While I agree many posters here have likely read your comments as echoing Russian propoganda for reasons other than the ones you propose, I think it is possible to be more clear. For example, I read your position as there being little difference between the use of propoganda by the West and by the Putin regime as everyone is using propoganda with some kernel of truth at their heart to manipulate their populations into supporting causing harm in the name of doing good. Your statements early in the thread posited that the equivalency between them would be more obvious to someone who could read Russian and Ukrainian, and was seeking out those sources directly. The result being it likely matters little what our policies or intentions are, we are likely to repeat the mistakes of the past by doing more harm than good. With Russia being a nuclear power, the risk involved in a misstep is greater. The US would probably do the most good by sitting this out and letting what's going to happen otherwise just happen as it will likely resolve itself in ways at least no more harmful than if we continued to support a prolonged war.Symmachus wrote: ↑Sun Sep 11, 2022 12:34 amAnyone who has followed what I have said can see that I have been consistent for a couple of weeks now. Nearly every single reply has been some variation on "the Russians are to blame—what kind of Ukraine-genocider are you? You're duped by Russian propaganda." I didn't realize that people actually did grasp what I was saying and just made a conscious choice to ignore it. In any case, "I'm not saying that; I'm saying this" ten times and then concluding that people just aren't getting it because they keep turning it into a question of whether Russians are right/good vs. wrong/bad isn't an ad hominem argument. It is an exasperated description of what is happening.honorentheos wrote: ↑Sat Sep 10, 2022 7:52 pmIt may be good to be careful when arguing that others are engaging in ad hominem dismissals when also making points only a few posts up essentially saying that ones point is simple yet apparently, "too difficult to grasp, no doubt because it doesn't flatter one's sense of justice," and go on to essentially dismiss every comment made as a failure of the poster to follow what you were saying.
Sym, the propoganda supports the policy. The propoganda may be manipulative (by definition it IS manipulative), but the policies aren't part of the propoganda. The statements of purpose given publicly may be. But policy-making, that is not. </end record screech moment>What I have said: our Ukraine policy seems confused and keeps escalating with no clear goal, and the people who are running it and advising on it in the government and media have a poor record which has resulted in major screw-ups with tiny countries—is it wise to continue this when a nuclear power is involved? I don't think that means that I have to come up with a new theory for how the international system needs to operate before I can discuss my concerns.Regardless, there are a few points I made that you may or may not dismiss for whatever cause, but are hardly based on attacking your person so much as the issues the dismissal on your part left unresolved.
That's basically what I have been arguing. In asking for what people think our policy is and so on, I have largely been offered explanations about how bad Russia is until the most recent couple of posts (a new day dawns and fresh light bursts forth). No matter how compelling or what truth they contain, they are part of propaganda war to win public support for involvement in Ukraine.
Bro. Yeah. This just put you in bro territory.I don't think that this kind of thinking should be the basis for our policy there.
So in other words, if you've been following (and maybe you haven't, because I'm responding to three or four people at a time), I am not equating propaganda and the policy. I have been trying, with great difficulty but as gently as I can, to get my interlocutors to disentangle them. You and I seem to agree on this.
Setting aside the convenience of excluding the Napoleanic Wars and WWI to create a century of choice, I think it gets at an underlying issue here which is the lack of understanding of what the 19th century nationalism includes? Your comment focuses on two main points in favor of the 19th century being less bloody than the century before or after. The relevant comparison is in how nationalist sentiment lead to a period of national expansion of a different order than the conflicts between traditional enemies such as between Spain/England/France/the Dutch, etc. The middle of the 19th century was a period of revolution and reordering that saw the formation of a unified Germany, conflicts over disputed lands in the old world and the new, and the seeds sown that not only lead to WWI but the Bolshevik revolution and WWII as well. You describe the wars of the 20th century as being about ideals, but the wars of the 19th century were about identity and pride which are sources of conflict with dominance as their aim, inherently. WWI and WWII were not started over ideals but over 19th century beliefs about national identity. They were resisted over ideals rather than competing claims of a different national identity and rights of ownership. The Cold War was a conflict over ideals, but never resulted in direct West vs. Soviet or China warfare. If war breaks out of Ukraine, it won't be due to Russian idealism over the right way to run an economy but over Russian national identity and the belief they have the right to certain lands and privileges. That's 19th century nationalism, only now with nuclear weapons. I'd argue we had a solid 70 years without major national conflict between 1945 and today due largely to the conflict being between ideals and not assumed rights or national identity.I decided to ignore your interest in turning this into a discussion of the proper international system the minute you used the 19th century as the evil bad time of nationalism that was just so horrible. I don't think we should go back to that world system, it is not at risk of happening any time soon anyway, and it is not even possible, because the material circumstances are so vastly different. But since you think it was such an evil time and so unworthy of respect, tell me, how many wars were fought among the nationalist states after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 until 1910? Which was the worst of them? It was hardly century of great power conflict. After Napoleon, the practice of states being open and clear about their interests and aims led to a much more stable world with smaller scale wars than the century after that where state competition was embedded into larger moral conflicts. You tell me which century you think was better on the atrocity front. I see in an upcoming Foreign Affairs that this is a war between "democracy and nihilism," so I guess we in the US are sticking with the plan of the last century. Anyway, the 19th century system became very dangerous when the material circumstances changed, especially the economic and technological circumstances, which had put too much a strain on it by 1914. But I don't think at all that it was because nations had interests and pursued them—they still do!We have left the question on the table as to what you imagine to be the world order you prefer over the one being sought though current US support of Ukraine. And that remains either ignored or dismissed as unnecessary.
I wonder—and I say that sincerely, meaning I'm just not sure—whether the system from the 1990s onward, where the US was the default hegemon and sole superpower, can also survive the economic and technological transformations of the past decades and the strains it is imposing on the post Cold War arrangement; and I think we should be conscious about the serious dangers that could result from trying to maintain a 1992 world in 2022. North Korea is tiny country and economically insignificant, and by all measures its nuclear program, while shocking to exist in the first place, really should be beyond the power of the North Koreans to maintain, given their zombie economy. But I learned from listening to a panel at the Billington Cyber Security Conference the other day that they are able to bring in more the $2 billion annually from cyber attacks, and that that their nuclear program only costs about $700 million per year, which means that they can fund it through Cyber theft alone and still have a lot left over. Now, that's North Korea. We are approaching Russia like they're the Balkans from 1994: sanctions and NATO support (if not yet troops). And that was a tough one for NATO to coordinate. I just don't see the alignment of tactic to task because these tactics probably just don't work like they used to. I don't know what the world system should be like, but we should consider the very real possible that the 1990s were a fluke at the moment and not guidebook for the future.
You said this was an example of the Ukraine engaging in attacks on ethnic Russians. It wasn't. I don't care how you might spin it, it wasn't what you introduced it as being. What it is may not be nice and neat and the kind of action you'd invite to dinner, but it's reality. Cynical? No, that's realism. If you are more of a student of Kotkin and not just reading him to find points of agreement you'd see policy making is like that. You aren't seeking for the pure white needle in the mud. You are often trying to find the least bad option among many where some of the worst can be catastrophic. Shutting off a utility as the canal effective is makes as much a sense as a matter of resolving dispute over territory as any other action. Were there legitimate humanitarian concerns involved, there are avenues for raising those and resolving them. They normally involve agreements between the occupying force and nation supplying the utility. Again, it's not something you can moralize without taking a side in the moral balance of actions. You don't like being accused of shilling for Putin, but this is a clear example where, even if unintended, you are very much taking a side over what you seem to think is a neutral moral issue. That would make you what some call a useful idiot if that is in fact how you think.What is cynical is that you don't distinguish between the legality of something and the morality of something but treat the satisfaction of the former as an instance of the latter.Understanding how the Fourth Geneva Convention pertains to matter of civilian populations and infrastructure support is entirely essential to properly framing the matter of the Ukraine having shut down the canal used as an example of Ukrainian animosity towards ethnic Russian. If that appears the epitome of cynicism to you, the issue appears to be with what you believe "ought not to be" compared to how they are out of necessity.
I am just not convinced that Russia has 19th century nationalistic ambitions, and think that there are security concerns, some genuine and some opportunistic, tied to the imperfect security architecture in eastern Europe and central Asia after 1992. But forgive me if I don't see the goal here.
These actions were all part of an evolving policy regarding Putin's leadership that has to be dynamic to be relevant. The US under Obama failed to confront Russia over the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas which Putin claimed were part of Russia and the people were being forced to be part of a nation they did not want to be part of which since left both in conflict since 2014. The US decided that the intel on Russian mobilizing to invade Ukraine should be treated differently since it was clear Putin viewed the West as unwilling to respond to his expansionist behavior, and made the intentional decision to share intelligence on Russian intentions broadly beginning back in Fall 2021. Russia denied repeatedly that the US was telling the truth, and vacillated between claims this was all lies and that the US was going to provoke them into actually needing to act to protect themselves. The Ukraine publicly tried to downplay the concern of an actual invasion. Once the invasion began, the West largely expected it to be over quickly and focused on expressing outrage. When the Russian military proved inept and Ukraine both motivated and competent, the dynamic shifted again. And it will shift multiple times in the future. China will shift their positions, other nations will recalibrate, and the US will likely change our engagement as the dynamic shifts as well.
For decades the US policy makers imagined economic access would create economic opportunity that would lead to democratization for nations such as Russia and China. This proved wrong. You often quote Kotkin so I'm assuming if you've read him sufficiently you'd be familiar with his views on policy making regarding the authoritarian regimes whose approaches to market access have differed so widely yet their hold over their populations remains similarly tight if different in appearance. Yet you seem to argue for a naïve policy making approach.