Why the world needs Ukrainian victory

Thinking About ^ | 1/23/23 | Timothy Snyder

[Sunsong]

"Why does the world need a Ukrainian victory?

1. To halt atrocity. Russia's occupation is genocidal. Wherever the Ukrainians recover territory, they save lives, and re-establish the principle that people have a right not to be tortured, deported, and murdered.

2. To preserve the international legal order. Its basis is that one country may not invade another and annex its territory, as Russia seeks to do. Russia's war of aggression is obviously illegal, but the legal order does not defend itself.

3. To end an era of empire. This could be the last war fought on the colonial logic that another state and people do not exist. But this turning point is reached only if Russia loses.

4. To defend the peace project of the European Union. Russia's war is not directed only against Ukraine, but against the larger idea that European states can peacefully cooperate. If empire prevails, integration fails.

5. To give the rule of law a chance in Russia. So long as Russia fights imperial wars, it is trapped in repressive domestic politics. Coming generations of Russians could live better and freer lives, but only if Russia loses this war.

6. To weaken the prestige of tyrants. In this century, the trend has been towards authoritarianism, with Putinism as a force and a model. Its defeat by a democracy reverses that trend. Fascism is about force, and is discredited by defeat.

7. To remind us that democracy is the better system. Ukrainians have internalized the idea that they choose their own leaders. In taking risks to protect their democracy, they remind us that we all must act to protect ours..."

[Jim Noble]

NATO is still vital to America's national security

If NATO is "vital" to America's national security, why aren't they guarding our Southern border?

[Socon-Econ]

The premises of the article are that (1) Russia is worse than the expanding Biden-NATO-EU axis and (2) we need to expend billions to remedy this. Quite the contrary. This axis is using Ukraine to advance its agenda of LGBT, socialism, and green economic devastation. While Russia is hardly a democratic republic, the leaders of this axis are attacking free speech, backing the wrong people in the Middle East, destroying national identities by fostering mass migration, and running rigged elections. And the billions spent on Ukraine should be used for health care, tax cuts, our own infrastructure, and sealing our own border.

[Socon-Econ]

The premises of the article are that (1) Russia is worse than the expanding Biden-NATO-EU axis and (2) we need to expend billions to remedy this. Quite the contrary. This axis is using Ukraine to advance its agenda of LGBT, socialism, and green economic devastation. While Russia is hardly a democratic republic, the leaders of this axis are attacking free speech, backing the wrong people in the Middle East, destroying national identities by fostering mass migration, and running rigged elections. And the billions spent on Ukraine should be used for health care, tax cuts, our own infrastructure, and sealing our own border.

[griswold3]

2 days agoA senior Ukrainian government official has been sacked following his arrest on allegations of corruption and after the Defense Ministry launched an internal audit to look into contracts…
Rats abandoning ship. There’s an audit coming (or there should be).

[Chauncey Gardiner]

- To keep international money laundering in place
- To keep over 40 bioweapons labs running
- To keep human trafficking going so world leaders can get their jollies
- To keep Nazism alive

[Toad of Toad Hall]

What is the evidence “he won’t stop there”? Where does that come from? You pull it out of thin air ignoring everything that went on from 2014 to 2022 and project your imagination into what happened after February. Honestly, I’m done with the “fight them over there”, “spread democracy and freedom” nonsense. It’s a grift. Unless your desire is to turn Ukraine into Afghanistan, we need a negotiated settlement now.

By the way, 5% is not a rounding error. Just saying.

[winslow]

Russia has made various gains also.
The Ukrainian army has lost around 120,000 men, much more than the Russians.
There are reports of large numbers of Polish military fighting in Ukraine.
It is a full on proxy war.

Russia would have had no excuse to invade if the west/Ukraine had not helped overthrow Yanukovych and spent the last 8 years attacking ethnic Russians in the Donbass region instead of keeping to the Minsk accords.

[Mr. K]

You must be a Biden-lover

[Sunsong]

There’s a saying you might like:

“God bless me and my wife
May son and his wife
Us four and no more!”

[escapefromboston]

It’s important for Russia to win to teach NeoCons a lesson to mind their own business and stop wasting money we don’t have.

[dforest]

Tell me what is “goodness” in the US regime. I will wait.

[Sunsong]

Crimea is Ukraine. putin didn’t stop there

[nathanbedford]

I take your point about provoking the war in Ukraine, which means provoking Russia to invade Ukraine. I do. But I question whether that helps us decide whether it is in our national interests to pursue our policy, such as it is, in Ukraine now that we are in this mess.

In other words, does the "provocation" constitute a national interest upon which to base policy?

There are some historical lessons:

Roosevelt arguably provoked Japan to wage war against the United States. Roosevelt had effectively cut off Japan's vital supply of oil without which it could not wage war nor could it effectively survive as an industrialized nation in 1941. Roosevelt was acting to discourage Japan's barbarous invasion of China but the record should also note that China was a nation at least as corrupt and probably a lot more corrupt than present day Ukraine, yet we imposed these sanctions on Japan fully aware that it would likely lead to war.

In 1938 Britain carefully avoided provoking Germany over the invasion of the Sudetenland and the subsequent overrunning of the rest of Czechoslovakia. That appeasement did not prevent the overrunning of Czechoslovakia nor the invasion of Poland in 1939. The lesson? Appeasement did not avoid World War II. Britain's about-face and warning to Germany that it would declare war if Germany invaded Poland, did not avoid war either.

Perhaps provocation and appeasement were not the triggers either way. Perhaps it was the Ribbentrop/Molotov pact that so rearranged the balance of power in Europe that Hitler, feeling free of the threat of a two front war, invaded Poland simply because he could.

Absence of provocation did not deter Hitler from invading the Soviet Union in 1941 even though he was receiving all of the food, fuel and raw materials he could wish for from the Soviets. I believe he invaded the Soviet Union not because he was provoked but because the Soviet's conciliatory actions were irrelevant to Hitler. He invaded the Soviet Union because he could and because he thought he would win.

So one turns to Putin's invasion of Ukraine and asks, why did he do so? Well, he has a history of invading other countries such as Georgia, Crimea as well as his war in Chechnya and his adventures in Syria. Was he provoked on these occasions?

People who find that Putin was provoked cite the encroachment by NATO ever closer to Russia's homeland. They say that his invasions were in response, seriatim, to individual accessions of Eastern European nations to NATO, contrary to express promises. This assertion is disputed as a matter of fact but let's accept it for the purposes of analysis.

We ask ourselves, is Putin's reaction reasonable? We live in an age of hypersonic missiles when the travel time from anywhere in Europe to Moscow is now down to single digit minutes. What difference does it make to Russia's national security if Ukraine east of the Donbos, but not west of the river, is under his control or NATO's?

Does the balance of power in the nuclear age really change? Does it change in the conventional military sense? Does it change enough to say that it constitutes a "provocation" justifying an invasion?

We might also ask, was the alleged "provocation" of moving NATO ever closer to Russia an actual Causes Belli or, given Putin's aggression and belligerence in places like Chechnya, was the provocation justified? After Putin's invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, was the provocation justified as one could argue that Roosevelt's provocation of Japan for it's invasion of China was justified?

Which is the higher value, or which value is it in the national interest of the United States to support, avoiding provocation because provocation is imprudent or upholding the principle that thou shalt not invade thy neighbor?

The real question here is to identify the national interest of the United States. I don't think provocation as the pivot gets us very far. On the one hand, good arguments can be made that the mess we are in an Ukraine is bleeding us white and exposing us to nuclear war but on the other hand one can argue persuasively that our international defense posture with our allies and neutrals depends on the principle of supporting sovereignty.

My point is that we will do almost anything except the excruciating work of actually identifying our national interest. And that more than the issue of provocation tells us why we are in the mess we are in.

[Toad of Toad Hall]

Where’s your map after November? Oh, that’s right…. That doesn’t tell the story you want. Much of Ukrainian ‘wins’ were the result of Russia stepping back to shorten their line. And the Ukrainians paid dearly for those gains, and now they’re giving it back. Unless NATO intervenes directly Ukraine is going to cease to exist as anything but a rump state. So, are you willing to send Americans to fight Russians?

[NorseViking]

Chechnya was and is a part of Russia and in never voted for secession. Its separatist dictator was supported by the West if anything.
In 2008 Georgia was who attacked first. It is proven by international investigation.
I have no idea what Syria has to do with it. Russia was invited to help Syria preserve itself as a country which successfully did. Russia is a single foreign power present in Syria legally.

[Toad of Toad Hall]

Crimea is part of the same conflict. See, you really need to think about what you’re saying before you start rattling off the platitudes. You need to investigate the history of this conflict and stop paying attention to the cheerleaders who see dollar signs wherever blood is spilled.

[jospehm20]

Europeans should handle European problems.

[nathanbedford]

Perhaps because the United States has not invoked article 5 as it did against Afghanistan upon the attack of 9/11.

Perhaps further because the "invasion" of our southern border is not actually being done by a nationstate.

Anyway, I have never seen the logic of invoking a failure to defend America's border as a reason not to defend Ukraine's border. It seems to be self-evident that we have a duty to defend our own border which we are failing to do. But that failure has nothing whatever to do with whether we have a national interest in defending Ukraine's border.

Is there some sort of Newtonian law that says a failure to defend the border in one place prohibits one from defending a border in another place? Is there a law that says if you do defend the border in one place you must defend another border in another place? It seems to me each border should be defended or not depending on our national interest.

Whether we should defend Ukraine's border is a matter of America's national interest quite apart from the internal politics of converting America's electorate into a Democrat slave state.

[Socon-Econ]

Sorry for the double post. But I would further ask whether Putin is any worse than Biden, Brazil’s Lula, Trudeau, Macron, the Scottish sexual degenerates, or the Chinese communists. There are far worse villains who are given an easy pass while they use the Ukraine to weaken Russia.

[Palio di Siena]

No.
The saying I like is :
Can’t see it from Southern Maryland