I gotta say I find this kind of thing tiresome. Can either of you look me in the eye and say that you think Mearsheimer’s contention was that Russia were afraid of a direct ground invasion by NATO troops? Like I assume you get that this is not the case and that that’s what nukes are for. So why pretend? It’s hard enough to understand wtf is going on and what people think without playing dumb half the time.
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If the contention was that he didn’t care about a ground invasion then why did he care about Nato expansion to a shared border? Last I checked, he has ICBM’s. The whole thing was an exercise in dishonesty from the first instance, you’re right about that, but the dishonesty was from Mershemier and the other useful idiots parroting Putin’s propaganda. Chief amongst them, Trump of course.
We have a containment thread for this. Plus it’s clear you’re trolling Keeed and hoping to start a fight. The CN stuff at least has content but you are just doing no content jabs.
Either post those in the Ukraine LC thread or I’m going to start deleting and moderating accordingly.
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We can see the impact of NATO expansion in this war. NATO are able to supply arms to Ukraine via Poland, a NATO country since 1999. This is making it harder for Russia to project power into its neighbour Ukraine.
You’re going to be like “Well that’s GOOD! I don’t WANT them to do that!”. Right, but that’s not relevant. As I’ve posted before, after the US tried to invade Cuba and kill its leader and Cuba turned to the USSR for help, by all rights the US should have eaten shit about having missiles stationed along its border. Instead the world was taken to the brink of nuclear war. If you’re concerned about such things as “not having nuclear war”, you have to deal with world powers as they will actually behave, not as you think they should.
Mearsheimer was wrong, but he was wrong because Russia isn’t actually a great power anymore. It’s more like a larger North Korea, which can’t be challenged directly because it has the power of wreaking destruction, but now has to accept that as it has no power beyond that, it has little control over regional affairs. If Russia had easily crushed Ukraine and right now had a successful puppet regime installed in the country, it wouldn’t mean that he was right necessarily, but it would be a lot clearer that “omg look though they left their border with the Baltics undefended” is a retarded argument that he was wrong.
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btw if it is Russia who bombed NordStream (which seems likely) then there are a few different motives and maybe it’s a combination of all of them. It could be to dodge PR or financial fallout from failing to supply gas, they can be like “oh sorry our pipelines have exploded”. I’ve also seen suggestion that it’s a move from Putin designed to take resupplying gas off the table as a potential carrot that any internal challengers could offer to garner support from foreign powers. But another possibility is that it’s a power play to remind the West that Russia still does have the power of destruction. Like a “we have the power to destroy infrastructure if needed and we are willing to do it, we’re not bluffing” kind of thing. Maybe the truth is a combination of all of the above.
I don’t see how Russia really benefits from blowing up infrastructure they already control. They can, and have, already stopped the gas from flowing through these pipelines. Blowing it up removes the leverage they could have had this winter, where they could leverage Europe’s thermostats to say, sure we’ll turn the heat back on if you stop waging a proxy war against us in Ukraine. Which state actor would want to remove that option from the table? I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
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Hi Keeed! I’m not ruling out the US but the benefit to them seems nebulous, while the downside of being discovered sabotaging the energy infrastructure of the whole of Europe for no clear reason seems extremely large (and the chances allies agreed to this plan seem close to zero). I’d say I have it like 80/20 Russia/US.
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Just a theory. Havent seen this elsewhere.
It could be a move to put increased pressure on energy markets. A lot of energy prices are based on forward predictions of prices.
A certain “no russian gas” winter is going to be more expensive now than a “maybe no russian gas winter”
Possibly getting high on their own supply around the instability of european countries politically. Especially UK.
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Agree that it seems insane and risky for the US to do this but there is an actual geopolitical benefit that is fairly straightforward to see. The only conceivable benefit to Russia is maybe they can declare force majure and not pay penalties for not delivering gas through NS1. How much would those penalties be? Was Russia paying them these past few months? Would they really pay them this winter? The West has no more sanction levers to pull, what the hell leverage would Europe have to enforce these penalties? It seems pretty far fetched to me: permanently destroying an asset that you spent billions of dollars on, and already control the flow of gas through. And balancing this very thin and questionable benefit is the very real harm to Russia, by losing the leverage of being able to move gas through these pipelines in exchange for concessions from the Europeans.
Ukraine is probably happy to see those pipelines destroyed, but do they have the capability to carry this out? Maybe, I don’t know. Buy a fishing boat, drive it to the Baltic, you’d only need a few frogmen to set the charges and diving to 300 feet or whatever isn’t all that hard probably. Ukraine doesn’t have any submarines in their navy, which is probably what you’d want to use for an operation like this. But Ukraine doing this seems far fetched and I’d imagine there’d be some record of a ship loitering around there in the recent past.
Well Mearsheimer said that he didn’t think that Russia would invade Ukraine because he thought that the forces they had available would not be up to the task of conquering and occupying even large parts of eastern Ukraine. And because he thought that Russia could get more or less what it wanted with a saber rattling demonstration. So he was wrong about Russia not invading but right about what led him to that conclusion: that Russia didn’t have sufficient forces deployed to carry out an invasion. And I think he called Russia a declining and marginal great power, which seems roughly correct.
A rival gas distributor doing industrial sabotage would be a fun twist.
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It is better to think if Putin personally benefits, not if Russia benefits. Because Putin is clearly going to value his personal interest in maintaining control of Russia over Russia’s geopolitical interest.
From that perspective, I think the explanation that this takes away the ability of any successor regime to turn the pipeline back on makes the most sense.
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Not saying this isn’t what they’re trying to signal, but it seems pretty dumb. Like, we know they have scuba divers or torpedoes or whatever they used to blow it up. And blowing up your own shit is like the deplorables who blow up their own yeti coolers or kuerigs or whatever.
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It stops any usurper from turning it back on and is a clear threat to other infrastructure. Just lol
This seems very tenuous. In this scenario you’d be looking to deter a coup from a faction that wants to end the war and restore the status quo ante business relationship with Europe? Just want to clarify what you’re suggesting.
SK has chosen to be real, let’s go with liberal, with their interpretations now that all of their previous posts are deleted
David Goldwyn, who ran the State Department’s energy program under former President Barack Obama, said it was “unequivocal” that Russia was behind the attack, noting it executed something similar on a gas pipeline in Turkmenistan in 2009.
Russia’s message is clear, Goldwyn added: “Prepare for a life without Russian gas. … It’s a threat of a complete cut-off.”
The state with the most obvious interest in attacking the pipe is Ukraine. The water is shallow enough they just need a fishing boat, scuba gear and explosives.
Except if the Germans and French found out about it they’d go apeshit and Ukraine might end up losing support.
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Whoever sells wool sweaters to Europe is obviously someone who gains a lot from this. Have we looked into Wales and New Zeland?
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