Welcome to War.
Sometimes I almost think the 'Kiev falls in X days" is trying to lure the Russians into a trap or something. I mean, I don’t actually think that, but 30 days to take a city of 3 million in a well armed and extremely resistant country with massive global support is just… dubious.
It took 4 years with staggering amounts of death and destruction to drive the rebels out of Aleppo. It took 6 years, 2 wars, and almost complete destruction of Grozny for the Chechens capitulate. The US spent trillions trying to hold Afghanistan and lost the whole country like an hour and a half after they said they were maybe leaving someday soon-ish.
Thirty days seems wildly unlikely to me.
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Oddly enough, I actually know how to drive the Ural-made Russian/Soviet 6x6 trucks. I was actually trained on the older ZIL-131 because we needed someone to drive it to test a project I worked on at the AF Research Lab. The front fender was about ear-level on me 
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Sure. But there’s no telling that if we allowed Putin to recreate the USSR piece by piece we’d be any better off. And we know 100% it would be a human rights catastrophe.
Why are you going to the mat so hard for the pragmatic argument that we should have just left Eastern Europe to the wolves? At best it’s very very murky that even pragmatically that would be the best course of action.
Why is it so important 1) separate out the moral argument, and then 2) go to the mat HARD for the pragmatic argument? None of us have a damn clue what happens if the West didn’t expand NATO. But some itt seem to really want to go to mat hard that we should have done so.
I mean, appeasement worked so well in the 30s, why not try it again, amirite?
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What would Kissinger do?
There’s no indication that reuniting the USSR is anything but a fantasy? What? You don’t consider Putin invading a sovereign democracy to be some indication that he’s serious?
You seem awfully cavalier about putting the rest of Eastern Europe’s fate in the idea that Putin’s ambition ends with Ukraine. I doubt they feel the same.
Putin has been clear from day one that he thinks the breakup of the USSR is the worst thing that ever happened to Russia. He wrote a manifesto and made it required reading for everyone in Russia’s military. You can’t just say “Well we know Putin lies, so we can’t believe anything”. That’s a cop out and the whole point of blasting a firehose of lies - so that there is no truth, and people will just believe whatever they want. You have to dig deeper than that, look at the frequency of arguments, how long have they been told, do they line up with actions, do they make sense, etc.
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It’s very different now because reasons. Hitler was a totalitarian dictator who invaded one country after another in his dream to unite Europe. Putin has only invaded one country. See? Completely different.
Also nukes obviously. But we should still have shunned the former Eastern bloc when they looked to the West for security and economic stability. Because look what we made Putin do.
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The point is I’m not. I view this as a non black/white issue. I don’t fully agree with Meirscheimer’s argument, at least not to the extend he equates a huge amount of the blame to NATO and does skirt around the Putin issue. What I am going hard at is people making sweeping statements about an intensely complex geopolitical issue that has been ongoing since at least the end of Kuchma’s reign (specifically Ukraine [rightfully given popular support] moving away from Russian satellite). I didn’t think I was separating, you said there was no moral argument involved. I see moral and pragmatism (or strategic as Mearscheimer puts it) as destined to be elements of the same decision. Morals (whether right or perverse) guide many ostensibly strategic decisions.
Anyway derail over. I don’t know why this thread puts me on such tilt. Also I’m only responding to you out of force of habit (clicking reply on most recent post), so I’m sorry if it seems like I’m singling you out.
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maybe I missed it up thread. Was this news already posted?
https://twitter.com/SecretaryPete/status/1498876156032032771?s=20&t=H9t5fE1Hh0vvaMXFc4EA0A
Had a reply but Suzzer ponied me (unless he was mocking the viewpoint in which case sigh). It’s ridiculous to equate certain people itt’s arguments with appeasement. I assume it was tongue-in-cheek anyway.
I was more thinking of that interview, not necessarily people in this thread. Seems pretty appeasement-y to me.
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I don’t think most are going hard for the pragmatic approach, just pointing out that it’s much easier to only focus on the moral argument (because then you at least get to hold that moral high ground) and dismiss the pragmatic view. It’s very easy to be morally right when it’s not your life that is at stake.
This is and should be a legit discussion and I don’t think it’s that easy to say here that the moral approach was the right one (if the war leads to Putin killing millions while the West stands by - are we really so sure that Ukraine will have made the right choice?). Yet, we have people trying to call anyone who suggests that Mearsheimer might have a point is a Russian bot.
I’m not in the Mearsheimer camp, but I think he does know what he’s talking about - even if his conclusions might be wrong - and that we shouldn’t just dismiss that point of view out of hand (e.g. the claims that Mearsheimer’s position is the same that saying rape victims should just enjoy it - there are better and less lazy way to refute his argument than that).
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I mean it’s certainly the furthest I’ve seen on the spectrum.
honestly, after watching his video and reading the interview just posted, that’s EXACTLY the analogy that pinpoints the extreme discomfort I feel with his arguments. Simplistic analogies aren’t always wrong. I’ve been a victim of sexual harassment when i was in the military, and the “boys will be boys” attitude and the pressure to just let it go and not report it is the exact same feeling i get from this argument.
So yeah, I had been struggling to understand why Mearsheimer’s appeasement-style argument bothered me so much, and I thank whoever made that anaolgy for clarifying it for me.
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I don’t view it as black and white either. The pragmatic case is murky. Sure.
But my gut says that even giving Putin the possibility to gobble up one former Eastern bloc country after another is not the pragmatic way. It puts us in the position of gambling with hundreds of millions of lives that Putin’s ambitions stop at Ukraine, and he won’t throw all those other countries back into totalitarianism.
If they all fight back like Ukraine, it’s pretty easy to see how that leads to worse conflict than what we have now. Like even on a pragmatic level - is that a world we want to live in? What would it do to the global psyche to watch all that carnage unfold over the course of a decade or whatever?
And yeah I’m not an expert like Messer. So wtf does my gut matter compared to him? But how many experts were dead wrong that Putin wasn’t going to invade? Literally not one expert the Star Slate Codex guy could find predicted a) Putin was going to invade and b) the Ukrainian resistance was going to be this fierce. The entire world’s military pundit brain trust apparently thought it was one or the other, but not both. So I’m not super confident in appealing to authority right now.
We are in completely uncharted waters, just as we would be if we hadn’t expanded NATO. Can we all agree on that at least?
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Agreed. I mean I’m in favour of NATO expansion. But I don’t really have a good answer as to how to deal with this beyond wishing Ukraine had been admitted into NATO in 1998 or something pre-Putin!
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Biden mentioned it in the SOTU.
There was one ex-general I saw who predicted Ukraine would be as bad as Iraq for Putin. I wish I could find that tweet because he was definitely bucking the pre-invasion groupthink.
https://twitter.com/yermolenko_v/status/1498785592292872197
Good fodder if you see a Russian troll anywhere. Atrocities in Donbas seems to be their new talking point.
This guy was just on CNN btw. Very powerful.