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Not sure if this belongs here or in SQS, but it could either be a small question I don't understand or a discussion depending on whether or not people disagree about the answer.
Why did support for Ukraine split along the left/right the way it did (at least in the U.S.), when typically one would expect it to go the other way. That is, the right is usually more pro-military, pro-military intervention, and patriotic defending of one's homeland. Even though the right tends to be more focused on domestic issues and oppose foreign aid, military support tends to be the exeption. Although there was bipartisan support of the Iraq war (at least in the aftermath of 9/11) the Republicans were more strongly in favor of it and stayed in favor of it for longer. If Russia had threatened to invade the U.S. the Republicans would have been not only gung-ho about repelling them but also about retaliating and obliterating them in revenge so that none would dare try ever again. So you would think they would sympathize with Ukrainians as similarly patriotic defenders of their home turf, while the left would be all peace and let's try to get along and diplomatically convince the invaders to stop without violence, or something like that.
But that's not what happened. Why?
Is it just because the left has been harping on about Putin for years so hopped on the anti-Russia train too quickly and the right felt compelled to instinctively oppose them? If China had invaded Ukraine (for some mysterious reason) would the right be pro-Ukraine and the left opposing intervention because they don't want to piss off China (and accusing Ukraine of being nazis as an excuse)? That is, is there something specific to Ukraine/Russia that caused this divide here specifically, or am I misunderstanding the position of each side regarding military intervention in general (or has it changed in the past few decades and my beliefs used to be accurate but no longer are)?
Did it? How does what we see now differ from bog-standard American political polarization?
I'd be the first to note that the Republicans have a more vocal wing that's openly Ukraine-skeptic, but that wing notably isn't even charge of the Republican party, let alone 'the right' as a whole. It's also incredibly typical of American political party tradition of the party out of power flirting with more radical peace movements right up to the point they come back into power. Cindy Sheehan was a darling of the Democratic party up to the point the Democrats were in charge of Iraq and Cindy kept protesting the war. Republicans are an isolation party until they're in charge of foreign policy.
From my perspective, the American right is much more skeptical about how the US goes about supporting Ukraine, than about whether to. When things get tied to, say, anti-corruption measures, people who aren't just using corruption as an argument-soldier tend to be more accepting. When actually challenged to explain how, say, conventional arms delivery meaningfully risk nuclear war despite an entire cold war to the contrary, that doesn't seem to be a particular close-held belief when put into context by even casual inquiry. The closest thing is a consistent concern is cost... which is both a framing narrative but also one that the government can easily undercut at will by simply explaining how it chooses to frame costs.
These are far more indicative of 'I don't trust how the other party handles things' skepticism than actual opposition. If a Republican had been at the helm at the start, we'd have Republicans being the pro-support party and the Democrats warning how Trump was recklessly going towards nuclear war, etc. etc. etc.
Factions of the American right far more organized, far more coherent, and far larger lack the ability to meaningfully dominate the American right's perspective on policies far closer to the party base, let alone Trump's likely coalition. I hear far more from the opponents of the American right about how the right is against Ukraine than I hear any sort of chorus from the right against it.
The Cold War isn’t even close to analogous. Now because of advanced weapons, the US can give Ukraine weapons that easily and frequently do hit Russia’s territory (including Moscow). That never happened during the Cold War as far as I know.
In so much that the Cold War is an aggregate rather than singular thing, this would be true. In so much that the Cold War was filled with examples that serve as analogies for what does / does not trigger nuclear war, including direct conventional combat between nuclear states or conventional military support resulting in tens of thousands of deaths, this is false.
I also not that you fail to identify how conventional arms deliveries meaningful risk nuclear war, which was the subject of the risk comparison.
If you mean that the US or Russia never gave advanced weapons to allies or proxies against their superpower adversaries, this is false. Notable examples included the Soviets giving the Koreans entire armored divisions of equipment and then giving the Vietnamese state-of-the-art surface-to-air systems and various forms of rockets, and the Americans giving stinger missiles and other weapons to the Afghans, and major military packages to the Europeans and even the Iranians for use against the Russians.
If you mean that 'the US couldn't give weapons that could easily and frequently hit Russia's territory', this is also false. The entire point of many of the ballistic missile treaties in the cold war was precisely because the US could give weapons that could easily and frequently hit Russian territory, and US military aircraft and missile technology only stopped being unique in so much that it proliferated to the point that many nations had the ability. This doesn't even address dynamics of Russian/Soviet (and, most relevantly, allegedly Putin's) perspective of the power dynamic between the US and NATO countries, which diminished perceived relevant differences between the US military launching a missile from German territory and German forces launching a missile from German territory.
If you mean that weapons provided by the superpowers were never used to do so, this was because the superpowers never invaded their adjacent neighbors who were in range of their territory, not for a lack of willingness to do so. The willingness to do so was a rather significant part of NATO's architecture.
There are interpretations and angles you could have meant that would make your intended statement true, but none of them particularly validate the contested claim of how conventional weapons meaningfully risk nuclear war. Casual mechanisms are consistently lacking, or downright silly.
Would we really nuke Russia over some smallish number of mushroom clouds in Ukraine though?
I'd like to think not, as it seems fantastically self-defeating -- but guess I could imagine the pitch.
Maybe the democrats are playing a variant of the 'madman' strategy here -- if your opponent is so dumb that you can't predict whether he will blow off his head to spite his face, you need to be very cautious?
You are as equally unlikely to nuke Russia over Ukraine as Russia is unlikely to nuke Ukraine over Ukraine, or the Afghans over Afghanistan, or the Chechans over Chechnya. The Cold War, and the post cold war, has a number of examples of both powers accepting losses in wars of choice- even when internationally humiliating- rather than invoking nuclear weapons.
Common misconception of what Madman Strategy counter-play is. When someone is suspected of invoking madman theory, the equilibrium is to be less, not more, cautious.
Ultimately, there's only two general conditions when dealing with a nuclear madman: either they are faking it, in which case they are actually rational, or they are not faking it, in which they are not rational. This is binary, not spectrum- you can't be both simultaneously rational and irrational from a nuclear deterrence perspective, because deterrence itself is a binary. You are either deterred from an action, or your are not.
If they are rational, you don't make concessions in the name of caution, because doing so is unnecessary (they aren't actually mad), it incentivizes the rational-madman to continue to continue to fake madness (as a rational means to get further concessions), and it also obfuscates the ability to identify actual madmen. You continue to operate below assessed nuclear thresholds, you just do so based on your own analysis of what the actual thresholds are, not what the fake-madman claims (because he is a liar), based on common lines of assessment.
If they are not rational, you don't make concessions because if they responded rationally to concessions, they wouldn't be irrational, but faking irrationality. When dealing with truly irrational actors, the counterplay isn't rationality-based deterrence, but capability degradation that limits their ability to inflict harm, which cannot be assumed to be traditionally deterred. This means a lot of things, many of which harmful, but critically targeting the irrational-madman's rational support network whether that is domestic or abroad.
The common mistake people have with Putin and nukes in Ukraine is being bound up in a general narrative where Putin is simultaneously a rational actor and an irrational actor, and that nuclear actions will be done for simulateneously rational and irrational reasons.
Interesting points as always -- to be clear, I'm saying that if Biden is dumb enough that his response to Putin nuking some stuff in Ukraine might be 'full exchange' -- Rational Putin needs to be pretty cautious about what he nukes in Ukraine. "Nuclear Moron Strategy" if you will.
Not sure how this works if Biden is only pretending to be retarded; isn't the point of it that it's hard for Putin to be sure?
Of course if Biden is a moron and Putin is a madman none of it works all that well.
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Not a nuke, but an overwhelming NATO-backed (and probably OK'd on the down low by China) attack on basically of Russia's military capabilities? Probably.
Yeah I think so too -- although conventional WWIII doesn't necessarily seem like a great outcome either.
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This is nonsense. During the Cold War, neither the US nor the USSR gave weapons in proxy wars that resulted in incursions into the other sides’s territory let alone amped up the exchange.
Mentioning Korea is besides the obvious point — Korea wasnt LA. Mentioning ballistics is also obviously beyond the point. They weren’t actively being used.
The Cold War did not have anything close to the current situation.
Finally the causal mechanism is clear — weapons are provided that help Ukraine make serious inroads into say Crimea and Russia uses tactical nukes. NATO responds and the world ends.
Neither had the opportunity, as neither directly invaded an adjacent neighbor and started a sustained urban bombardment campaign.
In terms of preparation, the Russian position on NATO as a threat is that this is precisely what NATO has been from the start: a US proxy threatening incursions or worse into peaceful Russian territory. The Russian narrative, propaganda it may be, is as relevant to precedent for Russian nuclear deterrence posturing as anything else, or even more so, because one can take Russia's own words and actions for what both represents a threat but demonstratably does not represent a nuclear-retaliation trigger.
You seem to have missed the original point as much as the previous replier, so that's not a surprise.
The Cold War had numerous examples of both sides engaging in massive conventional arms shipments that resulted in tens or even hundreds of thousands of casualties to the other in the other's wars of choice where losing would not threaten to trigger state collapse and existential risk thresholds that drive nuclear weapon use.
As the relevant comparison being invoked was nuclear risk, that is incredibly relevant, especially as the Cold War had multiple contexts were nuclear war was far closer than the current Ukraine war.
That is not a causal mechanism, as the threshold criteria has already been falsified in this very conflict.
If 'serious inroads into Russia' were the standard that would invoke nuke use, nuclear weapons would have been used last year, because the Ukrainians have already made 'serious inroads' into de jure Ukrainian territory that Russia annexed. This is just one of the reasons why Putin's annexation gambit of the eastern parts of Ukraine last year was panned as a strategic mistake- in his attempt to box himself and any would-be successor into continuing the conflict to victory, he demonstrated that Ukrainian military successes in internationally-recognized but Russian-annexed Ukrainian territory were NOT something Russia was going to go nuclear over, a dynamic that was furthered with the Kherson defeat and which is ongoing in the southern front in late 2023. The obvious rheotrical off-ramp- that these aren't 'serious' inroads- just undermines the central premise, because the Russians can always claim that a major defeat is not 'serious', which moves the nuclear retaliation from objective criteria to subjective criteria, which goes to rational or irrational actors, which drives back to what observable indicators there are of nuclear thresholds and if they've already been passed X number of times, why they should be believed to be nuclear on X+1 time.
A similar lack of credibility occurred with claims that any attack on Crimea might meet a nuclear response- there have been many, many, many attacks on Crimea since the war started. They have not made the war go nuclear. Attacking ships in port did not make the war go nuclear. Conducting operations from within Russian-claimed territory, and even internationally-recognized Russian territory, did not make the war go nuclear. There was never any particular reason to believe they would besides people claiming clear causal mechanisms, but like many, many other Russian red lines, these have not been nuclear. That the Russians claim Crimea is a part of Russia as any other is itself undercut by the other areas they claim is part of Russia, ie. the territories they claimed not only when they didn't already hold them, but also lost significant major portions of. The precedent is already set, because Crimea is only as indisputably Russian for nuclear deterrence purposes due to being annexed as the also-annexed Ukrainian east, which has not been basis for nuclear retaliation.
A third extension of this theme of undermining nuclear-threshold criteria is, of course, Russia's own attacks into the other's territory: Russia set precedent in the world that strikes into urban centers were an acceptable form of non-unacceptable activity, and when the Ukrainians reciprocated, the Russians demonstrated it was not, in fact, a nuclear threshold. These were, notably, established with Urkainian strikes not dependent on Western advanced munitions, but from Ukraine's own stocks of Soviet-derived (and in some cases Soviet-produced) munitions. The actions doable from non-American sources demonstrated the lack of threshold criteria in claimed thresholds, and so western-provided munitions have to have something more than a magical western aura to be nuclear-escalation risk. Maybe if Urkraine began some sort of population-targetting WMD campaign... but the Ukrainian bio-weapon labs have not exactly materialized.
Between strategic mismanagement and precedence, the Russians have demonstrated that Ukraine taking Russian-claimed cities, reciprocating strikes, and other forms of military engagement remain below the level of nuclear threshold criteria, which is typically only associated with the survival of the state or WMD retaliation. Throughout the war, the Ukrainians have not significantly impacted the Russian state's ability to maintain internal control of the population, or even the military, which might cause a threat to the continuity of government, which is also credible nuclear thresholds. The most relevant threat to the state's capacity to control in the last two years have been overwhelmingly self-inflicted internal politics, which would not- and did not- lead to a credible nuclear threat.
If the argument is that aid packages will eventually allow Ukraine to march on Moscow, which would threaten state survival, that's not an argument against current aid packages. That's an argument against hypothetical future packages well, well after the point of Ukraine taking its internationally recognized borders.
And this is aside from the assumption of the Western response, for which leading to MAD results from the typical muddling of whether actors are rational or irrational. Even setting aside the nature of assuming the NATO response would be nuclear, if the Russians are rational nuclear actions, and NATO nuking is a given, then the Russians would not conduct the nuking that leads to MAD, because they are rational and the use of the nuclear weapon would not be worth it. As the Russians have not used nuclear weapons to reverse battlefield setbacks even without the threat of NATO nuking, the non-Russian observer is going to have to justify why a particular Russian battlefield loss will precipitate nuclear use when it hasn't been rational to do so to date, but also why- if the argument twists to that the Russians are irrational- why the irrational Russians haven't done so to date.
Which goes down to the typical muddling of actors being simultaneously rational and irrational which tends to retreat for the motte when challenged.
That’s a lot of words undermined by your first sentence. My whole point is “this war is categorically different from what happened in cold war proxy wars” and you confirmed in the first paragraph that I am correct.
You can’t say on one hand the Cold War established when nuclear weapons would be used and we haven’t reached that point while on the other hand acknowledge this situation never occurred during the Cold War.
Finally, my scenario hasn’t been falsified. My position is that if Russia was seriously threatened in Crimea or Moscow, Russia May use nukes which creates a spiral. Since the only way Ukraine could possibly threaten Russia this way is with our support, you just have your causal mechanism.
Finally, one need not find this example compelling to be worried about an existential threat. Let’s say there is a 5% chance. That is clearly a valid concern when giving weapons to Ukraine
No, not really.
You may need to re-read it, and then read the second, and the subsequent paragraphs, because that is not the concession you are looking for. Especially in light of response paras 4 and 5, which actually do address what you think paragraph one addresses.
Of course you can. The application of category qualifications is a basic skill.
If you understand what makes something qualify for a category, you can look for whether a new thing has the prerequisite characteristics to qualify. If we know that, categorically, something has characteristics X, Y, and Z, then if something we don't know doesn't have X, Y, and Z, we may not know it well, but it's not the category. In this case, 'the Cold War established when nuclear weapons would be used' is a category- the category of what sort of things would lead to nuclear weapons being used, i.e. the thresholds, i.e. existential concerns.
As the category already exists, then for novel example (war nearby rather than a ways away) to qualify for the category, you need to establish it as meeting the criteria. When the criteria are existential risk, you need to establish existential risk. If it does not, you can absolutely judge that it doesn't meet the category of concern.
At the end of the day, new things don't simply fall into pre-defined categories they haven't qualified for.
Now, you could try to argue that a starting premise is wrong- that we don't know Russian thresholds- but that would undermine the argument that we shouldn't send weapons because it would cross nuclear thresholds. The argument presumes an understanding of thresholds. If you don't, then there's no basis to the claim. If you do, then it's just discussing where the threshold is- and so far you've retreated from examples of non-threshold advanced weapon use.
Your position fails to have a causal mechanism because there is no objective relationship between claimed components due to in-build subjectivity and assumptions.
You don't define what a 'serious' threat to these areas is which allows retroactive retraction of any standard. You don't provide a causal relationship dynamic to explain how Crimea substantially differ from other areas Russia claimed are categorically the same but didn't nuke over and which thus demonstrate that control loss alone is not a threshold. You didn't establish why NATO should be automatically assumed to nuke, or why Moscow would choose to do so on the understanding of that, or why Moscow would escalate to MAD if it was willing to be nuked on that understanding in the first place. The is the classic conflation of rational and irrational nuclear actors- Moscow is simultaneously rational enough to resort to MAD, but irrational enough to instigate MAD.
You even conflate Crimea and Moscow for the same opposition point, despite that the scale of resources to remove Russian control from one is of entirely different magnitudes than the other. The Moscow-based Russian Federation does not face existential risk if it loses Crimea- it does if a force is capable of taking Moscow. The two forces are not the same, and the aid shipments that have to date not even allowed Ukraine to capture its own territory are demonstratably not enough to capture Moscow.
This is not a causal mechanism- this is basic assuming the conclusion on handwavium, while throwing in non-falsifiables that wave off the counter-examples.
It's not clearly a valid concern at all, since you pulled 5% out of the same source that you assumed the conclusion, but didn't actually contrast it to the existential risks that follow from NOT providing weapons sufficient to defeat an invasion and annexation of territory against a country that actually did give up nuclear weapon potential in the past.
This is a classic example utility monster logic application, which struggles with infinities and resorts to smuggling in the framing while denying other fictional metrics that would counter the desired conclusion. You can say there is a 5% chance that conventional arms leads to a nuclear war, and someone else could say NOT sending enough arms to conventionally defeat Russia leads to a 5.00005% chance of nuclear proliferation by security-concerned countries that leads to nuclear war. Both are negative infinities.
If you want to say infinity is equally bad in either direction, it doesn't matter- negative infinity either way is still infinity. If you want to say a more likely infinity matters more, you need to actually justify why. Otherwise, there's nothing valid about it- it's just an arbitrary claim to relevance.
Dude. I don’t know what to say.
The basic point I was an am making is that the Cold War is no guide contra to what you said. You haven’t provided any evidence it is.
Seems like you are trying to use some weird “debate trick” as opposed to address the substance of the argument. I’m not making the claim that “we shouldn’t send weapons because it would cross nuclear thresholds.”
I’m saying that sending weapons may cross that threshold (likely depending on Ukraine success) and therefore I don’t judge it to be worth the risk.
As for everything else, again it seems to be a weird debate trick as opposed to substance. For example:
I don’t need to. Losing territory that was small and not part of Russia prior to the invasion is different from losing Crimea which has been Russian for most of the last hundred years, is of key strategic value, and has been de facto Russian since 2014. They are of different categories so I would make a reasonable assumption that Russia would react differently. This seems obvious and happy to try to explain the assumptions but it doesn’t feel like a conversation.
Indeed, most of your argument comes down to “your argument relies on assumptions and judgements.” Yes. So does the argument for providing weapons. The question is which one is reasonable. Trying to play this weird gotcha game isn’t really all that interesting.
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