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I'm not a fan of our (US + NATO) current Ukraine policy, but that isn't because I'm an isolationist. I think it's just dumb policy, on several different dimensi

I'm not a fan of our (US + NATO) current Ukraine policy, but that isn't because I'm an isolationist. I think it's just dumb policy, on several different dimensions. The version of the criticism you're leveling right now can be inverted very easily. That the people arguing for escalation in Ukraine, that it's "the exact same thing [that] happened in 1938" (it isn't), and that unless we do things like a NFZ it leads to a larger war, have a cartoon version in their heads of war and geopolitical strategy. Where there's clear boundaries between the "good guys" and "bad guys", like this is some Marvel film where you don't really even need to watch it to know what happens (spoiler alert: the good guys win!). Perhaps they are the ones who have something, and some history, to chew on.

yks 4y ago
You either accept a moral responsibility to protect sovereign nations from elimination, and elimination at this point was stated by Russian officials and media as a goal numerous times, or you accept the Russian position of "lands and peoples belong to the strong men" and we're back to the age of conquest, but now with nukes. Not only the former position is morally right, but it also prevents or at least postpones the nuclear proliferation. This is not only about Ukraine, this is about the whole Eastern Europe, and literally about post WW2 order that you seem to be enjoying the fruits of, if only by hanging out on Hacker News.
- remarkEon 4y ago
  I don't recall the United States and Ukraine signing a mutual defense pact, or a treaty that designates the United States as the guarantor of Ukrainian independence. The former position you are advocating for literally amounts to "the United States is the Global Empire, and all changes in state arrangements must be approved by Her". That's fine, but just make that your argument. Trying to morally guilt trip people is pointless because there's at least a dozen other conflicts around the world right now where you can make the same argument, about some country's sovereignty being violated. >This is not only about Ukraine, this is about the whole Eastern Europe, and literally about post WW2 order that you seem to be enjoying the fruits of, if only by hanging out on Hacker News. I'm not sure what purpose you think this sentence serves. If your argument is, again, the United States is the Global Imperial Power and, because I post on HN, I am balking in my responsibility to sufficiently support this Empire, then got it. I'll make sure to "do better".
  - yks 4y ago
    > a treaty that designates the United States as the guarantor of Ukrainian independence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit... > there's at least a dozen other conflicts around the world right now where you can make the same argument Which other conflict is waged with the goal of eliminating the country completely and destroy its culture? There were no major conflicts of this kind since WW2. Changing the government, plenty of times, but not erasing borders with the cultural genocide and some forced children "relocation" on top of that. I didn't say anything about the US as a global empire or whatever, it's the collective World's responsibility to maintain peace and it's failing. But I say that there are clear "good guys" and "bad guys" here, regardless of the history of the US.
    - remarkEon 4y ago
      I see the Budapest memo referenced a lot but, obviously, it's a memo ... about ways to get rid of nukes. It's not a treaty that obligates anything at all from the United States or anyone else in terms of security support or guaranteeing Ukrainian sovereignty. I will grant, however, that the Ukrainians (and the Russians, we made promises to them in it too) probably feel pretty slighted with how history turned out in the ensuing decades. From your link: >>Another key point was that U.S. State Department lawyers made a distinction between "guarantee" and "assurance", referring to the security guarantees that were desired by Ukraine in exchange for non-proliferation. In the end a statement was read into the negotiation record that the (according to the U.S. lawyers) lesser sense of the English word "assurance" would be the sole implied translation for all appearances of both terms in all three language versions of the statement. >Which other conflict is waged with the goal of eliminating the country completely and destroy its culture? There's a lot going on in Africa and the Horn. More or less all feature some degree of genocide or mass killings, objectives of replacing the current government, or redrawing the lines on the map. >There were no major conflicts of this kind since WW2. This is absolutely not true. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan (the first one), Myanmar and a couple others I'm forgetting all were an order of magnitude larger than this one in terms of casualties. Maybe you mean this is the first major conflict of this kind in Europe since WWII, in which case... maybe, because you'd have to omit Yugoslavia. There's room to argue about that one. Not sure why that's relevant, unless we're going back to the insistence about the United States' role in security on the European continent.
- thrwy_meta 4y ago
  >>>You either accept a moral responsibility to protect sovereign nations from elimination And yet we've been arming the Saudis while they starve and bomb the Yemenis into oblivion for the past 10 years. >>>This is not only about Ukraine, this is about the whole Eastern Europe https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Wars-are-only-evil-when-Westerners-are-the-victims https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Wars-are-only-evil-when-West... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/civilised-european-look-like-us-racist-coverage-ukraine https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/civili... I find the degree to which HN has taken umbrage with this particular war.....unsurprising, yet extremely telling.
  - grey-area 4y ago
    So don’t do that either. I agree there is rampant hypocrisy and that should stop too. That is not an argument against supporting Ukraine.
int_19h 4y ago
It's never the "same exact thing", but parallels are obvious and numerous. What more, Russia is already openly talking about some of the things they want to "reintegrate", and if you are familiar with the finer details of Russian internal politics, you can easily name a few more that aren't necessarily floated often (such as North Kazakhstan, which is "South Siberia" in irredentists' parlance). So yes, even if you do give up on Ukraine, it won't stop there. In that, again, this is very much like 1938. BTW, I should probably add at this point that I'm ethnically Russian as well as Russian citizen, although I've been living mostly out of the country for the past decade. But I still remember very well what our nationalists are, I'm familiar with the kind of political musings Putin gets his inspiration from, and my firm belief is that this is going to be a much bigger war than most everybody in the West currently anticipates.
- remarkEon 4y ago
  I appreciate the perspective. It does conflict a bit with that of Russian friends I have here in the US, but that's probably to be expected (no one familiar with this should assume that Russians have a uniform distribution of views on politics). I'd tell you that I've walked patrols in some of the same mountains that Soviet soldiers did in Afghanistan, and have read some (but obviously not all, who can) of the material from folks that Putin takes his influence from. What I'd also tell you is that starting WWIII over Kazakhstan is not going to go over well in the United States. I don't think you were implying that, but I frankly consider that issue Russia's business and not mine, and not that of the United States. >In that, again, this is very much like 1938. I'm looking for some actual evidence that the global geopolitical situation is comparable to 1938. Merely pointing out that a country in Europe has been invaded is not sufficient. At this point, I think I should probably note that I consider Putin's invasion of Ukraine to be an enormous blunder. The humanitarian cost is already well documented, but from a strategic perspective, which is the theme of this thread, he's going to deplete his forces to such a degree that any follow-on invasion of other countries is going to be even more of a disaster. I don't know why or how he was convinced this was a good idea. He was always going to pay a significant cost, even if he, eventually, gets a land bridge to Crimea.
  - 4y ago

yks 4y ago

You either accept a moral responsibility to protect sovereign nations from elimination, and elimination at this point was stated by Russian officials and media as a goal numerous times, or you accept the Russian position of "lands and peoples belong to the strong men" and we're back to the age of conquest, but now with nukes. Not only the former position is morally right, but it also prevents or at least postpones the nuclear proliferation. This is not only about Ukraine, this is about the whole Eastern Europe, and literally about post WW2 order that you seem to be enjoying the fruits of, if only by hanging out on Hacker News.

remarkEon 4y ago
I don't recall the United States and Ukraine signing a mutual defense pact, or a treaty that designates the United States as the guarantor of Ukrainian independence. The former position you are advocating for literally amounts to "the United States is the Global Empire, and all changes in state arrangements must be approved by Her". That's fine, but just make that your argument. Trying to morally guilt trip people is pointless because there's at least a dozen other conflicts around the world right now where you can make the same argument, about some country's sovereignty being violated. >This is not only about Ukraine, this is about the whole Eastern Europe, and literally about post WW2 order that you seem to be enjoying the fruits of, if only by hanging out on Hacker News. I'm not sure what purpose you think this sentence serves. If your argument is, again, the United States is the Global Imperial Power and, because I post on HN, I am balking in my responsibility to sufficiently support this Empire, then got it. I'll make sure to "do better".
- yks 4y ago
  > a treaty that designates the United States as the guarantor of Ukrainian independence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit... > there's at least a dozen other conflicts around the world right now where you can make the same argument Which other conflict is waged with the goal of eliminating the country completely and destroy its culture? There were no major conflicts of this kind since WW2. Changing the government, plenty of times, but not erasing borders with the cultural genocide and some forced children "relocation" on top of that. I didn't say anything about the US as a global empire or whatever, it's the collective World's responsibility to maintain peace and it's failing. But I say that there are clear "good guys" and "bad guys" here, regardless of the history of the US.
  - remarkEon 4y ago
    I see the Budapest memo referenced a lot but, obviously, it's a memo ... about ways to get rid of nukes. It's not a treaty that obligates anything at all from the United States or anyone else in terms of security support or guaranteeing Ukrainian sovereignty. I will grant, however, that the Ukrainians (and the Russians, we made promises to them in it too) probably feel pretty slighted with how history turned out in the ensuing decades. From your link: >>Another key point was that U.S. State Department lawyers made a distinction between "guarantee" and "assurance", referring to the security guarantees that were desired by Ukraine in exchange for non-proliferation. In the end a statement was read into the negotiation record that the (according to the U.S. lawyers) lesser sense of the English word "assurance" would be the sole implied translation for all appearances of both terms in all three language versions of the statement. >Which other conflict is waged with the goal of eliminating the country completely and destroy its culture? There's a lot going on in Africa and the Horn. More or less all feature some degree of genocide or mass killings, objectives of replacing the current government, or redrawing the lines on the map. >There were no major conflicts of this kind since WW2. This is absolutely not true. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan (the first one), Myanmar and a couple others I'm forgetting all were an order of magnitude larger than this one in terms of casualties. Maybe you mean this is the first major conflict of this kind in Europe since WWII, in which case... maybe, because you'd have to omit Yugoslavia. There's room to argue about that one. Not sure why that's relevant, unless we're going back to the insistence about the United States' role in security on the European continent.
thrwy_meta 4y ago
>>>You either accept a moral responsibility to protect sovereign nations from elimination And yet we've been arming the Saudis while they starve and bomb the Yemenis into oblivion for the past 10 years. >>>This is not only about Ukraine, this is about the whole Eastern Europe https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Wars-are-only-evil-when-Westerners-are-the-victims https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Wars-are-only-evil-when-West... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/civilised-european-look-like-us-racist-coverage-ukraine https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/civili... I find the degree to which HN has taken umbrage with this particular war.....unsurprising, yet extremely telling.
- grey-area 4y ago
  So don’t do that either. I agree there is rampant hypocrisy and that should stop too. That is not an argument against supporting Ukraine.

int_19h 4y ago

It's never the "same exact thing", but parallels are obvious and numerous. What more, Russia is already openly talking about some of the things they want to "reintegrate", and if you are familiar with the finer details of Russian internal politics, you can easily name a few more that aren't necessarily floated often (such as North Kazakhstan, which is "South Siberia" in irredentists' parlance). So yes, even if you do give up on Ukraine, it won't stop there. In that, again, this is very much like 1938. BTW, I should probably add at this point that I'm ethnically Russian as well as Russian citizen, although I've been living mostly out of the country for the past decade. But I still remember very well what our nationalists are, I'm familiar with the kind of political musings Putin gets his inspiration from, and my firm belief is that this is going to be a much bigger war than most everybody in the West currently anticipates.

remarkEon 4y ago
I appreciate the perspective. It does conflict a bit with that of Russian friends I have here in the US, but that's probably to be expected (no one familiar with this should assume that Russians have a uniform distribution of views on politics). I'd tell you that I've walked patrols in some of the same mountains that Soviet soldiers did in Afghanistan, and have read some (but obviously not all, who can) of the material from folks that Putin takes his influence from. What I'd also tell you is that starting WWIII over Kazakhstan is not going to go over well in the United States. I don't think you were implying that, but I frankly consider that issue Russia's business and not mine, and not that of the United States. >In that, again, this is very much like 1938. I'm looking for some actual evidence that the global geopolitical situation is comparable to 1938. Merely pointing out that a country in Europe has been invaded is not sufficient. At this point, I think I should probably note that I consider Putin's invasion of Ukraine to be an enormous blunder. The humanitarian cost is already well documented, but from a strategic perspective, which is the theme of this thread, he's going to deplete his forces to such a degree that any follow-on invasion of other countries is going to be even more of a disaster. I don't know why or how he was convinced this was a good idea. He was always going to pay a significant cost, even if he, eventually, gets a land bridge to Crimea.
- 4y ago