I think the most moronic thing and the great tragedy about this conflict that with a high probability it was a purely emotional and badly thought out action from Kremlins in which they just lashed out at the world and Kremlins really wanted to put a Medvechuk-style figure after some small purges and it was the entire idea, but almost everyone else thinks that they are insane nationalist maniacs, greatly because they are just these incomprehensive retarded boomers who slide more and more into incoherent conspiratorial rants and there is just nothing outside of it.
I actually wrote a tweet about this at the beginning of the war, in which I said that people underestimate the role played by his arrest, for precisely the kind of reason you are talking about: https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1504978570120245253.
Out of curiosity: If an Anglo-French observer would have argued back in 1939 that Hitler should be allowed to expand into Eastern Europe because he'd have a giant headache on his shoulders for decades to come afterwards, how exactly would you respond to this? Especially without the benefit of hindsight? In 1939, it wasn't yet clear just how brutal the Nazis were going to become. Even Kristallnacht was a very small drop in the bucket in comparison to what came later, after all.
Also, you seem to view a 1980s Kosovo-style situation as unsustainable for Russia, but it seems to have been very sustainable for Serbia. After all, it is precisely because of this strategy failing to achieve any meaningful results over 15+ years that the Kosovar Albanians opted to resort to a strategy of much more violent resistance instead. But Ukrainians won't be able to do that as easily because they have a much older population relative to 1990s Kosovar Albanians.
I also think that you underestimate just how culturally compatible Ukrainians actually are with Russians, relative to Albanians vs. Serbs. Albanians and Serbs have different religions and belong to different language families. In contrast, Russia and Ukraine both originated from Kievan Rus' and their peoples have previously spent hundreds of years living in a single country. A Russian nationalist could easily argue based on past experience that holding onto Ukraine won't be such a huge challenge for Russia because both Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union managed to do it for a very long time without the sort of chronic difficulties that they faced elsewhere, such as in Poland. Indeed, from a historical perspective, it is Ukrainian independence that is the aberration, not Russian rule over Ukraine.
You also underestimate the possibility that Ukrainian nationalism could have been very seriously discredited after a Russian conquest of Ukraine, similar to how Nazism was discredited after Germany's total WWII defeat (and it previously had many passionate believers in Germany). The remaining Ukrainian nationalists could move to the West by the millions, never to return to Ukraine, while the remaining Ukrainian population, now significantly reduced (from 35 million to 25 million or even less than that) could conclude that the West is an unreliable friend and ally and that Ukraine thus once again should make it peace with Russian rule in order to prevent further bloodshed and suffering for the Ukrainian people.
I also think that you might underestimate the extent to which a mafia state like Putin's Russia would be willing to support dissent in Ukraine. After all, even an ostensibly civilized country such as 1950s France was willing to torture hundreds of thousands of Algerians in order to quell the Algerian FLN. France actually was militarily successful in that war; it withdrew for political reasons, such as Algeria's rapidly growing Muslim population posing a threat to France's European character, political reasons that won't exist here, because Ukrainians will never be capable of becoming a demographic threat to Russians.
I also think that you overestimate just how much Russia and China can be pulled apart at this stage. After all, if the West would have offered to accept Russia's December 2021 ultimatum in its entirety in exchange for Russia ending all military, technological, and scientific cooperation with China, withdrawing from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and committing in writing to wage a trade embargo on China in the event that China would have ever attacked Taiwan, do you think that Russia would have actually accepted such a Western proposal? Or would it have told the West to screw itself and insisted that its own relationship and ties with China are non-negotiable?
The worst thing is that Putin comes from the family of people with a quite long lifespans and it's quite predictive of how long the person would live, hence Russia is fucked for decades with a very decent probability, there is no chance for anything good ever, the entire potential was wasted.
1) You overlook the fact that Putin's aggression against Russia's neighbors - whether NATO members or not - has been ongoing for years - obviously in aggravated forms for non-NATO members: disruptions in the electoral process, attacks against IT infrastructures, distributions of Russian passports to Russian-speaking minorities, support to secessionist movements, violations of airspace and maritime territory etc. The mere fact that 2 countries with well-entrenched neutrality traditions - Finland and Sweden - are desperate to join NATO as quickly as possible is a rebuttal to your view that Putin would stop his aggression with Ukraine.
2) It is precisely the West's past tolerance with Putin's aggressions, e.g. in Georgia, Moldova, Crimea, and Syria, that have encouraged him to decide a full-blown invasion of Ukraine. Still, you propose that the West should tolerate and facilitate further those aggressions? Regardless of indifference for the fate of the Ukrainian people, that would not bode well for Putin's other potential victims.
3) You argue in favor of a quick conventional military defeat of Ukraine and a shift to insurgency. That is by far the most destructive form of warfare for the civilian population, as already experienced precisely by Ukraine in World War 2. And with some exceptions in very specific terrains (e.g., Afghanistan), partisan warfare / insurgency generally does not work.
4) You argue in favor of economic sanctions, while they have been so far (unfortunately) much less effective at deterring Putin than military support for Ukraine.
5) You vastly exaggerate the difficulty for a modern country to obtain nuclear weapons. As reminder, North Korea succeeded in that enterprise. South Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine, Turkey, Vietnam - all potential targets for aggressive neighbors - have financial and technology capacities exceeding by (very) far North Korea's. They CHOOSE not to have nuclear weapons. But if there is no international order any longer, if anyone can invade their less powerful neighbors without fear of international retaliation, nuclear deterrence is the only rational choice for those countries.
6) One can argue that severely crippling the Russian army (about half of its military potential destroyed in one year) comes at a very modest cost for the West, through their military support for Ukraine. A similar result would have come at a much greater financial cost for the West if they had engaged directly in conflict with Russia, and obviously at a much greater risk.
7) There are many indirect benefits for the West in facilitating a Russian defeat in Ukraine. Besides the obvious benefits of deterring further aggressions by Putin or other would-be invaders, Russia's loss of credibility in the military domain is the best advertisement for technologically superior Western weapons. See for instance signs of an incipient shift in traditional Russian customers such as India and Algeria, which now seek to diversify their providers. Ultimately with positive long-term diplomatic consequences for the West.
These points seem to be largely true but they mostly don't address how the West itself (and in particular the U.S.) benefits from its current course of action, which is specifically what Philippe is addressing. Simply deterring other Russian aggression against other non-NATO countries (#1 and 2) doesn't in itself do much for the U.S., nor does Russia not succeeding and/or Ukraine prevailing in this particular war (#3, 4 and 6). Even taking points #5 and 7 at face value, those hardly seem like sufficient benefits to justify the current scale of involvement without resort to a moral argument (which may well be powerful and correct but is in any event a distinct issue).
Hitler wanted to conquer Eastern Europe, not the world. He wanted Germany to have a colonial empire like the Anglo-French already had. His biggest sin pre-war, other than his anti-Semitism, was wanting to have his colonial empire be filled with white people. The West believed that only non-whites actually deserved to be colonial subjects.
The Confederacy has no desire to expand at the Union's expense, to my knowledge. They simply wanted to be left alone. Why exactly would the Confederacy and Union have thus been incapable of harmonious coexistence, especially if the Union would have viewed slavery in the Confederacy as a fact of life, just like the West viewed authoritarianism in post-2000 Russia as a fact of life, especially before 2014?
Ukrainians sure believe that there is a difference between living under Moscow vs. Kiev. Kiev actually is a democracy, after all, albeit a flawed one. Moscow is a mafia state where critics get routinely poisoned, tortured, and/or murdered.
Hitler desired conquest for conquest sake. It was part of his ideology.
Also, as a socialist, his economic model was doomed to failure. It required constant plunder to stay afloat, and thus had to be expansionary.
Anyway, the basics of Anglo policy is "don't let them have the means to challenge us". So long as you have Russia on one side and Britain on the other, it's impossible to conquer either. But if you absorb the resources of Eurasia then it becomes possible to build a fleet to rival the Anglos. Regardless of intent, it simply can't be allowed.
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The Confederacy and the Union were incapable of harmonious existence when they were one country! I would read up on what the pre-civil war period was like, there were a lot of problems.
And on a more basic level, there is absolutely no way the Union is going to allow another country to control the exit to the Mississippi River or lose its uncontested dominance of the continent.
"Ukrainians sure believe"
I don't know what they believe. They are forced to fight against their will and they can't have elections.
Beyond that, would I care what Japanese believed in the 1940s? If your beliefs are wrong they are wrong.
Kiev defiantly is a mafia state. I've seen nothing about Ukraine worth believing in.
Yes, and I think that what Philippe is getting at is that we should confront our involvement in this conflict primarily and overtly as a moral question. Perhaps many if not most Americans already do this and Philippe (by virtue of his own habits of mind) is somewhat overemphasizing the extent to which others are arriving at their position of support by way of cold ratiocination. But in recent situations where many Americans conflated moral and strategic justifications at the outset of a conflict--I think it's fair to say that this happened with respect to both Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other less substantial recent interventions in the Middle East and North Africa such as in Libya, and probably even in Vietnam insofar as clear lines were not drawn between concerns about "domino theory" vs. the importance of keeping a deleterious form of government out of South Vietnam (though I did not live through that process and so don't want to overstate that last point)--it became clear over time that the absence of risk of almost any material impact on our lives being posed by events in the relevant country meant that in the end we just had to give up once the initial frisson of compassion/fear faded. I do not personally discount the argument that defending mostly innocent people from the tyrannical imposition of imperial rule is a moral imperative even if at very substantial cost, but it's hard to argue with Philippe that our current engagement in Ukraine has not primarily been justified in these terms in public discourse.
And for what it's worth, the examples that you note where some sort of moral logic seems unassailable involved some of the most extreme circumstances imaginable--the enslavement of many millions of people in our own country in one case and a mostly successful rampage across large swaths of the world, undergirded by a horrifying ideology that makes Putin's revanchism look quaint, in the other. So I think for many Americans the moral question of our obligations in this particular situation would in fact be somewhat contested if debated on its own, hence the oft-cited strategic justifications which tend to obscure that question, and hence Philippe's essay.
Well, the West does have an interest in expanding the EU into Ukraine, though a cynic could argue that letting Russia have Ukraine and then encouraging Ukrainians (and even Russians!) to immigrate en masse to the EU would have been better.
Yes, North Korea got nukes, and how's that working out for them on the economic and diplomatic fronts? And keep in mind that North Korea's current level of economic existence and survival since 1953 is largely due to NK being propped up by China, which considers North Korea to be vitally strategically important but can't put military bases there for reasons that can be largely traced back to the PRC not having a UNSC veto in 1950 and Stalin making a really dumb decision to boycott the UN at the same time.
Go through the list of countries that broke the nuclear non-proliferation regime and you'll tend to find that, like North Korea, they're exceptions for a reason. Israel and, back in the day, South Africa are and were considered strategically important by the US but placing military bases there was infeasible for political reasons. Iran, which has reached breakout capability but has yet to go all the way, has geography that makes it effectively impossible to invade from the North, East, or South, has oil to survive sanctions, and historical accidents prevented a successful invasion from the West until it was too late (nobody wanted Saddam Hussein to actually win against Iran, the US got bogged down in an insurgency in Iraq that Iran did a lot to help, and by the 2010s Iran had developed a bunch of missiles to point at nearby oil facilities).
A key difficulty in obtaining nuclear weapons is how to avoid economic or military interventions to stop you from succeeding. And most countries that can form an alliance with a country powerful enough and willing to provide that level of protection, can usually just get their powerful ally to directly cover them with their nuclear umbrella. Of your list of countries, South Korea, Taiwan, and Turkey are all under US protection (yeah, Taiwan is under increasingly unambiguous "strategic ambiguity", but it still counts), and Ukraine is currently being invaded by Russia, and a consistent demand from Russia from Day 1 has been that Ukraine must pledge to never build nuclear weapons, so it kind of illustrates this very point.
Vietnam, meanwhile, has been in living memory targeted for aggression by two different nuclear-armed countries: the United States and China, so I highly doubt that its government is under any illusions about the "international order" protecting them. In fact, Vietnam has consistently abstained on UN resolutions condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine because they consider Russia to be a vital ally against potential future Chinese aggression, just as the Soviet Union was a vital ally in 1979. So I'm not sure that they're a great example to point to.
From a pure Realpolitik perspective, doing nothing to support Ukraine would actually strengthen the appeal of NATO. It would show that either you’re inside the alliance or the alliance will do absolutely nothing to help you. What’s the point of being inside the alliance if it’s happy to help those outside it?
And from the perspective of an ordinary Ukrainian citizen… wouldn’t a quick defeat with little infrastructure damage be the preferred outcome? Russia invested a lot of money into improving the quality of life in Crimea (the bridge alone was a huge investment) so wouldn’t the average Ukrainian be better off with a quick defeat? Right now even if Ukraine does end up with victory, it will likely be a Pyrrhic victory as most of the nation would be obliterated and the economy would have to be restarted from scratch. How does the average person benefit from this? Or do people seriously believe that Putin would start a new Holodomor after the occupation?
It seems like the only people benefitting from the war are NGOs, intellectuals who get to stroke their ego and entrepreneurs in the military industrial complex. Maybe also Ukrainian women who were able to relocate to the EU without a work visa? Everyone else is worse off from Ukraine not giving up quickly.
Ukraine has a conscript army and adult men aren’t allowed to leave the country. They are an army of slaves, like every other conscript army in history.
Ukraine was a shithole before the war, even poorer and more corrupt than Russia. It will be a shot hole after the war. There is little reason to believe that Kiev can run the country any better then Moscow or that determining whether it “liberates” a bunch of shelled out villages in the donbass full of Russian ethnic pensioners that wouldn’t even vote for Kiev is going to make anyone better off.
The Ukrainians who want freedom would’ve been able to emigrate to the EU in my scenario. The biggest difference would’ve been that men would be allowed to emigrate as well, rather than just women and children. Russia didn’t restrict their borders (despite all the propaganda warnings about this from the Ukrainians) and I’m sure they’d be happy to let anyone leave if they do wish.
I’m sure there’s some percent of people who would genuinely prefer to leave in a shack with no electricity for the sake of freedom but what percentage of the population is that?
1) the war could likely have been avoided if we stayed out of ukraine business
2) there is little to no chance that Putin would attack a nato country of ukraine fell, and if he did it would not have been a threat
3) there is no way to speculate how support for Ukraine affects other players like China. Hawks think it will scare them into not acting. It could just as easily convince them that the west is aggressive and expansionist and wants to support color revolution in China because it doesn’t find its government legitimate.
4) there is no evidence that live under Moscow will be any worse then life under Kiev. Ukraine was a pathetic failed state.
Life in war is defiantly worse then either outcome.
5) there is even less evidence that people in eastern ukraine care about being part of ukraine
6) Ukraine’s army is a conscript army and adult men are not allowed to leave. We have no clue how they would act if they were free to decide if they would fight (same goes for the Russians)
7) I can’t think of anything dumber then starting ww3 over this
If conscription in general is immoral, then Russia should have let Serbia fall to Austria-Hungary back in 1914. For that matter, without the benefit of hindsight, perhaps Hitler should have been allowed to expand into Eastern Europe so that he would have a gigantic headache on his shoulders for decades to come afterwards.
Conscription was justifiable in Ukraine on the eve of war. It was also justifiable for say the French in both world wars, at least at the beginning.
Conscription was not justifiable once it was clear the First World War front lines were settled. The sides should have made peace, and being able to use conscription allowed them to throw away lives instead of making peace.
The situation in Ukraine is similar. They should have made peace once the Kiev thrust failed. They had another opportunity after their initial counter offensive.
Instead Russia counter mobilized and that was it. The ability to use conscription allows the Ukranian government to throw away lives the same way Douglas Hauge did in Paschendell or the Somme.
Indeed, I can’t imagine permanently stationing a million or more troops in Eastern Europe wouldn’t have been at least somewhat costly for Nazi Germany, no?
The gains in the East would not have been as profitable and Germany wanted on any reasonable timescale. But in a generation, provided a system as unstable of Nazi Germany could last, they could be a threat.
BTW, my favorite and only realistic "Nazi's win" alternate history is this.
Was it actually reasonably foreseeable ahead of time that the Nazis would engage in mass murder, mass ethnic cleansing (other than of Jews, obviously), et cetera back in 1939, though?
Philippe Lemoine argues that had Russia conquered Ukraine, it would have gotten a giant headache afterwards. But can’t one make a very similar argument on a much larger scale in regards to the Anglo-French allowing Nazi Germany to expand all of the way up to the Urals? Especially when most Nazi atrocities were not yet reasonably foreseeable? (In 1939, it might have been reasonable to assume that the German people and even the German military and intelligence services would not be willing to utilize the necessary levels of brutality that it would take to subdue protesting white Christian Europeans—since, after all, they were not non-white Third Worlders and were thus perceived as having more value by contemporary people, many of whom were still racists.)
The majority of the cost you identify is economic - i.e. from the sanctions. But that cost would be borne regardless of whether we provide military assistance. Sanctions plus insurgency support is also an indefinite commitment, almost as expensive, and would enrage Russia almost as much.
It seems that - sotto voce - you are actually arguing for an even more extreme position, where the West doesn't simply abandon Ukraine militarily, but also diplomatically and economically, by gradually going back to consuming Russian gas, normalising relations, etc, while perhaps maintaining some token objections to the occupation (as it did with Crimea in 2014).
You make some good arguments, but you need to do a better job of editing for length. This could have been half as long and conveyed all of your points.
Lemonine writes: "Even if you don’t count the US, the EU and the UK still have a combined GDP almost 10 times larger than Russia’s GDP, a population more than 3 times larger and outspend it on defense by a factor of more than 3." If you add in the US, the correlation of forces is still greater.
Later on in the piece he writes “The real problem is that military assistance to Ukraine is emptying US inventories very quickly and that the industry can’t keep up.“ Now which is it, the West is so strong it is unthinkable to engage with it, or so weak that a medium-sized war, where the Ukrainians are doing all the fighting, is too much for the West to handle?
Lemonine proposes that “The Russian elites are convinced that, unless Ukraine is subordinated to Moscow in some fashion, Russia can’t be a great power.” If he is right, then it says we are dealing with an irrational actor. If Russia is irrational, why not do a blitzkrieg against Estonia and Eastern Latvia, annex the territory and announce an attack on Russia territory will incur a nuclear response? That’s a crazy-bold move, but it might be possible with a larger initial force operating along a much shorter front.
So we are left with an irrational actor fighting a war in Ukraine. Lemonine says we should stop aiding the Ukrainians, allowing the government to collapse and the war continue as an insurgency, which will soon collapse, as the Russians, long past winning hearts and minds, will simply drive the Ukrainian civilian population out of the country and slaughter those civilians that remain behind. Ukraine produces little the Russians don’t already have enough of, so it does not need the population of Ukraine. Its value is symbolic according to Lemonine. I prefer supporting the government of Ukraine over this scenario. Of course, what I’d really like if we had rational actors in Washington, in which case this war would have ended already with a win for Ukraine AND Russia. But as Iraq showed, this is not the case, “blobs” are brainless.
Out of curiosity: If an Anglo-French observer would have argued back in 1939 that Hitler should be allowed to expand into Eastern Europe because he'd have a giant headache on his shoulders for decades to come afterwards, how exactly would you respond to this? Especially without the benefit of hindsight? In 1939, it wasn't yet clear just how brutal the Nazis were going to become. Even Kristallnacht was a very small drop in the bucket in comparison to what came later, after all.
Also, you seem to view a 1980s Kosovo-style situation as unsustainable for Russia, but it seems to have been very sustainable for Serbia. After all, it is precisely because of this strategy failing to achieve any meaningful results over 15+ years that the Kosovar Albanians opted to resort to a strategy of much more violent resistance instead. But Ukrainians won't be able to do that as easily because they have a much older population relative to 1990s Kosovar Albanians.
I also think that you underestimate just how culturally compatible Ukrainians actually are with Russians, relative to Albanians vs. Serbs. Albanians and Serbs have different religions and belong to different language families. In contrast, Russia and Ukraine both originated from Kievan Rus', belong to one language family (even one language mini-family: the Eastern Slavs), and their peoples have previously spent hundreds of years living in a single country. A Russian nationalist could easily argue based on past experience that holding onto Ukraine won't be such a huge challenge for Russia because both Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union managed to do it for a very long time without the sort of chronic difficulties that they faced elsewhere, such as in Poland. Indeed, from a historical perspective, it is Ukrainian independence that is the aberration, not Russian rule over Ukraine.
You also underestimate the possibility that Ukrainian nationalism could have been very seriously discredited after a Russian conquest of Ukraine, similar to how Nazism was discredited after Germany's total WWII defeat (and it previously had many passionate believers in Germany). The remaining Ukrainian nationalists could move to the West by the millions, never to return to Ukraine, while the remaining Ukrainian population, now significantly reduced (from 35 million to 25 million or even lower than that) could conclude that the West is an unreliable friend and ally and that Ukraine thus once again should make it peace with Russian rule in order to prevent further bloodshed and suffering for the Ukrainian people. In other words, something akin to a geopolitical version of the Stockholm Syndrome.
I also think that you might underestimate the extent to which a mafia state like Putin's Russia would be willing to support dissent in Ukraine. After all, even an ostensibly civilized country such as 1950s France was willing to torture hundreds of thousands of Algerians in order to quell the Algerian FLN uprising. France actually was militarily successful in that war; it withdrew for political reasons, such as Algeria's rapidly growing Muslim population posing a threat to France's European character, political reasons that won't exist here, because Ukrainians will never be capable of becoming a demographic threat to Russians and are much more compatible with Russians than Muslim Algerians are with Frenchmen. (For that matter, France was successfully able to keep Algeria pacified for over 70 years, from the early 1870s to 1945, and could have been capable of sustaining this for much longer if it wasn't for France being massively weakened by two World Wars and the Muslim Algerian population beginning to accelerate their population growth. By 2100, if one includes both Crimea and Donbass as a part of Russia, the Russia-Ukrainian population advantage might be as much as 10:1 in Russia's favor according to the most recent (2024) United Nations population projections, a figure comparable to European France vs. Algeria back in 1900 or 1910.)
I also think that you overestimate just how much Russia and China can be pulled apart at this stage. After all, if the West would have offered to accept Russia's December 2021 ultimatum in its entirety in exchange for Russia ending all military, technological, and scientific cooperation with China, withdrawing from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and committing in writing to wage a trade embargo on China in the event that China would have ever attacked Taiwan, do you think that Russia would have actually accepted such a Western proposal? Or would it have told the West to screw itself and insisted that its own relationship and ties with China are non-negotiable?
By the way, back when Anatoly Karlin himself was still a Russian nationalist, he had much less hate for China than he had for the West, because as he pointed out, Chinese have killed many orders of magnitude less Russians throughout history than Westerners did. So, Russian nationalists wouldn't have the same reasons to hate China as they would with the West. China can't conquer Russia because it would get severely nuked in the process. Besides, why bother when China can simply trade with Russia? And Chinese don't want to live in Outer Manchuria because they're already leaving Inner Manchuria for more southern regions of China in extraordinarily massive numbers right now.
Out of curiosity: If an Anglo-French observer would have argued back in 1939 that Hitler should be allowed to expand into Eastern Europe because he'd have a giant headache on his shoulders for decades to come afterwards, how exactly would you respond to this? Especially without the benefit of hindsight? In 1939, it wasn't yet clear just how brutal the Nazis were going to become. Even Kristallnacht was a very small drop in the bucket in comparison to what came later, after all.
Also, you seem to view a 1980s Kosovo-style situation as unsustainable for Russia, but it seems to have been very sustainable for Serbia. After all, it is precisely because of this strategy failing to achieve any meaningful results over 15+ years that the Kosovar Albanians opted to resort to a strategy of much more violent resistance instead. But Ukrainians won't be able to do that as easily because they have a much older population relative to 1990s Kosovar Albanians.
I also think that you underestimate just how culturally compatible Ukrainians actually are with Russians, relative to Albanians vs. Serbs. Albanians and Serbs have different religions and belong to different language families. In contrast, Russia and Ukraine both originated from Kievan Rus' and their peoples have previously spent hundreds of years living in a single country. A Russian nationalist could easily argue based on past experience that holding onto Ukraine won't be such a huge challenge for Russia because both Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union managed to do it for a very long time without the sort of chronic difficulties that they faced elsewhere, such as in Poland. Indeed, from a historical perspective, it is Ukrainian independence that is the aberration, not Russian rule over Ukraine.
You also underestimate the possibility that Ukrainian nationalism could have been very seriously discredited after a Russian conquest of Ukraine, similar to how Nazism was discredited after Germany's total WWII defeat (and it previously had many passionate believers in Germany). The remaining Ukrainian nationalists could move to the West by the millions, never to return to Ukraine, while the remaining Ukrainian population, now significantly reduced (from 35 million to 25 million or even less than that) could conclude that the West is an unreliable friend and ally and that Ukraine thus once again should make it peace with Russian rule in order to prevent further bloodshed and suffering for the Ukrainian people.
I also think that you might underestimate the extent to which a mafia state like Putin's Russia would be willing to support dissent in Ukraine. After all, even an ostensibly civilized country such as 1950s France was willing to torture hundreds of thousands of Algerians in order to quell the Algerian FLN. France actually was militarily successful in that war; it withdrew for political reasons, such as Algeria's rapidly growing Muslim population posing a threat to France's European character, political reasons that won't exist here, because Ukrainians will never be capable of becoming a demographic threat to Russians.
I also think that you overestimate just how much Russia and China can be pulled apart at this stage. After all, if the West would have offered to accept Russia's December 2021 ultimatum in its entirety in exchange for Russia ending all military, technological, and scientific cooperation with China, withdrawing from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and committing in writing to wage a trade embargo on China in the event that China would have ever attacked Taiwan, do you think that Russia would have actually accepted such a Western proposal? Or would it have told the West to screw itself and insisted that its own relationship and ties with China are non-negotiable?
Out of curiosity: If an Anglo-French observer would have argued back in 1939 that Hitler should be allowed to expand into Eastern Europe because he'd have a giant headache on his shoulders for decades to come afterwards, how exactly would you respond to this? Especially without the benefit of hindsight? In 1939, it wasn't yet clear just how brutal the Nazis were going to become. Even Kristallnacht was a very small drop in the bucket in comparison to what came later, after all.
Also, you seem to view a 1980s Kosovo-style situation as unsustainable for Russia, but it seems to have been very sustainable for Serbia. After all, it is precisely because of this strategy failing to achieve any meaningful results over 15+ years that the Kosovar Albanians opted to resort to a strategy of much more violent resistance instead. But Ukrainians won't be able to do that as easily because they have a much older population relative to 1990s Kosovar Albanians.
I also think that you underestimate just how culturally compatible Ukrainians actually are with Russians, relative to Albanians vs. Serbs. Albanians and Serbs have different religions and belong to different language families. In contrast, Russia and Ukraine both originated from Kievan Rus' and their peoples have previously spent hundreds of years living in a single country. A Russian nationalist could easily argue based on past experience that holding onto Ukraine won't be such a huge challenge for Russia because both Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union managed to do it for a very long time without the sort of chronic difficulties that they faced elsewhere, such as in Poland. Indeed, from a historical perspective, it is Ukrainian independence that is the aberration, not Russian rule over Ukraine.
You also underestimate the possibility that Ukrainian nationalism could have been very seriously discredited after a Russian conquest of Ukraine, similar to how Nazism was discredited after Germany's total WWII defeat (and it previously had many passionate believers in Germany). The remaining Ukrainian nationalists could move to the West by the millions, never to return to Ukraine, while the remaining Ukrainian population, now significantly reduced (from 35 million to 25 million or even less than that) could conclude that the West is an unreliable friend and ally and that Ukraine thus once again should make it peace with Russian rule in order to prevent further bloodshed and suffering for the Ukrainian people.
I also think that you might underestimate the extent to which a mafia state like Putin's Russia would be willing to support dissent in Ukraine. After all, even an ostensibly civilized country such as 1950s France was willing to torture hundreds of thousands of Algerians in order to quell the Algerian FLN. France actually was militarily successful in that war; it withdrew for political reasons, such as Algeria's rapidly growing Muslim population posing a threat to France's European character, political reasons that won't exist here, because Ukrainians will never be capable of becoming a demographic threat to Russians.
I also think that you overestimate just how much Russia and China can be pulled apart at this stage. After all, if the West would have offered to accept Russia's December 2021 ultimatum in its entirety in exchange for Russia ending all military, technological, and scientific cooperation with China, withdrawing from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and committing in writing to wage a trade embargo on China in the event that China would have ever attacked Taiwan, do you think that Russia would have actually accepted such a Western proposal? Or would it have told the West to screw itself and insisted that its own relationship and ties with China are non-negotiable?
- military effort is a protection racket (https://polsci.substack.com/p/politics-of-contention-and-war-as), it is not driven by the general interest. Hanania was writing that US foreign policy belicosity stems in large part of this special interest capture
- if you loved sleepwalkers and guns of august, you'll enjoy the "proud tower"... my reading from the chapter on Mahan is that the US is most responsible for WWI: https://polsci.substack.com/p/the-strategic-importance-of-maritime, with WWII being just a side-note.
- the Russian Gov has consistently told the US Gov for over 20 years that Ukraine was a red line. We need to get back to what people said before 2022 and before 2014. Western media since is hysterical and delusional.
- the cost of war on Russia is uncertain. The military cost of one to three hundred billion, there is maybe 1 trillion a year due to energy costs for Europe. There is the possible cost of sidelining China, which could cost another trillion per year, and the long term cost of being sanction happy, destroying the rule of law in the west, and the value of the dollar and eur, which would cost around 100 trillion, but as a one off.
- Philippe is addressing the weakest and most hysterical arguments for war, like those about dissuasion. Those arguments were never heard before the war, and were suddenly put forward to justify the new stance of the west. Is there a way to steelman the case instead?
"The Russian elites are convinced that, unless Ukraine is subordinated to Moscow in some fashion, Russia can’t be a great power..." Incorrect. Russian elites are convinced, quite correctly, that the US has been working to transform Ukraine into a hotbed of vehemently anti-Russian sentiment and into a NATO outpost with a 1200 kilometer border with Russia that Neocons can use as a staging ground for attacks of all kinds aimed at destroying the Russian state. They're also convinced that the US will use Ukraine as a host for medium range ballistic missiles and eventually hypersonic missiles that will be capable of striking Moscow and other major Russian cities within minutes, which would be an incredibly dangerous situation if only because of how much it would escalate the risk of a nuclear exchange triggered by accident.
Why would Russian elites think any of this? Because Neocons have been talking and writing openly about doing exactly this for many years and Russian elites have been watching Neocons turn their words into actions for well over a decade.
The superior move for the US was truly not to deliver weapons. Russia could still be tied up by funding insurgency at a far lower cost. Economic sanctions would have still turned Europe to US`s shale gas. And Europe could still be easily rallied under US leadership and maybe even made to pay more money into NATO. There`d still be options for diplomacy to drive a wedge between Russia & China.
This scenario gains everything US gained from weapon deliveries with extra perks and at much lower price.
It might have been true that if the West didn't help Ukraine in February 2022, and Ukraine fell to Russia, Russia would not invade a NATO member. But it's not so true anymore.
The main Russian evening shows (particularly Solovyov's one, 60 minutes led by Skabyeva, the one run by Simonian) nearly every other day discuss annexation of Poland ("the hyena of Europe") in one way or another. Even the former president/prime minister, Medvedev, regularly discusses "the Polish question" on his Telegram channel - last time was literally last week.
You have to consider what the propaganda is telling Russians for a year now. Russia is at war with all of NATO, and is basically winning. Even though the US, UK, Poland and other countries support Ukraine with weapons (and, according to the Russian propaganda, also send their soldiers to Ukraine), Russia still holds strong in there. The propaganda talks about Russian victories and heroism all day long, every day.
Now imagine that Russia wins the war in Ukraine. A war that they said (for years now) was a war with all of NATO. How will they persuade 140 million Russians that it's time to stop now, instead of attacking a NATO country like Poland? After all, NATO was just beaten down -- Russia is winning. And if they attack Poland, they'll no longer have an issue with Kaliningrad being blocked off from the rest of Russia.
I think the most moronic thing and the great tragedy about this conflict that with a high probability it was a purely emotional and badly thought out action from Kremlins in which they just lashed out at the world and Kremlins really wanted to put a Medvechuk-style figure after some small purges and it was the entire idea, but almost everyone else thinks that they are insane nationalist maniacs, greatly because they are just these incomprehensive retarded boomers who slide more and more into incoherent conspiratorial rants and there is just nothing outside of it.
I actually wrote a tweet about this at the beginning of the war, in which I said that people underestimate the role played by his arrest, for precisely the kind of reason you are talking about: https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1504978570120245253.
Out of curiosity: If an Anglo-French observer would have argued back in 1939 that Hitler should be allowed to expand into Eastern Europe because he'd have a giant headache on his shoulders for decades to come afterwards, how exactly would you respond to this? Especially without the benefit of hindsight? In 1939, it wasn't yet clear just how brutal the Nazis were going to become. Even Kristallnacht was a very small drop in the bucket in comparison to what came later, after all.
Also, you seem to view a 1980s Kosovo-style situation as unsustainable for Russia, but it seems to have been very sustainable for Serbia. After all, it is precisely because of this strategy failing to achieve any meaningful results over 15+ years that the Kosovar Albanians opted to resort to a strategy of much more violent resistance instead. But Ukrainians won't be able to do that as easily because they have a much older population relative to 1990s Kosovar Albanians.
I also think that you underestimate just how culturally compatible Ukrainians actually are with Russians, relative to Albanians vs. Serbs. Albanians and Serbs have different religions and belong to different language families. In contrast, Russia and Ukraine both originated from Kievan Rus' and their peoples have previously spent hundreds of years living in a single country. A Russian nationalist could easily argue based on past experience that holding onto Ukraine won't be such a huge challenge for Russia because both Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union managed to do it for a very long time without the sort of chronic difficulties that they faced elsewhere, such as in Poland. Indeed, from a historical perspective, it is Ukrainian independence that is the aberration, not Russian rule over Ukraine.
You also underestimate the possibility that Ukrainian nationalism could have been very seriously discredited after a Russian conquest of Ukraine, similar to how Nazism was discredited after Germany's total WWII defeat (and it previously had many passionate believers in Germany). The remaining Ukrainian nationalists could move to the West by the millions, never to return to Ukraine, while the remaining Ukrainian population, now significantly reduced (from 35 million to 25 million or even less than that) could conclude that the West is an unreliable friend and ally and that Ukraine thus once again should make it peace with Russian rule in order to prevent further bloodshed and suffering for the Ukrainian people.
I also think that you might underestimate the extent to which a mafia state like Putin's Russia would be willing to support dissent in Ukraine. After all, even an ostensibly civilized country such as 1950s France was willing to torture hundreds of thousands of Algerians in order to quell the Algerian FLN. France actually was militarily successful in that war; it withdrew for political reasons, such as Algeria's rapidly growing Muslim population posing a threat to France's European character, political reasons that won't exist here, because Ukrainians will never be capable of becoming a demographic threat to Russians.
I also think that you overestimate just how much Russia and China can be pulled apart at this stage. After all, if the West would have offered to accept Russia's December 2021 ultimatum in its entirety in exchange for Russia ending all military, technological, and scientific cooperation with China, withdrawing from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and committing in writing to wage a trade embargo on China in the event that China would have ever attacked Taiwan, do you think that Russia would have actually accepted such a Western proposal? Or would it have told the West to screw itself and insisted that its own relationship and ties with China are non-negotiable?
The worst thing is that Putin comes from the family of people with a quite long lifespans and it's quite predictive of how long the person would live, hence Russia is fucked for decades with a very decent probability, there is no chance for anything good ever, the entire potential was wasted.
1) You overlook the fact that Putin's aggression against Russia's neighbors - whether NATO members or not - has been ongoing for years - obviously in aggravated forms for non-NATO members: disruptions in the electoral process, attacks against IT infrastructures, distributions of Russian passports to Russian-speaking minorities, support to secessionist movements, violations of airspace and maritime territory etc. The mere fact that 2 countries with well-entrenched neutrality traditions - Finland and Sweden - are desperate to join NATO as quickly as possible is a rebuttal to your view that Putin would stop his aggression with Ukraine.
2) It is precisely the West's past tolerance with Putin's aggressions, e.g. in Georgia, Moldova, Crimea, and Syria, that have encouraged him to decide a full-blown invasion of Ukraine. Still, you propose that the West should tolerate and facilitate further those aggressions? Regardless of indifference for the fate of the Ukrainian people, that would not bode well for Putin's other potential victims.
3) You argue in favor of a quick conventional military defeat of Ukraine and a shift to insurgency. That is by far the most destructive form of warfare for the civilian population, as already experienced precisely by Ukraine in World War 2. And with some exceptions in very specific terrains (e.g., Afghanistan), partisan warfare / insurgency generally does not work.
4) You argue in favor of economic sanctions, while they have been so far (unfortunately) much less effective at deterring Putin than military support for Ukraine.
5) You vastly exaggerate the difficulty for a modern country to obtain nuclear weapons. As reminder, North Korea succeeded in that enterprise. South Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine, Turkey, Vietnam - all potential targets for aggressive neighbors - have financial and technology capacities exceeding by (very) far North Korea's. They CHOOSE not to have nuclear weapons. But if there is no international order any longer, if anyone can invade their less powerful neighbors without fear of international retaliation, nuclear deterrence is the only rational choice for those countries.
6) One can argue that severely crippling the Russian army (about half of its military potential destroyed in one year) comes at a very modest cost for the West, through their military support for Ukraine. A similar result would have come at a much greater financial cost for the West if they had engaged directly in conflict with Russia, and obviously at a much greater risk.
7) There are many indirect benefits for the West in facilitating a Russian defeat in Ukraine. Besides the obvious benefits of deterring further aggressions by Putin or other would-be invaders, Russia's loss of credibility in the military domain is the best advertisement for technologically superior Western weapons. See for instance signs of an incipient shift in traditional Russian customers such as India and Algeria, which now seek to diversify their providers. Ultimately with positive long-term diplomatic consequences for the West.
These points seem to be largely true but they mostly don't address how the West itself (and in particular the U.S.) benefits from its current course of action, which is specifically what Philippe is addressing. Simply deterring other Russian aggression against other non-NATO countries (#1 and 2) doesn't in itself do much for the U.S., nor does Russia not succeeding and/or Ukraine prevailing in this particular war (#3, 4 and 6). Even taking points #5 and 7 at face value, those hardly seem like sufficient benefits to justify the current scale of involvement without resort to a moral argument (which may well be powerful and correct but is in any event a distinct issue).
We fought hitler because he wanted to conquer the world and living under the nazies would have been a hell scape.
We fought the civil war because trying to share a the contingent with a giant slave empire would never have worked out.
Putin is not trying to conquer the world. Nor is live under Moscow or Kiev all that different.
Hitler wanted to conquer Eastern Europe, not the world. He wanted Germany to have a colonial empire like the Anglo-French already had. His biggest sin pre-war, other than his anti-Semitism, was wanting to have his colonial empire be filled with white people. The West believed that only non-whites actually deserved to be colonial subjects.
The Confederacy has no desire to expand at the Union's expense, to my knowledge. They simply wanted to be left alone. Why exactly would the Confederacy and Union have thus been incapable of harmonious coexistence, especially if the Union would have viewed slavery in the Confederacy as a fact of life, just like the West viewed authoritarianism in post-2000 Russia as a fact of life, especially before 2014?
Ukrainians sure believe that there is a difference between living under Moscow vs. Kiev. Kiev actually is a democracy, after all, albeit a flawed one. Moscow is a mafia state where critics get routinely poisoned, tortured, and/or murdered.
Hitler desired conquest for conquest sake. It was part of his ideology.
Also, as a socialist, his economic model was doomed to failure. It required constant plunder to stay afloat, and thus had to be expansionary.
Anyway, the basics of Anglo policy is "don't let them have the means to challenge us". So long as you have Russia on one side and Britain on the other, it's impossible to conquer either. But if you absorb the resources of Eurasia then it becomes possible to build a fleet to rival the Anglos. Regardless of intent, it simply can't be allowed.
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The Confederacy and the Union were incapable of harmonious existence when they were one country! I would read up on what the pre-civil war period was like, there were a lot of problems.
And on a more basic level, there is absolutely no way the Union is going to allow another country to control the exit to the Mississippi River or lose its uncontested dominance of the continent.
"Ukrainians sure believe"
I don't know what they believe. They are forced to fight against their will and they can't have elections.
Beyond that, would I care what Japanese believed in the 1940s? If your beliefs are wrong they are wrong.
Kiev defiantly is a mafia state. I've seen nothing about Ukraine worth believing in.
Yes, and I think that what Philippe is getting at is that we should confront our involvement in this conflict primarily and overtly as a moral question. Perhaps many if not most Americans already do this and Philippe (by virtue of his own habits of mind) is somewhat overemphasizing the extent to which others are arriving at their position of support by way of cold ratiocination. But in recent situations where many Americans conflated moral and strategic justifications at the outset of a conflict--I think it's fair to say that this happened with respect to both Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other less substantial recent interventions in the Middle East and North Africa such as in Libya, and probably even in Vietnam insofar as clear lines were not drawn between concerns about "domino theory" vs. the importance of keeping a deleterious form of government out of South Vietnam (though I did not live through that process and so don't want to overstate that last point)--it became clear over time that the absence of risk of almost any material impact on our lives being posed by events in the relevant country meant that in the end we just had to give up once the initial frisson of compassion/fear faded. I do not personally discount the argument that defending mostly innocent people from the tyrannical imposition of imperial rule is a moral imperative even if at very substantial cost, but it's hard to argue with Philippe that our current engagement in Ukraine has not primarily been justified in these terms in public discourse.
And for what it's worth, the examples that you note where some sort of moral logic seems unassailable involved some of the most extreme circumstances imaginable--the enslavement of many millions of people in our own country in one case and a mostly successful rampage across large swaths of the world, undergirded by a horrifying ideology that makes Putin's revanchism look quaint, in the other. So I think for many Americans the moral question of our obligations in this particular situation would in fact be somewhat contested if debated on its own, hence the oft-cited strategic justifications which tend to obscure that question, and hence Philippe's essay.
Well, the West does have an interest in expanding the EU into Ukraine, though a cynic could argue that letting Russia have Ukraine and then encouraging Ukrainians (and even Russians!) to immigrate en masse to the EU would have been better.
Re: 5
Yes, North Korea got nukes, and how's that working out for them on the economic and diplomatic fronts? And keep in mind that North Korea's current level of economic existence and survival since 1953 is largely due to NK being propped up by China, which considers North Korea to be vitally strategically important but can't put military bases there for reasons that can be largely traced back to the PRC not having a UNSC veto in 1950 and Stalin making a really dumb decision to boycott the UN at the same time.
Go through the list of countries that broke the nuclear non-proliferation regime and you'll tend to find that, like North Korea, they're exceptions for a reason. Israel and, back in the day, South Africa are and were considered strategically important by the US but placing military bases there was infeasible for political reasons. Iran, which has reached breakout capability but has yet to go all the way, has geography that makes it effectively impossible to invade from the North, East, or South, has oil to survive sanctions, and historical accidents prevented a successful invasion from the West until it was too late (nobody wanted Saddam Hussein to actually win against Iran, the US got bogged down in an insurgency in Iraq that Iran did a lot to help, and by the 2010s Iran had developed a bunch of missiles to point at nearby oil facilities).
A key difficulty in obtaining nuclear weapons is how to avoid economic or military interventions to stop you from succeeding. And most countries that can form an alliance with a country powerful enough and willing to provide that level of protection, can usually just get their powerful ally to directly cover them with their nuclear umbrella. Of your list of countries, South Korea, Taiwan, and Turkey are all under US protection (yeah, Taiwan is under increasingly unambiguous "strategic ambiguity", but it still counts), and Ukraine is currently being invaded by Russia, and a consistent demand from Russia from Day 1 has been that Ukraine must pledge to never build nuclear weapons, so it kind of illustrates this very point.
Vietnam, meanwhile, has been in living memory targeted for aggression by two different nuclear-armed countries: the United States and China, so I highly doubt that its government is under any illusions about the "international order" protecting them. In fact, Vietnam has consistently abstained on UN resolutions condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine because they consider Russia to be a vital ally against potential future Chinese aggression, just as the Soviet Union was a vital ally in 1979. So I'm not sure that they're a great example to point to.
From a pure Realpolitik perspective, doing nothing to support Ukraine would actually strengthen the appeal of NATO. It would show that either you’re inside the alliance or the alliance will do absolutely nothing to help you. What’s the point of being inside the alliance if it’s happy to help those outside it?
And from the perspective of an ordinary Ukrainian citizen… wouldn’t a quick defeat with little infrastructure damage be the preferred outcome? Russia invested a lot of money into improving the quality of life in Crimea (the bridge alone was a huge investment) so wouldn’t the average Ukrainian be better off with a quick defeat? Right now even if Ukraine does end up with victory, it will likely be a Pyrrhic victory as most of the nation would be obliterated and the economy would have to be restarted from scratch. How does the average person benefit from this? Or do people seriously believe that Putin would start a new Holodomor after the occupation?
It seems like the only people benefitting from the war are NGOs, intellectuals who get to stroke their ego and entrepreneurs in the military industrial complex. Maybe also Ukrainian women who were able to relocate to the EU without a work visa? Everyone else is worse off from Ukraine not giving up quickly.
Ukraine has a conscript army and adult men aren’t allowed to leave the country. They are an army of slaves, like every other conscript army in history.
Ukraine was a shithole before the war, even poorer and more corrupt than Russia. It will be a shot hole after the war. There is little reason to believe that Kiev can run the country any better then Moscow or that determining whether it “liberates” a bunch of shelled out villages in the donbass full of Russian ethnic pensioners that wouldn’t even vote for Kiev is going to make anyone better off.
The Ukrainians who want freedom would’ve been able to emigrate to the EU in my scenario. The biggest difference would’ve been that men would be allowed to emigrate as well, rather than just women and children. Russia didn’t restrict their borders (despite all the propaganda warnings about this from the Ukrainians) and I’m sure they’d be happy to let anyone leave if they do wish.
I’m sure there’s some percent of people who would genuinely prefer to leave in a shack with no electricity for the sake of freedom but what percentage of the population is that?
Should Russia have allowed Serbia to fall to Austria-Hungary back in 1914 and instead had open borders between Serbia and Russia?
1) the war could likely have been avoided if we stayed out of ukraine business
2) there is little to no chance that Putin would attack a nato country of ukraine fell, and if he did it would not have been a threat
3) there is no way to speculate how support for Ukraine affects other players like China. Hawks think it will scare them into not acting. It could just as easily convince them that the west is aggressive and expansionist and wants to support color revolution in China because it doesn’t find its government legitimate.
4) there is no evidence that live under Moscow will be any worse then life under Kiev. Ukraine was a pathetic failed state.
Life in war is defiantly worse then either outcome.
5) there is even less evidence that people in eastern ukraine care about being part of ukraine
6) Ukraine’s army is a conscript army and adult men are not allowed to leave. We have no clue how they would act if they were free to decide if they would fight (same goes for the Russians)
7) I can’t think of anything dumber then starting ww3 over this
If conscription in general is immoral, then Russia should have let Serbia fall to Austria-Hungary back in 1914. For that matter, without the benefit of hindsight, perhaps Hitler should have been allowed to expand into Eastern Europe so that he would have a gigantic headache on his shoulders for decades to come afterwards.
Conscription was justifiable in Ukraine on the eve of war. It was also justifiable for say the French in both world wars, at least at the beginning.
Conscription was not justifiable once it was clear the First World War front lines were settled. The sides should have made peace, and being able to use conscription allowed them to throw away lives instead of making peace.
The situation in Ukraine is similar. They should have made peace once the Kiev thrust failed. They had another opportunity after their initial counter offensive.
Instead Russia counter mobilized and that was it. The ability to use conscription allows the Ukranian government to throw away lives the same way Douglas Hauge did in Paschendell or the Somme.
Conscription has a high barrier to entry.
It isn’t always immoral, but it’s probably immoral.
The Tsar should have let Austria hungry try its luck with Serbia.
The allies shouldn’t have let Germany conquer to the urals.
Indeed, I can’t imagine permanently stationing a million or more troops in Eastern Europe wouldn’t have been at least somewhat costly for Nazi Germany, no?
The gains in the East would not have been as profitable and Germany wanted on any reasonable timescale. But in a generation, provided a system as unstable of Nazi Germany could last, they could be a threat.
BTW, my favorite and only realistic "Nazi's win" alternate history is this.
https://www.amazon.com/Festung-Europa-Anglo-American-Nazi-War-ebook/dp/B015URFGEC/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
They conquer to the Urals, have a Cold War with the Anglos for a decade, then get stomped. The world is a lot worse off for it.
Was it actually reasonably foreseeable ahead of time that the Nazis would engage in mass murder, mass ethnic cleansing (other than of Jews, obviously), et cetera back in 1939, though?
Philippe Lemoine argues that had Russia conquered Ukraine, it would have gotten a giant headache afterwards. But can’t one make a very similar argument on a much larger scale in regards to the Anglo-French allowing Nazi Germany to expand all of the way up to the Urals? Especially when most Nazi atrocities were not yet reasonably foreseeable? (In 1939, it might have been reasonable to assume that the German people and even the German military and intelligence services would not be willing to utilize the necessary levels of brutality that it would take to subdue protesting white Christian Europeans—since, after all, they were not non-white Third Worlders and were thus perceived as having more value by contemporary people, many of whom were still racists.)
"Was it actually reasonably foreseeable ahead of time that the Nazis would engage in mass murder"
He literally wrote a book saying that was his plan.
He talked about gassing 12-15 thousand “Hebrew corrupters of the people”, not the entire Jewish population, which numbered in the millions.
The majority of the cost you identify is economic - i.e. from the sanctions. But that cost would be borne regardless of whether we provide military assistance. Sanctions plus insurgency support is also an indefinite commitment, almost as expensive, and would enrage Russia almost as much.
It seems that - sotto voce - you are actually arguing for an even more extreme position, where the West doesn't simply abandon Ukraine militarily, but also diplomatically and economically, by gradually going back to consuming Russian gas, normalising relations, etc, while perhaps maintaining some token objections to the occupation (as it did with Crimea in 2014).
You make some good arguments, but you need to do a better job of editing for length. This could have been half as long and conveyed all of your points.
Lemonine writes: "Even if you don’t count the US, the EU and the UK still have a combined GDP almost 10 times larger than Russia’s GDP, a population more than 3 times larger and outspend it on defense by a factor of more than 3." If you add in the US, the correlation of forces is still greater.
Later on in the piece he writes “The real problem is that military assistance to Ukraine is emptying US inventories very quickly and that the industry can’t keep up.“ Now which is it, the West is so strong it is unthinkable to engage with it, or so weak that a medium-sized war, where the Ukrainians are doing all the fighting, is too much for the West to handle?
Lemonine proposes that “The Russian elites are convinced that, unless Ukraine is subordinated to Moscow in some fashion, Russia can’t be a great power.” If he is right, then it says we are dealing with an irrational actor. If Russia is irrational, why not do a blitzkrieg against Estonia and Eastern Latvia, annex the territory and announce an attack on Russia territory will incur a nuclear response? That’s a crazy-bold move, but it might be possible with a larger initial force operating along a much shorter front.
So we are left with an irrational actor fighting a war in Ukraine. Lemonine says we should stop aiding the Ukrainians, allowing the government to collapse and the war continue as an insurgency, which will soon collapse, as the Russians, long past winning hearts and minds, will simply drive the Ukrainian civilian population out of the country and slaughter those civilians that remain behind. Ukraine produces little the Russians don’t already have enough of, so it does not need the population of Ukraine. Its value is symbolic according to Lemonine. I prefer supporting the government of Ukraine over this scenario. Of course, what I’d really like if we had rational actors in Washington, in which case this war would have ended already with a win for Ukraine AND Russia. But as Iraq showed, this is not the case, “blobs” are brainless.
Out of curiosity: If an Anglo-French observer would have argued back in 1939 that Hitler should be allowed to expand into Eastern Europe because he'd have a giant headache on his shoulders for decades to come afterwards, how exactly would you respond to this? Especially without the benefit of hindsight? In 1939, it wasn't yet clear just how brutal the Nazis were going to become. Even Kristallnacht was a very small drop in the bucket in comparison to what came later, after all.
Also, you seem to view a 1980s Kosovo-style situation as unsustainable for Russia, but it seems to have been very sustainable for Serbia. After all, it is precisely because of this strategy failing to achieve any meaningful results over 15+ years that the Kosovar Albanians opted to resort to a strategy of much more violent resistance instead. But Ukrainians won't be able to do that as easily because they have a much older population relative to 1990s Kosovar Albanians.
I also think that you underestimate just how culturally compatible Ukrainians actually are with Russians, relative to Albanians vs. Serbs. Albanians and Serbs have different religions and belong to different language families. In contrast, Russia and Ukraine both originated from Kievan Rus', belong to one language family (even one language mini-family: the Eastern Slavs), and their peoples have previously spent hundreds of years living in a single country. A Russian nationalist could easily argue based on past experience that holding onto Ukraine won't be such a huge challenge for Russia because both Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union managed to do it for a very long time without the sort of chronic difficulties that they faced elsewhere, such as in Poland. Indeed, from a historical perspective, it is Ukrainian independence that is the aberration, not Russian rule over Ukraine.
You also underestimate the possibility that Ukrainian nationalism could have been very seriously discredited after a Russian conquest of Ukraine, similar to how Nazism was discredited after Germany's total WWII defeat (and it previously had many passionate believers in Germany). The remaining Ukrainian nationalists could move to the West by the millions, never to return to Ukraine, while the remaining Ukrainian population, now significantly reduced (from 35 million to 25 million or even lower than that) could conclude that the West is an unreliable friend and ally and that Ukraine thus once again should make it peace with Russian rule in order to prevent further bloodshed and suffering for the Ukrainian people. In other words, something akin to a geopolitical version of the Stockholm Syndrome.
I also think that you might underestimate the extent to which a mafia state like Putin's Russia would be willing to support dissent in Ukraine. After all, even an ostensibly civilized country such as 1950s France was willing to torture hundreds of thousands of Algerians in order to quell the Algerian FLN uprising. France actually was militarily successful in that war; it withdrew for political reasons, such as Algeria's rapidly growing Muslim population posing a threat to France's European character, political reasons that won't exist here, because Ukrainians will never be capable of becoming a demographic threat to Russians and are much more compatible with Russians than Muslim Algerians are with Frenchmen. (For that matter, France was successfully able to keep Algeria pacified for over 70 years, from the early 1870s to 1945, and could have been capable of sustaining this for much longer if it wasn't for France being massively weakened by two World Wars and the Muslim Algerian population beginning to accelerate their population growth. By 2100, if one includes both Crimea and Donbass as a part of Russia, the Russia-Ukrainian population advantage might be as much as 10:1 in Russia's favor according to the most recent (2024) United Nations population projections, a figure comparable to European France vs. Algeria back in 1900 or 1910.)
I also think that you overestimate just how much Russia and China can be pulled apart at this stage. After all, if the West would have offered to accept Russia's December 2021 ultimatum in its entirety in exchange for Russia ending all military, technological, and scientific cooperation with China, withdrawing from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and committing in writing to wage a trade embargo on China in the event that China would have ever attacked Taiwan, do you think that Russia would have actually accepted such a Western proposal? Or would it have told the West to screw itself and insisted that its own relationship and ties with China are non-negotiable?
By the way, back when Anatoly Karlin himself was still a Russian nationalist, he had much less hate for China than he had for the West, because as he pointed out, Chinese have killed many orders of magnitude less Russians throughout history than Westerners did. So, Russian nationalists wouldn't have the same reasons to hate China as they would with the West. China can't conquer Russia because it would get severely nuked in the process. Besides, why bother when China can simply trade with Russia? And Chinese don't want to live in Outer Manchuria because they're already leaving Inner Manchuria for more southern regions of China in extraordinarily massive numbers right now.
Out of curiosity: If an Anglo-French observer would have argued back in 1939 that Hitler should be allowed to expand into Eastern Europe because he'd have a giant headache on his shoulders for decades to come afterwards, how exactly would you respond to this? Especially without the benefit of hindsight? In 1939, it wasn't yet clear just how brutal the Nazis were going to become. Even Kristallnacht was a very small drop in the bucket in comparison to what came later, after all.
Also, you seem to view a 1980s Kosovo-style situation as unsustainable for Russia, but it seems to have been very sustainable for Serbia. After all, it is precisely because of this strategy failing to achieve any meaningful results over 15+ years that the Kosovar Albanians opted to resort to a strategy of much more violent resistance instead. But Ukrainians won't be able to do that as easily because they have a much older population relative to 1990s Kosovar Albanians.
I also think that you underestimate just how culturally compatible Ukrainians actually are with Russians, relative to Albanians vs. Serbs. Albanians and Serbs have different religions and belong to different language families. In contrast, Russia and Ukraine both originated from Kievan Rus' and their peoples have previously spent hundreds of years living in a single country. A Russian nationalist could easily argue based on past experience that holding onto Ukraine won't be such a huge challenge for Russia because both Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union managed to do it for a very long time without the sort of chronic difficulties that they faced elsewhere, such as in Poland. Indeed, from a historical perspective, it is Ukrainian independence that is the aberration, not Russian rule over Ukraine.
You also underestimate the possibility that Ukrainian nationalism could have been very seriously discredited after a Russian conquest of Ukraine, similar to how Nazism was discredited after Germany's total WWII defeat (and it previously had many passionate believers in Germany). The remaining Ukrainian nationalists could move to the West by the millions, never to return to Ukraine, while the remaining Ukrainian population, now significantly reduced (from 35 million to 25 million or even less than that) could conclude that the West is an unreliable friend and ally and that Ukraine thus once again should make it peace with Russian rule in order to prevent further bloodshed and suffering for the Ukrainian people.
I also think that you might underestimate the extent to which a mafia state like Putin's Russia would be willing to support dissent in Ukraine. After all, even an ostensibly civilized country such as 1950s France was willing to torture hundreds of thousands of Algerians in order to quell the Algerian FLN. France actually was militarily successful in that war; it withdrew for political reasons, such as Algeria's rapidly growing Muslim population posing a threat to France's European character, political reasons that won't exist here, because Ukrainians will never be capable of becoming a demographic threat to Russians.
I also think that you overestimate just how much Russia and China can be pulled apart at this stage. After all, if the West would have offered to accept Russia's December 2021 ultimatum in its entirety in exchange for Russia ending all military, technological, and scientific cooperation with China, withdrawing from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and committing in writing to wage a trade embargo on China in the event that China would have ever attacked Taiwan, do you think that Russia would have actually accepted such a Western proposal? Or would it have told the West to screw itself and insisted that its own relationship and ties with China are non-negotiable?
Out of curiosity: If an Anglo-French observer would have argued back in 1939 that Hitler should be allowed to expand into Eastern Europe because he'd have a giant headache on his shoulders for decades to come afterwards, how exactly would you respond to this? Especially without the benefit of hindsight? In 1939, it wasn't yet clear just how brutal the Nazis were going to become. Even Kristallnacht was a very small drop in the bucket in comparison to what came later, after all.
Also, you seem to view a 1980s Kosovo-style situation as unsustainable for Russia, but it seems to have been very sustainable for Serbia. After all, it is precisely because of this strategy failing to achieve any meaningful results over 15+ years that the Kosovar Albanians opted to resort to a strategy of much more violent resistance instead. But Ukrainians won't be able to do that as easily because they have a much older population relative to 1990s Kosovar Albanians.
I also think that you underestimate just how culturally compatible Ukrainians actually are with Russians, relative to Albanians vs. Serbs. Albanians and Serbs have different religions and belong to different language families. In contrast, Russia and Ukraine both originated from Kievan Rus' and their peoples have previously spent hundreds of years living in a single country. A Russian nationalist could easily argue based on past experience that holding onto Ukraine won't be such a huge challenge for Russia because both Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union managed to do it for a very long time without the sort of chronic difficulties that they faced elsewhere, such as in Poland. Indeed, from a historical perspective, it is Ukrainian independence that is the aberration, not Russian rule over Ukraine.
You also underestimate the possibility that Ukrainian nationalism could have been very seriously discredited after a Russian conquest of Ukraine, similar to how Nazism was discredited after Germany's total WWII defeat (and it previously had many passionate believers in Germany). The remaining Ukrainian nationalists could move to the West by the millions, never to return to Ukraine, while the remaining Ukrainian population, now significantly reduced (from 35 million to 25 million or even less than that) could conclude that the West is an unreliable friend and ally and that Ukraine thus once again should make it peace with Russian rule in order to prevent further bloodshed and suffering for the Ukrainian people.
I also think that you might underestimate the extent to which a mafia state like Putin's Russia would be willing to support dissent in Ukraine. After all, even an ostensibly civilized country such as 1950s France was willing to torture hundreds of thousands of Algerians in order to quell the Algerian FLN. France actually was militarily successful in that war; it withdrew for political reasons, such as Algeria's rapidly growing Muslim population posing a threat to France's European character, political reasons that won't exist here, because Ukrainians will never be capable of becoming a demographic threat to Russians.
I also think that you overestimate just how much Russia and China can be pulled apart at this stage. After all, if the West would have offered to accept Russia's December 2021 ultimatum in its entirety in exchange for Russia ending all military, technological, and scientific cooperation with China, withdrawing from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and committing in writing to wage a trade embargo on China in the event that China would have ever attacked Taiwan, do you think that Russia would have actually accepted such a Western proposal? Or would it have told the West to screw itself and insisted that its own relationship and ties with China are non-negotiable?
- military effort is a protection racket (https://polsci.substack.com/p/politics-of-contention-and-war-as), it is not driven by the general interest. Hanania was writing that US foreign policy belicosity stems in large part of this special interest capture
- if you loved sleepwalkers and guns of august, you'll enjoy the "proud tower"... my reading from the chapter on Mahan is that the US is most responsible for WWI: https://polsci.substack.com/p/the-strategic-importance-of-maritime, with WWII being just a side-note.
- the Russian Gov has consistently told the US Gov for over 20 years that Ukraine was a red line. We need to get back to what people said before 2022 and before 2014. Western media since is hysterical and delusional.
- the cost of war on Russia is uncertain. The military cost of one to three hundred billion, there is maybe 1 trillion a year due to energy costs for Europe. There is the possible cost of sidelining China, which could cost another trillion per year, and the long term cost of being sanction happy, destroying the rule of law in the west, and the value of the dollar and eur, which would cost around 100 trillion, but as a one off.
- Philippe is addressing the weakest and most hysterical arguments for war, like those about dissuasion. Those arguments were never heard before the war, and were suddenly put forward to justify the new stance of the west. Is there a way to steelman the case instead?
"The Russian elites are convinced that, unless Ukraine is subordinated to Moscow in some fashion, Russia can’t be a great power..." Incorrect. Russian elites are convinced, quite correctly, that the US has been working to transform Ukraine into a hotbed of vehemently anti-Russian sentiment and into a NATO outpost with a 1200 kilometer border with Russia that Neocons can use as a staging ground for attacks of all kinds aimed at destroying the Russian state. They're also convinced that the US will use Ukraine as a host for medium range ballistic missiles and eventually hypersonic missiles that will be capable of striking Moscow and other major Russian cities within minutes, which would be an incredibly dangerous situation if only because of how much it would escalate the risk of a nuclear exchange triggered by accident.
Why would Russian elites think any of this? Because Neocons have been talking and writing openly about doing exactly this for many years and Russian elites have been watching Neocons turn their words into actions for well over a decade.
Why can't NATO places missiles in the Baltics and/or Finland instead, if it really wanted to do so? Conquering Ukraine won't make Russia saf er.
Also, it appears Russia is following a policy of genocide, https://twitter.com/IKoshiw/status/1631217524070121475?s=20 something which has been apparent since Bucha. How does that fit into your decision making schema?
As every lying Democrat knows, Russia put Trump into office. Therefore, the stupid, pointless, war in Ukraine.
This is an excellent analysis.
The superior move for the US was truly not to deliver weapons. Russia could still be tied up by funding insurgency at a far lower cost. Economic sanctions would have still turned Europe to US`s shale gas. And Europe could still be easily rallied under US leadership and maybe even made to pay more money into NATO. There`d still be options for diplomacy to drive a wedge between Russia & China.
This scenario gains everything US gained from weapon deliveries with extra perks and at much lower price.
It might have been true that if the West didn't help Ukraine in February 2022, and Ukraine fell to Russia, Russia would not invade a NATO member. But it's not so true anymore.
The main Russian evening shows (particularly Solovyov's one, 60 minutes led by Skabyeva, the one run by Simonian) nearly every other day discuss annexation of Poland ("the hyena of Europe") in one way or another. Even the former president/prime minister, Medvedev, regularly discusses "the Polish question" on his Telegram channel - last time was literally last week.
You have to consider what the propaganda is telling Russians for a year now. Russia is at war with all of NATO, and is basically winning. Even though the US, UK, Poland and other countries support Ukraine with weapons (and, according to the Russian propaganda, also send their soldiers to Ukraine), Russia still holds strong in there. The propaganda talks about Russian victories and heroism all day long, every day.
Now imagine that Russia wins the war in Ukraine. A war that they said (for years now) was a war with all of NATO. How will they persuade 140 million Russians that it's time to stop now, instead of attacking a NATO country like Poland? After all, NATO was just beaten down -- Russia is winning. And if they attack Poland, they'll no longer have an issue with Kaliningrad being blocked off from the rest of Russia.
The people of Russia would execute a successful revolution to start a new war? I find this prospect completely fantastical.