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Notes -
This is nothing compared to other Ukrainian public relation efforts.
First there was picking American transgender woman as official spokesperson for Ukrainian army, who then went on unhinged rant threatening to kill "Russian propagandists" all over the world.
(speaking in English, not Russian, so it is clear that it were not Russians in Russia who were target of this threat)
This speech is there, it is something you will hear from mouth of cartoon Evil Mastermind(TM) in corny B movie, just before Action Hero(TM) storms in and drops the villain into his/her/their/zir/xir own shark tank.
Someone in charge then noticed this does not make Ukraine look exactly like Avengers team and decided to suspend Cirillo.
So sanity prevailed and all will be good (optics) from now?
Well, Zelensky just decided to make honorary "ambassador of Ukraine", of all people, Marina Abramovic, world famous performance artist.
It sounds like 4chan fake news prank, but it is real, reported by mainstream media(and then vanishing from their pages).
Ukraine knows well what it is doing, Ukraine tries hard to signal it is on the right side and win hearts and minds.
Hearts and minds of people who matter, not yours.
edit: links
Given how hard the US right is now pulling for "1. feed Ukraine to Putin 2. ???? 3. PROFIT!" - it's hard to blame Zelensky for betting on the other side. He has people's lives at stake. If sucking up to whatever Western weirdo is what helps to get weapons to save a thousand of Ukrainian lives - worth it thousand times over. I mean, the US red tribe can't be both "fuck all those guys over the border" and then be wondering "why those guys over the border suck up to Democrats?!" Because that's their only option, if the right says upfront they want nothing to do with it. Ukraine is toast without Western help, they just don't have the resources to fight Putin alone, especially given they can't afford to get a million of their own killed people like Putin can. So yes, sometimes it would look stupid. Sometimes it will be stupid - desperate people don't always look very attractive.
The implication being that the pro-Ukraine side, by contrast, has a plan?
How'd Syria go?
Libya?
Afghanistan?
Iraq?
Iraq the first time?
Iran?
Afghanistan the first time?
...Like, what's your actual conception of how this is all going to roll out? Putin is couped by the competent, democratic statesmen who form his opposition and then Russia reforms into a functional capitalist democracy, thereby nullifying the threat of their considerable nuclear arsenal? Is that the road you're looking for?
If you want to defend the interventionist consensus, defend the results it has delivered over the last thirty years through the multiple fucking iterations it has played out, very publicly, at vast economic and social and human cost. Show how all the previous disasters were really just faulty perception, or working the kinks out, or something other than simply a blind-spot in your geopolitical perception the size of the fucking moon. I'll cop to not expecting the Russian army to be a shambolic trash-disaster, and sure, right now we are fairly thoroughly mauling that army for pennies on the dollar, given that Ukranian and Russian lives are considered to have no value in the equation. But what's the endgame, here?
What are you willing to call success, such that we can move on, job well done, no more entanglements and expenditures needed?
What are you willing to call failure, such that you agree that it's time to cut our losses?
Because I have heard this fucking song and dance before, where "these next six months are critical" for ten or fifteen or twenty years at a stretch, and my heuristic is that anyone selling that bullshit is either a braindead incompetent or a literal vampire who requires decapitation and a stake through the heart. I refuse to play this game where we pretend that all those previous disasters and betrayals and massacres and atrocities didn't actually happen or were just crazy random happenstance, where we pretend that American foreign policy and leadership should be presumed to be competent and efficient and generally on the ball. I can't pretend that hard, and I have zero respect for those who can.
That is their “plan”, pretty much. Or that there will be a glorious campaign of liberation ending in Crimea, and Putler will capitulate because he’s actually a paper tiger. Or that he’ll be couped by a second Gorbachev/Yeltsin who will do the same. Or that he’ll not actually be replaced by anyone, and instead there’ll be another Time of Troubles and the Russian state will disintegrate, and there won’t be any negative repercussions because it’s not like the collapse of a state with thousands of nuclear warheads would result in that. I’m not being flippant. That’s the “plan”, as expressed by their own words and narratives.
What precisely do you think happens when a state with thousands of nuclear warheads collapses?
Something definitely worse than, say, Ukraine agreeing to a ceasefire.
I assume you mean that "something" happens to Ukraine?
I recall the men with their hands on the buttons didn't launch even back during the Cold War when the chain of command was intact and clear. You think they will have more resolve/recklessness when it isn't?
That's not what I meant, but that would also be conceivable in that case, obviously.
I meant rogue states, terrorist groups, organized crime groups etc. gaining control of nuclear warheads and using them for blackmail etc. Nuclear warheads entering the black market. Ethnic conflicts, humanitarian catastrophe etc.
I don't think any of this needs to be spelled out actually, but I'll assume your question was honest.
My question was honest in that I wanted to hear what you had in mind when you alluded to that - some specific outcomes or just a generic nuclear scare.
It looks like whatever consequences there are would largely befall Russia itself. If the West can be confident that the concerted Russian nuclear stockpile is, at worst, MAD, surely they can laugh off a single straggler or two who tries to point a fraction of that stockpile at them?
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I think it's more like this
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It is not a board game. USA will continue to have relations with all involved parties, it does not end.
No, not expecting that. I would settle for Russia defanged enough that they shut up about USSR-sized sphere of influence. And will stop thinking they can take on NATO or countries supported by NATO.
It appears that going through ginormous stockpiles produced by USSR may be needed before that will happen.
(obviously, settling for being corrupt and internally violent and sort-of-useful as sort-of counterbalance against China would be nice, but sadly they actually believed that they are still superpower entitled to rule over central and eastern Europe...)
USSR sized sphere of influence? Ukraine is closer to Moscow than Canada is to Washington.
They also made repeated comments and actions concerning Baltics and Poland. I am well aware that they have not invaded this countries outright, so far.
But I want them to stop completely and cease any military threats whatsoever (for start, stop repeated airspace incursion with their military planes). And ensure that their officials makes threats/jokes/suggestions about invading Poland as often as Germans ones are doing as of 2023.
And I want all US servicemen and equipment brought back to the USA, all foreign military entanglements ended, and for our supposed allies to defend themselves.
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Okay, what's your assessment of what we've achieved versus what we paid from this approach to date?
We defanged Iraq very thoroughly in the first gulf war. Hussein no longer was able to exercise territorial ambitions. Do you find that this made the world a better place?
My knowledge about middle east and wars there is far more limited than of eastern Europe so I do not feel very qualified to answer.
But my expectation was that Russia was going to start serious war with someone at some point (or recreate USSR by repeated invasions and countries surrendering). So funding defence of Ukraine is preferable in my opinion to fighting direct NATO-Russia war that would be far more problematic in many aspects.
That it was worth spending this funds to achieve this, though less innocent lives would be lost if materiel would be provided earlier, on larger scale and more decisively rather then being dripped bit by bit.
(disclaimer: I am from Poland, not from USA - for me aggressive and too powerful Russia is top1 geopolitic problem)
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How do you arrive at this conclusion from Russia invading what was literally their own satellite state for 20 years after the USSR fell until the US took it away? It's just completely out of touch with reality.
I base it on treating Ukraine as own satellite state and on their comments and actions concerning Baltics and Poland.
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This "Russia = USSR" logic doesn't work out the way you think it does.
Firstly, it means inheriting the legacy of the Holodomor. Attempting to claim a moral right to rule a people after you attempt to genocide them is...something.
But even ignoring that, the USSR literally agreed to dissolve into independent states in 1991. If the Soviets "owned" Ukraine, then Russia inheriting their claims means it has no claim as such over Ukraine.
Also, the Budapest Memo had Russia agree to not use military force against Ukraine.
You can talk all you want about "satellite states" and what not, Russia already agreed decades ago it wouldn't do what it has been doing since 2014.
It's geopolitics, who the fuck cares. If tanks and jet fighters required newborns to be put in blenders in order to function, nothing about our world would change.
I think a great many people care about moral justification for a claim of rulership.
Indeed, we are all here because, centuries ago, some opportunistic Anglos and Scots had questions about rulership.
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I'm not claiming that Russia = USSR.
USSR controlled Ukraine more or less directly up until 91.
Ukraine was then it's own state on paper, but in reality a Russian satellite state up until 2014. "A russian satellite state for 20 years" Technically 23.
It only entered the western orbit after the coup in 2014. (Well the western part of it)
Russia isn't trying to expand its sphere of influence to USSR levels, that would mean going as far west as Germany. It's just trying to maintain it at post USSR levels and even that is seen as some extreme aggressive act while NATO bombs and murders everyone outside of the west indiscriminately and people that think they're civilized make endless excuses for the abuse.
Doesn't really matter. Russia signed the agreements to let Ukraine be independent. Can't complain if it actually exercises that status.
Yeah, because it can't. There's no going back in that regard unless NATO itself breaks up, and Putin's invasion literally reversed the flagging support for that organization. Talk about a strategic blunder. What it is doing, however, is trying to gobble up nations while it can to its west. Because once the NATO aegis is established, it's over, that country is not coming back.
Which bombs are we referring to? Bosnia and Herzegovina? Serbia? Afghanistan? The Gulf of Aden? Libya? Syria?
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I sometimes consider the hypothetical world in which the 2003 invasion was skipped. It's obviously hard to predict such outcomes, but I think it's not implausible a continued Hussein regime might not be better for the average Iraqi. It's not like they had a particularly good human rights record.
Sure, there was a lot of destruction from the war (which I'd generally agree was poorly-conceived), but how would Iraq have faced the Arab Spring? It seems plausible that could have ended less like ISIS and more like the still-ongoing Syrian Civil War, likely complete with Russia intentionally bombing civilian targets and waves of refugees fleeing to Europe.
For all it's faults in the invasion, the country now could be much worse than it is today. Which is distinctly not an endorsement of the operation, merely a pause for consideration.
It could be. The actual result was sufficiently awful that I would prefer to roll those dice. Certainly the difference between the predicted and actual outcomes leaves me with zero faith in the wisdom of further interventionism.
For the record, I agree with your take. The comment is more referencing cases in which people rhetorically imply that the country is worse off than otherwise, which I think is less clear.
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Amusingly, in a late 200X with no Iraq War, then the Iranians still have a nuclear program in its later stages, only for it's initial target. Who would still be, at best, maintaining the strategic bluff of ambiguity in hopes of deterance, as they did before, but with the understanding that their most significant enemy truly was pursuing greater WMDs.
Black humor, but humor none the less.
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The Arab spring was the US as well... Saying Iraq would've been destabilized anyways because the US would start destabilizing MENA countries again a decade later doesn't really make US foreign policy look better.
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Whatever plan they may or may not have, it's certainly less stupid than Carlson's "we feed Ukraine to Putin and he'll battle China for US" or Vivek's "We feed Ukraine to Putin and there would be peace in our time". But I suspect, different "pro-Ukraine" sides - many of which aren't as pro-Ukraine as they present - have different plans. US Democrats probably try to maximize the profit (both pecuniary and political) from the war while committing to as little as possible and not letting Russia become unpredictable (because that looks like work and who needs that), most of the EU tries to show off as much as possible while doing as little as possible, Ukrainians try to survive...
Given current players, likely pretty badly for all involved. Probably there will be some temporary ceasefire and then a new war in 5-10 years, and so on. Until Russia finally collapses, but that can take a long while - last time it took 70 years.
We all dead, sooner or later? I mean, what exactly you expect the "endgame" to be? It's not some kind of Magic The Gathering match, where you sit down, play a round, then come up and go back home. Who told you there's such a thing as "endgame" at all? The war surely will end, one way or another, at least all the previous wars did. How it will end depends on a lot of things, and anybody who says they can predict it, are lying.
If you approach any task with "when are we calling it a failure finally", then yes, the question would only be when you call it a failure. But then, why you are surprised there are so many failures? You're literally rooting for it, so you're getting what you asked for.
This would actually have been the best option, but only if it was taken several years ago. Russia and China uniting and working together are the only real powerbloc capable of dealing with the US - if they were in opposition to each other, or if Russia was firmly a part of the western community, the global situation would look very different right now. Russia has no motivation to go into Ukraine if NATO doesn't expand to their borders and they're a respected member of the western coalition - so in that universe the war just doesn't happen anyway, given that one of the roots of this conflict was over Ukraine moving into the EU orbit or the Russian orbit. There's a decent bit of evidence that Russia actually did want to be a part of the western community and would have preferred this to being part of the "global south"/jungle, and I think that world is a much nicer place to live in this one.
But that ship has sailed, and if Carlson is suggesting that the US try to pivot to that option now then he's deluded. China and Russia have a lot of reasons to be enemies, but the current situation has forced them together - and done so in a way that's going to be hard to disentangle. Both of them know that they're unable to take on the US individually, and at the same time they think that the US is impossible to negotiate with and an untrustworthy partner. Serious thinkers have said for years that one of the chief goals of US foreign policy should be to make sure that Russia and China absolutely hate each other, which isn't really that hard of a goal to achieve - but US policy over the last few decades has just brought them closer and closer together, and made it clear that continuing to use the US dollar and existing global financial infrastructure is a critical weakness. What can the US even credibly offer Russia to pull them away from China at this point? Even if Trump gets in and manages to overcome the deep state inertia preventing him from normalising relationships with Russia, I don't think they'd be willing to come back to the table because they've gotten too invested in their own alternatives.
Even if Russia and China disliked each other as much as, say, India and China (an immense long shot), Russia isn’t sacrificing millions of men, the entire Eastern third of their country, all their power in Central Asia and unfathomable amounts of treasure on some bullshit crusade against the CCP at America’s behest lmao. Ironically there’s nothing more neocon ‘game theory’ than trying to play CK2 or Civilization in real life and thinking the US can bait Russia into fighting WW3 for us.
Making peace with China is easier, more desirable and more in America’s interests than making peace with Russia.
You're totally right, but it isn't like the US would need them to be at war. They'd just need them to be mildly hostile to each other, to the point that they'd be more willing to work with the US than their immediate, border-sharing neighbour. There isn't even a need to go to war with China in this case - they'd be too economically dependent. If you made sure the US didn't ship their entire manufacturing industry to China in the 90s as well, the differential in capacity would be so massive conflict just wouldn't even need to happen.
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Our current plan is to give Ukraine every weapon we have, regardless of whether or not the Ukrainians are able to win the war, letting the war drag on while we essentially use up our weapons in Ukraine (which will probably lessen our ability to defend Taiwan (and thus secure our chips supply), lose credibility as it becomes obvious that we can no longer actually deliver on our promises, and Ukraine will probably lose Donbas anyway.
I think it would be better to cede Donbas and arm the remaining and build NATO bases in West Ukraine as a deterrent to further incursions.
wait
are you against sending weapons to Ukraine or not?
And combo "cede Donbas" and "send NATO soldiers to fight against Russia" is quite curious and new to me.
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This is obviously false. On the contrary, the plan is explicitly not to give many weapons - such as long-range rockets, planes, and many other things - or at least delay giving them as long as possible. If the plan really were "to give Ukraine every weapon we have" it's impossible to explain why ATACMS rockets or modern planes were not given or why modern tanks were only given late this year - we certainly had them way before that, they weren't created this year.
"Win the war" is a very vague thing - and the extent of how much Ukrainians win right now is a direct function of how much weapons (and what kind of weapons) they have. Right now, their air capabilities are minuscule, and they long-range strike capabilities are such that they can only do sporadic one-off hits, after months of preparation. This is way short of "every weapon we have", unless US military has been lying to us for years about all those advanced weaponry they are supposed to have, and somehow instead spent all those billions on building mocks of all that weaponry that doesn't exist in reality. I don't think even the most committed conspiracy nuts go that far.
Giving enough weaponry not to lose but not enough to decisively win - which was the actual plan for the last 1.5 years - is a great way to let the war drag on. You concept does not offer any explanation why we're discussing long-range rockets today and not in February 2022. Mine explains it perfectly. I think the concept that explains the available facts
Did you wake up yesterday from a 20 year coma? Ukraine has been "ceding Donbass" since 2014. That's when it came under Russian control (fun fact: the guy who organized it, Igor Girkin, is now being slowly tortured to death in Russian prison, because that's how Russian "thank you" looks like) and since then, Ukraine didn't have any control there and could do nothing about it. Just as they could do nothing about Russia owning Crimea (besides completely toothless and impotent "sanctions"). Presenting it as some kind of a "solution", while this was exactly the starting point of the war, is completely bewildering - it's like saying "we could avoid WW2 if only we let Hitler arm himself and signed a peace treaty with him and given him Sudetenland". And it didn't happen in the last century - it happened less than 10 years ago! And still you feel free to completely ignore it. Astonishing.
So, your solution is instead of having Ukrainians fight Russians with Western weaponry, is to have Western troops do the same? That would go just fine with German, French and Belgian voters. They dream about their soldiers dying on Ukrainian soil, I am sure, and despite now willing to send about 1 tank per month as soon as the war is out of TV screens, they will surely be glad so send hundreds of them and live bodies in the harm's way because... what? I am not sure how this makes any sense.
according to unconfirmed reports they let Ukrainian POW to attack and beat him
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...I'm not sure where to even begin with this statement. I cannot form a sensible model of a thought-process that would have this statement as its output. Could you elaborate?
Do you agree that the american occupation of Afghanistan was a failure?
Do you think pessimism regarding American foreign policy or military competence or the general strategic goals in the invasion of Afghanistan is the primary cause of that failure? That if we had only pushed harder, been willing to commit more, worthwhile outcomes could have been secured?
We are all dead sooner or later no matter what policy we pursue toward Russia or Ukraine. You are acting as though your policy preferences require zero justification. That is a pretty wild response to someone pointing to three decades of extremely ruinous policy failure.
Why do you believe your prefered policy a good idea? Why is it a better idea than doing nothing?
Do you understand that your prefered policies have costs? That they have consequences? That if government is a coherent concept at all, you need to actually try to anticipate these things and steer a course toward positive outcomes? Is politics literally nothing more to you than good fucking vibes?
If no one knows anything, why are you criticizing the people who don't want to spend a lot of money and resources escalating this war and its attendant tail-risks? Why do you even have an opinion?
Prove it. Support that statement. Why is it better? On the basis of what data? What leads you to this conclusion?
Elaborate what? You pre-declare that US intervention must be a failure and the only question is when we recognize that failure. In that model, of course it'd be a failure. I just don't accept that model as something having to do with the reality.
Irrelevant for the question being discussed.
No, I think if they pushed smarter, and been willing to do different things, then yes, they could be. It's not a direct function of dollars spent or boots standing on the ground. At least not that alone. But again, this is irrelevant for the question discussed.
Again, policy failures in Afghanistan are not relevant here, as we're not talking about Afghanistan.
I didn't say "no one knows anything", I said exact picture years ahead is not possible to predict right now. That's not the same thing at all. If you demand "before we do anything, tell me and guarantee me you can exactly predict what would happen in a multi-factor hyper-complex event 10 years ahead" - then of course you won't be able to do a single thing. That's not how things are done. You have a general goal, and general means of achieving it - in this case, trim Russia's ambition of territorial conquest in Europe, and giving Ukrainians the weapons - and then you adapt your tactics depending on the circumstances arriving.
The war is already "escalated". That choice is past us. The question is - does the "collective security" arrangement in Europe survive, or do we go back to "every little country for themselves" and the inevitable endless bloodbath that follows that. There's still a chance to preserve that order, but it is going away fast. And more we talk about "when we already recognize we lost everything and should give up?" the sooner we lose everything, including all this nice cushy civilization we enjoy so much. It's much more fragile than commonly thought.
I can't even begin to understand what you mean here, but let me assure you in one thing. Contrary to the belief popular on many college campuses, adding swearing to your argument does not make it more convincing, it just makes you look more unhinged.
Observation of the existing facts. When somebody literally proposes as a solution for the war the situation from which the war started, I conclude he's either ignoramus or is lying to my eyes. When somebody proposes a bunch of non-sequiturs as a supposedly logical argument to a goal - I assume he is either bad at logic or is lying. Carlson has been proposing wildly illogical concept of if we let Russia consume Ukraine, Putin somehow would be friendly to the US (this is laughable to anyone who listened for the last 5 years of Russian propaganda, which has been full of mouth-foaming anti-Western paranoia, and their whole geopolitical concept is rooted at opposition to the West, which is weak and decadent and soul-less) and somehow commit himself to fighting China (despite Russia having zero motive for that and tons of motives to the contrary) - and doesn't even bother to support his fantasies with anything but other wild stories (like the stupid biolab shit). That makes about as much sense as saying if only we helped Hitler to introduce common sense banking regulations, he'd be off the whole Jews thing - about that level of silliness. Vivek is simpler, he's just playing ignorant. He's proposing a solution which he must know - since he is not actually dumb - is not solving anything because that's where the war started. But it sounds nice to people who are ignorant in the matter, and makes him sound like he has solutions for everything to people that want somebody to have solutions. And also to the people who think "fuck Ukraine, better give that money to me!" but are ashamed to say it aloud, so they are looking for someone to say the same but in a smart way, so it doesn't sound asshole-ish but geopolitically smart. That's all his play, the whole con. Fortunately, he's also irrelevant since there's no chance he'd be anywhere near any real power anytime soon.
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You're cheating.
How'd Rwanda go? I guess there weren't any stars and stripes draped caskets flying home, but at the same time hundreds of thousands of people died in large part due to the apathy of the West - your choice to do nothing also carries consequences. I can even imagine a hypothetical counterfactual where we did intervene, and after averting genocide and saving a quarter million lives, the isolationists could still I-told-you-so about the failed Rwandan state, neocolonialism, continued ethnic violence between Hutus and Tutsis, incompetent American foreign policy wonks, whatever.
Similarly, there's a parallel universe where we failed to arm South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and any or all of them fell into the orbit of China/USSR. Any of these countries could easily have been failed states suffering under communism rather than the prosperous, developed nations they are today. Airlifting supplies to West Berlin? Fuck that, have you seen the price of sugar in New York?
Many of the examples you give are just categorically different from Ukraine. Selling/donating a country arms to defend it's right to self-determination is distinct from us putting boots on the ground and invading a sovereign nation ourselves. If the Ukrainians decide the juice isn't worth the squeeze, and hey, whatever, those Russians aren't that bad anyways.
Implicit in your writing is that Ukrainians lack agency and are just useful pawns for the West to push around a board. My impression is that support in Ukraine for prosecuting the war is fairly high. Internationally, many loathe Putin even more than they used to and support for NATO (cold comfort to you, perhaps) and the West are boosted. Again, the inverse of many of the examples you gave, no?
Failure would be Ukraine being completely conquered and subjugated by Russia. Failure would be the Ukrainian army deserting en masse, as they lose a sense of national unity and their appetite for the war. Failure would be swathes of the world aligning with Russia, China and/or communism/authoritarianism.
As you point out, it's harder to paint a rosy picture of success. Childish dreams of kumbaya moments where Russia and China join our big hugpile and all the nations of the earth are buddy-buddy as we blast off in SpaceX rockets to other solar systems are unlikely to follow from sending Ukraine some artillery shells and tanks. Success may just be another frozen conflict and DMZ around Crimea and the Donbas. But the Ukrainians can make that decision for themselves, and if they decide to fight, I believe that they should be given the means to do so within reason.
Overseas military adventures don't particularly interest me, and I align with you in large part in your condemnation of the wars we have prosecuted in the last half-century. But I disagree that absolute isolationism in every scenario is the appropriate heuristic to pull from that. s
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