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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   35220 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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I'm actually kind of in favor of giving nukes to Ukraine, in place of a lot of the aid we're currently sending. We did guarantee their Territorial Sovereignty back in 93 in exchange for them giving up their nukes, seems to me that the simplest and arguably most just path to maintaining that commitment would be to hand them a handful of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles along with an apology.

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You tell me "that's weird hearing it from an American" I tell you "look to the beam in your own eye". Both of the last two world wars started with Russia deciding it wanted to pick a fight with someone. First with the Serbian intervention in 1914, and then the with invasion of Poland in 1939.

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We did guarantee their Territorial Sovereignty back in 93 in exchange for them giving up their nukes

this did not happen

Ukrainians never had working nukes. The nukes were always in the hands of Moscow-controlled soldiers. The Ukrainians received a huge $$ payout. Anything about "territorial sovereignty" was just fluff language regularly put into these sorts of joint-statements. Calling this an "agreement" at all is pushing it. Not a single person who signed that statement from the US, from Russia, or from Ukraine, thought this was the United States guaranteeing to go to war to uphold the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine.

Anything about "territorial sovereignty" was just fluff language regularly put into these sorts of joint-statements.

If it was put in, they have a right to treat it as valid.

it wasn't, you're misunderstanding the language demonstrated by no person who negotiated it or signed it thinking that's what it meant

if the Ukrainians attempted this, they would have been invaded and destroyed then

the USSR/Russia could have invaded these countries, they had the men, and they had the tanks and guns, and they chose not to

invading a home depot in the US on the other side of the world is quite a bit different than invading a country you currently have a hundred thousand soldiers already in

This would be boiling the Russian frog too quickly and would be seen as a direct escalation with unpredictable results. Slowly bleeding out Russia via the open wound of the Ukraine War allows for much better temperature control. Way worse for the Ukrainian people and the region in general, but I'm convinced they are assigned zero weight by U.S. decision makers when making these calculations.

I'm sorry but you seem to have mistaken me for a utilitarian. Please explain to me why I should care more about not "boiling the Russian frog too quickly" and avoiding "unpredictable results" than honoring past commitments.

You didn't frame your comment as a choice between honoring past commitments and not honoring them. You framed it as a choice of how best to honor past commitments. So this ostensible defense is spurious.

you seem to have mistaken me for

I'm sorry but you seem to have mistaken me for someone trying to persuade you. I'm simply making a general comment on how the state department appears to think, not advocating for a particular position.

Well you failed then

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