Clearly we need another dozen aircraft carriers
Anything less would be unmanly 
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I think in Putin’s view the US hasn’t won a war since WW2, and the Russians believe (perhaps justifiably) that they were actually the ones that defeated Germany. We invade, commit some atrocities, make misery for everyone, then it peters out and we leave without accomplishing anything but profit for the military industrial complex.
If he’s decided we would be unwilling to use force in a way that would actually stop him, long term, the level of military strength is meaningless.
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If only we’d stayed in Vietnam another fifty years
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People in the anglosphere, to be precise. It’s really only UK and US media that seem like they almost look forward to this.
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And the Russians.
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“We need 12 carriers. We need a strong amphibious force to include nine big-deck amphibs and another 19 or 20 [LPDs] to support them. Perhaps 30 or more smaller amphibious ships to support Maritime Littoral Regiments… to 60 destroyers and probably 50 frigates, 70 attack submarines and a dozen ballistic missile submarines to about a 100 support ships and probably looking into the future about 150 unmanned.”
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This isn’t good
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The idea of these two regions being sovereign republics oppressed by Ukraine and wanting to “re-join” Mother Russia was always going to be the pretext for invasion. Thin and lacking any grounding in history as it is, he knows that his domestic Know-Nothings and the Useful Idiots and purchased shills in the West will swallow it.
Now that the Olympics are over and he doesn’t have to worry about upseting Xi, his next step will be a speech in front of parliament followed by a return to the kind and scale of war that Europe and Eurasia hasn’t seen for 80 years. Sadly, at the moment I think he’s just jerking Macron and Biden around on the diplomatic front.
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My guess is Biden doesn’t really think diplomacy has a shot at this point.
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I don’t think he ever did. Biden has to go through the motions but he’s also had his agencies pre-emptively de-bunking every one of Putin’s BS talking points and pretexts, has been laying the international groundwork for harsh economic punishments, and has been making a deliberate show of military strength in NATO territory.
Also, unlike Macron, there’s no domestic political advantage to Biden being seen as a peacemaker.
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Biden has done a great job navigating this. Macron has to worry about Russian natural gas imports, so he has to make a much bigger show on the diplomatic front.
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When Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy made peace, in the late seventeenth century, Kyiv lay on the Muscovite side. Its academy was Russia’s only institution of higher education, and its graduates were valued in Russia. Kyivan churchmen told their new rulers that Ukraine and Russia shared a common history; that seemed to give them right to tell it. Muscovy was renamed the “Russian Empire” in 1721 by reference to Rus, which of course had been defunct for half a millennium at that point. Between 1772 and 1795, Poland-Lithuania was partitioned out of existence, and the Russian empress (herself a German), proclaimed that she had restored what had been taken away: again, the myth of a restored Rus. In the late nineteenth century, Russian historians offered a similar story, one which downplayed the Asian side of Russian history, and the seven hundred years in which Kyiv had existed beyond Russia. This is more or less the story that Putin tells today.
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That is the breaking point. Recognizing them in any form breaks the Minsk agreement and sanctions kick in. No reason to hold back after that.
My hope is they will simply ask for a military presence, Russia will roll in, and the rest of the monstrosity in Belarus will wait to see if the Ukraine reacts militarily. That’s a very optimistic best case.
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The one economic sanction that matters here is nixing the nordstream 2 project which would irrecoverably damage the Russian economy. As long as Germany refuses to put it to a stop there any economic sanctions will be marginal at best.
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(source: NYT)
Good morning. A Russian invasion of Ukraine would be unlike most wars in 80 years.
A new era?
There have been dozens of wars in the almost 80 years since World War II ended. But if Russia invades Ukraine in the coming days, it will be different from almost all of them. It will be another sign that the world may be entering an alarming new era in which authoritarianism is on the rise.
In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain the two main ways that a war in Ukraine would be distinct. I will also update you on the latest developments, with reporting from my colleagues around the world.
1. Regional dominance
A Russian invasion of Ukraine seems likely to involve one of the world’s largest militaries launching an unprovoked ground invasion of a neighboring country. The apparent goal would be an expansion of regional dominance, either through annexation or the establishment of a puppet government.
Few other conflicts since World War II fit this description. Some of the closest analogies are the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in the 1970s, Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and Hungary in the 1950s — as well as Vladimir Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. The U.S., for its part, invaded Panama in the 1980s and used the C.I.A. to overthrow an elected government in Guatemala in the 1950s. Of course, it also launched several faraway wars, in Iraq, Vietnam and elsewhere.
But the world’s most powerful counties have rarely used force to expand their boundaries or set up client states in their region. Instead, they have generally abided by the treaties and international rules established in the 1940s. The phrase “Pax Americana” describes this stability.
The relative peace has had enormous benefits. Living standards have surged, with people living longer, healthier and more comfortable lives on average than their ancestors. In recent decades, the largest gains have come in lower-income countries. The decline in warfare has played a central role: By the start of this century, the rate at which people were dying in armed conflicts had fallen to the lowest level in recorded history, as Joshua Goldstein, Steven Pinker and other scholars have noted.
A Russian invasion of Ukraine would look like the kind of war that has been largely absent in the past 80 years and that was once common. It would involve a powerful nation setting out to expand its regional dominance by taking over a neighbor. A war like this — a voluntary war of aggression — would be a sign that Putin believed that Pax Americana was over and that the U.S., the European Union and their allies had become too weak to exact painful consequences.
As Anne Applebaum has written in The Atlantic, Putin and his inner circle are part of a new breed of autocrats, along with the rulers of China, Iran and Venezuela: “people who aren’t interested in treaties and documents, people who only respect hard power.”
This is why many people in Taiwan find the situation in Ukraine to be chilling, as my colleagues Steven Lee Myers and Amy Qin have explained. “If the Western powers fail to respond to Russia, they do embolden the Chinese thinking regarding action on Taiwan,” said Lai I-chung, a Taiwanese official with ties to its leaders. If the world is entering an era in which countries again make decisions based, above all, on what their military power allows them to do, it would be a big change.
2. Democratic recession
Political scientists have been warning for several years that democracy is in decline around the world. Larry Diamond of Stanford University has described the trend as a “democratic recession.”
Freedom House, which tracks every country in the world, reports that global political freedom has declined every year since 2006. Last year, Freedom House concluded, “the countries experiencing deterioration outnumbered those with improvements by the largest margin recorded since the negative trend began.”
A Russian takeover of Ukraine would contribute to this democratic recession in a new way: An autocracy would be taking over a democracy by force.
Ukraine is a largely democratic nation of more than 40 million people, with a pro-Western president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who in 2019 won 73 percent of the vote in the election’s final round. That victory and recent polls both indicate that most Ukrainians want to live in a country that resembles the European nations to its west — and the U.S. — more than it resembles Russia.
But Putin and his inner circle believe that liberal democracies are in decline, a view that Xi Jinping and other top Chinese officials share.
They know that the U.S. and Europe are now struggling to lift living standards for much of their populations. Putin and Xi also know that many Western countries are polarized, rived by cultural conflicts between metropolitan areas and more rural ones. Major political parties are weak (as in the case of the old center-left parties in Britain, France and elsewhere) or themselves behaving in anti-democratic ways (as with the Republican Party in the U.S.).
These problems have given Putin and his top aides confidence to act aggressively, believing that “the American-led order is in deep crisis,” Alexander Gabuev of the Carnegie Moscow Center wrote in The Economist this weekend.
In the view of Putin’s regime, Gabuev explained: “A new multipolar order is taking shape that reflects an unstoppable shift in power to authoritarian regimes that support traditional values. A feisty, resurgent Russia is a pioneering force behind the arrival of this new order, along with a rising China.”
As I’ve tried to emphasize before, the situation in Ukraine remains highly uncertain. Putin may still choose not to invade, given the potential for a protracted war, a large number of Russian casualties and economic turmoil. An invasion would be a spectacular gamble with almost no modern equivalent — which is also why it would be a sign that the world might be changing.
Related: “The 21st century has become a dark century because the seedbeds of democracy have been neglected and normal historical authoritarianism is on the march,” David Brooks wrote in a recent Times column.
And Farah Stockman argues that the Russia-China friendship that Richard Nixon feared has arrived.
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True, but there are two big sanctions that the West can impose that will leave a serious mark on Putin and his fellow kleptocrats: locking Russia out of SWIFT (the international bank transfer settlement system) and imposing yet more Magnitsky law sanctions (perhaps with such laws being enacted in yet more countries). What’s the point of being a billionaire if you can’t spend your money in relatively pleasant places on high-quality goodies?
A lot more Germans are waking up to the fact that Nordstream 2 will bind their country to a shakedown artist like Putin in very unhealthy ways. The time for anyone in power in the West to stop from going into operation it is long past, though. There are too many sunk costs at this point, as even the Biden administration has tacitly acknowledged. The best we can hope for in terms of punishing Russia re: Ukraine is more delays on its opening.
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Nice and typically slimy use of the passive voice, Bobo. You’ve fooled us into ignoring the fact the neoliberalism you’ve championed on behalf of selfish Boomers for the last 30+ years poisoned those seedbeds.
Richard Nixon feared a (nominally) Communist alliance. American nationalism aside, I strongly suspect he would have no problem with the anti-democratic broad worldview that now somewhat binds Putin and Xi.
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So I think it’s been decided - it’s war, unless someone unexpectedly gives in. But that someone is not going to be Putin. He knows that he has nothing to lose: sanctions haven’t deterred him so far, he’s prepated for Russia being locked out of SWIFT with tons of cash and an alternate system that’s already in use, and he has an ally (China, duh - who may just start messing with Taiwan now, to keep the US distracted). NATO is not going to intervene directly - as much as some Americans have been fearmongering (in the USA anyway) over omg the administration using war as a distraction, NATO is not going to go to war over Ukraine. As much as it sucks for us living in Russia’s backyard, we’re just not worth escalating a conflict for, never been, as it has been extensively proven during the 20th century. NATO may supply Ukraine with arms and money but nothing else. And the EU has no army on its own. (Besides, NATO is not an offensive organization, it’s a defensive one. It won’t intervene directly unless a NATO country is threatened.)
Even though my country is a EU member I’m really scared now - Ukraine is our neighbor, and our Dear Leader PM is already so far up Putin’s ass it’s impossible for him to crawl out now. He’s been consistently pushing Russian interests at home and in the EU, constantly threatening leaving the EU if it starts intervening in him building his autocratic kleptocracy, and I’m terrified to think what would happen were he forced to openly choose sides between Russia and the EU.
This video is a bit old now (posted 9 days ago) but I think it does a great job assessing the situation at that point, and predicting what may happen.
The same channel also has a pretty accurate overview of the background of the conflict:
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