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So Trump has now not only signed an oil deal with Russia, but also wants to lift sanctions. This seems totally indefensible. Not only does it send a clear signal (if the Greenland debacle was not clear enough) that America no longer gives a shit about the rules-based world order or the stability of the west as a block, by removing sanctions from a country that is fighting an aggressive war and that Europe regards as a serious threat. It also lifts sanctions on an ally of Iran. A country that America is currently fighting and active war against. A country that Russia is providing with military aid. He is trying to lower the high oil prices caused by the war with Iran, but seemingly making Iran stronger in the process by aiding its ally, thus making the war more difficult.
Is there some 5head strategy move I am not seeing here? Or is the man actually that inept? Is this because he is mad that Zelensky called him weak?
It seems stupid and incredibly short sighted, and it is difficult to see how this will even help America.
No. It is a basic 1d move. You just can't see the board because ideology and priors.
Ukraine is important for Russia, the foaming at the mouth Brussels and UK elite that have bet a big chunk of their prestige on it, and I guess is also important for the Ukrainians - at least what is left of them.
But it is not important for the USA. After the end of the cold war Russia is so weak that it no longer needs to be contained. Case in point - the war in Ukraine. Actually devastated Ukraine that drains Europe treasure and prevents even the meager chance of Europe getting its shit together and threatening the US economic dominance is even preferrable.
The geopolitical balance won't shift too much no matter who controls that wreck of a country now. And Europe is on declining trajectory. So why bother with it. If the "new Europeans" we are importing start to dominate it will turn into shithole, if they don't - Europe will have enough internal strife to not be able to project much power outside of its border. The only challenge for USA is potentially China. And you can see that US see it that way by the comparatively better way it treats Korea, Japan and Vietnam (and well Russia).
Russia is not providing much military assistance to Iran and in the mind of Trump intelligence sharing is fair game. Trump prefers to trade with Russia than to sanction it. And because Ukraine is local problem, there is no need to get too involved with it. On the other hand Putin has hydrocarbons that are lately in something of a crunch. So aside from public's opinion, there is no real downside of giving some sanctions relief to Russia when it aligns with US interests.
USA is the seed of Albion, and by the time said Albion still played the great game competently it was known as the Perfidious Albion. And the UK had no friends only interests. Same is with USA. Although the British had more class about it.
And lastly - Zelensky thinks of himself as equal to the west, when in fact he is the west's bitch. And while some European leaders prefer the girlfriend experience and the other prefer the dominatrix one, in the case with Trump -as the brass brute that he is - seems he doesn't like his bitches talking back instead of sucking - as Ivana Trump can no longer confirm.
Ukraine was always going to end this way, and if I were in charge I would have told Zelenskyy to get stuffed in 2022 when this all started. Its just not in our strategic interests to prop up the independence of a small unimportant bit of farmland at the cost of using up our strategic reserves, making us more dependent on Muslim energy, and placing us in a terrible position of showing weakness to the globe and not being able to defend actually important Taiwan and its high end chips from China.
Zelenskyy was brilliant at quipping about not needing a ride, but that’s a shitty reason to arm them and ultimately proved Europe to be mostly too weak to worry about.
The best case scenario (other than a clear Ukrainian victory) would have been a Russian victory in 2023. By then, they would have taken enough damage to dissuade them from further adventures, but hundreds of thousands of men wouldn't have been slaughtered.
The longer this war goes on, the more screwed Ukraine is demographically.
The people who I hate the most are those who view this war as a way to test new drone technology with real live meat puppets, or who put the strategic goal of "weakening Russia" above the lives of real people.
Yes, it's all Russia's fault, but at this point the Ukrainian state is an active impediment to the happiness of the Ukrainian people. Conscription in this forever war is little better than slavery. And the women who fled to Germany are going to find husbands there and never come back. Who is being saved?
France in WWI had a population roughly equivalent to Ukraine in 2022 and suffered 1.3 million military deaths throughout the war compared to 200,000 Ukrainians in a similar amount of time. You can argue that the Ukrainian numbers are underestimates, that the overall demographic picture is different, etc., but that's not going to be anywhere near enough to account for a 6.5x difference. And France was not demographically screwed in the long-term; in fact, they managed to lose a Ukraine war's worth of military deaths a generation later and still turned out no more worse for wear.
Well, 1920 France didn't have a population pyramid like 2020 China (looking at the 18-34 set). Indeed, there were more women than men, because the country just went through some event that killed a bunch of said men.
Ukraine's gender imbalance is worse than China's, and it was normal before. This is not meaningfully distinguishable from genocide.
At this point I'm pretty sure every Ukrainian man, especially those who didn't instantly flee the country on invasion, are just actively suicidal, perhaps even more than the Finns are. No actual organized resistance to being sent to war, nothing awaiting you when you return except for a smoking hole in the ground, and a convenient enemy to kill yourself fighting.
The way the men behave in the drone footage is compatible with this conclusion.
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France had a real population of about 40 million (plus substantial colonies) in WW1. Ukraine had a fake population of 40 million because they claim Crimea and pre-2014 borders as part of Ukraine, whereas some of the soldiers they were fighting came from these parts.
Ukraine has also suffered very high casualties. France or Germany never resorted to roving forcible conscription squads running and chasing after men in the street, there was no equivalent of vanning (except until the end of WW2 with the Volksturm).
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Maybe a majority of the men who died were higher quality leading to the now weak France today
Im not sure the evidence bears this out. You don’t really see a correlation between deaths in the early 20th century wars and, for lack of a better term, nationalism and martial vigor. The Brits and French aren’t meaningfully more nationalistic than Austrians, and both are less nationalistic than most of Eastern Europe who suffered more.
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And a weak Europe more generally. Their neutral nations haven't fared any better, though.
If there are HBD implications of killing everyone who cared enough about the country to
commit ritual suicide by Maximgo to war to defend it, it should be visible here. (And the other half that were smart enough to stay home proceeded to emigrate to the US for the same reasons Ukrainian women left at the start of the war.)More options
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Half of France's population didn't flee to Germany with no intention of return.
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Looks at French demographics... recoils in horror.
It's funny you should mention France because they are the first country to have undergone the demographic transition. Supposedly if, starting in 1700, France and England had the same fertility, there would be 500 million Frenchmen alive today, and we'd all be speaking French.
French people in 1700 composed about 3% of the world's population. Today, it's about 0.7%.
And yes, France really suffered demographically in WWI and didn't recover. There are probably around 50-60 million ethnic French people alive today, not really much more than 1914. And that's despite a baby-boom following WWII where the fertility rate was 3. It helps that they didn't send all their women to a different, better country to wait out the war.
Ukraine's fertility rate is closer to 1. There isn't going to be a baby boom waiting for the brave soldiers when they return. The ones who can will emigrate. Millions of women already have. So the situation in Ukraine is fundamentally different and worse than France's, which is itself quite bad.
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To be fair France is very demographically screwed right now. I'm guessing there will be barely any white frenchmen in a few generations.
To be fair, "right now" is approximately 100 years later than World War I, and the effects of that war on anything in the present have probably almost completely dissolved.
If there's one thing in geopolitics that has compounding effects that increase over time, it's gotta be massive population loss (directly via killing, or indirectly via missed births).
No, massive population loss is relatively easily and quickly overcome by a corresponding baby boom.
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