Lol. What is your view on this?
Well, preventing a genocide by any means necessary is my stance. Of course I’m a ‘bit’ emotional because I have lots of friends in Ukraine who are scared af but willing to put skin in the game.
I know first-hand what war does to families. Both of my great grandpas died in winter war, and the fatherlessness runs deep to this day. I actually did my psychology thesis on Finlandization and lack of communication. In military service I went the whole way (1yr reserve officer school, 1yr as a salaried instructor) and after that I did one tour in Eritrea in peace corps.
Of course I’m emotional about this and willing to have a reasonable conversation with regs in here, these new fucks with their one socal history class (back in the day) is what bothers me. I’m not saying that having a skin in the game is required to have these kind conversations but it sure helps. Sure I’m drunk but that’s the way it goes, runs deep too.
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Do you think I’m arguing against you?
Yes I thought so, maybe you aren’t and if so I’m sorry.
Three sources familiar with the talks said banning Russia entirely from the SWIFT financial transaction system was not under active consideration after running into major objections from European countries.
European lenders have expressed concern that banning Russia from SWIFT would mean that billions of dollars of outstanding loans they have in Russia would not be repaid.
Lol
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What’s your proposed solution? Yeah USA are the baddies, no shock, and the lesson is never give up the nukes, but getting into a hot war with the Russians seems bad for everyone involved and lesser solutions aren’t without risk. I’m sort of at a loss what to do on this one.
that’s a bad take. Ukraine has the second largest army in europe after russia, at 200k soldiers. they can and certainly will put up a fight. they will also get help from several european states, because they realize appeasement to putin isn’t likely to stop the invasion of the next country after ukraine.
lend-and-lease worked pretty well, although of course the authorization granted by president/congress must be limited and strictly regulated, and hopefully doesn’t turn into an endless blackwater contract.
i don’t think deployments of US soldiers are likely or would be wise, provided that there are a lot of soldiers in the theater already between ukraine, poland, baltics, etc. air and naval support is of course on the table.
i know swift seems like such an easy lever, but others have pointed out it’s a much smaller negotiable chip than say Nord Stream 2, which by itself carries smaller incremental volume than existing pipelines, and looking like it will be losing business every year. the right set of immediate sanctions would start seizing assets in uk/us and elsewhere, and chase oligarchs’ yachts away from mediterranean. the way to rattle putin’s inner circle is to confine them to living in russia.
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Do you think China’s relationship with Taiwan has any effect on the situation in Ukraine?
i was thinking about that. putin is carrying a lot of water for xi lately. if they could somehow commit US naval ships to the black sea, and take them away from the south china sea, it could play a role in containing chinese freedom of navigation exercises, or something else more aggressive.
we haven’t really seem xi order any purely military actions yet, but the world probably thinks it’s in his range.
incidentally, russian troops from far east are heading to the border with ukraine. in some sense, siberia is such a juicy resource just sitting out there. too tempting for xi to ignore.
I don’t necessarily have a proposed solution. I ask whether we should approach foreign policy through a results-oriented, consequentialist approach of if we should be deontological even if it leads to bad outcomes?
If the former, are there promises in the Budapest Memorandum, whether implied or explicit, that will make it harder to get other countries to accept similar promises in the future? If we leave Ukrainians to the mercy of Russia, are we treating them like the Kurds?
If you ask me I think that a lot of peoplewouldnt have a problem with that. Ukraine has nothing to offer. Putin has the gas and the prices are going up and people care about their money a lot more than about some rights of people they dont care about. “Nation states” is one of the worst constructs mankind could come up with.
It’s fine to say that other countries shouldn’t care enough about the Ukraine to get involved in a potential war.
But framing it as “nation-states are stupid, who cares about some silly border dispute?” would be quite the hot take to people whose country is getting overrun.
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Thats not what I meant by that. The problem is that people feel like Germans, like French, like Americans and thats usually the people they might care the most about. But we are all humans we all live on the same planet but we rarely grant people from other nations the same rights/comforts that we have. Like Kennedy said in 1963 “Ich bin ein Berliner” everyone should say now “I am a Ukrainian, I am a Taiwanese , insert any country that is getting oppressed or exploited”. There should be huge anti war demonstrations everywhere and demand that Russia takes its troops back. I doubt there will be any demonstrations if he invades and conquers Kiev. The thinking will be “Its only the Ukraine, Putin might even be right that this belongs to Russia anyway.” And that is how we tackle all the problems that we face these days be it a pandemic, climate change or genocide. Ethiopia anyone?
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that’ll work
Nation-states are still better than a minarchy.
Save the snarky comments. Nothing will work if he wants to do it. Nothing worked on Iran or North Korea so far either. Then why even bother talking about it?
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The DPRK has literally been stopped by military force in a major 20th century war involving a multinational coalition. I’m not aware of Iran invading anyone, only Iraq invading them, so I’m confused what you’re talking about here.
Apologies for the snark, but it’s naive in the extreme to think that if only we all thought of each other as like people that we could contain things like Russia with mass protests and demands for peace outside of Russia. Their leadership simply isn’t contained by the same parameters other places are.
Force, or the threat of force, seems like it has to happen in order to stop an invasion of Ukraine at this point. I’m not exactly jumping at the thought of a hot war with Russia and think letting it happen is better than that hot war, but that decision fucks over 41m people in Ukraine pretty damn hard.
What I am talking about? These countries remain dictatorships with bogus elections despite heavy sanctions by the international community. So if Putin takes the Ukraine and we sanction him nothing will change. Thats what I mean nothing will work because nobody will (want to) go to war.