That depends entirely what you mean by “potential.” Theoretically, the US and Canada are potential threats to each other. England and France and Germany have a long history of wars against each other but none of the current governments or populaces of those countries have any significant designs on war against each other. Theoretically, they are threats to each other. And in that way, yes, Moscow will always be a threat to Ukraine (and vis-versa).
However, as long as Putin and his cronies and ilk are in power in Russia, Russia is a threat to its neighbors in an entirely different manner. But to believe that can’t ever change, that a rational and just government can’t come to power in Russia and deliver real peace, freedom, and prosperity to its people, is to embrace a weird form of deterministic nihilism. Russia does have good people and Putin can be overthrown. And a good government can result.
… and a bad government can follow later. We’ve had a period of peace in Europe but there’s no guarantee it will last. And of course there are all kinds of conflict areas and old hates all over the world that can spill over into war at any given moment. Many of them are nuclear powers too. We’re just kicking the ball down the street on this planet. We’re in a constant technology and arms race, constant propaganda and intelligence war, constant economic war, constantly committing ethnic cleansing and just doing general good old exploitation of the weak for fun and profit. You tell me how it all ends, if not in global disaster.
This latest violence is just more of the same shit we’ve always been doing. Let’s see if we can kick the ball a little further down the street this time, that’s all I’m looking for. It gets more and more complicated the longer we play these games though, and at some point we will reach catastrophic failure.
They don’t want that. However they do want access to consumer goods.
The unspoken “grand bargain” with the Russian people at the start of Putin’s reign was:
Reduction in visible violent crime
Increase in living standards
Access to foreign consumer goods for broad swathes of society (iPhones, Starbucks…)
Now, after this “grand bargain” Putin introduced brainwashing about the might of the Russian arms preparing for (possible) contingencies and the inability to provide said items should oil prices drop/war breaks out. But Russia is a hyper-individualistic society and if you can’t deliver on these two points…something is going to happen.
He seems aware that there’s a clear danger of a palace coup and is now appealing to the lowest common denominator of his base. He’ll have to hang (literally) several oligarchs to placate the masses.
I think this line of reasoning risks deteriorating into: “everyone does bad things sometimes, so nothing really matters and we can’t do anything about it.” We’re talking about a concrete example of a bad actor who has wantonly attacked a neighbor with complete disregard for the human and other cost that it has to both his and other countries and the people involved who suffer.
You seem to think that Zelensky could negotiate and appease Putin into peace while maintaining the freedom and prosperity that he is building in his country. That simply reveals to much trust in what is clearly an evil man. I firmly reject the kind of moral equivocating that you seem to be embracing. Putin is the evil one here. This isn’t something where we need to try to see it from all sides.
@loppar Putin sounded a little tinpot dictator-ish to me, but perhaps that was lost in translation. Hopefully he is as rational as I suspect he is.
@Silyak Also worth noting is the stark contrast between how western countries conduct their operations vs what Russia is doing right now. This will be endlessly dissected for a myriad of strategic, operational and tactical reasons, but the basic difference in morals, values and conduct is on full display here.
Watching that is a bit shocking, he’s seems more desperate with every act.
Elgert says it’s not about the oligarchs, but I agree with you that seems to be the long game. Pivot to blaming the rich, with all their resources and take their goods.
No it wasn’t. It was pretty unhinged. I guess full-on paranoia is setting in. Naryshkin (the stammering FSB chief Putin embarrassed during that televised meeting) met with Kadyrov in Chechnya and if I was a paranoid dictator living in total isolation for two years I’d suspect something was up between these two. Naryshkin has the brains and Kadyrov - despite being both insane and spectacularly dumb at the same time - has a sizeable private army.
This speech was a direct message to someone, I’m not well versed in Kremlinology to know to whom exactly.
No. I said I think it will end in a deal, without making any moral judgments. Now that I’ve seen Putins latest rant it seems less likely.
Then I zoomed out a bit to lament the fact that fascism, militarism, hate, greed and fear are staples of human civilization - not aberrations. Whatever happens now, we are back to an era of hard power politics, further arms race and militarization. The idea of peace through trade relations is dead. Even if they hang Putin tomorrow, the Pandora’s box of war has been opened again. It won’t be the last time. And every year we keep churning out arms and keep the propaganda flowing, the closer we get to systemic collapse. What’s the solution? I don’t see one. Which is why I say we are just kicking the can down the road towards total war.
A war that we lost. Body count does not necessarily coincide with victory. We killed a lot more Taliban and Al Qaeda than they killed of us, but they out waited us and won. So say what you will, but we lost a war we could and should have easily won.
Exactly where did you get these numbers? I have heard conflicting reports. Tens of thousands of troops sounds highly unlikely.
Going against first tier American weapons systems is hardly a measure how good or bad their military equipment is. Russia has pretty sophisticated weaponry. As good as the US? I doubt it, but I wouldn’t consider it crap, by any stretch.
And I am going to need sources to back up your fanciful claims of mass Russian casualties. They seem massively exaggerated to me and I haven’t heard of numbers anywhere near that high.
Regardless, Ukraine, if it stands alone, will fall. It’s just a matter of when. The only way Ukraine survives is with Western intervention. I have a feeling it’s coming, but don’t fool yourself, the territory held by Ukraine shrinks more and more each day.
Ukraine, outside of surrender, does not have enough to offer to stop the Russians. The negotiations for the things you are talking about with Donbass and Crimea may have prevented the war. But will all the sanctions and outside pressure on Russia, negotiations have to give Putin more than just a smidgen of what he has already taken. If the west wants peace, they have to give Russia a face saving way out. Since nobody is doing that and rather itching to get involved, the negotiations are just a pacification tactic.
And how do you reckon we would do that? That’s WW3 your talking about. It’s a really bad idea to think that Russia is weak. Their military apparatus is massive especially in proportion to the population.
No. Even 5 years ago Putin wasn’t a threat. 7 year ago we were making deals with them and even gave them control of Syria chemical weapons stockpile, which is how they got into Syria in the first place. Boris Yeltsin wasn’t a bad guy. After the fall of the USSR, we became down right friendly with Moscow, to a fault. Putin had been undermining our interests for 2 decades and we still managed to be friendly with him.
You can’t do that with anybody much less Russia. But if there was ever a time to wipe Russia off the map, it was WW2 after Germany fell. Then kicking the Soviets back to Moscow would have been possible, especially with the atomic bomb which we had and they didn’t at the time.
No, we couldn’t. It was always an unwinnable war. We went there to get the bad guy, then spent decades trying to set up a self-sufficient government. The bad guy was in an entirely different country and we spent 15+ years setting up a government that was toppled by horse-mounted extremists using 1800’s battle tactics. Remind me again how we set up our government while pushing back the strongest military in the world? France helped a bit, but we were effectively on our own. These people weren’t ever interested in our form of government, and they weren’t interested in freeing themselves from the oppression they lived under while Al Qaeda either. You can lead a horse to water…
I fail to see how this disqualifies Putin from being a threat honestly.
Bullshit. The war was totally winnable. But you have to fight it, to win it. Which means to kill and destroy the bad guys to the point where they are unable to fight or cease to exist all together. We lost because of regime change ideology, idiotic rules of engagement, the strategy of 'limited war, and a lackadaisical attitude towards the whole thing. If the US committed to win, we would have won, easily.
Putin has always been a threat. I have been railing against the guy for as long as he’s been there. Right now it’s very fashionable to be anti-Putin. I was anti-Putin when we were cutting absurd deals with him. When we were sending him “Reset” buttons in the hands of hillary, negotiating with them as partners with Iran, the Syrian red-line debacle, etc. He’s been exploiting every US mistake since he first got into power. He undermined our interests where ever we were. When the US would make a deal, Russia was right behind trying to undermine it. But nobody cared back then. Now, all the sudden people care, because he engaged in a war we practically dared him to start.
Go back and look at the last 2 years, prior to the war and see all the events leading up to this war. Look at what interactions with Russia and with Russian interests we had. Putin hasn’t changed, he’s always been this way. And I have never trusted him, but the US did. Especially the obama admin.
Every time an uncle, brother, father, or son was killed, 2 more extremists were created. The entire population was effectively a hydra, making this war unwinnable without total domination of a people… which is then considered genocide. So to remain ethically on the ‘righteous’ side, we weren’t winning that war.
I misunderstood what you meant in the other post, disregard
I disagree. We never had a clear goal other than, “kill the terrorists.” Which, like you said spawns more terrorists as in their minds it fulfills the world view they have. If afghanistan was a war of total annihilation, we absolutely could have won. I heard someone say once (and I wish I could remember who) “The purpose of the military is to kill people and break stuff.” If that was our goal, we could win that easily. But that is never our goal anymore. WW2 and its aftermath changed how America approaches war ever since. We can’t always win a war and give everything back afterward and expect it to work out in our favor.
edit: I should have read your other response. We sort of agree. We could never win that war, because we were never prepared to do what it takes to win it.
That’s not the point of war. Your not there to be righteous. Your there to defeat your enemy. The point of war is to destroy your enemy. That has to be the commitment otherwise you get bad outcomes. It’s also the most humane way to carry out war.
The only “humane” war, other than the one not fought, is the one ended quickly. Dragging out war causes more pain and death for far more people than commitment to victory ever would or could.
That’s why the US has lost every engagement since WW2. We adopted the idea of regime change and limited war. That we are so powerful, we could just show up and win and clearly that’s not true.
Even if your hypothesis that killing terrorists creates more terrorists, that changes with disproportionate force.
It’s simply a matter of commitment and resources. If you have the commitment and the resources, you can win easily. But you cannot with with one of those two missing. You can have commitment and no resources, you get no where. You can have resources and no commitment and you get what we got in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, Korea. All of which were winnable, but lacked commitment to victory. There was always some other agenda or new politic.
And its fine to argue the validity of each war, perhaps some should have never been engaged in the first place. But none of them should have been engaged without a the clear goal of defeating your enemy totally enough, that they are no longer a threat.
But I have no doubt, this war will be total war. Perhaps there is a miracle. Perhaps cooler heads prevail, but lacking that we are headed towards total war and it’s going to be ugly for millions.
I agree, but then we have lost our way as a ‘righteous’ country. We fought the bad guys, then the innocent civilians related to those bad guys changed their colors and became bad guys, so we fought them, then their relatives changed colors…
I have always agreed we could wipe the place clean, as in total sanitization/genocide, with very little effort. But that is not what we want to be known for, and therefore is not worth it. Winning this war was not possible while still viewing ourselves as the ‘good guys’ in the situation.
Nothing like a nerd throwing a punch at you, then you atom bomb his neighborhood - right? Unfortunately, proportionate response is kind of an important thing for society.
