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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
Well, it’s been 45 years now and counting since the Contras took over………I’m still waiting………….
Then that could work China and the US could get Ukraine and Russia to negotiate, but It is only going to happen if the stalemate is breaking in one sides favor or another, or if both sides are exhausted.
Or Else, hopefully.
At least if China ends up taking out Putin to settle things, that’s better than us being blamed for it.
But the real issue is, did he have COVID?
If it happens it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
And haven’t they been transporting “refugees” from Guatemala etc from their southern border to their northern border, because Mexico doesn’t want them and the US is where they were really headed anyway?
A few days after Russia invaded Ukraine last year, I posted the following map (at the bottom) in one of the Ricochet threads, illustrating what I thought things would look like at the end of this war. In short: Russia gets everything east of the Dnieper River, which would provide a natural, fairly easily defended barrier for them. Crimea is recognized as Russian. Ukraine retains everything west of the river, including Odessa. Such a bitter pill for Ukraine would need to be compensated with something substantial. Accelerated NATO membership and integration would, I believe, provide that.
Aforepromised map:
I guess I underestimated the Cuban interventions. They apparently don’t keep their hands only on American affairs. According to Wikipedia, they have intervened, often militarily, in:
1959 Panama Invasion
1959 Dominican Republic Invasion
1963 Algerian “Sand War”
1964-1967 supplied and trained guerilla fighters against Venezualan Govenment
1964-1965 Congo Crisis
1960’s and 70’s Aided Portuguese Rebels in the Prtuguese Colonian War
1960’s Guinia-Bissau war of Independence
1972 Yemenite War
1970’s Insurgency in the Dominican republic
1973 Yom Kippur War(!) Cuba sent troops (I didn’t even know that)
1973-1990 Supported Communist insurgency in Chile
1974-1991 Angolan war (they sent over 337,000 troops)
1977-1978 Somalian Ogaden War
1978-1979 Nucaraguan Revoluion (establishing the Sandinistas. They actually sent troops, unlike the U.S.)
1980’s Espionage in Venezuala
1992 Venezualan Coup Attempts
2000’s (No longer with Soviet support) Venezualan Government. Quote form Wiki “By 2010, former Major General Antonio Rivero claimed that about 92,700 Cuban officials were operating in various offices of Venezuela’s government.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_Cuba
FIFY.
Unless, of course, you’re about to make the case that Cuba was acting independently, implementing its own foreign policy, etc., not only in Latin America but lands far afield therefrom. If so, I’d be very interested in your making that case. Particularly in regards to Cuba being as much of (more of?) a “Boss” in Latin American affairs as/than the US.
I would be surprised if they could make that stick but that is definitely a possibility Rivers are often good natural borders. I am just not sure that will comport enough with the facts on the ground, unless Russia is truly able to bring numbers to bear.
It isn’t a boss but it definitely has been involved even after the decline of the Soviet Union. It is difficult to say how much of that is being a good Soviet satellite and how much is being a committed communist true believer. We tend to forget that Fidel was a first generation Marxist. He had a true belief and passion for the world wide communist project. I tend to agree this is more him be loyal to his Soviet allies, but I am not sure it isn’t partially the true believer aspect.
As the ole proverb goes, …
“There is many a slip ‘tween the cup and the lip”.
The Russians have long had a naval base in Crimea, vital to regional control and keeping outside powers out. We have a naval base in Cuba, vital to regional control and keeping outside powers out. A lot of America’s military capability is in Texas and the Deep South, an existential vital interest of ours.
But Moscow, those staunch anti-imperialists, made a formal military alliance with the Cubans (which we haven’t yet done with Ukraine), built their own naval base in Cuba (which we don’t have in Ukraine) and delivered atomic bombs to the area (which we haven’t done in Ukraine). So it’s hard for me to take Russia’s bruised feelings too seriously. We, or more accurately, our proxies, tried our own equivalent of the 40 mile column into Kyiv. We got our asses kicked and we haven’t been back.
What’s so wrong about Patton’s advice? “Tell them to get their asses back to Russia where they belong”.
Then that would be proof of the Soviet Union exercising more control over a country than the U.S. ever has.
The Cuban Missile Crisis in late 1962 wasn’t just about the Soviets putting nuclear missiles in a location that the US viewed (correctly) as unacceptably close to its borders, i.e. Cuba . It was also about US having had, a year earlier, put nuclear missiles in a location that the Soviets viewed (correctly) as unacceptably close to its borders, i.e. Turkey. The crisis was resolved by the Soviets agreeing to remove their nuclear missiles from Cuba in PUBLIC, FOR ALL THE WORLD TO SEE fashion, and the US agreeing to remove their nuclear missiles from Turkey some months later, quietly.
Also, the US base in Cuba is leased, not conquered.
“[E]ver?
I suggest, as a counter-example, that you look into the matter of who was in charge of writing Japan’s … Constitution.
PS:
This to-and-fro between you and I (interesting though it has been) about which country has been (for more than a couple of centuries now), and continues to be (for now, anyway), the 800-pound gorilla in the Western Hemisphere (from the Arctic all the way to the Antarctic) has reached the stage of being a trivial distraction from the topic of this thread. Hence, I’m done with it.
You mean after we defeated them in a war that they started? Not really comparable.
And yet, once we got them rebuilt and started them on their way, we left them alone in freedom. That is not even in the same realm as the satellite nations under the Soviet Union.
Yes, because they did some very bad things and then we conquered them. They good news for them is being conquered by a democratic republic means you get a pretty fair shake in the end. It would have been quite a bit different if they had been conquered by the Soviet Union at the time, so yes the US at the time execute pretty extreme control over Japan, just as the Soviets did over the East Germans and eventually all of Eastern Europe.
OK, I’ll take GPentelle’s suggestion and return to the core of the post. Most of the thread has been absorbing, genuine discussion without the flourishes of nasty rhetoric that too often pop up in blog arguments. GP kept faith with us, so I’ll keep faith with him and try to channel my disagreements.
Pat Buchanan’s no hero of mine, but he had a point when he headlined a column, “How About Showing Russia Some Respect?” I have to admit that I once thought Trump’s election could be the beginning of a new detente with Russia. Republicans, like my man Nixon, have always been better, tougher, smarter negotiators with Moscow, and yet the Russians have also liked them better and given them better deals, because they were based on honest assessments of real power, military/diplomatic/cultural/financial, and hence were realistic enough to endure. The Russians like opponents with the political strength to make their deals stick.
This was not to be, for reasons that may someday fill hours of graduate seminars. Because of Russiagate, Trump never had the chance to engage; second term might have been different. And Trump’s deal might have been good, or it might have been awful; we’ll never know. We can’t rewind history and insert edits.
So where do we go from here? Whatever our answer is will have to be based on hard reality, guided by some sense of morality. Anne Applebaum is not likely to like it. And neither is RT chief Dimitri Kiselyev.
I have a youngish (40-50ish) Russian-speaking Ukrainian in-law. He loooves Putin (last I heard). They even named their firstborn after him. I don’t think we have a clue what the Ukrainian people want — and maybe especially not the Russian-speakers.
I’m very skeptical that our government does either. And, as you suggested above, I would hope the behind-the-scenes conversations would be about how our “aid” can’t go on forever and we’re not going to put our people in harm’s way, so you fellas better figure out what you can do to appease the Russians to end this thing without losing the whole farm. I understand this can’t be a public conversation, but everything the Biden administration is signaling indicates the US is 100% behind Ukraine to the (bitter) end. I think it’s monumentally stupid, but nothing less than I would expect from the 20-year-olds running the sh–show in the WH.
I really have to wonder about people like that. When I lived in Arizona, it was easy to see people – especially on the news, often getting arrested for throwing stuff at cops, etc – who seemed certain that Mexico was just the best. And yet I doubt you could pay them to actually live in the country/under the government they claimed to want.
Biden has famously been wrong on foreign policy for forty years. It is possible a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then, but it is more likely he is just as wrong now. The 20 somethings in the WH could certainly be sleepwalking us into World War III. They don’t have the life experience to realize the world isn’t a friendly place and often the choice is between bad and worse.
Or if Biden really didn’t want to get involved at the start, and was more or less pushed into it, that means his record of being wrong is still intact: he’s just doing the right thing despite his preference to have done the wrong thing.
This is what I mean by we don’t know what the Ukrainian people want. We should not be surprised if Russian “patriots” find Putin’s strong Russian nationalism attractive.
In fact, its one of the reasons I like Donald Trump. He puts America and American’s first.
But the people most in favor of Trump seemed to be Americans. Why do people who think Putin is so great, not run to live under his rule?
This youngish man grew up in Ukraine and married into my family. They’ve lived here for decades, and I’m not sure his affections were ever for Ukraine, but possibly always aligned with Russia. That may be true of many of the Russian speakers living in Ukraine.
Well, even before this, people like that had the option of voting with their feet. That they seem unwilling to do so, reminds me of those in Arizona who were talking about how great Mexico supposedly is, but never actually wanted to live there.
And given past events over there, I have to wonder how many of the Russian-speakers in Ukraine were basically “plants.” Russia has been doing it to Poland or something more recently, as I recall.
I am not sure if that reassures me or terrifies me. On the one hand I am relieved he is doing, by my lights, the right thing. On the other hand it means he probably isn’t acting according to American interests, but is instead acting in terms of international interests. That is bad because they may currently be in alignment, but that need not remain the case.