After WW2 the US subsidized Europe's defense because we had the world's strongest economy and European countries were decimated. We did it in order to give them a chance to rebuild. Unfortunately, we never required the Europeans to assume their fair share of the burden now that they've recovered.
With France calling to establish a EU armed force separate and apart from NATO in order for Europe to distance itself from the US, maybe it's time to let them have their way.
The US has already committed around $175 billion to Ukraine. Apparently, it's not enough. The fact is, Ukraine is a European problem. Since Ukraine and the Europeans don't like our solutions maybe it's time for them to step up and solve the problem themselves.
An EU armed force would be a silly idea, because the EU is governed by unanimity on a lot of issues so it would just get bogged down and be an exercise in futility. Also quite a few non-EU countries, such as UK, Norway, Turkey, Japan, Canada might want to join it.
The fact that we have given Ukraine $175 billion in war funding and their gdp is around the same shows there is a problem with corruption and lack of respect by their leaders on what we as Americans have sacrificed for their country. Europe is lucky we are their big brother and they are just spoiled trust fund babies that haven’t had to fend for themselves.
If Europe wants to continue to fight and start WW3, let them be decimated.
The deeper issue is where the money actually gets spent. How much of it was spent on purchases (including bribing the Biden Crime Family) from entities such as US defense contractors, corrupt NGOs, "consultants", etc.?
On top of that insult, they added the injury of creating untold trillions of dollars of US dollar denominated derivative debt, the cash from which they've used to subvert and destroy the USA via bribes, PYSOPs, and financial vandalism.
The UK and Europe are not our allies. They are defacto enemies.
The drama in the news you see is the Trump regime destroying them, and reshuffling the deck of the global order.
To be fair, in the past some european "leftists" did criticize the US security umbrella because it required that significant amounts of USA military hardware had to be purchased by europeans, creating a quasi-monopoly. The primary beneficiaries of that in the US were mainly defense contractors, their investors and employees. I'm not sure how much of a "ripple effect" to the rest of the USA there was.
If it is easy to get it, a follow-up report on where defense spending actually goes would be useful.
I'm Irish and live in Ireland, and for years prior to the invasion of Ukraine I've been complaining about smug arrogant Europeans scoffing about how much of its budget the US allocates to defense and military spending, as opposed to us caring intellectual Europeans who spend a tiny fraction on defense and allocate the rest to rainbows and smiles. When literally the only reason Putin hasn't run roughshod over Europe is because of NATO and because of the US supplying military aid to buffer regions like Ukraine.
Or as Orwell said about pacifists: "Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf."
So, in the pie graph showing funding shortfalls, why the weird spelling for Turkey, but nobody else? I mean, you didn't list Germany as "Deutschland"...
This is a decent analysis. I did not know how much of the deficit was due to Germany, Spain etc.
Caveat: posting this as a European with a dual connection to the UK and one of the dark blue countries "pulling their weight", where some people this morning started to wonder whether, in the light of Trump being perceived as actively pro Putin, American troops on the ground deployed there to protect the eastern flank of NATO could be potentially given orders to protect Russian tanks rolling west instead. This was not a dominant mood, but more than one voice like this. Leaving aside EE paranoia (admittedly rooted in much history).
In the so called grander scheme of things though. Do you really think that there are only two camps? The "it's neither our interest or our moral duty" (let's call them isolationists) and the "it's our moral duty" (let's call them "idealists")? Isn't there a "realist" camp that believes that it's in the interest of the US to keep Russian territorial/imperial ambition in check? Sure, Zelensky is strictly speaking wrong in claiming that if Ukraine falls to Putin in one way or another, the US will feel it over the ocean. But the idea that Ukraine is the end of this is.... kinda optimistic to the extreme? And once Putin gets a bit of rest and a chance to recover, what's next? Moldova, Baltics, Poland? Yes he's obsessed with Ukraine in ideological ways that he's not obsessed with those other places. But we're still talking about someone who wants to recreate a greater Russia on the ruins of the old Soviet Union AND Warsaw Pact countries. So, who owns Ukraine is probably not of your concern, true. But war rumblings in Europe and increasingly confident Putin feeling he's been given free board to play his war games there, probably significantly more so. Surely there are many people in the US who see this -- as I said, leaving all idealistic concerns aside.
American policy for 80 years was was that it was in their rational interest to keep Russia contained and in check. Had this interest suddenly changed?
Trump is not pro Putin and never has been, that's a US domestic contrivance by his enemies for his unwillingness to be mindlessly anti-Russia. Trump is a pro-US domestic populist representing a proletariat who has no vested interest in European security, and he's acting like it.
I think there is definitely a camp who wants to be realist, but I don't think a forever-war is easily sellable to realists.
Moldova, the Baltics, and Poland are all now NATO, and all have Article 4 to lean on, and Ukraine was Putin's bright-line hardon. And policy experts here knew Ukraine was a bright line for decades.
> American policy for 80 years was was that it was in their rational interest to keep Russia contained and in check. Had this interest suddenly changed?
That interest changed radically in 1991.
Granted, our actual *policy* did not. But our interests surely did. That, to me, is the point where the USA should have started weaning Europe off the tit, hard. And quite possibly should have done for Russia, the rest of the former USSR, and the Warsaw Pact countries what we did for Germany and Japan after we defeated *them* militarily, even if it was a vastly different sort of war.
> But we're still talking about someone who wants to recreate a greater Russia on the ruins of the old Soviet Union AND Warsaw Pact countries.
I have seen this claim a number of times. Do you have sources for this you could share which make the case in a calm, rational manner? I haven't seen any evidence of Russia meddling in the affairs of their neighbors that wasn't first prompted by US meddling in the affairs of Russia's neighbors. Mostly aimed at continuing this prolonged hostility towards Russia.
We certainly weren't their *allies*, but we had pretty decent relations with pre-Soviet Russia. We *really* should have continued *that*, rather than the Soviet Era relations.
I knew some USAID type workers, Bahai "pioneers" (missionaries) in Ukraine 20 years ago. There was a lot of that kind of stuff going on in the wake of 1991 during the "post cold war" era that was, on the surface, intended to "help" the former USSR adopt western norms, but they were failures in the sense that instead of liberalism flourishing, corruption and oligarchy flourished. (there is no genetic basis for liberalism in "inbred" eastern cultures that practiced cousin marriage and that had honor systems instead of Constitutional order.)
Reagan and Bush Sr. were more interested in kicking the sick dog Russia in the ribs while it was laying on the ground than actually "helping" bring about liberal reforms. Clintons followed that by exploiting anti-Slavic bigotry in their classic "wag the dog" moves in the Bosnian/Kosovo wars.
The neocons and war mongers in both USA political parties benefitted from anti-Russia policy and political exploitation.
Corrupt western propaganda covering up that reality reached peak absurdity with the Trump Russia conspiracy theory.
There has never been any reason for Russia to go along with such absurd propaganda.
Yeah, we (the USA) absolutely fucked the dog on that one. To comment here on your reply to one of my posts elsewhere, it's entirely possible that they'd not have become full on Western Civilization members for a very long time, but they could have been a *far* larger beneficial trading partner, and far less hostile. (I'm not saying "never" because never is an even longer time.) I mean, just imagine if it was post-Communist Russia who was our major foreign manufacturer instead of still-Communist China. I mean, I suppose it's possible that they simply don't have the population numbers for it, but it would leave us in a better position today with regards to *both* Russia *and* China.
And yet, *they* are still a bunch of fuckin' commies.
Which, I mean, sure. You're likely correct. That's absolutely not my primary concern here. I'm not saying that Chinese people aren't intelligent. I'm saying that I hate their government. Though, hell. For *our* sakes, maybe it's *better* that they're still crippling themselves with that retardation.
To your last point, Ukraine was part of Russia before the US existed.
Poland, Romania, the Baltics, and possibly Finland are the NATO members who might have to worry about Russia; the others, not so much.
Part of the issue for the US is that the cheap gear is mostly gone. Reserve equipment counting down until it would be scrapped, missiles due for expensive overhauls, and stuff we just don't use anymore is relatively cheap. (The math valuing the amount of military aid is an example of why the Pentagon can't pass an audit.) Actual new production costs a lot more.
A lot of the equipment used by both Russia and Ukraine is old Soviet stuff -- such as the BMP-1 IFV or the MT-LB/MT-LBu which is often used as an APC. While not the latest kit, these are still very useful, e.g. for supplying/rotating troops at the front.
In general, it makes a lot of sense for armed forces to store old equipment (this is something the UK is very bad at -- e.g. we had 900 Chieftain and 400 Challenger I tanks that could've been put in long term storage to reactivate in an emergency).
The argument of “he’ll take more!” Is always so silly, because the answer to the question is in the question, he can’t take Poland and other eastern countries because they’re apart of NATO and would then give the other members(US included) justified reason to go hot.
“But trump hates NATO”, he hates NATO countries who don’t do their 2%, which Poland does. Poland has always been Pro US, they’re always ready to buy our newest weapons and gadgets, so that this doesn’t occur.
This is like saying “China takes Vietnam, so they’ll take Japan next!” We have bases and actual alliances with Poland/Japan, Ukraine/Vietnam are meant to be nuisances to their respective countries, they’re not meant to be actual allies, just the hanging rook that Russia/China take but puts them in check. A hot war for Russia/China, and proxy war where the US gathers intel, destabilizes areas next to enemy countries, and we lose no men.
The “realist” take is more like a “head in the sand” take, because it ignores all the planning and buildup the US has done in those countries for decades. It’s armchair generals that think all of this just suddenly occurred 3 years ago(at the youngest) or 10(at the oldest), not knowing this stuff has been on the back burner for decades. I’m sure their will be some “random” war in the southern Asia or SEA in 5ish years. And no, not Taiwan.
Honestly, China fighting India would be so great for us. We could see how much the PLA has improved, stagnated, or decayed, from their foray into Vietnam. It’d be great.
The “realist” perspective is “hey, glad to hear you want to cut off that wart, but I have an actual tumor you should cut off” but no one, Democrat or Republican, besides Massie, would EVER think of cutting aid to that “ally”.
Realists have been paying attention and know that a world war is not worth Ukraine, and the same REALITIES that keep NATO from directly fighting in Ukraine keep Russia out of Latvia: Mutually assured destruction. Any realist would find this “peace through cataclysmic war” idiocy laughable.
The Russians have well and truly gotten their dicks stuck in a bear trap named "Ukraine". Their best units have been repeatedly decimated, and they lack the young male population to easily replace them. Plus their modern tank production is so low they've been deploying T55s for two years now, FFS.
What army is Putin going to invade Poland with? Will he use Belarusian recruits? More Norks? And what model MBT will he be primarily equipping them with? It won't be the T90 or the T14.
I don't disagree that Putin *wants* to get the band back together. I just don't believe he has the men and material to accomplish his desires.
> Only the UK, Poland, Greece, and Estonia are pulling their relative weight
Looking at the UK, while it does spend a lot of defence, it does not get good value for money. E.g. over the last 25 years it has spend almost trice on defence as South Korea has, yet the Korean army is about 10-20 times bigger, in terms of number of tanks, artillery pieces, APC, soldiers, etc.
I did a comparison back in 2021 of the British army with Finland, Greece and Singapore, and concluded that UK could have much bigger forces *on the same budget*. But instead UK MoD seems to want a small number of expensive, gold-plated exquisitely hand-crafted pieces of kit. see: https://pontifex.substack.com/p/scottish-defence-policy-ii-nation
Measuring a military with a spreadsheet by any means is also foolish. Look at how Saddam Hussein's army performed. On paper, he had the 4th largest army, 5,500 main battle tanks, 950,000 troops and the 6th largest air force with over 700 war planes.
Their resistant was almost meaningless. The US did not lose a single tank. Let that sink in.
Yes, the US military should let that same lesson sink in. Not every enemy is going to let us surround them and bomb the shit out of all their leadership and logistics before we invade.
And we lost 9 tanks in that war. Most to friendly fire, but still…
7 to "friendly" fire. 2 destroyed to prevent possible capture. 0 destroyed by the 5500 main battle tanks of the enemy.
For clarity, Iraq did not "let us" surround them. They had no equipment that could stand against ours in any way. The WWII German military would have put up stiffer resistance
The best resource the US military has is not the F-35, some secret drone defense, or any other technology. It is the vast number of well trained, battle tested men. The greatest weaknesses are the over reliance on expensive systems, the loss of the nation's industrial capacity, and leadership that is not accountable.
To your earlier comment about drones. You are correct that they provide a lot of value for the cost now. I hope our defense department has paid attention to how they have been used in the current conflict and has an effective defense already, or at least in development. Without an effective counter, our aircraft carriers are the equivalent of horse cavalry in WWI. Just a bigger target.
I think you highly over estimate the number of young battle tested men in the current US military. Almost all of the kills in Afghanistan over the final decade were from a group of about 300 dudes cycling into and out of DEVGRU. Afghanistan T3R was something like 10:1 or larger. Even in Iraq (the current topic) T3R was 3:1, and that was the last time we did any sort of large scale deployment similar to what's going on in Ukraine, and we were only able to do so because we had friendly ports to establish our military.
When you want to stage a war anywhere globally and you've got the world's two largest oceans on either side of your country, your army is going to be mostly logistics, and your strength is going to be the number of friendly ports you can move your army into.
Weird that I know half of those people and I've never served. Your numbers are suspect at best.
"While specific numbers for Silver and Bronze Star awards in Afghanistan are difficult to pinpoint with exactness, the Army has awarded 75 Silver Stars and 891 Bronze Stars for valor, along with 27,076 Bronze Stars for other meritorious service, during the war in Afghanistan." Simple Google search results. Obviously the 27K is composed of some BS. They don't typically give bronze and silver stars to everyone in a unit involved in a firefight.
I am counting vets that are out of the service as a resource. Granted, most GWOT vets want nothing to do with our government due to the way they have been abused for nothing. That would possibly change in a real war with a near peer... that we didn't start for stupid reasons. It would certainly change in the face of any enemy invading.
Yes... amateurs and tactics, professionals and logistics... Where do we care about without friendly ports nearby?
While the western MIC does seem to rape the taxpayers, measuring a military with a spreadsheet is a fools errand. Since you are European, look into the Soviet invasion of Finland in WWII.
"You're a Putin stooge!!!!" -libs, probably, not realizing how NATO arming up is the last thing Putin wants
Seriously while I believe Ukraine is in the right and I support the general idea of helping them, it concerns me how many hardcore Ukraine boosters react with indignation to the idea that we should define a specific end goal and consider how our aid & other actions will get us to it. Instead it's vague platitudes about "victory," "it's in our vital interest," "whatever it takes," etc. The fact that they mostly focus their outrage on Trump and half of America rather than on the Euros as you say is another indication that they're not thinking things through.
What concerns me is most Ukraine supporters didn't give a single solitary shit about Crimea and wouldn't know Maidan if it hit them in the head with a bat. Most Ukraine supporters, in my view, needed an issue to latch onto as a virtue signal after their vaccine mandate issue fell apart. The Blue Egregore needed fuel and it latched onto a war that largely doesn't concern us, and probably got a lot of people killed in the process.
> Most Ukraine supporters, in my view, needed an issue to latch onto as a virtue signal after their vaccine mandate issue fell apart.
That's *certainly* not true of me, or of anyone else who's a serious geopolitical analyst (though TBH most people who talk politics on the net aren't serious people). I've been writing about how Putin needs to be stopped since before the full-scale invasion, e.g. https://pontifex.substack.com/p/the-skripal-poisoning-a-case-study
Actually it'd probably be fairly easy for the USA and Europe to end the war on broadly favourable terms, but it requires that Putin be treated firmly (otherwise he has no incentive to end the war). i wrote about this here: https://pontifex.substack.com/p/will-trump-end-the-russia-ukraine
Putin has brilliantly and holistically exploited the weaknesses and stupidities of the west (including wokeism, censorship and corruption) for decades, like it or not. That won't change.
We now see that what used to be theoretical, the possibility of the west overcoming its stupidities and weaknesses and evolving toward "something better", is, sadly, a practical impossibility (for the mainstream culture/politics).
What is actually happening is that postmodernism is driving regression* toward left-elitism and totalitarianism, away from classical liberalism.
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Smart People [left-elites] Are Especially Prone to Tribalism, Dogmatism and Virtue Signaling
musaalgharbi. substack. com /p/smart-people-are-especially-prone
Symbolic Capital(ism)
Exploring the relationships between social justice discourse, inequality, and the rise of the symbolic professions.
Smart People Are Especially Prone to Tribalism, Dogmatism and Virtue Signaling
The symbolic professions aggressively select for those who are highly educated and cognitively sophisticated. This is a key source of their dysfunction.
This isn't perfect academic material, but it does provide a useful summary of one systems-theoretical model of cultural evolution, disruption, and regression.
-----
re: David Ronfeldt's TIMN model of social change
disruption -> disintegration -> regression to ideological tribalism -> reintegration at a higher, more complex level (social form)
... At first, when a new form arises, it has subversive effects on the old order, before it has additive effects that lead to a new order. Bad actors may prove initially more adept than good actors at using a new form — e.g., ancient warlords, medieval pirates and smugglers, and today’s information-age terrorists being examples that correspond to the +I, +M, and +N transitions, respectively. As each form takes hold, energizing a distinct set of values and norms for actors operating in that form, it generates a new realm of activity — for example, the state, the market. As a new realm gains legitimacy and expands the space it occupies within a social system, it puts new limits on the scope of existing realms. At the same time, through feedback and other interactions, the rise of a new form/realm also modifies the nature of the existing ones.
... Societies that can elevate the bright over the dark side of each form and achieve a new combination become more powerful and capable of complex tasks than societies that do not. Societies that first succeed at making a new combination gain advantages over competitors and attain a paramount influence over the nature of international conflict and cooperation. If a major power finds itself stymied by the effort to achieve a new combination, it risks being superseded.
... A people’s adaptability to the rise of a new form appears to depend largely on the local nature of the tribal form. It may have profound effects on what happens as the later forms get added. For example, the tribal form has unfolded differently in China and in America. Whereas the former has long revolved around extended family ties, clans, and dynasties, the latter has relied on the nuclear family, heavy immigration, and a fabric of fraternal organizations that provide quasi-kinship ties (e.g., from the open Rotary Club to the closed Ku Klux Klan). These differences at the tribal level have given unique shapes to each nation’s institutional and market forms, to their ideas about progress, and, now, to their adaptability to the rise of networked NGOs.
Jordan Hall's thoughts on postmodern social conditions, and the disruption of legacy "sense making" systems (hierarchies of curated expertise) by network technologies.
They are actively replacing their own citizens, so why would anyone believe they would fight for them? The UK Gov was more interested in Russian oligarch money than terrorist attacks on British soil and EU is a GRU & FSB playground.
Our NATO invest does what Europe would never do. NATO assures us that our military is interoperable with their's, using our standards and equipment. Our training. And helping lower the overall cost of our military equipment with volume. We learned in WWII that Europe can't manage itself. It's only worse now. And we should rethink it. But in many ways from a military planning standpoint the option cost of NATO means we had to spend less political capital with our own standing army or risk hedging on threats. From a military planning standpoint we always knew NATO would not pay it's way.
If the NATO member nations have a shared enemy, and we identify that us shouldering the majority of the burden saves us money in the long run, that makes sense. Without a shared enemy, the case generally falls apart in the eyes of the people who don't see a shared enemy.
NATO was founded to counter Russia. The question is, does USA see Russia as an enemy? Trump voted with Russia and against Ukraine at the UN recently, so maybe not.
There's a lot of interests in the US that see any war as a business opportunity, and their thumbs are on the scales with most presidents. These elements are probably the only reason the Russian Boogeyman has lasted this long. Their influence over Trump appears to be relatively minor.
Most business in the US exists outside of policy. The MIC exists *only* because of policy, so they have a very vested interest in manipulating that policy. Lots of folks talk about the revolving door between, say, the FDA and the food industry, but that revolving door is even more profound between the Army and the defense industry. Many of my extended family got filthy, filthy rich off that door, in fact.
And these folks live in DC brownstones and go to USAID cocktail parties, so it's an entire culture of foreign government manipulation for profit where questioning the wisdom of influencing a Ukraine election (for instance) is unquestionable in polite company.
In the 1990s there were very large US defense contractors doing manned space launches (for civilian customers) in a part of the former USSR, operated out of armed compounds in the Moscow area. (Because it was less expensive than the bloated US space bureaucracy at the time.)
Clintons and the Bosnia, and the incremental takeover of the former USSR by oligarchs (ignored or supported variously by the USA) changed that.
NATO was founded to counter the Soviet Union, which Russia is not. Or in the formula of Lord Ismay:
Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay was NATO’s first Secretary General, a position he was initially reluctant to accept. By the end of his tenure however, Ismay had become the biggest advocate of the organisation he had famously said earlier on in his political career, was created to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
It succeeded in the first, failed then succeeded in the third and is now failing in the second.
I think that's exactly what we're seeing now with Russia and Europe spending double or more on ukraine as a percent of thier GDP as US. Or at least I thought we had a shared enemy.
Inside the last two years, Europe is taking their own security more seriously and making up for lollygagging the prior decade. Inside the last two years, the direct military aid to Ukraine has still only come from a small number of countries who are immediately adjacent to Russia or who read English language news.
Yeah, I guess my point is, that seems like an issue for Poland and the UK to take up with Italy. Europe as a whole is contributing fairly (as I see it) relative to the US with regards to Ukraine. But I do agree with your other point they did not pull thier weight for decades with NATO.
Only shared propaganda. The USA (really the Democrats) have been pulling the strings on this conflict since the beginning. Only a fool listens to them when they tell us that Russia is unstoppable if it gets past one of the weakest militaries in Europe.
The mature thing to do would be issue an ultimatum with clear conditions and an achievable deadline. We haven't had a president who can do that this century. Lacking that, we're left with motivating other through fear of chaos.
I guess everyone else could start with living up to the terms of the treaty, effective today. They can negotiate making up for past failures to do so. Until you're caught up on obligations, you don't get to count on the benefits.
The North Atlantic Treaty doesn't contain any terms regarding level of defence spending. Specifically, the 2% guideline is nowhere in the treaty, and was only created decades after the treaty was written.
It was established and agreed to by NATO members in 2006. It was renewed after we provoked the 2014 invasion. It was agreed to by the members of NATO. For 20 years, much of Europe has failed to live up to their financial commitment. Yet they expect others to honor a commitment requiring the sacrifice of the lives of their citizens. That is a truly bizarre way to look at the world. Those that bring nothing to the picnic should expect to get nothing. For people living in the real world, a treaty is a piece of paper. They tend to get broken eventually. Do you think a nation's ability to participate in their own defense has weight in the ultimate decision to honor a mutual defense treaty? If a nation doesn't have enough of a military to hold off an aggressor until help arrives, it would be easy to back out of a mutual defense treaty by simply saying the country we agreed to help no longer exists. When the treaty was created, no one could imagine a nation would be so foolish as to make its national security entirely dependent on the goodwill of others.
You are welcome to peruse NATO's statement on the topic:
Unless I missed something in the article or comments, no one has mentioned that up to Biden becoming President, NATO was kept alive supporting shitty, corrupt and idiotic wars in the middle east for several decades (after Bosnia).
Some NATO number crunching on that (middle east wars) would be interesting.
Well, some of us have. I may not have mentioned it in the comments here, I can't remember, but I know I've mentioned it in *some* substack comments section recently that I started thinking -- or at least had it pointed out to me -- that the US still being in NATO, and possibly there still being a NATO at all, wasn't a great thing, during the Bosnia intervention. Like, "NATO was founded to deal with the Soviet Union, and we won the Cold War, why are we still doing this and dealing in regional conflicts?"
And when NATO started expanding in '99, I *knew* it was a bad thing we were still in NATO. We should have done for Russia what we did for Germany and Japan after we defeated *them* in a major war, i.e.: rebuilt them in our image. An industrially productive and friendly Russia would be a vast improvement over what we have now, and I'd far rather have spent the last 35 years building up *their* economy than China's. After all, Communism had already *fallen* in Russia. Why not help them out, instead of keeping Communism on life support in China?
Oh, hey, looks like I did say that here, but far below this point in the comments.
When the USSR disintegrated it wasn't like the defeat of Nazi Germany or the Japanese Empire with subsequent US military occupation. Lots of "communist" type infrastructure and bureaucracy remained (I know a family originally from Uzbekistan that had ties to the CIA that tried several times to get set up with economic "reform" programs funded by the USA that had to fight the local (ex-Soviet) war lord and Mulla types for years).
So, there were extensive USAID-type programs in Russia/Ukraine, but they were usually pretty farcical given the way that oligarchs and mafia types were allowed to grab vast parts of the economy.
The idea that a culture with a vastly different psychological archetype would spin on a dime and adopt "western", secular-liberal reforms in itself was a complete joke.
To start, "western" culture evolved from a gene pool in NW Europe that had banned cousin marriage for 1,000 years and had become OUTBRED.
So, western culture evolved high-social-trust in social institutions and practices like Constitutional order that are alien to inbred, clannish, eastern cultures that have low social-trust (trust is only within clans and kinship groups, not between them).
One of the best, most accessible, comparative schemes for lay readers to understand why western culture is unsuitable when imposed on non-western cultures is Henrich's W.E.I.R.D. model. (Henrich is a cultural anthropologist with an additional PhD in economics.)
And yet, China is *also* culturally foreign to the WEIRD folks. My primary point here is that I would prefer if the richest nation on earth had been exporting trillions in cash to a place no longer run by communists who hate us for ideological reasons. I'm not saying Russian oligarchs are great. I'm saying their motivations align with ours more easily than that of communist ideologues.
Russian oligarchs want money. Chinese True Believers want universal communist revolution. I consider one of these motivations *significantly worse* than the other.
With a few exceptions, Russia's economy wasn't suitable for integration into the (western) "international system" (Kissinger's phrase). As I said, there were lots of USAID type programs put in place in the 1980s/90s, and most of them failed. Russia's government was unstable for a long time after 1991.
At this point, in hindsight, Nixon/Kissinger were obviously wrong in thinking that integrating China's economy with the "international system" would result in an overall "liberalization" of China.
Kissinger and his many fellow globalists made a lot of money from off-shoring USA working class jobs*, otherwise I can't imagine why a sane person would advocate for globalization.
According to some anthropologist I can't remember, Japan's cultural evolution had some significant parallels to the west. At contact with the west it was on the way to being a post-Feudal, early industrial culture that evolved from clan-based dynastic politics to increasingly include merchant elites.
Western contact pushed that stuff along.
But my point was that Germany and Japan were defeated militarily in a more "clean" way, so it was easier to impose western norms after the defeats and prevent corruption.
Imperial Japan obviously wasn't communist in the Marxist sense.
"Fascist" Germany obviously wasn't communist.
The USSR slowly disintegrated and that allowed corruption to fester and spread, unregulated by "classically liberal" social institutions and high-social-trust, with the strongest, most brutal and corrupt thug-oligarchs (many former communist bureaucrats) rising in power.
"If you don’t know who Victoria Nuland is, or what she was doing in Ukraine in 2014, then you have no idea what’s going on.
The Deep State started this war. It was the Obama CIA/State Dept that funded Nazi militant groups to start a civil war in Ukraine, and initiated regime change to a CIA/State Dept puppet, Yatseniuk.
This was all revealed in the leaked phone call between State Dept diplomats and Deep State agents, Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt.
After the Maidan coup in February 2014, the US CIA/State Dept owned Ukraine via proxy, and the CIA began using Ukraine as a giant offshore playground for criminal racketeering and money laundering. Ukraine became one giant CIA base, directly on Russia’s border.
Then the US/NATO began building up Ukraine’s army for the sole purpose of one day fighting Russia. The US/NATO began supplying Ukraine with weapons, equipment, missiles, training, intelligence, etc.
Covert elements within the US government, along with their European partners in NATO, used espionage to overthrow and take control of the nation of Ukraine, then built a massive standing army on Russia’s border, then tried to bring Ukraine into NATO, and thus start WW3.
If you are still buying the official MSM narrative about this conflict, you should not be engaged in conversations.
Everything the MSM told you about Ukraine/Russia has been a lie, and in many cases, the inverse of the truth.
I personally think that Maidan was probably pushed by US soft power and probably organic as well, so some of both. Evidence of one does not preclude the other. That said, if we never pushed the soft power there we'd have far fewer dead people.
So, honestly, that right there is the primary reason I *do* feel any sort of moral obligation to defend Eastern Europe and even Ukraine from Russia. We were acting like that dick at the bar who stands behind his buddies and taunts the big guy a couple tables over.
This is, please note, *not* me saying that we should continue Biden era policy on Ukraine. Just explaining why I, or someone else, might feel like the USA bears some moral responsibility here.
Certainly that is also extremely bad, but I strongly suspect (though obviously cannot prove) that Ukraine would not have been invaded in the first place without the last ~30 years of US policy towards Russia.
And I'm also certainly not claiming that the US bears *sole* moral responsibility.
Putin was always going to want Crimea unless Ukraine was just Belarus 2, which is just (Not)Russia. Were we screwing around in the country and making Putin sweat? Yea, but Ukraine having any independent thought was not okay for Putin.
Either America screws around in Ukraine and Russia invades or we didn’t screw around(or they never noticed it because it was very minimal) and then Ukraine is just a puppet state of Russia. It’s just six of one, half a dozen of the other.
> Putin was always going to want Crimea unless Ukraine was just Belarus 2, which is just (Not)Russia.
Right, but those two countries (three if you count Byelorussia) have been effectively the same thing for the last 1100 years, since the Empire of the Kievan Rus showed up in ~900 AD. (Yes, originally Kiev was in charge, until Moscow broke away from *them*!) Ukraine only owned the Crimea in the first place because Khrushchev transferred the territory to the Ukrainian SSR from the Russian SFSR to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the reunification of that territory with Great Russia.
"Ukrainian" and "Russian" are separate languages along the lines of "British" and "Texan" being separate languages once you add another 900 years to that mix. I mean, the division of Ukraine as a separate political entity didn't even really happen until the founding of the Soviet Union in the first place. Prior to that, it had just been "Mikra Rossiya" or "Little Russia" since ~1300 AD, and that was just as part of the overall area of... Russian-ness.
I'm not saying that they can't be or don't deserve to be a separate entity if that's what they want, but they're less distinct from the Russians than the Caledonians are from the Britons.
> then Ukraine is just a puppet state of Russia. It’s just six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Right, but Ukraine has been a puppet state of Russia off and on -- and more "on" than "off" -- for the last 700 years. This just... isn't exactly novel territory for that part of the world.
The whole situation there (and, admittedly, my comment here) is just a mess. Sorry, it's early.
The larger Slavic (eastern) civilization/culture is based on a completely different psychological archetype (and economic archetype) than "western" liberalism (see Henrich's WEIRD model).
WEIRD is a maritime (and savior) merchant culture that rapidly evolved classical liberalism (Constitutional order) after its core gene pool became outbred 1,000 years ago.
The East, including Slavs, were more inbred, clannish and agrarian.
Imposing "liberal" western values on the (pre-liberal/illiberal) middle east was a violent disaster for decades. Imposing western values on the (pre-liberal) Slavic east is also turning into a violent disaster.
I don’t understand the need to create conspiracy theories for why ex-Warsaw Pact populations would want to more closely align themselves with Western Europe. Look at GDP. Look at corruption indexes. Look at relative constitutional freedoms. Is there any metric whatsoever one could point to to support an argument of preferring to be in the Russian sphere of influence as opposed to Western Europe’s?
A conspiracy theory is not necessary to explain Maidan, but lack of necessity for a conspiracy theory does not mean there wasn't a conspiracy. whynotboth.gif
Well, next step down this rabbit hole is sussing out the difference between application of soft power (which absolutely happened, in some capacity) and initiation of a conspiracy. I see a pretty big difference between those two ideas but I get the feeling some folks don’t see that distinction. Was French support for the American colonists a “conspiracy?” I guess I’m outing myself as an idealist here, but I find that historical reference highly relevant to this discussion.
One last unrelated point while I’m on the soapbox: I think it’s proper to weigh costs and benefits and “moral hazards” for the US support here. This article lays out important data and advocates a credible position. Withdrawing US financial support from Ukraine is a defensible position. But my biggest problem with the Administration’s apparent pursuit of this position is the blatant lying they are doing to enact it. Most critically in lying about Russia’s singular culpability in unilaterally invading a neighboring sovereign country (again and again.) It’s embarrassing and, frankly, un-American in my eyes.
Those are good questions. The simplest definition of "conspiracy theory" is that I am theorizing that a group of people conspired to do a thing. It should be clear that a group of people did in fact conspire to apply soft power to regime change in Ukraine on behalf of the west.
I think those claims should be balanced against the reality that Russia ASSUREDLY was doing the same thing, and that we beat them at their own game. But that begs the question why we bothered to play the soft power game there in the first place. What did we win? Was it worth it?
You won't find me defending Trump's words anywhere, as far as I can tell. I even spell out twice in this article that Trump's *words* are wrong on this issue. So we can agree there.
The soft power game has been going on as a component of the hard power game for 100s of years.
Russia and the rest of the various parts of the geopolitical "east" feared rising European power. Napoleon and Hitler justified those fears. Western maritime colonialization of much of the planet justified those fears.
Historically, rising western power required control of trade routes, including through the middle east (silk road, tea and spice trade, etc.)
AGRARIAN Russia tried to harass or block those trade routes so that it could expand to the south and otherwise extend its influence, long before the USSR/communism. Harassing those trade routes, via the Great Game, was the most obvious way to try to weaken and distract future western Napoleons/Hitlers from invading Russia and/or politically influencing its extensions such as Ukraine.
Because it is "eastern", and pre-liberal in its genetics, Russia is also more holistic. Being more holistic/agrarian in its psychological-civilizational archetype means it is able to exploit western-liberal stupidity and weaknesses.
That is accurate, but it's easily verifiable history that the US made a lot of noise about not expanding NATO eastward in 1990 and 1991, and then proceeded to do just that starting in 1999. I agree, it makes perfect sense why the Warsaw Pact countries would want to be in NATO, and part of the EU. It made no sense, and was in fact highly counterproductive, for the USA to be as antagonistic towards Russia in the intervening years since the fall of the Soviets.
If it were the case that the US was strong-arming countries into a club for the US's benefit, I'd agree. But I simply don't think that's the case. Eastern Europeans want to be in the Western European club of their own volition. And who could blame them? NATO, EU, Euro, it's all the same impulse. In fact, it's the RUSSIANS who strong-arm these countries to try to keep them from looking westward. Which is the only reason the US feels the need (obligation?) to apply their soft power in the first place.
Most people who disagree on this topic have a fundamental disagreement about how much of these regime transitions are organic and how much are a result of US soft power. I don't think that question is really answerable, but I think "some of both" is a reasonable statement most people would be forced to agree with, and if "some of both" is reasonable then the question is "why do the soft power thing at all in a place like Ukraine?" Doing it in Zimbabwe is low risk. Doing it in Ukraine seems like a very bad idea once you take into account the risks with your ROI calculation.
It’s definitely a question of values that doesn’t lend itself to calculations easily. To go back to my initial example, it would seem to me the French’s investment in the American colonies paid off in spades for the world, including themselves. But they probably wouldn’t have calculated that at the time if they did the math.
Again, not to say the calculation isn’t important. Using these “values” definitely didn’t pay off for us in Iraq or Afghanistan. Statecraft is hard.
(Again) Corruption. Clintons. Wag the Dog. Bosnia/Kosovo.
Corrupt Democrats (Biden crime family, Burisima, Hunter's laptop) gained power for a long time by playing geopolitical games in Ukraine, Russia bashing and engaging in farcical and massive lies, gaslighting and conspiracy theories (Hillary's lies, including the lies about being shot at in a helicopter) are legendary, and obvious signs of psychopathic personality.
The elite-"left"/Democrat establishment is corrupt and mentally ill. It really is just that simple.
> Eastern Europeans want to be in the Western European club of their own volition. And who could blame them? NATO, EU, Euro, it's all the same impulse.
Absolutely no argument. I understand *their* motivations completely. In their shoes I'd want exactly the same thing. I even *said* that in the comment you're replying to.
"I agree, it makes perfect sense why the Warsaw Pact countries would want to be in NATO, and part of the EU." -Warmek, a day ago
But I'm not *in* their shoes, I live in the USA. And it was not in *our* interest to tie those countries to us militarily, no matter how much in *their* interest it was to tie us to *them* militarily. That's my point. They could have *wanted* to be in NATO all they liked. And we could -- and should -- have said "No."
Well, to be fair, that's not actually my ultimate position. I think the USA should have handed the keys to NATO over to Europe itself and dipped out in '91, having actually accomplished the task that NATO was founded to do; Countering the Warsaw Pact. At which point a USA-less NATO could have done whatever it wanted with the requests of those Eastern European countries. It's *their* continent, after all.
That is retarded propaganda and ignorance. Hungary is the most obvious exception. In general, post-communist people and countries in central-east europe understand that communism has continued to mutate and evolve into "wokism" and similar social pathologies in the west.
Being overrun by middle eastern refugees and immigrant rape cults is only possible when postmodern western politics regresses into complete retardation and authoritarianism (Biden's FBI censoring regime critics at the request of Ukraine's govt).
They read English language media and were captured by the Blue Egregore's pivot to Ukraine! as the virtue signal when they had to bail on the masks-and-vaxes virtue signal.
Yes. Western European governments are against their people. Germany is a great example. What used to be East Germany voted for the pro-Germany, anti-Communist party that the rest of the dirtballs are trying to ban. Why? They've tried Communism once and have no desire for a second round. Eastern Europe is caught between the rising totalitarian Communism of the EU and traditional Russian authoritarianism and brutality.
You are the only one "creating conspiracy theories". You ignore the enormous debacle of the Democrat's MADCOW Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory.
You PROJECT your mental dysfunction while mindlessly repeating absurd D-party propaganda.
The larger Slavic (eastern) civilization/culture is based on a completely different psychological archetype (and economic archetype) than "western" liberalism (see Henrich's WEIRD model).
WEIRD is a maritime (and savior) merchant culture that rapidly evolved classical liberalism (Constitutional order) after its core gene pool became outbred 1,000 years ago.
The East, including Slavs, were more inbred, clannish and agrarian.
Imposing "liberal" western values on the (pre-liberal/illiberal) middle east was a violent disaster for decades. Imposing western values on the (pre-liberal) Slavic east is also turning into a violent disaster.
Re Nordstream 2 destruction. The depth and temperature of the bombed parts of the pipeline require the activities and material support of, at minimum, an oilfield support vessel (decompression chamber, dive suit heating etc). The yacht supposedly used by Ukraine lacks in every department the ability to support the necessary dive activities.
However, the USS Kearsarge, deployed to the Baltic at the time (and the largest US warship ever to deploy there) has/had all of the necessary abilities to carry that equipment in its well deck. Was observed loitering in the area on its exit run and had helicopters hover directly over the blown sections of pipeline, just prior to the bombing. Joe "never to be sufficiently maligned" Biden openly stated he would destroy it the year prior..
In the Means + Motive matrix, Ukraine is vastly lacking in one, The US of the time had both...
One wonders if Trump is doing to the EU what Reagan did to the Soviet Union-lure them into spending themselves into oblivion. The Soviets weren't ever going to give up their catastrophically inefficient economic system and the Euros won't give up their gigantic welfare system. So any military buildup is both constrained and and highly competitive with other priorities. If he isn't,, he should be since as Vance pointed out, we no longer have shared values.
One factor most fail to mention concerning a US retreat into isolationism is the fact that Europe, a net importer of food and energy, has no blue water navy. It is the US alone that has the force structure and global reach to keep the sea lanes open. Right now, in a hypothetical war between Europe and a Russo-Chinese alliance, Europe would starve in the dark. To achieve real independence from the US, Europe would have to build such a force, and to do so would take not just money but time - years if not a decade or more. Until such a time, European boasts about going it alone are just empty words.
Now, realistically, would the US stand aside and let bad actors shut down the sea lanes? Unlikely. Hence the tension in US policy between staying globally engaged to help maintain a stable world order and, on the other hand, not carrying the burden and onus of being the world policeman. And, by onus I mean enduring the condescension and self-satisfied opprobrium of the free riders.
After WW2 the US subsidized Europe's defense because we had the world's strongest economy and European countries were decimated. We did it in order to give them a chance to rebuild. Unfortunately, we never required the Europeans to assume their fair share of the burden now that they've recovered.
With France calling to establish a EU armed force separate and apart from NATO in order for Europe to distance itself from the US, maybe it's time to let them have their way.
The US has already committed around $175 billion to Ukraine. Apparently, it's not enough. The fact is, Ukraine is a European problem. Since Ukraine and the Europeans don't like our solutions maybe it's time for them to step up and solve the problem themselves.
> France calling to establish a EU armed force
An EU armed force would be a silly idea, because the EU is governed by unanimity on a lot of issues so it would just get bogged down and be an exercise in futility. Also quite a few non-EU countries, such as UK, Norway, Turkey, Japan, Canada might want to join it.
My fuller thoughts on the issuer of a European Military Alliance are here: https://pontifex.substack.com/p/european-defence-policy-how-europe
The fact that we have given Ukraine $175 billion in war funding and their gdp is around the same shows there is a problem with corruption and lack of respect by their leaders on what we as Americans have sacrificed for their country. Europe is lucky we are their big brother and they are just spoiled trust fund babies that haven’t had to fend for themselves.
If Europe wants to continue to fight and start WW3, let them be decimated.
The deeper issue is where the money actually gets spent. How much of it was spent on purchases (including bribing the Biden Crime Family) from entities such as US defense contractors, corrupt NGOs, "consultants", etc.?
On top of that insult, they added the injury of creating untold trillions of dollars of US dollar denominated derivative debt, the cash from which they've used to subvert and destroy the USA via bribes, PYSOPs, and financial vandalism.
The UK and Europe are not our allies. They are defacto enemies.
The drama in the news you see is the Trump regime destroying them, and reshuffling the deck of the global order.
Add the "woke" element and other corrupt parts of in the USA's military and national security apparatus.
To be fair, in the past some european "leftists" did criticize the US security umbrella because it required that significant amounts of USA military hardware had to be purchased by europeans, creating a quasi-monopoly. The primary beneficiaries of that in the US were mainly defense contractors, their investors and employees. I'm not sure how much of a "ripple effect" to the rest of the USA there was.
If it is easy to get it, a follow-up report on where defense spending actually goes would be useful.
I'm definitely in the second camp, blaming Europe, and this post gives me some comfort.
Thanks for doing the math I can't.
I'm Irish and live in Ireland, and for years prior to the invasion of Ukraine I've been complaining about smug arrogant Europeans scoffing about how much of its budget the US allocates to defense and military spending, as opposed to us caring intellectual Europeans who spend a tiny fraction on defense and allocate the rest to rainbows and smiles. When literally the only reason Putin hasn't run roughshod over Europe is because of NATO and because of the US supplying military aid to buffer regions like Ukraine.
Or as Orwell said about pacifists: "Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf."
The sole reason Putin hasn't run roughshod over Europe is that there's no upside for Russia in doing so.
And there never will be, but the Eurotards don't want to see that.
> When Europe says they “stand behind Ukraine,”
they mean way, *way* behind Ukraine. Like one stands behind a punching bag and Mike Tyson.
So, in the pie graph showing funding shortfalls, why the weird spelling for Turkey, but nobody else? I mean, you didn't list Germany as "Deutschland"...
This is a decent analysis. I did not know how much of the deficit was due to Germany, Spain etc.
Caveat: posting this as a European with a dual connection to the UK and one of the dark blue countries "pulling their weight", where some people this morning started to wonder whether, in the light of Trump being perceived as actively pro Putin, American troops on the ground deployed there to protect the eastern flank of NATO could be potentially given orders to protect Russian tanks rolling west instead. This was not a dominant mood, but more than one voice like this. Leaving aside EE paranoia (admittedly rooted in much history).
In the so called grander scheme of things though. Do you really think that there are only two camps? The "it's neither our interest or our moral duty" (let's call them isolationists) and the "it's our moral duty" (let's call them "idealists")? Isn't there a "realist" camp that believes that it's in the interest of the US to keep Russian territorial/imperial ambition in check? Sure, Zelensky is strictly speaking wrong in claiming that if Ukraine falls to Putin in one way or another, the US will feel it over the ocean. But the idea that Ukraine is the end of this is.... kinda optimistic to the extreme? And once Putin gets a bit of rest and a chance to recover, what's next? Moldova, Baltics, Poland? Yes he's obsessed with Ukraine in ideological ways that he's not obsessed with those other places. But we're still talking about someone who wants to recreate a greater Russia on the ruins of the old Soviet Union AND Warsaw Pact countries. So, who owns Ukraine is probably not of your concern, true. But war rumblings in Europe and increasingly confident Putin feeling he's been given free board to play his war games there, probably significantly more so. Surely there are many people in the US who see this -- as I said, leaving all idealistic concerns aside.
American policy for 80 years was was that it was in their rational interest to keep Russia contained and in check. Had this interest suddenly changed?
Trump is not pro Putin and never has been, that's a US domestic contrivance by his enemies for his unwillingness to be mindlessly anti-Russia. Trump is a pro-US domestic populist representing a proletariat who has no vested interest in European security, and he's acting like it.
I think there is definitely a camp who wants to be realist, but I don't think a forever-war is easily sellable to realists.
Moldova, the Baltics, and Poland are all now NATO, and all have Article 4 to lean on, and Ukraine was Putin's bright-line hardon. And policy experts here knew Ukraine was a bright line for decades.
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1700719253685678286
> American policy for 80 years was was that it was in their rational interest to keep Russia contained and in check. Had this interest suddenly changed?
That interest changed radically in 1991.
Granted, our actual *policy* did not. But our interests surely did. That, to me, is the point where the USA should have started weaning Europe off the tit, hard. And quite possibly should have done for Russia, the rest of the former USSR, and the Warsaw Pact countries what we did for Germany and Japan after we defeated *them* militarily, even if it was a vastly different sort of war.
> But we're still talking about someone who wants to recreate a greater Russia on the ruins of the old Soviet Union AND Warsaw Pact countries.
I have seen this claim a number of times. Do you have sources for this you could share which make the case in a calm, rational manner? I haven't seen any evidence of Russia meddling in the affairs of their neighbors that wasn't first prompted by US meddling in the affairs of Russia's neighbors. Mostly aimed at continuing this prolonged hostility towards Russia.
We certainly weren't their *allies*, but we had pretty decent relations with pre-Soviet Russia. We *really* should have continued *that*, rather than the Soviet Era relations.
I knew some USAID type workers, Bahai "pioneers" (missionaries) in Ukraine 20 years ago. There was a lot of that kind of stuff going on in the wake of 1991 during the "post cold war" era that was, on the surface, intended to "help" the former USSR adopt western norms, but they were failures in the sense that instead of liberalism flourishing, corruption and oligarchy flourished. (there is no genetic basis for liberalism in "inbred" eastern cultures that practiced cousin marriage and that had honor systems instead of Constitutional order.)
Reagan and Bush Sr. were more interested in kicking the sick dog Russia in the ribs while it was laying on the ground than actually "helping" bring about liberal reforms. Clintons followed that by exploiting anti-Slavic bigotry in their classic "wag the dog" moves in the Bosnian/Kosovo wars.
The neocons and war mongers in both USA political parties benefitted from anti-Russia policy and political exploitation.
Corrupt western propaganda covering up that reality reached peak absurdity with the Trump Russia conspiracy theory.
There has never been any reason for Russia to go along with such absurd propaganda.
Yeah, we (the USA) absolutely fucked the dog on that one. To comment here on your reply to one of my posts elsewhere, it's entirely possible that they'd not have become full on Western Civilization members for a very long time, but they could have been a *far* larger beneficial trading partner, and far less hostile. (I'm not saying "never" because never is an even longer time.) I mean, just imagine if it was post-Communist Russia who was our major foreign manufacturer instead of still-Communist China. I mean, I suppose it's possible that they simply don't have the population numbers for it, but it would leave us in a better position today with regards to *both* Russia *and* China.
The Chinese gene pool has higher IQ.
And yet, *they* are still a bunch of fuckin' commies.
Which, I mean, sure. You're likely correct. That's absolutely not my primary concern here. I'm not saying that Chinese people aren't intelligent. I'm saying that I hate their government. Though, hell. For *our* sakes, maybe it's *better* that they're still crippling themselves with that retardation.
We actually had better relations with the Soviet Union. At least we were talking to them.
To your last point, Ukraine was part of Russia before the US existed.
Poland, Romania, the Baltics, and possibly Finland are the NATO members who might have to worry about Russia; the others, not so much.
Part of the issue for the US is that the cheap gear is mostly gone. Reserve equipment counting down until it would be scrapped, missiles due for expensive overhauls, and stuff we just don't use anymore is relatively cheap. (The math valuing the amount of military aid is an example of why the Pentagon can't pass an audit.) Actual new production costs a lot more.
A lot of the equipment used by both Russia and Ukraine is old Soviet stuff -- such as the BMP-1 IFV or the MT-LB/MT-LBu which is often used as an APC. While not the latest kit, these are still very useful, e.g. for supplying/rotating troops at the front.
In general, it makes a lot of sense for armed forces to store old equipment (this is something the UK is very bad at -- e.g. we had 900 Chieftain and 400 Challenger I tanks that could've been put in long term storage to reactivate in an emergency).
The argument of “he’ll take more!” Is always so silly, because the answer to the question is in the question, he can’t take Poland and other eastern countries because they’re apart of NATO and would then give the other members(US included) justified reason to go hot.
“But trump hates NATO”, he hates NATO countries who don’t do their 2%, which Poland does. Poland has always been Pro US, they’re always ready to buy our newest weapons and gadgets, so that this doesn’t occur.
This is like saying “China takes Vietnam, so they’ll take Japan next!” We have bases and actual alliances with Poland/Japan, Ukraine/Vietnam are meant to be nuisances to their respective countries, they’re not meant to be actual allies, just the hanging rook that Russia/China take but puts them in check. A hot war for Russia/China, and proxy war where the US gathers intel, destabilizes areas next to enemy countries, and we lose no men.
The “realist” take is more like a “head in the sand” take, because it ignores all the planning and buildup the US has done in those countries for decades. It’s armchair generals that think all of this just suddenly occurred 3 years ago(at the youngest) or 10(at the oldest), not knowing this stuff has been on the back burner for decades. I’m sure their will be some “random” war in the southern Asia or SEA in 5ish years. And no, not Taiwan.
We must bring peace, air fields and nuclear capable missile systems to Myanmar, or China will conquer India!
Honestly, China fighting India would be so great for us. We could see how much the PLA has improved, stagnated, or decayed, from their foray into Vietnam. It’d be great.
The “realist” perspective is “hey, glad to hear you want to cut off that wart, but I have an actual tumor you should cut off” but no one, Democrat or Republican, besides Massie, would EVER think of cutting aid to that “ally”.
Realists have been paying attention and know that a world war is not worth Ukraine, and the same REALITIES that keep NATO from directly fighting in Ukraine keep Russia out of Latvia: Mutually assured destruction. Any realist would find this “peace through cataclysmic war” idiocy laughable.
Yes. 1991. NATO should have been stood down.
The Russians have well and truly gotten their dicks stuck in a bear trap named "Ukraine". Their best units have been repeatedly decimated, and they lack the young male population to easily replace them. Plus their modern tank production is so low they've been deploying T55s for two years now, FFS.
What army is Putin going to invade Poland with? Will he use Belarusian recruits? More Norks? And what model MBT will he be primarily equipping them with? It won't be the T90 or the T14.
I don't disagree that Putin *wants* to get the band back together. I just don't believe he has the men and material to accomplish his desires.
> Only the UK, Poland, Greece, and Estonia are pulling their relative weight
Looking at the UK, while it does spend a lot of defence, it does not get good value for money. E.g. over the last 25 years it has spend almost trice on defence as South Korea has, yet the Korean army is about 10-20 times bigger, in terms of number of tanks, artillery pieces, APC, soldiers, etc.
I did a comparison back in 2021 of the British army with Finland, Greece and Singapore, and concluded that UK could have much bigger forces *on the same budget*. But instead UK MoD seems to want a small number of expensive, gold-plated exquisitely hand-crafted pieces of kit. see: https://pontifex.substack.com/p/scottish-defence-policy-ii-nation
Measuring military power by budget alone is massively foolish. Drones are cheap.
Measuring a military with a spreadsheet by any means is also foolish. Look at how Saddam Hussein's army performed. On paper, he had the 4th largest army, 5,500 main battle tanks, 950,000 troops and the 6th largest air force with over 700 war planes.
Their resistant was almost meaningless. The US did not lose a single tank. Let that sink in.
Yes, the US military should let that same lesson sink in. Not every enemy is going to let us surround them and bomb the shit out of all their leadership and logistics before we invade.
And we lost 9 tanks in that war. Most to friendly fire, but still…
7 to "friendly" fire. 2 destroyed to prevent possible capture. 0 destroyed by the 5500 main battle tanks of the enemy.
For clarity, Iraq did not "let us" surround them. They had no equipment that could stand against ours in any way. The WWII German military would have put up stiffer resistance
The best resource the US military has is not the F-35, some secret drone defense, or any other technology. It is the vast number of well trained, battle tested men. The greatest weaknesses are the over reliance on expensive systems, the loss of the nation's industrial capacity, and leadership that is not accountable.
To your earlier comment about drones. You are correct that they provide a lot of value for the cost now. I hope our defense department has paid attention to how they have been used in the current conflict and has an effective defense already, or at least in development. Without an effective counter, our aircraft carriers are the equivalent of horse cavalry in WWI. Just a bigger target.
Are you here to fix the cable?
I think you highly over estimate the number of young battle tested men in the current US military. Almost all of the kills in Afghanistan over the final decade were from a group of about 300 dudes cycling into and out of DEVGRU. Afghanistan T3R was something like 10:1 or larger. Even in Iraq (the current topic) T3R was 3:1, and that was the last time we did any sort of large scale deployment similar to what's going on in Ukraine, and we were only able to do so because we had friendly ports to establish our military.
When you want to stage a war anywhere globally and you've got the world's two largest oceans on either side of your country, your army is going to be mostly logistics, and your strength is going to be the number of friendly ports you can move your army into.
Weird that I know half of those people and I've never served. Your numbers are suspect at best.
"While specific numbers for Silver and Bronze Star awards in Afghanistan are difficult to pinpoint with exactness, the Army has awarded 75 Silver Stars and 891 Bronze Stars for valor, along with 27,076 Bronze Stars for other meritorious service, during the war in Afghanistan." Simple Google search results. Obviously the 27K is composed of some BS. They don't typically give bronze and silver stars to everyone in a unit involved in a firefight.
I am counting vets that are out of the service as a resource. Granted, most GWOT vets want nothing to do with our government due to the way they have been abused for nothing. That would possibly change in a real war with a near peer... that we didn't start for stupid reasons. It would certainly change in the face of any enemy invading.
Yes... amateurs and tactics, professionals and logistics... Where do we care about without friendly ports nearby?
No, your boyfriend called me over to snake his plumbing.
My former roommate gets confused about what the nature of that relationship was. Glad to hear you gave him a good ramming!
Personally, I think you should have stuck with Bunny. Different strokes...
While the western MIC does seem to rape the taxpayers, measuring a military with a spreadsheet is a fools errand. Since you are European, look into the Soviet invasion of Finland in WWII.
"You're a Putin stooge!!!!" -libs, probably, not realizing how NATO arming up is the last thing Putin wants
Seriously while I believe Ukraine is in the right and I support the general idea of helping them, it concerns me how many hardcore Ukraine boosters react with indignation to the idea that we should define a specific end goal and consider how our aid & other actions will get us to it. Instead it's vague platitudes about "victory," "it's in our vital interest," "whatever it takes," etc. The fact that they mostly focus their outrage on Trump and half of America rather than on the Euros as you say is another indication that they're not thinking things through.
What concerns me is most Ukraine supporters didn't give a single solitary shit about Crimea and wouldn't know Maidan if it hit them in the head with a bat. Most Ukraine supporters, in my view, needed an issue to latch onto as a virtue signal after their vaccine mandate issue fell apart. The Blue Egregore needed fuel and it latched onto a war that largely doesn't concern us, and probably got a lot of people killed in the process.
> Most Ukraine supporters, in my view, needed an issue to latch onto as a virtue signal after their vaccine mandate issue fell apart.
That's *certainly* not true of me, or of anyone else who's a serious geopolitical analyst (though TBH most people who talk politics on the net aren't serious people). I've been writing about how Putin needs to be stopped since before the full-scale invasion, e.g. https://pontifex.substack.com/p/the-skripal-poisoning-a-case-study
Are you retarded or just a shill?
Read BJ's article on egregores if you haven't already.
"serious geopolitical analyst". lololololol
Actually it'd probably be fairly easy for the USA and Europe to end the war on broadly favourable terms, but it requires that Putin be treated firmly (otherwise he has no incentive to end the war). i wrote about this here: https://pontifex.substack.com/p/will-trump-end-the-russia-ukraine
Putin has brilliantly and holistically exploited the weaknesses and stupidities of the west (including wokeism, censorship and corruption) for decades, like it or not. That won't change.
Self-evidently USA and Europe should fortify their societies so they are more resistant to memetic attack by Russia. This is a no brainer.
At the same time we should encourage resistance to the Putin regime in Russia, both through propaganda and through practical help.
We now see that what used to be theoretical, the possibility of the west overcoming its stupidities and weaknesses and evolving toward "something better", is, sadly, a practical impossibility (for the mainstream culture/politics).
What is actually happening is that postmodernism is driving regression* toward left-elitism and totalitarianism, away from classical liberalism.
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Smart People [left-elites] Are Especially Prone to Tribalism, Dogmatism and Virtue Signaling
musaalgharbi. substack. com /p/smart-people-are-especially-prone
Symbolic Capital(ism)
Exploring the relationships between social justice discourse, inequality, and the rise of the symbolic professions.
Smart People Are Especially Prone to Tribalism, Dogmatism and Virtue Signaling
The symbolic professions aggressively select for those who are highly educated and cognitively sophisticated. This is a key source of their dysfunction.
Musa al-Gharbi
Dec 03, 2024
https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/smart-people-are-especially-prone
This isn't perfect academic material, but it does provide a useful summary of one systems-theoretical model of cultural evolution, disruption, and regression.
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re: David Ronfeldt's TIMN model of social change
disruption -> disintegration -> regression to ideological tribalism -> reintegration at a higher, more complex level (social form)
https://twotheories.blogspot.com/2009/02/overview-of-social-evolution-past.html
---excerpts---
... At first, when a new form arises, it has subversive effects on the old order, before it has additive effects that lead to a new order. Bad actors may prove initially more adept than good actors at using a new form — e.g., ancient warlords, medieval pirates and smugglers, and today’s information-age terrorists being examples that correspond to the +I, +M, and +N transitions, respectively. As each form takes hold, energizing a distinct set of values and norms for actors operating in that form, it generates a new realm of activity — for example, the state, the market. As a new realm gains legitimacy and expands the space it occupies within a social system, it puts new limits on the scope of existing realms. At the same time, through feedback and other interactions, the rise of a new form/realm also modifies the nature of the existing ones.
... Societies that can elevate the bright over the dark side of each form and achieve a new combination become more powerful and capable of complex tasks than societies that do not. Societies that first succeed at making a new combination gain advantages over competitors and attain a paramount influence over the nature of international conflict and cooperation. If a major power finds itself stymied by the effort to achieve a new combination, it risks being superseded.
... A people’s adaptability to the rise of a new form appears to depend largely on the local nature of the tribal form. It may have profound effects on what happens as the later forms get added. For example, the tribal form has unfolded differently in China and in America. Whereas the former has long revolved around extended family ties, clans, and dynasties, the latter has relied on the nuclear family, heavy immigration, and a fabric of fraternal organizations that provide quasi-kinship ties (e.g., from the open Rotary Club to the closed Ku Klux Klan). These differences at the tribal level have given unique shapes to each nation’s institutional and market forms, to their ideas about progress, and, now, to their adaptability to the rise of networked NGOs.
...
---end excerpts---
similar:
Jordan Hall's thoughts on postmodern social conditions, and the disruption of legacy "sense making" systems (hierarchies of curated expertise) by network technologies.
https://medium.com/deep-code/situational-assessment-2018-the-calm-before-the-storm-5a0bd014ec84
and
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/202005/the-hammer-the-dance-and-the-red-religion
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John Vervaeke's "Crisis of Meaning" Youtube video series is pretty good, as are his written materials.
Related to Vervaeke, "Stage theory" (evolutionary psychology, cultural evolution, systems theory) is one deep dive that some people find useful:
[ How meaning fell apart: https://meaningness.com/meaningness-history ]
Learned helplessness is heartbreaking here! Totally inept, the leaders of Europe have turned on their own people.
I have long said that European countries should spend more on defence (and spend it more wisely, in many cases).
They are actively replacing their own citizens, so why would anyone believe they would fight for them? The UK Gov was more interested in Russian oligarch money than terrorist attacks on British soil and EU is a GRU & FSB playground.
Our NATO invest does what Europe would never do. NATO assures us that our military is interoperable with their's, using our standards and equipment. Our training. And helping lower the overall cost of our military equipment with volume. We learned in WWII that Europe can't manage itself. It's only worse now. And we should rethink it. But in many ways from a military planning standpoint the option cost of NATO means we had to spend less political capital with our own standing army or risk hedging on threats. From a military planning standpoint we always knew NATO would not pay it's way.
If the NATO member nations have a shared enemy, and we identify that us shouldering the majority of the burden saves us money in the long run, that makes sense. Without a shared enemy, the case generally falls apart in the eyes of the people who don't see a shared enemy.
NATO was founded to counter Russia. The question is, does USA see Russia as an enemy? Trump voted with Russia and against Ukraine at the UN recently, so maybe not.
There's a lot of interests in the US that see any war as a business opportunity, and their thumbs are on the scales with most presidents. These elements are probably the only reason the Russian Boogeyman has lasted this long. Their influence over Trump appears to be relatively minor.
> There's a lot of interests in the US that see any war as a business opportunity
Certainly the USA has been described -- accurately IMO -- as "government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations".
I guess the military-industrial complex is about 2-3% of GDP and considerably more as a proportion of donations to politicians.
Most business in the US exists outside of policy. The MIC exists *only* because of policy, so they have a very vested interest in manipulating that policy. Lots of folks talk about the revolving door between, say, the FDA and the food industry, but that revolving door is even more profound between the Army and the defense industry. Many of my extended family got filthy, filthy rich off that door, in fact.
And these folks live in DC brownstones and go to USAID cocktail parties, so it's an entire culture of foreign government manipulation for profit where questioning the wisdom of influencing a Ukraine election (for instance) is unquestionable in polite company.
NATO was founded to counter the Soviet Union. That's not quite the same thing as Russia.
Different name, same country.
In the 1990s there were very large US defense contractors doing manned space launches (for civilian customers) in a part of the former USSR, operated out of armed compounds in the Moscow area. (Because it was less expensive than the bloated US space bureaucracy at the time.)
Clintons and the Bosnia, and the incremental takeover of the former USSR by oligarchs (ignored or supported variously by the USA) changed that.
Nope.
No, it is not. The USSR included all the FSRs and not only by coercion. Ukraine especially was the junior partner in the whole enterprise.
NATO was founded to counter the USSR/communism. That ended in 1991.
NATO was founded to counter the Soviet Union, which Russia is not. Or in the formula of Lord Ismay:
Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay was NATO’s first Secretary General, a position he was initially reluctant to accept. By the end of his tenure however, Ismay had become the biggest advocate of the organisation he had famously said earlier on in his political career, was created to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
It succeeded in the first, failed then succeeded in the third and is now failing in the second.
I think that's exactly what we're seeing now with Russia and Europe spending double or more on ukraine as a percent of thier GDP as US. Or at least I thought we had a shared enemy.
Inside the last two years, Europe is taking their own security more seriously and making up for lollygagging the prior decade. Inside the last two years, the direct military aid to Ukraine has still only come from a small number of countries who are immediately adjacent to Russia or who read English language news.
Yeah, I guess my point is, that seems like an issue for Poland and the UK to take up with Italy. Europe as a whole is contributing fairly (as I see it) relative to the US with regards to Ukraine. But I do agree with your other point they did not pull thier weight for decades with NATO.
Only shared propaganda. The USA (really the Democrats) have been pulling the strings on this conflict since the beginning. Only a fool listens to them when they tell us that Russia is unstoppable if it gets past one of the weakest militaries in Europe.
BJ's gone Trumper! :P
This is good documentation, but not nearly tribal enough for most people.
Any day now, Trump is going to condemn suicide and 50 million Democrats are going to kill themselves immediately.
As a European I would be happy for the USA to leave NATO (giving a years warning) if that's what they wanted to do.
But one way or the other clarity (something politicians are often very loathe to do) is important.
The mature thing to do would be issue an ultimatum with clear conditions and an achievable deadline. We haven't had a president who can do that this century. Lacking that, we're left with motivating other through fear of chaos.
> The mature thing to do would be issue an ultimatum with clear conditions and an achievable deadline.
That would make sense, although I don't see it happening.
I guess everyone else could start with living up to the terms of the treaty, effective today. They can negotiate making up for past failures to do so. Until you're caught up on obligations, you don't get to count on the benefits.
The North Atlantic Treaty doesn't contain any terms regarding level of defence spending. Specifically, the 2% guideline is nowhere in the treaty, and was only created decades after the treaty was written.
It was established and agreed to by NATO members in 2006. It was renewed after we provoked the 2014 invasion. It was agreed to by the members of NATO. For 20 years, much of Europe has failed to live up to their financial commitment. Yet they expect others to honor a commitment requiring the sacrifice of the lives of their citizens. That is a truly bizarre way to look at the world. Those that bring nothing to the picnic should expect to get nothing. For people living in the real world, a treaty is a piece of paper. They tend to get broken eventually. Do you think a nation's ability to participate in their own defense has weight in the ultimate decision to honor a mutual defense treaty? If a nation doesn't have enough of a military to hold off an aggressor until help arrives, it would be easy to back out of a mutual defense treaty by simply saying the country we agreed to help no longer exists. When the treaty was created, no one could imagine a nation would be so foolish as to make its national security entirely dependent on the goodwill of others.
You are welcome to peruse NATO's statement on the topic:
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_49198.htm
Unless I missed something in the article or comments, no one has mentioned that up to Biden becoming President, NATO was kept alive supporting shitty, corrupt and idiotic wars in the middle east for several decades (after Bosnia).
Some NATO number crunching on that (middle east wars) would be interesting.
Well, some of us have. I may not have mentioned it in the comments here, I can't remember, but I know I've mentioned it in *some* substack comments section recently that I started thinking -- or at least had it pointed out to me -- that the US still being in NATO, and possibly there still being a NATO at all, wasn't a great thing, during the Bosnia intervention. Like, "NATO was founded to deal with the Soviet Union, and we won the Cold War, why are we still doing this and dealing in regional conflicts?"
And when NATO started expanding in '99, I *knew* it was a bad thing we were still in NATO. We should have done for Russia what we did for Germany and Japan after we defeated *them* in a major war, i.e.: rebuilt them in our image. An industrially productive and friendly Russia would be a vast improvement over what we have now, and I'd far rather have spent the last 35 years building up *their* economy than China's. After all, Communism had already *fallen* in Russia. Why not help them out, instead of keeping Communism on life support in China?
Oh, hey, looks like I did say that here, but far below this point in the comments.
When the USSR disintegrated it wasn't like the defeat of Nazi Germany or the Japanese Empire with subsequent US military occupation. Lots of "communist" type infrastructure and bureaucracy remained (I know a family originally from Uzbekistan that had ties to the CIA that tried several times to get set up with economic "reform" programs funded by the USA that had to fight the local (ex-Soviet) war lord and Mulla types for years).
So, there were extensive USAID-type programs in Russia/Ukraine, but they were usually pretty farcical given the way that oligarchs and mafia types were allowed to grab vast parts of the economy.
The idea that a culture with a vastly different psychological archetype would spin on a dime and adopt "western", secular-liberal reforms in itself was a complete joke.
To start, "western" culture evolved from a gene pool in NW Europe that had banned cousin marriage for 1,000 years and had become OUTBRED.
So, western culture evolved high-social-trust in social institutions and practices like Constitutional order that are alien to inbred, clannish, eastern cultures that have low social-trust (trust is only within clans and kinship groups, not between them).
One of the best, most accessible, comparative schemes for lay readers to understand why western culture is unsuitable when imposed on non-western cultures is Henrich's W.E.I.R.D. model. (Henrich is a cultural anthropologist with an additional PhD in economics.)
https://weirdpeople.fas.harvard.edu/qa-weird
And yet, China is *also* culturally foreign to the WEIRD folks. My primary point here is that I would prefer if the richest nation on earth had been exporting trillions in cash to a place no longer run by communists who hate us for ideological reasons. I'm not saying Russian oligarchs are great. I'm saying their motivations align with ours more easily than that of communist ideologues.
Russian oligarchs want money. Chinese True Believers want universal communist revolution. I consider one of these motivations *significantly worse* than the other.
With a few exceptions, Russia's economy wasn't suitable for integration into the (western) "international system" (Kissinger's phrase). As I said, there were lots of USAID type programs put in place in the 1980s/90s, and most of them failed. Russia's government was unstable for a long time after 1991.
At this point, in hindsight, Nixon/Kissinger were obviously wrong in thinking that integrating China's economy with the "international system" would result in an overall "liberalization" of China.
Kissinger and his many fellow globalists made a lot of money from off-shoring USA working class jobs*, otherwise I can't imagine why a sane person would advocate for globalization.
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* Les Leopold used US Department of Labor data to estimate a loss of 30 million USA jobs over the last several decades. https://www.racket.news/p/the-real-book-about-the-white-working
Japan is an example of Western culture?
Clan-based ethno-states vs modern nation states?
According to some anthropologist I can't remember, Japan's cultural evolution had some significant parallels to the west. At contact with the west it was on the way to being a post-Feudal, early industrial culture that evolved from clan-based dynastic politics to increasingly include merchant elites.
Western contact pushed that stuff along.
But my point was that Germany and Japan were defeated militarily in a more "clean" way, so it was easier to impose western norms after the defeats and prevent corruption.
Imperial Japan obviously wasn't communist in the Marxist sense.
"Fascist" Germany obviously wasn't communist.
The USSR slowly disintegrated and that allowed corruption to fester and spread, unregulated by "classically liberal" social institutions and high-social-trust, with the strongest, most brutal and corrupt thug-oligarchs (many former communist bureaucrats) rising in power.
If you "feel a moral obligation to defend both Europe and Ukraine from Russia" the you have some waking up to do.
A terrific summary by @BioClandestine, an actual investigative journalist who has been all over this ever since the kinetic action started:
https://bioclandestine.substack.com/p/the-deep-state-started-this-war
"If you don’t know who Victoria Nuland is, or what she was doing in Ukraine in 2014, then you have no idea what’s going on.
The Deep State started this war. It was the Obama CIA/State Dept that funded Nazi militant groups to start a civil war in Ukraine, and initiated regime change to a CIA/State Dept puppet, Yatseniuk.
This was all revealed in the leaked phone call between State Dept diplomats and Deep State agents, Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt.
After the Maidan coup in February 2014, the US CIA/State Dept owned Ukraine via proxy, and the CIA began using Ukraine as a giant offshore playground for criminal racketeering and money laundering. Ukraine became one giant CIA base, directly on Russia’s border.
Then the US/NATO began building up Ukraine’s army for the sole purpose of one day fighting Russia. The US/NATO began supplying Ukraine with weapons, equipment, missiles, training, intelligence, etc.
Covert elements within the US government, along with their European partners in NATO, used espionage to overthrow and take control of the nation of Ukraine, then built a massive standing army on Russia’s border, then tried to bring Ukraine into NATO, and thus start WW3.
If you are still buying the official MSM narrative about this conflict, you should not be engaged in conversations.
Everything the MSM told you about Ukraine/Russia has been a lie, and in many cases, the inverse of the truth.
I personally think that Maidan was probably pushed by US soft power and probably organic as well, so some of both. Evidence of one does not preclude the other. That said, if we never pushed the soft power there we'd have far fewer dead people.
> The Deep State started this war.
So, honestly, that right there is the primary reason I *do* feel any sort of moral obligation to defend Eastern Europe and even Ukraine from Russia. We were acting like that dick at the bar who stands behind his buddies and taunts the big guy a couple tables over.
This is, please note, *not* me saying that we should continue Biden era policy on Ukraine. Just explaining why I, or someone else, might feel like the USA bears some moral responsibility here.
I mean, I concur with everything else you said.
The real blame is on the UK for telling Ukraine not to sign a peace deal a couple months into the conflict because NATO would have your back.
Certainly that is also extremely bad, but I strongly suspect (though obviously cannot prove) that Ukraine would not have been invaded in the first place without the last ~30 years of US policy towards Russia.
And I'm also certainly not claiming that the US bears *sole* moral responsibility.
Putin was always going to want Crimea unless Ukraine was just Belarus 2, which is just (Not)Russia. Were we screwing around in the country and making Putin sweat? Yea, but Ukraine having any independent thought was not okay for Putin.
Either America screws around in Ukraine and Russia invades or we didn’t screw around(or they never noticed it because it was very minimal) and then Ukraine is just a puppet state of Russia. It’s just six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Except that puppet state MIGHT be more unpleasant for a few million Ukrainians, whereas provoking a world war would be deadly for most living things.
We really need to bring back proportionality.
> Putin was always going to want Crimea unless Ukraine was just Belarus 2, which is just (Not)Russia.
Right, but those two countries (three if you count Byelorussia) have been effectively the same thing for the last 1100 years, since the Empire of the Kievan Rus showed up in ~900 AD. (Yes, originally Kiev was in charge, until Moscow broke away from *them*!) Ukraine only owned the Crimea in the first place because Khrushchev transferred the territory to the Ukrainian SSR from the Russian SFSR to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the reunification of that territory with Great Russia.
"Ukrainian" and "Russian" are separate languages along the lines of "British" and "Texan" being separate languages once you add another 900 years to that mix. I mean, the division of Ukraine as a separate political entity didn't even really happen until the founding of the Soviet Union in the first place. Prior to that, it had just been "Mikra Rossiya" or "Little Russia" since ~1300 AD, and that was just as part of the overall area of... Russian-ness.
I'm not saying that they can't be or don't deserve to be a separate entity if that's what they want, but they're less distinct from the Russians than the Caledonians are from the Britons.
> then Ukraine is just a puppet state of Russia. It’s just six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Right, but Ukraine has been a puppet state of Russia off and on -- and more "on" than "off" -- for the last 700 years. This just... isn't exactly novel territory for that part of the world.
The whole situation there (and, admittedly, my comment here) is just a mess. Sorry, it's early.
The larger Slavic (eastern) civilization/culture is based on a completely different psychological archetype (and economic archetype) than "western" liberalism (see Henrich's WEIRD model).
WEIRD is a maritime (and savior) merchant culture that rapidly evolved classical liberalism (Constitutional order) after its core gene pool became outbred 1,000 years ago.
The East, including Slavs, were more inbred, clannish and agrarian.
Imposing "liberal" western values on the (pre-liberal/illiberal) middle east was a violent disaster for decades. Imposing western values on the (pre-liberal) Slavic east is also turning into a violent disaster.
Boris wasn't on his own. Blinken was part of that too.
I don’t understand the need to create conspiracy theories for why ex-Warsaw Pact populations would want to more closely align themselves with Western Europe. Look at GDP. Look at corruption indexes. Look at relative constitutional freedoms. Is there any metric whatsoever one could point to to support an argument of preferring to be in the Russian sphere of influence as opposed to Western Europe’s?
A conspiracy theory is not necessary to explain Maidan, but lack of necessity for a conspiracy theory does not mean there wasn't a conspiracy. whynotboth.gif
Well, next step down this rabbit hole is sussing out the difference between application of soft power (which absolutely happened, in some capacity) and initiation of a conspiracy. I see a pretty big difference between those two ideas but I get the feeling some folks don’t see that distinction. Was French support for the American colonists a “conspiracy?” I guess I’m outing myself as an idealist here, but I find that historical reference highly relevant to this discussion.
One last unrelated point while I’m on the soapbox: I think it’s proper to weigh costs and benefits and “moral hazards” for the US support here. This article lays out important data and advocates a credible position. Withdrawing US financial support from Ukraine is a defensible position. But my biggest problem with the Administration’s apparent pursuit of this position is the blatant lying they are doing to enact it. Most critically in lying about Russia’s singular culpability in unilaterally invading a neighboring sovereign country (again and again.) It’s embarrassing and, frankly, un-American in my eyes.
Those are good questions. The simplest definition of "conspiracy theory" is that I am theorizing that a group of people conspired to do a thing. It should be clear that a group of people did in fact conspire to apply soft power to regime change in Ukraine on behalf of the west.
I think those claims should be balanced against the reality that Russia ASSUREDLY was doing the same thing, and that we beat them at their own game. But that begs the question why we bothered to play the soft power game there in the first place. What did we win? Was it worth it?
You won't find me defending Trump's words anywhere, as far as I can tell. I even spell out twice in this article that Trump's *words* are wrong on this issue. So we can agree there.
CLASH OF INBRED VS OUTBRED GENE POOLS AND CIVILIZATIONS
The actual "Great Game" is an old, evolving geopolitical game between western/WEIRD* colonialization/globalism and most of the rest of the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Game
The soft power game has been going on as a component of the hard power game for 100s of years.
Russia and the rest of the various parts of the geopolitical "east" feared rising European power. Napoleon and Hitler justified those fears. Western maritime colonialization of much of the planet justified those fears.
Historically, rising western power required control of trade routes, including through the middle east (silk road, tea and spice trade, etc.)
AGRARIAN Russia tried to harass or block those trade routes so that it could expand to the south and otherwise extend its influence, long before the USSR/communism. Harassing those trade routes, via the Great Game, was the most obvious way to try to weaken and distract future western Napoleons/Hitlers from invading Russia and/or politically influencing its extensions such as Ukraine.
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* https://weirdpeople.fas.harvard.edu/qa-weird
Because it is "eastern", and pre-liberal in its genetics, Russia is also more holistic. Being more holistic/agrarian in its psychological-civilizational archetype means it is able to exploit western-liberal stupidity and weaknesses.
Does the Bay of Pigs ring a bell? Invading a country taken over by your adversary is an American Tradition.
Yet you keep repeating Democrat Party (left-elite globalist) propaganda and lies.
The trolls have arrived. Whelp, it was an interesting discussion while it lasted…
Projection, troll.
That is accurate, but it's easily verifiable history that the US made a lot of noise about not expanding NATO eastward in 1990 and 1991, and then proceeded to do just that starting in 1999. I agree, it makes perfect sense why the Warsaw Pact countries would want to be in NATO, and part of the EU. It made no sense, and was in fact highly counterproductive, for the USA to be as antagonistic towards Russia in the intervening years since the fall of the Soviets.
If it were the case that the US was strong-arming countries into a club for the US's benefit, I'd agree. But I simply don't think that's the case. Eastern Europeans want to be in the Western European club of their own volition. And who could blame them? NATO, EU, Euro, it's all the same impulse. In fact, it's the RUSSIANS who strong-arm these countries to try to keep them from looking westward. Which is the only reason the US feels the need (obligation?) to apply their soft power in the first place.
Most people who disagree on this topic have a fundamental disagreement about how much of these regime transitions are organic and how much are a result of US soft power. I don't think that question is really answerable, but I think "some of both" is a reasonable statement most people would be forced to agree with, and if "some of both" is reasonable then the question is "why do the soft power thing at all in a place like Ukraine?" Doing it in Zimbabwe is low risk. Doing it in Ukraine seems like a very bad idea once you take into account the risks with your ROI calculation.
George Kennan who is probably the greatest diplomatic figure of the immediate postwar era specifically warned of the expansion of NATO.
It’s definitely a question of values that doesn’t lend itself to calculations easily. To go back to my initial example, it would seem to me the French’s investment in the American colonies paid off in spades for the world, including themselves. But they probably wouldn’t have calculated that at the time if they did the math.
Again, not to say the calculation isn’t important. Using these “values” definitely didn’t pay off for us in Iraq or Afghanistan. Statecraft is hard.
(Again) Corruption. Clintons. Wag the Dog. Bosnia/Kosovo.
Corrupt Democrats (Biden crime family, Burisima, Hunter's laptop) gained power for a long time by playing geopolitical games in Ukraine, Russia bashing and engaging in farcical and massive lies, gaslighting and conspiracy theories (Hillary's lies, including the lies about being shot at in a helicopter) are legendary, and obvious signs of psychopathic personality.
The elite-"left"/Democrat establishment is corrupt and mentally ill. It really is just that simple.
> Eastern Europeans want to be in the Western European club of their own volition. And who could blame them? NATO, EU, Euro, it's all the same impulse.
Absolutely no argument. I understand *their* motivations completely. In their shoes I'd want exactly the same thing. I even *said* that in the comment you're replying to.
"I agree, it makes perfect sense why the Warsaw Pact countries would want to be in NATO, and part of the EU." -Warmek, a day ago
But I'm not *in* their shoes, I live in the USA. And it was not in *our* interest to tie those countries to us militarily, no matter how much in *their* interest it was to tie us to *them* militarily. That's my point. They could have *wanted* to be in NATO all they liked. And we could -- and should -- have said "No."
Well, to be fair, that's not actually my ultimate position. I think the USA should have handed the keys to NATO over to Europe itself and dipped out in '91, having actually accomplished the task that NATO was founded to do; Countering the Warsaw Pact. At which point a USA-less NATO could have done whatever it wanted with the requests of those Eastern European countries. It's *their* continent, after all.
That is retarded propaganda and ignorance. Hungary is the most obvious exception. In general, post-communist people and countries in central-east europe understand that communism has continued to mutate and evolve into "wokism" and similar social pathologies in the west.
Being overrun by middle eastern refugees and immigrant rape cults is only possible when postmodern western politics regresses into complete retardation and authoritarianism (Biden's FBI censoring regime critics at the request of Ukraine's govt).
https://www.aaronmate.net/p/fbi-helps-ukraine-censor-twitter
Also see Matt Taibbi's new summary of the Ukraine CLUSTERFUCK:
https://www.racket.news/p/farewell-to-volodymyr-zelensky-the
The mystery to me is why the UK is so belligerent. Poland I can understand while not thinking it is our concern but the UK?
They read English language media and were captured by the Blue Egregore's pivot to Ukraine! as the virtue signal when they had to bail on the masks-and-vaxes virtue signal.
Obviously, they're concerned about being invaded by Russia, given the number of times Russia has tried to invade England before.
Oh, wait... ;)
Clintons. Corruption. Wag the Dog.
Yes. Western European governments are against their people. Germany is a great example. What used to be East Germany voted for the pro-Germany, anti-Communist party that the rest of the dirtballs are trying to ban. Why? They've tried Communism once and have no desire for a second round. Eastern Europe is caught between the rising totalitarian Communism of the EU and traditional Russian authoritarianism and brutality.
You are the only one "creating conspiracy theories". You ignore the enormous debacle of the Democrat's MADCOW Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory.
You PROJECT your mental dysfunction while mindlessly repeating absurd D-party propaganda.
(duplicate)
The larger Slavic (eastern) civilization/culture is based on a completely different psychological archetype (and economic archetype) than "western" liberalism (see Henrich's WEIRD model).
WEIRD is a maritime (and savior) merchant culture that rapidly evolved classical liberalism (Constitutional order) after its core gene pool became outbred 1,000 years ago.
The East, including Slavs, were more inbred, clannish and agrarian.
Imposing "liberal" western values on the (pre-liberal/illiberal) middle east was a violent disaster for decades. Imposing western values on the (pre-liberal) Slavic east is also turning into a violent disaster.
also: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-first-draft-of-the-ukraine-wars-history/
Thank you. I appreciate it when someone shows the details of their homework.
What details? I clicked it, there's nothing more in that post than what was in the comment...
My grievance is real and has been left unanswered and unaddressed.
OK, I'll bite. Which grievance is that? :D
I've been wanting some good gumbo, but not too spicy, and cornbread, for a long time. :)
Re Nordstream 2 destruction. The depth and temperature of the bombed parts of the pipeline require the activities and material support of, at minimum, an oilfield support vessel (decompression chamber, dive suit heating etc). The yacht supposedly used by Ukraine lacks in every department the ability to support the necessary dive activities.
However, the USS Kearsarge, deployed to the Baltic at the time (and the largest US warship ever to deploy there) has/had all of the necessary abilities to carry that equipment in its well deck. Was observed loitering in the area on its exit run and had helicopters hover directly over the blown sections of pipeline, just prior to the bombing. Joe "never to be sufficiently maligned" Biden openly stated he would destroy it the year prior..
In the Means + Motive matrix, Ukraine is vastly lacking in one, The US of the time had both...
One wonders if Trump is doing to the EU what Reagan did to the Soviet Union-lure them into spending themselves into oblivion. The Soviets weren't ever going to give up their catastrophically inefficient economic system and the Euros won't give up their gigantic welfare system. So any military buildup is both constrained and and highly competitive with other priorities. If he isn't,, he should be since as Vance pointed out, we no longer have shared values.
One factor most fail to mention concerning a US retreat into isolationism is the fact that Europe, a net importer of food and energy, has no blue water navy. It is the US alone that has the force structure and global reach to keep the sea lanes open. Right now, in a hypothetical war between Europe and a Russo-Chinese alliance, Europe would starve in the dark. To achieve real independence from the US, Europe would have to build such a force, and to do so would take not just money but time - years if not a decade or more. Until such a time, European boasts about going it alone are just empty words.
Now, realistically, would the US stand aside and let bad actors shut down the sea lanes? Unlikely. Hence the tension in US policy between staying globally engaged to help maintain a stable world order and, on the other hand, not carrying the burden and onus of being the world policeman. And, by onus I mean enduring the condescension and self-satisfied opprobrium of the free riders.