Russia shouldn't get to demand a buffer zone made up of sovereign nations. It's a country's right to choose it's alliances.
Military coercion is just unacceptable. If Russia can't use soft power to keep a country in its sphere of influence, they should shut the fuck up. It's wrong to let a trigger-happy bully dictate to sovereign countries which alliances they can or can't join. It's right to protect small independent nations from trigger-happy bullies.
As for the expansion since the 90s: when the countries the Soviets had been oppressing decided to finally gain protection from the oppressor, it was only right to let them into the alliance. Not doing so would be bending over backwards to protect the interests of the bully.
It's is absurd to think NATO is an objective threat to Russia. It's a nuclear armed power. No one's attacking it.
It's kind of amazing, there is just nothing here in this whole article. If this is the best that can be done for this position, that says something.
Putin is likely to invade eastern Ukraine, and we certainly aren't going to go to war with Russia over it. But we can & should turn it into another quagmire (Afghanistan / Vietnaam) for Russia that continually drains them of blood and treasure, weakens Russia's position in the global community, and weakens Putin's position within Russia.
I think there's a real, hard problem for the west, even if we think the article author's view of Russia's aims are too myopic, we (the west) are sort of stuck.
- We don't like having Russia using military force to annex land so close to Europe.
- It's not even remotely rational for us to exert the military force necessary to stop Russia.
I find myself agreeing with Lee's conclusions even if I think the article isn't well argued. Ukraine is out of our sphere of influence, and a world where the US extends its sphere and influence to provide security guarantees to buffer states to Russia and China is an unstable one.
We can reverse the parties to see this...imagine if we had any kind of border dispute with Mexico and one of Russia or China was providing security guarantees (e.g. "if you violate Mexico's sovereignty for any reason, it's war with Russia/China") and they brought a carrier fleet to drive the point home. This would clearly be insanely provocative.
My current thinking is: we can't have a stable equilibrium that requires China or Russia to accept concessions (WRT spheres of influence and neighboring states) that we would find totally unacceptable - we're not enough more powerful.
Genuinely meant as constructive criticism for a young journalist: this is choppy and somewhat difficult to read.
Also, if you're a recent Chicago polisci grad cribbing straight from Mearsheimer's lecture on Ukraine, you should probably at least explicitly credit him
Why does this author believe we should be focusing on containing China?
What makes China a greater threat than Russia? In this nuclear age both countries pose similiar threats, even though China is dramatically larger in both size, population and GDP. China has been nowhere near as aggressive as China.
Russia actively attacked the US with their election interference. That was not testing the waters, but a full on attack. One can question the efficacy of that attack, but it was an attack. Russia has also been actively expansionist, while China has not been. China has done many horrific things, but they have been internal within China's borders. Taiwan is a grey area where ownership has long been contested, but Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Georgia are not grey areas.
There is not evidence that China has expansionist ambitions. China clearly has laid out what it views as their borders, and while we disagree with some of those borders (Taiwan and the South China Sea) they at least have clear limits on where they want to expand. On the other hand, Russia has no clear limits on the areas they may wish to expand to (as shown by their annexations).
Now, the fact that Ukraine is an ideological ally does not necessarily justify letting them into NATO. One can reasonably argue that it is not worth the blood and treasure to help Ukraine stay independent of Russia. But the same is true of Taiwan.
I think we need a clearer understanding about what the "threat" from China truly is. China will almost certainly surpass the economy and eventually the military might of the US alone, simply because China has so many more people than the US. But China will not surpass the economy and military might of NATO. NATO has roughly the same population as China, and is far richer than China, and China is extremely unlikely to catch up. This calculation does not change even if the arrangement is China + Russia.
The main "threat" from China is just a threat to the pride of the US, which is that the US will no longer be individually the most dominant country. That is important in many ways, but the only solution to this "threat" is Matt Yglesias's "One Billion Americans" plan. Allying with Russia is irrelevant in this discussion.
China could pose a threat to NATO if they were able to form an alliance with developing countries that could eventually compete with NATO. But the best way to prevent China from doing that is to encourage those countries to adopt democratic ideologies that inherently make them wary of China.
It’s a choice between maintaining the status quo or normalizing relations with Russia regarding this issue. There isn’t some third option. Russia has a formidable military, we aren’t attacking a Russian naval base, and they are the low cost EU energy supplier.
This is just all deterrence from both sides parts. If you cross the Russians, there will be costs. The current situation is just us and the EU trying to impose costs on the Russians. But it’s clear, that the Germans are done with all this foolishness from the Ukrainians regarding supplying gas. The Russians as well made a huge capital investment and it’s returns are based on less money going to Ukraine. If the Ukrainians don’t like that, they should have taken Putin’s deal in 2014.
When we have decided to normalize relations, then we’ll negotiate an end to this. The Russians are flexing like they are going to take more land. I say we flesh that out and prove out none of this other land in the east is worth anything to them. IMO, they probably took the good land as is.
Glad this article got published on this site! Reading NYT, FT etc on this has been a bit maddening. Both the underlying assumptions that this is all caused by Putin, and that the US is nothing but a passive observer on the sidelines.
I’m also very concerned about the growing consensus that the best course of action is to send arms to Ukraine to ‘increase the cost’ of any Russian invasion. As if a long running civil war is least worst option.
I don’t know if this is typical of foreign policy writing or just the author’s style, but I came away from this article mostly thinking that its arguments can’t be that strong if they require so many ad hominem attacks and “look how smart I am” turns of phrase. The contrast with what I come to Slow Boring for is stark, and I’m hoping future contributions will be more appropriate for the venue.
I wonder how Taiwan or South Korea would feel about our betraying the Ukrainians like we did the Kurds. If we think it necessary to contain China, we might want to consider that.
The American political establishment foreign policy is a study in contradictions, hypocrisy and blatant stupidity. So we are supposed to be for a global new world order. From the left it is envisioned as a collectivist utopia with no more poor people in the world. For the right it is viewed as that growing economic pie that returns larger slices to those that would work hard and compete for it in the private economy.
But then how the hell does any of that view jibe with a continued Cold War posturing with one of the largest and most dangerous European and Asian countries on the planet?
How can this view that the world will coexist peacefully within the control of some global EU, when the seeds of global war are AGAIN percolating in Europe and Asia?
Either we are justified in our belief in national sovereignty and a rejection of all things globalist, or we are missing something key in our political approach to settling conflict with other countries.
My view is that it is a bit of both... we should reject globalism as designed by the Klaus Schwabb cohort, but adopt another type that is basically a well designed global trade arrangement that offers careful balance for economic differences between trading partners. And we should throw away the old proven broken and failed knee jerk foreign policy patterns. They really have never worked. They have made a mess out of the world and cost the national and world millions of lives.
The fact that China and Russia can still be pursuing military expansion at this time in the evolution in what we assume is a modern civilized world tells us most of what we need to know to reject globalism as an achievable goal, and to also reject our global foreign policy standards... because if one or both of them were valid, neither China nor Russia would be investing in their war machine escapades.
This issue goes back to the fall of the Berlin Wall and a couple of years later, the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. Gorbachev agreed to the unification of Germany under West German government and even Germany's membership in NATO. In return, the USSR (at the time) got economic aid and what Gorbachev and future Russian leaders thought was a promise not to move east. After all, the Warsaw Pact dissolved with the Soviet Union. Yes, there is disagreement over this, as the promise was not written down at the time. But, the National Security Archives (George Wash. Univ.) used the FOIA in 2017 to access memos and notes that that documented extensive talk about it in the Bush Administration. So fault Gorbachev for not getting it in writing. I think the more important issue is what country in the world wants an 'enemy' military alliance expanding to its borders. Who is it an alliance against? The U.S. says it The blog curses Russia for wanting to preserve its 'sphere of influence, but the US says it will count any interference in the Western Hemisphere by an outside power as an assault on the U.S And if any country should be looked at with a more critical eye, it's Ukraine. The last Presidents are like musical chair of those looking West and those looking East and all unable to end the endemic corruption for which it is known.
B. Ukraine has earned our help, sometimes our foreign policy should be principled
C. Europe should wean themselves off Russian oil more quickly, standing up to Putin would motivate them to do so, standing up to Putin is good for Climate Change.
D. The Chimerican economy makes it hard for either country to exert any real leverage, pivoting to China is more economic than geopolitical. China is beside the point in this context.
E. A conflict with an armed and formidable Ukraine would be bad for Putin.
Good lord this article is stupid. Putin's Ukraine policy is driven by his domestic politics; there is literally no concession the US and NATO could make that would lead to less Russian belligerence. He needs the rivalry to maintain standing, and he'll invent it regardless of our policy choices. There will be no benefit to any compromise.
The problem here is we already have an agreement from both Russia and the US to respect Ukrainian territorial integrity and Russia broke it. I don’t see why that would help. It seems to me we’re gaining nothing in this deal.
Russia shouldn't get to demand a buffer zone made up of sovereign nations. It's a country's right to choose it's alliances.
Military coercion is just unacceptable. If Russia can't use soft power to keep a country in its sphere of influence, they should shut the fuck up. It's wrong to let a trigger-happy bully dictate to sovereign countries which alliances they can or can't join. It's right to protect small independent nations from trigger-happy bullies.
As for the expansion since the 90s: when the countries the Soviets had been oppressing decided to finally gain protection from the oppressor, it was only right to let them into the alliance. Not doing so would be bending over backwards to protect the interests of the bully.
It's is absurd to think NATO is an objective threat to Russia. It's a nuclear armed power. No one's attacking it.
It's kind of amazing, there is just nothing here in this whole article. If this is the best that can be done for this position, that says something.
Putin is likely to invade eastern Ukraine, and we certainly aren't going to go to war with Russia over it. But we can & should turn it into another quagmire (Afghanistan / Vietnaam) for Russia that continually drains them of blood and treasure, weakens Russia's position in the global community, and weakens Putin's position within Russia.
I think there's a real, hard problem for the west, even if we think the article author's view of Russia's aims are too myopic, we (the west) are sort of stuck.
- We don't like having Russia using military force to annex land so close to Europe.
- It's not even remotely rational for us to exert the military force necessary to stop Russia.
I find myself agreeing with Lee's conclusions even if I think the article isn't well argued. Ukraine is out of our sphere of influence, and a world where the US extends its sphere and influence to provide security guarantees to buffer states to Russia and China is an unstable one.
We can reverse the parties to see this...imagine if we had any kind of border dispute with Mexico and one of Russia or China was providing security guarantees (e.g. "if you violate Mexico's sovereignty for any reason, it's war with Russia/China") and they brought a carrier fleet to drive the point home. This would clearly be insanely provocative.
My current thinking is: we can't have a stable equilibrium that requires China or Russia to accept concessions (WRT spheres of influence and neighboring states) that we would find totally unacceptable - we're not enough more powerful.
Genuinely meant as constructive criticism for a young journalist: this is choppy and somewhat difficult to read.
Also, if you're a recent Chicago polisci grad cribbing straight from Mearsheimer's lecture on Ukraine, you should probably at least explicitly credit him
Why does this author believe we should be focusing on containing China?
What makes China a greater threat than Russia? In this nuclear age both countries pose similiar threats, even though China is dramatically larger in both size, population and GDP. China has been nowhere near as aggressive as China.
Russia actively attacked the US with their election interference. That was not testing the waters, but a full on attack. One can question the efficacy of that attack, but it was an attack. Russia has also been actively expansionist, while China has not been. China has done many horrific things, but they have been internal within China's borders. Taiwan is a grey area where ownership has long been contested, but Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Georgia are not grey areas.
There is not evidence that China has expansionist ambitions. China clearly has laid out what it views as their borders, and while we disagree with some of those borders (Taiwan and the South China Sea) they at least have clear limits on where they want to expand. On the other hand, Russia has no clear limits on the areas they may wish to expand to (as shown by their annexations).
Now, the fact that Ukraine is an ideological ally does not necessarily justify letting them into NATO. One can reasonably argue that it is not worth the blood and treasure to help Ukraine stay independent of Russia. But the same is true of Taiwan.
I think we need a clearer understanding about what the "threat" from China truly is. China will almost certainly surpass the economy and eventually the military might of the US alone, simply because China has so many more people than the US. But China will not surpass the economy and military might of NATO. NATO has roughly the same population as China, and is far richer than China, and China is extremely unlikely to catch up. This calculation does not change even if the arrangement is China + Russia.
The main "threat" from China is just a threat to the pride of the US, which is that the US will no longer be individually the most dominant country. That is important in many ways, but the only solution to this "threat" is Matt Yglesias's "One Billion Americans" plan. Allying with Russia is irrelevant in this discussion.
China could pose a threat to NATO if they were able to form an alliance with developing countries that could eventually compete with NATO. But the best way to prevent China from doing that is to encourage those countries to adopt democratic ideologies that inherently make them wary of China.
It’s a choice between maintaining the status quo or normalizing relations with Russia regarding this issue. There isn’t some third option. Russia has a formidable military, we aren’t attacking a Russian naval base, and they are the low cost EU energy supplier.
This is just all deterrence from both sides parts. If you cross the Russians, there will be costs. The current situation is just us and the EU trying to impose costs on the Russians. But it’s clear, that the Germans are done with all this foolishness from the Ukrainians regarding supplying gas. The Russians as well made a huge capital investment and it’s returns are based on less money going to Ukraine. If the Ukrainians don’t like that, they should have taken Putin’s deal in 2014.
When we have decided to normalize relations, then we’ll negotiate an end to this. The Russians are flexing like they are going to take more land. I say we flesh that out and prove out none of this other land in the east is worth anything to them. IMO, they probably took the good land as is.
Glad this article got published on this site! Reading NYT, FT etc on this has been a bit maddening. Both the underlying assumptions that this is all caused by Putin, and that the US is nothing but a passive observer on the sidelines.
I’m also very concerned about the growing consensus that the best course of action is to send arms to Ukraine to ‘increase the cost’ of any Russian invasion. As if a long running civil war is least worst option.
I don’t know if this is typical of foreign policy writing or just the author’s style, but I came away from this article mostly thinking that its arguments can’t be that strong if they require so many ad hominem attacks and “look how smart I am” turns of phrase. The contrast with what I come to Slow Boring for is stark, and I’m hoping future contributions will be more appropriate for the venue.
Amazing how in these discussions there are always a few tankies who love Mother Russia.
I wonder how Taiwan or South Korea would feel about our betraying the Ukrainians like we did the Kurds. If we think it necessary to contain China, we might want to consider that.
You know things are hopeless when Tucker Carlson is the voice of reason.
The American political establishment foreign policy is a study in contradictions, hypocrisy and blatant stupidity. So we are supposed to be for a global new world order. From the left it is envisioned as a collectivist utopia with no more poor people in the world. For the right it is viewed as that growing economic pie that returns larger slices to those that would work hard and compete for it in the private economy.
But then how the hell does any of that view jibe with a continued Cold War posturing with one of the largest and most dangerous European and Asian countries on the planet?
How can this view that the world will coexist peacefully within the control of some global EU, when the seeds of global war are AGAIN percolating in Europe and Asia?
Either we are justified in our belief in national sovereignty and a rejection of all things globalist, or we are missing something key in our political approach to settling conflict with other countries.
My view is that it is a bit of both... we should reject globalism as designed by the Klaus Schwabb cohort, but adopt another type that is basically a well designed global trade arrangement that offers careful balance for economic differences between trading partners. And we should throw away the old proven broken and failed knee jerk foreign policy patterns. They really have never worked. They have made a mess out of the world and cost the national and world millions of lives.
The fact that China and Russia can still be pursuing military expansion at this time in the evolution in what we assume is a modern civilized world tells us most of what we need to know to reject globalism as an achievable goal, and to also reject our global foreign policy standards... because if one or both of them were valid, neither China nor Russia would be investing in their war machine escapades.
This issue goes back to the fall of the Berlin Wall and a couple of years later, the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. Gorbachev agreed to the unification of Germany under West German government and even Germany's membership in NATO. In return, the USSR (at the time) got economic aid and what Gorbachev and future Russian leaders thought was a promise not to move east. After all, the Warsaw Pact dissolved with the Soviet Union. Yes, there is disagreement over this, as the promise was not written down at the time. But, the National Security Archives (George Wash. Univ.) used the FOIA in 2017 to access memos and notes that that documented extensive talk about it in the Bush Administration. So fault Gorbachev for not getting it in writing. I think the more important issue is what country in the world wants an 'enemy' military alliance expanding to its borders. Who is it an alliance against? The U.S. says it The blog curses Russia for wanting to preserve its 'sphere of influence, but the US says it will count any interference in the Western Hemisphere by an outside power as an assault on the U.S And if any country should be looked at with a more critical eye, it's Ukraine. The last Presidents are like musical chair of those looking West and those looking East and all unable to end the endemic corruption for which it is known.
A. You can't make deals with Putin
B. Ukraine has earned our help, sometimes our foreign policy should be principled
C. Europe should wean themselves off Russian oil more quickly, standing up to Putin would motivate them to do so, standing up to Putin is good for Climate Change.
D. The Chimerican economy makes it hard for either country to exert any real leverage, pivoting to China is more economic than geopolitical. China is beside the point in this context.
E. A conflict with an armed and formidable Ukraine would be bad for Putin.
F. YOU CAN"T MAKE DEALS WITH PUTIN.
How have the Ukrainians earned our help?
They booted out Yanukovych(Putin's puppet) and are relatively democratic. All I'm suggesting is send weapons and trainers.
Good lord this article is stupid. Putin's Ukraine policy is driven by his domestic politics; there is literally no concession the US and NATO could make that would lead to less Russian belligerence. He needs the rivalry to maintain standing, and he'll invent it regardless of our policy choices. There will be no benefit to any compromise.
The problem here is we already have an agreement from both Russia and the US to respect Ukrainian territorial integrity and Russia broke it. I don’t see why that would help. It seems to me we’re gaining nothing in this deal.