This applies to China as well. I'm no fan of China and their treatment of Hong Kong et al. But, what are you gonna do about it? It seems that the "pro-China" and "anti-China" sides are just identities. I'm "anti-war-between-nuclear-armed-countries" myself.
I use this username on a bunch of sites and like it when people refer to me as "Klaus" like it's my name. Idk what else they would refer to me as but it's funny.
I decided long ago to just use my name because then I don't go off the rails as much, so of course all my thought don't get input--just the ones that are reasonably polite. Also, any opportunity to make librarian recommendations my real goal.
There is a strategic reason for bluster: a credible signal that the US will defend Ukraine can stop Russia from (further!) invading Ukraine.
I can't say if any of the people doing the bluster are aware of the difficulties or ramifications of this. And "just walk around swinging your big dick" is just *too* appealing to people's ego, so people will be more likely to want to believe this even if it's not true.
I'm certainly no foreign policy expert, but consider this from a law of unintended consequences perspective. If we do some saber rattling, other countries are less likely to think they can get away with the odd invasion without an American response. If we sound too reasonable, they're more prone to do something that we then decide we have to respond to. It's game theory. I'd rather be the slightly unhinged guy that no one wants to get in a fight with. So the underlying point about mutually assured destruction and the horrors of war is spot on, but I disagree a bit on how we avoid all that.
I disagree pretty strongly here. I think you are taking the exact wrong lesson from the 20th century. The only reason any country has a nuclear arsenal at all - and the only reason Jews went from a large European minority to virtually non-existent outside of a couple countries globally - is the blase reaction the Democratic world had to countries being eaten by authoritarians. Letting Putin waltz into Ukraine IS very literally telling him that it's okay to press Russia's claims, so bye-bye Baltics. Same goes for China. A fear of a nuclear war is legitimate, but is it really morally acceptable to let dictators do whatever they want globally with zero repercussions? Last time we did that it proved to be a catastrophic mistake, what makes you think this time will be different?
Because historically that is the de facto understanding that the West has had with the Soviet Union (and now arguably Russia) for literally generations? The West can try to make it uncomfortable for Putin but actually sending in the troops is insane.
The US has maintained the same "your borders do not grow" understanding with Russia/USSR since Yalta. That's why all the wars were proxy wars - the USSR couldn't occupy Afghanistan or even Korea because that would create a larger conflict. The US has conceded client states, but to call Ukraine a client state would be pretty inaccurate. If the USSR had tried to occupy Finland there would have been gunfire in West Germany within the week.
This is not historically accurate. After WWII the USSR seized Eastern Europe as a buffer zone and installed puppet governments in Eastern Europe, including in East Germany. The Ukraine had an even closer relationship with Russia: it was part of the USSR.
And the Soviet Union did invade Afghanistan in the 1970's so I am not sure why this is one of your examples.
They invaded one of their puppet states. They invaded Hungary too. Weirdly did not invade Austria when Austria broke away - maybe it had something to do with knowing that it wasn't a full-on puppet state and thus would have caused a global war. Afghanistan was a dumb example on my part, but the point still stands.
So basically the USSR has countries that it thinks are worth armed intervention and countries that it believes do not rise to that threshold? How is that not true of every country on the planet?
Which last time? Vietnam, where we ravaged a country and killed millions there for no strategic purpose, all to prevent a unification that was going to happen no matter what because a substantial majority of people in both halves wanted it to? Or are you referring to World War II, which conspicuously did not feature nuclear weapons until the very end? The "if we had acted sooner, we could have prevented Hitler" is really not a helpful historical counterfactual.
You were probably were raised in a context in which the United States really did have an overwhelming military advantage over its major competitors. That is no longer the case. We. could. lose. a. war. with. China. or. Russia. Not Iraq lose, not Vietnam lose, but as in they slaughter our infantry and take territory we intend to protect lose. If you base your whole view of foreign policy on American mythology then you'll never consider the possibility that we could just lose.
It doesn't matter if we could lose. That's wholly irrelevant. If we lose the exact same global outcome happens as if we had done nothing at all. This isn't Vietnam. Taiwan isn't internally fragmented over joining China. Japan is not debating the China issue. To use Iraq and Vietnam and Afghanistan as examples here is to wholly deny agency to the people that are under threat here.
You are making the fundamental assumption that they will merely stop. This is the appeasement assumption - that if we just let them take Taiwan they'll be happy. I think that's wildly naïve. And even if you think nuclear war is guaranteed in the event of military conflict do you think we should just let Russia take over the Baltics again? Should we just let China invade Japan? You can talk about how bad it is all you want, but to pretend like this is merely about Ukraine is silly IMO.
How long do you think the United States can contain China and its ambitions? They've got 1.5 billion people, an immense economy that the rest of the world is absolutely dependent on, a vastly more technologically advanced military than even 10 years ago, and a government that despite all of its authoritarianism enjoys the overwhelming consent of its people. So how long do you think the United States is going to get to say "sorry, we determine where great powers can and cannot expand"? It's not a rhetorical question. America's relative decline is not a choice; it's an inevitability. Given that, how long do you think we can hold on to a 1990 mindset?
I think the Chinese navy and air force are pathetic, the population is aging rapidly, and I don't think China will be able to force their way past the US into Taiwan in my lifetime. You are making the fundamental mistake of conflating army with ability to invade over water, and the Chinese navy is a bunch of tiny coastal ships that really can't project much power beyond its shores.
I think it's also a bit misleading to cite US vs China when in reality where the US goes so will Japan and Germany and the UK and Canada and Australia and likely many more. The US the tip of a much larger spear whereas Russia and China are their entire spears. The Democratic alliance (which almost assuredly includes India as well) has a much larger population.
Like Nazi Germany, we only need to occupy them until the Chinese people (like the German people) take control of their government and remove the bellicose leaders.
Many times governments do these things as a defensive measure to cover for their ineptitude.
In the next 20 years—as a result of the one child policy—rapidly aging China becomes an economic backwater unable to fight any wars.
In fighting in Vietnam, we stopped The Domino (The domino theory was a Cold War policy that suggested a communist government in one nation would quickly lead to communist takeovers in neighboring states), the chain of Communist Countries terrorizing their neighbors until the governments fell and the Communists stepped in. This is what happened in Vietnam. In 1954, the country divided. People segregated into Communist North, and free South. Then the terrorism started, bombings, executions, etc. Vietnamese refugees tell me the war was as much N/S racial & cultural, as it was communist vs liberty.
Is it morally acceptable to let the USA do whatever they want globally with zero repercussions given the track record of foreign interventions since WW2?
I imagine at least one world leader would completely misunderstand the point of at least one of these books and take it as their righteous cause to fire a nuclear warhead at someone.
I've seen enough reviews of The Great Gatsby where someone thinks Fitzgerald is an advocate for Gatsby to know that many people can read but apparently don't know how to.
There's something reductive to me about the "Russia and China have nuclear weapons: therefore America should do nothing to stop their aggression" argument. It basically makes us entirely powerless and I do not agree that the US should just accept foreign aggression on the part of Russia and China.
I'm not saying do nothing. I'm saying that a military response could very easily result in the kind of hot war Americans are too stupid to believe that we can get in anymore, and we could very well lose even on a conventional front, and if we won then both Russia and China seem perfectly capable of launching a retaliatory nuclear strike in response that would instantly become the most defining individual event of human history.
Also lol at the United States complaining about "foreign aggression."
I'm by no means an expert in this area, but my understanding is that our hopes of winning a conventional war against the USSR was not good either. That's one of the reasons Berlin was such a big deal: we couldn't reasonably defend a Soviet claim on Berlin without using nuclear weapons, inviting retaliation.
The United States would win a modern conventional war against Russia and Russia would struggle to conquer Europe today. Russia is not a push over, it wouldn’t be easy, but it could be done.
Berlin (which was literally surrounded by East Germany) is also much different than Ukraine.
Underrated point. Ukraine was foolish to give up their nuclear weapons. I don't blame them, and I don't think anyone who lived through the early 90s can, but it should serve as an object lesson to other countries.
Yet that is what everyone who says "well, they have nukes, so we can't interfere with them" is doing: encouraging every country to get nukes to stay safe.
You would have to be incredibly naïve to fail to see that sometimes the international order doesn't hold up and that armed force is a credible hedge for that scenario.
I have no idea if this will work, but I've wondered if the US could cut a deal with North Korea to end their nuclear program in exchange for an end to sanctions. So your broom at target might say made in North Korea.
Something like this happened in 1994 under Clinton and included some funding for light-water reactors in North Korea that the Republican Congress cut. Certainly possible that DPRK would have reneged on the agreement anyway, but it was a feckless sanctions regime with a steady trajectory and ultimate realization of a nuclear armed North Korea ever since. We should probably get used to that.
We've been sanctioning Cuba with good result. Us old farts remember a time when Cuba was hijacking planes out of the US on a weekly basis. Khrushchev tried to plant nuke missiles in Cuba.
"If the missiles had remained, we would have used them against the very heart
of America including New York. We must never establish peaceful coexistence.
In this struggle to the death between two systems, we must gain
the ultimate victory. We must walk the path of liberation even if it costs
millions of atomic victims."
--Che Guevara lamenting the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Why shouldn't we accept foreign aggression on the part of Russia and China? That seems like an ahistorical position to hold.
A) Powers always accept foreign aggression from other powers so long as those occur in their sphere of influence. That normally turns out fine.
B) We expect Russia and China to accept far more invasive foreign aggression from us. That turned out fine for them.
I want all countries to come together in a united one world government of peace and prosperity. But failing that, it seems like observing the norms of international relations would be preferential.
Last I checked america is not imposing an authoritarian despot on China or Russia’s border. So point B is bullshit as far as im concerned.
And we shouldn’t because territorial integrity is important. America promised to protect and respect Ukrainian territorial integrity. Letting Russia take it over makes our word appear worthless. If Ukraine can be wiped off the map then I don’t see why Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania wouldn’t also feel the same.
Respectfully, it's difficult to argue with someone who is stating Bush Administration talking points as if they were reality. But I wish you a good day.
Afghanistan, the country*, didn't attack us. The majority of 9/11 attackers were Saudi Arabians. We eventually found Bin Laden himself in Pakistan (supposedly a US ally.) Our human-rightsies-respecting "democracy" fell in about twenty minutes and most of the locals who were involved in its building are either now cowering in the shadows fearing reprisals, or multi-millionaires in Los Angeles. It was a fool's errand from start to finish, a completely self-inflicted national humiliation that not only failed to prevent further international terror in the two decades that followed the invasion but also failed to rebuild Afghanistan.
*It's a country only in the loosest sense. Its central government never, at any time, exercised control over most of its territory. And that's precisely the way the "Afghans" like it.
Yes, Saudi's funded and participated in the dirty work. But their base of operations was Afghanistan. Likewise in the 60s, Cuba was the host of terrorist actions in the US, however the funder was the USSR.
And yes Pakistan is on the fringe of our influence. We keep them close to prevent a Pakistan-India war which would in reality be China backed war against India. If we can keep Pakistan out of the influence of China is best, even if some of Pakistan's leaders are bad actors.
"It's a country only in the loosest sense. Its central government never, at any time, exercised control over most of its territory. And that's precisely the way the "Afghans" like it."
I think our "word" on the world stage has been pretty suspect for a long time, but the Iraq war definitely did irreparable damage to it.
The US, like any global power in history, has always been a mercurial ally. If we're not getting something out of a conflict, we don't bother. And whoever's doing the calculus on Ukraine right now doesn't see the upshot yet.
I would argue that Libya is far, far worse. Gaddaffi believed he had an understanding with the US that giving up his nukes was enough to guarantee peace between the two countries. At least with Saddam you could trace the lineage of the conflict back to the invasion of Kuwait. What's the justification for air strikes in Libya?
My point was that our "word" on the world stage hasn't been respected since at least 2003. The invasion of Libya was after that. I'd view it as another data point highlighting what I said above.
I think you could make the argument that deposing Gaddaffi was stabbing him in the back. Saddam didn't have the benefit of any such arrangement with the US so in terms of betrayal Libya was worse.
Kuwait was the public justification for deposing Saddam, but the "lineage of the conflict" dates back at least to the souring of his formerly close relationship with the CIA.
I'm not suggesting I agree with J Alex Keene here (I'm not sure what I think as yet), but it seems odd to argue that because our word has been damaged by foolish actions, that we should no longer care about it. Your solution to the damage our reputation suffered in 2003 (and beyond) is surely not to stop honoring our word, but this time in the way *you* want us to not honor it?
My point was that our word has been worthless for nearly 20 years, if not longer. I wasn't making a broader point, except that the word of any global power is dependent upon the advantage they see in keeping it under specific circumstances.
If France or Germany or the UK were actually threatened, I believe we'd stick to our word. With marginal powers bordering belligerent nations, we're less interested in keeping promises.
If we actually wanted to honor our word, there are many different strategies we could take besides just throwing more guns at the problem. For example, The Marshall Plan.
It seems like your point is that our word has always been worthless (as well as the word of every major power which doesn't require others to believe they will honor their word to thrive). Fair enough. I'm a bit of a disillusioned naive idealist and I still *want* to believe that a nation's (our nation's) promises matter, that there is some utility in being understood to keep our promises (and there certainly is, but possibly less than what we perceive we gain by failing to honor them). However, I suspect your interpretation is correct.
"But whatever the right answer is, it’s absurd to suggest that a desire to avoid such a conflict makes one a tankie."
Except I think what's being objected to here is not so much the desire to avoid conflict, but Bruenig's casual assertion that Japan deserves to be invaded.
As for the rest of it -- I don't think it's as simple a question as you're making out. I find it extraordinarily unlikely that Putin will push the button even if there's armed conflict -- if ever there was a guy who wanted to survive, it's him. But the bigger point is that you AVOID a hot war precisely by hemming him in. It's why we stationed troops in Germany after WWII and why we have troops in Korea. You don't actually fight -- but everyone knows there could be a fight, so nobody starts anything.
Whether the calculus is right for this tactic in the Ukraine, I don't know. The politics are murky, and Russia essentially claims it's part of their aboriginal territory. But if Putin is successful in taking the Sudetenland -- er, Ukraine -- what reason do we have to think they will stop there? The Ukraine shares a border with Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Poland. What if Putin goes further West? At SOME point we have to deploy troops, right? And it's always going to be under the threat of escalation to nukes. So... what makes you squeamish about the Ukraine in particular?
But hem Russia in, and China in, for how long? This is a point I should have made more clearly: just about everyone acknowledges that America's relative power in the world has diminished significantly since the moment of true unipolarity post-Cold War. And most serious people understand that this is to some degree inevitable, that at the very least China is simply going to become more active on the world stage, and Russia remains a serious threat, and India might very well become a military power in the next century.... And so policies of worldwide containment of bad actors (by which we merely mean rivals) become completely untenable. Either we exhaust ourselves trying to police the world, or we spark an immense war in our zeal to maintain a world order that was never going to endure, or both. I do not see how "contain Russia and China in perpetuity" is a workable plan.
Yes -- I just responded to another comment of yours, acknowledging that the strongest argument for doing nothing is that we've become comparatively weak. But being comparatively weak indefinitely is not really a workable plan, either. At a certain point we will have to assert ourselves, or trouble will come find us. Precisely because it's not a unipolar world, and yet the US still has an outsized mythological presence, sooner or later, someone will test us. And it seems to me that standing strong early (at a place and time where we CAN stand strong, and will not get pantsed) is a good way not to get gobbled up in a multi-polar world.
There are already nukes pointed at the United States. See Freddie's article. By any measure this is a significantly greater *risk* - if a lesser symbolism than missles within binocular distance of Florida - than the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Hence by your standards trouble has found us.
I don't feel particularly troubled by this, no more so than yesterday.
The point isn't the nuclear threat. The point is that sooner or later a reinvigorated Russia (or a newly invigorated China) will feel free to go beyond reclaiming old territories and move into the US sphere of influence -- which puts us at greater risk of conventional war in our own backyard.
Why wait until the wolf is at the door? Build a credible fence farther out.
I'm normally a big fan of your comments so I say this with genuine respect: I fear your understanding of history may be lacking in some perspectives.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was NOT trouble coming to find us. There is no way to read that historical event that way except through blind American patriotism.
- We commit an act of aggression against Cuba (invading it at the Bay of Pigs);
- We commit an act of aggression against the USSR (placing nuclear missiles in Turkey);
- They combine to retaliate (placing missiles in Cuba);
- We both agree to remove our missiles.
Yes, the America, Fuck Yeah Version supports your point. But that version doesn't exist in reality. I would suggest reading a wider range of sources on some of these issues.
I can see I picked a confusing example, so I apologize for that. (I'm fighting a multi-polar battle in these comments -- you know how that goes.) My point is simply that Russia has projected power into our back yard before, it's shockingly easy for them to do, and if they think we are a weak, fat, bloated empire that won't set and maintain limits... why wouldn't they do it again?
"If the missiles had remained, we would have used them against the very heart of America including New York. We must never establish peaceful coexistence. In this struggle to the death between two systems, we must gain the ultimate victory. We must walk the path of liberation even if it costs millions of atomic victims."
--Che Guevara lamenting the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis
This is binary thinking. There is a middle ground. We didn't originally occupy Germany to keep Stalin down ... although it had that effect. We occupied Germany to keep German men from reforming an army. What happened after that, was that we seduced the German people into a peaceful existence.
Likewise, we refactored Afghanistan for a bit under US occupation. We got girls into school, they were going to grow into educated moms. Given a generation or two, of young men and women who grew up with and expected equality, we'd have seen a major change. Those educated girls would have been the moms that rocked the cradle. (the hand that rocks the cradle leads the nation) What people don't see is that there was no hidden army in Afghanistan. The people were over-run by their neighbors next door. If all the teens and young dudes who had grown up with girls in school had risen to be the majority of the men, our exit would have had a much different result.
Is it your opinion that NATO invading Russia and Russia invading Europe were equally likely events?
Also, is it your opinion that the Eastern European countries in which Russia stationed troops AGREED to that? Or were they absorbed into the USSR's orbit of control against their will? I'm not sure that comparing the Soviet empire to a voluntary security alliance makes much sense.
Russia has historically been preoccupied by the threat from the West since Napoleon. Putin is completely traditional in this regard.
Your interpretation is a misreading of history. In the aftermath of WWII both sides carved out their spheres of influence where they would brook no foreign interference. War by proxy is possible in places like Vietnam and Korea. There is zero reason to believe that Putin or the Russian security apparatus would be so blasé about a threat from the West on their doorstep.
I feel I need to preface this with the disclaimer that I DO NOT agree with the Russian government or their approach at all.
A lot of the American discussion about this is completely absent the Russian perspective. From their view we've spent thirty years acting aggressive towards them. Before that was 45 years of a Cold War in which they (not wholly without merit) viewed us as an aggressor. Before that was the most apocalyptic war in human history. Before that was 20 years of western isolation and oh yeah, us ACTUALLY INVADING RUSSIA. And that's just the last century.
How much of that ia true is debatable, and I certainly don't like what Putin does. But this wariness of the West, as you note, is wholly within Russian traditional norms and often for good reason.
I am, in theory, fine with American wars intended to curtail aggression from foreign regimes. Pax Americana, and what not.
In practice, we’ve rather conclusively proved that our political elites have no idea how to even formulate a consistent list of victory conditions, let alone implement military force in pursuit of it, even if you give them a generation of time in which to replay mulligans.
My gut instinct is to revive the draft with no exemption for college students, and remove from office any politician caught trying to help their family dodge it. If the citizenry of the US care enough to shed an ocean of blood in the name of international peace, let it be shed. If they are not, then let Ukraine fend for themselves.
We already have the draft ... President Carter reintroduced it under The Selective Service Act. If you're a US male over the age of 18, you've registered for Selective Service. You probably signed a postcard in High School in your senior year.
I am well aware of SS. I’m talking about a *draft*. Everyone, male and female, rich and poor, all ethnic groups, rolls the dice after high school and some enlist for a hitch.
It’s utopian, to be sure, to imagine universalism in military service with no outs for the senator’s daughter or minorities ending up as infantrymen at three times their per capita. That’s why it’ll never happen.
Nonetheless, such a system would be vastly superior to the one we have, not least of which is because we wouldn’t be so cavalier about wars of choice if they actually impacted regular voting people.
Israel has universal service and it makes the country as a whole take military action very seriously. Lots of people are 1 degree away from someone in the military service, and essentially everyone is 2 degrees away. There's a distinct lack of chickenhawks who talk about how awesome war will be for other people to fight.
Perhaps I should say this: if your concern is that the United States will be insufficiently bellicose, that we will be too conservative about what we consider our security interests rather than too profligate, that there's not enough internal pressure in this country that pushes us to conflict.... I think that's a hard reading of history or politics to justify. The limitless expansion of what we consider our obligations to protect seems designed to hem in foreign powers to the point that they practice a minimal expansionism that we would never, ever consent to ourselves. And since the decline of our unipolar dominance is an inevitability, that seems almost certain to eventually produce a major war.
But the other possibility is that a major war will come to us no matter what. If American unipolar dominance is coming to an end, then so is a peaceful world. If Russia can take Ukraine without response by the "world's policeman," then why can't it take other territories it considers its own? Why can't China take Taiwan? Why can't they, in fact, spread out as far as they like. If it's not a unipolar world, conflict IS coming.
That said, I agree with you that we could lose. The really awful thing about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is not their immediate impacts (bad as those were) -- it's that we unnecessarily showed the world our ass. We showed that we could lose, and lose badly, to a bunch of third-rate car bombers.
So if your argument is that we should bide our time and rebuild our strength... I get it. But if you think that we can avoid war... I think that's far less likely than at any time you and I have been alive.
Indeed, why can't Russia take Ukraine? Why can't China take Taiwan? Why can't - picking two countries at random here - Sierra Leone take Liberia?
What is the case for the average American to be the one to prevent these things, either through deployment or two decades of ruinous taxation (as in the case of Afghanistan)?
"What is the case for the average American to be the one to prevent these things"
History shows, that if little wars start, much larger wars will result. Look at the causes of WWI. Some silly little duke in some silly little country no one in the US had ever heard of got assassinated by anarchists. BUT, but this country had a treaty with that country ... those guys were out for blood, and then that happened, then Russia got pulled in, then Germany got pulled in (ironically Germany didn't start WWI). Too many secret treaties created a chain of events that no one foresaw.
Which was the same reason we ended up in Iraq. We promised to protect Kuwait in exchange for Kuwait not buying nor developing nukes. Well, some dumb bitch of an ambassador said to Saddam Hussain that we wouldn't protect Kuwait, when in fact we obligated ourselves to protect Kuwait ... then this happened, and then that happened, and we're in a war again.
But what if we never promised to keep Kuwait nuke free? Then what? Perhaps Iraq invades, Kuwait nukes Baghdad, Iran steps in and invades Iraq ... yet again. Riyadh steps up and nukes Tehran ... then where are we?
Yeah, what if, indeed? What if WW1 countries didn't have all those treaties, what if the US never got involved? Would it have ended up some globe-spanning meat-grinder?
Treaties is how little mice defend themselves from big lions. Without treaties, you have The Thirty Years War, which killed about 1/3 of what is modern day Germany. What stopped that, and prevented another was The Peace of Westphalia, or The Treaty of Westphalia ... which contains concepts which Putin is violating in his justification for invading Ukraine.
And? The minute we start warbling about the Westphalian peace, all Russia needs to do is point at a map of Kosovo. There is no higher principle at play here - might makes right.
Uh, not to get too intimate this point: Archdale Ferdinand was not some silly little Duke in some silly little country that no one had ever heard of.
He was the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, also know as the Holy Roman Empire. He was assassinated by an ethnic minority in his Empire. Had some minor noble been assassinated, probably WWI doesn't happen. At least not right then.
Also the one where the US is excellent at actually doing wars, but terrible at winning them. The US' security apparatus exists to grow, not to define victory conditions. Hence two decades in Afghanistan ended up funnelling money to all the right people, but manifestly failed at the status goals of ending international terror and building a Rockwell-painting democracy on the Kabul river.
I think this is a key factor many people don't acknowledge. The US definitely has imperial ambitions and has acted upon them many times, but these are often subordinate or directed by corporate interests. And it just so happens we have some of the largest military manufacturers and suppliers in the world.
To Lockheed Martin, it barely matters who wins because everyone on either side is using their product.
Anyone over the age of say, 35, should - by now - realize that there is never a "goal" of "winning" *any* war and establishing peace and "democracy" abroad. The goal of the US military and the MIC is to create and perpetuate chaos on behalf of the global financial elites and weapons systems/services firms in their portfolios.
I believe I agreed with Freddie that the US's unipolar dominance (to the degree we had it at all) is likely coming to an end, and that we've shown ourselves weak, so I'm not sure what you're objecting to.
What period of time did you have in mind for effective unipolar dominance by the US? In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union? Because that is a tiny window of time and immediately subsequent to that Russia started picking up the pieces. The invasions of Chechnya and Georgia not ring a bell?
Invasion of Georgia lol. As if it occurred in a vacuum and without significant US sponsorship of Georgian aggression against Ossetia. In fact the Russian military actions there PREVENTED a larger, perhaps even world war from happening.
And we can always justify doing nothing by the immediate savings in lives and treasure. Does that mean it's always a good idea to do nothing? Especially when "doing something" often involves no fighting at all, but simply stationing troops in a place someone else would like to invade?
Look, I would love for the US to be less aggressive abroad. But suppose the United States makes an absolute pledge, backed by a constitutional amendment, to bring all troops home within two years, and to fight no wars outside the present borders of the US. Does the world become safer, or less safe? Does the US itself become safer, or less safe? I don't know, but I think the answer is far from obvious, and it's probably case-by-case. For sure South Korea falls, right?
What I'm pushing you to think about is the possibility that at SOME point, the use of American force (or at least the presence of American troops) will become necessary to save lives. I don't know that that's true in the Ukraine. But if you can't agree that there is some tipping point where it becomes better for the US to draw a line in the sand, I don't think you're grappling with reality.
One problem with these kind of hypothetical threat assessments is its speculative nature and that fear-projection on our side unavoidably impairs our ability to make sober analysis of what the other side is doing. The Iraq War was a case in point.
Why does South Korea necessarily fall? South Korea and China have a very strong positive commercial relationship and North Korea doesn’t have the resources to launch an invasion without Chinese support. Why would China want two economic basket-case Koreas? They only need one as a buffer-state and they have that with the status quo.
Even if your estimates of worldwide threats are accurate, an overextension of military commitments abroad is just as much a risk as an under extension of them. Do you think its possible that Putin may have calculated in 2014 that a failed-war-weary US public would be unlikely to summon the will to intervene after the annexation of Crimea?
South Korea is armed to the teeth and its conventional forces are far more advanced than their North Korea counterparts. The only thing keeping North Korea on the map are nukes and sponsorship from the Chinese. Existence as a de facto client state is always uncertain and it involves subordinating your domestic priorities to the foreign policy interests of your sponsor so good luck getting rid of those N. Korean nukes.
I can only think of two wars that has positive outcomes. One is WWII. The other, more arguably, is the Civil War.
Most wars just kill a huge number of civilians, enrich the war merchants, and don’t really settle anything.
I suppose putting a company of the 82nd Airborne in The Saini as a blood border between the Egyptians and the Israelis is a good idea. But do we really need 170 bases worldwide? Lunacy. And expensive as hell.
Of course it is possible that military intervention abroad may actually prevent worse catastrophe. But speculation like that is easy. The historical track record shows the tendency of American pols in the post-WWII era is to use that rationale to justify intervention. Hasn't always worked out very well, has it? Why not consider bringing the troops home and raising the drawbridge? Do you actually know anyone who wants to get blown to pieces so Russia can't exert sovereignty over territory on it's own border? Sucks if they do that, but it isn't exactly the same as them launching a missile attack on our country and whoever's left scraping the bodies of innocent people off our own sidewalks.
The end of unipolar dominance does not mean war must be coming. Especially large-scale war. Britain, France, Germany, and Russia gained a sort of equilibrium for much of the 19th century in a non-unipolar world. While wars did break out (quite dramatically when, say, Napoleon upset this equilibrium), they were nothing like the scale of the 20th century wars.
Sadly, war will likely always be with us, but my hope is that it will look more like the 18th or 19th century than the 20th, with wars remaining relatively short and localized.
Not disagreeing with you but I wonder how much of the post-Napoleon peace was because the European powers were busy trying to colonize, hence a lot of their manpower was away from the Old Continent. (Even Germany had possessions in southwest Africa and even Melanesia.)
China is hugely active in Africa, locking down those rare earth minerals, but for the most part there's nowhere left for the caravel to land. There is nowhere else to colonize. The major powers are locked in a cell together with no island to sail to.
Colonies largely expanded their ability to go to war, as it gave them more humans and raw materials to draw from. In many countries, the amount of soldiers needed was relatively small. And as we saw in WWII, some of these imperial powers were able to draw soldiers from multiple continents which increased their capacity for war across the planet.
I think the truth is quite simple. Most of the ruling families were the same family and war is deeply unpleasant. It's even more unpleasant when you're waging a war against your cousin who you spent many Christmas holidays with while growing up.
Wars are expensive in material and humans. Everyone saw the benefit to keeping a relative peace because everyone was able to expand and grow together. Many tensions arose because some (England) were able to take more advantage of the situation than others (Russia), but most of the ruling classes of the various European countries were able to get most of what they wanted, which made war less likely.
Especially because gaining a few counties in rural France meant Russia and England may end up on your borders.
I stand corrected. You are absolutely right. For some reason I forgot all about the colonial aspect of WW2, for example, where the UK in particular benefitted hugely from its manpower in India, Africa etc (to say nothing of ANZAC).
It's definitely easy to forget! Throughout my entire education, I don't think I ever heard even once about how colonial powers leveraged their colonies during the war.
It's always taught as England and France tried to stop Hitler but needed help from the US to finish the job. Also, Russia was there.
Indeed. Britain pushed Napoleon back and defeated him. In a multipolar world, to the degree there's peace, it's because the major actors maintain a credible threat of war, and act when necessary.
Isn't it funny how capitalism and imperialism seem to go together, but here are two of the worlds biggest communist countries - yes one a former communist country - most bent on expansion.
The CCCP is nominally communist, but basically functions as a capitalist country with central economic planning. This was a big shift that happened after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Twenty years later, China has the largest consumer market on the planet and plenty of new imperial ambitions.
But even had they remained an actual Maoist government, no one has ever said that imperialism is unique to capitalism. I think it just comes with a certain level of acquired wealth and power, whether the country is a democracy or under an absolute monarch.
Freddie writes as though imperialism is tightly correlated with capitalism all the time. Its one of his chief reasons for hating capitalism, and in the same breath saying communism is better. Many communists do this.
Was China not interested in expansion during the Maoist period? What about Tibet?
In a recent essay, Freddie's definition of communist excluded China for a number of reasons. You may disagree with his definitions, but there it is.
I think just looking at history would correlate imperialism with capitalism, since capitalist nations have been the most prolific colonizers. That's not to say a communist or socialist state could never be a colonial power. But, from the history we have, the correlation between capitalism and colonialism is pretty strong.
The era of pax America must come to an end eventually. It is probably better to go without a global war. Killing a lot of people on all sides will at best delay the inevitable.
I think it's both reasonable to think that the US should limit what those commitments are to its close allies and their territory, and that those commitments should be more solid and more credible.
I like Bruenig a lot and think her haters are often deranged, but I disagree with your assessment of what was objectionable about her statement: that she flippantly asserted that Japan deserved to be invaded, which was a blatantly shitty and cold thing to say. You can easily argue against America going to war with China and NOT dismiss the invasion of a country by an authoritarian superpower as “coming to them”.
Yes, agreed on all counts. Smith was clearly responding to her glib assertion that Japan deserves to be invaded, nothing more. It wasn’t some attack on her for being dovish.
I think that the rest of the thread shows that it wasn't "nothing more" but that he also endorses a vision of America as world police that I don't believe is sustainable.
Reading that Noah Smith thread, I agree with Jeet Heer's tweet that Smith makes a point to mock.
Absurd questions almost necessitate absurd responses. Responsibility always lands on the antiwar crowd, too. We need to treat every conceivable hypothetical--no matter how silly--seriously. It's exhausting and just ridiculous.
Bruenig may have been being glib, but I don't understand how someone could read her response and think that she's advocating for some sort of "Eye for an Eye" policy instead.
The point that everyone in the comments is missing is that there has been a historical understanding between the West and the USSR/Russia (and China) for literally generations. The great powers got their exclusive spheres of influence and any armed conflict was relegated to backwaters like Angola or Malaysia. In the old order there is absolutely no question where the Ukraine, Georgia, etc. lie.
And of course the reason that the great powers de facto agreed to not trespass on each other's home turf is because the risks involved in a shooting war were too terrible to contemplate.
I agree with you point on Russia—having rose from the ashes of the USSR. But not China. The only reason China wasn't a problem in the past, is that they were too backwards to be a problem. Don't forget, China lost a land war to Vietnam in 1979 ... in their own back yard.
China under the CCP remains officially Maoist with a stated goal of instituting world wide communism. Every company operating in China is officially an arm of the PLA (People's Liberation Army.)
It was the West that broke that understanding by allowing the expansion of NATO into the remnants of the USSR, and failed to help Russia weather the financial disasters following the collapse of the USSR. We guaranteed a Putin would rise to pick up the pieces and grant a bit of stability and economic security. The lesson of Versaille, remembered in the Marshall Plan, forgotten again only a generation or two later.
Our treaty obligations to Ukraine are murky at best. We ship tens of millions of dollars of materiel and hard cash to them every year (some of which even makes it to their defense budget.) We've done everything wrong with Russia over the past few years - we've shrieked hysterically about how evil they are and how terrible Putin is, but done nothing in practice over the invasion of Crimea (which is now, seven years on, pretty definitively integrated into the Russian Federation.) We've spoken loudly, carried a big stick, but dropped the stick on our toes. No wonder the response of our betters is to, well, double down and shriek louder.
This is aside from the fact that Ukraine isn't a member of NATO - a calculus America made years ago, even pre-Budapest accord, and one that was undermined by 'Euromaidan'. And for all that we fall onto fainting couches about Russian interference in American elections, 'Euromaidan' might as well have had a 'brought to you by the Atlantic Council' banner above the square.
I'm personally an isolationist but leaving that aside, it's hard to see how we're doing anything other than blunder after blunder in the region. We get involved when there's no need, then we stand back when something actually happens. And throughout it all we don't notice the demographic pressure cookers - Crimea was one, the Donbass is next, Estonia will be next after that.
Old joke: the Israelis and the PLO are negotiating. The Israelis say "OK, you'll have control of Gaza." The PLO says, "Alright, and what do we get in return?"
Because Israel doesn't want to govern a hostile people, and because the neighboring states (wealthy Jordan in particular) don't want a poor and dissatisfied people in their country, and the Arab states benefit from having the safety valve of an unfree Palestine to rally people around.
I would nominate both of those as examples of how a country can self-inflict massive wounds thanks to an overly aggressive belief in its need to project power everywhere at all times.
I would argue that at least with Iraq the US was already involved--it essentially occupied the Kurdish region of the country after the first Gulf War. Once the US was enmeshed to that level there was no good way out.
With Libya the wounds seem entirely self inflicted.
There aren't. Some enterprising photographer plucked this photo out of the public domain [1,2], slapped a pink filter on it, and sold it back to us. Over [3] and over [4] and over [5] and again.
It's a shame that so many people have only one historical frame of reference. Everything is Munich. Perhaps we'd be better off if they read The Guns of August, because the flippant disregard for the horrors of war on display is much more reminiscent of 1914 than the insane Churchillian LARPing people want to do.
Through a very strange rote I ended up reading the Guns of august as a teenager (I was obsessed as a kid with the last book of the Anne of Green Gables series, Rilla of Ingleside, which is essentially a historical novel about WW1). Because I stumbled upon an interest in WW1 before studying WW2, I feel like I have an uncommon perspective of knowing A LOT (for a causal reader of history) about WW1, and less about WW2. WW2 is an easy war to latch onto as a “good war, ugly but necessary” if you only know a little about that war and nothing else. But WW1 is the opposite. A completely and utterly pointless slaughter that did not need to happen. Instead of thinking if every war in terms of WW2 we need to remember the prequel and how it led directly to that “necessary war”.
Excellent point, but there isn't anyone left to testify on your behalf from personal experience. Which means the same bitter lessons may have to be learned again.
I feel like Ukraine and Japan and Taiwan are really quite different. Japan has been an ally for decades. They've been an ally for decades and China attacking Japan is a pretty easily defensible red line. And yes, mutually assured destruction means we have to be willing to contemplate a huge nuclear war where billions of people die and I think making it clear that we are and will keeps the peace without the uncertainty factor. Taiwan is slightly less crystal but I think it would be pretty immoral if Taiwan is invaded and destroyed simply because they thought we were serious for decades. If West Berlin was worth m.a.d. so are Tokyo and Taipei.
Ukraine on the other hand seems like a foolish idea to go marching off to war over a country that has not ever seriously been described as a close US ally. Containment of major power for a country which has been our friend for five minutes makes little sense to me. Sell them arms to defend themselves, ensure that they stay out of NATO states including the Baltics but expanding to a nuclear war over this seems insane.
This applies to China as well. I'm no fan of China and their treatment of Hong Kong et al. But, what are you gonna do about it? It seems that the "pro-China" and "anti-China" sides are just identities. I'm "anti-war-between-nuclear-armed-countries" myself.
Just stop and read my book list, Klaus--they all need to read the books.
I use this username on a bunch of sites and like it when people refer to me as "Klaus" like it's my name. Idk what else they would refer to me as but it's funny.
I decided long ago to just use my name because then I don't go off the rails as much, so of course all my thought don't get input--just the ones that are reasonably polite. Also, any opportunity to make librarian recommendations my real goal.
I don't even use my real name on Facebook lol
But you use your own photo.
I don't do that either. A lot of my friends have meme photos at this point
There is a strategic reason for bluster: a credible signal that the US will defend Ukraine can stop Russia from (further!) invading Ukraine.
I can't say if any of the people doing the bluster are aware of the difficulties or ramifications of this. And "just walk around swinging your big dick" is just *too* appealing to people's ego, so people will be more likely to want to believe this even if it's not true.
I'm certainly no foreign policy expert, but consider this from a law of unintended consequences perspective. If we do some saber rattling, other countries are less likely to think they can get away with the odd invasion without an American response. If we sound too reasonable, they're more prone to do something that we then decide we have to respond to. It's game theory. I'd rather be the slightly unhinged guy that no one wants to get in a fight with. So the underlying point about mutually assured destruction and the horrors of war is spot on, but I disagree a bit on how we avoid all that.
I disagree pretty strongly here. I think you are taking the exact wrong lesson from the 20th century. The only reason any country has a nuclear arsenal at all - and the only reason Jews went from a large European minority to virtually non-existent outside of a couple countries globally - is the blase reaction the Democratic world had to countries being eaten by authoritarians. Letting Putin waltz into Ukraine IS very literally telling him that it's okay to press Russia's claims, so bye-bye Baltics. Same goes for China. A fear of a nuclear war is legitimate, but is it really morally acceptable to let dictators do whatever they want globally with zero repercussions? Last time we did that it proved to be a catastrophic mistake, what makes you think this time will be different?
Because historically that is the de facto understanding that the West has had with the Soviet Union (and now arguably Russia) for literally generations? The West can try to make it uncomfortable for Putin but actually sending in the troops is insane.
The US has maintained the same "your borders do not grow" understanding with Russia/USSR since Yalta. That's why all the wars were proxy wars - the USSR couldn't occupy Afghanistan or even Korea because that would create a larger conflict. The US has conceded client states, but to call Ukraine a client state would be pretty inaccurate. If the USSR had tried to occupy Finland there would have been gunfire in West Germany within the week.
It's true - the United States famously respects foreign borders.
This is not historically accurate. After WWII the USSR seized Eastern Europe as a buffer zone and installed puppet governments in Eastern Europe, including in East Germany. The Ukraine had an even closer relationship with Russia: it was part of the USSR.
And the Soviet Union did invade Afghanistan in the 1970's so I am not sure why this is one of your examples.
They invaded one of their puppet states. They invaded Hungary too. Weirdly did not invade Austria when Austria broke away - maybe it had something to do with knowing that it wasn't a full-on puppet state and thus would have caused a global war. Afghanistan was a dumb example on my part, but the point still stands.
So basically the USSR has countries that it thinks are worth armed intervention and countries that it believes do not rise to that threshold? How is that not true of every country on the planet?
Which last time? Vietnam, where we ravaged a country and killed millions there for no strategic purpose, all to prevent a unification that was going to happen no matter what because a substantial majority of people in both halves wanted it to? Or are you referring to World War II, which conspicuously did not feature nuclear weapons until the very end? The "if we had acted sooner, we could have prevented Hitler" is really not a helpful historical counterfactual.
You were probably were raised in a context in which the United States really did have an overwhelming military advantage over its major competitors. That is no longer the case. We. could. lose. a. war. with. China. or. Russia. Not Iraq lose, not Vietnam lose, but as in they slaughter our infantry and take territory we intend to protect lose. If you base your whole view of foreign policy on American mythology then you'll never consider the possibility that we could just lose.
China and Russia cannot invade any of the 50 states in any meaningful way. Even put together, the Russian and Chinese navies are a joke.
Americans' blasé attitude about wars can be bad for the world and the people who live in it, but it isn't incorrect.
Go Navy! Sail on to victory, and sink their bones to Davy Jones, hooray!
It doesn't matter if we could lose. That's wholly irrelevant. If we lose the exact same global outcome happens as if we had done nothing at all. This isn't Vietnam. Taiwan isn't internally fragmented over joining China. Japan is not debating the China issue. To use Iraq and Vietnam and Afghanistan as examples here is to wholly deny agency to the people that are under threat here.
"If we lose the exact same global outcome happens as if we had done nothing at all."
Except for the irradiated wastelands and nuclear winter, you mean.
You are making the fundamental assumption that they will merely stop. This is the appeasement assumption - that if we just let them take Taiwan they'll be happy. I think that's wildly naïve. And even if you think nuclear war is guaranteed in the event of military conflict do you think we should just let Russia take over the Baltics again? Should we just let China invade Japan? You can talk about how bad it is all you want, but to pretend like this is merely about Ukraine is silly IMO.
How long do you think the United States can contain China and its ambitions? They've got 1.5 billion people, an immense economy that the rest of the world is absolutely dependent on, a vastly more technologically advanced military than even 10 years ago, and a government that despite all of its authoritarianism enjoys the overwhelming consent of its people. So how long do you think the United States is going to get to say "sorry, we determine where great powers can and cannot expand"? It's not a rhetorical question. America's relative decline is not a choice; it's an inevitability. Given that, how long do you think we can hold on to a 1990 mindset?
I think the Chinese navy and air force are pathetic, the population is aging rapidly, and I don't think China will be able to force their way past the US into Taiwan in my lifetime. You are making the fundamental mistake of conflating army with ability to invade over water, and the Chinese navy is a bunch of tiny coastal ships that really can't project much power beyond its shores.
I think it's also a bit misleading to cite US vs China when in reality where the US goes so will Japan and Germany and the UK and Canada and Australia and likely many more. The US the tip of a much larger spear whereas Russia and China are their entire spears. The Democratic alliance (which almost assuredly includes India as well) has a much larger population.
Like Nazi Germany, we only need to occupy them until the Chinese people (like the German people) take control of their government and remove the bellicose leaders.
Many times governments do these things as a defensive measure to cover for their ineptitude.
In the next 20 years—as a result of the one child policy—rapidly aging China becomes an economic backwater unable to fight any wars.
Show me the irradiated wasteland in Hiroshima & Nagasaki.
In fighting in Vietnam, we stopped The Domino (The domino theory was a Cold War policy that suggested a communist government in one nation would quickly lead to communist takeovers in neighboring states), the chain of Communist Countries terrorizing their neighbors until the governments fell and the Communists stepped in. This is what happened in Vietnam. In 1954, the country divided. People segregated into Communist North, and free South. Then the terrorism started, bombings, executions, etc. Vietnamese refugees tell me the war was as much N/S racial & cultural, as it was communist vs liberty.
I think people forget that Ukraine *had* nuclear weapons. And gave them up in exchange for a security guarantee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances
Is it morally acceptable to let the USA do whatever they want globally with zero repercussions given the track record of foreign interventions since WW2?
I think the US has a better moral track record than China or Russia.
Lock "world leaders" in a library and make them have a book discussion and read these:
_A Canticle for Leibowitz_ by Walter M. Miller (1957).
_On the Beach_ by Nevil Shute (1957)
_Alas, Babylon_ by Pat Frank (1959)
_The Road_ by Cormac McCarthy (2006).
I imagine at least one world leader would completely misunderstand the point of at least one of these books and take it as their righteous cause to fire a nuclear warhead at someone.
Sad, but probably true.
I've seen enough reviews of The Great Gatsby where someone thinks Fitzgerald is an advocate for Gatsby to know that many people can read but apparently don't know how to.
discouraging
There's something reductive to me about the "Russia and China have nuclear weapons: therefore America should do nothing to stop their aggression" argument. It basically makes us entirely powerless and I do not agree that the US should just accept foreign aggression on the part of Russia and China.
I'm not saying do nothing. I'm saying that a military response could very easily result in the kind of hot war Americans are too stupid to believe that we can get in anymore, and we could very well lose even on a conventional front, and if we won then both Russia and China seem perfectly capable of launching a retaliatory nuclear strike in response that would instantly become the most defining individual event of human history.
Also lol at the United States complaining about "foreign aggression."
Sanctions don't work, so in effect you're saying do nothing.
Sanctions are an act of war.
Diplomacy is a word that exists because not every conflict between nations needs to lead directly to war.
Diplomacy is of course preferable to war and sanctions.
I'm by no means an expert in this area, but my understanding is that our hopes of winning a conventional war against the USSR was not good either. That's one of the reasons Berlin was such a big deal: we couldn't reasonably defend a Soviet claim on Berlin without using nuclear weapons, inviting retaliation.
The United States would win a modern conventional war against Russia and Russia would struggle to conquer Europe today. Russia is not a push over, it wouldn’t be easy, but it could be done.
Berlin (which was literally surrounded by East Germany) is also much different than Ukraine.
The USSR was a different beast
> "Russia and China have nuclear weapons: therefore America should do nothing to stop their aggression"
Unfortunately, it's the exact lesson that the US has taught the world over the past generation.
This is a illogical response
Libya and Iraq had their regimes changed. Iran hasn't. Ukraine is in this situation precisely because *they gave up their nuclear weapons*.
I think the lesson sucks, but it's absolutely the one the world has learned.
I said "Iran" but I should've said "North Korea."
If the world were a dog, the US would absolutely be training it to get nuclear weapons.
Ah I see, I rescind my complaint.
Underrated point. Ukraine was foolish to give up their nuclear weapons. I don't blame them, and I don't think anyone who lived through the early 90s can, but it should serve as an object lesson to other countries.
I wasn’t expecting someone to promote nuclear proliferation on this thread but here it is
He's not promoting it as a good thing, obviously. He's promoting it as a prudent thing for countries that want territorial integrity.
Yet that is what everyone who says "well, they have nukes, so we can't interfere with them" is doing: encouraging every country to get nukes to stay safe.
You would have to be incredibly naïve to fail to see that sometimes the international order doesn't hold up and that armed force is a credible hedge for that scenario.
It means sanctions are ok. Armed troops? Literally insane.
And this has been the status quo for literally generations.
Sanctions don't work, we've been sanctioning Cuba for decades with zero result
Also North Korea, Iraq, Iran....
I have no idea if this will work, but I've wondered if the US could cut a deal with North Korea to end their nuclear program in exchange for an end to sanctions. So your broom at target might say made in North Korea.
How about a security guarantee, where is they give up their nukes, we promise to come to their aid if they're invaded?
There is no way that China would allow this.
If the regime wants to remain in charge they'd be utterly insane to agree to such terms.
Something like this happened in 1994 under Clinton and included some funding for light-water reactors in North Korea that the Republican Congress cut. Certainly possible that DPRK would have reneged on the agreement anyway, but it was a feckless sanctions regime with a steady trajectory and ultimate realization of a nuclear armed North Korea ever since. We should probably get used to that.
It's what you have. The world isn't perfect.
We've been sanctioning Cuba with good result. Us old farts remember a time when Cuba was hijacking planes out of the US on a weekly basis. Khrushchev tried to plant nuke missiles in Cuba.
"If the missiles had remained, we would have used them against the very heart
of America including New York. We must never establish peaceful coexistence.
In this struggle to the death between two systems, we must gain
the ultimate victory. We must walk the path of liberation even if it costs
millions of atomic victims."
--Che Guevara lamenting the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Why shouldn't we accept foreign aggression on the part of Russia and China? That seems like an ahistorical position to hold.
A) Powers always accept foreign aggression from other powers so long as those occur in their sphere of influence. That normally turns out fine.
B) We expect Russia and China to accept far more invasive foreign aggression from us. That turned out fine for them.
I want all countries to come together in a united one world government of peace and prosperity. But failing that, it seems like observing the norms of international relations would be preferential.
Last I checked america is not imposing an authoritarian despot on China or Russia’s border. So point B is bullshit as far as im concerned.
And we shouldn’t because territorial integrity is important. America promised to protect and respect Ukrainian territorial integrity. Letting Russia take it over makes our word appear worthless. If Ukraine can be wiped off the map then I don’t see why Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania wouldn’t also feel the same.
Dude, we were doing that literally six months ago. We invaded a country that BORDERS China and propped up a puppet government for 20 years. So....
You mean the country which attacked us, was harboring terrorists, and then we put in place a democracy which respected human rights? That country?
Respectfully, it's difficult to argue with someone who is stating Bush Administration talking points as if they were reality. But I wish you a good day.
Afghanistan, the country*, didn't attack us. The majority of 9/11 attackers were Saudi Arabians. We eventually found Bin Laden himself in Pakistan (supposedly a US ally.) Our human-rightsies-respecting "democracy" fell in about twenty minutes and most of the locals who were involved in its building are either now cowering in the shadows fearing reprisals, or multi-millionaires in Los Angeles. It was a fool's errand from start to finish, a completely self-inflicted national humiliation that not only failed to prevent further international terror in the two decades that followed the invasion but also failed to rebuild Afghanistan.
*It's a country only in the loosest sense. Its central government never, at any time, exercised control over most of its territory. And that's precisely the way the "Afghans" like it.
Yes, Saudi's funded and participated in the dirty work. But their base of operations was Afghanistan. Likewise in the 60s, Cuba was the host of terrorist actions in the US, however the funder was the USSR.
And yes Pakistan is on the fringe of our influence. We keep them close to prevent a Pakistan-India war which would in reality be China backed war against India. If we can keep Pakistan out of the influence of China is best, even if some of Pakistan's leaders are bad actors.
"It's a country only in the loosest sense. Its central government never, at any time, exercised control over most of its territory. And that's precisely the way the "Afghans" like it."
We could learn a thing or two from them.
I think our "word" on the world stage has been pretty suspect for a long time, but the Iraq war definitely did irreparable damage to it.
The US, like any global power in history, has always been a mercurial ally. If we're not getting something out of a conflict, we don't bother. And whoever's doing the calculus on Ukraine right now doesn't see the upshot yet.
I would argue that Libya is far, far worse. Gaddaffi believed he had an understanding with the US that giving up his nukes was enough to guarantee peace between the two countries. At least with Saddam you could trace the lineage of the conflict back to the invasion of Kuwait. What's the justification for air strikes in Libya?
My point was that our "word" on the world stage hasn't been respected since at least 2003. The invasion of Libya was after that. I'd view it as another data point highlighting what I said above.
I think you could make the argument that deposing Gaddaffi was stabbing him in the back. Saddam didn't have the benefit of any such arrangement with the US so in terms of betrayal Libya was worse.
Kuwait was the public justification for deposing Saddam, but the "lineage of the conflict" dates back at least to the souring of his formerly close relationship with the CIA.
I'm not suggesting I agree with J Alex Keene here (I'm not sure what I think as yet), but it seems odd to argue that because our word has been damaged by foolish actions, that we should no longer care about it. Your solution to the damage our reputation suffered in 2003 (and beyond) is surely not to stop honoring our word, but this time in the way *you* want us to not honor it?
My point was that our word has been worthless for nearly 20 years, if not longer. I wasn't making a broader point, except that the word of any global power is dependent upon the advantage they see in keeping it under specific circumstances.
If France or Germany or the UK were actually threatened, I believe we'd stick to our word. With marginal powers bordering belligerent nations, we're less interested in keeping promises.
If we actually wanted to honor our word, there are many different strategies we could take besides just throwing more guns at the problem. For example, The Marshall Plan.
Thanks for helping me understand your argument.
It seems like your point is that our word has always been worthless (as well as the word of every major power which doesn't require others to believe they will honor their word to thrive). Fair enough. I'm a bit of a disillusioned naive idealist and I still *want* to believe that a nation's (our nation's) promises matter, that there is some utility in being understood to keep our promises (and there certainly is, but possibly less than what we perceive we gain by failing to honor them). However, I suspect your interpretation is correct.
"But whatever the right answer is, it’s absurd to suggest that a desire to avoid such a conflict makes one a tankie."
Except I think what's being objected to here is not so much the desire to avoid conflict, but Bruenig's casual assertion that Japan deserves to be invaded.
As for the rest of it -- I don't think it's as simple a question as you're making out. I find it extraordinarily unlikely that Putin will push the button even if there's armed conflict -- if ever there was a guy who wanted to survive, it's him. But the bigger point is that you AVOID a hot war precisely by hemming him in. It's why we stationed troops in Germany after WWII and why we have troops in Korea. You don't actually fight -- but everyone knows there could be a fight, so nobody starts anything.
Whether the calculus is right for this tactic in the Ukraine, I don't know. The politics are murky, and Russia essentially claims it's part of their aboriginal territory. But if Putin is successful in taking the Sudetenland -- er, Ukraine -- what reason do we have to think they will stop there? The Ukraine shares a border with Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Poland. What if Putin goes further West? At SOME point we have to deploy troops, right? And it's always going to be under the threat of escalation to nukes. So... what makes you squeamish about the Ukraine in particular?
But hem Russia in, and China in, for how long? This is a point I should have made more clearly: just about everyone acknowledges that America's relative power in the world has diminished significantly since the moment of true unipolarity post-Cold War. And most serious people understand that this is to some degree inevitable, that at the very least China is simply going to become more active on the world stage, and Russia remains a serious threat, and India might very well become a military power in the next century.... And so policies of worldwide containment of bad actors (by which we merely mean rivals) become completely untenable. Either we exhaust ourselves trying to police the world, or we spark an immense war in our zeal to maintain a world order that was never going to endure, or both. I do not see how "contain Russia and China in perpetuity" is a workable plan.
Yes -- I just responded to another comment of yours, acknowledging that the strongest argument for doing nothing is that we've become comparatively weak. But being comparatively weak indefinitely is not really a workable plan, either. At a certain point we will have to assert ourselves, or trouble will come find us. Precisely because it's not a unipolar world, and yet the US still has an outsized mythological presence, sooner or later, someone will test us. And it seems to me that standing strong early (at a place and time where we CAN stand strong, and will not get pantsed) is a good way not to get gobbled up in a multi-polar world.
How will trouble come and find us, us meaning the average American?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis
There are already nukes pointed at the United States. See Freddie's article. By any measure this is a significantly greater *risk* - if a lesser symbolism than missles within binocular distance of Florida - than the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Hence by your standards trouble has found us.
I don't feel particularly troubled by this, no more so than yesterday.
The point isn't the nuclear threat. The point is that sooner or later a reinvigorated Russia (or a newly invigorated China) will feel free to go beyond reclaiming old territories and move into the US sphere of influence -- which puts us at greater risk of conventional war in our own backyard.
Why wait until the wolf is at the door? Build a credible fence farther out.
I'm normally a big fan of your comments so I say this with genuine respect: I fear your understanding of history may be lacking in some perspectives.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was NOT trouble coming to find us. There is no way to read that historical event that way except through blind American patriotism.
- We commit an act of aggression against Cuba (invading it at the Bay of Pigs);
- We commit an act of aggression against the USSR (placing nuclear missiles in Turkey);
- They combine to retaliate (placing missiles in Cuba);
- We both agree to remove our missiles.
Yes, the America, Fuck Yeah Version supports your point. But that version doesn't exist in reality. I would suggest reading a wider range of sources on some of these issues.
I can see I picked a confusing example, so I apologize for that. (I'm fighting a multi-polar battle in these comments -- you know how that goes.) My point is simply that Russia has projected power into our back yard before, it's shockingly easy for them to do, and if they think we are a weak, fat, bloated empire that won't set and maintain limits... why wouldn't they do it again?
Let's hear from Uncle Che
"If the missiles had remained, we would have used them against the very heart of America including New York. We must never establish peaceful coexistence. In this struggle to the death between two systems, we must gain the ultimate victory. We must walk the path of liberation even if it costs millions of atomic victims."
--Che Guevara lamenting the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis
"Either we ..."
This is binary thinking. There is a middle ground. We didn't originally occupy Germany to keep Stalin down ... although it had that effect. We occupied Germany to keep German men from reforming an army. What happened after that, was that we seduced the German people into a peaceful existence.
Likewise, we refactored Afghanistan for a bit under US occupation. We got girls into school, they were going to grow into educated moms. Given a generation or two, of young men and women who grew up with and expected equality, we'd have seen a major change. Those educated girls would have been the moms that rocked the cradle. (the hand that rocks the cradle leads the nation) What people don't see is that there was no hidden army in Afghanistan. The people were over-run by their neighbors next door. If all the teens and young dudes who had grown up with girls in school had risen to be the majority of the men, our exit would have had a much different result.
If NATO hemmed in the old USSR with troops in Germany then why could you not argue that the USSR hemmed NATO in with troops in E. Europe?
Is it your opinion that NATO invading Russia and Russia invading Europe were equally likely events?
Also, is it your opinion that the Eastern European countries in which Russia stationed troops AGREED to that? Or were they absorbed into the USSR's orbit of control against their will? I'm not sure that comparing the Soviet empire to a voluntary security alliance makes much sense.
Also a good point. NATO was FAR more likely to invade the Soviet Union than vice versa.
Russia has historically been preoccupied by the threat from the West since Napoleon. Putin is completely traditional in this regard.
Your interpretation is a misreading of history. In the aftermath of WWII both sides carved out their spheres of influence where they would brook no foreign interference. War by proxy is possible in places like Vietnam and Korea. There is zero reason to believe that Putin or the Russian security apparatus would be so blasé about a threat from the West on their doorstep.
I feel I need to preface this with the disclaimer that I DO NOT agree with the Russian government or their approach at all.
A lot of the American discussion about this is completely absent the Russian perspective. From their view we've spent thirty years acting aggressive towards them. Before that was 45 years of a Cold War in which they (not wholly without merit) viewed us as an aggressor. Before that was the most apocalyptic war in human history. Before that was 20 years of western isolation and oh yeah, us ACTUALLY INVADING RUSSIA. And that's just the last century.
How much of that ia true is debatable, and I certainly don't like what Putin does. But this wariness of the West, as you note, is wholly within Russian traditional norms and often for good reason.
People often conflate *acknowledging* the Russian point of view with *defending* it. "Oh, you're sounding like Boris! You must be one of them!"
I am, in theory, fine with American wars intended to curtail aggression from foreign regimes. Pax Americana, and what not.
In practice, we’ve rather conclusively proved that our political elites have no idea how to even formulate a consistent list of victory conditions, let alone implement military force in pursuit of it, even if you give them a generation of time in which to replay mulligans.
My gut instinct is to revive the draft with no exemption for college students, and remove from office any politician caught trying to help their family dodge it. If the citizenry of the US care enough to shed an ocean of blood in the name of international peace, let it be shed. If they are not, then let Ukraine fend for themselves.
We already have the draft ... President Carter reintroduced it under The Selective Service Act. If you're a US male over the age of 18, you've registered for Selective Service. You probably signed a postcard in High School in your senior year.
I am well aware of SS. I’m talking about a *draft*. Everyone, male and female, rich and poor, all ethnic groups, rolls the dice after high school and some enlist for a hitch.
It’s utopian, to be sure, to imagine universalism in military service with no outs for the senator’s daughter or minorities ending up as infantrymen at three times their per capita. That’s why it’ll never happen.
Nonetheless, such a system would be vastly superior to the one we have, not least of which is because we wouldn’t be so cavalier about wars of choice if they actually impacted regular voting people.
Israel has universal service and it makes the country as a whole take military action very seriously. Lots of people are 1 degree away from someone in the military service, and essentially everyone is 2 degrees away. There's a distinct lack of chickenhawks who talk about how awesome war will be for other people to fight.
Perhaps I should say this: if your concern is that the United States will be insufficiently bellicose, that we will be too conservative about what we consider our security interests rather than too profligate, that there's not enough internal pressure in this country that pushes us to conflict.... I think that's a hard reading of history or politics to justify. The limitless expansion of what we consider our obligations to protect seems designed to hem in foreign powers to the point that they practice a minimal expansionism that we would never, ever consent to ourselves. And since the decline of our unipolar dominance is an inevitability, that seems almost certain to eventually produce a major war.
But the other possibility is that a major war will come to us no matter what. If American unipolar dominance is coming to an end, then so is a peaceful world. If Russia can take Ukraine without response by the "world's policeman," then why can't it take other territories it considers its own? Why can't China take Taiwan? Why can't they, in fact, spread out as far as they like. If it's not a unipolar world, conflict IS coming.
That said, I agree with you that we could lose. The really awful thing about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is not their immediate impacts (bad as those were) -- it's that we unnecessarily showed the world our ass. We showed that we could lose, and lose badly, to a bunch of third-rate car bombers.
So if your argument is that we should bide our time and rebuild our strength... I get it. But if you think that we can avoid war... I think that's far less likely than at any time you and I have been alive.
Indeed, why can't Russia take Ukraine? Why can't China take Taiwan? Why can't - picking two countries at random here - Sierra Leone take Liberia?
What is the case for the average American to be the one to prevent these things, either through deployment or two decades of ruinous taxation (as in the case of Afghanistan)?
"What is the case for the average American to be the one to prevent these things"
History shows, that if little wars start, much larger wars will result. Look at the causes of WWI. Some silly little duke in some silly little country no one in the US had ever heard of got assassinated by anarchists. BUT, but this country had a treaty with that country ... those guys were out for blood, and then that happened, then Russia got pulled in, then Germany got pulled in (ironically Germany didn't start WWI). Too many secret treaties created a chain of events that no one foresaw.
Which was the same reason we ended up in Iraq. We promised to protect Kuwait in exchange for Kuwait not buying nor developing nukes. Well, some dumb bitch of an ambassador said to Saddam Hussain that we wouldn't protect Kuwait, when in fact we obligated ourselves to protect Kuwait ... then this happened, and then that happened, and we're in a war again.
But what if we never promised to keep Kuwait nuke free? Then what? Perhaps Iraq invades, Kuwait nukes Baghdad, Iran steps in and invades Iraq ... yet again. Riyadh steps up and nukes Tehran ... then where are we?
Yeah, what if, indeed? What if WW1 countries didn't have all those treaties, what if the US never got involved? Would it have ended up some globe-spanning meat-grinder?
Treaties is how little mice defend themselves from big lions. Without treaties, you have The Thirty Years War, which killed about 1/3 of what is modern day Germany. What stopped that, and prevented another was The Peace of Westphalia, or The Treaty of Westphalia ... which contains concepts which Putin is violating in his justification for invading Ukraine.
And? The minute we start warbling about the Westphalian peace, all Russia needs to do is point at a map of Kosovo. There is no higher principle at play here - might makes right.
Uh, not to get too intimate this point: Archdale Ferdinand was not some silly little Duke in some silly little country that no one had ever heard of.
He was the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, also know as the Holy Roman Empire. He was assassinated by an ethnic minority in his Empire. Had some minor noble been assassinated, probably WWI doesn't happen. At least not right then.
Into this point, not intimate.
Napoleon broke up the HRE in the early 1800s and German unification put any thought of it to bed over 40 years before Ferdinand was shot.
I'm sure this would have been a relief to Bosnians living under an Emperor that described himself as Holy and Roman.
No 911 they would be to busy killing each other.
What unipolar dominance? How would you reconcile that scenario with one where Russia is able to seize Crimea or keep Assad in power in Syria?
Also the one where the US is excellent at actually doing wars, but terrible at winning them. The US' security apparatus exists to grow, not to define victory conditions. Hence two decades in Afghanistan ended up funnelling money to all the right people, but manifestly failed at the status goals of ending international terror and building a Rockwell-painting democracy on the Kabul river.
Yup, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc are all huge wins for the military industrial complex.
I think this is a key factor many people don't acknowledge. The US definitely has imperial ambitions and has acted upon them many times, but these are often subordinate or directed by corporate interests. And it just so happens we have some of the largest military manufacturers and suppliers in the world.
To Lockheed Martin, it barely matters who wins because everyone on either side is using their product.
But like, you can't win a land war in Asia.
Anyone over the age of say, 35, should - by now - realize that there is never a "goal" of "winning" *any* war and establishing peace and "democracy" abroad. The goal of the US military and the MIC is to create and perpetuate chaos on behalf of the global financial elites and weapons systems/services firms in their portfolios.
I believe I agreed with Freddie that the US's unipolar dominance (to the degree we had it at all) is likely coming to an end, and that we've shown ourselves weak, so I'm not sure what you're objecting to.
What period of time did you have in mind for effective unipolar dominance by the US? In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union? Because that is a tiny window of time and immediately subsequent to that Russia started picking up the pieces. The invasions of Chechnya and Georgia not ring a bell?
Invasion of Georgia lol. As if it occurred in a vacuum and without significant US sponsorship of Georgian aggression against Ossetia. In fact the Russian military actions there PREVENTED a larger, perhaps even world war from happening.
I tend to think the really awful thing about those wars are all the innocent people we killed.
That's because you're not considering all the innocent people who would be killed in a multipolar Hobbesian free-for-all.
But we can always balance hypothetical people saved against real people killed and use that to justify any military aggression we prefer....
And we can always justify doing nothing by the immediate savings in lives and treasure. Does that mean it's always a good idea to do nothing? Especially when "doing something" often involves no fighting at all, but simply stationing troops in a place someone else would like to invade?
Look, I would love for the US to be less aggressive abroad. But suppose the United States makes an absolute pledge, backed by a constitutional amendment, to bring all troops home within two years, and to fight no wars outside the present borders of the US. Does the world become safer, or less safe? Does the US itself become safer, or less safe? I don't know, but I think the answer is far from obvious, and it's probably case-by-case. For sure South Korea falls, right?
What I'm pushing you to think about is the possibility that at SOME point, the use of American force (or at least the presence of American troops) will become necessary to save lives. I don't know that that's true in the Ukraine. But if you can't agree that there is some tipping point where it becomes better for the US to draw a line in the sand, I don't think you're grappling with reality.
One problem with these kind of hypothetical threat assessments is its speculative nature and that fear-projection on our side unavoidably impairs our ability to make sober analysis of what the other side is doing. The Iraq War was a case in point.
Why does South Korea necessarily fall? South Korea and China have a very strong positive commercial relationship and North Korea doesn’t have the resources to launch an invasion without Chinese support. Why would China want two economic basket-case Koreas? They only need one as a buffer-state and they have that with the status quo.
Even if your estimates of worldwide threats are accurate, an overextension of military commitments abroad is just as much a risk as an under extension of them. Do you think its possible that Putin may have calculated in 2014 that a failed-war-weary US public would be unlikely to summon the will to intervene after the annexation of Crimea?
South Korea is armed to the teeth and its conventional forces are far more advanced than their North Korea counterparts. The only thing keeping North Korea on the map are nukes and sponsorship from the Chinese. Existence as a de facto client state is always uncertain and it involves subordinating your domestic priorities to the foreign policy interests of your sponsor so good luck getting rid of those N. Korean nukes.
I can only think of two wars that has positive outcomes. One is WWII. The other, more arguably, is the Civil War.
Most wars just kill a huge number of civilians, enrich the war merchants, and don’t really settle anything.
I suppose putting a company of the 82nd Airborne in The Saini as a blood border between the Egyptians and the Israelis is a good idea. But do we really need 170 bases worldwide? Lunacy. And expensive as hell.
Also, check out Caitlin Johnstone.
Of course it is possible that military intervention abroad may actually prevent worse catastrophe. But speculation like that is easy. The historical track record shows the tendency of American pols in the post-WWII era is to use that rationale to justify intervention. Hasn't always worked out very well, has it? Why not consider bringing the troops home and raising the drawbridge? Do you actually know anyone who wants to get blown to pieces so Russia can't exert sovereignty over territory on it's own border? Sucks if they do that, but it isn't exactly the same as them launching a missile attack on our country and whoever's left scraping the bodies of innocent people off our own sidewalks.
The end of unipolar dominance does not mean war must be coming. Especially large-scale war. Britain, France, Germany, and Russia gained a sort of equilibrium for much of the 19th century in a non-unipolar world. While wars did break out (quite dramatically when, say, Napoleon upset this equilibrium), they were nothing like the scale of the 20th century wars.
Sadly, war will likely always be with us, but my hope is that it will look more like the 18th or 19th century than the 20th, with wars remaining relatively short and localized.
Not disagreeing with you but I wonder how much of the post-Napoleon peace was because the European powers were busy trying to colonize, hence a lot of their manpower was away from the Old Continent. (Even Germany had possessions in southwest Africa and even Melanesia.)
China is hugely active in Africa, locking down those rare earth minerals, but for the most part there's nowhere left for the caravel to land. There is nowhere else to colonize. The major powers are locked in a cell together with no island to sail to.
Colonies largely expanded their ability to go to war, as it gave them more humans and raw materials to draw from. In many countries, the amount of soldiers needed was relatively small. And as we saw in WWII, some of these imperial powers were able to draw soldiers from multiple continents which increased their capacity for war across the planet.
I think the truth is quite simple. Most of the ruling families were the same family and war is deeply unpleasant. It's even more unpleasant when you're waging a war against your cousin who you spent many Christmas holidays with while growing up.
Wars are expensive in material and humans. Everyone saw the benefit to keeping a relative peace because everyone was able to expand and grow together. Many tensions arose because some (England) were able to take more advantage of the situation than others (Russia), but most of the ruling classes of the various European countries were able to get most of what they wanted, which made war less likely.
Especially because gaining a few counties in rural France meant Russia and England may end up on your borders.
I stand corrected. You are absolutely right. For some reason I forgot all about the colonial aspect of WW2, for example, where the UK in particular benefitted hugely from its manpower in India, Africa etc (to say nothing of ANZAC).
It's definitely easy to forget! Throughout my entire education, I don't think I ever heard even once about how colonial powers leveraged their colonies during the war.
It's always taught as England and France tried to stop Hitler but needed help from the US to finish the job. Also, Russia was there.
Indeed. Britain pushed Napoleon back and defeated him. In a multipolar world, to the degree there's peace, it's because the major actors maintain a credible threat of war, and act when necessary.
Yes, but this can lead to a lot of stability. Of course, when it does go to shit, it goes catastrophically to shit, as was seen in WWI.
There's currently a single threatener of war in every global issue. That has obviously not been ideal for decades.
No argument there.
Isn't it funny how capitalism and imperialism seem to go together, but here are two of the worlds biggest communist countries - yes one a former communist country - most bent on expansion.
But also, fuck Russia.
Can't tell if this is a serious comment.
The CCCP is nominally communist, but basically functions as a capitalist country with central economic planning. This was a big shift that happened after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Twenty years later, China has the largest consumer market on the planet and plenty of new imperial ambitions.
But even had they remained an actual Maoist government, no one has ever said that imperialism is unique to capitalism. I think it just comes with a certain level of acquired wealth and power, whether the country is a democracy or under an absolute monarch.
Its semi-serious.
Freddie writes as though imperialism is tightly correlated with capitalism all the time. Its one of his chief reasons for hating capitalism, and in the same breath saying communism is better. Many communists do this.
Was China not interested in expansion during the Maoist period? What about Tibet?
No True Scotsman, right?
In a recent essay, Freddie's definition of communist excluded China for a number of reasons. You may disagree with his definitions, but there it is.
I think just looking at history would correlate imperialism with capitalism, since capitalist nations have been the most prolific colonizers. That's not to say a communist or socialist state could never be a colonial power. But, from the history we have, the correlation between capitalism and colonialism is pretty strong.
The era of pax America must come to an end eventually. It is probably better to go without a global war. Killing a lot of people on all sides will at best delay the inevitable.
No war but the class war!
I think it's both reasonable to think that the US should limit what those commitments are to its close allies and their territory, and that those commitments should be more solid and more credible.
I like Bruenig a lot and think her haters are often deranged, but I disagree with your assessment of what was objectionable about her statement: that she flippantly asserted that Japan deserved to be invaded, which was a blatantly shitty and cold thing to say. You can easily argue against America going to war with China and NOT dismiss the invasion of a country by an authoritarian superpower as “coming to them”.
Yes, agreed on all counts. Smith was clearly responding to her glib assertion that Japan deserves to be invaded, nothing more. It wasn’t some attack on her for being dovish.
I think that the rest of the thread shows that it wasn't "nothing more" but that he also endorses a vision of America as world police that I don't believe is sustainable.
Reading that Noah Smith thread, I agree with Jeet Heer's tweet that Smith makes a point to mock.
Absurd questions almost necessitate absurd responses. Responsibility always lands on the antiwar crowd, too. We need to treat every conceivable hypothetical--no matter how silly--seriously. It's exhausting and just ridiculous.
Bruenig may have been being glib, but I don't understand how someone could read her response and think that she's advocating for some sort of "Eye for an Eye" policy instead.
The point that everyone in the comments is missing is that there has been a historical understanding between the West and the USSR/Russia (and China) for literally generations. The great powers got their exclusive spheres of influence and any armed conflict was relegated to backwaters like Angola or Malaysia. In the old order there is absolutely no question where the Ukraine, Georgia, etc. lie.
And of course the reason that the great powers de facto agreed to not trespass on each other's home turf is because the risks involved in a shooting war were too terrible to contemplate.
I agree with you point on Russia—having rose from the ashes of the USSR. But not China. The only reason China wasn't a problem in the past, is that they were too backwards to be a problem. Don't forget, China lost a land war to Vietnam in 1979 ... in their own back yard.
China under the CCP remains officially Maoist with a stated goal of instituting world wide communism. Every company operating in China is officially an arm of the PLA (People's Liberation Army.)
It was the West that broke that understanding by allowing the expansion of NATO into the remnants of the USSR, and failed to help Russia weather the financial disasters following the collapse of the USSR. We guaranteed a Putin would rise to pick up the pieces and grant a bit of stability and economic security. The lesson of Versaille, remembered in the Marshall Plan, forgotten again only a generation or two later.
Our treaty obligations to Ukraine are murky at best. We ship tens of millions of dollars of materiel and hard cash to them every year (some of which even makes it to their defense budget.) We've done everything wrong with Russia over the past few years - we've shrieked hysterically about how evil they are and how terrible Putin is, but done nothing in practice over the invasion of Crimea (which is now, seven years on, pretty definitively integrated into the Russian Federation.) We've spoken loudly, carried a big stick, but dropped the stick on our toes. No wonder the response of our betters is to, well, double down and shriek louder.
This is aside from the fact that Ukraine isn't a member of NATO - a calculus America made years ago, even pre-Budapest accord, and one that was undermined by 'Euromaidan'. And for all that we fall onto fainting couches about Russian interference in American elections, 'Euromaidan' might as well have had a 'brought to you by the Atlantic Council' banner above the square.
I'm personally an isolationist but leaving that aside, it's hard to see how we're doing anything other than blunder after blunder in the region. We get involved when there's no need, then we stand back when something actually happens. And throughout it all we don't notice the demographic pressure cookers - Crimea was one, the Donbass is next, Estonia will be next after that.
Question for some people here. Should China or Russia put troops in Latin America or Palestine to stop us?
Trick question: no one wants to be in charge of Palestine
Old joke: the Israelis and the PLO are negotiating. The Israelis say "OK, you'll have control of Gaza." The PLO says, "Alright, and what do we get in return?"
I'll admit my ignorance here. Why does no one want to be in charge of Palestine?
Because Israel doesn't want to govern a hostile people, and because the neighboring states (wealthy Jordan in particular) don't want a poor and dissatisfied people in their country, and the Arab states benefit from having the safety valve of an unfree Palestine to rally people around.
And whoever's in charge is responsible and has to answer for "so why are missiles flying from your land into other countries?"
Or Iraq or Libya.
I would nominate both of those as examples of how a country can self-inflict massive wounds thanks to an overly aggressive belief in its need to project power everywhere at all times.
I would argue that at least with Iraq the US was already involved--it essentially occupied the Kurdish region of the country after the first Gulf War. Once the US was enmeshed to that level there was no good way out.
With Libya the wounds seem entirely self inflicted.
Well, the first Iraq war was also self-inflicted.
April Glaspie? Amazing how often the right hand doesn't know which foot the left hand is shooting.
Yep!
I have never seen that photograph with a pink (?) grade. Where did you source it?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Upshot-Knothole_GRABLE.jpg
Getty Images, where I have access to a license. Didn't know there were different gradings.
There aren't. Some enterprising photographer plucked this photo out of the public domain [1,2], slapped a pink filter on it, and sold it back to us. Over [3] and over [4] and over [5] and again.
[1] The government archive website is being finicky but the archive was itself archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20100328221833/http://www.nv.doe.gov/library/photos/photodetails.aspx?ID=1214
[2] Full size: https://web.archive.org/web/20100329203550/http://www.nv.doe.gov/library/PhotoLibrary/xx-069.jpg
[3] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2017/03/02/donald-trumps-military-budget-plan-is-less-impressive-than-he-claims
[4] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-the-last-man-who-knew-everything-the-life-and-times-of-enrico-fermi-father-of-the-nuclear-age-by-david-n-schwartz-w58hlq6qk
[5] https://nypost.com/2020/01/15/doomsday-diet-of-mushrooms-could-save-humanity-in-event-of-nuclear-war/
It's a shame that so many people have only one historical frame of reference. Everything is Munich. Perhaps we'd be better off if they read The Guns of August, because the flippant disregard for the horrors of war on display is much more reminiscent of 1914 than the insane Churchillian LARPing people want to do.
One of my favorite parts of Tuchman was her absolute disdain for Wilhelm II. I was cackling at certain points of The Guns of August.
Through a very strange rote I ended up reading the Guns of august as a teenager (I was obsessed as a kid with the last book of the Anne of Green Gables series, Rilla of Ingleside, which is essentially a historical novel about WW1). Because I stumbled upon an interest in WW1 before studying WW2, I feel like I have an uncommon perspective of knowing A LOT (for a causal reader of history) about WW1, and less about WW2. WW2 is an easy war to latch onto as a “good war, ugly but necessary” if you only know a little about that war and nothing else. But WW1 is the opposite. A completely and utterly pointless slaughter that did not need to happen. Instead of thinking if every war in terms of WW2 we need to remember the prequel and how it led directly to that “necessary war”.
Excellent point, but there isn't anyone left to testify on your behalf from personal experience. Which means the same bitter lessons may have to be learned again.
I feel like Ukraine and Japan and Taiwan are really quite different. Japan has been an ally for decades. They've been an ally for decades and China attacking Japan is a pretty easily defensible red line. And yes, mutually assured destruction means we have to be willing to contemplate a huge nuclear war where billions of people die and I think making it clear that we are and will keeps the peace without the uncertainty factor. Taiwan is slightly less crystal but I think it would be pretty immoral if Taiwan is invaded and destroyed simply because they thought we were serious for decades. If West Berlin was worth m.a.d. so are Tokyo and Taipei.
Ukraine on the other hand seems like a foolish idea to go marching off to war over a country that has not ever seriously been described as a close US ally. Containment of major power for a country which has been our friend for five minutes makes little sense to me. Sell them arms to defend themselves, ensure that they stay out of NATO states including the Baltics but expanding to a nuclear war over this seems insane.