If you can’t predict whether that would make him back down from threats to use nukes, then you can’t predict if losing makes him more likely to use nukes in the first place.
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there’s no off-ramp. Not for putin, at least. Biden is signalling to would-be coupsters inside russia. That’s the off-ramp.
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Appeasement as a strategy to avoid greater conflict with a dictator has pretty much always failed and led to worse outcomes. See Chamberlain, Neville.
Appeasement of somebody who uses the threat of nukes to hostilely conquer territory is a terrible precedent, and also creates a pretty good incentive for other dictators to acquire nukes to do exactly the same thing!
If you want to consider the second order problem you have to do a lot more work. And in the end you probably end up only slightly modifying the original conclusion to something like it’s mostly Putin’s problem. He should get on that.
In other words, Putins off ramp is to fall out a window. Could happen, Russia has unbelievably dangerous windows for some reason.
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Also need to factor in the likelihood of future nuke use/threats if he gets what he wants here.
here’s what i said about off-ramps and whether putin can accept that he has to take them.
in March Ukraine, Russia, and the West - #6916 by VoteForSocialists
but i don’t see any outs for putin right now, barring an offramp of his own choosing. he will have to mobilize and he is prepared to use his nuclear threats. he has said that for years. he doesn’t err on the conservative side. his miscalculations are almost always catastrophic.
and April (patting myself on the back for calling out izyum and kherson)
and May
i still think that a palace coup is very unlikely, a lot of people would have to make a pact ahead of time, and quickly create an offramp to negotiate with ukraine and the west. a lone kingslayer would be in immediate danger from knives out.
regional mutiny is possible, and it would be interesting to see if aany police or rosgvardia join the protesters, but it’s a long shot that whole detachments do this, and they would face state forces brought from other regions. right now it looks like putin would have enough power to survive that, but you never know in russia. corruption is a double edged sword. remote chance of civil conflict driving putin into an offramp. more likely kadyrov putting down dissenters in neighboring republics, and zolotov doing the same elsewhere.
there is a gigantic internal police force, also a big part of state budget, and even the war hasn’t reduced the money spent on them. sanctions will eventually whittle that down, but not quickly, it’s a multiyear process at this rate. alternatively putin could make another blunder and start mobilizing his police force for the war. that would embolden and accelerate internal protests.
If your frame of reference is that the US actions in arming/supporting Ukraine are totally reasonable and justified, sure, I guess, it’s all Putin’s problem. And we all have to live with how he deals with this problem.
But the problem is that Putin and probably most Russians don’t share this frame of reference and they don’t view the US intervention that way. To which I’m sure many will say, hahahaha sucks for you, Putin, deal with it. Which is all well and good until whatever escalation that Putin does to deal with this problem starts impacting the wider world. In which case we can all bask in the knowledge that the West’s actions were reasonable and right and just and that it’s all Putin’s fault. That and a dollar fifty will get you on the bus (assuming the bus still exists after whatever terminal escalation happens).
How many times are you willing to cave to Putin‘s demands when he threatens to escalate?
the policy of letting a monkey play with a grenade isn’t viable, just because the monkey’s frame of reference is different from reality.
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If I was King of America we’d never have gotten involved with Ukraine in the first place so it would have never come to that. I’d cave immediately!
Why though? There’s no reason not to. We’re already established that Russia hasn’t escalated to nuclear war so far, we’ve reduced Russia’s sphere of influence and expanded our own. By the value criterion of Great Game politics, involvement was the correct maneuver.
In KeeeeedWorld, the only guarantor of security for any nation is having enough nuclear weapons to end humanity. Which might pose some problems!
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A very exploitable strategy
How so?
Also, Russia expanding its sphere of influence is neither good nor bad. It’s just what Great Powers inevitably do. But the US expanding its influence, even to nations that are begging for it, is bad, because US expansion is always bad, and the US is the only nation with any agency or culpability. This is Realism 101.
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Only if you care if the liberal world order extends beyond the US border, which Keed obviously does not
He probably doesn’t even think that. By his logic we should acquiesce every piece of territory we have if Russia makes a nuclear threat.
I don’t know what Russia’s red lines are. But let’s start by saying that I think Biden is right that the risk of nuclear war is the highest it’s been since the Cuban missile crisis. And why is that? Because the US is fighting an intense proxy war with Russia. Russia is currently in the process of escalating their involvement in this war by deploying many more soldiers to the war zone and will possibly escalate the brutality of their tactics as well. This might put pressure on the Ukrainians and their US backers. How will the US escalate in response? I’ll not pretend to know, but if the US successfully escalates in response, what will the Russian response be? And on and on. Where/how does it end? I don’t know. I agree with Admiral Fred Thompson:
