Not “every country” has signed a memo offering various security guarantees in return for a nation handing over its nuclear arsenal.
The cost of effectively nodding at one of the signatories blatantly violating the memo is, of course, that similar attempts at disarmament in the future will be met with incredulity or laughter.
So you are right, there is nothing legally compelling any signatory to enforce the provisions of the memo. Not doing so, though, has some costs.
To this account I will add: that nuclear disarmament will be seen as most unwise.
Putin will more likely interfere in the Balts (indirectly) than in C Asia. In the latter he has China, on whom he has economically tied his country’s future, who will not approve and big Countries bordering C Asia like Turkey, Iran and Pakistan who will not be happy at Russia returning.
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On the first point, your own cite clearly states that the Iranian was indeed flying “a known commercial route,” exactly like the Dutch plane was. Never for a moment did it go off course.
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Flying the same vector and from the same direction that an F-14 responding to a potential call from an Iranian gun boat being pursued by a US warship would be flying from. In an extremely time compressed and volatile situation.
So, no…not exactly like a plane clearly flying a commercial air line route and freaking 30,000+ feet (which no sane attack bird from the Ukraine would be flying at) and in a non-time compressed situation. What the fuck did the ‘pro-Russian’ crew of that SAM think was attacking them from that vector and altitude at that time and in those circumstance? Walk me through the logic here on how this ‘mistake’ is comparable to that of the Vincennes, and how what I said was ‘another falsehood’ (unless you meant that both were covered up, in which case I agree there was a cover up in both cases).
The key point is that it was taking off later than it was scheduled to, and it was coming from approximately the same direction and vector that an F-14 being scrambled would be coming from…and that the Vincennes had very little time to make a determination as to whether it was hostile or not, seeing as how they were actually in (acknowledged, rather than claimed) Iranian national waters and in pursuit of an Iranian gun boat at the time with shots already having been fired.
It was a fucked up situation all around and a lot of mistakes were made due to that. I’m not seeing where the critical time compression and fog of war factor was involved in this shooting in the Ukraine.
The US and UK guarantee THEY won’t violate Ukraine’s territorial integrity. There is not a word in the Budapest Memorandum that says they’ll protect Ukraine from anyone else threatening its territorial integrity.
Yes, the memo doesn’t legally oblige the other signatories to uphold the terms of the memo against defaulters in any way (unless the defaulters use nukes).
Though if they don’t on their own volition, the worth of such memos may be considered questionable in the future.
Exactly what good are guarantees that are not backed up by any consequences for failure to adhere to them?
The “value” of putting pressure on a defaulter is exactly the value these countries place on nuclear disarmament.
I believe the official line is that they thought it was an AN-26 troop transport plane, not an “attack bird”. Of course, AN-26s don’t fly as high as commercial planes and don’t follow commercial routes, but frantic Russian handwave.
I dunno, he’s obviously dumb enough to still think of geopolitics in 19th century terms.
In the real world, we’ve kind of understood by now that having friendly, economically prosperous neighbours is preferable to straight up owning them and having to spend millions keeping control over them. And it’s not like Russia needs a buffer from Zee Germans.
I guess I’m just kind of baffled as to *why *he’s doing it in the first place. And I don’t think “because he can” is a good enough reason, he’s not George Mallory :).
I think there’s a common problem in looking at what other countries are doing. When you’re on the outside (like we are) you tend to look mainly at the foreign policy issues in a situation like this. But to the people making the decisions, the domestic policy issues outweigh the foreign policy issues.
My guess is that Putin’s main goal is domestic, even though he’s invading another country. He’s using a successful military operation to quiet political opposition against his regime.
To be cynical, precedents are probably irrelevant. What are the chances the world will ever again see a situation where a nuclear power peacefully breaks up and we have to diplomatically convince some of the successor states to give up their holdover nuclear weapons?
I’m going to assume that if Scotland wins its independence, London will quietly redeploy any nuclear weapons to another part of the UK before it takes effect. (Britain’s nuclear arsenal is, in fact, based in Scotland. But it’s all based on submarines, which makes it easy to move.) And there doesn’t appear to be any other situation where this could be an issue on the horizon.
Well, that goes to show that you’re not Russian. If you had grown up in a country that had undergone the kind of trauma that the Germans inflicted last time (and of course the that Russians inflicted on themselves), and had long memories of being invaded by every major European power (including France and the UK) you might not dismiss 19th century geopolitics with a sophisticated chuckle.
I don’t think to quiet opposition exactly since he’d quieted it already. Especially if considering his recent actions, or just in isolation: why do something as extremely irresponsible as give heavy SAM’s to some combination of rogue non-state actors and your own clandestine military operatives? (take you pick as to what the ‘eastern Ukraine rebels’ really are, or some combination of those two things). His approval is something like 80% in Russia before that.
Today’s WSJ had a good piece by Holman Jenkins, most brilliant business columnist around IMO, but also turns the same sharp logic on foreign affairs sometimes His suggestion is that Putin’s goal is domestic, but a longer game where he thinks it secures his long term future better to completely rupture relations with the West and then take advantage of pressure the West might put on Russia’s economy to be a national savior, scrapping any remaining facade of democracy in Russia and just becoming president-for-life outright. Ie that Putin was rattled by the experience of the last election, and demonstrations that followed it, and doesn’t want to take any chance facing the voters again, even in a rigged election.
So by that theory it’s domestic, but somewhat darker than just creating feel good moments for passive domestic consumers of state propaganda. Rather he’s actually trying to provoke a more serious crisis with short term damage to Russia, that he can use to transition away from fake democracy to a more secure dictatorial/totalitarian state where he can die in bed in Russia with his money. He’s only in his early 60’s and apparently healthy. Actuarially he’s got a long way to go just quieting opposition even in a sham democracy. He may think a crisis, or even a larger war, can help him secure a form of govt, with him still in charge obviously, that’s less work keeping the public happy.
But still along “a known commercial route,” which you have earlier implied it did not.
They probably mistook it for a AN-26, as Kobal2 pointed out.
How could they possibly have done so? Might have something to do with the fact that they’re drunken irregulars / amateurs, who - as I have already pointed out - had been downing Ukrainian planes for a little while already. (The USS Vincennes, on the other hand, was run by pros - so there’s another difference.)
“Critical time compression” = Probably not as extreme as in the case of the USS Vincennes - the idea was probably more along the lines of “if we let that plane slip through and complete its mission, more of our friends will die.”
“Fog of war” = Absolutely, with lots of Ukrainian planes over rebel territory for a while now, compounded by the fact that the rebels are pretty amateurish.
Anyway: I see similarities, you see differences - I don’t think either of us is going to change his opinion.
Any form of disarmament (not just a break-up into successor states) would require a state to give up its arms, presumably in exchange for some form of security guarantees.
This precedent simply makes that a harder sell. Give up your arms, so the new narrative goes, and the world will shrug its collective shoulders when a guy like Putin comes along and makes the disarmed state dance like an old wild west villian - by shooting at its feet. Dance, sucker, dance! Agreements to the contrary not in the form of actual military alliances are not worth the paper they are printed on.
The lesson is inescapable - having nukes is better than not having them. Which does not exactly bode well for world security.
I agree. But personally I think the idea of voluntary nuclear disarmament has already been thrown under the train. And it was the United States that did it.
The supposed agreement in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was that nuclear powers all agreed to not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear powers. This gave an incentive to countries to not develop nuclear weapons - it supposedly immunized them from a nuclear attack.
And then there was the Gulf War on 1991. Iraq was not a nuclear power. So it should have been immune from the threat of being attacked by nuclear weapons. But then the United States government announced it had a new policy. Chemical and biological weapons were classified as Weapons of Mass Destruction along with nuclear weapons. And we said that if Iraq used its Weapons of Mass Destruction by making chemical weapon attacks, we would respond with our Weapons of Mass Destruction by making nuclear weapon attacks.
This was a clear violation of the spirit of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty even if it somehow slipped through some loophole. It was now clear that there was no real protection offered by foregoing nuclear weapons.
It seems to me that some sort of HARM (homing anti-radar missle) would be the best counter to the BUK threat. I wonder if the Ukrainian Air Force trains for a “wild weasel” mission.
Transponder signals are, in essence, what a plane uses to announce its identity to the outside world, and Iran Air 655 was sending both a civilian and military transponder signal, Pentagon officials say.
In all fairness, that would be reason enough to heighten the level of alert on the ship. Transponders identify the aircraft as a friend or foe. It was sending both. Not that the result is any the less tragic, but it is more understandable than MH17’s demise.
“Inescapable”? I don’t see a “lesson” here at all. Can you describe the scenario in which Ukraine’s possession of nuclear weapons could have avoided the present situation? Should they have nuked Russia, or nuked the southern or eastern parts of their own country? It seems to me that the real lesson of nuclear weapons in the evolution of the nuclear age is that there is no situation in which a sane power would ever use them.