If Russian invaded Ukraine, would you favor or oppose war against Russia?

[viper37]

Let the people speak.

I'm asking if your country should ride to Ukraine's rescue.

favor.

I'm all for preserving Ukraine's independance.  But I won't be the one on the front lines, so it's easier for me.

[viper37]

No. Obviouly not. Ukraine isn't a NATO member and I think there's a lot of risk because I think winning matters more to Russia than the UK/West (obviously not Ukraine) so they may escalate with other actual NATO members on their borders (and who could say that'd be wrong) and they're a nuclear power.

We should however give Ukraine all the support we can to enable them to defend themselves - weapons, training, whatever other support we can. We should help Ukraine as much as possible, but not to the extent of mutual defence.

Edit: And we should make clear we're not interested in doing deals with Russia about Ukraine, if Ukrainian leaders aren't in the room. We are supporting a sovereign state.

I feel like this is utopia.  Putin will advance as far as he can go without being stopped, and the longer we delay the correction, the harder it will be.

Ukraine will be remembered as the next Tchecoslovaquia.  Faced with war with Russia, and possibly even China, occidental countries will capitulate and agree to partition Ukraine to preserve peace.

[viper37]

As a proud Ukrainian-Canadian... Canada should not "go to war" with Russia.  Even as a part of NATO we have little ability to project force to the region.

we have troops in Ukraine and the Baltics, trying to train their armies, help with their communications, etc.

[viper37]

Looking at what we know about Russian casualty numbers in several of their recent conflicts, I just don't see competence there, if anything I see very poor performance for an army that is purportedly supposed to be designed for direct conflict with the West.

WWII casualties against Germany were much superior for the Russians.  Granted, they got lots of help from the Allies, but still, it shows that an underequipped, undertrained army can still overwhelm a superior force be sheer numbers.

[jimmy olsen]

No, we need to keep our commitments to our NATO allies like the Baltics, but full war over the Ukraine is too much.

[Eddie Teach]

Is South Korea in NATO?

[jimmy olsen]

Is South Korea in NATO?

Is North Korea Russia?

There are separate long standing alliances with regards to South Korea and Japan.

[Zanza]

I have said it before when we discussed NATO here, but I feel that Russian conventional capabilities are overstated. In the last two decades, Russia fought a war in its own province of Chechnya, supported separatists in two small parts of Georgia, annexed the mainly Russian Crimea and supported Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine. That's all operations in "friendly" areas just beyond their border. Not massive wars of conquest against foreign nations.  They have not really demonstrated much capability or competence in these wars.

Their special forces in Syria, mercenary companies like Wagner, their hackers, their political disinformation campaigns both overtly in Russia Today and more hidden in social media and their vast array of useful idiots admiring Putin in the West are their real assets with which they can cause damage to the West. So they are fairly skilled at this irregular warfare. Which also has less obvious costs than an outright invasion of Ukraine would have.

They have concentrated 150 to 200k men near Ukraine now. Enough to invade, but probably not enough to hold a territory with 40 million hostile inhabitants supported by outside powers.

[Sheilbh]

I think I'd disagree slightly on the liberal democratic systems work. I think there tends to be a bit of "real commmunim has never been tried" about this where we exclude failures in liberal democratic states by applying quite a selective and narrow definition of what a liberal democracy looks like. There's also frankly thousands of years of anti-democratic discourse that still influences modern thinking and economic measures.

For example there's a very strong liberal tradition that what matters is clear, predictable rules, the rule of law, constitutions, protection of property rights and protection of (elite) minority rights because by definition capitalism produces economic inequality and you need to protect the (billionaire) sheep from the whims of the mob which is what democracy represents. That's a huge strain of the classical liberal tradition and a huge part of western thought. The challenge to liberal democracy working isn't necessarily Putin or Xi, but Singapore, the developmentalist states in Asia - Taiwan, South Korea - arguably early post-war Germany, or even apartheid South Africa which is the famous example of a country with the rule of law and a state that ticks off all those other criteria but was absolutely not a democracy. Basically the institutions of a liberal state matter far more - in this argument - than democracy which isn't essential or helpful.

The other side of that is because capitalism produces inequality it will lead to reactions against that inequality and democracy is a way of managing that in a less risky, revolultionary way by providing a mechanism for change and addressing those issues.

It's a bit like democratic peace theory where I think the interesting is what's excluded to reach the conclusion and from my understanding what causes and best promotes economic development is hugely contested with hundreds of studies and no clear conclusion, much as I'd like it to be the case, that liberal democracy is the key.

And I'm not sure we can dismiss China, Russia - or Turkey, or Hungary. In the illiberal democracy world a huge part of Erdogan or Orban's success is that they have materially improved the lives of many people. There may be cronyism but that isn't necessarily an issue if you have a growing economy/pie and you're just divvying up a little bit of the extra for you and your friends - I think it' probably more of an issue in a shrinking economy or during a recession. If we look at the current economic crisis in Turkey that hasn't been provoked by any of the democratic backsliding of the last decade, it wasn't caused by cronyism - neither of those have been major concerns for international investors. It was caused by Erdogan making comments that implied a risk to the independence of the central bank - which is definitely in category 1, that what matters for investors is an independent central bank not liberal democracy (I'd add, incidentally, that when Brown allowed central bank independence in the UK in 1997 the resistance was from the Labour left who viewed it as contrary to a democratic socialist party to not have monetary policy controlled democratically by political institutions). Although in Turkey the latest polling is that AKP might lose.

This also true in Russia - the economy has increased, unemployment and poverty are massively down, purchasing power is up vastly on the 90s. That's based on hydrocarbons for sure and to an extent arguably Putin was lucky but I think that is the basis of support for him and if there weren't those material successes for normal Russians I don't think he'd still be in office. I think it's more challenging now because the economy is stalling and if it starts shrinking then Putin and his cronies can't share the proceeds of growth with the Russian people in the same way they have.

Especially with China I don't think it's possible to overstate the legitimacy the Chinese system acquires because of the type of life someone entering the workforce in 1980, or even 1990 had then compared to now when they are looking to retire. I'd also add that my understanding is that China viewed covid as a huge test of legitimacy which they feel actually went very well. There wasn't resistance to huge restrictions and compared to Europe or North America, China has been incredibly successful in repressing covid which is something Chinese people have noticed and this follows their comparison of the Chinese economy with the European or US economy in responding and recovering from the financial crisis. Again there may be issues as Chinese growth slows, or if it was in a recession and around transitions of power - but I'm not convinced we can just write off their success.

That's not to say those systems are better - and clearly they're not for many (especially minorities or "out" groups), but I think there's been a lot of hubristic self-congratulation on the obvious virtues of liberal democracy in the last thirty years. I think we could do with a bit of thinking on if our system works (my own take is we are too institutionalist/formalist/proceduralist and not democratic enough - and I think that drives a lot of domestic issues but I also worry if we are capable of responding to change or crisis or emergency etc) and why the bits that don't, don't. Especially if we do still see liberal democracy as a universal model, because it isn't clear to me that it's self-evident to other countries and peoples that it's better than the alternatives which are developing and a lot more sophisticated and responsive than the old Communist bloc or military junta model of the cold war.

[Tamas]

But what are these more responsive non democratic modern regimes? China maybe but with the 1984 level of control of public space and flow of information how could you possibly judge it objectively? For decades a significant portion of Westerners thought the Soviet Union was the new effective way of life while in fact it was dysfunctional right from the beginning. And the modern neo-feudalistic states of Russia Turkey and Hungary are clearly less efficient in response to anything than Western democracies.

[Sheilbh]

But what are these more responsive non democratic modern regimes? China maybe but with the 1984 level of control of public space and flow of information how could you possibly judge it objectively? For decades a significant portion of Westerners thought the Soviet Union was the new effective way of life while in fact it was dysfunctional right from the beginning. And the modern neo-feudalistic states of Russia Turkey and Hungary are clearly less efficient in response to anything than Western democracies.

My point isn't that they're more responsive and efficent than Western democracies - but looking at the financial crisis and recovery from it and looking at covid I think there is case for that in relation to China - but that the alternatives to liberal democracies are more sophisticated and responsive than the old 20th century model. And too much of our criticism and analysis focuses on those systems. We're fighting the last war.

And I think there's goal-post moving here as I say - we've shifted from liberal democracies to Western democracies which is different. And I'm not sure how many of the lessons of Western democracy can apply to the rest of the world (start as one of the richer countries in the world, generally speaking already have stable institutions and established borders etc). My point is those states - China, Turkey, Russia, Hungary - don't exist because of propaganda they exist because of material success. A few decades of Putin running Russia has not resulted in a disaster for the average Russian and I think that's part of the challenge we need to understand.

[alfred russel]

They aren't viewed as disasters because they are incremental improvements in prior governments but are dramatically short of potential.

Russia and China would need to increase per capita GDP almost 50% to hit the dizzying heights of Poland, but that isn't seen as disastrous because the soviets and Mr. Mao set a really low bar.

[Eddie Teach]

Chinese growth has been pretty phenomenal though.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I think you miss the mark largely by just being wrong about facts on the ground, Sheilbh. The core issue is unaccountable leadership does not have the same pressure to respond when things go wrong. That does not guarantee that over short windows of time (which is really all you are talking about here, and already conceded when I brought up the point), any government can do well. But when one system produces inferior results over the long term, the costs of that compound over time. I actually specifically never used the term "liberal Democracy" in my post, and for a reason, to me it's more about systems with accountability. Strictly defining a state as a liberal democracy bogs down in minutiae which isn't helpful, but it is fairly obvious historically and in the present which states have leadership that are regularly accountable for fuck ups. Note I also posited there are ways for truly unfree societies to foster an element of accountability for top leadership, albeit the structures of that are harder to maintain over long periods of time because individuals' leaders can use the levers of their unfree society to curtail limits to their power.

The under-performance of societies with unaccountable leadership from the 18th to early 20th century was not something that happened in a few years, but steadily grew over time, so that by the early 20th century several former great powers were in literal "sick man" status. Part of the reason this happened is they were competing with societies that had more accountable leadership, which previously they were not since almost no societies had meaningfully accountable leadership prior to this time frame.

Also for Turkey specifically Erdogan literally has a son in law in an important finance position, or did, and the Turkish central bank is not remotely independent any longer. Suggesting that cronyism isn't involved or that said bank's failures aren't directly tied to Erdogan being allowed to freely implement his naive and bad monetary policy ideas is simply dead wrong.

Noting that Putin has "improved" Russia from a period of time in which Russia was literally undergoing a generational collapse on par with the collapse of the Russian Empire and a virtual wipeout of its economic norms does little to counter the simple point that Putin has been hiding problems with petro dollars. It's also fairly limited to not see the many cracks in that system. It's also very hard to imagine Putin turning over power either when he dies or becomes infirm to someone who will even do as well as he has, he has fostered a society of scattered oligarchs mostly loyal to him, and the idea they won't be fighting like an old Roman Empire succession when he's gone seems doubtful to me, and the idea that won't send Russia teetering seems limited as well. In the historical scope what happens during one man's reign is not really that important when talking about systems. Nothing precludes individual autocrats from doing a decent enough job (which I don't even think Putin has really done, I think he's literally just gotten lucky on the economy piece because he took over a country at its literal floor of economic activity.)

Singapore is far too small to meaningfully use as an example for anything. It is a city-state that has a lot of money funneled through it by outside entities, it is not a real country in a meaningful sense. The PRC is not 30 years old, it is 72 years old. For at least the first half or so of that timeline its unaccountable leadership produced mixed to very poor results, including one of the world's greatest die-offs in the form of a famine that killed 30 million people. If you want to look only at the era of Deng + Ziang + Hu, when you had restrained Chinese leaders who focused on market reforms, a soft hand on the economy and stimulating growth as the most important things, it's easy to conclude the PRC is doing great. However note that Ziang and Hu were not examples of unaccountable leaders, they were part of a new tradition in the PRC of some checks on the paramount leader's power and some expectation they would not rule for life--Xi has torpedoed that change, and is a bellicose ultranationalist who has seen over a trillion dollars in wealth wiped out from Chinese listed companies has overseen a real estate debt bubble of unprecedented historical size, has taken actions that have led to almost all of its close neighbors to enter economic treaties specifically designed to refocus as much of trade as possible away from China, has seen Western economic partners at least start to attempt divestiture from over investment in China, has seen large scale capital flight, to little real positive.

Xi has every marker, and the Chinese economy has every marker, of mismanagement, but since PRC is an unfree society, he cannot be criticized, and since he removed the institutional limits on his power that were in place when Ziang and Hu were paramount leader, there is little the PRC can do to deal with it.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Chinese growth has been pretty phenomenal though.

It has been but it also started from a place of very low development relative to other large countries when it began its Deng era reforms in the late 70s/early 80s. Also speaking about the arc of history, there is an element of "okay how long has this gone on." As noted we didn't start to really notice the "deficit" imposed by the cronyism, nepotism, lack of accountability and etc when looking at unfree societies vs ones with accountability mechanisms in history until several generations had passed by. The relative decline of countries like Spain, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire etc didn't happen in a 30-40 year period of time.