I think what really irks many progressives, especially those outside the US, is that America faced no real 'consequences' as a result of the Iraq war. Just a bunch of perfunctory disclaimers and Op-eds admitting how 'wrong' it was post-fact. But no real, negative, ramifications for either the country, the hostile media, the foreign-policy elite or even the government. No sanctions, no international isolation, not even a thousand extra body-bags courtesy of a foreign power supplying Saddam with weaponry to aid against a hostile, illegal invasion. Just a "yep, got it, shouldnt have done that, soz guys, probably wont do it again for a good while, btw see how humble we are? The Chinese/Russians would never!". But none of the tangible 'consequences' that the US regularly threatens to mete out to others.
Of course, this is because in the real-world, there are only 2 countries (excluding EU) that have the power to sanction anybody and nobody is/was going to sanction the US for crimes past or present. But then you are left face-to-face with the reality that the balance between raw, coercive power and geopolitical ethics/laws is not as even, or 'favorable' towards the latter, as you might like. Progressives hate the idea of compromising with this aforementioned reality.
I actually sympathize with the first bit Re 'consequences'. Americans can't be permitted to go prancing about the world stage selectively applying some international laws/norms whilst violating others, invading countries, drone-bombing weddings, etc. All the while proclaiming that there is some perfectly unique, feedback-loop within their system that then 'rights the wrongs' and so invalidates the need for the sort of severe outside censure/penalties which they are happy to dish out themselves. Luckily (for non-Americans), power dynamics are shifting and the raw US power that underpins a lot of their, use-of and immunity-to, unilateral, punitive, actions, is now in a gradual but irreversible relative decline. Massive countries like China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, etc, countries with no obviously deep links to the US (maybe outside of a momentary convergence of interests) will shift the balance of power and by mid-century should cement a truly multi-polar world.
Progressives, however, are then going to have to come to terms with the fact that the US will no longer be the hegemonic rule-breaker par-excellence. China already boasts very similar levels of geopolitical power and by mid-century will likely have overtaken the US in a lot of key metrics. China, already, is nigh-on impervious to western censure and is growing increasingly impatient with any criticism. How will the progressives then react to a nation that doesnt even present them with the illusion that their disapprobation matters?
"When Russia invaded in 2014, Ukraine was thinking about joining the EU, but not NATO"
Yeah, as if the pressure ever stopped. Conveniently forgot that at the same exact year foreign powers supported, funded, and celebrated the orange-colored Maidan "revolution", resulting in the toppling of the democratically elected government of Ukraine by friendly to them goons, which included bona-fide neo-nazis in their coalition.
And areas of Ukraine were historically part of Russia for centuries, and some, like Crimea, had a majority ethnic Russian population, and the country is being cuddled by foreign powers to be used as a pressure point against Russia. Not that this gives Russia the right, but it's an understandable concern and right next to its borders.
Meanwhile, the US has invaded 4 countries in the last 20 years, halfway around the world from itself, that it had absolutely no reason to be or BS, and helped destabilize several others and arbitrarily punish ("sanction") whichever it doesn't like with huge cost to their populations. Cry me a river about their concern for "aggresion" in this case.
I find myself to be in complete agreement with the second part of your post but not so much with the first.
The fact is that Germany, France even Ukraine are concerned about the language coming out of Washington.
If Putin attacks Ukraine he will clearly be the most responsible party, by far but there are concerns, and not just from the Putin friendly alt-right or the far-left.
I recommend you check out the Bloggingheads conversation between Robert Wright and Thomas Friedman. Thomas Friedman, yes let's invade Iraq yesterday Thomas Friedman, was arguing NATO expansion was a mistake and that the best resolution to this crisis would be an officially neutral Ukraine.
"Meanwhile, some in the press (though few to no people in positions of power) are still flirting with fringe ideologies like MMT, which urge higher deficits and lower taxes in every situation."
Neither "fringe" nor "ideology" applies to MMT and the phrase "...which urge higher deficits and lower taxes in every situation" reveals that you don't know much about it. That contention compares badly with the large majority of your writing which is informed and free of hyperbole. I feel MMT has much to recommend itself, especially as an alternative to Neoliberal economics which is still dominant in the US in spite of its many defects and the sorry record it has had in our country for the last fifty years. Maybe consider investigating MMT and posting your thoughts?
"My position on this conflict has been the same since 2014: Russia is the aggressor and what it's doing to Ukraine is terribly unfair, and also there's very little the US can do about it and a lot the US has done in the past to help get us here."
Although I think you're broadly correct, I think you are missing something on the concept of provocation in understanding how Russia sees it – and of course one of the tragedies of war is that both sides often think the other provoked it. If you look at it in terms of morally-neutral regional power politics with Russia and the Western countries as adversaries, it certainly looks like the Western countries are continuing their push to expand their alliance to Russia's borders – or from a revanchist perspective, inside Russia's historical borders. Whether it's via membership in the EU or NATO is a distinction without a difference – in fact I'd say the former is more of a sign of alliance with the Western nations than the latter – so a step like, say, granting visa-free travel, or joining the DCFTA, or announcing that you're seeking EU membership, is seen as part of a realignment being pushed against Russia's interest, not without reason.
The big caveat, of course, being in the EU is way better than being in Russia's 'sphere of influence' and literally every country knows this, so Russia basically has no hope of maintaining a sphere of influence by normal means. The EU is widely seen as weak but is very, very good at leveraging all kinds of economic strength (as long as its citizens pay no price whatsoever), so the sheer gravity of the market will pull countries like Ukraine in. This is a direct threat to Russia's influence in the region, which powers always see as key to their self-interest – no one wants an enemy right on their border.
I still agree with you that tools such as sanctions and (maybe) weapons shipments are fine; the issue of the sanctity of international borders is also important and allowing Russia to annex Crimea essentially unpunished was a big mistake that I think exacerbated the current crisis. And I think it's plausible that Putin thought the EU would back down and the US wouldn't care and now is caught in a kind of bluff he didn't expect to deliver on. I also always suspect these things are driven by internal politics we don't hear about, like some threat to his power from a close ally. Who knows? But I don't think Russia is wrong to see Ukraine falling out of its sphere of influence as a precursor to important countries like Kazakhstan doing so as well, and because the only source of power it has our arms and natural resource supply, they are the only ones they can use.
So yes, it's a war of aggression in which Putin would be in the wrong. But strictly in terms of power balance, the West has definitely taken steps to shift the balance away from Russia. In theory, it could promise to take those steps, like disavowing EU or NATO membership – although at this stage that might look like capitulation and invite further Russian overreach. Statecraft is complicated, but I think you really are overlooking the history of power balance in Eastern Europe in the last few decades; Ukraine is much more salient to Russia than Iraq was to the United States.
And more importantly, tons of vaguely aggressive rhetoric from hawks in WaPo or the Atlantic, who've spent the past 20 years never seeing a war they didn't want to start or double down on, calling for "resolve" and making horrible WWII analogies that decry "appeasement," and saying Putin won't stop with Ukraine, and the future of the whole free world is on the line, in the service of escalatory maximalist approaches that prevent any diplomatic concessions that might actually avoid a war. "No war in Ukraine" isn't just a call for the United States to avoid personally fighting it, but for the United States to swallow its pride and do what's necessary to actually avoid it.
The graver straw man is implying that those calling for realism and restraint somehow do not "support Ukraine" and its democratic leanings. Every decent, informed American with a conscience supports Ukraine, and hopes Vladimir Putin drops dead of a heart attack tomorrow. That just doesn't tell us what the hell to actually do about it, to minimize the harm and injustice that results from anarchic great power politics.
I get that there's recency bias and agree can't confuse Ukraine with Iraq. But it's equally irrational to see the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles as isolated errors, detached from national pathologies, biases and blind spots that remain very much alive in our foreign policy establishment today. And yes: NATO expansion is related to those pathologies. Realists warned against it for precisely the fear that it would stoke Russian insecurity whenever they recovered enough to push back against it, and lofty idealists laughed them out of the room.
You write, "A Russian invasion would a clear and unambiguous act of aggression. And yet some progressives insist on seeing Russia’s buildup as a reaction to Western aggression."
^A Russian invasion can be two things at one time. Yes, it's evil and indefensible by any Western standard - and also something that may not in fact have happened had NATO not surged thousands of miles up to Russia's borders in its decade of weakness. And it might yet not happen, if we weren't too proud to admit what everyone already knows, and offer say a 20-year moratorium on NATO expansion. The maximalist voices who think we still live in 1998 and the United States can get everything it wants all the time are part of the reason we're at an impasse.
I for one much prefer a discourse that finally errs on the side of vigilance against this "blob," who romanticize America's military as a "global force for good," and inevitably trend towards a more aggressive and warmongering foreign policy than the American people actually want. The chances of direct war with Russia are low, but the stakes of such a conflict are high enough - and the experience of complacent media drumbeat recent enough - to warrant forceful and preemptive opposition to the idea.
The people that want war should join the army get on the plane and sit in a fox hole in the freezing cold waiting for command to charge. From the pictures of the 82nd Airborne troops loading onto planes I had the impression there were too few to make a difference and once again we, American are sacrificing young men and women for poorly developed goals.
I think there's a missed opportunity to discuss the impact of COVID on people. There's a lot of people who have been traumatized by the past two years and have moved forward very different than before and I do wonder how that'll affect their perspective going forward beyond COVID.
There is certainly a lot of BS rhetoric on both the "hawk" and "dove" sides about the Russia/Ukraine thing. It seems like the real issue of substance that the two sides do disagree about is whether there are concessions the US could make that should be acceptable to us, and which would prevent an invasion.
The real controversy, from what I can tell, is whether the US could solve the whole problem by putting it in writing that Ukraine will never be a NATO member. Perhaps as part of a deal that establishes Ukraine as a neutral state that will not enter military alliances with either NATO nor Russia.
Leave aside the lessons learned from the Iraq war, it's worth putting the Russia-Ukraine conflict through some basic marginal cost-benefit analysis.
Is there anything we can do, that we are willing to do, that could possibly improve the situation any? And if yes, would the improvement justify the cost?
I mean, we've been trying sanctions for years, and killing the pipeline appears to be a non-starter. A weapons buildup is brinkmanship by definition, and exactly what Russia is doing. Brinkmanship is a dangerous game, and it frequently leads to a bad place.
But back to the last-war problem: have any of the vested interests that dragged us to hell in Iraq changed? So why should we trust anyone in the establishment?
The United States, American media and American politicians are doing nothing but talking about war: defending the Ukraine when there is ZERO Russian interest in invading Ukraine - much less occupying it.
This is a great post, but I think the risk of a hyper inflationary outcome if the Fed doesn’t hike rates is overstated. Hyper inflations are extremely rare and the key conditions just aren’t there (chiefly, runaway monetary financing of government deficits). I just don’t see the mechanism for how higher inflationary expectations results in currency collapse. Feels a bit blackbox, hand wavy.
"Meanwhile, recent U.S. troop deployments to NATO countries in East Europe such as Poland and Romania total fewer than 6,000 — a pittance compared to the 130,000 soldiers Russia has amassed on the Ukraine border, and certainly nowhere near enough to be the basis of military action."
On the contrary, 6000 NATO troops can do quite a lot. "Bluntly, they can die. They can die heroically, tragically, and in a manner that guarantees that the action cannot stop there." (Schelling, Arms and Influence). NATO troops dying in eastern Europe would mobilize domestic support for a conventional war. That was the logic of the East Berlin garrison, that is still the logic of placing an airborne battalion of 500 soldiers in Latvia.
Second, while few or no politicians are openly dumb enough to say the magic phrase "war with Russia," they are advocating measures equivalent to war. A no fly zone, as Rep. Kinzinger brilliantly proposed, would guarantee act of war. Shooting down a Russian fighter jet is an act of war, shooting down a Russian fighter jet with a NATO jet flying out of Poland or Romania justifies a Russian attack on that country. Imagine the response if a Russian jet out of Syria shot down an American fighter jet during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Disconnecting Russia from global finance is tantamount to an act of war under international law. One of the anti-US/anti-Roosevelt lines is he provoked the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor by embargoing the Japanese economy and denying them oil.
There is a moral difference between Iraq and Ukraine. It's weird and difficult to articulate, but no amount of tu quoque'ing can make it immoral for America to condemn the invasion of Ukraine.
To turn around and do exactly that, many of the same people cheerleading for sending anti-tank weapons to Ukraine were rending garments and denouncing Putin when Russia was (falsely, in turned out) accused of paying the Taliban bounties for American servicemembers, or when Iran armed Iraqi insurgents. Many of the politicians demanding NATO deployments to Eastern Europe and aggressive confrontation with Russia, even if that sparks a war (if Putin is unhinged enough to attack Ukraine, as we are now told to assume he's insane, why would he be any more reluctant to invade Estonia, or bombard Germany?)
What if Russia refuses to export gas to Eastern Europe, and the lights turn off and the heat goes out? Should we invade to end the humanitarian crisis and (forcibly) restore LNG shipments?
In short, even if no one says "invade Russia," demanding actions that predictably lead to a shooting conflict between NATO and Russia is not a smart move, nor is it a morally superior path to those who say to stay out of the war.
For clarity - I favor arms shipments to Ukraine, I favor closing the Bosphorus to Russian ships, I do not favor shutting down Russian banks. That hurts ordinary Russians far more than the kleptocrats, and unlike western democracies, popular discontent in Moscow leads to police rounding up the demonstrators, not to government policy changes.
I think what really irks many progressives, especially those outside the US, is that America faced no real 'consequences' as a result of the Iraq war. Just a bunch of perfunctory disclaimers and Op-eds admitting how 'wrong' it was post-fact. But no real, negative, ramifications for either the country, the hostile media, the foreign-policy elite or even the government. No sanctions, no international isolation, not even a thousand extra body-bags courtesy of a foreign power supplying Saddam with weaponry to aid against a hostile, illegal invasion. Just a "yep, got it, shouldnt have done that, soz guys, probably wont do it again for a good while, btw see how humble we are? The Chinese/Russians would never!". But none of the tangible 'consequences' that the US regularly threatens to mete out to others.
Of course, this is because in the real-world, there are only 2 countries (excluding EU) that have the power to sanction anybody and nobody is/was going to sanction the US for crimes past or present. But then you are left face-to-face with the reality that the balance between raw, coercive power and geopolitical ethics/laws is not as even, or 'favorable' towards the latter, as you might like. Progressives hate the idea of compromising with this aforementioned reality.
I actually sympathize with the first bit Re 'consequences'. Americans can't be permitted to go prancing about the world stage selectively applying some international laws/norms whilst violating others, invading countries, drone-bombing weddings, etc. All the while proclaiming that there is some perfectly unique, feedback-loop within their system that then 'rights the wrongs' and so invalidates the need for the sort of severe outside censure/penalties which they are happy to dish out themselves. Luckily (for non-Americans), power dynamics are shifting and the raw US power that underpins a lot of their, use-of and immunity-to, unilateral, punitive, actions, is now in a gradual but irreversible relative decline. Massive countries like China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, etc, countries with no obviously deep links to the US (maybe outside of a momentary convergence of interests) will shift the balance of power and by mid-century should cement a truly multi-polar world.
Progressives, however, are then going to have to come to terms with the fact that the US will no longer be the hegemonic rule-breaker par-excellence. China already boasts very similar levels of geopolitical power and by mid-century will likely have overtaken the US in a lot of key metrics. China, already, is nigh-on impervious to western censure and is growing increasingly impatient with any criticism. How will the progressives then react to a nation that doesnt even present them with the illusion that their disapprobation matters?
"killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people" in Iraq = Error
Russia invading Ukraine = Crime against humanity
"When Russia invaded in 2014, Ukraine was thinking about joining the EU, but not NATO"
Yeah, as if the pressure ever stopped. Conveniently forgot that at the same exact year foreign powers supported, funded, and celebrated the orange-colored Maidan "revolution", resulting in the toppling of the democratically elected government of Ukraine by friendly to them goons, which included bona-fide neo-nazis in their coalition.
And areas of Ukraine were historically part of Russia for centuries, and some, like Crimea, had a majority ethnic Russian population, and the country is being cuddled by foreign powers to be used as a pressure point against Russia. Not that this gives Russia the right, but it's an understandable concern and right next to its borders.
Meanwhile, the US has invaded 4 countries in the last 20 years, halfway around the world from itself, that it had absolutely no reason to be or BS, and helped destabilize several others and arbitrarily punish ("sanction") whichever it doesn't like with huge cost to their populations. Cry me a river about their concern for "aggresion" in this case.
I find myself to be in complete agreement with the second part of your post but not so much with the first.
The fact is that Germany, France even Ukraine are concerned about the language coming out of Washington.
If Putin attacks Ukraine he will clearly be the most responsible party, by far but there are concerns, and not just from the Putin friendly alt-right or the far-left.
I recommend you check out the Bloggingheads conversation between Robert Wright and Thomas Friedman. Thomas Friedman, yes let's invade Iraq yesterday Thomas Friedman, was arguing NATO expansion was a mistake and that the best resolution to this crisis would be an officially neutral Ukraine.
Check out the video:
https://youtu.be/mBOczZjQO1Q
"Meanwhile, some in the press (though few to no people in positions of power) are still flirting with fringe ideologies like MMT, which urge higher deficits and lower taxes in every situation."
Neither "fringe" nor "ideology" applies to MMT and the phrase "...which urge higher deficits and lower taxes in every situation" reveals that you don't know much about it. That contention compares badly with the large majority of your writing which is informed and free of hyperbole. I feel MMT has much to recommend itself, especially as an alternative to Neoliberal economics which is still dominant in the US in spite of its many defects and the sorry record it has had in our country for the last fifty years. Maybe consider investigating MMT and posting your thoughts?
Tweet by David Klion, shared by Matt Yglesias so I assume he also agrees.
Good summary of the Russia/Ukraine crisis in my opinion:
https://twitter.com/DavidKlion/status/1492558754558189569?
t=9Ku9HgbCKm2SeUs2Myrbbg&s=19
"My position on this conflict has been the same since 2014: Russia is the aggressor and what it's doing to Ukraine is terribly unfair, and also there's very little the US can do about it and a lot the US has done in the past to help get us here."
Although I think you're broadly correct, I think you are missing something on the concept of provocation in understanding how Russia sees it – and of course one of the tragedies of war is that both sides often think the other provoked it. If you look at it in terms of morally-neutral regional power politics with Russia and the Western countries as adversaries, it certainly looks like the Western countries are continuing their push to expand their alliance to Russia's borders – or from a revanchist perspective, inside Russia's historical borders. Whether it's via membership in the EU or NATO is a distinction without a difference – in fact I'd say the former is more of a sign of alliance with the Western nations than the latter – so a step like, say, granting visa-free travel, or joining the DCFTA, or announcing that you're seeking EU membership, is seen as part of a realignment being pushed against Russia's interest, not without reason.
The big caveat, of course, being in the EU is way better than being in Russia's 'sphere of influence' and literally every country knows this, so Russia basically has no hope of maintaining a sphere of influence by normal means. The EU is widely seen as weak but is very, very good at leveraging all kinds of economic strength (as long as its citizens pay no price whatsoever), so the sheer gravity of the market will pull countries like Ukraine in. This is a direct threat to Russia's influence in the region, which powers always see as key to their self-interest – no one wants an enemy right on their border.
I still agree with you that tools such as sanctions and (maybe) weapons shipments are fine; the issue of the sanctity of international borders is also important and allowing Russia to annex Crimea essentially unpunished was a big mistake that I think exacerbated the current crisis. And I think it's plausible that Putin thought the EU would back down and the US wouldn't care and now is caught in a kind of bluff he didn't expect to deliver on. I also always suspect these things are driven by internal politics we don't hear about, like some threat to his power from a close ally. Who knows? But I don't think Russia is wrong to see Ukraine falling out of its sphere of influence as a precursor to important countries like Kazakhstan doing so as well, and because the only source of power it has our arms and natural resource supply, they are the only ones they can use.
So yes, it's a war of aggression in which Putin would be in the wrong. But strictly in terms of power balance, the West has definitely taken steps to shift the balance away from Russia. In theory, it could promise to take those steps, like disavowing EU or NATO membership – although at this stage that might look like capitulation and invite further Russian overreach. Statecraft is complicated, but I think you really are overlooking the history of power balance in Eastern Europe in the last few decades; Ukraine is much more salient to Russia than Iraq was to the United States.
There have been voices calling for the US/NATO to defend Ukraine militarily. MP Tobias Elwood from the UK is one. Here's another. https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2022/01/us-must-prepare-war-against-russia-over-ukraine/360639/.
And more importantly, tons of vaguely aggressive rhetoric from hawks in WaPo or the Atlantic, who've spent the past 20 years never seeing a war they didn't want to start or double down on, calling for "resolve" and making horrible WWII analogies that decry "appeasement," and saying Putin won't stop with Ukraine, and the future of the whole free world is on the line, in the service of escalatory maximalist approaches that prevent any diplomatic concessions that might actually avoid a war. "No war in Ukraine" isn't just a call for the United States to avoid personally fighting it, but for the United States to swallow its pride and do what's necessary to actually avoid it.
The graver straw man is implying that those calling for realism and restraint somehow do not "support Ukraine" and its democratic leanings. Every decent, informed American with a conscience supports Ukraine, and hopes Vladimir Putin drops dead of a heart attack tomorrow. That just doesn't tell us what the hell to actually do about it, to minimize the harm and injustice that results from anarchic great power politics.
I get that there's recency bias and agree can't confuse Ukraine with Iraq. But it's equally irrational to see the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles as isolated errors, detached from national pathologies, biases and blind spots that remain very much alive in our foreign policy establishment today. And yes: NATO expansion is related to those pathologies. Realists warned against it for precisely the fear that it would stoke Russian insecurity whenever they recovered enough to push back against it, and lofty idealists laughed them out of the room.
You write, "A Russian invasion would a clear and unambiguous act of aggression. And yet some progressives insist on seeing Russia’s buildup as a reaction to Western aggression."
^A Russian invasion can be two things at one time. Yes, it's evil and indefensible by any Western standard - and also something that may not in fact have happened had NATO not surged thousands of miles up to Russia's borders in its decade of weakness. And it might yet not happen, if we weren't too proud to admit what everyone already knows, and offer say a 20-year moratorium on NATO expansion. The maximalist voices who think we still live in 1998 and the United States can get everything it wants all the time are part of the reason we're at an impasse.
I for one much prefer a discourse that finally errs on the side of vigilance against this "blob," who romanticize America's military as a "global force for good," and inevitably trend towards a more aggressive and warmongering foreign policy than the American people actually want. The chances of direct war with Russia are low, but the stakes of such a conflict are high enough - and the experience of complacent media drumbeat recent enough - to warrant forceful and preemptive opposition to the idea.
The people that want war should join the army get on the plane and sit in a fox hole in the freezing cold waiting for command to charge. From the pictures of the 82nd Airborne troops loading onto planes I had the impression there were too few to make a difference and once again we, American are sacrificing young men and women for poorly developed goals.
I think there's a missed opportunity to discuss the impact of COVID on people. There's a lot of people who have been traumatized by the past two years and have moved forward very different than before and I do wonder how that'll affect their perspective going forward beyond COVID.
There is certainly a lot of BS rhetoric on both the "hawk" and "dove" sides about the Russia/Ukraine thing. It seems like the real issue of substance that the two sides do disagree about is whether there are concessions the US could make that should be acceptable to us, and which would prevent an invasion.
The real controversy, from what I can tell, is whether the US could solve the whole problem by putting it in writing that Ukraine will never be a NATO member. Perhaps as part of a deal that establishes Ukraine as a neutral state that will not enter military alliances with either NATO nor Russia.
Leave aside the lessons learned from the Iraq war, it's worth putting the Russia-Ukraine conflict through some basic marginal cost-benefit analysis.
Is there anything we can do, that we are willing to do, that could possibly improve the situation any? And if yes, would the improvement justify the cost?
I mean, we've been trying sanctions for years, and killing the pipeline appears to be a non-starter. A weapons buildup is brinkmanship by definition, and exactly what Russia is doing. Brinkmanship is a dangerous game, and it frequently leads to a bad place.
But back to the last-war problem: have any of the vested interests that dragged us to hell in Iraq changed? So why should we trust anyone in the establishment?
OMG what a terrible article.
The United States, American media and American politicians are doing nothing but talking about war: defending the Ukraine when there is ZERO Russian interest in invading Ukraine - much less occupying it.
This is a great post, but I think the risk of a hyper inflationary outcome if the Fed doesn’t hike rates is overstated. Hyper inflations are extremely rare and the key conditions just aren’t there (chiefly, runaway monetary financing of government deficits). I just don’t see the mechanism for how higher inflationary expectations results in currency collapse. Feels a bit blackbox, hand wavy.
The question is what Putin will do after Ukraine. Anyone actually think he will stop there? I’m getting more and more convinced brute force is a must.
"Meanwhile, recent U.S. troop deployments to NATO countries in East Europe such as Poland and Romania total fewer than 6,000 — a pittance compared to the 130,000 soldiers Russia has amassed on the Ukraine border, and certainly nowhere near enough to be the basis of military action."
On the contrary, 6000 NATO troops can do quite a lot. "Bluntly, they can die. They can die heroically, tragically, and in a manner that guarantees that the action cannot stop there." (Schelling, Arms and Influence). NATO troops dying in eastern Europe would mobilize domestic support for a conventional war. That was the logic of the East Berlin garrison, that is still the logic of placing an airborne battalion of 500 soldiers in Latvia.
Second, while few or no politicians are openly dumb enough to say the magic phrase "war with Russia," they are advocating measures equivalent to war. A no fly zone, as Rep. Kinzinger brilliantly proposed, would guarantee act of war. Shooting down a Russian fighter jet is an act of war, shooting down a Russian fighter jet with a NATO jet flying out of Poland or Romania justifies a Russian attack on that country. Imagine the response if a Russian jet out of Syria shot down an American fighter jet during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Disconnecting Russia from global finance is tantamount to an act of war under international law. One of the anti-US/anti-Roosevelt lines is he provoked the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor by embargoing the Japanese economy and denying them oil.
There is a moral difference between Iraq and Ukraine. It's weird and difficult to articulate, but no amount of tu quoque'ing can make it immoral for America to condemn the invasion of Ukraine.
To turn around and do exactly that, many of the same people cheerleading for sending anti-tank weapons to Ukraine were rending garments and denouncing Putin when Russia was (falsely, in turned out) accused of paying the Taliban bounties for American servicemembers, or when Iran armed Iraqi insurgents. Many of the politicians demanding NATO deployments to Eastern Europe and aggressive confrontation with Russia, even if that sparks a war (if Putin is unhinged enough to attack Ukraine, as we are now told to assume he's insane, why would he be any more reluctant to invade Estonia, or bombard Germany?)
What if Russia refuses to export gas to Eastern Europe, and the lights turn off and the heat goes out? Should we invade to end the humanitarian crisis and (forcibly) restore LNG shipments?
In short, even if no one says "invade Russia," demanding actions that predictably lead to a shooting conflict between NATO and Russia is not a smart move, nor is it a morally superior path to those who say to stay out of the war.
For clarity - I favor arms shipments to Ukraine, I favor closing the Bosphorus to Russian ships, I do not favor shutting down Russian banks. That hurts ordinary Russians far more than the kleptocrats, and unlike western democracies, popular discontent in Moscow leads to police rounding up the demonstrators, not to government policy changes.