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General Discussion => The Speakeasy: OOG/Off-topic Discussion => Topic started by: Makkal on 30 Jun 2015, 23:16
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Presuming you don't know, Russia decided to gobble up part of the Ukraine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014%E2%80%9315_Russian_military_intervention_in_Ukraine) because it's Russia and it could. Likewise, they deployed Iskander missiles (http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-placing-state-of-the-art-missiles-in-kaliningrad-2015-3?op=1) to Kaliningrad, a violation of cold war treaties.
The response from NATO was basically warily clenching its sphincter; people objected and there was increased air coverage, but no action was taken to punish Russia. However, US troops did travel to the Baltics and are currently in a number of training exercises with local troops.
Now Russia is making noises at the Baltics, (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33325842) specifically Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This is troubling because those are NATO nations. If Russia invades them, the other NATO nations (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/North_Atlantic_Treaty_Organization_%28orthographic_projection%29.svg/550px-North_Atlantic_Treaty_Organization_%28orthographic_projection%29.svg.png) are obliged to come to the aid of any member who is under armed attack.
That means the US, the UK, France, and Germany going to war with Russia. Some people are suggesting this would be "World War III," but that would only happen if China (or another power) were to ally with Russia, and I don't see that happening. Russia, however, has nukes, and the US has war fatigue. It's also possible that NATO lets the Baltics fall to Russia.
The problem here is Putin. There's every bit of evidence that he sees himself as a strong-willed Ubermench and Western leaders as weak-minded and unable to commit. Propaganda in Russia is strong, and there's evidence that even liberal Russians view NATO as a tool of American imperialism, and would buy into a narrative wherein a fight between Russian and NATO forces is defending Russia from Western aggression.
Putin believes that that NATO won't respond to Russia invading the Baltics, so he's likely to invade the Baltics. If NATO does send troops, he's likely to use tactical nuclear strikes under the assumption that Western (mostly American) forces won't nuke back for fear of escalation. Even if they do, the battlefield is the Baltics. The Russian government doesn't seem to care much for their own people, Latvia becoming a nuclear wasteland is probably fine.
In an exchange where both sides are only using tactical nuclear strikes, Russia continues to have the logistical edge. They could win.
He's a man who's playing chicken with the sincere belief that whomever he's going up against will swerve first, because he's motherfucking Putin and they're not.
I'm not saying we're headed toward MAD. I believe Putin is right in his assessment of the willingness of foreign powers to deploy nukes. If he starts dropping them, the US will spend a decade building up its anti-missile technology before daring to respond. I am saying that I feel for the people in the Baltics because their best case scenario is a bloody conflict, while their worst one is having their cities and people burned to radioactive ash, which is terrifying.
I expect James Bond will see a jump in popularity in the coming decade and the US regress socially.
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I realize that the above post sounds alarmist. A lot of it is speculation based around the attitude and beliefs of a world leader I've never sat down and had tea with.
It's possible that NATO just lets the Baltics fall and issues sanctions. That's pretty much seceding the war. At that point, there's no reason for Russia to give a fuck about the desires of NATO countries, which means an increase in Russian aggression.
It's also possible that Russia lets off a tac-nuke in the Baltics, the American people freak out, and the US military decides to launch a preemptive strike against Russia itself that lays waste to most of its cities, and then has to weather a (weak) secondary strike. We could do so. On a sociocultural level, the fallout from that would be fascinating.
It's also possible that Putin has a horrible accident, and everyone mourns the passing of a great leader.
There's also China to consider in all this. Their standing policy is 'if someone, anyone, launches nuclear missiles at anyone else, we'll launch ours at them.' Of course, that policy was created some time ago, and modern Chinese military leadership may revisit it.
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NATO reacting if they attack baltic countries... Like the UK was supposed to defend Ukraine according to the treaty of nuclear demilitarization of Ukraine after the collapse of Warsaw Pact ?
Ok, I may be a bit cynical over that one, and I guess NATO would react in such a case... But well. I am not that confident recently in NATO's ability to back up their interests...
Anyway, those countries are also EU countries, and I highly doubt that Putin would go that far... Well, he is not an idiot, quite the contrary.
I am not sure what suddenly makes you say that Russia is going for baltic countries... ? I know those are extremely scared of the neighbor ogre and probably the most anti Putin voices in the EU currently but well...
There is a difference between shows of force, muscle flexing and everything else at the boundary, and actual invasion... We are not talking about Georgia here...
Edit : also, China and Russia have always hated the guts out of each other (which may be less true now that the Soviet Union has fallen)... Not that it prevents them to cooperate in face of adversity and necessity though.
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NATO reacting if they attack baltic countries... Like the UK was supposed to defend Ukraine according to the treaty of nuclear demilitarization of Ukraine after the collapse of Warsaw Pact ?
Ok, I may be a bit cynical over that one, and I guess NATO would react in such a case... But well. I am not that confident recently in NATO's ability to back up their interests...
They have the ability. The question is whether they have the desire. Letting the Baltics fall to Russia is always an option. It makes NATO look weak though and sends a clear message that countries that aren't the US, the UK, Germany, and France can hang for all the big boys care.
Anyway, those countries are also EU countries, and I highly doubt that Putin would go that far... Well, he is not an idiot, quite the contrary.
He's a smart man. He's relying on NATO to not commit to defending the Baltics the way it would other parts of Europe... and he may be right.
Is France going to rush to the defense of Estonia? If nuclear missiles start flying, France *could* backhand Russia but doing so means sticking oneself in the crosshairs of a counter bombing.
It's not like Russia could take France with a conventional army. Why bother?
Again, I agree Putin is smart. He also considers himself stronger than Western leaders. Why wouldn't he invade the Baltics when he assumes the response will be whining and inaction?
I am not sure what suddenly makes you say that Russia is going for baltic countries... ? I know those are extremely scared of the neighbor ogre and probably the most anti Putin voices in the EU currently but well...
There is a difference between shows of force, muscle flexing and everything else at the boundary, and actual invasion... We are not talking about Georgia here...
Because Russian military leaders are talking about how recognizing their independence was a mistake. Because the Russian military is actively aggressing a neighbor. Because the Russian military is sending tacnukes to Kaliningrad.
(http://www.ferryto.ie/images/elements/maps/kaliningrad_map.jpg)
From Kaliningrad, the iskanders can hit Lithuania or Poland, and Russia has shown no interest in Poland.
I don’t think Russia is committed. I think Russia is testing to see what the international response to its activities are. Right now, that response is some tongue clicking.
Here's some more from the BBC: Moving ever closer to a new Cold War (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33237439). Maybe this is all sabre rattling, but remember that sabre rattling can go south fast when it comes to tense military units looking at one another from over a boarder.
Likewise, The Queen of England (http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-33266090&post_id=10206000344240521_10206000344200520) suddenly felt the need to give a speech about the dangers of a divided Europe. It's almost as though she suddenly wanted to remind other European nations, especially Germany, that it's important to work together to defend oneself.
Tangent: I had no idea that there was a country called Balarus hanging around Eastern Europe.
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Uh, not to say I like the actions of Putin/Russia, but...
it's not like the 'west' is doing nothing but 'warily clenching its sphincter'. The 'West' is expanding eastwards for quite some time now, basically in violation of cold war treaties as well, hiding behind the 'right' of free countries to choose for themselves - nonewithstanding that the free 'West' would have had the same free choice to stand by the promise to russia not to expand their sphere of influence eastward.
The situation isn't the result of Putin being around. It's simply that for some time now the 'West' felt safe to go against the agreements it had with Russia. Now Russia responds, as the 'West' was about to stand basically on its lawn with working hard to have the Ukraine join the EU.
Russiamight have chosen less 'diplomatic' means in securing its interests than the 'West' has so far, but that doesn't at all mean that this is by now a situation where both sides contribute towards an escalation.
Putin being removed by having 'an accident' certainly won't change that. It won't have a good smell about it, even it it is a bona fide accident.
Peace in Europe is only possible with Russia, never against Russia. What worries me is more the thought that the US might decide that peace in Europe is not necessarily in their interest.
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I doubt it. Think back a ways, back before Ukraine's EU membership bid was torpedoed (which is where this whole thing started). What were the headlines about? Spying. People were questioning the role of the United States in the world, why they would spy on their allies and why they would interfere in sovereign business. Really, the explosion of Europeanist feelings in Ukraine and Russia's imperialist response was a political godsend to the US government. Flash forward to today, and the latest allegations that the US spied on Brazil and France aren't even headline news.
See, arch-conservative principles (the neocon stuff that exists at the far end of the conservative spectrum) requires a boogeyman. In the end, Putin needs the West to play that role and the US government needs Putin. Before all this happened, the US's role wasn't the only thing being questioned in the world, remember that Putin's role as President was being questioned. He fared worse in the last elections and had to clamp down on native Russian criticism. This was all very deliberate. Putin and the US essentially need to operate at a level of war below confrontation but above pacifism so that they don't have to deal with domestic issues.
This happens everywhere. You'll also likely have noticed that an attempt to engage Iran in peaceful dialogue following their people electing to form closer ties to the Western world (in the form of their election of Rouhani) is presently being torpedoed by congressional Republicans (who offer, as an alternative, tactical bombardment) and Ayatollah Khamenei (who cites sovereignty and their ability to build nuclear weapons as a reason they shouldn't sign a nuclear weapons treaty). And when that looked like it wasn't enough and the two nations might finally overcome the bitter divide, we got Benjamin Netanyahu flying to the US from Israel to make sure we all know we can't trust Khamenei's conservative Iranian faction. Domestic issues be damned and peace be ended, because a lot of people need to make sure this tense, belligerent stance is maintained in order to keep political power.
This exists between the US and Cuba, US and China, China and Japan, and in all manner of strange hateful relationships all over the world in a bid to keep us afraid of a foreign force outside our borders. The Internet is making that far harder to manage. Nowadays, Americans like me usually have spoken to Russians and Iranians in person; we know these people aren't monsters and vice versa. That's shined a very harsh lens on domestic issues and a lot of us are starting to question whether or not we're really getting our money's worth for our government and whether these scary foreigners sometimes have good ideas we can use and ideas they can contribute. Keeping the threat of outside force on the headlines is the only way to keep us from focusing on our own situations and sharing ideas with each other that our governments would consider anathema.
In short, I don't foresee Putin being assassinated. The people most likely to try are the people who need him most.
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Putin is no different than other leaders of bigger and stronger countries.
It all for real started after the (USA backed/organized) coup on the Ukraine.
Loosing another post soviet "friendly" country to the USA is not good and NATO tightening its grip around Russia.
The new Ukraine establishment wants to privatize its land(Private investors can buy it beginning in January 2016.) and allow GMO.
Open invasion of Ukraine is pointless
Best situation for Russia would be another Maidan
(http://i.imgur.com/UzaEGyw.jpg?1)
(https://i.imgflip.com/7tafd.jpg)
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Putin is no different than other leaders of bigger and stronger countries.
It all for real started after the (USA backed/organized) coup on the Ukraine.
Loosing another post soviet "friendly" country to the USA is not good and NATO tightening its grip around Russia.
The new Ukraine establishment wants to privatize its land(Private investors can buy it beginning in January 2016.) and allow GMO.
Open invasion of Ukraine is pointless
Best situation for Russia would be another Maidan
Woah, woah, woah.... as an American, I am highly offended by any implication that NATO has actually had any kind of positive geopolitical affect. If the US was going to start a coup to annoy Putin, they would have helped the Chechens, not the Ukrainians or even Russian mainstream opposition politicians. We all know that my country doesn't back popular dissent, we arm Muslim caliphates. We've got a tradition to uphold.
Seriously, though, this all started when Yanukovich torpedoed his own government's EU association agreement. The Ukrainian protests that followed seemed to be of the mind that Russia was attempting to annex the country again. Which, not helping matters, Putin helpfully did, partially.
I mean, does anyone else sometimes not want to give these idiots credit? The problems happening right now are a general clusterfuck, and I'm surprised more people don't realize that it's not the revolution that was the problem, it was our outdated power structure around it trying to cope. This was all handled so badly that everyone's just trying to make it out of the game having "lost" as little as possible. And all because, surprise surprise, there was actually a popular revolution in Ukraine. Look how hard people try to downplay the popular revolution Iran had recently.
Putin's a big problem for his own country. He's using an old playbook from the Cold War on how you attain and maintain power, one that was pretty thoroughly outflanked by the idea of economic power (that's the one China's made famous). Grabbing Crimea would have been a big deal some 20 years ago, but today that's the kind of thing modern powers use as a justification to deal damage to foreign economies and convince their neighbors that they need closer ties to themselves.
Now, the former Warsaw countries are inviting the US to deploy weapons in their nations and Ukraine is having their gas cut off. Politicians may not be as smart as we think, but there's every possibility a lot of people in two huge American industries are about to make a LOT of money and they'll have Putin, really, to thank. And we'll all be snide about it, because we figure this is political, we aren't getting our leashes yanked around by real opportunists.
And the world goes around...
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@Makkal: I still think you are overexagerating things a bit... Baltic countries, while right to be scared, are in the EU (and hastened to get in for that same precise reason). It's not a hazard that they chose to do so, and the EU, while still fragile on the military and strategic side, is still an entity. Also, Putin has also taken to threaten Finland, and Sweden in the same move. He may be testing how far he can go, but I believe that his goal is not invasion, but pointing out the fact that Russia is under huge geopolitical pressure as well and literally surrounded by NATO and EU influence.
@Vic: actually this new spy scandal is making the headlines here, as it has done when it was about Germany too. It's maybe not a big things in the US, but in Europe, we talk about it.
@Askrajel: that image with the Joker, as caricature as it may be, conveniently forgets that when Russia invaded Georgia, nobody batted an eye either... It's more a matter of if the targeted country holds right in the interests of one of the big powers or not.
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If Putin were anything like The Joker, he would be looking at ways to bail out Tsipras and Greece just for kicks :P and a naval base in the Med. Not that he has any money.
Anyhow. After looking at how successful regime change has been in Afghanistan, Iraq, Tunis, Libya, Egypt, Somalia and Syria, one can just wonder how assassinating the Leader of a Large Country With Nukes would work. 'Cause the others went that well.
Now if you really want to find out what is going to happen, remember that women rule the world. Victoria Nuland saw the Maidan Revolution coming from a kilometre away (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957) (cynics will say she caused it, hahaha, fools), she predicted the regime would fall and even predicted who was going to be part of the new government in Kiev and who was not. So forward looking, I wish I could manage coincidence the way she does. But being married to a PNAC neocon like Kagan is more sacrifice than I could take. She still runs the State Department Euro division, by the way.
Now seriously, my guess is that Putin would try and keep things on the slow burner for a long time. He could stir up trouble forever in Ukraine and the Baltics, maybe Venezuela, and try and make it very expensive for the EU and US to get their way.
Just sayin' ;)
Q
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Dat approval rating though...
89%
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/06/24/putins-approval-ratings-hit-89-percent-the-highest-theyve-ever-been/
Probably not a good idea to assassinate one of Russia's most popular leaders of all time. Lots of angry Russians. Lots.
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@Makkal: I still think you are overexagerating things a bit... Baltic countries, while right to be scared, are in the EU (and hastened to get in for that same precise reason). It's not a hazard that they chose to do so, and the EU, while still fragile on the military and strategic side, is still an entity. Also, Putin has also taken to threaten Finland, and Sweden in the same move. He may be testing how far he can go, but I believe that his goal is not invasion, but pointing out the fact that Russia is under huge geopolitical pressure as well and literally surrounded by NATO and EU influence.
@Vic: actually this new spy scandal is making the headlines here, as it has done when it was about Germany too. It's maybe not a big things in the US, but in Europe, we talk about it.
@Askrajel: that image with the Joker, as caricature as it may be, conveniently forgets that when Russia invaded Georgia, nobody batted an eye either... It's more a matter of if the targeted country holds right in the interests of one of the big powers or not.
I'm just talking about the BBC (I don't actually read much American news here). The spy scandals just drop off the radar these days. That did NOT happen pre-ISIS and Ukraine. And that's crazy, because the idea that the US government was elbows deep in pretty much every government's business on the planet is kind of a big deal. Now we've got lawmakers here in the States using Ukraine as justification that they were right to spy on our allies, even places that had nothing to do with us. At the very least, I'm sure the US government can breathe a sigh of relief that Putin has, at best, swept their own issues under the rug and, at worst, justified them.
And that's kind of a problem, because they can kind of access my webcam and I don't need them cataloging what I say over Teamspeak. I've certainly said things that might make me sound like I think nationalism is a giant lie, more pervasive and insidious than any other cultural identifier we have, and that I think the very idea of different countries turns very real and dangerous ailments to the human condition like war, poverty, and discrimination into political footballs.
But, you know, Putin and all. Rargh rargh. Obviously no one in Russia is rolling their eyes at this nonsense as hard as I am because that's what the news tells me.
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Dat approval rating though...
89%
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/06/24/putins-approval-ratings-hit-89-percent-the-highest-theyve-ever-been/
Probably not a good idea to assassinate one of Russia's most popular leaders of all time. Lots of angry Russians. Lots.
I think this is the biggest reason Putin won't be assassinated by western agents. A sudden decapitation would leave two major scenarios - at best, a power struggle between the nationalists and plutocrats whose position has actually been damaged by sanctions; we have to just pray it doesn't turn into an open civil conflict. At worst, another equally-aggressive nationalist leader rises to take Putin's place... and now knows the west won't hesitate to kill him, too. Neither option is particularly pretty picture.
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I think the current meta-game is that the US will let Russia fuck with it's satellites to a certain level in exchange for staying out of the way a bit when it comes down to it in a few of the upcoming Middle East reshuffles. Thus has it -always- been between them trading various satellites and no-go zones.
There's going to be a lot of nebulous double-think upcoming when the US starts teaming up more and more with Iran and gets more away from the Saudis.
And nobody external is ever assassinating the head of a country with that many nuclear weapons, absolutely never, ever, happening. That is suicide for everyone.
But in general the amount of overall world givings a shit about Russia have about 100% to do with the current oil prices. Prices are in the toilet, the Russian economy is in the toilet because of it, and they are currently getting slammed in international courts for illegally appropriating corporate assets.
The long game of getting away from Russian gas addition by the EU will eventually limit their current fear of pissing off the Russians. IE Germany, etc won't go past certain lines of sanctions or raising trouble because they currently buy too much fuel from Russia. Another decade or two of renewable energy development and the Russian blackmail systems gets less effective.
It's not a coincidence that the push the last 15 years to get the US oil independent with internal fracking is going to coincide with us finally telling the Saudis to go to hell. The same will happen for Europe and Russia.
I also like your observations Vic Van Meter, some good thoughts!
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Inb4 everyone in this thread perishes mysteriously in automobile accidents. :/
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I think the current meta-game is that the US will let Russia fuck with it's satellites to a certain level in exchange for staying out of the way a bit when it comes down to it in a few of the upcoming Middle East reshuffles. Thus has it -always- been between them trading various satellites and no-go zones.
There's going to be a lot of nebulous double-think upcoming when the US starts teaming up more and more with Iran and gets more away from the Saudis.
And nobody external is ever assassinating the head of a country with that many nuclear weapons, absolutely never, ever, happening. That is suicide for everyone.
But in general the amount of overall world givings a shit about Russia have about 100% to do with the current oil prices. Prices are in the toilet, the Russian economy is in the toilet because of it, and they are currently getting slammed in international courts for illegally appropriating corporate assets.
The long game of getting away from Russian gas addition by the EU will eventually limit their current fear of pissing off the Russians. IE Germany, etc won't go past certain lines of sanctions or raising trouble because they currently buy too much fuel from Russia. Another decade or two of renewable energy development and the Russian blackmail systems gets less effective.
It's not a coincidence that the push the last 15 years to get the US oil independent with internal fracking is going to coincide with us finally telling the Saudis to go to hell. The same will happen for Europe and Russia.
I also like your observations Vic Van Meter, some good thoughts!
It really is just a huge generational divide. Putin was born in 1952. John McCain was born in 1936. Xi Jinping was born in 1953. Seyyed Ali Khamenei was born in 1939. They lived through the Cold War; their worldview is built a certain way. It's just a way that means very little to people born even as early as the 1970s. The current generation is growing up knowing two things:
1. They can connect with people around the world and see that other people are the same as they are, either just as kind or just as horrible as people in their own neighborhoods, and...
2. The government doesn't run our countries, our businesses run our countries.
That makes the world much different. A land grab, which used to mean so much in the great dystopian Risk game played during the Cold War, in reality means very little. The only thing it's really worth in the modern day are sea rights and oil drilling rights, and even then oil prices are dropping largely because the world is trying to eradicate fossil fuels for environmental and domestic political reasons (when your conservatives want nothing but energy independence damn the cost and your liberals want to turn your country into a giant wind farm, the only unquestioned loser is a foreign fuels company).
That's why modern winners are generally commercial and industrial giants that profit on the inter-connectivity of the modern world, so we tend to be governed by large business interests. They've learned to cross international borders, turn court systems to their advantage, and waged a marketing campaign that has far better production values than anything a political party can bring to bear. That's fundamentally changed how the world works.
Right now, we talk about the US and Russia, but the most powerful "nation" in the world right now is the European Union. Iran and the US may finally get some kind of deal done and begin working together, not because they stopped hating each other but because the EU sanctions are now the best leverage the US has in the world. Iran's not afraid of our nuclear weapons or our aircraft carriers, they're afraid of being locked out of the money pool. Predictably, the people who are working against the deal are a smaller group of very conservative people on both sides who refer primarily to the Cold War period and use that terminology and worldview. The people working for it are younger and are looking at the world in a more evolutionary way. Right now, Iran has more in common with the US and even the hated Saudis than it does with its own self thirty years ago. There are far too many common interests (ISIS, oil rights, the stability of newly Shiite and mutual ally Iraq, Israel and Hamas jerking them around on their leashes, you could even say that they have a lot in common with equal religious rights considering how many persecuted Shiites live around the Middle East) for the US and Iran to feasibly be ignoring each other. It's like two guys who fought over a girl in middle school still trying to give each other a cold shoulder when the girl's married someone else, they're in college, and they have the same mutual friends who keep inviting them out to do the things they both like to do.
On that note, it's also important to note how crazy that generational gap is in some of these countries. Look at what the Ayatollah says compared to how young Iranians speak. It's like having Pope Benedict's Vatican acting as the supreme leader of Denmark. I have friends from my college days (exchange students) that often talked about how weird it was to have that divide. Imagine if to go from a major city to the suburbs, you had to suddenly act like someone completely different. It was going from tank tops and jeans in Tehran to having to don a full veil in some of its outlying suburbs.
Who knows, one day we'll be the elder statesmen who can't figure out someone's new way of looking at the world.
But back on the topic, the reason I bring this all up is that the last holdouts are the original contestants, Russia and the US. And it's weird to think about Ukraine as a proxy war between the US and Russia when it seems like, to someone removed from the situation, the US is barely involved, the EU is actually about to make a bigger "land grab", it looks like a bunch of arms companies are about to have the "don't piss off the Russians" qualifier removed from their sales guidelines, and Putin is actually opening the door to foreign fossil fuel competition by making Russian companies akin to how we used to see OPEC (ironically because OPEC, specifically the Saudis, are attempting to screw American alternative oil company innovations by making them comparatively too expensive).
People running by the old playbook tend to play well to the news that doesn't really know better, but it looks to me like the US is going to end up being a pitbull on a leash in a chainlink fence around the EU and Putin is shooting his country's economic standing in the foot with a gun the EU gave him. So, weirdly, the major political winner here may end up being the EU.
And I know that accusing the EU of being successful at anything is akin to heresy, especially in the EU, but while everyone was watching China, Russia, and the US, the EU might be becoming the world's real superpower. Commercial interests dominate it, they combine to form the world's largest economy, and while Putin may have just opened a new market in traditional US powerhouse industries, the EU has plenty of fuel companies, they'll own almost the entire Baltic coastline, and they make a ton of the weapons that US companies retail. If it wasn't for Tsipras's little economic suicide bomb stunt going on in Greece and the upcoming UK referendum on leaving the EU, I'd imagine they'd be doing nothing but patting themselves on the back.
But make no mistake, Putin is helping them do it and the US government has decided to just sit back and try not to get too involved. Neither of the "major players" here are going to "win." Russia is going to end up less influential and trusted by its neighbors, the US will end up less influential in the region, and the EU might gain a Ukraine without a Crimea and own the highway to it (and quite possibly Moldova considering it'll be sandwiched completely between two member states). US and EU companies will make a lot of money. The best thing Putin will get is Crimea and possibly some of Eastern Ukraine, unfortunately for him the poorer end.
That all changes if Putin actually does attempt to invade. If the gloves come off, Russia will be beset from all sides. The US would come from the East and the rest of NATO from the west. When Putin made the statement that it would be ridiculous to attack NATO, it doesn't have much to do with equipment or rationale. It's that the Russian army is in no way going to be able to defend both ends of his country from a conventional attack.
Putin's old and out-of-touch with the modern pulse of the world, but even in his old-school worldview he's outgunned. I highly doubt he's going to force everyone's hands in this matter. Honestly, though, he lost as soon as Yanukovich was ousted. Everything from Maidan on out is consolation and damage control, and it hasn't been very delicate.
All I can say on behalf of the United States is that they were smart enough to do nothing. You can screw yourself by that playbook. Putin could have played that same card and used the oil card sympathetically on an EU member state (which is how you do it these days). Instead, he's kind of screwed. If the EU manages to get its shit together and moves quickly, they can essentially shut Russia out of Europe. At the very least, they've got to be kicking themselves for not accepting Turkey for EU membership when they did; they could have run gas and oil straight up through Turkey from the Middle East and sanctioned Russia into oblivion.
I guess everyone's still a little new to this game.
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I don't think it'd be a smart move to oust the Russian oil. The russian economy depends a lot on selling oil to Europe. If we stop buying it, the Russians will see us as responsible for the crash of their economy - and not without reason. In the end that will lead to war, even if Russia can't win it - because they loose as well when they don't and in war they at least feel as if they can do something about their situation.
I'm repeating myself: There can't be peace in Europe against Russia, it's only possible with Russia.
Also, while I think it plays some role, it's not so much about 'outdated' worldviews informing policy making. Having studied history, it seems to me that this model is brought up again and again: Yet in the end interest that are held and ways to pursue them remain largely the same: Only the veneer in which we dress them change, in my opinion.
The 1. point is really nothing new. It's just a bit simpler do do so nowadays. But how many people really do connect? It's a minority. And even if they do, few people generalize their experiences. It can be seen when it's about Christians: The new anti-religious atheists know from experience quite often that not all theists are Westboro fanatics. Yet they apparently love to talk and argue as if all Christians were.
The 2. point is peobably nothing new at all. A working economy is of very high importance for any state's survival. Those that control the economy have always had proportional influence. You can easily see that already in the crusades, especially the fourth, which ended exactly where the economic interests were fulfilled: In Konstantinople.
I personally rather do buy some Russian oil, enjoy friendly trading relations with them and have a peacful Europe, then not buying the oil, be 'free of Russian influence' and be on the brink of a war, because Russia crashes.
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It's not a coincidence that the push the last 15 years to get the US oil independent with internal fracking is going to coincide with us finally telling the Saudis to go to hell. The same will happen for Europe and Russia.
Not necessarily.
Oil fracking is highly polluting and that is one of the reasons that for now it's strictly forbidden in several EU countries.
Which may be subject to change someday though, but there is nothing certain in that regard.
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@Vic:
Moldova and even Georgia have already expressed interest in EU application... And I can understand why Georgia did so (pretty much like the Baltic Countries, but also we often forget how countries like Slovenia have gone from poverty and third world economy to a booming modern country)... But that is exactly what is pissing Putin to no end. He is completely surrounded, and directly at his doors. I can understand why he sees it as a direct threat, and why all this military muscle flexing and nuclear rearmament is happening and showcased with such... desperation.
Turkey is a delicate matter and while it was hotly debate 10 years ago, now that they have elected Erdogan and go the way they are going, nobody bothers with the debate anymore, Turkey basically decided the way they want to go for themselves...
Though oil pipelines are not excluded to still go through, the main issue being that Russia doesn't like it and applies pressure against it, especially since Iran is getting closer to a removal of economical penalties...
There is also the fact that while we look at the real reasons behind it as you nicely explained, there is still a hefty dose of ideology and politics that have to play a certain lever, especially for Putin who is de facto the leader of the traditionalist world and has to cater at least a minimum to the people he represents. I don't think Putin cares for that ideology, but the realities of politics and representation literally demand that he doesn't forget it. While it is the sugarcoat of it, the things that are shown in the media and the justifications for everything as usual, I think that ideological conflict goes deeper since it's basically a clash between traditionalist views (which are a wide majority in the world) and postmodern views.
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More news:
Anti-American Sentiment Surges in Russia (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jun/30/anti-american-sentiment-surges-in-russia-and-the-f/)
That protest movement has long been quashed, but state television and senior politicians continue to demonize the United States against the backdrop of war in Ukraine, where Washington is frequently portrayed as seeking to establish military bases as part of a plan to encircle Russia.
The feeling is mutual. A Gallup poll this year found negative American sentiment toward Russia at a post-Cold War high, with 70 percent unfavorable and 24 percent favorable.
In a fiery broadcast last year, Dmitry Kiselyov, a presenter on one of Russia’s top TV shows, reminded viewers that his country was the only one in the world capable of “turning the United States into radioactive dust.” Mr. Kiselyov also stated on prime-time television that Russia reserved the right to a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States if it thought its sovereignty was in danger.
The message that the United States has become Russia’s avowed enemy was further reinforced last week when the head of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, said in an interview with a Russian government newspaper that Washington “would like it if Russia did not exist as a state at all.”
Russia Blasts Finland Barring Parliament Speaker (http://news.yahoo.com/russia-blasts-finland-barring-parliament-speaker-180408518.html)
Finland and Russia are not getting along well these days.
Want to Escalate US/Russia Tensions? Arm Ukraine (http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/07/02/want-to-escalate-u-s-russia-tension-arm-ukraine/)
United States-Russian military tensions are exploding. On June 23 the Pentagon announced plans to station hundreds of tanks, howitzers and other armor in the Baltics and throughout other East European NATO countries. Russia meanwhile is increasing its forces in Belarus and speeding up the deployment of Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad, the heavily armed Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania.
While both the United States and Russia should step back from the brink, many Obama administration officials are pushing for a dangerous escalatory step: the shipment of billions of dollars of lethal weapons to the post-Maidan government in Ukraine.
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Inb4 everyone in this thread perishes mysteriously in automobile accidents. :/
Mysterious umbrella stab wounds.
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I don't think it'd be a smart move to oust the Russian oil. The russian economy depends a lot on selling oil to Europe. If we stop buying it, the Russians will see us as responsible for the crash of their economy - and not without reason. In the end that will lead to war, even if Russia can't win it - because they loose as well when they don't and in war they at least feel as if they can do something about their situation.
I'm repeating myself: There can't be peace in Europe against Russia, it's only possible with Russia.
Also, while I think it plays some role, it's not so much about 'outdated' worldviews informing policy making. Having studied history, it seems to me that this model is brought up again and again: Yet in the end interest that are held and ways to pursue them remain largely the same: Only the veneer in which we dress them change, in my opinion.
The 1. point is really nothing new. It's just a bit simpler do do so nowadays. But how many people really do connect? It's a minority. And even if they do, few people generalize their experiences. It can be seen when it's about Christians: The new anti-religious atheists know from experience quite often that not all theists are Westboro fanatics. Yet they apparently love to talk and argue as if all Christians were.
The 2. point is peobably nothing new at all. A working economy is of very high importance for any state's survival. Those that control the economy have always had proportional influence. You can easily see that already in the crusades, especially the fourth, which ended exactly where the economic interests were fulfilled: In Konstantinople.
I personally rather do buy some Russian oil, enjoy friendly trading relations with them and have a peacful Europe, then not buying the oil, be 'free of Russian influence' and be on the brink of a war, because Russia crashes.
That's what I'm trying to tell you, though. The entire thought of Russia perhaps being on the brink of war because their oil interests are about to be ousted, it doesn't actually matter. They have access to nuclear weapons, massive arms technologies and a colossal standing army... and technically speaking none of these are worthwhile cards. Putin's actual cards include having a currently existing oil infrastructure, and he just threw that one in the pot and let anyone else who has a hand come to play. And they will.
What's Putin going to do? Start a war in the Baltics with NATO? Nuke Kiev? Think that's going to end on a positive note for his country? He wrote himself into a corner, and there isn't a single thing he can do about it that's going to end up as a surefire gain. His military options might be vast and varied, but none of them will win him anything. At issue here is that the rulebook was fundamentally re-written with the advent of the world economy in the modern world. You've described the scenario perfectly, but I don't think you realized the crucial detail.
Essentially, the US and EU can and have dealt significant damage to Russia without firing a shot. They did it by using Crimea as a context by which to cripple Russia's economy. They're calling Putin's bluff, knowing they have the military superiority, by crashing Russia out of Europe and taking what actually matters. Customers. With fewer people to sell to in the world and with fewer goods he can use as leverage, Putin's in danger of bleeding out his own country. Before, he could at least say that gas supplies had relatively inflexible pricing and he'd have that as a way to force his neighbors to reckon with him. With the Saudis dropping oil prices and the EU having a plethora of sellers interested, that's not a tenable position.
In essence, Putin is trying to intimidate nations but he's actually fighting corporations, and he doesn't have the ammunition or position to do that. He has what he needs to try to fight Poland or Ukraine, not Shell or Vector. They don't care if there's anti-American sentiment (which is sort of ironic, considering America's basically holding up its hands and following Europe's bouncing ball at this point). In fact, arms companies will actually make money based on polls showing the Russians as angry and fixing to invade.
It doesn't matter that Putin would have to be absolutely stupid to launch that attack, they just need to paint him with the correct paint. All Putin's done at this point is taken off his clothes and made sure to raise his arms so they could make sure he had full coverage. It's a tactical blunder, and it's based almost exclusively on not understanding what's going on in the world around him. Re-taking Crimea is a good move in the sense of the 1960s, it's an invitation to be taken advantage of today.
And the Russian people, in the end, will be the ones that pay for it, as they have been paying already. If there's one group of people that these corporate interests don't give a toss about, it's what happens to the Russian people after they take over former Russian markets and crash the currency. Once the wind blows through and more reliable situations exist in Russia for these corporate interests, they can always re-speculate in Russia and make money all over again.
@Vic:
Moldova and even Georgia have already expressed interest in EU application... And I can understand why Georgia did so (pretty much like the Baltic Countries, but also we often forget how countries like Slovenia have gone from poverty and third world economy to a booming modern country)... But that is exactly what is pissing Putin to no end. He is completely surrounded, and directly at his doors. I can understand why he sees it as a direct threat, and why all this military muscle flexing and nuclear rearmament is happening and showcased with such... desperation.
Turkey is a delicate matter and while it was hotly debate 10 years ago, now that they have elected Erdogan and go the way they are going, nobody bothers with the debate anymore, Turkey basically decided the way they want to go for themselves...
Though oil pipelines are not excluded to still go through, the main issue being that Russia doesn't like it and applies pressure against it, especially since Iran is getting closer to a removal of economical penalties...
There is also the fact that while we look at the real reasons behind it as you nicely explained, there is still a hefty dose of ideology and politics that have to play a certain lever, especially for Putin who is de facto the leader of the traditionalist world and has to cater at least a minimum to the people he represents. I don't think Putin cares for that ideology, but the realities of politics and representation literally demand that he doesn't forget it. While it is the sugarcoat of it, the things that are shown in the media and the justifications for everything as usual, I think that ideological conflict goes deeper since it's basically a clash between traditionalist views (which are a wide majority in the world) and postmodern views.
For sure, and I should point out as to the above, I'm in no way saying that what you're describing isn't what people think nor that it's far from a political football. You don't even have to look outside your own country, no matter what it is, to know that "traditional values" and looking backward to earlier times plays well with certain segments of the population (a.k.a. the baby boom). You can gain political power in your own nation this way. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to see the world that way, because global power in the age of ICBMs, air superiority, and of course the ability to crush your enemies economically has made the physical distances of borders and locations almost completely irrelevant.
By that, I mean you can see many people having an aneurysm over whether or not to move weapons into the Baltics. It's a purely symbolic move on the part of anyone involved in doing it (though it is exactly the kind of thing weapons manufacturers make money on) and it represents no actual additional threat to Russia. However, that's what people are focusing on. They're not focusing on what happens if domestic and friendly nations' companies move in on Russian markets and take advantage of their weakness. That's the real threat to Russia, here, because Russia can piss off its neighbors enough to guarantee it will lose a fight with BP. And then Putin will need to somehow convince his neighbors that his oil is worth trusting him over because it's (hopefully) cheaper.
That hearkening for simpler times completely exists, and it's a sentiment that has some kind of exploitation in every nation on the planet to one degree or another. I don't deny it's there or that Putin has to handle it. The problem is, I actually do think Putin buys into that philosophy. Nobody who didn't would sell his economic position to suit a land grab of Crimea; it's not in keeping with a realistic view of the global situation, to put it as mildly as possible.
China's actually conducting what looks like an experiment in that field at the moment at Senkaku. A lot of people think China's trying to claim them for themselves, and in a way they are. However, they know that surrounding the islands with warships weakens their position economically by making them look, well, like Putin. Xi isn't quite that rash, though. China is trying to say that the islands belong to Taiwan, which it claims but doesn't actually claim (they're pulling a long-game of trying to reconnect lost economic ties and re-unify, the latter of which is anathema in Taiwan but the former is very appealing). The tactic currently seems to be to treat the situation the same way, trying to essentially drive Japan off of Taiwan's land.
And that's how you guarantee a win. At the very least, Japan has to defend its own position on the islands to the world and has to perform some manner of development (as they've started to do). If Taiwan ever gains control of the islands, even closer economic ties benefit them. If they can force a negotiation, they can come out with some kind of personal rights over the island. They might even be able to muscle out a deal. However, key to the approach is to make sure they're seen as being big-stick people without ever using it. Never be more trouble than you're worth; China thrives on industrial exports and forms a very vital link in the world's supply chain.
It's a tough balancing act, but Xi Jingping seems to be pulling it off. China is just threatening enough to make sure everyone notices, but not threatening enough to make everyone worried. Best yet, they use their people as an asset to foreign companies, not governments. By allowing access to their population and the lucrative market they comprise without making that look like something that could vanish over an argument, they've got real-world economic power.
Shame about Turkey, though. Just from an economic perspective and with the changing conditions in the Middle East, the EU could call the hand and win all the money in the pot. Like I said, though, the situation in the Middle East is fluid, to say the least. It's funny to think that the worst problem Putin has on his hands isn't America or the EU, it's the Saudis trying to put the strangle on the same oil companies that are looking to snatch up his business.
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Well, Vic, I simply don't agree with your analysis. Even if Russia has nothing to win when going to war, they might yet do it if they have nothing to loose by going to war and their economy is crashed due to no one buying thier oil.
And maybe Putin might not hit the 'true enemy', the corporations if going to war. Yet it will be disastrous for the people of Europe if he does. It might not 'matter' to you and some corporations, but it will very much matter to the people of Europe.
Also, I think you give a bit too much credit to 'the corporations'. Yes, they have influence, but that's nothing really radically new, nothing surprising and it doesn't mean that some old way of politics stopped working, because it's nothing new, really. it's oversymplifying the situation in my book to look at this purely from the economic perspective. Geostrategic advantages are as real today as they were when the traders of Venice re-routed an entire crusade to end in Constantinople.
Anyhow, maybe we should simply agree to disagree.
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The Baltic states have a large population of people who are Russian, but are not full citizens. This is a problem.
The Narva Strategy, is to use those ethnic Russians in an attempt to take control of the city of Narva, and hold a "referendum".
The idea behind it, is to gamble that the NATO countries will be unwilling to commit to defending Narva, or unable to commit before "facts on the ground" are established.
It is intended to call the NATO bluff, because, if they do commit to defending Narva, then the ethnic Russians are deniable. The Kremlin has No Idea Whatsoever as to how those ethnic Russian citizens of Baltic states were able to obtain Russian-army issue hardware, and not just export-model hardware which is what you'd expect "military hobby enthusiasts" to possess. If NATO does not commit to defending Narva, or does not commit in time to prevent the "facts on the ground" being a "democratic referendum establishing the Narva city-state", then it shows that RUSSIA STRONK, NATO PUNY, USA IRRELEVANT, and then Russia can do whatever it wants in the east of Europe, and the EU will just have to live with being a Russian puppet state.
In any case, the bigger issue is this:
A permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, unilaterally redrew its borders by military force, and the UN did absolute bugger all.
The UN is a bust. It's gone League of Nations.
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In any case, the bigger issue is this:
A permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, unilaterally redrew its borders by military force, and the UN did absolute bugger all.
The UN is a bust. It's gone League of Nations.
You refer to the USA, no?
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Pretty sure our borders haven't changed since Alaska and Hawaii became states.
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The United Nations Security Council's big five are the USA, the UK, France, China, and Russia.
Ukraine Says Russian Generals Lead Separatists (http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-07-02/ukraine-says-russian-generals-lead-separatists)
Hardly shocking.
The dossier reports that Ukrainian intelligence services believe there are just under 9,000 Russian regular army soldiers currently deployed inside Ukraine, organized into 15 battalion tactical groups. That estimate could not be independently confirmed. The Russian Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
The Ukrainians also contend that Russia continues to pour heavy weaponry into Ukraine, an accusation often echoed by senior U.S. officials. Those weapons include tanks, armored personnel carriers, and anti-aircraft missile systems similar to the one that accidentally shot down Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17 over Donetsk last year.
On Capitol Hill, there’s bipartisan support for giving the Ukrainian military defensive weapons, given the Russian actions, but the Obama administration has made clear they have no intention of going beyond the limited non-lethal assistance that is currently being provided.
Possibly 9,000 or so Russian troops led by Russian generals along with tanks, carriers, and missile systems, working alongside native separatists.
I expect that the Obama admin will provide 'lethal assistance' at some point, but want to come off as calm, collected, and non-aggressive right now. I do wonder how the presidential elections will spin current events with Russia.
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Pretty sure our borders haven't changed since Alaska and Hawaii became states.
And at least in the case of Hawaii it was quite the typical unilateral (as unilateral as it is with Crimea) annexation. Luckily for the USA, the UN didn't exist by then. Similar is true for USAmerican territories like parts of American Samoa. Manua was annexed in 1904, then added to American Samoa. Swains Island was annexed in 1925 - that's in both cases after the annexation of Hawaii, by the way.
Anyhow, the USA has a long history of agressive foreign policy, acquiring the major part of its current landmass - some more, some less forcefully: The Florida acquisition 1810-19, Texas Annexation 1845 and Mexican Cessation 1848 make up for hughe swathes of the continental territory of the US. And it didn't quite stop there, as pointed out above. Even today the US is very keen to control geostrategically important places through a network of military bases. One only has to take a look at the percentage of Okinawa covered by US military bases - against Okinawan wishes. But hey, Japan agrees with it, no? the question is how much of a choice they have in the matter.
I dislike the portrayal of Russia-USA as one where Russia is this really bad expansionist Empire while the USA is somehow managing to be neither bad nor imperialist nor expansionist. To cite John T. Flynn:
"The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims, while incidentally capturing their markets; to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples, while blundering accidentally into their oil wells."
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There aren't really any countries that weren't formed out of whole cloth by violently taking things from people who were in the way and forcing those people to accept their new overlords, until enough time passed to form some national identity. Too many glass houses to throw those expansionist stones, especially in Europe :)
While we all have faults and certainly much blood and shame on our collective hands, I will in general hold the record of the capitalist democratic western nations against Russia in most things. People weren't running across the Berlin Wall from the West to get into the soviet union. People aren't in rafts from Miami heading into Cuba, etc.
I think we can fully admit our own faults (which are many), and still quite comfortably condemn the current soft-war shittery Russia is conducting across its borders in supposedly sovereign nations.
Regarding Okinawa, our (US) fleets and bases in the area are the only thing standing between China becoming even more overtly aggressive in Southeast Asia and Japan rescinding it's nonviolent constitution and re-arming for conflict. While it sounds counter intuitive a US military presence in Southeast Asia is a stabilizing force.
People love to criticize our controversial global military presence but without our military security blanket many of the nations harboring our military would suddenly find themselves needing to arm themselves and under aggressive pressure from nearby rivals.
If we aren't there, then it's just Iran and Saudi Arabia staring at each other over the strait of Hormuz. If we aren't there then South Korea, Japan, and China have no reason not to be shitting on each other in an even more hostile manner. Maybe some people will get their wish and we leave, and we'll just see how it goes.
This doesn't mean that things are not completely ridiculous on many fronts; the military industrial complex is an awful thing and I'm sure most of those bases around the world are completely unneeded and wasteful. But there are many hot areas of the planet where some of the nations involved are unreasonable and seem to only respond to the threat of force backing up international norms.
I struggle with some of these things because I try to be an optimist and hope that people are rational and cooler heads can negotiate and be civil but the world is a terrible, violent, awful place. Our military is often the very wrong tool for most situations which we have been very, very misguided in its use especially the last 15 years or so, but sometimes it is the least bad tool for preventing more awful things.
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Not to belittle the importance of US bases in Okinawa (Japan is still ok with those because it's always better than nothing with China), but the Japanese army is actually quite developed. Their navy is one of the first in the world, and their military equipment is top tier. I think if China or Russia were to go after Japan, they would be for a very nasty surprise. The only thing that the japanese do not have is nuclear power.
The real problem I have with NATO is its inability to learn that smashing down regimes like in Iraq, Afghanistan (it's better here but still), or Lybia, leaves huge voids that prove to be real fertile ground for terrorist organizations. That and the short term support they like to offer to dubious organizations out of realpolitik: England arming Arabia against the Turks, the US arming the Afghan mudjaidins against the soviet, and both of them (UK, US) making their 'allied targets' to not forget and focus on their religious beliefs to a point where they were told to use them as a total doctrine... Guess from where comes the current wave of islamist terrorism now? The mistakes done in the middle east by interfering with religion and beliefs as a support for war and resistance, which worked perfectly on the short run, but proves disastrous now). Well, they seem to have learned eventually considering their reluctance to go in Irak/Syria or Lybia, but the devil is out of the box.
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While we all have faults and certainly much blood and shame on our collective hands, I will in general hold the record of the capitalist democratic western nations against Russia in most things. People weren't running across the Berlin Wall from the West to get into the soviet union. People aren't in rafts from Miami heading into Cuba, etc.
Well, people are coming to Europe (and Europe is taking far more people in than the US nowadays) because we destroyed their economies. The climate change is pretty much made by the 'West' and so those people fleeing the Sahel do so mainly because we made life there unbearable for them: Not so much because we live so much better here. The Greek people coming to Germany do so mainly because we exploited their economy - the same goes for Spanish and Portugese people. I'm pretty sure that the USA didn't work on mutually beneficial trade with Cuba.
So, if these people are coming it's more because the West has a) been very successful at exploiting the resources of others or even squandering them and b) follows a model that - while not really sustainable - is able to outperform more sustainable economies in the short run.
Thus, I'm not quite sure whether we should uncritically take the direction of migration as a sign of the 'West' having such a great track record. It might be just as much the sign of a very unreasonable economy that values short-time gain over long-time prosperity.
As to glass houses and stones: That's exactly my point. It's quite easy to condemn the Russians for annexing Crimea, if one ignores history. It's nothing the USA didn't do, it's nothing the European nations didn't do. It's not like there's something that should make us believe that any of the nations in the world wouldn't do it, given opportunity and a percieved net gain in doing so.
And lastly: As I said I'm not at all convinved that the US is selflessly having their troops in foreign countries to promote peace, freedom and democracy. It doesn't make sense to say: We have to behave in such an imperialistic, agressive manner to prevent others from doing so - unless one believes that the USA is especially justified in this, while others are not.
Somehow, miraculously, the USA is maintaining military presence all over the globe for purely altruistic reasons, while given the opportunity all other nations (like China and Japan in your example) would only fill any power vacum the USA could leave with malintent and egoism? What is making the USA not acting in it's own interest, but in the common interest of humankind in such a wondrously twist?
This sounds like quite the sort of exceptionalism that is also some form of exemptionalism, which amounts to the double standards which explain while doing the same things is OK if the USA is the actor, but not if anyone else. It's measureing not by objective standards, but it's judging a priori that whatever the others do is bad, because they are morally impure and that what the USA is doing - whatever it is - is good, because they possess some moral purity that others lack. It#s having double standards.
It's my strong conviction that the USA doesn't have some divine mandate to police foreign countries. I'm also quite sure that the USA isn't maintaining their military presence in Asia for the altruistic sake of preventing "Korea, China and Japan shitting on each other" - that is merely a more convenient semi-justification than honestly admitting that the USA is securing their very own, selfish interest in the Pacific and eastern hemisphere.
(And that's of course true for any country. The German forces dispatched to Afghanistan weren't there out of purely altruistic motives of making the world a better place - they were there to secure German interests.)
The US isn't using their military to prevent awful things from happening - unless you count the USA not getting what is in their interest as 'awful thing'.
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Well, for Portugal and Spain, their economies seem to have taken off again and doing fairly well now. I have even heard of people coming from northern Europe there because they actually have a shortage in expertise in some fields (construction, etc). Also, investors.
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(http://d2ws0xxnnorfdo.cloudfront.net/meme/565787)
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Well, for Portugal and Spain, their economies seem to have taken off again and doing fairly well now. I have even heard of people coming from northern Europe there because they actually have a shortage in expertise in some fields (construction, etc). Also, investors.
The last data I have seen is suggesting little change for the people. Unemployment rates are still high - especially for young people. Portugal managed to get the over all unemployment rate down to about 13.7% in May form the 17.5% at the start of the second quarter of 2013 (Statistics Portugal) and youth unemployment went down to 33.3% in may from 40.7% (Eurostat) - now that's still every third young person without a job. Spain got their unemployment rate lowered to 23.78% from its all time high of 26.94 percent in the first quarter of 2013 (National Statistics Institute (INE)). The youth unemployment rate is at 49.30 percent in May of 2015 from it's an all time high of 55.80 percent in July of 2013 (Eurostat) - that's every second of the young people there being unemployed.
I'd think that's still a good step away from doing fairly well. Just think about your circle of frinds and imagine every third or second of them would be 'unemployed'. Imagine further that that's not only true for your friends, but all people in that age segment. Would you say under those conditions that your country 'is doing good'?
Yes, they are taking in people in certain fields, especially engineering, because previously all the young people in those fields left for 'greener pastures'. It's not because they have such a great need of people in those fields: It's because they have no one left at home who can do the job.
Anyhow, both Spain and Portugal seem to do better, slowly. I hope it will remain like that. Yet that's not really changing that to good part their problems stem from the mercantilist politics of Germany.
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I mentioned their economies, not their social situation. You may be extrapolating a bit on what I said, I never said that their countries are doing well, but I will freely admit that what I said was rather vague...
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Quite frankly, I would dearly love to see the U.S. leave NATO and abandon its member countries to whatever Putin wants.
We've spent a shitload of money and lives since 1942 trying to fix or prevent problems in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. I think it has been a bad investment, probably from the start, at least in terms of what we've gotten out of it. Some of it was necessary, yes, but I'd rather we were spending the money here, rather than on bases in Germany, Japan, Poland, and the Baltics, just so we can get snippy comments about how imperialist we are.
Everyone gets mad at us if we act as "world policeman". And, (see Bosnia, Rwanda, Syria, and Iraq currently) everyone gets mad at us if we don't. I suggest that America would be better off letting everyone be mad at us and not spending any money on anyone else. For a long time, we've essentially served as the greater part of Europe's armed forces, since almost no country in Europe has a military that would last longer than a fly against a windshield versus Russia. Well, it's about time they pulled their own weight.
As far as I'm concerned, if Putin decides that he wants to summer in Paris with the Russian army, I don't really give a fuck. I wish that my government felt the same.
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If Putin really wants to come invade Europe, I really don't think that our armies would just not 'last longer than a fly'... Anyway, the whole scenario sounds pretty ludicrous to me in the first place. That kind of things would just lead to full nuclear war...
Also, respectfully, I do not think the US was here to fix or prevent problems in Europe or the rest of the world. It's about interests and power projection. It's what makes your country influential and basically feeds the comfort of your population at the end of the chain. It's what provides you access to resources that you do not have on your territory, and overall, it's international leverage. Be the dominant country, reap the fruit.
In the cold war, it was about preventing the other side to spread its influence. Now, it's about defending national interests. You can sugarcoat it under ideological beliefs or not, the main process behind remain the same. I just happen to think that the US do it wrong at times. I see France doing the exact same thing, albeit to a smaller scale, but the country has been doing it for centuries more than the US and it still reeks of colonial smells. I wouldn't be surprised to see the british doing the same thing, though... Not sure. Anyway, it's ethically as debatable as what the US does, but it's done in a much subtler and less inflammatory manner.
So yes, speaking about what I know best, France too does it everywhere in North and central Africa (and used to do it in Indochina). Valuable uranium mines (and some that didn't meet the expectations and ruined Areva), among other things, are national interests. We may camouflage it under peace missions sent to prevent civil wars and African national coups (which is true), but the true story is about national interests. We do 'police' the world too, and while the US umbrella takes the brunt out of it, I also think that's because the US tends to go where they are not actually wanted.
That, and the US, being the leader of NATO, have started to do it seriously wrong since Vietnam, which were the first cracks that started to show in the american empire (and don't tell me the US are not an empire, they totally are but in name, they even bear the symbol). Since then, the US have a clear issue with the denial of their progressive loss of power and projection over the world, much like France has itself a stuck up issue of denial and taboo with strategic national projection and interests since the defeat in 1940.
The thing is, the US use strategic intervention like a hammer, so every problem is being treated with a hammer. Strategic interests in a country like Iraq ? Smash it with a hammer. Terrorist issues in Afghanistan ? Smash it with a hammer. Then it spread to NATO and lap dog presidents like Sarkozy and they do it again with Lybia. The result ? ISIS and its various subgroups.
Who managed to start the whole islamic modern Jihad ? Not necessarily Lawrence of Arabia or anything, but the british colonial empire, followed by the most damageable action the US did - and granted, was probably hard to foresee, can't blame them - when supporting the Afghan rebels against the soviet invasion in the 80s. It spreaded like dominos until it put ablaze the minds of the whole middle east, with consequences that we are dealing with to this day.
There is also another factor that directly counts in national interests: the weapon industry of every dominant country. Those industries are strategic assets under the care of their own nations and also have to sell their shit so that they remain able to develop more and pay for a part of the defense national budget. If your country remains cloistered and isolated, nobody buys. You have to showcase the performance of your shiny toys so that they sell properly. The most recent example for us was the Dassault Rafale, that suddenly got many contracts after a whole decade of absolutely nuts (which was not helped by the concurrence and US lobbying its own national interests). Why do we came into absurd scenarios like in the first Iraq war or the Falklands where NATO or the UK suddenly fought against exocet missiles and french fighter planes ? Because they are desperate to sell and enforce their national interests, especially when everybody else is already pressured by other NATO industrial interests, or just outright Russia...
You will tell me that Russia doesn't do that and hasn't seen a war in ages (maybe not with their presence in Ukraine now). But they play it very smart. How many countries (ex soviet or not) have bought cheap outdated russian gear, or more advanced gear, and are fighting against each other with ? Or more importantly, fighting against NATO industrial military weapons ? How has this not turned into some kind of sick playground between weapon manufacturers of both sides to test them without getting involved (especially Russia), as a mean to showcase their performances, and to sell them ? Why does Russia systematically backs up NATO's declared enemies in the UN (Iran a few years back, Syria, etc) ? They all buy Russian. They are all Russian strategic interests.
Also, why is the US to this day trying so hard to push a 30 years old transatlantic treaty again on the EU ? Because it benefits their national interests they have here and perfectly know they are losing their grasp on Europe with the EU getting stronger and more defined every day. They also know that the EU is now the world most powerful economy and also surpasses them in demography.
If you really want the US to revert to isolationist, you will just lose your dominant edge in... everything.
Edit : is this necessarily all bad if the US choose that ? No, I don't think so. I think your ideas have merit in themselves and they are what defined the US in most of the first half of the 20th century until Pearl Harbor happened. But the times have changed, and the devil is out of the box now, so to speak. Backpedaling sounds a bit... hard to me.
Edit 2: also, whether they want it or not, the US are with Europe at the forefront of the ideological battle of today (Postmodernism vs Trationalism), against the opposite leader of that war, who is Putin.
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If Putin really wants to come invade Europe, I really don't think that our armies would just not 'last longer than a fly'... Anyway, the whole scenario sounds pretty ludicrous to me in the first place. That kind of things would just lead to full nuclear war...
Also, respectfully, I do not think the US was here to fix or prevent problems in Europe or the rest of the world. It's about interests and power projection. It's what makes your country influential and basically feeds the comfort of your population at the end of the chain. It's what provides you access to resources that you do not have on your territory, and overall, it's international leverage. Be the dominant country, reap the fruit.
In the cold war, it was about preventing the other side to spread its influence. Now, it's about defending national interests. You can sugarcoat it under ideological beliefs or not, the main process behind remain the same. I just happen to think that the US do it wrong at times. I see France doing the exact same thing, albeit to a smaller scale, but the country has been doing it for centuries more than the US and it still reeks of colonial smells. I wouldn't be surprised to see the british doing the same thing, though... Not sure. Anyway, it's ethically as debatable as what the US does, but it's done in a much subtler and less inflammatory manner.
So yes, speaking about what I know best, France too does it everywhere in North and central Africa (and used to do it in Indochina). Valuable uranium mines (and some that didn't meet the expectations and ruined Areva), among other things, are national interests. We may camouflage it under peace missions sent to prevent civil wars and African national coups (which is true), but the true story is about national interests. We do 'police' the world too, and while the US umbrella takes the brunt out of it, I also think that's because the US tends to go where they are not actually wanted.
That, and the US, being the leader of NATO, have started to do it seriously wrong since Vietnam, which were the first cracks that started to show in the american empire (and don't tell me the US are not an empire, they totally are but in name, they even bear the symbol). Since then, the US have a clear issue with the denial of their progressive loss of power and projection over the world, much like France has itself a stuck up issue of denial and taboo with strategic national projection and interests since the defeat in 1940.
The thing is, the US use strategic intervention like a hammer, so every problem is being treated with a hammer. Strategic interests in a country like Iraq ? Smash it with a hammer. Terrorist issues in Afghanistan ? Smash it with a hammer. Then it spread to NATO and lap dog presidents like Sarkozy and they do it again with Lybia. The result ? ISIS and its various subgroups.
Who managed to start the whole islamic modern Jihad ? Not necessarily Lawrence of Arabia or anything, but the british colonial empire, followed by the most damageable action the US did - and granted, was probably hard to foresee, can't blame them - when supporting the Afghan rebels against the soviet invasion in the 80s. It spreaded like dominos until it put ablaze the minds of the whole middle east, with consequences that we are dealing with to this day.
There is also another factor that directly counts in national interests: the weapon industry of every dominant country. Those industries are strategic assets under the care of their own nations and also have to sell their shit so that they remain able to develop more and pay for a part of the defense national budget. If your country remains cloistered and isolated, nobody buys. You have to showcase the performance of your shiny toys so that they sell properly. The most recent example for us was the Dassault Rafale, that suddenly got many contracts after a whole decade of absolutely nuts (which was not helped by the concurrence and US lobbying its own national interests). Why do we came into absurd scenarios like in the first Iraq war or the Falklands where NATO or the UK suddenly fought against exocet missiles and french fighter planes ? Because they are desperate to sell and enforce their national interests, especially when everybody else is already pressured by other NATO industrial interests, or just outright Russia...
You will tell me that Russia doesn't do that and hasn't seen a war in ages (maybe not with their presence in Ukraine now). But they play it very smart. How many countries (ex soviet or not) have bought cheap outdated russian gear, or more advanced gear, and are fighting against each other with ? Or more importantly, fighting against NATO industrial military weapons ? How has this not turned into some kind of sick playground between weapon manufacturers of both sides to test them without getting involved (especially Russia), as a mean to showcase their performances, and to sell them ? Why does Russia systematically backs up NATO's declared enemies in the UN (Iran a few years back, Syria, etc) ? They all buy Russian. They are all Russian strategic interests.
Also, why is the US to this day trying so hard to push a 30 years old transatlantic treaty again on the EU ? Because it benefits their national interests they have here and perfectly know they are losing their grasp on Europe with the EU getting stronger and more defined every day. They also know that the EU is now the world most powerful economy and also surpasses them in demography.
If you really want the US to revert to isolationist, you will just lose your dominant edge in... everything.
Edit : is this necessarily all bad if the US choose that ? No, I don't think so. I think your ideas have merit in themselves and they are what defined the US in most of the first half of the 20th century until Pearl Harbor happened. But the times have changed, and the devil is out of the box now, so to speak. Backpedaling sounds a bit... hard to me.
Edit 2: also, whether they want it or not, the US are with Europe at the forefront of the ideological battle of today (Postmodernism vs Trationalism), against the opposite leader of that war, who is Putin.
Again, I'm not sure why everyone figures the US government has any part of this. If anything, they're being incredibly passive. All they'll do is facilitate arms sales to the east European countries using Putin as a scarecrow. But they're otherwise remaining mum on the issue, which they didn't have to do. They could have sent a strategic bombing campaign or strafed eastern Ukraine and turned it into a proxy war, but they haven't.
The time when the world looked at America as the sole protector and adjudicator is long since passed; the EU doesn't need them for anything except hired muscle at this point. Also the time when you could point at them and try to pin the world's geopolitical machinations on them is over. As I've been saying, that's trying to point back at an American/Soviet conflict that does not exist anymore.
It's not everyone else's fault, though. That's exactly what Putin did, and he's paying for it now. His consolation prize is essentially a money sink; Crimea survives on government aid. Meanwhile, Russia's economy got axed right at a crucial moment for oil prices.
Don't buy the hype, step back and look at the real winners and losers. Politicians are always good at spinning public image, so everyone might come out of this smelling at least rosy, but it's pretty clear who's gained and who's lost here. And the one country that's gained absolutely nothing except potential markets is the US. Don't chase after the red herring.
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(http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/russia-wants-war.jpg)
(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vJGuKPiM5_E/UwIMaPpNj2I/AAAAAAAAKwg/p2bv8HBIvno/s1600/US-Military-Bases-Around-The-World.jpeg)
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(http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/russia-wants-war.jpg)
(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vJGuKPiM5_E/UwIMaPpNj2I/AAAAAAAAKwg/p2bv8HBIvno/s1600/US-Military-Bases-Around-The-World.jpeg)
Ooooh, sounds scary, doesn't it? :lol:
Hint: think about what the deep red countries have in common.
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Lyn, Russia has 700k active military, at least, with 2 million in reserves. If Putin decided he wanted to be in Berlin, and went straight through Poland, he'd be there in probably not much more than two weeks, assuming no U.S. intervention or use of nuclear arms.
For example, Germany is a great country, economically, and perhaps socially, if you like that system, but in terms of military might, well, you guys (Europeans) are militarily sophisticated, but your sheer military force isn't even third-rate compared to the PRC or Russia. At a certain point, even in modern warfare, numbers will tell. And German weaponry, while good, is not good enough to go up against 1.5 million Russians. Sorry, it just isn't.
And that's Germany. Let's not talk about some of the others.
That's why, incidentally, the U.S. has pushed NATO so hard. It really isn't - if you look at past history and actions - just about a sphere of influence or selling weapons...although one would have to be blind and deaf to think that isn't part of it, true. It's been about the fact that the USSR really was an aggressive foreign policy player (not claiming that we weren't), and there is no way to deter a country the size of Russia from doing what it wants in Europe without all of the smaller nations following a "attack one, you attack us all" policy.
Should we want to deter Russia from increasing its influence on Europe? Well, that's for Europeans to decide. Most of the people who actually live close to Russia don't seem to like the idea.
As for the E.U., saying that the E.U. is more powerful than the U.S. only works if you believe that statistics outweigh reality. The E.U. is a loose coalition of independent states, often fractured, usually heading in several different directions, and, currently, rather in a bit of trouble. The whole system reminds me of the Articles of Confederacy that the U.S. colonies tried before the Constitution.
The reason that the U.S. has been having so much trouble in terms of military actions recently has nothing to do with declining power. Indeed, the U.S. is more powerful now than every before - the perception of declining power is due to the fact that other states are catching up, to a degree. That said, to portray this as an inevitable decline in American power is questionable - others are catching up, but, so far, not very much. Right now, assuming no nuclear war, the United States could easily crush any of its potential competitors, and probably two at once.
Rather, the problem the United States has is that it has been trying to embrace a humanitarian sort of war, a war in which, if you are not actually avoiding collateral damage, you can at least look like it. If you were to put someone with the war morality of the 1940s in control of the U.S. tomorrow, there would be no ISIS. There might be rather a lot of dead civilians, but ISIS would be gone.
I'm not arguing for that. I simply maintain that trying to interfere, without being willing to go all the way, is a fools errand. I don't argue that the U.S. should become isolationist, I argue that we should leave NATO because protecting Europe isn't worth the cost, whatever happens to Europe. Besides, France and the U.K. have nukes, let them deter Putin. Or not. It's not our problem, and if Putin ends up as master of Europe somehow, we can just trade with him.
I also don't think that we should be running around the world trying to prevent genocides or overthrow regimes. Every time we do, we either kill way more innocent people than might have died otherwise, or we create the circumstances for an even worse regime later. This is not always the case, but it is enough of the time to convince me it's a bad idea. So if we decide that we have a national interest in Iraq, for oil for example, we don't go in trying to liberate people and set up a government. We go in, take the oil, and kill anyone who tries to stop us. Or, you know, we can buy the oil for less than the cost of invasion. :roll:
As it is, we went in, and we didn't get the democratic government we wanted, or the oil either. Yay.
Incidentally, if you want to know what I would do as the leader of the U.S...well, I would pull out of pretty much every foreign country except Korea. I would focus on maintaining dominance within our own hemisphere, and I would open the U.S to unlimited immigration (but not emigration) from around the world.
As for Empire...you had better damn well hope the U.S. never becomes a true empire. The U.S. has so far acted more like the old Roman Republic, so far as I can see. More of an emphasis on alliances, and persuasion. Get an analogue of someone like Titus Vespasian in charge, and the world would be a much nastier place. That's true for the PRC as well, btw. Both the U.S. and PRC have behaved much more diplomatically than they technically have to, given the disparity of strength between them and their neighbors. That's not to say that they've acted morally, it's just to say that, compared with the British Empire or the Roman Empire, they've been far less, well, imperial.
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Incidentally, I may be coming off as a bit hostile towards Europe. I'm not. I want to visit it, I'm trying to learn French, and I find its history genuinely interesting.
But I also see us spending vast amounts of money running military bases around the world (but especially in Europe and the Middle East), and conducting training exercises with allies, and then getting blamed for virtually every foreign policy problem in the world, including those that we really had nothing to do with, like Ukraine and Georgia and Rwanda.
Meanwhile, Europe is building CERN and funding health plans better than ours and spending almost zilch on their military, because, hey, we've got their backs.
Well, that's great, but I live here, and I'd rather other countries were paying for their own defense, and that we were using that money to build particle accelerators and subsidize healthcare and go to Mars. I mean, France keeps talking about a 35 hour work week, and average (as opposed to one-percenters) Americans are paying rather large total income taxes + entitlement taxes + sales taxes while working 60+ hours a week. For what? So we can "protect" the rest of the world? If that's the price of protecting the rest of the world, the rest of the world can fend for itself.
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People talking about Russia invading western Europe or vice-versa or America taking over the planet or any sort of total warfare scenario weird me out. The age where that sort of stuff could happen is done, and everyone involved knows it. All this fight is over is political projection and reputation, and a semi-nebulous financial benefit.
Nobody wants any sort of serious conflict, because they know that even the detonation of a modest amount of nuclear weapons (like the UK or Frances arsenals) would totally collapse the environment and lead to half the people on the planet dropping dead.
It's all about shifting the status quo a little bit in a direction favourable to you without breaking it completely.
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People talking about Russia invading western Europe or vice-versa or America taking over the planet or any sort of total warfare scenario weird me out. The age where that sort of stuff could happen is done, and everyone involved knows it. All this fight is over is political projection and reputation, and a semi-nebulous financial benefit.
Nobody wants any sort of serious conflict, because they know that even the detonation of a modest amount of nuclear weapons (like the UK or Frances arsenals) would totally collapse the environment and lead to half the people on the planet dropping dead.
It's all about shifting the status quo a little bit in a direction favourable to you without breaking it completely.
That's more or less what people following the appeasement policy prior to WWII said.
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Ooooh, sounds scary, doesn't it? :lol:
Hint: think about what the deep red countries have in common.
Well, just seems to me that the US did a bit more than just arms sales to Poland...
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I don't want war.
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I don't want war.
Well. That's...not negotiable, in a way. There will always be war.
The question is, how bloody will it be, and how many people will it involve?
As an American, I want the next war to involve everybody but us. And yes, I phrased that statement entirely correctly.
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There will always be war.
Because people are awful.
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There will always be war.
Because people are awful.
Awful? No.
If you think that this is what this concludes, you have mistaken what universe we live in.
We are an evolved species, struggling for life, in a universe that hates us, that hates life. 99.9% of species before us have gone extinct, have died out, because they could not adapt. We, ourselves, killed off other human-like species, such as the Neanderthals, in order to survive, to thrive. We are the descendants of the most capable, the most violent.
Our heritage is one of murder, genocide, and destruction, in the name of survival. We didn't choose this - it is the way the universe is. And war is the choice of our species to compare and contrast two different social positions against each other, to find which is worthy of survival.
It's not perfect - that's why I think the U.S. should be spending its time investing in space tech rather than fighting right now. But it is fighting that got us to where we are.
But, even should we expand into space, there will be war, and conflict, and violent death. It's the way of this universe. It is survival of the fittest. You cannot get away from it. It will always be with us. It's where we came from, and it's written into the bones of this forsaken reality.
If you want to wish for something better, or blame someone, don't blame humanity. We've done more than can be expected with what we were given. Blame whoever designed this damned universe, whether a god, or blind chance, or whatever. It has made us to be what we are. We are what was necessary to survive.
Survival is the only ultimate value, until we can rewrite the laws of reality.
I only say this: that I want humanity to survive, to spread among the stars - and this, hopefully out of my own nation - as a revenge against all of reality for what it is. That life should persist, and thrive, and eventually dominate and destroy a universe so hostile to it.
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Leave evolution and the universe out of this.
1) The universe doesn't hate anyone. It's incapable of hating. And more objectively speaking, the conditions in the universe aren't life-averse either. And if you destroy it, there is nothing life would have a place in. Life depends on the existence of this universe.
2) Evolution has (by necessity, being descriptive theory) nothing to do with morality: And 'awful' certainly is a moral, normative category. Also, furthermore, cooperation playes and played a far greater role in the evolution of the human species than murder, genocide and destruction (and murder here, maybe also genocide, are again morally evaluative hand have basically nothing to do with the descriptive theory of the change of species).
Survival as used in evolutionary theory can't be a value. If you introduce values, evolutionary theory can't possibly be by what you measure them. If there are values in life and in the world - or in reality, then there are for sure more ultimate values than survival, as humans certainly don't merely want to survive, they aim to live well.
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War is counter intuitive to survival. Especially when we have weapons that could end all life on Earth.
I'm scared enough about the future without having to worry about World War 3 too.
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Leave evolution and the universe out of this.
No. Not now, not in the future, not ever.
1) The universe doesn't hate anyone. It's incapable of hating. And more objectively speaking, the conditions in the universe aren't life-averse either. And if you destroy it, there is nothing life would have a place in. Life depends on the existence of this universe.
All of our terms are anthropomorphisms of what really is. In this case, the phrase "the universe hates life" is entirely appropriate. If you were to place the universe, as a thought experiment, as a house, the area suitable for human life, would be smaller than a proton. Of all the reality we could potentially exist in, we would be instantly destroyed in the greatest proportion of it. And even in the tiniest portion that we do know, most of it is hostile to life.
Of course life depends on the existence of this universe, in the sense that it needs matter and energy to exist. But within those constraints, this is possibly the worst sort of universe life could exist in (see Krauss, and other physicists). We live in a universe as antithetical to life as it is pretty much possible to be, while still having life. If you disagree, you simply need to read more.
2) Evolution has (by necessity, being descriptive theory) nothing to do with morality: And 'awful' certainly is a moral, normative category. Also, furthermore, cooperation playes and played a far greater role in the evolution of the human species than murder, genocide and destruction (and murder here, maybe also genocide, are again morally evaluative hand have basically nothing to do with the descriptive theory of the change of species).
Evolution is descriptive. How we got here is descriptive. However, your premises are flawed. First, the fact that something is descriptive does not mean that it does not also prescribe, assuming that one has certain values, such as "survive". I hold such values.
In addition, violence between living beings has been the greatest and most constant factor of life on earth. Of course people have cooperated. Of course people have lived together. No one is arguing that, except, perhaps, your mental straw-man of me you constructed to argue against because it would make you feel better.
What I am saying is that violence between persons, between cultures, between societies, is inevitable, because of the universe we live in. We live in a universe of scarce resources, locations, and opportunities. We live in a universe in which "survival of the most adaptive" is an ironclad rule. We live in a universe which designed us, not the other way around.
And because of that, the future of humanity will necessarily conform to those realities. To claim otherwise is the height of unjustified arrogance and hyperactive pride.
Survival as used in evolutionary theory can't be a value. If you introduce values, evolutionary theory can't possibly be by what you measure them. If there are values in life and in the world - or in reality, then there are for sure more ultimate values than survival, as humans certainly don't merely want to survive, they aim to live well.
Of course survival can be a value. I am valuing survival right now. In fact, survival is the basis of all values - for without the survival of a species, that species can value nothing. Personally, I also value survival - I may not thrive, but I cannot thrive without living to try. All lasting values, therefore, are predicated on survival.
If the species does not survive, all morality that species might possess is utterly of nothing.
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People talking about Russia invading western Europe or vice-versa or America taking over the planet or any sort of total warfare scenario weird me out. The age where that sort of stuff could happen is done, and everyone involved knows it. All this fight is over is political projection and reputation, and a semi-nebulous financial benefit.
Nobody wants any sort of serious conflict, because they know that even the detonation of a modest amount of nuclear weapons (like the UK or Frances arsenals) would totally collapse the environment and lead to half the people on the planet dropping dead.
It's all about shifting the status quo a little bit in a direction favourable to you without breaking it completely.
That's more or less what people following the appeasement policy prior to WWII said.
While I understand the similarities, I find your analogy a bit harsh and unfair. They certaintly did not have nuclear weapons before WWII...
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Lyn, Russia has 700k active military, at least, with 2 million in reserves. If Putin decided he wanted to be in Berlin, and went straight through Poland, he'd be there in probably not much more than two weeks, assuming no U.S. intervention or use of nuclear arms.
For example, Germany is a great country, economically, and perhaps socially, if you like that system, but in terms of military might, well, you guys (Europeans) are militarily sophisticated, but your sheer military force isn't even third-rate compared to the PRC or Russia. At a certain point, even in modern warfare, numbers will tell. And German weaponry, while good, is not good enough to go up against 1.5 million Russians. Sorry, it just isn't.
And that's Germany. Let's not talk about some of the others.
That's why, incidentally, the U.S. has pushed NATO so hard. It really isn't - if you look at past history and actions - just about a sphere of influence or selling weapons...although one would have to be blind and deaf to think that isn't part of it, true. It's been about the fact that the USSR really was an aggressive foreign policy player (not claiming that we weren't), and there is no way to deter a country the size of Russia from doing what it wants in Europe without all of the smaller nations following a "attack one, you attack us all" policy.
Should we want to deter Russia from increasing its influence on Europe? Well, that's for Europeans to decide. Most of the people who actually live close to Russia don't seem to like the idea.
As for the E.U., saying that the E.U. is more powerful than the U.S. only works if you believe that statistics outweigh reality. The E.U. is a loose coalition of independent states, often fractured, usually heading in several different directions, and, currently, rather in a bit of trouble. The whole system reminds me of the Articles of Confederacy that the U.S. colonies tried before the Constitution.
The reason that the U.S. has been having so much trouble in terms of military actions recently has nothing to do with declining power. Indeed, the U.S. is more powerful now than every before - the perception of declining power is due to the fact that other states are catching up, to a degree. That said, to portray this as an inevitable decline in American power is questionable - others are catching up, but, so far, not very much. Right now, assuming no nuclear war, the United States could easily crush any of its potential competitors, and probably two at once.
Rather, the problem the United States has is that it has been trying to embrace a humanitarian sort of war, a war in which, if you are not actually avoiding collateral damage, you can at least look like it. If you were to put someone with the war morality of the 1940s in control of the U.S. tomorrow, there would be no ISIS. There might be rather a lot of dead civilians, but ISIS would be gone.
I'm not arguing for that. I simply maintain that trying to interfere, without being willing to go all the way, is a fools errand. I don't argue that the U.S. should become isolationist, I argue that we should leave NATO because protecting Europe isn't worth the cost, whatever happens to Europe. Besides, France and the U.K. have nukes, let them deter Putin. Or not. It's not our problem, and if Putin ends up as master of Europe somehow, we can just trade with him.
I also don't think that we should be running around the world trying to prevent genocides or overthrow regimes. Every time we do, we either kill way more innocent people than might have died otherwise, or we create the circumstances for an even worse regime later. This is not always the case, but it is enough of the time to convince me it's a bad idea. So if we decide that we have a national interest in Iraq, for oil for example, we don't go in trying to liberate people and set up a government. We go in, take the oil, and kill anyone who tries to stop us. Or, you know, we can buy the oil for less than the cost of invasion. :roll:
As it is, we went in, and we didn't get the democratic government we wanted, or the oil either. Yay.
Incidentally, if you want to know what I would do as the leader of the U.S...well, I would pull out of pretty much every foreign country except Korea. I would focus on maintaining dominance within our own hemisphere, and I would open the U.S to unlimited immigration (but not emigration) from around the world.
As for Empire...you had better damn well hope the U.S. never becomes a true empire. The U.S. has so far acted more like the old Roman Republic, so far as I can see. More of an emphasis on alliances, and persuasion. Get an analogue of someone like Titus Vespasian in charge, and the world would be a much nastier place. That's true for the PRC as well, btw. Both the U.S. and PRC have behaved much more diplomatically than they technically have to, given the disparity of strength between them and their neighbors. That's not to say that they've acted morally, it's just to say that, compared with the British Empire or the Roman Empire, they've been far less, well, imperial.
Vikarion, that's where we disagree then. France alone is something lke 150k active, and then you can add Germany, UK, Italia, Spain, Sweden, Finland, etc... All the 27+ countries that can contribute + maybe all the other non EU states that will feel threatened. Ok, a lot of them may be counted out considered the state of their military. So at worst, we are left with the core countries, which can totalize an equal if not superior number of military forces. The EU alone is 550k in demographics, which is like 3 times what Russia can field.
I'm not saying that the scenario would be easy, and Putin might blitzkrieg its way all the way through there the time for all those countries to coordinate. I'm just saying that I think I disagree with your assesment of the situation...
Anyway, that case scenario sounds so ludicrous to me that well...
Also, I never said that the EU is more powerful than the US (which sounds a bit weird and vague, i'm not really into national pissing contests...), just that their economical influence and sphere is rated first... And as you say, it doesn't say it all. It is a pointer among many. Also, the EU is no more in trouble currently than the US. We all have our current crisises and social issues, and it's true for the US internally too, which can be a real boiling powder keg in certain social milieus and inequalities. It is also true that EU is currently going through an certain amount of internal problems because it's still being built, and like anything relying solely on international cooperation... Well, it's not easy. The only thing I was saying is that economically, the EU holds generally more weight, the same way that military wise, it's certainly not the case. I only brought it up as a way to prove my point, and I sitll think it does.
If we want to speak about decline then, let me rephrase : a relative decline in power then. Although I might still disagree with your view here as well. I'm not only speaking about sheer military might alone. Maybe I will have to look for a source I had on the matter that I found very insightful, even if not american. Probably biased though, like we all are... But it was actually more taking into account the global image that the country projects on the world rather than it's military force in itself.
I would disagree with your view on dealing with IS with a 1940 mentality. You will beat them at the cost of civilian and military losses. Ok. Then what ? What do you think happened in Mali ? They got defeated and mopped up, and are now coming back from Lybia. Which means military forces have to remain there. Which stretches military budgets and logistics. I know the US has a vast military power where to draw forces... Is it limitless however ? NATO considers that the current situation will only be resolved in cooperation with the locals, a view that I might be more inclined to believe than 1940 doctrines on total warfare...
I also am not sure where you got that the term Empire necessarily implies an evil or tyrannical regime... Or maybe we don't share the same definitions ?
Edit : I also almost forgot to add that while differences there is, I would really like the EU and the US to continue cooperate, maybe on a new blank slate, rather than having to worry about petty conflicts with a country that grossly shares the same postmodernist values.
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Ooooh, sounds scary, doesn't it? :lol:
Hint: think about what the deep red countries have in common.
Well, just seems to me that the US did a bit more than just arms sales to Poland...
Yeah, they sent in McDonalds...
Look, I know there's a narrative for all this, and it's meant to inform you a certain way. However, it's VERY important that you step far, far, far away from the conversation and just look at the world as it actually is.
America's military isn't, and hasn't, been this inescapable worldwide-influential superpower for probably 20-30 years. They're a for-hire kneebreaker. Nobody's fought the kind of war the American (or Russian) military was built to fight in decades. When they have, the American military was about as negotiable as a steamroller. But, then, that's not the war anymore. The war in Iraq with an actual military resistance was over in a matter of weeks, at most. The actual war in Iraq, fought against ever-shifting factions of guerrillas, took over a decade. America, in fact all countries, are not prepared to deal with that kind of war. They're still trying to figure out how to fight it.
However, that doesn't stop American arms companies from selling munitions. And what you need to understand, rather urgently, is that war makes the most money during the periods on the brink, so times when those last for very long periods are very good for arms manufacturers. How's this for a statistic. The last time official reliable records were available, Russia was the second largest arms exporter with total exports of 4 billion dollars. The United States was first... with 50 billion. That's right, everything you've ever heard about Russia selling weapons, it's small potatoes compared to the money US companies have invested into that.
And, lest we forget, the US arms companies actually employ companies from around the world and in multiple states, meaning that everyone has hands in the pie. It's why you don't see much in the realm of weapons sales regulations here. They employ people in all 50 states and in countries from Israel to Germany.
So the phrase, "more than arm Poland", is a misnomer. They will sell weapons to anyone that wants them as long as they can drum up fear of an appreciable threat. Poland's more than armed already, and Putin probably just sealed them a ton of business in Eastern Europe. This is after ISIS showed up, which, alone, in 2008, more than TRIPLED arms sales out of the United States.
Putin's playing the same game, of course, but he doesn't understand the stakes or contestants. That's why everyone's talking about the United States here when Obama has, probably shrewdly, decided to let Putin take the heat and follow the EU's bouncing ball. We all remember that his political situation was starting to look shaky for the first time in decades and he needs a boogeyman as much as any conservative politician. But he's fighting from an old playbook. He took over a piece of ground that's doing little but sucking up money and given his "enemies" all the PR they need. He's made his oil supply seem unreliable, his intentions seem imperialistic, and his economy vulnerable to international sanctions.
His army, of course, isn't going to stand up to the combined forces of NATO, but then again NATO isn't interested in stopping him completely. They need a boogeyman, too, and a lot of the old boogeymen in the Middle East aren't painting themselves in such broad strokes. If we, as people, suddenly hit the brakes and decide to start looking at our domestic situations rather than fearing foreign powers, we have a tendency to tell them to do very difficult things or we vote them out of office. It's always expedient, if you aren't interested in improving your country, to make sure everyone's afraid of what's outside of it.
So look back at your images. Ever wonder who makes them? Who informs you as to what they mean? Who even tells you that these are the affairs of state for the United States and Russia even though we'd probably rather someone fix our broken infrastructure and social lattice? A very few, but very influential people have, for the better part of human history, led us all around by the nose.
Don't buy the hype. There's heavy metal in Iran, Starbucks in Russia, and we celebrate Cinco de Mayo in the US. The only thing stopping a true cultural revolution in our lifetimes is that global power is based entirely on fear, and unfortunately fear is easily marketable.
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Thoroughly interesting read from all of you thank you for writing in this thread.
I think sometimes we like to play the what-if military thought games and we head out into the realms of the improbable. But we all know the improbable leads to the possible sometimes :/
I don't think there isn't going to be any sort of 'hot' war anywhere any time soon with any first world countries, just not going to happen (although we are happy to keep building weapons systems to fight the last war we never fought). Sadly we'll continue to see "third-world" countries obliterating each other's populations at a low boil for decades to come. Hundreds of thousands of people dead across Africa, Iraq, Syria, and a lovely slow soft war in Eastern Europe that will continue for a long time. As pointed out earlier none of the big boys are getting involved, we're happy to sell to the combatants or fund proxies.
Regarding Europe as a defensive military vs Russia on it's own in a fantasy non nuclear conflict, it's game over in quick order for a short campaign. Europe's forces just don't have the numbers, and more importantly the massively complicated command and control and force projection required for today's sort of fighting. The Russians are quite good at this sort of thing, and it's Borsch in France in a few weeks. Remember the Libyan air campaign recently? The Euro air forces couldn't do much of anything on their own and were about 100% dependent on American command and control, coordination, and pointing out where the Europeans put the bombs. This was not widely reported in the press because this was supposed to be seen as a 'European' leading campaign, but it was basically run by the Americans because the Europeans just don't have the air hardware and coordination to run those sort of sorties. It's not a slight on the Europeans, they are (perhaps wisely), spending that money on healthcare and public infrastructure, and we spend it on fancy AWACS.
And let's be honest even at the -height- of the cold war, there weren't nearly enough NATO ground forces to do much more than be cannon-fodder to slow down Russian armored advances until a full mobilization could occur or before things escalated to nuclear. This is a similar situation in South Korea; there's enough North Korean artillery and missiles pointed at Seoul to basically obliterate the civilian population and the small US/Korean force on the border in a surprise attack. This doesn't mean that NK won't be absolutely crushed if an actual campaign gets going, but the first part of the conflict those border troops are forfeit.
The same thing in Europe, if it started the actual 'long' war would be about beating back Russian forces from their full advances gained early on.
As usual though all of our military hardware and R&D tends to be for the last conflict. I personally feel like the current US disposition will be caught on their asses with the over-reliance on satellite/GPS/electronic coordination.
The Chinese and the Russians are just as smart as we are. There are ways to beat technologically superior forces and bloody their noses so they don't engage fully. Detonating an EMP in low orbit and frying the local band of GPS and spy satellites would be devastating. The US forces are utterly dependent on 'high tech' for coordination.
The Chinese specifically are investing heavily in area denial capabilities. They don't have to beat the US military, they just have to launch enough missiles and torpedos and destroy enough satellites to knock out a single carrier and keep our ships away from the South China sea. It's a different set of priorities.
As it is I've got huge facepalm for the current F-35 boondoggle. We're spending billions on ultra high tech manned fighters when all signs are pointing to this being the last generation of human piloted air combat. The best solution is always a mix of high/low tech. You don't retire the A-10, you mix the A-10 with capable drones, etc. Hugely expensive and under performing platforms like the F-35 are not going to turn conflicts, you can buy 5x the number of slightly less high tech fighters and bombers for what you pay for a few F-35's who are jack of all trades masters of none. Or in 10 years you are throwing 100 AI-controlled expendable drones lobbing their own missiles at independently selected targets. I think the days of having a giant floating ship full of people flying manually controlled aircraft is on the way out, and unfortunately we probably won't realize it unless one gets destroyed.
We are in a very, very strange time period for military stuff.
There's a brilliant sci fi short story by Arthur C. Clarke "Superiority" http://www.mayofamily.com/RLM/txt_Clarke_Superiority.html
Basically a technologically advanced space military spends all it's time upgrading and spending on super weapons while the opponent fields conventional forces. The new high tech weapons are super awesome, but there's always some problem and the conventional 'backwards' opponents keep winning with their 'inferior' tech. It's a warning, great story.
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Thoroughly interesting read from all of you thank you for writing in this thread.
I think sometimes we like to play the what-if military thought games and we head out into the realms of the improbable. But we all know the improbable leads to the possible sometimes :/
I don't think there isn't going to be any sort of 'hot' war anywhere any time soon with any first world countries, just not going to happen (although we are happy to keep building weapons systems to fight the last war we never fought). Sadly we'll continue to see "third-world" countries obliterating each other's populations at a low boil for decades to come. Hundreds of thousands of people dead across Africa, Iraq, Syria, and a lovely slow soft war in Eastern Europe that will continue for a long time. As pointed out earlier none of the big boys are getting involved, we're happy to sell to the combatants or fund proxies.
Regarding Europe as a defensive military vs Russia on it's own in a fantasy non nuclear conflict, it's game over in quick order for a short campaign. Europe's forces just don't have the numbers, and more importantly the massively complicated command and control and force projection required for today's sort of fighting. The Russians are quite good at this sort of thing, and it's Borsch in France in a few weeks. Remember the Libyan air campaign recently? The Euro air forces couldn't do much of anything on their own and were about 100% dependent on American command and control, coordination, and pointing out where the Europeans put the bombs. This was not widely reported in the press because this was supposed to be seen as a 'European' leading campaign, but it was basically run by the Americans because the Europeans just don't have the air hardware and coordination to run those sort of sorties. It's not a slight on the Europeans, they are (perhaps wisely), spending that money on healthcare and public infrastructure, and we spend it on fancy AWACS.
And let's be honest even at the -height- of the cold war, there weren't nearly enough NATO ground forces to do much more than be cannon-fodder to slow down Russian armored advances until a full mobilization could occur or before things escalated to nuclear. This is a similar situation in South Korea; there's enough North Korean artillery and missiles pointed at Seoul to basically obliterate the civilian population and the small US/Korean force on the border in a surprise attack. This doesn't mean that NK won't be absolutely crushed if an actual campaign gets going, but the first part of the conflict those border troops are forfeit.
The same thing in Europe, if it started the actual 'long' war would be about beating back Russian forces from their full advances gained early on.
As usual though all of our military hardware and R&D tends to be for the last conflict. I personally feel like the current US disposition will be caught on their asses with the over-reliance on satellite/GPS/electronic coordination.
The Chinese and the Russians are just as smart as we are. There are ways to beat technologically superior forces and bloody their noses so they don't engage fully. Detonating an EMP in low orbit and frying the local band of GPS and spy satellites would be devastating. The US forces are utterly dependent on 'high tech' for coordination.
The Chinese specifically are investing heavily in area denial capabilities. They don't have to beat the US military, they just have to launch enough missiles and torpedos and destroy enough satellites to knock out a single carrier and keep our ships away from the South China sea. It's a different set of priorities.
As it is I've got huge facepalm for the current F-35 boondoggle. We're spending billions on ultra high tech manned fighters when all signs are pointing to this being the last generation of human piloted air combat. The best solution is always a mix of high/low tech. You don't retire the A-10, you mix the A-10 with capable drones, etc. Hugely expensive and under performing platforms like the F-35 are not going to turn conflicts, you can buy 5x the number of slightly less high tech fighters and bombers for what you pay for a few F-35's who are jack of all trades masters of none. Or in 10 years you are throwing 100 AI-controlled expendable drones lobbing their own missiles at independently selected targets. I think the days of having a giant floating ship full of people flying manually controlled aircraft is on the way out, and unfortunately we probably won't realize it unless one gets destroyed.
We are in a very, very strange time period for military stuff.
There's a brilliant sci fi short story by Arthur C. Clarke "Superiority" http://www.mayofamily.com/RLM/txt_Clarke_Superiority.html
Basically a technologically advanced space military spends all it's time upgrading and spending on super weapons while the opponent fields conventional forces. The new high tech weapons are super awesome, but there's always some problem and the conventional 'backwards' opponents keep winning with their 'inferior' tech. It's a warning, great story.
Why do we talk up potential opponents of the western world like the contenders walking into Floyd Mayweather fights? Putin's nowhere near stupid enough, I would imagine, to start any kind of war with the rest of Europe. Those nations benefit by him being just warlike enough to scare the nations not in-line yet. We tend to forget that this whole mess started through a gambit by a president attempting to balk at European ties in favor of Russian ties. Frankly, Putin just did the EU a big favor by proving what a lot of people were saying about him at Maidan completely correct.
But a real hot war? Well, let's think about this strategically. The Russian military may be able to make it through a few nations with some kind of blitz warfare... if we're playing a gigantic game of Risk. However, Putin did get a nice, long look at the world's ability to combat CONVENTIONAL forces. Remember, the ten year quagmires in the Middle East were all guerilla warfare with people huddled in small enclaves. The actual military forces, many of which are just as well-equipped as the modern Russian army? It took a "coalition" of western nations something on the order of a week or two to conquer entire countries. Unless Putin wants to wage a religious war of attrition (and that's only if NATO doesn't just carve up the Russian Federation), he would be dead in the water.
Don't forget this isn't the Cold War anymore. China will very likely wash its hands of the whole business (they tend to make a profit when the US in particular gets involved in these kinds of things). That means Russia, likely all by itself, will need to defend itself from both sides, one of which is absolutely in range of unassisted US airpower and, unfortunately, that's also the place where the Russian economy (and feasibly its war machine) derives a large sum of its wealth. And that's only taking the US into account. Britain would almost certainly be involved, and despite what many people even in my own country tend to think, the Brits aren't exactly tea-drinking pacifists. A war in Iraq over questionable means is a lot different than a Russian attack on the EU. I'd say that, by themselves, the Brits are more than a match for the western half of the Russian army.
Then you consider Russia's airpower and naval power. In this theater, they're not even close to matching or equaling any kind of western retaliation. While land warfare gets a lot of press, America alone could make life complete Hell for any Russian force anywhere with drone warfare. Their development is leagues ahead of anyone else in the world visibly, which makes you wonder what they have that they don't tell us about. That's without taking into account the enormous array of contraptions the US not only has, but markets everywhere.
Then there's the list of allies he'd have. Putin can count on nobody and nothing anymore outside his own country. Counting Hong Kong and Taiwan, Russia is China's tenth largest trading partner. In front of them on that list are, in order from first to ninth, the US, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, Australia, Malaysia, and Brazil. You'll notice that, at the very least, three of those countries would certainly be heading to Russia if they went to war with the EU. As many as seven would be willing. Almost all would be sympathetic. That doesn't put Russia in a great position to ask them to be their partner here, especially in their own war of aggression. Jingping's interests here lay in maintaining his economy and profiting from bond purchases, not jumping into a war that the US is almost certain to deal them considerable damage in (China's military is, at best, a few decades in development behind the US, mostly because they spent their time and money developing tools which have practical geopolitical value). North Korea might help, but that's going to be hilarious for the above mentioned reasons. China won't save North Korea from its most important trading partners if an actual war broke out. Not anymore.
These kinds of things are being told to Putin by people who have knowledge of the situation. In terms of a conventional war, Russia's position couldn't be much worse. If the Russian army and (we're assuming universally supportive even after the breakdown of Russian authority) people decide to forego modern convenience and fight a Taliban-style guerrilla war, they might be able to hold their own for a while (though certainly not to keep anything they take). What they need to do, more than anything, is spin what is essentially the loss of a Ukrainian situation that was turning out to their advantage into something they can call a victory. Sort of what happened when weapons inspectors came up empty-handed in Iraq and the US had to try to spin the situation into some kind of victory so they could pull out rather than calling it a "whoops!" moment and a colossal waste of money.
Hence Crimea, east and west Ukraine, etc. etc. etc. Not enough to actually piss anyone off, since everyone will use EXACTLY these points to get what they want. The US stands back, and their corporations make money while their sure first-ballot victory in the World's Most Evil Imperial Organization contest gets downgraded to, at best, co-finishers. The EU gets every opportunity to tell Ukrainians that if they'd been part of the EU then this wouldn't have happened (and I'm assuming that the prospect of essentially snapping up Ukraine is occupying the minds of everyone not involved in Greece's doubling-down on their economic bluff). And Russia gets a little feel-good ra-ra-ra from their people by snapping up "Russian" lands full of "Russian" people to downplay just how badly this all turned out for them, their economy, and their geopolitical currency.
I imagine the narrative will play out though. This is all, of course, assuming two things. One, that Putin is well aware of how this is all turning out and has decided to make sure everyone looks at his playbook and agrees with his telltale signs of "victory". The other is that people with real political-military power don't actually buy it. Putin's got no chance of coming out with even a consolation prize if someone does something that Europe considers crossing the line from politically expedient to liability.
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I don't disagree, I was thinking more Risk board game style of 'this is how many forces Russia has to throw at Europe' today vs 'this is how many actual tanks and planes are ready to go' in Europe to defend.
In that scenario before the US gets involved, before anyone else does anything, the Russians just plow through with sheer number of forces.
They can't hold it, they can't possibly win long term, but they can blow up a ton of things and zoom where they want to for a very short period of time.
(http://qph.is.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-ae788879f72c3c9d2e7f260977f068b5?convert_to_webp=true)
(http://qph.is.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-b12d6e54cb41fba9e97447999cdb7a2b?convert_to_webp=true)
(http://qph.is.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-869eea8736ed2d69d5d7ad2354185dc3?convert_to_webp=true)
(http://qph.is.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-34c1b02063060a4e5ed63d599c5d7e40?convert_to_webp=true)
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I don't disagree, I was thinking more Risk board game style of 'this is how many forces Russia has to throw at Europe' today vs 'this is how many actual tanks and planes are ready to go' in Europe to defend.
In that scenario before the US gets involved, before anyone else does anything, the Russians just plow through with sheer number of forces.
They can't hold it, they can't possibly win long term, but they can blow up a ton of things and zoom where they want to for a very short period of time.
That's sort of the thing, though. Russia's military sounds a lot bigger and badder than it is. They can bully countries like Georgia, but I'm not convinced that, even in that scenario, they'd get through Ukraine and Poland before Germany's military met them. And, lest we forget, those maps showing US military bases sort of skips over a salient piece of information. Germany is host to a pretty ridiculous amount of NATO forces. I think there are almost 40 thousand American servicemen in Germany alone, plus a whole host of NATO's toys.
It's one of those things that gets glossed over a lot when talking about these kinds of issues. NATO's major strength (and the reason most countries have tried, for the sake of all that is Holy, to not piss them off) is that they can be almost anywhere in technology that reduces the strength you derive from your numbers. Putin said, straight up, that fighting NATO was foolish, and that takes a lot from someone whose endgame here is to try to showcase strength. The best thing to do is to try by every means possible to get what you want while making sure NATO doesn't think you're a threat.
... Actually, the best thing to do is to single-handedly become one of the largest trading partners of all your former enemies by using your people as a sort of semi-enslaved workforce, then using technology derived from those former enemies to make sure your own people are economically valuable and earn a spot at the head of the table, thereby making your country untenable to attack just because of the sheer pain of not having that trading partner. People do not give the Chinese government of the last thirty years anywhere NEAR enough credit for essentially figuring this game out before anyone else did. America will do its best to appease those nations where US citizens make money.
Anyway, on the subject of Russia, Putin's pretty well aware of his situation. Russia, like many countries, sounds better militarily on paper. They have a lot of active duty service personnel, but their technology hasn't really kept strides with the rest of the developed world since about the 80s. They're not shopping at Wal Mart, mind you, but they're built to engage in a kind of warfare that hasn't even been the means of conventional warfare since the mid 90s.
It also doesn't help his cause that his own country houses at least one of those aspiring Islamic nation-states that the US has a bad habit of arming when it's politically expedient. Part of his military is, unfortunately for him, going to be tied up on internal matters.
I'd say he'd make some serious progress through Ukraine and conquer places like Estonia in the about 10-12 hours he'd likely have before he'd have to engage NATO on both fronts. So yeah, you might be right about a few of the Baltic states if we're talking about a Hitler-esque land blitz. The terrain would be a pain in the ass, though, so I don't think they'd make it through Poland. On the other hand, at least that would make their western front a little easier to hold once they were stopped.
Putin's biggest problem, though, would be who arrives through his backdoor. Honestly, if it was just the European theater, I'd be inclined to say Russia could invade and hold quite a few nations for no reason but the terrain alone at least for a little while. However, unlike almost every other war in their history, their biggest problem would be coming from the Pacific Ocean. I think a blitz across the Pacific on behalf of a force consisting of units from the American, Canadian, Australian, Japanese, and possibly even South Korean militaries would be far more devastating than anything we're imagining in Russia. Hell, the first two nations routinely coordinate training exercises in each others' backyards for just that kind of attack. That's a more interesting scenario in the Tiger forest, how bits of some of the world's most technologically advanced militaries would fare against Russia's manpower in one of the densest forests known to man.
Entirely unlikely to happen, but that's a great thought experiment. How fast could those nations advance through the east of Russia? Obviously, that's exactly the kind of scenario that the Russian army has been practicing for since Stalin was in power.
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Too much land mass, not enough troops. Impossible to conquer any really large parts of Russia.
As your front moves forward it spreads, and eventually you've got a million square miles to cover. With today's low number/high tech forces you can't cover it. You can go straight to 'x' city and kill anything in the way, but you can't hold x, y, z, russian cities 2,000 km apart.
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Too much land mass, not enough troops. Impossible to conquer any really large parts of Russia.
As your front moves forward it spreads, and eventually you've got a million square miles to cover. With today's low number/high tech forces you can't cover it. You can go straight to 'x' city and kill anything in the way, but you can't hold x, y, z, russian cities 2,000 km apart.
However, they don't have to hold anything other than the things that matter to the west of Russia. They don't need "X City" they need to "blow up X refinery, X dam, X power supply, X etc." The same reason they don't have to conduct an extermination campaign of deadly and dirty house-to-house fighting means they can essentially return the area to the Bronze Age and focus on military bases. It would make an invading force invading from the other side equally difficult to stop. In the past, Russian militaries abandoned the west and retreated eastward, using their population as a blunt instrument.
The calculus changes when your former citadel isn't a citadel anymore.
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Well here's hoping we can keep all these wars virtual.
Maybe in the future we'll all get our matrix connections and we can hash it out and see how it plays in 2030's version of ARMA.
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Well here's hoping we can keep all these wars virtual.
Maybe in the future we'll all get our matrix connections and we can hash it out and see how it plays in 2030's version of ARMA.
Oh come on, why can't they go nuts?! Call of Duty always gives us the same old wars. I want to see Call Of Duty: DROC, where you can build and run your own militia, taking over coltan mines and paying your workers with huffs of paint.
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Thoroughly interesting read from all of you thank you for writing in this thread.
I think sometimes we like to play the what-if military thought games and we head out into the realms of the improbable. But we all know the improbable leads to the possible sometimes :/
I don't think there isn't going to be any sort of 'hot' war anywhere any time soon with any first world countries, just not going to happen (although we are happy to keep building weapons systems to fight the last war we never fought). Sadly we'll continue to see "third-world" countries obliterating each other's populations at a low boil for decades to come. Hundreds of thousands of people dead across Africa, Iraq, Syria, and a lovely slow soft war in Eastern Europe that will continue for a long time. As pointed out earlier none of the big boys are getting involved, we're happy to sell to the combatants or fund proxies.
Regarding Europe as a defensive military vs Russia on it's own in a fantasy non nuclear conflict, it's game over in quick order for a short campaign. Europe's forces just don't have the numbers, and more importantly the massively complicated command and control and force projection required for today's sort of fighting. The Russians are quite good at this sort of thing, and it's Borsch in France in a few weeks. Remember the Libyan air campaign recently? The Euro air forces couldn't do much of anything on their own and were about 100% dependent on American command and control, coordination, and pointing out where the Europeans put the bombs. This was not widely reported in the press because this was supposed to be seen as a 'European' leading campaign, but it was basically run by the Americans because the Europeans just don't have the air hardware and coordination to run those sort of sorties. It's not a slight on the Europeans, they are (perhaps wisely), spending that money on healthcare and public infrastructure, and we spend it on fancy AWACS.
And let's be honest even at the -height- of the cold war, there weren't nearly enough NATO ground forces to do much more than be cannon-fodder to slow down Russian armored advances until a full mobilization could occur or before things escalated to nuclear. This is a similar situation in South Korea; there's enough North Korean artillery and missiles pointed at Seoul to basically obliterate the civilian population and the small US/Korean force on the border in a surprise attack. This doesn't mean that NK won't be absolutely crushed if an actual campaign gets going, but the first part of the conflict those border troops are forfeit.
The same thing in Europe, if it started the actual 'long' war would be about beating back Russian forces from their full advances gained early on.
Now that I actually read more or less about that kind of things in spite of myself on forums related to my job, and while it remains amateurish, I think you are confusing a lot of things.
First, Russia, as in the current Federation of Russia, is absolutely not USSR or Warsaw Pact.
First we have to get back a bit in time, between the end of WW2 up to the 80s. USSR is a colossus that encompasses satellites states as far as DDR (which is already western Europe, or at least central). Its manpower is incredible and NATO perfectly knows that they are absolute masters on land: manpower, and especially armour and tanks that NATO cannot possibly match until the very late Cold War (just before the collapse), with the introduction of more modern gear actually able to stand against the soviet arsenal of T-72B, T-80B, etc, by introducing the modern lines of armour that we know (Abrams, Challenger, Leopard 2, etc). Before the middle of the 80s, USSR not only has a colossal amount of those, but they are far superior to everything that NATO can field (NATO strengths rely elsewhere). Due to that state of affairs, NATO was incredibly under pressure from West Germany in particular, but also all the NATO Europe that knew that a single, head front massive assault from their soviet enemy would just pierce through anything like through butter. That is incidentally why they started to setup in the Fulda Gap (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulda_Gap) in part as a way to counter that.
Now then, before I start rambling, my point is that Russia is not that USSR. Russia hasn't the steamrolling capability that USSR held.
Second, just add up the countries that you showed on your pic : approximately 900 tanks, and 1500 IFVs for the 3 allied countries depicted. That is indeed a bit less than what Russia fields. Now then, add Italia, Spain, Poland, etc. I am pretty sure we can come to a respectable amount of forces that would be a match for the Russian numbers depicted. Moreover, I would put my money on a defending army at equal numbers, even if slightly less.
I actually think that what could make Russia win in such a case scenario is that UK, France and Germany forces are already spread thin all over the globe.
I also think that while indeed Lybia showed that European militaries had to rely too much on specific hardware and force projecting tools that the US lent them, it doesn't mean that they can't do it without them. Proof is currently, France is doing perfectly fine on its own in Mali, Center Africa, and Iraq. They were just happy to rely on the US because the logistics are not great (yes, they do not have the sheer capabilities the US have) and extremely expensive.
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Russia, like many countries, sounds better militarily on paper. They have a lot of active duty service personnel, but their technology hasn't really kept strides with the rest of the developed world since about the 80s. They're not shopping at Wal Mart, mind you, but they're built to engage in a kind of warfare that hasn't even been the means of conventional warfare since the mid 90s.
Recent Chinese R&D military boom might disagree with you here. Their MBTs and armour especially, have nothing to be ashamed of compared to modern NATO MBTs. Most of their arsenal has actually been completely renewed.
Likewise, Russia may still have a great deal of old gear, but their technology, especially for their airforce, is nothing to be ashamed of.
No I think the main issue with both of them is that they actually haven't seen a war in eons. They don't know how their new stuff is going to behave (except maybe Russia that tests at least a part of it by selling it or deploying it in Ukraine, but that's hardly their latest in terms of tech). They don't know how their men are going to behave.
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Leave evolution and the universe out of this.
No. Not now, not in the future, not ever.
1) The universe doesn't hate anyone. It's incapable of hating. And more objectively speaking, the conditions in the universe aren't life-averse either. And if you destroy it, there is nothing life would have a place in. Life depends on the existence of this universe.
All of our terms are anthropomorphisms of what really is. In this case, the phrase "the universe hates life" is entirely appropriate. If you were to place the universe, as a thought experiment, as a house, the area suitable for human life, would be smaller than a proton. Of all the reality we could potentially exist in, we would be instantly destroyed in the greatest proportion of it. And even in the tiniest portion that we do know, most of it is hostile to life.
Of course life depends on the existence of this universe, in the sense that it needs matter and energy to exist. But within those constraints, this is possibly the worst sort of universe life could exist in (see Krauss, and other physicists). We live in a universe as antithetical to life as it is pretty much possible to be, while still having life. If you disagree, you simply need to read more.
2) Evolution has (by necessity, being descriptive theory) nothing to do with morality: And 'awful' certainly is a moral, normative category. Also, furthermore, cooperation playes and played a far greater role in the evolution of the human species than murder, genocide and destruction (and murder here, maybe also genocide, are again morally evaluative hand have basically nothing to do with the descriptive theory of the change of species).
Evolution is descriptive. How we got here is descriptive. However, your premises are flawed. First, the fact that something is descriptive does not mean that it does not also prescribe, assuming that one has certain values, such as "survive". I hold such values.
In addition, violence between living beings has been the greatest and most constant factor of life on earth. Of course people have cooperated. Of course people have lived together. No one is arguing that, except, perhaps, your mental straw-man of me you constructed to argue against because it would make you feel better.
What I am saying is that violence between persons, between cultures, between societies, is inevitable, because of the universe we live in. We live in a universe of scarce resources, locations, and opportunities. We live in a universe in which "survival of the most adaptive" is an ironclad rule. We live in a universe which designed us, not the other way around.
And because of that, the future of humanity will necessarily conform to those realities. To claim otherwise is the height of unjustified arrogance and hyperactive pride.
Survival as used in evolutionary theory can't be a value. If you introduce values, evolutionary theory can't possibly be by what you measure them. If there are values in life and in the world - or in reality, then there are for sure more ultimate values than survival, as humans certainly don't merely want to survive, they aim to live well.
Of course survival can be a value. I am valuing survival right now. In fact, survival is the basis of all values - for without the survival of a species, that species can value nothing. Personally, I also value survival - I may not thrive, but I cannot thrive without living to try. All lasting values, therefore, are predicated on survival.
If the species does not survive, all morality that species might possess is utterly of nothing.
Oh, you were talking about evolution as a dogma and scientistic worldview, rather than a phenomenon of nature or a theory of natural science. Sure, you can do that. Go on.
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Lyn,
I should be clear, I wasn't referring to all of NATO, I was referring to the prospective outcome of one or two nations in Europe opposing Russia, in order to dispel the idea that NATO was purely a US idea for opposing Russia.
The point is not that any individual nation in Europe is weak. The point is that NATO is not a purely U.S. creation for its own benefit. You, as Europeans, need to stick together. And I, as an American, think you can now do so without us. We didn't force NATO on you. You need NATO. But, at this point, I think you can have NATO without us, and still survive, easily.
As for American power...I'm a liberal...I seek to limit American power. And yes, relatively, it is declining. But it is declining only very gradually, if that.
You, as a European, cannot imagine the power that the U.S.A. currently holds. I've had the pleasure, as a contractor who has done government work, to occasionally encounter it. All I can really say is that it is, even in what the most plebeian of American citizens encounter, apocalyptic.
I don't worry as much as you seem to think I should about America losing power. If you knew as much as I do, you wouldn't either. I worry about - as I said - some American managing to create an empire out of it. I've worked on military bases. I've talked with members of the military. The United States is not in any danger of being outclassed. You should not fear that. Rather, fear what I have seen: a deeply professional, truly advanced series of military systems all based around the idea of completely destroying an actual military competitor. To respond to others...well, we've seen how that ends up. And yet, we really aren't reliant on things like GPS - I've heard too many complaints of having to operate without it by trainees, or having to learn compass headings to take that seriously. Put the U.S. military into the fight it is designed for, and, well...
I don't worry about being outclassed. I worry that our own system has become increasingly imperial, increasingly dictatorial, without reference to the will of the people. Because while the American people are generally pacifistic and accommodationist, the American government is militaristic. And it has been ever more so in the last twenty years, because it can be. All it has to do is convince my fellow voters that we are under attack.
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I wouldn't go to the point to call them weak, but yes indeed.
Anyway, I really wasn't refering to the US power per se, but US might and image, which are two different things.
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Oh, and I also worry about that power being turned on us, the citizens. Musn't forget that.
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Didn't bother reading past the first page, but there's something that needs to be pointed out because it's scary as fuck. Putin is the lesser evil here. He's quite seriously holding back far worse warmongers and his removal would almost certainly lead to an even worse bastard in charge with less grasp of what kind of consequences further war would lead to.
Putin is a batfuck insane warmonger, but he's frighteningly enough the best of all the realistic alternatives.
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Who do you have in mind ?
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Putin is a batfuck insane warmonger, but he's frighteningly enough the best of all the realistic alternatives.
He is not perfect... we have Gruzia and Ukraine(but more like a reaction to events he did not start) yet those countries are still here they are not failed states like Iraq or other... people seem don't see(or don't want to) what nation is the biggest warmonger on this planet.