Politics

[Sabattiboy]

Agreed, settling the world's really big issues takes time, time to project consistency, time to win trust, time to formulate and cement agreements. Four years of a presidency, the correct presidency, is way too short. Eight years may be ok without the pathetic ankle biting by the short sighted opposition to win noddy points. From out here in my context and looking at your's I conclude that democracy is way too problematic to be entrusted to people.

It's not supposed to be but when new generations arrive that paid nothing for what they been handed it turns into foolishness.
(Watch a kid with a car they had to buy vs a car they been handed for free with all costs of operation paid for them.)
I listen to many people disdain worker unions but none of them lived in the pre union times. When asked where paid holidays came from they all think the government gave them to us. Read the labor laws and they will find it gives them very little compared to what came from union contracts. Try to get the NLRB to enforce a violator with the law. will teach another lesson.
How is this explained to a people with no ears or brains? It can't be.
For most of my adult life I have listened to reasons why people didn't vote in the elections. When asked if they would participate in support of a candidate they approved of the answers are similar; have to work, have to watch sports, too tired, blah blah blah. When asked why things have went to hell in a hand basket? It will be someone else's problem or cause.
Will a state vote out a bad senator or representative that has a position of power? No. They want the goods they get for their state. The framers of America's constitution never believed Americans would put up with the stuff that now goes on in Local, state or federal government. You see, they had to throw them out the hard way back then. Today we have recall elections, general elections etc. Are they used to shape the people we need to fix problems? No. Will we get what our lack of effort deserves? Yes, we currently are getting just that.

Bush the younger said it would be a lot easier if it was a dictatorship.
Obama said he spent a lot of time trying to convince people to do what they already should do.

Do our leaders use the tools they have to deal with out of control companies? They seem to have forgotten how that is done or they own stock in a company that is out of control, antitrust comes to mind, so why would they do something that affects their own pocketbook?
Would a dictator fix any of this or would it turn into the same things we see in other countries run that way?
History says some lessons are learned the hard way. I doubt that will ever change.

 

[wesheltonj]

. . . One could say this is laughable, I will say that this is Realpolitik because the simple fact is the Europe cannot live without the Russian gas. . .

Well they could have. Most of Europe like the USA listens to the greenies and they were stupid enough to close their reactors, where if kept open, they would not have that problem. Just like we shut down our "dirty coal" fired power plants for Solar and Wind.

Except for transportation costs, we could sell the crap out on LNG to Europe.

 

[375 Ruger Fan]

One could say this is laughable, I will say that this is Realpolitik because the simple fact is the Europe cannot live without the Russian gas.

My guess is the Russian natural gas is mainly consumed for heating, electricity generation and industrial needs. As winter turns to spring, the natural gas requirement for heating will decline. Look for possible clamping down on Russian gas in a month or so. Ironically, one of the other big gas suppliers to Europe is Iran and Qatar from the huge offshore field known as the North Field on the Qatar side and South Pars on the Iranian side.

 

[One Day...]

I think our primary difference is with regard to Russia's actual place in the world and Putin's perception of its place in the world. That too is realpolitik. That doesn't make the situation any less dangerous, in fact, likely more so.

Russia may demand that nations on its borders not exercise self-determination, but that is very different than Russia compelling nations on its border to behave in something other than their own perceived national interests; rather like the Monroe doctrine through at least the Spanish American War.

I think most leadership in the West understood Crimea's importance to traditional Russian interests in the Black Sea. However, Ukraine as a whole, particularly since 2014 has made great strides in Westernizing, or probably more correctly, in de-Russification of much of its culture and bureaucracy. Equally bold steps seem to have been taken with respect to changing its military culture.

Russia is a little more than a third world country with a superpower's nuclear arsenal. It does not have a superpower's Army or Navy, and with a GDP the same as Texas, it is unlikely to ever have one. It deploys relatively small numbers of fairly sophisticated first line equipment, but has not made near the investment necessary to maintain such equipment in extended forward deployed operations. Its nuclear arsenal makes it dangerous - like a childish bully that has access to a loaded firearm. But that does not make him or Russia powerful - merely dangerous. Neither has the right to threaten other independent states.

I disagree with your conclusions about the restraint being displayed by Russian ground forces. Yes, there have not yet been neighborhood leveling conventional strikes against Ukrainian civilians as their air force employed in Syria, but I am ever more convinced that the Russians have not yet seized Kiev and Kharkov because they can't. Projecting power is difficult. It requires a high level of planning skill, vast resources, and the means to deliver those resources. The Russians have had no experience with that sort of warfare on this scale since the Second World War, and I see little evidence that they have made training for such operations a priority since the collapse of the USSR.

That lack of experience also likely failed to properly inform the logistics demands of modern sustained combat operations. Unlike the T-34 and the Mig-21, modern combat aircraft and combat vehicles devour spares, fuel, and manhours at incredible rates. The US Army's "tooth to tail" ratio is roughly 28% - 72%. Though that seems unwieldy, it also allows that 28% to operate with enormous flexibility and lethality in force projection operations.

If the cross border deployment numbers are remotely accurate, they have the equivalent of three or four Russian-sized mechanized divisions, with supporting forces, in the attack. That is a corps-sized force, but no doubt divided among three different commands all of which are apparently in contact with the enemy and demanding resupply. I am more certain every day that they have fought themselves to a standstill.

Complicating the "exercise" is the apparent defeat in detail of the Russian airborne force which seems to have had a key objective of establishing two or three different FOBs. The failure to achieve those objectives further exacerbates the supply effort.

No, I believe that Putin convinced himself that Ukraine, and specifically the government, would submit to a lethal show of force. It seems to have become very lethal indeed.

This is a very rational analysis of the other hypothesis.

My assertion is that Putin has not (yet?) decided all-out war on Ukraine; your assertion is that he has but he does not have the military capability to do it.

My analysis may be distorted by my aging understanding of the Russian/Soviet military capabilities.

Let us just say that if you are proven right, and if Russia is not militarily capable of defeating Ukraine, then there are a lot of upcoming changes for Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, etc.

We shall see...

As to the solution to the overall situation, I would personally see it quite similarly to what Kissinger and Brzezinski were recommending from 2000 to 2008. Some sort of "Finlandization" of Ukraine and Belarus in a first step, then progressive integration of Russia in the EU, and why not in NATO in the long run, as they ought to be pretty nervous about their border with China, and China territorial claims on Siberia (where most of their natural resources lie)...

 

[One Day...]

Well they could have. Most of Europe like the USA listens to the greenies and they were stupid enough to close their reactors, where if kept open, they would not have that problem. Just like we shut down our "dirty coal" fired power plants for Solar and Wind.

Except for transportation costs, we could sell the crap out on LNG to Europe.

My guess is the Russian natural gas is mainly consumed for heating, electricity generation and industrial needs. As winter turns to spring, the natural gas requirement for heating will decline. Look for possible clamping down on Russian gas in a month or so. Ironically, one of the other big gas suppliers to Europe is Iran and Qatar from the huge offshore field known as the North Field on the Qatar side and South Pars on the Iranian side.

All good points, and indeed decisions bear consequences, especially stupid decisions, but the bottom line is that any alternate strategy will take a few years to execute, including building terminals to unload and process US gas if this option develops.

Not to mention the fact that Qatar production is already committed to long term contracts, and Iran is not a much friendlier nation state than Russia, and is currently closer to Russia than to the Western world.

In any case, for the short term, it is dramatically simple: use Russian gas or, in Germany, turn off both light and heat; and in the rest of Europe, turn down the thermostat by 50% and forget about producing fertilizer (a huge consumer of gas).

 

[DieJager]

Some more insight why Putin calls it " denazification"

Thread by @kamilkazani on Thread Reader App

@kamilkazani: Let's discuss Putin speech. He declared Ukrainians to be "Neonazis" and promised to "denazify" them. Indeed the "Nazi" character of Ukrainian statehood and identity has long been a central thesis of Ru...…

threadreaderapp.com

Make sure to follow this man on Twitter. Great insights.

 

[Red Leg]

This is a very rational analysis of the other hypothesis.

My assertion is that Putin has not (yet?) decided all-out war on Ukraine; your assertion is that he has but he does not have the military capability to do it.

My analysis may be distorted by my aging understanding of the Russian/Soviet military capabilities.

Let us just say that if you are proven right, and if Russia is not militarily capable of defeating Ukraine, then there are a lot of upcoming changes for Georgia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, etc.

We shall see...

As to the solution to the overall situation, I would personally see it quite similarly to what Kissinger and Brzezinski were recommending from 2000 to 2008. Some sort of "Finlandization" of Ukraine and Belarus in a first step, then progressive integration of Russia in the EU, and why not NATO in the long run.

I strongly support having done that starting in 2000. I am not sure it is an option with this leadership at this point. That said, Putin can not emerge from this "defeated." Though another leader could.

 

[Red Leg]

Some more insight why Putin calls it " denazification"

Thread by @kamilkazani on Thread Reader App

@kamilkazani: Let's discuss Putin speech. He declared Ukrainians to be "Neonazis" and promised to "denazify" them. Indeed the "Nazi" character of Ukrainian statehood and identity has long been a central thesis of Ru...…

threadreaderapp.com

Make sure to follow this man on Twitter. Great insights.

Really bright man. Writes in the vernacular rather than the ponderous pace of the think tank class, or the breathless urgency of journalists.

 

[Kevin Peacocke]

Terrible as this military conflict is, a number of very important points are being made which will help shape the future, and hopefully make it more peaceful:
1. The UN is totally redundant it it's original mandate as a keeper of world peace.
2. NATO is not the agressive bogey man that the Russians were fed, they are not interfering.
3. Russia will unlikely use it's nukes. MAD seems to be holding.
4. The world is over war, everyone is against Putin for what he has done and he probably is surprised.
5. The interdependencies of the globe means nobody is an island as the saying goes, and the price as Russia will find out, and Europe sees clearly with its energy options, is just too high. Call this MEAD, mutually economic assured destruction.

 

[Foxi]

Read the Ukrainians were lubricating their bullets with pork fat for use on the chechens

sure thats fake news.
No one wants to turn the muslim world against itself.
Ukraine needs every friend in the world and not an further Sepoy mutiny.
@ wesheltonj
"War is the father of all things" (Heraclitus)
much will now change here.

 

[375 Ruger Fan]

Terrible as this military conflict is, a number of very important points are being made which will help shape the future, and hopefully make it more peaceful:
1. The UN is totally redundant it it's original mandate as a keeper of world peace.
2. NATO is not the agressive bogey man that the Russians were fed, they are not interfering.
3. Russia will unlikely use it's nukes. MAD seems to be holding.
4. The world is over war, everyone is against Putin for what he has done and he probably is surprised.
5. The interdependencies of the globe means nobody is an island as the saying goes, and the price as Russia will find out, and Europe sees clearly with its energy options, is just too high. Call this MEAD, mutually economic assured destruction.

I agree and hope you are correct.

For those that have never seen the classic, "Dr. Strangelove" you own yourself the pleasure of watching it. This is a link to the trailer.

 

[Pheroze]

The power of a letter to the editor is amazing. Just my little contribution to the war effort My letter to the editor

Then later the same day....

Coincidence? I think not lol

 

[Ray B]

I see a book deal and movie- For Whom The Bell Tolls in Ukraine. The only remaining issue is who will replace Gary Cooper.

 

[VertigoBE]

My guess is the Russian natural gas is mainly consumed for heating, electricity generation and industrial needs. As winter turns to spring, the natural gas requirement for heating will decline. Look for possible clamping down on Russian gas in a month or so. Ironically, one of the other big gas suppliers to Europe is Iran and Qatar from the huge offshore field known as the North Field on the Qatar side and South Pars on the Iranian side.

Not quite, gas stocks in Europe are at their lowest in many years, for this moment in the year. This is indeed in part due to Russian flows being quite low since beginning of 2021, but also due to the competition over LNG with Asia, who was willing to pay a premium over Europe, in order to secure additional gas (instead of coal) for the production of power. Europe is in no position yet to forego further Russian supply. Even more LNG would be difficult, if not impossible due to limits on the number of LNG ships available to send volumes, but more importantly due to limited re-gassification capacity in EU countries.

In fact, gas nominations from Russia towards Europe, have increased since Friday 25/02 (!). This is the true RealPolitik that @One Day... was referring too. Together with the "some Russian banks have been excluded from Swift" --> in other words not the important ones. Russia is delivering gas, Europe is paying for it. All the other talk of sanctions is just that, talk. There is nothing with real teeth so far. Sure a few oligarchs will not be able to vacation at Saint Tropez over the next few months. But that is about it.

I remain fully convinced that despite what the media is telling us right now, the current military operations from Russia are still limited, controlled and not yet full out war. The main indicator for this is that after 5 days of "war" there have only been a few hundred civilian deaths. Looking through the media hysteria, the emotional pleas from Ukraine and the rest of the world, but observing only the facts: Putin has always shown himself as a cold blooded, rational chess player. Why would this time be different? The Russian army (as the US military/analysts presented it previously) is second only to the US military, why would they suddenly look like bumbling idiots in main stream media? If Ukraine is indeed doing so well, with their civilians on TV who just received a gun for the first time from the Police station and who are using their left over Vodka bottle as a Molotov cocktail, why agree so soon to a meeting with the Russians to negotiate? Why say that there will be a follow up and discussions were constructive?

Again, do I agree with this Russian aggression? My answer is clearly no.
Do I think Zelensky, the EU and US could have done things differently, not to end up in this situation, I think yes.

Who in their right mind (whether morally right or wrong does not matter) thought it was a great idea to continue to pull the bear's tail in his own back yard, and not expect the bear turning around at some point and giving a slap.

This whole conflict is a pointless exercise of morally superior feeling people who live in a dream world of sugar clouds and pink unicorns. Unfortunately it is the Ukrainian people who will be paying the butchers bill for these politicians with lofty promises.

 

[Opposite Pole]

Well, here is what I don’t understand, Germany is a NATO country, Germany does not fulfil its NATO obligations in regards to minimum military spending while at the same time trying to build a gas pipeline that will directly pump money to a defacto NATO enemy and at the same time work directly against EU goals of having secure sources of independent, reliable gas supplies. Soviet gas supplies are notoriously unreliable, and they have in the non-distant past used their gas valve to exert political pressure.

If Germany does not want US troops stationed in Germany, Poland will welcome them with open arms. For those who think Soviet aggression is a thing of the bygone, cold war era, look at what happened in Georgia or Ukraine. True, there are issues involving US troops stationed in other countries (through bilateral agreements not due to military operations) such as soldiers’ immunity from the local laws which causes unnecessary frictions and is hard to understand. When US soldiers rape a local woman, have a punch up with the locals, or cause a car accident while drink driving they should not have immunity but these are still issues with individual soldiers, not a military aggression by the US army. I for one am happy to work with USA vs risk yet another (there were many) war with the Soviets. Throughout the entire 20th century we had maybe 20 years without them medling and invading our country. Lesson learned.

I was browsing through the forum and found my old post from about a year ago. Sadly I was correct in saying that Soviet aggression was not a thing of the past.

 

[Kevin Peacocke]

The power of a letter to the editor is amazing. Just my little contribution to the war effort My letter to the editor

View attachment 454964

Then later the same day....

View attachment 454965

Coincidence? I think not lol

Well done!

 

[WAB]

Terrible as this military conflict is, a number of very important points are being made which will help shape the future, and hopefully make it more peaceful:
1. The UN is totally redundant it it's original mandate as a keeper of world peace.
2. NATO is not the agressive bogey man that the Russians were fed, they are not interfering.
3. Russia will unlikely use it's nukes. MAD seems to be holding.
4. The world is over war, everyone is against Putin for what he has done and he probably is surprised.
5. The interdependencies of the globe means nobody is an island as the saying goes, and the price as Russia will find out, and Europe sees clearly with its energy options, is just too high. Call this MEAD, mutually economic assured destruction.

You are too kind to the UN. I would characterize them as incompetent and irrelevant.

 

[Rob404]

 

[Fred Gunner]

Yes, He Would’: Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes​

Putin is trying to take down the entire world order, the veteran Russia watcher said in an interview. But there are ways even ordinary Americans can fight back.

Reynolds: Do you think Putin’s current goal is reconstituting the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire, or something different?

Hill: It’s reestablishing Russian dominance of what Russia sees as the Russian “Imperium.” I’m saying this very specifically because the lands of the Soviet Union didn’t cover all of the territories that were once part of the Russian Empire. So that should give us pause.

I’ve kind of quipped about this but I also worry about it in all seriousness — that Putin’s been down in the archives of the Kremlin during Covid looking through old maps and treaties and all the different borders that Russia has had over the centuries. He’s said, repeatedly, that Russian and European borders have changed many times. And in his speeches, he’s gone after various former Russian and Soviet leaders, he’s gone after Lenin and he’s gone after the communists, because in his view they ruptured the Russian empire, they lost Russian lands in the revolution, and yes, Stalin brought some of them back into the fold again like the Baltic States and some of the lands of Ukraine that had been divided up during World War II, but they were lost again with the dissolution of the USSR. Putin’s view is that borders change, and so the borders of the old Russian imperium are still in play for Moscow to dominate now.

We’ve seen pressure being put on Kazakhstan to reorient itself back toward Russia, instead of balancing between Russia and China, and the West. And just a couple of days before the invasion of Ukraine in a little-noticed act, Azerbaijan signed a bilateral military agreement with Russia. This is significant because Azerbaijan’s leader has been resisting this for decades. And we can also see that Russia has made itself the final arbiter of the future relationship between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Georgia has also been marginalized after being a thorn in Russia’s side for decades. And Belarus is now completely subjugated by Moscow.

But amid all this, Ukraine was the country that got away. And what Putin is saying now is that Ukraine doesn’t belong to Ukrainians. It belongs to him and the past. He is going to wipe Ukraine off the map, literally, because it doesn’t belong on his map of the “Russian world.” He’s basically told us that. He might leave behind some rump statelets. When we look at old maps of Europe — probably the maps he’s been looking at — you find all kinds of strange entities, like the Sanjak of Novi Pazar in the Balkans. I used to think, what the hell is that? These are all little places that have dependency on a bigger power and were created to prevent the formation of larger viable states in contested regions. Basically, if Vladimir Putin has his way, Ukraine is not going to exist as the modern-day Ukraine of the last 30 years.

Putin came to power after a series of operations that many have seen as a kind of false flag — bombings of buildings around Russia that killed Russian citizens, hundreds of them, followed by a war in Chechnya. That led to Putin coming to power as a wartime president. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 also came at a difficult time for Putin. Now we’re seeing another big military operation less than two years before he needs to stand for election again.

Do you really think he’ll use a nuclear weapon?

Hill: The thing about Putin is, if he has an instrument, he wants to use it. Why have it if you can’t? He’s already used a nuclear weapon in some respects. Russian operatives poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium and turned him into a human dirty bomb and polonium was spread all around London at every spot that poor man visited. He died a horrible death as a result.

 

[One Day...]

Thread by @kamilkazani on Thread Reader App

@kamilkazani: Let's discuss Putin speech. He declared Ukrainians to be "Neonazis" and promised to "denazify" them. Indeed the "Nazi" character of Ukrainian statehood and identity has long been a central thesis of Ru...…

threadreaderapp.com

Hmmmm......

"Long before the rise of Hitler, Stalin had been building the German military might, which would then strike on Allies" ... "Stalin invited German officers to the USSR schools to get experience with high-tech armaments" ... "Guderian, the future architect of German Blitzkrieg, learnt how to use tanks in Kazan Tank Academy" (implied: from the Soviets?) ... "Soviet-trained German military crushed the Allies in no time. While the Soviet military who taught them..." etc.

These ones are new on me...

I am fully aware of the secret clause of the 1922 Rapallo treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union, but I was not aware that the USSR had "high-tech armaments" in the 1920's and early 1930's for Germans to "get experience" with.

By the way, it seems that if the Soviet had done that, the Wehrmacht shock when confronting T34 for the first time would have been lessened, had they been given the opportunity to "get experience" with them.

But, of course, as it turns out - at least in conventional writings of history - the development of the T34 was not initiated by the Soviets until 1937, and the ponderous KV1 in 1938, while the German terminated their military training agreements with the Soviets in 1933.

As to where modern tank warfare was conceived, with all due respect to Russian Tukhachevsky, I would think that British Hart, Fuller and Hobart, French Estienne and de Gaulle, and German von Seeckt, von Manstein, and even Guderian himself, would be surprised to hear that it was in the Soviet Union and that it was taught by the Soviets to the Germans..

Indeed the German army trained and maneuvered in Kazan in the 1920's and early 1930's, but who was teaching who seems to be reversed in this thesis. Last I checked, Rapallo allowed German officers to teach in the Soviet army and air force staff academies, and Soviet officers were allowed to take the German army’s general staff course, not the other way around...

At the very least, let us just say that I have never been exposed to this (re)writting of history before. Have you Red Leg?

I stopped reading at "Stalin was building German military power to unleash it on the Allies." I may have missed the subsequent more relevant parts to this thread, but I am not a big fan of history revisionism...