No. of Recommendations: 2
No, you don't.
Uh, huh. How well did Obama's "That's a red line - don't you go crossing it!" work? Not very well. Because that's the thing in poker: if you're bluffing, there's a nonzero chance that the other players end up calling your bluff and at that point you throw your cards down.
Obama folded. Didn't do anything when other parties crossed his red lines. What are you willing to do for the Ukrainians?
Smaller countries are frequently able to drive out occupiers and invaders that are much larger than they are as long as they are adequately resourced.
You guys keep coming back to this. You're drawing on what you think are clever arguments from the American Revolution, Iraq and Afghanistan. But you're wrong historically. Rather...badly.
In the American Revolution, the British were interested in keeping their colonies as they saw them as a significant economic engine for the Empire.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the Americans fought insurgents while simultaneously building infrastructure and trying to do economic development.
Now. Are the Russians doing economic development inside the Ukraine right now?
Quite the opposite. No sooner do the Ukrainians fix their power grid than does a drone from Putin fly over and take it right back down again. What's the quality of life of your average Ukrainian not on the front lines right now?
A force defending their homeland can repel a vastly larger armed force. Heck, that's what we've seen with Ukraine for the last three years - they were perfectly capable of keeping the Russians deadlocked and defending their nation, provided we gave them the resources to do it.
This is the European argument: let's keep having Zelensky blood Putin until Putin gets tired and quits. It's such a flawed way of looking at it I don't know where to begin.
1. It assumes an infinite well of dudes for Zelensky to call on <--- he doesn't have this
2. It assumes Putin is a rational actor <--- he's not
Well, Trump apparently just cut Ukraine off - so clearly he's not all that concerned with making sure Russia pays a price for their invasion.
He just gave Zelensky a great incentive to dust off his suit, fly the F back to D.C., sign the minerals agreement, have lunch, and then go home.
And Ukraine's strategic importance lies in the global collective security principles that underlie the entire Westphalian system.
Does it, now. Where were these Wesphalian principles when Putin seized the Crimea? Or invaded Georgia?
Which is the sort of military adventuring that blew up into two full on World Wars, and is vastly more dangerous now that nuclear weapons are in the mix. That was the benefit of the Pax Americana - we ran a massive military and made sure that the world wasn't constantly wracked by military conquest.
Uh, huh.
The West failed to stop Hitler because of simple aversion to fighting and the assumption they were dealing with a rational actor in Hitler. They weren't. The Allied armies particularly the French were in fact numerically superior to the Wehrmacht in 1938 and could have easily marched into the Ruhr and put a stop to Hitler's early advances. They didn't.
In this case there's already a shooting war going on that's resulted in a battlefield stalemate. The historical analogy is not in fact World War II, but World War I where the Imperial German Army had advanced deep into France and the front had stabilized only 100 miles from Paris.
The British? Were running out of dudes to send.
The French? Half the French army was in a state of mutiny.
Does this sound familiar? That's the situation the Ukrainians are in right here, right now.
