Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
What is the general consensus about the war in Ukraine? I had a sense things were going very badly until I read Anders' post here:
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/world-war-2-could-learn-something
The argument is that the situation was always awful, but if you compare what happened in Ukraine to the Nazi invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland, things went far better because of the semi-illegibility of everybody's strategy against Russia:
"For Ukraine it is of course a catastrophe to be invaded by Russia and an even worse catastrophe to capitulate after a long and ruinous defense. Just as it was an unmitigated disaster for Poland to be invaded and occupied by Germany in 1939.
But for the world the only thing that matters is that the aggressor loses more from military action than they gain. This is certainly true for the Ukraine War. The war might have been a disaster for Ukraine, but it is also a disaster for Russia. Even if the Russians eke out a win in the end they will be weaker at the war's end than at its start. Not only does this limit Russia's abilities to invade other countries, it also serves as a signal to other potential aggressors to think twice before they act.
This is undoubtedly a win for the international community."
What is the counterfactual we are comparing to, though? The case is easier to make that 2024 Russia lost something compared to 2021 Russia (and even more so compared to 2013 Russia), though by no means clear cut; but the more interesting case is comparing 2024 Russia to a counterfactual 2024 Russia that stood by and did nothing, or even more interestingly the 2030 continuations of either scenario. If states only optimised their own absolute, or even relative to other states, power, we would observe a lot fewer wars in general.
I didn't write the article, so I'm only answering for myself, here. But the counterfactuals are:
A history in which Ukraine's allies, particularly the US but also European countries, did basically nothing to help Ukraine, or even negotiated peace with Russia on favorable terms right as the war was starting.
A history in which Ukraine's allies, particularly the US but also European countries, immediately declared war on Russia as the war was starting in Ukraine.
Under 1, if Russia could have eaten Ukraine with little effort, that would have given their war machine practice, it would have boosted rather than ground down Russian morale, and it would have given them the strategic and material advantages of their new territory without much in the way of costs. It would have basically taught Russia and everybody else that war works, thus encouraging more war in the future.
Under 2, if Russia had been opposed at the outset, Putin would have been virtually forced to retaliate with nuclear weapons, given the speech he made promising consequences like those the world had never seen. And (though this may seem like a trivial by-the-way) it would have given other belligerent powers across the world the green light to declare wars of their own if they had been thinking about it.
These counterfactuals seem worse, and far worse, than the actual history we're living in.
That's not applying the counterfactual at the decision point that I thought we were looking at - surely to assess how bad or good the decision to go to war was for Russia, and by extension what this means for future nations deciding whether or not to go to war somewhere, we should be looking at counterfactuals where Russia decided to not go to war. If the verdict is that Russia was on track to be completely screwed and came out slightly less screwed by attacking Ukraine, then the signal is in favour of invasions, despite reality looking like Russia is getting screwed.
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