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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28360 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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Excellent summary. I’d only add that I think a lot of these nonsensical foreign policies come from a “strategy-game understanding” of geopolitics. You can’t just offer Russia a big pot of gold to get +100 relations. Russia and China currently have deeply aligned interests. Both are non-status quo powers. Russia has already paid a significant cost in involuntary decoupling from the West and is now rebuilding those value chains with China. The Russian public is as anti-American as they’ve been for decades. Given the above, even if you could extract a promise from Putin to play nice, there’s no reason to expect it to hold.

The whole vulgar geopolitical mindset that believes that we just have to achieve "multipolarity" and then whatever desired outcome (generally something like the advancement of socialist economics or socially conservative culture) happens also often comes off like the person advocating it has this huge complex game board inside their head where this piece moves here and that piece moves here and good things happen and everything just seems to be based on so much wishful thinking.

I understand why Russians and other peripheral countries would advocate for multi polarity. What I haven’t really grokked is why an American would expect that to improve our situation.

Because maintaining the Empire is really expensive, to the point that the US government cares more about it than actually doing the job it is supposed to back home. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but huge swathes of the US are in absolutely terrible shape - drug addiction, economic malaise, continual border crises, unsustainable birthrates, infrastructure falling into malign neglect... the portion of the US population that directly benefits from the empire is shrinking day after day, and the portion for whom it is an unbearable burden is growing. One of the reasons for Trump's enduring popularity among his base is that he has directly advocated for pulling American funding out of a variety of overseas shitholes and focusing on America - that's a large part of what America First actually means.

Everyone except them (the master strategist) is a robot NPC whose actions can be predicted by economics 101 game theory.

IME this sort or thinking is rampant within the US state department and I believe that it is largely responsible for the situations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya turning out the way they did.

Yeah, well, why do you think George Kennan believed US, after dealing with USSR, should be isolationist ? Because he didn't think the people produced by the US system of government are capable of not fucking up everything given half the chance.

Especially as we've already seen that Putin is the sort of person who'll renege on a deal the moment he sees it as advantageous to do so. Is this guy at all familiar with the last century or so of European politics/culture? All that's missing from this proposal is a line about "securing peace in our time".

And of course you can’t have any discussion about appeasement without someone invoking WWII. As if that was the sole appeasement in the history of military affairs.

Appeasement works when you can buy time to improve defenses. When Russia invaded Ukraine, we should’ve strengthened our NATO allies (a core goal for the US); not a corrupt state that was outside our sphere of influence.

As I've argued on previous occasions, every Russian tank, plane and helicopter destroyed in Ukraine is one that wont be able to threaten Poland, Latvia, Finland, Et Al.

Clearing out old stock to significantly weaken the largest regional threat is strengthening our allies, and as others have pointed out, likely at a far lower price point than trying to fortify the Russian border.

Is Poland under threat? If the Russians can't even reach Kiev, it seems unlikely that they're poised to sweep into Warsaw.

Not as much of a threat as it was before the Russian army was revealed to be a paper tiger, but yes it is absolutely under threat.

Well that sacrifices the Baltics too who have been good since they would be militarily indefensible without Ukraine.

And every post communist country does the “corruption” game until they improve institutions and do the Poland game (tracking do be one of the wealthiest Euro countries in a decade). Country’s don’t pop out of Russian sphere and become good Euro countries day 1 but they all seem to get to that point with time.

Why is it sacrificing the balkans? You could while Ukraine was being invaded move a bunch of military installations into the Balkans so that if Russia expanded (questionable whether they would) they wouldn’t be facing a group trying to get it together but a group that is already together.

The Baltics, not the Balkans. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are small and flat. The original defense plans for a Russia-NATO war called for abandoning them first and counterattacking from Poland.

You would need trenches and permenent troops like S Korea to even have a chance at protecting it. It’s just an area Russia has better access too and shorter supply lines. Ukraine for NATO is likely cheaper than keeping 150k troops combat ready for the next 50 years.

Indeed. Not to mention that the last guy dumb enough to trust a deal with Putin famously just got murdered.

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