Scott A. vs. Tyler on Ukraine; Scott Sumner on Ukraine; Robert Wright and Freddie deBoer on Ukraine; Luke Burgis on hot capital; Tanner Greer on Ukraine
I watched the Mearsheimer video when it was making the rounds a couple of weeks ago, and I do not think Sumner is giving a fair or accurate summation of Meirsheimer's arguments. His position was that Putin would not try to occupy Ukraine, not there would be no invasion. These are two different things. Secondly, Meirsheimer's criticism of NATO expansion is not that it is sinister, but that it extends security guarantees to countries of little strategic interest to the West but which Russia views rightly or wrongly as being in its sphere of influence, creating conflict that is high risk low reward. Ditto for Ukraine joining the EU.
Frankly, I think Sumner watched a different video than I did, and if I were doing the scoring I'd give him negative fantasy points for that post.
Yup. The irony is I have a really hard time with both Sumner and Meirsheimer. I think they both make valid and unconventional points in their respective fields and are therefore indispensable in a way. But they both are so single-minded that they oversell their points often come across to me as shallow and disingenuous.
Sumner is a brilliant monetary economist, but when I see how simplistically dismissive he is about everything else, it makes me doubt his economics.
I buy into Realism as an IR theory, but Meirsheimer's reductionism to a robotic "great power politics" to the exclusion of all else is not realistic. Like, I went back and read Kissinger (who's The Godfather of Realism) and he had a much better template for understanding Ukraine and where to go with it.
In today's blogpost, and in yesterday's ("Safe Haven No More"), Arnold Kling offers sharp insights about political psychology, incentives, and unintended consequences. He highlights the "Do something!" bias in emergency response.
Do his insights square with his recent analysis of state-capacity libertarianism?:
"Competent governance during pandemics, power outages, and other emergencies would diminish calls for greater government intervention during times of crisis."—Arnold Kling, "State Capacity and Accountability" (3 January 2022).
Consider several empirical generalizations that inform Arnold's analyses:
1. Fear drives intervention.
2. We construe social conflicts as moral dyads: a deliberate agent vs a feeling victim.
3. Banks depend on partnership with government.
4. Elites, perhaps via college, constitute a broad, informal bloc (across government, finance, media, firms, orgs, academe, cultural institutions, entertainment).
5. Information technology (Twitter etc) enables broad elites quickly to coordinate on a moral dyad and to pressure all institutions to cancel the bad actor.
Taken together, these mechanisms crowd out competent governance and greatly increase the scope of intervention during times of crisis.
Maybe right, but there's a lot to unpack there. Let's look at a couple of the key terms in your hypothesis.
1. We have to consider the counterfactual about what a less capable, less competent government would be doing during this emergency. It's quite possible that such a government would be more likely to intervene, make things worse, and blunder us into WWIII by mistake. The fact that Western governments have so far clearly rejected calls for overt military intervention is a good thing.
2. The crowding out effect goes both ways. That is, I think it's more supportable to say that all governance (both competent and incompetent) is subsumed by the broader societal intervention. From a libertarian perspective, this is ambiguous, but I think my core beliefs tell me this has to be a good thing. We don't want concentrated power. Government being "crowded out" is evidence that government is no longer the sine qua non of social power.
You can see, for example, how poorly the effort to revert to a state of atomistic governmental supremacy is working out for Russia. Maybe it'll work, but as a long run proposition, I'm not sure
3. The broadening of the scope of intervention is also maybe a good thing. We need to think more clearly about the lines of acceptable social and economic intervention. Like, I'm obviously against freezing the finances and refusing to do business with peaceful political protesters. I'm pretty much okay with doing the same to nation-states launching full scale invasions of their neighbors.
Zelensky even gives these people awards. I also didn't know until recently that the guy had a 31% approval rating right before the war started and was considered the hack frontman for a manipulator oligarch. That the country was going bankrupt.
I think Ukraine is a backward gangster state where the two gangs feud over who is top dog and nothing more. They should probably split up. Either way we shouldn't have a dog in the fight over which gang wins.
The good guys in Ukraine are the regular people, farmers and so on, often Russian-speaking, who don't want Russia ordering them about and are now proving their determination with their blood. Over the last 10 days, more than 60,000 military age men have come back to Ukraine from Poland and other European countries to fight. It's the same as you not wanting people to force your children to wear masks in school and kindergarten, and paying through your nose for Catholic school for them. That doesn't make you a Nazi.
It doesn't make much more sense to call Ukraine neo-Nazi because Azov exists, than it is to call USA neo-Nazi because Proud Boys and KKK and the kind of people who marched in Charlottesville with tiki torches exist. Azov, where all non-armchair neo-Nazi types concentrate, is tiny. It's only one regiment of the national guard (not the military - the military does not tolerate neo-Nazis), based in Mariupol. It existed under the aegis of the shady interior minister, Avakov, and its members have participated in conflicts around property development and such, probably for money. The political influence of Azov in Ukraine has always been indistinguishable from zero. For example, they only ever had one MP out of 450, in the last (VIII) Rada, and he was voted out in 2018. As for 2014, back then Western diplomats condemned violence by those kind of guys and by pro-Russian guys (who also burned and killed lots of people in and around Kiev) in the same sentence. Generally speaking, the amount of PR damage the existence of Azov has done to Ukraine is so much larger than any possible good it might have done that I find it plausible that some people there are Russian assets. If memory serves, Yarosh, the leader of the Right Sector, was reported to have taken Russian money in 2013/4 - "for the revolution", as such people often do, but still.
I'm not claiming Ukraine is a neo-Nazi state, but it appears to have a lot more neo-Nazi's in it then a Canadian Trucker Protest, but we don't seem to have a problem with that.
The bottom line is that Ukraine had a legitimate government. If people didn't like it they didn't have to wait very long for another election. It was overthrown violently, something neo-nazi's had a big role. Then the parts of the country that voted for the other guy got violently suppressed and laws were passed to discriminate against them.
Having overthrown the government in a violent coup, I think the smart move would have been to just let the parts of Ukraine that didn't want to be in Ukraine go. It's not like this east/west split thing hasn't been around a long time. You were never going to get Crimea back. Killing all those people or trying to turn Crimea into a desert didn't make people like the government any more.
On top of that the big thing that the coup was supposed to solve, corruption, doesn't appear to have gotten better. It just seems like one gang got traded for another.
I think the involvement of western government officials and NGOs in all this was really dumb and indefensible. I'm mostly interested in how Ukraine affects me. I don't think it helped anyone involved. Ukraine has to rise or fall on its own. This dependence on the west to solve its problems means it doesn't solve its own problems.
Even today we hear that if the government acknowledges Crimea and Donbass the conflict can be over. I have to think that if Zelensky didn't think the West was going to bail him out he would take that deal, so again our support is holding up peace.
As to racial attitudes, my stance on Ukraine is much like Bismark's on the Balkans. It wouldn't be worth the life of a single US marine. Ukraine has a GDP of 156B, less than Kansas. The idea of starting a nuclear war over Ukraine is baffling to me.
There is no realpolitik reason to go to war for Ukraine. The moral case is murky at best. I don't believe Putin invaded for the lols and plans to go after Poland next, but if you wanted to convince me that was the case all of this other stuff makes it harder to believe.
Nobody fought for Crimea, if you didn't notice. Cutting off agricultural water was nasty but so is stealing a piece of territory.
> Even today we hear that if the government acknowledges Crimea and Donbass the conflict can be over.
Peskov says so, but is he to be trusted this time? Remember that up until 24/02 Russians were telling everybody till they were blue in the face that Russia has no plans to invade, won't invade, it's ridiculous, Biden is scare-mongering, etc. Besides, Peskov also wants "demilitarization" and neutral status while saying that Ukraine is an independent state which will be able to live however it wants, and it's not clear how that would work.
> On top of that the big thing that the coup was supposed to solve, corruption
Was it? I didn't notice. It was explicitly supposed to solve the problem of a sharp realignment towards Russia. Forgive me for being blunt, but your picture of it seems to consist of equal parts of what Sen. McCain peddled to CNN and of what Russians peddled to their TV audience. This picture misses key facts which I have pointed out in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/CandideIII/status/1468954255143108615
> It was overthrown violently, something neo-nazi's had a big role.
Catching bullets with your body isn't violence. The actual transfer of power was effected by a parliamentary vote, 386 yea out of 450, while capitol district was still under control of Yanukovich's government, and the people who came to power were the leaders of the parliamentary opposition, not representatives of the "people assembled" (there weren't any). You might say it was a parliamentary coup. Strictly speaking it _was_ unconstitutional, but Americans of all people have no standing to criticize others on this point. As for supposed big role of neo-nazis, it's false. I should know because I was there. They did have a visible presence (unlike LGBT and other progressive factions) but the vast majority of occupiers had nothing to do with them. You might as well condemn the Canadian trucker protests because a few of them happened to be racist.
> I think the involvement of western government officials and NGOs in all this was really dumb and indefensible.
I have said as much at the beginning of the Twitter conversation I linked above.
From what I've seen of 2014, it didn't seem very peaceful. I wasn't there, but the videos do not seem "mostly peaceful".
A comparable event in my mind would be if Jan 6th had resulted Donald Trump seizing power, though Jan 6th probably didn't have as much violence.
That it was followed by a war against the Donbass that killed 14,000 people, an economic war against Crimea, the burning of protestors in Odessa alive, the legal persecution of the Russian language, and the arrest and prosecution of political opponents...
There is no realpolitik reason for any outsiders to get involved in Ukraine. At best we are talking about a moral reason, but that moral reason is quite muddled. After overthrowing a government, simple common sense states you might not be able to hold onto parts of the country that overwhelmingly voted for the guy you overthrew! Combined with the fact that it was a fact on the ground...I don't know what you are gaining by no acknowledging reality.
Even if you think Putin wanted the whole country, as of today if Putin has offered the equivalent of status quo ante bellum, take it! If its not genuine then when he breaks the pact you can say "see, he's Hitler" and you'll have the moral high ground. Short term circumstances aren't going to get better, if they surround your army terms may get worse. Long term time seems on your side. But as it stands it just seems like stubbornness. Maybe the far right really does have a veto over policy? I don't think Nato is coming, but even if it did....
It's a dumb move. It's probably dumb for the Ukranians. You don't want an insurgency in your country, and you don't want WWIII fought there. If the west gets involved, China could get involved. Or nukes could start flying. It's DUMB. Russian coming to Serbia's aid in 1914 didn't help the Serbs. What's building in the west...it's not calculated. It's going to be about as smart as COVID was. Even if you win, you'll lose.
I wanted to post this old link corroborating my hypothesis about some people in Azov being Russian assets: https://web.archive.org/web/20051104061154/http://www.gazeta.ru/2005/07/20/oa_164574.shtml The gist is that in 2005 Putin's then youth wing "antifascist" organization, Nashi, invited Korchinsky, one of the godfathers of Ukrainian ultra-nationalists, to its Seliger camp to give talks. But since I'm here anyway...
> I wasn't there, but the videos do not seem "mostly peaceful".
Yes, you weren't there, and that makes all the difference. You only see what various media with various agendas want to show you. In fact, over the whole period from November 2013 till the very last few days of February 2014 when the subway was stopped for 2 or 3 days, walking around town outside of 1km radius around the square and government district (which abut each other) you wouldn't have known anything was afoot. Nothing was looted, not even the branch of Sberbank which stood right on the Maidan square with its windows unsmashed and unboarded-up throughout. No private property was taken over. People resisted efforts by riot police to clear them out of the square, sometimes violently (as when that BTR charging the barricade was burned down with molotovs), and on the last day fought off armed attacks by Kalashnikov-wielding SWAT teams with plyboard shields and a few hunting guns. It's true that the people ended up having been used as a lever by one gang of more or less corrupt political operators to oust and/or co-opt another gang of more or less corrupt political operators, but that's democracy for you.
> followed by a war against the Donbass
Which was created by Strelkov-Girkin and his men, sent in by Russians specifically to foment rebellion. People tend to overlook this.
> After overthrowing a government, simple common sense states you might not be able to hold onto parts of the country that overwhelmingly voted for the guy you overthrew!
I agree that this makes sense. I wrote as much in the last paragraph of my old post, https://candide3.wordpress.com/2014/01/10/putinophilia/ Just the other day I wrote on the TM forum that ceding Crimea and what is now LDNR would make sense because those regions don't want anything to do with Ukraine and never will, same as the rest of Ukraine now wants nothing to do with Russia.
> as of today if Putin has offered the equivalent of status quo ante bellum, take it!
I agree. Unfortunately that is not what is on offer at the moment. I just saw three SAM contrails go past my window.
> But as it stands it just seems like stubbornness.
It is. Ukrainians have a long history of stubbornness about national survival, much like the Poles, the Scots, and the Irish. What Putin offered Ukrainians in his 24/02 speech is the equivalent of COVID triple-maskers double-boosters' boots stepping on your and your children's faces forever. Most common people in Ukraine, who wouldn't know the difference between far right and far left, such as those farmers who tow away Russian equipment, don't want what Putin offered. Putin either didn't know or thought they were deluded and would have an epiphany the moment they saw Russian boots on the ground.
> It's going to be about as smart as COVID was. Even if you win, you'll lose.
The ironic thing is that I'm not even sure to what extent forumposter even disagrees in principle with Biletsky's claimed views, which, at least as regards racial matters, are clearly quite distinct in some respects from OG Nazi conceptions.
Re: "bad guys are bad," let me try and steelman the Wright argument. I think steelman-Wright would say that:
1. yes, bad guys are bad, but it matters what kinds of bad they choose to be, and how effective they are in being that.
2. when the less-bad guys (hopefully, "we") fall short of what (arguably) should be our own standards, it gives the bad guys more excuses to do even worse things, and more ways to generate support for their doing so.
So for instance, the Iraq war and the 1999 bombing of Belgrade were better-intentioned and harmed civilians less than what Putin has done in Chechnya, Syria, and now Ukraine. But they arguably gave him excuses for doing those things and helped him build Russian support. If you believe that the Iraq and Yugoslavia actions were wrong in themselves, this is one more reason to oppose them; and even if you supported them morally, this should count among their costs prudentially.
An analogous argument might apply for those of us who oppose Trump wrt Clintonian corruption. What Trump has done was, on the anti-Trump view, obviously much worse than anything either Clinton ever did. But a Trump opponent can nonetheless be mad at the Democratic establishment for turning a blind eye to the Clintons' corruption, on the grounds that it helped Trump get away with his even worse corruption by giving him an excuse and making him look "not so bad" in comparison.
Not saying the US hasn't done many bad things, but I don't really buy the excuse-enabling theory of behavior. People are always going to make excuses to blame their opponent for 'forcing' them to do what they wanted and had decided to do anyway, and frankly any crazy accusation from no matter how long ago seems to work equally well in a way that is mostly insensitive to any objective measure of how much of a saint or sinner the other guy has been. You see this all the time from individual relationships up to great power realpolitik and geopolitical dynamics, it's just what humans do.
> "Incidentally, Rothman writes for Commentary, a publication known as a home for Neocons, notorious for being interventionist. If Rothman is more cautious than the Twitter mob, that tells you something."
Alternate hypothesis: Neocons are uncomfortable with non-governmental reaction for the same reason they're interventionists. They're power hungry and their power stems from government monopoly on force and being an "established voice" (i.e. recognized lobbyists) of various interests.
They'd love to put the genie back in for exactly the same reasons that Putin hurriedly trying to roll back modern Russia into the Soviet era police state.
<i>It’s not just the non-profit sector. Eighteen years ago, I wrote
My theory is that the political process preys on fear. A politician identifies something that constituents might perceive as a threat. Next, the politician "markets" the threat, playing up its importance. Then, the politician says, "If you are afraid of this threat, then vote for me." The politician's proposal for addressing the threat typically involves expanded government activity, which often does more harm than good. Rinse, soak, repeat.</i>
I don't even think politicians are the cause. It's the news media. Whenever there's a slow news day, Big Media will make up an alleged "crisis" and start trying to convince you and me it exists. The "why" is simple: emergencies (real or phony) sell papers and get people to read them or turn on the TV. Of course when one of them does start to be believed, there are all the politicians, and the lawyers too, circling like vultures to see whom they can attack while we are distracted.
The media don't care how much this damages the market or society; they just want to get your blood pressure up so they can exploit you. And neither do the politicians or lawyers.
This is how Big Media came to be in bed with authoritarians. But there is a cure. Burn your TV.
You're blaming the news media, but let's consider the bigger picture. Suppose we snapped our fingers a la Thanos and made the news media disappear. To maintain this, you'd have to have most people commit to being Amish. To simply be OK with not knowing and not caring about what's going on in the wider world around them.
Maybe that kind of humanity would be better, but it's definitely not the kind of humanity we have.
Scott Alexander critiques Cowen for not making clearer predictions, but his prediction was "50/50" that Russia invades Ukraine- that isn't a prediction- even saying "90/10" isn't really a prediction. A prediction is either yes or no. As for the other predictions he critiques, the ones he claims are wrong about weak resistance aren't really wrong yet- we are ten days into the invasion with no real insight into the actual Russian strategy being followed.
As for me- I was wrong- I said explicitly that Russia wouldn't invade, and then I compounded the mistake it by saying that Russia would only annex the separatist territories when they did invade. I have also predicted that the Russians will succeed in whatever their goal turns out to be. I stand by that last prediction.
Outside of the Alexander essay, the idea that this invasion could have been avoided by the West not pushing NATO to the Russian border is clearly a correct one. The entire idea expanding NATO this way was ludicrous overreach by the US and its allies and served no useful purpose other than to antagonize the Russians. It made the world more dangerous, not less, as events of the last 2 weeks clearly demonstrate.
"Scott Alexander critiques Cowen for not making clearer predictions, but his prediction was "50/50" that Russia invades Ukraine- that isn't a prediction- even saying "90/10" isn't really a prediction. A prediction is either yes or no. "
Indeed. Since SA himself seems to enjoy adding useless probabilities to his quasi-predictions, perhaps this point escapes him. There's more confusion than that, so I'd say there is some way to go before these people get to 'thinking in bets'.
"could have been avoided by the West not pushing NATO to the Russian border is clearly a correct one"
Nope. More to it than that. Denmark has Greenland and Thule Air base which looks over the north pole at the whole of Northern Russia, joined in 1949. Consider Turkey bordered the Soviet Union when it joined in 1952. West Germany same in 1955. Estonia borders Russia proper and is only *80 miles* away from St Petersburg(!) but that has been acceptable for the past 18 years as a NATO member. Yes, "But Ukraine is different", ok, but 18 years of no big deal vs "clearly" worth a destabilizing major war is not exactly coherent. Putin has his reasons, but they aren't the ones he says he does.
" the idea that this invasion could have been avoided by the West not pushing NATO to the Russian border is clearly a correct one. "
I call BS.
It's a clear idea, and those against NATO and the US might support this idea, but there's no way to prove, today, that it is correct. And many, like me (in Slovakia), flatly don't believe it.
Putin invaded because he thought he could win quickly, with shock and awe and Zelensky running away like the Kabul president ran away.
Putin has LONG been complaining about NATO. Many might even say he complains so that the Useful Idiots, like near-genius Meirsheimer, can claim that's THE reason for the invasion.
Other can say it's the $110 - $150/b price of oil that has given Putin cash.
Or that Putin is 69, and time is running out for him to achieve his goal of re-uniting Russia and Ukraine into "one people", as he often has been claiming.
Or that Biden's running away from Afghanistan meant there would be no military help for Ukraine, so he was safe in any case.
Or my favorite - Putin was betting 90% that Ukraine falls within a week, and 50% that it falls within 2 days. He bet wrong.
Fear of NATO expansion was one of the weakest influences for invading "now".
(PS I usually like your Althouse comments when I see them.)
Freddie DeBoer seems to agree with you, and blames NATO for Putin's moral agency to decide to invade. That's cognitive dissonance. Putin chose this war, and did not have to. Zelensky is choosing to fight against aggression, rather than surrender and lose, so while he has a choice, he has also been both metaphorically and literally "forced" to choose fighting back - war.
The new ideas are old axioms . Consider these two observations made some 80 years ago:
From Churchill:
"Never let a good crisis go to waste"
From H L Mencken:
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
If crisis elevates the power of the state should we not be surprised to see nations in constant crisis? Adam Smith observed governments have a massive capacity for destruction saying in context of the British / American conflict:
"There is a great deal of ruin in a nation"
So what is the "Western" interest in the Russia / Ukraine conflict? Do American leaders want peace? Or do they want a crisis? Well, consider the dilemmat Democrats have with energy prices and their anti-fossil fuel platform. High gas prices are bad in the political short-term, but they serve the goal of "weaning" Americans off fossil fuels.
Consider this statement by the Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm in regards to energy priorities and ask yourself, if high gas prices encourage the desired energy transition, is the current administration opposed to high prices if they can be blamed on "world events?"
"We're working through an energy transition...The reality is, we have to take some time to get off of oil and gas, we recognize this. This is a transition."
Granholm is admitting that she supports the Great Reset, of which one of the major components is to destroy the gas-station infrastructure so that only the few who can afford electric cars will be capable of travel outside of urban areas.
The Great Reset would be a true catastrophe, worse than nuclear war, and must not happen.
I watched the Mearsheimer video when it was making the rounds a couple of weeks ago, and I do not think Sumner is giving a fair or accurate summation of Meirsheimer's arguments. His position was that Putin would not try to occupy Ukraine, not there would be no invasion. These are two different things. Secondly, Meirsheimer's criticism of NATO expansion is not that it is sinister, but that it extends security guarantees to countries of little strategic interest to the West but which Russia views rightly or wrongly as being in its sphere of influence, creating conflict that is high risk low reward. Ditto for Ukraine joining the EU.
Frankly, I think Sumner watched a different video than I did, and if I were doing the scoring I'd give him negative fantasy points for that post.
Yup. The irony is I have a really hard time with both Sumner and Meirsheimer. I think they both make valid and unconventional points in their respective fields and are therefore indispensable in a way. But they both are so single-minded that they oversell their points often come across to me as shallow and disingenuous.
Sumner is a brilliant monetary economist, but when I see how simplistically dismissive he is about everything else, it makes me doubt his economics.
I buy into Realism as an IR theory, but Meirsheimer's reductionism to a robotic "great power politics" to the exclusion of all else is not realistic. Like, I went back and read Kissinger (who's The Godfather of Realism) and he had a much better template for understanding Ukraine and where to go with it.
In today's blogpost, and in yesterday's ("Safe Haven No More"), Arnold Kling offers sharp insights about political psychology, incentives, and unintended consequences. He highlights the "Do something!" bias in emergency response.
Do his insights square with his recent analysis of state-capacity libertarianism?:
"Competent governance during pandemics, power outages, and other emergencies would diminish calls for greater government intervention during times of crisis."—Arnold Kling, "State Capacity and Accountability" (3 January 2022).
Consider several empirical generalizations that inform Arnold's analyses:
1. Fear drives intervention.
2. We construe social conflicts as moral dyads: a deliberate agent vs a feeling victim.
3. Banks depend on partnership with government.
4. Elites, perhaps via college, constitute a broad, informal bloc (across government, finance, media, firms, orgs, academe, cultural institutions, entertainment).
5. Information technology (Twitter etc) enables broad elites quickly to coordinate on a moral dyad and to pressure all institutions to cancel the bad actor.
Taken together, these mechanisms crowd out competent governance and greatly increase the scope of intervention during times of crisis.
Kling vs Kling?
Maybe right, but there's a lot to unpack there. Let's look at a couple of the key terms in your hypothesis.
1. We have to consider the counterfactual about what a less capable, less competent government would be doing during this emergency. It's quite possible that such a government would be more likely to intervene, make things worse, and blunder us into WWIII by mistake. The fact that Western governments have so far clearly rejected calls for overt military intervention is a good thing.
2. The crowding out effect goes both ways. That is, I think it's more supportable to say that all governance (both competent and incompetent) is subsumed by the broader societal intervention. From a libertarian perspective, this is ambiguous, but I think my core beliefs tell me this has to be a good thing. We don't want concentrated power. Government being "crowded out" is evidence that government is no longer the sine qua non of social power.
You can see, for example, how poorly the effort to revert to a state of atomistic governmental supremacy is working out for Russia. Maybe it'll work, but as a long run proposition, I'm not sure
3. The broadening of the scope of intervention is also maybe a good thing. We need to think more clearly about the lines of acceptable social and economic intervention. Like, I'm obviously against freezing the finances and refusing to do business with peaceful political protesters. I'm pretty much okay with doing the same to nation-states launching full scale invasions of their neighbors.
Who are the good guys supposed to be in Ukraine?
The more I learn about Ukraine, the more I don't see one.
Putin calling them neo-Nazi's is made fun of, but then I go on YouTube and find that was the opinion of places like Time and the BBC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE6b4ao8gAQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SBo0akeDMY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy910FG46C4
Not only did these people help overthrow the government and brutalize the Donbass, but they also burned Russian protestors in Odessa alive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec0mgpwW6_Y
Zelensky even gives these people awards. I also didn't know until recently that the guy had a 31% approval rating right before the war started and was considered the hack frontman for a manipulator oligarch. That the country was going bankrupt.
https://mate.substack.com/p/by-using-ukraine-to-fight-russia?s=r
https://thegrayzone.com/2022/03/04/nazis-ukrainian-war-russia/
I think Ukraine is a backward gangster state where the two gangs feud over who is top dog and nothing more. They should probably split up. Either way we shouldn't have a dog in the fight over which gang wins.
The good guys in Ukraine are the regular people, farmers and so on, often Russian-speaking, who don't want Russia ordering them about and are now proving their determination with their blood. Over the last 10 days, more than 60,000 military age men have come back to Ukraine from Poland and other European countries to fight. It's the same as you not wanting people to force your children to wear masks in school and kindergarten, and paying through your nose for Catholic school for them. That doesn't make you a Nazi.
It doesn't make much more sense to call Ukraine neo-Nazi because Azov exists, than it is to call USA neo-Nazi because Proud Boys and KKK and the kind of people who marched in Charlottesville with tiki torches exist. Azov, where all non-armchair neo-Nazi types concentrate, is tiny. It's only one regiment of the national guard (not the military - the military does not tolerate neo-Nazis), based in Mariupol. It existed under the aegis of the shady interior minister, Avakov, and its members have participated in conflicts around property development and such, probably for money. The political influence of Azov in Ukraine has always been indistinguishable from zero. For example, they only ever had one MP out of 450, in the last (VIII) Rada, and he was voted out in 2018. As for 2014, back then Western diplomats condemned violence by those kind of guys and by pro-Russian guys (who also burned and killed lots of people in and around Kiev) in the same sentence. Generally speaking, the amount of PR damage the existence of Azov has done to Ukraine is so much larger than any possible good it might have done that I find it plausible that some people there are Russian assets. If memory serves, Yarosh, the leader of the Right Sector, was reported to have taken Russian money in 2013/4 - "for the revolution", as such people often do, but still.
I'm not claiming Ukraine is a neo-Nazi state, but it appears to have a lot more neo-Nazi's in it then a Canadian Trucker Protest, but we don't seem to have a problem with that.
The bottom line is that Ukraine had a legitimate government. If people didn't like it they didn't have to wait very long for another election. It was overthrown violently, something neo-nazi's had a big role. Then the parts of the country that voted for the other guy got violently suppressed and laws were passed to discriminate against them.
Having overthrown the government in a violent coup, I think the smart move would have been to just let the parts of Ukraine that didn't want to be in Ukraine go. It's not like this east/west split thing hasn't been around a long time. You were never going to get Crimea back. Killing all those people or trying to turn Crimea into a desert didn't make people like the government any more.
On top of that the big thing that the coup was supposed to solve, corruption, doesn't appear to have gotten better. It just seems like one gang got traded for another.
I think the involvement of western government officials and NGOs in all this was really dumb and indefensible. I'm mostly interested in how Ukraine affects me. I don't think it helped anyone involved. Ukraine has to rise or fall on its own. This dependence on the west to solve its problems means it doesn't solve its own problems.
Even today we hear that if the government acknowledges Crimea and Donbass the conflict can be over. I have to think that if Zelensky didn't think the West was going to bail him out he would take that deal, so again our support is holding up peace.
As to racial attitudes, my stance on Ukraine is much like Bismark's on the Balkans. It wouldn't be worth the life of a single US marine. Ukraine has a GDP of 156B, less than Kansas. The idea of starting a nuclear war over Ukraine is baffling to me.
There is no realpolitik reason to go to war for Ukraine. The moral case is murky at best. I don't believe Putin invaded for the lols and plans to go after Poland next, but if you wanted to convince me that was the case all of this other stuff makes it harder to believe.
Nobody fought for Crimea, if you didn't notice. Cutting off agricultural water was nasty but so is stealing a piece of territory.
> Even today we hear that if the government acknowledges Crimea and Donbass the conflict can be over.
Peskov says so, but is he to be trusted this time? Remember that up until 24/02 Russians were telling everybody till they were blue in the face that Russia has no plans to invade, won't invade, it's ridiculous, Biden is scare-mongering, etc. Besides, Peskov also wants "demilitarization" and neutral status while saying that Ukraine is an independent state which will be able to live however it wants, and it's not clear how that would work.
> On top of that the big thing that the coup was supposed to solve, corruption
Was it? I didn't notice. It was explicitly supposed to solve the problem of a sharp realignment towards Russia. Forgive me for being blunt, but your picture of it seems to consist of equal parts of what Sen. McCain peddled to CNN and of what Russians peddled to their TV audience. This picture misses key facts which I have pointed out in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/CandideIII/status/1468954255143108615
> It was overthrown violently, something neo-nazi's had a big role.
Catching bullets with your body isn't violence. The actual transfer of power was effected by a parliamentary vote, 386 yea out of 450, while capitol district was still under control of Yanukovich's government, and the people who came to power were the leaders of the parliamentary opposition, not representatives of the "people assembled" (there weren't any). You might say it was a parliamentary coup. Strictly speaking it _was_ unconstitutional, but Americans of all people have no standing to criticize others on this point. As for supposed big role of neo-nazis, it's false. I should know because I was there. They did have a visible presence (unlike LGBT and other progressive factions) but the vast majority of occupiers had nothing to do with them. You might as well condemn the Canadian trucker protests because a few of them happened to be racist.
> I think the involvement of western government officials and NGOs in all this was really dumb and indefensible.
I have said as much at the beginning of the Twitter conversation I linked above.
From what I've seen of 2014, it didn't seem very peaceful. I wasn't there, but the videos do not seem "mostly peaceful".
A comparable event in my mind would be if Jan 6th had resulted Donald Trump seizing power, though Jan 6th probably didn't have as much violence.
That it was followed by a war against the Donbass that killed 14,000 people, an economic war against Crimea, the burning of protestors in Odessa alive, the legal persecution of the Russian language, and the arrest and prosecution of political opponents...
There is no realpolitik reason for any outsiders to get involved in Ukraine. At best we are talking about a moral reason, but that moral reason is quite muddled. After overthrowing a government, simple common sense states you might not be able to hold onto parts of the country that overwhelmingly voted for the guy you overthrew! Combined with the fact that it was a fact on the ground...I don't know what you are gaining by no acknowledging reality.
Even if you think Putin wanted the whole country, as of today if Putin has offered the equivalent of status quo ante bellum, take it! If its not genuine then when he breaks the pact you can say "see, he's Hitler" and you'll have the moral high ground. Short term circumstances aren't going to get better, if they surround your army terms may get worse. Long term time seems on your side. But as it stands it just seems like stubbornness. Maybe the far right really does have a veto over policy? I don't think Nato is coming, but even if it did....
It's a dumb move. It's probably dumb for the Ukranians. You don't want an insurgency in your country, and you don't want WWIII fought there. If the west gets involved, China could get involved. Or nukes could start flying. It's DUMB. Russian coming to Serbia's aid in 1914 didn't help the Serbs. What's building in the west...it's not calculated. It's going to be about as smart as COVID was. Even if you win, you'll lose.
I wanted to post this old link corroborating my hypothesis about some people in Azov being Russian assets: https://web.archive.org/web/20051104061154/http://www.gazeta.ru/2005/07/20/oa_164574.shtml The gist is that in 2005 Putin's then youth wing "antifascist" organization, Nashi, invited Korchinsky, one of the godfathers of Ukrainian ultra-nationalists, to its Seliger camp to give talks. But since I'm here anyway...
> I wasn't there, but the videos do not seem "mostly peaceful".
Yes, you weren't there, and that makes all the difference. You only see what various media with various agendas want to show you. In fact, over the whole period from November 2013 till the very last few days of February 2014 when the subway was stopped for 2 or 3 days, walking around town outside of 1km radius around the square and government district (which abut each other) you wouldn't have known anything was afoot. Nothing was looted, not even the branch of Sberbank which stood right on the Maidan square with its windows unsmashed and unboarded-up throughout. No private property was taken over. People resisted efforts by riot police to clear them out of the square, sometimes violently (as when that BTR charging the barricade was burned down with molotovs), and on the last day fought off armed attacks by Kalashnikov-wielding SWAT teams with plyboard shields and a few hunting guns. It's true that the people ended up having been used as a lever by one gang of more or less corrupt political operators to oust and/or co-opt another gang of more or less corrupt political operators, but that's democracy for you.
> followed by a war against the Donbass
Which was created by Strelkov-Girkin and his men, sent in by Russians specifically to foment rebellion. People tend to overlook this.
> After overthrowing a government, simple common sense states you might not be able to hold onto parts of the country that overwhelmingly voted for the guy you overthrew!
I agree that this makes sense. I wrote as much in the last paragraph of my old post, https://candide3.wordpress.com/2014/01/10/putinophilia/ Just the other day I wrote on the TM forum that ceding Crimea and what is now LDNR would make sense because those regions don't want anything to do with Ukraine and never will, same as the rest of Ukraine now wants nothing to do with Russia.
> as of today if Putin has offered the equivalent of status quo ante bellum, take it!
I agree. Unfortunately that is not what is on offer at the moment. I just saw three SAM contrails go past my window.
> But as it stands it just seems like stubbornness.
It is. Ukrainians have a long history of stubbornness about national survival, much like the Poles, the Scots, and the Irish. What Putin offered Ukrainians in his 24/02 speech is the equivalent of COVID triple-maskers double-boosters' boots stepping on your and your children's faces forever. Most common people in Ukraine, who wouldn't know the difference between far right and far left, such as those farmers who tow away Russian equipment, don't want what Putin offered. Putin either didn't know or thought they were deluded and would have an epiphany the moment they saw Russian boots on the ground.
> It's going to be about as smart as COVID was. Even if you win, you'll lose.
What can I say? It's an evil choice.
The ironic thing is that I'm not even sure to what extent forumposter even disagrees in principle with Biletsky's claimed views, which, at least as regards racial matters, are clearly quite distinct in some respects from OG Nazi conceptions.
Where do we have dogs and why?
Germany buying f35s is worth more then Ukraine, and that is just the start.
Re: "bad guys are bad," let me try and steelman the Wright argument. I think steelman-Wright would say that:
1. yes, bad guys are bad, but it matters what kinds of bad they choose to be, and how effective they are in being that.
2. when the less-bad guys (hopefully, "we") fall short of what (arguably) should be our own standards, it gives the bad guys more excuses to do even worse things, and more ways to generate support for their doing so.
So for instance, the Iraq war and the 1999 bombing of Belgrade were better-intentioned and harmed civilians less than what Putin has done in Chechnya, Syria, and now Ukraine. But they arguably gave him excuses for doing those things and helped him build Russian support. If you believe that the Iraq and Yugoslavia actions were wrong in themselves, this is one more reason to oppose them; and even if you supported them morally, this should count among their costs prudentially.
An analogous argument might apply for those of us who oppose Trump wrt Clintonian corruption. What Trump has done was, on the anti-Trump view, obviously much worse than anything either Clinton ever did. But a Trump opponent can nonetheless be mad at the Democratic establishment for turning a blind eye to the Clintons' corruption, on the grounds that it helped Trump get away with his even worse corruption by giving him an excuse and making him look "not so bad" in comparison.
Not saying the US hasn't done many bad things, but I don't really buy the excuse-enabling theory of behavior. People are always going to make excuses to blame their opponent for 'forcing' them to do what they wanted and had decided to do anyway, and frankly any crazy accusation from no matter how long ago seems to work equally well in a way that is mostly insensitive to any objective measure of how much of a saint or sinner the other guy has been. You see this all the time from individual relationships up to great power realpolitik and geopolitical dynamics, it's just what humans do.
Kicking Anna Netrebko doesn't even *feel* good.
> "Incidentally, Rothman writes for Commentary, a publication known as a home for Neocons, notorious for being interventionist. If Rothman is more cautious than the Twitter mob, that tells you something."
Alternate hypothesis: Neocons are uncomfortable with non-governmental reaction for the same reason they're interventionists. They're power hungry and their power stems from government monopoly on force and being an "established voice" (i.e. recognized lobbyists) of various interests.
They'd love to put the genie back in for exactly the same reasons that Putin hurriedly trying to roll back modern Russia into the Soviet era police state.
<i>It’s not just the non-profit sector. Eighteen years ago, I wrote
My theory is that the political process preys on fear. A politician identifies something that constituents might perceive as a threat. Next, the politician "markets" the threat, playing up its importance. Then, the politician says, "If you are afraid of this threat, then vote for me." The politician's proposal for addressing the threat typically involves expanded government activity, which often does more harm than good. Rinse, soak, repeat.</i>
I don't even think politicians are the cause. It's the news media. Whenever there's a slow news day, Big Media will make up an alleged "crisis" and start trying to convince you and me it exists. The "why" is simple: emergencies (real or phony) sell papers and get people to read them or turn on the TV. Of course when one of them does start to be believed, there are all the politicians, and the lawyers too, circling like vultures to see whom they can attack while we are distracted.
The media don't care how much this damages the market or society; they just want to get your blood pressure up so they can exploit you. And neither do the politicians or lawyers.
This is how Big Media came to be in bed with authoritarians. But there is a cure. Burn your TV.
Human nature is in bed with authoritarians.
You're blaming the news media, but let's consider the bigger picture. Suppose we snapped our fingers a la Thanos and made the news media disappear. To maintain this, you'd have to have most people commit to being Amish. To simply be OK with not knowing and not caring about what's going on in the wider world around them.
Maybe that kind of humanity would be better, but it's definitely not the kind of humanity we have.
Scott Alexander critiques Cowen for not making clearer predictions, but his prediction was "50/50" that Russia invades Ukraine- that isn't a prediction- even saying "90/10" isn't really a prediction. A prediction is either yes or no. As for the other predictions he critiques, the ones he claims are wrong about weak resistance aren't really wrong yet- we are ten days into the invasion with no real insight into the actual Russian strategy being followed.
As for me- I was wrong- I said explicitly that Russia wouldn't invade, and then I compounded the mistake it by saying that Russia would only annex the separatist territories when they did invade. I have also predicted that the Russians will succeed in whatever their goal turns out to be. I stand by that last prediction.
Outside of the Alexander essay, the idea that this invasion could have been avoided by the West not pushing NATO to the Russian border is clearly a correct one. The entire idea expanding NATO this way was ludicrous overreach by the US and its allies and served no useful purpose other than to antagonize the Russians. It made the world more dangerous, not less, as events of the last 2 weeks clearly demonstrate.
"Scott Alexander critiques Cowen for not making clearer predictions, but his prediction was "50/50" that Russia invades Ukraine- that isn't a prediction- even saying "90/10" isn't really a prediction. A prediction is either yes or no. "
Indeed. Since SA himself seems to enjoy adding useless probabilities to his quasi-predictions, perhaps this point escapes him. There's more confusion than that, so I'd say there is some way to go before these people get to 'thinking in bets'.
"could have been avoided by the West not pushing NATO to the Russian border is clearly a correct one"
Nope. More to it than that. Denmark has Greenland and Thule Air base which looks over the north pole at the whole of Northern Russia, joined in 1949. Consider Turkey bordered the Soviet Union when it joined in 1952. West Germany same in 1955. Estonia borders Russia proper and is only *80 miles* away from St Petersburg(!) but that has been acceptable for the past 18 years as a NATO member. Yes, "But Ukraine is different", ok, but 18 years of no big deal vs "clearly" worth a destabilizing major war is not exactly coherent. Putin has his reasons, but they aren't the ones he says he does.
" the idea that this invasion could have been avoided by the West not pushing NATO to the Russian border is clearly a correct one. "
I call BS.
It's a clear idea, and those against NATO and the US might support this idea, but there's no way to prove, today, that it is correct. And many, like me (in Slovakia), flatly don't believe it.
Putin invaded because he thought he could win quickly, with shock and awe and Zelensky running away like the Kabul president ran away.
Putin has LONG been complaining about NATO. Many might even say he complains so that the Useful Idiots, like near-genius Meirsheimer, can claim that's THE reason for the invasion.
Other can say it's the $110 - $150/b price of oil that has given Putin cash.
Or that Putin is 69, and time is running out for him to achieve his goal of re-uniting Russia and Ukraine into "one people", as he often has been claiming.
Or that Biden's running away from Afghanistan meant there would be no military help for Ukraine, so he was safe in any case.
Or my favorite - Putin was betting 90% that Ukraine falls within a week, and 50% that it falls within 2 days. He bet wrong.
Fear of NATO expansion was one of the weakest influences for invading "now".
(PS I usually like your Althouse comments when I see them.)
Freddie DeBoer seems to agree with you, and blames NATO for Putin's moral agency to decide to invade. That's cognitive dissonance. Putin chose this war, and did not have to. Zelensky is choosing to fight against aggression, rather than surrender and lose, so while he has a choice, he has also been both metaphorically and literally "forced" to choose fighting back - war.
The new ideas are old axioms . Consider these two observations made some 80 years ago:
From Churchill:
"Never let a good crisis go to waste"
From H L Mencken:
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
If crisis elevates the power of the state should we not be surprised to see nations in constant crisis? Adam Smith observed governments have a massive capacity for destruction saying in context of the British / American conflict:
"There is a great deal of ruin in a nation"
So what is the "Western" interest in the Russia / Ukraine conflict? Do American leaders want peace? Or do they want a crisis? Well, consider the dilemmat Democrats have with energy prices and their anti-fossil fuel platform. High gas prices are bad in the political short-term, but they serve the goal of "weaning" Americans off fossil fuels.
Consider this statement by the Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm in regards to energy priorities and ask yourself, if high gas prices encourage the desired energy transition, is the current administration opposed to high prices if they can be blamed on "world events?"
"We're working through an energy transition...The reality is, we have to take some time to get off of oil and gas, we recognize this. This is a transition."
Granholm is admitting that she supports the Great Reset, of which one of the major components is to destroy the gas-station infrastructure so that only the few who can afford electric cars will be capable of travel outside of urban areas.
The Great Reset would be a true catastrophe, worse than nuclear war, and must not happen.