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“The Case Against Western Military Assistance to Ukraine”
A superb essay (link below) that constitutes a valuable contribution to this matter. The author painstakingly (and, in my view, compellingly) lays his out arguments for the following propositions:
- It’s extremely unlikely that, had the West not helped Ukraine, Russia would have attacked a NATO member next
- Western military assistance to Ukraine makes proliferation more, not less, likely
- Providing military assistance to Ukraine is not cheap once you take into account the indirect costs
- The argument that committing to Ukraine’s defense was necessary to deter wars of aggression is flawed
- The argument from credibility is a self-fulfilling prophecy and a recipe for the sunk cost fallacy
Link:
https://philippelemoine.substack.com/p/the-case-against-western-military
Published in General
If that’s a response to things Putin does, then we’re still not the ones doing the escalating.
What was Trump’s position on Ukraine joining NATO? The possibility of which seems to have been the deciding factor for Russia.
??
It’s somewhat anarchic. And where are Iraq’s Christians, who were safe under Saddam?
And yet Russia didn’t attack while Trump was in office, which might mean something too.
I don’t think he was that keen on Ukraine joining NATO.
But it doesn’t offer a gateway to Ukraine…and won’t enable Putin to threaten multiple other nations…
Yes., but the whole point is that Trump would have done something aggressive. That was his deterrence. If Putin thought he would sit back and do nothing, he would have invaded earlier.
Yes, exactly, which means that claiming Trump was a bad president or something, because he “would have” spent even more than Biden – on something that didn’t happen for Trump – is nonsense.
Not that you are claiming that, but anyone who does is full of it, and their claims are easily ignored.
That’s exactly what we did with Britain (and every other country) in World War II and I don’t remember anybody suggesting that Britain compromise or surrender territory except for Mohatma Ghandi. In fact when Britain did offer giving Hitler the Sudatenland in exchange for peace, they got their brains bombed out. Maybe I missed it but were there any serious calls to bring Hitler to the peace table? I really don’t think peace overtures are going to be effective against Russia.
I’ve heard this argument before. You are picking on the one drawback of the new Iraq in order to discount the enormous changes for the good that have happened. Besides, most of the Christian persecution was carried out by ISIS forces when they occupied vast swaths of Iraqi territory. The Iraqi government really hasn’t been that discriminatory. They recently declared Christmas a national holiday in order to make better relations with the Christians.
I never said that it was bad! I would want Trump to have acted aggressively toward Russia.
By the middle of March 2022, two rounds of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, facilitated by Turkey, had already taken place, and progress was being made. A third round was planned for the end of May, which got postponed to early April. The first week of April, Boris Johnson went to Kiev and told Zelensky that he should cease and desist. Negotiations stopped.
This was confirmed in a recent interview by the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, Bennett, who was also making progress, in a separate way, in serving as a direct conduit between Putin and Zelensky directly, and got both of them to express openness to making various concessions. Both the UK and the US expressed their disinterest in his efforts. He got the message, and stopped.
To this day, it is the US and UK who remain adamant against negotiating. Until/unless that changes, Putin has no one to negotiate with anyway, since Zelensky is not going to go against the US’s and UK’s wishes.
Energywise, the timing was very good. Ten years of Operation Greta had Europe dependent on Russia. Having the former German Chancellor on the board of Rosneft was right. Germany/Europe should have been plugged into Nord Stream 2. A mysterious number of cracks in French nuclear reactors … The pieces were in place. But Germany held strong and shuttered a lot of industrial capacity to make it through the winter. The Schroder card failed. Any leverage has now gone. Waiting a few years and French reactors would be fixed and other gas sources would be online (Norway, Greece,…)
I don’t doubt your sources for this, but how does anyone actually know that he is “making progress” in peace talks, unless one side actually does something concrete, like a cease-fire or moving troops away. Negotiations between warring parties involve more bluffing and betting than the World Series of Poker. Hardly anybody says what they really mean because the other side intends to kill their people. If you can imagine the deception that goes on between a home seller and a buyer, or from a used car salesman for that matter, just imagine what goes on with people threatened with extinction.
Since Russia is presumably not going to leave on their own accord, what do you suggest Ukraine give them in exchange for stopping their warring?
They broke a lot of eggs to make that omelette is what I’m saying.
For eg women’s de facto human rights have not recovered. Until 2003 most urban women in Iraq chose to not cover their heads. It’s no longer safe for them to make that choice.
Consider:
https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/report/26289/iraq-women-were-more-respected-under-saddam-say-women’s-groups
Indeed. Not by Saddam’s government. Whodathunkit?
The government isn’t, but it isn’t strong enough to stop those who are.
Apparently it’s getting bigger:
https://amp.dw.com/en/in-iraq-christmas-is-many-muslims-favorite-new-holiday/a-60239353
The first sign of progress is when each party reaches into their grab-bag of previously declared ABSOLUTELY-POSITIVELY-NON-NEGOTIABLE items, pulls an item/some items from it, and places it/them on the negotiating table.
That was taking place back in March 2022, in the case of both the Turkey-facilitated talks between Ukrainian and Russian negotiation talks and the Naftali Bennett-facilitated communications between Putin and Zelensky. In the case of the Bennett efforts, there were two items that fit the category described in the previous paragraph:
From Putin’s grab-bag: Russia’s insistence that Ukraine demilitarize.
From Zelensky’s grab-bag: Ukraine’s insistence on NATO membership.
That was progress. The UK/US nipped it in the bud.
No danger of proliferation if Russia wins?
Sweden conducted “10 small underground plutonium explosions in a defense research laboratory in Solna, a Stockholm suburb” in 1972. “As of today [1985], Sweden should be able to build a bomb in two years”
the institute…developed the nuclear reactor Agesta, designed to produced 15-18lb of weapons-grade plutonium a year, enough to manufacture up to 10 tactical atomic weapons … Sweden built a nuclear-pulse generator that would trigger a warhead and a prototype implosion device”
that was research from years ago-the Swedes are not less knowledgable now than they were then- and the Finns, Balts & Poles have similar technical abilities. An aggressive Russia on their borders (after a failure of US deterrence) would easily motivate the acquisition of nuclear weapons.
A US that wouldn’t help Ukraine b/c of the cost 0f $100B (or fears of “provoking” Putin) will not be seen as credibly defending the Poles in the face of additional nuclear saber rattling by Putin.
The Finns, Balts, and Poles developing/acquiring nuclear weapons, without permission from the US? Not a chance.
Since when does anybody take orders from the U.S. on their nuclear weapons programs?
How many of them didn’t sign some kind of non-proliferation treaty?
Do you understand what NATO is and who is and is not a member?
I think Qaddafi did. He shut down his program. Got bombed anyway.
Oh, are we pretending there is no US Empire today? Okay! Well I guess nobody does then!! :-)
I was aware of that when I wrote my comment, but I couldn’t think of another country that has ever directly submitted to U.S. demands. That was kind of a special case because we actually threatened Qadaffi by killing his family members in an air raid. As far as I know, all other hostile nations to the U.S. have completely ignored calls for nuclear non-proliferation. As far as friendly countries, they mostly keep out of the nuclear game because they know the U.S. has their backs, and wants to keep them non-nuclear. It is only based on that back-up support. Many friendly countries have declined to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons , including Japan, and NATO countries Germany, Spain, Canada, and Turkey. According to this author, at least 19 countries have made attempts to make nuclear bombs so far.
We don’t always even know when it is happening because South Africa successfully made bombs and the entire world was unaware until after it happened.
There’s a US empire, all right, but it’s largely a commercial one. The US is powerful but it’s not a puppetmaster. Other countries frequently don’t do what we want, and that’s normal. We don’t control Ukraine. We don’t control South Korea. We don’t control Israel.
BTW, since this is a conservative website with a spectrum of views, let me pre-emptively also stipulate that the World Economic Forum, George Soros, and Bill Gates have nothing whatsoever to do with running American foreign policy.
We don’t need Russia’s oil or gas. They don’t need us to produce airplanes or computer chips. Neither side has a decisive economic weapon.
He was bombed by the US in 1986. He didn’t shut down his atomic program (which wasn’t much to begin with) until the Gulf War period, after the turn of the century. He died when his own people rebelled.
No, we do not have an “Empire.” Unless you want to use it in the metaphorical sense like “The singer Michael Jackson had an Empire.” Or the “the New England Patriots football team had an Empire.”
Quick definition of “Empire” in my computer’s dictionary:
I was in a Moscow hotel in early 1986 and my wife and I went downstairs to breakfast early. There was a gloomy American sitting at a table. As we passed him, he said, tersely, “We just hit Omar Qaddafi. Four a.m.”
He sounded exactly like Richard Castellano, Clemenza in The Godfather, warning that the Mafia war was about to “hit the mattresses”.
But you do control Europe, you do control most of Latin America, you do control places like Egypt and Jordan or even Indonesia or Thailand. Not completely, and to varying degrees, but enough. I agree that this is mostly done economically – with the ever present threat of sanctions we can agree that conflicts can be faught this way?
Sure, though they absolutely cannot make high end chips yet, which puts them on a lower economic trajectory without importing what they need from you.
Example from 2019:
“Mexico’s defense minister said Monday that the nation has deployed nearly 15,000 troops to its northern border to increase border enforcement, part of a deal to avert U.S. tariffs on Mexican goods, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).”
https://thehill.com/latino/450093-mexico-deploys-15000-troops-to-us-border-mexican-army-chief/