In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard Zbigniew Brzezinski did say that if Europe went to war again it would start in Ukraine.
Some choice quotes:
“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”
“However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.”
This is one of the issues I see with books of prognostications, they aren't so much as predicting the future as advocating for a course of action. They are selling their own version of the future.
Dugin serves as an adviser to State Duma speaker Sergei Naryshkin, a key member of the ruling United Russia party who has loudly supported Russian intervention in Ukraine, and has made widely viewed television appearances to discuss the Ukraine crisis alongside high-ranking members of the government. [Economist Sergei Glazyev] is also an associate of Dugin's.
Few books published in Russia during the post-communist period have exerted such an influence on Russian military, police, and foreign policy elites as Aleksandr Dugin’s 1997 neo-fascist treatise Osnovy geopolitiki: Geopoliticheskoe budushchee Rossii (Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geo-political Future of Russia).
The Foundations of Geopolitics sold out in four editions, and continues to be assigned as a textbook at the General Staff Academy and other military universities in Russia. “There has probably not been another book published in Russia during the post-communist period which has exerted a comparable influence on Russian military, police, and statist foreign policy elites,” writes historian John Dunlop, a Hoover Institution specialist on the Russian right.
The publication of The Foundations of Geopolitics in 1997 was received with great interest, and brought Dugin to the attention of powerful figures in the Russian government. He wisely befriended the oligarch Aleksandr Taranzev, who recommended him to the military general staff.
...
Dugin’s book was incorporated into the curriculum of the Russian military academy and became required reading for the next generation of officers. One year later, Dugin was appointed senior political adviser to Gennadiy Seleznyov, a former member of the Communist Party and chairman of the Russian parliament, who headed the Center for Geopolitical Analysis, a think tank dedicated to policy recommendations on internal security matters.
...
The radical intellectual’s stature reached new heights with the appointment of Vladimir Putin to the Russian presidency. Slowly but surely, Dugin succeeded in ingratiating himself with the new president’s inner circle. He forged strong ties with a hawkish, security-oriented clique of insiders, mostly composed of ex-members of the military and the security services. First and foremost among them was Igor Sechin, a former KGB official who has served as Putin’s closest adviser for the past fifteen years and is now deputy prime minister. Other members of this powerful faction include Security Council secretary and former head of the FSB Nikolai Patrushev; former deputy prime minister and Security Council member Sergei Ivanov; and Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of the lower house of parliament and chairman of Putin’s ruling United Russia party.
The activities of the copious and studious Eurasianist intellectual Alexander Dugin are making progress, and it is known that he has close relations with the Academy of the General Staff and once headed an advisory group in the office of Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznyov.
> With "unofficial" translations you will never know if the translators didnt censor/change the meaning somehow
With official translations, you don't know that, either. In fact, for the same reasons that politicians who speak in multiple languages often give speeches, on a given subject, with substantially different content in different languages, official translations of books that are designed as political propaganda or advocacy often shade the content to different anticipated audiences in different languages.
> “Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”
He claims that without any proof. This maybe would have been true in the 19th century given the technologies for war and power at that time.
But we have the 21st century now. Why should the Ukraine be so important? Why could Russia not be an empire without Ukraine? Russia is the biggest country with the most sources of raw materials. It has the most nuclear weapons. It has a huge fleet. It is feared by all of its neighbors.
But that all doesn't matter nowadays. Because if you want to be a world power in 21st century what you need is a huge economy. And Russias GDP is as big as Italy. But invading Ukraine wouldn't help Russia to increase its GDP.
And that is why what Zbigniew Brzezinsk writes is outdated nonsense. Everyone who believes that still lives in the 19th century.
It would be easier to take your opinions seriously if they weren’t contradicted by events happening right now; events which match Brzezinski’s “outdated nonsense” from the 90s perfectly.
You could very well be correct, perhaps the leaders of these countries are living in the 19th century. But the fact that the current leaders of Ukraine, USA and Russia are acting in line with/on these older assumptions makes them relevant still today.
Also there’s plenty of information backing up his claims in the book, you’re welcome to go read it. It’s an excellent window into the way geopolics is rationalised, written by one of the people who have shaped it!
Predicting the future is hard, specially if you think in 20-30 years forward.
But, giving enough predictions, you will have a lot of hits in a sea of misses. A lot of development happened in the middle that could had turned things in different directions. Also, beware of hindsight bias.
Anyway, it is not just one data point what matters. What comes after in his predictions and how adjusted is to what happens in reality (without creative accounting, like with Nostradamus predictions) may tell how right that was.
> But, giving enough predictions, you will have a lot of hits in a sea of misses.
I somehow doubt that he made the range of varied and contradictory predictions necessary to make this hypothesis correct. I don't know what to call this muddled assertion that so many people seem to be making about hindsight bias or survivorship bias. It's like a bias towards claiming bias, which seems absurd to me. Is everyone just hunting for places where they can use some witty sounding assertion that they saw someone else use and so they're incorrectly applying it everywhere with little discrimination?
The creative accounting was done by others. They say that Nostradamus "predicted" this because they choose what they read, when they read, and apply it to particular situations that fit, and not to others that don't, being aware of that or not. There is a bunch of cognitive biases around that, with fancy names like selection bias or Texas sharpshooter fallacy, to name a few.
It may not be for this case, I just point out that you should be aware of the possibility.
Your whole NATO core staff been voicing this in unison for 2 decades in a row, only for Western politicians to dismiss it. Lookup my other posts today, and especially this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30453790
The Mongols didn't need an economy to create chaos and conquer most of Eurasia. Babylon was conquered by Macedonia, Constantinople fell to the Turks, and Rome to the Vandals. Mixing up economic power with willingness to bleed for a mythical cause is a mistake. Also, who needs an economy when you can just have a big army and take booty? Definitely not Russia.
This is not the modern-day version of USSR vs USA. It's the modern version of the Mongol Horde vs Civilization. (No offense to current Mongols; you guys are cool).
Modern Russia is not an unstoppable army of nomadic warriors with a strong martial culture arising from their making their living as herders. It's a badly run kleptocracy trying desperately to remain relevant.
Come and see. They don't have to hold land and in most cases, the strategic goal is to have puppets hold it for them. USSR was three levels deep in puppets (four if you count "republics").
They tried puppets in Ukraine for some time. They also have a dependent client state on another of Ukraine's borders, in Belarus, "led" by a terrified semi-lame autocrat who needs to prove his loyalty to Putin to continue in office.
Bad things (and increasingly belligerent, isolated psychopaths) on two sides.
Not only does Putin have nothing to lose from all of this, there is more than a hint that he has nothing to lose full stop. More than one analyst and political aide has observed that Putin has changed significantly on a personal level, and appears to be paranoid about Covid and about all his generals and advisers.
It's not just a threat; at this point it is a risk.
Agreed. The attack on Ukraine is actually rather later than I imagined that it would happen (I thought this would happen immediately after Trump lost the election).
What happens next is anybody's guess and that's a very bad feeling to have in times like these, the fate of the world as we know it is in the balance.
As we have seen before, only very recently: bad things happen when psychopaths start to unravel, especially malignant narcissists.
Putin has long kept his narcissism under a kind of control.
A bit of bare-chest, bareback horseriding. A few ice hockey matches with opponents who comically offer little resistance.
A gigantic pseudosecret palatial residence that looks like a seat of power for a Bond villain, but is actually his safe space.
But even in Russia's nationally televised broadcasts Putin appears to be struggling to control his emotions and his temper.
It's not particularly difficult to see that loyalty to a psychopath loses its currency when that psychopath has no use for you, but also that using your loyalty as a constant mediating influence becomes impossible when the psychopath departs from reality.
The question for any kind of diplomacy, hardball or softball, is this: is Vladimir Putin still in full control of himself? Because he's behaving unusually on the basis of his prior record. Only a handful of years ago he was a very different figure on the world stage. If his narcissism has no supply, no moderation, things could get even uglier.
And yet again he is signposting it -- "all relevant decisions have been taken."
We kept pretending his signposts were diplomatic noise, when in fact he's just a psychopath telling people what he is going to do to them.
Maybe he has nothing to lose from threatening. But he would have a lot to lose (namely Moscow, and any place where he's known to usually spend time) if he actually fired a nuke at some EU capital.
I'll bet that that would not be Paris or London. But to try to guess what someone who has nothing to lose will do is folly, Putin might very well be beyond caring even about such stuff: he wants his legacy cemented and there are two ways out of that that would satisfy him: the fact that he is remembered as a great Russian or that there isn't anybody left to remember what kind of an idiot he was.
For some idea of this mentality, if you haven't seen it yet I highly recommend the movie Der Untergang, which is as historically accurate as they could make it, and which gives a unique perspective on how things could get so bad that parents would poison their children to avoid them having to live in a world where they weren't the victors.
NATO article 5 is a meaningless piece of paper in and of itself if the will to retaliate isn't present and we will only find out about that at the moment someone wants it invoked. I would not necessarily bet on knowing how that ends. The response against what happened just now is underwhelming, and the various investments in fomenting nationalism/isolationism may well pay off. These are very dangerous times.
> I highly recommend the movie Der Untergang, which is as historically accurate as they could make it
And in case anyone didn't make the connection, is also the movie where the scene used in all those "Hitler hears about..." YouTube clips is taken from.
Nuclear weapons require constant, ongoing maintenance if they have any hope of going bang. Russia doesn't have the assets to keep that up anymore. Their nuclear arsenal is probably a fraction of its theoretical capability.
In addition, if Putin tried to launch nukes, I doubt the other oligarchs would go along with his mass suicide plan.
If there is one thing I've learned about Russian technology then it is that in general it will operate 'good enough' to do what it was designed to do even if that means that it isn't designed in a way that we would consider elegant. Assuming that Russia's nuclear arsenal is dysfunctional or even non-existent would be a very large - and possibly fatal - mistake, especially given that it never was designed as a precision tool anyway but relied on massive overkill. You may well be right, but if history is any guide here making assumptions without hard evidence about the nature of an enemy arsenal, either positive or negative will lead to trouble.
I had a couple conversations with an engineer who worked a long career on maintaining nuclear warheads. I was rather surprised when he told me that he didn't view nuclear war as likely.
As he explained it, plutonium warheads break down over time. They create helium gas pockets and sometimes internal fractures that prevent detonation.
The solution is to reform the warhead every few years.
The problem here is that plutonium has over a dozen crystalline forms. If they don't achieve a uniform crystal, the warhead will fail to detonate due to the imperfections along the lines where the different crystals come together. This takes a ton of time and money (and often many, many attempts).
Together these mean that the warheads are getting very old and the upkeep to keep them working is huge. Russia can keep a few in working order, but not nearly what their previous arsenal would imply.
I have always wondered this. Nuclear Apocalypse scenarios always assume the ICBMs will all function as specified. Maybe they will, but it's not like you can thoroughly test each one. But I guess they don't need to.
There were assumptions that lots of missiles would malfunction or not reach their intended targets and so various cities and strategic objectives were targeted with multiple warheads from different launch sites. This led to 'overkill':
Ukraine has excellent farmland. Russia has their own local economy and can produce most of the things they need just with their direct neighbors. French cheeses, American-branded phones, and Italian cars may be too expensive for the Russian economy, but the Russian government doesn't care. Close-enough products can be had for a fraction of the price.
Thinking of things in terms of raw GDP is what is getting the west into a total mess. For years now people have said Russia won't do anything and couldn't possibly be a threat because their GDP is so low. China will never be a major player because their GDP per capita is so low.
But that's, frankly, stupid. People in Switzerland pay $20 for a sandwich. People in Vietnam are paying $0.75 for a sandwich that tastes twice as good. People in China are getting locally made phones with the equivalent of US pocket change and riding high speed trains for the cost of a slow and janky NY subway trip. GDP means absolutely nothing outside of international trade within the global sphere. GDP didn't help America beat Afghanistan, one of the absolute poorest countries on earth. It didn't help them beat North Korea or Vietnam either. They still haven't succeeded in removing communism from poverty-stricken, bottom of the barrel GDP Cuba. If Russia decides to keep moving into western Europe, their GDPs mean nothing. Seizing that land just means Russia gets all of what those countries have, forever, without the high price tag.
GDP isn't motivating angry dictators to invade. They're doing it because they can.
All that might be true for consumer products, but it’s absolutely not true for weapons systems and cutting edge technologies. Their J-20 fighter jet has a cost between 30-120 million, whereas the F-35 costs 78 million. It’s also worth mentioning that the high speed rail in China only exists because of strict control over airways making trains artificially competitive. Despite this state rail system holds 850B in debt alone (with some numbers I’ve seen online indicating a total system debt of 1.8 trillion), and is losing money daily. Regardless of the rumored numbers, a debt level that high indicates that they have to pay near-western prices for advanced technology. Tanks, jets and high speed rail are considerably more challenging to produce cheaply than sandwiches or obsolete smart phones.
Agree 100%. The problem is really, GDP is in one currency. There should be a second metric, adjusted to local buying power, for countries with loads of internal resources, and production capability.
When I look at numbers, for example, which China spends on military spending, and research? Then try to equate it not in USD, but in local buying power?
And also consider many Chinese companies are state owned, including resources (mining), refining, and producing weapons...
Compared to almost everything the US GOV and the West do, being for profit...
It seems to me that China's military budget dwarfs all of NATO, in terms of buying power.
Yet most seem to not consider this. Even in planning.
US air superiority means little, if each US plane costs 40x a Chinese plane, and each US plane is swarmed by 100 planes at once...
> There should be a second metric, adjusted to local buying power, for countries with loads of internal resources, and production capability.
There is, it's called GDP PPP (Purchasing Power Parity). It adjusts for local prices, so countries like Russia and China rank higher than they would at a nominal level. Keep in mind though global commodities are typically priced the same (or similar) worldwide; PPP only applies to goods produced internally.
There's a difference between political failures and military ones. Apples and oranges. No amount of military power can compensate for a lack of (or unachievable) political goals.
Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan all lacked coherent political goals. "Destroy military forces supported by half the country" is not a valid strategy.
Side note: you've used the old-fashioned (and Putin-favoured) english nomenclature for Ukraine as "the Ukraine" in the first sentence, and the Ukraine-preferred nomenclature in the second.
This is actually the crux of the issue in two sentences. Ukraine is a sovereign state, but Putin politically asserts it is merely a territory they control, harking back to a pre-WWII time; Ukraine was a territory regularly divided up and under the control of different neighbouring states as a bargaining chip, gift, settlement, or conquest.
This is I guess why Brzezinski talked about it as it was and as it is. Ukraine used to be passed around and fought over as a set of territories without a home. Post WWII, it is a nation state and its existence as a nation state historically perturbs its neighbours, most notably Russia.
Ukraine still has all the geographical significance it had. It's the second-largest country by land mass in Europe, it is fertile (a nearby breadbasket, geopolitically), it is also mineral rich, etc.
So Brzezinski wasn't wrong to say it was still a source of conflict, a prize, but now being an independent nation state it has the right to defend itself and enter alliances. That makes it a risk strategic point -- even perhaps a pivot -- in a future conflict.
> Why could Russia not be an empire without Ukraine?
If Russia is to (re)build an "empire", it needs Ukraine to do it, for all the reasons above.
Bold to say Brzezinski wrote nonsense, though. Good for you: put yourself out there as an international statesman.
One of the reasons things like the EU are a good idea, is because there are very few if any nation states e.g Basque in Spain, Northern Ireland in Ireland/UK, Scotland in UK, Shetland in Scotland, Swedish Finns in Finland and so on and so on (and it's a global thing, Kurds in Iraq/Syria/etc). It's all a bit fractal and and subjective and shades of gray and often it's the drawing of sharp artificial boundaries over the top of that that causes the problems.
One thing that unifies the extreme socialist left and the extreme and alt-right in the UK is an almost rote belief in regional self-determination, as if all of those movements could have a place of their own if wider agreements can only be broken up. The paradox of both the extreme left and extreme right is that many among them admire Putin as a "strong leader" and believe Putin is acting out of Donbas's interests in liberating them. Their shock at the disconnect with what is actually happening -- that everyone free of motivated reasoning could see coming -- is fascinating.
But there is a funny thing going on right now at great speed. For a while in Europe it has been Putin's world and we just live in it -- he's been the most sophisticated single backer/instigator of discontent across the continent. But it looks like there is a chance, right now, that this bubble could burst for him, and burst domestically. It's going to be a turbulent fortnight.
Russia’s GDP is 25% smaller than the U.S. State of Texas.
It sounds like a joke but it isn’t.
Texas GDP is $2.0 trillion.
Russia GDP is $1.48 trillion.
Most of Russia’s GDP is selling oil and gas which is one of the reasons Putin is able to do this now. Through higher oil prices he’s amassed a war chest of $631 billion in foreign currency reserves that will enable him to weather sanctions. That along with the friendship treaty with China giving them a market to sell their oil and gas and sanctions will prove fairly toothless.
Also the Italy comparison doesn't take into account GDP PPP per capita (Italy 44th in the world, Russia 77th and below several former Comecon states) or the extensive difference in the amount of stolen wealth in their respective diasporas.
This is all assuming you share an underlying rational with the leader of Russia, which you don't. Putin obviously doesn't care about having a good economy or making life better for the average Russian. He cares about making himself look strong and maintaining power, and showing strength. In the long run Russia is going to hurt over this, but that's not what Putin cares about.
+1 to this comment -- as you state it's not possible to apply western success metrics to Russian politics or Putin. Of that Italian-sized economy, the spoils go to Putin's oligarchs and the average Russian is apathetic about political influence and fed government-owned TV news. Historically, they haven't been able to influence things and their needs matter little. It isn't a western democracy or economy -- it's more like an authoritarian regime where it's the needs of the political leadership that matter. They should have seized Putin's super-yacht before it fled Germany last week.
The flipside though is that Putin wouldn't be doing this unless he thought it would be popular and cement his legacy as a czar; and he wouldn't commit his Russians to it if he didn't think it would make Russia stronger and benefit Russia in the long term. His thinking is rational in this regard. Barbaric, but rational. And it will take more than sanctions to shake the foundation of this medieval belief.
Is there a strong reason to believe that Putin thinks this way? As recently as two days ago, people in my circles were presenting this as an argument for why Putin wouldn’t invade, since it seemed so obvious that Russia would be stronger by claiming to occupy the moral high ground while protecting the separatist regions through deterrence.
There is no reason. People are just projecting because geopolitical war is too nuanced. For more informed takes on this check out Peter zeihan. I’m not saying his take is gospel, but at the very least he reveals the plethora of factors that are at play that the news will never tell you about.
Putin's move here is like what you do when your character is about to die in CK3 so you just throw all your armies at a neighboring territory while you still have a claim you can press, even if your casus belli isn't accepted by the neighbors.
The strongest reason for me to believe his thinking is rational in terms of the Russian interest is that there is very little that could make Russia worse after his rule, and there are many reasons to suspect he's facing his own mortality. So here he's making a high-price choice which will dent his bank account and possibly his short-term popularity. As the richest man in the world and the most popular man in Russia, he must be dying and trying to make one last push. Otherwise there's no reason for him not to rest on his laurels: His massive wealth and the total ownership of Russia he has already. The man should retire. But he wants to make himself Peter the Great or Ivan the Terrible; to put himself into the annals of the Orthodox Church, he must conquer the cradle of the Rus'.
My theory on Putin is that he may be suffering from cancer. It would explain his terror of close contact with people, and this extreme move --
My fear about him is that he may want to take the rest of the world with him when he dies, including Russia.
I've met little "non-political" Russians like Putin playing guitar, working illegally at restaurants; accidentally overstayed a visa, have to go home to visit Moscow; you know because there's a soviet pin inside the jacket. Yuri Gagarin, or something. He's one of a type that exists and travels around Europe now.
[Edit: I saw this article had never been posted on HN so I just put it up... but it's been immediately deleted, for reasons I don't know].
Hah. Wild. I had read this a few years ago and never saw the comments. It's a pretty great piece of writing, maybe even more brilliant if it's totally fake; but yeah, his comments call it into doubt. It's hard for me to tell whether he's being sarcastic, on drugs, or admitting to making it up. Or all three.
One theory being discussed is that Putin will declare Russia + Belarus + Ukraine a new country, and thus can be the leader of it and avoid difficult changes needed to continue to serve as President. They've done quite a bit of dancing to keep him in power despite term limits, and a new constitution would greatly facilitate his (and his cronies) ability to hold power
> They've done quite a bit of dancing to keep him in power despite term limits,
Wasn't it hilarious how in 2008-2012 (? or thereabouts) the Prime Minister was suddenly more important than the President, when before and after it's been the other way around?
There seems to be an "anschluss" underway with Belarus already. But it doesn't appear today that Putin needs any legal grounds to declare anything he wants; he's essentially president-for-life already, without changing the borders.
Ukraine has gas reserves that seem to be mostly untouched because of regional turmoil and therefore a temporary inability to get that gas out of the ground.
Russia is close to a modern day feudal state if you think about it. The only difference is that Putin splits the country's mineral resources with the oligarchy instead of the land. This is coming from an acclaimed Russian novelist, Vladimir Sorokin. This Spiegel interview with Sorokin dates from before the 2008 Russo-Georgian war:
at some level, it’s fair to say that serfdom just never stopped: you can call the leader “tsar”, “comrade”, “president”, or whatever else you want if it makes you happy, but “prole” and “serf” are more or less cognates too.
> Because if you want to be a world power in 21st century what you need is a huge economy.
Lol being a world power was never about the economy, it had always been about military strength. Americans might think that they are a superpower because they have one of the largest economies in the world, but that’s being totally small-minded and missing the fact that the reason why their economy is that big in the first place is that the purpose of economies is to power the military with networks, talent, and money.
So many commentators did not live through post-USSR 90s to completely miss the mentality and culture which shapes Putin's decisions.
First, you need to understand values of a person, then their goals, then their methods to achieve the goals. 90s in post-USSR countries were a relatively free environment (from state prosecution) and it naturally selected for individuals which wanted as much power as possible and were willing to take it. For these individuals power is given only to those, who are powerful enough to have it, and must be taken from those, who are not powerful enough to keep it. If you are having your power, than it is moral for you to keep it until you don't.
This way of thinking is not something new or unique to post-USSR 90s - we as humanity have lived with this way of thinking for millennia and our thinking gave birth to countless empires and kingdoms. Those, who were powerful enough to be emperors, also had a right to be. Those, who challenged them in their power, would be new emperors, if proven powerful enough, otherwise would be painfully killed, their property and wives taken and their name forgotten. Let's call this mentality a "Cult of a Warrior". When you are living in this mentality, nothing is worse than feeling shame of abandoning your ideals or friends; you must be a truthful Warrior of the Cult until you die. But in the same time you can freely take anything you like which does not already belong to any of your friends, because if somebody is not powerful enough to fight you, than this person is not worthy of keeping this thing in the first place.
Some of us (humans) during a course of time have countlessly discovered and rediscovered that people can be treated as equal in principle, independent on their physical/economic/political power. This arrangement led to a more productive economic environment where zero-sum-game of Cult of a Warrior changed to a positive sum game of "Everybody Must Be Soft Cult". Also less overall human suffering is kind of cool, but economy thing is always first. In Everybody Must Be Soft Cult power over people can be used only with great care, everything is governed by a bureaucracy and no-one is unwilling to take too much responsibility for any action. This Cult uses a strong moral system to prohibit each of its members from using too much power on the others and those, who do not accept this system, are gradually punished with worse and worse strikes of punishment each time to learn their lesson. At the end, those individuals, who do not understand the reason for given punishment (its always abuse of power over others), are brought to death or exiled. Welcome to the Western civilization as we know it.
So let's go back to Putin and Ukraine. If we accept as an axiom that Putin is an adept of the Cult of a Warrior, then we can make the following conclusions:
1. Putin sees himself as a Chief Warrior of his tribe and therefore has factual and moral power to make any decisions for his tribe as he likes it. I will call him the "Chief Warrior" from now on.
2. The Chief Warrior sees that as time goes on, more and more fellow members of his tribe are turning from Cult of a Warrior to the Cult of Everybody Must Be Soft. From a point of view of a Warrior nothing is worse than to convert yourself to an Everybody Must Be Soft person. Worse is only when your children convert to Everybody Must Be Soft Cult and become all PC and LGBTQ drug loving hippies. No Warrior wants that to their children.
3. So from the Chief Warrior point of view he (in the Warrior cult its always he) does not have any choices at all regarding what to do with his life and how to guide his tribe next. First of all, he must save the tribe from this fucking Everybody Must Be Soft epidemy which is happening right now and must do so ASAP.
4. To save the tribe from Everybody Must Be Soft epidemy it must be separated from the source of the illness in the first place. That means economic and information blockade. All key technologies and industries must be developed in house, all external communication must be ceased, the nation must be quarantined until it find its Warrior soul again. Also its awesome if some of the most active bad blood from the Everybody Must Be Soft movement emigrates in the process.
5. So how to turn a course of a nation of 100+ million people, rapidly integrating from 1990s into Western economy and system of values? It is not so easy. You nee some help from your opponent in doing so. Remember Eastern martial arts - it takes less power to use your opponent against himself, then to do everything all by yourself? So you need to use Everybody Must Be Soft system of punishment to get yourself excluded and expulsed from its system. Economic sanctions is the name for it. For all sanctions the national economy will get a strong hit in the short term, but will become independent from the Everybody Must Be Soft economic system in the long term. Everything, which does not kill us, makes us stronger - said a fellow Warrior (or something like that) once.
6. How to get economic sanctions from the West? Everybody Must Be Soft always punishes for abuse of power, so we must show it to them. Crimea in 2014 was a nice start and we also reminded our fellow Warriors that our soul of the Warrior is not lost yet to the illness, that the times are turning. Also have to make internal reforms regarding freedom of speech, independent news media and political parties to smoke out all the Everybody Must Be Soft elite, so that this liberal pus comes out of an ill body of the Warrior which always has been and always will be Russian Empire, or Russia as it is simply called right now.
So what can people from Everybody Must Be Soft Cult can do to gain advantage in this fight? First of all, get their heads out of their arses and imagine that some people from another culture living on another continent might think differently than they are regarding fundamental ways of living and morality. Take some LSD and watch Chinese martial arts movies for Christs sake if you have so limited imagination.
Second, launch a program of giving free Western university education to Russians with a condition of returning back to their shitty dictatorial country as it is right now and starting improving something in this regard. Subsidize creation of Russian voice-over for all Western movies, give free English language classes to people over 30 and overall increase cultural transfer to people living currently in Russia. To kill Putin you have to convert all these people into the Everybody Must Be Soft mentality.
Third, in NO CASE create any new economic sanctions to Russia and repel all the old ones. Going the sanctions route would be like giving the Chief Warrior exactly what he wants on a silver plate. Give large amounts of aid to Ukraine to compensate for inconvenience of having a bully neighbor at the same time.
Fourth, either Everybody Must Be Soft Cult wins by converting everyone over, or it dies from hands of the Great Russian and Chinese Warriors who are getting stronger in the meantime.
PS. Sorry for my grammar and typos, not a native speaker.
Also slightly edited regarding grammar/typos.
I think the Sanctions/No Sanctions debate is mostly moot. North Korea has been in the status of pariah state for decades and hasn't bent an inch. Compare that to China for whom we gladly swept the Tiananman Massacre under the rug, respected their sovereignty, made them a top trading partner and they have also not bent an inch. And we have hosted thousands of Chinese grad students at our universities. They are also watching the events in Ukraine right now and thinking "Why not Taiwan?" Modern dictators have learned very well the propaganda game. "We're rich because our enemies fear us" or "We're poor because our enemies are mistreating us" both work pretty well.
North Korea has definitely bent. Their nuclear program is moving slowly. Their cruise missile program is moving slowly. Without the sanctions they would have had missiles to carry out a global nuclear strike decades ago. South Korea launched satellites in the 90s!
China also bent. But in a way that is very different from what people expected. There was this idea that economic freedom must lead to political freedom. It was the cornerstone of political calculations for a century in the west. But it turns out China bent on the economic side without bending on the political side. This wasn't preordained, if hardliners in China had won their battle against reformers China would still be trapped. But by the time that it became clear that this was the greatest miscalculation of the last half century, it was too late. China became too entrenched economically in the global order for any sanctions to be possible.
But sanctions have worked. Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons because of sanctions.
What sanctions don't do is they don't lead to regime change. But they absolutely lead to massive behavioral changes.
"Bent" meaning in their intentions. Opening up to China was always meant to show them that capitalism was to everyone's advantage and that in a few decades they'd trend away from authoritarianism naturally. That absolutely hasn't happened. They are not the same country as they were 30 years ago but in many ways they are much worse.
> North Korea has been in the status of pariah state for decades and hasn't bent an inch.
There are sanctions on the NK leadership and you have to convert them and their children into the Western way of thinking before they can even give open information to regular people. Right now Russia just started to censor its internet and Western values together with Western media cat still freely flow to Russia's people. This window of opportunity is closing rapidly, over though.
> Compare that to China for whom we gladly swept the Tiananman Massacre under the rug, respected their sovereignty, made them a top trading partner and they have also not bent an inch.
Because China has ~ 1B people and it heavily censors its media from the start. You cannot change mentality of so many people so fast.
Yeah China censors media. So does Russia. So long as the control media they can make the population believe nonsense. Even countries with statutory freedom of speech are getting bombarded with propaganda very effectively. It's never been easier to get huge swaths of a national population to believe abject lies. Once they believe that government abuses are necessary for security they will get away with them forever.
Thank you, this is a very useful model of the philosophical differences between Russia and the west since the fall of the soviet union and provides some quality food for thought about how to change the direction geopolitics are going with the resurgence of strongmen across the globe.
I have traveled to Ukraine and Russia several times, dated a Russian briefly, then a Ukrainian, worked with Ukrainians in DC for several years, learned a bit of Russian and Ukrainian along the way... One of the things that I did not anticipate at first was the shared philosophical heritage with the west - my Russian ex-girlfriend's favorite book was Seneca's Letters to Lucilius, for one random example. For another, take a visit (in better times) to the Hermitage in St Petersburg and notice how the museum honors greek/roman philosophy and empire as much as any western museum.
The philosophical position upon which this country was founded - the rise of what recon517 is calling the "Everybody Must Be Soft" philosophy - has only been a dominant force recently, really only coming onto stage in the 20th century. It is not what has ruled the world for the majority of our 6,000 years of civilization and there is no guarantee that it will continue to do so. The idea that those who take and keep power by whatever means have a moral right to it is not new. I recently finished reading Xenophon's Anabasis (aka The Persian Expedition), and this philosophy seeps through just about every page as the Greek army lays waste to anyone not deemed of benefit to them, even fellow Greeks. Xenophon was a close friend of Socrates, remember.
Xenophon addressing the army, Anabasis book 6:
"As long as you stay together united as to-day, you will command respect and procure provisions; for might certainly exercises a right over what belongs to the weaker."
My point with all of this is 1) we have more shared history than you might think, and 2) that if you enjoy the fruits of an equality mindset over the fruits of a winner-takes-all mindset, then do not take it for granted. Its dominance in politics is not guaranteed, at home or abroad.
Live it, understand it, be it, calmly share it, never force it. We cannot win this war of ideas by treating it like a war. The irony is that in the end it is far more powerful to cooperate than to take, but the success rests upon preventing individuals from concentrating and exercising that power.
My two cents, another imperfect model for consideration.
What do you suppose makes it so impossible for a soft cult politician to recognise a warrior when they see one? Because warriors seem to have no problem seeing the other way around.
The Americans had their noses rubbed in it for 20 years in Afghanistan, only to see the warrior Taliban spring right back up overnight. I can’t imagine a more effective wake-up call than that.
It would have been better if they had just called Gorbachev and asked if invading Afghanistan could ever work or they should just drop it. He has the experience and I’m sure he would have been happy to share it.
I don't think they have a problem recognizing those that subscribe to the warrior cult mentality - notice how often our politicians publicly call Putin a "thug"? It's dealing with it that's the issue. You literally have to change a culture - how does one do that? Clearly sanctions are a blunt tool and often backfire. And violence is supposed to be the last resort for those of the equality mindset, whereas it's the first for the warrior mindset. It's tricky.
I've tried to map this model onto Afghanistan but I think that's a bit of a different beast. America was 100% foolish to invade, I agree. But an equality mentality and a warrior mentality are not the only cultural philosophies. Religion alters the picture in yet another way.
Perhaps, but the way the last cold war ended was by economic collapse. The warrior cultists needed somebody feeding and arming them, so they needed an economy, and their economy wasn't up to the task. I'm pretty sure the folks pushing the sanctions understand this.
Also, you could choose more neutral labels. The point of the egalitarians isn't that people should be soft but that people have rights even if they can't defend them. And really Putin believes this too, he just ignores this when convenient. He isn't okay with harms done to Russia when it was weak. If he really accepted this warrior ethos, he would think they were perfectly fine. Russia couldn't defend its interests, so it deserved whatever it got.
A neutral term for might makes right is kraterocracy. "Democracy" doesn't quite capture the alternative, but will do. Perhaps "egalitarianism" is better.
> Perhaps, but the way the last cold war ended was by economic collapse. The warrior cultists needed somebody feeding and arming them, so they needed an economy, and their economy wasn't up to the task. I'm pretty sure the folks pushing the sanctions understand this.
Except currently Europe desperately needs oil and gas from Russia.
> Also, you could choose more neutral labels. The point of the egalitarians isn't that people should be soft but that people have rights even if they can't defend them.
It was partly irony, partly an attempt to show how we (West) could be seen from their (Warrior) side. Because Warrior clan's people deeply despise the other ones.
> And really Putin believes this too, he just ignores this when convenient. He isn't okay with harms done to Russia when it was weak. If he really accepted this warrior ethos, he would think they were perfectly fine. Russia couldn't defend its interests, so it deserved whatever it got.
If your friend is badly beaten physically, you do not leave this friend behind to die because he is a weakling, you help him heal his wounds and make revenge later. If your friend has became weak emotionally, than it is time to dump or even kill him because of mercy. Because true strength of the Warrior lies in his spirit first and in its body second.
Russia in 90s was very weak economically, but spiritually was at its peak of Warrior (or bidlo/gopnik) ethos.
> A neutral term for might makes right is kraterocracy.
Do you want NYC to be a glowing rubble? An American direct attack on Putin would all but guarantee that outcome and likely a few more cities with it. Remember they also have subs right off our coast and I am not interested in finding out if their sailors are willing to follow through with their strike.
Some choice quotes:
“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”
“However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.”