peace" in the eyes of Trump to try to direct Trump's ire in the other direction.
We now have pretty good confirmation that no peace deal will be forthcoming in the near term. JD Vance has said that the war won't end anytime soon. This backs up further reporting following the mineral deal that Trump's team was looking for ways to compel Russia to come to the table, and didn't really find any options that they liked.
The bull case for a Trump-brokered peace deal was the idea that the US could use its power to demand that both sides come to the table, and if either side tried to walk away then the US could force them back. This worked halfway, as the US has a lot of leverage over Ukraine for things like intelligence gathering, air defense, and to some extent other military deliveries. Much of MAGA hates Zelenskyy personally, and Trump was more than willing to exercise that leverage when Zelenskyy snubbed him at the WH meeting. The problem was that the other half of the puzzle was missing. Some claimed that the US could threaten Russia by promising to "drown Ukraine in weapons" if Russia didn't come to terms. However, Trump has been unable or unwilling to do this, so we had the situation where Trump could compel one side quite effectively, but when the other side did something Trump didn't like all he could do was tweet "Vladimir, STOP".
Peace is good as a general rule, and it would have been good if Trump could have gotten a peace deal along the lines of "ceasefire at current lines of control, Ukrainian defense guaranteed by Europe" so it was worth a shot. But alas, it seems like the war will continue.
At this point I just feel horrified for the Ukrainians. They're stuck in a war they can't win, led by a "president" with no elections, and a universal draft that just keeps getting lower and lower in age. Their men are not allowed to leave the country since they're all property of the state. People talk about how this war is a pyrric victory for Russia, but I think the early success was also a pyrric victory for Ukraine, since it tricked them into thinking that if they just stay committed enough they'd be able to win. Now Zelensky and the generals feel like they can't possibly give up any land for peace, so they'll fight to the bitter end.
I guess the Soviets should have just let the Germans roll over them, then, as soon as they started surrendering by the hundreds of thousands. 20 million dead could have easily been avoided if they had just seen the writing on the wall and given up.
Should the South Vietnamese fought harder against the North Vietnamese? Should we have supported them longer and harder? How much longer and harder? Should we have maintained troop commitments?
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I don't think that would have resulted in fewer dead....
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