Russia actually has civil defense drills where millions of people prepare for nuclear war. I am not aware of any such thing occurring in America. I don’t know about European countries that are members of NATO. Do they do this in France and Germany? The fact that Russia engages in this type of preparation, would suggest to me that they think they can actually win a nuclear war. The idea that anyone could “win” such a war is insane, but if they actually believe that they would be the victor in such a conflict, that would give them an incentive to use the weapons that America and other NATO countries do not possess.
So what? Drills are cheap, especially if the population goes along with it. Maintenance of nuclear arsenals tends to be fairly expensive, and while Russia has some money now (though their defense budget is pretty light), there was about a decade where they couldn’t even pay the troops. Regardless, some civil defense drills will mean jack shit if things to nuclear. They know it as well as we do. So that’s probably out of the question…they aren’t going to initiate a nuclear exchange any more than we are. Everything less than though, however, is bad for them in almost similar terms. A war with NATO would probably stretch their conventional forces beyond the breaking point. And then there is the economic side. Today, they still have trade with Europe. I’m thinking not so much if there is a war. And their infrastructure today is relatively good…but not so much if it’s getting the crap bombed out of it, especially in western Russia, which it would be as NATO would be going after logistics systems.
There is no victory for Russia in one of the Baltic states unless NATO folds and Russia is able to annex one or more of the states without intervention. Hell, even if the Europeans didn’t fight it would hurt Russia badly if countries like Germany simply stopped all trade with them. I doubt they could survive that alone, let alone this military stuff.
God, this debate. I’m just picturing those here asking if it’s worth defending Estonia or Latvia asking the same thing of Austria, Poland or Czechoslovakia eighty years ago.
Calling these places ‘disputed territories’ on some long-term scale is such an American-centric point of view, valuing those outside of the Anglo-Saxon sphere as somehow less worthy.
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NM…missed the WWII reference.
So if a country isn’t supposed to risk a nuclear war, why don’t we use that?
We just set up a video conference call between Trump and Putin and when the cameras come on, Trump is dramatically holding his finger an inch over a big red button on his desk. Trump then tells Putin that he will launch a nuclear attack against Russia unless Russia pulls all its forces back inside its 1999 borders.
According to theory, a country should accept any conditions rather than face the risk of a nuclear war. Putin would have no choice other than to back down and withdraw his forces.
But…but…Russia has civil defense drills? That makes all the difference, doesn’t it? Means they think they can win at thermo-nuclear war, despite what that AI said in that movie one time…
Eighty years ago we didn’t have thousands and thousands of nuclear warheads that were - each one of them - capable of destroying an entire city in one blast, knocking out the entire electrical grid and all the infrastructure necessary to run a society such as water and refrigeration - reducing the lives of the surviving people to a Hobbesian nightmare, if they’re “lucky” enough to not die horrifically of radiation poisoning or rapidly-developing cancer. Each one of them can do this. And there are thousands and thousands of them ready to go at any minute. You’re still thinking in terms of pre-World War II military strategy, when you could just throw manpower at a conflict. Nukes changed the game completely.
I think it’s safe to say that Putin knows this as well. The US also has ‘thousands and thousands’ of the things, and I’d hazard a guess we are more confident a large percentage of them will work (and that the missiles will actually fly). This is why it’s highly unlikely that Putin would invade one of the Baltic states while NATO is still a viable organization and presenting a united front.
So we let Russia take Latvia. If they take Latvia, why not the Czech Republic? Where do you draw the line? Germany? France? England? Canada? Which of these Allies is worth taking stand for?
The thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons we have pointed at each creates Mutually Assured Destruction. This would be the only deterrent we could use on a superpower. NATO means that we will stand together if a madman wants to invade you. Which may be the only thing that would give a madman pause.
But lets talk about member nation commitment and [URL=“https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/02/world/europe/trump-nato.html”]Trump telling them they need to spend more. This seems to suggest that he is right on this point. The percentage of spending is waay out of whack, especially from our prosperous friends. I don’t thing threatening them in the press is the way to go about it but…
I agree…several of the NATO members aren’t pulling their fair share. This isn’t a point of contention new to Trump either…Obama and Bush said similar things. What really brought it home to me was an article I read where the German army was deployed for joint exercises with other NATO members and they didn’t have weapons for all the troops…or even trucks. They have really let things slip, and they aren’t the only ones.
The problem with how Trump is going about it is he is forgetting that their leaders are politicians as well…and how would it look, to their own (voting) citizens if they just caved in and did what the US is demanding, especially if we are demanding it in such a ridiculous manner instead of through the proper channels. And, as with many of Trump’s things, it’s an issue that is already solving itself…NATO spending was already up for many members, and has risen since Trump was elected and started blathering on about this issue. It’s like the Mexican illegal immigration issue…it’s something that’s already being solved (illegal immigration from Mexico is down since the last year of the Obama presidency), and what Trump is doing is actually counter productive to his supposed goal.
Eighty years ago we had machine guns, tanks, bombers and chemical weapons that had just a few years prior laid waste to Europe and killed millions. There were movies and talking heads routinely abhorring the notion of using these weapons in anger once again, and there was real, genuine terror that a war against Germany would see western capital cities in ruins and the countrysides poisoned wastelands.
They might not have had nukes, but they still had the capacity to wreak near-civilisation ruining destruction.
I repeat my statement, and add something else. Collective security is the only way to make an aggressor behave. Want to avoid a nuclear war? Don’t give an inch of an ally’s territorial integrity to a hostile power. Especially if you expect allies when that hostile power tangles with you.
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Maybe we disband NATO, but give Latvia all our nuclear weapons.
You just don’t get it. No peacekeepers would be going anywhere. Combat troops would go to Russian encampments and annihilate the enemy. It is war.
NATO troops kill the invading army.
What part of “invading a country starts a war” is unclear to you?
If Russia starts a war, the front will run from the Arctic through the Middle East, in all likelihood.
Could spiral? Dude, you just don’t get it. Russia invading NATO IS A HUGE DEAL FROM MOMENT ONE. That’s why we need to make sure Russia isn’t tempted to start a war, by having an alliance that will impose the most extreme costs on Russia if they attempt to conquer peaceful countries.
Why is it that in all your scenarios, you brush off Russian invasions as “oh well, boys will be boys!” but the collective defense of the victims is viewed as a completely insane act?
I’m just being a pragmatist here. I don’t want to see war. The fact that humans spend so much time killing each other in horrific ways, is insane. I think there are very, very few political scenarios that could not be resolved diplomatically and would truly necessitate people actually killing each other.
If the choices are “one country gets taken over by Russia” and “dozens of countries have a war with Russia” I would choose the former. The only situation in which I wouldn’t, is if Russia was committing horrific war crimes and genocide against whatever country it took over. Do you think that’s likely to happen? I don’t. Maybe it was under Josef Stalin, but Vladimir Putin isn’t Stalin, no matter how bad he might be.
I understand the idea that not honoring our treaty makes America look like a bitch. I get it. I don’t want that anymore than you do. But I want a military conflict with Russia even less.
Why isn’t “NATO remains a strong defensive alliance to deter Russia from starting WW3” an option for you?
Hey, does anyone remember what caused NATO Article 5 - the mutual protection one - to be invoked for the first and only time? All the NATO members who could contribute paid a butcher’s bill as a consequence of that in Afghanistan.
The reason why there have been several references to WWII and specifically Poland is that you have the same attitude as many before WWII, including Neville Chamberlain. Basically, a strong, united front is how you prevent the war you want to prevent, and your way is how to encourage Putin et al to do something very, very stupid. Even taking the US out of the equation, there is a possibility that the rest of NATO will fight…and, you know, they have nukes too, right? So, while the fallout, er, so to speak might not include the US (it might, too), a hell of a lot of people could potentially die because one balding idiot miscalculated due to some other idiots (including one orange haired one I can think of) fucked up and lead to that miscalculation.
I think Churchill summed it up best when he spoke to Chamberlain after the Munich agreement: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.”
If we simply stood down and let Russia attack one ally without doing anything, why would Russia choose to stop there? If we won’t fight for Latvia, why should Russia think we’d fight for Lithuania or Estonia? Or Poland or Romania or Hungary or Slovakia or the Czech Republic? Or Germany or France or the United Kingdom? If you think Putin won’t grab whatever he can take, you have a much higher opinion of his good character than I have.
I never said we should fight for Ukraine or Georgia. We have no alliance with those countries so we can deplore their occupation but we’re not bound to fight for them. But we have drawn the line at the borders of NATO and we should stand on that line.
Trump has also repeatedly said things which make it sound like he thinks that NATO, instead of being a defensive alliance, is some sort of protection racket. Instead of saying our NATO allies should spend enough on their own military forces to contribute to the collective defense (as previous administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, have done), Trump has implied that our NATO allies need to be paying us.
“Nice little country you have there. Be a shame if something were to…happen to it. Capisce?”
My President, the Gangster. :smack: