You say it like it’s their choice. Moldova never asked for Transnistria. It’s fairly SOP for Russia to take bites from its neighbours, let’s stop blaming the victims. Whatever Russia ends up doing, they are preparing for themselves a second Chechnya at the very least.
Of course it is not just their choice. Russia has indicated their willingness to accept current holdings (for now, you are right there are no guarantees).
Ukraine could and should get better than just that, but this notion of taking back Crimea is a pipe dream and I don’t support continued funding until that goal is realized.
If you want to be extremely cynical and seek to strictly extend and project the USA's power as harshly and effectively as possible, the war in Ukraine was God's gift to the USA. They get to basically take out Russia (China's key geopolitical ally) without losing a single American life, for a tiny fraction of the amount they're used to spending on wars.
And yet it's American nationalists themselves who want it all to stop, to throw all of its European allies under the bus and burn the alliance with the rest of the Western world to the ground. An amazing and almost impressive act of self harm.
It's not so much "America first" with you lot, it's "America alone".
> If you want to be extremely cynical and seek to strictly extend and project the USA's power as harshly and effectively as possible, the war in Ukraine was God's gift to the USA. They get to basically take out Russia (China's key geopolitical ally) without losing a single American life, for a tiny fraction of the amount they're used to spending on wars.
In a sane timeline, support for Ukraine should be unanimous amongst US politicians. Whether they would be neocons (following the calculation you outlined), liberals out to support oppressed people, cold-hearted capitalists out to make a buck both during wartime and in reconstruction, anyone supporting the military who will get an influx of new toys as their old ones are shipped out to Ukraine at basically no cost for the taxpayer, testosterone-addicted macho patriots who get to see American technology crush the remains of a former peer adversary.
You are assuming I am some Trump American-first Republican. I think you are severely misjudging the politics of Ukraine support in the US, which has collapsed in the last few months.
Perhaps I am opposed to harsh projections of American power in an increasingly multipolar world? The global playing field is leveling, I think that is precisely the wrong time to be making even bitterer enemies.
Yes I am assuming that very much, but it does not matter that much, either you're America first or you agree with their foreign policy anyway on Ukraine. I understand that Ukraine support has been politicised even when it should not be. This says much more about the utterly dysfunctional state of American politics and the decline of American society whereby you're seriously entertaining reelecting Trump next year. It does not say much at all about Ukraine. If it were not Ukraine, it would simply be something else equally irrelevant to domestic American politics but equally politicised.
>Perhaps I am opposed to harsh projections of American power in an increasingly multipolar world?
I don't know, are you? Put another way the USA is helping support a free and independent country against an imperial genocidal conqueror. Isn't that what the USA is kind of supposed to do? Otherwise what exactly does it stand for?
Or another way: In forcing "détente" on Europe, are you happy to trade good relations with most of Europe, your oldest allies, for maybe better relations with Russia, your enemy who hates you and seeks your destruction? Really? Sounds like a shit and moronic deal to me.
>The global playing field is leveling, I think that is precisely the wrong time to be making even bitterer enemies.
It's too late lad. Russia hates you even more than they hate your mother country, my homeland, the UK. In fact Russia hates you more than any other country on the planet. They utterly despise you and Anglo-American cultural hegemony. In for a penny, in for a pound and all that. They've been working to undermine the USA since well before the war started. There is no going back any time soon. Instead you advocate surrender to the same people who wish to destroy you. Weak.
> In forcing "détente" on Europe, are you happy to trade good relations with most of Europe, your oldest allies, for maybe better relations with Russia, your enemy who hates you and seeks your destruction? Really? Sounds like a shit and moronic deal to me.
There won’t be any détente in Europe. There was an opportunity in the early 2000s but both Russia and Western European countries fumbled it. Now the door was closed and Russia’s actions ensured that it won’t open for quite a while. It is difficult to grasp how profound the effects on European politics has been.
This is what is so pathetic about those Americans who delude themselves thinking that if they close their eyes it will be ok. The world is slipping through their fingers and they don’t realise that this is accelerating the disintegration of American power. This war is fundamentally different from Iraq in a way they do not seem to grasp.
It's pretty typically American to only be able to see the world through the lense of their own parochial internal interests and partisan conflicts. Their economy and military and geography of the country are so big that the gravity field of the place is massive, and both liberals and conservatives there rewrite things in terms of their own dysfunctional political cultural battles. Not to say other places in the world don't have ideological blinders, but the US is extreme.
The prime example of this was the nonsense that got Trump impeached ... Trump trying to strong-arm Zelensky into intervening into US domestic politics. "Art of the deal" wasn't so much that, as it was just total blindness to anything outside his own internal interests. American tribal politics were clearly so important that the survival of Ukraine itself was a bargaining chip.
FWIW up here in Canada none of the 5 mainstream political parties have taken a position against supporting Ukraine, financially and militarily. Given the size of the Ukrainian-Canadian population (third largest Ukrainian population after Ukraine and Russia) such a position would be electorally toxic.
> it does not matter that much, either you're America first or you agree with their foreign policy anyway on Ukraine
It does matter because you basically said "if you really cared about maintaining American unipolarity no matter the cost, you would be all in on Ukraine" - and I don't care about maintaining American unipolarity no matter the cost. A multipolar world is an inevitability.
> you advocate surrender to the same people who wish to destroy you. Weak.
Somehow I suspect that I am not the jingoistic nationalist here.
That was a hypothetical. I was just observing that the Ukraine war is amazing for US interests in a strictly Machiavellian, geopolitical sense. We Europeans are getting fucked over by the Russians, Ukrainians most of all and of course Russians are destroying themselves too for the sake of land (as if Russia hasn't got enough...). The USA is laughing here. I mention this because it's clear that it isn't a humanitarian issue for the US isolationists, they just don't want to spend the money (at least in theory, of course it's really all about domestic political tribalism and almost nothing to do with Ukraine for at least one side of the divide in the US), so I am speaking to them here on those terms.
>Somehow I suspect that I am not the jingoistic nationalist here.
Yes indeed how nationalistic of me to checks notes oppose wars of imperial conquest in Europe.
That rhetoric, outside of being sociopathic, is also almost certainly just not true.
I'm sure you've also been watching this war play out. When Russia first invaded their army was disorganized, relatively ineffective, and on extremely unstable footing. And when NATO entered the picture there was genuine fear about Western weaponry. Now Russia's military is much more effective, the visage of dominance of Western weaponry has been completely destroyed (along with large amounts of said weaponry itself), Russia's military production has reached highly competent levels, and they're altogether in a much better place. Even the no American lives part is false. Not only have numerous mercenaries and contractors been killed, but I think it's extremely safe to assume that there have been casualties among the inevitable individuals who are not officially there.
Also, one mistake you make is in claiming that withdrawing will have negative consequences (which I agree with), and then jumping from there to 'well, then we shouldn't withdraw!' Unfortunately in real life the choice is often not between a good choice and a bad choice, but between a bad choice and an awful choice. This is even more true when acting under poor leadership, or leadership with insufficient foresight. And I don't see how continuing this war is anything but negative for basically everybody, except perhaps Boeing and other arms dealers.
Have you noticed near to everything "we" say, as far as analysis of this war goes, ends up being simply not true? Russia's running out of missiles, the Russian economy is collapsing, this counter-attack's going to destroy Russia, this weapon or that weapon will be a 'game-changer.' So forth and so on. And now we're at "well it's just a stalemate."
The latest 'big battle', so far as I know is ongoing in Avdiivka. [1] I have not read the Wiki page on it, but if you're interested in following the war, that'd probably be a reasonable starting spot.
Nice cherrypicking and building strawmen. How about the Russia's obvious failures? Was Kyiv offensive a "feint" according to you?
Avdiivka is a village of 1000 inhabitants, and it's the biggest Russian assault since Russia took the town of Bakhmut about a year ago. With this pace, Russia is going to take Kyiv in the year 3000.
No, the Kyiv offensive was obviously a poorly executed failure. And it happened right at the start of this war, which is exactly what I am saying. "That" Russian military lost to a relatively improvised small scale counter-offensive, while the "new" Russian military beat back a massive Ukrainian counter-attack directly backed (and probably directed) by NATO. These are practically two different forces. We're not weakening Russia, we're hardening it.
As for Avdiivka, read the Wiki on it for more info. It's an industrial city, one of the most heavily fortified locations in Ukraine, and of significant strategic value. Every inch in that place comes at a high price, and both sides desperately want to control it. So it's a pretty reasonable bellwether to keep your eyes on.
You don't have to worry about my knowledge of Avdiivka. It's a village which has a value only for Russia, because it's very close to Donetsk city and is a major thorn in the Russian propaganda - can you explain to me how is Russia so strong and at the same time after 2 years of war still can't push Ukrainians more than 10 kilometers from the downtown of Donetsk city, the capital of DPR?
For Ukraine, the only value Avdiivka represents is that it allows them to bleed Russians for it, because it just matters so much for them. Otherwise, Avdiivka is even less important than Bakhmut (that one was at least a logistics node) and the loss of it did not lead to any frontline collapse - on the opposite, Ukrainians were able to recover Bakhmut flanks since then.
> We're not weakening Russia, we're hardening it.
What military analysts are you following? Because from what I hear from my sources (e.g. Kofman, Massicot) Russia's forces are very much degraded with many of the best units lost.
The scale of it is astounding. In the past few weeks, it has been a wave every hour or two, sometimes faster, with 5 to 20 vehicles a wave; minesweepers and a 2:1 bmp to tank ratio. Lots of troops and they barely get anywhere. It is horrid. The only real breakthrough that the Russians have made was through a long waste pipe into town. They rushed a ~150 people through after smaller groups, but those mostly ended up cut off from any resupply with the AFU having retaken their 3rd, main line of defense in that area. Destroyed a massive Russian column in that too.
I find analysis for this war quite inane to consume. The reality of war is that very often even the participants themselves are not entirely sure what's going on, let alone what will happen. See, for the most obvious example, the Ukrainian counter attack. So I simply prefer to look at what little data we can get that both sides agree upon and use that to get an indication of the broad "direction" of the war.
So for instance the average Ukrainian soldier is now up to 43 years old [1], more than a decade older than when the war began. And Ukraine has been turning to increasingly aggressive conscription efforts, with the military demanding even more. There's now also major friction between the head of the Ukrainian military and Zelensky, with Zelensky looking to replace him. [2] These sort of little nuggets, which are not disputed by either side at this point, give you an indication of the "direction" of the war.
It's the same reason I find Avdeevka relevant. Avdeevka does have strategic value, but what really matters is that it's a hill both sides have decided to die on. It's similar to something like Verdun. Verdun is a completely irrelevant town in France, far smaller than Avdeevka and with much less strategic value, yet hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives fighting over it. The reason the result mattered is not because this side or that now controlled Verdun, but because it was a major bellwether for the "direction" of the war.
