What is happening? Why? What should be done about it?
What does it mean for the United States and the world?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply
Simple Justice
What is happening? Why? What should be done about it?
What does it mean for the United States and the world?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply
Excellent, I can make one comment and cover both of today’s posts:
Is winter over yet? I’ve had enough of snowflakes. Not so long ago we all had a good laugh about “that depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” Now, the young ones all shed tears and run crying over exactly that debate. Maybe we should just let Russia swallow up a bunch of its neighbors again, so we can have another few decades of cold war to give the kids something real to worry about.
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared.”
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
Empires are difficult to administer, and the collapse of the USSR was basically the disintegration of an empire Stalin built by terror and brutality. I have often wondered if FDR’s foreign policy was influenced by a foresight that Soviet leadership would not be able to manage indefinitely all the territories they sought to absorb. If Putin is indeed trying to reconstruct the former USSR, there is no reason to think it will work any better the second time around.
That part of Putin’s rhetoric is confusing. I don’t understand his references to the USSR and what connection that has to Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Like you said, it would seem to be doomed from the start, but maybe history won’t repeat itself this time?
I suspect we can agree that history is not only a story told about rational actors.
What are our national interests there? I haven’t seen anything worth shedding our blood over.*
We just got out of one God forsaken mess, we don’t need to get involved in another.
We have amateurs running our government, I’m afraid we’ll get drawn into another cesspool.
*I saw a minimum of combat. It isn’t what they show on TV. I lost friends in Nam and the sandbox. I don’t need to go to funerals of the children of friends because some idiot politicians thought it was a good idea to get involved in something. And we will. A year from now there will be advisors there. Three years from now there will be troops there.
Is there a distinction to be drawn from the fact that we choose to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, as opposed to Putin forcing the issue?
Not to the grunt on the ground.
If you think Putin is the only one forcing the issue, you haven’t been paying attention. The US has been trying to start a war in Ukraine for almost a decade now. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt picked the new leaders of Ukraine after they successfully overthrew the russia-friendly elected leaders, and they have been pressing for war in various ways ever since. Putin is a bad guy… obligatory gertrude… blah blah…
Putin is in a situation similar to what the US would face if China overthrew the government of Mexico and then moved in a bunch of weapons and “advisors.”
Have you ever met a conspiracy theory you didn’t like?
You had to see this coming. What did you expect from our resident wing nut?
It’s a shame that the non-lawyer forget this is a law blog, and see an open thread like this as an invitation to spew their craziest crap. Even though you’re back, this doesn’t seem to be enough to remind the nutjobs to control their worst impulses.
Real conspiracies and tin foil hatted conspiracy theorists are not mutually exclusive. They both can exist and do exist.
The trick is being able to distinguish between what’s real and what’s nuts, no matter how badly you want to believe the ridiculous.
This is stunningly ignorant and ahistorical. This is what happens when you take a couple factoids and twist them for the benefit of idiots and crazies. In 2014, after Victor Yanukovych was forced out of office by pro-democratic protests, the US provided support and aid to help bring democracy to Ukraine and forge closer ties to Europe than Russia. All perfectly normal, and unlike Putin, we didn’t invade Crimea.
At no time did the US pick Ukraine’s leaders or press for war. That’s fucking nuts.
Or more to the point, a distinction with all the breakaway places supported by the US over the years. Is the Donbas region wanting to not be part of the Ukraine any different than, say, Taiwan? South Korea? Kosovo? Panama? West Virginia?
I’m not sure who made the US the sole arbiter of “When in the Course of Human Events…” scenario approvals and denials for other nations….
If they were to break away, that would be one thing. Putin says so is not quite the same.
True. And then there’s the question of “what percent have to want to break away in order to inflict the breakaway on the remaining percentage?” Along with the whole “how do we know for sure that’s what they want?”
Oh what a tangled web….
Historically that region is a dog’s breakfast of intermingled groups and tribes and transplants that’s likely to never be sorted out to everyone’s satisfaction in my lifetime.
Putin, Lavrov, and others in the Kremlin regularly talk about “the Kosovo precedent”, and it was a significant justification put forth for Russia’s military support and recognition of the breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia.
Does such precedent exist under international law? If it is valid, is Putin nevertheless incorrectly applying this case of international law? We can’t really answer that, because international law doesn’t have judges, the toothless ICJ and ICC nothwithstanding, and its only enforcement mechanisms are national armies and competitive economic sanctions regimes. And maybe the UN Security Council. Which Russia has a permanent seat on.
Sitting here in Houston 350 miles from the Mexican border it is hard for me to be worried about a border 10,000 miles away. The influx of people over the Mexican border has a direct impact on me. Unless, Biden screws up even worse and starts a shooting war, Ukraine has almost no impact on me.
For decades, European leaders have criticized US leadership and decried their reliance on us. Now is the time for Europe to step up. If what Putin is doing is so bad, then France, Germany, Poland etc should act without depending on US backing.
And this is the exact attitude that gave us the Sudenten Crisis, the partitioning of Poland, and eventually World War II. This is the attitude we look back at and shake our heads, saying “Why didn’t those dopes just stop Hitler before he started? Why did they let him have his way for so long?” Everyone before WWII had just as much–if not more–reason to say “Why is this MY problem? It’s way over there!”
Something something learn from history something something…
Sixty years ago, a lot of people like John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara thought like you. They gave us hundreds of thousands of dead in southeast Asia.
Wise men know history, learn from history. They know when things are the same and when they are different. They use more than anecdotes and slogans.
Putin is not Hitler nor Stalin and the Russian army is not capable of fighting far from its borders.
Oh I agree that judging everything solely based on “We don’t want another WWII” is not valid. There are differences, definitely. My comment was mainly in response to the attitude of “Why is this my problem.”
But I also bet there were European leaders in the 30s saying something along the lines of “Hitler is not Napoleon…”
Yes this is different than Czechoslovakia of 1938. But I’d still say it’s very unlike Vietnam. Particularly since, in this instance, the US and the UK made guarantees to the Ukraine about 30 years ago re: its security in return for nuclear disarmament. If their reward for going along with that is being conquered and subjugated, that’s a pretty big blow to our (admittedly tattered) reputation specifically, and the goal of nuclear disarmament generally.
Does that mean I think we have to sell the lives of our young countrymen to prevent it? I don’t know. But I know the path to the answer is way the heck more complex than “That doesn’t sound like my problem.”
It’s an anachronistic geopolitical game. The last gasp of a dying tradition of strongmen taking over countries and using them to invade and attempt to conquer others for territorial, political, and material gain. Or it should be.
Putin’s rhetoric will try to confuse the issue and raise the idea that American involvement in the destinies of other nations is the same, but it isn’t. This is a different step which must be resisted. It’s too complex an issue. My reaction is that Putin must be resisted, cast out of Ukraine including Crimea, and choked to death economically. Yes, doing so will be costly and dangerous but giving ground to Putin will not work and it will cost more later to undo everything he does next on top of this. I’m doing the appeasement argument and I don’t like it, if anyone cares, but I’m sticking with it. Draw the line, don’t let him walk over it. Get ready to commit to something more.
What more can we (talking about Americans here, not Europeans) do economically? Russia’s been under various sanctions since 2014 at this point, and they haven’t budged; the Russian people seem not to care, or at least not care enough, about the effect on their economy. And it might be because, as Mikhail Gorbachev discussed, for any Russian born in the early 1980s and before, they have enough memory of the extremely hard times of the 1990s in Russia, and are more than willing to deal with Putin’s corrupt cronyism while the spectre of that decade still lingers. So they’re not going to revolt and overthrow Putin, particularly given the ridiculousness (former communists, extreme nationalists, and more) of his opposition.
Unless America wants to start sanctioning European countries, who are supposed to be our allies, for buying Russian gas and energy products, I don’t see what more we can do to cripple their economy anymore than we already have.
It’s bombs and soldiers. I’m calling for crushing any invasion of Ukraine immediately and with overwhelming force, the eviction of all Russian assets from Ukraine including Crimea, and whatever additional economic sanctions we can bring in order to salt the earth in our modern way.
Otherwise, I think you’re right on. It’s the Europeans who should be taking the lead against Russian encroachments and there’s little we can do now beyond using force. If we are going to use force, then we should not do it by half measures. If Russia wants to play this stupid geopolitical game, then we should give it its stupid prize.
[apologies for the length; I won’t be surprised if this gets trashed even with TT rules]
My concern is this turns Ukraine into another Afghanistan: suppose we put boots on the ground in Ukraine, the war is hard fought and the country is wrecked, but we do manage to achieve the objective of expelling the Russians from the country. Don’t we then have to keep the troops there indefinitely to keep the Russians out, prop up the Ukrainian economy, and make sure the government doesn’t collapse and civil war or anarchy breaks out? Would we have to conduct a punitive expedition and invade Russia to keep them away from Ukraine? What does that mean for the prospect of nuclear warfare? What about the native Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine, many of whom might be pro-Russia, pro-Putin? What do we do with them assuming we expel Russia from Ukraine? Or are we just going to not worry about these things, like we did in entering Iraq and Afghanistan, and declare “Mission Accomplished”, then spend trillions cleaning up the mess afterward? And bigger question, do we have a point at which we accept failure to achieve the objective, and withdraw? What would such withdrawal signify for other global tension points, like Taiwan, the South China Sea, Syria, and so on? Might it be better to save our fight for another day?
Furthermore, unlike Afghanistan, right now we don’t have a 9/11-type event that gets the American people rah-rah-ing in favor of war. A war against a military superpower like Russia, which would necessarily involve a draft (and remember, the draft is no longer limited to men), might seriously further destabilize our politics. And would the draftees even fight well? There’s significant chunks of the population, including among the young, who believe either that the USA is an evil empire of white supremacy built through genocide/slavery or, conversely, that the last election was fraudulent and the country is basically no longer democratic; how are you going to motivate people to fight when that kind of messaging, that the US is illegitimate, has been prevalent for several years now? Particularly when you conscripted them? If you’re Secretary of Defense Austin, are you still going to worry about screening for extremism in the ranks when you have to get more bodies for the front? If you remove the screening, what does that signify to the high-ranking generals within the service and the politicos and intelligence/national security officials without that pushed for such measures? Troop morale and chain-of-command integrity matters, because you can’t win a war with drones and bombs alone. You need to occupy territory, which requires living, breathing people.
I’m afraid too. No plan survives contact with the enemy. All war is contingencies. Nothing about this is good. Putin is playing a very dangerous game and we’re invited to the table.
I see no way this doesn’t end without American troops on the ground whether now or later, which is disturbing. This brinksmanship has to end, though. I hope you’re right and we’re better off waiting, but I just can’t see that doing any good at all.
Ah, you want to leave America the Great as the sole superpower in the world again! Scream and yell and sanction China to bits, invade Russia and crush them, and then stand astride the world.
Actually, there are a lot of people who fought against the Germans who don’t want that to happen.
I expected someone to accuse me of being imperialistic, which would have been fine, but you could have done it better than this. Next time, I’ll critique myself and show you really how to get under my skin. This isn’t it, my mirror image.
What, why, what…done, and to do too?
WTF, eeeesteeeeremed one?
Weebles wobbling, is this a new concept for you?
Feeling inable to comprehend the world and the Unites States of America’s quandary?
Too funny….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=YftSWkNUvts
P.S. your google-ige search ratings are dropping. You should do something about that.
BTW, how the heck have you been doing?
Having any fun this winter yet?
Ahem.
If/when Putin invades Ukraine there will be no military response from any NATO country. The ironclad #1 rule of modern warfare is that nuclear powers _never_ _ever_ get into a shooting war. Proxy wars, yes, but never direct confrontation. NATO doesn’t want WWIII. My best guess is that they believe Putin will invade Ukraine so they haven’t placed any NATO forces in his way. The US is not getting into a war with Russia.