Peter doesn't think we have any compelling national interest to get into a war with Russia over Ukraine. I agree, and would amplify it like this:
Why on earth are we talking about getting into a war in Russia in the winter?
I mean, you could ask Napoleon how that turned out, or the German 6th Army. Heck, you could ask the Afghani allies we just left behind how good an idea this is. Since our military has such a good track record this century.
Peter's take is that the Powers That Be are getting desperate as the economy is mired in stagflation, the vaxx mandate is increasingly unpopular, and Biden's approval rating drops lower than any President in my lifetime. A foreign adventure is often the prescription for what ails them - politics ends at the water's edge, right?
Except no - firstly, this is nothing but madness. Bill Clinton at least had the good sense to bomb a Somali aspirin factory rather than Sevastapol. Secondly, we've heard from Democrats for 20 years that politics does NOT end at the water's edge.
Quite frankly, it's time for Congress to step up as the Adult Supervision* and pass a resolution saying that we do not have a compelling national interest in NATO expansion into Ukraine, and we sure as heck don't have a compelling interest in Americans getting killed over that. It sure would be something to see the Democrats filibuster that.
It's been a long time since I've tagged a post "Atomic War" ...
* This just goes to illustrate how weird things are.
UPDATE 22 January 2022 18:17: J.Kb has a must read post about this.
21 comments:
Putin thinks he has 'all' the odds on his side. Equipment, trained personnel, and weather...
And he apparently does. I'd hate to think of being back in the logistics world trying to work a US involvement in anything beyond a 7 to 10 day war there.
Unless we want a nice can o sunshine dropped on our cities we'd be wise to rein these demon possessed loons in.
Congress telling Moscow we have "no compelling national interest" in Ukraine would be tantamount to April Dipshit telling Saddam that we had "no compelling interest" in Kuwait in Summer 1990.
So, how'd that one work out for everyone?
The answer is simpler.
Quietly ship Ukraine half a dozen nukes and a short-range delivery system. (We've certainly got some IRBM chassis sitting around in mothballs somewhere.)
Tell Moscow if they want to trade Kiev, Karkiv, etc, for Moscow, St. Petersburg, etc., to go ahead on and do whatever they like.
If not, maybe they should start working out their problems in Ukraine with something other than infiltrated airborne brigades and Spetsnaz. And stop using the Sudetenland Excuse for intervention.
Wash hands of the local issue, and let those involved sort it out on their own, in their mutual best interests.
This is why even lions don't go after porcupines.
https://i.imgur.com/0nmevmH.png
Putin is right on this one and I certainly don't give a damn about Ukrainian borders. Let the Russians, Ukrainians, and Eurofags fix this themselves.
NATO should have ended the early 1990s.
At this point I root for Putin to occupy that excuse of a country and be done with it. It's going to be great for everyone (except Moldovans perhaps).
Good grief Aesop… go back to scrubbing bedpans and folding laundry because larping as a tactician isn’t your thing. If I were an evil Russian megalomaniac (and I’m not, for the record)… I’d tell my new friends in Cuba and South America that they need nukes too - and send them a free sampler, HAR HAR HAR! Stick THAT up your nylons, nurse!😆👍
Going to war in the winter isn’t the same now as it was in ol’ Boney’s day. Peter Grant and Aesop are alarmists and prone to over-reacting and this is just more hyper-ventilation and out gassing. All we are seeing here is sabre rattling. (Or, when Joe does it - an old geezer shouting at clouds). After the debacle in Afghanistan there is no way your country will go to war. Joe is so incompetent that even the lefties are starting to hate him… and his puppeteers know it. It’s also obvious to everyone at this point that as long as the democrats have a say in military affairs… the inevitable result is failure and loss.
Putin knows fools when he sees them, and Joe can’t fool anyone at this point. If Putin is serious about the Ukraine… now’s the time.
Sorry, Glen, never wore nurse nylons, so I'll defer to your expertise on that. Maybe guys in Canada are different that way? And we don't scrub bedpans, nor has anyone else, for at least 50 years now, which is probably the last time you knew anything about anything. Anything that's full of shit we just flush. Now you can guess why I never see your comments on my blog either.
Cuba tried to go the nuke route once before. It didn't work out well for them, nor Russia either. Back when they still scrubbed bedpans, somewhere. Maybe you've heard of that, but if not, you could look it up. There's a first time for everything, I suppose.
Central America?
You really know nothing about anything, do you?
They'd happily shoot them all off at each other, and wouldn't have the range anyways to get anywhere I care about. Although a world minus Mexico City is something to dream about.
Go back to kissing the Queen's hindquarters like a good subject of the crown, and leave geopolitics to countries that have aircraft carriers, and more than one neighbor. And try not to forget that if we'd sent someone besides Benedict Arnold and a band of ragamuffins, you'd be living in the 60 States of America, a happy accident for which I'm sure both countries are better off. The next time I'm in London, I'll drop a wreath on the old traitor's grave, in gratitude.
But for your edification, a humbled and hobbled Russia is in everyone's interests. Except for nuclear weapons and their former military, they're a third world country, and always have been. We spent 70 years dealing with the other kind of Russia, and their pretensions and delusions of grandeur cost us at least two open wars, one long cold one, and tens of thousands of lives, not to mention trillions of dollars wasted.
Anything which keeps them on a tight leash is in the world's best interest.
Look up 1933, and isolationism, and get back to us.
Good lord woman - settle down! You’ll get your panties in a twist and have the entire hen house flapping and squawking. War gaming with hysterical old women like you and Peter is like trying to play Monopoly with the retards. You two monkeys always end up trying to hump the same football!
Putin holds the cards. He doesn’t face JFK, he faces a guy that literally needs diapers. Biden can stack as many nukes as he wants wherever he wants. He doesn’t have the guts or the capacity to use them any more than you do. At the end of the day, Biden is a vegetable and the US military brass are a ridiculous rainbow of sexual degenerates and affirmative action flunkies. You saw what happened when they tried to project force in Afghanistan. They couldn’t even fall back in a coherent fashion. There will be no drama or brinkmanship if Putin decides to make his move. Biden’s puppeteers will have him huff and puff for the cameras and that’s it.
putin holds the cards, all of them. nato is an empty shell with us holding the pieces together. germany couldn't get a single jet fighter up in the air the other day when putin sent bombers over for a looksee. few people remember but ukraine elected a pro ruskie prez which was promptly deposed by hillary and brenen to safeguard the biden mafia grift there. they (pelosi, kerry, clinton, biden) and their progeny have been robbing ukraine blind for decades now. time for their cash cow to die. putin doesn't want ukraine, just the east/south russian speaking provinces that can pay their own way. he doesn't want extra mouths to feed. NO MORE LIVES FOR THEIR GRIFT. btw, we already have reserve troops in ukraine training them. pray they don't get caught in the middle.
"Look up 1933, and isolationism, and get back to us."
You mean these uSA had no military presence around the globe then?
The most recent, updated annually by the Congressional Research Service:
Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2021
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/natsec/R42738.pdf
Glen, I just don't think we can win this one. First of all, Ukraine isn't a "democracy" in any meaningful sense. Second, I can't see any compelling reason to bring them into NATO - they have been un Russia's sphere of influence since the 16th century, and it sure seems to be to be recklessly provocative of us to try to change this "to contain Putin".
When you consider that the deal in 1989 was that we wouldn't expand Nato into the Warsaw Pact, and now it looks like that we're trying to extend it to Sevastopol - and realize that Russian distrust of the west goes all the way back to the Fourth Crusade - this looks like the boneheaded foreign policy move of all time. And remember it's winter in Russia, and the amount of logistics or combat support we can count on from our NATO "allies" in Germany is about zero.
IMHO, the number of American combat deaths that this is worth is zero. The number of American civilian deaths this is worth is also zero. The chance that our "elites" can pull this off is zero. It's a stupid game, there's no way we can win, and we shouldn't play.
I wouldn't send a single American there under any circumstances.
But as Glen, in typical block-headed fashion, has overlooked, the use of nukes wouldn't rest with Gropey Dopey, doddering in an Alzheimer's catatonia, it would rest with ground commanders in the Ukraine.
"Don't f**k with us, we won't f**k with you" makes the lemon no longer worth the squeeze. Putin stays in his own cage, and Ukraine goes back to unscrewing what Russia spent 80-400 years screwing up.
@Jaime,
"No military presence"?
Punch your history teacher in the mouth, and demand a refund of all tuition.
What you know about American worldwide military presence in and prior to 1933 wouldn't fill a thimble.
Look up Cuba. China. The Philippines. Wake Island. Midway. Guam. American Samoa. Puerto Rico. St. Thomas. St. Croix. Korea. Then look up Veracruz. Haiti. Nicaragua. Dominican Republic. Honduras. Panama. Korea. Nuka Hiva. Sumatra. North Russia and Siberia. That's adventures and occupations in 13 different countries, stretching halfway around the world in both directions. And the bases we didn't have then that we do now? The British and French had most of them first. Did you drop out, or did your teachers just skip everything we did in the world from 1870-1930, let alone 1945-1990?
If you can link to US uses of force since ever, maybe try reading it too.
(cont.)
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Putin is simply a KGB throwback with delusions of grandeur, and he misses the old Soviet Union. He won't live forever, and when he dies, the power struggle to succeed him will be Byzantine and epic. Younger men won't be filled with the same nostalgia about those days as Putin has, sitting on top of his dung heap as the current Lord of The Flies. (And Merkel has the same disease.)
But sacrificing states over there, to buy time here?
How did that work out with China? Poland? The Sudentenland? Eastern Europe? Isn't one Pearl Harbor per century enough to drive the lesson home on how isolationism works out?
NATO should have been abolished around 1990. Most of Western Europe wants nothing to do with it anyways, and never has, since about 30 seconds after Hitler shot himself. We should have replaced it with the former enslaved states of Germany and Eastern Europe, who have a far different memory of the Soviet Union's tender embrace, and told Russia to happily stay inside its own borders, where they could screw their own country up to their heart's content, until the end of time, without let or hindrance.
But there are always 3-5 countries who think they deserve a grander place on the world stage than fate has alloted them, and want to go grabbing more, as if it were still 1400. the price for being rich, free, and alive, all at the same time, and being on top of the world's heap, is to contain that nonsense with minimal aggravation.
Countries who get tired of that duty, and shirk it, crumble. Ask Britain and France what it feels like to become prey after being the apex predators for centuries, and look at how it's gone for them since 1945. Spain has been a disaster since 1600, and Italy since 451 AD. And things are pretty rugged in Russia about now, for the same reason, since 1990.
There's no other world to inhabit, and in this one, the wolf is always at the door.
Nations that forget that lesson repent of it at their leisure.
Fat Bill was so busy spending the imaginary "peace dividend" in the 1990s, he totally missed Islam rising to fill up the vacuum left by the departure of the Soviet Union from the stage, and he was wholly bought and paid for by ChiCom interests.
So, anyone: how's studied ignorance of the rise of China and Islam in the 1990s paid dividends for you, up to the current moment?
Are you freer, richer, and happier now than you were in 1992, when we were the "world's only superpower"?
Did all the rest of the world "respect our authoritah"?
Or did they have rather different goals in mind than we did, while we've sat around complacent and dilletante?
How much blood and treasure did that plan cost us, in just the last two decades?
I'll wait over here while you work that one out.
Leave the isolationism of the 1930s on the scrap heap of history.
It didn't work then, and it won't work now.
As you're about to find out, and once again, with the nation's smallest army and navy since the late 1920s, and a currency about as valuable as Weimar marks from the same era.
Ask Germany what it feels like to be the world's bitch for a century, because their fate awaits us all too readily.
Babylon is fallen, coming soon to a theater near you.
Almost like there was a prophecy, or something.
Maybe we are Babylon.
I agree with all BP… you are 100% right on all of that. To me it is intuitively obvious. Also obvious is that Putin could decide to take the Ukraine this morn and be mopping up by coffee time this afternoon. My spider sense is going off. I think there’s a grift in play: somebody will offer concessions, the players will pose for pics as they wisely move in the direction of peace…and grifters on both sides will make fortunes off the books behind closed doors.
Didn't Sloppy Joe allegedly give Putin a wish list of industries that he'd rather his cyber-attackers not mess with? If that's the case, then it's not a stretch to imagine the hackers knocking out the power grid and nuking us to hell.
THAT is my concern...
Personally, from what I've read the Russian military is in much worse shape than most people realize. Taking Ukraine won't be as easy as some forecast, but he'll try hard and potentially cause problems a long way away in the process.
Totally agree.
Many don't know it or remember but when Ukraine had a huge nuclear weapons stockpile in 1994 left over from the fall of the USSR; We and Europe promised to defend them from the Russians if they gave them up. They did and we aren't.
https://theconversation.com/ukraine-got-a-signed-commitment-in-1994-to-ensure-its-security-but-can-the-us-and-allies-stop-putins-aggression-now-173481
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