All Things Russia & Ukraine

[Essexfenwick]

"If Russia stops fighting, the war ends; if Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends.

If Biden stays strong, with U.S. drones as a judicious increment in punishing Putin’s brutality by reversing his aggression, Biden’s presidency will be deemed by wise historians as, on balance, a success." - George Will

George Will is a nutcase. Like Sheldon in a bow tie. Like Trump .. he is divorced but unlike Trump .. his genes are suspect an he abandoned his wife who he created a downs syndrome child with.

Fun fact.

You should be banned permanently for denigrating innocent kids born with disabilities.

DocBarrister

The child is holy born or unborn. The parent abandoning or aborting is a nutcase.

[admin]

"If Russia stops fighting, the war ends; if Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends.

If Biden stays strong, with U.S. drones as a judicious increment in punishing Putin’s brutality by reversing his aggression, Biden’s presidency will be deemed by wise historians as, on balance, a success." - George Will

George Will is a nutcase. Like Sheldon in a bow tie. Like Trump .. he is divorced but unlike Trump .. his genes are suspect an he abandoned his wife who he created a downs syndrome child with.

Fun fact.

...and three. Essexfenwick, that's fair warning of trolling...

[Essexfenwick]

I’ll try to be less obviously effective

[Farfromgeneva]

there are only three people I can think of that benefit from the pipeline destruction:

1) the people who built it, esp if it was insured.
2) the Chinese - assuming they are just in favor of the chaos in Europe
3) the USA.

Of the three, my understanding is that the USA is unique in have the equipment required to pull it off.....

Of course we don't know. And that is probably the best answer until we have a verifiable one, but Tucker is firmly entrenched in the muckraking business - so he goes hard to the hoop with unverifiable accusations. That said, the lack of any other credible "suspects" does seem to say a lot....

4) an extreme eco-terrorist group can't be ruled out yet can it, though they tend to claim their actions?

If we're going to speculate, I think it has to be someone who ASSUMES the likelihood that they will get caught is pretty high. Satellites.

Or? They're idiots. So sure, eco terrorists. Makes as much sense as other choices.

Come to think of it, maybe this group WAS involved?!?!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1uLzZVSIo1U

[Farfromgeneva]

Now that I've discovered where VDH has been publishing, it's interesting to walk backwards through what he's been saying about this war.
VDH is, after all, a highly regarded military historian who included political & cultural factors in his history of wars. He was praised by the likes of Sir John Keegan. He was also a visiting fellow at USNA for a semester. All before he began commenting on contemporary politics & culture.
He's hardly a Putin fan or apologist. Much of this could have been written by DocB.
https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/14/ukra ... or-a-bang/

You're pretending that you didn't notice that this piece is ENTIRELY different in tone and content from the last piece you cited?

No mention of Biden. No mention of "A once haughty and sanctimonious green Europe". No mention of "the left".

Totally different work, and still managed to give an assessment of the situation. A Xmas miracle!!

It's as if I've been right to criticize his nonsensical partisan horse hockey all these years, preferring that he (horrors) simply call balls and strikes.

How about that?

It's totally consistent on the subject -- the war in Ukraine.

He just doesn't lapse into domestic partisan politics in the second piece, which is apparently the only thing you read for.

Yes. He did. Rendering the essay utterly useless. Would you take a foreign policy take serious if Rachel Maddow wrote it, and spent half her time hitting the American right with complaints that have NOTHING to do with the subject at hand? Of course not. You wouldn't take her seriously.

But sure, pretend like this is SO hard to understand.

If VDH wrote like he did in the second piece? I wouldn't complain, and would actually consider his opinion.

Krugman may be a better example as Maddow is only an intellectual in coffee shops in Brooklyn.

[old salt]

I agree with Tom Nichols, not VDH.

VDH has a tragic Hobbsian perspective. He understands human nature.
He'd tell Nichols to suck it up & stop being such a drama queen.

[DocBarrister]

Now that I've discovered where VDH has been publishing, it's interesting to walk backwards through what he's been saying about this war.
VDH is, after all, a highly regarded military historian who included political & cultural factors in his history of wars. He was praised by the likes of Sir John Keegan. He was also a visiting fellow at USNA for a semester. All before he began commenting on contemporary politics & culture.
He's hardly a Putin fan or apologist. Much of this could have been written by DocB.
https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/14/ukra ... or-a-bang/

You're pretending that you didn't notice that this piece is ENTIRELY different in tone and content from the last piece you cited?

No mention of Biden. No mention of "A once haughty and sanctimonious green Europe". No mention of "the left".

Totally different work, and still managed to give an assessment of the situation. A Xmas miracle!!

It's as if I've been right to criticize his nonsensical partisan horse hockey all these years, preferring that he (horrors) simply call balls and strikes.

How about that?

It's totally consistent on the subject -- the war in Ukraine.

He just doesn't lapse into domestic partisan politics in the second piece, which is apparently the only thing you read for.

Yes. He did. Rendering the essay utterly useless. Would you take a foreign policy take serious if Rachel Maddow wrote it, and spent half her time hitting the American right with complaints that have NOTHING to do with the subject at hand? Of course not. You wouldn't take her seriously.

But sure, pretend like this is SO hard to understand.

If VDH wrote like he did in the second piece? I wouldn't complain, and would actually consider his opinion.

Krugman may be a better example as Maddow is only an intellectual in coffee shops in Brooklyn.

Don’t quite get this post. Krugman is a Nobel Laureate in economics. Maddow graduated from Stanford and has a doctorate in political science from Oxford. Both are elite intellectuals with worthwhile opinions.

DocBarrister

[Farfromgeneva]

We cannot just get accustomed to it; because silence and acceptance is complicity in our own undoing:

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters ... apple_news

"I am taken aback, and not for the first time, that terrible and shocking things now just flow over Americans as if chaos is part of a normal day. We don’t have to accept the new normal.

The Widening Gyre

I began the morning, as I often do, with a cup of coffee and a discussion with a friend. We were talking about last week’s nuclear warnings from Russian President Vladimir Putin, and while we were on the subject of unhinged threats, I mentioned Donald Trump’s bizarre statement over the weekend that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had a “DEATH WISH,” with a racist slam on McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, added in for good measure.

“Oh, yeah,” my friend said. “I’d forgotten about that.” To be honest, so had I. But when I opened Twitter today, The Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell’s tweet that “we are still under-reacting to the threat of Trump” jumped out at me. She’s right.

We are also, in a way, underreacting to the war in Ukraine. Our attention, understandably, has become focused on the human drama. But we are losing our grip on the larger story and greater danger: Russia’s dictator is demanding that he be allowed to take whatever he wants, at will and by force. He is now, as both my colleague Anne Applebaum and I have written, at war not only with Ukraine, but with the entire international order. He (like his admirer Trump) is at war with democracy itself.

And somehow, we have all just gotten used to it.

We are inured to these events not because we are callous or uncaring. Rather, people such as Trump and Putin have sent us into a tailspin, a vortex of mad rhetoric and literal violence that has unmoored us from any sense of the moral principles that once guided us, however imperfectly, both at home and abroad. This is “the widening gyre” W. B. Yeats wrote about in 1919, the sense that “anarchy is loosed upon the world” as “things fall apart.”

For many years, I have often felt this way in the course of an ordinary day, when it seems as if I am living in a dystopian alternate universe. A time of hope and progress that began in the late 1980s was somehow derailed, perhaps even before the last chunks of the Berlin Wall’s corpse were being cleared from the Friedrichstrasse. (This was a time, for example, when we started taking people like Ross Perot seriously, which was an early warning sign of our incipient post–Cold War stupor.) Here are some of the many moments in which I have felt that sense of vertigo:

In my lifetime, I have seen polio defeated and smallpox eradicated. Now hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead—and still dying—because they refused a lifesaving vaccine as a test of their political loyalty to an ignoramus.

After living under the threat of Armageddon, I saw the Soviet flag lowered from the Kremlin and an explosion of freedom across Eastern Europe. An American president then took U.S. strategic forces off high alert and ordered the destruction of thousands of nuclear weapons with the stroke of a pen. Now, each day, I try to estimate the chances that Putin, one of the last orphans of the Soviet system, will spark a nuclear cataclysm in the name of his delusional attempt to turn the clock back 30 years.

As a boy in 1974, I delivered the newspaper that announced the resignation of Richard Nixon, who was driven from office in a political drama so wrenching that part of its name—Watergate—has become a suffix in our language for a scandal of any kind. Now the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination is a former president who is a walking Roman candle of racist kookery and unhinged conspiracy theories, who has defied the law with malicious glee, and who has supported mobs that wanted to kill his vice president.
Against all this, how can we not be overwhelmed? We stand in the middle of a flood of horrendous events, shouted down by the outsize voices of people such as Trump and his stooges, enervated and exhausted by the dark threats of dictators such as Putin. It’s just too much, especially when we already have plenty of other responsibilities, including our jobs and taking care of our loved ones. We think we are alone and helpless, because there is nothing to convince us otherwise. How can anyone fight the sense that “the center cannot hold”?

But we are not helpless. The center can hold—because we are the center. We are citizens of a democracy who can refuse to accept the threats of mob bosses, whether in Florida or in Russia. We can and must vote, but that’s not enough. We must also speak out. By temperament, I am not much for public demonstrations, but if that’s your preferred form of expression, then organize and march. The rest of us, however, can act, every day, on a small scale.

Speak up. Do not stay silent when our fellow citizens equivocate and rationalize. Defend what’s right, whether to a friend or a family member. Refuse to laugh along with the flip cynicism that makes a joke of everything. Stay informed so that the stink of a death threat from a former president or the rattle of a nuclear saber from a Russian autocrat does not simply rush past you as if you’ve just driven by a sewage plant.

None of this is easy to do. But we are entering a time of important choices, both at home at the ballot box and abroad on foreign battlefields, and the center—the confident and resolute defense of peace, freedom, and the rule of law—must hold."

I think this was more true two years ago than now with respect the middle giving a lot of rope to the extreme rights increasing “land grab”.

Other thing id comment on is just yesterday I was playing some various songs, with videos on YouTube because he’s a kid and likes the videos. 70s -90s random stuff and went at one point back to back with We Didn’t Start the Fire and It’s the End of the World as We Know It which are both about change in time and teams and tough things in the world and life. Both reflecting the period where we thought it was all going to dog doo. Then I think about the volatility of any powerful country or region in the world and it’s impact in the moments on the people. We should always strive to reach (which is planning + execution but the battles are in the planning/philosophy) the platonic ideal of whatever our goals are. However, I wonder what the right balance or mix of focus on planning and execution vs investigating the past in order to create a historical recording with as little fidelity as possible should be.

Realize this is a nice way of saying this feels a little too stressed on elevating the weight of documenting and adjudicating the past vs focusing on ensuring future execution and planning. They aren’t mutually exclusive and maybe the lower volume of explicit rejection of this crap pulled isn’t people caring less or being anesthetized as much as dedicating more of their finite bandwidth of taking care of now and the future.

[Farfromgeneva]

Now that I've discovered where VDH has been publishing, it's interesting to walk backwards through what he's been saying about this war.
VDH is, after all, a highly regarded military historian who included political & cultural factors in his history of wars. He was praised by the likes of Sir John Keegan. He was also a visiting fellow at USNA for a semester. All before he began commenting on contemporary politics & culture.
He's hardly a Putin fan or apologist. Much of this could have been written by DocB.
https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/14/ukra ... or-a-bang/

You're pretending that you didn't notice that this piece is ENTIRELY different in tone and content from the last piece you cited?

No mention of Biden. No mention of "A once haughty and sanctimonious green Europe". No mention of "the left".

Totally different work, and still managed to give an assessment of the situation. A Xmas miracle!!

It's as if I've been right to criticize his nonsensical partisan horse hockey all these years, preferring that he (horrors) simply call balls and strikes.

How about that?

It's totally consistent on the subject -- the war in Ukraine.

He just doesn't lapse into domestic partisan politics in the second piece, which is apparently the only thing you read for.

Yes. He did. Rendering the essay utterly useless. Would you take a foreign policy take serious if Rachel Maddow wrote it, and spent half her time hitting the American right with complaints that have NOTHING to do with the subject at hand? Of course not. You wouldn't take her seriously.

But sure, pretend like this is SO hard to understand.

If VDH wrote like he did in the second piece? I wouldn't complain, and would actually consider his opinion.

Krugman may be a better example as Maddow is only an intellectual in coffee shops in Brooklyn.

Don’t quite get this post. Krugman is a Nobel Laureate in economics. Maddow graduated from Stanford and has a doctorate in political science from Oxford. Both are elite intellectuals with worthwhile opinions.

DocBarrister

VDH has domain knowledge and built a resume on something of substance previously. Then sold out.

Krugman has domain knowledge and back in the day hui a resume on something of substance. Then sold out.

You seem to put a lot of value on credentials ignoring that even within credentialed there’s a wide dispersion in quality.

[DocBarrister]

"If Russia stops fighting, the war ends; if Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends.

If Biden stays strong, with U.S. drones as a judicious increment in punishing Putin’s brutality by reversing his aggression, Biden’s presidency will be deemed by wise historians as, on balance, a success." - George Will

George Will is a nutcase. Like Sheldon in a bow tie. Like Trump .. he is divorced but unlike Trump .. his genes are suspect an he abandoned his wife who he created a downs syndrome child with.

Fun fact.

You should be banned permanently for denigrating innocent kids born with disabilities.

DocBarrister

The child is holy born or unborn. The parent abandoning or aborting is a nutcase.

You can’t denigrate a child with Down Syndrome and then claim to care for children or understand what is truly “holy”.

Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven.

Matthew 8:10

DocBarrister

[Essexfenwick]

"If Russia stops fighting, the war ends; if Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends.

If Biden stays strong, with U.S. drones as a judicious increment in punishing Putin’s brutality by reversing his aggression, Biden’s presidency will be deemed by wise historians as, on balance, a success." - George Will

George Will is a nutcase. Like Sheldon in a bow tie. Like Trump .. he is divorced but unlike Trump .. his genes are suspect an he abandoned his wife who he created a downs syndrome child with.

Fun fact.

You should be banned permanently for denigrating innocent kids born with disabilities.

DocBarrister

The child is holy born or unborn. The parent abandoning or aborting is a nutcase.

You can’t denigrate a child with Down Syndrome and then claim to care for children or understand what is truly “holy”.

Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven.

Matthew 8:10

DocBarrister

Your condemnation of slavery and abortion is flawless. Bravo !!

[old salt]

As historians, I'll take Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough any day of the week.

distinguished company.

https://www.amazon.com/Cold-War-Militar ... 081296716X

[Seacoaster(1)]

Update:

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgr ... -october-5

Snippet:

"Increasing domestic critiques of Russia’s “partial mobilization” are likely driving Putin to scapegoat the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and specifically Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Putin deferred mobilization for all students, including part-time and masters students, via a decree on October 5.[13] Putin told Russian outlets that because “the Ministry of Defense did not make timely changes to the legal framework on the list of those who are not subject to mobilization, adjustments have to be made.”[14] That direct critique of the MoD is also an implicit critique of Shoigu, whom Putin appears to be setting up to take the fall for the failures of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The chairperson of the Russian State Duma Defense Committee, Colonel General (Ret.) Andrey Kartapolov, also criticized the MoD on Russian state television on October 5. Kartapolov said that all Russians know the MoD is lying and must stop, but that message is not reaching “individual leaders,” another jab at Shoigu.[15] One Russian milblogger claimed that Kartapolov’s comments demonstrate that Shoigu will soon be “demolished” and “recognized as the main culprit” of Russia’s military failures. The milblogger reminded his readers that it was the Russian MoD and its head that made an “invaluable and huge contribution to the fact that we are now on the verge of a military-political catastrophe.”[16] Another milblogger defended Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin and Chechen head Ramzan Kadyrov for criticizing the MoD, applauding them for driving necessary change.[17] Kadyrov’s announcement that Putin awarded him the rank of Colonel-General is similarly indicative that Putin is willing to appease the siloviki base that has taken continued rhetorical swings at the MoD establishment.

Putin will likely hold off on firing Shoigu for as long as he feels he can in order to continue to blame Shoigu for ongoing military failures and to build up support among other factions. Shoigu’s replacement will need to take responsibility for failures that occur after his tenure begins. Putin is already working to improve his support among the nationalist milbloggers and the siloviki such as Prigozhin and Kadyrov. Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov old reporters on October 5 that Prigozhin “makes a great contribution within his capabilities” to efforts in Russia and Ukraine and declined to answer questions surrounding Prigozhin’s critiques of government officials.[18] A milblogger emphasized on October 5 that Putin “regularly hosts military correspondents, carefully reads their reports, asks the right questions, and receives objective answers,” implicitly contrasting that relationship with the dishonest way in which milbloggers believe the MoD interacts with Putin.[19]

Russian authorities detained the manager of several milblogger telegram channels on October 5, indicating that the Kremlin is likely setting limits on what criticism is allowed in the domestic Russian information space. Alexander Khunshtein, the deputy secretary of the General Council of Putin’s political party, United Russia, published footage on October 5 showing Russian authorities detaining Alexei Slobodenyuk.[20] Slobodenyuk is an employee of Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Patriot media group and the manager of several milblogger telegrams, the most prominent of which are “Release Z Kraken” and “Skaner.” The telegram channel “Skaner” has featured criticism of major state officials and military personnel, the most prominent of whom are Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, and Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. Russian authorities detained Slobodenyuk on accusations of fraud. His detention suggests that the Kremlin is attempting to set boundaries for which criticism is allowed in the information space and on which high-ranking officials milbloggers and journalists can criticize—Defense Minister Shoigu, Putin‘s likely scapegoat-in-waiting, now appears to be fair game, whereas officials close to Putin such as Lavrov and Putin’s spokesperson are off-limits."

[MDlaxfan76]

I agree with Tom Nichols, not VDH.

VDH has a tragic Hobbsian perspective. He understands human nature.
He'd tell Nichols to suck it up & stop being such a drama queen.

I'm sure Nichols would have an appropriately abrupt retort to Hanson.

I have a touch of the Hobbesian as well...and it tells me that human nature includes the capacity to commit immense atrocities and war crimes in the name of ego and ambition and, thus, the only way to respond to such is to utterly defeat it.

Never excuse or reward it.

[MDlaxfan76]

As of September 14, that was a pretty fair assessment...having been so utterly wrong in his earlier assessments. Those earlier assessments look even more wrong on October 5.

But even when he's acknowledging a new reality, Hanson doesn't attribute the successes of the Ukrainians as of that moment to the Ukrainian's superior morale (though he'd acknowledged that possible factor) rather he attributes their success to the West's superior weaponry...both, combined, are what is working, relative to the Russian morale. Western weaponry would not be sufficient if the morale advantage was reversed. He'd missed that nearly entirely in earlier assessments and still struggles to recognize it.

He feeds into Putin's narrative that this is a proxy war between the West and Putin's Russia, rather than the West coming to the defense of sovereign neighbor brutally attacked...very different tone and Hanson knows it. He ain't dumb.

Hanson then turns to scenarios that are indeed very thorny...I say, 'ya, und?'...what is the recommendation?

Ohh yeah, force the Ukrainians to negotiate and accede to Putin's demands, else America will "slide into a nuclear confrontation with a desperate autocrat".

Same old story.

Hanson should stick to writing conservative opinions about history. But that ain't where the $$$ are I guess.

So he acknowledges the Ukrainians superior morale but somehow he doesn't consider that a factor in their success ?

He's making the point that the Ukrainians superior morale is a factor but that would not be enough without superior western weapons.
Do you disagree with that ?

As you know, I certainly think that "superior western weapons" matter (a lot), especially precision targeted.

However, Hanson does not say that the Ukrainians had/have a big advantage in morale...he nods at the importance of morale, but then ignores it, though he does describe the Ukrainians as "heroic".

Soon the conflict descended into a war of attrition in Eastern Ukraine over the occupied majority Russian-speaking borderlands.

That deadlock was eventually going to be resolved by relative morale, manpower, and supply.

Would the high-tech weaponry and money of the United States and Europe allow heroic Ukrainian forces to be better equipped than a larger Russian force—drawing on an economy 10 times greater and a population nearly four times larger than Ukraine’s?

After the latest sudden Ukrainian territorial gains and embarrassing Russian retreats, we now know the answer.

Russia may be bigger and richer than Ukraine, but it is not up to the combined resources of the United States, along with the nations of NATO and the European Union.

Most are now in a de facto proxy war with an increasingly overwhelmed Russia. And so far, a circumspect China has not stepped in to try to remedy the Russian dilemma.

What you say is a "nod" is establishing it as a given in the analysis. Rather than restating it, it is implicit in the terminology used -- morale...heroic...embarrassing.

He cites morale as one of the 3 factors determining the outcome of the battles in the east.
He doesn't even include weapons superiority in that formula, since he had already established it as a given.

It's obvious that superiority in both weaponry AND morale are consistent factors in the success.
You're splitting hairs.

What were Hanson's earlier assessments which were wrong ?

It's naive to deny that the Ukrainians are US proxies -- supply, training, ISR & limits to targeting.

I think you're reading into what he wrote overly generously. My assumption is that he's a smart guy and is choosing his words and logic construct carefully. And, thus, if he'd wished to emphasize that fighting to protect one's country, one's family, one's community, one's children against a brutal aggressor committing atrocities is a vastly superior motivation to that of conscripts and mercenaries invading a country they assumed would be a pushover, he'd have said that. But he didn't.

I see that as a conscious choice.
If you want to say he's just sloppy in his writing and that of course he must have meant that, ok.
(You and I would agree that both factors have been very important).

But what I've seen of his logic, right from the beginning of his commentaries and as a through line through out, is that Russia has vastly superior resources and military, and that Ukraine can't possibly win (a moving prescription for limiting Ukraine's loss, never victory), that the US and the West should not get involved as that will feed into Putin's narrative of this being a proxy war instead of a war of self-defense, moving to the US shouldn't do more because that risks nuclear confrontation, that the best that could be hoped for would be a limited Ukrainian defeat sold as a 'win', and then containment of Russia, not defeat of Putin's aggression...especially given the prediction that the Europeans would not step up and stand strong with Ukraine...a prediction that keeps being proven wrong as well.

All with the Biden bad, Trump good messaging as undercurrent.
And the other undercurrent being a "historical" justification of Putin's ambitions.

[Farfromgeneva]

I agree with Tom Nichols, not VDH.

VDH has a tragic Hobbsian perspective. He understands human nature.
He'd tell Nichols to suck it up & stop being such a drama queen.

I'm sure Nichols would have an appropriately abrupt retort to Hanson.

I have a touch of the Hobbesian as well...and it tells me that human nature includes the capacity to commit immense atrocities and war crimes in the name of ego and ambition and, thus, the only way to respond to such is to utterly defeat it.

Never excuse or reward it.

Speaking of ego and ambition, I see the CPAC had a book written about their activities, goals and ideals. Should probably read it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_120_Days_of_Sodom

[old salt]

As of September 14, that was a pretty fair assessment...having been so utterly wrong in his earlier assessments. Those earlier assessments look even more wrong on October 5.

But even when he's acknowledging a new reality, Hanson doesn't attribute the successes of the Ukrainians as of that moment to the Ukrainian's superior morale (though he'd acknowledged that possible factor) rather he attributes their success to the West's superior weaponry...both, combined, are what is working, relative to the Russian morale. Western weaponry would not be sufficient if the morale advantage was reversed. He'd missed that nearly entirely in earlier assessments and still struggles to recognize it.

He feeds into Putin's narrative that this is a proxy war between the West and Putin's Russia, rather than the West coming to the defense of sovereign neighbor brutally attacked...very different tone and Hanson knows it. He ain't dumb.

Hanson then turns to scenarios that are indeed very thorny...I say, 'ya, und?'...what is the recommendation?

Ohh yeah, force the Ukrainians to negotiate and accede to Putin's demands, else America will "slide into a nuclear confrontation with a desperate autocrat".

Same old story.

Hanson should stick to writing conservative opinions about history. But that ain't where the $$$ are I guess.

So he acknowledges the Ukrainians superior morale but somehow he doesn't consider that a factor in their success ?

He's making the point that the Ukrainians superior morale is a factor but that would not be enough without superior western weapons.
Do you disagree with that ?

As you know, I certainly think that "superior western weapons" matter (a lot), especially precision targeted.

However, Hanson does not say that the Ukrainians had/have a big advantage in morale...he nods at the importance of morale, but then ignores it, though he does describe the Ukrainians as "heroic".

Soon the conflict descended into a war of attrition in Eastern Ukraine over the occupied majority Russian-speaking borderlands.

That deadlock was eventually going to be resolved by relative morale, manpower, and supply.

Would the high-tech weaponry and money of the United States and Europe allow heroic Ukrainian forces to be better equipped than a larger Russian force—drawing on an economy 10 times greater and a population nearly four times larger than Ukraine’s?

After the latest sudden Ukrainian territorial gains and embarrassing Russian retreats, we now know the answer.

Russia may be bigger and richer than Ukraine, but it is not up to the combined resources of the United States, along with the nations of NATO and the European Union.

Most are now in a de facto proxy war with an increasingly overwhelmed Russia. And so far, a circumspect China has not stepped in to try to remedy the Russian dilemma.

What you say is a "nod" is establishing it as a given in the analysis. Rather than restating it, it is implicit in the terminology used -- morale...heroic...embarrassing.

He cites morale as one of the 3 factors determining the outcome of the battles in the east.
He doesn't even include weapons superiority in that formula, since he had already established it as a given.

It's obvious that superiority in both weaponry AND morale are consistent factors in the success.
You're splitting hairs.

What were Hanson's earlier assessments which were wrong ?

It's naive to deny that the Ukrainians are US proxies -- supply, training, ISR & limits to targeting.

I think you're reading into what he wrote overly generously. My assumption is that he's a smart guy and is choosing his words and logic construct carefully. And, thus, if he'd wished to emphasize that fighting to protect one's country, one's family, one's community, one's children against a brutal aggressor committing atrocities is a vastly superior motivation to that of conscripts and mercenaries invading a country they assumed would be a pushover, he'd have said that. But he didn't.

I see that as a conscious choice.
If you want to say he's just sloppy in his writing and that of course he must have meant that, ok.
(You and I would agree that both factors have been very important).

But what I've seen of his logic, right from the beginning of his commentaries and as a through line through out, is that Russia has vastly superior resources and military, and that Ukraine can't possibly win (a moving prescription for limiting Ukraine's loss, never victory), that the US and the West should not get involved as that will feed into Putin's narrative of this being a proxy war instead of a war of self-defense, moving to the US shouldn't do more because that risks nuclear confrontation, that the best that could be hoped for would be a limited Ukrainian defeat sold as a 'win', and then containment of Russia, not defeat of Putin's aggression...especially given the prediction that the Europeans would not step up and stand strong with Ukraine...a prediction that keeps being proven wrong as well.

All with the Biden bad, Trump good messaging as undercurrent.
And the other undercurrent being a "historical" justification of Putin's ambitions.

You gloss over the fact that Hanson consistently refers to the Ukrainians as heroic & cites their morale as a factor.
If he ever does another edition of Carnage and Culture he'll likely do a chapter on the Ukrainians.
The time to examine that is after the victory is won.
How do you read that he thinks the US should not be involved ? He reminds us that Trump delivered aid when Obama-Biden & the EUros would not.
Like all sane observers, he warns of the danger in escalating when the opponent is a madman with nucs (Strangelove ref).
He also reminds us that Biden has vowed not to get US forces involved, which limits how much we can do.
He's been accurate in his analysis, so far, & has been less pessimistic than most of the military experts.
He's not a cheerleader, projecting his own preferred outcome into his analysis.
He acknowledges the heroism of the Ukrainians as well as the criticality of western aid.
It's just too soon to declare victory. As a historian, he'll have to stand by anything he predicts now.

[DocBarrister]

Discontent among supporters of Russia’s faltering invasion of Ukraine has produced an extraordinary barrage of criticism directed at the leadership of the Russian military, creating a new challenge to President Vladimir V. Putin, who, after cracking down on Russia’s liberal opposition, now faces growing dissent in his own camp.

The latest salvo came on Thursday when a Russian-installed occupation official in Ukraine fired a broadside at the Russian defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, a close associate of Mr. Putin. The official, Kirill Stremousov, said Mr. Shoigu should consider killing himself because of the Russian army’s failures in Ukraine.

“Many people are saying that as an officer, the defense minister could simply shoot himself for being the one who let things get to this state,” said Mr. Stremousov, the deputy governor of the Kherson region of southern Ukraine.

Last month, it was largely pro-Russian bloggers who were voicing anger over the failings of military planning that led to the Russian army’s being routed in northeastern Ukraine. But after Russian forces were forced to retreat in two other sections of the front line in the last week, prominent officials have increasingly joined the chorus.



https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/10/06 ... e-war-news

DocBarrister

[Kismet]

As of September 14, that was a pretty fair assessment...having been so utterly wrong in his earlier assessments. Those earlier assessments look even more wrong on October 5.

But even when he's acknowledging a new reality, Hanson doesn't attribute the successes of the Ukrainians as of that moment to the Ukrainian's superior morale (though he'd acknowledged that possible factor) rather he attributes their success to the West's superior weaponry...both, combined, are what is working, relative to the Russian morale. Western weaponry would not be sufficient if the morale advantage was reversed. He'd missed that nearly entirely in earlier assessments and still struggles to recognize it.

He feeds into Putin's narrative that this is a proxy war between the West and Putin's Russia, rather than the West coming to the defense of sovereign neighbor brutally attacked...very different tone and Hanson knows it. He ain't dumb.

Hanson then turns to scenarios that are indeed very thorny...I say, 'ya, und?'...what is the recommendation?

Ohh yeah, force the Ukrainians to negotiate and accede to Putin's demands, else America will "slide into a nuclear confrontation with a desperate autocrat".

Same old story.

Hanson should stick to writing conservative opinions about history. But that ain't where the $$$ are I guess.

So he acknowledges the Ukrainians superior morale but somehow he doesn't consider that a factor in their success ?

He's making the point that the Ukrainians superior morale is a factor but that would not be enough without superior western weapons.
Do you disagree with that ?

As you know, I certainly think that "superior western weapons" matter (a lot), especially precision targeted.

However, Hanson does not say that the Ukrainians had/have a big advantage in morale...he nods at the importance of morale, but then ignores it, though he does describe the Ukrainians as "heroic".

Soon the conflict descended into a war of attrition in Eastern Ukraine over the occupied majority Russian-speaking borderlands.

That deadlock was eventually going to be resolved by relative morale, manpower, and supply.

Would the high-tech weaponry and money of the United States and Europe allow heroic Ukrainian forces to be better equipped than a larger Russian force—drawing on an economy 10 times greater and a population nearly four times larger than Ukraine’s?

After the latest sudden Ukrainian territorial gains and embarrassing Russian retreats, we now know the answer.

Russia may be bigger and richer than Ukraine, but it is not up to the combined resources of the United States, along with the nations of NATO and the European Union.

Most are now in a de facto proxy war with an increasingly overwhelmed Russia. And so far, a circumspect China has not stepped in to try to remedy the Russian dilemma.

What you say is a "nod" is establishing it as a given in the analysis. Rather than restating it, it is implicit in the terminology used -- morale...heroic...embarrassing.

He cites morale as one of the 3 factors determining the outcome of the battles in the east.
He doesn't even include weapons superiority in that formula, since he had already established it as a given.

It's obvious that superiority in both weaponry AND morale are consistent factors in the success.
You're splitting hairs.

What were Hanson's earlier assessments which were wrong ?

It's naive to deny that the Ukrainians are US proxies -- supply, training, ISR & limits to targeting.

I think you're reading into what he wrote overly generously. My assumption is that he's a smart guy and is choosing his words and logic construct carefully. And, thus, if he'd wished to emphasize that fighting to protect one's country, one's family, one's community, one's children against a brutal aggressor committing atrocities is a vastly superior motivation to that of conscripts and mercenaries invading a country they assumed would be a pushover, he'd have said that. But he didn't.

I see that as a conscious choice.
If you want to say he's just sloppy in his writing and that of course he must have meant that, ok.
(You and I would agree that both factors have been very important).

But what I've seen of his logic, right from the beginning of his commentaries and as a through line through out, is that Russia has vastly superior resources and military, and that Ukraine can't possibly win (a moving prescription for limiting Ukraine's loss, never victory), that the US and the West should not get involved as that will feed into Putin's narrative of this being a proxy war instead of a war of self-defense, moving to the US shouldn't do more because that risks nuclear confrontation, that the best that could be hoped for would be a limited Ukrainian defeat sold as a 'win', and then containment of Russia, not defeat of Putin's aggression...especially given the prediction that the Europeans would not step up and stand strong with Ukraine...a prediction that keeps being proven wrong as well.

All with the Biden bad, Trump good messaging as undercurrent.
And the other undercurrent being a "historical" justification of Putin's ambitions.

You gloss over the fact that Hanson consistently refers to the Ukrainians as heroic & cites their morale as a factor.
If he ever does another edition of Carnage and Culture he'll likely do a chapter on the Ukrainians.
The time to examine that is after the victory is won.
How do you read that he thinks the US should not be involved ? He reminds us that Trump delivered aid when Obama-Biden & the EUros would not.
Like all sane observers, he warns of the danger in escalating when the opponent is a madman with nucs (Strangelove ref).
He also reminds us that Biden has vowed not to get US forces involved, which limits how much we can do.
He's been accurate in his analysis, so far, & has been less pessimistic than most of the military experts.
He's not a cheerleader, projecting his own preferred outcome into his analysis.
He acknowledges the heroism of the Ukrainians as well as the criticality of western aid.
It's just too soon to declare victory. As a historian, he'll have to stand by anything he predicts now.

I'm curious. Which other historians are declaring victory?

[old salt]

This is from the editor at the NYT Book Review who wrote the review of the VDH book I posted a few pages back.
He is a Kissinger expert & acolyte, ...& it shows. This is as realpolotik as it gets. I find it convincing & somewhat reassuring.

Opinion
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/wi ... ine-203243

Will Putin Cross Western Redlines in Ukraine?
Vladimir Putin is not the only one who can draw red lines.
by Barry Gewen, June 27, 2003

THE RUSSIAN invasion of Ukraine has brought home an unpalatable but clarifying truth: For all the expressions of moral outrage and the exhortations of militant rhetoric, the United States and its allies are not about to risk World War III by fighting to preserve Ukrainian independence. The West has shown itself willing to spend billions in military and humanitarian assistance, but ultimately the Ukrainians are on their own.

To everyone’s surprise, they are doing remarkably well indeed. But that could change. As we now know, Vladimir Putin is unpredictable, even irrational. He could choose to end the war with an exit ramp that allows him to declare “victory”—the most important buttress in the ramp being a guarantee by the West that Ukraine will never join NATO—or he could decide to double-down, committing yet more atrocities and war crimes, killing yet more civilians, unleashing devastation on yet more Ukrainian cities.

Putin has already been accused, even by the president of the United States, of waging a genocidal war. That isn’t true—no more than saying the United States waged a genocidal war in Vietnam. But if Putin were to bring more lethal force to bear in Ukraine, the situation may come close to the public’s perception of genocide, and the pressure to “do something” would grow. Would that change the West’s posture on the conflict? It is hard to see the White House deciding to intervene militarily, even if Russia’s war crimes mounted. It is even harder to see France and Germany agreeing to commit their troops and risk their civilian populations at home. Should Washington go it alone and raise the stakes militarily in response to a Russian escalation, Putin would have achieved one of his long-term goals: weakening NATO.

And what if, in desperation, he employed a tactical nuclear weapon? Based on several conversations I have had, that would be the final straw for many otherwise moderate people, and they would advocate for a military response in order to “punish” Putin. But it’s difficult to understand the rationale for this. Western intervention in protest against the use of a nuclear weapon in Ukraine could well bring about the use of many more nuclear weapons, and beyond Ukraine. Call this appeasement if you will, but moral outrage is a dangerous basis for foreign policy. The geopolitical principle for letting the Ukrainians fight on their own will not have changed even with the introduction of nuclear weapons or the total destruction of Kyiv. Nothing that happens inside Ukraine should cause us to “sleepwalk” into World War III.

Like it or not, Putin has drawn a red line around Ukraine, and he has offered historical, cultural, and religious reasons for his use of force. We don’t have to agree with those reasons (though how many of us are expert enough in the tangled history of Russia and Ukraine to provide knowledgeable responses?), but we have accepted his red line. We have even indicated our understanding that halfway measures like a no-fly zone would be a violation of that line.

However, Putin is not the only one who can draw red lines. If the West’s leaders and diplomats are doing their jobs, they have already communicated to him that the West has red lines of its own. Ukraine may be Putin’s playground, but the member-states of NATO are not, and any move against Poland or the Baltic states would result in a full-fledged and united response. Setting boundaries is a two-way street.

It’s true that red lines are not always the best way to conduct diplomacy. Misused, they can produce inflexibility and raise false hopes. But with dangerously ambiguous situations—like the status of Ukraine—they can bring clarification. Each side is given warning of just how far it can go. The West has to make clear that it will fight to preserve NATO against Russian military encroachment, even if it will not fight for the sake of Ukrainian independence. That is—or should be—our red line.

Barry Gewen is an editor at the New York Times Book Review and the author of The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World.