This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Henry Kissinger died today. I knew he was a popular punching bag for the left, but seeing the barrage of over-the-top reactions gives me the feeling that I’m missing something. My impression is that Kissinger was a brilliant diplomat who laid the foundation for total American victory in the Cold War. Even if you’re a bleeding-heart internationalist who thinks he’s bad for killing foreigners in Indochina, his role in normalizing relations with China probably saved way more Asian lives than he killed. What is the steelman “Kissinger is evil” position? What am I missing?
In addition to what @Skibboleth mentioned below Kissinger was also instrumental in US support for Pinochet's coup against Allende in Chile.
I do not think people's unrelated good and bad acts somehow function to cancel each other out. Maybe if the evil things were in some way necessary to do the good things we can say the things were on net good but I don't think a case could be made that Kissinger's evils were actually necessary to accomplish his good deeds. You don't get, like, one free murder for every life you save. Or every thousand. Or every million. You get no free murders!
The dissolve all government and trust in the inherent goodness of anarchy, because otherwise that's exactly what you get if you accept the legitimacy of policy at scale.
Policy is about choices, including not making choices. People will die as a consequence of not only action, but also no action, and also regardless of action. There is no world where government action at scale doesn't negatively impact many people, there are only worlds where you don't mind the losers because you like the winning more. This is why 'good' and 'evil' policies are judged on more than just the presence of deaths.
This is where individual-level morality of individuals fails to be coherent at scale, because 'acts' and 'deeds' can be individual actions independent of eachother. You can conduct one with no need to conduct the other. But this isn't true at the policy level of not just national, but international level. The good and the bad are not independent of eachother, they are often outputs of the same sort of policies. To pick a mostly benevolently-seen example, the same 'let's save the environment' policies that push for electrical vehicles also drive mass strip mining and enable the geopolitical blackmail shenanigans of the resource-controllers that not only enable, but empower, abuse of people at regional scales. You don't actually have the policy finess to go 'I want the good stuff, but none of the bad,' particularly when inconsistent strategy can deliver worse of both. This is how Responsibility to Protect legal theories that won the public argument about western intervention in Libya led to... open-air slave markets in Libya.
When it comes to Kissinger's career, the evils and the goods both came from the same overarching Cold War policies of communist containment that led to the Soviet Union's defeat in the Cold War. Despite some nostalgic revisionism, there was nothing pre-ordained about the fall of the Soviet Union, or that it would occur in the way it did. The Soviety Union was not, in fact, too poor to keep itself together by force- it lacked the will, not the means, to maintain a nuclear-deterrence repression state. In so much that Kissinger's good deeds entailed the relatively peaceful dismantling of the Soviet Union, so did his bad crimes.
But Kissinger just straightforwardly bombed and wrecked Cambodia. He created the conditions for Pol Pot to take power just as much as NATO created the conditions for open-air slave markets in Libya. He didn't even get the US much in the way of gains from that war - US credibility was greatly damaged. Vietnam was a huge disaster that could've been a moderate disaster if he'd shown a little more restraint. America losing a big Vietnam war as opposed to a small Vietnam war surely helped the Soviets in the Cold War.
If your thesis is that anti-communist containment was a global good that should be pursued despite a few megadeaths, then doing what he did in South East Asia was actually really bad since it hurt the anti-communist agenda, tarred it with the sting of defeat, led to the Ford/Carter years of pullback and consolidation.
There was considerably more to it than that, so this would be a reductionist rather than accurate summation of the reasons involved.
That is not the thesis, no.
Pullback and consolidation is a considerable part of what Nixon-Kisenger were trying to do, seeking to create the conditions for, and saw as a key point in the anti-communist containment vis-a-vis a position of unsustainable overreach.
This is not the counter-argument you think it is.
OK, so in pursuit of negotiating leverage over North Vietnam he oversaw the carpet-bombing and wrecking of Cambodia. Is that better?
Nixon and Kissinger sought, eventually and after much unnecessary bloodshed, to Vietnamize the conflict. They did not want to pull out and have the South Vietnamese get crushed after so much effort had been put in to prop them up. He wanted US allies to do more of the heavy lifting, sure. But he didn't want to lose. Nixon and Kissinger did not get what they wanted, they doubled down on a bad gamble that, predictably, failed. A recurring issue for US statecraft, that.
How did losing a big Vietnam War put the US on course to achieve its foreign policy objectives or peacefully dissolve the Soviet Union? On this issue alone, surely Kissinger's input was unhelpful to US interests and immoral to boot.
It is considerably more honest to not ignore context, reason, and the utilitarian considerations at play for the decision makers making decisions, yes. It might even be relevant to note the targets, which were not, in fact, distributed across all of Cambodia.
One in no way needs to believe such reasons are sufficient for them to be relevant, of course. But critiques of amorality are not strengthened when ignoring reasons.
They absolutely wanted to pull out.
Nixon ran on a platform to pull out. Both Nixon and Kissinger were willing to incur significant political costs previous Presidents did not to establish the conditions for how to pull out. Nixon and Kissinger were literally the driving forces for the January 1973 Paris agreements which led to the American pull out.
They did not want South Vietnam to get crushed, but they were absolutely willing to accept the risk of it being lost, because- notably- they were not Domino Theorists, and thus did not believe any defeat would be catastrophic everywhere, and didn't consider Vietnam or the Indo-China border area a vital interest worth pouring the level of resources into.
Kissinger and Nixon thought of Vietnam as a distraction from the bigger and more important issues and areas relevant to strategic competition. Managing a loss in Vietnam was preferable to trying to 'win' Vietnam because 'winning' Vietnam meant being more likely to 'lose' the Cold War.
By your implied conditions of losing, he did. They just would have disputed it was an actual American loss in a meaningful sense of win-lose, as opposed to taking the preferable loss of a lose-lose.
Careful, Ranger. Your typical competence on when trying to snidely deride American competence is showing.
Nixon and Kissinger did get the crux of what they wanted: they forced forward negotiations for how the US would get out of Vietnam, got out of Vietnam, recovered the POWs, established a framework for allowing the US to re-intervene if North Vietnam broke the Paris accord, and a few other incidentals that history has generally forgotten. They didn't get everything that they wanted- and some of that it is due to facts beyond the control of American statecraft, by the design of the American state- but no one ever does, and insisting a failing to achieve some things is equivalent to an overall failure is incompetent analysis, particularly when lacking the context behind failings.
The policy choices that let the South Vietnamese get crushed as it did, most notably the cutting off aid that the South Vietnamese government had been dependent and the refusal of the US to re-intervene when North Vietnam broke the Paris accords and began its conventional invasion, were not Nixon-Kissinger policies, and occurred independently of the Cambodia policy. The cut-off of aid was a result of the American Congress throttling the budget, against the wishes of the politically-dead Nixon (who was at the tail end of Watergate), and for a host and variety of reasons of which Cambodia was not particularly salient or relevant to.
This is the not particularly complex concept of reallocation of resources. Unless you think the US was somehow gaining more ability to fight the Soviet Union across the globe by fighting a big war in Vietnam, not-fighting a big war in Vietnam gave the US government big-war resources to use elsewhere.
Which, in fact, we know happened. Just from the military component, once freed from Vietnam responsibilities the post-Vietnam military subsequently went onto a number of deliberate reforms and paradigm shifts that took the US from the 'they couldn't beat peasants guerilla fighters in a jungle' reputation to 'they defeated a million-man Soviet-style army with more casualties to friendly fire than enemy fire' in less than 20 years- and thus part of the psychological setup of perceived and actual inferiority that undermined the willingness of the Soviets to violently resist the separatists and dissolution of the Soviet empire-state. Meanwhile, back to the 70s, the reallocation for forces / focus from Vietnam allowed the US to re-balance in other areas including Korea (where the North Koreans had been trying to use the US preoccupation with Vietnam to attempt it's own insurgency-uprising), Europe (where nearly a seventh of the American military that was the critical assumption of NATO was tied down in Vietnam), the Middle East (where american logistical networks no longer pre-occupied supporting Vietnam played a significant role in the Yom Kipper resupply efforts), and elsewhere.
The benefit of resource reallocation only holds, of course, if you consider Vietnam a 'big' war in the first place. At its height, the US military presence in Vietnam was only about half a million active-duty service members.
What, the consequences of illegally and secretly invading or bombing neutral countries finally caught up to the President and Congress spat the dummy, demanding total withdrawal? Nixon and Kissinger were playing their own game, haughtily excluding everyone else from their plans and then turn around with a shocked expression when they got the rug pulled out from under them.
Expanding the war into Cambodia was a direct cause of much of Nixon and Kissinger's political woes, it went squarely against his electoral promises to withdraw and scale down the war. It caused considerable public anger and distrust, including in Congress. The duo's loss-management skills were poor, especially since fighting in Cambodia didn't change the outcome.
And what was the fruit of the Paris Accords? The North Vietnamese had no plan to abide by the terms of such an open expression of US defeat (withdrawing US forces without withdrawing NV forces...) - better to drop the pretence and negotiate directly with North Vietnam to get the POWs and leave unilaterally.
That's a big war, albeit not a world war.
You completely misunderstood my point, obviously it was better to leave Vietnam sooner, which is a process that Nixon/Kissinger ironically undermined with their determination to claw out a draw by coercion - it was never going to happen. I don't see how I'm stupidly deriding American competence when they made the exact same mistake again in Afghanistan, launching these ill-planned interventions over low-value regions, realizing they've lost, wasting a lot of time negotiating and trying to bully people who are playing a fundamentally different game with far higher stakes. The North Vietnamese were ferociously determined and were not going to accept defeat, or even a draw. If 500,000 troops couldn't beat them, a piece of paper certainly wasn't going to help - this is the error Kissinger and Nixon made.
What's the quote about repeating the same thing again and expecting a different outcome?
Not really, no. Cambodia was not particularly relevant to the American political opinion or actors involved at the time. This isn't exactly some social secret either- there still exists public opinion polling and records of remarks and interviews from the period that you could look at if you cared to.
This is more of a demonstration of your lack of awareness of relevant subject matter.
Simply because you believe the framing you subscribe to should be the one others subscribe to does not make it so. It does, however, make you wrong when trying to characterize the reasons that actually held influence to those others.
This would be demonstration two...
Exactly what was described in the answer you ignored but dismissed as they didn't seem relevant or important to you. Which would be demonstration three....
Absolutes that seem big to people with smaller frames of reference are not the same as big things in absolute terms. A seventh is a considerable and non-trivial fraction, but it is not a big fraction.
Since the Soviets subsequently lost the Cold War to the results of the post-drawdown reorientation of the US, that would surely be an uninformed conclusion, even without the fallacious attempt to assume a conclusion that doesn't even hold.
I understood your point, it was simply characteristic of you and unsubtly trying to ignore previous points to make a jab.
You are stupidly deriding because you are demonstrating a considerable lack of intelligence, awareness, or understanding of the things you deride.
Such as here. This line, and the paragraph that was clipped, is its own example. It does not take some sort of uncommon insight to identify multidues of differences- and things to critique- between Vietnam and Afghanistan from political, social, diplomatic, economic, military, opposition, local regional, and many other relevant factors. Breezing past them for a not-partiuclarly-well-constructed historical metaphor to force a commonality on topics you have stronger opinions than knowledge about is quite characteristic of you, but also a stupid form of derision.
You never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I am pretty sure the quoted section explicitly acknowledges that good outcomes can justify evil acts, so I'm not sure what your first three paragraphs are doing. As to the last paragraph, if you want to make the case that America's bombing of Cambodia, or supporting a coup of Allende, or supporting Pakistan's genocide in Bangladesh were actually necessary to topple the Soviet Union I am open to hearing the argument but I do not believe it just because you assert it.
More options
Context Copy link
I think that after the mid 70s it was clear. In the early 80s everyone just waited for the regime to die. Probably there were signs during the space race too - but then the smart people were either too pro USSR or too blinded by anti communism to be objective.
This is completely wrong.
The most amusing anecdote to that effect: in 1987 Star Trek TNG's future history included launches from Baikonur Cosmodrome, USSR in 2363; in 1989 another mention established the USSR as still active at least through 2123.
But most of the rest of the recent Twitter thread where I saw that is good too, and a more academic view can be found here.
I keep harping on this lately for some reason, but for a decade and a half the position of "the smart people" was that, as Walter Cronkite put it, “It turned out there had never been a race to the Moon”. It wasn't until 1989 that the very existence of the N1 rocket, including the most powerful rocket stage ever flown until the SpaceX SuperHeavy tests this year, finally leaked.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link