It's entirely possible that annexation would be better than autonomy. A legitimate gripe about the autonomy deal is that it would give Putin power inside Ukraines parliament. Smart commentators noted that autonomy was probably more pro-Putin then annexation.
If Donbass was just annexed this could be avoided. The autonomy thing seems more about saving face (pretending that borders are sacrosanct) than finding a good workable solution.
Zelensky tried to implement Minsk, as promising to end the Donbass war was part of his landslide victory, including going out to Donbass and telling the nazies that he wasn't some loser they could push around. However, when push came to shove it turned out they could push him around. It probably doesn't help that the oligarch behind Zelensky funds Azov and other far right military groups and uses them as a personal army.
And of course the west encouraged Zelensky to take a hard line stand, which he eventually came around to after realizing he couldn't actually command the army in Donbas anyway.
I still think the fundamental problem with Ukraine is that it isn't a natural country. People in the middle provinces could probably get along, but the far west and far east are just fundamentally at odds.
Today I saw a picture from an Azov base in Maripoul. The DPR capture it and they found a woman's corpse in the basement. It had been tortured and a bloody swastika carved into her stomach. Maybe you can say this is propaganda, but I've seen plenty of images and videos like this from all over Ukraine, most of it uploaded by Ukranians. How can somebody from Maripoul and somebody from Lviv ever get along. A divorce makes a lot more sense.
I agree with this, but I also think there's an important question of how much of the problem was inherent (Ukraine isn't a natural country) and how much was the result of outbreak of hostilities.
Plenty of countries with big linguistic differences get along relatively well (Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, etc).
From what I've read, going back to before the initial Donbas war, even the mostly Russian parts of Ukraine preferred to be part of Ukraine. The war resulted in the polarization and ethnic cleansing of the population. Where the Ukrainians took over, they killed or chased off Russian sympathizers. Where the Russians took over, they killed and chased off Ukrainian sympathizers.
With this much worse war, this trend will be that much worse. I guess my question is whether there's some point at which, counterintuitively, divorce might induce more ethnic cleansing?
1. The world in general has a strong incentive to avoid war and ethnic cleansing.
2. If we allow borders to be changed because of war and ethnic cleansing, do we create an incentive for more?
I'm not wedded to this, just thinking out what would create the strongest incentives against future war. Mariuopol is at this point going to be a bombed out shell populated by whomever controls it at the end of the war. I'd bet the Russians, but if Ukraine controls it, they'll end up repopulating it with people who will get along with people from Lviv and kick out anyone who's too pro-Russia. None of the outcomes are very pleasant.
1) Nobody will win in this war. Of any ethnic or political background or region.
People are right to recognize that any territorial split will bring the chance for instability and violence. They usually only opt for it is the status quo already has too much instability and violence. Actual separatism has mostly been confined to the far ends of the country, but that is what we are discussing.
Maybe if Kiev had fallen in a day it all could have been relatively bloodless. Then you have to weigh life in under Moscow versus life under Kiev to what we are actually getting. Obviously enough people are rejecting that option for Ukraine to resist.
2) That said countries do break up peacefully plenty of times in modern history too.
3) Some of the decisions Kiev has made are unforced errors. You don't make the Russian language basically illegal and then expect Russian regions to be happy about it. Similarly, you don't persecute political opponents and expect people to respect your democracy. And of course the massive corruption at all levels destroys social trust too.
You don't say you want Crimea back because you love them as citizens but then cut off their electricity and water to spite them.
And finally I just find the entire Maiden coup to be illegitimate. You don't like Yanacovich, wait for the next election. Is it that hard? I don't like Biden and I'm not tossing Molotov cocktails. It happened, whatever, but it's not like there haven't been errors since.
These errors may not justify what Putin has done, but they make it a lot more likely and a lot harder to get outsiders to judge him, and they were mostly unnecessary and done out of spite.
> You don't make the Russian language basically illegal
Where are you getting this dope? Nobody made Russian illegal, basically or not. The language of state business (e.g. courts) is Ukrainian, and waiters in restaurants and stores are obliged to greet customers in Ukrainian before switching to whatever is convenient, but for example children still study and pass their high school leaving tests in Russian (~10% in 2020). Russia does not do even this much: all the Tatar and Bashkir and Dagestani children who graduate in Russia have to sit their tests in Russian exclusively. Recently they enshrined the status of Russian as "the language of the state-forming people" in their constitution.
There's a lot of daylight between 'Putin is rational, self-interested, and driven by totally-legitimate security interests' and 'Putin is Hitler.' First, I think it's clear that Putin wasn't just looking for neutrality and the eastern breakaway regions recognized, he wanted to subsume the whole of Ukraine, whether by annexation or installing a puppet regime; when I see people writing as if they think he just wanted neutrality and the eastern regions, it's self-discrediting at this point.
Anyway, the rule of balance of power politics is that a nation will expand its influence and territory until its hegemony matches its military might, or contract in influence and territory as the case may be. In order for Russia to reach the point where it's willing to accept neutrality + independence for Donetsk/Luhansk or something like that, it had to be made to realize that it wasn't as militarily powerful as it thought it was, enough to take the whole country at a tolerable cost. It wasn't just a matter of the parties not 'negotiating hard enough.' Sometimes wars have to be fought so nations can learn what they are or aren't capable of.
Obviously, Putin would want to take over Ukraine. I suspect he would like to take over the whole world if he actually could.
However, Putin seems capable of cost/benefit analysis. In 23 years of rule he hasn't done anything too outlandish.
Maybe he doesn't get his costs and benefits right sometimes (who does), but I think he was perfectly capable of understanding that launching the war involved tons of risks and costs. Kiev might fall in a week, but it might not. Even if he overestimated this outcome, I doubt he assigned a 100% probability to it, or he would have done this a long time ago.
We forget that Russia already decided to make peace in 2014/2015. It didn't try to take over Ukraine then, and it would have been a lot easier then.
It's possible to believe that he was genuinely frustrated with the last eight years and decided that not going all the way in 2014 was a mistake. He may just have decided the risk was worth it, and perhaps a different risk profile would have elicited a different response. Some people say sticks would have changed that risk profile, other carrots.
I'm also not sure that "a little invasion" like the Biden gaffe was really possible. If you try to seize Donbass, you're at war. If your at war you've already rolled the dice, I don't think the response to Russia would be any better if they had confined fighting to the eastern part of the country. If your going to roll the dice you might as well try to win.
In any event, the current situation being what it is, I think one should think hard of what all the parties need to get out of this to end the war, as everyone involved is losing each day it goes on. Events on the ground might theoretically improve the negotiating position of either party slightly, but in general I think that each day is a net loss for everyone.
Re: "So one lesson, call it the Bob Wright lesson, is that we should try harder at negotiation."
What if "we" (presumably, US/NATO) believes that it doesn't have to negotiate a deal because Russia will look wrong if Russia invades? Negotiations aren't salient, vivid, categorical -- and invasion is. Instead, "we" pokes the bear, in the belief that (a) the bear probably won't invade because it's a bad look, and (b) most people will focus naturally on the invasion rather than the poking, if the bear does invade.
Hitler did not invade Czechoslovakia; he was "invited in" after he browbeat the Czech leader. The leaders of Poland, on the other hand, refused to hand anything over to Hitler, so he did invade Poland.
Czechoslovakia emerged from WW2 relatively unscathed, certainly compared to Poland.
The lead up to the war that started in September 1939 is much more nuanced (and fascinating) than most people are aware.
Given what life under the Nazies was like, even defeat in war was probably preferable.
But not everything is a WWII analogy. Hitler was disappointed by Munich because he wanted a war and felt he was cheated out of it. Popular history says he became stronger between 1938 and 1939, but detailed history is much more debatable (his army got stronger but his Air Force got weaker relatively, the spitfire and hurricane that won the battle of Britain weren't produced in any numbers at that point).
By contrast, I'm not sure Putin would have been disappointed by getting most of what he wanted without a war. He's been in power for 23 years without starting a major war (I don't count tiny wars against random small countries in the middle of nowhere).
I could be wrong, but if peace had been tried and failed then the case for intervention would be much stronger.
Of course Putin would have been happy to get what he wanted without a war. All the evidence is that he did not plan for an actual war but for a literal "special military operation" that would be over in a few days. The problem is that "most of what he wanted" was surrender. Putin's 24/02 speech laid out his objectives clearly: the complete destruction of Ukraine as an entity independent of Russia and of Ukrainians as a people separate from Russians (some "local color" would be permitted, like in Russian national "republics" and AOs, but that's about it). That is what "denazification" means in Putin's terms. Read his 2021 article for details. I understand it's all abstract for you, so here's an analogy. You took your children out of the public school with triple masks and critical race theory practicioners putting them in "oppressor" affinity groups and preteen trans counseling, because you hate that shit, didn't you? You and a lot of other Americans like you are paying a lot of money for private Catholic school, or leave the wife home and homeschool, or move further out into the exurbs or to red states where incomes are lower etc. to escape it. But the point is that you have somewhere to run. Now imagine Biden makes a big speech saying that he is mobilizing National Guard and shutting all those options down. Those who don't submit are "nazis" and will be killed or reeducated. What would you do then?
I'd probably fight and die. I don't know. What did people do when faced with this in the past? What are people in Ukraine doing now? Some are fighting. Some are running. Some are staying in place and just waiting to see what happens.
My advice is the same whether you take the Putin is Hitler who wants to kill us all no matter what stance or the Putin is a rationale actor you will respond to reality on the ground in his own self interest stance.
If you make a reasonable peace offer he will either:
1) Accept it
2) Reject it
#1 ends the war, which is in Ukraine's interest. Less people will die, and Ukraine is only going to get stronger over time. Basically everything agreed to can get revised in a decade.
#2 Then it will increase internal resolve within Ukraine, damage Russian morale, and make Ukraines case more appealing to the Internationale community.
It seems like a win/win to me.
If the war goes on there will be more destruction and death. It is unclear to me how much the peace terms will change if the war goes on. It could be that Russia is completely dysfunctional and that Fukuyama's prediction that there will soon be a total collapse and Putin will be overthrown is true. It could be that the entire Ukrainian army in the east will get pocketed and then giving up Donbass will seem like a good deal that is no longer on the table. I feel genuinely unqualified to make predictions on the military side of things. I suspect few are.
I do know that every day it goes on more people die, more animosities grow, more of the country is destroyed, and the harder peace gets. In what you would call the muddle through scenario the terms don't really change but everything still gets worse for everyone involved.
I assume that giving up your army is not on the negotiating table, and as such I'm not sure what there is to lose in trying. The worst case scenario is that Putin's nature, whatever it is, gets revealed even more fully.
> I assume that giving up your army is not on the negotiating table
On 24/02 Putin spoke of "demilitarization" alongside "denazification". If it isn't on the table now it is because Ukraine fought as it did.
> If you make a reasonable peace offer
That's what they are trying to do in Turkey right now. One problem is that what is reasonable for Ukraine may not sound reasonable to Putin, and vice versa. These sets do not necessarily intersect, at least not yet (see above). Another is that peace cannot be concluded with Russia alone. It would be like having half your house trashed and a family member murdered by a robber, who you barely succeed in pushing out of the remainder of the house because he ran out of ammo, and then deciding to just get it all over with, live and let live.
Politicians (dictators or otherwise) make speeches to justify their actions. Please remember that actions now in the past were once in the future and subject to change.
So they are. A little over a century ago Russia had a similar attitude to Poles and newly established Poland that it has to Ukraine now. Then the Red Army under the able leadership of Tukhachevsky and Stalin got crushed under Warsaw and as a result Soviet Russia had to make terms and finally admit that Poland existed. Even despite Western appeasement of Stalin after WWII, Poland stayed a separate state, kept its church, language and culture, and of course it is an EU and NATO member now.
Regarding Russian intentions as enunciated this time by Putin, if you think it's just window dressing then you're nuts. 350 years of history disagree with you. Russia has gone so far on occasion as to forbid the printing of any books whatsoever, even first grade school books and song books, in Ukrainian.
I agree that Russia has always wanted control over Ukraine. Even if that control is expressed as a negative covenant for Ukraine not to be in alliance with NATO and the West.
The question is whether the ongoing war will thwart that goal, and if not, whether the war and all the death and destruction will have been worth it.
The latter is for Ukrainians themselves to decide, because it is them suffering death and destruction, not commenters over here. Since they have been fighting for over a month already, their tentative answer seems to be yes.
I agree that it was a blunder not to try a peaceful settlement. And the longer the war lasts, the more probable that a peace settlement will lead to the ouster of Zelensky from power and not Putin. At some point, barring a complete defeat of Russia, people will reasonably ask why did we fight this war just to give Russia what it wanted at the outset?
Poland was banking on the British/French guarantee, which turned out to be worthless. France sent a feint intervention that just drove around in circles for a little bit and then returned back to the Maginot Line. The Comic Book Neocon Telephone version of history of the Polish guarantee is that the British should have somehow teleported a much larger version of the BEF into Poland to fight the bad guys. And the US should have not been neutral at the time, so it should have also similarly summoned an army of multiple millions and teleported them into Poland using the magic of good intentions.
Most sober historians now see that Poland should have taken the Czech route, which would have enabled it to avoid the awful fate that it did when it was dismembered by the USSR and the Nazis simultaneously, basically resulting in every Polack who knew how to read being put on a list and shot (my hyperbole).
Poland was in a tough spot, it had no good options in 1939. It probably should have teamed up with the Czechs and others to try their luck with the Nazies in 1938 or earlier.
However, the Poles themselves were ruled by a fairly nasty regime also looking to expand (and they took a chunk out of the Czechs too). It's one of those overlooked facts of history.
Re: "A lesson we could be learning is that the consequences of any foreign policy, including non-interventionism, are difficult to evaluate at the time they are undertaken and difficult to predict relative to the long term. I think of that as the libertarian humility lesson. It is the one I would push the most."
Is it difficult to evaluate the short-term consequences of military intervention? Well, one consequence, invariably, is great collateral harm: many innocent civilian deaths and massive property destruction. This much we do know. Anyone who rejects collective guilt will evaluate these clear and present collateral harms as awful.
Is it plausible that short-term consequences of non-intervention would be similarly awful? Those who advocate war bear the burden of proof. It speaks volumes that no-one makes the counter-argument: 'If we attempt to incapacitate our enemy, by means of war, we very probably will thereby save more lives in the short term than war kills.'
Long-term consequences of any foreign policy are indeed shrouded in uncertainty. For example, does military intervention strengthen deterrence? Or does it plant seeds of revanche?
Thus we have certainty of massive clear-and-present harms versus conjectures about the balance and scale of uncertain long-term costs and benefits. This contrast justifies a baseline presumption against military intervention. Do those who favor military intervention make a clear and convincing case?
Libertarian humility need not entail paralysis. It can focus on clear-and-present peaceful help for the weak and the vulnerable; for example, humanitarian aid and open borders for war refugees.
A libertarian coda: War, today, causes bigger government, which then persists long-term.
Note: Economic sanctions are an intermediate remedy. Richard Hanania and Arnold Kling make strong cases against sanctions.
How does the West offer the Ukraine status quo in exchange for Russia not changing the status quo? But fine, let's be willing to settle for that in a negotiation in which each side will initially ask for more.
I don't see how opposing the "current thing" is operational. And what if the definition of the current thing is multidimensional. Is green energy investment the current thing? Or is it the belief that unaverted climate change will cause huge costs?
To be fair, I also doubt that the complexity of human decision-making can somehow be simplified and measured (or at least talked about as if it were quantifiable, fungible, aggregatable and so on) in something called "utils". The extra step from these bogus "utils" to dollars is not that big in my opinion.
It's entirely possible that annexation would be better than autonomy. A legitimate gripe about the autonomy deal is that it would give Putin power inside Ukraines parliament. Smart commentators noted that autonomy was probably more pro-Putin then annexation.
If Donbass was just annexed this could be avoided. The autonomy thing seems more about saving face (pretending that borders are sacrosanct) than finding a good workable solution.
Zelensky tried to implement Minsk, as promising to end the Donbass war was part of his landslide victory, including going out to Donbass and telling the nazies that he wasn't some loser they could push around. However, when push came to shove it turned out they could push him around. It probably doesn't help that the oligarch behind Zelensky funds Azov and other far right military groups and uses them as a personal army.
And of course the west encouraged Zelensky to take a hard line stand, which he eventually came around to after realizing he couldn't actually command the army in Donbas anyway.
I still think the fundamental problem with Ukraine is that it isn't a natural country. People in the middle provinces could probably get along, but the far west and far east are just fundamentally at odds.
Today I saw a picture from an Azov base in Maripoul. The DPR capture it and they found a woman's corpse in the basement. It had been tortured and a bloody swastika carved into her stomach. Maybe you can say this is propaganda, but I've seen plenty of images and videos like this from all over Ukraine, most of it uploaded by Ukranians. How can somebody from Maripoul and somebody from Lviv ever get along. A divorce makes a lot more sense.
I agree with this, but I also think there's an important question of how much of the problem was inherent (Ukraine isn't a natural country) and how much was the result of outbreak of hostilities.
Plenty of countries with big linguistic differences get along relatively well (Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, etc).
From what I've read, going back to before the initial Donbas war, even the mostly Russian parts of Ukraine preferred to be part of Ukraine. The war resulted in the polarization and ethnic cleansing of the population. Where the Ukrainians took over, they killed or chased off Russian sympathizers. Where the Russians took over, they killed and chased off Ukrainian sympathizers.
With this much worse war, this trend will be that much worse. I guess my question is whether there's some point at which, counterintuitively, divorce might induce more ethnic cleansing?
1. The world in general has a strong incentive to avoid war and ethnic cleansing.
2. If we allow borders to be changed because of war and ethnic cleansing, do we create an incentive for more?
I'm not wedded to this, just thinking out what would create the strongest incentives against future war. Mariuopol is at this point going to be a bombed out shell populated by whomever controls it at the end of the war. I'd bet the Russians, but if Ukraine controls it, they'll end up repopulating it with people who will get along with people from Lviv and kick out anyone who's too pro-Russia. None of the outcomes are very pleasant.
1) Nobody will win in this war. Of any ethnic or political background or region.
People are right to recognize that any territorial split will bring the chance for instability and violence. They usually only opt for it is the status quo already has too much instability and violence. Actual separatism has mostly been confined to the far ends of the country, but that is what we are discussing.
Maybe if Kiev had fallen in a day it all could have been relatively bloodless. Then you have to weigh life in under Moscow versus life under Kiev to what we are actually getting. Obviously enough people are rejecting that option for Ukraine to resist.
2) That said countries do break up peacefully plenty of times in modern history too.
3) Some of the decisions Kiev has made are unforced errors. You don't make the Russian language basically illegal and then expect Russian regions to be happy about it. Similarly, you don't persecute political opponents and expect people to respect your democracy. And of course the massive corruption at all levels destroys social trust too.
You don't say you want Crimea back because you love them as citizens but then cut off their electricity and water to spite them.
And finally I just find the entire Maiden coup to be illegitimate. You don't like Yanacovich, wait for the next election. Is it that hard? I don't like Biden and I'm not tossing Molotov cocktails. It happened, whatever, but it's not like there haven't been errors since.
These errors may not justify what Putin has done, but they make it a lot more likely and a lot harder to get outsiders to judge him, and they were mostly unnecessary and done out of spite.
> You don't make the Russian language basically illegal
Where are you getting this dope? Nobody made Russian illegal, basically or not. The language of state business (e.g. courts) is Ukrainian, and waiters in restaurants and stores are obliged to greet customers in Ukrainian before switching to whatever is convenient, but for example children still study and pass their high school leaving tests in Russian (~10% in 2020). Russia does not do even this much: all the Tatar and Bashkir and Dagestani children who graduate in Russia have to sit their tests in Russian exclusively. Recently they enshrined the status of Russian as "the language of the state-forming people" in their constitution.
There's a lot of daylight between 'Putin is rational, self-interested, and driven by totally-legitimate security interests' and 'Putin is Hitler.' First, I think it's clear that Putin wasn't just looking for neutrality and the eastern breakaway regions recognized, he wanted to subsume the whole of Ukraine, whether by annexation or installing a puppet regime; when I see people writing as if they think he just wanted neutrality and the eastern regions, it's self-discrediting at this point.
Anyway, the rule of balance of power politics is that a nation will expand its influence and territory until its hegemony matches its military might, or contract in influence and territory as the case may be. In order for Russia to reach the point where it's willing to accept neutrality + independence for Donetsk/Luhansk or something like that, it had to be made to realize that it wasn't as militarily powerful as it thought it was, enough to take the whole country at a tolerable cost. It wasn't just a matter of the parties not 'negotiating hard enough.' Sometimes wars have to be fought so nations can learn what they are or aren't capable of.
Obviously, Putin would want to take over Ukraine. I suspect he would like to take over the whole world if he actually could.
However, Putin seems capable of cost/benefit analysis. In 23 years of rule he hasn't done anything too outlandish.
Maybe he doesn't get his costs and benefits right sometimes (who does), but I think he was perfectly capable of understanding that launching the war involved tons of risks and costs. Kiev might fall in a week, but it might not. Even if he overestimated this outcome, I doubt he assigned a 100% probability to it, or he would have done this a long time ago.
We forget that Russia already decided to make peace in 2014/2015. It didn't try to take over Ukraine then, and it would have been a lot easier then.
It's possible to believe that he was genuinely frustrated with the last eight years and decided that not going all the way in 2014 was a mistake. He may just have decided the risk was worth it, and perhaps a different risk profile would have elicited a different response. Some people say sticks would have changed that risk profile, other carrots.
I'm also not sure that "a little invasion" like the Biden gaffe was really possible. If you try to seize Donbass, you're at war. If your at war you've already rolled the dice, I don't think the response to Russia would be any better if they had confined fighting to the eastern part of the country. If your going to roll the dice you might as well try to win.
In any event, the current situation being what it is, I think one should think hard of what all the parties need to get out of this to end the war, as everyone involved is losing each day it goes on. Events on the ground might theoretically improve the negotiating position of either party slightly, but in general I think that each day is a net loss for everyone.
Re: "So one lesson, call it the Bob Wright lesson, is that we should try harder at negotiation."
What if "we" (presumably, US/NATO) believes that it doesn't have to negotiate a deal because Russia will look wrong if Russia invades? Negotiations aren't salient, vivid, categorical -- and invasion is. Instead, "we" pokes the bear, in the belief that (a) the bear probably won't invade because it's a bad look, and (b) most people will focus naturally on the invasion rather than the poking, if the bear does invade.
Hitler did not invade Czechoslovakia; he was "invited in" after he browbeat the Czech leader. The leaders of Poland, on the other hand, refused to hand anything over to Hitler, so he did invade Poland.
Czechoslovakia emerged from WW2 relatively unscathed, certainly compared to Poland.
The lead up to the war that started in September 1939 is much more nuanced (and fascinating) than most people are aware.
Given what life under the Nazies was like, even defeat in war was probably preferable.
But not everything is a WWII analogy. Hitler was disappointed by Munich because he wanted a war and felt he was cheated out of it. Popular history says he became stronger between 1938 and 1939, but detailed history is much more debatable (his army got stronger but his Air Force got weaker relatively, the spitfire and hurricane that won the battle of Britain weren't produced in any numbers at that point).
By contrast, I'm not sure Putin would have been disappointed by getting most of what he wanted without a war. He's been in power for 23 years without starting a major war (I don't count tiny wars against random small countries in the middle of nowhere).
I could be wrong, but if peace had been tried and failed then the case for intervention would be much stronger.
Of course Putin would have been happy to get what he wanted without a war. All the evidence is that he did not plan for an actual war but for a literal "special military operation" that would be over in a few days. The problem is that "most of what he wanted" was surrender. Putin's 24/02 speech laid out his objectives clearly: the complete destruction of Ukraine as an entity independent of Russia and of Ukrainians as a people separate from Russians (some "local color" would be permitted, like in Russian national "republics" and AOs, but that's about it). That is what "denazification" means in Putin's terms. Read his 2021 article for details. I understand it's all abstract for you, so here's an analogy. You took your children out of the public school with triple masks and critical race theory practicioners putting them in "oppressor" affinity groups and preteen trans counseling, because you hate that shit, didn't you? You and a lot of other Americans like you are paying a lot of money for private Catholic school, or leave the wife home and homeschool, or move further out into the exurbs or to red states where incomes are lower etc. to escape it. But the point is that you have somewhere to run. Now imagine Biden makes a big speech saying that he is mobilizing National Guard and shutting all those options down. Those who don't submit are "nazis" and will be killed or reeducated. What would you do then?
I'd probably fight and die. I don't know. What did people do when faced with this in the past? What are people in Ukraine doing now? Some are fighting. Some are running. Some are staying in place and just waiting to see what happens.
My advice is the same whether you take the Putin is Hitler who wants to kill us all no matter what stance or the Putin is a rationale actor you will respond to reality on the ground in his own self interest stance.
If you make a reasonable peace offer he will either:
1) Accept it
2) Reject it
#1 ends the war, which is in Ukraine's interest. Less people will die, and Ukraine is only going to get stronger over time. Basically everything agreed to can get revised in a decade.
#2 Then it will increase internal resolve within Ukraine, damage Russian morale, and make Ukraines case more appealing to the Internationale community.
It seems like a win/win to me.
If the war goes on there will be more destruction and death. It is unclear to me how much the peace terms will change if the war goes on. It could be that Russia is completely dysfunctional and that Fukuyama's prediction that there will soon be a total collapse and Putin will be overthrown is true. It could be that the entire Ukrainian army in the east will get pocketed and then giving up Donbass will seem like a good deal that is no longer on the table. I feel genuinely unqualified to make predictions on the military side of things. I suspect few are.
I do know that every day it goes on more people die, more animosities grow, more of the country is destroyed, and the harder peace gets. In what you would call the muddle through scenario the terms don't really change but everything still gets worse for everyone involved.
I assume that giving up your army is not on the negotiating table, and as such I'm not sure what there is to lose in trying. The worst case scenario is that Putin's nature, whatever it is, gets revealed even more fully.
> I'd probably fight and die.
Well, there you have it.
> I assume that giving up your army is not on the negotiating table
On 24/02 Putin spoke of "demilitarization" alongside "denazification". If it isn't on the table now it is because Ukraine fought as it did.
> If you make a reasonable peace offer
That's what they are trying to do in Turkey right now. One problem is that what is reasonable for Ukraine may not sound reasonable to Putin, and vice versa. These sets do not necessarily intersect, at least not yet (see above). Another is that peace cannot be concluded with Russia alone. It would be like having half your house trashed and a family member murdered by a robber, who you barely succeed in pushing out of the remainder of the house because he ran out of ammo, and then deciding to just get it all over with, live and let live.
Politicians (dictators or otherwise) make speeches to justify their actions. Please remember that actions now in the past were once in the future and subject to change.
So they are. A little over a century ago Russia had a similar attitude to Poles and newly established Poland that it has to Ukraine now. Then the Red Army under the able leadership of Tukhachevsky and Stalin got crushed under Warsaw and as a result Soviet Russia had to make terms and finally admit that Poland existed. Even despite Western appeasement of Stalin after WWII, Poland stayed a separate state, kept its church, language and culture, and of course it is an EU and NATO member now.
Regarding Russian intentions as enunciated this time by Putin, if you think it's just window dressing then you're nuts. 350 years of history disagree with you. Russia has gone so far on occasion as to forbid the printing of any books whatsoever, even first grade school books and song books, in Ukrainian.
I agree that Russia has always wanted control over Ukraine. Even if that control is expressed as a negative covenant for Ukraine not to be in alliance with NATO and the West.
The question is whether the ongoing war will thwart that goal, and if not, whether the war and all the death and destruction will have been worth it.
The latter is for Ukrainians themselves to decide, because it is them suffering death and destruction, not commenters over here. Since they have been fighting for over a month already, their tentative answer seems to be yes.
I agree that it was a blunder not to try a peaceful settlement. And the longer the war lasts, the more probable that a peace settlement will lead to the ouster of Zelensky from power and not Putin. At some point, barring a complete defeat of Russia, people will reasonably ask why did we fight this war just to give Russia what it wanted at the outset?
Poland was banking on the British/French guarantee, which turned out to be worthless. France sent a feint intervention that just drove around in circles for a little bit and then returned back to the Maginot Line. The Comic Book Neocon Telephone version of history of the Polish guarantee is that the British should have somehow teleported a much larger version of the BEF into Poland to fight the bad guys. And the US should have not been neutral at the time, so it should have also similarly summoned an army of multiple millions and teleported them into Poland using the magic of good intentions.
Most sober historians now see that Poland should have taken the Czech route, which would have enabled it to avoid the awful fate that it did when it was dismembered by the USSR and the Nazis simultaneously, basically resulting in every Polack who knew how to read being put on a list and shot (my hyperbole).
Poland was in a tough spot, it had no good options in 1939. It probably should have teamed up with the Czechs and others to try their luck with the Nazies in 1938 or earlier.
However, the Poles themselves were ruled by a fairly nasty regime also looking to expand (and they took a chunk out of the Czechs too). It's one of those overlooked facts of history.
Re: "A lesson we could be learning is that the consequences of any foreign policy, including non-interventionism, are difficult to evaluate at the time they are undertaken and difficult to predict relative to the long term. I think of that as the libertarian humility lesson. It is the one I would push the most."
Is it difficult to evaluate the short-term consequences of military intervention? Well, one consequence, invariably, is great collateral harm: many innocent civilian deaths and massive property destruction. This much we do know. Anyone who rejects collective guilt will evaluate these clear and present collateral harms as awful.
Is it plausible that short-term consequences of non-intervention would be similarly awful? Those who advocate war bear the burden of proof. It speaks volumes that no-one makes the counter-argument: 'If we attempt to incapacitate our enemy, by means of war, we very probably will thereby save more lives in the short term than war kills.'
Long-term consequences of any foreign policy are indeed shrouded in uncertainty. For example, does military intervention strengthen deterrence? Or does it plant seeds of revanche?
Thus we have certainty of massive clear-and-present harms versus conjectures about the balance and scale of uncertain long-term costs and benefits. This contrast justifies a baseline presumption against military intervention. Do those who favor military intervention make a clear and convincing case?
Libertarian humility need not entail paralysis. It can focus on clear-and-present peaceful help for the weak and the vulnerable; for example, humanitarian aid and open borders for war refugees.
A libertarian coda: War, today, causes bigger government, which then persists long-term.
Note: Economic sanctions are an intermediate remedy. Richard Hanania and Arnold Kling make strong cases against sanctions.
How does the West offer the Ukraine status quo in exchange for Russia not changing the status quo? But fine, let's be willing to settle for that in a negotiation in which each side will initially ask for more.
I don't see how opposing the "current thing" is operational. And what if the definition of the current thing is multidimensional. Is green energy investment the current thing? Or is it the belief that unaverted climate change will cause huge costs?
Voting seems terrible and ineffectual right up until it's compared with not having a vote at all.
To be fair, I also doubt that the complexity of human decision-making can somehow be simplified and measured (or at least talked about as if it were quantifiable, fungible, aggregatable and so on) in something called "utils". The extra step from these bogus "utils" to dollars is not that big in my opinion.