I do agree there are limits…but good strategy means pushing at them.
Again, tricky. If Russia invades Latvia, NATO will have to make airstrikes on targets inside Russia, airbases especially, but also supply chains. It would be a suicidal strategy to limit operations solely to within Latvia.
(I keep wanting to type “Latveria.” Sorry, comic book geek.)
Someone forgot to tell this to ISIS
ISIS isn’t waging “war”. That’s the trouble with dealing with the sort of military-cross-terrorist thing they are doing; it doesn’t fit neat little definitions. “Declare war” on ISIS, go ahead. What exactly have you just declared war upon?
Everyone who waves their black flag or swears loyalty to ISIS. Admittedly, they’re harder to identify than a German panzer division, but when they’re screaming “Allah Ackbar! This is for ISIS!” or something like that while running their hijacked truck through a crowd, we can make a reasonable guess that they’re our enemy.
Didn’t we declare war on Barbary pirates twice?
They are, more or less, in Syria and Iraq (and to a much lesser extent, Libya). It’s just everywhere else, they operate like traditional terrorist cells like Al Qaeda and they inspire disaffected, sometimes self-radicalized muslims to carry out completely random terrorist attacks.
A lot of what ISIL is doing is war. They have a leadership, they have seized territory, they have been administering that territory with a government, they have been supplying themselves, etc. I’m frankly not sure why you think you can’t call what they are doing a war, and you haven’t explained it at all.
I doubt we’d see attacks against targets inside Russia. Just like we didn’t attack targets in China or Russia during the Korean or Vietnam Wars. The political goal of limiting the war would outweigh the military disadvantage.
It’s very war-like, yes. But it’s also not; if you beat them militarily and they technically withdraw their forces, have you really won?
The point of my post was that a “war” is a specific period of military action, conducted between states, with specific purposes, and (usually) defined beginning and ending points. As we’re finding with the so-called Islamic State, the edges are being quite blurred; at what point will this “war” be over, one wonders?
The abrupt end to a war leading to a surrender and/or occupation with virtually complete peace afterward only happens occasionally. Plenty of military campaigns have “ended” but conflict kept on going through insurgencies - Napoleon’s conquest of Portugal and then Spain in the Peninsular War, the Spanish-American War leading to the Philippine-American War, the Japanese conquest of the Philippines, the German occupation of most of France, and of course the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
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if you beat them militarily and they technically withdraw their forces, have you really won?
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Well…yeah. Is this a trick question? If you’ve beaten their up front military units and forced them to withdraw you’ve most likely hurt or even destroyed those units in the open and you’ve denied or at least heavily impeded their use of that territory for recruitment, for funding and for training and forced them to go back underground and into the shadows. You haven’t completely beaten them until the local people are so opposed to them that they help hunt them down like dogs, so it’s not a total victory, but you’ve certainly ‘won’ in just about every meaning of that word that’s applicable.
For most of human history this simply isn’t true…and there is no reason to have such a narrow definition of ‘war’ today either, not with organizations like ISIS who ACT like states (i.e. they take and hold territory, they put in a civilian infrastructure and bureaucracy, impose taxes and provide services, have a standing military, etc etc). There have been plenty of historical wars that didn’t have a neat and clean end and where an insurgency went underground after being militarily defeated to fight on from the shadows.
Speaking for myself, the anxiety is because I think Trump will do what’s best for Trump, not what’s best for the USA. If these means giving Putin a free hand in the Baltics, Syria, Ukraine, or anywhere else, then so be it. Based on his statements, Trump seems as if he essentially doesn’t care what happens to other nations, even those that hold to Western* values were they to be attacked by nations that don’t. I believe Trump would not respond in a scenario where Russia attacks the Baltics or Poland, if China were to attack Taiwan or Japan, or if North Korea were to attack South Korea. It’s like Trump doesn’t care if the bad guys (nations without Western values) beat other good guys (nations with Western values) as long as the USA doesn’t have to get involved.
In my previous post I mentioned the title “leader of the free world.” My guess is that Trump would disavow the title proudly. It might not take a war, we’re probably at the point where as of 1/21/17 it wouldn’t be a stretch to call Angela Merkel the leader of the free world, or perhaps to say that such a position no longer exists and that Obama was the last unofficial holder of the title.
Where did you get this definition of war?
Do you think that the Revolutionary War was a war? It doesn’t meet your definition on several points. On the other hand, I think it clearly was a war.
I seriously see no merit to the argument that ISIL is not conducting a war, or that others are not conducting a war on ISIL. It’s pretty ludicrous, to my view, to watch what is happening in Mosul and elsewhere and say, “Yeah, that isn’t a war because it fails some pointless aspect of what I think a war should be when I look at it in a certain way.”
To be rather blunt, what’s the point of this semantic nitpicking? Bombs are being dropped, people are being killed, bullets are being fired, etc. This sounds like two surgeons debating over a patient who has suffered major injury: “Well, has she lost 2.7 liters or 3 liters of blood? Because here at this hospital, we define hemorrhage as losing three liters of blood, whereas your definition might be different.”
The original statement was that, as a rule in recent times, “wars” are limited to the region they started in. Someone offered ISIS as an example of someone who doesn’t follow this rule. My point was that the self-named Islamic State isn’t waging a “war”, so it sees no reason to limit its application of violence to a specific region.
Ravenman, what particularly about our Revolutionary War did you think doesn’t meet the definition? At the outset, it wasn’t a war. It was a relatively un-co-ordinated military insurrection by the colonists against the attempt by the English crown to impose certain decisions of Parliament. But when the colonists united and formed a polity which purposefully engaged in military operations designed to obtain specific goals, it became a war. I guess YMMV.
I’m not sure how you measure that the Americans constituted a state and ISIL does not constitute a state. I’m not talking about the relative merits of either, I’m just talking about statehood.
ETA: but this is aside from the point that I’ve never heard a definition of war that requires that only states can wage it. Again, I would like to know where you got your definition.
In the absense of declared wars these days, legally speaking, there are international armed conflicts (involving more than one nation-state) and non-international armed conflicts, which are usually civil wars or single country-only insurgencies where there are no other countries directly invovled. Here, Da’esh considers itself a state - it’s right there in their English name, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. It has many of the hallmarks of a state - borders consisting of fixed territory it controls, its own currency, limited bureaucracy administering the territory it controls, and it insists that it has the exlusive right to control the territory that it occupies and the people living on it. It is not diplomatically recognized by anyone as a state, but for all intents and purposes, it is a de facto state. Even if it wasn’t, the fact that the governments of Syria and Iraq are fighting it separately would qualify this as an international armed conflict.
You can cling to an idiosyncratic definition of a “war,” but in terms that are actually used in day-to-day international parlence, “war” is an outdated term that is informally used to describe any armed conflict and is not used with any kind of strict criteria, unless you want to argue that war on terror, war on drugs, and the war on Christmas also conform to your definition.