Chap wrote: ↑Mon Aug 29, 2022 8:02 pm
Physics Guy wrote: ↑Mon Aug 29, 2022 5:54 pm
Russia invading Ukraine didn't suddenly turn Ukraine into a perfect state peopled by saints, except in media presentations in faraway countries. People shouldn't have to be saints, though, to deserve not to be murdered.
That's the nub of it for me.
Hmmm. My complaint is about incompetent policies designed and heralded by incompetent people, and allowing those people and their allies to set the terms of the discussion in determining what course of action should be taken. I think their policies are partially responsible for this situation and will make all of this even worse if we continue to pursue them.
Many Russians look at it this way: Ukraine's eight year shelling and sub-genocidal terrorizing of of ethnic Russians in Donetsk and Luhansk didn't suddenly turn Donetsk and Luhansk into a perfect state peopled by saints, except in media presentations in Russia. People shouldn't have to be saints, though, to deserve not to be murdered.
Assuming the truth of these "murders" and "atrocities" for now, every side can play this game endlessly, and atrocities committed in a conflict do not seem to me to be a sound
basis for policy (I emphasize the word "basis"). Addressing it should certainly be a part of the policy, once the full story behind media sensationalism can be discerned and relevant facts can be sifted from propaganda. A policy that is fundamentally about avenging civilian deaths will be disastrous and will lead to total war when you're dealing with a country like Russia and not the used car dealerships in the Balkan states. Governments seem to grasp this at least, but why instead a long-term war of attrition is any better is a mystery to me if we care about civilian deaths and atrocities—what about all the needless civilian deaths and inevitable atrocities that will lead to? Is "Putin is just a bully" sufficient to answer for a policy that would lead to that? Not to me.
To be sure, I don't think civilian deaths or atrocities are a basis for whatever the NATO countries' policies are. News-consuming voters might have their passions stirred by it, but I don't think they are primary considerations for policy makers because otherwise we have to ask why they focus on the atrocities that they do and ignore countless others. Discussions of atrocities and civilian deaths are obviously subordinated to larger policy goals, but in the western countries there is very little discussion of these policy goals, and atrocity porn helps to delay discussion of those questions. That's why, at least in the US, these same people keep popping up behind and around every one of these disasters. Given that these atrocities are ultimately the result of policy failures, it seems to me the policy discussion should come sooner rather than later. Dim cliches like "Putin is just a bully" might make you feel good, but ultimately it is self-defeating and becomes the more destructive the more it is used as a justification for poor policy choices.
And just because something is an atrocity does not mean that it is not an element of a propaganda campaign. This is a lot like the opening year of World War One, when atrocities committed against Belgians by the German armies were used to whip the British population into a frenzy in order to win public support for the war that many British politicians thought they needed to fight for other reasons that had little to do with Belgium. Perceived atrocities committed against ethnic Russians by the Ukrainian government are the core of Russian propaganda, after all, even though many of the elements of that propaganda campaign happen also to be true.
Kishkumen wrote: ↑Mon Aug 29, 2022 8:45 pm
I just have so little sympathy for Putin and the invasion of Ukraine, just as I had no patience for the US invasion of Iraq, which is even more unfounded and much worse in its initial conception. By quadrupling down on brutal, incessant shelling of civilian homes, Putin has signed his own death warrant, and how we got where we are suddenly matters much less in the calculus. That is the spirit of what Physics Guy seems to be saying.
It is not a question of sympathy for me, but with respect, the idea of just retribution lurking behind this response will lead to a situation of total war if we indulge them: it doesn't matter what the other side wants or what the causes of this conflict art—at this point, Putin is a criminal, so only his submission and punishment matters. That certainly can only be answered by total war because Russia is not Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria. We cannot punish Putin, and he is more popular in Russia than Joe Biden is anywhere except perhaps suburban DC and Berkeley. He has not signed his own death warrant. And it wouldn't matter if he did, because this war is not a personal pet project for Putin designed to make the comparison with Peter the Great more real in his deluded mind or whatever half-wit American commentators go on about—it has a lot of support in Russia, and it is better to understand why and grapple with that rather than boxing the shadows of an evil dictator caricature. If it's not him, it'll be another Russian leader in ten or twenty years.
So I think it really does matter how we got here. This has every mark of being about Russia's traditional concern over its ever precarious security. We have given them reason to feel it keenly, so any policy that includes the spread of US and European liberal democracy as its goal will get us more of the same. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has had a policy in Eastern Europe that is as imperial a project as any, and we should either assume the burden of empire properly or surrender our pretensions to the principled realism of the past, a realism that recognized real constraints but was motivated and conditioned by a set of ideals that Americans largely shared (one of the great ironies of this for me is that the people most passionately flying Ukrainian flags tend to be the people most open to the idea that America is evil racist country laced with white supremacy through and through—if that's so true, let's get the beam out of our own eye before attempting to extract the mote from our Russian brother's).
Russia at any rate is not going to be deterred in the slightest by the empire-LARPing that constitutes US foreign policy. It's concerns can be apprehended and addressed, and that makes them real and concrete, whereas Bush-style fantasies about the spread of liberal democracy as an inevitability and thus a duty are airy fantasies with a very bloody track record in their attempts to make them real. Russia is a country spanning several time zones, comprised of dozens of ethnic groups, where hundreds of languages are spoken, bounded by vast but fairly artificial land borders, with very few natural ports that are serviceable year-round and that are independent of foreign control or influence (look at what they are doing in Ukraine: taking control of all the coastal areas, which rings all kinds of bells for people familiar with Russian history). The NATO countries did no favors for anyone by expanding up to Russia's borders throughout the 90s and early 2000s, when Russia was too weak to object meaningfully, by attempting to put missiles in Poland, by instigating and supporting a number of revolutions in Belarus and Ukraine in the early 2000s, building on of the largest armies in Europe in unstable and corrupt country on Russia's border, most of which has historically been part of Russia, and even by interfering in Russian domestic politics in 2012, which was a lot more than memes on Facebook. There is nothing to do about past provocations like this in a particular way, but the issue that defines these actions as provocations—Russian security concerns—can be addressed and will have to be addressed at some point anyway. Stephen Kotkin—again, someone who is a proponent of response to this invasion and no fan of Putin—is not alone in pointing out how the west has been repeating this pattern for the past century and a half: Russian security concerns are ignored whenever Russia is riven by internal conflict or economic weakness, that weakness is exploited by opposing powers, and then those security concerns come roaring violently back when Russia recovers. This is just a fact of the Eastern European situation that needs to be dealt with, and I find dismissal of all of these causes to be dangerous because they are the heart of the issue. Call it Russian propaganda all you want; it is a fact one will have to reckon with.
Shryver's views seem to be—and they are
not my views—that the NATO countries are irredeemably decadent, Russia has an unassailable moral right to its invasion, that there is no moral foundation to the NATO response, and that everything coming out of the west is propaganda. I don't share such a bleak view of the west nor harbor such a rosy fantasy about Russia. They certainly have a moral right to security, which we have failed to respect and which will have to respected if this is to end rather than escalate, but that is not the same as morally justifying their invasion. I don't think justification matters: it has happened, but it has happened for understandable reasons, and we do ourselves and Ukrainians no favors by ignoring them and retreating into the same species of pseudo-democracy promotion that has been so disastrous elsewhere for so long.
My complaint is that our conversation in the United States and our policy are currently dominated by demonstrably incompetent people who do hold views rejected not just by me or Shryver but probably most Americans when those views are presented on their own and not embedded in atrocity porn: namely, the view that the United States can and should be the world hegemon. Not only has it proven false that the United States can be such a hegemon, it has also proven impossible, reckless, and fatal for the countries that become the lab rats for this theory. Like Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been and remains just such a lab rat, however just or unjust the situation, and the fact that people like Bill Kristol and his camp are talking quite openly now about wearing Russia down in a long drawn out conflict (again, like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria) by endlessly supplying Ukraine with weapons and other support means more and more civilian deaths. Now, that seems to be the main concern of people in this thread, so are those inevitable deaths justified just so that Putin can be put back in his place like a naughty child? Or do we need to escalate this to total war on account of the civilian deaths? Probably the goal is to wear Russian down in the one case or win a decisive military victory in the other, so that Russia's final negotiating position will be weaker. Good luck—not to them in their gamble, but to all the people who have to be the lab rats for their theory.
For it is rash to think that a country like a Russian can be worn down over an issue of border security through a conflict like this. I don't remember that working out so well in the past. Proponents of this fantasy derive their confidence from the self-congratulatory myths about the USSR's Afghan war, which they totally decontextualize or else know nothing about it. Even if those myths were rooted in reality—and they are not—it didn't turn out so great for Afghanistan, now, did it? And it was not without its side effects for the United States, as we well know.
Physics Guy wrote: ↑Mon Aug 29, 2022 8:01 pm
In particular, war is usually the only answer to war. Once someone starts one, you can't just talk to their bullets.
Yes and no. Of course war is answered by war, but the question is how or whether to continue/escalate or end, and at what point on what terms. Most wars have not been settled by complete and total victories (World War Two is completely anomalous in this respect). Even those that are apprently overwhelming victories don't necessarily lead to stability separate from the negotiating table (Israel's massive and overwhelming victory of 1967 lead to 6 years of brutal but unofficial skirmishing, another war, and then 9 years before a difficult negotiations brought about a settlement). Eventually, there is a risk-benefit calculation in light of the military situation, and the opposing sides each try to maximize their interests in negotiating an end. My question: what are the NATO countries doing to get to that situation? The strategy we seem to be taking is, flood Ukraine with an endless supply of weapons and other support (
to the point that we deplete our own reserves) in the hopes that they wear Russia down into submissive negotiation position. Can you tell me what other conflict since World War Two that has worked in? How about just the last twenty years? How about just since Obama's shining presidency? Many, many civilians will have die and suffer miserably in policies of this kind, and I don't see what benefit it will win, other than the temporary sense of satisfaction that people who live in splendid comfort will get when they watch/read the news about how wrongdoing has been punished.
Shouldn't there be something like a global police force, which could be called in anywhere, like a sort of mother of all SWAT teams, to deploy armour and airstrikes against things like terrorist insurgencies?
No, there shouldn't be, but this is basically how the ISW people want the United States to operate. Formulated this way, it makes Russian propaganda sound right on target with the desires they impute to NATO. How would you ensure that this global police force would not become the puppet of one interest faction or another and that it would have only the benevolent interest of all the people of the world at heart? Who gets to define "benevolent" and "interest"? And what would happen to its legitimacy when one of its "mother of all SWAT teams" operations were felt by many to be unjust? What about when there were legitimate claims on two sides of an issue? Would you have to appeal to the Inter-Galactic Supreme Court in that case? Would the Inter-Galactic Supreme Court have its own benevolent police force to enforce its decisions? How would
it maintain its legitimacy against the other police force? Wouldn't that global police force be informed by its own ideological presuppositions, and so wouldn't its enforcement actions actually be an imperialist imposition of one set of ideological principles upon another? I'm sorry, but this sounds like a typically self-deluding technocratic fever-dream.
The problem still isn't solved. We should all be fighting on YouTube only by now, but there are still plenty of barbaric morons eager to seize the power that comes from a gun barrel, and even rogue states that seem to think that collectively, with guns upscaled to divisions.
The problem of how countries and groups with above stone-age level technology will frequently disagree, and project and defend their interests hasn't been solved? Probably never will. If you want to come out and argue for a liberal-democratic Imperium Americanum, with European junior partners as administrators of the empire in the Easter European Sector, come out and do so. Many will not want it (the "barbaric morons" as you call them), so you will have to assume a "[racially progressive and ungendered person's] burden" and civilize them, which will require introducing these barbaric morons to our more enlightened gun barrels.
Analytics wrote: ↑Mon Aug 29, 2022 6:00 pm
If I had to distill your point, I'd say you are pointing out in a Socratic way that we don't know as much about this as we think we do. The first step to wisdom is to realize we don't know, and we really don't know all of the pertinent details of what's going on in Ukraine. Am I on the right track?
I am not sure I would put it that way. I don't think there is a "truth" about Ukraine that one can attain by a process of reasoned dialogue. Put simply, I am skeptical that we can understand the details of the war on the ground on a day-to-day basis. These "daily updates" from ISW are very suspicious to me because I suspect they are based on media reports mostly. I have very little faith that such reports would be any more reliable or any less propagandistic than what comes out of Russia. ISW podcasts were saying back in February "it's all over now and Kiev will be taken in a day" which was a total speculation, and now it's "Ukraine can win this thing, just look at the maps: it's September and Russia only controls the coasts." All of this suggests to me that they have no idea what Russia is trying to do with its invasion. Maybe Putin isn't Hitler trying to take over Poland? My skepticism approaches something closer to worry when I see that this idea percolates into the heads of policy makers so that we get policies like handing over tens of billions of dollars no-questions-asked because the policy maker believes that "Ukraine can win this thing."
The problem I'm highlighting is that we lack any policy that has a principled realism of the sort that the United States once excelled in. The ISW people, neo-cons and Reaganists all, are fine with and indeed promote military escalation that will neither solve the problem nor help Ukraine. That seems to be shared by most Republicans as far as I can tell, and on the other hand we have most Democrats who live in the foggy world of Obama's bromides that apparently appeal to Physics Guy and others here; but these are not principles, just sentiments. This apparent "bipartisan agreement" on Ukraine is actually a coalescence of opportunisms. The only dissenters to these groups with any public reach, unfortunately, are a weird motley of reflexive anti-Americans on the left and on the right Twitter experts in "
Geopolitics - History, Empires, and War - Macroeconomics and Markets - Data Analytics"—and just to remind you that there is a human here—"Music."
So I am sure the "democracy" promoters will once again win the day, and this will just keep getting worse. I have always preferred Russian-style optimism to American-style optimism, and so I end with it here: "However bad things are now, don't worry, and look forward to the future—because they are going to get worse!"
The AFU clown show in southern Ukraine scales new heights.