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It has been a while since we have had a Ukraine thread, and I thought this time it might be worth crossing the aisle from what is happening (our typical topic) to what we would prefer to see as an outcome – our oughts.
As Hume argued we can’t get from a stack of “is” statements to an ought, and that often leaves our ought assumptions being left implicit rather than discussed when we focus on what is happening day to day. I think one of the really interesting things about this conflict is that it reveals a lot of different ground level preferences and assumptions, and while the war itself is largely limited to Russia fighting in Europe’s eastern fringes it has serious worldwide geopolitical implications.
Imagine it is mid 2026 and you wake up to a final victory by one side or the other, say in the top 90% percentile plus of favourability, however you wish to define it.
For example, on one hand perhaps something like Russia breaks through the Ukrainian lines, takes all four oblasts that it claims (or even up to Lviv, if that’s your expectation), sanctions are rolled back and Russia has arguably gained from the war. NATO is shown to be divided, America is unwilling or unable to intervene in such conflicts and Russia has a clear sphere of influence where it has veto that is starting to put pressure on eastern members of NATO, if it wishes. Meanwhile for Ukraine, it might be Russia being forced back to prewar borders, maybe even Crimea is on the path to being returned conditional on lifting sanctions, on the road to the EU and with clear NATO security guarantees, whatever you want to add or take out for either as their ideal goals.
How would you feel in each of these scenarios: which one would you prefer and thinks leads to a better world on balance?
I’m certainly not saying either of these extremes are equally likely – or even likely at all. If you feel like I’m being unfair or trying to trap you just talk about one or the other for sure, but I think the exercise might show something interesting.
For me, I personally sympathize with the Ukrainians and think that their quality of life will be better should they win, but that’s only a small part of the picture for why I think the Ukrainian victory scenario is pretty much all upside, and the Russian one a serious blow to global flourishing. I worry about a world where wars of aggression are seen to be net positive, and if small countries look upon this and see that the past promises of allies aren’t worth nearly as much as they were expecting they may well scramble for nuclear weapons or launch arms races. Taiwan, South Korea and even Japan might be in this category, and South East Asia may well follow. Should China wish to act on Taiwan, it might both be emboldened by the US pulling back support/western sanctions being weak + transitory and see its window before nuclear weapons are in the picture closing, leading to further conflicts that could go very wrong.
However, many people outside of Russia hope for a Russian victory, and not only bots for sure. Some may simply be pro Russia in the sense of wanting Russia to do well as a terminal end in itself, but that is far from the central reason: a lot of the MAGA/Vance position seems to be something like hoping to get America out of forever wars by showing countries that they can’t use the US as backstop of treasure to unpin their security. A world where America won’t back them up or push them to do so leads to less money spent and be positive for America, either preserving its power for the key fights or stopping the need for it to get entangled abroad altogether, Russia clearly winning can be positive for those advocating this vision. Meanwhile, those who dislike the west itself or its efforts to project its liberal views worldwide might see NATO/the US being shown as unable to win proxy wars or being weaker/more divided than the alliance hopes is a good in itself. I also know some commenters here think that Ukraine was basically pushed into conflict and then left to die by the US establishment/deep state. Maybe a clear Russian victory would make others in future not fall for this and avoid all the pain of further invasions, those in the sphere of Russia and China will have to accept their sovereignty has more asterisks than others and this is clearly better as an equilibrium.
I’m really interested in what others have to say on this though, have I got the “pro” Russia position roughly right for example? Or have I missed something else fairly fundamental that someone wants to add to the ought framing?
I much prefer an ukrainian victory. The most likely scenario for that is simply that putin dies. I don't think his replacement will make anything resembling putin's demands for a ceasefire. I think his demands are literally insane and this isn't discussed enough.
Forget the ukrainians, the europeans, the americans, morality, who did the thing first, the day-to-day osint chatter, saint Olga, and everything else. Bird's eye view, long term. It's been years. Hundreds of thousands dead, economy cut off and re-tooled. Every month thousands more dead. The russians are fighting a war on the scale of world war I for ... some benefit most Russians, I'm sure, couldn't articulate.
You really have to discard the value of russian lives to almost nothing, and think you're in an existential war with the west, to continue this.
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You best start believing in a world of international anarchy and self-help, you're living in it.
The US went in on Iraq. The US and NATO went in on Serbia and Libya, the US seems to be moving on Venezuela any minute now. I don't mean this in a whataboutist 'it's not fair!!!' sense, I mean this in a descriptive sense, this is just what strong powers do. This is what they've always done. Russia and China are not uniquely peaceful countries with a deep-seated love of international law only for the big mean US to bully them into being aggressive. Russia has interests, America has interests, China has interests. No country can get such huge amounts of land, wealth and power peacefully.
They're biding their time, prioritizing, calculating, scheming, plotting, building up, saber-rattling and then drawing their swords for a fight. They don't necessarily want to fight, certainly not against strong opponents. But they will do so if they think that's their strongest strategy. The US likes fighting most because America's become accustomed to weak opposition since the end of the Cold War, China will be as or more aggressive if they find themselves almost unchallenged.
China and Russia aren't going to 'play by the rules' if some random bureaucrat in the EU or State Department gets to write the rules and introduce new ideas all the time like 'responsibility to protect' and then interpret the rules to his advantage. The rules are made up, they're a facade resting on top of a skewed balance of power. The 'rules' didn't even work during the Cold War when there was a vaguely objective system with each great power getting a veto in the UN security council. The UNSC did not stop fairly large wars between the power blocs then. A vague and unspecified, infinitely flexible 'rules based international order' certainly isn't going to now.
Wars of aggression are always going to be calculated according to the balance of power, risk and reward. Then some diplomats will produce evidence, justifications and rhetoric to show they're the good guys, the baddies started it, we're defending ourselves. That's just how the world is. The real danger is from the dud schools of international relations, the people who kept calling for spreading liberalism all around the world at the point of a JDAM. This behaviour has consequences, it makes the Western bloc more threatening. It makes other countries suspicious of our motives and intentions, it makes us look crazed or rabid and to some extent we are, fighting irrational conflicts for the sake of liberalism.
Or the people who said 'serious warfare is such a 20th century thing, let's do more damage to our military industry than all the chaos of post-Soviet Russia could inflict on Russia.' Joe Biden literally laughed at the prospect of Russia-China-Iran cooperation in the 1990s. John Kerry said regarding Ukraine "You just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests," he said it was 19th century behaviour. No, it's eternal behaviour. The US does it, everyone can and will do it. Only some in the US got pretty arrogant and lacked both self-awareness and awareness of the power-balance. Thus they made a bunch of strategic errors.
Ukraine is done for, regardless of whether they lose less or lose more the country is wrecked. The Ukrainian leadership did not perceive the gravity of the situation and operated under a world of vibes and ideology when they needed to be considering the balance of power. They just aren't going to be beating a bigger power with more men, materiel and nukes, when said power is determined to win. That doesn't happen in industrial warfare. If a great power truly wants to beat a secondary power, it will win. All moments of luck, all tactical excellence, all fleeting technological advantages are eventually erased by weight of numbers, weight of industrial output, weight of firepower.
If Korea and Japan wake up and think seriously about their situation and whether they need nukes, that's a good thing. The highway is no place for sleeping drivers, the world is no place for sleeping, or even drowsy, countries. Taiwan needs to think very carefully about their position. Can they fight China? They're an island totally reliant on external food and energy. If they fight China and China doesn't get knocked out of the war fast, Taiwan loses. There's nothing Taiwan can do to change this, they can't develop nukes now, it's too late. The US was the one who shut down the Taiwanese nuclear program (twice), they thought they knew better about Taiwanese security than Taiwan did. Same happened in Australia albeit less dramatically. Vibe-based nuclear non-proliferation would never work on the big powers, the US isn't going to disarm and nor is Russia. You can see this in the tragicomedic 'disarmament' aspect of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
If this seems unrealistic to you, trying to cancel aggressive war is the same kind of thing.
I don't think the core of what you have said is "wrong" and it aligns fine with my text you quoted - it's just a fair chunk of it is obviously true ground level cynicism and missing the higher level logic that actually makes things interesting.
Interstate anarchy is a baseline factor for all relations but it clearly waxes and wanes, pointing to it is not enough - for example the actual cost/benefit calculation of taking territory has moved sharply post industrialization (I actually think this random review of Vicky II is a fairly good overview of some of that in the context of a game's mechanics). My point is that should such wars be seen as more likely to be net positive for one party again we are going to end up with far more stupid expensive wars. WW1 for sure and WW2 in part happened because states (mainly but not just Germany) were assuming that their limited and focused wars could come out as solidly net positive, and led to utter ruin that they did not predict as their assumptions were totally off. That is my ought - it would be good for human flourishing if countries expected wars of aggression to not be net positive at the margin, maybe even for NATO/the US that would be a good lesson too. We ought to avoid making it more positive at the margin.
I also think there's a clear ought with the nuclear dynamics here, which is perhaps easy to miss at the level of "countries will always bully each other, nukes exist, and the tech isn't going away". Schelling was right and a non nuclear world seems impossible without a fundamentally different political reality, but that's the start point of the conversation, not the end. Proliferation fraying and breaking might be inevitable at the margin, but it's still bad for several reasons, and it would be a real failure of the US to prioritize its own selfish long term interests if it accidentally or knowingly creates a nuclear arms race across Asia and the Middle East. The arms control treaties in effect have reduced weapons totals massively, lowering the probability of an accidental launch and limiting the impact of a war should it occur. Conversely, any event that pushes countries to scramble for weapons at short notice creates bad dynamics, and ought to be avoided if possible.
We can chat about the ground level realities, and no "ought" chat in the end can avoid them, but I would be really interested in who you think "ought" to win, who would you prefer, based on what you have written above? Russia, because the liberal order needs to realize that other powers can have preferences and it can't always win?
Well to really achieve this, you need true world hegemony where one power is so strong that it can rule the world and prevent any shift in the balance of power. China's plan is to become so strong that they can trounce the US and allies directly. No amount of credibility or 'resolve' can compensate for outright weakness.
Alternately, widescale nuclear proliferation. The non-proliferation treaty is another example where the natural defensive tendencies of various powers have been suppressed by a world of vibes and theory. As the balance of power shifts, states are inevitably going to nuclearize and probably in a more dangerous and chaotic way than if the natural course of affairs developed.
I think people are too fixated on the status quo of the past 20 or 30 years, where the US could wreck weak countries at will while the strong countries were mostly independent inside their borders. It's not natural for only America to have a foreign policy, for American wars to be 'counter-terrorism' or 'police action' or 'pre-emptive strikes' while other people's wars are 'illegal invasions'. All great powers will have their own foreign policies, that's how it works. There is nothing that can be done to persuade China to accept an international system where they can't invade or install friendly govts where they like but the US can. China has armies and fleets, nukes and tech, they are made to be used.
I'm sympathetic to Russia taking Russian-majority parts of Ukraine in abstract but I also think this war is net-negative for Russia, Ukraine, Europe and the Western bloc. We in the West could've and should've resolved it before it happened by making credible promises about our intentions for Russia and Ukraine, by doing nothing with Ukraine, pretending it didn't exist rather than waving a red flag to a bull. In RAND reports from before the war they talk about ways to put pressure on Russia by arming and getting closer with Ukraine, you can sense that it's about point-scoring in Syria and Libya, imposing costs on Russia like they're a naughty schoolboy. We're not in school, there is no police to call and routinely attacking an
I don't think putting pressure on Russia is a good idea, it just pushes them closer to China. Russia can do all kinds of things to impose costs on us if they want.
We should've been wooing Russia away from China. What ought to have happened is that our statesmen should've displayed elementary diplomacy and grand strategy, stopped huffing vibes about Euro-Atlantic integration and the open-door policy, learnt to prioritize and delay gratification.
I don't see any good ending now, only bad and worse endings. The key lesson is to break out of the stultifying prison of vibes that we're still immersed in.
WW2 was as bad as it was due to a conflict between vibes-based and realist strategic thought. The UK and France decided to declare war on Germany in 1939 for the sake of Poland, who they had no plan or hope of defending but guaranteed anyway. It makes zero sense to do this. Hitler, quite reasonably, did not expect this insane behaviour. If Chaimberlain understood what he was doing, was prepared to prioritize and strategize, WW2 would've been a quick and easy victory. He could've made an alliance with Germany against Russia, then perhaps betrayed Germany. He could've allied with Russia against Germany, at the cost of Poland. He could've just done nothing, rearmed at home and waited for a better opportunity. He could've worked with Italy if it weren't for some idiot journalists revealing the partition plan for Ethiopia and wrecking the Stresa front (this was before Chaimberlain got into office tbf).
Anything would've been better than 'diplomacy so shit that Russia and Germany (who deeply hate eachother) ally against us' and 'military so weak we can't attack while Germany is conquering Poland' and 'declare war on Germany anyway.'
But Chaimberlain was entranced by vibes and bungled so badly the world's greatest empire was destroyed. And Poland was absolutely wrecked. Another massive failure for the vibes-based school of international relations, which they somehow repackage as proof that you need 'resolve' and not to 'appease'. No, countries need to think strategically and pick between a range of options based on the situation and their capabilities.
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I may be the rare example of a European who wants Russia to win, and even though I can't shake off the suspicion of having motivated thinking due to having Russian roots and family, my motivation is really that I think that this outcome would be better for the modal European, too. (Matter of fact, I have left Russia long ago and do not regret my loss of any ties to it.)
Bluntly speaking, the only way to ever get a ruling class to make concessions to their powerless subjects is for those subjects to be able to credibly threaten betraying the rulers for another. This is how Bismarck was forced to install one of the first systems of social security and workers' rights over his own ideological disgust (lest the workers become communist), the US mellowed out its capitalism and the USSR mellowed out its communism during the cold war (lest the populace sympathise too much with the other), and Europe got flooded with free American money and support (lest it too develop Russian sympathies), not too mention all the free shit China, Russia and the US throw at third world countries routinely to get them to vote in some way in the UN.
The 1990-2008 era was a tragedy for Europe as we got one thing after the other rammed down our throats (DMCA analogues, deregulating trade treaties...), even being forced to go to war for the US and eat the terrorist backlash, because what were we going to do, declare allegiance to the ghost of the Soviets? There's nowhere to defect to anymore!
I don't want this to continue, and for that, Russia and/or China being strong is necessary. (...and the two are unfortunately entangled) When each of them and the US fears nothing more than that we might fully side with the other, they will once again have to buy our loyalty.
(Unless you are a senator or SV millionaire, the same reasoning applies for Americans too. The threat of Soviet subversion is surely nontrivially part of why you were not forced to go die in Vietnam etc.)
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There are very few, if not zero, feasible victory scenarios for Russia that are net positive at this point
I do agree, but my set of "ought" assumptions and values means that is a very good to thing to me, while others seem to both assume that Russia has actually carried out a real geopolitical coup here, and that's a very good thing.
I certainly noticed I was confused, hence this post. Focusing in on the ought is part of that - there's some kind of halo effect where the is and the ought are pretty highly correlated, even where that seems not required, and I was curious about the opposing position.
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Samuel Huntington wrote in the mid-90's about Ukraine, Russia and the Crimea during the period where the recent status quo was negotiated. He was saying back then that the natural opposition of civilizational forces was going to result in the reabsorption of Ukraine into Russia, or else the amputation of the Crimea and the related areas which were heavily Russian ethnically. This is just another one of those colonial states that didn't get partitioned correctly when the empire pulled out.
This was always in the cards, as is the natural tendency for locally dominant military powers to seek to control/influence the countries that border them. The US has an interest in who is in charge of Canada and Mexico. If the government is objectionable (or impotent) enough, we send troops in.
None of this justifies Russia abrogating its treaty and invading their former colony. It reinforces the bad lessons we're teaching about nonproliferation. If Ukraine hadn't given up their nukes for a pinkie promise from the Russians and the US, they might have had more options. But we deal with the world as it is.
The best case scenario for Europe is that Ukraine and Russia hammer out an ugly peace, Trump takes the blame, Russia takes the eastern third of Ukraine, NATO pushes to the borders of Russia itself, completing the European wall and saddling Putin with a festering international relations problem about the annexed provinces. This is also IMO the most likely scenario.
This is a bad outcome for Ukraine and the US, but far from the worst. Ukraine will have to become a de-facto dictatorship and military speed bump for Russia's next try. Or it could just collapse internally and become a semi-failed state.
The real winner in the whole idiotic project is China, who isn't involved and is able to test all their new gadgets while getting Russian oil at pennies on the dollar and turning the Russian economy into a Chinese fief. The days when a rapproachment between the US and Russia could counterweight China in Asia are over, China has secured their only big land border with an indebted and politically isolated Russia.
Russia, to my mind, has won the most pyrrhic of victories. Yes, in a decade they've been able to detach a few provinces from a weak and hilariously corrupt Ukraine, provinces that were 75% Russian to start with. And in return, they're going to get Nato up on their borders, their natural resources are in hock to the Chinese, the Europeans are scared shitless and looking for someone to surrender to, and it's probably going to be Trump.
The US position is getting better in Europe and worse in asia/Africa. It is unlikely we can stop China from expanding their asian hegemony. But with this Ukraine gambit, a lighter version of the Iron Curtain will be re-established, this time not in central Germany, but right up to the Russian and Belorussian borders.
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I mean, personally, I want Russia to get a major victory soon so the war ends. I supported Ukraine in early 22, when it looked like Ukraine might be able to win. I think you're missing this large segment of the population that just wants the war to end and doesn't care about eastern european ethnic politics in your 'pro-Russian' steelman.
Out of interest does that mean you're indifferent to Russia and Ukraine winning, whichever is more likely, just that it is over?
I am essentially indifferent to who controls the Donbass, yes, although I have some sympathies for Galicians. Russia isn't going to conquer Galicia and even the Russians know that.
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As someone who was never really of the belief that the Ukraine could win - what evidence were you relying on for this belief? This is a sincere question, I've never heard anything that overcame my belief in the difference between population sizes, so I'm very curious why it felt winnable for Ukraine for you.
I remember when this sentiment was prevailing.I think it was mostly based on the recent memory of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, both of whom were willing to surrender (in effect) territories in exchange for (in effect) bribes. It was probably tempting to believe that some new version of them will step up and carry out a successful palace coup. People were also forgetting that an armed force that stumbles and bumbles may later actually learn and adapt. There was also wishful thinking that the Ukrainians will receive and learn to master Western wonder weapons that will sweep the orcs away.
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I still think Ukraine can "win" for given value - as in its resistance has led to a far better outcome for the country than unconditional capitulation in 2022, but these conversations are what we have been having here for years to little effect. We simply have to wait for the dust to settle to be sure, and then perhaps a decade or two. Dean's comment that won a quality contribution is probably the gold standard here.
Personally, the bit where Ukraine routed and broke 90% of the fighting power of the 1st Guards Tank Army in 22 was the evidence for me that these boys could fight and Russia was really fucking up hugely - I love the saying "Hard pounding this gentlemen, let us see who pounds the longest" in relation to this war but that day had other good quotes, such as: "The Guard retreats. Save yourself if you can!”. But now we're back stuck with "is" statements.
This makes sense to me - so it's not so much "Ukraine wins" as it is "Russia loses," which I can see.
TheMotte is super slow for me now, so I'll look at Dean's submission as soon as it finishes loading - thanks!
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The extremely poor performance of the Russian army for the first couple of months, basically.
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I am pro Russia for several reasons.
The fundamental debate regarding what the west is. The globalists want to see a gobalist, universalist empire. I want the west to focus on itself. We shouldn't be fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine or Venezuela. Even if these wars went well I don't want a global empire. They are inherently multicultural, require a police state and tie our fate to people we have nothing in common with. I support all groups fighting the globalists. The refugee and heroin flows from Afghanistan stopped when the globalists were physically kicked out of the country by the Afghan people. The Iraqis kicked the globalists out of most of their country as well. Hopefully people fighting for Keir Starmer and Macron get kicked out of Ukraine as well. These wars end up with us footing the bill while we get swamped with migrants. Then we need more government control to stop whatever evil cartoon character the media is trying to scare us with this time.
Being sucked into the west would wreck Ukraine. Their culture would get replaced by America ghetto culture, their cities would fill with migrants and they would get all the same cultural bagage that saddles the rest of Europe. I have visited Kiev and it was a beautiful city with minimal third world migration, few tattooed fat women with nose rings. The last thing they need is an EU/Soros cultural program.
It is bad enough that we northern Europeans have to be in the EU with Greeks and Romanians. Now we are going to add Ukraine into this mess? We are going to end up paying to be in a brutally corrupt and inefficient EU.
The Eurocrats aren't even trying to hide that they are trying to bring down Russia. What they want to replace it with is woke vassal states. I see it is positive that Russia is Europe's largest country and is free and independent.
All empires need Limes. The idea that the woke globalist order is going to stretch to Eastern Ukraine and to the Chinese border will put us in a constant state of semi war. It is much easier to have large buffer zones between us and other civilizations. Pushing right up against them creates conflict that we don't need. I don't want to get nuked for transgender story hour in Taiwan, Tehran or Kharkiv.
We have two competing world orders. The BRICS world order is based around civilizational states that make deals with each other. The other competing globalist world order is based upon forcing a world view on the entire planet and defining all decent as evil that has no legitimacy. This world view is fundamentally opposed to states being sovereign as the global order is supposed to stand above the nation state.
The idea that Europe is about to be steamrolled by Russia stands in contrast to the other narrative that Russia is a collapsing gas station. Which one is it? Is Russia about to collapse or are they about to conquer Europe? If Germany is going to be steamrolled by Russia it says more about their current civilizational incompetence than anything else. The German diplomat who cried at the Munich security council meeting after JD Vance said that European countries have to protect themselves reveals a lot about the incompetence of our current ruling class.
I can understand both these positions, but I don't understand how you can hold them simultaneously. Either Ukraine's local culture is good and deserves better than to be subsumed by the standard Westernized global culture, or Ukraine is a shithole and adding it to the EU will further dilute European greatness in the same way as adding Turkey would have done; but I don't see how both can be true at the same time.
Though speaking of questionable dichotomies,
while I've had this thought before, I think a reasonable steelman is "Russia is collapsing but hasn't collapsed yet; we're still in the danger zone; that's why it's important to keep it quarantined long enough for it to completely fall apart". A wounded bear that hasn't stopped fighting yet is a dangerous thing.
You can think there are good aspects of Ukrainian culture that need not be tainted while also thinking you don't want the bad aspects of Ukrainian culture like the corruption.
Say you value a jar of Northern Europe at 100, Ukraine at 50 and migrants at 10. Mixing Europe and Ukraine worsens Europe. Mixing migrants and Ukraine worsens Ukraine. I bet he'd prefer to replace all third world migrants with Ukrainians if that was somehow possible.
It should be mentioned here that, for one, the Galician minority in Ukraine is culturally closer to the Poles than to the Russians.
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Ukrainian culture is a mixed bag. They have a far worse corruption problem than western Europeans and would drag us down with that. They are also poor and will be an endless black hole for money.
On the flip side they have a lot of positive qualities as well. However, those qualities are less likely to impact us through the EU.
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It's very strange to try and portray one nation conquering and subsuming another as the pro-sovereignty position. Ukraine was the buffer zone, Russia is the one shrinking the size of the buffer here. Accusing the EU of wanting vassal states in opposition to russia which operates on the model of creating actual vassal states borders on absurd. BRICS does not exist, it's a joke, the two largest "members" of BRICS have a current live territorial dispute.
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Total Ukraine Victory or Total Russian Victory?
As you said, both options are unlikely, but one (TUV) is by several magnitudes more unlikely than the other. Realistic end of war, that could be predicted when the three day special operation failed (and was predicted by sharp observers), is permanent cease fire and permanent DMZ around the current front line.
Best solution for Earth, imagine 1500-2000 km long and 20-50 km wide ruined and abandoned zone that will revert to nature and becomes wildlife paradise.
Now, back to your question: TRV or TUV, what one should we prefer?
It depends how you feel about Global American Empire of Rules Based Order.
In TRV world, GAERBO is defeated and thoroughly humiliated. In TUV world, GAERBO is strenghtened and emboldened to do whatever it wants.
Whatever was the war about in the beginning, it is now whether GAERBO is still the biggest, strongest and sharpest shooting cowboy on the corral.
Your choice, whatever is more interesting.
My interest in writing this post is that we spend so long arguing over which is more likely (which is a very important question) that we don't get into the reasons why one person or the other on this forum hopes for an opposite outcome. Like you say, it ties a lot into your views on the American Empire, but that itself opens up a load of questions and interesting points on what outcomes people actually prefer. For example, Vance, does he want to pivot to China, genuinely dislikes Europe, hates Zelensky, thinks this is hopeless, or something else? I struggle to accurately model and therefore predict his preferences on Ukraine and therefore a lot of other things.
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This seems an oversimplification. In my mind, a rule-based international order became beneficial around World War one, when it became apparent that large-scale conflicts between industrial powers were now massively net negative.
The US co-opted that concept in their hegemony. Never completely, as the Western hegemon there was always an element of "rules for thee, not for me". Still, the US empire was build partly from soft power (with some chunks of colonial conquests, of course). But at least in Europe and parts of Asia, the deal that they offered (free trade, at least some token effort towards democracy, refraining from breaking the pax Americana and accepting McDonalds) was pretty sweet compared to what other superpowers had offered, historically.
I like the concept of a RBO. It tremendously improved the quality of life in Europe, compared to what we had before. I see the US as a somewhat ambiguous ally to the RBO, though. In Europe, they did good, elsewhere they often made big messes by ignoring the principles of the RBO (say, GWB in Iraq). My overall impression is that most of their gambles to ignore the RBO did not pay off. The key allies of the US are for the most part not countries they conquered and turned into colonial puppet regimes, but countries whose alliance they secured through a soft power approach (which includes the former Axis powers, of course).
I would like to see a future where wars of conquest do not pay for themselves, neither for the US, nor for anyone else. One way to punish defectors is to arm their victims, so that they will not gain a quick, painless victory. From this (admittedly cynical) perspective, the Ukraine war has been a great success: Putin's "special military operation" has been turned into a long war of attrition, caused a depletion of his Soviet stockpiles and so on.
Isn't Japan the clear former Axis power who got "conquered and turned into colonial puppet regimes"? "Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers" is a dictatorial position held by American, basically a colonial governor
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I think the framing is slightly incomplete. It wasn’t that Russia simply out of the blue decided to invade Ukraine. The relevant areas have been essentially disputed for a decade with low level attacks against Russians in the relevant provinces and Russian agitation in the same. You have the color revolution in 2014. The whole thing was messy and then Russia decided to turn it up to 11.
Also re nuclear weapons Qaddafi was the impetus.
Sure, but I would put all your statements there in the "is" aisle, the history is central to all of this but has been the topic of a lot of past threads - what might be interesting is what this implies in your view, alongside everything else, for what "ought" to be the outcome? What would you like to see as the outcome as best for the world?
I dont think ought is all that interesting. Or rather, I think focusing on oughts lead to utopian thinking which lead to disaster. Much rather have some basic ideas of the good while focusing on marginal improvements of “is”
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