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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.
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.
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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