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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

The latest escalation of the war in Ukraine

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JANUARY 31–A LIVELY, AND GENERALLY QUITE INTERESTING DISCUSSION IN THE COMMENTS, AS BEFORE

Provision of tanks to Ukraine in the West's proxy war against Russia is another dangerous escalation of the conflict.  We haven't discussed the Ukraine situation, and the risk of nuclear conflict, in awhile, and reader Brendan Moran suggested another discussion might be illuminating.  So what do readers make of these developments?  Do they bring us closer to nuclear conflict?  Will they "help" end the conflict or prolong it?

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50 responses to “The latest escalation of the war in Ukraine”

  1. Nick Drew

    IMHO, the potential development that might directly lead to a genuine nuclear risk, would be a seriously credible Ukrainian attempt to recapture Crimea. Ukraine seems very far from being able to attempt that just now, so it's not really relevant.

    On Crimea specifically: I haven't seen anyone in government in the West suggesting that a Ukrainian assault on Crimea would be positively supported (unlike efforts to recapture other pre-2022, and even pre-2014 territories). Everyone studiously avoids mentioning Crimea in official statements of support. (Check this for yourself.) This is highly significant and, of course, linked to para 1 above.

    Finally, there's an important conventional factor that has been conspicuous by its absence since about day 5 of the invasion: the Russian airforce. This has primarily been active only in distance-launched missile attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. My interpretation of this is: Putin cannot afford to squander it. If Putin was to commit, and lose, his airforce in reckless tactical attacks over Ukraine, he is quite unable to replace that (unlike manpower and even tanks etc, which he isn't going to run out of in any plausible event).

    If something – either a Russian offensive or a Ukrainian offensive, or both – forced him to commit that airforce, well, it's his last conventional throw of the dice. If in so doing, that airforce were to be seriously mauled, that's when the nuclear option looks like his last (offensive) play.

    On that analysis the provision of Patriot etc anti-aircraft systems is far more significant than tanks. (BTW, the continuing supply of Western artillery is more significant than the tanks.)

    Reply
  2. Daniel A. Kaufman

    I have throughout been in support of providing Ukraine with whatever it needs to defend itself against and repel Russia’s invasion, in which it routinely commits horrific war crimes that are well documented.

    Russia’s nuclear threats are not credible, and wouldn’t change anything if they were. It cannot be our standard that nations with nuclear weapons can simply behave in whatever fashion they wish, no matter to what depths that behavior sinks. This is not a matter of principle, but of prudence.

    Had Ukraine already been in Nato, this would not have happened. No chance. Zero. Once Russia has been repelled and its murderous commanders and their hooligans brought before the war crimes tribunal, Ukraine should be fast tracked for Nato membership.

    Reply
  3. Christopher Morris

    I continue to believe that the Russians are very unlikely to use their nuclear weapons. In the foreseeable future they would be useless as weapons (and it is traditional Russian/Soviet policy to view them as weapons).

    Right now Putin seems intent on regaining land in the east recovered by Ukranians. The promise of tanks, most of which won’t arrive for months, will likely speed up the timing of the Russian offensive, weather and available canon fodder permitting. Two things. (1) Ukraine could cut off Russian supplies to Crimea completely, w/o retaking it, and this may well happen. Putin’s reaction will be fury, but it’s not clear what he could then do. (2) We don’t know that much about US-NATO help to Ukraine. For instance, the newspapers report that there’s discussion of providing F-16s, and it is said (as usual) that it would take months to train pilots to use them. But there are also stories that Ukranians have been training for six months on F-16s. Who knows how long they have been training on Leopard tanks. The US and Britain started to train Ukranians after 2014. There is a lot we don’t know.

    The Cold War is over, and the world has returned to its old patterns of conflict, old as in pre-1914, with very new weapons. Grim. But there are constraints that didn’t exist sixty or so years ago. One needs just to think how few serious border crossings or attempts to conquer a neighbor since WWII.

    Reply
  4. Mohan Matthen

    I'm not sure what the premise of the question is. The US and its allies could hasten an end to the war by refusing to help Ukraine, or for that matter, by forcing a settlement that favours Russia's demands. Would that be acceptable because it would "'help' end the conflict?" I for one don't think so. It's a pity that Ukraine's main supporter has such dirty hands itself. But this doesn't change the facts. Russia's government is solely responsible for a brutal military engagement.

    Brian, I know that a couple of times in the past, you've recommended John Mearsheimer's views on the subject. But though he did predict some of this, I don't understand how his reasoning is in any way ameliorative. He thought it inevitable that if Russia was provoked by an expansion of NATO, it would react aggressively, and that this is a reason not to expand NATO. (I don't think NATO should be expanded, but I'm surprised a "realist" believes this.) But, first, his premise is that Russia is a great power and entitled to such a response. I find that difficult to accept: Russia's GDP is smaller than Italy's, and its geopolitical influence is smaller than Turkey, and nobody would think it's okay to be dictated to by Italy or Turkey. And second, predicting intentions shouldn't mean bowing to them. (It's telling that he immediately jumped into bed with Viktor Orban.)

    Anyway, thanks for raising the question. I'm sure the responses will be very instructive.

    Reply
  5. Peaceful IR Realist

    The key question is, why are the tanks even necessary? Answer: the tanks are necessary because the Russian military is much stronger than the pro-war propagandists in the Anglophone mainstream media have previously acknowledged. Thus, the need to send tanks vindicates the view advanced by Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who called for "diplomatic solutions" in November 2022 on the ground that the Ukraine war risked getting stuck in a WWI-like stalemate in which the fighting continued for "years … with little change in territory but millions of pointless casualties" (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/us/politics/biden-ukraine-russia-diplomacy.html). The war hawks who opposed negotiations on the ground that Russia's military was a "paper tiger," and Ukraine was poised to make further battlefield gains, have been proven wrong. However, the hawks are still in charge, and the tanks show that, to break the stalemate, the US is willing to risk escalation. In fact, the NY Times recently reported that the Biden administration is even considering helping Ukraine strike Crimea, and that the Biden administration may be willing to do so "even if such a move increases the risk of escalation" (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/us/politics/ukraine-crimea-military.html).

    It is impossible to say whether prolonged war and the US's heightened risk appetite actually leads to the use of nuclear weapons, but there is one thing we know for certain: Russia will use nuclear weapons only if it is extremely desperate, and long before Russia gets to that point, it will have launched enough conventional bombs and missiles at Ukraine to reduce that country to a pile of rubble. Of course, Ukraine's interest in all of this is routinely ignored by the US media. You'll have to go to Al Jazeera to learn that Zelensky's 10-point peace plan does not even request Ukrainian entry into NATO – instead, it merely asks for security "guarantees," which is not the same thing (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/28/what-is-zelenskyys-10-point-peace-plan).

    Reply
  6. Brian Leiter

    Russia has the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world: that makes it a great power. My view is that, given the risk of nuclear conflict, there should be limits to how much assistance is provided so as not to provoke a broader conflict. A small risk of a catastrophic event should be taken seriously, and it is hard to see how Ukraine's territorial integrity (which was already violated in 2014) could justify it.

    Reply
  7. ANONYMOUS!

    It’s clear that neither the United States nor NATO is interested in prolonging the war. After all, the longer it goes on, the more damage it does to Russia. And contrary to the consensus gentium (as clearly expressed by one commenter), Russia does not bear “sole responsibility” for the conflict. NATO expansion to include Ukraine brought it into conflict with the sacrosanct principle (for Russia) of Ukrainian neutrality. This was perfectly clear in 2008 when NATO announced this plan, but no-one bothers to remember that. Somehow history begins last February.

    The Putin-as-madman thesis (as Hitler, as Stalin, as arch-imperialist) is a ridiculous media fiction. Ask yourself, what if China were able to persuade Mexico to join with it in a military and economic alliance, while at the same time demanding that the port of San Diego (home to the Seventh Fleet, a nuclear sub base, and much else besides) be given back to its rightful owner? We would be in a highly asymmetrical war with Mexico immediately.

    The moralizing view of the conflict, with Zelensky and the Ukrainians as plucky heroes and the Russians as the embodiment of pure evil, is also stupid. Remember when the consensus w/r/t Ukrainians was that they were all Jew-hating crypto-Nazis? That was just a few years ago.

    What’s darkly amusing is to see that, yes, there actually is a neo-Nazi brigade in the Ukrainian army, installed there for political reasons. Imagine if the Klan were still active in Alabama, had it’s own paramilitary force, and for reasons of expediency, this unit was integrated into the regular army. Our “anti-racist” ideologues would all wring their hands and call for the abolition of the Pentagon. But here the makeup of the Azov Battalion has gone completely unremarked upon.

    What I find really appalling—apart from the hypocrisy—is the way that everybody I know—without exception—has treated the conflict exactly like it’s the Super Bowl, moronically cheering on the destruction, because “our team” represents an abstract good, locked in an transcendental cosmic showdown with forces of evil. We must therefore fight until the end!

    “We” meaning “them”… Stateside liberals can do our part by putting the Ukrainian bi-color on our Twitter feeds, on our bumpers, and on our yard signs (where it can displace Black Lives Matter) and cheer on Zelensky like he’s the second coming of Tom Brady. Huge swaths of Ukraine already look like Chechnya, and adding more tanks, artillery, and missiles will only cause more destruction. But that’s OK, I guess, when it’s all for a good cause …

    Reply
  8. ANONYMOUS!

    Sorry, I meant to say "not prolonging" the war (obvs) …

    Reply
  9. Zlatko Bacic

    I am unpleasantly surprised that the military aid to Ukraine by the West is referred to by Brian as "the West's proxy war against Russia." Proxy war against Russia, really?! It's an incredibly distorted version of the reality. It was Russia that brutally attacked Ukraine, and continues to rain destruction on its cities and vital civilian infrastructure by rockets and drones every day, causing untold civilian casualties and devastation. This war could end the moment Russia stops the aggression and withdraws its troops behind its borders, where they belong. Brian apparently suggests, just as the Russians do, that aiding Ukraine to defend itself prolongs the war and increases the risk of escalation. Speaking of blaming the victim…. I suppose the logical conclusion of Brian's line of thinking that the West should stop arming Ukraine, thereby forcing it to end the fight, and essentially capitulate on Russia's terms. This would surely reduce the risk of nuclear escalation, at the small price of the subjugation of Ukraine by Russia.

    It is akin to advising a victim who is being raped to stop resisting, since this will make the rape less painful and end it faster. And of course nobody should try to help the victim, since the attacker may be armed and very dangerous.

    Reply
  10. Ian Rumfitt

    Is the West in a 'proxy war' with Russia? Every fortnight or so, Sir Lawrence Freedman, the leading UK authority on military strategy, posts an essay on his son's website, 'Comment is Freed'. His most recent piece ('Proxies and Puppets', 21 January) addressed precisely this question and I commend it to your readers. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, Freedman's analysis is on a different plane from what one finds in the press (well, the British press, anyway).

    More generally, I have found Freedman's essays (which have been appearing pretty much since the start of the crisis) insightful.

    Reply
  11. Brian Leiter

    Professor Bacic and I clearly differ on what the "reality" is. I thought calling it a proxy war–that's not how it started, but that's what it has become–was fairly uncontroversial: after all, the U.S. Secretary Defense has now said openly the goal is to permanently weaken Russia. I'm also skeptical that moral judgments from the personal realm about aggressors and victims make much sense in the amoral international realm. Do see some of the earlier comments, by Peaceful IR Realist, and Anonymous!, which bear on this point. A "negotiated settlement," which is what I would wish for, need not involve "capitulation" on either Russia's or Ukraine's terms. Sanctioning Russia and providing support to Ukraine was justified, what concerns me is the escalation and the increased risk of nuclear conflict. Is Ukraine's territorial integrity (that's what at issue, not subjugation) really worth a small risk of nuclear war? I don't think so.

    Reply
  12. Christopher Morris

    It’s hard to convince North Korea not to seek nuclear weapons, as they seem to be very useful deterrents to would-be conquerors or enemies. (Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons after the end of the Soviet Union, and Gaddafi, had given up his.) But that aside, how useful are they? Some years ago the late Thomas Schelling visited Iran as a private citizen, hoping to talk to anyone involved with Iran’s nuclear project. He wanted to explain how much trouble these weapons are: they need to be constantly maintained, protected, updated; their security was hard to assure (think of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal); systems to prevent accidents must be constructed and maintained; etc. No one would talk to him, presumably thinking he was an agent.

    So a key question here is of what use are these weapons to the Russians, aside from deterring the West from invading or attacking targets inside the Russian Federation? It’s hard to see how detonating a nuke in Ukraine would be useful — Russian soldiers might be contaminated by the radiation, and the area struck would not be very useful to the Russians occupiers. Detonating a nuclear weapon might have “expressive” value to a defeated Putin, but even his allies (e.g., China, India) would warn him not to violate the so-called nuclear taboo. The US has told the Russians what they can expect in the event they attack a NATO country or they detonate a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. And the guess of some is that we have told them we’d retaliate against a tactical nuke with very powerful non-nuclear weapons.

    So I don’t think it likely that there will be a nuclear conflict ahead. Of course, my confidence level is not all that high…

    Reply
  13. Dean C. Rowan

    Glenn Greenwald interviewed German left/anti-war politician Sahra Wagenknecht a day or two ago. She speaks about Germany's legacy of relations with Russia/USSR and the war in Ukraine, echoing many of the comments above. She also criticizes liberal satisfaction with politics-as-lifestyle, an ideological adoption that weakens the left in Germany. She barely addresses nuclear threats, but the topic is obviously in the background throughout. Clearly, she shares many of Mearsheimer's views. Much of the discussion is about the topsy-turvy confusion of left and right politics, independent of Ukraine. The interview starts around 19:25 and lasts about 45 minutes. I get the sense Greenwald is pacing his questions to allow for real-time translation into German.

    https://rumble.com/v27rlj8-system-update-31.html

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  14. Zlatko Bacic

    If Ukraine's territorial integrity is not "really worth a small risk of nuclear war", is then the integrity of the three small Baltic states expendable as well? Where does the slippery slope end? A successful grab of an even bigger piece of Ukraine (after Crimea), would only embolden Putin further. Trying to, in effect, appease aggressors by letting them have most or all of the fruits of their aggression (and leaving the victim in ruins) never ends well, as 20th century history of Europe showed clearly. The aggressor's appetite only grows.

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  15. Brian Leiter

    The Baltic states are already in NATO, so any aggression against them would trigger existing treaty obligations. Russia knows that, and won't test it. What inductive inference we can draw from the single case of Hilter and Chamberlain is not obvious. Hitler's military position was much stronger relative to his adversaries, and of course there were no nuclear deterrents in place. Crimea was effectively ceded without resistance in 2014, and only eight years later, and after considerable provocation as documented on prior threads, did Russia move again against Ukraine.

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  16. David Ross

    I'm happy to see that, aside from the anonymous poster from Роскомнадзор, most of the people above understand that this is a war of aggression which is not going to be resolved diplomatically. In light of the horrific acts Russia has carried out (against both Ukrainian and Russian-speaking civilians) in the occupied territories, the Ukrainians have no incentive to give up any of their territory, and even if Russia 'wins' (which seems unlikely) there will be internal resistance for years. None of this is a decision that the US will or can make for Ukraine, and the best way to bring an end to the rapine is to help Ukraine drive out the invaders.

    Reply
  17. Zlatko Bacic

    One can argue that it was precisely the lack of strong, effective response of the West to Russia's occupation of Crimea that ultimately emboldened Putin's current much larger aggression of Ukraine. Also, should the West, out of fear of nuclear escalation, eventually pressure Ukraine to cede even more territory to Russia, the Baltic states would have good reasons to question the credibility of the NATO obligations to defend them at all cost (these have never been tested). And so would Russia. For a deterrent to be effective, there must not be even a shred of a doubt that it will be implemented without hesitation, come what may.

    Reply
  18. Peaceful IR Realist

    The war in Ukraine is indeed a "proxy war": in this 2017 interview about the 2014-2022 phase of the conflict (in which the US was supporting Ukraine's efforts to defeat Russia-backed forces in eastern Ukraine), former CIA Director John Brennan described the conflict as a "proxy war" between the US and Russia, stating: "I do think Mr. Putin’s decisions to move into Ukraine … was based on the premise that there was not going to be a symmetric Western military response… I felt as though there were things that we could have done that wouldn’t have got us into a proxy war." (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/john-brennan/)

    Reply
  19. David Wallace

    I think the medium-term security of the Baltics is less clear-cut than that. (I agree that there is no near-term prospect of Russia just rolling on into them.) There is always a certain level of uncertainty as to how strongly treaty obligations will be defended: if there wasn't, the west could just have incorporated Ukraine into NATO back in 2008, confident that Russia would then leave it alone. The Baltics are not at all easy to defend strategically (albeit Sweden and Finland joining NATO helps here) and given the recent memory of Trump, you can understand why the Baltics might not want to rely 100% on the NATO security guarantee in the future.

    Of course, my own observations on this are worth very little. What's more important is that the Baltic nations themselves seem to agree: they, along with other Eastern European states, are easily the strongest supporters of Ukraine. Latvia and Estonia have each given about 1% of their GDP – almost half their defense budget! – in military aid to Ukraine. Poland, Lithuania and Slovakia are also major contributors. As I understand it (going back to the original post) this is part of the backstory about sending tanks – what matters is not Germany sending its own tanks but Germany giving permission for countries with German tanks to send them to Ukraine. And Poland and other eastern European countries were increasingly starting to talk about sending their tanks anyway, permission be damned.

    Reply
  20. s. wallerstein

    What I find really appalling—apart from the hypocrisy—is the way that everybody I know—without exception—has treated the conflict exactly like it’s the Super Bowl, moronically cheering on the destruction, because “our team” represents an abstract good, locked in an transcendental cosmic showdown with forces of evil. We must therefore fight until the end!

    ANONYMOUS!

    Yes. It's not everyone I know, but I live in Chile, not the United States.

    It is incredible how the narrative you describe is served to us every day by "liberal" media such as the NY Times and The Guardian, which previously I had a bit of respect for.

    The narrative is so pervasive in mainstream media in the U.S. and U.K., not to mention the mainstream Chilean media, that it is hard to resist its power and actually a while ago I gave up trying to.

    I woke up for a few seconds and even laughed a bit when I read what you wrote above. Thanks.

    Probably I'll go back to admiring Zelensky as a "plucky hero" and fearing/condemning Putin as the new Hitler (only a bit crazier than the original Adolf) in a few minutes because the power of the brainwashing is irresistible, but it's nice to emerge from the cave from time to time.

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  21. Mohan Matthen

    @Anonymous!, comment 7. It's a little hard to respond to comments that are so compressed that they might have a lot more standing behind them than meets the eye. I mean maybe your name is really Sergei Lavrov, and you know a lot more than I do. (Actually, that's not hard; you don't have to be Lavrov.)

    But on the face of it, the following is absurd as a justification for Russia's invasion:

    "Russia does not bear “sole responsibility” for the conflict. NATO expansion to include Ukraine brought it into conflict with the sacrosanct principle (for Russia) of Ukrainian neutrality."

    For one thing "NATO expansion to include Ukraine" never happened and wasn't on the table in February 2022. True, people talked about it back in 2008, but as I recall, the suggestion was deprecated even way back then by no less than Angela Merkel. It's possible that a lot of people were talking about it in the months leading up to the invasion–how do I know?–though I don't remember Ukraine's admission being officially imminent. It never went as far as an actual application by Ukraine. And when Ukraine did make an application, a couple of months after Russia's invasion, it went nowhere.

    As for the Azov Brigade, I truly don't know what to make of it. I agree that it looks and smells pretty sinister. And your analogy of a hypothetical Klan chapter may, for all I know, be apt. Imagine a unit like what you're claiming the Azov to be in France or Turkey or Japan. People would be outraged, you're certainly right about that. But it would be a leap to say that this would justify all-out war.

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  22. LFC

    Whatever one thinks of Russia's *jus ad bellum*, it has damaged its case by violating the *jus in bello* repeatedly and egregiously.

    That is, even if one were to conclude that the Russian Feb.22 invasion was justified under standard principles of international law, or justified in some "realist" sense, there is no question that the way Russia has conducted its operations constitutes a massive violation of international law (the law of armed conflict) and other norms governing warfare. That could be mostly deliberate, or it could be partly a result of the Russian military being so incompetent that it can't target its weapons at all, or perhaps it's a combination of the two. The massive violation of the jus in bello, while technically it shouldn't affect the analysis of the jus ad bellum, almost has to color one's evaluation of the entire Russian "project" here.

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  23. David Wallace

    I want to push back a bit against the suggestion from some commentators (though not Brian) that the Western-media narrative about the war is laughable. Yes, that narrative often elides the fact that Ukraine is a morally complex country itself (what country isn't?) And yes, any moral harms caused in the war are dwarfed by the consequences of a nuclear exchange.

    But: Russia has invaded a neighboring country, against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of its population, with the goal at least of annexing substantial parts of its territory (though I think there is good evidence for more maximalist war aims). In doing so its forces – according to very widespread evidence, not restricted to Western governments or media – have committed war crimes on a large scale, including rape, torture, murder, and the relocation of children to Russian soil. And it is engaged in a continuing use of missiles and drones intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure and the civilian population. Some of this, especially the removal of children, arguably satisfies the definition of genocide (much of the rhetoric on Russian media, including from senior government and quasi-government officials, is also genocidal in intent).

    It's fine to say that Western media ignore various immoral actions by Ukrainians. It's fine to say that Western governments are hypocrites given their complicity in other atrocities, past and present (Yemen comes to mind). It's fine to say that it is not in our strategic interest to be involved, and that we need to recognize the cold calculus of great power politics. It's fine to be concerned that providing arms will prolong the conflict and do more harm than good (though the Ukrainian people themselves do not seem to agree). And it's fine to think that the threat of nuclear war forces us to set aside the Ukrainians' interests for the greater good. One can do all this without denying that the Russian government is perpetrating a moral horror.

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  24. YAAGS

    I would echo other commenters on nukes being strategically useless in Ukraine. If Putin really wanted to retaliate, it seems like he could just trickle a battalion of Spetsnaz through the southern border and then have them destroy power plants and other critical infrastructure. I guess the hope is either that he knows he can't do that because they would all just defect or that the CIA owns the cartels so no foreign agents can cross the border without our knowledge.

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  25. s. wallerstein

    Most of what you say is true.

    However, sorry, but I'm not trying to save Ukraine, but to save my own sanity and my own lucidity in the face of the immense propaganda barrage of the liberal mainstream media to convince us that this is a moral crusade against radical evil, that of Putin, a super-bowl between Good and Evil (capitalized).

    My first duty towards myself and towards those few who listen to me (and they are few) is to resist that bullshit barrage.

    I'll be called a tankie by some, but although I have opportunities to join the "Putin is the good guy" club, I will not. As I said above, I live in Chile and there are those in Chile who, having been the victims of the evils of U.S. imperialism, assume that anyone who is against U.S. imperialism, in this case, Putin is good and thus, back him. I don't stand with them.

    However, the bullshit I see daily is not that of Russia Today, but that of the NY Times, the Guardian and of CNN, even CNN-Chile.

    So my job (a self-appointed) one is not to join the easy chorus of those who point out how bad Putin is and what a great man Zelensky is, but to refuse.

    That may sound pretentious and adolescent, but a lot of what I see from the common sense hegemonic view of this conflict isn't adolescent, it's childish.

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  26. Dean C. Rowan

    David Wallace's comment @23 above gives me pause. I get the gist of his comment, which boils down to the last sentence. But I smell a kind of question begging, because if every criticism prior to that sentence is "fine," and if we had made decisions based upon good faith accounting for those criticisms, then there might not have been an invasion (or at least not this one) in the first place. I myself don't think it's merely fine to give Western media government the "boys will be boys" pass.

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  27. OS

    Whether the war is a proxy war is not settled by the claim, made by the U.S. Secretary of Defense, that the goal of the US is to permanently weaken Russia. After all, the fact that my end aligns with someone else’s does not turn their project into a means to my end. (This may remain true even as I do a great deal to help them pursue that end.) Similarly, the fact that the US's stated goal–that of permanently weakening Russia–aligns with Ukraine's does not make the war a proxy war, not unless we assume that Ukraine is not a genuine agent pursuing its own interests.

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  28. LFC

    I agree with David Wallace @23. The Russian government and military have shown themselves to be almost completely unconcerned with even trying to conform to the rules and norms of armed conflict. Rape and murder, deportation of children, apparently deliberate targeting of apartment houses and civilian infrastructure are all blatant, flagrant violations of the laws of war. I suppose it isn't that surprising, given the Russian military's past behavior in Syria, Chechnya, etc. And that no country has totally clean hands in this respect is no excuse.

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  29. titanium

    A recent article in Newsweek is illuminating on what the war in Ukraine is really about: https://www.newsweek.com/battle-ukraines-titanium-1777106

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  30. Blinn Combs

    Sadly, the most reliable fact about the U.S. media, which Chomsky and others have been busily documenting for the last half-century plus, is that nothing so reliably shuffles long-standing narratives as a bit of open State Department (and Pentagon) backing. Prior to last year's invasion, it was relatively common knowledge that Ukraine had years-long civil war; that it had two ethnically different regions that vied internally for political power and had been the subject of no less than two (U.S.-backed–though that part seldom made headlines) coups over a single decade; that it had a growing and worrisome Nazi element within its elite institutions in the west; that it was mostly ruled by what everywhere else we derisively call regional oligarchs; that it was seen by our political class mainly as a large stalking ground for D.C. lobbyists and other hopeful con men; indeed that Zelensky was himself a direct beneficiary of one of these fraudsters and himself had large sums of loot parked in offshore shell accounts (see Pandora papers).

    Other factors typically go less publicized, like the fact that since 2015 (part of the aftermath of the predictable Russian invasion of Crimea—the site of Russia’s largest southern naval base), U.S. forces have been training ten thousand Ukranian military officers a year, or the fact that defense money had been pouring in over that same period, lord knows how much of it through clandestine channels. We’ll have to wait the inevitable decades until the next generation’s Anthony Weiner details our role in the “legacy of ashes” for this conflict. (Until then, this is pretty useful background: https://congressionaldish.com/cd244-keeping-ukraine/ which was thankfully prepared before the invasion rendered such thoughts largely unspeakable.

    Others are just farce—like the widely circulated claim that Russia bombed its own Nord Stream II pipeline, which U.S. petro-politicians have been salivating to shut down since its inception, or my personal favorite—Biden’s claiming in a speech to the factory workers building missiles for Lockheed—that Ukrainian parents were naming their kids “Javelin” and “Javelina.”

    But say what you will, it’s been great for a lot of businesses. There’s a reason that six of the ten richest counties in the U.S. are all nested around D.C., and with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, it’s hard to underestimate the relief generated in those quarters by renewed demand for war materiel. I mean, people have mortgages!

    I have utterly no interest in defending Putin, but I do find that his actions have more in common with what I typically expect from our “leaders” than they do of any comic book caricature. (Though, given the comparative international body counts, I’m possibly being too generous to our own warlords.) The swiftness with which we all suddenly became deeply emotionally invested in a region of the world with which virtually our entire population was previously barely aware has been something to behold, and speaks, to my mind at least, more to the relief of a nice distraction from our own slowly-evolving political trainwreck than to any independent interest, much less acquaintance.

    To what extent this was all helped along by a steady stream of politically manufactured anti-Russian propaganda throughout the Trump years is a matter of speculation. Though an ever-larger share of that has turned out—inevitably—to be a complete fabrication. (See, most recently: https://www.racket.news/p/move-over-jayson-blair-meet-hamilton)

    For what it’s worth, I found this treatment, featuring Nicolai Petro, one of the more enlightening of the many I’ve read and seen:

    Inevitably, the civilians caught in the middle suffer the most and have the fewest defenders.

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  31. David Wallace

    To be clear, when I say these views are “fine”, I don’t necessarily mean I agree with them; I just mean they’re morally and intellectually defensible. ( FWIW I largely agree with the first two and largely disagree with the others.)

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  32. David Rosenthal

    Right on.

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  33. Blinn E Combs

    I erroneously referred to Tim Wiener as "Anthony Weiner" above. Happily, I learn that he's recently released a new book on U.S.-Russia relations.

    Also related to my point about the domestic manufacture of anti-Russian propaganda, this brand new writeup from Jeff Gerth at the Columbia Journalism Review is an absolute must read: https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-1.php

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  34. ANONYMOUS!

    Hello, Sergei Lavrov here, coming to you from my office in the Roskomnadzor. Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, but you know how it is when the samovar is on the fritz, they tell you the repairman will be there between 12 and 5, and then he shows up at 6, amirite?!?

    W/r/t comment # 21, as for what certain “people” were “saying” back in 2008, let’s bear in mind that it was NATO itself doing the talking. What was NATO saying, exactly? To quote from NATO’s own press release (taken from NATO’s own website, “nato.int”):

    NATO welcomes Georgia's and Ukraine's aspirations for membership
    At the Bucharest Summit, NATO Allies welcomed Ukraine's and Georgia's Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership and agreed that these countries will become members of NATO.
    They also agreed that both nations have made valuable contributions to Alliance operations and welcomed democratic reforms in Ukraine and Georgia.
    The Membership Action Plan (MAP) is the next step for the two countries on their direct way to membership.
    Allies made clear that they support Georgia's and Ukraine's applications for MAP. Allies also said NATO will now begin a period of intensive engagement with both countries at high political level to address the questions still outstanding regarding their MAP applications. NATO Foreign Ministers were asked to make a first assessment of progress at their December 2008 meeting.

    I remember reading about this in the FT in 2008 and thinking, “uh-oh”.

    The Russians—that is, the Russian foreign policy establishment, whatever the Russian equivalent of “Foggy Bottom” is— clearly regarded the 2008 MAP announcement by NATO as a provocation. Were they justified in this perception? Or were they acting out some form of (vodka-and-herring induced) psychosis?

    The United States has, as we all learned in high school, something called the Monroe Doctrine, under which the US gets to call the shots in an entire hemisphere. In comparison, can a Russian demand for Ukrainian neutrality be dismissed as per se unreasonable?

    I seem to recall some spot of bother in that area of the world, not that long ago … Barbarella? … Barbarino? … it doesn’t really matter, because that’s ancient history, and we can’t be bothered to look it up.

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  35. UK ex-philosopher

    Brian, you write, "I'm also skeptical that moral judgments from the personal realm about aggressors and victims make much sense in the amoral international realm." How is that skepticism maintained when you consider WW2 or, say, the Bosnia War? It seems obvious that there was a moral judgement for nations to make about whether or not to fight Hitler's Germany. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you.

    A different point: you often hear (at least here in the UK) commentators in the media say that 'all wars end with negotiations', and no one ever challenges this apparently sage wisdom. It's obviously false though. Many wars, perhaps most of them, end with military victory/defeat. To the extent that there are any negotiations that follow the battlefield outcome, they're a formality. And those conflicts which do end with negotiation in the absence of overwhelming military victory often don't really end. Witness Nagorno-Karabakh, where twenty years after the first war, we now have another one. It seems highly likely to me that any negotiated settlement between Ukraine (and its partners) and Russia that could be reached in the present battlefield context would sow the seeds for future conflict in the region.

    Relatedly, there's a lot of talk about Ukraine and its partners not being willing to negotiate at the moment, and how bad that is. But it also seems pretty likely that Russia itself is not willing to negotiate in good faith at the moment, since it probably sees itself as being in a decent position to take more land this year. Both sides (rightly or wrongly) see themselves as having significant offensive potential; under those conditions, negotiations won't get far.

    Finally, Peaceful IR Realist seems to me to pick arguments with the weakest of his or her opponents rather than the strongest. He or she writes, 'The war hawks who opposed negotiations on the ground that Russia's military was a "paper tiger," and Ukraine was poised to make further battlefield gains, have been proven wrong. However, the hawks are still in charge, and the tanks show that, to break the stalemate, the US is willing to risk escalation.' The experts I've been following (e.g. Rob Lee, Michael Kofman), who (s)he would surely classify as hawks since they have been calling for Ukraine to be given tanks and warn against entering negotiations at this point, have never said that Russia's army is a paper tiger, and indeed have warned against jumping to that conclusion (albeit the Russian military has certainly shown itself to be less capable than most of us thought before the war). Further, the last time we discussed Russia-Ukraine on this messageboard, there were plenty (Peaceful IR Realist perhaps among them?) who were arguing that we should seek a negotiated settlement, just as Ukraine indeed was poised to make significant advances: this was, I think, during the period when Ukraine was advancing in Kharkiv and was (we now know) poised to re-take Kherson city.

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  36. Peaceful IR Realist

    One thing to add on this: in November 2021 (roughly three months before Russia's February 2022 invasion), the United States and Ukraine signed a "Charter on Strategic Partnership," which stated, among other things:

    (1) "the United States supports Ukraine’s … aspirations to join NATO";
    (2) "The United States supports Ukraine’s efforts to maximize its status as a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner to promote interoperability"; and
    (3) "Ukraine intends to … advance its Euro-Atlantic aspiration."

    https://www.state.gov/u-s-ukraine-charter-on-strategic-partnership/ (Separately, I realized the links I supplied in my earlier posts do not work because I put them in parentheses – they work if you copy and paste what's in the parentheses).

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  37. Christopher Morris

    Here is the full statement of no 1 above in Peaceful IR Realist’s note:

    “Guided by the April 3, 2008 Bucharest Summit Declaration of the NATO North Atlantic Council and as reaffirmed in the June 14, 2021 Brussels Summit Communique of the NATO North Atlantic Council, the United States supports Ukraine’s right to decide its own future foreign policy course free from outside interference, including with respect to Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO.“

    This document (agreement) dates from the time the US and British intelligence has known of Russian plans. Biden publicly revealed this intelligence in October 2021, as I recall. So the US was pressuring Putin not to go ahead and trying very hard to persuade Zelensky that they might invade.

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  38. s. wallerstein

    I can't speak for Brian, but sure, there are always moral judgements to be made, but I'm suspicious and others are too of the pre-fabricated moral judgments that the mainstream media pushes.

    I've said this before here, but I'll repeat it: in 2016 I clicked on the NY Times website as I did daily and I saw so many opinion pieces and articles on Russia and what evil threat it was that I imagined I was back in 1958.

    I lived through the first cold war (I'm 76) and I realized back then how the whole show was moralized: we were good (with God on our side, as the song says) and they were bad. Khruschev was a monster and JFK only wanted to extend the touch of liberty to the benighted slaves of communism behind the iron curtain. We always acted from noble motives and they alway acted from nefarious ones.

    I saw this coming in 2016 and then with Russia-gate, they successfully associated the evil Mr. Putin with the evil Mr. Trump and with that, they were off and running.

    The whole idea of falling for the new cold war, for this instant moralism, made in Washington and marketed by the New York Times and CNN is repugnant to me. It insults my intelligence and that of other thinking people.

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  39. David Wallace

    'Others are just farce—like … my personal favorite—Biden’s claiming in a speech to the factory workers building missiles for Lockheed—that Ukrainian parents were naming their kids “Javelin” and “Javelina."'

    FWIW, that claim was confirmed by the Ukrainian ministry of justice, and reiterated several months later by Klymenko-Time, which so far as I can tell (corrections welcome) is a Ukrainian news service not affiliated with the Ukrainian government. I suppose they could all be lying but it's unclear why they'd bother. (https://klymenko-time.com/en/novosti/adelina-dzhavelina-i-artur-bajraktar-kakimi-imenami-ukrainczy-nazyvayut-detej-v-vojnu/)

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  40. Peaceful IR Realist

    You write, "the last time we discussed Russia-Ukraine on this messageboard, there were plenty (Peaceful IR Realist perhaps among them?) who were arguing that we should seek a negotiated settlement, just as Ukraine indeed was poised to make significant advances: this was, I think, during the period when Ukraine was advancing in Kharkiv and was (we now know) poised to re-take Kherson city."

    (1) Russia announced its retreat from Kherson on November 9, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/09/world/europe/ukraine-russia-kherson-retreat.html
    (2) The New York Times article reporting Chairman Milley's support for diplomatic negotiations was published on November 10, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/us/politics/biden-ukraine-russia-diplomacy.html
    (3) One of the questions the article addressed was whether Russia's retreat from Kherson was a sign of further Russian setbacks to come. Milley pushed back against that notion, arguing that the "pullback from Kherson appeared to be aimed at setting up a more defensible position." The fact that we now believe Ukraine needs tanks and armor is a vindication of Milley's warning that Russia was setting up a more defensible position and the battle-lines could become calcified.
    (4) Although not everyone described Russia's military as a "paper tiger," some on this thread did, and regardless, the broader point was whether Ukraine's successes on the battlefield were a sign of further major gains to come. As the NY Times put it, Biden and Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, opposed Milley in part on the ground that "the Ukrainians have been emboldened by their success on the battlefield, making them reluctant to trade away territory at the bargaining table."

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  41. Blinn Combs

    The "confirmation" is–quite literally–a Facebook post made in late July from the Ministry of Justice, two months and change after Biden's speech. You're welcome, of course, to believe that there's a little Jan-Javelin (Ян-Джавелін–notice the cutesy alliteration of the English transliteration that disappears in the Ukranian) and Adelina-Javelina (Аделіна-Джавеліна) toddling about Ukraine somewhere. Other questions come to my mind, like why is the Ministry of Justice posting about baby names on Facebook? Of course, in the middle of a war, newborns make for good public messaging, and when you can slide little love-letters to your arms dealers, so much the better. The best part of the speech was when Biden, as though to underline the point, emphasized in the delivery of this drivel: "…not a joke…." There are few such obviously self-refuting utterances in D.C.

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  42. UK ex-philosopher

    In haste:

    The talk of Ukraine being poised to take back territory was concentrated in the period before they took Kherson. Sensible commentators since then have been far more wary of saying that Ukraine is going to make further large advances in the short-term, partly because winter was setting in, partly because it was well-known that positions on the east of the Dnipro river were more defensible for Russia, and partly become Russia has mobilised more men. Most people admit that the next few months are highly uncertain: it's possible that Ukraine could take back more territory, but it's by no means certain.

    None of this contradicts the point that Ukraine's battlefield successes have emboldened both them and their partners. We've gone from thinking that Ukraine would crumble and Kyiv would be under Russian control within a matter of days to seeing Ukraine as having the potential not only to defend but to retake land, if supplied with the right weapons at the right times.

    The best argument for not seeking a quick diplomatic solution is nowhere near as simple as you seem to be suggesting: it's certainly not that Ukraine is poised to make advances in the coming weeks or even months. And if that had really been the driving rationale post-Kherson then wouldn't the last two months, in which Ukraine hasn't made major advances, have changed people's minds?

    The best reason for opposing Milley is that any diplomatic solution that could be negotiated at present would be hugely unfavourable to the Ukrainians – indeed, it would be simply unsellable to the Ukrainian population, and, crucially, it would not be a sustainable ground for long-term peace. At best, we'd likely end up with a long guerrilla war fought between embittered Ukrainian partisans and a puppet Ukrainian government in the image of Belarus. Who knows what the eventual outcome of that would be. Spillover into Belarus would not be unlikely. In any case, Russia would likely not be negotiating in good faith, given that they likely believe they can take more land from Ukraine. An unfavourable outcome for the Ukrainians might have been forced upon them, had Russia decisively defeated them on the battlefield, but that's not what happened. Of course Ukraine and its partners should be talking to the Russians all the time, but a diplomatic solution which leads to a sustainable peace is simply not a realistic prospect at the moment. I've seen very little engagement with this point from those advocating Milley's view (do let me know if I've missed something here – I've not read much in favour of Milley's position full-stop).

    By the way, when Ukraine really was poised to make gains, pre-Kherson, and it was fairly clear that this was the case, many who now advocate the Milley view were already pushing for negotiations. Presumably, then, even if it were the case that Ukraine was obviously poised to make further gains in the coming months, they'd still be pushing for negotiations. If so, they owe us some further rationale for their position, beyond simply pointing out that Ukraine is not, in fact, obviously poised to make gains in the coming months. The best argument I can make out for going for negotiations is that it's the best way to avoid nuclear war. I think that, in the short-term, that's true: seeking a negotiated settlement would diminish an already very small chance of nuclear weapon use in the next few years. It's much harder to make out what the long-term consequences would be for nuclear war, though – this issue was discussed exhaustively by David Wallace and interlocutors on previous threads, and there's no point in re-hashing it here.

    s. wallerstein: I think most of us here are jaded and habitually contrarian enough to be suspicious of narratives spun in the NYT and other media. I often share your reaction to these venues. Columnists are almost always best ignored, whatever outlet they're writing in. That said, last time we talked about this issue on Leiter Reports, someone replied to me linking approvingly to an article in the Grayzone. I hope our dissatisfaction with mainstream media doesn't take us to places like that. Anyway, this has little to do with the point I was asking Brian about.

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  43. Christopher Morris

    Our retaliatory strategy to many kinds of nuclear attack on Ukrainian or European soil may well be non-nuclear. This has been discussed in the news, and the piece below may interest readers here. Don’t be distracted by Petraeus; others have said the same.

    – Retired Gen. David Petraeus recently spelled out a possible scenario on ABC News. “Just to give you a hypothetical,” the former U.S. war commander said, “we would respond [to Russia’s use of nuclear weapons] by leading a NATO…effort that would take out every Russian conventional force that we can see and identify on the battlefield in Ukraine and also in Crimea and every ship in the Black Sea.”

    The U.S. and NATO could carry out such an attack without using any nuclear weapons. Given what we’ve seen in the war so far, it seems that U.S. intelligence has a pretty close track on where every Russian unit in Ukraine is, where it’s going, what its officers are saying—in short, this all-out pummeling could probably be executed, mainly with air and artillery strikes, pretty swiftly.

    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/10/why-the-us-might-not-use-a-nuke-even-if-russia-does.html

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  44. David Wallace

    This looks plausible but is not reassuring. Russia has no plausible conventional retaliation and so might resort to tactical nuclear strikes on NATO bases in response. NATO might well feel compelled to respond either with nuclear strikes of its own or with overwhelming conventional force directed at Russia itself. At which point Russia plausibly escalates to strategic nuclear use. At which point, as likely as not, the world ends.

    It would be convenient if there was not a compelling moral and strategic case to support Ukraine; it would be convenient if there was not a real risk of nuclear escalation in doing so. Things are not convenient.

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  45. LFC

    Moral judgments in international affairs are inescapable, and even those identified as Realists — in the postwar American context, Morgenthau, Niebhur, and Kennan being the archetypal triad — could not avoid making normative judgments when they turned to matters of policy. Kennan's impassioned writing about nuclear weapons late in his career could not have come from the pen of someone who thought moral judgments had no place in the international realm, whatever he might have claimed; ditto for Morgenthau (see, among other things, his early and highly vocal opposition to the U.S. role in Vietnam, too forceful to be wholly explicable as a dispassionate assessment of "national interest").

    But while moral judgments are inescapable, in almost all cases (there may be a few exceptions), one cannot line up opposing sides as in a medieval morality play, with one side *purely* good and the other *purely* evil. Anonymous! @7 claims he/she knows people in the U.S. who treat "the conflict exactly like it's the Super Bowl, moronically cheering on the destruction, because 'our team' represents an abstract good, locked in a transcendental cosmic showdown with forces of evil." There is no question that the Russian military has committed many highly immoral, one could say evil, acts, but that doesn't make this a "transcendental cosmic showdown." And I don't think people making policy decisions view it that way. Rhetoric is one thing, policy another, and the two don't always match up, as the history of the Cold War, to take one example, amply demonstrates.

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  46. Theonlyrealismisscientificrealism

    Brian, I understand your view to be that a global nuclear war is such a terrible prospect that the loss of Ukraine (or parts of Ukraine) to Russia is an acceptable and logical price to pay.

    Is your view:

    A. That losing Ukraine is the least worst (but still regrettable) option?

    or

    B. That, more than being the least worst option, there will actually be some positive benefits to Russia winning the war?

    I read you as holding position A and Peaceful IR Realist as holding position B. Is that correct?

    BL COMMENT: My view is basically "A," although I don't think Ukraine losings its autonomy is what is on offer; a negotiated settlement will require in ceding some land in the East.

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  47. Daniel A Kaufman

    A lot of this "mainstream media" talk sounds like Trump.

    The fact that *some* media outlets engage in hyperbole, romanticism, black and white thinking, etc., should not rob us of our ability to make rudimentary distinctions.

    One may be confronted with two actors, both of whom are bad, but one of whom is much worse. That both are bad is not a reason to side with or give advantage to the worse.

    Ukraine *does not want* to cede its territory and citizens — and children — to its murdering, kidnapping, and raping Russian neighbor.

    Decent people who can will help.

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  48. David Wallace

    Stepping back from the immediate issues, it's interesting to see how much the rationale being offered for a concessionary approach to Russia have evolved in the last year. (This is not intended as a criticism of anyone.)

    A year ago, the position being called 'realism' was (as I understand it) that geopolitics is largely-amoral great-power rivalry, and 'great powers' are states with sufficient military and economic clout that they naturally exercise hegemonic power over their neighbors. And what made Russia specifically a great power was its conventional military and resource strength (based partly on its large population), such that a small state like Ukraine on its border could not plausibly resist it and was just going to suffer if it tried. This was the context for the view that we should be concerned about Russia's 'vital security interests' but not Ukraine's.

    And indeed the overwhelming majority of people discussing the subject a year ago (certainly including me) thought that Ukraine was going to lose its conventional war in reasonably short order. Checking back to early threads on Brian's blog, the dovish view was that Ukraine could not repel the Russians even with Western help, so that arming them was just prolonging their suffering; the hawkish view was that the Ukrainians might eventually prevail in a protracted insurgency but were going to lose the initial phase of the conflict.

    (In hindsight, scholars who specialize in 20th/21st century war, and retired generals, were often less pessimistic about Ukraine's chances in conventional war, but I can't say I noticed at the time.)

    Fast forward a bit, and it looks pretty plausible that the combination of Ukrainian military competence and NATO's industrial resources, are drastically stronger than Russia's military/industrial capabilities (such that the US and its allies are spending basically a rounding error in their overall military budget, against Russia's near-total mobilization), and the conversation moves to how much progress Ukraine can make in its counteroffensives for given levels of Western resource supply. In turn, the case for going slow in that supply is based pretty much entirely on Russia's nuclear deterrent, and has little to do with Russia's conventional strength: it looks fairly plausible that if we were relaxed about providing Ukraine with armor, fixed-wing aircraft, and longer-range precision munitions, their military advantage would start looking decisive, but we are reluctant to do so because of the nuclear escalation risk.

    That leads to a very different sense of 'great power': a nation is a great power if it has an sufficiently strong nuclear deterrent, more or less irrespective on how it does on other metrics. And that's a perfectly defensible way of using the term. But it's quite different from its previous usage, so that taking general theories of great-power politics and applying them in this context may mislead. Ukraine had about a third of the USSR's nuclear arsenal on its soil before agreeing to get rid of them, and would not have found it hard to develop the capacity to use them; by this definition it would be a great power. Pakistan is arguably a great power (perhaps its lack of ICBMs disqualifies it); North Korea is edging towards great-power status.

    To loop back to the longer-term concerns I raised in earlier threads: if a realism based on this definition of 'great power' entails that non-nuclear neighbors of nuclear states should have their security concerns subordinated to those nuclear states, the proliferation risk becomes fairly apparent.

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  49. Peaceful IR Realist

    You write, "Of course Ukraine and its partners should be talking to the Russians all the time, but a diplomatic solution which leads to a sustainable peace is simply not a realistic prospect at the moment." I agree that Russia's territorial demands in Ukraine create a wide gap between the Russian and Ukrainian negotiating positions, and that this is a major hurdle for any efforts toward reaching a diplomatic solution. However, Ukraine's negotiating leverage will not increase if the war gets stuck in a stalemate, as Milley predicts, so it's not clear that there's anything to gain from waiting to negotiate. Additionally, we might see some progress on the territory issue if the United States decided that reaching a diplomatic solution in Ukraine was a high priority. That is because the reason Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 was not to conquer Ukrainian territory, but to prevent the United States from pulling Ukraine into NATO. You make a fine point that any sustainable diplomatic solution would have to be acceptable to the Ukrainians, but the other side of that is that a sustainable solution would also have to be acceptable to the Russians, and the main thing the Russians want is for the United States to stop trying to pull Ukraine into NATO. Zelensky's 10-point peace plan indicates that Ukraine is willing to make concessions on NATO, but meaningful concessions on that issue cannot come from Zelensky; they have to come from Biden. Although everything Russia has done since its annexation announcement suggests that it is digging in its heels, Russia's behavior must be judged in the context of the US's refusal to negotiate. Thus, we do not know whether reaching a diplomatic solution is realistic, because we haven't tried.

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  50. Brian Leiter

    I would not think it is plausible that merely having nuclear weapons makes a "great power." Having enough nuclear weapons to annihilate the world does seem sufficient–that together with some other substantial military capacity, but I don't know enough to specify the details. But the U.S., Russia, and China, at least, are "great powers" in the relevant senses. I'm sure the IR folks have a more nuanced account.

    The proliferation risk is already extremely high, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the success of the North Korean dictatorship in hanging on, and the rather different ending of the Libyan dictatorship. Countries within the U.S. security umbrella are not, at present, rushing to get nuclear weapons, but those outside it (like Iran) take a very different view. I would not be surprised if Japan develops a nuclear arsenal over the next generation, and Australia would be wise to do so too, given increasing concerns about U.S. political stability. Or so it seems to this amateur observer.

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