Quote (IceMage @ Nov 5 2023 02:21am)
But helping the Ukrainians fight back against Putin's expansionist ambitions is clearly in our interest, and our support(along with the rest of Europe) has changed the result.
I honestly don't even understand the argument. You're saying "the US should've allowed Russia to conquer Ukraine, it was in our interest and Europe's interest to do so", but you don't really make an argument for it. You simply argue that what we have done has consequences. Sure, the war might end with Russia ending up with some parts of Ukraine, but the Ukrainian nation will still exist. That's still a win for the US-led world order. And Putin's army and nation will have taken a significant beating, showing how expansion in this world does not come without a real cost.
As I said in my last post, I don't know that you and I even agree on what a positive result would be. I'm a supporter of a US-led world order. But I'm not sure you are, so my arguments in favor of upholding that world order obviously aren't persuasive for you, because you don't believe in it. But if you don't support it, you should make that clear in the argument, instead of hiding behind "but China".
Who has the expansionist ambitions here? The whole thing started with us expanding into Ukraine via color revolution. The interventionalists would make the same superficial arguments that spreading American influence, our brand of 'democracy' (nevermind the democracy we overthrew) is in our interests. And there's a cynical argument for treating Ukraine as a pawn to be conquered in the name of US ambitions. But that argument, just like the one being made by interventionalists now, is myopic. It only looks like its clearly in our interests when our vision is short sighted. What do we accomplish by taking Ukraine, if we can't hold it? What do we accomplish by throwing US military support at western Ukraine if Russia gets back the half of the country they wanted and all we get is a major liability as the poorest and least resource rich stretch of Europe is bombed to rubble and depopulated as another refugee crisis swarms the EU like Syria 2.0?
That's not a win for a "US-led world order". We may have wound up with more territory annexed into our sphere of influence than pre-2014, but its territory we don't want and don't profit from, taken at severe cost not measured in lives or treasure but in stability and geopolitical influence. Is it worth losing the petrodollar? Is it worth showing China the impotency of our military might and their capability to seize Taiwan by force? Is it worth the flood of refugees and weaponry, the hungry mouths on an EU now being choked away from critical energy and food resources? Was it worth getting the unaligned ascendant world powers like India to align against us with China and Russia?
That's the thing.
I am the supporter of the US-led world order here. I want to see a less dangerous world where China doesn't feel empowered to take Taiwan and Putin has no need to invade his allies. And everything the Biden administration has done is completely self-destructive and causing the worst possible outcomes on all those fronts. We're not upholding a world order, we're actively sabotaging it. Alienating our allies, aligning the rest of the world with our enemies, losing our economic control, showing other countries they can beat us militarily, conjuring up our own liabilities and conflicts in countries that used to be peaceful and stable, our bull in their china shop. I could not possibly be less persuaded by shallow arguments that basically boil down to 'putin bad, must punch putin'. The argument should always have been framed as what can we do and what is the cost. It was easy to predict this failure, and we're in the middle of it now, and I'm not going to be some great nostradamus when years down the road we look back and say oh, that backfired. Just like Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc etc
This post was edited by Goomshill on Nov 5 2023 02:10am