peter Zeihan 2020
- Thread starter Cherico
- Start date
Its Irrational from our pov, far as were concerned Russia is huge, it has nuclear weapons it has everything it needs to survive as a country in side of their national boarders.
From the Russian point of view they must expand until they hit naturally occuring defensable positions to secure their nations survival. The problem is doing so creates large anti russian coalitions created to bring them down. This has happened numerous times in Russian history and looking at their demographis this is the last time when they can pull this shit.
The west wants to bleed russia white so they will go home, Russias doing a death or glory attack with the last generation they have to pull it off. They lose they become a chinese vassal, they win they become a great power for at least a little while, they do nothing and they likely become a chinese vassal.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Because the war has been of zero benefit to Russia, and has cost them massively economically, militarily, and politically.
Now please answer the question.
PeaceMaker 03
Well-known member
A point people are forgetting:
Ukraine was the #3 Nuclear empower on earth until we convinced them to give up the nukes.( When the USA Guaranteed to protect Ukraine from Russia..... go Brandon). They have nuke reactors and more than enough engineers and physicists needed to make nukes.
Next time Putin rattles the nuclear saber, Ukraine responds with any nuke launch will see Moscow and several other Rissian city's turned into radioactive wastelands. This is your only warning.
That is what I would have been doing for the last year or more if I had any pull in the Ukraine government.
Ukraine was the #3 Nuclear empower on earth until we convinced them to give up the nukes.( When the USA Guaranteed to protect Ukraine from Russia..... go Brandon). They have nuke reactors and more than enough engineers and physicists needed to make nukes.
Next time Putin rattles the nuclear saber, Ukraine responds with any nuke launch will see Moscow and several other Rissian city's turned into radioactive wastelands. This is your only warning.
That is what I would have been doing for the last year or more if I had any pull in the Ukraine government.
Megadeath
Well-known member
The last year or so they haven't really been in a great place to meet the industrial needs to make nuclear weapons. Enrichment facilities aren't quick or easy, and a trustworthy and suitable delivery system would also be an issue, in direct competition with their other military industrial needs. Maybe they should have back when Crimea was annexed, but I don't think they would have receiced a lot of support and would more likely have faced severe push back from most the west.
PeaceMaker 03
Well-known member
Oh I agree with everything you just said, but threat of existential nukes, is a hell of a motivator, for a country with institutional knowledge of nuclear weapons.
If you had Russia as a genocidal neighbor would you give up the knowledge of making nukes as well as the hardware?
Who says they have not been working low output enrichment since Crimea was invaded? Small enough to be handled in one secure facility? Then again I am a Vindictive SOB, who grew up hearing about the Soviets, the Holodomor, and times that Putin might call “Great Soviet Empire”. Also a great deal about the nazis.
Know how to tell the difference between a soviet and a nazi? One has Gulags the other concentration camps, because One is cheap the other is efficient Soviets will starve you and the nazis will gas you.
If you had Russia as a genocidal neighbor would you give up the knowledge of making nukes as well as the hardware?
Who says they have not been working low output enrichment since Crimea was invaded? Small enough to be handled in one secure facility? Then again I am a Vindictive SOB, who grew up hearing about the Soviets, the Holodomor, and times that Putin might call “Great Soviet Empire”. Also a great deal about the nazis.
Know how to tell the difference between a soviet and a nazi? One has Gulags the other concentration camps, because One is cheap the other is efficient Soviets will starve you and the nazis will gas you.
Start with an analysis of both the Russian and the global situations before the war.
Globalization is ending, rapidly. China and Europe are both likely to collapse into chaos as a consequence. Turkey is likely to be one of the major winners in the post globalized world. Russia has no possibility of gaining US assistance or support at any even remotely acceptable cost.
Turkey effectively has a lock on the Black Sea while Sweden, Denmark, and Norway can collectively lock down the Baltic Sea. Incidentally, none of those nations have any love for Russia and all of them are likely to do relatively well in the world to come. Throw in the UK and it becomes effectively impossible for Russian shipping to reach anywhere in Europe, or even the Atlantic. Getting Russian raw materials to western European factories requires the consent of those third parties or shipping by land. By land means Polish consent.
China absorbs an enormous amount of raw materials, but all that demand is about to fall away. And when it does, the manufacturing infrastructure is relocating to the US and its close allies. The core US system already has, relatively, secure sources of raw materials that are entirely independent of Russia and have far fewer political, security, and transport issues. That combined with the greater US efficiency (compared to China), the shrunk potential market (thanks to demographics), and the return of a more imperial international system of trade means that the only real markets for those Russian raw materials at scale are Europe and Turkey.
In the middle term (ten to twenty years), Russia's economy was already utterly fucked and its security situation was already going to go to hell.
At the same time, the US was going to do nothing but accelerate its lead over Russia (and everyone else). The US is about to open up space in an economically viable manner at scale, and it will retain an effective monopoly on orbit for a long time to come. A private US company, that also happens to be the US NatSec establishments primary launch provider, is proving that it can economically and effectively put more satellites into orbit than everyone else in all of human history combined. Starlink is a truly global, redundant, secure, high speed, low latency, communications system; and its a private project. Once it is proven? The next constellations are going to be US NatSec assets. True, 24/7, global surveillance. With all of the take being fed to the worlds most powerful data processing infrastructure sitting securely in the US. Star Wars Missile Defense? The US has the technology and infrastructure to make it fully viable on a scale beyond the wildest dreams of Regan, and it will absolutely do so.
The US, in peace time, casually throws more money into its military than the rest of the world combined. Iraq and Afghanistan proved that the US could throw the equivalent of the entire GDP of Russia in additional funding onto its military every year for a decade without having a notable economic impact on the broader US economy.
That's the external picture. A US that Russia is utterly unable to compete with, zero powerful allies, lack of demand for its only economic exports, and hostile powers blocking its access to its only realistic potential markets of scale.
Internally, it has an utterly fucked education system, a collapsing demographic, and essentially zero ability to compete on the high technology end for at least a decade or two.
So Russia does nothing, letting the status quo play out? It is fucked with zero real ability to materially alter its situation.
Or Russia invades Ukraine.
At an absolute minimum, the US would take the opportunity to sanction the Russian economy as extremely as possible. Europe would either have to go along or fracture because Poland would force the matter; the EU either joins in the sanctions or Poland goes its own way and NATO dies because the US would absolutely break its alliances with most of Europe in such a situation.
Europe is left with three choices. 1) accept the economic damage caused by a sudden removal of Russia from their supply chains, 2) cut a deal with Russia, or 3) collapse the EU as the member nations have their own separate ideas about what to do. Two of those three are straight wins for Russia. The EU as a unified bloc is Russia's most likely enemy in many respects, Europe as a collection of independent nations substantially improves Russian security and Russia's relative economic power.
Or Europe accepts the economic damage and gets thrown into a Depression on par with the Great Depression at the same time Europe is facing its own demographic issues and the US is reassessing its own economic and security relationships in preparation for a deglobalized world. The relative economic damage is worse for Europe than for Russia and the domestic political consequences of that damage are far worse for Europe than for Russia.
Russia's actions are also highly likely to trigger a continental scale famine. To support the population of an industrialized world (what we have now), you need the appropriate agricultural inputs. Fertilizer. The belligerent powers control approximately half of the global supply of Potash fertilizers and Russian natural gas is the source of basically all European produced nitrogen based fertilizers. Replacing the missing supply, even on a crash priority basis, is at least a five year process (more likely a decade). Food shortages have collapsed more nations than every other cause in all of human history, combined.
Russia is food secure, as is the US and its core allies. Africa and the Middle East aren't. Which will cause more chaos in those areas and consequential reduce their ability to provide raw materials.
More chaos, more disruption. Except that, again, Russia is essentially immune to all of this. It doesn't border the chaos zones and it doesn't import anything from them.
The US has two choices in response. It can beggar itself trying to stop the chaos, and still probably failing, or it can continue on its current path and basically ignore it because the US and its core allies are all essentially immune to all of this. If the US intervenes then it will be distracted from Russia and won't be as much of an issue. If the US doesn't intervene then Russia gets to return to a world before globalization fucked it over hard.
Now the direct military situation. Russia doesn't need to fear direct US, or European, military intervention; its nuclear arsenal ensures that. Russia is also perfectly willing to utilize genocide as a military tactic. Its primary military objective is specific geographic features, its secondary military objective is people (specifically young children who can be effectively indoctrinated into loyalty and women of breeding age who can be used to produce more ethnic Russians), its tertiary objective is natural resources. Any infrastructure left intact in its wake is an incidental bonus.
Russia is perfectly willing to level every single building in Ukraine and kill every male between the ages of sixteen and sixty if that is what victory takes. Power plants and agricultural infrastructure aren't just acceptable targets, they are primary objectives.
Grind its way to the Dnipro River and Russia gains a natural border with Turkey that is something approaching defensible. The military force it needs to defend its western border drops substantially.
Take the rest of Ukraine and, if NATO/Europe is still intact negotiate with them to turn western Ukraine into a neutral, demilitarized, buffer state in exchange for concessions from NATO/EU/US. If, on the other hand, the economic consequences have resulted in Russia not facing substantial opposition then it continues on and grabs Moldova and part of Romania to get the border it really wants, perhaps even pushing into Bulgaria to get the Balkan Mountains as well. That leaves Poland as the only conventional attack route Russia really has to worry about.
And a Poland that is caught between a Russia filled with raw materials but in need to advanced technology and a Germany with one of the worlds most advanced industrial bases but in desperate need of raw materials.
For Russia, a much more pleasing situation.
And the cost? Russia already lacked any substantive allies, so the political damage on that front is a relative nullity. It was already facing economic collapse in the near future, so it may as well do what it can to export the same to its competitors. Militarily? It costs Russian lives, a currency Russia has always been willing to spend to achieve its strategic objectives.
The true lose condition for Russia is that it fails to secure everything east of the Dnipro before Ukraine exhausts Russia's conventional forces and Europe remains relatively unified. In this circumstance, Russia has to decide whether it escalates to nukes or accepts losing the war.
Because if Russia can secure to the River then it will be able to fortify that line to the point where Ukraine will not be able to dislodge it, and that is Russia's minimum objective achieved.
---
So Russia's actions in Ukraine? They are absolutely morally abhorrent. But they are also rational. The relative costs to Russia of the war compared to doing nothing are marginal and the potential gains are substantial
There are many contradictions that this theory is trying to solve with highly detailed and specific assumptions about various reactions that have low chances of all being fulfilled.
Nevermind that in status quo countries like Poland and Denmark cannot close trade routes just willy nilly, even now Kaliningrad didn't get a land blockade despite everyone thinking about it. Only extreme actions from Russia's side can possibly make it happen, and so Russia goes on a streak of extreme actions...
In status quo. the "hostile powers" were only mildly hostile yet by international order they could block jack shit, even the oh so "russophobic" Poland was buying some energy resources from Russia itself, yet Russia is doing the only thing that can make the risk of it higher.
Yes, split EU is beneficial to Russia, but i don't think for these reasons - the overall situation has multiplied the hostility and distrust it will get from its western borders for decades to come, blocking any security or economic benefits it would get. However, it would open up some new expansion opportunities, and that is apparently what the powers that be truly give a damn about. Though the other issue in that is NATO, which was given a new lease on life by current events. Oops...
Except on the wrong continent, the African one, if any. If their plan is to starve some of the richest countries in the world that sit on top of world trade and are so good at agriculture that they normally have to pay farmers to not make food... It's a bad plan.
Replacing missing supply? We are talking about potash, something made since literal ancient times, not microchips or aircraft, why the 10 year lead time?
What the fertilizer doom scenarios never mention is that Canada alone has about a third of global production and can expand on top of that, and that EU itself can probably meet a good enough chunk of own needs with Germany and few lesser producers.
Also the priority assessment is kinda correct, but unnecessarily complicated.
It's:
1. Land and resources that are inseparably under/on it, or more like simply resources and land one annoyingly needs to control to get them, resources above all.
2. Population of potential serfs to work on 1.
3. Everything else.
This is the reason for the comparison to other economically resource heavy, wide but not tall minor powers of Middle East. The ruling classes of Russia live and prosper on resources, as you said, they kinda suck at other stuff. How to keep them happy if you're struggling? Get more land with resources, and start handing it out to them. That's why they are doing.
Even if the grand economic calculus comes out on the minus for Russia as a whole, with the loss of military equipment, trade, middle class incomes etc, the VIPs with the right connections can still make out like bandits (which they often are btw), these things aren't contradictory, while the parts that end up with the minus have little to no voice among the powers that be. Russia is basically sacrificing the interests of own working class, middle class, and even few remaining tech investors, for the benefit of current and upcoming resourcemonger oligarchs.
Again, if there was any justification for this overwhelming concern about good attack routes...
They would be in use in this current grand opportunity already.
It seems like Russia is bent on becoming the customary exemplary picture under this quote, possibly replacing the Maginot Line:
"Fixed fortifications are monuments to man's stupidity. If mountain ranges and oceans can be overcome, anything made by man can be overcome." –George S. Patton.
Seriously, any power capable of neutralizing Russia's WMD arsenal reliably enough to invade it, will make a grand mockery out of these fortification lines too. They may not even be that good at holding back Ukrainians...
Ships from Russia can still get to Germany without crossing Denmark's straits.
Nevermind that in status quo countries like Poland and Denmark cannot close trade routes just willy nilly, even now Kaliningrad didn't get a land blockade despite everyone thinking about it. Only extreme actions from Russia's side can possibly make it happen, and so Russia goes on a streak of extreme actions...
Of course Russia cannot compete with US anymore for plain economic calculus if nothing else, and without ridiculous internal reforms that would go into history as something listed along with modernization of Japan, which is about the opposite of what Putin&co are doing, this will never change. Under them, Russia is heading towards being a colder, bigger Saudi Arabia\Iraq\Iran with nukes.
In status quo. the "hostile powers" were only mildly hostile yet by international order they could block jack shit, even the oh so "russophobic" Poland was buying some energy resources from Russia itself, yet Russia is doing the only thing that can make the risk of it higher.
And here we already see that this plan has... overestimated the power of resource supplier dependence of developed economies. So far we are in scenario 1, and the damage still seems overshadowed by the damage of stupid lockdown abuse for no good reason at all.
Yes, split EU is beneficial to Russia, but i don't think for these reasons - the overall situation has multiplied the hostility and distrust it will get from its western borders for decades to come, blocking any security or economic benefits it would get. However, it would open up some new expansion opportunities, and that is apparently what the powers that be truly give a damn about. Though the other issue in that is NATO, which was given a new lease on life by current events. Oops...
Is it? That seems like a wild assumption not in line with reality so far. Self inflicted corona bullshit was more economic damage it seems to me. Europe can have its choice of suppliers, and is willing to play some shadier games in Africa to get them, especially now.
Except on the wrong continent, the African one, if any. If their plan is to starve some of the richest countries in the world that sit on top of world trade and are so good at agriculture that they normally have to pay farmers to not make food... It's a bad plan.
Replacing missing supply? We are talking about potash, something made since literal ancient times, not microchips or aircraft, why the 10 year lead time?
What the fertilizer doom scenarios never mention is that Canada alone has about a third of global production and can expand on top of that, and that EU itself can probably meet a good enough chunk of own needs with Germany and few lesser producers.
Russia returns to global stage how? Even a tenth of the level of intervention that it would take to beggar US would be enough to beggar Russia. Symbolic and moderately effective intervention in relatively small Syria is what you are looking at here. This is a baby's first sandbox, not grand return to global stage.
This part is utterly self-contradicting. Yes, no one is invading Russia on the ground even now, when the excuses exist, and opportunity is better than ever, because of nukes, that's why all the further attempts to make specific geographical features of borders sound like an overwhelming issue belongs in the XVIIIth century. We live in the age of ICBMs and stealth jets, and those don't care about mountains and rivers.
Also the priority assessment is kinda correct, but unnecessarily complicated.
It's:
1. Land and resources that are inseparably under/on it, or more like simply resources and land one annoyingly needs to control to get them, resources above all.
2. Population of potential serfs to work on 1.
3. Everything else.
This is the reason for the comparison to other economically resource heavy, wide but not tall minor powers of Middle East. The ruling classes of Russia live and prosper on resources, as you said, they kinda suck at other stuff. How to keep them happy if you're struggling? Get more land with resources, and start handing it out to them. That's why they are doing.
Even if the grand economic calculus comes out on the minus for Russia as a whole, with the loss of military equipment, trade, middle class incomes etc, the VIPs with the right connections can still make out like bandits (which they often are btw), these things aren't contradictory, while the parts that end up with the minus have little to no voice among the powers that be. Russia is basically sacrificing the interests of own working class, middle class, and even few remaining tech investors, for the benefit of current and upcoming resourcemonger oligarchs.
No border is defensible if there is a mess loosely resembling an army defending it. It's the psychological barrier of nukes defending it, and if in next decades some sort of western powers with some sort of means to neutralize that issue and willingness to fight Russia arises... bloody hell of science fiction proportions will fall upon Russia's increasingly backwards army and no geographical features can save it from that kind of technological overmatch, no more than the Atlantic saved the natives of Americas from colonization, and few rivers are not the Atlantic.
Such verbal concessions are inherently fickle for both sides. The EU/NATO/US didn't go for it in the first place for that reason among other things, like the implication that Russia gets to saber rattle enough to be allowed a veto seat at the NATO table, forgetting that it's not a member nor a superpower strong enough to make dictates that NATO has to follow.
Again, if there was any justification for this overwhelming concern about good attack routes...
They would be in use in this current grand opportunity already.
Well, yeah. For partially different reasons, the Ukrainian landgrab and perhaps further, smaller ones, serve to enrich the important people of Russia, at the cost of the unimportant people of Russia (well over 90% of them) plus the poor sods inhabiting the territories being grabbed.
The true loss condition is becoming China's colony after the war, whatever the result, badly enough for China to start dictating terms to the oligarchs.
Looking at the fortifications already being built by Russia in other places...
It seems like Russia is bent on becoming the customary exemplary picture under this quote, possibly replacing the Maginot Line:
"Fixed fortifications are monuments to man's stupidity. If mountain ranges and oceans can be overcome, anything made by man can be overcome." –George S. Patton.
Seriously, any power capable of neutralizing Russia's WMD arsenal reliably enough to invade it, will make a grand mockery out of these fortification lines too. They may not even be that good at holding back Ukrainians...
The rationality only applies to few hundred people in Russia at most, unfortunately every single one of them being very important and close to high ranking decisionmakers of Russia. The rest is empty promises, ignorance, centuries of propaganda and delusions of grandeur. The costs will be massive, but paid mostly by other, less important people, so who cares, while the gains will go to these important people.
Last edited:
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Well, I see you clearly have some logic to this, however this is completely ignoring a few very important things:
1. Russia benefited more from the globalized economy than Europe. Natural resources can be had all over the world, cutting edge technology only comes from a few places, all of which Russia has now cut itself off from.
2. Europe (aside from Poland) was in a place of pathological anti-militarism. The German military is a shambles, the Swedish military has been withering away, and everyone else has been steadily reducing budgets and force sizes since the end of the Cold War. There was a compulsion against trying to use the military to solve national problems in every part of Europe except maybe for Poland, and this is something that massively benefitted Russia. This invasion of Ukraine actively destroys that.
3. Russia's opening moves in the war did not reflect the kind of military or economic objectives you are talking about. They tried to take Kiev in a knock-out blow, and it seems their intelligence reports had them seriously thinking that the Ukrainians would roll over like many parts of the Ukrainian military did in 2014. Putin and company were clearly hoping to present the world at large with a fait-accompli, where Zelensky and his government were in their hands by the time other world leaders got over the shock of it actually happening. If they had been able to pull that off, using economic pressure and other things to force Europe to accept what had already happened would not have been an unreasonable expectation, but it didn't happen.
4. As Marduk pointed out, your argument about Russia seeking defensible borders is absolutely contradictory to your argument that nobody else will dare get directly involved because of fear of Russia's nukes. Either nuclear weapons are an effective deterrent, or they aren't. You can't have it both ways.
5. Even if Russia wins, which looks highly unlikely at this point, they have already dropped from 'the world's second military power' to 'a military joke.' The sheer incompetence with which they've done everything has pulverized the aura of intimidation and fear they've wielded against smaller nations in Asia and the Middle East for decades, and that is not a small cost. Further, more than a million of their brighter young minds have fled the country to avoid the draft, and while they're willing to spend blood like water to try to win, that is no longer a price Russia can afford to pay.
The Russian census in 1916 had their population at 93 million people; this is back when the world population was still less than two billion, meaning that roughly one in twenty of all people on the entire planet was Russian. After seventy years of communism and then thirty years of post-communist cultural collapse and government corruption, the population is only about 147 million, having scarcely increased by 50% over more than a hundred years. Meanwhile, the world population has quadrupled, with the three primary potential threats to Russia, the US, China, and India, all grossly outpopulating it.
'Bury them in men' works as a tactic when you have a crushing numerical advantage, and your demographics are booming as your population steadily increases. When you're already in demographic decline, and you start throwing away lives by the tens of thousands, as well as send people fleeing by the millions, you are turning decline into a risk of collapse.
As Marduk pointed out, there's some logic to what's going on for powerful Russian elites who can engage in blatant war profiteering, but for Russia as a nation, this war is functionally suicide.
After thirty years of decline, Europe is re-militarizing, hardline pacifism is being politically and culturally marginalized, and major economic powers like Germany are starting to care a lot more about where they're getting their raw materials from, and whether or not those sources are reliable.
None of this is good for Russia, and if they hadn't institutionalized lying as an expected part of their professional culture, they would have known what a disaster they were sticking their hand into.
Evil men prosper when good men are lulled into a sense complacency and laziness. Few things can awaken them from such a state like war.
PeaceMaker 03
Well-known member
Not sure who said it, but someone mentioned Putin building and training 750k man army to attack Ukraine in the spring.
My first thought was almost double that has fled Russia since this dustup kicked off.
And a few months is not a trained army.
My first thought was almost double that has fled Russia since this dustup kicked off.
And a few months is not a trained army.
With what? Guess they will be using very loose definitions of "train" and "attack" by then. As in they will be fighting like China did in Korea.
Prince Ire
Section XIII
Being a mistake and being irrational are not the same thing. A decision can be a rational decision to make and still be the wrong decision to make.
Sometimes people fuck up
That would be my read too. Experience and common wisdom of 2022, that @LordsFire mentioned above, show why invading in 2022 would have looked like a reasonable plan: The US looked extremely weak and feckless post Afghanistan, Covid theoretically should have put the west in a particularly vulnerable position, and some solution to the Ukraine war ongoing for the previous 8 years would have to be resolved somehow, and resolving it in Russian favorable conditions would require an invasion at that point: securing Crimea requires forcing the Ukrainians to give up their claims, which looked like it would require a military solution, not a political one.
Georgia, Syria, and the first major operation in Ukraine in 2014-15 suggested such options were often quick, cheap, and effective at achieving these goals. Prior actions in Ukraine suggested they were unlikely to fight all that hard or well, and Afganistan also suggested such, in the sense that American trained allied troops failed.
And of course, a quick win over such a prominent American project would be a great blow to the American Empire, and undermine the credibility of US promises, especially on the heels of Afganistan.
It seems quite clear at this stage they greatly miscalculated, 2022 was not quite as prime a time to invade Ukraine as it appeared. The irrationality though, to the degree it was there, was how long it seems to have taken the Russians to really internalize how different things were, not moving to more general mobilization and treating this as the proper war it was until 6-9 months in.
History Learner
Well-known member
Is that why Russian oil revenues were up 28% in 2022? Is that why Europe is suddenly buying lots of oil from places like India, which don't have large deposits but do have a trading relationship with Russia that sees them buy up large amounts of said oil and then ship it with a premium to Europe? India is playing an increasingly important role in global oil markets, buying more and more Russian oil and refining it into fuel for Europe and the US.
Weird how, if there was other places to buy it from, that they are still buying Russian crude eh?
By what metrics?
Good thing two of those three are not threats to Russia.
Good thing that literally did not happen, and is completely made up.
Except it's not by any rational analysis of the demographic data. The worst case claim for Russian casualties in this war is about 15x less than the births Russia recorded in 2016 alone.
Except that's false on all accounts, especially given we know Europeans continue importing LNG...from Russia. The European Union still imported 11.8 million tons of LNG from Moscow between March and October of 2022. That is 2 million tons more than in the same period in 2021.
I'm also very curious how Europe is supposed to re-militarize with Russia having destroyed its manufacturing base:
Except they didn't. They're going to win this war and in a decade be the pre-dominant power of Europe.
Even then, it all hung on Russia being able to do a Desert Storm style showing before USA can really react, and unfortunately for them Ukraine didn't play along.
They had some issues in Georgia but overcame them with sheer numerical advantage (it's a tiny country, fraction of the population of even Israel).
Ukraine got gradually better and some of their own allies were warning them, to be ignored.
Syria? Russian intervention was symbolic, it's still not over, and they have to worry about getting competed with by Iran. The only thing they have proven that modernish air support can do a lot when the other side has jack shit for air defenses, and one can do it on a leaner budget than Americans if willing to accept some extra risk.
As for Afghanistan, western troops didn't lose a single battle, it was just a political kerfuffle.
You are ascribing waaay too much real estate in Putin's head to America, most of which in fact belongs to Russian Empire (which is also where at least part of the chronic underestimation of Ukraine's willingness and ability to resist comes from).
Last edited:
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
The key here, is that they miscalculated because they were willfully blind, and they had all the signs they needed to know that 2022 would not be like 2014.
They just flat refused to believe them.
Yes, things always look obvious in hindsight. This is still all mistakes, not irrationality. Outside of such things like "being the underdog is irrational". Do you believe there was a way for Russia to secure Crimea without a war? If not, then the War was always a matter of when, not if. 2022 looked like a good year to do it.
2022 might still be the most rational year to do it. Maybe better to have done it earlier, but spilt milk. I don't see doing it later to have given them a better option. We'll have to see how everything turns out in the end if they can get a win out of this or not.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
I'm saying the irrationality is in how they built their military and at least a significant part of their intelligence apparatus in a self-defeating way.
On top of that, they further goofed by not rapidly shifting their war objectives to securing Donetsk and Luhansk, then declaring victory and ending the war. If they hadn't insisted on taking Kherson, on fighting Mariupol down to the bitter end, etc, and focused on those two areas when it was clear that their military wasn't remotely capable of what they thought it was, they probably could have ended the fighting in weeks.
Call it job done, claim you were only ever there to secure the DNR and LNR from Ukrainian 'aggression,' and you can present a lesser fait accompli before the international community has largely hardened against you.
Further, they've continuously failed to address the systemic structural problems in the Russian military. They still have the culture of lying, they still repeatedly commit to wasteful and stupid attacks because they can't tell each other the truth, etc, etc.
There are multiple levels at which Russia is still acting irrationally.