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So, Curtis Yarvin just dropped a long essay about why he doesn't like the West's support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/ukraine-the-tomb-of-liberal-nationalism
Or, at least, that's what I think his point is. As usual with his writings, it can be hard to tell.
FWIW, reading Unqualified Reservations was probably the single most important event in my journey to this weird part of the internet that we call the Ratsphere, even though Yarvin probably doesn't consider himself a rationalist (and I neither do I, really).
However, on this particular point (Ukraine), I find myself quite frustrated. All those words, and he never once (as far as I can tell - I admit that I only had time to skim the article) addressed what I would think would be the most obvious point if you're trying to convince a bog-standard Westerner why they shouldn't support Ukraine: Ukraine was invaded by Russia. Not a "regime change" type invasion, a la USA vs. Iraq '03, not a "peacekeeping" invasion. A "Russia wants some of the land currently controlled by Ukraine to be controlled by Russia instead" invasion. A good, old-fashioned war of conquest for resources. The kind of war that, since 1945, the industrialized West (or "first world") has tried very hard to make sure nobody is allowed to wage, especially not in Europe. And therefore, the West's support for Ukraine is entirely justified by the desire to make sure nobody is allowed to get away with just seizing territory because they want it.
Like I said, maybe he does try to convince the reader why this policy is wrong, but in true Moldbuggian fashion, he uses 10,000 words to say what would be better said with 100.
Or maybe he assumes that anybody paying attention knows why the standard narrative is wrong. Maybe I'm wrong about how and why Russia invaded Ukraine.
As a side note, I do think it's interesting that the both the most radically right-wing Substack author I follow (Yarvin) and the most radically left-wing Substack author I follow (Freddie DeBoer) both think the West's support for Ukraine is bad. Is this just horseshoe theory? They both hate the United States for different reasons and anything it does is wrong by default?
But why do we want that? The U.S. had a clear interest in preventing this when the spread of Communism was a real threat. But that's not the case any longer. What interest do we have in guaranteeing the rights of the weak everywhere against the strong? (Without taking position on whether or not Ukraine is stronger than Russia, the implication seems to be that they cannot win without massive assistance from us.) Some countries, perhaps, are Too Big to Fail. Is Ukraine really one of them? Is preservation of the status quo worth any amount of blood or treasure? I'm not persuaded of the automatic moral duty of bystanders to intervene when one country consumes another any more than when one wild animal consumes another. In terms of international relations, the world is a jungle and jungle rules and ethics apply.
Interest? Easy- by guaranteeing the rights of the weak against the strong, you can prevent the strong from becoming stronger, and eventually strong enough to deprive you of your rights/sovereignty. In any framework which acknowledges conquest as a benefit to strength (more ressources to conquer more resources), the best way to prevent someone from ever being able to conquer you is to keep them from conquering others- or, failing that, to maximize the costs of doing so to the extent that the rate of return is diminished as much as possible.
Additionally, since the invention of the telegraph history indicates that the US public will be willing to intervene to defend allies or those they sympathize enough with or when someone attempts to seize such leverage that could be used against the United States. Unless you posit that this historic norm will go away, if you expect there to be interventions it's best to do it when it's cheapest (before conquerors conquer a mighty empire) and easiest (when a norm against conquest enables cooperation against would-be conquerors).
Arguably, given the effects that could be expected of food export collapse. Or rather, keeping Ukraine free of Russia can arguably keep Russia from being too big to fail as a global agricultural exporter, and thus denying Russia leverage over the global food supply when they have already demonstrated intent, willingness, and actual efforts to use economic livelihood inputs to pressure, punish, or attempt to coerce other states.
Who says any net amount of blood or treasure is on the line?
There is a linguistic motte and bailey here about the different meanings of 'any mount'- which could be miniscule or massive. Arguments that massive amounts of blood or treasure are being spent rely on selective use of absolute vs relative metrics , categorization overlap (Ukrainian casualties versus American casualties), and of course the general issues of accounting (the treasure spent on a munition slated for decomissioning or a vehicle in cold war storage is not the the replacement cost used to make aid announcements more impressive).
There's also the general lack of consideration of the alternatives. A common criticism of western aid over the last many months has been that 'the West is running out of ammo and systems to give, and needs it for its own defense instead.' But this runs into the point that the only threat most NATO systems are credibly on hand for is... destroying the Russian equipment they would be destroying in Ukraine. Whereas if you give the systems to Ukraine, you not only pay a lower cost in blood and treasure for attriting the Russians via a proxy conflict rather than a direct conflict, but you also reduce the amount of weapons / ammo you need to keep on hand at all times going forward. NATO needs considerably less defensive capabilities now, in 2023 when something like 70-90% of Russian combat capability is committed to Ukraine, compared to the systems and bodies needed two years ago when Russia wasn't in Ukraine.
Amoral international realism is one of the strongest arguments for the Americans supporting Ukraine, not for refusing to provide aid. The objections to aid generally rely on morality to the neglect of the benefits of alliance management and denying the advent of rivals of sufficient mass or credibility.
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In the same way it was in the interest of the British during the Napoleonic Wars and the century of warfare prior to balance against any potential hegemon on the European continent, it is in the interest of any power in North America to balance against any possible hegemon in Eurasia. While China is the primary threat here, Russia represents smaller scale version of the same thing and, more generally, freezing borders in place to the greatest extent possible keeps Eurasia fragmented and unable to unite under a hegemon capable of threatening the US across the Atlantic or Pacific.
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No, but in Ukraine's case it isn't our blood and only a miniscule portion of our treasure. Bleeding Russia is on sale right now, so we bought a little.
Why is America hostile to Russia. Or China. Or Iran?
Iran gives a lot of financial support and weapons to anti-American forces in Iraq. IEDs killing Americans in Iraq were from Iran.
Again that’s cart after horse. Why is the US in Iraq to begin with.
Is that a serious question for me to answer? The Bush administration seriously misunderestimated how hard nation building can be. Blame them.
Let's not recursively ask questions driving towards "why are all nations not maximally isolationist?" Because they just aren't. That's not a privileged or default state. For many reasons many countries are in conflict. I don't have a pithy satisfying answer to such messy and varied matters.
It’s actually good to try to go to first principles. To try to act like an intelligent alien. Iraq isn’t a state which borders the US. Sure I know the reason why the US is there, but if someone says Iran is our enemy because of what it does in Iraq then it’s reasonable to ask why Iraq.
In the end of all of this I see little or no reflection on the ultimate reasons for US imperialism - or if it benefits the US citizen
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Because the American public, with its default prioritization interest in domestic rather than international politics, is most easily moved to care about international politics on the basis of sympathy for an victim or moral offense, and Russia, China, and Iran give plenty of reasons to be offended. Russia acts like a steotypical drunk abusive wife-beater, Iran still chants 'Death to America' and had a non-negligable role in helping bomb Americans (and other people) abroad, and China was gradually seen as both a cheat and threatening a more sympathetic underdog.
That’s doesn’t explain much. These enemies are enemies that the US elites have decided to prioritise. Saudi is an ally and probably a greater influence in the terrorists who bomb Americans.
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Because great power politics is zero sum. There's the best, and there's the rest.
NATO is the best. Russia and China are possible nuclation points for the rest.
So, if russia wants to demonstrate themselves as a decrepit kleptocracy and take themselves out of the running for another 60 years, it's worth a few trillion in funny money bucks.
Why does America need to be a hegemon? It is one of the richest countries in the world - the richest per capita since the 19C. It didn’t feel the need for an empire then.
Your causal links are reversed, there.
America is rich because it is absolutly secure, has maximim prestige, is incredibly credible, and controls the global reserve curency.
All those qualities are confered on the US (and on NATO/NAFTA/whatever other treaty partereners it has to a lesser extent) BECAUSE America is the hegemon.
Thus, much like Rome, imperial china, spain, france, england, and etc; being a Hegemon makes you rich makes you the hegemon. Losing your hegemon cred puts you in danger of losing your riches.
Empires can be expensive and will in effect make the US poorer in the king run. And civilisations need to think about the long run.
This is something people say, but is just not true.
Empire is expensive when it starts to colapse. The solution then, is to not let it colapse.
In any case; the USA is in a unique position where they have managed to defer most of the inherently wealth destroying on the ground work to their hegemonic junior partners; and they get to reap most of the benefit of the expensive part of empire; excepting our little short 20 year neo-con adventure in the middle east.
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The 19th century was America's century of conquest. Natives, Mexicans, and almost the British Canadians were displaced or conquered.
Canada held on to its independence by the skin of their teeth. Most of Mexico was conquered. Modern day Mexico is the minority of their territory that escaped US conquest.
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Being from Britain, American Hegemony is great. America might be the world's first large Empire with such enthusiastic imperial satellites.
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Which 19th century are you thinking about?
Many would argue that the US absolutely did engage in bloody imperial conflicts in 19th century, ranging from the support of the Texas succession against Mexico, the Mexican-American war which was a major war of territorial expansion, the civil war against separatist, the various Latin American interventions, and of course the buildup to the Spanish-American war, which saw the US become a formal empire right at the end of the century.
Moreover, the 19th and then pre-WW2 20th century was absolutely a period of repeated American anti-imperialist actions to thwart, counter, or militarily defeat imperialist actions. The Monroe Doctrine, hypocritical as it was, was generated as a way to deny imperial conquests to those who would have otherwise been able to enforce them. American China policy was not only about getting American access to the China market, but preventing and rolling back other empires from exclusive market and political control. The Spanish-American War was driven in the leadup on a wave of anti-Spanish Empire yellow press and fervor. This doesn't even go to the influences those born in the 19th century had in the mid-20th, where the US even threatened to militarily intervene against the British and the French empires over the Suez Crisis.
If you want to appeal to the 19th century US, it's kind of important to remember that the post-Civil War reconstruction was an aberation, not a norm of pacifism. When the US had the ability, it absolutely was the sort to get involved to defend its interests... and regularly framed those interests in opposition to imperialist efforts.
Yes. That’s totally true, and I should have asked in the post why the US wants to be a world hegemon, or empire, which wasn’t the case at the start.
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Because they want stuff that we also want or have?
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Why did Rome strive to ensure that the Germanic tribes could never unite? Why did the Roman Senate say "Carthaginem delendam esse"?
Because hegemony requires that any hypothetical threats be destroyed before they gain strength.
Therefore, the US is opposed to China, Russia and Iran. Therefore, a conflict between the US and India is inevitable in the near future.
If you, as a US citizen, want to enjoy the security and wealth that American hegemony provides you, then you must accept the blood that must be shed to achieve it.
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Possible reasons:
The norm is good in and of itself, in that it prevents the chaos that would come if everyone felt they could reopen the books. Can you imagine what Africa would be like?
The norm is pragmatically good for specific amoral US interests: the US has completed its own expansion into some of the best-placed territory in the world. It needs no more. Its enemies however, do. China is hemmed in by US allies and a secessionist region that it wants back both for ideological and geostrategic reasons. Russia clearly feels geographically insecure. The US would prefer they stay hemmed in or insecure and thus promulgating the norm and the perception of vigorous US reaction to attempts to revise borders has the potential to hobble its enemies and prevent their ascension.
More like 2a: US allies with enemies with revanchist goals will be far more comforted by vigorous US action rather than inaction.
More specific to this war than the general principle: Russia is a geopolitical rival and this weakens them. It arguably weakens the EU too (who buys Russian gas instead of more expensive US LNG?), while strengthening US leadership and thus leverage in Europe - the mythical "EU army" would have died when Germany admitted they wouldn't send tanks until the US did, if it had ever been alive in the first place. Everyone loses here from a protracted conflict, except the US. And maybe Ukraine, depending on how much you value self-determination.
Assuming that communism alone and not the threat of Russian expansion was the concern, yes.
Does the US actually do that everywhere? I'd argue that the US tried it in, like, Mogadishu and then immediately lost taste for it at the first sign of trouble. So Clinton sat back and allowed the relatively "cheap" - in terms of prevention costs - Rwandan genocide.
Elsewhere the US actively guarantees the rights of the strong against the weak: e.g. in its support for regimes like Sisi's that literally shot unarmed protestors. Support for the Saudis who were bombing Yemen. I wouldn't say Iran is weak but US sanctions and support for Saudi Arabia and Israel alters the power balance in favor of the latter.
No, but it isn't the status quo, and it isn't US blood and treasure is cheap(er) - for the US.
This situation - for better or worse - is actively causing Russian power to degenerate. One way or another, I don't think we're headed back to the pre-2022 status quo. That's not necessarily a good thing - a desperate Russia is a dangerous Russia - but some planners are apparently willing to take the risk
I actually was of the opinion that Ukraine (hell, Europe's security issues more generally) wasn't a core concern of the US and it should focus on Taiwan since it would almost inevitably cave fast. But, if Russia is so incompetent as to bungle their invasion and are now trapped in a quagmire where US material can constantly bleed them...the logic changes.
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Here is where I have a little more sympathy for DeBoer's position. The US has been plenty glad to be a bystander in dozens of other bloody conflicts in Africa and the Middle East, so what makes Ukraine so special? Yarvin just seems agitated that his ideological opponents seem to be winning.
It's a big country in Europe and not in the Middle East/Africa, to put it crudely.
Putting aside the "emotional" component of things as well, there's real benefits for the US to be had in this conflict, the US has been throwing pocket change and whatever rubbish it can be bothered to pull out of mothballs in exchange for watching Russia repeatedly shoot itself in the feet and legs.
This, combined with those who reflexively oppose the west, seems to explain a lot of the pro-Russian sentiment in the west for this war.
Eh, no. It hasn't been sending 'rubbish' out of 'mothballs'. Germans did that with a delivery of literally mold-covered east-German anti-air missiles.
Stingers and Javelin ATGMs are still standard issue. The ammunition sent also was of the same type military is still using.
The only piece of 'rubbish' sent by the US was the M777 howitzer, and maybe some shitty armored cars and humvees.
Now it's sending Bradley IFVs which.. are kinda midway, depending on their configuration.
As I said the last time this argument came up, while Something like 30 Billion dollars might sound like a lot it is quite literally pocket change when viewed in the context of the US Federal budget.
Likewise expending a bunch of ammo/gear that was approaching the end of its shelf-life anyway on actually diminishing a threat to our allies rather than in training exercises or just scrapping it seems like a no-brainer to me.
Uh-huh. Americans just sent their almost expired ammo to Ukraine, which is why they're now sweet-talking South Korea and Israel to start selling off parts of their artillery shell stockpiles.
Yes actually. Volume is volume.
If you can convince other countries to send their existing stockpiles to Ukraine while buying restocks from GD, ATK, and Raytheon that's a win for the US military industrial complex.
No, US is talking about buying shells from abroad, not selling shells to foreign countries.
Indeed, some have said they won't ship shells to Ukraine, but will sell them to various NATO countries who can then ship out their own stockpiles.
Yet despite all this shuffling, apparently there isn't enough 155mm ammo for Ukrainian guns.
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Well cut quote, everything you've listed is covered by "pocket change".
There's a difference between mothballed & obsolete and 'equipment that's still in front line use and will be missed because no one can restart production lines fast enough'.
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Wild animals in the jungle is a misleading analogy. A better analogy would be "I'm not persuaded of the automatic moral duty of bystanders to intervene when one human being robs another" (which in these days of "property crime isn't all that big of a deal, especially when it happens to rich white people" leftist thinking is perhaps not as extraordinary a position as I might prefer). Just as human beings who want their property to remain in their possession have a vested interest in making sure other humans' property is protected from theft, countries who want their sovereignty over their territory to remain intact have a vested interest in defeating any defector nations who decide that they should just take that other country's land because they can.
And yeah, sure, these same Western nations have their own history of military conquest for profit. That doesn't make them hypocrites for standing up to Russia in 2022, any more than if my grandfather happened to have been a professional thief, it would be hypocritical for me to become a police officer.
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Because that’s what the US empire is founded on, and besides Russia is our enemy.
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Do you actually believe that the US government's actions abroad are motivated by a principled desire to be good and moral? I cannot possibly understand how you could given the history of the US and specifically their military adventures over the past few decades. When I look at the actual actions and even the statements that come out of the US military, the idea that they base their decisions on morality as opposed to the hard calculations and strategic gameplaying of empire is utterly farcical.
The US has not achieved their goals, and the blowback/second-order consequences from the sanctions they placed on Russia are only beginning to come back around. Cutting off a major energy supplier like Russia is going to cause, and already is causing, severe issues in energy markets. The current conflict and the US response to it is playing a large part in the massive inflation we're seeing all over the western world, and these things are continuing to get worse, not better.
Yes, to an extent. But there's also the practical dimension.
The US signals to others that it won't let Taiwan be easily invaded by China, by supporting Ukraine.
Removing the moral dimension, supporting Ukraine is still a useful measure, because it shows that a smaller country will recieve support when the bigger nation on its borders invades.
Regardless of how the war ends, Russia doesn't look likely to get anything worth the cost. That's a deterrent analogous to MAD in a cold Nuclear War. Pay the price to bring down an enemy up front, so you don't have to pay it further down the road when it's higher.
The RAND corporation, one of the most influential think-tanks in the US government and which put out a paper outlining why starting the Ukraine conflict was a good idea for the US before it happened, has actually started claiming the opposite. The US is going to have a lot of trouble fighting the Ukraine war and defending Taiwan at the same time, and the conflict now risks overextending the US rather than Russia/China. I highly recommend giving the following document a read: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA2510-1.html
But either way there's no chance that the US actually shows that signal to anyone. Have you heard of Yemen? The US is assisting Saudi Arabia, a much larger and wealthier country, as it tries to crush the Houthis. The US' actions historically make the idea that "a smaller country will receive support when the bigger nation on its borders invades" a non-starter.
Russia, from the research I have done at least, views this as a fight for survival and self-determinism. What they wanted was a stable buffer zone, and what they are going to get instead is rubble - but that rubble isn't going to be hosting NATO nuclear interdiction systems. What Russia thinks is that the US believes it has the right to launch a nuclear first strike, and that placing those interdiction systems will give them the confidence to do so. From their perspective, a war which knocked their economy back two decades and made them look like fools in US-influenced media would be an absolute bargain compared to the fate awaiting them if they lost.
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There is no singular 'they' or 'their' to execute a single decisionmaking framework.
As the saying goes, organizations don't make decisions, people make decisions, and organizations as large and complex as the United States have a lot of people who make their decisions for a lot of reasons. There are absolutely times when the government's decisionmaking is driven by people motivated by principles they view as good and moral- and simultaneously driven by people whose interests are strategic, and by people whose interests are tangential but they're making a compromise, and by people just phoning it in while they focus on another areas like their domestic political interests, and by people who are making quid-pro-quos, and so on. These are not contradictory, these are simultaneous, and a dirty secret is that people in government don't all share the same ethic systems or valuation of specific information.
The depends on what you believe their goals and the expected timeframes are expected to be. The American government by and large hasn't been among those arguing that the Russians would collapse within months under sanctions or that this would be anything but a long war.
This depends on you believing this is a bug, and not a feature or means to advance other goals (such as transition to green energy, or forcing European divestment from Russian energy dependence, or advantaging American industrial investment attractiveness versus other regions), or just an acceptable cost achieving other objectives.
'Large' in absolute or relative terms? Likely no for either- both as a % of spending but also in relation to other macroeconomic pressures (especially the still-translating implications of COVID policies), the war is a correlation to issues with deeper causations. COVID stimulus spending and Biden's ironically named inflation reduction act and ongoing investment changes around the world as well as demographic-shift driven investment and consumption dynamics are all independent of the Russian invasion.
Certainly, but irrelevant unless they would be better for a change of policy, which is not at all obvious would be the case if, say, the western coalition had collapsed in infighting or if the Russians were to win or various other potential alternatives.
If you make this claim then you destroy the original argument being made and that I was responding to. The argument you're making is the one that the Russians themselves have - that the US is fundamentally incapable of engaging in long-term diplomacy or strategy. Why should people assume that the US will make moral decisions like protecting smaller nations when the US has no coherent foreign policy? One day you might get someone making a moral decision, and the the next you're dealing with someone from the MIC who wants a more devastating war in order to increase the profit margins of his campaign donators. I will freely concede the point that the US is incapable of acting strategically and should never be trusted to honour agreements or understandings and that this defeats my point, but it bolsters my own argument in the long run.
I assumed that the goals of the US were those outlined in this paper also put out by Rand - https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3063.html That document contains policy proscriptions which were actually followed, which lends it a bit of credibility in my eyes.
I think that this is indeed an unexpected consequence. US interests are not advanced by a rising tide of populism and economic desperation in Europe - but this also completely destroys the moral credibility of the US. If they're willing to drive Europe into a far-reaching economic depression and energy crisis because it might advance their geopolitical gameplaying, why should anyone give them any moral credibility at all?
I disagree, but actually disentangling and working out the precise nature of where blame can be assigned is the sort of thing that would be a full-time job and take up a lot of time.
Economic conditions continuing to deteriorate and hence opening the door for populist and nationalist leaders is far from irrelevant. This could have serious potential blowback, and I don't think trying to get a colour revolution started in Hungary is going to fix it.
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I don't think that they draw a distinction.
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