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National Demographic's avatar

I have a few issues with this article because it cherrypicks instead of being genuine.

1. It's untrue to say Russia hasn't been a fixation of US foreign policy pre-2013. In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia and president Bush considered sending troops to Georgia (in the end, only humanitarian aid was sent). A year later, US started military training to Georgians. The reason why it escalated in recent years is not LGBT issues but the fact that Russia gets more and more aggressive towards its neighbors (massive military buildup in Kaliningrad, de-facto vasalization of Belarus, continuous incursions into Norwegian, Polish, British and Baltic air spaces, submarines 5 miles from Stockholm etc.) as it goes out of its post-USSR slump and invests in military with oil money.

2. Russia is an irreligious country. Anti-LGBT laws are not justified by Christianity at all. Of the 8% of Russians who attend religious institution at least once a month, most are Muslims in Caucasus and Tatarstan. Instead, Putin constantly referenced traditional values and low fertility rate. This is not Poland where anti-LGBT laws are indeed fueled by the religious right.

3. The NYT article is about rise of authoritarianism in Eastern Europe. Easy to understand why Ukraine is not covered - in Freedom House ranking, it goes up (from 55 in 2017 to 62 now) while the other countries go down (e.g. Poland from 89 in 2017 to 82 now). So the direction is opposite.

Also, to say what happens in Poland is mostly liberal hysteria is unserious. State TV is basically worse than during communist times; the news is "5 minutes of hatred" towards the enemy of the month, usually the opposition or gays or Germans. There's no news anymore, the typical segment goes like "Germans furious about Polish wealth", "Disgraced opposition wants to take away your money", "Disgusting attack on Christianity by the gays" (they started an LGBT support group for Catholics), "Government bravely solves inflation". Last year, they tried to force the main independent TV station out, only a strong reaction from the US made the president to back out and not sign the bill. The state oil monopoly bought regional media and installed literally party apparatchiks in the newsrooms - you can go on.

4. The map of elections from 10 years ago is hardly relevant now. The 2014 aggression really solidified Ukrainian national identity as it became clear that Russia is not a brother but rather your mom's abusive boyfriend. Usage of Russian dropped significantly and in last year's election, the only relatively pro-Russian candidate, Boyko, got less than 12% of the vote, almost exclusively in the areas immediately bordering the separatists republics in the East (and in rural areas around Odessa).

5. The TFR argument misses a valid point. TFR of 1.2 doesn't mean most people have 1 kid. While technically a possibility, in case of Eastern Europe it's actually more common that some people have 2-3 kids but lots of people have 0 kids. And while below-replacement-level fertility is a relatively new phenomenon, there is actually quite a bit of examples where populations with such fertility started insurgencies: East Germans, and lately Georgians and Armenians.

There's plenty of arguments why America should not interfere or at least not be as invested in Ukraine and this piece touches on some, but some are real misses.

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CyberOWL's avatar

Couple of notes:

1) On the odds of a successful insurgency: terrain isn't just mountains and swamps, urban guerillas are a thing, and fighting insurgents in cities and towns is by far more annoying and more of a nightmare than fighting them in, like, hills. To boot, Ukraine also has a marshy Big River that offers the actual swamps, and I wouldn't want to be tasked with rooting out amphibious vodyanoy-taliban squatting in the labyrinthine lagoons of the Dnieper.

2) On the odds of a successful insurgency 2: demographics. While the quip about birth rates predicting willingness to fight and the implied dig at western unwillingness to sacrifice the slightest inconvenience for an ideal is funny, it only applies in aggregate or on average. But you don't need everyone in the country to be involved in the insurgency, you just need a motivated minority. Ukraine might be below replacement, but you will absolutely find more than enough people to form a local Vietcong/Taliban in case the Russians actually invade.

3) On the odds of a successful insurgency 3: kit. Russia has the tanks, but Ukraine has the Saab next generation anti-tank weapons. Assymetry being the central theme of modern warfare. Having the costly kit that can be taken out by squatting slavs in bushes, for pennies, is actually a strategic weakness.

3) If Russia invades, and does in fact run into a local Vietcong/Taliban equivalent, and gets embroiled, it might well be morally *worse* for Russia than Vietnam or Afghanistan were for America - in addition to the usual humiliation and hit to national self-confidence from a defeat at the hands of a bunch of angry rednecks, there is also the matter of a war on Ukraine being essentially fratricidal. It is one thing to "go blow up coloured devils of some sort" halfway across the planet, and another to go shooting literal cousins. And then lose. Notably, this is the typical argument for why an Appalachian Hillbilly Resistance would probably succeed against the US government.

4) Russia cares more than America, but America should realize this is about the future of its empire and its credibility as an ally, and adjust its commitment accordingly. Ukraine isn't just about Ukraine, the stakes are broader - I am Czech, and we are watching Ukraine with *extreme* attention to see how credible America is as an ally, especially given the history of western betrayals and being repeatedly sold out for the sake of short-sighted, temporary appeasement of implacable imperialists (Munich conference, Yalta). If NATO allows Putin to take Ukraine, then the Baltics and Poland can reasonably expect to be next, and they will start taking steps to ensure military security outside the NATO framework. Putin counts on this - the stakes here are actually the loyalty of the entirety of Central-Eastern post-communist Europe. We are scared.

Don't be the Neville Chamberlain to Putin.

5) Full agreement that America no longer promotes ideals that would inspire anybody normal. Aspiring to democracy and peeping westwards through the barbed wire of the Iron Curtain under the Soviet yoke was one thing. If the American empire was still 1980s Reagan-Rambo-TopGun-GreedIsGood, we'd all be on board 100%. Being lectured on pronouns by non-binary avocadoes is another, substantially less inspiring story. I understand the American empire needed a new universal Casus Belli after "democracy" succeeded and became the global baseline (except for a few holdouts where it will conversely never be a thing, and so is equally useless as a propaganda device), but I feel y'all could have done a lot better coming up with an ideological justification for imperialism than wokeness, possibly the least appealing cause of all currently in circulation except for kicking puppies - not least because it smells very similar to stuff post-communist countries (as opposed to pre-communist ones) already tried and are currently trying to get as far away from as possible. Of course, it's possible and even likely that "wokeness" is the cold-war era work of our own intelligence agencies, currently dismantling the American empire by the all-conquering centrifugal force of pure cringe, the universal solvent of civilizations.

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