Operation Enduring/Iraqi Freedom. OEF was Afghanistan.
Had to Google it myself - Operation Enduring Freedom / Operation Iraqi Freedom
https://mobile.twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1498994992857104389
This is by an independent pollster with the obvious caveat of some people being being afraid to express their opinion to anyone.
The data is pre-invasion but OTOH Putin was making it pretty clear that he would invade at this time. Though he clearly lied about the extensiveness of the invasion. Would take a lot of bad facts over time for his support to erode to the point where Putin feels pressured, imo.
What happened to ‘men 18-60 cannot leave Ukraine’ ?
This is right. If you press hard enough, the Mearsheimer side eventually admits that Russia would have invaded Ukraine even if they insisted they didn’t want to join NATO. They have to, because Ukraine disclaimed any interest in joining NATO immediately before Russia invaded them. Russia’s goal in Ukraine has always been to maintain control of its political affairs. That’s inconsistent with Ukraine joining NATO, to be sure, but NATO is not the real issue. Assume for a moment that the US sent no Javelin missiles or any other kind of military aid to Ukraine for the last 8 years. Do you think Russia would still be invading? Absolutely. They’ll then retreat to hazy generalities about “Western orientation” or something, which basically means not being ruled from Moscow.
When they do that, they pretend they aren’t conceding the entire argument, but they actually are. All that’s left is the insight that anti-colonialist forces should be aware that the colonial power may react violently to assertions of independence. High-level stuff. But how is it relevant that George Kennan thought it was a mistake to let Poland and Romania into NATO? On the revised account, those moves were highly successful. Those countries managed to safeguard their internal political independence at a time when Russia was unable to do anything about it.
Everything that’s distinctive about the Mearsheimer view is wrong. What’s correct about it is exactly equivalent to the normie view:
Normie, dumb: Putin’s a bully, and he’ll take whatever he can get away with. The only thing he understands is force.
Mearsheimer, highly sophisticated: As realists, we need to seek out and understand Putin’s red lines vis a vis NATO expansion. Of course, I’m just using NATO expansion as a shorthand for any action that shifts the balance of power in a way that’s unfavorable to Putin. And by red lines, I mean any opportunity Putin has to use force to get the things he wants. Now, let’s turn to a lengthy historical digression of dubious relevance to the matter at hand.
What’s more, it’s now pretty clear that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a miscalculation. He may succeed in occupying Ukraine, but if he does, he’s going to get bare military control of a bombed out country that hates him, at the cost of wrecking his economy, bloodying his just-revamped army, pissing off China, and inducing a massive rearmament in Europe that is infinitely more menacing to Russia’s long-term strategic prospects than Ukraine being a full-up NATO member, let alone any vague Western orientation. In hard strategic terms, the Western strategy was correct. Russia wasn’t strong enough to hold on to Ukraine. The actual cause of the tragedy is that the West was too fractious and opaque for Putin to understand the gravity of the mistake he was making with this war.
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They’re not
Translation: Trains full of Ukrainian mothers with children are heading to Prague. The migratory wave is coming.
Also it’s Ukrainian men ages 18-60 cannot leave Ukraine. Men with foreign citizenship can leave though there reports of them being held back at the border with women and children going first.
I dunno, this is not entirely insane. The US’s dilemma is that it faces a rising and adversarial power in China that it would like to devote resources to containing, but it also has to deal with an unfriendly Russia. That’s why the US is always complaining about how EU countries aren’t meeting their spending goals under NATO and their armies are completely useless. By getting Germany in particular to make huge investments in its military, the US is going to be able to scale back its involvement in Europe and do the long-sought pivot to Asia.
I do think it’s nuts to claim that Biden somehow engineered this, as the whole thing was deliberately engineered by Putin, but there’s no doubt it was a huge miscalculation by Putin. And the Chinese, who are pissed at Russia now for fucking this up so bad.
Obviously the propaganda works for these guys. Far better than reason would suggest it should.
Mearsheimer doesn’t obscure any of this. He says it isn’t all about NATO and I’m sure he’d agree that “NATO expansion” is a convenient shorthand for NATO expansion, military weapons and support, Western NGO/CIA/State Department efforts to expand our wonderful democracy in other states, and EU membership. Broadly, stuff that tries to get Ukraine out of Russia’s sphere of influence and into the Western sphere.
So, the difference between the Normie view and Mearsheimer is that Mearsheimer says, hey, we shouldn’t be doing all this stuff in Ukraine because it’s going to provoke a violent response from Russia and we won’t be able to do anything about it. Whereas the normie view says hell yeah let’s do all this stuff, democracy’s great…oh shit now what do we do. Nothing, because there’s nothing that can be done.
Would not be going to that one if any of the others are a choice.
Two things:
- We did do something about Russian aggression! We provided a bunch of weapons so that Ukraine could make a Russian invasion too costly to be worthwhile.
- When you say we “shouldn’t” have cooperated with Ukraine’s efforts to shake off Russian control, is that a moral should or a realist should? Morally speaking, it’s hard to say that it’s wrong to support an independence movement, even if there’s a risk that that support will lead to violence. It’s not like we were propping up some puppet regime to fight for us like in South Vietnam. Ukrainians wanted to try for independence. It seems to me like that’s their call to make. Practically speaking, this is working out just fine for US interests. You’re flitting between morality and realism as is convenient. When the question is whether we should support Ukrainian independence because it’s morally correct, we’re supposed to be hard-headed realists. But when Russia overreaches and ends up murdering a bunch of people, we’re supposed to feel responsible.
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I suspect that the people going there are mostly Moldovans living in Ukraine
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We sent 47 Javelin launchers to Ukraine. Are those 47 launchers turning the tide against ten thousand Russian armored vehicles? I’m skeptical. Is the Russian attack not meeting Russian timelines and objectives? Again, maybe, but I’m skeptical of Western media and Western Defense Twitter on the subject. On the other hand, was that military support part of what provoked the Russian invasion? I think it’s indisputable that it did. If Mearsheimer is correct in saying that the military support was ultimately worse than useless isn’t something I can comment on, exactly because I don’t know what Russian expectations and goals of the invasion are and how the current situation conforms or deviates from those expectations. If Ukraine wins and Russia doesn’t meet their objectives then Mearsheimer was wrong. We’ll have to wait and see.
I’m not vacillating between moral should and realist should. It’s all realist should. But, of course, if you recognize that efforts to lead Ukraine towards the west are leading Ukraine down the primrose path, then it is immoral to do that knowing that the west is going to be powerless if and when the violent Russian response happens. But I don’t think that the west was cynically arming Ukraine knowing what was coming, they hadn’t thought that far ahead. These are the same people who planned the Iraq invasion after all, don’t think Vicky Nuland really saw this coming.
is that 40-mile-long convoy still just … sitting there? surely there’s a drone or two that could be smashing the fuck out of the front of that column???
Not if the Russians have total air supremacy around the column.
I think that was corrected to a 3 mile convoy that was 40 miles outside of the city.
Whoops, small mistake! Could happen to anybody…
Whoosh
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I mean yeah when people look more like you, you identify with them better.
It’s part of why everybody’s bending over backwards for Ukrainian refugees but freaks out over ME refugees. One looks like them and the other looks like those 9/11 guys.
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