- cross-posted to:
- news@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- news@beehaw.org
cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/113454
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Hey, EU, feel free to ignore whatever the US and Russia say. Love, an American.
I don’t think a lot of Americans appreciate how much hatred the UK has for Russia. No politician is going to win any votes with a line of let’s cozy up to the Russians.
Regardless everyone in the western world knows that Russia’s word isn’t worth anything. So ultimately these negotiations are nothing but PR stunt and will achieve nothing except possibly pissing off Europe.
I hope our leaders get their shit together and (1) ramp up their support for Ukraine a lot and (2) work on making the EU more independent from the US (and others).
This is really sad.
Yet again, I can’t help but look back towards Biden, who overall seems to have employed a practice of making no plans to safeguard any of his work against an election loss.
I wish he would’ve negotiated an end to this while Ukraine still had some leverage. I feel like that’s been treated as a shocking proposal for the last three years. But it always seemed obvious to me: if Trump wins, you could lose any and everything. He could simply withhold weapons and invite Russia to complete full conquest. He could issue Zelinsky an ultimatum to surrender and live in exile or face a firing squad in St. Petersburg.
Ukraine will be lucky to simply survive these peace talks. Why they didn’t negotiate this before the election seems to be another in an endless catalog of hubristic decisions.
Seems obvious to me why the Biden administration couldn’t negotiate with the Russians: the Russians were waiting for Trump to come back to power.
I’m sorry, but that seems like BS.
I recall very clearly that Biden and Blinken maintained that they were refusing to open any negotiations with Russia. Maybe Russia would’ve refused. But I distinctly recall Biden taking a hard line stance, and anyone who suggested that he, Blinken, and Zelinsky accepting that they weren’t likely to recover full territorial control being basically tarred and feathered as MAGA puppets.
I just don’t see the point. So many lives were spent to defend the country. Will it mean anything? We’ll see.
I’m sorry, but that seems like BS.
Believe it. See also: Bibi
I do not understand what your point is.
What lesson did you take from the fiasco with Bibi? Biden claimed for months that he was going to get Bibi to agree to a ceasefire, and that it was close, and that the major obstacle was Hamas. And that they were working “tirelessly”. And critics continued to insist that if he was serious, he needed to call up Bibi and say that he either accept a ceasefire or continue the war with rocks and sharp sticks, but that one way or another, Israel was about to stop firing US-made bullets at kids. And we were told that it doesn’t work that way.
And then Trump said that Bibi had to agree to Biden’s ceasefire by January 20th or there’d be “hell to pay”. Obviously not because of any humanitarian concern, but the point is that it was obvious all along: when the US is your essential supplier, the US can largely dictate exactly when you sit down at the negotiating table.
Do you see some other lesson here besides that Biden was terrible at diplomacy, specifically because he never really wanted diplomacy?
Do you see some other lesson here besides that Biden was terrible at diplomacy, specifically because he never really wanted diplomacy?
Yes.
One shouldn’t get all foreign diplomacy information from sound bites. What Biden said, and what anyone else says is rarely every relevant. There are things going on that cannot be made public - most of what goes on cannot be made public for many and varied reasons.
It’s well known that Bibi hated Biden and Biden was trying to use every tool available to get him to stop being a genocidal monster. He could have frozen the arms shipments - in fact, he did - until the republiQans forced them to continue because they knew what was up.
He could have gone nuclear. He could have torn up all the history and all the treaties and made the entire middle east dark. Because he’s competent and a regular human he did not do those things. Should he have? Many think so. Many would be wrong. He tried to reason. He tried to cajole. He tried with the leverage on arms, on money, on access - all the things. Diplomacy was in full effect though some on here would have you not know about it for their own reasons.
And what the republiQans knew was this: Bibi was very much in the tank for trump. Because he knows how easy to manipulate trump is, and he knows with trump in office he’ll get to do whatever he wants with zero pushback.
So they performed this charade where Bibi continues open war crimes, waits til the election, then trump does his tough-guy imitation, and then Bibi says “oh no! I’d better implement the ceasefire I’d already worked out months ago with Biden’s team!” and everyone who doesn’t know better thinks trump had a damned thing to do with it. He did not. That Bibi flew here pronto to lick trump’s wig or whatever fucked up dance they do says more than any sound bite you’d get out of a headline.
but the point is that it was obvious all along: when the US is your essential supplier, the US can largely dictate exactly when you sit down at the negotiating table.
Well, what do you think trump negotiated with? Do you think he’ll stop the arms sales? Cut back the funding? Maybe something so drastic as to say a bad thing about what Likud has done publicly? No. trump negotiated with nothing because trump has no interest whatsoever in stopping Bibi’s goals. He wants to participate. Bibi waited for trump to give whatever edge he could to the campaign and then moved forward gleefully.
I mean no disrespect, but I think you need to exercise a much more critical lens. If only as an exercise in understanding other viewpoints, even if you think they’re somehow incorrect.
Biden didn’t need to tear up treaties or threaten to invent new powers. He literally just had to obey US law.
A law known as the Leahey law states very, very frankly that it is illegal – completely against US law – for any US agency to knowingly provide weapons which they believe will be used to commit human rights abuses or violate international law.
Numerous whistleblowers in the state department – Stacey Gilbert, Annelle Sheline, Josh Paul – flagged the provision of weapons to Israel as a clear violation of the Leahy law. They repeatedly pointed out that internally, the State Department had clearly determined that weapons were routinely being used in a manner that made further deliveries a criminal act under US law. This happened in full public view. These three people (as well as others outside of the state department) resigned from the jobs they’d worked their whole lives for out of duty to the constitution to publicly disclose that Blinken and Biden were knowingly acting in direct violation of US criminal law. That’s what makes this so frustrating. Biden had no excuse. Despite every claim to the contrary, his complicity in the war crimes in Gaza were conducted knowingly and deliberately. It was not passive, it required active, determined will to carry out. I think that based on numerous public testimonials from within his administration, frankly, the International Criminal Court had sufficient evidence to charge Biden with war crimes as they did Netanyahu and Galant. But obviously charging the US president is just way too hot a potato.
Biden withheld a single item: 2000 lbs bombs. That was a purely symbolic gesture. That in no way limited Israel’s ability to conduct the war. And that was on purpose. If it had, he wouldn’t have done it.
No one prevented him from withholding anything. I’m not sure what you think Republicans forced him to do, but that is the sole item that was withheld, and that restriction persisted until he left office.
This is very, very painful stuff to digest. But I hope you can take a deep breath and at least sit with these facts for a moment. I think we should all do so out of respect for people like Gilbert, Sheline, and Paul who sacrificed their careers and reputations over these plain facts.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/27/opinions/gaza-israel-resigning-state-department-sheline/index.html
Those are very well made points, and I didn’t know a few of them, so thank you for that.
That said: What would you have him do? Biden, that is. In 2024, with the fate of the world as we know it at stake, would you tell Israel no more weapons?
If that were to have happened, what would be the result?
Do you think russia might have jumped in there with both feet? If not, why not? Would that have any effect on the rest of the middle east? If not, why not?
I’m not suggesting it’s simple - in fact, I’m railing against those who do - but I don’t believe Biden was interested in prolonging the war crimes of the Likud at all. And that’s what every discussion about this ends up with and that discussion, in turn, leads us to trump. Every time.
In order for negotiations to conclude, both sides have to agree. The US isn’t one of those sides. In 2022 there were a lot of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, but they were so far from agreeing that they realized there’s no use in negotiating for a long time.
There’s nothing Biden could have done, apart from sending even more aid, to help the situation. And now with Trump chatting with Putin, there’s hardly any difference. No deal will be reached without Ukraine agreeing, which they’re clearly not.
The only result from this will likely be that the US completely stops all support, forcing the EU to send even more aid, and the war will drag on a lot longer, probably years.
I find it tragic the lack of strategic thinking or imagination that the national security world is capable of.
If what you’re saying is true, this is the best outcome. Biden did the best that one could do. This result is the result you get from implimenting the best possible strategic war planning of the strongest military in all of history.
That’s preposterous. If Biden, Blinken, and Austin sat down and applied the world’s most formidable military power to simulating outcomes, among possible outcomes would certainly be these two:
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Trump wins, withdraws all support, and possibly begins sanctioning Ukraine or supplying weapons and intelligence to Putin. Zelinsky is killed and Ukraine comes fully under Russian control as a puppet state.
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Zelinsky agrees under pressure from Biden to negotiate a ceasefire in 2022. European leaders buy into a plan where they muster an overwhelming pressure campaign of limited duration to apply maximum pressure to Putin economically, and Biden warns that if Putin doesn’t come to the table, all bets are off: Ukraine enters into a complete mutual defense pact with the US, and we begin building long range ballistic missile launchers on their border. OR; Ukraine agrees to surrender parts of Crimea and the Donbas in exchange for a complete withdrawal. Russia acquiesces. The war ends. Both sides are mad, but Trump comes into office more than two years after Russia has completely withdrawn, and Ukraine maintains a sizeable stockpile of American weapons, making a resumption of the conflict unappealing to Putin.
I don’t love outcome 2. But can we not pretend that this was not an option obviously available to Biden? An option he refused to even consider, despite the obviously enormous risks?
Biden should’ve compelled an end to this by any means necessary before Trump took office. This was not an unforeseeable outcome, and they made no effort to even consider a response strategy.
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Remember when Biden said some idiotic thing earlier in the war about how Ukraine wasn’t thankful enough and felt that support was owed to them? That’s when I knew Biden want taking this seriously. It was theatrics to him.
what
I wish he would’ve negotiated an end to this while Ukraine still had some leverage.
Ukraine doesn’t want to give up land, and isn’t willing to tolerate not having security guarantees. Russia is convinced that it can ultimately militarily prevail.
Wars end when one side is either unable to continue or the two sides moderate their demands to some kind of meeting point. What’s the Biden administration going to do?
The US isn’t willing to go to war on the matter, so compelling Russia militarily probably isn’t an option. The US could have withdrawn military support for Ukraine, but I don’t think that that’s what you want. There’s more sanctions, but we’ve already got a lot of sanctions in place, and you want a rapid resolution.
Maybe we could have dramatically ramped up aid for Ukraine, as long as Ukraine could have made use of it. The US is probably willing to do that to some degree, as long as it doesn’t compromise its position relative to China. But will that substantively change the situation? Like, if you’re Putin, you’ve probably got a pretty good incentive to try to stick it out, if you feel that Biden and Trump are going to have much of a difference in position.
And Russia has zero interest in working with Biden. Because they knew that between their election interference, their US-based puppets, and general voter dissatisfaction with Biden (and Harris), all they had to do was wait it out to get a much more favorable administration who will acquiesce to their demands.
No: because that assumes that Putin knew Trump was going to win.
Both sides knew that the outcome of a coin flip election could make or break the terms of any future agreement, so Putin had no way to confidently know that a negotiation in 2025 would yield better terms than 2024.
I mean, it’s all hypothetical. Maybe Putin would rather go for broke, because he’s insane and an evil asshole. Maybe he’d rather die blowing up the whole world than every accept a stalemate. But the theory that there was no room to negotiate is preposterous.
I can definitely say in this moment, though, that Biden’s refusal to even discuss negotiating a ceasefire was certainly a massive, costly mistake.
This is uncomfortable to say, but the US President has pretty much unconstrained authority to control the diplomatic matters of most of our allies. It’s not unlimited, but it’s obviously enough that the President of the United States can – if they choose to – simply dictate the end of a proxy war. I think this is really more obvious common sense than some fringe theory, but for any skeptics, Trump demonstrated this by commanding Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire deal he hated that Biden had ostensibly been trying to secure for about 7 months. The only difference between Biden’s seven months and Trump’s seven days was that Trump didn’t ask. He just dictated what was going to happen.
That is… horrible. It’s not a basis for international relations or peace or sovereignty or respect for allies…
But it is a frank demonstration that Biden could end the war in Ukraine at pretty much any time. Any month of the year that suited him, he could’ve picked up the phones and said it was time to strike a deal.
He couldn’t end it on the terms of his choosing! The terms would’ve sucked at all points, but negotiated settlement was always an option. And at any point if he’d done that, I can guarantee you that Ukraine would’ve gotten a better “deal” than what whatever is going to be imposed on them by Trump & Putin.
The point was always that whatever “deal” was worked out, unless Ukraine would become part of NATO or have security guarantees with say NATO boots on the ground for decades, Russia would have only used the temporary pause to build up its forces while doing hybrid warfare, then try again in a couple of years. Also, it is misleading to characterize the war in Ukraine as an American proxy war, it ignores the complex relationships between all involved actors and most importantly ignores Ukrainian autonomy. Lastly, Netanyahu did “what Trump said” temporarily because it was in his interest to boost Trump as he expected to soon get Trump’s blessing to continue waging war on Palestinians (and it seems even Netanyahu was surprised by how emphatic Trump’s approval is).
Now, IMO Biden should have been much bolder in sending more military support to Ukraine and approving long-distance strikes etc., which would have encouraged other NATO allies to do the same. By trying to play it safe, Biden & co. ensured that the conflict would become more drawn out and expand, making things more dangerous for everyone. The Democratic Party and European allies could have used much more war rhetoric, painting Russia as enemy number one, to drum up more popular support at home, but again hesitated. The Biden admin also should have worked with the Ukrainians and other European allies on a realistic, sustainable peace deal rather than talking loosely about how Ukraine needed to “accept” that they would lose terrain while also saying Ukraine’s very reasonable security guarantee requests were “unrealistic”. But that’s very different. To suggest that Biden could have just said “ok stop, now peace” and created something lasting seems utterly out of touch with at least all of Russian politics ever since Putin came to power.
By trying to play it safe, Biden & co. ensured that the conflict would become more drawn out and expand,
This is how you know it’s a proxy war.
As you point out, Biden’s decisions were obviously ones that would prolong the war rather than affording a decisive counteroffensive. This was because the goal of slowly bleeding Russia’s military out to weaken a rival power and bolster the American weapons manufactures was placed more highly than than trying to put Ukraine into a position of strength from which to demand a ceasefire on their own terms.
I don’t know what Zelensky wanted, or what his plans were. But I think the most obvious and sensible approach would’ve been to privately lay out the bargain: the US gives Ukraine more or less everything that it wants to kick Russia’s ass for a couple of months with the awareness that a full defeat of Russia by Ukraine is impossible, and pursuing a regime change would be inviting a nuclear world war. As such, the US goes hard, and puts Ukraine in a position to make the most modest concessions necessary to end the war in a way that lets Russia survive while having demonstrated that the overall approach was a disaster.
Could Putin decide to try again a few years later? Sure. Is it likely? And would that situation have been worse than what we’re about to watch Trump and Putin do? Jesus Christ, not by a Texas mile.
Letting the war continue under any terms into Trump’s presidency should’ve been viewed as the number-one all-time greatest military vulnerability to Ukraine, and should’ve been prevented at any cost.
I’m not quite as convinced as you are that there was that deliberate a strategy to prolong the war and let it fester, and I still think the description of it as just an American proxy war is overly simplistic. But we do seem to agree on many points, most importantly that Ukraine should have gotten, and still should get, a lot more support and not be artificially restrained. Thanks for the chat.
The Kremlin dictates U.S. policy. If Ukraine doesn’t go along, the U.S. will sanction Ukraine and start sending supplies to Russia.
The president has some leeway, but our support for Ukraine was because we passed laws to support them.
The Trump admin cant pass any laws. Its why they are trying to go all in on executive power, even when its illegal. They lack legislative power due to a fractured congress, even in their own party.
They barely control the house, and many republicans actually want to support Ukraine. and will not be able to sanction Ukraine or materially support russia.
I have my doubts that Trump will have enough pushback to make a difference but I’m not an American so I could be wrong.
They are going to have sham midterms and then magically have way more support
The Trump admin cant pass any laws. Its why they are trying to go all in on executive power, even when its illegal. They lack legislative power due to a fractured congress, even in their own party.
Regarding the mass layoffs? I don’t think that that’s actually the primary reason, though the House is a pretty narrow Republican majority. I think that it’s more that one aspect or another of the layoffs are potentially unpopular. Congressional representatives may need to be around for a while, and I would guess that even for Republican legislators who have constituencies that overall support layoffs, they’d rather not be directly involved, because some people are going to be upset, and some people are going to find that a government service that they liked isn’t there any more. Trump is out in a bit under four years, and Elon’s not elected or going to be in government and IIRC – though his role is certainly fuzzy – at least for a while was under some classification that was supposed to be for people who are only expected to be present for 180 days or less, so he may not be around for too long. A senator or representative may hope to be around Congress for a long time. Easier to just let the President act and then not take any action to stop what he’s doing.
Same sort of reason that Congress hasn’t declared war in ages, just done variations on “authorizing the President to make use of military force”. Declaring war is potentially-politically-costly if a war becomes unpopular. Politically-safer for Congressional representatives to authorize the President to act and then letting him mostly be exposed to any political risks.
No shit.
