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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?
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?
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