What I mean is that even though the North Vietnamese. the Ayatollah’s Iranians, and the Taliban never invaded the US, they were none the less able to influence the American public to vote differently. The Iranian hostage crisis contributed to Reagan’s election. The ongoing casualties inflicted by the North Vietnamese contributed to LBJ not running and Nixon beating the Democratic nominee. The ongoing war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with ISIS, Al Qaida, the Taliban, and so on, contributed in part to Americans decreased support for those wars, and subsequently to Obama beating McCain. Ukraine could pull off a similar feat without having to invade Russia.
And that’s all I said. When a war is going badly, the next step to convince a wavering population to hang in there is to claim that if the war is not won abroad, the fight will come home. This works particularly well in Russia, a paranoid country whose rulers have blamed its failings on big bad external threats since the revolution. And of course they WERE invaded by Germany, and lost millions of soldiers fighting them off.
Whether or not Putin believes it is irrelevant.
Those are terrible analogies - limited wars against weak countries far away, while America was the main superpower on Earth. But note that America used the same argument in the war on terror and the invasions of Afghanistan and Kuwait: Fight them overseas, or we will be fighting them at home.
To avoid category errors, it’s important to put yourself in the mind of your enemy as much as possible. So let’s do it by analogy.
Imagine if Mexico had been a US territory recently, as well as Canada, but we both cut ties with the U.S. Now imagine Russia comes calling, and offers Canada entry into the new Warsaw pact. We accept. Now there are Russian soldiers, missiles and equipment in Canada on your northern border, and we start acting belligerant.
In the meantime, you perceive the rest of the world as being increasingly hostile to you. Then suddenly Mexico announces that it wants to be in the Warsaw pact too. It atarts getting advisors and material support from Russia. China announces it will help Russia arm Mexico. For good measure, Mexico used to be part of America just a generation ago, and there were still Americans in Mexico who wanted to remain allied with America.
In the meantime, the world is hitting you with more and more sanctions, and thr push for global warming mitigation is threatening your only real source of wealth, oil and gas. You are getting hit from all sides, militarily, diplomatically, and economically.
Of course this is a paranoid dark fantasy - all Putin would have had to do to protect Russia was to become a decent international player and stop invading neighbors. But that’s not the way he thinks. He sees nothing wrong with what Russia has done, and simply thinks that the world is now arrayed against him.
That’s a really dangerous place to be when you have access to 6,000 nuclear warheads. Threating to personally punish him when the war ends is not helpful.
Indeed, that is what I believe she meant, but it could be interpreted mistakenly or as propaganda as saber rattling. We need to give Putin an out. Again, my favorite is the Russian Afghanistan ploy; declare victory and go home.
I was given to understand that Johnson was in very bad health.
Nope. I am not going to go digging for my own opinions to satisfy you. You made the claim, you back it up. Show me where I criticized anything Biden has done in support of the war. Or just drop it, because I really don’t care and won’t hold you to it.
Yes, the same argument was made, but when McCain lost in 2008 it didn’t result in Bush Jr. pushing the red button. If he had given the order to launch nukes just because Obama beat McCain, the people who have their finger on the button would likely have disobeyed the order.
I think it’s likely Putin doesn’t make it out of this war alive, no matter what happens. But barring them launching the nukes, Russia itself will be fine, and the people who actually control the button (or whatever they actually use in Russia) are presumably aware of that.
He was, and he did eventually die from a heart attack right around the time his hypothetical second term would have ended. None the less, he was planning on running in ‘68, but ended up changing his mind, in large part due his decreased popularity due to the unpopularity of the Vietnam war.
Well, you can’t do that, because there is no victory to declare. ‘Going home’ would mean prolonging the war, and Putin likely winning eventually.
What I had in mind would be to give Putin a no-win scenario, but one in which he might actually survive if he chooses well. Something like this:
"Vlad, you have two choices: You ARE going to lose the Donbas - that is inevitable. Try to leep it, and we’ll arm Ukraine with everything we have short of nukes and let them use those weapons any way they want. And they are pissed. Go that route, and you lose the Donbas and Crimea and you will be held to account and Russia will pay reparations forever.
"Your second choice is to withdraw your military back inside Russia proper, completely out of Ukrainian Territory. We will negotiate shared use of Crimea, or make Crimea a Demilitarized zone. You can tell your people you saved Crimea from complete destruction and you ‘de-Nazified’ Ukraine, even though we know that was bullshit from the start. But if you need it to save your sorry ass, you do that.
Your other alternative is to keep teying to destroy Ukraine. You will fail, because we will continue to arm them until you do. Then Ukraine will destroy every military vehicle and every soldier in Ukraine, including in Crimea, and there will be notning left to push back into Russia and you’ll be a man without much of a military.
And if you think launching a nuke will save you, let’s just say that if you do, your ancestors will curse your radioactive remains. Got it?"
Anyway, there is one way in which Kamala’s comment might have been smart - if it was a precursor to negotiations. As in,“Get out of Ukraine if you want to live. If we have to push you out by force, we will go on with that military tribunal. Play ball, and we might just let that go and you can live out the rest of your life in your kleptocrat Dacha. Don’t play ball and what Russians are left will curse your swinging corpse.”
IMHO the problem with this scenario is that it doesn’t actually guarantee Putin making it out of the war alive. It’s liable to piss off the people with guns and tanks (Prighozin seems like he’s already starting down that path), and increase the chances that they will turn those weapons against Putin.
That’s all true. At this point, I’m not sure there are any soft landings left, and people in Europe should be buying iodine pills and Geiger counters. But if there is some way to climb down from this, something like I suggested is at least plausible.
I do not think it’s likely that this will wind down in an orderly fashion. I think there is at least a 50/50 chance of at least one nuclear bomb going off before this is done.
Many analysts think a single bomb strike is impossible, as retaliation would be demanded if a European city was destroyed by a nuke. That’s always been the question: is a limited nuclear war even possible when all sides have nukes? If not, we should be prepared for everything up to and including a global holocaust.
A Nuclear war would make our fear of global warming look almost silly. Even a limited nuclear exchange would result in a deep global depression and huge environmental and human destruction. I can’t believe how cavalier some people are being about it.
I doubt anyone thinks Global Thermonuclear War (or “a limited nuclear exchange”) is any kind of acceptable exit condition, for obvious reasons.
TL;DR. Any settlement that depends on Russia keeping its pledges is worthless. Russia’s credibility is zero. The absolute minimum that Ukraine could accept- that it ought to accept if they aren’t imbeciles- is a unilateral Russian withdrawal from Dombas, and a complete demilitarization of Crimea. That would return to the pre-invasion status quo. Since any Russian promise not to invade Ukraine again is worthless (see first sentence), Ukraine either outright joins NATO or receives massive military aid in armor, planes, missiles and artillery, to the point they’re as well-armed as if they were part of NATO.
This. Nuclear deterrence was always based on the stance that in the end we would suffer a nuclear war rather than acquiesce to nuclear blackmail and unconditional surrender. Otherwise, why shouldn’t a sufficiently megalomaniacal dictator with enough fanatical followers to launch the nukes demand the total surrender of the planet?
I would argue that the more fundamental problem is that it treats Putin as a rational actor who is looking for an optimax resolution to this war (that he unilaterally created) but as I noted previously, Putin is a master troll who has never had a long term strategy beyond “Make Russia Feared Again” and now that he’s fumbled the ball on that he really doesn’t have a viable fallback position. And nothing about this war ever made any rationale sense because even if Russia had succeeded militarily the economic cost of holding Ukraine would have devastated the Russian economy just as effectively as international sanctions. There was never any world in which Putin was going to reconstitute the Soviet Union, and even if he did the same problems that caused the Union to dissolve exist today in spades.
So you really have to think of Putin as a bank stick-up man cum hostage taker who is now making progressively more ridiculous demands for a helicopter and and airplane and a giant bag of money and coke which even he has to realize at this point that he’ll never get. And even if he is ousted in a palace coup (there is virtually no chance that any outside party will have the opportunity to do so, or the influence to hold the leadership if they did) the successor is going to inherit the shame shitball situation with no way to back down without appearing weak, and there is nothing worse to Russians than a weak leader (which is why Putin was so revered until recently while Gorbachev and Yeltsin are regarded with a combination of disgust and hatred inside of Russia).
I don’t know to which people you are referring but this is the very reason that Biden et al are making vague comments about response; they want to be seen as neither acceding nor provoking Putin. But ultimately, whether to use nuclear weapons or not is really in the shaky hands of Vladimir Putin. If he does use weapons, it will almost certainly be within Ukraine and probably against Kyiv in a desperate attempt to decapitate the government and create enough instability to make some kind of advance possible, or in the western regions to stop the flow of weapons or supplies but not so close to Poland or Romania as to be seen as potentially attacking them. The danger is that something goes awry and is seen as an attack against NATO, or that a NATO ally decides to step in directly to forestall further attacks and widens the war into a general European conflict which Putin can’t even hold out against.
Many people I follow (and a few whom I know) are anything but cavalier about the possibility of a nuclear exchange over Ukraine, and a few are even making calculations about just how much of Ukraine it might be worth giving up for even a few years while some miracle of regime change happens in Putin’s Russia. I don’t think that is a good calculus because any gains are just going to encourage Putin (especially if they are clearly about preventing nuclear saber-rattling) and that doesn’t even get into the wildcards that are China and Taiwan or Pakistan and India coming to the conclusion that nuclear conflict is inevitable and maybe survivable if you strike fast and hard, and that way madness lies.
We had five or maybe ten good years after the collapse of the Soviet Union to deal with this problem effectively, and instead US administrations (of both political flavors, it should be noted) fucked around in the Middle East, gorged themselves on cheap Chinese goods and labor, and then got so engaged in a Global War on Terror that they ignored the existential threats of both climate change and massive nuclear arsenals, and now here we are in roughly the same geopolitical situation as circa 1955 only with much more destructive capacity and increasing desperation on all sides.
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I dearly hope Zelensky and his cabinet have deep, very well fortified bunkers in Kiev they can get to on five minutes notice.
I would point out that Crimea holds Sevastopol, home port of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and pretty much the only harbor capable of being that home port on the north shore of the Sea (apart from Odessa, but that’s not going to be Russian any time soon). Russia has a lease on the base until 2042, and it was used as a point of origin for the “little green men” who invaded and took over Crimea in 2014.
Demilitarizing Crimea would mean Russia giving all that up - essentially, it would sign away the Black Sea Fleet. That would be an extremely bitter pill for even a prostrate Russia to swallow. Perhaps finding some way to exclude anything more than, say, a rifle company worth of troops from Sevastopol, with Russia keeping the harbor as a naval base, would be sufficiently palatable for a Russian leader suing for peace.
Well what would happen to the Sevastopol base if Ukraine invaded Crimea and bodily pushed/killed all Russian ground forces off the peninsula?
That had less to do with North Korean good will and more with being told by the Soviet Union and China that they would not back an unapproved invasion of South Korea. This didn’t prevent North Korea from trying to decapitate the South Korean government or conducting commando raids into the south.
I’m not saying that’s impossible - though it would probably be very difficult; Sevastopol has been besieged before and it took 8 months for Germany to take it in 1942. I’m merely stating that “demilitarize Crimea” is a negotiating point that would be really hard for Russia to accept, something on the order of “give up a third of your navy.” If we’re looking at directions toward peace, we need to keep Russia’s point of view in our minds when we think about acceptable exit conditions.
Russia had negotiated access and naval basing to Sevastopol as part of Ukrainian independence, an agreement that was fully honored by Ukraine until Russia decided to void it by militarily annexing the Crimea. Fuck “Russia’s point of view” if that means giving them a foothold for future aggression.
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