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America will do nothing except 'strongly condemn' what's happening, just like the rest of the world. The simple fact is that there is no real upside to risking
by avazhi 5y ago
America will do nothing except 'strongly condemn' what's happening, just like the rest of the world. The simple fact is that there is no real upside to risking actual war with Russia - that the Russians will dominate the Ukraine while walking away with a bloody nose (in the form of minor troop losses of its own) is a foregone conclusion. Without more, that's a localised conflict that Russia rather hilariously can try to claim the moral high ground about (NATO encroachment, historical alliances, American instability and foreign meddling), but if America or indeed any of the other nuclear powers gets involved, the risks increase massively very quickly. If two nuclear powers went at it properly here - I don't care which two - we enter into long-tailed territory and it's something we've simply never seen. There's absolutely no chance America or the UK risk that - they can get their wheat from somewhere else.
On the one hand, I feel bad for Ukrainians. On the other hand, the whole world saw it coming, just like we can see China invading Taiwan at some point in the future, and the calculus will be the exact same: Taiwan means more to China than it does to America, and the Ukraine means more to Russia than it does to the West.
It is perilous to fight somebody, whether it's Putin or Xi, with vested emotional interests in the subject matter of the fight when all you've got is ideology.
And so nothing will come of this except 'strong condemnations'. As if any strongman ever gave a fuck.
- nine_k 5y agoI hope that beside strong condemnations, the US will also help with money (wars are expensive!) and stuff useful at war, from medical supplies to maybe weapons like Stingers and Javelins. I also hope that the US will share intelligence information; US's abilities here are far greater than Ukraine's.
- pkaye 5y ago> America will do nothing except 'strongly condemn' what's happening, just like the rest of the world. People don't want a 'world police' anymore.
- ethbr0 5y agoThen they're going to have to remember what a world without police looks like.
- pc2g4d 5y ago
- flyinglizard 5y ago“People” don’t want their regular neighborhood police either, but take it away and people start appreciating it.
- m0llusk 5y agoThe defund the police rhetoric caused politicians in my city to poll the populace and it was found that 85% wanted more police.
- bayesian_horse 5y agoThe sanctions are extremely tough and not entirely painless for the US and other western countries. Also the US has delivered weapons to Ukraine. They don't want to engage in a war with Russia, and that decision I think is the right one for now. A couple years down the road, if the sanctions don't succeed in containing Putin's aggression, we might have a different discussion.
- smegger001 5y ago>A couple years down the road, if the sanctions don't succeed in containing Putin's aggression, we might have a different discussion. Yeah well we tried that back in 2014 when it was the Crimean Penensula. I think its time we have that discussion NOW.
- bayesian_horse 5y agoAny direct confrontation with Russia may go nuclear. The NATO doctrine understandably requires a direct attack on a NATO member to run that risk. In my opinion, Russia will not have a lot of appetite for further aggression after all those sanctions. Invading NATO members and setting off a huge, unwinnable conflict should be pretty far down the list of priorities in the next few years.
- markvdb 5y agoPutin is going on seventy already. A couple years down the road, with some luck he'll be six foot under.
- vanviegen 5y agoWhat people are you talking about exactly? Those in Ukraine?
- powersnail 5y agoUkraine hasn't requested any foreign military aid so far.
- vanviegen 5y agoOf course they have, privately, all the while knowing they were never going to get it.
- powersnail 5y ago“Of course” according to what?
- rmk 5y agoOf course according to the repeated pronouncements of everyone ranging from their President to Foreign Minister to Defense Minister to the ambassadors. See this report for a brief example: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN07135/SN07135.pdf https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN07... The US and UK governments have been formally and repeatedly asked for help. This information is also constantly in the news. The US has provided almost $3 Billion in military aid to Ukraine in the past several years alone. The UK has also provided significant amounts of aid. Ditto for NATO. All of these are not 'forced' on Ukraine!
- powersnail 5y agoMy bad. I've not followed the situation closely enough to see these information before. Thanks for the enlightenment.
- rad_gruchalski 5y agoMaybe a better way to phrase it is “people don’t remember why it was good to have world police”.
- avazhi 5y agoI wasn't intending to suggest that America or anybody else should take action or 'police' anything, but I do find the 'all bark, no bite mentality' currently being paraded about by the world's leadership to be, at best, disingenuous and at worst cowardly. I suppose somebody might ask what I would prefer the US State Department say, and I guess I'd personally want more realpolitik: "Putin's a megalomaniacal piece of shit with nationalist historical aspirations that stretch back to Peter the Great; NATO's contributed to all this to the extent that it's been dick swinging in Eastern Europe for the past 20 years; the Ukrainians should probably just surrender since they're all basically (and historically were) Russian anyway, and they stand no chance of actually resisting, and no other country on Earth is going to risk nuclear war over them." Not exactly feel good material for a bolded NYT headline, but at least it's honest.
- jjtheblunt 5y agoI wonder how resolve would shift if Putin were to come down with a case of polonium poisoning, or other tricks from his own repertoire?
- rmk 5y agoI do not think the US does political assassinations (I may be utterly wrong here, if so, please post examples!) It does use assassinations against terrorists or quasi-political figures such as Qasem Soleimani, but I doubt that eliminating Putin is even being contemplated here.
- markvdb 5y agoFidel Castro is an obvious example. There were at least 638 (!) failed CIA political assination attempts against him. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_attempts_on_Fidel_Castro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_attempts_on_Fide...
- rmk 5y agoLol. Taking out mob hits on Castro, that's just epic! I totally forgot the "Communist Stooges" category that America had a special loathing for. I'm sure they were a no-holds-barred category!
- bayesian_horse 5y agoSome would blame it on the CIA. The more likely perpetrator would always be someone in Russia trying to replace Putin. Assassinating or targeting political leaders is a war crime. The CIA might have done that - quite a while in the past, mind you - but never against an adversary like Russia. At the very least you would expect a few US politicians to drop dead if there ever were such an attempt.
- avidiax 5y agoThat would be a pretty terrible escalation in the spy game. There is an uneasy balance where government officials and their families are off limits for any physical harm. That means that CIA officials can live relatively peaceful lives just as FSB agents do. If you let that genie out of the bottle, it better be a prelude to a winnable war, or you had better be happy to have all your government officials, diplomats, and their families on permanent lockdown.
- oezi 5y agoThe question obviously is if Ukraine compares to Hitler taking Austria or part of Czechoslovakia and condemnation is just appeasement until an assault on the next country...
- ethbr0 5y ago> China invading Taiwan at some point in the future And that's the perspective this should be viewed from. The US may not have a firm interest in Ukraine. The US has a fairly firm interest in Taiwan. The US has a serious interest in Korea, Japan, and the countries bordering the South China Sea. You have to strongly and unconditionally support international order re: Ukraine, so that Xi takes away the right message.
- newuser94303 5y agoI think the stronger message is that the US is trying to move chip manufacturing to the US so it will not care about Taiwan.
- selfhoster11 5y agoAlternative interpretation: they are trying to undo the total idiocy that was putting all your microchip eggs in one basket. It doesn't matter how cost-effective it is to centralise production, if the result is that the production capability for the single thing we need the most to continue our lifestyle (high-performance integrated circuits), is in peril from a natural/man-made disaster occuring in a small geographical area.
- rmk 5y agoAfter decades of cheerfully deindustrializing and giving up the source of ordinary people's prosperity, the US is waking up to the stupidity of doing this. It's very visible in the chip industry because it's very visibly dominated by just a couple of firms and because a large range of seemingly simple things can not function without sophisticated integrated circuits.
- throw10920 5y ago> The US has a fairly firm interest in Taiwan. Why only "fairly firm"? I've heard arguments that if Taiwan is invaded and TSMC falls under PRC control, then the US faces massive chip shortages for years (possibly leading to riots and a destabilized government), and those seem plausible to me.
- maccolgan 5y agoThe time for the US to stop acting as the world police has gone, why does the US need to intervene in a former buffer state ~10000 km away? NATO will presumably step in when the threat comes close enough.