Quote (Black XistenZ @ Feb 2 2023 04:21pm)
There is a major difference this time around: the "foreign fighters" we're supporting with US weapon here are the organized armed forces of a sovereign nation with several hundred thousand trained soldiers at their disposal, and they are defending their homeland against a foreign invasion. Our failures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam etc. were always of the opposite variety, with our own forces being the invaders, or with our local allies being insurrectionists (e.g. Syria) or parties in a civil war (e.g. Vietnam). There is no reason whatsoever to think that Ukraine couldn't win a conventional war if only they have sufficient Western weapons at their disposal. (Whether that leads to Russia nuking Kyiv, to them retreating, or to good-faith peace negotiations is of course up for debate.)
What the West is doing is fairly transparent: supply Ukraine with as much weaponry as necessary so that they don't lose, while trying to avoid anything that comes with increased risk of escalation (e.g. an F16 which goes down on a Russian border town and causes a blazing inferno).
I don't see the difference between the US arming "parties in a civil war" and arming pro-western Ukrainians to fight Russians alongside pro-Russian Ukrainians. America and NATO in general have laid out how the only 'win' in this war is to expel Russia from the pro-Russian territories that formally joined Russia, which would not be a defensive action against invaders but the opposite, a ground invasion into hostile territory. They've rejected any peace talks that don't reclaim those territories under western Ukraine's yoke. And those aspirations sure seem far fetched right now. Most of the historical wars involve foreign superpower backers, we were arming Sunnis to fight the Russian-backed Assad. Just like Vietnam had rival parties with foreign backers, and its similar in Ukraine, so it won't be surprising when the outcome is the same.
Quote
That's a circular argument. You're postulating that Russia would definitely escalate with nukes once they realize they cannot hold on to the territory they want (because we supplied enough tanks, artillery and antiair to Ukraine), then use this postulate to arrive at your desired outcome, namely that this is a lose-lose scenario for the West in which no good endgame exists.
But that's kind of the point, isn't it? Even if we somehow could commit the resources necessary to actually drive a winning proxy war against Russia, Russia has the trump card of nukes and they would rather nuke Ukraine than lose the war. And that is most definitely a lose:lose scenario for us. But everything so far points to Russia winning this conventional war despite all the weapons we send to Ukraine, they're organizing a late February offensive by all accounts.
So how do we arrive at a positive outcome for us? If we were looking retroactive, Joe Biden
could have faced off against Putin prior to the invasion, staged NATO troops in Ukraine and said NATO would defend Ukraine like it was our own and dared him to move in. At a minimum, holding western Ukraine, or taking a NATO backed ground invasion against Russia. Which probably would have escalated into all out war and soon nuclear war, which is a very good reason why we
didn't take that line. But without NATO defending Ukraine, and Russian invading it directly, our proxy support either cannot hold Ukraine or at best could existentially threaten Russia to the point they'd sooner nuke Ukraine than back down.
I think long range missiles are a good example. If we supplied Ukraine with long range weapons capable of striking Moscow, and they did, then even if this wasn't enough to "win a conventional war", it would most certainly provoke Russia into a fatalist reaction.
In terms of whether we could supply enough tanks and heavy weaponry and jets so that Ukraine could actually siege the separatist regions? I think its just unrealistic.