Quote:
Originally Posted by Targan
It's pretty obvious that the biggest mistake Ukraine made wasn't in 2013, or 2014, or at any time during the current hot phase of their conflict with Russia. Ukraine's biggest mistake was in 1994 when it believed that the security assurances given by Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States were worth any more than the paper they were written on.
Giving Ukraine just enough equipment and ordnance to keep the conflict at a stalemate isn't doing anyone any good. Soldiers on both sides keep dying in appalling numbers, the Russians continue to engage in war crimes and crimes against humanity on a daily basis while the western world watches on and makes "tut-tut" noises, and Putin knows with almost total certainty that given time, the rest of the world will stop caring enough and he'll get what he wants.
If the west wasn't going to intervene properly at the start, with a Ukraine-wide no-fly zone and even better, boots on the ground, then we should have given the Ukrainians everything they needed, from day one. What's the point of helping someone fight a war if you know the help isn't sufficient to guarantee they'll win? At this point I genuinely can't judge whether or not Ukraine would be better off capitulating.
Many of us are Cold War kids. Teenaged me would be utterly horrified and totally confused if I was brought forward in time and saw this travesty underway today. It's like testosterone levels dropped by 80% over the last 30 years.
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Funny you mention that. I saw somewhere that the average testosterone levels for 18 year old men now is at the same level as 65 year old men 23 years ago, so maybe there is something to that theory.
In grand geopolitical terms, I think we are seeing the death of the Westphalian nation-state. Most countries, especially non-nuclear armed countries, are actually incapable of defending themselves against any serious aggressor. Ukraine almost certainly would have fallen by now without Western aid, even as inept as the Russians have proven to be in military combat and logistics. The nation-state status quo was stabilized by shifting alliances through the end of colonialism, and then through the Cold War by the two-pole geopolitical system, but now all that is dead. So what's to stop Venezuela from invading Guyana if they want to and the United States chooses to do nothing? Brazil? The UK? And let's say the UK does decide to do something - is it a sure thing that the UK will prevail in a conventional conflict half a hemisphere away when their entire army now numbers only 75,000 men and women in active duty?
I remember when NATO decided to support the Libyan rebels, and the combined combat forces of Germany, Italy, and the UK (and maybe France) were completely dependent on the US for munitions to bomb Libya with.
If Ukraine was guilty of something, then most of the world was guilty of it as well, as they demobilized not only their military, but their infrastructure to support a military. When Russia originally invaded the Ukraine in 2014, Ukraine only had around a brigade of active duty soldiers to resist with. A lot of the initial combat against the Russians was by legit citizen militias. I think the mistake a lot of people made (including Biden) was thinking that Russia would be content with a minor land grab. It's apparent that Putin really does bemoan the collapse of the USSR and is looking to rekindle it, or at least rekindle the Russian empire as his legacy.