Why Americans lose wars
It's really a Paradox
The strongest armed forces, which is extremely capable and has high morale, has the ability to fight a war in every Continent, adapts well into difficult situations and learns from it's past mistakes, why does it lose conflicts? Americans can (correctly) argue that they haven't been defeated on the battlefield in fixed battle. But the truth is that they have lost wars, there is no credible denial about this. That Afghanistan is an Islamic Emirate today, just shows how the Global War on Terror was lost. Just like the fact that there is no South Vietnam anymore.
American partisan politics and polarization simply denies the ability to have a real discussion of this last lost war, which happened in the country called "the Graveyard of Empires", something that future historians won't forget. The simple reason is that this lost war happened because the actions of US Presidents from both parties, which then simply makes debate in the highly partisan discourse difficult. And this makes debate simply too painful, perhaps. The debate, just like with the lost war in Vietnam, is put aside and perhaps only later discussed if ever.
Yet the similarity with South Vietnam and Afghanistan are obvious. In both occasions, the Americans left their past ally on it's own because of the unpopularity of the war (perceived or real), with the result that Afghanistan collapsed even quicker than South Vietnam, but in a similar spectacular fashion, now with Afghans clinging to the undercarriages of US military transports and then falling into their deaths. Something quite similar to the final stages of the withdrawal from Saigon.
The Idea of "the Forever War"
A Marine general testifying on Capitol Hill during the War on Terror put it aptly with telling that the country was in war, but it sure didn't feel so at home. Americans simply haven't felt that their country has been in wars, not even with in their taxes. This creates the environment for the idea that all wars are done for the military-industrial complex themselves and lead by a Foreign Policy establishment (called "the Blob" by some) totally separated from American life. It's the the idea of Smedley Butler of "war being a racket" put on steroids. The problem with this is that even if the part of the criticism of Butler and later people is true, if not taken to be the only part of the problem, but that everything is just a racket for the military-industrial complex to prosper, you can make disastrous decisions. Because then the conclusion of simply withdrawing is logical, because the whole conflict was "artificially engineered" by the US itself. This leads to simply Americans looking at their own navel and totally forget that there's the enemy view of the conflict is totally different. Something like the conflict in Vietnam didn't originate from the US and invading a country like Afghanistan because a financier of a terrorist attack happened to stay there does have consequences. If you brake it, you own it, as the saying goes.
This can see both in the way Vietnam war was lead by the administrations of Johnson and Nixon, but also the in the way that the war in Afghanistan was dealt by Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden. Once the Taliban regime was toppled, Afghanistan never was a focus for any administration, but an inconvenient problem that should be ended as quickly as possible and the troops being withdrawn. How to fight a war when you promise to withdraw your forces at some certain time is in my view, beyond hubris. And this was clear to Pakistan, that successfully played it's cards and averted the hostility of the US while still backing the Taliban. Obviously Pakistanis could burn the candle from both ends. In the Vietnam war, the Americans simply saw the conflict as part of Cold War had their domino theory, not like North Vietnam. That China and North Vietnam had a border war few years after and how Vietnam then invaded Kampuchea to oust Pol Pot's regime shows just how wrong the domino theory was. Yet even more delusional than the domino theory was the reason given to the fighting in Afghanistan: that if Afghanistan was lost, it would become a terrorist haven and attacks on mainland US would continue and increase. This lunatic idea that was simply reurgitated so many times that it seemed to make sense, lead to the peace agreement that then Trump made. Because Trump truly went with this line. Thus Taleban promised not to attack the US or US forces and promised to talk to the Afghan government, which wasn't at all part of the peace treaty. Biden then kept to the agreement made by Trump while the Taleban disregarded the the part of talks with the Afghan Republic and staged a successful offensive to conquer all of Afghanistan. This then encouraged Putin to take Ukraine once and for all in a Blitzkrieg style attack, which didn't go according to plan.
The Future, the next Forever War to end
There are worrisome signs that this delusion continues, where the US looks at conflicts just from it's own viewpoint. The war in Ukraine is talked as a "forever war" that ought to be quickly halted. Marco Rubio, the incoming secretary of state, sees the war as stalemate that has to be ended and we all know Trump's campaign promise to end the war immediately. Above all, we already have an example how Trump makes peace agreements with the Taliban example. We have seen what happens, when Trump wants the peace deal to happen... and which side then gives in to get the deal done. What is, again, totally absent is the understanding how Russia and Putin sees this war. Putin has said that Russia is at war with NATO. Hence the US isn't for him a intermediary, but the belligerent, the enemy here. For Trump to say that he's in good relation with both Zelensky and Putin is very difficult to understand. The US isn't an intermediary here. Just think what the reaction would have been if Roosevelt had said how good terms he is with Hitler or the Japanese Emperor and the conflict can be ended. For Russia, the enemy is the US. For Putin this an existential fight politically, where it isn't at all an existential fight for the US and Trump. It's just a campaign promise among others. And this is the real problem here. For Ukraine, it truly is the fight is existential for the whole country, which makes it here the weakest side. Yet when people have the wrongful idea that the conflict is a forever war (that happened because of NATO enlargement) and thus has to be ended with US withdrawal, this will have serious consequences for NATO and the status of US being a Superpower. The idea that now Europe will strongly rearm itself is unlikely. It's a pipe dream. What is likely that "Finlandization" will prevail: European countries will, one by one, try to then to remake the broken ties with Russia. Hungary and Orban, friend of Trump, is showing the way. Russian actions will be "understood" and accepted. It may take as long for Putin to die of natural causes or whatever, but that is the likely outcome if Russia wins this war. And by getting what it has taken already, or perhaps have the border on the Dniepr, Russia will have prevailed. In Russian rhetoric, it will be a victory over NATO. Russia will achieve it's goal of weakening Atlanticism. The inability for Americans to see how this weakens their own alliance is quite telling. Because the alliances are just a symptom of the military establishment that makes forever wars possible. Or so the thinking goes with the "forever war" mentality.
But that's just my opinion. I would like to hear what others think. Are there other causes for the US to lose wars? Or am I wrong?
The strongest armed forces, which is extremely capable and has high morale, has the ability to fight a war in every Continent, adapts well into difficult situations and learns from it's past mistakes, why does it lose conflicts? Americans can (correctly) argue that they haven't been defeated on the battlefield in fixed battle. But the truth is that they have lost wars, there is no credible denial about this. That Afghanistan is an Islamic Emirate today, just shows how the Global War on Terror was lost. Just like the fact that there is no South Vietnam anymore.
American partisan politics and polarization simply denies the ability to have a real discussion of this last lost war, which happened in the country called "the Graveyard of Empires", something that future historians won't forget. The simple reason is that this lost war happened because the actions of US Presidents from both parties, which then simply makes debate in the highly partisan discourse difficult. And this makes debate simply too painful, perhaps. The debate, just like with the lost war in Vietnam, is put aside and perhaps only later discussed if ever.
Yet the similarity with South Vietnam and Afghanistan are obvious. In both occasions, the Americans left their past ally on it's own because of the unpopularity of the war (perceived or real), with the result that Afghanistan collapsed even quicker than South Vietnam, but in a similar spectacular fashion, now with Afghans clinging to the undercarriages of US military transports and then falling into their deaths. Something quite similar to the final stages of the withdrawal from Saigon.
The Idea of "the Forever War"
A Marine general testifying on Capitol Hill during the War on Terror put it aptly with telling that the country was in war, but it sure didn't feel so at home. Americans simply haven't felt that their country has been in wars, not even with in their taxes. This creates the environment for the idea that all wars are done for the military-industrial complex themselves and lead by a Foreign Policy establishment (called "the Blob" by some) totally separated from American life. It's the the idea of Smedley Butler of "war being a racket" put on steroids. The problem with this is that even if the part of the criticism of Butler and later people is true, if not taken to be the only part of the problem, but that everything is just a racket for the military-industrial complex to prosper, you can make disastrous decisions. Because then the conclusion of simply withdrawing is logical, because the whole conflict was "artificially engineered" by the US itself. This leads to simply Americans looking at their own navel and totally forget that there's the enemy view of the conflict is totally different. Something like the conflict in Vietnam didn't originate from the US and invading a country like Afghanistan because a financier of a terrorist attack happened to stay there does have consequences. If you brake it, you own it, as the saying goes.
This can see both in the way Vietnam war was lead by the administrations of Johnson and Nixon, but also the in the way that the war in Afghanistan was dealt by Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden. Once the Taliban regime was toppled, Afghanistan never was a focus for any administration, but an inconvenient problem that should be ended as quickly as possible and the troops being withdrawn. How to fight a war when you promise to withdraw your forces at some certain time is in my view, beyond hubris. And this was clear to Pakistan, that successfully played it's cards and averted the hostility of the US while still backing the Taliban. Obviously Pakistanis could burn the candle from both ends. In the Vietnam war, the Americans simply saw the conflict as part of Cold War had their domino theory, not like North Vietnam. That China and North Vietnam had a border war few years after and how Vietnam then invaded Kampuchea to oust Pol Pot's regime shows just how wrong the domino theory was. Yet even more delusional than the domino theory was the reason given to the fighting in Afghanistan: that if Afghanistan was lost, it would become a terrorist haven and attacks on mainland US would continue and increase. This lunatic idea that was simply reurgitated so many times that it seemed to make sense, lead to the peace agreement that then Trump made. Because Trump truly went with this line. Thus Taleban promised not to attack the US or US forces and promised to talk to the Afghan government, which wasn't at all part of the peace treaty. Biden then kept to the agreement made by Trump while the Taleban disregarded the the part of talks with the Afghan Republic and staged a successful offensive to conquer all of Afghanistan. This then encouraged Putin to take Ukraine once and for all in a Blitzkrieg style attack, which didn't go according to plan.
The Future, the next Forever War to end
There are worrisome signs that this delusion continues, where the US looks at conflicts just from it's own viewpoint. The war in Ukraine is talked as a "forever war" that ought to be quickly halted. Marco Rubio, the incoming secretary of state, sees the war as stalemate that has to be ended and we all know Trump's campaign promise to end the war immediately. Above all, we already have an example how Trump makes peace agreements with the Taliban example. We have seen what happens, when Trump wants the peace deal to happen... and which side then gives in to get the deal done. What is, again, totally absent is the understanding how Russia and Putin sees this war. Putin has said that Russia is at war with NATO. Hence the US isn't for him a intermediary, but the belligerent, the enemy here. For Trump to say that he's in good relation with both Zelensky and Putin is very difficult to understand. The US isn't an intermediary here. Just think what the reaction would have been if Roosevelt had said how good terms he is with Hitler or the Japanese Emperor and the conflict can be ended. For Russia, the enemy is the US. For Putin this an existential fight politically, where it isn't at all an existential fight for the US and Trump. It's just a campaign promise among others. And this is the real problem here. For Ukraine, it truly is the fight is existential for the whole country, which makes it here the weakest side. Yet when people have the wrongful idea that the conflict is a forever war (that happened because of NATO enlargement) and thus has to be ended with US withdrawal, this will have serious consequences for NATO and the status of US being a Superpower. The idea that now Europe will strongly rearm itself is unlikely. It's a pipe dream. What is likely that "Finlandization" will prevail: European countries will, one by one, try to then to remake the broken ties with Russia. Hungary and Orban, friend of Trump, is showing the way. Russian actions will be "understood" and accepted. It may take as long for Putin to die of natural causes or whatever, but that is the likely outcome if Russia wins this war. And by getting what it has taken already, or perhaps have the border on the Dniepr, Russia will have prevailed. In Russian rhetoric, it will be a victory over NATO. Russia will achieve it's goal of weakening Atlanticism. The inability for Americans to see how this weakens their own alliance is quite telling. Because the alliances are just a symptom of the military establishment that makes forever wars possible. Or so the thinking goes with the "forever war" mentality.
But that's just my opinion. I would like to hear what others think. Are there other causes for the US to lose wars? Or am I wrong?
Comments (87)
A really good, comprehensive summary. Discouraging. I can't think of much to say. I don't have anything near an answer. How can we go through Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan and all the chaos and catastrophe associated with them and still think there is value in these types of policies?
One thing I have thought about a lot, starting in the early 1990s - Gorbachev gave us the gift of a new eastern Europe and western Asia. How did we handle it? Even knowing Russia's historical paranoia about being surrounded and invaded, we immediately started expanding NATO right up to it's borders. Now it's enclosed by hostile countries backed by the US and western European militaries. No wonder Putin is furious. We blew it. We were naive and thoughtless, but then, as your summary shows, we always seem to be.
The OP brings to mind the ongoing discussion here on the forum - "In Support of Western Supremacy, Nationalism, and Imperialism." That thread displays the US's superpower mania at a scale that dwarfs even our past adventures. The fact that that kind of fantasy still holds power always confounds me. The worst part is that the desire for military solutions to political problems is still strong in mainstream political leadership.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_strategy
France colonized Vietnam and held it until Japan took it over until they lost it to Hiroshima, and then the US didn't want it to go Comminist so the whole wrangling in their politics that was supposed to end with allowing the Vietnamese to democratically choose their course. More US meddling and then war, but the point is the US never wanted to take over Vietnam. They just wanted them to do as they were told. Had the US wanted to annex it for statehood, that'd be a different story, but even then, colonies are hard to hold. The British Empire couldn't hold and neither could the USSR.
Perhaps for Dick Cheney and Haliburton, but not for the North Vietnamese soldier fighting the Americans. Or the young Afghan men that we called the Taleban. For them it's not the military industrial complex or profits, it's a war to defend your country against an outside aggressor. The simple fact is that in war the enemy is has different objectives than you and you cannot assume that he has similar aspirations and objectives as you do.
It was very telling that when Kissenger (of all people) got the Nobel peace prize for "for jointly having negotiated a cease fire in Vietnam in 1973", his North Vietnamese counterpart Lê ??c Th? refused to take the prize because of a totally logical reason: the war was not finished, it was just an armstice. This just shows the total difference in the thinking of the two belligerents.
A controversial Nober peace prize:
This is even more clear in the idea when the tool of sanctions is raised or when the military response is retaliatory and limited in scope. For the US politician an economic slowdown and the voter having economic difficulties will mean losing the next election. For leaders of a country that is attacked or sanctioned by the US, it won't. For them the conflict is usually truly existential, and thus economic hardship won't matter so much. The Houthis in Yemen are a perfect example of this. As the Yemen civil war has now gone on for a decade and the Saudi intervention failed, but did achieve to bomb the country back to being as poor as in the 1970's, the Houthi government can hardly care about some retaliatory bombing of the US when the Houthis attacked international shipping. They know that an US invasion force won't come to fight them in the mountains.
"The US" does not refer to a single/uniform/monolithic entity.
I suppose that's exposed by the nature of democracy.
Administrations come and go, whatever sentiments come and go, ...
A weakness of democracy (compared to dictatorships or theocracies for example)?
Well, if politics are like fashions and impatience a driver, then perhaps.
We can just hope that voters generally are smart enough.
Quoting Dmitry Peskov · via Reuters · Oct 2, 2023
Quoting Vladimir Putin · via Newsweek · Oct 17, 2023
Quoting T Clark
This is the line that has been discussed again and again especially the Ukraine war thread (which btw started before the large scale Russian invasion started).
But did you really blow it?
I can look at this from a different angle as my summer cottage is very close to the Russian border. Please understand that the US isn't almighty, it's just one actor in Europe. The World doesn't circle around the US. Russia itself is the really big actor here. The Soviet leadership avoided the largest wars when the USSR collapsed, but the problem was that Russia knew just one thing, that it was an Empire. It has all these minorities, a large Muslim population and many people who really aren't European. How could this be a nation state? The new leadership especially under Putin couldn't see itself as a "humble" European nation state, because Russia simply isn't a nation state. If there was a theoretical window of opportunity to link Russia into Europe, it would have been immediately when the Soviet Union collapsed. Yet that would have needed larger than life politicians both in Moscow and Washington DC, but those political Houdini's didn't exist. That door closed during the time of Yeltsin, not Putin. And with Putin, the KGB took hold of the power in Russia. With the Kursk accident, Putin's Russia was back in the old ways.
Yet the self flagellation of the West is only possible when one ignores totally what Putin and the Russian leadership themselves have said to be the reason for war. NATO enlargement is one of Putin's lines, but so is the artificiality of the state of Ukraine and it being natural of Ukraine being part of Russia. Just how delusional this talk would be if the UK prime minister would say similar things about Ireland? That it's an artificial country and should be back in the UK. I think that many Irish would be alarmed of the kind of crazy talk. But it somehow isn't crazy when Putin says it.
Also please understand that key players in the NATO enlargement were the new countries themselves. And when Putin made the large scale attack on Ukraine, it was the Finnish street, the people, that changed their ideas of NATO in a heartbeat and the politicians followed. Without the invasion, both Finland and Sweden would be happily outside NATO. The Baltic States and Poland (correctly) understood that for Russia, the collapse of Soviet Union was another Times of Troubles and the country could soon get over it as they did once oil prices went up. Hence it was for the "near abroad" countries this brief opportunity to get out of Russia's stranglehold.
Quoting T Clark
Bob Ross likely wanted to stir up a heated debate, luckily didn't get banned. Yet I don't think there's a US superpower mania. The last true excess were the neocons, who didn't themselves believe at first they got the power. They themselves were encouraged by the last war that the US won: the liberation of Kuwait back from Iraq. That is now the time that I see as the pinnacle of US power, which lead the neocons to go crazy later. Trump actually destroyed them (the neocons) in my view, although he can appoint them into his administration. He simply walked over Jeb Bush and nobody still goes with the line that President Bush "just got bad intel with Iraq". That is something thanks to Trump.
Yet Trumpism might go overboard too much on the other side. If the US really thinks Russia attacking Ukraine happened because of US actions and hence it's the US that has to "de-escalate", really think twice what you are doing. Luckily Trump has admitted that things have changed. Above all, Ukraine hasn't yet been giving the treatment that the Republic of Aghanistan and South Vietnam got. But this outcome can still happen. A Dolchstoss given to Ukraine with Europe just watching from the side just what the hell happened is the worst outcome. But that hasn't happened.
He's right though, isn't he? The US makes a schizoid global leader when there's no existential threat to keep things on track. The world needs an emperor. Not exactly like a Dune emperor, but similar.
Do you live in the Baltics?
Quoting ssu
Living where you do, you may know more about this than I do. I remember back in the early 1990s when Bill Clinton and the rest of NATO started expanding NATO. Even back then I thought it was a graceless response to a world changing action.
Quoting ssu
I don't necessarily think we should have "linked Russia into Europe." I just think it was a big mistake to move NATO right up to Russia's borders. We reacted very aggressively to Russian weapons in Cuba back in the 1960s. Why would we expect to Russia to feel differently? What benefit did the west get out of it?
Quoting ssu
It always seemed to me that was just a rationalization for political and propaganda purposes. Maybe I'm wrong.
Quoting ssu
I'm sure that's true, but that's not a good enough, or even very good, reason for us to agree to let them in. For us to tie up our military into riskier entangling alliances made it more likely that we would end up in a war with Russia. That would be a very bad thing. A very, very bad thing.
Quoting ssu
Again, that's not a good enough reason for us to act. We need to look after our own interests. Expansion of the EU allows for greater cohesion in Europe without getting the military involved.
Quoting ssu
I found his logic disturbing. Stronger than disturbing. But I don't see that he violated any of the guidelines. Just espousing unpopular opinions shouldn't be a good enough reason for moderator action.
Quoting ssu
There are a lot of hawks still around. I kept expecting Israel to attack Iran with strong US military support.
Quoting ssu
I have a fantasy that Europe will step up to take a bigger military and political role in the world, especially in Europe.
Something's a bit off ? here.
NATO isn't seeking to take over countries. Countries seek to be part of NATO for defense and have to qualify (which can take some years).
For a country the size and geography of Russia it might be easy enough to list all kinds of "hostile countries" in the vicinity. It's not like grabbing land resolves the (supposed) situation. But yeah, mistakes were made, things were blown.
? Nov 2, 2024 (should actually have been in the Ukraine Crisis thread)
If "Putin is furious", it's because the Ukrainians went their own way.
Quoting Sergey Lavrov · Jan 22, 2024
Quoting ssu
Some things are imported from Russia straight through sanctions. ;)
1. Waging war is a matter of costs and benefits.
2. In order to gauge whether a war is lost or won, the conditions for victory must be established.
3. Countries may lie to foreign and domestic audiences about their reasons for going to war, and their victory conditions for reasons that should be obvious.
If we look at Afghanistan with that in mind, what were the real reasons for US involvement there? What did the US expect to gain, and at what cost?
It probably comes to no surprise to you that I am deeply skeptical about the US' stated reasons for going to war: 'the war on terror' and 'spreading democracy'. I think these are both completely unbelievable and clearly fabricated for PR purposes, quite similar to how the US did not invade Iraq over suspected WMDs.
This leaves us guessing as to what the real reasons were for US involvement in Afghanistan, without which it is impossible to gauge whether the US achieved its goals or not.
My sense is the following: the US keeps getting into 'forever wars' not by accident, but because forever wars serve US interests. The US goal in Afghanistan and Iraq was a 'forever war' - continued conflict and instability.
Why would the US be interested in that?
Simple - the US is a maritime power that must dominate global trade and divide the Eurasian continent in order to maintain global dominance.
Being the most powerful maritime power and having strong maritime powers as its allies, domination of maritime trade is a given. However, the goal is to dominate global, and not just maritime trade.
As such, it is of prime strategic interest for the US to disrupt land-based trade routes to keep key rivals from establishing land-based alternatives to US-dominated sea routes.
The US lacks the means to efficiently invade and occupy large countries overseas, and therefore cannot seek hard, long-term control over vital trade regions. However, to disrupt trade hard control is not necessary - sowing chaos and instability is enough.
Enter the 'forever war': a (relatively) low-footprint, low-cost method of destabilizing key regions in the world for long periods of time.
The war in Afghanistan is a continuation of a long-standing US policy of sowing instability in Central Asia and the Middle-East that started with the overthrowing of the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953. The war successfully extended instability in the region for another 20 years.
When viewed through this lens, the war in Afghanistan was not a defeat at all.
So why is the US so interested in destabilizing this region? Because Central Asia and the Middle-East connect key US rivals: China, Russia and India (plus potential regional powers that may spring up in the Middle-East in the long-term like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey).
Note how this bloc of three countries comprises a gigantic portion of the world's population and natural resources.
To make a long story short, due to the nature of the wars the Americans fight, they often do not have to win decisive military victories in order to reach their goals. However, not winning a decisive victory is not the same as losing.
Given their history, it's hard to find fault with Russia for not believing that. We didn't when Russia moved it's military into Cuba. Heck, I don't even believe it. It's a political attack on Russia backed up by a massive armed force.
Quoting jorndoe
As I noted, Russia is historically paranoid about invasion, but as they say, just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. This is from Wikipedia - Invasion of Russia.
What made these different?
Certainly not the comparative military strength of the opponents. Saddam had a million men under arms, a military with a wealth of relatively recent combat experience, and Iraq had spent lavishly on high the Soviet and French equipment (and this was before the huge technological/qualitative gap between NATO and Russian equipment widened). But the result was an out and out rout. 147 Coalition servicemen were killed while Iraqi casualties were somewhere between 200,000-300,000, with perhaps 50,000 killed in action.
A clear difference with the GWOT is the goal of state building and a transition to liberal democracy, but this wasn't the case in Vietnam (where the US backed a coup and the state was far from a liberal democracy) nor in Korea (an authoritarian dictatorship at the time of the war; also, militarily, a draw).
Ok, but several of those "invasions," are counter invasions in wars Russia started. Particularly, they are former colonies/conquests of Russia fighting for independence or fighting off Russian attempts to recolonize them, and in some cases Russia had carried out sizable genocides against those peoples in living memory. In WWI, Russia mobilized first (Germany last), and invaded Germany first, they just lost. The "Continuation War," is the continuation of the Russian attempt to reconquer Finland, as it reconquered Poland and other lands with its military ally... Nazi Germany. Crimean War? Also kicked off by Russia invading its neighbor.
Sometimes, if all your neighbors think your the asshole and start buying guns and making alliances against you, you might consider what the common denominator is.
Also, one of those isn't even an invasion, but contingency planning staff work where a single shot was never fired...
Second, you could probably generate lists of equal or
even longer length for Germany or France, on which Russia's name would appear as "invader."
The World definetly doesn't need an Emperor. Centralized powers have their weaknesses. Far better is that there's simply countries that tolerate each other and don't start wars, even if they disagree on matters. That would be the ideal.
Quoting T Clark
Close, but no cigar. I live in Finland.
Quoting T Clark
The fact is that if the applicant countries themselves wouldn't have been active, NATO enlargement wouldn't have happened. That's the reality which the anti-US narrative (that it was totally Clinton's idea) totally forgets. In fact, behind closed doors the US asked if for example in the case of the Baltic States Finland and Sweden could give them security guarantees. Totally horrified about the prospect, Finland (and likely Sweden) refused and urged the countries to be accepted into NATO. For the applicants their reason to join NATO was Russia. But for NATO especially the 90's were the time when the organization tried to find a purpose (something on the lines that Trump later has talked). One also should understand that in NATO there's Article 1, that member countries refrain from using violence at each other, which is important. Hence for example Greece and Turkey haven't had a border war. NATO is an European security arrangement and there simply is no counterpart for it in the EU realm.
Remember that actually many European countries really have put their defense 100% in the participation in the joint defense of NATO. It's really an international organization, which was totally evident on just how long Turkey let Sweden to wait to get into NATO. And note how many times US Presidents have been disappointed in NATO, the "No Action, Talk Only" club sometimes when the US wants allies to participate in some endeavor.
Quoting T Clark
You do understand then that many other countries, like the Baltic States, would have been treated the same way as Ukraine and Georgia by Russia and likely Russian military bases would be back in the Baltic states, if these countries wouldn't have used the window of opportunity they had. Just look at Moldova. It has a frozen conflict with Russian "peacekeepers" the example how Russia has meddled also in Georgia:
The Baltic States wouldn't be independent and so charming that they now are if it wasn't for NATO memership. And is that for you think irrelevant? Well, not for the Balts and not for my country either. Just as I like that there is a South Korea, and not that the whole Peninsula is part of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, I also like that the Baltic States are independent and not under the thumb of Putin.
Quoting T Clark
Just look at what the Russians actually do in the occupied territories. Russification of the population is no joke. That they have now publicly annexed territories that they (Russians) even don't control yet. That tells about their objectives quite clearly. It's not just words, it's the actions.
Quoting T Clark
Let's see what Trump does. When it comes to Israel, it feels like the US is the ally of Israel, not the other way around. I personally view the reason for this is the large pro-Israeli Evangelist vote in the US. It's not the American Jewish (who can also oppose the policies of Israel), it those waiting for Armageddon and the rapture.
Quoting T Clark
Hate to be the pessimist here, but you are correct. It is a fantasy. Poland is already doing it, and Germany and other Western countries can happily assume that Polish rearmament will be enough. Remember that during the Cold War WW3 was going to be fought out in Germany and very close to the border of France etc. Now there's Poland there, so I don't think that a real turnaround will happen. Here I accept that I'm a bit of a pessimist, as I said.
Quoting jorndoe
The difference between an organization that is voluntary to join and an organization that you are forced to join (like the Warsaw Pact) should be obvious. But the way many talk of NATO enlargement is if it has been just a plan of the US (or in US, the objective of the Foreign Policy blob) with the applicants being passive "victims". It's always puzzled me, but I think it's the idea that the US treats all countries the same way. That how the US treats and has treated Panama, Guatemala or Haiti is similar how it treats Ireland, Belgium or France. The obvious fact that it doesn't in a similar fashion, just as France has treated differently former colonies in the Sahel and member states in the EU. Another example is how China treats West European countries and compare it to how the act towards the Philippines.
Well, you could also have a long list of when Russia has attacked it's neighbors. After all, it was Catherine the Great who said "I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.
Imperialism is typically argued as a purely defensive action. Just Finland as an independent nation and as part of Sweden has had I guess up to 17 wars or so with Russia since the founding of the state. Yet no denying in what Napoleon and Hitler attempted.
The last US win, the Gulf War, is very telling here. First, the US created a huge coalition, which had as it's members countries like Syria (one armoured division), Morocco and Pakistan. The US worked in the UN (something that now it doesn't do) and got an OK from the Soviet Union. The US took really seriously the Iraqi army and massed a huge army, that still was around from the Cold War. The huge Reagan build up of an Army intended to fight in Central Europe then liberated Kuwait. Secondly, the objective was clear (liberation of Kuwait) and the US did listen to it's Arab allies. Just listen what Dick Cheney said in 1994:
Which just makes it all so confusing. You didn't even have different people then Invading Iraq, you had the same guy that gave the above interview just a few years earlier going against his own words. But then I guess, he hadn't been the CEO of Halliburton yet. So yes, I do accept and understand the "war as racket" argument, but not all wars are rackets of Halliburton. Other countries can have agency in wars too.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yet Korea finally did become a democracy in the 1980's and thanks to the Koreans themselves. And if some Americans are quick to say that now the US and Vietnam have good relations, how better would it be if there would be a South-Vietnam? Who knows.
In fact the "state building" had success in the Balkans. Or has at least until now (as we are talking about the Balkans). But then the forces deployed to for example Bosnia were far bigger to size when compared to the invasion force that went to Iraq, a far larger country with a larger population. But large forces weren't needed because the great Rumsfeld said so. And were is Iraq actually now? Not with the best relations with the US, but it didn't become the Islamic State. Even if that was close.
Even if there are the examples what are successes, where it has been very beneficial that the US has stood up and has assisted it's allies or fought wars, the view that involvement in foreign conflicts is a swindle persists. And especially in the realm of Trump.
We'd need a global government for that.
I didn't claim Russia was an innocent victim, only that they had a well justified fear of invasion. It wasn't a secret. US and NATO policy makers knew about it.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Is that true? I doubt it. I'll let you do the homework.
That displays my ignorance. I thought Finland was considered one of the Baltic states. Pardon if that is considered an insult. It wasn't intended to be.
Quoting ssu
From your point of view, I can see this is important, but from the perspective of US national security it shouldn't have been the main consideration. After the dissolution of the USSR, any expectation that Russia would give up it's influence, even hegemony, in the region was unrealistic. We knew this, but American triumphalism won out over common sense.
Quoting ssu
That's nice, but not a good enough reason, given the predictable consequences.
Quoting ssu
Again, I don't fault the various countries for making the decisions they did. I just think that thumbing our noses at Russia was a dangerous idea. From the point of view of an American, it seems like results of these actions include the invasion of Ukraine. I'm not certain that's a realistic assumption on my part, but it sure looks that way.
Quoting ssu
Not irrelevant, but not enough.
Quoting ssu
Yes. What an odd attitude. It's because they see the State of Israel and it's modern wars as signs of the end of days, Armageddon. Pretty creepy. If I were Israel, it would make me nervous.
And not just Germany and France. Also the Mongol horde and Ottoman empire. All these were existential threats to the integrity of European Russia.
Sure, look up how WWI started and how WWII ended. If starting a war, losing it, and getting invaded counts as "being invaded," then Germany was certainly invaded by Russia (twice in the 20th century), not to mentioned partitioned by it and turned into a puppet state for half a century.
How do you think the war with Napoleon ended? And the Hundred Days? And it's not like Russia hadn't made it into France proper earlier for lack of trying.
With Germany, I suppose the question is "when do you count Germany as coming into existence?" If you're looking at the same time frame and the Thirty Years War on, it's easy to generate such a list. And since the list counts even foreign interventions in civil wars, the French Revolution and its aftermath alone create such a list (plus all of Germany and France's wars). Or just England's myriad attempts to conquer France. I mean if the Chechen War is an invasion then the Haitian rebellion, or the US wars with the Sioux, etc. would be too.
As I said, previously:
Quoting T Clark
Well, sure, in the same sense that if you regularly drive black out drunk you might have a "justifiable fear of car crashes."
I'm not sure if the conclusion that "we blew it," flows from this though. Countries have lobbied hard to get into NATO because of a justifiable fear of Russian invasion and colonization. The counterfactual where NATO doesn't expand and Russia stops invading its neighbors is far from clear, it seems equally plausible that more countries might face invasion otherwise.
Anyhow, I get your point, and I think it's perfectly valid if it is framed in terms of the traumas of World War I and the Russian Civil War, and then the Second World War. That alone would be enough.
The Dune Universe had the Bene Gesserit breeding program and Paul Atreides. What have we got? Donald Trump. .
Kursk, on the other hand, doesn't qualify in this context. There's a negligible chance that Ukraine would invade Russia, had they not invaded first. For that matter, Crimea 2014 seems to have taken most by surprise, and the response (until 2022) were mostly sanctions.
NATO/Europe/China would be reckless to attack Russia; they have the world's largest nuclear weapons arsenal, a fairly straightforward deterrent. It could happen if Russia attacked a NATO member. Europe, Canada, Alaska have bordered Russia for a good while (some over sea), and not threatened with any invasion. Why would they? It's the other way around, defense against Russian encroachment/assault. Just ask the Moldovans, and the Swedes and Finns. Well, and the Ukrainians and Georgians. NATO represents a different kind of threat: the Kremlin can't do as they see fit (which some are thankful for).
Anyway, don't want to spam here, should probably go to the Ukraine Crisis thread instead.
You guys keep ignoring my argument. Im done with this discussion.
Ever heard of the UN? Something like the Security Council is what humans can possibly do.
Two nation states can become one (even if that usually is a difficult and painful integration), but not many. Nations states can in the end form only a loose confederacy of states. Even the European Union is a de facto confederacy, even if it desperately tries to act like an federation or an union.
Quoting T Clark
It wasn't. Finland is seen as part of the Nordic countries. Scandinavian countries are Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Something similar to all the different names for the British Isles.
Quoting T Clark
And this really is the crux of my argument.
US usually acts without at all thinking of the objectives of other actors. They don't matter to you. Hence the US has it's own narrative of what is going on that is different from the reality on the ground. This creates a fundamental inconsistency, when the other side doesn't at all have the objectives the US thinks it has. In the Vietnam war it was the Domino theory and the prevention of Communism spreading in the South East Asia, which isn't the way the Vietnamese saw it. North Vietnam saw the conflict as a war to unite their country. The North Vietnamese soldier wasn't fighting for the spread of Communism, he was fighting for Vietnam. The Marxist-Leninist rhetoric simply hid this from the Americans.
In Afghanistan it was "War against Terror" and the idea of the country not becoming a haven for terrorists, while the local geopolitics and the objectives of countries like Pakistan was totally ignored. And this was the crucial mistake. American administrations simply choose outright denial of reality as their policy with Pakistan. Pakistan had formed the Taleban, it assisted it all throughout the war. OBL was living basically next to a Pakistani military camp. And in the end it assisted the Taleban to take over the country, a military operation that was a spectacular success. Pakistanis even publicly rejoiced over this. Yet for the US, Pakistani was an "ally in the war on terror" and never went to accuse of Pakistan of anything. Why? Because Pakistan was a nuclear state. Attacking Pakistan and then the situation would be even worse! Hence Americans choose simply denial.
The Caption from 2007: "President Bush says he gains influence with world leaders by building personal relations with them. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf got a dose of that diplomacy at the White House last fall, when Bush hailed him as a friend and a voice of moderation. "The president is a strong defender of freedom and the people of Pakistan," Bush said that day, side by side with Musharraf.
This shows how absolutely delusional US leaders can be in believing their own narrative. Yet for Pakistan the real objective with Afghanistan is to keep it out from the Indian sphere of influence. Their (the Pakistanis) main external threat is India. This had nothing to do with "war against a method" the US was proclaiming it all to be about. In Central Asia the US came, had bases everywhere and then withdrew totally.
NATO enlargement is the same. People forget what the discourse around NATO was in the 1990's was like. I do remember. It was that NATO was an old relic that had to renew itself to basically be a global actor (policeman). The Cold War was over. Having territorial defense and a large reservist army was WRONG, outdated, relic from a bygone era! Yet for the countries applying to NATO is was Russia, Russia and Russia. It never was anything else. Yet for Clinton it wasn't. He got votes from the Polish and Eastern European communities (surprise) and it was all about a new security network. The US also got new allies for the War on Terror when countries like France didn't join (remember Freedom Fries?). This is totally and deliberately forgotten and ignored by those going with Kremlin's line, that the objective was to poke Russia. The US didn't think about Russia. Russia was done, it couldn't fight it's way out of a paper bag as it had severe problems just with Chechnya. That was the thinking at that time.
Only now the reality is understood in Europe and NATO has gone back to it's roots to be a defensive alliance. Yet Trump during his last administration started with the 90's rhetoric, which showed just how clueless he can be.
Quoting T Clark
@T Clark, no you didn't know it. This is pure hindsight. Please read what hubris filled ideas were in the US during the Yeltsin era. It wasn't triumphalism, it was the idea that the Cold War had ended. Then you focused on 9/11 and the global war on Terror. All things were looked at from that prism. Hence when Russia occupied Crimea, this came out from nowhere to the US intelligence agencies. There were no assets in the region, the system was focused on hunting muslim terrorists. The denialism can be seen from the many times that the US wanted to "reboot" the relationship with Russia, even if Russia had attacked Georgia with it's "breakaway regions with peacekeepers" masquerade. The attempted reboots are also forgotten in the "US actions did it" narrative.
The real hubris is that you believe in your own narratives that you have created for your own domestic political consumption. The idea of all the conflicts the US is engaged are "forever wars" to support the military industrial complex is actually one of these ideas. But so was the idea that Pakistan was an ally in the "War on Terror". Or that the Islamo-Fascists like the Taleban hated American democracy and would want to attack you... and that's why you were fighting in Afghanistan. To believe one's propaganda, a narrative that one loves, is pretty damaging when the actual reality is different.
Quoting T Clark
You get my reasoning, great! But then the next question. Why then thumb your noses at China?
Just then leave China alone. Why all the fuss about Taiwan? Why not have good relations with China? Is Taiwan a reason to have war with China? They have nuclear weapons too. A lot more than North Korea and are making more of them as we speak.
There ought to be consistency in your actions. When the political discourse in the US isn't accurate about the situation abroad, then this creates a fundamental problem: what the US president says to be the objectives, will really be the objectives of the state and the US armed forces. Now, if that isn't close to the reality on the ground and is made up propaganda, because it's just something that reaffirms popular beliefs that aren't fixed in the real world, you will continue to lose.
I didn't ignore it, I pointed out that your evidence to support your position is historically illiterate, listing colonial rebellions and literal staff work as "invasions." You then asked me to "do the homework," on if Russia has ever invaded Germany and France, which, given the relevance of the Napoleonic and World Wars, is frankly comic.
Also, arguing for "spheres of influence," what is this, 1938? You know who thinks Poland should be in Poland's sphere of influence? Poles. And the same sort of thing goes for Czechs, Finns, Ukrainians, etc.
If one takes historical subjugation to be a valid standard for wielding influence over one's neighbors that other countries should base their foreign policy around then China also should have a "sphere of influence," extending across virtually all its neighbors (including Eastern Russia). But then this cuts both ways because former German holdings in East Prussia overlap not only Poland, but the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, and indeed into the Baltics as well. And Poland has historically ruled directly over the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine, and parts of Russia, Moldova, and Romania. Austria has some shared overlap here as well. The Turks likewise, further south. Even if "historical control and influence," were a valid standard, NATO's core membership had just as much, and often more of a history in the expansion states when compared to Russia.
Out East this same exact sort of thing holds. Japan has historically held Korea, large swaths of China, and land controlled by Russia. But I have never seen anyone claim that the US military alliance with ROK should never have been formed because it is an affront to Japan and China's historical domination of their smaller neighbor, nor that a US alliance with Poland is troublesome because Austria and Germany dominated that area in the past and should get to in the future. Such facile arguments only ever appear in the context of Russia.
Good point. The expansion states are in the German and Turkish historical spheres of influence and conquest, same for Austria as a member of PFP embedded in NATO, so the historical claims thing only seems to be cutting one way in this reasoning.
Should the UK have a right to dictate India's military alliances and attack India to prevent new ones? No one says this but they have a longer history of continuous control and management than Russia does in some of the areas in question.
:lol: Why do we have to be a Three Stooges movie? Why can't we be Dune?
Quoting ssu
We tried that. It didn't work.
Quoting ssu
The US military was built to deal with Hitler and Stalin. It's since been reduced to limited military engagements with non-state actors, so it's tried to morph from sledgehammer into surgical instrument. It will continue to morph, but not in the direction of ideal global arbitrator. Probably back toward sledgehammer of an isolationist state.
Speaking for myself, it's not that they don't matter, it's that they don't matter enough to undermine our own national security. Your countries' motivation was to make things better. The US's should have been not to make them worse.
Quoting ssu
I agree that the US had the wrong narrative in Vietnam. It just wasn't worth it. Millions of people died. I also agree we had the wrong narrative in expanding NATO, but that doesn't mean the narrative we should have had is the same as yours. Your narrative might have been right for you, but it wasn't right for us.
Quoting ssu
Agreed. That's what my position in this discussion is based on. Our leaders were delusional when we expanded NATO.
Quoting ssu
Are you suggesting this is a good reason for expanding NATO?
Quoting ssu
Of course it was, and that is understandable.
Quoting ssu
Saying the US should have acted consistent with our own national interest, including to promote stability in Europe, rather than the interests of nations formerly in the Russian sphere is not "going with Kremlin's line."
Quoting ssu
There was no excuse for not knowing. Lot's of people in the US did and said so. Even I knew it at the time. It was obvious to anyone who wasn't blinded by ideology.
Quoting ssu
I agree completely. Taiwan is not worth war with a country with a huge military and nuclear weapons. I feel the same way about Taiwan that I do about Finland. No, that's not true, I feel a lot more sympathy and common cause for the people of Europe. Taiwan is a fake country occupied by the losers in the civil war in China with delusions of grandeur. The US should never have staked its "reputation" on supporting it.
Quoting ssu
Again, I agree. The difference is that I think it is a good argument for my position rather than yours.
Would the UK even want that? I don't think so. Britons are past their Empire. They've accepted it. Even can laugh at it like Monty Python. Just like the Spanish understand well that they don't have the Empire they formerly had. But Putin doesn't think so. That's the huge difference.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Exactly. This ought to be the point. And many past Empires have understood this.
Historical spheres are part of history. Those politicians referring to history and historical spheres are usually quite dangerous: when there isn't any current obvious link or relationship, you can then refer to history and things like "historical spheres of influence".
Dude. Putin wanted to join NATO in 2000.
Taiwan is risking war with China. Just like Ukraine was risking war with Russia, South Vietnam was risking war with the North, etc.
Uncle Sam isn't risking anything.
Why say that? You haven't made things worse. They would be far worse without you. Remember that the US is actually very popular in Europe.
Quoting T Clark
Was then defending South Korea from Northern attack worth it?
Quoting T Clark
So just where do you put the line for defending democracy and your allies? Is the UK worth then defending? Is Canada? I am personally glad that for example the tiny nations of the Baltic could avoid the present situation of Moldavia, Georgia or Ukraine.
Quoting T Clark
Are you familiar with the actually discourse when NATO expansion happened? It was totally different from where NATO is now when Sweden and Finland joined. Look, there were no plans to defend the Baltics. That was too escalatory or offensive! A NATO member (likely Germany perhaps) saw making actual warplans to defend the Baltic States too escalating for Russia. NATO didn't train it's forces as it does now in the Baltic States. Russia had a special observer status in NATO. And as @frank pointed, people genuinely talked about the prospect of Russia joining NATO. Unfortunately, there is a route of application to the organization, which Russia wouldn't take. It would have to get the blessing from all other nations to join in and face a road the Sweden had. Russia simply then should have been controlled by democrats, not KGB people. In the end, war in Kosovo ended these hypothetical ideas. So in reality the "window of opportunity" to join NATO already ended during the Yeltsin years.
Quoting T Clark
But you did promote stability in Europe. Or do you think that without NATO and US involvement, that Russia would have been peaceful and not tried to get it's empire back? That is naive. This should be easy to understand when Putin says that the fall of Soviet Union was the greatest tragedy in the 20th Century. Russia would have simply far more easily taken back a lot more than it has now attempted. Likely the Baltic States would be Russian satellites and the Ukraine would be a rump satellite state with Novorossiya being a part of Russia (which btw the latter can still happen). Europe simply would be far more unstable than now! Does that help your national interest?
Quoting T Clark
I think people who want to be independent ought to have their independence and simply the UN charter ought to be respected. It is as simple as that. NATO is an European security arrangement that works and it has created stability in Europe. SEATO and CENTO didn't work and these areas are still volatile. Alliances simply work. They aren't a burden, just as international cooperation isn't a hindrance.
Quoting Tzeentch
Just like Poland was risking war with Germany in the late 1930's. Just like Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Norway were also risking war with Germany, for that matter. And not only did they risk it, they got the war Hitler. How badly done from them! Especially the Poles, didn't they get the memo (Mein Kampf) that they were Untermenschen and should move away somewhere else and give their lands to the German Übermenschen?
Going straight to WW2 and Hitler comparisons isn't really a serious argument, and I was hoping for/expecting something better from you.
(Ok, sorry, back to having an interesting discussion...)
Yet the issue really is just what for example Ukraine did wrong? You can argue that it did the greatest mistake, as Mearsheimer pointed out, is that it gave it's nuclear weapons back to Russia. But back then I think the West and the US wouldn't have been happy for that. In fact the US was extremely happy that Ukraine also gave an enormous amount of shoulder fired SAMS (MANPADS) away too. Then the threat they posed was to get into the hands of terrorists! Cold war was over, you know. So Ukraine trying to hold on to a nuclear deterrent and put a lot of effort to make them into an effective weapons system (something that is totally possible for Ukraine), would have made Ukraine a pariah state in the eyes of the West. Besides, back then many Ukrainians loved Putin. Russians were brothers.
Baltic countries surely understood the writing on the wall: all of them have Russians / Russian speaking minorities. They are, just like Finland, extremely close to St. Petersburgh and Moscow, hence they are strategically close to the heart of Russia. And then they are tiny nations: Estonia has the population similar to Maine as is a bit bigger than Maryland. The city of Narva is as close to St. Petersburgh as Philadelphia is to Manhattan, New York. Hence without there being NATO, it isn't hard to tell how risky it would be to Estonia.
This is a fair critique. In particular, the widespread looting that occured during the second invasion poisoned public opinion against the US. The thought was "we tried to get rid of Saddam forever, the Kurds fought him, Iran fought him. The US can come in and effortlessly sweep him aside. Thus, if there is mass rioting and abuses, it is because the US wants it to happen."
But the idea wasn't entirely that you didn't need as many men. Certainly, you needed fewer in terms of the initial invasion, because Iraq's military had been badly battered by the Gulf War and sanctions and the US had already defacto partitioned the Kurdish third of the country. And so the idea was to use the Iraqi army for stabilizing unrest. That was the fatal flaw. There was a plan to have way more men involved, it just hinged on an extremely important factor that the US was powerless to guarantee.
Now, in their defense, militaries have often done this type of work after losing a war because order in defeat is still preferable to chaos (e.g. the French army being freed and rearmed to go fight the communards in Paris by Prussia). But they didn't in this case, and there was no backup plan. And the decision to stop paying the soldiers when they didn't show up (aimed at enticing them back) backfired monumentally.
Right, and by that point it was already becoming readily apparent that China would be the main rival the US had to contend with (whilst back in the 80s and 90s people did talk quite a bit about a reunified Germany and Japan's economic boom, something you still see in all the sci-fi of the era).
And this is precisely why a lot of foreign policy written at the time discusses what a wonderful ally a liberal, denocratic Russia would make, particularly if integrated into the EU. Such a move would:
Put almost all the world's weapons production and knowledge base for weapons production, including nuclear delivery systems, into the liberal alliance.
Offer a balance to Germany in the EU by adding another large economy/population (and recall that closer to unification and earlier in the EU the domination of Germany was a larger concern, although it is still a going concern, as it was in the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis).
Russia, with the US, Canada, Mexico, etc. would represent a share of the world's energy resources to rival with OPEC, allowing for greater flexibility and insulation from instability in the Middle East.
A Russia in NATO would give the NATO a giant land border with China, an absolutely massive asset in the current rivalry.
The peace dividend from bringing Russia into the fold would be huge for Europe and even huge for the US given how expensive the nuclear deterrent is (on par with Russia's entire defense budget).
The idea that it was in US, or "Western" interests to pauperize or dominate Russia doesn't cash out. There was much to gain and the people making at policy at the time were extremely idealistic (and perhaps we can even say naive) vis-á-vis the ways in which they thought economic development would lead to liberalization and "win-win" situations for all.
For instance, China was never faced with something like Cold War containment doctrine as its meteoric rise really kicked off. The US (its firms and people) invested literally trillions in the Chinese economy, as did the EU. In particular, it moved the very heavy industry needed to wage wars over to China. What helped the US defeat Japan was its astounding ship building capacity. Today, the US makes about 0.1% of new tonnage. China makes almost more than the rest of the world combined. Commercial aircraft is another area where European and American investment and technology transfers have been very large.
Now, certainly generosity wasn't the main motivation here. This was done to exploit comparatively lower costs for production in China. And we might point out how this huge transfer of wealth and economic activity could actually have been said to hurt Western nations (while enriching some small segments of their population). But it also isn't the sort of policy one engages in if one is obsessed with preserving military advantage. And there is ample evidence to show that decision makers involved in this process really did believe that economic growth in China (and elsewhere) would result in liberalization and better relations.
People still make this sort of argument. "Take sanctions off Iran, they will develop a wealthy, educated middle class and liberalize." Whether one ought to believe such things given history is another question entirely.
NATO expansion happened in this sort of context, hope over an "End of History," and the idea that gradually [I]all[/I] nations would liberalize.
Even W. Bush era policy contains a good deal of this idealism, which is why it made establishing liberal democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan war aims.
Plus the price of access to the huge Chinese markets was that the goods sold had to be manufactured there. The US government was hostile to American business as exemplified by the Bell System divesture. There was no reason for American industries to remain in the US and every reason to transition to global entities.
Why do you think things broke down between the US and Russia? What went wrong?
Worse for you, perhaps and other small nations under the USSR's thumb. The US is now juking around in Europe with the military of a country that has 10,000 nuclear warheads.
Quoting ssu
I don't know.
Quoting ssu
But you weren't our allies. You were countries that we were friendly with but with which we had no binding military relationships. Do you expect us to send US troops to Finland if Russia decides to invade?
Quoting ssu
There was never any realistic chance of Russia joining NATO.
Quoting ssu
Yes. Wouldn't that be nice. What a surprise it didn't happen. Not.
Quoting ssu
I'm not sure what would have happened. I don't think you are either. It was never realistic that we could somehow keep countries bordering Russia outside the Russian sphere of interest. It certainly doesn't work that way in the US. We have the Monroe Doctrine and haven't shied away from sticking our noses in our neighbor's affairs.
Quoting ssu
Sure, and I think Kamala Harris should be the president elect of the US.
Quoting ssu
When I said "risk" I meant risk to the US. What is the US's vital national interest in Taiwan? What was it in 1948?
I don't think you and I are going to get any closer to agreement. I'm all for leaving it at that.
From the experience of Bosnia and the Balkans, the US Armed forces understood what it would take. And Chief of Staff of the Army general Eric Shinsheki publicly stated how many troops would be needed in the post-war occupation. This was too high for the great visionary Rumsfeld, who fired Shinseki. Later at the so-called "Surge", the levels came to the level what Shinseki had originally stated. Iraq of course had internal problems being such a divided country with so much bloodshed and internal strife all of it's present history, so Divide et Impera could work. With Americans, this meant basically a Sunni insurgency and a separate Shia insurgency against the Americans. At least the Kurds were friends.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Was there this kind of thinking? Paul Bremer really didn't do so with his CPA order number 2:
Yes. Why not simply fire tens of thousands of professional soldiers without no thought given to what they would do. It really was the Sunni's themselves that thought that they would at least as bureaucrats be used. But no. So Americans dissolved the security apparatus totally. Then riots ensued. As the great visionary Rumsfeld said in April 2003:
And it did happen: an insurgency and an Civil war ensued. And then happened something that shows just where the reasons lie for the US losing wars: The US forces in Iraq basically won the campaign against Al Qaeda in the Sunni heartlands. Without any direction from Washington politicians and left to their devices, the military itself took the initiative and used the ancient old tactic of simply picking part the insurgency by making deals with some of the groups. Hence there was the "Sunni Awakening" that basically pacified the Sunni areas with "Sons of Iraq", earlier insurgents. But here came the politicians, and not only American politicians to ruin the issue. While Obama had made it a campaign promise to get the pull the forces out, the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose power relied on secterian policies, decided that the "Sons of Iraq" were a threat and disbanded everything that the US military had worked so much to form. So now for the second time, now not Bremer, but al-Maliki, disbanded armed Sunnis and didn't integrate them into the security apparatus they were willing to join (under US military). So again another insurgency. As the US had left, then now just called ISIS emerged from the again unhappy Sunnis, who later rapidly occupied large parts of Iraq and Syria. Because why the Shia officers and soldiers try to fight Sunni insurgents in Sunni towns that weren't friendly places for them in the first place? Hence all that effort had been flushed down the toilet and the US military had to come back to Iraq to fight ISIS.
Something like this usually happens when the politicians don't have a long term answer on how to win an insurgency. It's something that happens so frequently in many places. The West "comes to the rescue" and stabilizes the situation for some time. The enemy regroups. Then the focus wanes, and then finally the Westerners leave. And the place is in worse place. And this then makes the idea of "forever wars" so tempting. But it doesn't have to be like this. Insurgencies can be won, but they aren't won militarily without political insight and dedication. This reminds me of how the British understood how deal with a war where the other side won't surrender: then simply make the insurgents part of your team. If the British put the Boer population into concentration camps, then they also put them into leading positions after the war. Hence it isn't an accident that prime ministers of the new South Africa were for a long time Boer leaders who had fought the British. And hence you got one of history's strangest political friends, Chuchill and Jan Smuts, who the latter had been the Boer interrogator of captured Churchill. Roles change.
(Former prisoner-of-war (Churchill) and his former interrogator (Jan Smuts))
But if the US military had the idea of "Sons of Iraq", did the US do like the British did with the Boers or Russia did in Chechnya and picked a former Taleban leader to lead Afghanistan? Hell no! They chose not only an Afghan that had worked abroad, but basically a person, Ashraf Ghani, that had lived for very long in the US would be a great example of an immigrant to the US, a person that made a great academic career in the right American academic places: studied in American University in Beirut and later in Columbia university, then taught in Berkeley and Johns Hopkins and finally landed on a job in the World Bank. Then after nearly a quarter of Century out of Afghanistan, Ghani landed in the now occupied Afghanistan in an UN position and finally made it through in the Hamid Karzai administration. So this kind of person was seen by American leadership as a person to deal with all the problems that Afghanistan had. Well, the end was exactly what could be assumed from such a person. The Taleban kindly asked him to go away and he kindly responded by quickly leaving Afghanistan with all the millions he could take with him. Which he naturally denies to exist.
Yet Ashraf Ghani isn't the first of these fluent English talking people, who could well survive in the cocktail parties of Washington DC and are seen as a crucial players, yet who would have huge problems in the actual politics of the country the US picks them for. Many can remember the charlatan Ahmed Chalabi, that played an important part for the Americans in Iraq. Didn't stay long in actual Iraqi politics.
(Oregon high school yearbook, places where Afghan presidents start earning their spurs)
(Ahmed Chalabi with the visionary secretary of defense, Paul Bremer behind the two)
Let's then just think about this.
South Korea produces a lot of stuff. I personally like K-pop. The country is finally a democracy after the 1980's and it's one of the most prosperous countries in the World.
North Korea suffered large scale famine in the 1990's. It's a totalitarian state where family members are prisoned of people who successfully defect. I remember a Finn that actually visited the country. Not only had he a "minder", a person that looked at just what he did and talked with North Koreans, he had TWO minders, who basically were looking at each other and wouldn't talk to the foreigner in fear that they would say something wrong. After all, you cannot leave a member of the security apparatus alone with foreigners. The Juche ideology would still reign and likely the ruling family too even if the whole Peninsula would be part of the People's Democracy.
So would it be better that there wouldn't be a South Korea? You see, if the US wouldn't have raised a finger when North Korea attacked, the whole "South Korea" would be a distant memory as the the Republic of Mahabad in Iranian history. We would happily consider Koreans these inhabitants of the Hermit Kingdom.
And since this war was actually fought by the United Nations and the US, it definitely shows that countries are worth saving from aggressors. Similarly in the case of the Gulf War. Would the World be a better place if Saddam could have simply taken Kuwait and had then equivalent oil reserves to Saudi-Arabia? If this would have been something that the US wouldn't have done anything about, then you likely would have a nuclear armed Iraq with one of the largest armies in the world. Because prior to the Gulf War, Iraq did have a functioning nuclear program. It didn't have after the war that, especially after Clinton's operation Desert Fox in 1998. So yes, the "war is a racket" thing comes to play with the 2003 invasion.
The fact is that sometimes the US does the right thing by intervention. And this is why it's alliance with Europe has survived through the times. Even if it has done things like the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Quoting T Clark
Your troops are here today. I saw US marines in the navy garrison I was in last Sunday at the mess hall in the food line. We are now a member of NATO and those marines were taking part in "Freezing Winds" exercise that is now ongoing. We weren't earlier your allies. And I remember the CIA yearbook having a picture of us being "likely allies" of the Soviet Union. So that much trust in our non-alignment. Yes, it was a culture shock for me some years ago (before we were in NATO) to see in the same garrison's soldier home full of young British soldiers waiting for their pizzas. The last foreign troops that you could see in Finnish garrisons were during my grandparents time, they were from the Wehrmacht and the SS. But they were in the North, yet in the summer of 1944 German soldiers camped in my now summer cottage, an old farmhouse built in 1914 by my great grandparents. During the Cold War my father told that the only foreign soldier that he saw in Helsinki was a US Marine in the US Embassy when he renewed his visa to the US. But many then thought there were Soviet soldiers in Finland.
Quoting T Clark
As I've said, you would have had larger than life politicians on both sides for that to have happened.
Quoting T Clark
With Finlandization, we got our everyday life to be out of the Russian sphere of interest. So defending your country and in 1944 preparing to fight an insurgency kept Stalin out. And the Finnish Communists were idiots btw, they couldn't stamp out Finnish democracy without the Red Army in the country. So as @Count Timothy von Icarus put it so well:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I fully and wholeheartedly agree with this.
Quoting T Clark
Well, you didn't go to war with the French when they had their adventures in Mexico. In fact, the French intervened in Mexico twice, in the 1830's and then in 18611867 again. The Monroe Doctrine was given in 1823, so the French didn't care a shit about your doctrines back then. (And of course, they still are all around the American continent btw, which the Monroe doctrine accepts.) Oh, the US did disapprove the French actions in Mexico during the second intervention. However Abraham Lincoln wouldn't want to go to war with France then, because it would have been too easy for the French then to give overwhelming support to the Confederacy.
So the idea that it's OK for Russia to meddle in affairs because you meddle in affairs isn't a counterargument. State meddles in other states things all the time, actually. But violence is something else than just the typical influencing attempts embassies make.
Quoting T Clark
In a larger sense, what is the vital national interest to see China as a threat? Last country it invaded was Communist Vietnam, a country the you had just fought with.
The main problem is that just as Domino Theory or the "We have to occupy this country or otherwise it will be a terrorist safe haven"-theory aren't really discussed. And not explained to those that would (or could) understand a complex politics.
The US should understand that basically it's very crucial for it to have the dollar in the role it has now. Those countries, who aren't friends of the US, aren't keen to use it as a "reserve currency". But those who are your allies are OK with the present system. Why not? They get safety and prosperity. The system works for them. Especially in the age of populists like Trump, it's actually difficult to reason the obvious, that global trade does bring prosperity. That if you cut the alliances, stop globalization, stop trade and so on, you will just create a World that sucks even more than the present.
Were just going around in circles. I am all done.
Trying to join NATO was arguably the crudest and most risky way of doing so, and hedging the survival of the country on a distant maritime power was rather naive given the track record of said power, and that is a criticism that applies to virtually all NATO members.
We should know better than to trust Washington.
Finland and Sweden in my view waited for the right moment. Before 2022 there simply wouldn't have been a consensus to join NATO. If a conservative adminstration would have rammed through NATO membership, it would have become a right-left issue. Now it wasn't. Era of post-Finlandization ended when Putin attacked Ukraine on a wide front.
At least in NATO there are other countries too. Notice how the UK and for example Poland gave security guarantees for Finland during the application process to NATO membership. European NATO members aren't totally irrelevant.
And the "US allies" like South Vietnam, Afghanistan or present day Iraq aren't in the same category. The influencing attempts of the US go through the normal channels, not with some Finns that have lived all their life in the US making great careers in Washington DC then transcending to the country to solve our problems. And the US marines here on training aren't possibly attacked by some fringe Finnish group firing rockets at military bases.
However, my point remains that NATO leans completely on the American security apparatus, and at this point in time it is clear that the Americans will not commit to the defense of any nation in Europe, since it must focus on the Pacific and China.
Europe is in fact defenseless. And instead of acting accordingly, we do everything possible to follow Washington's line towards further confrontation with Russia.
Apparently people in Europe are under some sort of illusion that we can bluff the Russians into backing off, but that's obviously not working.
The Russians perceive our behavior as a clear sign that we are no longer interested in peace, and if we start treating them as 'the enemy', they will start treating us as 'the enemy', which is a position Europe can only lose from.
On the first page of the thread I wrote this post, arguing why America doesn't necessarily lose wars, but instead tends to fight wars in which a decisive military victory is not the goal.
We see another clear example of that in Ukraine, where even as Ukraine is starting to warm up to the idea of negotiations, the US continues to escalate the conflict in an attempt to drag things out.
You could go back and analyze a millions different variables, but IMO it really comes down to:
-the Russian invasion of Georgia (which didn't actually shift things as much as one might have expected, and wasn't a sea change)
-the Russian annexation of Crimea (where policy becomes overtly hostile but also pretty limpid, shying away from meaningful military aid)
-the Russian invasion of Ukraine (where US and EU policy becomes openly hostile)
I don't think these events are best explained by looking at US and EU policy. They're ancillary. Internal Russian politics, and Ukrainian politics are driving the bus. The mass uprisings in Belarus and in most of the Central Asian states that were once part of the USSR, and those Asian states' pivot into China's orbit also seen more relevant. US and EU policy is probably more relevant vis-á-vis Ukraine of course.
It's sort of like trying to analyze the Israel-Hamas war primarily in terms of US and Iranian policy. Are they relevant? Sure. Iran is probably significantly more relevant to Hamas' decision-making than the US is to Ukraine or Russia's, but the primary proximate decisions driving the current war seem to be very much out of Iran's hands.
Just for an example, the way the war was initially carried out, and what we now know about what was expected to occur, shows that the key variable driving decision-making on the pivotal event (the decision to invade) was a total disconnect between the Russian leadership's estimation of their military's capabilities and its actual capabilities, as well as the willingness of Ukrainians in general to resist, and specific Ukrainians' willingness to aid and abet them. The goal was a fait accompli with low loss of life, and Russian estimates for how the EU and US would have responded to that might have been over optimistic, but they probably weren't wildly off base. The real problem was an internal chasm between expectations and reality.
Ukraine potentially entering NATO is probably most relevant in that it would shut the door on reasserting control over Ukraine by force. If you read Putin's thoughts on the war and the history, I think it's really hard to come away with the idea that if NATO ceased to exist in say, 2020, the idea of reclaiming Ukraine would be a non-issue.
But isn't it true that Putin came to power in order to protect Yeltsin? Putin guaranteed that Yeltsin wouldn't be prosecuted for corruption. Putin in turn can't leave office without ending up in jail, so maybe he engineered the gutting of Russia by way of war with Ukraine in order to protect his position? Is that totally wrong?
What's the reasoning here, that Putin would have been forced out of power but for the invasion?
I don't think I've ever heard any analysis along that lines and it seems implausible to me given how much power Putin already wielded in Russia. In terms of his thinking, I would guess the key factors would be:
-His role in history/legacy and the relative success of annexing Crimea and the intervention to save Assad in Syria
-The conviction that it would be something like the "three day special military operation," that would quickly topple the government.
-The fact that Belarus had just had a popular revolt, requiring Russian forces to be moved in, and that they also had to send troops into Kazakhstan just a month earlier (and similar events had played out across the old satellites).
Stuff like gas resources and pipelines seem ancillary based on everything written about him. The historical narrative and prestige also takes center stage in his own speeches and writings.
But the conviction that it would be easy and low consequence seems like the big one. I am pretty sure the thought process wasn't "well, there is a decent chance I'll have to flee the capital and go on air giving a dire warning about civil war as an armored column led by an ex-catering chef pushes towards Moscow without resistance in a year," or "1,000 days in we'll have lost the better part of a million men and be making frontal assaults with Chinese golf carts with steel plates welded to them and dirt bikes."
My guess is that when the history is all written Saddam's decision to invade Iran will be one of the closer parallels.
Edit: or Bush II's decision to invade Iraq for that matter!
I guess I had that wrong then. :up:
Quoting Tzeentch
Don't think that Europeans aren't taking Trump seriously. They genuinely believe that Trump and his gang could take the US out of NATO. It's a genuine possibility that could happen: Americans could be perfectly capable of shooting themselves in the foot and breaking their strongest alliances, then wake up and notice that they aren't anymore the Superpower they used to be. If the US goes into isolationism, it simply will be a richer and larger version of Canada. People don't have anything against Canada, they might even know the name of the Canadian prime minister, but that's it. Who cares about the policies that Canada is pushing in it's foreign policy. It something quite irrelevant for Europeans.
Quoting Tzeentch
Isn't Poland acting accordingly? They are on the track to have the strongest military in Europe. Finland is arming itself and the military is excercising it's forces on a level not seen since the Cold War.
For Europe, the change happened actually in 2014. Then it change, as can be seen from this chart prior to the 2022 invasion:
From that lowpoint of 2014, the change on defense spending has been dramatic the closer the country is to Russia.
So the idea that lax Europe is just winging isn't current anymore. The change has already happened.
Quoting Tzeentch
And some do think that Ukraine is lead by drug addicted nazis too! Yes, the propaganda works like a charm.
Quoting Tzeentch
I'm sorry Tzeentch that I didn't notice your first reply as I guess the pages changed. But here's some comments. First of all, if military victory isn't the goal, then your talking about the "forever war" narrative.
Sorry, but if Osama bin Laden would have been in Sudan, the US would have attacked Sudan. And from Sudan of today, we can see what a similar quagmire it would have been once the US would have taken control of that large heterogenous country with multiple problems. And then I guess you would be making the same argument just why the US wants to disruption in Africa and the resources of Sudan.
But the simple truth is that OBL was in Afghanistan and since so many thousand Americans had been killed in the successful 9/11 attack, it couldn't be a job for the NYPD and the FBI to hunt down the ring of terrorists. As in the earlier bombing of the Twin Towers. Sorry, but that's the reality. That is the reason why the war and occupation of Afghanistan. Otherwise the neocons wouldn't have that opportunity to enlarge US dominance as they intended. Just like the successful operation of Hamas of breaching the wall and creating havoc gave the opportunity for the Netanyahu seemingly go with the "generals plan" in Gaza. Yet without "Al Aqsa flood", there wouldn't be plans to move everybody out from northern Gaza etc.
Hence US policy many times is a reaction to events that were made by others, and only then someone starts to think how this event can be used to further our own objectives and agenda. Still, it's a reaction to an event caused by others. And that is crucial here to understand.
Quoting Tzeentch
Yet notice one thing that has been true throughout the entire span of history: transport in trade by water is far more efficient and less costly than transport by land. One cargo ship can carry several cargo trains of produce. Ancient civilizations emerged on large rivers and the Mediterranean was such a lucrative sea for trade. It's just simply physics. Silk road and China's new land routes simply cannot compete with international shipping.
I agree with this. Putin doesn't care a shit about economics or the economy. He didn't care when the Russo-Georgian war started, he doesn't care now. Command economy is his solution to everything.
Quoting T Clark
Which you share with others, including:
Quoting Benkei
EU defense focus has almost been lulled to sleep by NATO.
I think Trump might come to the aid of the British, but not the EU. Trump sees the EU as weak and unworthy of respect.
As I indicated, it wasn't that I was being ignored, it was that my argument was. My argument - Russia is paranoid, we knew it, and we should have worked to avoid provoking it. Your argument - Russia's paranoia is not justified, which is irrelevant.
Well, if the Kremlin circle is paranoid, then it's not about NATO in particular, but about anyone resourceful supporting Ukraine's independence, sovereignty, etc, established in 1991.
Once the Kremlin decided that they couldn't let Ukraine be, losing some that control/influence (e.g. Crimea), then they'd already set the seemingly inevitable collision course.
Any paranoia on their part is due to Ukraine's independence, that they might increase the rent of Sevastopol or allocate it for something of their own or whatever, that they might look to the EU for cooperation/trade more so than Moscow, anything in short, that they might go their own way.
Expressing that as supposed NATO-phobia has caught on (which was reasonably predictable).
Take into consideration that it's about control of a sovereign country the present Kremlin circle's kind of control and what would you have the rest of the world do?
The Ukrainians and most of the world said "No", which is reasonable.
OK, so, no Ukraine NATO membership, then what?
Besides, exactly how has grabbing Crimea and Donbas (and generous bombing) solved their supposed NATO-phobia?
It hasn't, couldn't, but has instead (predictably) increased Russo-phobia or whatever.
Anyway, that was part of the story above, adding to the discourse (with embedded reference links that I was too lazy to add here), not so much specifically giving a direct counter-argument to your comment, apologies if that was unclear.
Youre still not really paying attention to my argument. Expansion of NATO started in the 1990s. Youre talking about todays situation which is, if my supposition is correct, the result of that action at least in part.
Yes, I think we Europeans might be genuinely worried about Trump leaving NATO - much like how a fat private fears PT. Yet, PT is the only way to whip said private back into shape.
Now would be the best time, since there is no concrete threat to Europe yet.
The problem I have described in the past though, is that I fear that the US will use European militarization as a means to create more tension between Europe and Russia.
That is the exact opposite of what Europe should want.
This is why I welcome the departure of the Americans if it were to happen.
About NATO being the US' strongest alliance I am not so sure, though. It certainly is big and has potential, but Europe is currently without teeth. It is also situated on the other side of the globe from where the next real 'Cold War' is going to take place (the Pacific).
Controlling Europe costs resources, and perhaps Europe is proving too big to control in a time when the US cannot afford to waste resources.
Personally, I think Europe has dropped down on Uncle Sam's priority list, in favor of the Five-Eyes Alliance, Japan and South-Korea. These countries have a far clearer overlap with US strategic goals and challenges.
Quoting ssu
Indeed. This is both logical and desirable. However, my principal worry is the way the US may use European militarization as a method to create more tension between Europe and Russia.
Under the current circumstances, one could easily envision this spiraling into a direct conflict.
The Poles seemed to have wisened up to this, and have started to push back on attempts to drag them deeper into the conflict.
That awareness needs to be present in all of Europe.
Quoting ssu
Roughly speaking that's true, but we are talking about a scenario in which Chinese sea trade were to be completely cut off.
At that point, land-based trade would be all that is left.
In a US-China confrontation scenario, the Chinese economy would simply implode if it couldn't find alternative markets over land, and this hangs like a sword of Damocles above them.
The real fight is about influence. Russian tanks won't be physically occupying West European Capitals. (Theoretically they could go "as peacekeepers" or something hilarious like that to the Baltic States, but even that is unprobable as it might be so that NATO wouldn't chicken out). But Russians can reach their objectives of breaking the Atlantic tie and to severely weaken NATO. That is the real goal of Russia here.
And they can succeed because if Trump really sees that the biggest enemy is the deepstate in the US, that "makes forever wars" and Putin says that he is now fighting the US. Aren't then the objectives totally in line here with the same objectives?
In my view, the populist idea is simply learning the wrong lessons from past conflicts: that sometimes it actually is worth wile to intervene even if Smedley Butler's old ideas are sometimes true, when the war goals are bizarre and a simple reaction to the people's demand for revenge.
I guess Russia-EU relations will return to normal now that Trump is taking office. Gas and oil will begin to flow again? The US will lose whatever influence it ever had over Europe. Europeans hate America anyway, so that's probably a good thing for everyone.
Quoting ssu
Trump's attack on the "deep state" is just about securing his control over the government. He doesn't share the ideological sentiments of his supporters. Putin's fight against the US is over, I think. Trump and Putin are pals.
Quoting ssu
I think we're entering a new global era. The US will continue to shrink off of the world stage. China will continue to grow and learn. All eyes will turn eastward.
Or then just leave the service. Let somebody else do the job that is better capable. Just go to your job at McDonalds or the supermarket. They have no problem of their employees being fat and the PT done on breaks (if there's any PT) are quite easy and meant for everyone.
Have all Europe accept Finlandization and Russia will be no problem.
Quoting Tzeentch
Yes, there's just one hot war in Europe, if you mean that by "no concrete threat". Because the Russian hybrid attacks (last few days ago) and the bellicose rhetoric of Russia sure feels like some kind of a threat.
Quoting Tzeentch
You mean there's a stronger alliance around? Russia and North Korea are an alliance, but when it comes to let's say Iran, It doesn't feel like China and North Korea or Russia are allies in the manner of attack on one is an attack on all. China, even if supporting Russia, has officially stayed neutral in the Ukrainian conflict and hasn't liked the nuclear sabre rattling of Russia.
Quoting Tzeentch
Many Americans are what I class as the "Pivot people". America has to Pivot! Well, perhaps not from defending Judeo-Christian heritage in the Middle East, but still, Europe! Bye bye Europe.
But let's just think of how "clear" these goals and challenges are:
- First, there's nothing like the NATO in the Far East. SEATO failed, the countries didn't see eye to eye and the US simply gave up. These countries do train to operate jointly at the level as NATO countries do. They usually hold exercises occasionaly with the US, but not with each other. What is the American solution? AUKUS. Which actually isn't anything new at all as the countries have already defense pacts with each other. How well South-Korea and Japan are doing together? Not so good as Germany and France.
- Which of these Far Eastern allies have the capabilities of the UK or France? None, even if Japan has a big navy. It's one thing to prepare for domestic security and defending in one's own territory, another thing to train for out of the area operations. NATO can do that, Far Asian allies of the US aren't capable of that.
- Which of these Far Eastern countries are rearming to meet the Chinese threat? Nothing like the rearmament in Europe is happening in the Far East, except China.
Hence the real question is, how many would be willing to fight alongside the US if Taiwan would be invaded? Totally different from the question of how many NATO countries would fight if Poland was attacked. Especially when the US policy is "Strategic Ambiguity".
Hence if the US intervenes in a Chinese retaking of Taiwan, likely the American President will scream for the NATO losers to join in.
Quoting frank
No, they won't and no, it's not a good thing for everyone. Democratic values like a justice state are worth defending. And so are things like the UN Charter. If we abandon those ideals of Enlightenment that have given us the present, it won't be better. First of all, Russia will not stop. Finlandization isn't nice. Russia is not a country that will say "Fine, we got what we wanted and now we'll leave you alone." Nope, once they have power, they will then start to meddle in our own domestic politics. The government has then to go after people that have made critique of Russia and Putin and supported the "Nazis" of Ukraine. That's the next step in "Finlandization" if Russia wins. It's an Empire, who just loves to be important.
Yet only a total failure will launch "Finlandization of Europe". But that would mean that Trump and his crew really turn out to be surrender monkeys and force the Ukrainians to sign a surrender deal. Let's be honest: Trump gave the Taleban the key to military victory with the Doha Peace deal, so there is the fear of that. When Trump has declared that he would end the war in 24 hours, then perhaps there's the wanting for a quick peace arrangement. And it's easy to choose just which party is more vulnerable at pressure. European states are looking at who would take the leading role, if a country like Poland would lead a "coalition of the willing" to support Ukraine. But let's remember that this is still the lame duck period of Biden now.
Quoting frank
For the populist/conspiracy theorist, it's not about ending "deep state" and strengthening the democratic institutions, it's basically having their control over the deep state, because they are the good guys. Would Trump start eradicating the Patriot Act? Of course not! When he's in charge, those kind of acts are just good. And I fear that many Trump followers think this way too.
Quoting frank
In my view, the likely outcome is that the US will continue to shrink off (voluntarily, actually) and NOTHING will replace it. China isn't going to replace the US. It has only a few allies and then trade ties. We won't start to learn Chinese, English will stay as the universal language for at least a Century, if not two. China doesn't have that ideological ambition that drove the West to conquer the World. They are too satisfied about themselves. Besides, the country faces large problems with it's population growth and likely is too confident about centally controlled economy it has.
It's not going a collapse like during the Bronze Age or something, it likely is a withering away and simply more actors on the global stage, just like more countries have launched satellites into space, not just the two Superpowers as in the 1960's. For example Hungary is sending (few hundred) troops to Chad, not as part of some international mission, but as a bilateral agreement with the Chadian government. Like Russian Africa Corps in the Sahel. I guess that Orban has been bitten by the Imperialism bug.
Russian Africa Corps (ex Wagner) African fighter. Likely in the Sahel region.
When the US loses war in this way, it does have an effect on the US. I've always said that then we just have to enjoy the decadence. Not a bad time to live, actually.
What I meant is that Russia is currently occupied in Ukraine and won't conceivably threaten to invade NATO for the foreseeable future.
In 20 years that situation might be different, and at that point the US pivot to Asia will have proceeded even further.
Quoting ssu
The principal difference is that China is a peer competitor and Russia is not.
War in the Pacific is very easily imaginable, whereas war between Europe and Russia is not logical at all.
If a peace is reached in Ukraine, relations will probably gravitate back to the pre-2008 status quo.
East-Asia however is critically imbalanced, with the US sphere of influence smushed up against China in an attempt to contain it, and to dangle a sword of Damocles over its maritime trade and with it its entire economy.
That's simply a situation the Chinese will not accept going into the future.
The only question is how long before the Chinese start throwing their weight around, and indications are that it may still take some time before the Chinese start taking military action. The political and economic war is already well underway, though.
I think America underestimated the tactical advantages of their enemy fighting on home turf, with all-or-nothing mentality, and with gorilla-terror tactics; and, as you mentioned, the perception from the US public also plays a huge role.
Not to mention, Biden left billions of dollars of military-grade resources in Afghanistan for the Taliban :roll: . It cant get anymore embarrassing for the US than that.
I think the US people generally dont want to spend billions of taxpayers dollars on foreign wars when they have so many problems at home that could be fixed with that money. I do not support sending any aid to Israel nor Ukraine: we need to fix our country first.
Trump says he is in good standing with everyonehe likes to embellish.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding, but the US doesnt actually have any military presence in Ukraine: all we have been doing is funding them. Let them fund their own battlesthey arent a part of NATO.
The US doesnt have a formal alliance with Ukraine. I would completely agree with you if they were a part of NATO. If Russia hits a NATO country, then they are going to get their shit rocked. Russia cant even take over Ukraine: imagine what would happen if the US got truly involved.
Always a pleasure to get your insights, thanks. BTW, Wall St is not liking the fact that Biden told Ukraine to strike inside Russia. Stocks are tumbling.
To put it simply: Only American soldiers sent to a war on another continent see and feel the war. Many in civilian life in Continental US don't even know about the conflict. In the country the war is fought, usually nobody can distance themselves from the war. For these people, the conflict can surely be marketed as an existential struggle. In the US, the Foreign Policy establishment has to try to conflate everything to be an "existential struggle", which makes Americans very, very skeptical. So skeptical that they can indeed believe that all wars are just forever wars concocted by the Deep state for war profiteering of the military industrial complex.
Quoting Bob Ross
It was a double whammy. Trump made a lousy peace deal, Biden went along with it and made it even worse. I feel for the Afghan war vets: they were really betrayed.
Quoting Bob Ross
Some thoughts: If military spending is cut, the money simply isn't put somewhere else. Likely you simply take less debt. For example the Global War on Terror was financed basically by taking more debt. You didn't see large tax increases then. Secondly, you are already paying at these interest rates (which are low) more in debt service than in defense spending. The historian Niall Ferguson has said once this happens, no country in the entire span of human history has continued to be the Great Power it was before.
This year, the debt service is higher than defense spending. Something just few years earlier was thought to happen in 2033.
And notice actually from the Soviet example: if you stop defense spending when defense has created a lot of jobs, then the economy goes south. Or in the case of the Soviet Union, simply collapses.
Quoting Bob Ross
Was South Vietnam a treaty ally of the US?
Nope. (Actually, SEATO gave protection to South Vietnam, but the country wasn't a treaty member)
Was Kuwait a treaty ally of the US?
Nope.
Was the Republic of Afghanistan a treaty ally of the US?
Nope.
Is Israel a treaty ally of the US?
Nope! (It's an one way street with Israel. The agreements: Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement (1952); a General Security of Information Agreement (1982); a Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (1991); and a Status of Forces Agreement (1994), all make it so that Israel doesn't have to lift a finger to help the US, but the US will surely help Israel when it is in trouble, or redrawing it's borders. Because thanks to AIPAC and the Evangelists... defending that Judeo-Christian heritage is enough!
Yes, unlike Putin is saying now, the US isn't fighting in Ukraine. It's just supporting the Ukrainians. Yet that there isn't that alliance with Ukraine doesn't make this assistance unimportant.
Just think what happens if the US stops the aid and declares: tough luck, too bad! Well, this will have many effects. Russia has just shown that it can do whatever it wants and if the US opposes it, the US will just bitch for a while and then loose interest and thus it can be defeated.
This will make a crack on NATO, which even if all it's cacophony with so many sovereign states in the alliance, has been on Ukraine quite firm and together. (Even if you have Hungary and Turkey). Everyone told that they were supporting Ukraine, but in the end... no.
Well, the little countries that are replaceable (like mine) will get the memo. Sure, they might act is nothing serious has happened... but the know in their heart just how much are the guarantees actually worth.
Legislation was put in place so that it would require a 2/3rds vote of the Senate to leave, and that's frankly not going to happen. He has some options for trying to get around that, but it wouldn't be that easy, and he would need elements on his side who aren't likely to go along easily.
He's much more likely to simply make America a much poorer partner in the alliance for the duration of his term rather than expend the political capital to leave. Plus, he isn't exactly great at follow through.
:up:
Right, and those allies have also been more on board with ratcheting up their own defense spending. The benefits vis-á-vis technology transfer have also tended to be better, e.g. Japanese technology being a key part of some of the cutting edge (back the ) features of the F-22. Partnerships with Europe are often rather duplicative, driving up costs to keep European defense industries going.
Certainly, European states have an interest in keeping their defense industries afloat. The US does the same sort of thing, creating its own light tank for the Pacific instead of buying the, by all accounts stellar, new Japanese option (which is of course overpriced, but it's overpriced because they aren't making many).
Also, these states, like Israel, are putting a premium on missile defense (given China has gone hard on the "missile spam" doctrine and missiles are Iran's main way to directly attack Israel) and you get a lot of synergy projects there. Europe certainly invests in these, but it's not likely to be the same sort of top priority given Russia's demonstrated ability to make missiles and their quality. Countermeasures against nuclear delivery systems are nice to have, but really only in China and the US' price range, and even if the US backs way out of Europe it's not like it's not going to want to stop housing its interception umbrella there because you need them along the periphery to have multiple methods of shooting down an ICBM, and you can't keep the fleet elements in the right places at all times.
US involvement in Vietnam was due to appeals from the French. The French told the US government that trade routes for rubber went through Vietnam, so that if it became communist, those routes would be cut off. The US originally fought in Vietnam with their ships disguised as French vessels. Crazy, but true.
[sup] Nolan D McCaskill · POLITICO · Nov 15, 2016[/sup]
Others have commented similarly to Obama. (Reasonable or not?)
Quoting Tzeentch
The Kremlin already has and continues to. Posturing, regressing, undemocratization, land grabbing, bombing, Russification, ...
Quoting Jun 21, 2024
Quoting Benkei
Quoting T Clark
Anyway, the Kremlin circle will "take offense" from whatever can then be used to further whatever they'd like to see, whatever they have in mind for their (chess)board. Thinking that's what others want is more than a little naïve. As mentioned a few times (e.g. here), you might ask the Baltics, the Moldovans, the Swedes, the Finns, ..., the Ukrainians, the Georgians, ...
Quoting Mar 21, 2024
Quoting Apr 8, 2024
Quoting ssu
Perhaps similar to , I'm guessing most aren't. There are things to do, kids to get to school, farms to tend, parties to have, books to read, renovations to complete, love interests to pursue, philosophical idealisms to discuss, suppers to cook, places to go, ...
What should Europeans do?
Quoting Banno
Quoting ssu
There's a difference between "take offence from" and "be provoked by."
From a point of view strictly focused on American national security, what 'the Baltics, the Moldovans, the Swedes, the Finns, ..., the Ukrainians, the Georgians, ..." want is not the primary factor. The interests of the US and these countries are not necessarily the same.
Yeah. As the much cliched quote goes, war is politics by other means. What can be done through war, can also preferably be done through political negotiation - for the most part.
There are a few neocons here and there. That's life.
It's a condemnation of the species that after so many pointless, savage wars we still continue to wage them...
On a Bird's-Eye View, the numerous wars waged by countries throughout history, killing numerous people, destroying, seems kind of ridiculous. Along that train of thought, deadly conflict comes through as absurd, should never be.
When zooming in we also have to differentiate defense and offense, weigh justification, whatever it all is. Often enough we can find both bad and well-meaning actors (and whatever else/between) actors all gone a hundred years after.
I don't think defense is absurd, though they say that the best defense is a good offense. Can all defense be narrated as offense, can all defensive measures be cast as threats?[sup](2024Apr8)[/sup] Say, if democracy is threatened, then I'd expect a response.
Anyway, it seems like a simple, universal answer to lean on is hard to come by. We're talking homo sapiens after all. Sometimes it just takes those few...
Actually I didn't know that, thanks for informing me! That takes care of that.
Quoting T Clark
The interest for the US is to stay as a Superpower. Whatever Trump thinks, it's the alliances that make the US the sole Superpower.
Quoting jorndoe
Indeed. War can be seen as ridiculous. The "isolationist" idea of not getting involved in any conflicts, but perhaps still retain a defensive force, seems rational. Yet, and unfortunately, this idea is simply naive and can have unintended consequences.
Let's assume the US as the Superpower and it's alliance gets behind the idea of isolationism. The result is that their actions dramatically lower the threshold of states to engage in wars. For example, why wouldn't Venezuela simply annex Guyana or half of it (the Essequibo territority), if nobody would lift a finger about it? Why wouldn't Peru and Equador go back to having border wars? Or Columbia finally getting that American contraption of Panama back to itself? And I took just possible conflicts in the American Continent as an example here.
There is a logic to why the idea of Westphalian sovereingty should be upheld, just as the UN charter. Both higher the cost of starting a war of annexation politically and economically. We really will go back as a civilization, when these ideas are thought to be irrelevant and we simply accept that annexations are OK to happen (or they aren't a problem for us). Classic imperialism will come back on a wider scale as there will be many more actors playing the "Great game".
As I've said, the idea that the US behind every conflict there is, makes people then to make a disastrous mistake in believing that a) the World would be a more peaceful place without US involvement or that b) it doesn't matter to America how much conflict there is in the World.
The simple fact is that if Central and South America would be economically prosperous and growing economies, why would there be an incentive for migration from those countries to the US? And if more countries in the American Continent simply collapse, what do you think that will result in the situation in the borders or coast of the US? Same thing is true for the EU. How Africa and the Middle East develop does have an effect on how many refugees try get into Europe.
The outcome we have already seen. A conflict that killed over 5 million people in Africa that had many of the Continents states involved with, is still totally absent from our knowledge as it didn't involve the US. There are several conflicts going around today that we aren't talking about, because the US and the West have taken no interest in them. Should we take interest? Interest, yes, military intervention, perhaps not. But the issue would to prevent the conflicts to happen in the first place. Rapidly economically growing countries where trade flourishes aren't usually starting wars or collapsing into civil wars.
There are a lot of people here who think that's true, but it's not. The US is relatively isolated from the rest of the world. We have a huge economy and vast amounts of natural resources. If we wanted, we could go it on our own. I'm not suggesting we should, but I don't think our superpower status is as good for us as you seem to. We're going to have to get used to a world where power is distributed more evenly.
I agree. I think Biden was from the generation that saw US prominence as an imperative, but we're moving toward the phase where we realize there's no percentage in trying to secure global order. Let it all go to hell. Why should we stick out big fat noses into it?
Sorry to say it, but this is quite delusional. Perhaps you didn't mean "going it on our own" to meaning being totally self sufficient in everything, but let's think about it.
What if all trade between the World and the US would immediately stop and the government would try to move everything to be self reliant:
- the US imports well over 3,8 trillion last year.
- 15% of all your overall food supply that Americans now consume is imported, so that would not be there.
- Major imports are 1) machinery, 2) vehicles and automobiles, 3) minerals, fuel and oil 4) pharmaceuticals
- US is dependent on outside production of rare earths, lithium, kobalt, platinum and nobium. The vast majority of the global mining of these minerals are outside the US in other countries.
- These would severely affect US manufacturing as the whole system of manufacturing is based on international trade and supply routes. The 100% American produced is quite dubious, when you take everything needed into account.
- When you would totally deny imports would very likely lead to similar bans on your exports, which constitutes 3,0 trillion last year.
- As the GDP is something like 29,17 trillion, stopping both imports and exports (6,8 trillion) would immediately mean a loss of -23% of GDP.
- Many millions of workers and professionals would lose their jobs as the export/import sector would cease to exist.
- As there is no trade with you, the dollar would immediately lose it's value as the reserve currency.
- All countries would frantically start altering their trade away from the US, which would at first bring a severe downturn to the global economy, but sooner or later the global economy would recover from the "disappearance" of the US from international trade.
- For investors the US wouldn't at all be a safe haven. Such lunatic economic policies would surely alter the idea of the US being a trustworthy place to invest.
To truly "go on your own" would have similar consequences of having a limited nuclear war. Yeah, it wouldn't kill every American (in fact an all out nuclear war with Russia wouldn't do that either). But the outcome would be an absolute disaster. Losing one fifth of your GDP in a year (which has never happened in US history) would have absolutely devastating consequences for your wealth, for employment and likely for the political stability of the country.
And if you argue that then you could redirect all the unemployed to "home grown" industries, that's not how it works. The economic shock would have aftershocks for a long time and in the end you would be far more poorer than now. To build up new manufacturing takes time and the fact would still be that you would have severely crippled your economy and it wouldn't recover to the level which you enjoyed earlier.
And btw, some countries have tried this, actually. Usually it has resulted the country if it earlier exported agricultural products, then to have famine. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia implemented a strict policy of self-reliance.The Khmer Rouge evacuated totally the capital and rationalized the evacuation as a matter of self-reliance. End result, by some estimates, between 500,000 and 1.5 million of the lives lost between 1975 and 1979 were due to Khmer Rougeinduced famine.
As much as we criticize globalization, a collapse of globalization has absolutely dire consequences. The Bronze Age Collapse was the first collapse of globalization. Another collapse of globalization happened when Antiquity turned into the Dark Ages.
It's totally different to have for example the capability to feed your population in a time of war if the trade routes are cut. You can have this backup, but to go for what the Khmer Rouge tried to get is sheer lunacy, a very dangerous idea. The positive aspects of global trade should be remembered.
Youre right, I didnt.
One of my favorite topics. The second collapse was Rome. Per Eric Cline, natural disasters including drought and earthquakes appear to have contributed to the Bronze age collapse. The other factors were warfare, and internal social upheaval that may have been the result of class struggle (but we don't really know). Cline believes it was a 'perfect storm' of events. With climate change set to increase stress in the world, we very well may be headed for another collapse.
Im not sure this is true. There are still a lot of people out there who want to maintain our current status. I also dont think there are many people who want to let it go all to hell. I dont either.
Simply to have Bronze you had to have trade as tin and copper wasn't found in the same place under one Empire. And then these ancient were basically top down command economies, which were very fragile compared to us.
Yet let's think about just how fragile our World is today. We just experienced a large pandemic that killed at least seven million world wide and about 1,2 million in the US. It was few years ago. Did the society collapse? No. How quickly did we recover? Very quickly. In our cynicism and gloom we often forget just how remarkable our societies are today.
Hence Einstein's famous quote of the next war after WW3 being fought with sticks and stones should really be given more thought. Is it really that after WW3 we literally are fighting with sticks and stones? Hardly. Let's think about if the worst happens and Russia, China and the US have a nuclear war. What happens to New Zealand or Argentina? Their cities won't be destroyed, they won't face radiactive fallout, they have agricultural production to make them self-sufficient. They naturally face a huge ecconomic depression as a large part of the global trade ceases to exist for a while. But will they forget engineering skills or the written language? No, libraries and universities in both countries will exist and so will the division of labor. Many parts in the US would survive intact too, even if large parts would become a nuclear wasteland. The World of Mad Max is an imaginary one and doesn't really portray anything else than what sells to us in movies.
In Antique times the fall was so great, that highly specialized labor had no demand anymore as the system collapsed. Technologies were forgotten. I always refer to this, but I still find it remarkable: from it's height in population, over 1 million people, Rome got to a similar population only in the 1950's. Such a large city was only sustainable during Antiquity with basically North Africa producing also food to Rome and "every road leading to Rome". Once the Vandals had North Africa, farewell large Rome.
The bigger they get, the harder they fall.
Let's see - Drop out of NATO. Quit the UN. Pull out all our overseas military. Drop Israel like a hot potato. No more money for Ukraine. Tell Taiwan to take a hike. Pull Disney Worlds out of France, China, and Japan.
Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck & Popeye bombing France:
Ah, it's so lovable when you desperately want to be a huge Canada: an important country, kinda.
As if the war and the Holocaust weren't bad enough, now it's copyright infringement!
But were they bad for an isolationist? Europe's troubles were Europe's troubles. Wars and Holocausts and stuff... on the European Continent. Oh yes, der Führer declared war on you, so even pro-German Charles Lindbergh went to participate in the war and flew P-38 Lightning in the Pacific. But I guess the photo ops with Herman Göring and medals from Germany didn't fly so well afterwards.
(Göring presented Lindbergh with the Service Cross of the German Eagle for his services to world aviation. And also a nice sword as it seems... or just showing it off to a friend.)
But I'm sure Charles Lindbergh would be now rooting for Trump. After all, Lindbergh headed the "America First" committee, and spoke loudly against the war and promoted the isolationist stance as can be seen from a speech by him in 1941:
So few months from that speech the US was in a war.