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Notes -
A Tone-Shift in the Ukraine War
Lately, I've noticed that the tone of the discussion regarding Ukraine both on the Motte and on X has changed considerably. Notably, it seems that people are taking a much more pessimistic view of Ukraine's chances. The default assumption now is that Ukraine will lose the war.
I think a stalemate is still quite possible, but the more optimistic assumptions that Ukraine would regain lost territory (or comically, Crimea) are now a dead letter. So what, exactly, are our leaders thinking? Recently, Macron went off-narrative a bit, suggesting that France could send troops into Ukraine. More ominously, Secretary of State Blinken said that Ukraine will join NATO.
Perhaps Western leaders view this sabre-rattling as good for their electoral chances. And, until recently, the war was seen as a relatively cost-effective way to weaken Russia. (Sadly, this seems to have failed as Russia has freely exported oil to India and China and is making armaments in great numbers).
But what of Ukrainians themselves? Will they tire of being NATO's cat's paw? It's impossible to find good numbers on how many Ukrainian men have been killed so far in this war. It's likely in the hundreds of thousands. Towns and villages throughout the country are devoid of men, as the men (hunted by conscription) either flee, hide, or are sent to the fronts.
User @Sloot shared this nuclear-grade propoganda. While Ukrainian men fight and die in some trench, an increasing number of Ukrainian women are finding new homes (and Tinder dates) in Germany. Concern about female fidelity has always been a prominent feature of wartime propaganda. But, this takes it to a new level, since the women are in a different country, making new, better lives for themselves. How many will ever even return to Ukraine?
Ukrainian men are getting a raw deal in an effort to reconquer lost territory, whose residents probably want to be part of Russia anyway. Why should Ukrainians fight and die for some abstract geopolitical goal of NATO?
At this point, I don't even think that there is a geopolitical goal in supporting Ukraine, but a reflexive conservatism regarding the liberal project. Putin violated the post-Cold War consensus, eroded the Liberal International Order, and he Must Be Punished (even if it would be against the national interest.) The Europeans had 25 years to keep peace on the continent and failed. They failed in the Yugoslav wars and they're failing in Ukraine now.
Even if you accept the claim that respecting the sovereignity and territorial integrity of states is an end in of itself, the time to do that was in 2008, with Georgia, and 2014, with Crimea. Or heck, 1998, with Kosovo. The Russians have never forgiven NATO for supporting a seperatist state within their sphereling, and is happy to pay them the wages of hypocrisy.
But even with all this, I am still pro-West, because Putin is not a realist actor, but a map-painter, who justifies atrocities with dusty history books. He's not pushing back against NATO's expansion in his sphere, but reclaiming historical clays. Motivations are important in geopolitics, and irrational actors shouldn't be tolerated.
I'm also pro-West. Putin and Russia don't provide a convincing alternative to a better future. But just because Putin is evil and wrong doesn't mean we can't make peace for pragmatic reasons.
This is not Munich in 1938. Russia is a wounded animal, encircled by NATO. People saying "if we don't stop him now, he'll take Poland" are fabulists. This is not a realistic scenario.
On the other hand, I think the lives of Ukrainian conscripts (and yes, even Russian conscripts) have non-zero value.
The very credibility of the LIO and the West in general is at stake. If Ukraine loses, then it's a green light to all with revanchist ambitions. Too much national honor has been put on the line by feckless politicians, who have entangled their political fates to this insignificant front. There's no room for pragmatism.
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Why you think that it is not plausible at all? If Russia invades Baltics and NATO effectively does nothing - why you think that Russia invading Poland is not a viable scenario?
I think that it is not very likely (fortunately) but it seems likely enough for me to justify supporting Ukraine.
The Baltics are part of NATO.
And NATO has real (though small) chance to collapse, especially if Trump would be president.
CSTO already did.
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NATO wouldn't do nothing in that scenario - given that the Baltics are members, an abrogation by the US of their mutual defense obligation to fellow members pretty catastrophically undermines their credibility with allies and vassals the world over. This doesn't even take into account that the rest of the EU would absolutely respond to an attack on a fellow member. At the very least Sweden, Finland, Denmark would become directly involved. Once you've got a hot war involving wealthy member states on their own territory I don't see France, Germany, the UK etc. just sitting that one out either.
That's certainly the theory. But there are some cracks in that theory.
First: Nato isn't a country, and has no unified military. It would take time, at least a few days, for the various European nations to coordinate a response and for the US to send troops over there. Diplomacy in Brussels is famously slow.
Meanwhile, the Baltics are small. The Suwalki gap from Belarus to Kaliningrad is just 100km long, and most of the baltics are not much wider than that. Russia would barely have to advance at all to be within artillery range of their capitals. A strong, quick offensive could cross the gap and occupy their capital in a matter of days, and then present NATO with a fait accompli. Do they really want to go to the mat to liberate these small, useless countries that have already been occupied?
Suppose they do. NATO commanders and politicians agree that, dammit, they've made a commitment, so they fully mobilize their militaries for an all-out war with Russia. At that point, Russia activates its nuclear ICBMs and points them at Europe in a menacing way. Attack us, it says, and we will nuke you, because this is an existential war of survival for us, and we have a lot more nukes than you do.
Europe asks its big bro the USA to help. The USA, after all, has just as many nukes as Russia, and much more advanced ones. At that point Russia points its nukes at the US and says: "do you really want to get involved in this? Are you really going to sacrifice millions of your people to save some tiny little insignificant country in Europe that most Americans couldn't point out on a map? Isn't that insane?" And then the US backs down, and then Europe backs down, and Russia gets a win.
Of course this isn't a new concern, it's been at the heart of NATO strategy ever since it was founded. The solution to this sort of salami-slicing has been the absolute inviolability of article 5, plus a bit of strategic ambiguity and the US's refusal to sign a no-first-use treaty against nukes. Essentially, to make Russia fear us more than we fear them. But I don't know how much that will hold in this modern world where the Republican party (traditionally the more hawkish) has become isolationist, our main rival is now China, and NATO has been unable to manufacture enough basic artillery for Ukraine. I'm not saying that Russia can definitely take the Baltics, and certainly not Poland. But... it's not a complete fantasy, either, it's a real fear.
Nato doesn't have a unified military, but member states frequently train together. I'd be surprised if the Scandinavian and Baltic nations haven't jointly planned for this sort of scenario. While a complete military response would almost certainly be co-ordinated at the European level*, individual nations could spring into action much more quickly. The UK would very likely also respond quickly to a situation like this.
*This is assuming that Trump pulls the US out of NATO (over the objections of almost the entire US political/military establishment).
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That's precisely why the Baltics have insisted on having tripwire troops there. If the Russians overran NATO troops from the major member countries while doing this blitzkrieg, it would be considerably more difficult for those countries to go "whatever, we don't care".
True, that adds to the political calculus and would certainly provoke a big public outrage. But still... when you're comparing against a potential nuclear war, I don't know if the loss of a few thousand troops would be enough.
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The CIA had good advance intelligence of the Ukraine War. In the event similar intelligence emerged indicating an invasion of the Baltics, NATO would station 50-100,000 troops there and be capable of repelling the invasion. It’s not a realistic scenario.
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Okay, but this doesn't actually say it's not plausible. There is a non-trivial number of Americans who don't want the US to have mutual defense obligations or vassals the world over, and their preferred candidate is one precisely lothed, and reciprocates the feeling, with the Europeans. That candidate- arguably the leading candidate- took a position that he would 'encourage' Russia to attack countries not meeting defense spending cutlines- a line that applied to a majority of NATO countries.
While I would be the first to note that Trump's criteria specifically would not ignore an attack on the Baltic states, and I doubt reading his characteristic hyperbole is worth that much, this is not a man who would particularly care about the credibility he has with allies he has characterized as parasites.
This is without noting that multiple NATO governments are variously politically aligned with Russia as-is (Hungary), or are a very plausible election scenario from coming into governments significantly less interested in EU or NATO as a strategic policy.
The issue isn't whether they'd sit out, the issue is that most of them are militarily irrelevant to a war in continental Europe, because decades of mismanagement and capability cuts have rendered them unable to mobilize units at scale or supply them with ammunition to sustain fires at the scale Russia has and is.
Further, one of the significant factors of the Balkan scenarios is that the wealthy member states would not be fighting a war on their own territory: rather, they would be presented a fait accompli in a rapid Russian occupation of the much smaller (and poorer) Balkan fringe, and then faced with the question of whether they really want to pay the high cost in blood and treasure to try and fight their way through the Russian forces there.
This returns to the question of credibility, where while the Americans face the doubt if they would show up, most of the Europeans face doubts of if they can show up in enough scale to matter.
If an actual war would break out and Finland conducted a full mobilizatio, we would mobilize 280 000 troops, and at least an implicit common understanding is that a large portion of these would fight in the Baltics. With one of the largest artilleries in Europe and supported by Sweden's considerable air force and naval capabilities, these wouldn't be able to win by themselves, but are nothing to sneeze at.
Finland and Sweden are both two of the biggest exceptions in Europe, and is part of why their decision to join NATO was such a strategic disaster for Russia's NATO-rationalizations for the war.
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With Trump as president I would not assume that it is impossible (and yes, Trump may also do sensible thing or order nuking Kaliningrad). And Trump has quite decent chances to be a president.
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What about, "If we don't stop him now, he'll attack Ukraine again"?
Just because Russia can't beat Ukraine militarily now, doesn't mean that Putin can't try for a second bite in the future, with the same rationales.
He's already attacking Ukraine, so I don't know how this would be worse.
Salami tactics. That was apparently what Putin was trying prior to 2022, but changed his mind for some reason, possibly because of Ukraine's arms buildup.
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Without the urgency of the current war encouraging the West to transfer arms to Ukraine, and especially if the West loosen economic sanctions on Russia following peace, Russia will replenish its arms stocks for the sequel war way faster than Ukraine can.
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Name any stupid war, and people will always ask why did the countries keep on fighting even though it was obviously to everyone's detriment. Who cares about Alsace-Lorraine or Kashmir, when it would be better for everyone involved if they just quit fighting and focused on the pragmatics of making money and living life in a stable environment?
Then you have Ukraine, and all of a sudden the most important thing in the world is maps from centuries ago or maintaining a precedent for the liberal world order, and everyone rallies around the idea that we must make massive sacrifices for a bit of soil. ("We," in this context, is the kind of we that is mostly composed of young Russian and Ukrainian men, not the person making the statement.)
Yeah, there has been a massive effort to manufacture consensus for the Ukraine War, framing it in apocalyptic terms and launching ad-hominem attacks against anyone who spoke up.
But I believe the tone has changed. People like David Sacks are openly speaking up against the war and not being canceled. Accusations of being a "Russian bot" are no longer sticking. The narrative is collapsing.
I mean, I kind of get it: if I were in Ukraine, I'd rather be in the Western sphere than the Russian sphere, Putin is an asshole who launched this whole war, and the US is getting to screw with a rival for comparative pennies. But at some point you've got to consider the humanitarian cost: I might prefer being in one sphere or another, but I'd always prefer being in either sphere peacefully than being blown apart by a shell in a war zone.
Yeah, it's weird. To me there doesn't seem to be that much difference between Ukraine and Russia. They're both poor, corrupt, Slavic-speaking countries that share a lot of culture. Sure, a European-leaning Ukraine is probably better than a Russia-leaning one, but it's not a huge difference.
But nationalism fucks with people's brains. No one wants to be ruled by a foreign race, even if that foreign race is only superficially different.
I'm reminded of how Bosnians, Serbians, and Croats all speak the exact same language but insist that they speak different languages. I've heard of courtroom trials where the defendant insists on getting a translator because, as a Bosnian, he can't understand Serbian. And then the translator just recites the exact same sentence back.
The differences between Ukraine and Russia are much smaller than the differences between Ukraine and Germany. And that's perhaps why nubile Ukrainian women vastly prefer to stay in Germany.
From my understanding it is popular to compare not Ukraine-as-it-is-now and Russia-as-it-is-now but comparing say Ukraine and Poland.
Or comparing Belarus with Estonia.
It is less "it is much better than in Russia" but about preferring to get to European standards, not Russian standards.
Yeah, that's the fantasy. But it won't be the reality. Ukraine is a Slavic country that is culturally similar to Russia. Whether they are politically part of Russia that won't change.
Estonia, on the other hand, is demographically most similar to Finland. That's why they got rich and Ukraine didn't.
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I really don’t believe the ‘Ukrainian women are hoeing it up’ narrative. Liberated American and Western European women don’t like casual sex much in practice, as much as they’ll defend their freedom to engage in it, and Ukraine has arguably the most conservative social norms of any Christian majority country outside of Africa.
What I will believe is that Ukrainian refugee women seek local husbands and get taken advantage of at high rates. This is, uh, not their preferred scenario, and I doubt they’re very happy about it. I’m also perfectly prepared to not believe in this scenario, either.
Ukrainian women are doing nothing wrong. If I were one, my immediate response would be to GTFO of Ukraine as quickly as possible. As it became clear that the war will last a long time and even once resolved will leave Ukraine a ruined place, I'd then look to settle down in whatever safe country I could find, ideally a relatively well-off one, which would likely involve finding a partner from that country. Maybe I'd use Tinder, if I were foolish. Regardless, in general it's not something I'd begrudge them, and given the option, I'd expect most would rather have stayed in a peaceful Ukraine and married a Ukrainian man. Unfortunately that option's not on the table, so they make do with the options that they're actually presented with.
The central issue is that men are being prevented from doing the exact same thing.
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