Fireside this week! Originally, I was thinking I’d talk about the ‘future of classics’ question in this space, but I think that deserves a full post (in connection with this week’s book recommendation and the next fireside’s book recommendation), so instead this week I want to talk a little about foreign policy realism, what it is and what its limits are.
Longtime readers will remember that we’ve actually already talked about ‘realism’ as a school of international relations study before, in the context of our discussion of Europa Universalis. But let’s briefly start out with what we mean when we say IR realism (properly ‘neo-realism’ in its modern form): this is not simply being ‘realistic’ about international politics. ‘Realism’ is amazing branding, but ‘realists’ are not simply claiming that they are observing reality – they have a broader claim about how reality works.
Instead realism is the view that international politics is fundamentally structured by the fact that states seek to maximize their power, act more or less rationally to do so, and are unrestrained by customs or international law. Thus the classic Thucydidean formulation in its most simple terms, “the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must,”1 with the additional proviso that, this being the case, all states seek to be as strong as possible.
If you accept those premises, you can chart a fairly consistent analytical vision of interstate activity basically from first principles, describing all sorts of behavior – balancing, coercion, hegemony and so on – that ought to occur in such systems and which does occur in the real world. Naturally, theory being what it is, neo-realist theory (which is what we call the modern post-1979 version of this thinking) is split into its own sub-schools based on exactly how they imagine this all works out, with defensive realism (‘states aim to survive’) and offensive realism (‘states aim to maximize power’), but we needn’t get into the details.
So when someone says they are a ‘foreign policy realist,’ assuming they know what they’re talking about, they’re not saying they have a realistic vision of international politics, but that they instead believe that the actions of states are governed mostly by the pursuit of power and security, which they pursue mostly rationally, without moral, customary or legal constraint. This is, I must stress, not the only theory of the case (and we’ll get into some limits in a second).
The first problem with IR Realists is that they run into a contradiction between realism as an analytical tool and realism as a set of normative behaviors. Put another way, IR realism runs the risk of conflating ‘states generally act this way,’ with ‘states should generally act this way.’ You can see that specific contradiction manifested grotesquely in John Mearsheimer’s career as of late, where his principle argument is that because a realist perspective suggests that Russia would attack Ukraine that Russia was right to do so and therefore, somehow, the United States should not contest this (despite it being in the United States’ power-maximizing interest to do so). Note the jump from the analytical statement (‘Russia was always likely to do this’) to the normative statement (‘Russia carries no guilt, this is NATO’s fault, we should not stop this’). The former, of course, can always be true without the latter being necessary.
I should note, this sort of ‘normative smuggling’ in realism is not remotely new: it is exactly how the very first instances of realist political thought are framed. The first expressions of IR realism are in Thucydides, where the Athenians – first at Corinth and then at Melos – make realist arguments expressly to get other states to do something, namely to acquiesce to Athenian Empire. The arguments in both cases are explicitly normative, that Athens did not act “contrary to the common practice of mankind” (expressed in realist dog-eat-dog terms) and so in the first case shouldn’t be punished with war by Sparta and in the latter case, that the Melians should submit to Athenian rule. In both cases, the Athenians are smuggling in a normative statement about what a state should do (in the former case, seemingly against interest!) into a description of what states supposedly always do.
I should note that one of my persistent complaints against international relations study in political science in general is that political scientists often read Thucydides very shallowly, dipping in for the theory and out for the rest. But Thucydides’ reader would not have missed that it is always the Athenians who make the realist arguments and they lost both the arguments the war. When Thucydides has the Melians caution that the Athenians’ ‘realist’ ruthlessness would mean “your fall would be a signal for the heaviest vengeance and an example for the world to meditate upon”2 the ancient Greek reader knows they are right, in a way that it often seems to me political science students seem to miss.
And there’s a logical contradiction inherent in this sort of normative smuggling, which is that the smuggling is even necessary at all. After all, if states are mostly rational and largely pursue their own interests, loudly insisting that they should do so seems a bit pointless, doesn’t it? Using realism as a way to describe the world or to predict the actions of other states is consistent with the logical system, but using it to persuade other states – or your own state – seems to defeat the purpose. If you believe realism is true, your state and every other is going to act to maximize its power, regardless of what you do or say. If they can do otherwise than there must be some significant space for institutions, customs, morals, norms or simple mistakes and suddenly the air-tight logical framework of realism begins to break down.
That latter vision gives rise to constructivism (‘international relations are shaped by ideology and culture’) and IR liberalism (‘international relations are also shaped by institutions, which can bend the system away from the endless conflict realism anticipates’). The great irony of realism is that to think that having more realists in power would cause a country to behave in a more realist way is inconsistent with neo-Realism which would suggest countries ought to behave in realist ways even in the absence of realist theory or thinkers.
In practice – and this is the punchline – in my experience most ‘realists,’ intentionally or not, use realism as a cover for strong ideological convictions, typically convictions which are uncomfortable to utter in the highly educated spaces that foreign policy chatter tends to happen. Sometimes those convictions are fairly benign – it is not an accident that there’s a vocal subset of IR-realists with ties to the CATO Institute, for instance. They’re libertarians who think the foreign policy adventures that often flew under the banner of constructivist or liberal internationalist label – that’s where you’d find ‘spreading democracy will make the world more peaceful’ – were really expensive and they really dislike taxes. But “we should just spend a lot less on foreign policy” is a tough sell in the foreign policy space; realism can provide a more intellectually sophisticated gloss to the idea. Sometimes those convictions are less benign; one can’t help but notice the realist pretensions of some figures in the orbit of the current administration have a whiff of authoritarianism or ethnocentrism in them, since a realist framework can be used to drain imperial exploitation and butchery of its moral component, rendering it ‘just states maximizing their power – and better to be exploiter than exploited.’
One question I find useful to ask of any foreign policy framework, but especially of self-claimed realist frameworks is, “what compromise, what tradeoff does this demand of you?” Strategy, after all, is the art of priorities and that means accepting some things you want are lower priority; in the case of realism which holds that states seek to maximize power, it may mean assigning a high priority to things you do not want the state to do at all but which maximize its power. A realism deserving of the name, in applied practice would be endlessly caveated: ‘I hate, this but…’ ‘I don’t like this, but…’ ‘I would want to do this, but…’ If a neo-realist analysis leads only to comfortable conclusions that someone and their priorities were right everywhere all along, it is simply ideology, wearing realism as a mask. And that is, to be frank, the most common form, as far as I can tell.
That isn’t to say there is nothing to neo-realism or foreign policy realists. I think as an analytical and predict tool, realism is quite valuable. States very often do behave in the way realist theory would suggest they ought, they just don’t always do so and it turns out norms and expectations matter a lot. Not the least of which because, as we’ve noted before, the economic model on which realist and neo-realist thinking was predicted basically no longer exists. To return to the current Ukraine War: is Putin really behaving rationally in a power-maximizing mode by putting his army to the torch capturing burned out Ukrainian farmland one centimeter at a time and no faster? It sure seems like Russian power has been reduced rather than enhanced by this move, even though realists will insist that Russia’s effort to dominate states near it is rational power-maximizing under offensive realism.
For my own part, I think declaring one’s self a specific ‘school’ of policy thinker is a bit silly, for the same reason I don’t declare myself a specific school of historian. These ‘schools’ are really toolboxes, with different tools valuable in different situations. Declaring one’s self a resolute ‘wrench guy’ becomes a problem if you are trying to hang paintings. I suppose I tend to be most skeptical of international law and institutions, which I often view simply as expressions of hegemonic power, but on the other hand customs and morals matter a lot, in no small part because they shape the perceived interests states pursue.
But these are, rightly understood, analytical and predictive tools, not normative ones. A school of IR thought can suggest what another state might do, or what might happen if you do something, but it cannot tell you what you should do. There is, after all, a reason that every realist appeal in Thucydides, the father of realism, is rejected by its audience – Sparta goes to war, the Melians reject the Athenians and in the end, after much misery, Athens loses the war. Realism can tell you how states generally act, but it cannot tell you how you should act.
On to recommendations.
Speaking of realism and ideology in foreign policy, I wrote a response to Emma Ashford’s analysis of the Trump administration’s foreign policy. Ashford presented four explanatory models for the administration’s foreign policy (realism; domestic policy; first term priorities; GOP infighting), to which I responded that ideology as a fifth category offered more explanatory power than the other four, though all of these factors are clearly at work. I think it is deceptively easy for folks who have found their views excluded from the previous administration – and this certainly seems to be how many of the realists think – to rush to the new administration and proclaim whatever it does ‘realism.’ But many of the actors shaping foreign policy in this administration are strongly ideological and it shows.
Meanwhile, for the logistics lowers out there, Drachinifel has a long discussion with Sal Mercogliano (of What’s Going On With Shipping) on the logistics of US Navy operations in the Pacific during WWII. And if you like that, I should that Sal also did a sit down interview on his own channel with Jon Parshall (one half of the author team of Shattered Sword, everyone’s favorite Midway book) on shipping in 1942 in particular.
In modern military affairs, CSIS brought Michael Kofman on to their Russian Roulette program for a battlefield update from Ukraine, covering both the recent Operation Spiderweb (the impressive drone attack on Russian airbases) but also conditions on the front line generally. I think Kofman is one of the more sober and careful voices on the conflict in Ukraine and so it is well worth listening to him, as a curb for both excessive enthusiasm or inordinate despair. I should also note that Kofman has been discussing lessons on airpower from both Ukraine/Russia and Israel/Iran on his own podcast, the Russia Contingency over at War on the Rocks, but it is behind the member paywall there (but I’d argue well worth the price of admission if you are interested in security affairs).
As an aside, I have a precis on the Battle of Cannae (216) set to come out at War on the Rocks not next week but the week after, so keep an eye out for that if it interests.
For this week’s book recommendation, I want to present a bit of ‘meta-classics,’ as it were, W. Scheidel’s What Is Ancient History? (2025) which I suppose I must note, I was given by the author. This is one of those books with a somewhat narrower focus, not about the history of antiquity but rather about the study of the history of antiquity and in particular its place within the structure of the academy in the United States. It is thus a book about what ancient history, as a field of study, has been and an argument for what it ought to be. That sort of inside baseball might have somewhat narrow appeal, but the argument is necessary.
The essential background to this argument, discussed by Scheidel in the introduction and returned to later in the work, is the ailing state of classics, which is the name in most Anglophone3 universities for interdisciplinary departments focused on the study of ancient Greece and Rome, built around the initial core pillar of language and literary study of the corpus of surviving ancient Greek and Latin literature. The essential context is that these departments are broadly fading, besieged by falling enrollments, limited public funding and the (substantially accurate) sense that they are the product of an imperial European moment now past but not forgotten. The question, then, of what to do with the study of antiquity, is quite a pressing one: the house in which ancient history as a field was born is now collapsing.
Scheidel presents a strong argument that rather than attempting to save the house as it is, what we ought to do is build a new one. That is what this book is about: what is ancient history, what sort of institutional structure does that definition most fit and how do we get there.
Scheidel moves the argument in four steps, each with its own chapter. In the first chapter, he effectively presents a definition of ancient history designed to be more logically and intellectually consistent than the old definition of Greece-n-Rome. Instead, Scheidel argues that antiquity is an identifiable process (as much as a period), the processes by which the basic infrastructure of ‘civilization,’ – social complexity and stratification, writing, cities, literature, complex economies based on farming, states and so on – emerged. That definition certainly includes Greece and Rome, the latter representing a late stage in this process in the Mediterranean, but it is also much broader than just Greece-n-Rome because it turns out by this definition ‘antiquity’ was independently invented in several places (in modestly different forms) and thus happened at different times in different places. Scheidel thus presents early on his answer to the title question, “What is Ancient History?” – it is the study of antiquity (in any place), the period during which this process took place.
That definition in hand, the rest of the book is about the kind of structure – both historigraphical and institutional – such a definition demands. The second chapter looks at how we ‘missed’ the broad, global definition of antiquity in favor of a weaker, narrower one focused on Greece-n-Rome, as well as developing the failures of this definition. The third chapter then argues for a shift to an institutional structure based on conceiving of ancient history as a form of ‘foundation’ history, rather than one locked into either a junior position in classics departments (dominated by philology and archaeology) or in history departments (dominated by modern history) and in either case, divorced from specialists in other parts of the ancient world. The fourth chapter at last gets to the elephant in the room: what about classics, as a field: why Scheidel thinks it needs to go and how it can be made to do so.
As you might imagine, I have a lot of thoughts on Scheidel’s argument and the broader question of the study of antiquity and Rome’s place in it – so many thoughts they wouldn’t fit here. Instead, I expect at some point later this year to write something more substantive on my vision for where the study of Mediterranean antiquity ought to go – though my view coincides with Scheidel’s far more than it differs. That said, even if one is on the opposite side of the ‘classics wars,’ Scheidel’s careful argument demands consideration from anyone looking to have an informed opinion on where the study of Greece, Rome and global antiquity should go from here. If that’s a topic that interests you, Scheidel’s manifesto – his word, not mine! – is well worth a read.
And that’s the week. Next week is, of course, the week of the fourth and I think I might try to say something about the history of the civil-military relationship in the United States.
I think a sixth explanatory model is useful for this administration’s foreign policy: profit, personal or family. This applies to the Trump family and also the Witkoff family, which is doing crypto business with the Trumps in the Gulf. It would apply to Elon Musk too, though his influence, especially on foreign policy, may now be negligible.
We might call that “intranational realism.”
I think it’s more a habit of incidental grifting at any opportunity than an actual driver of policy. There are, after all, always such opportunities, so as a primary motive personal profit would lack explanatory power.
I’m not sure I’d go that far.
As an example, Trump has proclaimed a ‘Liberation Day’ of the US levying high tariffs on all nations in the world (and certain uninhabited islands) that are ‘proportionate’ in the sense of “proportionate to these semirandom numbers I, Trump, got by shaking up a can of economic statistics and will falsely claim are the tariff rates the foreign countries charge us.”
Since that time, Trump has said that he will negotiate unilateral trade agreements with all the two hundred or so nations in the world, in parallel, and that these will all be much better deals than the US used to get, for somewhat confusing definitions of ‘deals.’
One of the very few, possibly the only so far as I can recall, such trade agreements actually lowering the tariffs in exchange for, well… anything other than possibly a cessation of the target country’s retaliatory tariffs that were a response to ‘Liberation Day,’ is the agreement he touted with Britain.
And this treaty included, quite specifically, a removal of tariffs on British auto imports.
Now, the British auto industry is not what you’d call a major export sector. The United States does not have a history of importing large numbers of cars from Britain, as opposed to from, say, Mexico. This was not something chosen either to have great benefit to Britain, nor to have great benefit to the average American auto buyer. But the one car firm Trump actually mentioned aloud in the context of this deal… is Rolls Royce, a brand Trump has had a lifelong fixation on as his particular preferred luxury car make.
It seems unlikely that specifically creating an import carveout for British cars serves an ideological purpose for the Trump administration, or most of the other drivers of foreign policy agenda one might imagine. It seems much more parsimonious to suppose that Trump is simply trying to keep the price of luxury Rolls Royces down for the kind of person he might socialize with at Mar-a-Lago, even as he increases the price of the typical four-door sedan for the kind of person who gave him all those seventy-something million votes. Personal financial gain plus personal brand preferences Trump foreign policy and domestic policy considerations alike.
“Now, the British auto industry is not what you’d call a major export sector. The United States does not have a history of importing large numbers of cars from Britain, as opposed to from, say, Mexico. ”
Well, this depends on your definition of “large numbers”, I guess, but in reality “cars to US” is quite an important export for Britain.
UK exports to the US are about £180 billion a year. Two-thirds of that is services. Of the rest, UK goods exports to the US, about half (£27 billion) is “machinery and transport equipment” of which £6 billion is car exports – about 20% of the UK’s total car exports and its largest single export customer for cars.
About 80% of the cars the UK makes are for export, so the US buys one in six of all the cars made in the UK. The US market is important for the UK car industry.
I suspect you may be confusing “the UK auto industry” with “UK-owned car companies” – they’re not the same thing. Most cars made in the UK are made by companies owned elsewhere.
You are perfectly correct, I would think, in that UK imports of cars to the US are not particularly important for most people *in the US*. But the car industry is a not-insignificant part of the UK economy, and in particular its exports, and the US is the biggest recipient of those exports.
I would also not rule out the possibility that Trump has got confused between Rolls-Royce, which is a British company whose exports really are very important to the US (jet engines), and Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Ltd, which is completely separate from Rolls-Royce and is in fact owned by BMW.
Not really? That’s trivially false for domestic policy: as the libertarians are fond of noticing, a free market regime offers at most a one-time bribe (to incentivize the liberalization), while strict permitting or regulatory regimes potentially offer a constant stream of bribes and favors to buy the continuation of favorable treatment.
Similarly, some foreign policies, regardless of their merits, are more monetizable than others. Iran was willing to pay for illegally given fissile materials, Germany was not. Trump could just force the Saudi state company to cut production when it wanted higher oil prices, but it’s hard to imagine something similar happening for any more diversified and liberal polity. Netanyahu was willing to essentially campaign for Trump, Macron was not, and anyway Macron’s endorsement would not have had a comparable weight. Maybe most infuriatedly, Armenian blood was bought and sold for relatively cheap by Azeri gas money. Gas money that Armenia simply lacked. One stance on that conflict was simply much more profitable than another.
I suppose one of the main, immediate drawbacks of realism is that even if you believe it does govern, states are not omniscient, and so will often act in ways that rational thinkers believe will maximise their power, but, in reality, do the opposite because those rational thinkers didn’t have access to all the relevant information. Like with the Russia-Ukraine example, the outbreak of the war may have been relatively predictable in a realism framework, because Russia WAS looking to maximise its power, and invading a poorly prepared country that was already mired in fighting allied partisans & special forces with a much larger, more sophisticated and more modern army, backed by a bigger economy does seem to logically lead to ‘a swift victory’ rather ‘3 year long meatgrinder featuring massive losses for little material gain’. Realism might be a good way to predict the actions of states, but it’s not prophesy – the results can still be far from what a rational state might expect, even when acting rationally, because the world is not entirely rational, at least not at the level a person can percieve.
Another issue is extent to which realism is true at different levels. I.e. foreign policy being realism based doesn’t necessarily mean the state itself is. E.g. foreign policy is going to be heavily influenced by state strength/resilience.
Like frankly Putin’s more maximal goals probably were more or less impossible from the start given his miscalculation of Ukrainian nationalism even with much worse Ukrainian military performance. That makes establishing some sort of government at scale hard. Also urban combat in modern warfare seems to be pretty awful even with relatively limited number of motivated defenders. Russia in the initial invasion outside the South (where nationalism is weaker) failed to take *any* city or large town even where there was minimal presence of the Ukrainian Army. Nationalism is a bit awkward to fit in to realism and a lot of other stuff about state capacity is squishy to, after all states are just a social construct!
Interestingly, the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley appeared to have made the same miscalculation, having described the the fall of Kyiv “within 72 hours” as the worst-case scenario.
https://theweek.com/ukraine/1010116/russia-will-not-capture-any-of-ukraines-cities-ukrainian-defense-minister-says
In hindsight, this could be interpreted as the failure to assess national morale/cohesion on his part – the same kind of mistake as what led to the outcome of Afghanistan withdrawal, except overcorrecting in the other direction this time. Though, the other way to look at it is that the U.S. had also recognized the initial invasion plan could have been very effective, but some notorious failures doomed it perhaps even more than nationalism (i.e. I read a passage from a biography of Zelenskyy which claimed that the printed maps found on the bodies of paratroopers near Hostomel dated to 1989 – meaning that they were dropped over what the map said was a dense forest, yet had been cleared years ago, leaving them with no cover and causing mass casualties.)
And according to the article above, Milley was rebuked by Ukrainian then-Defence Minister Reznikov (Everyone who has looked into the eyes of our soldiers at least once is sure that there will be no repeat of 2014. The aggressor will not capture either Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkiv, or any other city), who certainly got the better of that particular exchange in hindsight, even if he wasn’t strictly 100% correct (Kherson aside, Melitopol still counts as a city). Then, though, I recall Reznikov claimed that he would celebrate the conclusion of the 2023 campaign on a Crimean beach – which did not exactly happen either. Predictions are hard, and overconfidence is a thing.
I think fundamentally the viability of Kyiv in 3 days was a morale issue, not a competence one. Sure Russia made plenty of tactical and logistical mistakes and maybe *eventually* they could have taken it otherwise. But, it takes very few forces willing to fight to make a urban battle drag on for months. At Mosul, Aleppo, 1st/2nd Grozny there was nearly 10-fold numerical advantage for the attackers and all of those took 6+weeks. Even the US military could not take a city the size of Kyiv anywhere close to that fast if someone tried to stop them. US at Fallujah took 6 weeks despite a 4-to-1 numerical advantage. Competence can help create shock and awe effect to discourage resistance. But it can’t win in 3 days if people are willing to fight
Bret was too pessimistic with hindsight, but I think his February 25 and March 3 posts suggest he thought the types of resistance depending how well Ukraine did were 1. Conventional 2. Brutal urban combat 3. Insurgency. In the event things mostly stayed in the first one. But a better-performing Russia is going to have a lot of Mariupols to deal with: Sumy, Chernigov, Kharkiv, Kyiv as thanks to their poor performance they didn’t make it further than the outer suburbs of those places.
One problem Russia would have had was not that much infantry in the grand scheme of things which urban combat uses *a lot* of. They didn’t make any real effort to fix that until after Kharkiv counteroffensive.
I’m a little worried how small the US’s proportion of infantry is getting of overall military. That could give us a real mess at some point even against a non-major power. Local forces often act as a lot of that.
I think General Milley made the same mistake that many other Western military commentators made. They assumed that Russia wanted a completely prostrate Ukraine, a bit like Iraq after the US invasion in 2003. They’ also, assumed that seizing territory equated with victory and it is not clear that Russian military thinking sees it this way.
Initially, a completely prostrate Ukraine and territorial occupation does not seem to have been Russia’s desire. It looked like Russia wanted some fairly drastic but doable political changes in Ukraine centred on the rights of Russian speaking Ukrainian citizens and their physical safety.
My guess is that, at the start of the “Special Military Operation” Russia did not want to permanently acquire territory. Bringing Crimea up to Russian standards had shown just how costly territorial acquisition could be. Viewpoints change as the conflict continues.
Also, as the conflict goes on, I am not sure that in the “short” term (whatever short means here) Russia really cares about capturing territory. The object is to destroy the Kiev Gov’t and purge Nazis. It, to a great extent, does not matter if your actions in Lugansk Oblast or Lviv Oblast achieves this.
If you actually believe that Russia is trying to purge Nazis and protect minorities in Ukraine, you are at best extremely gullible.
This is really twisting the facts. At the start of the war, Russian government was outspoken in its aim to replace the Ukrainian government, and they commenced a major operation to conquer Kyiv. Even today, the Russian proposals for peace terms include the removal of the democratically elected government, a new government amenable to Russia, permanent prohibition for alignment with EU and NATO and permanent disarmament of Ukraine. If this is not “a state prostrate”, then nothing is.
It may indeed be that a formal annexation was not planned, but this is immaterial. If anything, life in a Russian ally like Belarus or “Transdnistria” is worse than being a part of Russia proper: you suffer all the lawlessness, corruption, kleptocracy and economic stagnation typical of Russian provincial life, but lack the minimal legal protections that Russian citizens still enjoy.
@FinnishReader,
Belarus doesn’t really seem that “kleptocratic”? Their levels of economic inequality are quite low by global standards, in contrast to Russia where they’re extremely high.
I’d say one would be much better off in Belarus than in Russia, in terms of economic well being (although you would have no more political freedom, maybe less).
“Belarus doesn’t really seem that “kleptocratic”? Their levels of economic inequality are quite low by global standards, in contrast to Russia where they’re extremely high.”
That is a bit of a non sequitur. It is perfectly possible for a country to have a low Gini coefficient if it has a population who are all more or less equally poor and a dictator who has built himself 17 giant palaces, and this is indeed what Belarus has. What it doesn’t have is oligarchs, because huge industrial enterprises remain in state hands, rather than being privatised as they were in Russia.
That is a bit of a non sequitur. It is perfectly possible for a country to have a low Gini coefficient if it has a population who are all more or less equally poor and a dictator who has built himself 17 giant palaces, and this is indeed what Belarus has. What it doesn’t have is oligarchs, because huge industrial enterprises remain in state hands, rather than being privatised as they were in Russia.
@ajay,
That’s fine, but if the leader with his 17 palaces still scoops up a smaller fraction of the total economy than 17 (or 170) oligarchs would, then I’d say that’s a net win. In general, I’d much rather prefer the dictator and no oligarchs to no dictator and plenty of oligarchs. Individual leaders come and go, whole classes that monopolize control over industrial production are much harder to outlast or get rid of.
“In general, I’d much rather prefer the dictator and no oligarchs to no dictator and plenty of oligarchs.”
That’s fine, but I wasn’t taking a position on which is preferable – just pointing out that you can have a kleptocratic ruler and low inequality in the same state, and this is what Belarus has. You had argued that Belarus “doesn’t seem that kleptocratic” because it has low inequality – I don’t think they are mutually exclusive.
”My guess is that, at the start of the “Special Military Operation” Russia did not want to permanently acquire territory.”
Well, if so, please explain me why they started the war by annexing territory which they even did not even occupy at the rike? Indeed, they annexed more than they control now.
You mean ‘Russian speaking Ukrainian citizens’ in the vein of President Zelensky?
By using the populations of their two Manchukuo-style puppet regimes as expendable cannon fodder?
I think this goes even deeper. Individuals obviously aren’t all-knowing perfect optimizers (far from it), so in either economics or international relationships, any theory positing that agents are ultimately rational maximizers must do so in the aggregate – over long enough periods of time, after enough feedback and time to settle into an equilibrium, states will *converge* towards that sort of rational behavior, not because people in charge will be fully rational, but because blind evolutionary forces will have weeded out those who act in ways that aren’t rational. Basically maybe you only want to go to war with Neighboria because its inhabitants are heathens that your God told you in a dream must be purged, but if it so happens that going to war with Neighboria will also be rational and power-maximizing for your country, then socio-political forces will converge towards putting you in charge because you’re a tool to achieve that goal.
The problem with this is obviously as you say lack of information, but also time scales. An election cycle is usually 5 years, and that’s unusually high turnover; in ye olde times a country could have the same king for decades. That’s a lot of time and a lot of friction to enable this sort of evolutionary process to happen unimpeded. And sometimes history moves faster than that. If a revolution topples the current regime and then starts invading neighboring countries to spread its gospel it’ll take quite a bit for any consequences of its potentially irrational actions to come back and reestablish the equilibrium (by punishing the revolution’s irrationality and feeding restoring forces that can eventually bring the country back on a saner path).
In one sense, the normative realists’ claim then makes sense: given that we know what the end point will eventually be, better go there as fast as possible and save us the hassle and pain of all those pretenses while maximizing the benefits. But on the other hand, this might be one of those cases where the prophecy actually sort of cancels itself: if everyone DID pursue realist goals nominally, but were as you’d expect still imperfectly informed, and imperfectly optimizing, then there might genuinely be less chance for the sort of natural selection that usually lets the “true” realist policy rise to the top, for the same reason why an inbred population is worse at evolving traits that confer resistance to certain diseases or cope with changing environmental conditions: less “gene” variety in the ideological makeup of that society.
Realists don’t “know what the end point [of state ‘evolution’] will be” any more than biologists know what the end point of biological evolution will be (other than heat death at some distant time, but that’s rather outside the scope of either field).
In the meantime, neither interstate systems nor ecological systems are moving towards a particular end point, and even (simplistically, for the sake of argument) purely negative traits, biological or political, will not at some time reach a point at which they “will have been weeded out” by evolutionary pressures. The relation of evolutionary pressures to negative traits is not that the former steadily culls the supply of the latter until one day you wind up with an ecosystem none of whose species have any more negative traits to select against because evolutionary pressure has worked its way through them all.
It’s hard to imagine that a view of states-as-evolutionary-entities, which treats political irrationality as comparable to negative biological traits, should exempt states from a similarly continual recrudescence of that political irrationality.
Sure, but that was my point – you definitely have plenty of irrationality as transient state, and at most you can argue that rationality is a convergent equilibrium. But also, any given equilibrium is only reached after enough time to settle, and since time to settle is long and conditions change fast, it’s very likely that lots of states simply never reach it before things change again.
So yeah, overall I can see the arguments for “realism” as a model but as Bret says it’s at best a tool, and it’s important to notice that it’s something that doesn’t describe a lot of cases because those transition periods in which a state fumbles around with ideas and options, trying to converge on an optimal policy, aren’t just annoying noise to approximate away, they are some of the most substantial (perhaps THE most substantial) parts of what we end up calling “History”.
That’s a bit of a common misconseption about economics. In a competitive equilibrium framework (which yes it has its obvious limits), agents literally only need to know their own preferences/production structure and prices. That’s literally the whole point of markets, to obviate perfect information and calculation.
In a strategic equilibrium, agents just guess a distribution for things they don’t know bc well, they must act on something (hence Harsanyi’s very profound intuition of mized strategies as equivalent to pure strategies in a stochastic environment). There is no assumption about these beliefs being *true*, just for beliefs *to be* (and in fact quite a lot of time is dedicated to the the tedious exercises of characterizing the infinite equilibria which can arise given the infinite set of beliefs, most of which necessarily false).
Indeed, and this fact is also what makes the ambiguous phrasing in this part of the post so frustrating.
To return to the current Ukraine War: is Putin really behaving rationally in a power-maximizing mode by putting his army to the torch capturing burned out Ukrainian farmland one centimeter at a time and no faster? It sure seems like Russian power has been reduced rather than enhanced by this move, even though realists will insist that Russia’s effort to dominate states near it is rational power-maximizing under offensive realism.
This could easily be read as implying that the present-day outcome was already foreseen on the day when the decision to initiate large-scale war was made and yet it was nevertheless accepted – hence, such ideological absurdity must prove realism wrong. Of course, Dr. Devereaux himself did not exactly foresee what has been happening today in late February 2022,
https://acoup.blog/2022/02/25/miscellanea-understanding-the-war-in-ukraine/
Second, the balance of equipment and numbers suggests that Russian forces are very likely to win in the field. There is a range of possibilities within that statement, from a relatively quick victory with the Ukrainian Armed Forces simply collapsing, to a slogging campaign that morphs almost seamlessly into insurgency as it proceeds, to, of course, the small but non-zero chance that the balance of morale and ability surprises everyone and the Russian offensive fails. This last possibility has been judged by the experts as being very unlikely, and I tend to agree.
At the same time, as I am writing this (now late in the evening EST on the 24th) it is increasingly clear that ‘swift Russian victory’ is also a rapidly vanishing possibility. Ukrainian forces do not appear to have collapsed or melted away but are standing to fight and while Ukraine has comparatively little in the way of air assets and air defenses, what they do have seems to be at least somewhat operational, which is something of a surprise given Russian superiority in indirect fires. Consequently, while the chances of a clear Ukrainian victory remain small, the scenario in which Ukrainian resistance, transitioning from open-field combat to urban combat to insurgency as necessary, inflicts heavy or even crippling losses on Russian troops now seems increasingly plausible.
So, it’s quite obvious that by and large, the leadership of RF did not either. While it is entirely possible (if more difficult) to argue that the purely socioeconomic costs of international isolation incurred by the war + the mess of administering all that territory would have still resulted in a net negative for Russian power even if it all went to plan – as indeed many Russians, at home or in diaspora like myself, have thought, and consequently believed at the time would ultimately preclude the invasion, only to be proven bitterly wrong – this passage does not even attempt this.
Now, the more charitable reading of the passage is that at some unspecified point between the start of the invasion and now, it would have been more rational for RF to stop then to proceed with the conflict as it is unfolding now – and hence, the fact that this did not happen presumably “disproves realism”. The issue here is that the current conduct of the war can also be rationalized within the exact same realist terms first outlined by Thucydides, and summarized in one of the linked posts as “Fear, Honor and Interest.” The passage seems to look at the issue entirely in terms of interest (both the “seems like Russian power has been reduced rather than enhanced” and “realists will insist that Russia’s effort to dominate states near it is rational power-maximizing”), but I would argue that Honor, in the Thucydides’ sense, had been the more important factor. To quote our host again
> Finally, the most easily misunderstood of the three, honor, timē (τιμή, pronounced ‘te-may’ not like time). We tend to think of ‘preserving the national honor’ as consisting of acting ‘honorably’ which in turn means acting in accord with some rule of moral conduct. ‘She is an honorable person’ is roughly synonymous with ‘She is a good person.’ This is not what Thucydides means here. Timē is honor in the sense that it is the dignity or respect paid to a thing; it can even mean the value or price of something for sale. There is no moral component in timē – timē is about the respect paid, not about being worthy of respect. What Thucydides is signalling here is the need to retain a certain reputation – for effectiveness, trustworthiness, ruthlessness, vengefulness – for a state, all of which gets neatly summed up by timē (and often goes by the term ‘credibility’ in modern policy debates)… Timē is how you generate that prediction – that you will be a strong ally and a dangerous enemy – by establishing a reputation, through a strong record, of being just that. In turn, that means that a great power cannot afford to be nice, because it has to maintain the kind of reputation that deters enemies and convinces friends that they will be defended. That means brutal, tit-for-tat retaliation.
Thus, it would seem consistent with a realist framework to claim that not backing down in a conflict unfolding in a former Soviet state (and perhaps a little more emotively, not “selling out” those who chose to betray their country of birth and instead place their trust in RF – often to the point of going on the frontlines for it) is the absolute core part of maintaining RF’s credibility, in the sense described above. Indeed, the argument that RF’s clear loss in Ukraine would lead to such a catastrophic loss of credibility that multiple regions would be encouraged to secede from RF, and therefore cause a permanent loss of great power status has been not-infrequently made over the years – both by the “Z” sphere arguing for a decisive sphere and by the Ukraine backers arguing that rather than encouraging a forever war, ongoing aid can permanently eliminate a Western rival’s great power status. At that point, the most important aspect of Thucydides’ framework, Fear, would be involved, and following that logic, the current losses in manpower and materiel + the strain on the economy could indeed appear justifiable from a realist, state-interest perspective when compared to the alternative.
It is certainly possible to argue against all of the above – i.e. I do not personally believe conditions on the ground are particularly favourable to secession regardless of the war’s outcome – but the post above does not even consider these arguments, let alone attempting to counter them within the same framework, and is sadly all the weaker for it.
So timē means “respect” in the sense that the Godfather used the word?
Firstly, this is a “Fireside Friday” post. So I think you’re holding it to an unreasonable standard of rigour.
Secondly, I think it’s pretty clearly implied that Bret is arguing against neo-realism. It’s been a while since I’ve read any Waltz but I’m fairly sure that honour (however defined) is less significant there than in the classical framing.
You raise some interesting points, but I’m a bit puzzled as to your actual thesis. If you’re arguing in favor of realism as a model… Well, demonstrating how easily one could add additional factors that could justify any desired course of action within that framework, isn’t entirely persuasive.
Yes, one could argue that respect is more important than whatever more concrete measure of state power is being sacrificed. But deliberately weakening the state, in order to strengthen the state, seems perilously close to “the beatings shall continue until morale improves.”
> If you’re arguing in favor of realism as a model… Well, demonstrating how easily one could add additional factors that could justify any desired course of action within that framework, isn’t entirely persuasive.
Yes, this is sadly a general issue with models of behaviour which emphasize some sort of a calculus in order to reach a conclusion. Utilitarianism is also notorious for people managing to justify just about anything they want within its framework, by claiming that something which is clearly wrong/amoral now will have greater benefits in the future than an action which is already moral in the present. I.e. the so-called “effective altruists”, who were not only funded by SBF, one of the most notorious frauds of this era,* but ended up a) convincing themselves the most utilitarian thing to do is to either create a superintelligent AGI god or prevent the emergence of an unstoppable AGI devil, and not any of the boring, grimy stuff about the sick and hungry people in the present; b) spending millions to have literal castles as headquarters, because that would make it more likely rich people would have give them more money and so eventually provide a return on investment. Etc., etc., etc.
https://oxfordclarion.uk/wytham-abbey-and-the-end-of-the-effective-altruism-dream/
Nevertheless, much like how Churchill might have defended democracy as “the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”, we might also treat both utilitarianism and IR realism in a similar fashion. Deontological approaches to morality infamously stumble next to the observable reality of differing moral values and the difficulty of proving one person’s set of them superior next to the other – as well an equally observable tendency of people to excuse themselves for actions they would condemn others for. Likewise, the problem with alternatives to realism is that they appear even more to, in the words of the post above, comfortable conclusions that someone and their priorities were right everywhere all along.
Consider the example above. If we are to accept the premise that the motivation behind the goals of RF leadership in the war is entirely ideological (which seems to be what Dr. Devereaux is pointing at), then the only options available to those opposed to those goals are to either change the ideology (impractical) or to simply rely on raw power to deny those goals (clearly Dr. Devereaux’s preferred option) – with the absolute and relative costs conveniently abstracted away.
The problem here is that if you look far enough, “our opposition is just too ideological to be reasoned with” claim had likely been made on both sides of just about every hot conflict or even cold confrontation – yet if all of that had been true, a massive number of treaties would have never been signed – from the various USSR-USA agreements like nuclear arms reduction pacts, to a countless number of treaties signed between opposing factions of different religions many centuries ago, “at the time when people believed in their own religion”. So, you can see why scholars of international relations could be skeptical of the claims that this one conflict is where negotiations are fruitless and only totalizing outcomes are possible.
On the other hand, as others have already pointed out on here, it is entirely possible for behaviour to align with both ideology and perceived realist incentives. In that case, because ideology is very difficult to change from the outside, the more promising approach would be to change incentives – but this requires one to understand them in the first place. Dr. Devereaux’s thought process appears to be – RF’s key realist goal would be to maximize power; the way the war has been fought right now is reducing its power; ergo, the RF leadership is not actually thinking in realist terms at all (or, perhaps, the costs have not been high enough.)
However, this ignores that the formative event for Putin and his inner circle had been the break-up of the USSR – and the the whole reason why both RF and Ukraine have thousands and thousands of Soviet military vehicles to burn through in this conflict is because the USSR fell apart without really getting to use them.** Consequently, the lesson of 1991 for Putin, Volodin, etc. that the military vehicle inventory is deeply secondary to state’s survival next to the strength of the national spirit (incidentally, the theme of many posts here regarding morale and cohesion). The fact that USSR broke up only a couple of years after leaving Afghanistan is easily interpretable as evidence that a good way to fatally weaken that spirit is to back out of a peripheral conflict and therefore to signal weakness to all those who would take advantage of it.
I do not know if they actually think that about Afghanistan specifically – but I know beyond doubt that the consensus opinion on Gorbachev across much of Russia (let alone in leadership circles) is that of a weakling who looked at the U.S. President who openly decried him as the emperor of an evil empire – and sought to compromise and receive approval from him. Consequently, another lesson is that you do not give in to the demands from nations whose leaders openly disparage you, because the cost of demoralizing the true believers who are the backbone of your country’s cohesion is immeasurably greater than any scrap they might wish to award you for cooperation.
Now, the other (generally more common) interpretation, of course, is that the USSR devoted too much to the arms’ race (although this again means the vehicles burnt up in Ukraine were never that important in the grand scheme of things) and not enough to people’s material welfare, and its ideology was discredited by people being subjected to over a decade of growing shortages of material goods, etc. In that framing, the greatest risk of the war is actually the long-term*** costs it’s imposing on the economy – but the counterargument to that is any number of regimes which had experienced far worse material conditions than anything the USSR faced in the 1980s and which Russia is reasonably likely to face now (i.e. “The Ardous March” in DPRK – aka a famine with a death toll plausibly reaching into low millions), but ultimately retained the faith of their hardliners and did not collapse.
Now, perhaps placing this much importance to whether the people inside the state believe in the project its leaders claim to pursue makes more of a constructivist than a realist – although, it might also make me more of a classical realist rather than a neorealist, which, according to Wikipedia, is what our host had actually been arguing against. (TL;DR, where neorealism sees structural forces between states, classical realism sees human nature in the Hobbesian sense – which is a less popular explanation nowadays since it is apparently considered untestable.) Whatever the case, it had been observed time and time again that states can fall apart in ways other than being defeated by other states, so any worthwhile theory of international relations ought to include that as both a potential outcome for each state and something the leadership of each state would be trying to avoid, even at times at the expense of their other goals, as I pointed out already. Does this make for a sufficiently clear thesis?
* Who later claimed to have never actually believed in its principles and to have instead considered them easy marks who would quickly bestow upon him elite credibility without any further questions – although some alleged this was an n-dimensional move where he fell on his sword for the sake of the movement by dissociating himself from it.
** Other than a fairly small fraction of mostly older hardware which was deployed in Afghanistan. A conflict for which most of them weren’t designed for – i.e. self-propelled guns often had to be used in place of tanks or even BMPs because those were designed to blend into lowland terrain and consequently had low-set turrets with low main weapon elevation/depression angles, so they struggled to hit targets in the hills and mountains. Some military historians argued that same design quirk might have saved Israel in 1973, as it crippled the effectiveness of (otherwise mechanically superior) Syrian armour in the Golan Heights and allowed the IDF to focus the bulk of its efforts on repelling the Egyptian forces in the Sinai instead of having to split its limited forces more equally.
I think it’s reasonable to point out that there can be multiple schools of thought for what Russia’s national interest is, and that the incomplete nature of information available to any organization further complicates the task of assessing which one is correct.
Putin and his government seem to have believed that Ukraine would fall quickly if Russia sent a few BTGs across the border to occupy major cities and military bases. This clearly wasn’t true, but if it *had* been true, the February 2022 invasion would be a much less obvious counterpoint to neo-realism.
Important political figures are also not neutral observers to questions of national interest. Putin remaining in power may or may not be in *Russia’s* national interest, but it’s definitely in *Putin’s* personal interest, so he is unlikely to be sympathetic to any conception of Russian interests that requires his removal, except perhaps under extreme duress.
This may seem obvious, but it has broader implications. When Putin learned that the 2022 invasion had gone poorly, did he consider ordering a withdrawal rather than doubling down? If so, did the perception that he had staked his legitimacy as leader of Russia on the invasion play a role in why he ultimately decided to forego any off-ramps?
We will probably never know, and Putin himself may not be entirely sure. But I think that’s the point. In the abstract, it’s probably true that states *want* to follow the national interest, but in reality it’s never quite so simple.
the other (generally more common) interpretation, of course, is that the USSR devoted too much to the arms’ race
I think both of them can be true? it can both be true that the Soviet Union was spending far too much on the military, which it was, and that also Gorbachev made concessions that he shouldn’t have (at the ideological level, if not at the military level).
“Realism” will only get you so far, for so long. In a dog-eat-dog, Darwinistic world of predator states and prey states, I see only an endless cycle of futility, empires rise and fall, human misery endemic, social and economic progress limited. I would prefer a “realism” that is bounded and influenced by a sort of celebratory internationalism that looks to our “better angels” for inspiration rather than a zero-sum game. I think of FDR in power — a realist about what to do against the menace of facism and militarism, but also looking beyond the world war to a more cooperative international arrangement of nations to promote mutual security and prosperity, shared by all. Rather than the US setting itself up as a global hegemon post-WWII — altho’ we certainly did do some of that with one hand, the other was doing some altruistic things albeit with a realistic benefit (e.g., the Marshall Plan) — orthodox US foreign policy was to seek an end to perpetual competition and conflict by establishing an international order that looked beyond selfish national concerns. Alas, we have entered a period of reactionaryism, and the New Deal and enlightened foreign policy are in full retreat. Trump has apparently found the One Ring, with the help of his Nine Supreme Ringwraiths, and the Orcs are on the march. No happy, cooperative, evolved Star Trek future for us! (To awkwardly mix literary analogies.)
Do not be so gloomy. Even a purely realist model suggests that:
– The number of polities tends to decrease over time, with the average size increasing, leading to the formation empires large enough to create internal peace. This process tends to run until local hegemons absorb their entire region (defined by the constraints of the transportation technology available at the time). (See the Fremen Mirage series.)
– That imperial longevity and cohesion will tend to increase.
– That, because they are inputs to military power, narrowly-understood technology (better sword, better plow) and loosely understood patterns of economic and social organization (literacy, roads, monetized trade) will tend to increase. Many of these — as a side effect as far as this view is concerned! — tend to improve quality of life. However, in the most familiar conditions (“plow agriculture”) this list also includes slavery.
– In the limit of transportation technology improvement, this would predict a global (galactic, etc.) hegemon. (The 17-18th century saw globe-spanning empires in a balance-of-powers situation, but with enough dynamism that given a few centuries at that techlevel, eventually it would have collapsed and the whole globe would have been painted one color.)
– Stepping over to stationary bandit theory, the straightforward reading of “increasing imperial cohesion and longevity” also suggests social and economic progress, and a reduction in misery, overlapping but not entirely coincident with the material aspects mentioned above.
The apparent futility is a direct result of assuming a lack of social or economic progress. Pardon — in the grim darkness of the past, there is not only war, but also the seeds of light that sprout and gradually turn into the present. Sure, there are some large and notable setbacks (Bronze, Roman, several iterations of China, etc.) but those are remarkable precisely because they cut against the general pattern of progress, however slow.
If there is an overarching pattern to history, it seems to be more a pattern of slowly growing empires punctuated by swift collapses, leading to no net change. (The same pattern is often found in the physical world, and in the stock market, but I leave it to a greater mind to figure out a broader theory.) So the former Roman Empire, for example, now contains many more polities than it did in 300 AD.
On a long enough timeline everyone dies. That doesn’t mean one should be gloomy and focused on their death all the time.
OTOH, while Africa contains many less polities than it did 75 years ago, it contains many less than it did 500 years ago.
In the longer term there is absolutely a tendency towards larger polities.
,i>In the longer term there is absolutely a tendency towards larger polities.
To an extent, but it doesn’t follow that the trend will continue indefinitely. It could be that there’s a limit to consolidation and that at some point the drive towards consolidation is outweighed by countervailing factors. Especially in an age where norms favor self determination and strongly stigmatize annexation, and where improved communications and global trade relations make it easier to survive as a small country.
The reason Africa has 50-some independent polities, no more, no less, is mostly due to fairly arbitrary and ill-grounded decisions made by England, France, Germany and a few other countries in the 1880s. I wouldn’t necessarily expect there to be exactly the same number of countries in Africa in 2125 as there are today.
Exactly the improved communications and trade relations that have in the past enabled agglomeration by conquest are continuing to drive agglomeration by voluntary merger. The most obvious models are the embryonic US deciding to be one polity, and the ongoing hesitant progress of the EU in this direction.
Certainly, it’s possible for an emphasis on self-determination to lead to a proliferation of e.g. autonomous regions, perhaps even some in-situ federalization of formerly unitary governments, but this should be unlikely to increase the number of polities (independent foreign policy + military).
The most obvious models are the embryonic US deciding to be one polity, and the ongoing hesitant progress of the EU in this direction.
The EU is not a country, as you state yourself it’s at most “progressing in that direction” and I strongly doubt it will ever become one. Maybe some of the countries in it will merge, but I don’t think they will ever include all 28. If they do end up merging, come back to me then and press the argument.
The US is a weird country in innumerable ways, and at present it’s hard to see scenarios where it breaks apart (mostly because its divisions along lines of race, values, class etc. don’t really follow geographic lines very well), but I wouldn’t at all be surprised to see other super-states like India and China eventually losing some of their outlying regions.
TBH, even realism (as such) isn’t neccessarily *that* negative; The argument is rather that you can have peace and cooperation *but only by fostering circumstances such that it is in everyone’s interest for there to be*.
On the other hand a lot of people assumed Russia would *not* invade because they (correctly) noted that the russian invasion was not prepared/deployed correctly and assumed therefore it was a bluff. (when it turns out, no, the russians were either just incompetent or hoping that the element of relative surprise would make up for their logistics/deployment shortcomings)
The memetic version of this is “I took a calculated risk… and man, am I bad at math!”
This is particularly problematic for states that have strong internal groupthink or ideology. Russian decision-making in the 2020s has been heavily shaped by specific schools of Russian ultranationalist thought. These have the typical hallmarks of fascist political theory (destiny of the race, foreign powers being simultaneously weak and strong, imagined conspiracies masterminded by specific groups that in reality are relatively less significant). It was within the context of this political ideology that Putin came to believe the following:
(1) That Ukraine was ‘naturally’ a part of Russia in some fundamental cosmic sense, that Russia was inherently destined to own Ukraine as a piece of property. And that the average Ukrainian somehow knew this as well as Putin did, and therefore would not resist his attempt to annex Ukraine.
(2) That the Ukranian government was fundamentally corrupt and self-serving and would neither boldly resist Russian conquest nor be able to command the loyalty of its citizens in doing so. Because in Putin’s mind nothing had changed since the pre-2019 and for that matter pre-2014 status quo (I still can’t get over the Ukrainians succeeding in getting a good if not excellent head of state by electing a comedian who had played one on TV, wish we’d managed to do as well).
(3) That Western states, being fundamentally decadent (because the Russians are so high on their own version of the Fremen Mirage that quite a few Western observers have gotten contact highs just from watching them enjoy themselves), would not act in a resolute manner to oppose the invasion or bolster Ukraine, even when Putin and his immediate subordinates directly announced that various NATO member states were literally next on the chopping block for intended conquest once Ukraine was subdued.
Strong ideology, getting all your information from yes-men who will leave out truth if it makes them or you look bad, and getting all your news of the wider world from media outlets that are doing the same thing, create an intensely distorted perception of reality. Attempts to act according to “interstate realism” while living in such a bubble will work about as well as attempts to navigate a cluttered room blindfolded.
In general assuming the states to be unified actors seems patently simplistic, especially as states became larger, more complex, and more participatory.
The US govt does not really want anything for more than 4 years, and oft it does not want anything for more than a twitter discourse cycle.
To what extent did the people who named the theory ‘realism’ deliberately or not so deliberately conflate the claims that the actions of states are governed mostly by the search for power and security and the claim to have a realistic=unclouded by sentiment view of international relations?
“the economic model on which realist and neo-realist thinking was predicted”
-> predicated
“and they lost both the arguments the war.”
ITYM “and they lost both the arguments and the war. “
I was just thinking about your discussion of the changes in warfare through the agrarian-to-industrial transition, generations of warfare, and where the US-Iran strikes fit in (or don’t) to those frameworks.
The news is plenty muddled, but my understanding is the US and Iran both warned each other, via Qatar, prior to the strikes to allow for the evacuation of personnel. Obviously one driver is limiting escalation; blowing up buildings while limiting human casualties lets you bluster while keeping the off-ramps that still let you save face. But it also seems like a culmination of industrial and fourth-generation warfare. Already the economic/strategic value of land is minimal. With maneuvers-based tactics and non-state/paramilitary/irregular forces, the tactical value of land seems much reduced too. If you can target materiel and its means of production, especially from a distance with standoff weapons, drones, or electronic warfare, your need to put human bodies in the line of fire is mostly gone too. To the point of the US/Iran strikes, neither do you need to care about killing their people. It doesn’t matter how many nuclear scientists or stealth bomber pilots they have; if you can destroy the nuclear facilities, stealth bombers, and airfields, they can’t do anything to you anyway.
I think both Ukraine and Israel fit in here too. In Ukraine, Russia does need boots on the ground, because their strategic aims do require them to hold the territory. While holding/regaining territory is obviously THE strategic aim for Ukraine, their own limitations in both fourth-generation materiel and personnel have pushed them towards the materiel-over-men approach. Israel has all the distance-striking capabilities they could need, and seem to have never seriously contemplated a full-scale ground invasion. But, while I’m not going to try to assess their human rights violations, its at least clear that minimizing civilian deaths, much less combatant deaths, was nowhere on their list of priorities.
Would love anybody’s thoughts on I’m on to something here or just think I’m smarter than I am.
On the Iran-Israeli-Iranian strikes and signalling:
Because Iran has no borders with Israel, Iran has no choice but to warn the states around it that Iran will be launching drones or missiles at Israel. If they didn’t, the defence forces of Iraq, Jordan, etc might assume that the Iranians were attacking them instead and counter attack. What seems to have been happening so far is that the neighbouring states promptly warn Israel as well, and certainly in late 2024 Iraq, Jordan, etc were contributing to the defence of Israel by shooting down Iranian drones and missiles.
Same for the recent Iranian missile attack on the US base in Qatar. The Iranians had to let the Qataris know that the missiles weren’t aimed at, say, the Qatari oil pumps and refineries.
As for the US strike, I don’t think the US deliberately warned the Iranians. They were trying to deceive observers by flying B-2s in the opposite direction to Diego Garcia, base for previous Middle East missions, while the real B-2 strike was launched. However the senior levels of this US presidential administration have not demonstrated great competence in comms security, so I wouldn’t be surprised that news of the strike reached the Iranians anyway.
It’s my understanding that Israel does give warning before they launch their missiles, but such warnings can only do so much when Hamas puts their rocket launchers and other material in the middle of cvilian areas. I’m curious what else Israel can do to minimize civilian deaths and still accomplish their goal of destroying Hamas.
This question ties into something pointed out in the past on this blog- if “don’t have a war in the first place” isn’t an option, then you’re thinking narrowly in terms of operations, not broadly in terms of strategy.
Given that the death toll in Gaza by this point has passed (at realistic minimum) fifty thousand, the simplest (if trite) answer to your question is that Israel could minimize civilian deaths by “not having a war.”
Despite the depraved indifference to human life exhibited by Hamas, Hamas could nevertheless have repeated the October 7th attacks monthly every month from October 2023 to the present and killed fewer civilians than have died in Gaza in the time since. And even that is theoretical, since Hamas assuredly lacked then and lacks now the means to repeat that attack monthly given how many men they lost doing it even once.
Of course, this doesn’t meet the “destroy Hamas” requirement, which is rather the point. Israel has set a strategic goal of “destroy Hamas, regardless of civilian casualties.”
This has implications regarding what ratio of Palestinian civilian casualties is considered acceptable. The observed preference of the Israeli government is a ratio of well over 50:1. That is to say, to the Israeli government’s way of thinking, the goal “destroy Hamas” justifies rating the value of a Palestinian civilian life is being less than 0.02 Israeli civilian lives. To be clear, this is what the Israeli government has already in effect decided by their actions, by the position “we will do what we have already done.”
Theoretically their actual position might be “we would be willing to directly kill every man, woman, and child in Gaza over this, rather than walk away,” in which case the ratio would be somewhere above 2000:1, with the value of a Palestinian life being somewhat less than 0.0005 Israeli civilian lives.
Now, one can argue that it would be very desirable to eliminate Hamas permanently, what with them being a murderous terrorist organization. This could then be said to justify the goal “destroy Hamas, regardless of civilian casualties” from Israel’s perspective if not necessarily from a neutral outside view.
But there’s a problem with that. The Israeli strategic goal is a chimera, a creature that logically cannot exist in a meaningful form.
Suppose, hypothetically, that God Himself struck dead every single individual currently on Hamas’ membership rolls. Everyone who even thinks of themselves as a member of Hamas, dead in an instant. And that, with the nominal goal of Operation Swords of Iron accomplished, the IDF withdraws from the Gaza strip, which surely this war was not about annexing and ethnic-cleansing for Israelis to settle, surely.
How long before the angriest, most embittered Palestinian survivors in Gaza, the ones who have lost the most family members and whose homes were the most thoroughly destroyed by the IDF, proceed to found a new and just as fanatically anti-Israel guerilla movement, possibly with a name like “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Hamas?” Care to start a betting pool on how long that will take? Weeks? Days?
Insofar as Palestinians who really, really hate Israel constitute a threat to the Israeli state, “destroying Hamas” will not, at this point, actually end that threat. Insofar as the existence of Palestinians who all believe the Israelis should be pushed into the sea is an existential threat to Israel, that existential threat will not have been extinguished. Because the current generation of Palestinian children aren’t going to forget having their homes destroyed and having to live in refugee camps with inadequate sanitation, medical care, food, and water.
Thanks for the reasonable, balanced response. Mulling it over, I think one of the things that determines strategy, not just in this situation but in any number of situations is one’s priorities, and ultimate values. If the chief priority is “destroy Hamas and ensure there is no threat to those who call themselves Palestinians”, then your last point about the next generation of Palestinians restoring or replacing Hamas would justify true genocide. If it is true that the majority of Palestinians do not want peace, and would rather be martyred than not have governing control of Israel, then essentially there ARE no Palestinian civilians; might as well bomb Gaza into the Stone Age, maybe even with nukes, and just wipe them all out. Going to the other extreme, if the chief priority is saving civilian lives, then Israelis should all just leave the land entirely. They won’t be killing Palestinians, and Palenstinians won’t be killing them since they’d all be gone. I don’t expect either extreme to happen, and wouldn’t support either if it did.
If you are correct that Hamas can’t repeat the attack on Oct. 7th, and it does seem that Israel is well on their way to neutralizing them, then I could see a grand strategy of “not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good”. If the radical Palestinians are reduced to the threat level of say, an organized crime family, instead of a formidable miitary-level force, then that could justify Israel publicly noting when that goal is expected to be reached and then, ceasing military operations of their own accord. My understanding is that it’s up in the air how many residents of Gaza actually support Hamas. Pro-Israel people say that Hamas was democratically elected and the Palestinians should reap what they sow, but I’ve seen arguments to the contrary. If the worst of the worst are neutralized, that should give the moderates a chance to come to the table.
The chief arguments against “Hamas was democratically elected, Gaza is reaping what it sowed” are twofold.
First is that Hamas was elected… once, in 2006. The next election was never held and Hamas tolerates no alternative political structures within Gaza that might threaten their pre-eminence. So that election was nineteen years ago now, and the majority of the current population of Gaza was not of adult age and in many cases was not born when that happened.
Second is that, well, Israel has actively supported Hamas, often as a counterweight against other more moderate Palestinian factions, many times over the decades. If fifty thousand Gazan Palestinians deserve to die to expiate the ‘sin’ of supporting Hamas, how many people in the Israeli military-industrial complex deserve the same fate? Is Netanyahu one of them? At least the Gazans have the justification that Hamas isn’t their own avowed enemy and the enemy of their country.
As I’ve said, the problem is that “destroy Hamas by doing as the IDF is now doing in Gaza” is a chimerical objective. It cannot be achieved without exterminating the population of Gaza. And, I would extend, there is simply no remotely reasonable way to argue that the actions of Hamas or their plausible future actions can in any way justify the IDF in carrying out 1/3 of an entire Shoah’s worth of murders, massacring such a large civilian population, purely in order to forestall the eventual threat that the children of the people they’ve already killed will grow up to become their enemies. Anyone who can countenance the idea would need to be conscienceless.
Furthermore, consider the situation and incentives the Palestinians face.
They aren’t actually presented with the choice “either be martyrs for the cause of eventually conquering Israel or live in peace.” When they try to live in peace, they get gradual piecewise seizure of their land and what few economic prospects they have left by Israeli settlements. If some of their most hotheaded individuals shoot at the Israelis, the Israelis then take this as justification to kill thousands of Palestinians, most of whom had nothing to do with the shooting. At the operational level it’s functionally not much different from the kind of “hostage-taking” anti-guerilla tactics banned by the Geneva Conventions, where soldiers round up random civilians and threaten to kill them if the guerillas don’t turn themselves in.
A Palestinian who has literally zero desire to conquer Israel will still face a reality that his life will involve constantly having it ground in their face that Israel has taken nearly everything from his people and does not show any sign of caring for their rights, their problems, or their future. That an increasing fraction of the Israeli people seem perfectly comfortable with the idea of just killing him and his entire family simply to be rid of him. And that he is constantly exposed to overwhelming violence or the threat of same, due to circumstances outside his control.
He doesn’t have to want to conquer Israel to view Israel as an enemy and likely existential threat to himself, his personal posterity, and his ethnic group… Because quite frankly, the Israelis have given him pretty good reasons to think that on their own. The longstanding grievances over the Nakba are, at this point, not required to keep the grudges going, because “you dropped a bomb on my uncle’s apartment literally last year and now he’s crippled” is quite enough to do the same job in actual practice.
A past Israeli politician said there would be no peace until the Palestinians “love their children more than they hate us.” Recent events strongly suggest that no, this will not bring about peace for the Palestinians either, not in practice.
The morally relevant ratio isn’t “their civilians : our civilians”, but “their civilians : “their soldiers.” US civilian deaths in WWII were under 100 (excluding merchant mariners and travelers who happened to be in hostile countries when the war started) while the US caused something like 500k-1M civilian deaths among Axis citizens. But that doesn’t mean that the US “valued German / Japanese civilians at 0.0002 American civilians” or something. It means that the bombings that crippled the Axis war machines hurt civilians too. But that doesn’t make America in the wrong in WWII. Nor would it improve our evaluation of American morality if German agents had managed to flatten Cleveland and thereby evened the civilian death ratio out.
And of course, an Axis victory in WWII would have led to incalculably more civilian deaths, probably including American deaths eventually.
In the case of Gaza, the 50k figure includes some very large number of Hamas fighters. Even if you take the figures quoted by Hamas sycophants, you get a civilian:military ratio of around 3:1. For urban warfare against fanatics who don’t wear uniforms and are happy to have as many civilians on their own side die as possible, that is not a bad number at all.
Just from the sources cited on Wikipedia, I find even a 3:1 ratio of civilian to Gazan ‘military’ fatalities rather unlikely, and I suspect the ratio is higher. Among other things, the “50,000 dead” figure is itself quite conservative because it specifically excludes major categories of things that kill people and mostly limits itself to people who can be identified as dead by name and personal information. Given that the IDF has taken to running over people it deems “terrorists” with bulldozers, this runs into obvious problems.
By contrast, in Fallujah against opposition one imagines might be considered loosely similar in general determination and firepower to Hamas, the US military managed a civilian:military death ratio of more like 1:2 or 2:5, which is starting to edge over towards ten times (not quite but close) as favorable as the Israelis are managing.
I don’t think it’s possible to do a candid review of IDF actions in Gaza that avoids phrases like “genuine indifference to civilian casualties.” Doctrinally they show no signs of actually caring whether or how many civilians are killed, and there are such frequent incidents of civilians being specifically killed even when there is no reason to think Hamas fighters are present, that it beggars the imagination to think that the IDF is taking the problem seriously.
I think the decision to decide that 3:1 civilian:military casualty ratios are ‘reasonable’ reflects either a dangerous lack of knowledge of what is achievable (e.g. Second Fallujah), or a simple decision to, as alluded to, devalue Palestinian civilian lives.
Ultimately, the 10/7 attacks almost certainly could have been prevented by more intelligent action on the part of the Israeli government. Hamas’ threat level justifies this kind of general invasion and destruction only insofar as the Israeli government itself has created a situation in which this becomes ‘necessary,’ which suggests major conflicts of interest and suggests that the real underlying goal is to long-term render Gaza uninhabitable until the population either dies off or evacuates en masse
I noticed that you had not addressed the possibility of Israel attempting to install a not actively hostile* government, possibly demilitarized, in Gaza after a hypothetical destruction of Hamas.
Are there any reasons I am unaware of which would hinder that? Like, for example, Hamas having already eliminated most people who could be used for that?
* Under ‘not actively hostile’ I include a government whose attitude to Israel could even be ‘we hate you, but as you are stronger than us we won’t attack you so long as you do not attack or sanction us.’ Though, for all I know the Israeli government might not even want that; maybe they might fear if that works voters in the foreign countries supporting Israel might wonder why that a second ‘not actively hostile government’ could also not be given control over the West Bank then.
I have not addressed the possibility, personally, because I do not consider it realistic. The right-wing coalition politics now dominant in Israel gets no benefit from viable civilian governments to spring up in the Palestinian territories.
First, because the existence of such governments would force Israel to start respecting their jurisdiction and local authority, resulting in systematic reduction of the ease and freedom with which settlers could occupy further Palestinian land and with which IDF soldiers could raid or attack at will and generally employ terror tactics.
Second, because as you point out, it would set a precedent for a two-state (arguably three-state) solution and the Israeli right wing does not want a two-state solution with both Israeli and Palestinian ethnostates existing side by side. It wants a one-state solution in which a purely Israeli ethnostate dominates all the land and the Palestinians are either dead or somehow so thoroughly subjugated as to not contest their status as second class citizens. There are, to be clear, Israelis who do not agree with this mindset, but they’re not in charge right now and haven’t been for quite a while.
Netanyahu is in this for all the marbles, and is not going to share. If he were inclined to share, he and his would not have backed Hamas against other more moderate Palestinian factions in the past, would have started restraining the settlers decades ago, and would not have indirectly engineered the present situation as it now stands.
That’s what they seem to be doing with… Literal looting gangs. Charming fellows such as Yasser Abu Shabab, previously in prison for murder, has been liberated, armed and now is running his own aid-looting gang with tacit but blatant IDF protection.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-militia-netanyahu.html
https://www.ft.com/content/6a039600-d4f3-4aaa-ae0f-e4ca72cf2268
At the end Israel’s (or rather, Likud’s) problem in Gaza mirrors Russia’s problem in Chechnya: they need to install a loyal local government, but one which would not have the skills, the incentives or the legitimacy to pursue more autonomy or prosperity for its subjects at the expense of Russian/Israeli control. So far, only mafiosi with kleptocratic aspirations seem to fit the profile, in both cases.
Hmm, I recall that Bret had mentioned on earlier posts of this blog that Israel clearly is putting in less effort to avoid civilian collateral damage than NATO-countries would have done in their place, to put it exceedingly generously to Israel.
I recall that, how many months ago was it again, the Israeli military had even accidentally shot some of the hostages held by Hamas, despite those running out of the building they were in unarmed.
What specifically do NATO countries do differently in dealing with groups that have the same capability and tactics as Hamas? All I’ve ever seen is that it’s horrible how many civilian cashualties Israel is causing, but I’ve never seen any practical alternatives offered besides backing off. And again, I do see Simon_Jester’s point that maybe it’s about time for them to do that now. But for the most part it seems like the ones criticizing Israel have offered no practical solutions on how they can better prosecute the war.
“What specifically do NATO countries do differently in dealing with groups that have the same capability and tactics as Hamas?”
The closest parallel might be the Battle of Mosul in 2017 – fought against the ISIS garrison of the city by various Iraqi and US forces, with support from various NATO and non-NATO US allies. https://mwi.westpoint.edu/urban-warfare-project-case-study-2-battle-of-mosul/
Comparisons: Mosul is about 70 sq miles, Gaza is twice as big (but obviously not all of that is urbanised).
Mosul had a civilian population of about 1.8 million, Gaza is roughly the same.
Mosul took nine months to retake, Gaza is 20 months in and still going.
Hamas had about 40,000 troops in Gaza, ISIS had more like 10,000 in Mosul (both figures obviously estimates).
In both cases much of the built-up area was destroyed by heavy bombardment. The Old City of Mosul was destroyed almost entirely – estimated costs to repair are in the $50 billion region. About 20% of buildings in Gaza have been destroyed and more damaged, and the total cost to repair is very similar – $53 billion (UN and WB did a study this year).
Attacker deaths: about 1200 in Mosul, slightly less in Gaza (excluding deaths during the initial attack in 2023 which were not in Gaza itself).
Defender deaths: probably around 10,000 civilians and 6,000 ISIS garrison died in Mosul (though again this is an estimate and other estimates are wildly different). Gaza is close on 60,000 dead total according to its health ministry but it is not clear what percentage of those are civilians – the ministry does not split them out. Estimates generally centre around 80% which would imply 12,000 Hamas dead and 48,000 civilians. Note also that neither casualty figure is split out by cause; for example, an anti-ISIS revolt in Mosul early in the battle was put down by ISIS, presumably involving killings.
So from that: Gaza is twice as big (geographically) and four times as heavily garrisoned, so it makes sense that the battle is taking longer. Israel seems to be causing roughly half as much destruction per enemy casualty as Iraq did, but roughly twice as many civilian casualties.
Israel has *much* looser rules of engagement in terms of civilians and it has been getting worse over the course of the Gaza War. Several times worse ratio of civilian to combatant dead than the US. Heck the Kurds and Iraqis are cleaner urban combatants.
i don’t know about “NATO countries” in general (most of them seem not to fight that many wars), but Bret pointed out last year that the US had a much better ratio of (direct) military to civilian killings during the Iraq War. I have an extremely dim view of US foreign policy in general, but they seem to do better about not killing civilians than most countries in general and than Israel in particular.
If you see the Gaza war as a punitive expedition to make clear the cost of terrorist actions, which i think is fair and reasonable, then the point where it would be resonable and moral to back off was crossed a long time ago. If you see it as an attempt to “eliminate Hamas” forever, then it isn’t reasonable to back off. But, i think that goal is completely unreasonable and irrational, for the reasons @SimonJester said.
“i don’t know about “NATO countries” in general (most of them seem not to fight that many wars)”
*Pete Hegseth has joined the chat*
What specifically do NATO countries do differently in dealing with groups that have the same capability and tactics as Hamas?
Well, my posts here should demonstrate I hardly consider NATO an unalloyed force for good – and yet I still struggle to recall the last time any of its members pursued a strategy which is hard to describe in practical terms as anything other than starving the “enemy population” into submission.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/gaza-hunger-israel-idf-netanyahu-b2745801.html
Backing off *is* a practical tactic, and potentially the only one other than genocide that will function long term (and it’s not clear that genocide will function long-term either, considering its effect on Israel’s perception on the international stage).
Although I believe there is a difference in degree of sectarian violence being carried out, I mentioned the Good Friday Agreement (and all of the enormous work that went into getting to the point of it being possible, and all of the work since then to keep it holding). This is an example of a NATO country ending sectarian violence in a way that has been sustained for decades.
Although the situation is nowhere near perfect, apartheid in South Africa was ended peacefully through political reform, not through violence. South Africa isn’t in NATO, but it is a similarly mature state with a comparable situation in their history.
Neither are perfect facsimiles of Israel/Palestine, but both show the ongoing effectiveness of non-military resolutions to cyclical sectarian violence, and tensions between coloniser and colonised within a state. Both are ongoing processes, but in contrast to Israel’s near-70 year violent struggle with the Palestinians, they appear to have actually been even somewhat successful.
“I’m curious what else Israel can do to minimize civilian deaths and still accomplish their goal of destroying Hamas.”
I mean, the answer has been staring them in the face since at least the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
Stop attempting to murder everyone. Undertake a concerted effort to fold Palestinians into the Israeli state in an open and honest manner. Make a concerted and continued effort to repair sectarian conflicts in a non-violent manner. While not easy, or foolproof, this has been entirely successful at disarming the IRA and stopping the continual violence of the Troubles.
Undoubtably this will be harder with the Israelis and the Palestinians, and may require different solutions to those in Northern Ireland (the shared state option may be extremely unpalatable to Palestinians, for instance), but it’s obvious to practically any borderline impartial onlooker that the cycle of violence can only be ended by stopping the violence (and this doesn’t limit ‘violence’ to murder and death, but includes expansion of colonisation as well).
Just to be clear: the obvious route to a lasting peace staring us in the face here is “Israel annexes the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in their entirety”? I’m not missing a subtlety?
I think you are missing a subtlety. I think you’re treating the violence in Israel as being contained entirely within Israel, rather than looking at the broader picture.
For one, Israel has been attempting to do that for 70-odd years and hasn’t managed it, so it doesn’t seem to be a terribly solid strategy.
Secondly, and most importantly, how long do you think a dominant Israeli state would remain peaceful having annexed all of Palestine? They may be riding on a high having dealt their opponents a significant blow at the moment, but they’re still surrounded by people who *really* do not like them. Governments, sure, but actual people? Not so much. And how long until those supportive governments are overthrown, or suddenly become less supportive as the political situation changes. It’s an exceptionally volatile region.
Stepping up the genocide in Gaza has already garnered a significant amount of support for Palestine in a way that has never really been present in the West before. Following that through to completion will likely produce *even more* backlash, with the likely result in successive Western governments pulling their support for Israel. Support that Israel relies on for its security in the region.
And sure, Russia is the backer of a lot of the anti-Israel positions in the middle-east, and they’re waning in their ability to support them. But it’s such a monumentally clear and obvious fracture-line in both the interests and support for the USA and the West (both internationally and domestically), that any potential rival to US hegemony would be a fool not to stoke it whenever the right opportunity arose (e.g. China).
Is all of that a certainty? No. It could well be that enough Western governments somehow manage to push through with unpopular support for Israel in the face of a public that is becoming increasingly aware and motivated by its genocidal actions. It could be that the public support for Palestine wanes once the genocide nears completion. It could be that Western countries one-by-one fall into authoritarianism where the will of the public doesn’t matter at all. It could be that the USA is able to browbeat both China and Russia into never actually intervening in anything anti-Israeli in the region (though considering the direction US power at the moment I sincerely doubt it).
But it’s still a *significant* risk that makes it very much *not* an obvious route to lasting peace.
OK, I’ve misread you in that case – what are we talking about here when we talk about “Undertake a concerted effort to fold Palestinians into the Israeli state in an open and honest manner” and “the shared state option”? Because that sounds to me like what’s also called a “one-state solution” – ie there’s only one state between the Jordan and the sea, and that state consists of what’s now Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, under a single government, elected by all its citizens, whether Jewish or Arab, regardless of where they live within its territory. Israel, in this case, has annexed the WB and Gaza – it has permanently added them to its territory.
And I agree with you that such a state wouldn’t remain peaceful for very long!
Ah, perhaps I misunderstood you as well. When you said ‘Israel annexes the West Bank and Gaza Strip in their entirety’ I interpreted that as ‘Israel kills or displaces every single Palestinian and settles Gaza and the West Bank’.
I’m not particularly saying that the single state solution is a particularly easy one. Just that there *is* precedent for something like that functioning in Northern Ireland, and that has been successful at disarming the IRA and preventing further armed conflict.
Whether the Israelis and Palestinians are anywhere near being mutually mature enough to do that is another question entirely. I’d overwhelmingly say no, but caveat that with the observation that there wasn’t peace in Northern Ireland until all of the various parties (including the British government) were mature enough to sort that out peacefully as well.
I suppose there’s also a sort of precedent for a two state solution in the fact that the Yugoslav Wars of the 90s had largely concluded by the early 2000s and don’t appear to have continued flaring up (not that it’s 100% peachy, but it’s not exactly 70 years of ongoing armed struggle either).
What I’ve yet to see clear precedent for is that Israel’s current plan is working, or is likely to work, to produce continued peace. Moreover, it seems their aims are to continually stoke armed conflict instead. ‘Mow the grass’ as they so callously put it.
The way Israel understands “giving warning” often includes…shooting an “empty” missile at the roof of a house, which they call a roof knock. Obviously, it’s entirely possible to be killed by such a “warning”, and frequently the time between the warning and the attack is small enough that it’s nothing but a fig leaf.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210520-roof-knocking-israel-warning-system-under-scrutiny-in-gaza-conflict
The “logical contradiction” identified in Realist theory (viz. “After all, if states are mostly rational and largely pursue their own interests, loudly insisting that they should do so seems a bit pointless, doesn’t it?”) is not a contradiction if we think in terms of interstate competition. The Realist prediction is not that states will always or automatically act to maximize their power or their chances of survival, but that states that act that way will survive and displace the states that do not. Therefore, Realists can make the normative case for acting to maximize state power because they want their state to survive.
But in practice, we see individuals advocating for other, competing states – which is completely irrational unless you assume they are all either insane, spies and saboteurs, or have some kind of complex n-dimensional scheme. To quote Chesteron: “To preach egotism is to practice altruism.”
That when American Realists saying that it’s good for Russia to dominate Ukraine & other states around it – many of them very clearly do; and others cover with the daintiest of fig leaves – they are not serving American interests. American Realists ought be the the loudest voices demanding the destruction of Russia. But they *don’t*.
IMHO, Realists fall into three camps – but really two. First, many of them implicitly (sometimes explicitly) are extremely western-Eurocentric, and consider it natural for “uncivilized” parts of the world to be dominated by brute empires. Second, some just love their theories so much they don’t care about the inconsistency of advocating for Russia to smash Ukraine but react with horror at the US shrieking at Canada. (These two aren’t mutually exclusive and I group them together.)
The other camp are just shills. They will (and some did) adore German tyranny, then Soviet, then Chinese, then Russian without the slightest itch of conscience.
The last group might be considered to be consistently pro-tyranny.
There are, I believe, a few comments from George Orwell about this being a surprisingly common school.
His note about nationalism adress this, the idea some people just sunk their identity into another tribe and for the winning and losing it all that it matter.
in short nihilistic realism become their ideology.
I agree with most of what you said. Just because someone espouses Realist ends does not imply that they will prescribe rational or intelligent means to achieve them. For example, Croesus presumably thought the best way to preserve Lydia was to attack Persia.
It is a bit like business. Companies seek to maximize profits, and companies that are more competitive will edge out their rivals. However, just because management wants to make lots of money does not mean they are competent.
“American Realists ought be the the loudest voices demanding the destruction of Russia.”
Why? One could argue that the main rival of the US is China and therefore the US should try not to antagonise Russia and avoid it becoming a Chinese ally (after all Nixon did it in reverse).
I’m not saying that this is the only policy that makes sense, and I’m not even an American, but it’s not inconsistent.
Because in the Realist model, Russia is not a potential ally – no state is! (Realists are not actually consistent with this however.) All states are enemies, and the only possible end is for states to destroy and conquer one another. “Alliances” are automatically temporary in pursuit of power, and you never want to aggrandize one ally because that will (with certainty) become your enemy once the mutual threat is removed.
Ironically, in the realist model, only much smaller and weaker polities, such as Ukraine, can be safely strengthened. They cannot threaten the great power directly, they so are useful tools. But the Realist does not deem them to have independent agency, a massive and irredeemable oversight.
That’s not actually the argument realists make? Every state tries to maximize its self interest (as mentioned either by power-seeking or safety-seeking) but that does not mean they cannot work together. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is the realist’s adage after all.
“the US should try not to antagonise Russia and avoid it becoming a Chinese ally”–The better argument is that Russia has already declared itself to be an ally of China, and that the best policy for the US is to damage or destroy Russia, to the extent possible at reasonable cost, thereby demonstrating (i) to the world that allying with China gets you nowhere and (ii) to China that its potential allies (the so-called Axis of Resistance) are pathetic losers and that if it chooses to challenge the established order, it will do so alone. (cue “Lucifer in Starlight.”) Add the fact that Russia would not be a useful or reliable ally, because economically backward, demographically collapsing dictatorships are neither good trade partners nor militarily useful.
I don’t know if bringing demographics into this really supports your argument. According to the website below, which claims to use the latest UN population projections, RF’s demographics are substantially better* than those of PRC itself – whereas the latter is expected to follow a similarly parabolic trajectory to Japan’s and end the century with its population back to 1960s levels (representing an absolute decline of some 750 million people down to ~660 million – “only” 250 million more than the US’ projected future population in 2100), RF is expected to have a much gentler and flatter trajectory, with the overall population staying practically flat between 2070-2100 at ~125 million – which is only about 20 million lower than now, and equivalent to its 1970s levels.
For that matter, this population trajectory would still leave RF as the most populous European country by quite some margin. In fact, the practically the only European countries whose demographics are expected to improve relative to Russia are the Nordic nations, the Netherlands, France and the UK – and even then, UK is the only one which would see an actual increase – from the current ~69 million, to around 75 million in 2050s, then maybe decline to 74 million by 2100. For the other aforementioned nations, it would be a largely flat trajectory from now on (i.e. France would get from the current ~66.5 million to 68 million in 2050, then 67.5 million in 2075 and 68.5 million in 2100), which is not a decline like Russia, but can hardly be said to be a significant improvement. (Worker-dependent ratios also don’t seem to become substantially stronger than Russia’s in any of those from what I could quickly surmise.)
On the other hand, population of the final member of the core European trio, Germany**, is expected to have effectively peaked nowadays, and would decline from the current ~85 million to ~70 million by the end of the century – in relative terms, a steeper decline than Russia’s, and one which will knock it back to circa 1960. Türkiye is often not considered “truly European”, but if you do, it’ll see a very similar decline regardless (from 87 million to 65 million – though not before peaking at 90 million by 2050.) The two next most important nations (by most estimates – particularly military-related ones), Italy and Poland, are actually expected to drop well below their own 1950 levels by 2100 (which is far back in time as the website’s grapher goes) – going from 59 million to 35 million, and from 36 million to 19 million, respectively. (Interestingly, that would make Poland’s early 22nd century population equivalent to that of the Netherlands.)
In fact, effectively the entirety of non-Russian Eastern Europe (including Belarus) would also drop to well below their own 1950 levels by 2100. However, few (if any) would drop quite as badly as Ukraine, which is already at its own 1950 levels of ~37 million, and is expected to be at less than half of that by 2100, going down to about 15 million.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/ukraine/2024/
So…as I said, bringing demographics into this complicates your point rather substantially. In fact, this exercise now made me wonder if a certain set of foreign policy moves from the current U.S. Administration (and its 2016-2020 iteration), often dismissed as pure grifting or “preference for dictators”, may actually be driven by pure demographic realism. That is, Trump had been famously friendly to Gulf/Sunni Arab states – to the point that after his first election victory, his first phone conversation was with Egypt’s Sisi – instead of the British Prime Minister, it what had been an unspoken tradition up until then. Well, those projections indicate that Egypt’s population would double by 2100, to 200 million – and in fact, the populations of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE would also double or more, to ~7, 70, and 25 million. Perhaps, the logic that “good trade partners” and “militarily useful” allies ought to be demographically strong, and those which are “demographically collapsing” can “go to the back of the queue” (to quote Obama on UK’s post-Brexit prospects) is governing a lot more of this Administration’s decisions than is commonly appreciated?*** (Though, in that case, one might have also expected considerably more respect offered to African nations than what we have seen to date.)
*Viewed in the crude sense of “declining population=bad” and “lowered fraction of working-age people=bad”. I am of course aware that indefinite human population growth is neither possible nor desirable, and see no reason why countries falling to their own population levels of 50 years ago, or moreover, that of 100 or 200 years ago, for completely natural reasons would be a tragedy as opposed to something to be welcomed for reducing the strain on replenishable and non-replenishable resources. However, this point seems rather outside the scope of the current discussion.
**The home of Powerwolf, which as we both know authored the song you referred to in your comment. Though, I much rather prefer Mantus as far as music from that country goes. It helps that they actually sing in their language.
***Of course, there is the matter of how much one trusts in these projections. The premise of very strong demographics in Gulf countries is particularly complicated by the expected future impacts of climate change. (And the same could be said of Africa, albeit to a rather lesser extent.) Likewise, one could claim that climate change would drive much more migration to Europe than is anticipated in these projections.**** At the same time, the idea that demographers working for the UN work completely siloed away from equally-UN IPCC, and their projections are somehow blind to the reports the latter put out every 7 years seems…not very credible.
****Though, by the same token, a lot more of it could end up going to Russia. In fact, if the future EU politics tilt a lot further towards “Fortress Europe”, as many expect them to, then the migrants may not have much choice – and the idea RF would be less willing to receive them than Europe when its government has a proven ability to ride roughshod over public discontent if it benefits their perceived interests may be rather naive.)
I think there’s also a point that part of the point is to uh…. signal? Like if you are telling someone “We have the power to do this and are going to do this, resistance is futile.” They might concievable y’know, not resist futilely. Which is a win for you even if you could crush them anyway.
The problem is that there is no non-circular way to identify what “maximizing power and chances of survival” means in practice. It becomes akin to evolutionary psychology, where you can offer infinite just-so stories to explain any real or postulated psychological trait.
As Orwell pointed out in his essay on Burnham, the same author was waxing about the evident superiority of autoritharian states while the Nazis were winning and about their inherent weakness while they were losing (as an aside, *neither* Orwell nor Burnham bothered to check whether the Nazi state actually exercised this absolute, uncontested authority over Germany. Just noticing the continuous infighting and compromise would have made Burnham’s original point moot).
Well another issue of the realist thing is who are the guys in charge apart of politically and their own motivations.
Putin is out for Putin alone frankly. Yes its bad for Russia but stopping would be worse for Putin or so Putin thinks.
so realist in the what is the best interest for the rulership class in their own opinion.
No “share this on bluesky” link?
The “Classics” is always going to be a field worth studying, for anyone with a love of history and the study of the human condition. Only the ignorant, philistines, or biased ideologues have a problem with this. Unfortunately, their number is legion.
There is a valid issue at work here where the relative degree of interest in specifically Greco-Roman history, in particular may decline relative to the interest in other periods of history.
There is also a valid concern that the entire field of history as a discipline is being systematically defunded by, well, the ignorant, the biased ideologues, and the willfully anti-cultural and anti-knowledge types we might by custom call “philistines.”
One thing I have noticed is that ‘realists’ seem to only apply their own school to the point that it makes their argument rather than taking it to its logical conclusion. If Putin was always going to invade Ukraine to maximize Russia’s power then Ukraine’s resistance to maintain its own power should be equally predictable. Furthermore under the realism frame work the United States support of Ukraine should be equally inevitable, as power is frequently a zero sum game and Russia gaining power in Eastern Europe inevitable requires the US to loose influence in the region which is unacceptable if the maximization of power is the end goal of every state.
Similarly Sparta and its allies warring with Athens is the expected and rational response as Athens maximizing its power by asserting its hegemony over Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean as that requires other polities to loose power, which, of course, runs contrary to their interests.
The realist arguments seem a lot less like like ‘every state will seek to maximize its own power’ and a lot more like ‘I decide which states have agency, and which states exist merely to be acted upon’.
The works that get this right are the Hollywood movies about professional murderers, with the famous “nothing personal”.
The attempts to convince are exactly analogous to saying “you shouldn’t be angry at me for pulling cards from my shirtsleeves, doing so is clearly allowed by the rules of physics”. Either the speaker is a moron and does not realize that they are making a type error, or else they are so arrogant they think the audience are morons who will not notice the type error. To be fair, in Thucydides the Spartan speaker answers the Athenian speech with “I’m too dumb to understand what this guy said, [stirring emotional speech for going to war with Athens]”.
The contract killer who says “nothing personal” while murdering people is most notably characterized by the fact that their depraved indifference to human life makes them so detached that they think it matters that they have no personal animosity toward their victims. That this is actually relevant, that their internal emotional state (or lack thereof) while carrying out a contract killing has anything to do with what anyone except themselves feels about the matter.
This is a crude caricature of both the original Thucydidean argument and the present-day ones.
> Similarly Sparta and its allies warring with Athens is the expected and rational response as Athens maximizing its power by asserting its hegemony over Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean as that requires other polities to loose [sic] power, which, of course, runs contrary to their interests.
The thing is, if you read the linked post, Thucydides does not deny that it is rational for the Spartans and others to oppose the construction of Athenian hegemony. Instead, to quote our host again
But there’s more to it than the persuasiveness of realist appeals to naked power and interest. It is that fundamentally moral argument which drives the Spartans to act in a way that Thucydides clearly thinks is against their interest. It is quite obvious from the subsequent narrative that Thucydides sides with Archidamus – this is the wrong moment for Sparta to go to war (the right moment will come a couple of decades later). And yet Sparta unpredictably – and catastrophically – miscalculates anyway. The role of cultural and religious norms, along with interactions within states are often neglected in realist IR theory, to their detriment. Of course, one might well argue – as the Athenians do – that it was not the moral calculation, but fear and interest wish pushed the Spartans to act, but I think the presence of Sthenelaidas’ speech in the narrative speaks to Thucydides’ realization that moral arguments can sway states to act for reasons beyond pure fear, honor and interest (but cf. Thuc. 1.88.1, where he attributes the decision to fear of the growth of Athenian power).
Now, it is true that Thucydides wrote his work as an Athenian – and in fact one who fought in that war, and was exiled for his failure – and that Athens ultimately lost that war…27 years later, following a sequence of events which might have had blocked off Athens’ defeat if any one of them went the other way (the completely failed attempt to invade Syracuse chief amongst them, but also Sparta accepting the support of Persian Achaemenids in what had arguably been one of the most airbrushed pages of “mainstream history”.) For what it’s worth, our host does not seem to second-guess Thucydides’ premise that Sparta & allies would have been able to win the war at a much lower cost if they bid their time and struck later (and similar arguments were also apparently made at the time by one of Spartan kings, Archidamus.)
As for the present day
> If Putin was always going to invade Ukraine to maximize Russia’s power then Ukraine’s resistance to maintain its own power should be equally predictable.
Under the realist framework, the foremost concern of a state is not power and its maximization (which Thucydides described as interest), but fear, which is about the state’s self-preservation. If the state’s attempt to maintain its present-day level of power carries unacceptable risks to its self-preservation and it cannot rely on honor (“credibility”; in this case of unacceptably steep reprisal) to make up the difference, then the realist thing to do is to accept the reduction in power now and attempt a comeback down the line if future conditions can be expected to be more favourable. Of course, this principle can be miscalculated, and at times quite badly (most notoriously the British/French strategy in the lead-up to WWII – although people often place too much blame on Chamberlain and Daladier as the signers of Munich without considering the extent to which they were left to “hold the bag” with degraded forces by their predecessors*), but this is still far more nuanced than the caricature quoted above. For what it’s worth, Mearsheimer advocated for Ukraine to retain a nuclear deterrent in 1993 (which had an extremely high chance of entrenching what at the time was an effective dictatorship that covertly decapitated one of its main opponents), so the suggestion he does not believe in Ukrainian agency at all seems ludicrous.
> Furthermore under the realism frame work the United States support of Ukraine should be equally inevitable, as power is frequently a zero sum game and Russia gaining power in Eastern Europe inevitable requires the US to loose influence in the region which is unacceptable if the maximization of power is the end goal of every state.
States also can – and must – choose which of their goals they must prioritize. As I quoted from his Nikkei interview in another comment, Mearsheimer believes that it is more important for the U.S. to confront China over Asia, with the simple logic that Asia is a much more politically and economically important region than (Eastern) Europe. In fact, this logic can further be extended to argue that hypothetically, it would be easier for the U.S. to first sacrifice Ukraine (and perhaps the Baltics) to Russia in order to win its cooperation in a conflict against China and then, after that conflict had been won, to move against Russia (presumably also weakened by that same conflict) at the time of West’s choosing, then to seek to grind down Russia in Ukraine while the Chinese power continues to get built up and then attempt to act against what by the numbers would be the greatest adversary the U.S. had ever faced**. In fact, if we are to go back to Thucydides, acting in this manner could perhaps be compared to Spartans cynically choosing to accept aid from the Persians for the sake of defeating the Athenians not that long after the whole Thermopylae thing. (And then, to continue with the analogy, the Spartans did end up moving against the Achaemenids later on – although with mixed success, and it was ultimately the Macedonians who defeated them both.)
Of course, if that was your real goal, you wouldn’t want to spell out in public the part where you are intending to eventually act against the state you are currently trying to get to switch sides, would you? And accusations of being a “traitor” or similar to the side you are hoping would make the switch would only work to the benefit of your real goal. Granted, people can and do argue that “we must focus on China” is just a fig leaf for those who really like Russia because…reasons. Or indeed, simply that the entire calculus is broken for either ideological reasons (I personally find Russia acting against China massively unlikely in large part due to the 20th-century cultural bonds) or material ones (like the 1930s example.) Nevertheless, the argument that a (possibly temporary) reduction in relative power in a (perceivedly) less-important theater is worthwhile for the sake of preserving power in a more influential theater is very, very different from “some states exist merely to be acted upon” caricature.
* Here is a remarkable article on just how much Chamberlain ended up contributing to British rearmanent – and particularly towards the RAF. While in hindsight, I believe it is still accurate to say that Munich was a mistake even in completely amoral terms purely because the extensive Czechoslovak fortifications would have likely inflicted significant losses on the fledgling Wehrmacht and the denial of the country’s factories (including those making Tatra trucks and what became the Pz. 38(t) tank) for precious months could well have degraded German combat power enough to make their 1940 triumph in France impossible, it is hard to deny that the British civilian populations specifically benefited greatly from Chamberlain’s actions at least in the short term (the question of whether the casualties from the Luftwaffe bombing and strafing effectively whatever they pleased for two or three years over Britain before Germany lost the entire war would have been greater than in the real world, when diminished-effectiveness bombing + the eventual V1/V2 attacks carried on for six years is not one I’m statistically equipped to answer.)
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2018/04/did-neville-chamberlain-create-conditions-raf-win-battle-britain
> Contrary to his quasi-pacifist image, Chamberlain showed a keen interest in the technical details of the new fighters, telling the House of Commons in May 1938 about their record-breaking speeds and their advanced features, such as “engines of unprecedented efficiency” and “variable pitch airscrews”. Indeed, in his enthusiasm for the Spitfire and Hurricane, Chamberlain showed more insight than Churchill, who, as a Tory backbencher, felt that the RAF should be concentrating production on two-seater fighters with rearward-firing turrets. In 1938 Churchill explained: “The urgency for action arises from the fact that the Germans must know we have banked on the forward-shooting, plunging Spitfire, whose attack must most likely resolve itself into a pursuit which, if not instantly effective, exposes the pursuer to destruction.” Exactly such a plane was being made, though not in the quantities that Churchill wanted. It was called the Boulton-Paul Defiant and proved a disaster in the war, offering little more than target practice for the Luftwaffe.
> Contradicting his reputation for parsimony, Chamberlain poured money into a succession of 13 RAF expansion programmes, while, as prime minister, he approved the construction of a series of aircraft factories, most notably the world’s largest plant at Castle Bromwich in Birmingham, which was meant to produce 1,000 Spitfires by June 1940. By 1939, rearmament was swallowing 21.4 per cent of Britain’s gross national product, a figure that reached 51.7 per cent by 1940. When Chamberlain finally declared war in September 1939, Britain’s aircraft output had overtaken that of Germany’s.
> The 1938 Munich Agreement was central to the “guilty men” charge sheet against Chamberlain. That is understandable. But apart from the cold reality that there was little public appetite for conflict at the time of Munich, Chamberlain understood that Britain’s aerial defences were still too weak for war. Just before he left Heston airport on 29 September, he received a letter from Sir Charles Bruce-Gardener, the chairman of the Society of British Aircraft Constructors, who privately warned that “if war was declared, the equipment available for the RAF, both in types and numbers, was far below that of the German air force”.
> Munich undoubtedly bought Britain time for the RAF to modernise dramatically over the next two years. In autumn 1938 Fighter Command had just 25 squadrons, mostly made up of obsolete biplanes. By the eve of the Battle of Britain, there were 58, most of them Spitfires and Hurricanes. Denis Webb, a manager at the Supermarine company that built the Spitfire, wrote, “Chamberlain’s despised scrap of paper gave us a good return”.
**One remarkable fact – during WWII, the combined population of Germany and Japan had only slightly exceeded that of the U.S. – whereas the Chinese population is >4X larger and even adjusting for working-age population wouldn’t make that much of a difference.
The way I see it, China, Russia and USA are all nuclear weapon states so going to a direct non-existential war between them is impossible, they have to use proxy wars to expend and deteriorate the opponent’s forces.
Ukraine works really well as a proxy between Russia and USA, and Taiwan could work as a proxy between China and USA. But I can’t really think what proxy China and Russia could have. Russia isn’t really friendly enough with Taiwan to give them meaningful amount of support, and I haven’t heard of China having any plans to invade Mongolia or any of the Stans near them.
From USA’s point of view, it’s safest to deteriorate Russia in advance so they wouldn’t have the resources to support China in a war over Taiwan.
This assumes that the conflict over Taiwan would be prolonged even in the absence of direct military intervention by the U.S. (“direct non-existential war between them is impossible”) Let’s just say that this is very much NOT a safe assumption.
Firstly, the Iran-Israel conflict highlights that any modern war begins (and ends) with the attempt to establish air superiority – and if possible, supremacy. Meanwhile, the recent India-Pakistan skirmish shows that Chinese air-to-air missiles really do live up to their specifications – in which case, even older PLAAF fighters (J-10s, used by Pakistan to such an effect, were designed in 1990s) could shoot down Taiwanese aircraft while still hovering over Chinese coast – the ranges of those missiles really are that long, and they match up with the wreckage of Rafales that was found well inside Indian territory. (Taiwan’s most advanced fighter, Mirage, is, of course, the predecessor to Rafale – and we know one of those got shot down by Pakistan as well. The F-16s the Taiwanese recently purchased but have not yet received are generally considered less capable then Rafales.) For that matter, even the long-range air defences on Chinese coast could theoretically target planes over Taiwan – though that would likely be an overkill. (And we also know long-range radars can now spot planes even as they take off from airstrips – in part because Ukraine itself is able to immediately send out warnings whenever Russian hypersonic missile carriers take off.)
With the core of the Taiwanese air force suppressed, the next step would be to deal with the air defence installations – which Taiwan really doesn’t appear to have all that many of. In theory, PRC’s stealth aircraft could destroy those with no losses taken in the same way Israeli F-35s destroyed Iran’s most capable systems. Even if you still don’t trust in their capabilities for some reason, there’s also the option of simply overwhelming the skies with their Predator/Reaper/Bayraktar equivalent, Wing Loong (‘Pterodactyl’), which they have been producing for nearly a decade by now. Either way, with the numbers and capabilities of their air force, it really shouldn’t take them all that long to suppress the entirety of Taiwanese air defence installations and make it safe for strike drones and aircraft to hover over the island. (Not to mention that strike drones launching their own missiles could and would be accompanied by observation drones simply providing coordinates to Chinese ballistic missiles, which can take off a few dozen km behind the coast and still hit any location on Taiwan.)
Once that step is achieved, the next one would be to use the aforementioned capabilities of the Chinese air force + rocket force to hunt the Taiwanese anti-ship missile launchers. Now, on one hand, that is quite a difficult task, as many of them are hard to distinguish from typical trucks, and Israel often failed to take out comparable Iranian launchers before they launched their payload. On the other hand, Taiwan really isn’t that large – it’s only 1.3 times the size of Crimea, 9 times smaller than Finland, ~12 times smaller than Ukraine after its territorial losses and 45 times smaller than Iran, which makes this task much, much easier than it was for Israel. Moreover, any of the anti-ship missiles that do get launched would have to go through the air defences of the escort fleet which would be protecting the landing craft. A typical Chinese destroyer can carry 50-60 long-range air defence missiles (think S-300, but probably more advanced by now) and they have ~30 of those ships + some older ones and about a dozen cruisers which could carry >100 such missiles on board.
Now, Taiwan would obviously attempt to use its own navy to the best of its abilities, but PRC’s fleets are clearly much larger and would benefit from the support of the country’s own coastal anti-ship missiles (which they have more of than Taiwan and which Taiwan cannot realistically suppress) and the dozens (hundreds?) of stealth aircraft, which may not be counterable by Taiwanese navy’s air defences. Hence, it’s not likely it can provide much resistance to the landing force – and that landing force would take (depending on the ship’s model) between 4 to 6 hours travelling at top speed to cross the median length of the Taiwan Straight. Once there, an extensive array of coastal mines couldbe problematic, but it’s a known threat and it’s unlikely they have not thought of an acceptable solution by now. Once that is overcome, there is probably not a whole lot Taiwanese ground forces could do if they are constantly subjected to overhead air and ballistic missile strikes (while having to deal with the significantly superior armoured vehicles – the bulk of Taiwanese armor is still early-mid Cold War stuff.) They would certainly aim to even out the odds with kamikaze drones, and those could cause some notable casualties, but even there, PLA would definitely have an advantage – particularly given that they have now developed a capability to launch ~100 small drones from a single unmanned “mothership”.
https://archive.md/KNchS
In theory, urban combat in Taiwanese cities could still be very bloody and drawn-out even in spite of all those advantages if we assume very high Taiwanese morale/cohesion and a determination to make a doomed last stand. However, even in that scenario, I’m not sure Taiwan would work as much of a proxy – since the PRC would already be in control of all the shipping and air traffic to the island due to the aforementioned advantages. Consequently, once the conflict starts, shipping any more aid to the island would become practically impossible without risking direct armed conflict – which you have already claimed would be “impossible” for the U.S. For that matter, Russia’s military aid would be irrelevant to PRC for what seem like the most likely scenarios of this conflict.
This is entirely about your statements regarding antiquity and Thucydides- I may do another post on other things you said later. I’m a bit confused about your point of disagreement with Dr. Devereaux regarding Thucydides.
Now, being less than familiar with the text of Thucydides’ history, I am here comparing what Dr. Devereaux says about the text with what you say about it. As I understand it, Dr. Devereaux’s contention is that Thucydides first portrays the Athenians saying “fear, honor, and interest should compel others to submit to us, and there is nothing wrong with that,” then portraying the Spartans saying “we don’t care about your fancy justifications, we’re gonna fight you anyway because our culture tells us we should.”
Which of the following would you say to that:
1) That the text of Thucydides, on this particular pair of dueling speeches, is more or less as I say?
2) That the text of Thucydides is as I say, but it’s more complicated than that in light of the rest of the text and/or historical context?
3) That I am substantially incorrect about the content of this particular pair of dueling speeches?
4) That I have correctly summarized Dr. Devereaux’s take on the text?
5) That I have not correctly summarized Dr. Devereaux’s take on the text?
6) That you have some point of disagreement with Dr. Devereaux’s take on the text overall including his past discussions of it?
7) That you have a disagreement with his take on the text in the context of this article?
Firstly, I would clarify an apparent misunderstanding. That is, the comment I wrote was replying NOT to the blog post itself, but to the comment left here by Sterling. I.e. this.
> One thing I have noticed is that ‘realists’ seem to only apply their own school to the point that it makes their argument rather than taking it to its logical conclusion…Similarly Sparta and its allies warring with Athens is the expected and rational response as Athens maximizing its power by asserting its hegemony over Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean as that requires other polities to loose power, which, of course, runs contrary to their interests…The realist arguments seem a lot less like like ‘every state will seek to maximize its own power’ and a lot more like ‘I decide which states have agency, and which states exist merely to be acted upon’.
I have already pointed out the reasons why I consider that to be a crude caricature, with quotes from the late 2019 blog post here on Thucydides. As for your questions, I would go for 2), 5) and maybe 7). That is, when you say
then portraying the Spartans saying “we don’t care about your fancy justifications, we’re gonna fight you anyway because our culture tells us we should.”
You are overlooking that in Thucydides’ text (and in Dr. Devereaux’s summary of it) the Spartans are NOT a monolith and their own King (one of the two, granted) takes the very opposite position – only to be overruled by the apella siding with ephor’s speech, which is in fact as what you have described. I also think the fact that the first speech in the text (again, according to Dr. Devereaux’s summary) is NOT Spartan or Athenian but Corinthian is often overlooked. That is, the Spartans do NOT choose to wage the war against the growing Athenian hegemony purely on their own initiative, but rather they allow themselves to be dragged into that war by their ally – an ally they end up warring against a mere decade after concluding that particular war.
Moreover, I believe that knowing what we know now, it is very easy to argue that the ultimate outcome of both the Peloponnesian War (one in the text) and then the Corinthian War is that all of the participants lost – firstly, by ceding territory and influence to Achaemenid Persia, which backed whoever benefited its interests the most, and then, by losing effectively all of their sovereignty all at once to the Macedonians.*
Consequently, a 7) from your list (a disagreement with his take on the text in the context of this article) for me is that in my view, Thucydides’ text should not be read without our present-day awareness of the third powers hanging over that situation and ultimately reaping all the benefits from it. Likewise, the core aspect of Mearsheimer’s arguments is the existence of exactly such a third power, which, in his view, is the main beneficiary from a prolonged conflict. A discussion of either which omits this aspect, (let alone a comparison between the two) would seem to be incomplete at the very least.
*Of course, I know that according to our host, the Macedonian way of war was simply far superior, with Macedonian phalangites actually drilled to execute a complex series of tactical maneuvers rather than simply being “upper-middle-class” men who showed up in expensive armour on the day the campaign was called and did as little training in peacetime as they thought they could get away with – but it would seem at least plausible to argue that if the key polei haven’t spent so many of their resources on warring against each other, then they could have had delayed the Macedonian advance for long enough to successfully emulate their tactical-operational innovations and ultimately stymie said advance sometime before all of them lost.
https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vi-spartan-battle/
Or to buy enough time for Persia to intervene against Macedon?
Or did I miss something in that time period which meant that they were too busy to have provided any help against Greeks even if they delayed the Macedonians for years?
> Or to buy enough time for Persia to intervene against Macedon?
Well, according to the wiki, Persia played some role even in the historical conflict already, but their desire to intervene appears to have been rather limited.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_Macedonia_under_Philip_II
It’s unclear to me if the alternate scenario posited here would have encouraged Persia to intervene much more substantially – and the kind of difference that might have made. Perhaps Dr. Devereaux could answer this one day, but not me.
Regarding Ukrainian agency and expectations for Ukraine to resist or not resist Russian invasion in 2022…
First, there is a three-decade gap between 1993!Mearshimer and 2022!Mearshimer. This is ample time for a man’s viewpoint on foreign policy to change, for him to be excessively influenced by some sources and insufficiently influenced by others, and even to forget principles like “some nations may have more agency in a given situation than a certain form of the narrative would predict.” And Dr. Devereaux did say he was referring to Mearshimer’s “career of late.” One can reasonably imagine that “of late” means “excluding the parts that happened thirty years ago.” No small number of scholars have begun their working life with meritorious work, only to end it with meretricious work.
Second, one can agree that in the realist framework nations are motivated most directly by “fear,” by the need for self-preservation. However, it is fairly clear that national resistance to Russian invasion was a self-preservation priority for Ukraine. It was directly such a priority for the specific individuals making up the Ukrainian government, since the Russians are clearly already trying to kill those individuals. It was more broadly a priority for the survival of the Ukrainian government as a state. Even if Zelensky were dead or fled the country, the Russians would not willingly permit a successor of his to run a Ukrainian state as independent of their control as the one Zelensky had run.
And moreover, it was to a considerable extent a priority for the survival of the Ukrainian people as a distinct ethnicity, culture, and nation. Russia shows every sign of being willing to actively destroy artifacts and cultural touchstones of Ukrainian independence, to conscript the Ukrainian men in territories they’ve conquered to be killed in furthering the war of conquest, and to kidnap away Ukrainian children to be fostered in Russia, all of which suggest that Russia’s long-term designs for Ukraine involve breaking the Ukrainian national self-concept and breaking them to the idea of being subjected to Russia as an ox might be broken to the yoke. Thus, we conclude that while Ukraine should rationally be expected to pursue self-preservation under realism, the evidence already available in 2021 would strongly suggest that resistance to Russian invasion was the only feasible path forward for the self-preservation of the Ukrainian culture and state. All evidence that has amassed since that point have only underlined this conclusion- that if the Russians gain full power over Ukraine, they are likely to do their best to destroy Ukraine on multiple levels in an attempt to make it more firmly ‘theirs.’
With all this in mind, it seems sort of irrelevant to quibble over whether Ukraine would be resisting Russia “out of fear” (which would be well justified) or “to maximize its power” (when this power would be reduced to zero, or to less than zero if such a thing is possible, if the Russians won).
There are a number of unexamined assumptions here. First and foremost, we have the idea the invasion was completely inevitable for quite some time before it happened – which is not very compatible with the available historical record. If we go back to what the resolutely pro-Ukrainian Institute for the Study of War was publishing as late as December 2019, for instance, we can see that even this group that is usually described as experts in the region clearly did not anticipate an imminent effort to conquer Ukraine (in whole or in part), as nothing like that is seen in their text.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231003081939/https://www.iswresearch.org/2019/12/the-perils-of-talks-on-russias-war-in.html
Instead, it lists Kremlin’s efforts such as an attempt to get Ukraine to provide special status for Donbas and demand that Ukraine accepts a federalized model, which in hindsight can be seen as very mild compared to the present-day intermediate outcome and future outlook – before demanding Ukraine rejects them all anyway, of course, and that the West stands by it. (Even so, its “What Can the West Do?” list is notably short of anything like “Send more weapons, because the alternative to the above is a wider war”.) While it is of course possible to argue that basic principles of realist theory would have precluded Ukraine’s leadership from ever agreeing to such a loss of sovereignty without being subjected to another military defeat (like how the Chinese leadership did not agree to a special status for Hong Kong up until they lost the Opium Wars and Serbia did not agree to relinquish control of Kosovo until the NATO bombing campaign), it is also true that states can and do sacrifice sovereignty in the face of other considerations.
I.e. if we go back to our Thucydides’ example, neither Sparta nor Athens fought alone, but at the head of their respective Leagues of smaller polei. Even though their members are still actors in the realist framework, they (assuming they weren’t outright conquered) have undoubtedly made a decision to sacrifice a measure of their sovereignty to be a part of the League as the least bad option. The entire process of EU integration is fundamentally about a sacrifice of sovereignty for most members for the sake of primarily economic benefits – an erosion which will become almost complete if the project ever reaches the “United States of Europe” stage. For Ukraine in 2019, of course, this would have been not about gaining a benefit as much as it would have been about averting loss – but the stakes also quite starkly pit a substantial loss of Power vs. the Fear of potential state extinction.
Granted, though it is possible to argue that Ukrainian agreement to terms like these would have merely smoothed along outright state extinction along the lines of Sudetenland -> rest of Czechoslovakia process, it is also notable that even ISW does not appear to be making that argument in its contemporary writings. There is also the fact that places like Moldova are still clearly sovereign, (i.e. it frequently elects pro-EU leaders) – even though there’s both a formerly Moldovan territory it has no de facto control over (Transnistria) and an autonomy with pro-Russian population and special status within the country itself (Gagauzia).
The other major unexamined assumption is the idea that the “Ukrainian national self-concept” could (and would) be erased this quickly as a likely consequence of what have seen going on to date seems to not only fly in the face of what it had already survived (as well as, say, what the Polish national self-concept, or Kurdish, or Armenian, etc., etc., had survived), but also ascribe the kind of competence to the current Russian state in this area which it has not demonstrated in other areas to date.
To give a related example, do you think that the Chechen “national self-concept” had been erased by now? Do you think that “the survival of the Chechen people as a distinct ethnicity, culture, and nation” is really imperiled when extrapolating from the current trajectory? If not, why would it be different in Ukraine? Essentially, it would seem to me that the only reason it could be different is if the Chechens are somehow, on the whole, better at preserving core parts of their identity then the Ukrainians – which would seem to be a weird conclusion to draw, and in need of strong evidence which we do not seem to have.
> the evidence already available in 2021 would strongly suggest that resistance to Russian invasion was the only feasible path forward for the self-preservation of the Ukrainian culture and state.
“Evidence already available in 2021” such as the two “people’s republics” and “reunified” Crimea continuing to teach Ukrainian in schools, 7 years after the Ukrainian state lost control of them? (As I recall, it was even mandatory for all students in Crimea, but relegated to an optional class akin to French in Donbass.) In fact, the teaching of Ukrainian in the occupied territories (and across Russia in general) had not been formally banned until the last week – justified with the “altered geopolitical circumstances”. Now, you can of course look at the fact this decision was still and say that it was always going to be the plan of RF, and the only reason it didn’t happen earlier is because…they thought it would cause too much resistance to do it immediately? (Considering all the other steps they did not hesitate to take in 2022-2024, forgive me if I do not consider it very credible.)
Alternatively, you can take explanation at face value and argue that this decision would have never been taken if the conflict has not reached such intensity. Perhaps, you could even treat that action as part of RF’s “asymmetrical response” to Operation Spiderweb – a bit akin to how it responded to Türkiye shooting down a jet taking part in the Syria campaign in 2016 by (temporarily) banning produce imports from it. Again, any number of “national republics” in Russia continue to teach languages of the native people, and have always been doing so. In fact, up until 2017, Tatarstan (where Tatars are only a bare majority, and 40% of the population are Russian) had Tatar language as mandatory school subject for all students. For comparison, could you imagine if all school students in Hawa’ii had to learn the native language, no matter their ancestry? This is clearly not the case now – considering that only 0.15% of the island’s population are estimated to speak it. Would you say that the Hawa’iian ethnicity, culture, and nation had been erased as the result?
Did it somehow escape your attention that Russia was unsatisfied by the status quo in 2019 or 2021, as demonstrated by the fact that it mounted a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022?
On February 23, 2022, Russia already had de-facto control over Crimea and most of Donetsk and Luhansk. That they sent 40,000 troops on a thunder run to Kyiv the next day shows pretty clearly what their actual goals were.
It’s very telling that “realists” somehow can’t see what’s staring them right in the face here.
And yet, the Institute for the Study of War apparently did not see it coming a mere 2 years and 3 months before that day – as demonstrated by the fact their update from that time, linked above, neither mentions even the possibility of such a move, nor urges the Western countries to step up weapon deliveries as much as possible. So, my question is, why? I see three main possibilities.
1) They are simply not as good as their reputation. (And they do have a fairly high reputation – i.e. our host recommended following their updates.)
https://acoup.blog/2022/04/08/fireside-friday-april-8-2022/
2) The conspiracy theory that a range of decisionmakers in the West wanted to keep Ukraine just strong enough to avoid losing outright, but not strong enough to either deter the invasion in the first place or to ever beat it back entirely, so that Putin would be tempted to enter a ruinous conflict and not leave it until attriting away the largest possible amount of Russian power, may be truer than people prefer to admit.
3) At the time ISW wrote that post, Russian leadership genuinely would have been satisfied with those concessions.
So, which one do you think it is?
I’m going to address this longpost in parts. First, you lead your post with the phrase: “there are a number of unexamined assumptions here. First and foremost, we have the idea the invasion was completely inevitable for quite some time before it happened…”
Now, I went over the text of my post, the one you were replying to, twice, and I don’t think I made such an assumption. At least, not in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War as it began in 2022. The war was certainly not inevitable until Russia decided to invade! However, the agency in that matter was ultimately on Russia, not Ukraine. Ukraine could not actually make a decision that would in any way compel Putin to not invade.
Is the general thrust of your post meant to be something along the lines of “Ukraine should have capitulated to Russian demands in 2015-2021, so that the invasion wouldn’t have happened?” Because to my reading, you’re sort of indirectly suggesting that, but I might be misunderstanding you.
My second observation is that you seem to lean very heavily on “this one specific website I call pro-Western didn’t predict in advance that Russia would invade Ukraine, therefore ???” My impression is that you’re trying to argue “Ongoing Russian encroachments were not an eventual fear-inducing threat to Ukraine, as proven by no one specifically predicting that the Russians would invade Ukraine until shortly before it happened.” However, you are citing only one specific institution, the ISW.
The ISW could overlook a possibility for a number of reasons. One is the desire to avoid sounding paranoid by predicting that Russia would do something likely to end badly for Russia. Another is that one does not need to specifically predict a future invasion when a major power is attempting a piecewise seizure of another nation’s territory. We’ve seen this dance before on many occasions, with nations of varying sizes being cut up slice by slice and absorbed by a neighboring power. The exact mechanics vary but the pattern is consistent enough that I imagine it would be obvious to the average person writing for ISW that this is a likely future outcome that Ukraine would have good reason to fear.
Given the internal political thinking behind Russia’s stance towards Ukraine (e.g. Alexander Dugin), no one had good reason to expect Russia to stop with ‘moderate’ demands if those demands were appeased. Especially given that one of those demands was that Ukraine break ties with the Western nations that could have guaranteed its independence. After all, Russia was already signatory to deals agreeing to honor Ukraine’s sovereignty in its entirety. It had reneged on those. Why would Russia not renege on further deals that involved settling for less than the whole pie?
My third reply to you revolves around concepts of national and ethnic survival. Here, you present a grab-bag of points which seem aimed to legitimize the idea that Ukraine could persist as a nation under Russian control, and that therefore Russian conquest does not pose a threat the Ukrainians would need to ‘fear’ and is somehow purely a ‘power move’ on their part in an attempt to maintain ‘power.’
I begin by repeating my observation that any action taken out of fear of national destruction or irreparable maiming can also be recast as a move to preserve national power; there is no clear dividing line between the two that makes the latter cynical and lesser and the former justified. Especially when the situation involves a smaller nation resisting subjugation by a larger one.
Now, you cite the example of Moldova. Moldova maintains its sovereignty but has significant problems with these enclaves, and Moldova doesn’t even share a land border with Russia. Ukraine would share such a land border, making it still more susceptible. In short, having slices of your territory taken over by a larger power with a known history of claiming pieces of its neighbors over and over until nothing remains is bad for you, when you are a smaller country neighboring that larger and more powerful one. It is bad enough that history suggests that nations are prudent to resist such treatment immediately and with nearly every means at their disposal, or they are likely to face eventual loss of independence.
This chains into some of your other arguments, along the lines of “would being subjugated by Russia actually be that bad for Ukraine?” The evidence of what has happened in the Donbass since 2022 suggests ‘yes, very much so.’ Russia’s efforts to eliminate Ukrainian cultural touchstones and Russianize the population have escalated, Ukrainian men in the Donbass have been mass-conscripted and sent to die fighting Russia’s war for it, and thousands of Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and shipped away into Russia to be ‘adopted’ and realistically never returned. These are not, to put it mildly, the actions of a state that ever intended to preserve Ukraine as a distinct component nation if it could get control of the place. And, again, we can see this preluded in existing Russian political ideology (as again with Dugin). The belief that Ukraine is actually inherently part of Russia and that Ukrainians should just ‘know’ this is persistent and fundamental in the Kremlin.
And then we also have your “is having another country overwrite your culture so bad, really” argument? You try the bit about Hawaii, for instance, and I would reply that YES, many native Hawaiians absolutely would argue that their national culture has been devastated and heavily damaged by mostly-Western foreigners moving in, abolishing native institutions, eventually ceasing native-language instruction (the ‘eventually’ is important here), and governing Hawaii for the economic benefit of the mainland. The Hawaiians are not outright entirely extinct as a people, but Hawaii itself will never be the same and it will never again belong entirely to a people recognizable as “like the old Hawaiians.”
If that’s the kind of fate you think is ‘good enough’ for Ukraine, then frankly Ukraine would have been better off keeping its nuclear arsenal and threatening to blow Moscow into a smoking crater the minute Putin so much as twitched in their direction.
That was certainly Mearsheimer’s position since 2014 or so – and since this thread began with the discussion of what Mearsheimer thinks, that certainly seems rather important to bring up. Since his position on the conflict dates to well before 2022, it doesn’t appear to make sense to constrain our discussion to 2022-present.
Not even if it somehow managed to covertly develop nuclear weapons between 2014 and 2022? (“Somehow” means I doubt it could have managed to conceal such a move before it was completed – and thus likely losing a great deal of support while providing a casus belli; that they had (and still have) the technical capacity to achieve it is not in doubt.) That seems rather contrary to what I have seen you argue in other threads. Meanwhile, the other options available to it would have generally had much less of a strategic effect, obviously, but many of them would have had altered the risk-vs-reward calculus of what occurred on February 24, 2022 substantially – which is my point. Otherwise, we could say no war (and no coup, revolution, law, etc.) is inevitable until the day it begins – and that’s just not very useful.
You have gravely misunderstood my writing. My initial post here contrasted ‘power’ with ‘fear’ in such a manner because the OP’s post (Sterling’s) was entirely focused on power and missed both the fear and interest/credibility dimensions entirely. Since I was primarily writing a rebuke to his post, it made sense to use a structure which would have reflected it. However, you have taken it ludicrously far when you read a dichotomy between fear-negating and power-maximising into my comments, and then spend paragraphs debunking what I never said. Of course “any action taken out of fear of national destruction or irreparable maiming can also be recast as a move to preserve national power” – and often, vice versa (i.e. the attempts to recast the invasion itself as being motivated by fear of NATO rather than by maximising power – some of which were seen in this very comment section.)
However, any action taken in the real world carries a balance of risks and probabilities – hence, “a smaller nation resisting subjugation by a larger one” needs to balance the costs of making gradual concessions vs. the probability of an open war. Rationally, “fear of national destruction or irreparable maiming” is much, much greater in the latter scenario for “a smaller nation” – and yet, you seem to persistently discount that. I.e.
And yet, it avoided war. Rather significant, no?
Where do we place a case like Mexico, then? It experienced precisely this treatment at the hands of the U.S. in the 19th century, and lost a substantial amount of territory – and yet, the U.S. stopped after that, and today, Mexico is generally believed to retain its independence. The Zimmerman Telegram was already brought up in this discussion, disparagingly – yet, it would seem that if we were to apply your logic consistently, Mexico should have had that offer, no? To give another 19th century example; the latest post by our host brings up the American actions towards Japan.
Following your logic, should the Japanese have fought that battle, after all? You know, to resist such treatment immediately and with nearly every means at their disposal? Another example is that of the Chagos Islands. Should Mauritius really have attempted to fight the British (and almost the certainly the Americans) over them in the 1960s, for fear of losing the entirety of its sovereignty, as opposed to doing what it actually did – which ultimately resulted in no further loss of sovereignty and the British giving those islands back this year?* And then, there is the case of Cyprus, which had seen no further encroachment from Türkiye after the formation of TRNC – even though your premise implies all of Cyprus (and then probably Greece also, wholly or in part) should have had become dominated by Türkiye by now. In short, we seem to have enough historical examples where larger nations
did stop with the ‘moderate’ demands to question the premise the Ukrainian government (two of them, really, considering the change of administration in 2019) was really acting in the best possible manner available to it and/or the only one consistent with realism.
…Can also be considered evidence that once a state chooses to commit to something as ghastly as a major war, this decision breaks psychological barriers holding back other ghastly actions it would not have otherwise taken. Your list can be contrasted with the lack of equivalent actions in regions such as Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which have been in a similar legal and de facto state for a lot longer.
The fate of Hawaiʻi had been tacitly considered ‘good enough’ by effectively every player in international politics – as attested by the conspicuous lack of calls to impose sanctions on key American officials for the sake of restoration of Hawaiian language instruction and the like. Hence, it illustrates how much worse things can get (and still be accepted worldwide) in comparison to examples actually from the region, such as the aforementioned Tatarstan.
However, I believe the most astute comparison might actually be with English-Scottish or English/British-Irish relationship, given the similar degree of intertwining – like it or not, the history of core Ukrainian territory around Kyiv had only been fully separate from that of Russia once before, and for only about 300 years (from annexation by Lithuania in the mid-1300s to the successful rebellion of the Khmelnytsky Hetmanate in 1649 – which ended up agreeing to pledge allegiance to Russia just 5 years later under the Pereyaslav Agreement.) And we all know that even when Ireland became an independent state, parts of it were left behind – with the fervent agreement of much of the local population, who have rejected their own language and were glad to see it largely die out, not even holding any officially recognized status until very, very recently (Kneecap, the best film of last year, is a fascinating exploration of NI’s dynamics.)
Yet, the UK had not pushed from “Ulster” to retake the rest of Ireland, and Ireland as a polity likewise did not undertake any strong actions to retake that area (one can recall the “sanitary cordon” which the major Irish parties still maintain around Sinn Fein) – in total violation to what you say states should do, or of your claim states do not settle for ‘moderate’ outcomes. Now, Irish language is seeing a revival in NI (as again chronicled by Kneecap) and the conditions generally seem to suggest Ireland was right not to take a more combative approach.
I suspect we may never agree on what the counterfactual course of history would have been: however, I again see little room to argue the risks of the current outcome had been minimized even by those in the West who were in favour of resolute Ukraine – to horrific consequences, for which only relatively few designated scapegoats (i.e. Merkel) have had to bear all the responsibility, while those like the ISW had been able to airbrush away their failings.
So…why no call for the West to provide more weapons and other military-related materiel in that article? As we learned in recent years, even nations with limited defence industry still had a lot to contribute – from secondhand cars/trucks for logistics to medical supplies and construction vehicles/materials to prepare fortifications. If they actually considered the present-day situation “a likely future outcome”, did they not have a moral and ethical responsibility to beat the drum for the above in every single article they wrote on the subject?
In other words, they effectively chose to prioritize their vanity – how they would appear to observers – over the best interest of those they were advising? That would not seem to reflect well on them – particularly given that they could have easily pointed to the Iraq War, Vietnam War and both recent Afghan Wars* show that powerful states do in fact get into entanglements “likely to end badly” for them.
*I should say the fact that the UK actually agreed to hand over the location of a strategic air base would seem to be greatly in violation of the logic of realism – either because it indicates norms and international institutions do have surprising power, or at least because in the words of “paulewenstein” here, it would mean that the theory is rather more normative than descriptive. (I.e. the former accepts that the UK can do this even if it considers that a greatly stupid move – the latter rejects the idea a state would voluntarily do this in the first place.) I don’t know if you have ever been on the “CredibleDefense” subreddit – but let’s just say it got a lot of the posters there quite upset at this defeat of hard power with soft one.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/1ksnusn/comment/mtnxnmn/
**Even if you believe the U.S. “had no choice but to retaliate” after 9/11, it had all the grounds to declare victory and leave 1-3 months into the war at the latest – and the recent India-Pakistan clashes show that wiser states absolutely can do such in similar circumstances.
TBH, that is where realism as an analytical discipline and realism as a normative one tends to differ: The Peleponnessian war is perfectly explicable by a realist framework. (note: I don’t think Thucky-boy is a realist in the modern sense)
Though there can still be *arguments* for what is actually the most effective way to maximize power. And remember even a realist recognizes that information isn’t perfect: States act on what they *believe* is in their best interest.
I occasionally surprise people by pointing out that under the principles of interstate realism it is absolutely unsurprising that Iran pursues nuclear weapons development, and that quite honestly they’d be fools not to under their circumstances. I don’t usually mention the words “interstate realism” when I say it, among other things because I’ve been pointing this out since before I had a name for the concept.
Iran has been very foolish to start quarrels it can’t win. Adam Tooze (my professor last year) has a good piece recently tracing, among other things, Iran’s GDP (non-)growth over the past decade. As Engels said, “Nothing is more dependent on economic prerequisites than precisely army and navy.” Enriched uranium is worthless without modern jets and missiles, but the mullahs have ignored this fact, allowed their economy to stagnate, and have ended up militarily laughable.
If you can make your janky 1960s-style theater ballistic missiles nuclear-tipped, modernizing them becomes a somewhat lower priority, because you only need to land one missile out of every ten, twenty, or even fifty to be hitting the enemy very, very hard.
Constructing a complex and heavily armed modern military that is fully the equal of the United States or of a country that has nearly total access to the US military-industrial complex (such as Israel) is prohibitively expensive. Constructing a military armed with Cold War era equipment, loading it down with 500-kiloton bombs, and relying on getting through the enemy’s technological superiority with an occasional shot that still does enough damage to make a man’s blood curdle, may actually be cheaper.
> You can see that specific contradiction manifested grotesquely in John Mearsheimer’s career as of late, where his principle argument is that because a realist perspective suggests that Russia would attack Ukraine that Russia was right to do so and therefore, somehow, the United States should not contest this (despite it being in the United States’ power-maximizing interest to do so). Note the jump from the analytical statement (‘Russia was always likely to do this’) to the normative statement (‘Russia carries no guilt, this is NATO’s fault, we should not stop this’). The former, of course, can always be true without the latter being necessary.
Mearsheimer’s stated argument is quite different – and arguably does not make the normative statement suggested here at all. This interview with Nikkei would appear quite illustrative.
https://archive.md/12CWP
Q: Now Russia and China are cultivating a friendly relationship premised on the U.S. as their common enemy. Do you think Russia and China will be compatible in their stances toward Asia?
A: The U.S. has foolishly driven the Russians into the arms of the Chinese. I think Russia is the natural ally of the U.S. against China.In 1969, the Soviet Union and China almost fought a war in Siberia. The Soviet Union and China — and now we’re talking about Russia and China — have a history of bad relations, in large part because they share a border and each occupies big chunks of real estate in Asia. Russia should be an ally of the U.S. against China, and the U.S. needs all the allies it can get to contain China.
But what we have done by expanding NATO eastward is we have precipitated a huge crisis with Russia that prevents us from fully pivoting to Asia. We can’t fully pivot to Asia because we’re so concerned about events in Eastern Europe. That’s the first consequence. The second is that we have driven the Russians into the arms of the Chinese. This makes no sense at all.
Q: The current tensions along the Ukraine border raise the question of whether the U.S. is capable of dealing with European and Asian issues simultaneously.
A: Let me chose my words carefully. The U.S. has the capability to deal with a conflict in Europe and a conflict in Asia at the same time. However, it does not have the capability to perform well in both campaigns at the same time. By getting involved in a conflict in Eastern Europe, we, the U.S., are detracting from our ability to contain China and to fight a war against China, should one break out.
Q: The Biden administration hosted a summit of democracies last year. Do you think this approach is effective in curbing the rise of authoritarian countries?
A: No. This is a geopolitical competition, and we should think of it as a geopolitical competition and not an ideological competition. The fact that Japan and the U.S. are democracies is very nice, but the truth is that they should be allied against China because China is a threat to both countries, regardless of ideology.
If you take the ideological argument too far, then you get to a point where you say Russia cannot be in the balancing coalition against China, because Russia is not a liberal democracy. I believe that would be foolish. What you ought to do is form an alliance with any powerful country you can find that will help you contain China. China is a formidable adversary.
Q: What can Japan and other countries that are not great powers do to protect stability in the region or the world?
A: Japan should become a key player in the balancing coalition against China and it should go to great lengths to think smartly about how to deal with China as well as influence the U.S. in positive ways. The Japanese should go to great lengths to explain to the Americans why getting into a fight with the Russians in Eastern Europe does not make good sense, and why the U.S. should be focused, laserlike, on East Asia, and not pay much attention at all to Eastern Europe.
Now, that interview is normally behind a paywall, so perhaps that was the reason why Dr. Devereaux is not aware of it already, but I believe Mearsheimer had made similar statements in other venues as well, if not perhaps to the same level of detail. Either way, the point is that the argument voiced by him is different from what this post claims it is. I guess it is possible to argue that the voiced arguments are a mask for his real views, but that would seem to require more evidence and/or elaboration.
For my part, I actually do think that it is right to say that someone like Mearsheimer “uses realism as a cover for strong ideological convictions”, but perhaps for different reasons. That is, the insistence that China and the U.S. have to be in conflict itself appears to be more ideological than realist – an ideology not altogether different from the one ascribes to Trump Administration officials in his linked Foreign Policy article (“But from an ideological perspective, Russia is a white and right authoritarian regime that is premised on Christian traditionalism, whereas China is a left authoritarian regime with a communist tradition and racially “other.”)
After all, I have never seen any self-proclaimed “realist” thinker make a serious argument why the most power-maximizing, value-neutral arrangement for great powers in the age of nuclear weapons and globalized trade would not be to simply ally completely with each other to the greatest realistic extent. A hegemony of the U.S., China, Russia and probably India + the strongest allies of either would logically all-but-eliminate the greatest possible Fear of a modern nation-state – that of a nuclear apocalypse – and result in an arrangement that would be essentially unbeatable by any other state or even a coalition of them, accruing the greatest possible material benefit for all participants of this hegemony over the long run. Obviously, there are enormous ideological and sociopolitical gulfs in the way of that – but isn’t the goal of a self-proclaimed realist to be able to overlook those in favour of the ultimate material benefit?
Similarly, I am bitterly amused that he is able to draw upon a real historical fact – In 1969, the Soviet Union and China almost fought a war in Siberia. – and apparently does not see that it is precisely the fact that Russia actually shares a land border with China and can actually end up in a direct confrontation with a land army of a country with 10X its population and a far stronger economy which makes the idea of joining an alliance against it, where the other members would bear less of a price for initiating hostilities and consequently have a much lower threshold for doing so, which makes it such a strategically awful idea from Russia’s perspective.
I can almost forgive a self-proclaimed realist for overlooking the powerful ideological forces drawing both countries together – though, he apparently understands enough ideology to have described Taiwan as “sacred” for PRC in other interviews, so his failure to realize that the Communist aspects/aesthetics of PRC would inherently appeal to the nostalgia felt to a greater or lesser extent by much of the Russian population should not have been inevitable. Sadly, it appears completely in keeping with all the other “West needs to work with Russia vs. China” ‘thinkers’, whose reasoning at its core (from my perspective) never really seems to go beyond Russia is mostly white and the West is also mostly white. The West is the least racist place in the world and everyone else, including Russia, is more racist than us. Hence, if we would rather work with Russia than China, it must be some strange, temporary historical anomaly which would make the more racist Russia choose the opposite and prefer working with “the racial other”.
I don’t know if terrible analysis on par with the thinking that lead to the Zimmerman telegram actually looks better for Mearsheimer. It’s like six of one, half a dozen of the other. Understood that you’re not really defending Mearsheimer yourself here.
This is an excellent comment. Especially the bit about the lingering appeal of communist and post-communist nostalgia (which might help explain why a lot of the post-communist left seems to have some lingering sympathy for Russia, unfortunately). Also the bit about “gee, Russia is white too, so why don’t they ally with America” which just seems completely brain-dead to me.
i would also point out, re: the 1969 war, something that Mearsheimer and others seem not to get. That conflict (and the Sino-Soviet split in general) was at least as much about ideology as about land, power, or any of the “realist” objectives. The fact that they were both “communist” doesn’t mean that they weren’t ideologically opposed, just like Catholic and Protestant states in the 17th century were ideologically opposed in spite of both being “Christian” (and sometimes allied with Muslims against the other “Christian” side).
Which I find ironic considering that Putinist Russia is so right-wing they even decriminalized forms of domestic abuse.
Not to mention that Marx own opinions on Russian Imperialism in his own time were closer to those who nowadays complain that Ukraine is not supported enough. IIRC, he had complained that Western Europe had not supported Poles who rebelled against the Czar and also had attitudes of Russians which now would be considered racist, like ‘Russia having a goal which can only be held by a civilized government ruling over a barbaric nation: world conquest’; though it could be those were not representative.
However, I admit post-communist leftists aren’t the only ones who have such, often facepalmingly, ‘ironic’ behaviour.
if it wasn’t clear (from my use of “unfortunately”), yes, I completely agree with you. Putin is much more a man of the (broadly speaking) right rather than left, and by his own self-description sees himself more as in the tradition of the Czarists and the “white’ side than the communists. (I think he mentioned at one point his personal hero was Stolypin, as well as, of course, Peter the Great).
While this is technically 100% true, I hope it is not read by passing readers to assume that decriminalization means the absence of consequences, as opposed to the downgrading from a criminal to a civil (“administrative”, in Soviet-Russian legal parlance) matter, to be brought before a magistrate. And more to the point, only the first offence brought before the court gets treated as a civil matter; once that one had been recorded, repeat offences become criminal matters.*
https://yurist21.ru/chto-schitaetsya-poboyami.html
One surprising argument I recall from that period was that on average, Russian judges were reluctant to deliver guilty criminal verdicts under the old law, because of the attitude “It’s not worth it to brand with a criminal record over a slap”. (Punishment for violence which required medical attention was never downgraded – the legal system is not that regressive.) As such, this intermediate step for the first offence could well have, in practical terms, made it easier to secure any prosecution at all in the first place. At the time, I even saw claims exactly that had happened and overall amount of verdicts spiked in the first year after the law was changed. I find it hard to retrace this now, however, or to find a more recent update; in general, Russia is a literal “grey area” with “No data” on the UN maps of domestic violence prevalence, akin to only a few other countries like Algeria, DPRK, Kazakhstan, Libya, Madagascar, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia or Somalia (and…Greenland) – which in itself probably says a lot. (Remarkably, countries like Iran or Niger do show up on at least some of the prevalence maps.)
*Having that said, according to a legal primer linked above (written by a woman, which is rather relevant here), the law on repeat offences (which existed before the aforementioned change) does not automatically provide for the public prosecutor (unlike the repealed law) and leaves this to the judge’s discretion to deem the plaintiff so dependent on the defendant or otherwise incapable of representing one’s interest (generally meaning children or mentally disabled) as to require one. Otherwise, she would have to represent herself or use her own lawyer, which might well have had a stronger chilling effect than the decriminalization itself – in the apparent absence of data, this is about as much as what can be said.
> The fact that they were both “communist” doesn’t mean that they weren’t ideologically opposed, just like Catholic and Protestant states in the 17th century were ideologically opposed in spite of both being “Christian” (and sometimes allied with Muslims against the other “Christian” side).
Exactly. The phenomenon where “heretics” to one’s side, whose differences relative to that side are, from outsiders’ perspective, quite minor, provoke far more bitter enmity than those actual outsiders do is in fact remarkably common. I.e. one might recall that ISIL justified its decision to become “a state” in the first place vs. Al-Qaeda’s strategy of international terror attacks with the reasoning it needed to focus on “the near enemy” before tackling “the far enemy”.
Moreover, since we have been talking Syria in the other thread, it’s utterly remarkable that for a few decades, Syria and Iraq were the only two states in the world which followed the ideology of Arab socialism/Baathism – and yet, though their stated ideology called for a complete merger with each other and the other Arab states as the United Arab Republic*, and this idea was even brought up at some of their bilateral talks, their actual relationship had quickly worsened to the point Syria backed Iran in the Iraq-Iran War. That, of course, has been an underappreciated reason behind their (historical) cooperation, one which too often gets flattened into “Oh, they are both led by Shiites, of course that’s what they would have done.” The 1986 story below is quite a reminder of how different some things looked 40 years ago.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-06-15-op-11484-story.html
*Which did happen between Syria and Egypt in 1958 – only to fall apart by 1961 as Nasser demanded too much subjugation, too quickly.)
Right, Steven Runciman has a nice quotation in the preface to his *The Medieval Manichee* to the effect that “more so than the unbeliever it is the wrong believer, the heretic rather than the infidel, whose suppression is the primary objective of the faithful”.
Did Mearsheimer also talk about what the Eastern European NATO members might think of his proposal?
As those:
1: Regard Russia as a security threat.
2: Have previously send their own soldiers to fight for US security interests in Afghanistan.
If the rest of NATO believes that Washington does not care about your security interests even if you have helped them they would be less interested in helping the US contain the PRC. And losing the support of the EU to gain the support of Russia looks like a poor trade to me.
Or have I misinterpreted what that Mearsheimer means with ‘not pay much attention at all to Eastern Europe.’
Yes, I see factors increasing the likelihood of conflict; however, ironically, many of them, like the US and China being the most powerful, respectively, democratic and totalitarian regimes leading to tension in their relationship, and part of the US electorate sympathising with Taiwan because they regard it as a fellow democracy, are at least partially ideological.
So, now I wonder whether there might be any Realists claiming that Washington and Beijing should avoid letting such ideological factors leading to ‘lose-lose conflicts’.
The Trump administration’s actions so far this year would argue strongly against the idea that states “act more or less rationally” to achieve their goals. That might have once been the case when most political parties tempered their ideology with reason and common sense… but that is definitely no longer the case with the modern Republican party.
> For my own part, I think declaring one’s self a specific ‘school’ of policy thinker is a bit silly, for the same reason I don’t declare myself a specific school of historian.
Can’t help but be reminded of some of my favorite lines of Latin prose from Horace:
ac nē forte rogēs, quō mē duce, quō lare tūter:
nūllius addictus iūrāre in verba magistrī,
quō mē cumque rapit tempestās, dēferor hospes.
…
et mihi rēs, non mē rēbus, subiungere cōnor.
(I’ve always found it interesting that the Royal Society’s interpretation of Nullius In Verba = “take no one’s word for it” is only tangentially related to what it originally meant in context: basically Bret’s point about schools of thought verbatim [though in Horace’s case, philosophical rather than IR])
Bar bar, bar bar bar, bar bar. 🙁
Or rather, would you mind trying to roughly and approximately render the prose in English, for those of us who have no Latin worth mentioning?
My own translation, trying to balance expressiveness with literalness:
> And so to avoid your question as to which philosopher, what school of thought I advocate: I am bound to pledge allegiance to the tenets of no master. I am carried away, a guest, wherever the storm of time takes me.
> One moment, I have become active and immersed in the political waves, an unyielding custodian and supporter of true virtue (i.e. Stoicism).
The next, I imperceptibly revert to the principles of Aristippus (i.e. Ethical Hedonism): I endeavor to make circumstances subject to me, not me to circumstances.
I’ve included the two lines specifically about philosophy that I excised in the original comment
Thanks for the quote! I am a bit surprised to see you call hexameters “prose” 🙂
I appreciate the insightful commentary, although I think your depiction of Meersheimer’s argument is simplistic at best. I’ve never heard him say the Russo-Ukrainian War was a good thing, or that they *should* have done it, only that it was to be expected given our own geopolitical actions, and that continuing to piss them off strengthens the threat of China to WW3 levels.
I do think a lot of modern push to realism simply emerges from the clear and evident failures of IR liberalism. You know the details more than I, but when the leading geopolitical strategy results in 7 trillion spent and a still burning Middle East, it’s not surprising a new ideology emerges to challenge it.
Realism certainly seems more reasonable than that garbage, but I agree that putting yourself in an ideological camp is stupid. For now I’d better focus on school and graduating so I don’t get set to the frontlines of WW3. Don’t want to be cannon fodder after all.
Appreciate your stuff as always, your blog is great!
I wouldn’t worry about the potential of WWIII conscription/draft meatgrinders – any conflict between powers appropriate to call a World War is going to go nuclear and we’ll all stop existing anyway.
(I.e., Russia, assuming all their reported warheads still function, have enough to hit every city with a population of 100,000 (or more) in America AND Europe about six times. NATO will return fire, and either target China so its not the Last Man Standing, or China will fire in sympathy with the Russians and draw fire that way. India will hit Pakistan, China, &co., Pakistan will hit India & neighbors, Israel will do for all their neighbors, and anyone with a spare nuke will hit anyone unaligned that might try something in the aftermath.
Leaving Central African and the smaller South American countries un-Bomb’d. …Although the following now-radioactive weather system is hardly likely to spare them.)
I am not at all sure that powers not directly involved in a nuclear war between two major powers will attack uninvolved powers “on general principles.” As an example, if NATO is under nuclear fire from Russia, it seems unlikely to me that they will spare the arsenal for attacking China if China was not obviously involved in the runup to the conflict.
Removing China from the equation (including both the counterforce strikes to neutralize its deterrent force and enough countervalue to incapacitate China as a state for the foreseeable future) would require hundreds of warheads, probably several hundred. And this is a nontrivial fraction of the available NATO nuclear arsenal. A fraction that might well be better retained as a deterrent (particularly the ballistic missile submarines and anything loaded onto the bomber fleet before it gets blown up) to discourage China from trying anything TOO blatantly domineering in the aftermath of the exchange. Or to launch follow-up strikes on any important Russian targets missed in the initial launch.
If one is thinking far enough into the future to be worried about potential rivals as “last man standing,” one is thinking far enough into the future to be worried about how well or poorly the surviving grandchildren will fare in a world where everyone has been bombed back into the Iron Age. Becoming the satellite nations of a globally pre-eminent China that takes over the world hegemony as “the last man standing” is, from a strategic standpoint, probably much preferable to the alternative of having everyone’s industrial civilization die out entirely, including yours, with no feasible path to reconstruction because all the easily accessible oil and coal deposits got mined out decades if not centuries ago.
Likewise, it would be absolute madness for China to launch because the US and Russia are launching at each other, when their government’s greatest chance of both personal survival and securing Chinese pre-eminence for centuries would be to just stay the hell out of it.
It would be even greater madness for, say, India to launch against China, because while India’s prospects of defending its periphery against China in a world without the US or Russia as relevant powers are… not great, they are still far better off trying to do that on their own than trying to do it with a few dozen large radioactive holes blown in their country from China retaliating with even a fraction of their arsenal.
Perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic, but I think that ascribes far more rational thinking capabilities to the people who have their hands over the proverbial buttons than exist at the moment. China are certainly doing a fairly decent job of portraying themselves as a level head in the current international climate (how truthful that is I’m not informed enough to comment), but the rest appear to be fairly unburdened by effective strategic thinking.
Putin’s Ukrainian debacle. Israel’s gung-ho assault of Iran (which they appear to have come off rather worse-for-wear on, and garnered unnecessary international sympathy for Iran’s current government), and literally everything the current American administration has done on the international stage. India and Pakistan’s recent spat could be read either way, as they had the conflict in the first place, but does seem to have been an instance of direct armed conflict between nuclear powers that *didn’t* devolve into nuclear exchange.
To preserve any semblance of industrial civilisation among the current big players in the event of a global nuclear exchange is going to take some *very* level heads and some steely nerves indeed, that I think is broadly lacking among pretty much everyone who could possibly be making these sorts of decisions.
I suspect that the biggest factor forcibly leveling heads in such a situation is that in a major nuclear exchange, the personal survival of the government leaders in question is very much at stake. It’s not a question of Country X’s leaders being ultra-rational geniuses. It’s that they know that if the nuclear bombs start flying, they are very likely to be among the first to die.
These aren’t especially sensible people, but they’re also not Cthulhu cultists merrily ushering in the end of the world just because they can.
My understanding is that Israel has mostly built a second strike nuclear capacity–missiles on German-made submarines in the Mediterranean–to deter Iran or anyone else from nuking it, though that may be less of a danger now. There is no reason why it would want or need to nuke anyone merely because the Great Powers were nuking each other.
This is sort of the premise behind “The Texas-Israeli War: 1999” a 1974 science-fiction war novel by Jake Saunders and Howard Waldrop.
An NBC WWIII devastates the major powers so Israel as one of the few remaining intact industrial economies starts export mercenaries in nuclear powered laser tanks. Including serving the USA remnant in suppressing Texas separatists.
One of the core foundational assumptions of Israeli policy is that the surrounding nations (Egypt, Jordan, et cetera) will predictably revert to their pre-1975 stance of conventional military aggression towards Israel at the first opportunity. Your Israeli center-right-coalition will then go on to explain that this makes it necessary or ‘necessary’ for Israel to seize buffer territories around itself, to maintain an extremely high state of military readiness, and to launch pre-emptive strikes against anything that looks like a threat (and in this framing “a threat” need not include nuclear weapons to justify a war that kills tens of thousands of civilians, as illustrated in Gaza).
However, this same reasoning suggests that in a world where the Israeli’s sole major ally (the US) is no longer strategically relevant (due to a nuclear exchange) and cannot supply Israel with advanced weapons, it is likely that the technological advantages Israel relies on to fend off the surrounding military powers will sooner or later expire. At which point, within the Israelis’ own framework for what they expect to happen next, they would tend to expect to be ‘swarmed under’ and pushed into the sea by the Arabs with the Palestinians at the vanguard.
Now, I’m not saying that’s what WOULD happen, I’m saying that’s what the Israelis would probably believe would happen.
And historically Israel has had a fairly consistent response to this kind of long term realization that someone they consider an enemy may some day gain the ability to defeat them: they attack first whenever they can, hard enough to convince themselves that the threat they imagine will never materialize.
I had been told that most Liberal Internationalists and Humanitarian Interventionists had opposed Bush’s Iraq War, with only a minority supporting it. The primary proponents instead being the Neoconservatives who had used 9/11 to get various Realists and other advocates of American primacy to support a war they had previously opposed.
(https://inthesetimes.com/article/what-the-iraq-war-teaches-us)
So, if anything it would have made more sense for Realism to have been discredited by that.
“Using realism as a way to describe the world or to predict the actions of other states is consistent with the logical system, but using it to persuade other states – or your own state – seems to defeat the purpose. If you believe realism is true, your state and every other is going to act to maximize its power, regardless of what you do or say.”
I think this goes too far. Taking the example earlier going from “Russia was always likely to do this” to “Russia carries no guilt, … we should not stop this” is a simple is-ought fallacy. But a forward looking ‘Russia is likely do to x’ plus a self-interested “x would be bad” would be a persuasive argument for “we should do y to forestall Russia from doing x”, and I don’t think there’s any fallacy here. Sure you could say y is inevitable because realism demands it, but almost any predictive model collapses in this way if you take as far as claiming full determinism.
Next week is, of course, the week of the fourth and I think I might try to say something about the history of the civil-military relationship in the United States.
A question from a non-American re: this. Today the word “militia” in the US seems to mean an armed group doing whatever they want, and as I understand it, they refer to the US constitution to defend their right to do that. But from the 18th century history I’ve read (mostly British history), that is not what 18th century people meant by “militia”. A militia was under control of the state; it was a defense against invasion/insurrection to support the standing army. And when I look at the US constitution, it seems clear to me that this is what they mean–it talks about how Congress is supposed to organize, arm, and discipline it, how the states should appoint the officers, etc. How did this shift in meaning occur, and how could anyone read the constitution to support the idea that a militia is not run by the state?
A militia is simply a military force formed of civilians rather than a formally trained and state controlled standing army. It overlaps with private armies, non-state armed groups, and paramilitary groups, and is usually at the heart of independence movements.
The US militia definition was heavily influenced by the needs of the British colonies to have more bodies fighting locally while having a limited number of regular army soldiers available to send. So they formed and trained the local settlers to fight under regular army leaders instead, and those trained settlers ended up forming the bulk of the US army during independence. Post independence the “well regulated militia” still exists in the form of the National Guard, who are part time soldiers controlled by the states, though now largely integrated into the standing forces and trained appropriately. Most western countries have something similar as Army Reserves/Home Guard.
The rebel/terrorist definition is a modern one largely based on perspective of the writer. They’re “good” when fighting alongside against a hostile state, “bad” when fighting against in support of a rogue state. Either way they’re pulled from civilians.
You’re on the right track historically, but I think you’re missing 2 important aspects of how Americans saw the militia in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
First, the primary use of the militia before the Revolution was too defend against our take land from Natives. Thus they grew up on a very local basis; think town more than State control. They generally weren’t equipped by the state but rather than each adult male was expected to bring their own equipment (read firearm)Secobd, at the time of the Constitution, militias were expected to be under State, in the American sense, rather than federal control. The drafters of the Constitution were very wary of a too powerful national government. The power balance of a strong national government and relatively week state government is a product of the Civil War.
The heir to the colonial militia is the National Guard. In most times, the Guard is under State control (though it is frequently federalized during wartime – the Guard actually makes up the majority of the US’s combat strength. If you’re unfamiliar with the US system, the “reserves” consist primarily of support units and are never under State control whereas the National Guard is primarily combat units).
Regarding your final question, the shift in meaning simply didn’t occur outside of the extremist movement. It’s not so much that “militia” in any legal or constitutional sense refers to organizations like the so-called “militia movement” as that the movement adopted the now mostly archaic term to provide a rationalization and (illegitimate) legal fig leaf b
Hypothesis, possibly incorrect:
The term “militia” largely dropped out of American common usage during much of the twentieth century, due in part to the Militia Act of 1903, which formally federalized many state militias and reclassified them as National Guard units. Other militia-type units remained under state control but were often named something other than ‘militia,’ such as the “New York Guard” and “Texas State Guard.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_defense_force#List_of_state_defense_forces
With the term lapsing for a long period, it became ripe for adoption by right-wing extremists in the 1980s, ’90s, and on as a “new” word for “well, whatever we want it to mean.”
We can see a similar process at work with various other symbols now favored by the American far right, such as the Gadsden flag (the one with the rattlesnake that says “Don’t Tread On Me”). This flag was used a little in the distant past of America but fell into obscurity. But, since the modern American far-right has as a cornerstone of their ideology the belief that they are being cruelly and improperly ‘tread on’ by external forces which they are righteously opposing, the Gadsden flag was a natural candidate for them to revive and use as a symbol.
“The term “militia” largely dropped out of American common usage during much of the twentieth century, due in part to the Militia Act of 1903, which formally federalized many state militias and reclassified them as National Guard units.”
At roughly the same time in the UK you have the Territorial Army Act (1907) which took the various regiments of yeomanry (18th century rural volunteer cavalry), volunteer (19th century urban volunteer rifles) and militia (the infantry descendants of the Anglo-Saxon fyrd) and brought them all together as the Territorial Army, now the Army Reserve.
Simon Jester mostly has it, but I will add that the relevant Federal laws create several kinds of militia, and so technically everyone in the USA who is potentially subject to the draft is also legally a current member of the militia. Including most of the wingnuts (well, in the ’80s; wingnut demographics have shifted significantly older this century), and this is a fact that was not lost on the various militia movements at the time, they did name themselves ‘militia’ because they did feel that it was legally true (with the conspiratorial caveat that if they weren’t really militia then the whole Act of 1903 was an Unconstitutional disbanding of the militia).
Which leads in to your closing question. American national ideology holds that the legitimacy of a government institution derives from the will of the people, but American right-wing ideology holds that government legitimacy is derived only from the will of specifically right-wing-approved (‘legitimate’, ‘real’, etc) people; consequently these ‘militia’ movements tend to think of themselves as the only valid government institution in their States.
So how many realists argue that the EU should build a fleet of ICBMs?
For that matter, being entirely focussed on the acts of individual states, how many realists think the EU exists in the first place?
I suspect that a rather pressing realist reason for why building ICBMS (as opposed to IRBMs or even MRBMs, which are all that’s needed for EU countries to be able to hit ~80% of Russia’s population) might be a bad idea from the EU’s perspective is that the United States might not be convinced by the inevitable excuse that they are merely building them to ward off the PRC – particularly if the development plans include sufficient range to strike Los Angeles and other cities on the West Coast of the U.S. (West Coast specifically because a missile actually needs about 1,000km less range to hit New York/other points on the U.S. East Coast than to hit Beijing, assuming you pick the same launch point in the EU for both strikes.)
In that case, it would practically be a no-brainer from the realist perspective for the US to nip this threat to its core territory in the bud by activating the >60k troops it currently has deployed in Europe and using them (+ any required reinforcements) to seize whichever political and military elites insisted on this proposal (in the face of what would have undoubtedly had been immense diplomatic pressure) + the key scientists/engineers involved in the efforts and send them off to Guantanamo or similar in the belly of a Chinook, and keep them there as an example to anyone who might want to repeat that step. After all, if the realist position is that national interest trumps any “customs or international law”, then it would be just another way to reinforce non-proliferation – one not particularly different from, say, dropping bunker busters onto Fordow Uranium Enrichment Plant. (In fact, since recent reports indicate that those strikes have not destroyed anything inside the actual facility, this option would be considerably more effective by comparison.)
(For that matter, other nuclear or potentially-nuclear states could also be expected to act to the best of their capacity to intervene with such a program. One underappreciated difference between the peak of the Cold War and now is that the majority of “third nations” have gotten significantly wealthier and more capable since then – and that includes their ability to project power overseas. I.e. PRC probably wasn’t thrilled when Britain and France got their nuclear weapons >60 years ago, but them actually doing anything about it would have been practically unthinkable at the time. Nowadays, they could hypothetically respond to the impending threat from such a “fleet of ICBMs” pointed at their cities by, say, attempting an assassination campaign against European missile program akin to the Israeli campaign vs. the Iranian nuclear scientists – particularly if they make a (possibly not very realist) calculation that Europe would have less of an ideological reason to stick with the program in the face of such casualties + other deterrence activities compared to Iran. (And Russia actually has a real-world track record of assassination attempts in Europe, though the ones concerning actual strategic (i.e. the CEO of Rheinmetall) rather than symbolic targets do not appear to have been successful in recent years.)
Likewise, Israel itself is unlikely to welcome the prospect of European bark (which they now appear to treat like background noise) getting backed up by a much stronger nuclear bite, even if they possess their own deterrent. Even a nation like Türkiye might decide that the effective European nuclear arsenal could end up as the ultimate shield for a future European attempt at regime change – and that acting together with like-minded states to dismantle this program would be cheaper than creating their own. However, the US would have a headstart over all these countries due to again, already having its own troops in the area and well-rehearsed protocols for bringing in even more.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_deployments#Europe
P.S. Admittedly, there are no American deployments in France + France already possesses its own nuclear weapons. However, its handful of missile carrier submarines and Rafales lack the range to engage the U.S./PRC landmass except at such close range that they probably would never be allowed to approach either. At the same time, the yields of those warheads are far too large to be credibly used for tactical purposes against hostile troops already positioned on European soil, so it’s either resistance via conventional land warfare until the ICBMs can be developed or the complete abandonment of that goal.
And yet it is a historical fact that a lot of countries have already built fleets of nukes, so I’m not convinced that everyone would be so opposed to the EU doing so.
Is this something that the realists declare to be impossible?
Re the general idea of EUCOM regime-changing the EU to stop them from developing ICBMs:
Putting aside that France developed land-based ICBMs once already, and did so at a time of far greater numbers of US troops in Europe, without anyone launching any longshot decapitation/regime change wars to stop them….
I don’t think I would characterize this plan as a “no-brainer” or as anything short of a likely disaster. Even to say nothing of political will or backlash, how does the US have anything like sufficient conventional forces in Europe to credibly attempt a war of surprise political decapitation, much less to force through the kind of lasting regime change that would make that decapitation stick (which seems like it should require a lot more than a one-off round of sudden coordinated attacks).
Most of those >60k troops that you mentioned are not even in units capable of independent combat operations. A lot of them are in logistics-and-sustainment units tied to bases, and those guys are not going to hop on a tank or a helicopter (that they’re not trained to drive or fly) and blast their way through various EU militaries en route through Germany and into central France to seize CEA Valduc (or whatever other nuclear sites the EU chooses to build for its hypothetical ICBM program). Even if they had the conventional combat power to do so, which they don’t. EUCOM is generally oriented around leaving it to local NATO allies to provide mass. It doesn’t have either the strength or the posture to suddenly attack the EU with hope of success.
Re French nukes:
I don’t know why you said that French submarines can’t get into SLBM range of the US. French SLBMs were designed to strike reasonably deep into Russia – even if not all the way to Vladivostok – from the Atlantic. The USA is not out of their range. These missiles are probably technically in range of the Eastern Seaboard even when their submarines are tied up at Brest, much less when they are at sea.
It’s true that the French also have a shorter-ranged nuclear-tipped cruise missile, but those aren’t so much intended to be the final deterrent as a form of particularly emphatic communication -about- the deterrent. Since other forms of communication can sometimes be misinterpreted, if you are approaching the ultimate red line, French doctrine calls for nuking you a little bit so that you understand very clearly that they are on the verge of nuking you a lot.
If the US truly were to launch a war the way you describe, and if the French realized that US forces were attempting to eliminate the French president and also the nuclear weapons facilities that allow France to maintain deterrence, then the situation would already have escalated past the last point at which communicating French seriousness by a limited nuclear strike could plausibly help avoid a larger exchange. The point of nuking as a form of communication would be to clarify the situation in a case where a hostile state might not clearly -understand- that they have pushed France to the brink of launching the SLBMs – such as in a confusing, escalating situation in which they misinterpret French commitment and try to call a bluff when the French are not bluffing. But all nuclear strategists already understand that attempting a counterforce strike against another nuclear-armed state will convince them to launch if anything will. The attackers would from the outset understand themselves to be crossing even the most permissive nuclear red line, so there is no ambiguity for a limited nuclear strike to clear up.
First and foremost, you are definitely correct regarding the capabilities of French submarines. To my shame, I somehow confused the 1980s French missile with the current one, and got deservedly called out on it. (Current generation of ballistic missiles on French submarines can more-or-less hit the U.S. Western Seaboard from their docks, if anyone else is wondering.) Perhaps I also misinterpeted the premise of the OP’s question, which either presupposes the lack of such capabilities OR it assumes France would never allow its nuclear weapons to be used on behalf of the rest of the EU, so it would have to develop new weapons somewhere else.
The latter assumption, of course, is hardly uncommon: it’s long been observed that a major reason why the “NATO frontline” states are (were?) so much more pro-American than the rest is because they trusted in the American nuclear umbrella but not the French one. “Would Paris or Lyon be exposed to nuclear retaliation for the sake of Warsaw or Tallinn?” is a question which the residents of those capitals tend to answer in the negative and behave accordingly. So, I also wrote most of the comment under the assumption this new fleet would be developed in Germany, and the France part was more of an afterthought (and hence relegated to the postscriptum.)
I do want to discuss this point further.
Even to say nothing of political will or backlash, how does the US have anything like sufficient conventional forces in Europe to credibly attempt a war of surprise political decapitation, much less to force through the kind of lasting regime change that would make that decapitation stick (which seems like it should require a lot more than a one-off round of sudden coordinated attacks).
Well, it depends. On one hand, Operation Danube in Czechoslovakia used >250k Soviet personnel in 1968. On the other hand, the 1956 Soviet intervention in Hungary used “only” 32k soldiers in total, while Operation Just Cause to depose Noriega in Panama used 27k American troops – and both of those succeeded. According to the updated figures, Germany alone, which would be the locus of this scenario, now has ~50k troops – and though that is still only a quarter of the 1990 levels, I somehow doubt very much all of those would be as incapable of offensive operations as you describe – the idea they are “not trained to fly” when 13k of those are with the Air Force is particularly strange, even if we account for many logistics personnel modern airframes require. And that’s not to mention that the USAF’s greatest overmatch over any other air force is actually not in the fighters or bombers or whatever but in its transport and logistics fleet, leaving the country uniquely capable of flying in thousands of reinforcements/day if the situation requires it. Granted, that requires control of airspace – but the aforementioned overmatch of US Air Force over European ones (and the knowledge of where air defences are located) means it’s far from unachievable.
https://archive.is/5zlIS
And as for political will, my thinking was strongly shaped by the fact that the U.S. had already passed “The Hague Invasion Act” all the way back in 2002. That is, back when Trump was still just another billionaire who briefly attempted to run for President (same as, say, Steve Forbes in the same electoral cycle), 75 American Senators have collectively decided that yes, any measure up to and including ones I have described would be justified…if the International Criminal Court in the Hague ever happened to try any American soldier for war crimes. Hence, my assumption that if the United States political establishment ever began to seriously believe that European nations intend to point their warheads at the American cities as well as those of Russia and China, they would be more than willing to countenance such measures.
For that matter, even if France committed to shielding such an effort, that may not be enough of a deterrent. That is, there was a notorious think tank paper last year which suggested that the American conventional missile power is already sufficient to perform effective counterforce strikes against the arsenals of both Russia and China simultaneously. While the premise is rather ludicrous (i.e. the not-inconsiderable number of Iranian ballistic missiles which got through the Israeli defences should rule out the idea mass launches of nuclear ballistic missiles can be reliably dealt with in and of itself), let’s just say that its claims (i.e., submarines can be easily tracked from satellites and targeted from the air or by other submarines well before they ascend to launch position and if they do manage to launch, nearby F-35s can shoot down ballistic missiles in their boost phase, to name just two) would sound a lot more plausible when there’s only a total of four missile carrier submarines (assuming all are seaworthy at the same time, which seem doesn’t happen often in any country’s submarine fleet) to perform counterforce against. (Well, them and the Rafales, which as you yourself have noted only carry cruise missiles.)
* The list of those 75 Senators included Hillary Clinton, as well as Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer (both of whom were at one point the fourth in line for Presidency) and other generally popular and influential Democratic politicians such as Bob Graham, Bill Nelson (eventually head of NASA), Dianne Feinstein, Maria Cantwell and Debbie Stabenow. (Unsurprisingly, every contemporary Republican Senator voted in favour besides Arlen Specter – who later switched to the Democrats anyway, but then lost the primary (and died of cancer soon after.)
Graham, I think, is particularly remarkable for having been associated with one of recent history’s greatest “what-ifs”. He was frequently thought of as a future VP in 2000 before Al Gore settled on Lieberman. And after that election, it was frequently speculated choosing him would have won Gore Florida and the Presidency with it. So, it should be clear that while such actions are certainly more plausible when the highest-ranking American politicians are openly rooting for parties like the AfD, even the “centrists”, “moderate pre-MAGA/pre-Tea Party Republicans”, “left-of-centre liberals”, etc., etc. have already signalled willingness to perform interventions of a similar nature. And well, to use a famous quote, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
In some respects you could actually make your assumptions more generous: the numbers of US troops in Europe lately have usually been more like 80k+ than 60k, possibly because your source was counting semipermanent deployments but not rotational deployments under Atlantic Resolve.
That said, if you are more specifically focused on troops deployed in Germany per se and not the EU as a whole, for a relatively recent look at the locations and posture of the Army’s main “tooth” units in Europe, you can consult https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/US_Army_V_Corps_-_Organization_2023.png
From this we can observe that the raw numbers are somewhat misleading as to where the bulk of the US Army’s ground combat power is deployed, with more of it (three brigades capable of mechanized maneuver warfare, plus Army aviation and other elements) in Eastern Europe as compared to a single brigade capable of mechanized maneuver (of mechanized cavalry), along with an artillery brigade and more Army aviation, in Germany. This is what I meant when I said that in addition to lacking the strength for a sudden decapitation war against the EU, EUCOM also isn’t postured for it. All the Atlantic Resolve brigades are rather far from Brussels.
Like I said, a lot of the raw number of soldiers based in Germany are tail rather than tooth. Germany hosts a number of sustainment/logistics units tied to permanent bases, as well as the biggest US military medical hub in the world outside the USA itself, but it is second to Eastern Europe in hosting actual ground maneuver warfare elements, not far above as the raw number of soldiers would suggest.
I do nevertheless think that if EUCOM (including its non-German-based elements and supply lines) somehow were to manage to involve itself in a war against only Germany without that war’s involving hostilities against any of the rest of the EU, it is a much less insanely hopeless matchup for EUCOM than a simultaneous conventional attack on all or most of the EU. Germany alone is not exactly fielding an EU-leading military at present, though that is sensitive to when this hypothetical EUCOM attack is imagined to occur (now vs. in a few years after a hypothetical ICBM program has gotten far enough along for there to be something to attack).
The figure of 50,000 active-duty troops for the German Armed Forces is well short of current manpower (it is less short, but still short, considering only the Army and not other arms). But on the other hand there remain for now some serious deficiencies in the Bundeswehr’s equipment readiness, endurance, magazine depth, etc., and I think it is fair to consider US brigades in Europe to generally be better off on all of those counts than German brigades and American air squadrons to be, for now, substantially more dangerous. The latter is set to change quicker than the former.
Re other parts of your reply less focused on Germany per se (which I split out):
I think the case of the Hague act is an interesting example of the kind of ambiguity that can come with claimed or implied willingness to escalate, similar to that mentioned in my first post in the different context of the French doctrine of using nuclear warning shots. It is possible to interpret that law, as you say, as an emphatic Congressional commitment to war in case of the Hague arresting a covered person. It’s also possible to interpret it as a piece of saber-rattling with all the element of bluster that the term implies – a threat that the USA -might- take extreme measures against such an arrest, while leaving a much larger range of options actually open. After all, if Congress wanted to insist on war, they could have passed a law explicitly ordering it rather than one only alluding to it as a possibility.
If we adopted the theory that saber-rattling by a legislature clearly signals the government’s commitment to carrying out the threatened act, we’d also wrongly have concluded, for example, that Iran’s recently passed law authorizing the closure of the Straits of Hormuz meant they were actually going to do that. We’d also probably have believed approximately a myriad of Russian threats to unleash various apocalypses in response to various contemplated helps for Ukraine between 2022 and the present. Many of these threats, taken at face value, signaled intent to escalate far more overtly and with purportedly less wiggle room than Congress wrote into its Hague act.
So I would say rather that when someone, especially a politician posturing on an international stage about military affairs, purports to show you who they are, it’s often good to take more than one look and use your best judgment rather than necessarily believing them the first time.
———-
Separately, continuing the discussion in principle about a hypothetical US counterforce strike against France to prevent them from resurrecting their land-based ICBM arsenal:
I pretty much agree that a conventional counterforce first strike could maybe actually work against a relatively small arsenal that has only a few platforms for deployment. I’m not the person to say much about specifically how likely it might be (other than that hunting the boats is clearly a better bet than trying to shoot down all 200-odd incoming SLBM warheads), but you’d not likely to have to hunt more than two boats at once, as there’s not likely to be more than that at sea at a time.
(and two can between them field all of the appropriate warheads, so the benefits of trying to surge more than two in a crisis partly drop off).
There’s a lot of distance between something that can maybe work or even probably work and something that’s a no-brainer when the consequences of a failure are so dire. No government has ever yet actually dared to try a counterforce first strike against a nuclear-armed opponent, even against arsenals smaller and less dangerous than France’s. It’s a hell of a lot to risk to take on just to prevent a situation that superpowers have gotten used to living with – a few more missiles in range of cities that already have lots of missiles in range of them.
Right, I’ll admit that when viewed with cooler head, what I initially wrote was far too flippant and too
TwitterX-like for what this community deserves. I believe the OP I responded to meant to signal that the EU is only seemingly “weak and irrelevant” due to the norms which should not matter under realism (i.e. the “nuclear taboo”) and my core point was that under the same outlook, suddenly transcending the bounds of behaviour others expect of you and developing a posture so confrontational as to be seeking the ability to consign to oblivion large cities of even remote countries one had not been in armed conflict with for many decades equally suddenly adds incentives to other “players” to likewise do all sorts of actions which you do not expect them to do (to you, that is) under the same “norms and customs” you have been used to.So, it was really meant to read as “no-brainer” if they can get away with it, which is a massive if for sure – though I still don’t consider it completely impossible. (Not when we live in a world where the Entebbe Raid had already happened 50 years ago.) A U.S. which really did not like the EU ICBM program has enough other conceivable ways to make life in the EU more miserable which we need not get here, but would all elevate costs and make the pro-ICBM calculus a lot less straightforward than suggested by the OP. There is also the ultimate risk that being a truly independent nuclear power and a significant conventional power potentially incentivizes all other sides to increase their nuclear arsenals (and hence, lead to the worst-case scenario of nuclear winter becoming even more severe) just so that they can be reasonably sure they can perform counterforce on you if nobody else does. (After all, one of the only ways for any attempt at running a state after a nuclear war to become even worse is if there is still a power with a capability to blackmail your state for survival necessities for their people because they can still drop a “third strike” on your least-affected locations.)
I knew you would bring that up! However, my point was about will, rather than commitment. The way I see it, saber-rattling does generally* tend to reflect what the speaker would preferred to see in a desired world, and the difference between whether or not it stays as saber-rattling is largely a matter of capability – both to carry out said act, and to avoid undesirable consequences from doing so. If the capability shifts, then yesterday’s saber-rattling can suddenly become reality.** Moreover, the shift could happen mostly in the heads of decisionmakers, and it would still lead to the same steps – arguably this is what happened between Russia and Ukraine both in 2014 and especially in 2022.
Perhaps an even clearer example is the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995. An Act which formally committed the U.S. to what was widely understood as a very inflammatory move in the region (even taking away considerable amounts of money from the State Department in case of a delay to reiterate this commitment) yet got passed with the votes of 93 Senators anyway. After all, the Act included a 6-month waiver which any President could reissue indefinitely, so of course they would just that, and so a vote for the Act was a pure piece of posturing with pure domestic upside and no downside at all, right? That is, up until 2017, when (then)-45th President decided not to reissue it after all (probably because he did not have the same understanding of the consequences as all his predecessors), and posturing became reality. Assessments seem to vary on how much (or how little) this move had shaped the current situation in the area – although, it would certainly be a mighty big coincidence if Gazan protests which erupted just four months later were completely unrelated. Protests so widespread that 183 Palestianians were killed and over 6,000 injured with live ammunition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_Gaza_border_protests
*Although, something like Solovyov threatening to “reduce the West to nuclear ash” was rather hard to view even as declaration of intent, when considering his villas on the coast of Lake Como in Italy.
**This also means that unlike seemingly a lot of people, I do think that Iran would move to “destroy Israel” as it promised again and again and again if the perceived costs of doing so ever became sufficiently low – but by the same token, “sufficiently low” does not describe the outcome of Israeli nuclear strikes that are effectively certain to follow such a move.
Ehm, you do realise that the European countries also have their own armies, some of which on their own already are several times larger than those 60K troops you are talking about? (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/armed-forces-personnel?region=Europe)
I actually was surprised to see your name above that comment; usually, you put in more thought into your posts.
Also, I doubt that in that scenario the PRC would actually oppose an EU ICBM program should it lead to conflict between the EU and USA. As conflict between the EU and USA would mean that the USA has less attention and resources left over to contain China.
This trenchant analysis of IR theory from an historian reminds me of the old joke:
– Historians complain that political scientists are all theory but no data; whereas…
– Political Scientists complain that historians are all data, but can discern no theory from any of it.
TGIF
The idea that any human ever has acted in a way that is “unrestrained by customs” is so ridiculous that I can’t believe anyone put forward that as an argument without being laughed out of the room.
Agreed, the more I learn about realism the dumber it seems. It seems patently obvious that a lot of the actions of both the United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, whether we’re talking about military interventions or foreign aid, for a start, were about pure ideology rather than “maximizing state power”. Same for the actions of other lower-ranked capitalist, socialist and neutralist countries during the 20th c, or for Catholic and Protestant powers in the 17th century. Likewise, I think US support for Israel today, as excessive as I find it, clearly doesn’t make sense from a rational self-interest point of view: it’s there because many Americans, most importantly evangelical Protestants, feel strong cultural and ideological ties to the state of Israel.
Interstate realism works much better when you use it as a theory of “this is what would happen, except for” and then have a substantial, chunky list of ‘except fors.’ It is much like how astronomers will still learn Newtonian-style physics and the mathematics of circular orbits and the two-body problem, even though everyone knows Einstein’s version of gravity has supplanted it and that all celestial bodies are constantly perturbed by the gravity of all other bodies anyway.
A simple thing can be useful indeed as something to build other, more complex and delicate things on top of. I wouldn’t care to live in a house made out of solid concrete slabs and nothing else, but having one solid concrete slab to serve as the foundation for the rest of the building serves quite nicely.
I mean, I’ve used realist arguments before, mostly when trying to argue with a liberal or a neocon fan of US hegemony. It’s sometimes a cheap and easy way to short-circuit the situation where we are starting from different value complexes and ideologies. Like if I’m arguing with someone who wants to invade the Middle East to spread “American values”, let’s say I think “American values” are mostly bad, he thinks they’re mostly good. Appealing to an amoral framework that dismisses the whole ideas of values, allies, ideologies, etc. can be a quick and lazy shortcut.
For that same reason though, it gets us nowhere in the end, particularly since realism is very much not what I actually believe. It’s generally better in such a situation, I think, to actually do the hard work of either trying to convince the other person why his value complex is wrong and yours is right, or else (which is probably more useful) of trying to come to a solution where different individuals and countries can figure out ways of coexisting that ensure peace *in spite of* their ideological differences. Cheap and easy sound bites are rarely a good way to get anywhere.
International realist logic can perversely serve to help justify a framework in which people can coexist peacefully despite ideological differences, because international realist logic fairly clearly predicts “war of all against all.” This is a grim enough prospect that it can readily be used to justify a constructed international order in which nations do not do this kind of thing.
In short “if we act like A, framework X will exist, and consequence B will occur, but that’s terrible, so we should not act like A.” The part where one reasons out that actors doing A within framework X will cause B is important.
“It seems patently obvious that a lot of the actions of both the United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, whether we’re talking about military interventions or foreign aid, for a start, were about pure ideology rather than “maximizing state power.””
Or because they saw spreading their ideology as a way to increase their power and influence, and saw the spread of their opponent’s ideology as their opponent gaining power and influence.
I’m sure that’s part of it, but I also think it’s pretty clear that American ruling elites and much of the population (and same for the Soviets, and the French and British and Cubans and Chinese) really did believe their ideology, just like 17th c Catholics and Protestants really did believe their religion.
I also think the same about the support of certain European states for Israel. Isreal had even sold weapons to Argentine during the Falklands War and had once elected as its prime minister a former terrorist who had green lit the assassination of Folke Bernadotte, a member of the Swedish royal family.
Though there are different groups driving this behaviour; for example, replace the Evangelicals with Germans having Holocaust-sized guilt complexes.
@Tus3,
until you experience it, it’s hard to really grasp the intensity of how some/many US evangelicals feel about Israel. I remember once turning on a Christian radio station and hearing a pastor argue that Israel should annex everything between the Nile and the Euphrates because the Bible says so.
Heavens, such things are new to me.
I had already heard a story on an internet forum of an Evangelical complaining that their children were thought on school that the Earth was round ‘because I thought everybody knew the Bible says that the Earth is flat*’.
What you said comes close in craziness.
* To be honest, the internet being the internet I am not 100% that was true; however, from more reliable sources, like Skeptoid, I do know that modern flat-Earthism, at least in the ‘West’, descends from 19th century Protestants who went so far with Biblical literalism they claimed that the Earth was flat.
Yeah, looking at the evidence, it’s pretty clear to me that US support for Israel comes down to
1. Electoral calculus (strong Israeli lobby, particularly in swing States, non relevance of pro-Palestinian movement)
2. Personal commitment/ideology to Israel from the individual presidents (both Biden and Trump, although probably not for the same reasons)
3. Pro-Israel ideology in the broader party (both Democrats and Republicans, although again probably not for the same reasons)
4. Pro Israel ideology in the federal administration
5. Everything else
6. Rational power maximisation strategy
You just wait until you find our our current neoliberal economics models are based on exactly the same premise…
I’m sure all of that is true. Perhaps ‘neoliberal’ was the wrong descriptor.
However, also true is that the foundational principle of our current economic models is that people are ‘realist’ wealth-maximisers, which in my experience couldn’t be further from the truth for the overwhelming majority of people.
I’m not suggesting that every single economist agrees with this, or that there aren’t nuances that are layered on top of this understanding to try and improve its predictive power, but it certainly falls down exactly the same pitfalls as realist international relations. Those are:
1. Distilling a wildly complex set of causal factors into a simplistic ‘people maximise profit/states maximise security’. This may be useful at a macro level, but really has as many holes as it does structure.
2. A significant proportion of influential people conflate ‘does’ with ‘should’. States *do* maximise security, so states *should* maximise security. People *do* maximise profit, so people *should* maximise profit. The fact that this is technically erroneous and not believed by leading experts doesn’t stop it from being a powerful belief among the people with the power to change these things.
The point about descriptive, analytical statements being recast as normative ones is super important IMO. It’s basically the trap that all of social darwinism falls into.
And it’s part of a wider fallacy I like to call agency denial (and it’s counter part, agency hoarding). This is an attempt to exonerate one party of blame in a situation by claiming that it’s actions were entirely directed by circumstances and so it had no real choice in how to act, while the other party was being entirely wilful and making deliberate, conscious choices whose outcome they knew in advance. You see it with WW2 German apologism: the claim that the Treaty of Versailles created by the evil Allies was so onerous than the Nazis had no choice but to go to war to overturn it. You also see it in studies of European Imperialism: there’s a strong tendency to portray the natives from America to India as passively responding to the colonisers (be it peacefully, violently, or by collaborating) according to what was happening around them, but never proactively taking any initiative. It sometimes borders into (presumably accidental) racism where Europeans are shown as the only ones “doing history” and everyone else merely automatons following along.
“You also see it in studies of European Imperialism: there’s a strong tendency to portray the natives from America to India as passively responding to the colonisers (be it peacefully, violently, or by collaborating) according to what was happening around them, but never proactively taking any initiative.”
What is the initiative to be taken here toward Europeans? Do you expect natives from America and India to attack Europe?
Well you can say Mongols and Turks did attack Russian before the Russian imperialism in Central Asia. But we are talking about European Imperialism, not Central Asian Nomadic Imperialism.
I have often heard a story about some European colonial power expanding into an area by allying with one local power to overthrow another. You could also see this as a local power taking advantage of an opportunity to ally with a distant power in order to defeat a traditional rival.
Isn’t that just collaborating?
“passively responding to the colonisers (be it peacefully, violently, or by collaborating)”
What I meant is that local powers chose how to act, what side to take, and were playing their own cards for their own gain in their own local power struggles. They weren’t all just sitting there passively until the Europeans arrived and forced them into a particular set of reaction. Agency doesn’t just exist in the largest geo-political scale of counter-colonising Europe.
If you want a concrete examples: Africans selling African salves to Europeans for the trans-Atlantic trade. That was something that they chose to engage in. But I’ve often seen it presented as: the white-man offered them guns and other highly desirable goods in exchange, so they didn’t have any real choice but to sell slaves. Yet I’ve never seen the argument: Europeans could make a lot of money from the slave trade, so they didn’t have any real choice but to take part in the transatlantic slave trade.
Actors on both sides deliberately chose a course of action for their own gain, and could have chosen otherwise. Yet very often the agency is completely shifted onto one party and the other left as an automaton that only ever reacts reflexively.
Or, to put it another way, agency isn’t about what is done but about the fact that acting that way is a choice. Obviously all choices are partially constrained by circumstances, technology, custom, etc…, but some element of choice remains. Agency denialism reframes historical events as if one side had no choice at all while the other had unconstrained free will.
well if the studies stated that the Europeans forced the natives into selling slaves against their will, then it would be lying.
The reality is the African slave traders are on the same side of European Imperialism, as collaborators. And they did benefit from the exploitation of their compatriots.
But it should be noted that the Europeans is still the one taking initiative in European Imperialism. Atlantic slave trade only existed because there was a market created by European for it. Implying that the natives were the one responsible for European Imperialism is also wrong.
In regards to the African slave trade, there was a definite pattern of violent selection at work in West Africa. States that participated in the trans-Atlantic slave trade tended to become richer and more heavily armed as a result, and this effect tended to amplify their ability to raid their neighbors for more slaves. Meanwhile, states that did not participate had to put up with being raided and having their people enslaved by heavily armed neighbors. Over time, this tended to weaken the nonparticipating peoples quite markedly and to strengthen the participants quite markedly.
In regards to Europe, the pattern is different. First, because there were no major colonial powers that did not practice slavery (at least in the parts of their colonial domains suitable for plantation agriculture or intensive mining, the industries for which slave labor was most in demand). Thus, it is harder to discern any pattern of violent selection between nations. But second, while being a slave trader or slave-owner was ONE way for a European man to become very rich in this period (assuming he survived exposure to disease and so on)… it was most certainly not the ONLY way. Individual Europeans were rarely forced to personally engage with slavery against their will. By contrast, West Africans had very little choice in whether to engage with it or not, because even if they refused to participate in the slave trade, they would still be raided by heavily armed neighbors who had not refused.
@Simon_Jester
This is precisely what I’m talking about. Your descriptive language undermines the agency of some of the parties involved, while ignoring the geopolitical and ideological constraints on the freedom of choice of others.
You say that the Africans had “very little choice” but to accept the guns for self defence against other Africans. Yet this need can only have arisen because other African actors were very happy to use those guns to actively attack and dominate their rivals. Yet your description doesn’t mention this motivating factor at all. You ignore the active wilfulness and focus exclusively on passive reactiveness.
And with the Europeans you do the opposite. You could say that, due to the intense interstate competition in Atlantic Europe in the Early-Modern Period, and for merchants inside the same state, that losing any competitive edge was tantamount to slow suicide. And the transatlantic was the most lucrative venture – or, more importantly, perceived as such at the time – and so the interstate anarchy and proto-capitalistic pressures of the time made it very difficult for European actors capable of taking part in the slave trade to not do so. Yet you don’t mention any of that all, and only mention the European’s apparently unconstrained freedom of action.
That’s not to say that I’m disagreeing with your description of the *events*. Or that my rebuttals above are the only part of the story – it’s not, both sides had some agency, and both sides’ agency was constrained by circumstances. I’d even agree that there was, on balance, more open choices from the European perspective and more constraints on the African one. But that doesn’t mean that we should go all the way and implicitly present it as only one side having any agency.
@holdthebreach
This is precisely what I’m talking about. Your descriptive language undermines the agency of some of the parties involved, while ignoring the geopolitical and ideological constraints on the freedom of choice of others.
You say that the Africans had “very little choice” but to accept the guns for self defence against other Africans. Yet this need can only have arisen because other African actors were very happy to use those guns to actively attack and dominate their rivals. Yet your description doesn’t mention this motivating factor at all. You ignore the active wilfulness and focus exclusively on passive reactiveness.
My exact words were “States that participated in the trans-Atlantic slave trade tended to become richer and more heavily armed as a result, and this effect tended to amplify their ability to raid their neighbors for more slaves. Meanwhile, states that did not participate had to put up with being raided and having their people enslaved by heavily armed neighbors. Over time, this tended to weaken the nonparticipating peoples quite markedly and to strengthen the participants quite markedly.”
…
I think you misunderstood what I meant when I later said West African peoples “had very little choice” about whether to “engage with” the slave trade. “Engaging with” does not mean “engaging in.” What I am saying is that West African peoples could not choose to live in a world where the slave trade did not exist or was not relevant to them. They could not ‘flip the off switch’ and just disconnect from it entirely, because even if they made the laudable principled decision to avoid the trade, they would still face the risk of slaver raids from hostile neighbors.
When a disaster (invasion, hurricane, whatever) strikes my city, I don’t have a choice about whether to “engage with” the disaster. The invasion, hurricane, whatever, is coming to my address whether I like it or not. I have plenty of choices about how I respond to the event, it’s just that “peace out and have nothing happen” isn’t one of them since the problem is coming to my doorstep against my will.
West Africans, both individually and collectively as nations, could choose not to engage in the slave trade, as in choosing not to trade slaves to the Europeans. But they could not choose for the slave trade to leave them unaffected, since the effects would come after them where they lived.
…
Conversely, any individual European could choose for the slave trade to leave them unaffected or only very indirectly affected, because by and large, no one was forcing Europeans to become slave-traders or overseers at gunpoint. The typical European who decided they did not want to participate in the slave trade did individually have the choice and was quite unlikely to, say, be shanghaied and find themselves aboard a slave ship and forced to participate in the trade against their will.
Now, European states had significant incentives to participate in the slave trade (lots of money) and European governments were by and large not democratic, so the individual European couldn’t choose for their state to avoid slavery or to avoid being indirectly affected by it. So there’s that.
“Do you expect natives from America and India to attack Europe?”
I don’t see why it would be so much harder to Indians to attack Europe than for Europeans to attack India. There was no big technological difference in the days of Clive of India.
Indian navy at that time was nowhere near the power of European navies.
England had had the scientific revolution though, which meant that their technological dominance over South Asia was going to inevitably happen sooner or later.
Plus, British conquest of the subcontinent was a gradual process and I wouldn’t say the tipping point when they became the clear hegemonic power was as early as Clive’s time. they didn’t defeat the Marathas until 1805 after all.
The real difference that enabled the British conquest of India in the late 1700s (one might reasonably say it was ‘all over but the shouting’ by 1800) wasn’t technology as such. Britain didn’t have an obvious technological advantage on the level of “rifles against bows and arrows” in India, the way they did in the Americas or some other parts of their empire.
The real difference was that, like quite a few other peoples to successfully invade and conquer large swathes of the Indian subcontinent before them, the British were a relatively unified force invading from a homeland that was effectively outside India’s collective reach, against a relatively disunified subcontinent that for practical purposes had no centralized self-government capable of organizing resistance on a subcontinent-wide basis.
The East India Company of the late 1700s would almost certainly not have been able to succeed in toppling the Mughal Empire of the 1600s, but then, they didn’t have to. Because they were up against the significantly decayed Mughal Empire of the late 1700s themselves. And the Mughal Empire of the late 1700s was in no shape to organize land-based resistance of the subcontinent, let alone to even begin to consider building fleets of ships with which to contest the Indian Ocean, let alone to build fleets of ships capable of threatening England.
I don’t think “South Asia was disunited” is really a useful answer. It explains just about as much or as little as saying “Europe was disunited”. After all, South Asia is a very diverse place- geographically, economically, ethnoracially, linguistically, religiously- why we would we expect it to be united? The real question is why Britain was still able to defeat the *individual* South Asian powers (Marathas, Sikhs, Mysore, etc.) , lots of which were not small countries in area or population, and some of which had reasonable effective militaries and on occasion did defeat either the British or other Western powers in battle. For that, I think you have to appeal to modern science, technology, the industrial revolution, etc..
The collapse of the Mughal empire after all didn’t mean that South Asia devolved into units the size of Bhutan or Swaziland (though there were certainly plenty of those, they didn’t account for most of the area or population). Many of the successor states, and many of the outlying regions that broke away from Mughal hegemony , weren’t particularly small by any stretch of the imagination.
By the 1500s I would argue there was already a significant military gap. Particularly in naval and fortification matters. Around the same time Cortez was conquering Mexico, the Portugese were establishing footholds in India, often in a *very* heavyhanded manner! They literally murdered the Sultan of Gujarat for instance during negotiations, seized Diu, and repulsed the resulting Gujarat attack.
Portugal in the late 1500s defeated an alliance of Deccan and Indonesian powers in a 5-year war!
It is true a unified India under the Mughals had some ability to push back, but remember the relative resources. They had a population of ~*150* million fighting the trading companies of countries on the other side of the world with less than a 1/10th the population.
I think people underestimate how early Europe got a major military advantage over the rest of the world. Shah Abbas heavily relied on European advisors, e.g. the Shirley brothers to modernize his army in the late *1500s*.
The Late Middle Ages were the opposite of stagnate. Gunpower started in the 1300s, within a couple hundred years were more effective at using it. The Caravel dates back to the 1200s with max 20 tons displacement. Shortly after trips to Canary Islands started becoming routine. Its successor the Carrack by the 1500s could have as much as *1000* tons displacement.
I wish that period from 1250-1520 got more attention. The Military Revolution is traditionally dated as starting in mid 1500s.
But Europe by 1550 *already* had leapfrogged from somewhat backward to the military leaders of the world. Crippling advantages in fortification and naval technology and a lesser advantage in field combat. And that I think can very fairly be described as a military revolution.
Ocean-going square-rigged ships are not simple machines, even though they don’t have steam engines. It took the Europeans centuries to learn how to build, man, sail, navigate, arm, and fight such ships. The Indian rulers had none of the necessary knowledge or experience.
YouTube channel Animagraffs has created a video on “How a 16th Century Explorer’s Sailing Ship Works” and it shows how hideously complicated machines. I suspect a steam ship is quite a bit simpler vessel.
And all of that complexity is probably required to sail the long distances efficiently and effectively. They will be especially required when it’s time to engage in combat with other vessels.
Some Hindu dynasties did engage in naval conquests overseas- the Tamil (or I guess, Old Tamil) Cholas conquered portions of Southeast Asia and I think their influence eventually spread as far as the Philippines. Cambodians seem to be about 10% genetically South Asian today. I think such overseas expeditions were very much the exception rather thn the rule, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chola_dynasty
The Caravel dates back to the 1200s and was a mere 20 tons or so displacement then. In 1312 Canaries were rediscovered. First European naval use of cannons in 1338. In 1434 Cape Bodjar was passed. 200-ton Carracks are now standard and it is the era of Henry the Navigator. The Portuguese are now categorizing ships based on # of cannons. New World was discovered in 1492 and India was reached in 1498. By the mid-1500s Europeans had naval dominance in most of the world. The largest Carracks could reach 2000 tons.
Mid-1600s saw the invention of the Ship-of-the-Line and major changes in naval tactics. But technological progress after that seems to have gotten much more incremental especially after the early 1700s. By then they were more or less at the limits of what is possible for wooden sailing ships. The Spanish ship La Real commissioned in 1769 had a displacement of 5000 tons.
So yeah, Europeans by the time they established superiority in the mid-1500s had been experiencing several centuries of stunningly rapid advances in naval matters.
By comparison Zhung He’s ships were about 500 tons displacement with two dozen cannons and largest Chinese junks were 2000 tons. These numbers were about the same 400 years later during the First Opium War.
So I expect Zhung He and Henry the Navigator’s ships would have been fairly matched. 100 years later, not so much…
Well technically I suspect the crossing point for China v Iberia naval technology probably happened a few decades after Zheng He’s voyages ended, but before they would have run into each other if China kept doing major Indian Ocean expeditions.
The case of European imperialism is slightly complicated by some of the mismatches and disparities between European states and the people they were, ah, imperializing. Note that the following statement applies less to India, which was relatively very developed when the British arrived on the scene, but more so to the Americas and to Africa:
There were often significant disparities of resources and information between European imperial forces and the native peoples they opposed. In the Americas, the natives often had less information about what was happening far away than the colonists did, due to the colonists being connected by sea travel.
The natives were also devastated by plagues almost immediately after Columbus’ arrival, and spent most of the following centuries in a state of post-apocalyptic population recovery that never actually succeeded in recovering the pre-Columbian populations up to the point where Europeans shoved them violently off the land. The disruption of governance and populations, combined with the technological gap and the information gap, made it difficult (though by no means impossible) for the native peoples to “take initiative” by enacting a systematic strategy towards the colonists at any scale much larger than the individual tribe.
It is difficult to do something the history books will record centuries later as “taking initiative” when your entire culture, nation, and people consist of, say, twenty thousand people living in villages that used to house ten times that number. When those villages are scattered across a patch of land a hundred miles across, and when you are surrounded and even interpenetrated by other peoples who have different languages and identities and may well be actively hostile to your people. And when “taking the initiative” in any violent or decisive manner might well result in your people being quickly exterminated by hostile settlers who are already roughly as numerous as you are and who have considerably better weapons and much stronger fortifications.
There are notable exceptions to this principle. King Philip’s War and the actions of Tecumseh come to mind as possible candidates; the success of the Hopi in driving out the Spanish for some years might count but may not qualify on scale grounds. There may well be others I haven’t thought of off the top of my head. But this is a broad-strokes observation and exceptions to the rule don’t really invalidate it, I’d say.
In Africa in the nineteenth century, the balance of factors was different (the natives were almost never outnumbered, for instance), but the imbalance of communications technology and firepower remained. And so did the imbalance whereby the African states (and non-state peoples) had homelands that were exposed to European expeditionary forces, while the European homelands were not exposed.
But native americans *did* often take initiative: They allied with europeans against each other or with each other against europenas or europeans against europeans. They traded, learned, sometimes tried to adopt european lifeways on thier own terms, sometimes not.
These things were not always successful in achieving what they were going for, but they were still agentic actions, and often significantly shaped (at least in the short-medium term) how things played out. The conquest of the americas took about 300 years after all.
Precisely. You do not need to be strongest to take the initiative or show agency. This has really little to do with balance of power, or even the events that happened. It’s to do with how the causes of those events are described in historiography. For the most part, the books talk about what the Europeans wanted, why they wanted it, their motivations, their conflicts of interest, and how these factors came together into a decision. How that decision was implemented via concrete actions is a separate topic. Very little is said, however, about what the natives wanted, why they wanted it, their motivations, their conflicts of interests, and the decisions that they had to made. Instead it’s typically presented as an automatic response: “X happened, so they reacted with Y,” it completely systemic way devoid of human agency or free will. Again, it’s not about what they did, it’s about the extent to which actors are presented as having any influence on what they did.
Of course, not all works on European Imperialism do this. But it is very frequent at the popular level. Almost never explicitly, but implicitly, by omission.
If the topic is European Imperialism, then it is alright for some books (especially schoolbooks) to focus on the actions of European Imperialists and not their native collaborators.
Like, when summarizing Operation Barbarossa, you don’t need to mention details about Ukrainian nationalists helping the Germans killing Jews and Poles, for example.
If you’re describing operation Barbarossa, you should treat the Nazis and the Soviets on an equal footing. If the topic is different, you should be treating the SS and Ukrainian nationalists on equal footing. Or the Gestapo and the French resistance on equal footing.
Crucially, this does **not** mean saying that both sides committed “equal atrocities” or were “equally bad”. It means that treating both sides with the same analytical tools. So how the cultural norms of both sides affected what they did. And how rival factions within both camps affected how they could act. If you’re using IR realism, it means seeing how both sides’ actions were motivated by a desire for state survival and expansion of power.
Which brings us back full circle to Brett’s initial criticism of IR realism theory: that it bestows on one side the agency (and in its fullest extent, moral authority) to maximise it’s own power, but doesn’t apply it’s own logic to the other side. All I was saying – and this will be my final word on a discussion that has gone on far too long considering how simple the original point is – is that this same asymmetrical application of historical theory applies with many other frameworks too, with the end result that some peoples are presented as the driving historical force and the other infantilised to reactionary, free-will-less spectators.
I haven’t seen any history book not treating the imperialists and natives on equal footing, unless the actions of the natives too insignificant to mention.
We know the Qing burning opium led to Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion led to Eight Nations attacking Beijing. We know about the Sepoy Mutiny in India, the war between Zulus and British, and so on…
you don’t need to mention details about Ukrainian nationalists helping the Germans killing Jews and Poles, for example.
I wouldn’t necessarily talk much about the Ukrainian nationalists (partly because they didn’t actually run a state of their own at the time), but I do think that a good summary of WWII in Europe should certainly (and usually do) devote some time to dealing with Nazi collaborationist regimes like the (really bad) ones in Slovakia and Croatia, for example.
@NVA I humbly suggest that you may not have read a sufficient number of books about the colonisation of the Americas in that case. Less so academic books, especially in recent years, but the idea of ‘the native passively and robotically reacting to the choices made by colonists’ is *rife*.
Another clear example of this, if you wanted one, were the actions of Atalhualpa (the Sapa Inca of the Inca Empire at the time of initial conquest). He was captured by the Spaniards and ordered to reveal the locations of the Inca treasuries. Current consensus is that the treasuries he directed them to were the treasuries of his political rivals rather than his own.
This is transparently an agentic action from a native ruler, taken to maximise their own personal political position in the face of circumstances. His agency was significantly reduced by being imprisoned, no doubt, but he wasn’t just some passive actor responding robotically to colonial agents.
I listed reasons why “taking the initiative” on a level that gets noticed in history books 400 years after the fact is difficult when in the position of, say, the North American natives. Not why it is impossible. Even when you are living in scattered enclaves in the post-apocalyptic overgrown ruins of your previous civilization shredded by multiple superplagues, it is still possible to take initiative in how you respond to the saucer men from Mars who show up to take your land from you.
It’s just… difficult.
It is not universal tendency.
For example, on r\AskHistorians I had once encounter a claim in the vein of: ‘The Spanish ‘conquest’ of the Aztec Empire is better understood as the Tlaxcalteks using Cortez and his men as their pawns in a regional power struggle against their rivals. As up to Mexican independence the Tlaxcalteks had a status and privileges only beneath those of the Spanish themselves and Tlaxcala had to pay only symbolic tribute things had clearly worked as planned for the Tlaxcalteks.’
However, I suppose that was an overreaction against another much more common narrative.
Both Iran and Israel are states that are not doing everything they can to maximise power or survive as they should be under neo-realism theory.
Iran was for centuries usually the most powerful Islamic country, culturally if not politically. The current day Iranian regime could regain a lot of that power and influence “just” by converting from being officially Shiite to officially Sunni.
Similarly Israel would be a lot more secure (and could oppress Palestinians all they like) if they “just” converted from a Jewish state to Moslem.
And the USA itself could become much more influential in the Middle East by changing into the United Islamic States of America. Although for sheer numbers, maybe the Hindu States of America would be better …
Yeah, that would be great for social stability in Iran, to suddenly change it’s official religion. You’re a genius who has a great understanding of politics.
And that’s really why Palestinians are mad at Israel, because they’re not Muslim. It has nothing to do with Israel killing and torturing civilians, stealing homes, breaking international agreements, bombing hospitals, deliberately shooting civlians in the kneecaps, denying their existence…
I think even within the boundaries of “realism is inadequate as a model to analyse all facets of international relations”, it would be a bit reductive to take it in terms of “a state will completely alter its own composition in pursuit of a form of maximized power and/or security that entails greater harmony with neighbouring countries”.
I suppose that could be taken in terms of “if the state is determined to maximize its security, one must first define what the state actually is”. An Israel that somehow had the capability to force the conversion of its entire population would not be achieving the objective of maximized security, because it would no longer be the state that set out for that goal.
Yes. For purposes of understanding Israeli policy, it is critical to understand that the Israeli state’s policy is defined firmly in terms of the belief that Arab and/or Muslim residents of Israel-held territory are not real citizens who have a right to expect that state policy will be designed with their interests in mind. Regardless of whether the Israeli state claims jurisdiction or authority over Arabs and/or Muslims as well as Jews, the Arabs and/or Muslims don’t “count” to the Israeli government. And so a notional situation in which the Israelis all convert to Islam would be a situation in which, so far as the current Israeli government is concerned, the population of ‘real’ Israelis would have already been reduced to zero.
Realism talks about convergent instrumental goals rather than about terminal goals.
Terminal goals are what agents — states, people, whatever — really want.
Instrumental goals are intermediate subtasks to achieving terminal goals.
Convergent instrumental goals are subtasks that are useful to so many different terminal goals that most agents can be expected to pursue them. Compare economics: very few people want money just to hang on to it; mostly they want money so they can buy the things they “really” want. However, because in this latter sense most people want money, economics can usefully make the simplifying assumption that people want money (“homo economicus”).
It turns out that keeping your terminal goals intact is one of those convergent instrumental goals. Whatever you want to accomplish now, you are unlikely to accomplish very much of it if you allow yourself to get reprogrammed to pursue some other set of goals.
“And the USA itself could become much more influential in the Middle East by changing into the United Islamic States of America”
Is the United Islamic States of America the same state as the USA?
It can be even more powerful to join with Iran to become the United Islamic Empire of America-Iran.
> Although for sheer numbers, maybe the Hindu States of America would be better …
Eh? Even in 2010, there were almost 600 million more Muslims than Hindus worldwide – a nearly 60% advantage in adherent numbers. Moreover, the projections (now admittedly a decade-old) suggest that by 2050 the gulf would only grow larger worldwide to an over 200% advantage – while the number of Hindus would increase from exactly one billion to 1.3, the number of Muslims would go from 1.6 to 2.7 billion, so even if such a option were possible, taking it would only look worse with time.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1350917/world-religions-adherents-2010-2050/
Having said that, Christians are already #1 worldwide at 2.17 billion – and even by 2050, that would still be true as their numbers are projected to increase to 2.9 billion. Now, one might argue that the U.S. needs to increase its influence in the Middle East/Sahel more than in the Christian parts of Africa which I believe would be mainly responsible for this increase, since those are already quite pro-American – but then again, one could equally hypothesize such a religion switch would massively diminish the U.S. influence in those countries (as well as much of Europe, etc.) Once you accept such an implausible hypothetical on face value, though, you can make just about any assumption after that.
P.S. I would myself be rather surprised if we found that this projection held true 25 years from now. Not because I doubt their skill at projecting future population changes by country all that much, but because they seem to start from the assumption the secularization/atheism trend had largely peaked already, and the “Unaffiliated” numbers would only grow by exactly 100 million from 2010 levels. Admittedly, they claim the gain in Unaffiliated would be considerably larger, but simply get offset by population decline in ageing majority-unaffiliated countries like the PRC, but again, this seems to be centered around some very arguable assumptions.
I think Pew suggests that Islam will be the biggest religion in the world by a healthy margin in 2050, though I may have the dates off.
No, apparently, Pew’s The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050 is literally the source for Statista’s data and has the exact same numbers. One interesting quote from there.
By this year, though, it seems like they recalculated their own 2010 figures, to the point they now considerably exceed their own 2050 projection – and the 2020 figures are larger still.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/06/09/religiously-unaffiliated-population-change/
So, the expected population share in 2050 is effectively certain to be larger compared to the earlier projection – even steeper-than-earlier-assumed population decline in China (home to 67% of the world’s religiously unaffiliated as of 2020) or Japan, Vietnam, ROK, etc. (all in the top 10 for unaffiliated population worldwide) are unlikely to overcome that. Granted, there are some countervailing factors too – i.e. the apparent explosion in the popularity of Christian music in the U.S., now described as the 4th-fastest growing music genre there. (Although, that can be just as plausibly interpreted as the sign of America’s ongoing ideological silo-ization.)
I fully agree with your take, but I’m not sure there has ever been a time when Persia/Iran was the most powerful Islamic country, and not the Ayyubid/Mamluk/Ottoman Sultanate. Maybe in the time of the Ilkhanate, but that was not (only) Iranian.
Politically, yes. The culturally part is true though. Persia had *enormous* influence on the Muslim world. E.g. Ottoman Turkish before they purified it linguistically was at least as influenced by Persian as English by Norman French. Persian was the court language of many of the Muslim states in India.
Persian culture and language, of course, but that wasn’t what I was talking about. I don’t think that any of the Persian states that existed after the Arab conquest was, in itself, more culturally powerful than the Abbasid/Ayyubid/Mamluk/Ottoman Sultanate.
I think the first sentence in your post plays interesting games with the phrase “not doing everything they can.” There is “everything you can hypothetically do,” and there is “everything you can, in practice, do.” These are not the same thing.
Also, I question whether Iran could actually regain great influence by being officially Sunni. Sunni countries are not required to like each other and military conflict between different groups of Sunni is very, very, very far from unprecedented. Most of Iran’s Islamic rivals in the region are opposed to Iran for strategic reasons that wouldn’t go away if the sectarian differences vanished.
I haven’t read Scheidel’s book, but the argument as presented here makes no sense. First of all, history departments have just the same problems as classics departments: declining enrollment, lack of perceived relevance to student futures, etc. Why would a separate ancient history department, with some sort of universal focus, be immune to the problems of its two neighboring disciplines? Second, you can’t do serious work in the history of any time and place without knowing the language, be it Greek, Persian, or Chinese. So a department of ancient history can maybe scrabble up a few dollars teaching undergraduate lectures, but someone will have to teach future scholars the relevant languages. If no one wants to learn the languages, then scholarship will disappear.
A tiny bit of game theory should lead any ‘realist’ to expect lots of cooperation and norms of varying complexity around it.
A simple model of iterated prisoner’s dilemma already leads to cooperation. Now add that you have multiple players who can pair up, but also observe each others behaviour, and also add imperfect information and noise and a ‘fog of war’, and you already get reputation effects and varying levels of forgiveness etc. And that’s just in models where players mostly care about survival only (i.e. defensive realism).
A realist _should_ expect ideology and norms to play a role: even if only because a reputation for fair play and honesty is a very valuable thing for an actor to acquire.
So capital-R Realism done lower-case-r realistically is perfectly compatible with norms and institutions being important.
I think where the model of Realism really breaks down is when Public Choice theory becomes really important: states are not unitary actors with goals. They are made up of coalition of people all with their own interests. And even a dictator has to have the (implicit) consent of enough people to keep her regime running. It’s even harder for democratically elected leaders credibly commit their country to promised behaviour in the future.
Tripwire forces are one example of how nations can compensate for this problem and commit themselves to honour a defensive alliance. In a pure realist framework, tripwire forces wouldn’t make a difference: the idealised realist state could just ignore the loss of the tripwire force, thus making them useless as a commitment device.
Thing is, the realists would argue that “tripwire forces” are in fact an illusion because yes, the states can always choose to ignore them. They might even point to the actual history of the matter, since there has not been an example when they were put to the test and functioned as intended (taking casualties yet drawing the ally in as the result.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripwire_force#Examples_in_practice
The closest example is apparently the British garrison over at the Falklands/Malvinas – and it’s a very grey example, because on one hand, the Argentine troops actually were ordered to avoid shooting at those forces entirely (meaning that they did believe in the power of their casualties to compel British response) – but on the other hand, the lack of those casualties did not prevent the British expeditionary forces from entering the fray a month later anyway – suggesting all of those forces could have stayed home and Britain would have still fought over the Falklands. All the other examples have the opposite methodological problem – how do you prove the USSR would have definitely moved into West Germany if not for the American and British garrisons there – or that if the push came to the shove, the politicians would have acted in accordance to their white papers?
For myself, I can think of one recent, borderline example not listed on this page. In and around the Nagorno-Karabakh region (at one point known by the then-local population as Artsakh), Russian peacekeepers were stationed for the purpose of separating the Azeri and Armenian troops. That did not prevent the Azeri forces from acting in the 2020 Karabakh War – and at one point, they actually shot down a Mi-24 helicopter of the peacekeeper contingent, killing two crewmembers. They simply claimed it was an accident, apologized, and Russia accepted that apology and moved on. Additionally, the peacekeepers on the ground were shelled twice (once at the base and once as a moving column) without causing casualties, and both attacks were ignored.
P.S. I suppose that on one hand, one can think of the way Iran nowadays so often aims to conduct its symbolic reprisal attacks on U.S. forces in a way which does not actually cause fatalities as an example of the tripwire principle holding. On the other hand, when Hezbollah took out over 200 U.S. Marines in Beirut with a truck bomb in 1983, their deaths (along with dozens of deaths at the U.S. embassy earlier in the year) did not serve as a tripwire triggering the surge of U.S. troops into Lebanon – but instead led Reagan to withdraw all troops from the country a few years later. (Which IMO makes it so ironic his name had become the shorthand for “tough foreign policy, and is instead rather demonstrative of how quickly self-induced cultural amnesia can function.) For that matter, the deaths of 58 French paratroopers in the same series of bombings did not serve as any kind of a tripwire either – which again suggests that the key factor is in the combination of national interest + national capability to respond without excessive cost to itself, rather than any cultural norm.
The most reliable role of a tripwire force is to somewhat alter the balance of incentives that shape a nation’s perceived national interest. A government may find that they can easily enough write off an isolated company of peacekeepers garrisoning a single small base when they sustain a few casualties in an ‘accidental’ artillery barrage… but that they might not be able to write off the loss of a division.
In some cases the tripwire’s presence is also relevant because the level of force the ‘tripwire’ holds is great enough to be a threat in its own right, or to guarantee escalation of the conflict. The US ‘tripwire’ in West Germany had nuclear weapons, and the troops in those units were nearly certain to use those nuclear weapons in self-defense if actually attacked directly.
This ensured that any Russian invasion would be nearly certain to start off a nuclear exchange well before it reached the French border, which in turn would tend to influence Russian calculations about what they could accomplish.
All military capabilities and all national interests are relative to the balance of available means and extant incentives. And thus small, subtle moves, moves that do not guarantee or force an outcome upon someone who is pre-resolved to ignore them, can nevertheless shift the incentives and means, and thus the capabilities and interests, and thus the decisions made by an opposing power.
Well, a division-sized tripwire is considerably “thicker”, so to speak, than some classic understandings of the concept, and I have been referring more to those. I.e. from the lead-up to WWI.
http://faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/personal/reading/tuchman-guns.html
> The French and British were devising joint plans from 1905 onward but often not very seriously. Would the British fight? Humor and chilling real politik existed as well: When French General Foch was asked “What is the smallest British military force that would be of any practical assistance to you?” Foch replies: “A single British soldier – and we will see to it that he is killed.”
A lot of other interesting quotes from that review. Apparently, though, while that book (The Guns of August, Barbara W. Tuchman) was very popular at the time, the later assessments had been far more mixed, including the criticism for reliance on recollections over documents – which might mean that statement was apocryphal as well. The book is not mentioned either in the Recommendations list or in the WWI-related posts, so it appears quite likely our host does not have a high opinion of it.
Years ago, someone at Crooked Timber (Belle Waring maybe) made the point that there is a certain mindset that favors reductionist theories, but the various reductionist theories can’t all be true. So humans may indeed be assemblages of “selfish genes,” but they can’t also be rational utility maximizers, since the genes have different goals. And they may be rational utility maximizers, as public choice theory would generally require, but then their state can’t be a unitary actor pursuing global power.
Reductionist theories work much better when they are used as a sort of blank foundation slab upon which to erect more complicated structures. No normal objects encountered in day to day life actually match the description of the “ideal frictionless sphere in a vacuum” referenced in introductory physics classes. But there is a very good reason why the physics teacher starts with the ideal frictionless sphere in a vacuum, then adds complications and the mathematics to cover those complications one at a time.
Agreed. I think for example that “human interactions are driven by class conflict” and “human interactions are driven by loyalty to kin and the kin-group” are both appealing (and extremely simplified and reductionist) ways to look at history and society- they both make intuitive sense and seem to explain some things very well. They clearly can’t explain *everything* though, since they’re in direct conflict with each other, so at best each of them can have *partially* explanatory power.
Not trying to defend Russia here, but why there is no mention of one of Russia’s top goals: preventing Ukraine joining NATO – which seems to be the most realistic goal of Russia rather than just ‘maximizes its power through land conquest’. And it doesn’t seem to fail that goal yet.
Also the fact that Ukraine keeps asking to join NATO and NATO keeps refusing them. Are they (Ukraine and NATO) acting according to their realistic state interest here?
Current NATO members want to be able to commit as much resource to the war in Ukraine as they choose, but not more. Supporting Ukraine without allowing Ukraine into the alliance seems optimal for that. Allowing Ukraine into NATO (assuming that meant a NATO-Russia war) would increase the chance of a decisive Russian defeat (which would probably though not inevitably benefit the West’s security), but also increase the chance of Western countries being drawn into a long high-casualty war that doesn’t actually increase their power or security.
Meanwhile there seems no downside for Ukraine in drawing more countries into the war on their side (the war will go better for them and they will bear less of the cost) unless those countries themselves have an interest in a weaker Ukraine (and Trump’s interest in minerals apart, that seems unlikely). The only possible downside for Ukraine might be the risk that NATO involvement provokes nuclear escalation – I suspect they think that chance is low.
So it seems to me both parties are pretty rational.
So they are all realist after all.
If Russia wanted to keep Ukraine from joining NATO, annexing territory seems to have been a mistake. Ukraine was improving relations with NATO prior to 2014, but once Russia invaded Crimea the relationship got a lot closer.
What were Ukraine’s other options? They lacked the manufacturing capacity to effectively fight Russia on their own–they needed allies. Given the geography NATO was the only realistic option. Russia basically drove Ukraine into NATO.
Further, I don’t think it’s realistic to say that keeping Ukraine out of NATO is a major goal for Russia. They are engaging in a war of conquest, and have repeatedly stated–this week in fact–that their goal was to absorb Ukraine into Russia through force. Attempts to describe this as anything but an invasion and war of conquest are not honest. I’m not saying YOU aren’t honest, but you are absolutely being lied to. As for why, again, they’ve told us. Putin wants to re-establish the Russian empire. Fortunately for the world, he’s doing so with an army that was built to manage internal affairs, not to win foreign conflicts. Far from being an example of Realism, this is an example of how ideology and internal pressures can make countries make bad decisions.
As for NATO’s behavior, you’re not looking broad enough. For decades the rule has been that you do not invade and annex countries. You can invade certain ones, and install puppet governments–both the USSR and USA have done that–but you’re supposed to leave a veneer of self-determination in place. And you don’t invade countries in Europe, the Americas, or major countries in Asia (Africa was a disaster for a long time, and no one cared about internal politics in the Middle East as long as the oil flowed). Russia invading Ukraine broke that rule. NATO was presented with two options: First, it could let Russia win. This is morally indefensible, but it’s also egregiously stupid, as there are numerous potential hot spots in the world that would immediately flair up (Taiwan, India/Pakistan, India/China, and others). The second option is to stop Russia and make it clear that the world will not tolerate such behavior. This is complicated by the fact that Russia has nuclear weapons (though it’s increasingly apparently that they will not use them), but NATO is used to working around red lines. Ukraine has been absolutely masterful with propaganda as well–and I mean that as a compliment. Their president’s statement “I don’t need a ride, I need ammo!” is right up there with the Spartan response “If.” Shame is a powerful tool here, and the US in particular, with our culture of rugged individualism and rooting for the underdog, basically had no choice at that point.
There’s also the fact that by aiding Ukraine NATO is able to do a number of things that would otherwise be unpopular. Testing tactics and weapons systems in real combat against a peer opponent is tricky; sending aid and advisors to someone you’re helping is easy. Believe me, EVERYONE is watching this war and taking notes! Likewise, most countries in NATO balked at increased military spending and putting the country on a more belligerent footing. Ramping up production to help an innocent people who were unjustly invaded, on the other hand, is something that people will support. Disposing of older munitions is tricky, expensive, and time-consuming; sending them to repel an invader gets them out of service (by blowing themselves and, hopefully, the enemy into very tiny bits) in a way that is cheap, effective, and politically favorable.
Whether you want to look at this from a Realist perspective, a moral one, internal politics, or psychology, or whatever, isn’t really relevant; they all give the same answer: NATO absolutely had to aid Ukraine. The alternative was to side with Russia, and watch the world burn.
“Attempts to describe this as anything but an invasion and war of conquest are not honest”
Not saying it is not an invasion and war of conquest. But it does not mean the conquest not serving the goal of keep NATO from pushing east.
If Putin just wanted lands and resources, he should annex Belarus first – where the government is more friendly – rather than going for a bloody war that may escalate further.
“You can invade certain ones, and install puppet governments”
So the west would be ok if Putin goal for the war is just to install a puppet government?
“NATO absolutely had to aid Ukraine”
Does not change the fact that Ukraine said they NEED to join NATO to guarantee their safety, and NATO still say nah. So either Ukraine or NATO is doing it wrong, while Russia is still fighting a weaker country without fear of NATO intervention.
Before late 2014, Ukraine wasn’t as vocal about their interest/need to join NATO – The pre-2014 government was more Russian-friendly; leaving a very thin window for a (under normal circumstances) year(s) long process.
After 2014, it was too late for Ukraine to join NATO. Russia took a chunk of their country they wanted back, and Russia had sent army units into eastern Ukraine – it was evident to both Ukraine and everyone else Russia had no intention to settle for what they had. … Which is a problem for joining a nuclear defense pact.
Who said nuclear? I did; because that’s all of NATO that really matters. If we let Ukraine join post-2014, or worse post-2022, NATO is going to be in a war with Russia. That war can only go nuclear. And then everyone dies. So, Ukraine gets excluded in favour of not-getting-nuked. Ukraine sees it differently, because they’re the ones left at risk of state extinction and abuses by Russia – but for NATO the math should be (is) simple: we can’t afford to let them in until there’s a near-certainty of a lasting peace.
“Ukraine sees it differently, because they’re the ones left at risk of state extinction and abuses by Russia – but for NATO the math should be (is) simple: we can’t afford to let them in until there’s a near-certainty of a lasting peace.”
As I said, they are all realist.
I would like to take one more issue: the European NATO members have an extremely high stake at maintaining the European state system where you simply don’t invade other countries. The existence of this system is necessary for the current European economic integration to function at very many levels. This allows the exact locations of many European borders to be administrative details instead of political powder kegs, and allows European civil servants to cooperate over borders at all levels without fearing that they might be suspected of disloyalty. A return to a system where every foreigner is a potential spy and all neighbours potential enemies would be disastrous.
This is also mirrored by the constant Russian propaganda advocating for partition of Europe. For Russia, Poland and Romania participating in such a partition would be a boon: first, it would be seen as a historic injustice by the Russian population, paving way for the next war of conquest, and more importantly, it would destroy the norms of how European states interact, making Europe permanently more unstable.
So, taking a line against Russia to maintain rules that benefit European countries is realistic behaviour.
Correction “partition of Ukraine”, naturally.
I fail to see how NATO was needed for a well-working all-European economic cooperation. Many seem not to have noticed that Russia‘s hostility has, by and large, always been aimed at members or supporters of NATO and its relations with militarily neutral Finland and Sweden was always significantly more cordial than with aspiring NATO-members Georgia and Ukraine.
Cmvt, I have noticed that all Russian invasions have been of non-members of NATO.
The thing that most reliably provokes Russian invasions is not being in NATO.
Again, if the goal was preventing the encroachment of NATO was a major goal, it has proven to be a colossal mistake (i.e. irrational, not realist). It has hardened not softened the resolve of Ukraine to become aligned with the West, and it has pushed a number of previously neutral states to join NATO (i.e. Finland).
The rational approach would have been to objectively consider what the driving forces behind the expansion of NATO had been (broadly a response to the threat Russia posed, and greater economic prosperity that came with alignment with the EU vs with Russia). Then, the rational approach would be to attempt to replicate the tactics of that success to expand Russian influence (as has been the approach of the PRC).
However, this approach is politically untenable for Russia’s head of state personally, and the upper echelons of Russian government. So, for reasons that are not rational at all on a state-level (but are on a personal level), Putin and his government commenced a disastrous military invasion of Ukraine that appears to have achieved the direct opposite of what it was intended to (weaken NATO’s influence on the Russian border).
That’s not Realism.
Why does everyone leave out what Phillip II did after the Spartans said “If” to him?
@NVA, if Russia wanted to keep Ukraine out of NATO they had already achieved this by seizing Crimea in 2014 and sponsoring separatists in the eastern provinces. NATO has a rule that you can’t join if you have any kind of unresolved border conflict. So Moldava can’t join, because there is a Russian sponsored separatist movement; and Georgia can’t join, because there are Russian sponsored separatists in South Ossetia.
The only way for Ukraine to join NATO from 2014 would be if the Ukrainian government announced in public that Crimea was now part of Russia, they renounced any Ukrainian claim.
“NATO has a rule that you can’t join if you have any kind of unresolved border conflict.”
A realist would certainly not trust someone to always follow a rule that they made themselves, for themselves.
Russians themselves already experienced a certain Austrian breaking a non-aggression pact. So “never say never”.
The thing is, in Putin’s own internal mental space, NATO has a very strong reason to follow that rule, a reason even the most hardened interstate realist would grasp immediately: fear of the Strategic Rocket Forces.
If Putin does not grasp this, then that is because Putin’s perception of reality is too divergent from the reality itself for him to make good choices. Being an interstate realist will not protect you or give you good guidance if you are, as the kids say these days, delulu.
“fear of the Strategic Rocket Forces.”
The rule is “you can’t join if you have any kind of unresolved border conflict”. It doesn’t specify that the border conflict must be with Russia. It doesn’t mention any “fear” as a reason either.
So it is because of the fear of Russia, not because of the rule.
The question is: does NATO fear Russia or Russia fear NATO more?
I think you’re missing my point. My point is that if we imagine Putin as a rational international realist, we should expect him to in turn expect NATO to NOT break their rule about integrating nations that have ongoing border disputes in the case of Ukraine. Even if he does not expect them to follow their rule for its own sake, he would surely expect them to avoid getting into an immediate war with Russia itself!
Of course, in reality Putin’s perceptions do not necessarily line up well with what is actually going on in Brussels, Washington, or anywhere else, because when you are that Dugin-brained you start making a lot of poor judgment calls. As I said, no amount of interstate realism will let you make good choices if you are delusional about what’s going on around you.
“NATO has a rule that you can’t join if you have any kind of unresolved border conflict.”
People say this a lot but it isn’t obvious that this is the case. There’s nothing about it in the North Atlantic Treaty, as far as I can see. And previous members have joined despite having border disputes. The UK joined in 1949 despite its neighbour Ireland claiming a large part of UK territory as rightfully Irish (Ireland has since abandoned its claim). Spain joined despite claiming a smaller chunk of UK territory in Gibraltar. West Germany joined in 1955 despite disputes with East Germany that weren’t resolved until the 1970s. Canada and Denmark have a continuing dispute over an island in the Davis Strait.
A dispute is not the same as a conflict. Canada and Denmark do not have troops shooting at each other over the island in question. West and East Germany did have spies and perhaps funded terrorists, but they weren’t sending recognisable, uniformed, armed forces into each other’s territories. In Northern Ireland the Brits weren’t facing off against the actual armed forces of Ireland.
Where do you draw the line between a dispute and a conflict? You can’t. That doesn’t stop it from being a useful principle which can be applied case by case.
If we are trying to evaluate the conflict in realist terms, we need to also ask what is the biggest threat to Russian security from Europe, and the answer is a united and assertive EU. This, long term, is a far greater problem than Ukraine in NATO would be.
In this context, even if Ukraine collapses next week, Russia has already lost as the political shifts within the EU as a result of the war won’t be reversed easily.
Looked at in this context, it could be argued that the war is also a defeat for China and the USA.
Both China and the US have pathways to as much global hegemony as they can “digest,” as it were, even if the EU is relatively strong and united. Not having to worry about the Russians (both because they are ground to catmeat and because the EU acts as a counterweight) is likely to be a significantly greater advantage for either power.
The bigger problem with Russia invading Ukraine to stop it from joining NATO is that Ukraine’s main incentive for joining NATO is fear of Russian invasions. To paraphrase something Dr. Devereaux once said in another context:
If you are not thinking broadly enough that “just don’t have a war at all, and see what happens then” is an available option, you are thinking ‘operational planning and tactics,’ not ‘strategy.’ The question of “whether to invade Ukraine” is itself a strategic question, which cannot be answered with something like “of course we must, because otherwise they might join an alliance due to the threat of being invaded by us!”
because Russian simply had no other (sure) way to stop Ukraine from joining NATO, as Ukrainian government has been hostile toward Russia from the start. NATO could simply changed it rule or Ukraine could accepted the loss of territory and then Russia would suddenly have a new NATO member right next to its border. At that point Russians would be afraid of attacking a NATO member.
Now, however, it is NATO who is too afraid to let Ukraine join. So it’s kind of working as the Russians want.
Of course, the war is still a loss to Russia, as it would rather like to have a friendly relation with EU than a war. But it is a sacrifice that a realist has to make. By rejecting to enter the war against Russia, the West may lose less. And of course Ukraine will lose the most.
“Ukraine could accepted the loss of territory and then Russia would suddenly have a new NATO member right next to its border.”
As a direct result of the Ukraine war, Russia now has *two* new NATO members more or less right next to its border.
TBH, there is an argument that Finland/Sweden was never really “up for grabs” the way Ukraine was. Considering a whole bunch of factors.
I still think the russian invasion was a clear mistake on Putin’s part *even had he succeeded with the initial invasion* but I don’t the calculations here are neccessarily that affected by it.
To be clear, I don’t think Putin’s fear of NATO is fear of NATO attacking Russia or anything: It’s fear of having the russian freedom of action/sphere of influence being restricted. And Sweden was never really in it, and Finland only weakly during USSR times.
Russia clearly prefers Ukraine under their control while Finland and Sweden in NATO.
In fairness, if we are to start thinking in these terms in the first place (if we don’t and just assume nuclear deterrent will hold indefinitely, this discussion is largely pointless) then Ukraine is an incomparably superior launch pad for a hypothetical NATO invasion than Finland and Sweden combined. A much larger shared border (especially if we are considering pre-2014 borders) allows for far more avenues of attack – including a considerably shorter drive towards Moscow. The terrain, too, isn’t as swampy in the summer (or as cold in the winter) as it is around the Finnish border. It’s the difference between a “humid continental” and “subpolar” climate under the classic Köppen-Geiger system.
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/koppen-climate-classification-system/
Granted, the one major advantage of Finland from this perspective is that it is very close to Russia’s “Northern Capital”. However, actually getting to it via this route (as opposed to, say, an attack through the Baltics) requires going through a preexisting Soviet set of fortifications, which had already stopped Finnish advances in 1941 once. Fortifications turned out to be a lot more important to the current style of warfare than many thought, and though these ones had been idle since the 1960s and experienced however much internal deterioration as the result, it should still be a lot easier to refurbish them than to construct new ones from scratch.
I think you may miss the actual strategic situation. Russia is not concerned about a Western attack. If it were, it would not empty its garrisons on its Western borders to get manpower for war of aggression in Ukraine – nor would it move strategic aircraft to bases near its Northwestern border where they could easily be reached by NATO. Also, if Russia were concerned about Western attack, it would not built excellent, wide roads to quite minor border crossings.
These practical issues show very well that Russia does not fear Western armies crossing its borders. (Really, can you really believe that NATO could reach an unanimous decision on such a proposal?)
The only thing that Russia is afraid of is that it might need to interact as an equal with other European states, just like, say, Italy or Spain.
Much of the discussion above appears to presuppose the situation where it does, in which case the simplistic idea that “two NATO states at the border is inherently worse than having one” is fallacious for aforementioned reasons. Otherwise, the discussion is not very relevant.
If we want to get even deeper into technicalities that are unlikely to matter in the real world, the text of the original Treaty only requires unanimous decisions when it comes to admitting new members. Otherwise, (and unlike, say, the EU) unanimous consensus is an “unwritten law” – and in late 2003, in the aftermath of less-than enthusiastic reaction to “Iraqi Freedom”, there has already been a rundown of all the creative ways which could be used to work around it in theory – but this would certainly be the proposal where no halfway reluctant member will allow any of those to slide in practice!
https://web.archive.org/web/20240910112904/https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA421879.pdf
P.S. In response’s to Arilou’s earlier comment.
The last part isn’t really correct: all of present-day Finland had been directly under the control of the Russian Empire for a little over a century (1808-1917) – although as the Great Duchy of Finland, it had a lot more of an autonomy than a Russian province (even considering the “Rusification” push under the last two tsars) – i.e. it retained its own currency, and was even allowed to retain a Parliament! (One with little power, but still a substantial difference to the rest of the Empire up until its final decade.) And what was known during the Cold War as the Kymi Province had been controlled for two centuries between the Great Northern War and the October Revolution – though back then, it was all a part of Viipuri (Vyborg) Province. Most of that area was reconquered by the USSR during the Winter War, thus forcing a new name for the remainder. (Apparently, it is now merged with other Southern Finland provinces.)
“Much of the discussion above appears to presuppose the situation where it does, in which case the simplistic idea that “two NATO states at the border is inherently worse than having one” is fallacious for aforementioned reasons.”
“I am afraid of being invaded by NATO” is one reason why a country might not want NATO members on its borders, but it is not the only one.
Two others which are more likely to be true for Russia’s current leadership are:
“my self-identity depends on my being able to dominate, influence or veto the politics of all my neighbours, and members of NATO are less easily cowed than non-members”
and
“my main concern is an internal rebellion by groups of people within my empire who would rather be prosperous and independent than belligerent vassals, and I fear that the existence of prosperous, independent, non-belligerent non-vassal states on my borders could serve to encourage such a rebellion, as indeed it has done in the very recent past on more than one occasion”.
Maybe the Finnish and Swedish commenters on here will prove me wrong, but I struggle to think of any time Russia specifically (as opposed to the USSR) had been able to “dominate, influence or veto” anything in those two countries specifically ever since 1991. One would have expected something like this to feature strongly in the internal propaganda, at least, and yet – nada. So, in that case, it’s not a loss at all – congruent with Arilou’s point.
I also don’t think this is very applicable – if we indulge for a moment the late McCain’s characterization of Russia as “a gas station masquerading as a country” (more recently amended by EU’s Borrell to “a gas station whose owner has an atomic bomb”) then the regions considered most likely to secede are effectively the gas stations of a gas station. Moreover, due to geography, it seems all-but-impossible for the most likely secession candidates to export oil to anywhere without using the existing pipelines through Russia* (i.e. Chechnya’s only international neighbour is Georgia – and there is still not even a paved road between the two, let alone a pipeline) Then, with every passing year, the global shift towards net zero, however imperfect, would turn being a petrostate from an asset into more and more of a liability. (While that would obviously strongly affect Russia too, its other exports such as agriculture would provide at least a partial buffer which the newly independent regions would not really have.)
* And you can ask South Sudan what it’s like to request the country you just seceded from to transport your oil. Technically, Sudan lets them do it, but it obviously demands transit fees. Whether Russia (assuming it even loses the conflict in the first place) would let them do it for the sake of those fees, or would prefer to close off the pipelines to maintain economic pressure is another matter entirely. After all, the region where the absolute majority of Russian oil comes from, Khanty-Mansi AO, is effectively right in the middle of Russia with no international border, and its output dwarves that of any part of Russia which is remotely likely to secede.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Sudan-and-South-Sudan-Clash-Over-Oil-Export-Fees.html
” I struggle to think of any time Russia specifically (as opposed to the USSR) had been able to “dominate, influence or veto” anything in those two countries specifically ever since 1991.”
Well, that is because it has not been able to do so to any great extent since 1991, but it could before that, when it was the USSR, and Putin would like to be able to do so again!
“I also don’t think this is very applicable”
What matters is not whether you think it’s applicable, but whether Putin thinks it’s applicable.
At least three potential responses spring to mind.
One is that the Ukrainian government hasn’t been hostile towards Russia from the start. Russia pre-2014 used to have a ton of political and cultural power in Ukraine, regularly getting pro-Russians elected to Parliament and sometimes (including during the initial stages of that confrontation) to the Presidency. I think it’s fair to say that Russia largely locked in the hostility when it used its (then substantial) influence over the Ukrainian government to have them force a confrontation between pro-EU and pro-Russian directions for Ukraine; by forcing that confrontation Russia opted to force Ukrainians to choose between pursuing EU membership and being pro-Russia and then lost the consequent political crisis (and then by seizing Ukraine and Donetsk/Luhansk, made sure its influence inside the rest of Ukraine would probably not recover for generations).
It’s not like Russia lacked any other options besides forcing that confrontation; the examples of e.g. Hungary and Slovakia show that it’s quite possible for pro-Russian governments to exist inside the EU. So it’s not clear to me that allowing Ukraine to continue towards the EU, while continuing to pursue influence in Ukraine and therefore also inside the EU (and perhaps inside NATO in the IMO less plausible case of Ukraine’s joining NATO), would have been so obviously a terrible choice for Russia that it merits nothing but dismissal.
So is it true as you say that choosing the conflict is actually “a sacrifice that a realist has to make?” Or did they not -have- to? To paraphrase our host, if you’re not seriously considering the possibilities and benefits of not starting a war, then you probably aren’t thinking strategically.
Second is that if stopping Ukraine from joining NATO is indeed such a high strategic priority that it merits starting at least a limited war, it seems likely that seizing Crimea and creating a frozen conflict in the Donbas achieved the goal with much less sacrifice of other Russian interests in Europe than subsequent choices entailed. Even in the (IMO unlikely) event that NATO opted to change its rules to facilitate a Ukrainian application, I’m not sure it’s likely that NATO could have admitted them “suddenly” as you describe. NATO admits members by unanimous consensus and has no mechanism for doing so secretly and by surprise. If Russia had kept its powder dry, the months to years-long application process, unavoidably public and politically debated in every existing NATO state, would have afforded them a long window to react – and I could see the pro-Russian political case for unfreezing a Donbas conflict to forestall a NATO application actually in progress going a lot better, and costing them a lot less influence and support across the whole continent, than the political case for unfreezing the conflict to pre-empt a NATO application that everyone could see was remote and aspirational.
Third, I kind of just don’t buy that pre-empting NATO membership is a very important a part of why the war began. If the conflict was about pre-empting Ukrainian membership in anything, I think there is a far stronger case that that thing was the EU than NATO. Recall that the EU, not NATO, was exactly the issue in the crisis of early 2014 that immediately preceded Russian military intervention. To the extent that Putin acted to forestall any perceived threat, then, I don’t think it was to Russia’s international military position vs. NATO so much as it was a perceived nonmilitary, domestic-political threat from the fortunes of a nation closely intertwined in the cultural world of Russians, whose news and affairs millions of Russians paid attention to.
But I also generally think the idea that the war, for Putin, was primarily about pre-empting -anything- is of only little usefulness – somewhat useful for explaining 2014, much less for explaining 2022. My general take is that aside from the details, the 2022 war was most of all about something Putin has talked a lot about upon, and since, starting it: using the war as an offensive wedge to break up the strongly American-influenced postwar international order in general.
(and, which he has talked about less openly but which I think is clearly implicit, intending the overall international situation to consequently move closer to, in the technical IR sense, interstate anarchy, in which classic imperial divide-and-rule tactics of great-power empires towards small states might be expected to resurge.)
“it’s quite possible for pro-Russian governments to exist inside the EU”
100% this.
Russia *already had* significant pro-Russian government in the EU, and not just with fringe-states like Hungary. Britain was pro-Russia enough to allow various oligarchs to buy up a significant proportion of property in London, as well as invest significant amounts of wealth in things like football clubs. Germany was pro-Russia enough that it hooked very near the totality of its natural gas requirements to Russian sources.
Prior to Russian belligerence in Ukraine (even up until the Ukraine war itself), the major players in the EU were broadly in favour of integrating Russia into the Western economy.
This was all thrown completely out of the window by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where it has done little other than successfully regain its status as a ‘pariah state’.
Even if Russia’s ultimate goal was to weaken the grip of the US on European politics, it was doing this *far more successfully* through this process of economic integration than it has been through military intervention, which has dramatically stiffened European resolve against Russia.
So the answers to ‘why did Russia choose this course of action’ are either ‘pure Realism isn’t a particularly great way of predicting the actions of a state’ or ‘Russia’s leaders are singularly inept at reaching their strategic goals’.
Personally, I rather believe that rational internal politics (i.e. what Putin needs to do to stay in power) have manifested as deeply irrational decisions on the state level, which is rather decidedly not Realist at all.
Russia pre-2014 used to have a ton of political and cultural power in Ukraine, regularly getting pro-Russians elected to Parliament and sometimes (including during the initial stages of that confrontation) to the Presidency.
Public opinion in Ukraine, prior to the mid 2010s, used to be shockingly pro-Russian. Old people were always more Russophile than young people, but in a country with the age structure of Ukraine or its neighbors, young people really don’t matter that much.
there was a fair amount of nostalgia, if not for the communist era, then at least for the general communist ideas as well- even a couple years ago, right before the war, Ukrainians were more likely to say they favored “state ownership and distribution” rather thn capitalism.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/war-with-russia-has-pushed-ukrainians-toward-the-west/?ex_cid=story-facebook&fbclid=IwY2xjawLTED9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETE3YmVpeWVRRTA0R3RZcjRzAR7-3zHYS2ShKLpq5cYuZ6LPKrVUqt5UQYvEbLTUqqEvBDd65suVH473R4SU9w_aem_K3Sfk3tT67hX9tp6KtufDA
>That isn’t to say there is nothing to neo-realism or foreign policy realists. I think as an analytical and predict tool, realism is quite valuable. States very often do behave in the way realist theory would suggest they ought, they just don’t always do so and it turns out norms and expectations matter a lot.
The irony is that Kenneth Waltz, the scholar who pretty much invented neo-realism (i.e., his book Theory of International Politics is why Dr. Deveraux dates neo-realism to 1979 specifically – that’s the year it was published), would be in complete agreement. He repeatedly stressed that neo-realism was meant to describe the environment that states operate in and the kinds of actions they might take, and did not necessarily explain specific “unit level” acts within it. In other words, he was trying to develop a theory of why states in general are able and sometimes willing to go to war, but did not claim to be able to definitely say why any particular state chooses to go to war at a particular time and place. This would later become the main point of contention between him and Mearsheimer (who of course does think that realism can predict the actions of specific states). To quote P. 71 of Theory of International Politics:
“The example helps to show what a theory of international politics can and cannot tell us. It can describe the range of likely outcomes of the actions and interactions of states within a given system and show how the range of expectations varies as systems change. It can tell us what pressures are exerted and what possibilities are posed by systems of different structure, but it cannot tell us
just how, and how effectively, the units of a system will respond to those pressures and possibilities.
Structurally we can describe and understand the pressures states are subject to. We cannot predict how they will react to the pressures without knowledge of their internal dispositions. A systems theory explains changes across systems, not within them, and yet international life within a given system is by no means all repetition. Important discontinuities occur. If they occur within a system that endures, their causes are found at the unit level. Because something happens that is outside a theory’s purview, a deviation from the expected occurs.”
>For my own part, I think declaring one’s self a specific ‘school’ of policy thinker is a bit silly, for the same reason I don’t declare myself a specific school of historian. These ‘schools’ are really toolboxes, with different tools valuable in different situations.
In my experience, this is pretty much how international relations is actually taught; realism/liberalism/constructivism and international/domestic/individual as “lenses” through which a situation can be understood. Ideally, a given analysis should really attempt to address all of them (although domestic and individual factors in particular tend to be pretty opaque).
Hmm, that reminds me something I had read about an economists who was very much a supporter of models assuming the ‘rational*’ behaviour of economic actors. However, he did not himself believe that humans acted economically rational, instead supporting such models on the following reasoning:
1: Models assuming the ‘irrational’ behaviour of economic actors are also not perfectly accurate, as that would require that they behave predictably irrational. If humans act irrational in a different manner than expected such a model might even do a worse job.
2: Models assuming the ‘irrational’ behaviour of economic actors are more complex; thus they would add complexity without it being certain that they improve accuracy.
Though, I don’t know whether that is the majority opinion.
I wonder whether that following that comparison, an analogy could be made between Mearsheimer and one of those economists who mistake the ‘useful model’ for reality.
My favourite example of those is Paul Samuelson: in 1961 he predicted that the Soviet national income would catch up and then overtake that of the United States within about three decades; this because the USSR had a higher investment-to-GDP rate and thus its economy would grow faster thanks to those extra investments. In 1980 he was still predicting that the Soviet national income would catch up and then overtake that of the United States within about three decades.
* Note, he was talking about the economic theory meaning of ‘rational’ which is actually closer in meaning to ‘consistent’ than how that in common speech the word ‘rational’ is used. Some complain that it ‘leads to confusion, but the term is already to entrenched to change’.
Since you’re interested (at least tangentially) in analyses of the Trump administration’s foreign policy motivations, you might want to check out Tanner Greer’s (relatively) recent breakdown of the 8 “tribes” of Trump’s policy towards China (https://www.fpri.org/article/2025/03/obscurity-by-design/) and their beliefs/motivations as well as limitations. (see also the accompanying blog post: https://scholars-stage.org/the-eight-tribes-of-trump-and-china/)
A plug for the libertarian view against “spreading democracy”: it’s not only about taxes. It’s also about two other things. The first is people dying or killing in an effort to create something that probably won’t work out very well. The second is the that wars tend to strengthen the national security state, which can intrude on individual liberties and create strong incentives for ensconcing the “military industrial complex.”
To be clear, I’m not a libertarian, but I largely agree with them on that critique.
Not a realist myself, but steelmanning the argument, I suppose one could claim that there is a spectrum of choices, some more power maximizing than others, and that one’s own country wants to be on the more maximal end of that spectrum, thus the ideological approach to policy.
Perhaps realism is defined as states behaving as if they were trying to maximize their power. But what is power? VVP, in common with Carl Schmitt, sees power as mostly military, with economic power a secondary adjunct to military power and soft power a mere propaganda campaign. This explains his behavior. Pete Hegseth sees power as a form of masculine gorilla chest-beating. Donald Trump believes that power is military and economic, but views soft power as weakness. The Europeans–if they could be shoehorned at all into realism–apparently believed that military power is insignificant. Etc.
IOW, realism has little predictive capacity, even if one believes that all states are means-ends rational. They’re trying to maximize very different things.
All models are wrong, but some are useful.
On the face of it, realism is a model that neglects all non-state actors, all within-state politics, and all motives other than the desire for power. It is not necessarily wrong in any particular case, but if any of those factors does become important, it is going to fail to model the world, and probably fail in a very impressive manner.
So it is perfectly sensible to experiment by examining the world through a realist lens every now and then, but anyone who claims it is the One True Way and all must accept its conclusions, as described by themselves, is either a fool or a liar. And, in the latter case, up to something.
Indeed, I get the impression that people who call themselves realists are quite keen to exclude most actual states from consideration, on the grounds that only Great Powers count. IIRC there is a comment in Max Hastings book about the Cuban Missile Crisis that it is surprising how many studies of that event ignore the actual state of Cuba, even though different decisions by it could have meant, for example, that there were no missiles on Cuba to have a Crisis about. Likewise we get plans about the Russo-Ukrainian war that ignore Ukraine – the country Russia is actually fighting in the war. No wonder that people who neglected the actual opponent expected it to be a walkover. Competitions without an opponent often are.
Realism as a model of the world is a perfectly acceptable radically simplified model, useful when its core assumptions are close to reality. Realists would seem to be fools, cranks and sellers of snake oil.
Certainly, “realists” who implicitly assume that reputation is a thing of no concern to a state are adding on quite an additional assumption to their model, and not drawing attention to the fact.
The way I would describe my opinion is this: States do not think and act, they behave. As such, a state which has, or tends to change itself to have, traits which are bad for survival tend to cease to exist while one with traits that are good for expansion will tend to expand. At the same time, states have some ability “copy what works”, though this ability is very imperfect because contextual differences or incomplete understanding can reduce the effectiveness of a copy. As you’ve discussed several times, a lot about Rome’s military and economic system was very well tuned to maximize military power by producing a lot of people who were liable for conscription and could afford good equipment, with the result that everybody nearby ended up either becoming Roman by annexation or resembling Romans because that was the only way to resist annexation.
Thing is, this process takes time, and technology has changed the statehood meta faster than natural selection can keep up. For most of history wars could get you land which was worth more than anything you could spend fighting, and so natural selection has produced states whose traits make them prone to war. In the modern world, the optimal “build” for a state is a robust liberal democracy willing to invest only enough into military power to seem a poor target for opportunists, and willing to make mutually beneficial trade agreements and mutual-defense treaties with any power that behaves similarly, and enthusiastic about investing in the prosperity and education of its people. But what we actually see in so many cases are countries with flimsy, token, or nonexistent democracies, willing to pick fights with anyone whose capacity to fight back isn’t an immediate existential threat, willing to use economic power to posture and bully, and willing to invest more resources in controlling their population than in empowering them. I think the overall trend is towards states more in line with modern political realities, but there is going to be a lot of unnecessary suffering along the path to that endpoint, and as a normative statement I think it is morally imperative to hasten and smooth that transition.
I am not completely sure about that.
One could argue that attempts to promote democracy are likely to backfire and have the opposite effect than intended. For example, in response to democratic regimes promoting pro-democracy NGOs/movements in other countries dictatorships might start to regard them as instruments of foreign governments and instead crack down on them and become even more oppressive.
On the “realism” of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Perun covered the subject a few weeks back.
Before 2022, Ukraine couldn’t join NATO because of the ongoing dispute over Crimea.
Post Russian invasion:
* Russian ally Armenia lost the Nagarno-Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan, largely because Putin didn’t do anything to help them with the Russian military fully committed to Ukraine. The Armenians have “switched sides” and seeking US help in reforming their military.
* Russian ally Bashir al-Assad lost power and had to flee Syria, because once again Putin didn’t send him any military help. Russia no longer has a naval base in the Mediterranean.
* Russian ally Iran has recently discovered that when Putin says “Russia stands behind you” he means quite a long way behind. Israel started destroying the Iranian SAMs and air force fighters in 2024; once again Russia hasn’t provided any replacement SAMs, or modern fighter aircraft. (Iran has been trying to buy SU-35s since 2017 or so.)
* NATO militaries have been made aware of their shortfalls in ammo production. Shell and missile production rates are going up, new factories for 155mm etc are being created.
* Germany in particular had some very embarrassing reveals that, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, only 25% or so of their tanks and combat aircraft were ever operational at a time due to cutbacks on spare parts and maintenance. They’re fixing that.
* Formerly neutral countries (and for their size heavily armed) Finland and Sweden have joined NATO. The “western front” for Russia to guard against, or worry about if say Russia invades Latvia / Estonia / Lithuania, just got much bigger.
Overall Putin seems really bad at this “neo-realism” strategy of maximising state survival / power.
You make a lot of points but most of these are flawed:
* Russia could not militarily help Armenia maintain its little unrecognized separatist state much like Armenia does not help Russia carve Ukraine. Russia could do more help diplomatically if it wasn’t all tangled in Ukraine, perhaps.
* Bashir al-Assad fell too suddenly for any meaningful help to be delivered. He lost Mosul in what, three days from the beginning of conflict? His Syrian government was apparently defunct and yes, there are definite Russian miscalculations in that.
* Shells are no longer that important. Drones are, and all kinds of them. Around two thirds of casualties are caused by drones now, mostly of suicide FPV variety. I’m not sure anybody outside of Russia/Ukraine is fully prepared for such wars.
It’s actually quite funny how Sweden tossed out its neutrality. Makes me think it is somehow no longer important in grand scheme of things. Finland is bound to “ukrainize” now, meaning it will have to spend on defense, but it will no longer have income to do so, so basically it has signed a contract to die heroically in exchange for life support. Ditto little Baltic states.
Wow. So much of this seems to be complete nonsense, life is too short to bother unpacking it all. I’m left wondering if ‘Ilya’ is a ChatGPT instance.
Well, the post did at least prompt me to look up Finland’s economic relationship with Russia. I was rather surprised at the reported numbers I found: ~6.5% imports, 2.5% exports? Honestly, quite a bit lower than I’d have guessed from the geography. I’m not seeing how that economy gets destroyed by joining NATO. I guess that sufficiently motivated reasoning will find a way…
I don’t think ChatGPT would have described Mosul as a Syrian city? Confusing it with Homs, I believe, seems like a more specifically human error.
Of course, ChatGPT might have “hallucinated” a completely new city in Syria instead – and it is now acknowledged there is no real way to prevent these hallucinations outright.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00068-5
1) Al-Assad fought a decade of civil war against the rebels, and Russia had notable intelligence and military assets in the country. The idea that the downfall was too sudden for Russia to help Al-Assad would be meaningful only if all these forces had been completely incompetent to inform their bosses about the developing situation – or Russia was unable and/or unwilling to help their best ally in the region.
2) Russia was indeed unable to help Armenia to hold an enclave that had an Armenian population, and, though unrecognised, was actually justifiably Armenian. They were unwilling or unable to honour their long-standing alliance with the only country in the Caucasus that relied on them.
3) Your points about the shells, or Swedish and Finnish NATO memberships make really no sense.
In fairness, you have to remember that Al-Assad had, if anything, been a lot more reliant on the Iranian support than Russian – while the direct intervention in the form of air support (and then Wagner/special forces ground support) only arrived in 2015, in the fifth year of the war (material support was almost immediate, of course), Iran had swiftly deployed allied Iraqi militias, other irregular forces* and, most importantly, Hezbollah, who were said to have been the most elite fighters on that side of the conflict, much, much earlier.
Consequently, the failure to preserve what used to be known as the Syrian Arab Republic reflects at least as badly on IRI as it does on RF – and it was IRI which had suffered the more immediate consequences, since the Syrian air defence sites, while still largely outdated and apparently only managing to claim a single F-16 in over a decade of air strikes on their Iranian allies in the country, were nevertheless capable enough to at least stop slow, highly detectable support aircraft from flying over the country. With them gone, Israel was able to refuel its fighters unimpeded over Syria and thus conveniently strike a range of targets in Iran.
In hindsight, I do think it’s hard to argue that a ground offensive with a large number of Russian troops to restore the control of the Syrian Arab Republic over all of its territory** would have been a far strategically superior use of resources to the current Ukraine War. (Even if to those living in that alternate timeline who had no idea of what we know, it would have probably appeared unjustifiably heavy on casualties and brought back echoes of Afghanistan.) However, an even more superior use would have almost certainly been to figure out some sort of a coup d’etat first. If Brezhnev could suddenly see into the present year he would have…probably done more things differently than either of us could count, but one of them would have very likely been to do regime change in Syria instead of Afghanistan*** – back when there was still a number of alternatives to Bashar’s father within Syrian top brass. RF would have been too late for that, but they might have had managed to act before the rot set in deep enough that an entire army division, led by the leader’s own brother, was reduced to selling scrap metal from buildings destroyed by other branches of the same military.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250303-where-s-the-gold-how-the-assads-sucked-syria-dry
* I.e. There were ~3 million of Afghan refugees in Iran in 2010s – possibly more in recent years after the Taliban takeover. Apparently, a good number of those have gone to fight in Syria in support of government forces in exchange for receiving citizenship at the end of their tour of duty.
**Technically, the pro-American Kurdish areas had those American garrisons, but I think the history of “escalation management” in Ukraine suggests they would have almost certainly been withdrawn if faced with numbers even 1/10th of those actually deployed in Ukraine.
***Ironically, the trigger for Soviet intervention was that they considered then-Afghan leader, who overthrew his predecessor and had him strangled, too much of a Stalinist, and thought the already-ongoing insurgency would calm if they replaced him with one of the more moderate Communist exiles. The rest is, well, history.
Well, that’s the thing: yeah, the war in Ukraine has been bad for Russia’s interests, but that’s because Putin (along with everyone else)* was working under the assumption that the Ukrainians would fold like they did in 2014. In a world where that happened and he got his short victorious war, I don’t think any of the events you listed would have come to pass, with the probable exception of Finland and Sweden joining NATO.
However, the Ukrainians spent the time between 2014 and 2022 preparing for war, not just in terms of bolstering their military but also improving their governance and bolstering their ties to the West. This was made easier by the fact that when Putin peeled off Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea he also peeled off the most pro-Russian areas in the country, (In 2010, Yanukovych got 91% of the vote in Donetsk, 90% of the vote in Luhansk, 85% of the vote in Sevastopol, and 79% of the vote in Crimea, and those were where he polled strongest.), which meant that overall the Ukrainian population was already more pro-Western and anti-Russian than it would have been even without resentment of the whole “taking bites out of our country” thing.
As a result, the 2022 Ukrainians were much more cohesive and capable than the 2014 Ukrainians, and so the short victorious war…wasn’t.
*As a side note, it’s kind of funny that Western intelligence services managed to predict that Afghanistan would be able to hold out against the Taliban and Ukraine would fall apart within weeks, while in reality Ukraine held out against Russia and Afghanistan fell to the Taliban within weeks.
A lot of the work of preparing Ukraine to resist militarily was done by the State Department, whereas a lot of the preparing Afghanistan to cohere nationally was done by the Defense Department. It is really not surprising that State is better at Defense’s job than Defense is at State’s, but sadly it’s also not surprising that the DNI’s office is so reflexively biased against State that they would get the whole set upside-down.
TBH, I think even had Putin had his short victorious war I think it would have ended up a net negative. It would still have galvanized Europe against him in a major way.
His position would be better than it is now, but still probably worse than before he started all this
Possibly, but given just how disunited Europe’s been regarding Russia even after years of warfare (bear in mind, they’re still getting a lot of their natural gas from Russia), I think that in the event of a short victorious war you get the following:
1. Sweden and Finland join NATO. Frankly, this isn’t much of a loss for Russia in terms of power and influence, given how close those countries already were to the West
2. The rest of Europe grumbles and postures and writes thinkpieces about how this is a return to 19th and early 20th century imperialism and expansionism and does precisely jack squat that would actually affect Russia.
3. Putin gets a pro-Russian or at least officially neutral but leaning Russian government in Kiev (see Finland during the Cold War), and possibly some territory–Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea–Russia’s military gets a prestige boost, and he shores up his domestic political position and standing in Eurasia.
All in all, I think Moscow would consider a slightly grumpier Europe a small price to pay for taking Eastern Ukraine, having the rest of Ukraine as a vassal state or buffer, and demonstrating to the rest of the world that they are ready, willing, and able to take what they want.
Your ‘disunited Europe’ still had even pre-Trump provided significantly more support to Ukraine than the USA did and after that idiot narcissist took over increased aid to fill in the gap left by the USA stopping to provide aid.
(https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/)
The amount of imported Russian gas has been reduced to less than half of the previous level since the escalation of the war in 2022. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1331770/eu-gas-imports-from-russia-by-route/)
Even the sanctions after Putin’s annexation of the Crimea had inflicted harm on the Russian military-industrial complex. For example, one of the reasons for the failure of the Russian Armata tanks was that an assembly line for mass production could not be set up because machine tools and other technology were never supplied due to sanctions.
(https://wavellroom.com/2023/02/10/armata-the-story-is-over/)
Or a series of massive insurgencies, that is also possible. Though one could claim that since we are discussing Putin’s imaginary ‘short victorious war’ that would not happen.
In response to Putin’s invasion the EU had rearmed and thrown I-forgot-how-many sanctions packages at Russia. If Putin had a ‘short victorious war’, Russia would clearly be an even greater threat and the rearmament and sanctions would likely be even greater.
Do you get your information from Fox News’ Star Trek-style mirror universe or something that you believe such nonsense?
> The rest of Europe grumbles and postures and writes thinkpieces about how this is a return to 19th and early 20th century imperialism and expansionism and does precisely jack squat that would actually affect Russia.
This rather underestimates just how quickly Western investment fled Russia in the aftermath of the invasion. The article below is dated to March 10, 2022 – just two weeks after the start of the war. By that point, 325 major companies have already been in the process of withdrawing from the country.
https://www.investopedia.com/nearly-330-companies-have-withdrawn-from-russia-5221814
In addition to several banks, stock exchanges, and other prominent financial companies, this list includes 10 of the biggest companies in the world by revenue, these being: Amazon: $457 billion; Apple: $378 billion; Volkswagen: $303 billion; Toyota Motor: $291 billion; Samsung Electronics: $279 billion; Alphabet: $257 billion; Mercedes-Benz Group: $194 billion; BP: $183.5 billion; Royal Dutch Shell: $183.2 billion; ExxonMobil: $181 billion
One can of course claim that if the war actually did end in a month or so, then most of those would have had come back, and/or say their involvement was worth much less than the territorial gain, but “a slightly grumpier Europe” does not seem like a remotely accurate summary of the fallout we observed even on a timescale which would have matched “the short, victorious war”.
Note: I had originally tried to post this reply yesterday; however, it then did not get through.
Maybe because there were too many links included? I have now removed them to be certain.
—
Your ‘disunited Europe’ still had even pre-Trump provided significantly more support to Ukraine than the USA did and after that idiot narcissist took over increased aid to fill in the gap left by the USA stopping to provide aid.
The amount of imported Russian gas has been reduced to less than half of the pre-‘escalation of the war’ level already in the end of 2022.
Even the sanctions after Putin’s annexation of the Crimea had inflicted harm on the Russian military-industrial complex. For example, one of the reasons for the failure of the Russian Armata tanks was that an assembly line for mass production could not be set up because machine tools and other technology were never supplied due to sanctions.
Or a series of insurgencies, that is also possible. Though one could claim that since we are discussing Putin’s imaginary ‘short victorious war’ that would not happen.
In response to Putin’s invasion the EU had rearmed and thrown I-forgot-how-many sanctions packages at Russia. If Putin had a ‘short victorious war’, Russia would clearly be an even greater threat and the rearmament and sanctions would likely be even greater.
@Tus 3:
Let’s take this from the top
“Your ‘disunited Europe’ still had even pre-Trump provided significantly more support to Ukraine than the USA did”
Dude, your own source played you false: “As a result, Europe has, for the first time since June 2022, surpassed the U.S. in total military aid, totaling EUR 72 billion compared to EUR 65 billion from the U.S. However, the increase has not been evenly distributed across Europe. Countries such as the Nordics and the United Kingdom have markedly stepped up their aid, while others, such as Germany, have maintained more moderate levels.”
RE: natural gas imports, if you actually look at the graph that you provided, you will note that the NordStream pipeline stayed at its prewar levels of use until the Russians cut off the gas supply, followed by an explosion.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/31/business/nord-stream-1-europe-inflation/index.html
The Yamal pipeline cutoff was the result of a contract dispute–and, I will note, according to your own graph the decline in usage began in 2021, well before the war started.
https://www.dw.com/en/russian-demand-for-rubles-for-gas-causes-first-shutdowns-in-poland-bulgaria/a-61602038
Regarding the T-14 Armata, I will grant you that.
As to the insurgencies, what insurgencies? There has been no insurgency in Crimea, so I would hardly expect there be to ones in Donetsk and Luhansk, as both of those areas were even more pro-Russian, and I’m not convinced that there would be an insurgency in a rump Ukraine against a pro-Russian or neutralist government as long as it wasn’t too obvious. Again, see Cold War Finland.
As to the sanction packages, despite those sanctions, Russia has still been able to sustain a three-year war. Without the extra strain caused by, y’know, fighting an actual war, I think the regime would have survived quite well.
As to this: “Do you get your information from Fox News’ Star Trek-style mirror universe or something that you believe such nonsense?”
Your own sources spoke against you and I didn’t cite Fox or Sky News even once. I think that says all that needs to be said about that.
You had not even bothered to read it.
Had you done so you would have noticed that when it comes to combined military and financial support the EU clearly surpassed the USA. When only looking at budgetary support EU institutions alone, excluding support from the individual countries making up the EU, surpassed the USA.
Moreover, when it comes to military support it is also based on nominal prices which do not take into account that US military equipment is overpriced relative to the ex-Warsaw Pact equipment Eastern European countries have given to Ukraine; moreover, said ex-Warsaw Pact equipment also has for Ukraine the advantage they already have earlier experience with it.
I only stated that as a reply to your claim “they’re still getting a lot of their natural gas from Russia” without even mentioning the amount is less than half compared to before the war.
Moreover, the Russians had only blew it up because they realised European governments were already looking for other sources; otherwise they only would have had destroyed a source of both income and leverage for very little gain, which would be dumb even by post-2021 Putin standards.
Though, I do admit that I had forgotten that the Nordstream pipeline had blown up that soon in the war. However, how many people bother to do half an hour of research to make sure they had not forgotten something for but one comment section post?
You picked about the worst possible analogy of all regimes which fell into the Soviet orbit just after WWII.
Finland was neither occupied, nor the victim of regime change, and had a democratic regime post war.
By contrast if Putin’s dream of a short victorious war had come about, Ukraine would have been occupied by Russian troops who would then go full ‘Katyn massacre’ on the Ukrainian ‘Nazi nationalist elite’ followed by a reign of terror. So, for example, post World War II, Poland which had insurgencies going on into the fifties would have been a better analogy; by the way post World War II the Soviet Union also had suffered from insurgencies in western Ukraine.
Look if you are spreading obviously false nonsense from a certain ideological perspective; don’t be surprised if people who coincidentally happen to be in a bad mood then make sarcastic remarks about a source spreading comparable obviously false nonsense from the same ideological perspective and geographical region.
@Tus 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlandization
“Finlandization (Finnish: suomettuminen) is the process by which one powerful country makes a smaller neighboring country refrain from opposing the former’s foreign policy rules, while allowing it to keep its nominal independence and its own political system.”
And I’ll leave it at that. The rest of your reply has already been sufficiently dealt with.
While I do not dispute the basic idea, more than a few points have issues with them. In particular, Armenia had effectively “lost the Nagarno-Karabakh conflict” back in 2020, and the formal return of the region back to Azeri control (where it always belonged according to international law) in 2023 after a day-long march was effectively predetermined by the incredibly lopsided losses Armenia had taken back in 2020. People often like to refer to Oryx for the documented Russian and Ukrainian materiel losses – which are roughly 3.5/1 in Ukraine’s favour. Way fewer people seem to know that well before 2022, Oryx has had a page on that conflict – where they found a 7:1 ratio in favour of Azerbaijan!
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2020/09/the-fight-for-nagorno-karabakh.html
All of that was just two weeks, as well. Frankly, even an actually committed Russian intervention on the side of Armenia would have had struggled to reverse the tide without sustaining severe casualties – not as severe as what we had seen in Ukraine, clearly, but still substantial. Azerbaijan, backed by Türkiye and probably at least some NATO members (again, in this case it’s Armenia and by extension Russia which would have been fighting in violation of international law – even if nations with substantial Armenian diasporas like France have generally ignored that in their diplomatic statements anyway) would have been able to give quite a fight – and the terrain would have made it more difficult to concentrate forces from all over Russia when compared to Ukrainian perimeter.
However, that assumes Russia would have even wanted to fight Azerbaijan in the first place – when in recent years, it had been a much more reliable military export customer than Armenia (one of the few nations on Earth to have bought the T-90s and BMP-3s, for starters). While some key members of Russian elite are Armenians (i.e. the head of RT, Margarita Simonyan), there are also more than enough Azeris or people with ties in Azerbaijan. (i.e. both the current St. Petersburg Governor, Beglov, and his predecessor, Poltavchenko, were born in Baku, so it’s obvious which side they emphasized with more – and you do not get picked to administrate the city Putin was born in and built his post-KGB political career in if he doesn’t care about your opinions at least somewhat.) Moreover, just two years before the conflict Armenia had street protests which forced its then-leader to resign and the spiritual leader of protesters was elected as the next Prime Minister. Though he claimed this need not have changed the relationship with Russia, it was obvious they did not trust him (the arrest of a key general, who actually got to be chair of Russia’s NATO equivalent, ODKB, on corruption charges, clearly did not help), so much of Russian propaganda wrote off the lack of any intervention on the side of Armenia in 2020 as a punishment for them daring to “have a color revolution” – rather than a simple matter of incapacity. In 2023, similar explanation/excuse was used.
I’ll discuss Syria more in a comment below, but I would like to note that “Russian ally Iran” is more than a little reductive and suffers from presentism bias. A whole lot of historical resentments (from Russian expansion in the 18th and 19th century occurring largely at the expense of Turkish and Iranian spheres of influence, to the lesser-known predecessor to Yalta, the 1943 Tehran Conference, only taking place because the British and the Soviet troops have occupied the country back in 1941, to USSR supporting Saddam’s Iraq during their bloody war) meant the relationship hasn’t actually been all that close. One example is that before the war, Iran very publicly prevented the use of its air bases by Russian aircraft in 2016, even though it was all in support of a mutual ally. This obviously made the country less willing to sell it more advanced weapons – and another key reason is that unlike the USSR, Russia liked to have a decent relationship with Israel, and the latter used a lot of diplomatic pressure to make it slow-walk advanced weapon deliveries to the region.
For the last three points, I’ll say that if you believe that nuclear weapons will prevent European states from attacking Russian territory, then they aren’t very relevant anyway. (Likewise, if you believe that the nature of war exposed in Ukraine is here to stay, then this kind of a meatgrinder would be too unpopular for democratic countries to contemplate offensively even if the nuclear specter was somehow absent.) And if you assume that “Russia invades Latvia / Estonia / Lithuania” (presumably, in place of Ukraine in this scenario?) then this would have had revealed NATO shortfalls just the same – and then you would have probably been writing about Putin being “really bad at this “neo-realism” strategy” because now Ukraine is getting pumped with advanced weapons and has the unanimous diplomatic backing to reclaim all its territory. Furthermore, the combined territory of all three Baltic states is comparable to the chunk of Ukraine occupied since 2022 anyway, and to my knowledge they lack the key mineral deposits like lithium, so even in purely amoral terms, it’s far from clear that would have been a better move.
Lastly, I’ll also note that the war could be very plausibly described as a net loss for the Russian state of still-uncertain severity, but an overall gain for Putin specifically and (still-undetermined, but trending that way) his chosen successor. While his popularity fell, “it’s better to be feared than loved”, and now he is undoubtedly feared more than ever. The most pro-Western people (mostly men, for conscription-related reasons) in the country have fled – and a chunk of them have reluctantly discovered they weren’t as pro-Western as they thought, and they would rather be middle-class in Moscow than precariat in any other country, so they came back, and are now more tightly bound to the state then if they never left in the first place.
Further, Navalny, so convinced he would be the next to lead Russia that he dared to come back after his first poisoning, was poisoned again or allowed to waste away in prison, and there was nary a protest – which would have been unthinkable earlier. A number of others have been arrested or exiled, and comparatively few replacements arose. The figurehead of the nationalist opposition, Prigozhin, also got flushed out and permanently dealt with at the cost of a few (admittedly fairly advanced) planes. A good number of various radicals have gone to the frontlines and died there. It’s possible that the war radicalized a lot more people to replace those, of course, but the fact that “Putin/Shoigu/Gerasimov haven’t bombed Ukraine hard enough” people will never plausibly receive meaningful Western support makes them less dangerous in his estimation than the “liberals” (quotes because nearly all so-called “liberals” in Russia are something like Ron DeSantis Republicans in terms of domestic policy preferences) as far as the regime-change potential is concerned. All in all, I can unfortunately easily see why he might even now consider all of this preferable to the prewar base case of Russia gradually falling behind and gradually growing discontent.
From a purely neo-realistic approach yes the loss of Armenia and Syria as allies isn’t much of a blow, but the point of Bret’s article is that people and states don’t just work that way.
The reaction in Armenia, not for everyone but for a significant number, is not going to be “well we couldn’t hold on to Nagorno-Karabakh forever, I don’t blame the Russians for not helping us.” It’s going to be “you useless bastards, where were you when we really needed you?” It may not be rational, but we value friends who support us more than strictly necessary.
Similarly the Syrian Assad leadership would have been thinking “We gave you a naval base and an airfield that not only helped us but also helped you in your power projection and military ventures in Africa. When the rebels started rolling south, your useless warships and aircraft left rather than fight beside us.” It wouldn’t have been logical for the Russians to lose ships and aircraft in that fight, but it would have been the right thing politically. See remarks by Bret in past articles and podcasts about Roman willingness to deploy legions in defence of their Socii allies, even if legions were lost.
When Russia ran short of drones to attack Ukraine with, the Iranians shipped them hundreds to thousands of Shaheds (we know this from battlefield remains) and probably some of their medium range missiles. When Iran asked Russia to provide them with modern SU-35 fighters, they got promises but no actual aircraft. When the Israelis started destroying the Iranian SAM-300s in late 2024, the Russians didn’t supply any replacements. I don’t know what the Farsi for “worthless freeloaders” is, but I suspect it is a popular sentiment about Russians in Iran right now.
The Iranians probably don’t have much choice going forward, but a lot of other theoretically non-aligned states are going to put a much lower value on Russian friendship after these events, even though neo-realistically they shouldn’t.
Again, this summary is clouded by motivated reasoning. To wit:
* Tartus (where the naval base is/was) happens to be ~250 km away from Damascus (where, you know, the capital is.) How exactly were those ships supposed to fight? If the suggestion that Assad should have attempted to govern the country from Tartus (or from Latakia, which is where the air base is) then, well, it clearly seemed easier for him to skip the intermediary step and just flee to Russia directly (reportedly with a considerable chunk of the treasury) which he was allowed to do.
For that matter, the strategic airpower post on here in particular repeatedly makes the point that bombing an area is a much, much less efficient way to deny it to an enemy when compared to occupying it on the ground. Hence, the air base did attempt strikes that fateful month – it just made very little difference when the soldiers were all abandoning their posts regardless. This was all completely unsurprising considering the situation on the ground. From the AFP article I linked earlier:
> Another list showed that mostly domestic expenses for his properties, including his main villa — which has since also been looted — amounted to $55,000 for just 10 days in August. That same month, a Fourth Division soldier wrote to Belal [head of Security Bureau of the Fourth Division] begging for help because he was in “a terrible financial situation”. Belal gave him 500,000 Syrian pounds — $33. Another soldier who abandoned his post was caught begging on the street.
To reiterate – a soldier serving in a division headed by the President’s brother abandoned his post to beg on the street. (While said brother and his associates spent a ton of money on themselves, of course.) There is a point beyond which you just cannot save those who practically don’t even bother to save themselves. Remember how, after the shock of the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, a lot of people ultimately settled into blaming the Afghan security forces for everything? Here such a reaction is at least as justified – and probably a lot more so. If anything, one might look at it the other way and say the surprising thing is not that the intervention force ultimately failed to keep this group of people in power, but that it ever managed to allow them to stay in power for an extra 10 years in the first place, while retaking the country’s 2nd-largest city (technically, half of it, as the other half was not lost until very recently) and going from controlling ~1/6 of the territory to around half of it.
* When Iran asked Russia to provide them with modern SU-35 fighters, they got promises but no actual aircraft.
Not exactly – at least if German military magazines are to be believed.
https://www.airdatanews.com/iran-receives-first-two-russian-sukhoi-su-35se-fighter-jets-report/
> Long-rumored, Iran’s desired Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets are already in the country, a Flug Revue report said.Two aircraft were reportedly handed over in a private ceremony at the KnAAPO plant in Komsomolsk-on-Amur on November 18. The two jets were then dismantled and loaded onto a Russian Air Force An-124 cargo plane that transported them to Tehran’s Meharabad Airport.
In fact, it could easily be argued that a key reason why Israel struck now (in addition to Syria becoming effectively hostile to Iran and the degradation of its other regional allies) was to preempt the impending arrival of more of these aircraft and the air crews becoming proficient in operating them. There were other deliveries too, like Mi-24 helicopters in 2023 – not directly relevant to the recent conflict, but hardly nothing. And publicly, Iran claimed that its domestic Bavar system was superior even to S-400, let alone S-300 – so, their claim got put to the test. Considering the reported infiltration of Iran by Israeli intelligence, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that any replacements would have simply had their locations leaked and got targeted by special forces operations – exactly like what happened with the remaining advanced systems at the start of the Israeli campaign.
Now, I agree that in an alternate timeline where the war did not happen, Iran could have had been conceivably provided with dozens of planes and AD systems in 2022-2023 already. The flip side is that in the absence of war, RF would not have needed to receive all those Shaheds in the first place – which markedly diminishes Iranian purchasing power and likely forces a lot of the purchases to be either debt-financed (debt which often ends up getting forgiven, like what happened with a lot of Soviet-era debts already) or just delayed indefinitely. Likewise, in the absence of war, the relationship with Israel would have been better, and there would have been more of a temptation to listen to their calls to deliver as little in the way of the advanced weapons as possible. For the same reason, Iran might struggle to receive weapon systems from other suppliers like PRC – they might very much want to obtain J-10s after their performance in the hands of Pakistani pilots, for instance, but whether PRC would risk upsetting its trade ties with both Israel and the Gulf states is another question entirely.
a lot of other theoretically non-aligned states are going to put a much lower value on Russian friendship after these events
The issue, for them is that they are not going to be choosing between RF and a Perfect Ally in a Vacuum, but RF and other powerful states that actually exist today. The United States’ record is hardly perfect, with both the Afghanistan withdrawal and its repeated unwillingness to support the political aims of Kurdish groups which fought and died for their interests.* PRC military industry may have had its prestige elevated by the India-Pakistan clash, but (a few fairly symbolic peacekeeper deployments aside) they are still yet to commit their troops in support of anybody else. Etc., etc.
If anything, I suspect the greatest risk to RF’s international reputation might actually occur in the Sahel, where the recent military administrations of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have all opted to kick out the French military and invite Wagner/RF African contingent in to deal with their shared Islamist insurgency. Opinions differ on whether this was simply dictatorships preferring each other or a rational response after the initial intervention into Central Africa actually did benefit the formal government there a lot (according to some reports, it had gone from being called “a phantom state” in aid group reports with ~20% control to >80% territorial control, even if reportedly achieved with little regard for collateral damage). However, all three of those are now reportedly in a substantially worse security situation – and if any one of them ends up falling outright or if an IS-like formation arises in some cross-border area, that might be a lot harder to dismiss by potential allies.
*While none of the Kurdish formations are an UN-recognized state and Armenia actually is, I do think the situation are somewhat similar, in that in both cases, an ally of the major state is attacked by another ally, and the major state chooses to let the attacking ally prevail because it is more powerful and more useful, even if it might have more of an emotional tie with the weaker one. Hence, the richer Azerbaijan got to reclaim its region from Armenia with no effort to stop it – while the declaration of independence by the Iraqi Kurdistan following an overwhelming referendum vote was immediately rolled over by the Iraqi state forces and Iran-aligned militias in a (thankfully largely bloodless, AFAIR) power play. The Syrian Kurds fared worse than that, being left exposed to outright intervention by Turkish troops and their local allies (“Peace Spring”), who have committed their fair share of war crimes. (One of the earliest events of “Peace Spring” was when some of those Turkish allies ambushed the car of Hevrin Khalaf, the leader of one Kurdish parties, pulled her out and shot her in the head. She was 34.)
If the suggestion that Assad should have attempted to govern the country from Tartus (or from Latakia, which is where the air base is) then, well, it clearly seemed easier for him to skip the intermediary step and just flee to Russia directly (reportedly with a considerable chunk of the treasury) which he was allowed to do.
Easier, maybe, but if Assad had any either ideological or ethnic loyalty, he would have retreated to Latakia and fought from there. I was fully expecting he would do that and was actually stunned when he didn’t.
About six weeks later, I would like to note a couple more things.
Firstly, it’s been of a disappointment to discover from The Pedant’s BlueSky that he had been making some of the very same arguments over there as the ones I replied to, and often just as easily counterable with basic history of the countries in question.
Secondly, not enough people outside the region appreciate that the indirect consequences of invading Ukraine ended up significantly worsening RF’s relations in the Caucasus with both Armenia and Azerbaijan. As I wrote above, the former’s loss of Karabakh seemed largely inevitable after their military’s disastrous performance in 2020, and in fact Putin and his inner circle appear to have effectively baked in that outcome (and Armenia’s sense of betrayal) even before the invasion and chose to pivot hard towards Azerbaijan instead. After all, just two days before the invasion, Putin and Aliyev literally signed a “Declaration of Allied Interaction” – it’s hard to signal one’s intent clearer than that. In realist terms, backing the winning horse clearly seemed to make a lot of sense, too.
Eventually, though, the invasion’s spillover boomeranged against Azerbaijan, too, when in December, a Ukrainian drone attack occurred at the same time as an Azeri passenger plane was trying to land at a Grozny airport, and a fragment from an air defence missile hit that plane (already affected by anti-drone GPS jamming by then), eventually causing it to crash and killing over half (38/67) of those on board. Predictably, the diplomatic fallout was compounded by the delayed and partial apology and reluctance to acknowledge responsibility. On the other hand, the violent anti-immigration police raid in Yekaterinburg the week of this Fireside (which ended up with dozens of Azeris beaten and two brothers found dead in custody) may well have occurred in the absence of the war (though, it’s certainly plausible that the war pushed the envelope of what law enforcement considered acceptable) – but it certainly wouldn’t have been as explosive if it wasn’t preceded by the destroyed passenger plane.
Azeri outrage* might at first had been dismissed as symbolic, even with acts like detaining the editor-in-chief of Sputnik’s Azeri subdivision, but it had brought very concrete consequences with it last week, as Azerbaijan and Armenia finally accepted the US’ role in brokering a full-on peace agreement – one where they agreed to not only build a transit route to connect Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan exclave (a place over which many had feared a Suvalki Gap-style conflict), but had named it Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity. If I have to give credit to the current President for something, it might have to be through acknowledging that either one of the Democractic alternatives to him would have almost certainly been too rigid, too ideologically pro-Armenian and altogether insufficiently transactional to pull off this fairly unambiguous win for America’s interests.
*To give an example, an apparently major Azeri publication, Report, published half-a-dozen opinion pieces expressing their outrage in all kinds of ways within the first several days of the incident. Notably, in one of them the author sought to explain the diplomatic fallout through the lens of constructivist IR theory, citing Hopf, Wendt and Adler to explain why the deaths of just two people could become so symbolic to Azerbaijan – at the same time as they could have been downplayed in Russia as the police briefly taking an overly hard line to uphold law and order – and how this same “difference in interpretations” served as the accelerant to the firestorm. While a cynic might look at the article below (unfortunately not translated to English by default, unlike many others over there) and claim it contains telltale signs of LLM production, it’s still remarkable to see the broader discussion here suddenly echoed in that manner.
https://report.az/ru/analitika/ot-diaspory-k-diplomatii-delo-safarovyh-i-hrupkost-mezhgosudarstvennyh-otnoshenij/
“For my own part, I think declaring one’s self a specific ‘school’ of policy thinker is a bit silly”
A point well made!
I’d also argue that there are many people who declare allegiance to an ideology and allow that belief system to blind themselves to realities on the ground.
Different contexts require different tools. What works for the USA will not work for Italy or Colombia or Afghanistan. Those who believe that, say, alt-right conservativism or progressivism or communism any other ideology is universally applicable is being, in the words of our host, a bit silly.
In other words: we should all embrace contextualism!
Honestly it seems a fairly bizarre notion to attempt to define a “universal antiquity”, given that Antiquity is very obviously not a universal process — it could not be more clearer that the ancient/medieval divide is fundamentally based on the fall of the Western Roman Empire and its perception in later Western-Eurocentric frameworks. There is absolutely nothing else of notice defining the period — no rough metallurgical boundaries divide like that between bronze and iron, as a matter of fact no significant technological distinction, no “process” of centralization or “”complexity”” magically and arbitrarily completes itself at the limit between one and the other, culture and politics alike demonstrate no fundamental distinction and indeed significant continuity.
Historical periodization is useless without reference either to specific themes and topics or to fundamental shifts in the human environment so paradigmatic as to concern the theme of human existence as a whole, and “antiquity” is pathetically insufficient in the latter frame and justifiably extinguishable in most cases of the former.
Quite a bit of Eurasia seems to have had a rough patch in this period. Both China and the Mediterranean seem to have been on a downward trend from the late 2nd century. China’s population didn’t recover until around 750 AD and Western Eurasia generally took even longer.
However, if you are trying to make it more universal, 500s is probably the best dividing line. Ice records suggest there was an eruption worse than Tambora (Year without a Summer) in 536, another nearly as bad in 540, and a third in 547. Start of the Late Antique Little Ice Age. Plus Justinian’s Plague in 541.
The following century sees the collapse of the attempt to reclaim the Western Roman Empire and a huge restructuring in the Middle East and North Africa. Seems to have generally been economically and demographically quite bad for most of this area.
Mesoamerica sees decline of Teotihuacan, Nahua expansion. The various Andes civilizations seem to have started declining in the 500s. Not enough evidence to connect to the post-536 climate mess, but timeline roughly matches.
In India Gupta Empire falls and will be 600 years before one realm rules most of India again. However, the Guptas terminal decline started a few decades before 536 so causal link is lacking and India doesn’t seem to have had notable demographic/economic collapse. However, 500s were a major structural change, so close enough for government work or trying to divide the world into eras…
China on the other hand bottomed out a few centuries before in the aftermath of the Han dynasty collapsing. 530s/40s were rough, but in the midst of general positive trend. China was reunified in 581 by the Sui, the first time in 400 years that it was semi-stable and unified. So 500s are a break point, just opposite direction of everyone else…
Mayans are similar problem in that if anything Classical Mayan civilization peaked *after* 536. Climate has been suggested as a reason, but if so the timetable suggests it was the Late Antique Little Ice Age *ending*, not *starting* that was the issue.
Just wanted to say that this is an excellent comment, rather unfairly overshadowed by the intensity of the discussion sparked by the primary topic of this Fireside. I hope our host sees this, and that the promised something more substantive on my vision for where the study of Mediterranean antiquity ought to go would be shaped by these points in some way.
Well, that’s exactly what we would expect given that effectively all the “ice ages” and “warm periods” seen in human history between the last proper ice age (“Last Glacial Period”) and the present climate change were confined to one hemisphere (generally the Northern one as the home of most of the population and most historical/archeological evidence), while the other hemisphere experienced the opposite changes, in the so-called “bipolar seesaw”. There wasn’t really a net change in temperature – merely a transfer of it via the thermohaline circulation.
https://www.geomar.de/en/research/fb1/fb1-p-oz/research-topics/low-to-high-latitude-climate-linkages/bipolar-seesaw/
Didn’t the Mayans live in the northern hemisphere, though? They should have seen the same warm/cold periods as everyone else.
Not exactly. Their location was on the same latitude as the northern half of Africa – i.e. much closer to the equator than Europe, where most of the evidence for “little ice ages/warm periods” traditionally comes from, and so thermohaline circulation does not make as much of a difference there.
Having said that, I now realize that Late Antique Little Ice Age is believed to be triggered by several volcanic conditions, rather than being (purely) thermohaline-related – and in fact, it may have even been triggered by an eruption at Ilopango, which is right on the edge of Maya territory. It’s therefore all the more interesting that I believe the Maya peak following said volcanic age alluded to in the OP is the local drying period of ~800-950 AD. Moreover, they apparently had an earlier drying period around ~200-500 AD – i.e. which ended with, or right before, said volcanic winter.
https://europepmc.org/article/PMC/4426404
From what I understand, climatic cooling of any kind generally leads to reduced precipitation (since there is less heat in the ocean and consequently less evaporation from it), so I wonder what made that region different if drought over there apparently abated during the volcanic ice age and came back with a vengeance after it ended. The paper has some hypotheses, but I would have to read like a dozen references it cites to be able to discuss this with more confidence.
This is an interesting take on realism but as an IR scholar who considers himself primarily a realist (although not exclusively one; as you say, there are limits to every explanatory framework), I feel the need to push back on a few points:
1. Most realists are well aware of the normative/descriptive tension within the theory and different scholars come down in different places in regards to it. Many early to mid 20th century realists for example were more normative, pushing back against the liberalism of the Wilsonian moment and advocating for a more hard headed foreign policy. In addition Waltz offers what I feel is a pretty good synthesis: states will sometimes behave in non-realist ways, basing their foreign policy on idealism or the like, but eventually the pressures of the international system will push them to behave in more realistic ones. (He uses the USSR as a case in point) By contrast, most realists I know feel Mearsheimer has lost the plot; although his theory predicts that Russia will seek to dominate its near abroad, it also predicts that both its neighbors and the US should resist this and his failure to recognize this is somewhat inexplicable.
2. Realists very much do recognize trade-offs, in particular the need to surrender of ideological preferences and peripheral interests in the pursuit of core ones. Many realists are critical of US involvement in the Middle East for example, because they feel its importance is overstated and declining and that the focus should be on other areas like Europe or East Asia that are more vital.
3. Although some illiberal realists may have clustered around the Trump administration, they are a decided minority. Realism has no trouble acknowledging the utility of alliances and Trump has been lighting the US alliance framework on fire for very little gain.
A frequent problem with people who call themselves “realists,” at least in the political/international relations realm is their view of reality is distorted by ideology. Two instances I can think of offhand are the neocons stating that the Iraqi people would welcome Americans with open arms in 2003 (hah!) and the pre-WWII Tories who felt that Hitler could be taken at his word (again, hah!). A third may be the belief that free markets would bring democracy to China (hasn’t happened yet).
“Realism” includes paying attention to facts that you don’t like. Of course, ignoring facts you don’t like, such as a people’s nationalistic feelings (especially when you’ve been treating them like crap for decades), is the opposite of realism: it’s believing one’s own hallucinations. A lot of world leaders, especially ones with authoritarian leanings (Netenyahu, Trump) or those who have fallen completely into being dictators (Xi, Bukele, Putin) try to make the world fit their personal hallucinations.
What does this have to do with peace, in general? Most of the most powerful states aren’t being run by “realists”; they’re being run by people who think their ideologies define factual, even if it opposes reality. Yes, strong countries can treat their weaker neighbors like crap; many do and have for millennia, but they don’t have to. Their leaders want to, usually for personal aggrandizement, not national interest.
Following “Matthias” above, I have a suspicion that many people in or near politics who call themselves “realists” aren’t so much describing their *goals* but their preferred *methods*. In particular, if you look at the position of the United States, from a “realist” point of view, it’s a very good position. The entire landmass of the Americas is almost completely covered in allies or quasi-allies (states that aren’t going to overtly support the US’s enemies). There is serious foreign policy debate in the US about defending Taiwan (6,000 miles from the lower 48 states, the American heartland) and Kyiv (4,500 miles), whereas our two main adversaries aren’t in nearly as good a position — China frets about Taiwan (110 miles away) being hostile and Russia frets about Ukraine (0 miles away) joining NATO.
But while the US has engaged in a lot of military adventures, it has also spent a lot of time, money, and political effort building and maintaining friendly relations with a large number of countries. And it’s clear that for building power in the long run, treating your allies to carrots works better than treating them with sticks.