Fireside this week! We actually haven’t had one of these in quite a while; we had a gap week in April but the last Fireside looks like it was in March! In any case, here we are and here’s Ollie:
For this week’s musing, I want to muse on the impact of the ‘long peace‘ on modern military capabilities. For those unfamiliar with the concept, the ‘long peace’ is a term we apply to the period since WWII which has had a low and indeed falling level of war, both inter-state and intra-state. Normally, when I say this is something that has happened, I find I encounter a great deal of incredulity among the general public. Surely they can list off any number of wars or other violent conflicts that happened recently. But the data here is actually quite strong (and we all know my attitude towards certainty on points of real uncertainty; this is not one of them) – violence has been falling worldwide for nearly 80 years, the fall has been dramatic and relatively consistent. It could end tomorrow, but it didn’t end yesterday. What I think leads to the misconception that there is no long peace is that this has also been a period of rising connectivity and information movement: wars are both fewer and smaller, but you hear about more of them.
I’ve discussed this before a few times, but I think Azar Gat is probably right to suggest that the long peace is itself a consequence of the changing incentives created by the industrial revolution and to an even greater extent, by nuclear weapons. Prior to the industrial revolution, war was the best way to get rich (if you won) because land and conquered subjects were so much more valuable than any kind of capital investment (infrastructure, manufacture, tools, etc.) that could have been developed with the same resources. The industrial revolution changes this, both by making war a lot more destructive (thus lowering returns to successful warfare)1 while at the same time massively raising returns to capital investment in things like infrastructure, factories and tractors. It suddenly made more sense, if you coveted your neighbors resources, to build more factories and buy those resources than to try to seize them by force. Nuclear weapons in turn took this same effect and ratcheted it up even further, by effectively making the cost of total war infinite.
I should note I find this version of the argument, based on incentives and interests more compelling than Steven Pinker’s version of the argument based on changing cultural mores. If anything, I think cultural values have lagged, resulting in countries launching counter-productive wars out of cultural inertia (because it’s ‘the doing thing’ or valued in the culture) long after such wars became maladaptive. Indeed, I’d argue that’s exactly what Russia is doing right now.
All of that is background for a thought I had discussing with some colleagues the dismal performance of the Russian army. We have all noticed that the Russian military appears far less capable than we thought it was; frankly it seems incapable of even some of the very basic tasks of modern industrial armies engaged in conventional military operations. Shockingly, it is a lot less capable of these things than older armies of yesteryear with much more limited technology. It’s not hard to imagine that even without all of the advanced technology, that by sheer mass and dint of high explosives (and basic logistical competence) that a capable mid-20th century army might well perform better than the Russian army has.
Yet the odd thought I had was this: what if Russian incompetence isn’t exceptional, but in fact the new normal in warfare? What is – quietly, because they haven’t tried to launch a major invasion recently – most militaries are probably similarly incapable of the basic tasks of industrial warfare?
Being good at war imposes a lot of costs, even if a country doesn’t go to war. Soldiers need to be recruited, trained and equipped. Equipment must be maintained and kept up to date. Officers need to be mentally agile and sharp. Experience needs to be retained and institutionalized. Capable leaders need to be promoted and incapable but politically influential leaders sidelined. The state, as we’ve discussed, emerged as an engine to do all of these things, but these are all difficult, unpleasant and expensive things. They all impose tradeoffs. An army filled with capable, educated and talented young officers is, for instance, a significant risk to regime stability, especially for non-democratic regimes. Recruiting quality means either institutionalizing conscription (politically unpopular) or raising taxes and spending a lot of money (also politically unpopular).
What kept states doing all of that was a sure knowledge that if they didn’t, the cost would be state extinction. Take a modern country like Venezuela. Venezuela is a basket-case, with catastrophic inflation combined with a moribund economy almost entirely reliant on oil exports, all atop substantial internal instability. Prior to the long peace, there’s little question what happens to a country like Venezuela, which is essentially a giant pile of barely guarded wealth: one – or several – of its neighbors would move in, oust the government and seize the territory and its valuable resources (oil, in this case). But because the leaders of a country like Venezuela know that, they may well try to avoid developing their country into such a weak state in the first place. Sure, bribery and corruption are fun, but only if you live long enough to use it; it’s not worth ruining the economy if the only consequence is being killed when Brazil, Colombia or the United States invades, disassembles your weakened and underfunded military and then annexes the country.
The reason that doesn’t happen is not because the United States, Brazil or Colombia has suddenly developed morality (the USA’s record as a neighbor to Central and South America is not one we ought generally to be proud of), but because it no longer makes economic sense to do so. The value of the oil and other resources would be less than the cost of maintaining control of the country. This is why, I’d argue, you see the proliferation of failed states globally: in the past it would be actively profitable for non-failed states to take advantage of them, but as a result of the changes in our economies, failed states instead represent a question of managing costs. States no longer ask if they can profit through a war of conquest, but rather if they’d spend less managing the disaster that a local failed state is by invading versus trying to manage the problem via aid or controlling refugee flows. Even by that calculation, invasion has generally proved a losing option.
But that has a downstream implication on what the militaries of most countries are for. In the past, militaries were necessary to deter invasion (or to profit from your own conquests). But in a world where most invasions are – or at least ought to be – self-deterring, for countries that do not have revanchist neighbors who might launch a stupid war of conquest out of pique, the bar to reach that kind of deterrence is extremely low (and of course if your potential threat is a great power like the United States or arguably China, having a military with a meaningful deterrence value might be beyond your abilities even if you focused on it. If the USA decides that a military solution is the least-bad-option regarding Venezuela (I think this would be a mistake), there isn’t much Venezuela could do about it). In that case, the traditional mission of most militaries stops being a major concern.
But then note how this impacts all of those difficult decisions a state has to make in order to retain a military capable of conventional warfare. It suddenly becomes a lot harder to justify all of those trade-offs. The threat that was keeping you ‘honest’ is greatly reduced, if not gone. Instead, the new incentive for most countries would be to build a military in a way that aims to minimize the political costs, rather than maximize combat power or even ‘security.‘ And I think that’s exactly what we see countries doing, in different ways based on their form of government.
For consolidated democracies with lots of legitimacy, which tend to be less worried about the possibility of an army filled with voters overthrowing the government, it makes sense not to build an army for conventional operations but instead with an eye towards the kinds of actions which mitigate the harm caused by failed states: armies aimed at policing actions or humanitarian operations. That also has the neat benefit of giving the country a low-cost way to ‘help out’ in an alliance system like NATO, which in turn serves to stabilize alliances with still-militarized, conventionally capable great powers, who then cover the issue of deterring a conventional war. Perun actually had a pretty good video walking through this logic.
Alternately, for low legitimacy forms of government, like autocracies, the concern is squarely centered on internal stability, and here we see a wave of armies designed primarily for ‘coup proofing.’ Russia’s military is actually a pretty good example of how this is done. An authoritarian government is looking to both maximize the ability of the army to engage in repression while minimize it as a threat to its rule. ‘Coup proofing’ of this sort follows a fairly consistent basic model (which I may elaborate on at a later date). First, command needs to be divided so that no one general or minister of defense can turn the whole defense apparatus against the leader. You can see this with how the Russian armed forces were fragmented, with Rosgvardiya and Wagner Group not reporting to the ministry of defense, but it also extends to the structure of the Russian Ministry of Defense, where the Army, the Navy and the Airborne forces (the VDV) all maintain infantry forces. Setting things up that way means that, in a pinch perhaps elite, well-paid and loyal VDV forces could be used to counter-balance grumbling disloyalty in, say, the army. Of course such fragmented command is really bad if you need to launch a conventional war, as, in the event, it was.
Meanwhile, maximizing the army for repression means developing paramilitary internal police forces at scale (Rosgvardiya is an obvious example), which direct resources away from core conventional military; such security-oriented forces aren’t designed for a conventional war and perform poorly at it. The People’s Republic of China is also reported to have this problem: internal security and repression absorb a lot of their security funds. At the same time, if the purpose of a military is internal repression, that means the loyalty of that army – or at least its officers and elite units – is the priority. As anyone who has ever run any kind of organization knows, making people happy and making the organization run efficiently are rarely fully compatible goals. Getting a military ready for a real fight invariably involves a lot of unpleasant tasks (or expensive ones) that soldiers might rather just not do (or might rather just embezzle the resources for), and if the goal is regime stability, it makes sense to let them not do them (or embezzle the resources). Meanwhile, the state is promoting not for capability, but for loyalty, which is why a blockhead like Valery Gerasimov might still be in command 15 months into a war in which his leadership has been astoundingly poor.2
All of which is to say, the brutal do-or-die demands (or in fancy speak, ‘the pressures of interstate anarchy’) which once forced most states to at least try to maintain competitive, conventionally capable militaries are fading because modern weapons and modern economies have changed the balance of incentives. Consequently, I suspect Russia is not the only paper tiger out there; the forest is likely to be full of them. Indeed, the exceptions are likely to be the handful of countries which still do feel the need to maintain competitive, conventionally capable armies either because they feel they have real security threats from revanchist powers (Israel, Taiwan, Poland, Finland, Ukraine, etc.) or because they form the backbone of an international system which requires that someone carry a big stick (the United States). Of course the big unanswered and at the moment unanswerable question is where countries like India or the People’s Republic of China fit. Are their militaries remaining sharp in preparation for possible great power conflicts or are they too letting the edge dull?
I sincerely hope we never find out. A world whose tanks are filled with cobwebs, where it makes little sense for most countries to focus massive resources on their militaries is a happier world. But I fear it is not yet the world we live in.
On to Recommendations!
First off, our valiant narrator has been at it; with so few Firesides lately, I have a bit of a backlog of his updates (and likewise a backlog in adding links to the relevant posts). In particular, he’s added the series on Crusader Kings III to the Teaching Paradox playlist, as well as recording audio versions of the “One Year into the War in Ukraine” retrospective, James Baillie’s excellent discussion of digital humanities and prosopography in the medieval Caucasus and Michael Taylor’s look back at The Face of Battle. All now ripe and ready for your listening enjoyment!
As usual for those looking to keep track of the war in Ukraine, Michael Kofman’s podcast appearances over at War on the Rocks remain very valuable; his latest was on May 30th talking about the potential of Ukraine’s coming offensive and is well worth your time. At time of writing, that offensive has clearly begun, but we know relatively little about how it is proceeding this early on, except that (as functionally everyone predicted), wars result in equipment losses, even fancy western equipment. I should note Kofman also has a more in-depth podcast series, The Russia Contingency, which I think is quite good but sits behind the War on the Rocks paywall.
Speaking of things behind paywalls, there were a few good recent articles over at Foreign Policy that I think deserve a look, though those too are (I assume) behind their subscriber wall. Evan Thomas offers a defense of the use of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the grounds that it was the ‘least bad option.’ That is not a popular position to take amongst much of the public these days (particularly in online spaces that lean left) but I think it is valuable to engage with the arguments even if one does not agree. I’ve made this point before but the fact is the issue is a complex one and anyone offering a simple answer is wrong. Certainty that the bombs were dropped as the last bad options is unwarranted (Soviet reception was a factor), but at the same time, certainty that Japanese surrender was immanent without the bombs is also unwarranted – our visibility into Japanese decision-making in that period remains less than perfect but it seems fairly clear that the all-important IJA and IJN intended to keep fighting.
Also at Foreign policy, Derek Grossman of RAND offers something of a sanguine view of the place of American diplomacy in Oceania, particularly in the context of competition with the People’s Republic of China. Once again, I don’t think one needs to entirely take on board the argument for it to be useful. American discourse about everything, but especially on security tends to accentuate the negative to the point of doomerism when I think the position of the United States – or more correctly the ‘status quo coalition,’ an idea I’ll develop a bit more in this space in July – retains strong advantages and there are in fact a lot of reasons to see potential upsides in the future generally (not the least of which is the continued decline of warfare noted above).
On the history front, Evan Schultheis on Twitter decided to build a massive Twitter thread dumping information about all sorts of organic armors (textile and leather) in the ancient world which is worth a read. This is a topic I intend to return to at some point, but in the meantime Evan knows his business on military equipment. I suppose I would offer a one caveat; the first is that just because the sources do not require glued linen armor (which Evan is 100% correct, they do not) does not necessarily rule it out (though I think it makes it quite unlikely). On balance, I would tend to think the textile ‘tube and yoke’ cuirass was more common than leather and I’d really like to see a twined linen reconstruction which acts the way we see these act in artwork (particularly their fairly rigid structure; the ‘yoke’ over the shoulders stands almost upright when not tied down in artwork). That said, I suspect that such a reconstruction would act that way, and I think seeing it demonstrated would be enough to convince me. Evan also briefly mentions the unreliability of Raffaele D’Amato’s work; this I would like to echo. D’Amato’s arms and armor reconstructions are frequently tendentious or even just wrong and he also seems to have been involved in more than a little shady sounding things in the world of antiquities. Do not rely on D’Amato on Roman military equipment.
I also really liked this r/AskHistorians response from Roel Konijnendijk (under his nom de plume of Iphikrates) on how hard ancient soldiers might train physically and how physically fit they might have been. In particular, he pushes back on the notion that all ancient warriors were ‘ripped,’ noting that these men were generally part-time soldiers conscripted from the farming classes and that armies of part-timers like this performed fine; the Romans conquered the Mediterranean with a citizen militia (albeit one that did train its soldiers once they were in the army and where they tended to serve long(ish) stints in service). I would suggest that, probably by the Middle Republic (but the evidence is hardly secure) the Romans seem to be doing training for ‘skill at arms’ and some level of fitness training was also clearly part of the mix by the imperial period (and perhaps earlier), but Roman soldiers too were not ultra-jacked supermen. We actually see a lot of senior Roman centurions represented visually on gravestones and what we see are pretty regular looking men; these are idealizing portraits, but that should tell us that if there was some ideal for Roman soldiers to be ripped like body-builders or Hollywood action stars, we’d see that. In practice, a big part of the issue here, as Roel notes, is that the modern conception of the ideal male form isn’t one that performs optimally or is normally attainable.
Finally, for this week’s book recommendation, I’m going to recommend something perhaps a touch more sentimental than analytical, J.D. Hornfischer, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors (2004). It would be easy, but I think wrong, to say the book was about the Battle off Samar, part of the larger Battle of Leyte Gulf, one of the most seemingly unlikely victories in US naval history, but I think it is more accurate to say that this is a book about the sailors who fought the Battle off Samar. Unlike previous recommendation Shattered Sword, which for all of its humanizing detail was first and foremost an analysis of the Battle of Midway, Hornfischer here is about the sailors more than the last stand of the title, though both matter a great deal.
For those unfamiliar with the Battle off Samar, the battle, taking place on October 25, 1944, was part of the much bigger Battle of Leyte Gulf; in this part of the engagement, the Japanese Center Force under the command of Takeo Kurita – an extremely powerful battle group including four battleships including the Yamato, the largest battleship ever put to sea, plus six heavy cruisers, two light and eleven destroyers – attempting to strike the American landing force instead encountered a small US escort group, Taffy 3, consisting of 6 small, slow escort carriers and 7 destroyers (four of which were actually even smaller destroyer escorts). Yamato alone displaced more mass than the entirety of Taffy 3. At the same time, the US escort carriers, which weren’t designed for this kind of fleet engagement (thus the word escort there) lacked the airpower to do serious harm to the Japanese battlegroup but also weren’t fast enough to get away either. The massive Yamato was, in fact, faster than the tiny escort carriers it was chasing. The battle is thus a desperate delaying action by the US ships present, with destroyers charging ships twenty times their size in an effort to slow down the IJN advance to buy time for help to arrive. In the end, almost preposterously, the tiny ships of Taffy 3 actually turned back Kurita’s Center Force and even more preposterously, inflicted more losses on the attacker than they sustained (though losses in Taffy 3 were heavy).
But what I find valuable and worth reading about this book – beyond Hornfischer’s writing, which is excellent, you will tear through this book – is that is focus isn’t on the battle but the men in the battle. The central question of the book is really less ‘how could such a victory be won’ so much as ‘what kind of person could win such a victory?’ Doubtless to some degree the portraits of the heroes of the day are sanded to a nice, smooth heroic finish in Hornfischer’s prose, but the portrait is still valuable because these sailors and officers were not the Best of the Best of the Best, they were not the elite of the US navy. These were, after all, relatively small, in theory unimportant ships; many of their crews were fairly new as were some of their officers. Instead the victors off Samar turn out to mostly be pretty regular fellows who, in a moment of crisis, saw what needed to be done and did it, understanding full well it might demand their lives (and in many cases did).
And the reminder that wars are not won by the efforts of the ultra-elite super-special forces that get features in Call of Duty games, but rather by the exceptional heroism of unexceptional soldiers and sailors is a good one.
- And we should note here both more destructive in the sense that casualties went up dramatically, but also more destructive in that industrialized wars are far more capable of destroying the new, infrastructure-heavy industrial methods of production. It is really quite hard for ancient or medieval armies to do meaningful long-term damage to an agricultural economy; farmers flee, crops are hard to destroy and in any case armies can’t do anything to the land itself. Even a sustained collapse might mean something like only a 25% reduction in total production; by contrast Liberia lost 90% of its GDP in just six years of internal warfare from 1989 to 1995. Industrial armies can easily destroy factories, level a non-trivial percentage of a country’s housing stock, torch its electrical grid and thus greatly reduce its economic production This can happen even if the country in question wins – ask Britain or the USSR after WWII.
- It’s behind the paywall, but I recommend Michael Kofman and Dara Massicot’s absolutely withering podcast on “Gerasimov’s Failed Offensive” for what I thought was a sharp but entirely justified critique of Gerasimov’s failures.
It seems like you might be missing an important ‘not’ in the first half of the very last sentence.
Couple of points:
Armies are often for more than defence. In the imperial period the Roman army was an engineering corps, a means of integrating people into Roman ways, an internal police force (banditry was an endemic problem) and the political base of imperial power. The Victorian British army was – perhaps unfairly – characterised a “gigantic system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy” (the real soldiering was done by the Indian Army). The Indonesian army is a patronage network, a means of maintaining state cohesion across the archipelago and only lastly a deterrent against invasion (the same could be said of many others – not least in Latin America).
Secondly, wars are fought for more than gain. The great contests of the last two centuries have been ideological – France’s neighbours went to war against the Revolution because they feared the spread of its ideology; ditto (in large part) Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914 (only liberal nationalism was the enemy). Germany reverted to conquest for gain in the 30s – and its enemies fought a crusade. The fights in the Cold War were again ideological. For an ideological issue to lead to war the ideology has first to capture a state.
A third point is that there is a dual interaction between the issues at stake and the ability to mobilise resources. The political base of Putin’s regime is far too narrow to allow full mobilisation – most Russians are not invested in the war. Likewise, the issues in Iraq or Afghanistan or Somalia were not compelling enough engage the mass of Americans (and Vietnam showed the difficulty of mobilising to fight a war that most people did not care about). If your values or your lives are not at threat, people will not turn out. If they do not turn out, then your capabilities will not suffice to fight a full-scale war.
The rise of fascism and communism 1930-1990 was arguably about economics, namely reactions against the coming of global capitalism and attempts to create alternative economic systems. In that extended sense WW2 and the Cold War were about attempts by the alternate systems to seize resources and workers, and the resistance by the capitalist powers. Indeed communism especially was ideologically and politically about little else besides economics.
“Indeed communism especially was ideologically and politically about little else besides economics.”
+1000.
Conservatives and liberals both, but especially Anglo-American conservatives, never seem to get this.
It’s something about not being so credulous about what people SAY.
??
Economic change was certainly a factor – but the movements were generated by the ensuing threats to the social order. Fascism was reactionary (Nazism was something else). That all major movements have an economic program (that is, ideas about changes in who gets what, on what basis) does not make them only about economics.
^Sorry, that was supposed to be a reply to @mindstalk0 ‘s comment about Adam Tooze (Wages of Destruction)
? I haven’t said anything about Tooze.
Double-sorry; my browser is playing tricks on me with stuff taking forever to load.
TIK says that your thoughts on this are wrong. Communism is fundamentally a cultish religious movement. Dialectical Materialism is a Religion:
I can’t claim enough familiarity with Marx to comment on the philosophical and ideological underpinnings of his writings. I would say that as came to pass in the Twentieth Century, it was “The Revolution” that was fundamentally a cultish religious movement. The perceived necessity of adopting a totalitarian mindset to win a revolutionary struggle and afterwards uphold the new system against any counter-revolution or revisionism. This was not unique to Communism; Nazism or even the Reign of Terror are other examples. For an earlier example that was literally a cultish religious movement there were the Puritans during the English Commonwealth.
A vision of a better world is not necessarily a cult (or, if it is, all significant movements are cults). Liberalism was a radical movement for a century or more – with a fiercely debated ideology. Marx was part of a broad spectrum of ‘socialist’ thinkers and advocates (St Simon, Owen, Proudhon..). The Second International is the departure point for modern social democracy, the Third for Leninist movements. Even then, there is considerable divergence – Castro is not Stalin, and Gramsci or Mandel are not Lenin.
It would be nice if we could effect great social changes without bloodshed – but there are not many examples of it. Repression often has as many – if less visible – victims – than revolution.
What makes it a cult is not a “vision of a better world” but the insane adherence to it after it has been refuted on its own terms. Marx himself called it scientific, which means it was refuted when its predications were falsified.
Beginning with e.g. Eduard Bernstein and the “revisionists”. At which point the True Believers doubled down and really did become a secular cult.
“It would be nice if we could effect great social changes without bloodshed – but there are not many examples of it. Repression often has as many – if less visible – victims – than revolution.”
+1000.
As if the Revolution did not issue in Repression.
Communism is a lot more than Marx and Engels, or dialectical materialism, though. Just like Christianity is about a lot more than the gospels.
In essence communism is about the question of how the means of production should be owned and managed. That question would remain a big issue of contention even if Marx and Engels had never been born. And even if they had never been born, there would be people arguing that the best answer to that question was “by the state”, and other people arguing that the best answer was “by worker’s cooperatives”.
Which I would argue reveals a fundamental flaw in the entire socialist/communist framework. Ultimately, how the means of production is owned and managed is derivative from a more fundamental question: how are the means of production created? Those factories didn’t spring out of the ground like mushrooms after all; they were created by financiers, hence “capitalism”. And if you insist on a labor theory of value viewpoint, ultimately it’s “who compensated the farmers for growing food to feed the workers while they were building the factory”. Just as in feudalism the means of production (farmland) was acquired by armed force, hence the noble class who were not just the political rulers of their demesnes but literally their owners; because until the reemergence of a State only the feudal class had the means to secure control of the land, without which agriculture wouldn’t be possible.
In a pure redistribution-of-land revolution it’s the Party or the Revolutionary Council or whatever name it goes by that actually controls who the land is redistributed to, not the actual farmers or former foot soldiers of the revolution; and it uses those spoils for nakedly political purposes- see Zimbabwe. In an industrialized revolution such as the Soviet Union, planning bureaus backed by the power and authority of the Party-controlled state decide where resources will be allotted and what projects will be greenlit.
Communism as conceived of by Utopianists would only be possible in a world which had reached a steady-state, in which novel and disruptive advances in technology didn’t happen and all that was left was for the fixed means of production to be distributed as equitably as possible. But that borders on eschatology.
“Just as in feudalism the means of production (farmland) was acquired by armed force, hence the noble class who were not just the political rulers of their demesnes but literally their owners; because until the reemergence of a State only the feudal class had the means to secure control of the land, without which agriculture wouldn’t be possible.”
This is an excellent comment on the whole- I’m excerpting this bit of it since I for some reason can’t reply to the whole thing. But, I don’t think it “disproves” or tells against socialism/communism in general. In fact, your point here is a really good one, and underscores that the feudal lords played a historically necessary role *at a specific point in time*. I’d say though, that just as technological and social advancements eventually made it possible for the state to displace the feudal class, similarly I hope/expect that eventually the state can take over the role of capitalist classes today. I assume you don’t think that the feudal classes had a *moral* right to their estates, even if they played a historically necessarily role, and similarly I don’t think that capitalists have a *moral* right to derive income from other people’s labour.
It’s interesting that you bring up “Zimbabwe”, I feel like a lot of critics of socialism/communism do. It’s interesting that they rarely bring up, e.g., Hungary (whose agricultural sector was famously highly productive during the communist years), or Czechoslovakia, or East Germany (where the state sector, if I remember the article I read correctly, performed similarly to the private sector), or even, if you just want to restrict yourself to Africa, to a country like Burkina Faso (which, while *way* poorer than Zimbabwe, actually saw their abysmally low GDP/capita increase after they had a Marxist revolution in 1984). The thing that stands out to me when I look at the performance of agricultural sectors after they have a socialist revolution is how much variation between countries there is. Some countries had disastrous performance complete with famines, others had mediocre performance, still others did fairly well. Stalin’s famines (and Lenin’s famine) certainly exist, and need to be taken into account, but so do the other communist societies that managed to avoid such disastrous consquences.
In any case, I agree with you (and I’ve seen this case made by others) that a planned economy would work *best* in a world of stasis where there was no more need for innovation. But, I think that a planned economy can take account of the need for innovation to some extent (the state can hire smart engineers and scientists, after all), and I also think that socialism and the planned economy aren’t the same thing: a socialist society can have some role for markets (as Hungary and Yugoslavia did, for example).
Bit the problem Witherspoon the real existing socialist states is that they are one party states, where the party function as a ruling class, exploiting the labor of the masses (see Milovan Djilas “The New Class”). The difference between various socialist countries are like the differences between different feudal societies; some are more venal like others. The socialist countries collapsed for to reasons: the people wanted liberal rights (which included religious and ethnic self expression), and the ruling class failed to produce the material wealth the the ruling class of the competing system provided. So there was a system with exploitive class rule without material wealth and lacking liberal freedom competing with a system with exploitive class rule that produced material wealth and (in the societies bordering on Eastern Europe) granted liberal freedoms.
If there ever was a society were the toiling masses really were in economic power, so that there were no economically exploitative class, or even if the rule of a class of planners anywhere coexisted with liberal freedoms, the question would be different.
Why would we not think the feudal classes did not have a right to their position? They did their job, without which everyone would have been miserable, and are entitled to just recompense.
I think what @Hector_St_Clare meant-
-was that the nobility didn’t have an inherent right to see their social and political position endure forever after the circumstances- feudalism- that created them had subsequently passed away.
As if they were separate things
It would need to be able to take into account the FACT of innovation. Which will occur, needed or not.
For instance, people inventing means of communication around the state-controlled apparatus.
how are the means of production created? Those factories didn’t spring out of the ground like mushrooms after all; they were created by financiers, hence “capitalism”.
And the following about landlords ‘creating’ agriculture.
Sorry – no. Agriculture well pre-dates landlords, many places and times had productive agriculture without landlords. They do serve an economic purpose – they redirect surplus to other ends (peasant communes generally don’t build cathedrals).
Likewise, finance is a mechanism which in capitalist societies gives private interests the means to build factories or IT platforms or buy sports teams. In usual times much of the infrastructure that allows factories to be built is provided by the state; in unusual times transitions are managed by the state (eg the New Deal).
US practice is not world history.
Note that in Roman imperial times many of the major industries were run by the state.
True, agriculture existed prior to the state or to feudal landlords; but a reply by @mindstalk0 to a comment in a previous blog gave an excellent cite from Against the Grain by James Scott. Scott points out that it was specifically the introduction of grain that made large scale armies possible and thus the necessity of supporting military structures:
So prior to the cultivation of grain there was what I call “hoe farming”- small scale farming that was inherently decentralized and not susceptible to land seizure. But grain, which introduced what I call “plow farming”, did create such a dynamic where control of land endlessly turned over on the basis of how well such land could be seized and held.
Was the the plow per se? The Inca, Maya, and Aztecs had kings and armies without plows.
No, not per se as you point out. But that was strictly my terminology to imperfectly distinguish between two rather different forms of agriculture.
Agriculture uses the plow. Always.
What the Inca and Aztec had (and waged war with) was horticulture.
(except both terms have some semantic drift, particularly as jargon.)
I have Against the Grain. Scott’s point is that only grains (or, in the Inca case, freeze-dried potatoes) can be stored for long periods. Thus part of the crop can be taken, stored and distributed among non-cultivators. Note that this does not require ‘ownership’ of the land, but rights to some portion of the yield (and a good many states operated on this basis – an Ottoman timar or a Mughal jagir were both assignments of land yield, not of land). Nor is it necessarily forcible – we see in Sumer and Elam, and in early Egypt an elaboration of hierarchies centred around religious practices (in Sumer care of the gods; in Egypt, commemoration of the dead).
I was also thinking of the various free peasant societies around the world, who often fought bitterly against the imposition of landlordism (eg the Ditmarschen, in the Alps, in Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe).
Yes, but fight they had to. In a handful of cases such as you mention it was possible for a yeomanry of small holders to resist centralization; that was as much due to geography as anything. For most of the agricultural world only a state or a feudal suzerain could guarantee the integrity of farms against plunder or appropriation- mainly by holding a monopoly on such appropriation themselves.
The point about having to fight cuts the other way – only a state could bring enough sustained violence against them. A second point (which Marx grasped) is that more complex societies allow diversion of surplus (to the detriment of the mass of folk), so allowing development. This latter not the main purpose (elites mostly use the surplus in conspicuous consumption, repression and war), but it happens. So you get castles and cathedrals, but also the windmill and the blast furnace.
Raids are perfectly capable of making farming unsustainable without war, even with losing the land.
But once you have the means to defend against raids, you have the means to seize land by war.
Another way in which Marx was disproven by the revisionists as early as the end of the 19th century: Marx extrapolated from the state of industrialism circa 1865 or so, presuming that pauper labor and the excesses of the Gilded Age would continue and worsen indefinitely, which simply didn’t happen: Social reform (including labor movements!) ameliorated the worst of the previous conditions. So to maintain that the “real” purpose of capitalism is so that industrialists can dress in top hats and coattails and their wives in pearl necklaces, living in manor houses with a staff of servants, is a cartoonishly naive and outdated viewpoint.
In some moments Marx thought things would get worse; in others he thought trade unions and protest would ameliorate matters. It helps to remember that up to the end of the 19th century around 10% of British people were too malnourished to be able to work, and a considerable portion of the remainder lived precarious lives in squalid surroundings. The present situation owes a great deal to the fact that 40-50% of GDP is appropriated and redistributed by the state. Marx thought such a state of affairs could only be effected by revolution; in a way it was, but the revolution was political and military.
But the essential point is that agriculture and the state it allowed was for thousands of years a trade of more numbers for poorer individual lives.
An even more apt comparison would be to say that capitalist countries are like feudalism under an aristocracy of nobles, while socialist countries are like feudalism under prelates of the Church (remember, bishoprics had substantial land holdings in the Middle Ages). The working class are still peasants; but at least under the nobles the peasants aren’t lectured to about their souls or subject to inquisitions.
An even more apt comparison would be to say that capitalist countries are like feudalism under an aristocracy of nobles, while socialist countries are like feudalism under prelates of the Church (remember, bishoprics had substantial land holdings in the Middle Ages). The working class are still peasants; but at least under the nobles the peasants aren’t lectured to about their souls or subject to inquisitions.
I think this is a really excellent analogy, honestly. But I think it runs in the opposite direction from what you’re trying to argue. The clergy, after all, are constrained (to some extent) by a (religious) ideology that’s supposed to be centered around the common good and to constrain their pride, greed and self interest, the nobles are not. You don’t have to be a Christian to prefer rule by the clergy to rule by nobles.
One could say exactly the same thing about the Communist Party of the USSR. Which was no better than the infamous venality of the pre-modern Catholic Church.
Except that socialist leaders are religious leaders who do not believe in Hell.
That is, clergy believe they will be punished for wronging the peasants. Socialists don’t. Indeed, many socialists openly bragged of treating people like so many eggs to be broken for their omelet.
One could say exactly the same thing about the Communist Party of the USSR. Which was no better than the infamous venality of the pre-modern Catholic Church.
The venality is real, but, the venality is certainly not *all there was* to the premodern Catholic Church. It was about the venality, but it was about other things too, some good and some bad. Anyone who thinks the Catholic Church was *just* a front for venality probably has an axe to grind (Protestant, liberal, humanist, Marxist, or whatever).
Also, I’d say that Hungary, East Germany and Yugoslavia all functioned a lot better than the Soviet Union- if you want to look at socialism at its best and assess its pros and cons (and the cons certainly exist) it would probably be fairer to look at the German, Yugoslav or Hungarian parties rather than the Soviet one. (Similarly it would be a bad idea to assess the postcommunist transition on how well it did in Russia, or to assess feudalism based purely on the Russian experience- Russia seems to have some unusual and very longstanding problems regardless of what political and economic system they’re practicing at any point in time).
The idea that the shorter the period of socialism the better it is run does not exactly support your other claims.
“Beginning with e.g. Eduard Bernstein and the “revisionists”. At which point the True Believers doubled down and really did become a secular cult.”
No Western European country actually ever ended up enacting socialism through fully liberal-democratic means though, and even the ones which did install social democracy are further away from actual socialism than they were in the 1970s, so I’d say that on that score, the true believers ended up being right and Bernstein turned out to be wrong.
Isn’t that basically saying “if it wasn’t created by a proletariat revolution, it isn’t socialism”? The point is that Marx predicted that pure laissez faire capitalism would produce something akin to an industrial form of peonage, which would become so unsustainable as to trigger a revolutionary reordering of society. What actually happened was that pure laissez faire capitalism was replaced by a social democracy that ameliorated the worst features of robber-baron capitalism and pauper labor. Your average European country today is a workers’ paradise compared to 150 years ago. Bernstein et al were correct when they said that reform was possible without necessarily smashing the old system.
was that the nobility didn’t have an inherent right to see their social and political position endure forever after the circumstances- feudalism- that created them had subsequently passed away.
That’s a big part of it, yes. Although I don’t think that feudal lords really had an inherent right to their position even during the feudal era (nor do I think that of capitalist owners in capitalist societies). I can recognize that people filled a particular role and carried out a particular function, while still disagreeing that that society was morally just (especially since there were and are other ways to organize agriculture and industry, e.g. through cooperative ownership or state ownership).
“The idea that the shorter the period of socialism the better it is run does not exactly support your other claims.”
That isn’t my claim at all? I think that the Warsaw Pact states (most of them, anyway) outperformed the Soviet Union for lots of reasons- cultural, economic, etc.- but none of them is that “socialism lasted for 45 years instead of for 73”.
Why not? It’s an excellent explanation when you look around at socialist states.
How about that many of the Warsaw Pact states, plus the forcibly incorporated Baltics, had twenty years before World War Two to begin to form modern democratic free market societies before being assimilated into the Soviet Union? Unlike Russia/USSR, they weren’t near-feudal societies that had had an industrial command economy crudely grafted on.
Your point of making the WWI ideological is limited, at best. All countries participating in it were nationalist, and the only countries seriously fighting against nationalism were Austria-Hungary and Russia. Only France and Great Britain were liberal in political sense, though social democrats did wield a lot of power in German parliament. The actual cause of the war was an illiberal nationalist state, Serbia, committing acts of state-sponsored terrorism on the soil of its neighbour. Franz Ferdinand was murdered because he was a liberal non-nationalist. He was striving for an Austria where Slavic peoples would have an official position and political influence. (Probably a doomed project, but we cannot know.)
Germany antagonised France and Great Britain mainly for economic reasons. It didn’t have a colonial empire like the others, and was unable to export its industrial production to the colonies of other major powers. There were also other reasons, like feeling of prestige, but the conflict was not driven by the French and Great Britain having somewhat more parliamentarian constitutions. If it had been, Russia would have fought on Austrian side, and Germany on the British.
“The actual cause of the war was an illiberal nationalist state, Serbia, committing acts of state-sponsored terrorism on the soil of its neighbour.”
Well, it was only controversially and recently Austrian soil, and I’m sure the Serbians didn’t think it belonged to Austria in the moral sense.
Nationalism is an ideology – and one to which the Russian Empire and Austria-Hungary did not subscribe. Even Britain struggled with it (see above all Ireland).
The historical consensus emerging from all the work of the last several decades is that A-H forced a war on Serbia hoping that it would allow an internal re-ordering that would preserve German dominance (over Czechs and Slovenians) in the Austrian bit, cement Hungarian dominance in their bit, exclude Russian influence and thereby allow enough concessions to the Slavs (Serbs, Slovaks, Croats) to keep the whole going. Germany backed it because their elites havered between fear of growing Russian power and fear of Social Democrat ambitions. They jumped into war as a way of solving both. See, eg Alexander Watson’s Ring of Steel, Volker Berghahn on Imperial Germany, Fritz Fischer and subsequent reactions.
“Armies are often for more than defence. In the imperial period the Roman army was an engineering corps, a means of integrating people into Roman ways, an internal police force (banditry was an endemic problem) and the political base of imperial power. The Victorian British army was – perhaps unfairly – characterised a “gigantic system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy” (the real soldiering was done by the Indian Army). The Indonesian army is a patronage network, a means of maintaining state cohesion across the archipelago and only lastly a deterrent against invasion (the same could be said of many others – not least in Latin America).”
This is entirely right, i think.
The Soviets and I think the Austro-Hungarian government also used their soldiers for extra agricultural labour at harvest time. (In the Soviet’s case I believe this was because, for ideological reasons, they had a habit of setting wages & prices too low in the agricultural sector and underinvestment in rural areas, so they had chronic labor shortages).
Agree, although the US government could have mobilized more resources (and more troops) for the war in Afghanistan if there had been any need for them.
True – but Iraq severely strained the current force structure. And that was well below the Vietnam level (166,000 compared to over 500,000).
“The Victorian British army was – perhaps unfairly – characterised a “gigantic system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy” (the real soldiering was done by the Indian Army). ”
That is a slight misquote of John Bright – he was referring to the British public service as a whole, including the home civil service, the diplomatic service, the navy, and the Church of England, as well as the army; and he was talking about aristocratic patronage, not about the public service itself being useless. Bright wasn’t an idiot, he knew that Victorian Britain needed a public sector!
You are also wrong to state that “the real soldiering was done by the Indian Army”.
There are a few errors here: first, you’re confusing the Indian Army (Indian soldiers with British officers) with the Army in India (the Indian Army, plus British Army units posted to India). And Bright very definitely meant to include both bits, given that he made that remark *in the course of a speech about British policy in India*.
Second, Bright was speaking in 1858 – three years after an enormous European war in which Britain had fought with an entirely British army. You may not have heard of the Crimean War but Bright definitely had.
I stand corrected on the quote. On the Indian Armies (both the Indian Army and the British Army in India, I think it’s fair to say that many of not most the better British generals of the 19th century (and much of the 18th) – Campbell, Wolseley, Roberts for the 19th, Clive, Coote, Wellesley for the 18th – learned their trade in India.
Well, India was the most important British colony and the British fought a lot of wars there, it’s not really suprising that a lot of senior officers went there at some point.
The point is that the Indian Army didn’t just fight in India: Indian units were deployed all over the empire. (though mostly in asia)
The point is that the Indian Army didn’t just fight in India: Indian units were deployed all over the empire. (though mostly in asia)
No, the “point” was that the British army was just a patronage scheme for toffs, and that the “real fighting” was done by the “Indian Army”. It’s wrong on all point — the British army was an effective fighting force which won plenty of battles, including against peer opponents, and saw plenty of service in India, rending any distinction between the “British Amy” and “Indian Army” vague and arbitrary.
I would like to point out that, despite Taiwan being in imminent danger, it’s actually not at all prepared to fight a modern war. The problem is fundamentally that the civilian government and the military are dominated by different parties, and the party dominating the military does not actually wish to fight a war against China. If they did their job too well, they’d lose.
Meanwhile, China is more likely to be prepared than Russia is. Unlike Russia which had a propaganda line of limiting its actions against Ukraine to the Gray Zone, Xi Jinping’s pronouncements have been telling everyone listening that he does expect the PLA to actually cross the strait.
Also, it’s worth noting that the PLA is not burdened to any degree by the requirements of oppressing the population. Because of what a disaster Tiananmen was on multiple levels for the CCP leadership (one recession, two leadership changes attributable to it) they have revised their doctrine to avoid sending the army in to massacre protestors. Instead, the People’s Armed Police does it. They’re a huge specialized unit that both prevents dangerous protests before they start and efficiently, (mostly) non-violently quells them, as well as some more mundane SWAT work. They are incredibly expensive, but they don’t distract the guys who are supposed to actually invade Taiwan.
Xi Jinping has been *telling* everyone that he expects the PLA to actually cross the strait, but my guess is that Ukraine has caused some serious reconsideration among senior Chinese leadership.
China is a lot less likely to be prepared than Russia was, for the simple reason that the PLA hasn’t fought anything remotely resembling modern armed conflict since 1979. The Russian military had at least fought in the 21st C in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria. Second rate or worse opponents, but actual combat with actual logistic requirements. Which wasn’t enough against a motivated and well supplied Ukraine.
The Chinese army has, let’s see, been involved in hand-to-hand skirmishes on the border with India, where firearms aren’t allowed, let alone artillery or missiles. That’s it since the 1979 border skirmishes with the Vietnamese. The Chinese navy has done slightly more, an extended presence around the Horn of Africa where they shoot the occasional pirate and practise resupply and refuelling away from home.
Maybe the Taiwanese military isn’t in great shape, but there’s no evidence at all that the PLA would do any better than the Russians.
I’m wondering if Xi Jinping thinks the Xi Administration is going to need to invade Taiwan in the future or if Xi Jinping thinks that China is going to need to invade Taiwan. In the latter case what’s going on in Ukraine or limitations Xi might perceive in the PLA might tempt him to kick the can. Better to succeed tomorrow than fail today and tomorrow is always a day away.
I think you’ve been reading too much propaganda (from either side) if you think the Russians are underperforming. Ukraine had one of the best European armies, and got massive support from the West – money, equipment, and especially surveilance:
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/all-seeing-eye-can-russia-break-through
Whether or not there’s any more incompetence or corruption now than earlier, I think the bigger factor is how easily mistakes can be spotted, and punished harshly (and recorded, uploaded and mocked online). And the misattribution of intention – Russia wasn’t launching a conventional war, rather they aimed to secure Crimea, remove WMD threats, and intimidate Ukraine into peace. Hence the small invading force, lack of large-scale infrastructure strikes etc. Only the last one failed, and that only because the West intervened. Even after that, Russia has been keeping it low-scale (3% of budget, 300k mobilized), precisely because they don’t think all-out war would be worth it. Rather they see it as using military means to control the Western-sponsored Maidan-coup.
And so it’s the West which is funding a counter-productive war out of cultural inertia. $100+ billion dollars, self-destructive sanctions, and showing the rest of the world that your banks cannot be trusted is a recipe for economic (and maybe political) self-destruction.
>Russia wasn’t launching a conventional war, rather they aimed to secure Crimea, remove WMD threats, and intimidate Ukraine into peace.
All of these supposed aims amount to a claim that Russia invaded Ukraine because Russia was afraid of Ukraine. Russia was afraid Ukraine would take Crimea back, Russia was afraid Ukraine would use WMDs on them, Ukraine needed to be intimidated in order to make Russia safe from Ukraine. But if any of that were true, Russia *wouldn’t* have invaded. Countries don’t start wars against neighbors they think are stronger; they only start wars they think they can win!
Surely the Russian fear wasn’t that Ukraine alone would be able to do those things, but that Ukraine *backed by the west* would. Given that, there’s a certain sense in launching the invasion before Ukraine formally joins NATO or anything similar.
(Of course, given how much aid the west has been giving anyway, it looks like Putin may have been mistaken anyway. But of course it’s easy to be wise in hindsight.)
This reasoning is specious.
First, the only reason NATO is supporting Ukraine is that Russia is invading. I haven’t heard anything about plans to arm Ukraine prior to the invasion, so this reasoning amounts to finding a post-hoc justification based on current conditions, not the conditions at the time.
Second, Russia invaded Ukraine in 2016 and NATO didn’t do much to support Ukraine. This is why Russia has Crimea. NATO only started to support Ukraine when it became an existential, rather than a territorial, war–when the risk became Ukraine not existing should they lose.
The idea that Russia feared Ukraine IN ANY WAY is pure propaganda. Propaganda which follows a very common model in today’s world. In today’s world it’s not considered acceptable to attack people, so every attack is painted as some sort of defensive operation–see what the USA did with Iraq for example. Russia is trying to find some way to make Ukraine look like the aggressor to justify the war to the world (which would strengthen their alliances and weaken Ukraine’s support if it were to succeed). That’s why they started with the whole “de-Nazification” justification, why they’re saying Ukraine doesn’t have a right to exist as an independent country (essentially saying Ukraine stole Ukraine from Russia), and why they’re now saying that NATO support would have made Ukraine a threat. None of it is true. Russia invaded Ukraine because Putin wanted to invade Ukraine.
I do not mean to undermine the efforts of the troops on the ground; however, it should be obvious to anyone paying attention that this war is very much a war of propaganda. Or, perhaps to put it in a way that’s more palatable, of public image. Neither side can win on their own; both rely heavily (Ukraine at all times, Russia increasingly as the war drags on) on support from allies. They accomplish this by the way the present themselves and their aims. Russia is attempting to make themselves look like the injured party; Ukraine is presenting themselves as the hard-fighting underdogs, Johnny Everyman bravely taking up arms in defense of his homeland. Those images are how support is justified to the populations of the nations offering aid, at least in NATO. That means that in a very real sense, even this blog post is part of the combat. People spreading Russian lies are quite literally attacking Ukraine supply lines, just as effectively as if they were launching RPGs against those lines. (No, that doesn’t mean I’m arguing that these should be outlawed; however, I think it’s important to put these comments into proper context.)
I’m not saying Russia’s reasonable to fear a western-backed Ukraine, I’m saying that Russia does in fact fear that. Those are two different statements. And I’m not sure where you get the idea that this is a “post-hoc justification based on current conditions, not the conditions at the time,” since Russia was expressing concern about NATO expansion since well before the war, e.g., https://defence-blog.com/russia-worries-about-natos-expansion-in-eastern-europe/
“Russia was expressing concern about NATO expansion since well before the war”
Before the war (meaning the invasion of Crimea) or before this current phase of it? The article you cited is from 2018, several years after they invaded Ukraine. Ergo, saying that they’re telling the truth is post-hoc justification based on current conditions, not the conditions at the time. I have seen no evidence from anyone (including Russian propaganda) that Ukraine was a threat prior to Russia’s invasion of their territory. The fear of NATO expansion occurred AFTER Russia invaded, and thus is not a creditable reason to launch the invasion.
If Russia hadn’t invaded NATO wouldn’t be expanding the way it is. Russia picked a fight with a guy they thought was scrawny, and now are saying they’re afraid because relatively disinterested but much stronger parties have decided to root for their victim.
Secondly, it’s reasonable to conclude, when someone throws out every possible justification (reasonable and not), that they are not being entirely honest in their statements. We know they’re lying because not all their justifications can be true–some are mutually contradictory, and they’ve been caught lying on several occasions. So we can’t trust that their statements are honest.
So it’s propaganda and lies. To blame Ukraine for this–to even accept, based on the poor “evidence” presented, that Russia is being honest–is pure victim-blaming.
The fear of NATO expansion occurred AFTER Russia invaded, and thus is not a creditable reason to launch the invasion.
Ahem:
Did Russia complain about the ‘betrayal’?
Repeatedly. In 1993 Boris Yeltsin, angling for Russia to join Nato, wrote to President Bill Clinton to argue any further expansion of Nato eastwards breached the spirit of the 1990 treaty. The US state department, undecided at the time about Poland’s call to join Nato, was so sensitive to the charge of betrayal that Clinton-era officials even asked the German foreign ministry formally to report on the complaint’s merits. The German foreign minister’s top aide replied in October 1993 that the complaint was formally wrong but he could understand “why Yeltsin thought that Nato had committed itself not to extend beyond its 1990 limits”. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/12/russias-belief-in-nato-betrayal-and-why-it-matters-today
Russia’s attitude towards NATO expansion is really quite well-known, so I’m surprised you aren’t aware of it.
“Russia’s attitude towards NATO expansion is really quite well-known….”
NATO was instituted as an anti-USSR alliance. No kidding they don’t want it to expand–that’s rather the point.
But for your argument to make sense you need to prove that Russia’s fears justify invading Crimea and then the rest of Ukraine when they did so. A long-standing aversion to the expansion of an alliance to keep your power in check doesn’t do that–after all, they’re not invading other non-NATO countries that are looking to be more friendly with NATO.
Basically, look at all the other countries that are looking to join NATO now and ask yourself “Why Ukraine and not these?” The explanation you provide fails to explain the available data.
This conversation is starting to resemble Russian propaganda attempts early in the war–I’m getting the sense that you’re throwing justifications out to see what sticks.
I find it distressing the extent to which Western foreign policy discourse these days seems to have embraced a knee-jerk hostility to what should be a pretty uncontroversial principle of not just international diplomacy, but more or less any relationship of any kind between two or more human beings — namely, the ability to see things from perspectives different from one’s own — especially since this ability is fundamental to understanding the basic IR concept of the “security dilemma,” a concept for which post-Cold-War NATO expansion may as well have been grown in a Petri dish to serve as a perfect 101-level textbook example.
With the security dilemma in mind, the importance of Ukrainian NATO expansion in particular to Russian policymakers shouldn’t be hard to understand, in terms of either place or time. In terms of place, Crimea is the longtime headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and is key to Russia’s ability to project naval power into the Black Sea and/or Mediterranean, whereas having forces based in Ukraine would massively enhance NATO’s ability to project power not just at Moscow itself, but more broadly into the southwestern regions of Russia that contain most of its population and key agricultural/industrial resources. In terms of time, the first two waves of NATO expansion in the mid 1990s and early 2000s came during a period when Russian geopolitical influence was at a historic low point, and both were still protested by the Russian government at the time (including not only Putin but also his solidly US-backed predecessor, the “democratic” “reformer” Yeltsin); NATO’s 2008 announcement that it intended to admit Ukraine and Georgia was arguably the first case where post-Soviet Russia had the power to respond with much more than angry words, and its response seems pretty legible in “security dilemma” terms, especially if we try to envision how the US might respond to reports of a foreign rival projecting military power through countries in our own self-proclaimed sphere of influence, like Cuba or Mexico or Cuba or Grenada or maybe even Cuba.
Echoing GJ, none of this necessarily implies any normative belief in the Goodness or Badness of Russia’s actions in Ukraine any more than a Burgundian invasion of the Netherlands, only that those actions are reasonably legible in terms of standard IR theory for dispassionately assessing the behavior of states, and anyone who considers it important for policy proposals to be practical and realistic (note the name of the advisor who brings up the movie scene!) should probably apply the same standard to foreign policies like NATO expansion as they do to domestic policies like universal healthcare.
But for your argument to make sense you need to prove that Russia’s fears justify invading Crimea and then the rest of Ukraine when they did so.
I never said Russia was “justified” in invading Crimea, so no, I don’t.
Basically, look at all the other countries that are looking to join NATO now and ask yourself “Why Ukraine and not these?” The explanation you provide fails to explain the available data.
Because Ukraine was historically considered core Russian territory, so having it join a rival power bloc strikes harder than having Poland or Estonia do the same.
This conversation is starting to resemble Russian propaganda attempts early in the war–I’m getting the sense that you’re throwing justifications out to see what sticks.
And I’m getting the sense that you aren’t really reading what I write, your just pattern-matching it to things you’ve read elsewhere and arguing against thouse.
especially if we try to envision how the US might respond to reports of a foreign rival projecting military power through countries in our own self-proclaimed sphere of influence, like Cuba or Mexico or Cuba or Grenada or maybe even Cuba.
Here’s the thing though: I think US behaviour towards Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Grenada etc. was *hideously evil*, so if I want to be at all consistent, I have to believe that Russian behaviour towards Ukraine (today, and at many other previous points in history) was, is and remains hideously evil as well. Cuba has the right to join whatever alliances they want, so does Ukraine.
Also as bad as the US treatment of Cuba is and remains today, the Russian treatment of Ukraine is even worse.
All of which is fair enough, but the question I’m raising isn’t whether or not the Russian state’s behavior should be condemned, it’s whether or not the Russian state’s behavior makes sense in terms of how states in the geopolitical arena should be expected (in a descriptive, not normative sense) to behave — and thus what could be done differently, whether in hindsight and/or going forward, to prevent and/or stop it. The point is that the Russian decision to intervene militarily in Ukraine makes pretty clear sense (again, not normatively, but descriptively) if one applies basic concepts like the security dilemma to the history of post-Cold-War NATO expansion and of post-Soviet Ukraine, particularly the events of the Maidan, which one doesn’t have to interpret as a purely US-backed coup d’etat in order to anticipate that the Russian state would interpret it that way. If we want to stop this war and/or similar future wars as opposed to merely grandstanding about it (or in other words, if doing good is more important to us than talking about doing good) then spending all our time solemnly intoning about the implacable evil of those Rooskie orcs and their Dark Lord Putin is an unserious response, and a more serious place to start would be to try to understand the situation as clearly and dispassionately as possible.
To me one of the most important questions this all raises is whether US policymakers’ apparent inability or refusal to grasp such points is due more to cynicism or sheer myopia — and since many of these same people have demonstrated in other situations both that they understand perfectly well why a state would react aggressively to hostile military alliances and foreign influence campaigns on its doorstep, and that they’re perfectly capable of eschewing moralistic purity for hard-nosed pragmatism in determining what policies they’ll support, the obvious implication is that these people have taken the stances they do (i.e. no compromise whatsoever on the moral imperative that Putin can do nothing to stop Zelensky from leasing Sevastopol to the US Navy, regardless of how many people may die in the resulting war, but compromise away with some Senator who wants poor people in the US to be required to chug raw sewage from a beer bong in order to qualify for food stamps) because of how they calculate those stances will serve their interests, and not because they’re really so selectively obtuse as to actually believe what they’re saying.
then spending all our time solemnly intoning about the implacable evil of those Rooskie orcs and their Dark Lord Putin is an unserious response,
The way Russia and the Russian people have been portrayed since the war started always makes me think of the Christmas truce back in WW1. When I was growing up, this truce was always emphasised in teaching about the subject, as a way of showing that We’re All The Same Really and that People Only Fight Because Their Leaders Make Them and that We Must Never Lose Sight Of The Humanity Of The Other Side. But it seems those lessons have all been thrown out the window now that we’ve got an enemy whom the media and education classes actually dislike. I guess the real lesson is that performative compassion is easy when applied to a century-old conflict.
It’s also interesting to compare how much cultural chauvinism and xenophobia were leveled at Germans in the West during WWI, with fabricated propaganda about the exceptional cruelty of German atrocities against occupied Belgium and using racialized language about “Huns” and so forth (German as a first language for millions of German/Austrian/Swiss immigrants in communities throughout the United States was essentially eradicated within the span of a few years during the late 1910s) as opposed to discourses during WWII, when needless to say Germany very much was committing the sorts of deliberate systematic atrocities that would’ve made a WWI-era Entente propagandist’s job extremely easy, but these atrocities were if anything downplayed during the war itself, and Western discourses tended to much more amenable (if anything too amenable) to notions that whatever atrocities were being committed didn’t represent the will of ordinary Germans and that the regime and the German people were fundamentally at odds. (Of course much of this “good Germans” rhetoric was amplified after the fact due to the political imperatives for each side in the Cold War to seamlessly incorporate their respective German populations into the new power blocs, but it wasn’t entirely a post-1945 fabrication.)
It’s almost as if the language of racialized cultural chauvinism gets deployed as a propaganda smokescreen to compensate when the actual facts of geopolitical power struggle are too complicated, morally ambiguous, and/or contain skeletons that a country’s own political leadership would prefer to stay buried in its closet.
The amount of egg that Allied propagandists got on their faces after WWI was probably the major factor. It was unquestionably a great aid to Goebbels and his department, which could truthfully point out that British propaganda had lied shamelessly — why believe them this time?
It’s also interesting to compare how much cultural chauvinism and xenophobia were leveled at Germans in the West during WWI, with fabricated propaganda about the exceptional cruelty of German atrocities against occupied Belgium and using racialized language about “Huns” and so forth
Allied propaganda may have exaggerated, but the Germans undoubtedly did commit atrocities in Belgium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_Belgium
As soon as somebody starts talking about euromaidan as a coup, you know they are not serious.
And what WMD threats?
This is just Russian propaganda, Sofie, and it is very silly to anyone who has been paying attention.
Or as silly as denial of Russia’s war crimes and genocidal intentions can be.
Well, this is one of the more insane takes on the unpleasantness in Ukraine that I’ve seen. Russia’s military underperformance has frankly been hilarious, there was never a risk of WMD in Ukraine, Putin absolutely launched a conventional war seeking to completely annex Ukraine as shown when Moscow tried to conquer Kyiv, and spending 100b dollars to cripple a major geopolitical rival is an absolute steal. The Americans alone poured several trillion dollars into the Middle East for no benefit, and I promise you that had you told Biden it’d only take 75b USD to strengthen NATO, revitalise the West, and shuffle Russia off the great-power list he’d jump at it.
Re the Battle of the Leyte Gulf:
This is not written to denigrate the brave sailors who fought there.
It is, however, written to denigrate stupid, arrogant, and cruel Douglas MacArthur for insisting on the wrong-headed counter-invasion of the Philippines.
The Philippines were basically just a larger island that should have been “hopped” on the way to Japan. One proof of this is that MacArthur had not completed the defeat of the Japanese in those islands by the time of the Japanese surrender on Sept. 2, 1945. In 1944-45 tens of thousands of Philippine civilians died during the counter-invasion campaign. Also of course U.S. military casualties, and misallocation of resources.
For a fairly full discussion of this topic, see Phillips Payson O’Brien, How the War Was Won (2015).
(Two people who understand the implications of the U.S. island hopping strategy were Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Tse-Tung, who both saw it as in their best interest to preserve their forces until the Americans had defeated Japan and the slugfest between the two them would resume.)
Something to consider, it might not be such a good thing for certain sectors of an ‘enemy’s’ security apparatus to be hollowed out by corruption.
It’s better for our national security if organized criminals are arrested, even if those organized criminals are Chinese citizens being busted by the People’s Armed Police.
Running circles around the Russian intelligence community is fun, but it’s better for our nuclear strategy if their nuclear strategy is based on actual information they managed to gather rather than assumptions, lies, and believing their own bullshit.
The Battle of Samar is one of the core legends of the modern USN; the sort of “will you let the men of Taffy 3 down, son?” type of thing.
(And rightfully so)
I’m afraid this won’t age well.
No…
Not at all.
My thoughts exactly. I think many observers, including those in the ivory tower, are in for a nasty surprise as the media/propaganda war and the real Russo-Ukrainian war continue to diverge.
Mate, even if Russia is able to hold off the Ukrainian Counteroffensive, they’ve already been humiliated. Their struggles have frankly been absolutely hilarious, they’ve flushed billions, they’ve lost countless men to death or desertion, and they’ve burnt the respect and prestige they’ve once had.
And all they’ve accomplished is a West that is more unified than it has been in decades and a few kilometres of poor, contested territory.
They aren’t a great power anymore, and with their inexorably declining population they might never be again. The importance of that decline cannot be overstated, and it probably cannot be reserved. It’s all but over. Moscow is a second rate has been that can’t even deal with a weaker neighbour.
No matter what happens, Russia has already lost. May the rest of the invaders bleed or flee.
This is accurate to the fantasy war in the media. I’ll give Ukraine credit, they’ve waged an amazing propaganda campaign, gaslighting on an unprecedented scale. They’ve also shown tenacious resistance, albeit with heavy NATO support.
However, when you dig further, you’ll notice a very different narrative, buried underneath the mainstream story of comically evil & inept Russians vs the Ukrainian paladins. There’s another version of the war in which Russians are competent, motivated, well-equipped, and are successfully attriting the AFU and its NATO support while achieving their objectives. There’s also holes and inconsistencies in the “official” version of events, which incidentally are always sourced from officials in Kiev — I’d hardly expect anyone reporting on their own country being invaded to be neutral & unbiased!
You’ll surely say that the latter is Russian propaganda, and I’m the one who’s gaslit. Maybe, but maybe not. Aside from that version being more logically consistent, I’ve seen a fair amount of footage from the front lines, and this whole illusion of Russian patheticness is never there. I see Russian soldiers operating like professionals, using their massive advantage in air/artillery power, launching missiles that do a controlled flip in midair before speeding into the horizon, Ukrainian cities under bombardment, many AFU dead, and so on. Media in the Western world never shows this stuff, but it’s real; meanwhile, I’ve never seen a single human wave of drunk conscripts with rusty mosin-nagants, despite this shaping up to be the best-documented conflict in human history thus far (as an aside, it’s really ironic that this war is so well-documented, yet also shrouded in illusion and noise).
I don’t expect to persuade the Slava Ukraini crowd, you’re too invested in your preferred narrative. But you must admit that there are two very different versions of the Russo-Ukrainian war, and they can’t both be true at the same time. Since I don’t consider truce or de-escalation a possibility, that means that either one version or the other will be shattered by reality, and which will that be? The outcome will result in massive cognitive dissonance.
As long as you ignore that it clearly wasn’t planned as a war of attrition
I don’t know if your limited strategic vision has clouded your ability to absorb countervailing arguments, or if you just woke up today and decided to tilt at strawmen, but literally nothing you said even engaged with my discorso.
I said nothing about Russia’s current ability to achieve its current, greatly reduced objectives. In fact, I’d argue that one of the most likely outcomes is one in which the Russians hold onto eastern Ukraine and a land bridge to Crimea, but cannot expand their control anywhere else. De-escalation and truces are always possible options if the two sides remain deadlocked.
But even if Moscow achieves this, they’ve still lost. It does not matter if Russia achieved its watered-down objectives now. They have still failed.
At the start of the war the Russians were widely expected to storm through Ukraine. I lived in Moscow, I speak the language, I and I can confirm that there was, in parts of the media and the population, a strong belief that Ukraine would crumble, that Russia would win in a matter of weeks.
Heck, it is clear that Putin believed this as well; otherwise, a lot of Russia’s early war efforts make no sense.
And that belief was shattered. Russia is no longer seen as a Goliath, as an equal player to the US and China. Its prestige is at an all-time low, and it is difficult to imagine that Russia will be considered anything other than a second-rate has-been also-ran in the near future.
And, heck, even if Moscow takes Kyiv (which it won’t), in the long term it does not matter. Russia’s population is plummeting, its economy is too weak to withstand the decline, and its population too xenophobic to allow for widespread immigration and assimilation. It’ll lose somewhere between 10-15 million people in the next 25 years alone.
And that is a reality no victory on the battlefield can possibly overcome.
“And, heck, even if Moscow takes Kyiv (which it won’t), in the long term it does not matter. Russia’s population is plummeting, its economy is too weak to withstand the decline, and its population too xenophobic to allow for widespread immigration and assimilation. It’ll lose somewhere between 10-15 million people in the next 25 years alone.”
I strongly oppose Russian invasion of Ukraine, but I think this “declining population” argument is…well, weak. Russia has, what, 140 million people today? It could be a perfectly well functioning country with 20% less people, or for that matter with 80% less people. England in the time of Isaac Newton had, what, a tenth of the people it has today? It didn’t stop them from being a flourishing civilization.
We need to stop confusing population size with how good a country is. The Russian regime does this too, and it’s a big part of why they wanted to annex Ukraine, to add another 45 million people. Bigger is not necessarily better.
Most countries the world over are eventually going to start declining in population (as they should). The question is not how you reverse the trend (in the short to medium term anyway), it’s how you manage the decline. Lots of counrties with lower fertility than Russia are doing fine. Russia’s problems are not due to low fertility, they’re due to 1) Putin and his circle, 2) Russian culture and 3) the traumatic collapse of communism in the 1990s.
I don’t think Russian power is broken, and it’s not quite that simple. I think Russia planned for a war of attrition, while hoping for a quick coup. I don’t mean to suggest that there haven’t been mistakes or setbacks on their side, just that it’s nowhere near what we’re told. It’s true, the early weeks saw Russia go in with overconfident blitzkrieg tactics, hoping for Ukraine to crumble, but instead met stiff resistance and took losses. After this, they regrouped, shifted strategy towards air/artillery bombardment/cautious advance/fortifying, and they’ve been successful ever since.
A concern for Russia is the “center of gravity” of Ukraine, that is, the most decisive objective in a conflict. In other wars, this was a capital city, or navy, or popular support. In the case of Ukraine, their center of gravity is NATO support, without which they probably would’ve negotiated a conditional surrender by now. With NATO support, their whole country could be occupied (with the Southeastern regions annexed), and they could still keep this going with an insurgency, potentially being a massive liability for Russia (because as this blog says, insurgencies are notoriously difficult to fight).
Thus, the win condition for Russia is to burn through NATO support for Ukraine, and they seem to be aware of this, which is why they’re dragging out the conflict.
I don’t agree that Russia has been doing well recently. Ukraine’s first counteroffensive was successful, and Russia’s most recent push took, well, Bakhmut, at the cost of sixty thousand causalities, billions of rubbles, and mountains of material.
Likewise, Ukraine’s second counteroffensive is still in its probing stages. It is too early to say whether or not Russia’s forces will be able to hold the line.
Finally, 100b dollars to get rid of a chief geo-political rival is a steal, and the Americans in particular would be idiotic to leave such a promising arena. As long as they don’t do something as incomprehensibly brainless as sending that moronic dolt back to the White House I suspect they’ll be in this for the long haul. They’ll scale up production if need be.
To Hector_St_Clare: a rapidly falling population is already causing major headaches for countries like Japan, places which are wealthier and better suited for dealing with it. It will be much harder for a place like Russia (and China), which has neither the money, nor the institutions, nor the ability to attract immigrants, to manage the decline.
And as these nations’ populations are falling, their chief rivals will, do to immigration, have populations which are increasing. Assuming they don’t do something as short sighted as closing their borders.
Like I said, it depends on which version of the war you’re following. There’s alot of disagreement out there on even basic points, due to the propaganda machine & fog of war.
As for economy, Russia did take a hit from the wall of sanctions, but they’ve recovered nicely, churning out war materiel while building a new economic network among BRICS & the global south. This will lead directly to Cold War II (assuming it doesn’t escalate to WWIII, which is unlikely but possible), and there’s no telling how that will conclude.
As for population, a stable society should not need constant population growth. However, the main problem of decline is lopsided demographics — too many retirees, with an overburdened, insufficient workforce supporting them. The West has responded to its low birth-rates with immigration as you said, but this also results in ethnic/cultural/political tensions, as I’m sure you’ve noticed recently.
Finally, I’ve noticed that many people are rather invested in the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian war, to say the least. I hope their minds don’t get shattered too badly if events turn out differently than expected.
Yes, there are two different versions of the Russo-Ukrainian War. However, here’s what is incontrovertible: Since their initial offensive, Russia has lost far more territory than it has gained. It is having to dig deep into its stockpiles of old tanks. Its war aims have shifted from “Take Kiev” to “Status quo ante”–which is what I suspect will be the endgame.
I suggest that you take your own advice.
You still aren’t addressing my overall points, and, ironically, buying into the propaganda that suggests that this war could end with a Russian victory.
And, as I’ve been saying over and over and over and over, it cannot. We’re well past the point where Moscow will take Kyiv, which was the bar both Moscow and outsiders set at the start of the invasion. Even if Russia holds on to Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, they’ve, frankly, still lost. The lives they’ve spent, the money they’ve thrown down the drain, the amount they’ve strengthened NATO, and the immense loss of face they’ve suffered isn’t going to be made up by holding onto a few fairly poor parts of the world.
And if people focus too much on anything, it is the tensions caused by multiculturalism. Multicultural liberal democracy is arguably the greatest accomplishment the West has ever tried to accomplish, and it is something worth dying for.
Anyways that will be my last response, I’ve said all I want to say.
And if people focus too much on anything, it is the tensions caused by multiculturalism. Multicultural liberal democracy is arguably the greatest accomplishment the West has ever tried to accomplish, and it is something worth dying for.
If you call becoming a hated minority in your own country a “great accomplishment”, I suppose.
Why can’t I directly respond to some of these comments?
Whatever. I find it hilarious that the week we debate about this is the week an armed revolt starts in Russia. I suspect Putin will beat down Wagner in a few days, but this is a further humilitation for Russia.
And, yeah, no, “a hated minority in your own nation” guy, you can FRO. Your national identitism and ethno-centrism can FRO too.
In the end we will win, I have no doubt, and you will lose.
And, yeah, no, “a hated minority in your own nation” guy, you can FRO. Your national identitism and ethno-centrism can FRO too.
National identitism and ethno-centrism are the norm for basically every group in the world except for white westerners, and most western countries are projected to become majority-minority by the end of the century. Put these two facts together, and the conclusion becomes inescapable.
And fighting for multicultural norms in non-Western countries is important too.
The West’s ability to import people due to that multiculturalism is why it will win the 21st century. Other countries can only draw upon the skills and talents of their own people; we can draw upon the skills and talents of everyone. They rise and fall based on whether their people want to have children; we do not need to fear a coming population disaster. Their children will become more and more like us and less and less like their parents, while ours lead the way on the issues of the day.
Multiculturalism is the West’s trump card, our sword and our shield. I’ve lived in several ethno-centric states, some of them dictatorships: it sucks. Why on earth would Westerners want to become more like that? Frankly, I suspect nearly everyone who does want to has never actually any significant first hand experience in an ethno-centric country.
Multiculturalism is the West’s trump card, our sword and our shield. I’ve lived in several ethno-centric states, some of them dictatorships: it sucks. Why on earth would Westerners want to become more like that? Frankly, I suspect nearly everyone who does want to has never actually any significant first hand experience in an ethno-centric country.
“Does ethnic diversity erode social trust? Continued immigration and corresponding growing ethnic diversity have prompted this essential question for modern societies, but few clear answers have been reached in the sprawling literature. Taking this as point of departure, this article reviews the existing literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust through a narrative review and a meta-analysis of 1,001 estimates from 87 studies. The review clarifies the core concepts, highlights pertinent debates, and tests core claims from the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust. Several results stand out from the meta-analysis. We find a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust across all studies. The relationship is stronger for trust in neighbors, and when studied in more local contexts. Covariate conditioning generally changes the relationship only slightly. The review concludes by discussing avenues for future research.” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335924797_Ethnic_Diversity_and_Social_Trust_A_Narrative_and_Meta-Analytical_Review
The counter to the long peace is the rise of Drug Cartels which are already taking territory in Mexico and Gangs taking territory in Latin America. Who kill those who won’t do as they are told. Effectively usurping power over the Government.
The Militaries have huge trouble suppressing those upstart rebellions.
A video by Vice on Criminal gangs challenging Government power by undermining security:
I think that the situation in Mexico is unique enough that it doesn’t support a more general claim that due to the “Long Peace” undermining the experience and practice of national armies, criminal and paramilitary organizations are more able to threaten the sovereignty of states. In Mexico you have a perfect storm of a lucrative, nearly un-interdictable source of illegal wealth combined with a government that traditionally is vulnerable to bribery and corruption. The fact that during Prohibition Cook County Illinois and New York City fit this description hardly meant that civil government was fading away. Also, the counter-example that Italy in the 1980s fought a virtual war against the Mafia and finally won.
As the video I posted shows. The Cartels have expanded their operations to Ecuador.
And have started violating the monopoly of violence by the Government there. And if not stopped will soon rule much of the country. The people will obey them or be killed.
The Weberian definition of the state is as a monopoly of legitimate violence within a territory, not monopoly of all violence. It specifically allows other actors to use violence, but it’s only the state that makes the claim that only its violence is legitimate.
Unless the cartels start calling the government illegitimate and making ideological claims about their legitimate right to rule, they aren’t really a rebellion but just very successful criminal gangs.
Mexico’s problems are also in large part due to the fact that there’s a country just north of them which is 1) a massive source of demand for drugs and 2) a massive source of supply for illegal guns.
Americans criticizing Mexico for its problems without acknowledging their role in the problem(s) never fails to annoy me.
“Poor Mexico, So Far From God, So Close to the United States.”
As much as I dislike Porfirio’s economically right-wing politics, this was one of the greatest aphorisms anyone ever said. +1000.
As another more recent Mexican President said (also a conservative, I think), “living in Mexico is like living next to the world’s worst drug addict”. When I shared that with a Mexican American friend of mine (she was a Republican at the time, actually, although I wouldn’t be surprised if the Trump era has changed her political partisan loyalty), she responded “it’s not LIKE living next to a drug addict, it IS living next to a drug addict).
‘the doing thing’ – done thing
You can see a partially finished twined tube and yoke armour here:
https://www.romanarmytalk.com/rat/showthread.php?tid=31507
Any Latin speakers able to translate a motto for Emutopia? This is very very slightly connected to the post: Dr Devereaux linked to a video by Perun, Defence Strategy for Small Nations, which uses the fictional nations of Emutopia and Kiwiland.
Emutopia has a banner or coat of arms, a ferocious emu head, but IMNSHO needs a motto as well. My proposal is
“All smaller islands will be ours!”
Everything sounds more ominous in Latin, so can someone provide a translation?
OK, someone is bound to ask why I don’t use Google Translate. Because Google Translate can’t explain itself, and I don’t know how good it is at Latin and have no way to check. And no, just translating back to English won’t necessarily work. I don’t know Latin but I do know some French, and the same English statement can translate into different French tenses depending on whether it is conditional or subjective or imperative. This motto is a statement of certainty, so I think needs to be imperative?
I would drop the verb entirely:
OMNES NOBIS INSULAE MINORES
If you wanted a verb, you could use future imperative third person:
OMNES SUNTO NOBIS INSULAE MINORES
Or “sint” (may they be be ours) or “erunt” (simple indicative, will be our).
Thank you Aldarion and ey81. Much appreciated.
While I don’t trust Google Translate with Latin other people probably will, and keeping the verb gives a result closer to the intended English. So the motto for Emutopia is
OMNES SUNTO NOBIS INSULAE MINORES
(Either spoken by James Earl Jones, or with the reverb on the audio out turned up to eleven.)
“I’d really like to see a twined linen reconstruction which acts the way we see these act in artwork”
Well I did make my own twice 9 and 13 layers with linen and home made fish glue. And the shoulders need to have a the flexibility (I admit I cheated a bit and dried them so they were sorta pre curved) to bend but they do stand up. Now I was in Houston and wore the things all day in the summer doing yard (no ideal what the neighbors thought) – and humidity and sweating in the end does reduce rigidity and effectiveness vs my trial arrow shots (before and after) .
But it was really quite good at 13 layers vs slashing or bludgeoning (Yes I really did have my kid hit me with baseball bat – I figured worst case it would be good story about how I had broken ribs).
Note my absolutely forbids me from making fish glue again it was shall say an aromatic process.
But you can also see this:
“Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor: Unraveling the Linothorax Mystery”
https://www.amazon.com/Reconstructing-Ancient-Linen-Body-Armor/dp/1421408198
Is there no edit? I dropped ‘my wife’ and few other words sorry for that.
I suspect that if either China or India tried to project power into neighbouring countries they would quickly find themselves bogged down and their armies incapable of functioning. I am not bullish on any attempt Beijing might undergo to take Taiwan for this very reason.
It places China in a bind. On one hand, the zenith of its power might be close at hand: its population is already dropping, and due to societal entho-centrism and widespread racism, it cannot import and assimilate immigrants like Western countries* can. If it does not take Taiwan now, it may never get another chance. On the other, an invasion of Taiwan is a gamble the PRC may well lose. It’s a tricky situation.
*Western countries also struggle mightily with racism, but many are not ethno-centric in the same way China is.
” I suspect that if either China or India tried to project power into neighbouring countries they would quickly find themselves bogged down and their armies incapable of functioning. I am not bullish on any attempt Beijing might undergo to take Taiwan for this very reason.”
India’s one famous attempt to project power into Sri Lanka ended with them getting roundly hated and their favored candidate for Prime Minister being assassinated by a 17 year old girl in retribution, so, yea.
Then again, I think major powers projecting power overseas is usually more of a bad thing than a good one, so I’m happy that both India and China are going to be limited in their ability to effectively project power.
“On one hand, the zenith of its power might be close at hand: its population is already dropping, and due to societal entho-centrism and widespread racism, it cannot import and assimilate immigrants like Western countries* can. ”
China will be fine. They (and India) are already overpopulated, they don’t need more people. Even a China/India with 600 million people instead of 1.2 billion is still going to be an important force to be reckoned with.
As far as the ethnocentrism goes, that depends on what you define as “western”. If you mean Western Europe and the Anglosphere, then yes- if you include Central and Eastern Europe then no.
A China that had a dropping population and an absurd percentage of its people over the age of 60 (nearly 40% by 2050!) will have grown old before it got rich, and that is a massive issue.
And I’m a forever foreign TCK type. I’ve lived in both Eastern Europe and China. Yes, Eastern Europe is extremely racist, and far more ethnocentric than Western Europe or the Anglosphere, but it isn’t as ethnocentric as China is.
I strongly agree with your first point though. The Americans war in Iraq was barbaric and criminal, and their struggle in Afghanistan was a bad show all around. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing for major powers to have difficulty projecting power abroad, and hopefully Washington learns how to keep its armies away from the developing world’s battlefields unless they are being used purely in a defensive role.
The USA is unparalleled in its ability to project power- or more properly I should say force. As the USA discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan, and should have remembered from Vietnam, force is not synonymous with power- actual effective control. What the USA needs is to be far, far wiser than it has been in the past about how it uses its substantial capacity to project force.
To be clear, when I say central & Eastern European countries tend to be highly ethnocentric (like South Asia, China, the Middle east etc.) I’m saying that in a neutral, descriptive sense, not a negative one. I quite sympathize with their desire to maintain their ethnic and cultural identities. (It has costs, as you point out, in terms of declining geopolitical power- how you balance the costs and benefits is going to be subjective).
I also haven’t lived in (or visited) either China or Eastern Europe before, although i have lived outside the west- I obsessively follow public opinion surveys esp. from non-western countries, though, so I’m going entirely off public opinion data here. I definitely value opinion from people who do have personal experience though.
“China will be fine. They (and India) are already overpopulated, they don’t need more people. Even a China/India with 600 million people instead of 1.2 billion is still going to be an important force to be reckoned with.”
Fine eventually, as in in decades. But in the mid-term population decline means that the people they do have will be disproportionally old. A demographic where half the people are 50 or older is going to be economically (and militarily) far weaker than the total numbers would suggest.
Re: the hypothesis that “Russian incompetence isn’t exceptional, but in fact the new normal in warfare,” it seems to me that there’s a much more straightforward hypothesis, which Occam’s Razor would suggest addressing before jumping to the effects of political systems on the psychology of mid-level officers and so forth — namely, we have very few examples in the post-WWII era of peer conflict between two well-equipped modern militaries (let alone two Great Powers) as compared to asymmetrical conflicts with qualitatively weaker militaries and/or counterinsurgency campaigns, and therefore we have little concept of how any modern military, including the US/NATO, would perform against an enemy that can effectively neutralize its air, naval, and/or missile assets.
In so many words, could it simply be that the “modern system” has been optimized for conflicts equivalent to a pack of schoolyard bullies ganging up on the weakest, scrawniest kid they can find, and is fundamentally incapable of picking on someone its own size?
To say this yet again: there’s whether you can win a war easily, and then there’s whether you can even mobilize your resources effectively: do you troops have modern working equipment, do they have food and shoes, are they well trained, etc. Russia has not just failed to conquer Ukraine quickly; Russia has not just failed to achieve vital air superiority over a much weaker opponent; Russia has failed to show up to the fight fully dressed.
That’s not about bullies ganging up on a weaker kid.
Well that’s sort of the point: “fully dressed” for a modern first-rank military would mean a combined-arms offensive taking full advantage of total or near-total ownership of the seas and skies, and an enemy that can challenge these capabilities in any meaningful way (i.e. not necessarily going toe-to-toe in these capabilities, but denying their opponent the full/unrestricted flexibility to which their doctrines have grown accustomed) can quickly impose prohibitive tradeoffs between costlier offensive assets like fighter jets or main battle tanks, and cheaper defensive assets like AA missiles or landmines.
The hypotheses that beg to be disproven here are: (1) when faced with an enemy better equipped than the proverbial teenagers with sandals and AKs, more or less any modern military would come across as partially-clothed if not altogether bare naked; (2) much like in World War I, the only truly reliable (albeit narratively and politically unsatisfying) way of overcoming this situation is a war of attrition to degrade the enemy’s capacity to field a well-equipped modern military at all, which is exactly the strategy Russia seems to have adopted after the first few months of the war; and (3) if anything, a far more bloated procurement process and a far greater aversion to large-scale casualties may actually make the US/NATO worse equipped to fight this sort of war than Russia.
“bloated procurement process”? At least in western democracies the funds allocated for military expenses actually show up on the front line as food, fuel, ammo and equipment.
I’m thinking here about the unit production costs for expensive high-tech US/NATO assets like planes and ground vehicles being far greater than their Russian (or Chinese for that matter) equivalents, the maintenance of these assets in the field being far costlier and more time-consuming, and both production and maintenance being tied to far more logistically cumbersome contractor/supplier networks that would quickly become untenable for an enemy with the long-range striking power to disrupt fragile global supply chains.
The story of M16s vs AK-47s in Vietnam may be a tired cliche by this point, but it’s not as if the problems it illustrates have actually been overcome in the meantime.
The USA and other western military powers generally invest in more capable weapons systems, even if that imposes a penalty of cost and complexity, because it’s been believed to be cheaper in the long run both economically and strategically; i.e. one high-tech stealth fighter is better than five third generation fighters even if the five older fighters are cheaper. This is because after World War Two no one really thought that two near-peer powers would ever again fight a prolonged industrial war until the Russo-Ukrainian war. As long as nukes exist the kind of total strategic industrial war like WW2 that makes quantity more crucial than quantity is unlikely to reoccur.
Sure, the US decision over the past several decades to consolidate, dismantle, and/or outsource so much of its industrial base, particularly as applicable to “dumb” mass-consumption military items like unguided artillery rounds, was apparently premised on the idea that a war like this one was unlikely if not altogether impossible due to the existence of nuclear weapons — but this is very different from arguing that such a war is unlikely due to expensive high-tech conventional weapons systems developed since the invention of nukes, and the idea that expensive “smarter” weapons in small quantities would enable the US arsenal to defeat the cheaper, “dumber,” yet still well-equipped arsenal of an actual rival military power even with nukes off the table is far from clear to say the least. (Not to mention, it also seems suspiciously well-aligned with the financial interests of Western industry in neither maintaining idle production capacity for mass-consumption war materiel, nor disrupting its broader economic model by having the government step in and repurpose civilian industrial capacity for military use.)
All of which only makes US policymakers seem all the more shortsighted since the conditions leading up to this war (i.e. a foreign military at odds with Russia being armed and trained by NATO, with neither a direct NATO security guarantee nor its own independent nuclear deterrent) were known well in advance, and indeed the obstacles to US/Russian nuclear escalation were presumably crucial to the US willingness to back the Ukrainian war effort in the first place!
Since our host has approvingly cited other military analyses by Alex Vershinin, one of the most insightful takes on the war so far in my estimation has been Vershinin’s piece “The Return of Industrial Warfare” from barely more than a year ago, where he raised a very loud alarm regarding not just Ukraine’s ability to go toe-to-toe with Russia in this kind of war, but more broadly the ability of the West itself as Ukraine’s de facto military-industrial supplier.
I know it’s actually his job and all, but seing Dominions 5 youtuber Perun becoming a something of an Internet Authority on international relations will still never not be funny.
The last few days have put this column in a whole new light. Someone’s been reading the tea leaves it seems