I think you should circle back from your fears about the Twitter mob to your initial assertion that foreign policy (and in truth, almost all policy) is rarely the result of a unitary actor.
Top-down following the elite has served us quite poorly (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan). It's likely true that bottom-up mob rule would also serve us poorly. But... we'd be best off without either fully in control. We don't want a unitary actor, we want decisions that reflect the will of the people but are softened by reality.
I think there's an obvious middle ground here in which the elected "leaders" and "experts" are checked against dragging us into bad wars (and bad policies) and "the mob" pushes leaders to actually do their job and try to craft policy that satisfies these desires. The "elites" are there to enforce the rule of law and make sure popular sentiment doesn't become a mob.
In the absence of this pressure, we can see outcomes would often be worse. The support for Ukraine is the latest example, but not the only one. From a technical, top down perspective, change would rarely occur.
----------------
At the same time, we should understand that Twitter is very much not "the mob" in any realistic sense. It's more accurate to say that Twitter reflects undercurrents in elite opinion than what the majority of people, who take little part in Twitter, actually think.
From that perspective, if Twitter is leading to irrational mob-rule it's still a top-down, elite driven phenomenon (in which the elites... or factions of them) are inciting up a mob to drive policy to their desired ends.
----------------
These two points, I'm sure, will seem contradictory. Maybe they are, but ultimately I'm trying to suggest that we usually juggle these alternative paradigms in our heads anyway. Just like some recessions are better described by competing macro theories than others, we should step back and figure out which political theory gives us the best tools to work with here. I don't know, but while I agree that rule of law is important, I'm less sure that the mob is really the source of the threat to it, and more confident that the basic desires of people are fundamentally a good place for policy to look to.
I've noticed a big dichotomy between real life and Twitter life on Ukraine. Very little engagement or caring by normie people IRL. Full on apocalyptic frenzy on Twitter.
It's hard to designate "elite" in this case. Twitter influencers are certainly not the masses, either in class or worldview. Though it's a wider "elite" than Biden and the Joint Chiefs.
I think the driving force here is:
1) Putin = Trump and they can't get Trump so they have to get Putin.
One doesn't have to love Trump to understand that Trump Derangement Syndrome was self defeating.
2) This class has been taking a lot of Ls recently. COVID, inflation, Afghanistan, BLM. Biden might legit lose an election to Trump in 2024 at this rate. They seem desperate for a W.
The second is scary because they might not get a W. They might wake up in a few weeks and find Putin in control of everything east of the Dnieper and the main Ukraine army surrounded. What do you do then?
Sensible people sign a peace deal but you can't make peace with Hitler.
Something that is really popular can turn around on a dime. BLM was insanely popular in Summer 2020. Biden was already running away from it by November and its totally radioactive within a year of its supernova. Putin Derangement Syndrome might end up the same.
I think this is right for a big subset of Twitter users. That being said, I have a train of thought here that, unfortunately, I can't lay out as much more than assertions at this point:
1. Twitter is chaotic because reality is chaotic. What I see on Twitter is that while anything pro-Russia is hammered down, anything that's blatantly crazy also gets hammered down. The people calling for no-fly zones and other overt acts of war also get hammered down. As such, this reflects the reality you're pointing to. There's no obvious right answer.
2. Contra some of the belief here, I don't think there is more chaos and uncertainty than in the past. Go read through the old EXCOMM transcripts. While it was certainly a high-society debate club when compared to Twitter, I think it's a fair reading to say that the overwhelming advice to Kennedy was to shoot first and ask questions later during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The only difference is, it all unfolded behind closed doors.
3. That is, the conventional wisdom of "what to do" with the USSR changed very quickly when confronted with reality. I think the same think will happen here in the event of the (pretty bad but not worst case scenario) where Putin wins militarily. I have the sense that emotion and attention is already somewhat waning. If that's the case, we've already passed the point of maximum danger.
I'm worried that the kind of people calling for no-fly zones aren't getting hammed down, but I hope I'm wrong. So far it hasn't happened.
Can you imagine if one of the true progressives had won instead of Biden? I've got plenty of problems with Biden, but on foreign policy he's been like a one man wall against insanity.
I think your second 'graph is excellent. IIRC something like 80 percent of Twitter engagement is from 10 percent of users, and only a small percentage of Americans use Twitter. Twitter isn't life, and it isn't popular opinion, either.
1. Cancel culture seeks to apply the "death penalty" (maximum indiscriminate harm w/o nuance, logic, trade offs or path to redemption) to it's targets.
2. Cancel culture is now taking aim at a nuclear armed state.
For 1. Cancel culture desires external exile, not necessarily maximum indiscriminate harm, but instead zero gain, and no path of redemption. Agree with 2.
What I would like to know is who/what is driving the policy change on nuclear power in Germany? Is this the elites who can read numbers, the mob looking at fuel bills, or something else?
Restraining anti-Russia sentiment seems a mistake.
1) The enemy is Putin's крыша. The populace doesn't really know what people are involved, so the shotgun approach works for the more international. The West then needs a way to lean on the domestic powers like Kadyrov.
2) Angry populaces give political cover for quick actions. The faster the West can create differentiated problems for Putin, the harder it will be for him to adapt. Putin is old. The more pain that is incurred, the more that his supporters begin to feel like it's time for his exit.
3) The best case (?) is to argue that the above benefits are not worth the blowback, eg. higher odds of a radicalized Russia joining Iran and North Korea in the Anti-West, with China earning more arbitrage profits.
Currently, the cost-benefit seems to weigh towards letting the people go on the march. Or there are other offsetting points?
This is very consistent with Martin Gurri's thesis in "The Revolt of the Public", that the "public" is now deciding things much more than the elites (e.g. Arab spring). Social media has an undeniable transformational power in new conflicts.
I don’t think the masses pushing the elites into foreign policy hawkishness is a new thing at all. It does imply a consciousness of weakness on the part of the elites. But how many times in history has a weak government decided it’s best option was war as a last ditch attempt to gain a bit of legitimacy and bring the people together. Maybe that’s not quite the same.
An extreme example of the masses pushing policy is the French Revolution, where the elites in the assembly had their actions limited and essentially dictated by the literal mob outside the doors, but that’s an extreme example.
The overshoot on informal sanctions completely eclipsing the formal sanctions will cause an enormous amount of economic destruction in the European core, which will blow back on us. This is an example of civilizational failure than one of specific political failure on the part of those who drafted the (extremely leaky by design) sanctions. It's sort of an odd dynamic for people who typically lean libertarian to face, because the state action was reasonable and restrained, whereas the action from the private market is insane, suicidal, and escalatory.
Certain parts of the government did not act prudently in setting the stage for this crisis, but even within the government there was ample dissent expressed both at the time of the 2013-2014 coup, the subsequent annexation, and in the interim. In the "salami slicer" metaphor of strategy, the West is salami slicing itself because it thinks it makes it look good to other parts of the sausage. In the escalatory ladder metaphor of nuclear war, the mob (lead by bluecheck tribunes) is charging the stage and demanding that we skip rungs on the ladder, disrupting the carefully calibrated strategic game installed by the central governments of both sides.
Foreign policy determined by the elite doesn't seem to be thought through any better than a mob. Bureaucratic elites aren't that smart, and till respond to self interest and local group pressures.
"There is widespread irrational hostility toward Israel." No, toward the policies of the Israel government, especially the policy of permitting, indeed encouraging, settlement by Israeli citizens into the Occupied Territories.
The people in power today are going to blunder us into an armed conflict with Russia if they continue down this path. I grew up in the Cold War- I haven't really feared a nuclear conflict that entire time until today. We are being led by a combination of psychopaths and idiots.
I think you are being very naïve in this article. The elites are fully in control of the Twitter mob- don't doubt it for a single second. The mob is being led by the media, and the media takes its marching orders from those in power in government.
"the media takes its marching orders from those in power in government." Nope, and it's more the other way around. People in government have their perception of what is going on and what other people think largely formed by media reporting, and they are terrified of what the press could do to them. The danger of the virtualized, socially and imaginatively-constructed and strictly norm-policed echo chamber is precisely how untethered it is from actual reality, and not having such an anchor in things hard to alter is one reason it can sustain a shifting of consensus to true flights of fantasy almost overnight,
and why things, ideas, opinions change and move so fast, amplify without limit, and without predictability.
Giving such a chaotic and meltdown-prone process the chance to spill over into the arena of conflict among nuclear powers ... well, we are going to find out sooner or later, quite possibly sooner.
State department to their Twitter HQ door-revolving attendants: “Put your thumb on the scales of the algorithm, give a directive to all moderators to promote anti-Russian news, memes, accounts, bots etc.
State department to their mainstream media door-revolving journalist flunkies: “Produce anti-Russian news stories and memes and disseminate them”
State department to Federal politicians: “Incite mass animus against Russia, it’s time for us to max-out our soft power in this war”
Normie American Twitter users: “Oh. I guess I should hate Russia”
The Intrepid Duo, Handle and Arnold Kling, in response to all this: “The Mob of Twitter users are becoming dangerous! The People are causing The Elites to go crazy. And who knows what’s next?! Maybe Israel could be targeted! This is Cancel Culture Run Amok! They’ve gone too far this time. It’s the Sycophant Journalists and The People who are in charge of starting wars! Politicians are scared for dear life of the totally scary media! Social media public sentiment is totally unpredictable and cannot be directed by fiat! We’re totally not inverting the reality of power!”
Here are two leading indicators of serious danger in this regard:
1. "The War But". Look for increased use of the expression, "Of course we don't want war, but ... " Don't search for this if you trying to stop drinkink. It's already trending, which is bad enough, but what's really depressing is the pulse of hits from a few months ago from Russian sources.
2. Since we've now seen it go into effect at least a hundred times over the last 15 years, the particular form of social-media-amplified insanity that is a bigger problem for the West than Russia ever was is the competitive sanctimony rat race and a escalating singaling spiral going into meltdown. The Rubicon that you absolutely don't want people to cross is when somebody cool, prestigious, high status, influential - whatever - starts criticizing people for not being good or caring enough to be brave enough to face war because standing up to evil is more important. That if you do not support doing more and More and MORE, you are pro-Putin and need to get cancelled. Or something like that, you get the point.
Once that stuff starts overcoming the folks trying to get everyone to calm down, it won't be long until we are all going to regret not having gone Full Prepper.
I agree with you here. The first thing I noticed about media coverage is that it was all exactly the same, with the same panic and urgency and similar phrasing as early Covid news coverage. It seems crazy to me that mere months after we slinked out of Afghanistan we are getting dragged into something new that is far more dangerous. “Weapons of mass destruction” wasn’t real, but we should believe everything we read this time. Banging the war drum against someone who has nuclear weapons seems foolish to me. Putin sucks and I feel sorry for the Ukrainians, but I’m not willing to get nuked over it or willing to send my kid over there either. Russia is not the same as Putin and the hatred of the Russian people is some manufactured thing in my opinion, and Twitter eats it up because Twitter loves conflict.
1. I don't think it's possible to say any more because the facts of the war itself are driving a massive change in public opinion and future prospects.
In Crimea, the population was like 90% ethnic Russian and the Russian takeover was basically a completely peaceful administrative change that didn't effect anything about how people were living their day-to-day lives.
In, say, Kharkiv, where the population was probably 75% Russian, the Russian takeover is coming through massive and shocking brutality. People getting blown up on their way home from the grocery. That's the kind of thing that's going to, for lack of a better term, inspire lasting resentment and animosity.
People who probably wouldn't have resisted a peaceful transfer will now fight and object. Taking that into account, a Putin win now will probably mean that the tolerant, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic nature of the area is destroyed. Think of the fact that many British loyalists migrated to Canada after the American revolution. That's probably the best case scenario.
2. Hah hah. No. I actually think national sovereignty is probably overestimated as a causal factor here. What I mean is, sovereignty is a byproduct of political conflict. It's generally granted or revoked as a result of a struggle.
Upon thinking about it, I'd argue that the proponent of inalienable national sovereignty in this conflict is Putin. Ukraine is part and parcel of Russian national beliefs and, further, was basically continuously a part of the Russian state from 1649 onwards.
Supposing Texas declared independence, I'd expect something vaguely similar. If Texas divorced itself from a weak and failing US (as the Ukrainians did from Russia), they would probably get it. If it's just a bunch of political whackos, they probably get laughed at. What happens after 25 or 30 years is pretty hard to say, but dependent on how far the two places diverge. The former Soviet states and satelites that have done the best 1) didn't have a 300 year membership in the Russian state (Empire or USSR version) and 2) made themselves so prosperous and protected that Russia couldn't practically assail them. Ukraine unfortunately has this history and (in part due to it) hasn't been anything close to as successful as, say, Poland.
--------
(Sorry for commenting on comments, but I think this is worthwhile discussion)
I think you should circle back from your fears about the Twitter mob to your initial assertion that foreign policy (and in truth, almost all policy) is rarely the result of a unitary actor.
Top-down following the elite has served us quite poorly (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan). It's likely true that bottom-up mob rule would also serve us poorly. But... we'd be best off without either fully in control. We don't want a unitary actor, we want decisions that reflect the will of the people but are softened by reality.
I think there's an obvious middle ground here in which the elected "leaders" and "experts" are checked against dragging us into bad wars (and bad policies) and "the mob" pushes leaders to actually do their job and try to craft policy that satisfies these desires. The "elites" are there to enforce the rule of law and make sure popular sentiment doesn't become a mob.
In the absence of this pressure, we can see outcomes would often be worse. The support for Ukraine is the latest example, but not the only one. From a technical, top down perspective, change would rarely occur.
----------------
At the same time, we should understand that Twitter is very much not "the mob" in any realistic sense. It's more accurate to say that Twitter reflects undercurrents in elite opinion than what the majority of people, who take little part in Twitter, actually think.
From that perspective, if Twitter is leading to irrational mob-rule it's still a top-down, elite driven phenomenon (in which the elites... or factions of them) are inciting up a mob to drive policy to their desired ends.
----------------
These two points, I'm sure, will seem contradictory. Maybe they are, but ultimately I'm trying to suggest that we usually juggle these alternative paradigms in our heads anyway. Just like some recessions are better described by competing macro theories than others, we should step back and figure out which political theory gives us the best tools to work with here. I don't know, but while I agree that rule of law is important, I'm less sure that the mob is really the source of the threat to it, and more confident that the basic desires of people are fundamentally a good place for policy to look to.
I've noticed a big dichotomy between real life and Twitter life on Ukraine. Very little engagement or caring by normie people IRL. Full on apocalyptic frenzy on Twitter.
It's hard to designate "elite" in this case. Twitter influencers are certainly not the masses, either in class or worldview. Though it's a wider "elite" than Biden and the Joint Chiefs.
I think the driving force here is:
1) Putin = Trump and they can't get Trump so they have to get Putin.
One doesn't have to love Trump to understand that Trump Derangement Syndrome was self defeating.
2) This class has been taking a lot of Ls recently. COVID, inflation, Afghanistan, BLM. Biden might legit lose an election to Trump in 2024 at this rate. They seem desperate for a W.
The second is scary because they might not get a W. They might wake up in a few weeks and find Putin in control of everything east of the Dnieper and the main Ukraine army surrounded. What do you do then?
Sensible people sign a peace deal but you can't make peace with Hitler.
Something that is really popular can turn around on a dime. BLM was insanely popular in Summer 2020. Biden was already running away from it by November and its totally radioactive within a year of its supernova. Putin Derangement Syndrome might end up the same.
I think this is right for a big subset of Twitter users. That being said, I have a train of thought here that, unfortunately, I can't lay out as much more than assertions at this point:
1. Twitter is chaotic because reality is chaotic. What I see on Twitter is that while anything pro-Russia is hammered down, anything that's blatantly crazy also gets hammered down. The people calling for no-fly zones and other overt acts of war also get hammered down. As such, this reflects the reality you're pointing to. There's no obvious right answer.
2. Contra some of the belief here, I don't think there is more chaos and uncertainty than in the past. Go read through the old EXCOMM transcripts. While it was certainly a high-society debate club when compared to Twitter, I think it's a fair reading to say that the overwhelming advice to Kennedy was to shoot first and ask questions later during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The only difference is, it all unfolded behind closed doors.
3. That is, the conventional wisdom of "what to do" with the USSR changed very quickly when confronted with reality. I think the same think will happen here in the event of the (pretty bad but not worst case scenario) where Putin wins militarily. I have the sense that emotion and attention is already somewhat waning. If that's the case, we've already passed the point of maximum danger.
I'm worried that the kind of people calling for no-fly zones aren't getting hammed down, but I hope I'm wrong. So far it hasn't happened.
Can you imagine if one of the true progressives had won instead of Biden? I've got plenty of problems with Biden, but on foreign policy he's been like a one man wall against insanity.
I think your second 'graph is excellent. IIRC something like 80 percent of Twitter engagement is from 10 percent of users, and only a small percentage of Americans use Twitter. Twitter isn't life, and it isn't popular opinion, either.
This is not bottom up. Covid hysteria, BLM hysteria and Kiev hysteria are all manufactured.
Just to be clear:
1. Cancel culture seeks to apply the "death penalty" (maximum indiscriminate harm w/o nuance, logic, trade offs or path to redemption) to it's targets.
2. Cancel culture is now taking aim at a nuclear armed state.
Have a nice day.
For 1. Cancel culture desires external exile, not necessarily maximum indiscriminate harm, but instead zero gain, and no path of redemption. Agree with 2.
What I would like to know is who/what is driving the policy change on nuclear power in Germany? Is this the elites who can read numbers, the mob looking at fuel bills, or something else?
Arnold, do you think the 5 years of non-stop anti-Russia propaganda that preceded this incident may have had an effect on the mob's thinking?
Restraining anti-Russia sentiment seems a mistake.
1) The enemy is Putin's крыша. The populace doesn't really know what people are involved, so the shotgun approach works for the more international. The West then needs a way to lean on the domestic powers like Kadyrov.
2) Angry populaces give political cover for quick actions. The faster the West can create differentiated problems for Putin, the harder it will be for him to adapt. Putin is old. The more pain that is incurred, the more that his supporters begin to feel like it's time for his exit.
3) The best case (?) is to argue that the above benefits are not worth the blowback, eg. higher odds of a radicalized Russia joining Iran and North Korea in the Anti-West, with China earning more arbitrage profits.
Currently, the cost-benefit seems to weigh towards letting the people go on the march. Or there are other offsetting points?
There is no way this is bottom up.
This is very consistent with Martin Gurri's thesis in "The Revolt of the Public", that the "public" is now deciding things much more than the elites (e.g. Arab spring). Social media has an undeniable transformational power in new conflicts.
I don’t think the masses pushing the elites into foreign policy hawkishness is a new thing at all. It does imply a consciousness of weakness on the part of the elites. But how many times in history has a weak government decided it’s best option was war as a last ditch attempt to gain a bit of legitimacy and bring the people together. Maybe that’s not quite the same.
An extreme example of the masses pushing policy is the French Revolution, where the elites in the assembly had their actions limited and essentially dictated by the literal mob outside the doors, but that’s an extreme example.
The overshoot on informal sanctions completely eclipsing the formal sanctions will cause an enormous amount of economic destruction in the European core, which will blow back on us. This is an example of civilizational failure than one of specific political failure on the part of those who drafted the (extremely leaky by design) sanctions. It's sort of an odd dynamic for people who typically lean libertarian to face, because the state action was reasonable and restrained, whereas the action from the private market is insane, suicidal, and escalatory.
Certain parts of the government did not act prudently in setting the stage for this crisis, but even within the government there was ample dissent expressed both at the time of the 2013-2014 coup, the subsequent annexation, and in the interim. In the "salami slicer" metaphor of strategy, the West is salami slicing itself because it thinks it makes it look good to other parts of the sausage. In the escalatory ladder metaphor of nuclear war, the mob (lead by bluecheck tribunes) is charging the stage and demanding that we skip rungs on the ladder, disrupting the carefully calibrated strategic game installed by the central governments of both sides.
The mob in action:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/03/russia-cat-ban-ukraine-war/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
Foreign policy determined by the elite doesn't seem to be thought through any better than a mob. Bureaucratic elites aren't that smart, and till respond to self interest and local group pressures.
"There is widespread irrational hostility toward Israel." No, toward the policies of the Israel government, especially the policy of permitting, indeed encouraging, settlement by Israeli citizens into the Occupied Territories.
The people in power today are going to blunder us into an armed conflict with Russia if they continue down this path. I grew up in the Cold War- I haven't really feared a nuclear conflict that entire time until today. We are being led by a combination of psychopaths and idiots.
I think you are being very naïve in this article. The elites are fully in control of the Twitter mob- don't doubt it for a single second. The mob is being led by the media, and the media takes its marching orders from those in power in government.
"the media takes its marching orders from those in power in government." Nope, and it's more the other way around. People in government have their perception of what is going on and what other people think largely formed by media reporting, and they are terrified of what the press could do to them. The danger of the virtualized, socially and imaginatively-constructed and strictly norm-policed echo chamber is precisely how untethered it is from actual reality, and not having such an anchor in things hard to alter is one reason it can sustain a shifting of consensus to true flights of fantasy almost overnight,
and why things, ideas, opinions change and move so fast, amplify without limit, and without predictability.
Giving such a chaotic and meltdown-prone process the chance to spill over into the arena of conflict among nuclear powers ... well, we are going to find out sooner or later, quite possibly sooner.
State department to their Twitter HQ door-revolving attendants: “Put your thumb on the scales of the algorithm, give a directive to all moderators to promote anti-Russian news, memes, accounts, bots etc.
State department to their mainstream media door-revolving journalist flunkies: “Produce anti-Russian news stories and memes and disseminate them”
State department to Federal politicians: “Incite mass animus against Russia, it’s time for us to max-out our soft power in this war”
Normie American Twitter users: “Oh. I guess I should hate Russia”
The Intrepid Duo, Handle and Arnold Kling, in response to all this: “The Mob of Twitter users are becoming dangerous! The People are causing The Elites to go crazy. And who knows what’s next?! Maybe Israel could be targeted! This is Cancel Culture Run Amok! They’ve gone too far this time. It’s the Sycophant Journalists and The People who are in charge of starting wars! Politicians are scared for dear life of the totally scary media! Social media public sentiment is totally unpredictable and cannot be directed by fiat! We’re totally not inverting the reality of power!”
They masked their toddlers on playgrounds for two years because Twitter told them to. They would absolutely start a nuclear war.
Here are two leading indicators of serious danger in this regard:
1. "The War But". Look for increased use of the expression, "Of course we don't want war, but ... " Don't search for this if you trying to stop drinkink. It's already trending, which is bad enough, but what's really depressing is the pulse of hits from a few months ago from Russian sources.
2. Since we've now seen it go into effect at least a hundred times over the last 15 years, the particular form of social-media-amplified insanity that is a bigger problem for the West than Russia ever was is the competitive sanctimony rat race and a escalating singaling spiral going into meltdown. The Rubicon that you absolutely don't want people to cross is when somebody cool, prestigious, high status, influential - whatever - starts criticizing people for not being good or caring enough to be brave enough to face war because standing up to evil is more important. That if you do not support doing more and More and MORE, you are pro-Putin and need to get cancelled. Or something like that, you get the point.
Once that stuff starts overcoming the folks trying to get everyone to calm down, it won't be long until we are all going to regret not having gone Full Prepper.
That's non sequitur if I've ever seen one.
I agree with you here. The first thing I noticed about media coverage is that it was all exactly the same, with the same panic and urgency and similar phrasing as early Covid news coverage. It seems crazy to me that mere months after we slinked out of Afghanistan we are getting dragged into something new that is far more dangerous. “Weapons of mass destruction” wasn’t real, but we should believe everything we read this time. Banging the war drum against someone who has nuclear weapons seems foolish to me. Putin sucks and I feel sorry for the Ukrainians, but I’m not willing to get nuked over it or willing to send my kid over there either. Russia is not the same as Putin and the hatred of the Russian people is some manufactured thing in my opinion, and Twitter eats it up because Twitter loves conflict.
1. I don't think it's possible to say any more because the facts of the war itself are driving a massive change in public opinion and future prospects.
In Crimea, the population was like 90% ethnic Russian and the Russian takeover was basically a completely peaceful administrative change that didn't effect anything about how people were living their day-to-day lives.
In, say, Kharkiv, where the population was probably 75% Russian, the Russian takeover is coming through massive and shocking brutality. People getting blown up on their way home from the grocery. That's the kind of thing that's going to, for lack of a better term, inspire lasting resentment and animosity.
People who probably wouldn't have resisted a peaceful transfer will now fight and object. Taking that into account, a Putin win now will probably mean that the tolerant, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic nature of the area is destroyed. Think of the fact that many British loyalists migrated to Canada after the American revolution. That's probably the best case scenario.
2. Hah hah. No. I actually think national sovereignty is probably overestimated as a causal factor here. What I mean is, sovereignty is a byproduct of political conflict. It's generally granted or revoked as a result of a struggle.
Upon thinking about it, I'd argue that the proponent of inalienable national sovereignty in this conflict is Putin. Ukraine is part and parcel of Russian national beliefs and, further, was basically continuously a part of the Russian state from 1649 onwards.
Supposing Texas declared independence, I'd expect something vaguely similar. If Texas divorced itself from a weak and failing US (as the Ukrainians did from Russia), they would probably get it. If it's just a bunch of political whackos, they probably get laughed at. What happens after 25 or 30 years is pretty hard to say, but dependent on how far the two places diverge. The former Soviet states and satelites that have done the best 1) didn't have a 300 year membership in the Russian state (Empire or USSR version) and 2) made themselves so prosperous and protected that Russia couldn't practically assail them. Ukraine unfortunately has this history and (in part due to it) hasn't been anything close to as successful as, say, Poland.
--------
(Sorry for commenting on comments, but I think this is worthwhile discussion)
And I never look at their comments, but I usually look at Arnold's comments.
Shrug. I prefer Weiss and Greenwald's approach, but this is Arnold's place, so I try to respect his rules (or at least the spirit of them)