Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

The geo political reality is that in the past 50 years economic and military relationships have intertwined to the point it takes a lot to escalate to the big war due to shared interests. And yes, I know everyone has their eye on Ukraine for that very reason.

---

DOD data does not support Redbrick's argument. Since 1980, in only 5 years have death rates in hostile action exceeded death rates by accident. Not once during that period did hostile action deaths come terribly close to half of total deaths.

https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/app/summaryData/deaths/byYearManner

There are valid grounds to criticize neverWars, but the death rate argument is not terribly compelling.

---

I did not make any argument about death rates/causality rates

ATL brough that up that topic

I then asked if it was because we had gotten better at fighting wars or if it was because we were not fighting peer competitors?

I gave no data and made no claims about military casualties

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Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative.

---

whiterock said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

It's not going to cost trillions to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and it will cost a helluva lot less than direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

I am a man of God. I am also the captain of my soul.

What do we say to the God of Death? NOT TODAY.

Nihilism doesn't solve problems. It feeds them. It's just a fancy way to find an excuse to do nothing.

It's not going to cost trillions to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and it will cost a helluva lot less than direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

---

trey3216 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

I am a man of God. I am also the captain of my soul.

What do we say to the God of Death? NOT TODAY.

Nihilism doesn't solve problems. It feeds them. It's just a fancy way to find an excuse to do nothing.

It's not going to cost trillions to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and it will cost a helluva lot less than direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

---

Then stop doing the devil's work and spreading the devil's lies. They've brought nothing but death and destruction to Ukraine.

---

Awful rich coming from someone spewing Margarita Simonyan's daily briefings.

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

I am a man of God. I am also the captain of my soul.

What do we say to the God of Death? NOT TODAY.

Nihilism doesn't solve problems. It feeds them. It's just a fancy way to find an excuse to do nothing.

It's not going to cost trillions to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and it will cost a helluva lot less than direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

---

I'm just saying the direction western governments have been headed towards is pretty bad. We may maintain peace, but we have a spiritual war at home and our government is acting like the devil.

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

It's not going to cost trillions to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and it will cost a helluva lot less than direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

---

1. Its not a binary choice.

"fund this proxy war or Russia invades NATO"

Russia knows very well it can not fight a war against the massive military alliance that is NATO.
you've got logical error in each of those sentences. Whether or not to engage in Ukraine is indeed a binary choice. You would stand by, do nothing, and let Russia have it all. That would most certainly involve a loss of deterrence. That would most certainly turn Russia into Belarus and move Russian armies 600mi closer to Nato (at minimum). It would most certainly have emboldened Russian policy toward Poland and the Baltics. Again, policy critics have not once explained how letting Russia have its way in Ukraine benefits any of Nato, anyhow, any time, any place, etc.....

2. Will it cost trillions...probably not....but lets not forget we did spend $2 trillion on the failed Afghan war. And no one said it would cost that much.
The money we've spent now is just financial cost of running the Ukraine govt and keeping not flush but operable with weapons & ordnance. It does not calculate the cost of rebuilding all that has been destroyed, of lost wealth and lost lives (i.e. lost tax base and economic demand). So, yeah, a war with Russia in Poland would involve trillions of dollars. I mean, look at the inconsistence of your argument. How could you dismiss the expense of major power conflict in the same paragraph where you cite the fact that we spent trillions on counter-insurgency in very small, almost powerless places?

And we spent $3 trillion on the Iraq war....again with D.C. never telling the American people it was going to cost that much.
We did not go into Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan intending for things to turn out the way they did. We DID get a benefit in all three places. And we did make mistakes with mission creep and/or failing on the peace part rather than the war part.

3. Money aside....the Russian Federation is not going anywhere. Any more than the USA is going away. And Ukraine is going to continue to be in the back yard of Moscow and they will continue to be there involved in the country hundreds of years from now. Russia will always take a interest in Ukraine....the same way the USA will always be involved with Canada or Mexico.
The USSR went away. The Russian Federation is under far more stress than you suppose. Sure, there will always be a Russian people and they will always have a government they dominate. But it doesn't have to be THIS iteration, or more importantly, THIS particular head of state. Regime change in Russia over the war in Ukraine is actually desirable. It would caution the next Russian head of state against military adventurism.

At the end of the day D.C. has limited interest in Ukraine and will eventually get tired of dealing with the place and has major priorities elsewhere on earth.
Wrong. Ukraine is not Mexico (despite the constant false comparisons to it). It is not Poland, either. But it is also not irrelevant. Russian intentions are obvious, and every one of the arguments made about Russian interests in Ukraine apply to NATO. No serious power of any size would argue it is wise to allow your largest single national security threat, your very raison d'etre, to move its armies 600mi closer to your more of your borders.

Moscow will not get tired of caring about Ukraine.
nor should it. But it can get tired of trying to bully its neighbors rather than dealing with them constructively.

---

Your arguments on Ukraine/Russia defy the millennia old reality of geopolitics in general and Russia specifically. In some ways, your position is actually rooted in ***uyama's "end of history," a perspective your worldview is otherwise not terribly fond of. Russia is not in some new incarnation trying to move beyond its past. It is the same old Russia - a corrupt and backward power seeking to use territorial expansion to defend itself against wealthier and more advanced societies which it believes do not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Russian bullying.

---

Quote:

---

There is one twist on the conventional wisdom that bears mentioning. Some argue that Moscow's decision to invade Ukraine has little to do with Putin himself and instead is part of an expansionist tradition that long predates Putin and is deeply wired into Russian society. This penchant for aggression, which is said to be driven by internal forces, not Russia's external threat environment, has driven virtually all Russian leaders over time to behave violently toward their neighbors. There is no denying that Putin is in charge in this story or that he led Russia to war, but he is said to have little agency. Almost any other Russian leader would have acted the same way.

There are two problems with this argument. For starters, it is non-falsifiable, as the longstanding trait in Russian society that produces this aggressive impulse is never identified. Russians are said to have always been aggressive no matter who is in charge and always will be. It is almost as if it were in their DNA. This same claim was once made about Germans, who were often portrayed during the twentieth century as congenital aggressors. Arguments of this sort are not taken seriously in the academic world for good reason.

Furthermore, hardly anyone in the United States or Western Europe characterized Russia as innately aggressive between 1991 and 2014, when the Ukraine crisis broke out. Outside of Poland and the Baltic states, fear of Russian aggression was not a concern frequently voiced during those twenty-four years, which one would expect if the Russians were wired for aggression. It seems clear that the sudden appearance of this line of argument was a convenient excuse to blame Russia for causing the Ukraine war.

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

It's not going to cost trillions to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and it will cost a helluva lot less than direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

---

1. Its not a binary choice.

"fund this proxy war or Russia invades NATO"

Russia knows very well it can not fight a war against the massive military alliance that is NATO.
you've got logical error in each of those sentences. Whether or not to engage in Ukraine is indeed a binary choice. You would stand by, do nothing, and let Russia have it all. That would most certainly involve a loss of deterrence. That would most certainly turn Russia into Belarus and move Russian armies 600mi closer to Nato (at minimum). It would most certainly have emboldened Russian policy toward Poland and the Baltics. Again, policy critics have not once explained how letting Russia have its way in Ukraine benefits any of Nato, anyhow, any time, any place, etc.....

2. Will it cost trillions...probably not....but lets not forget we did spend $2 trillion on the failed Afghan war. And no one said it would cost that much.
The money we've spent now is just financial cost of running the Ukraine govt and keeping not flush but operable with weapons & ordnance. It does not calculate the cost of rebuilding all that has been destroyed, of lost wealth and lost lives (i.e. lost tax base and economic demand). So, yeah, a war with Russia in Poland would involve trillions of dollars. I mean, look at the inconsistence of your argument. How could you dismiss the expense of major power conflict in the same paragraph where you cite the fact that we spent trillions on counter-insurgency in very small, almost powerless places?

And we spent $3 trillion on the Iraq war....again with D.C. never telling the American people it was going to cost that much.
We did not go into Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan intending for things to turn out the way they did. We DID get a benefit in all three places. And we did make mistakes with mission creep and/or failing on the peace part rather than the war part.

3. Money aside....the Russian Federation is not going anywhere. Any more than the USA is going away. And Ukraine is going to continue to be in the back yard of Moscow and they will continue to be there involved in the country hundreds of years from now. Russia will always take a interest in Ukraine....the same way the USA will always be involved with Canada or Mexico.
The USSR went away. The Russian Federation is under far more stress than you suppose. Sure, there will always be a Russian people and they will always have a government they dominate. But it doesn't have to be THIS iteration, or more importantly, THIS particular head of state. Regime change in Russia over the war in Ukraine is actually desirable. It would caution the next Russian head of state against military adventurism.

At the end of the day D.C. has limited interest in Ukraine and will eventually get tired of dealing with the place and has major priorities elsewhere on earth.
Wrong. Ukraine is not Mexico (despite the constant false comparisons to it). It is not Poland, either. But it is also not irrelevant. Russian intentions are obvious, and every one of the arguments made about Russian interests in Ukraine apply to NATO. No serious power of any size would argue it is wise to allow your largest single national security threat, your very raison d'etre, to move its armies 600mi closer to your more of your borders.

Moscow will not get tired of caring about Ukraine.
nor should it. But it can get tired of trying to bully its neighbors rather than dealing with them constructively.

---

Your arguments on Ukraine/Russia defy the millennia old reality of geopolitics in general and Russia specifically. In some ways, your position is actually rooted in ***uyama's "end of history," a perspective your worldview is otherwise not terribly fond of. Russia is not in some new incarnation trying to move beyond its past. It is the same old Russia - a corrupt and backward power seeking to use territorial expansion to defend itself against wealthier and more advanced societies which it believes do not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Russian bullying.

---

The best response to this sort of gibberish is a recent Substack post by John Mearsheimer. Highly recommended for anyone who's still in denial about the causes of the war:

Quote:

---

There is one twist on the conventional wisdom that bears mentioning. Some argue that Moscow's decision to invade Ukraine has little to do with Putin himself and instead is part of an expansionist tradition that long predates Putin and is deeply wired into Russian society. This penchant for aggression, which is said to be driven by internal forces, not Russia's external threat environment, has driven virtually all Russian leaders over time to behave violently toward their neighbors. There is no denying that Putin is in charge in this story or that he led Russia to war, but he is said to have little agency. Almost any other Russian leader would have acted the same way.

There are two problems with this argument. For starters, it is non-falsifiable, as the longstanding trait in Russian society that produces this aggressive impulse is never identified. Russians are said to have always been aggressive no matter who is in charge and always will be. It is almost as if it were in their DNA. This same claim was once made about Germans, who were often portrayed during the twentieth century as congenital aggressors. Arguments of this sort are not taken seriously in the academic world for good reason.

Furthermore, hardly anyone in the United States or Western Europe characterized Russia as innately aggressive between 1991 and 2014, when the Ukraine crisis broke out. Outside of Poland and the Baltic states, fear of Russian aggression was not a concern frequently voiced during those twenty-four years, which one would expect if the Russians were wired for aggression. It seems clear that the sudden appearance of this line of argument was a convenient excuse to blame Russia for causing the Ukraine war.

---

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

It's not going to cost trillions to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and it will cost a helluva lot less than direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

---

1. Its not a binary choice.

"fund this proxy war or Russia invades NATO"

Russia knows very well it can not fight a war against the massive military alliance that is NATO.
you've got logical error in each of those sentences. Whether or not to engage in Ukraine is indeed a binary choice. You would stand by, do nothing, and let Russia have it all. That would most certainly involve a loss of deterrence. That would most certainly turn Russia into Belarus and move Russian armies 600mi closer to Nato (at minimum). It would most certainly have emboldened Russian policy toward Poland and the Baltics. Again, policy critics have not once explained how letting Russia have its way in Ukraine benefits any of Nato, anyhow, any time, any place, etc.....

2. Will it cost trillions...probably not....but lets not forget we did spend $2 trillion on the failed Afghan war. And no one said it would cost that much.
The money we've spent now is just financial cost of running the Ukraine govt and keeping not flush but operable with weapons & ordnance. It does not calculate the cost of rebuilding all that has been destroyed, of lost wealth and lost lives (i.e. lost tax base and economic demand). So, yeah, a war with Russia in Poland would involve trillions of dollars. I mean, look at the inconsistence of your argument. How could you dismiss the expense of major power conflict in the same paragraph where you cite the fact that we spent trillions on counter-insurgency in very small, almost powerless places?

And we spent $3 trillion on the Iraq war....again with D.C. never telling the American people it was going to cost that much.
We did not go into Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan intending for things to turn out the way they did. We DID get a benefit in all three places. And we did make mistakes with mission creep and/or failing on the peace part rather than the war part.

3. Money aside....the Russian Federation is not going anywhere. Any more than the USA is going away. And Ukraine is going to continue to be in the back yard of Moscow and they will continue to be there involved in the country hundreds of years from now. Russia will always take a interest in Ukraine....the same way the USA will always be involved with Canada or Mexico.
The USSR went away. The Russian Federation is under far more stress than you suppose. Sure, there will always be a Russian people and they will always have a government they dominate. But it doesn't have to be THIS iteration, or more importantly, THIS particular head of state. Regime change in Russia over the war in Ukraine is actually desirable. It would caution the next Russian head of state against military adventurism.

At the end of the day D.C. has limited interest in Ukraine and will eventually get tired of dealing with the place and has major priorities elsewhere on earth.
Wrong. Ukraine is not Mexico (despite the constant false comparisons to it). It is not Poland, either. But it is also not irrelevant. Russian intentions are obvious, and every one of the arguments made about Russian interests in Ukraine apply to NATO. No serious power of any size would argue it is wise to allow your largest single national security threat, your very raison d'etre, to move its armies 600mi closer to your more of your borders.

Moscow will not get tired of caring about Ukraine.
nor should it. But it can get tired of trying to bully its neighbors rather than dealing with them constructively.

---

Your arguments on Ukraine/Russia defy the millennia old reality of geopolitics in general and Russia specifically. In some ways, your position is actually rooted in ***uyama's "end of history," a perspective your worldview is otherwise not terribly fond of. Russia is not in some new incarnation trying to move beyond its past. It is the same old Russia - a corrupt and backward power seeking to use territorial expansion to defend itself against wealthier and more advanced societies which it believes do not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Russian bullying.

The Cold War was nothing special in terms of great power competition throughout the ages. Sure, it involved nuclear weapons and heavy ideological trimmings, but the same nations were engaging in the same game over the same geography. And that same game and geography are at play today. Russia wants Ukraine and nobody in the neighborhood wants it to happen. The difference is, Russia is relatively weaker than it has been in many centuries. Russia is not oblivious to that, but it invaded anyway because it misread Ukraine, it misread Nato, and it misread the USA.

if you think a Russia successful in Ukraine would not also misread Nato and misread the USA all over again over a land bridge to Kaliningrad (i.e. Lithuania and Poland), you are not thinking clearly. The root cause of almost every war is one side misreading the other, to the point of actually misreading its own national interest. Russia should not have invaded Ukraine. It should have waited for Ukraine to make a natural turn back toward toward Russia. But Putin wanted to regain former glory and he did not respect Biden, so here we are.....

---

trey3216 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

It's not going to cost trillions to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and it will cost a helluva lot less than direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

---

1. Its not a binary choice.

"fund this proxy war or Russia invades NATO"

Russia knows very well it can not fight a war against the massive military alliance that is NATO.
you've got logical error in each of those sentences. Whether or not to engage in Ukraine is indeed a binary choice. You would stand by, do nothing, and let Russia have it all. That would most certainly involve a loss of deterrence. That would most certainly turn Russia into Belarus and move Russian armies 600mi closer to Nato (at minimum). It would most certainly have emboldened Russian policy toward Poland and the Baltics. Again, policy critics have not once explained how letting Russia have its way in Ukraine benefits any of Nato, anyhow, any time, any place, etc.....

2. Will it cost trillions...probably not....but lets not forget we did spend $2 trillion on the failed Afghan war. And no one said it would cost that much.
The money we've spent now is just financial cost of running the Ukraine govt and keeping not flush but operable with weapons & ordnance. It does not calculate the cost of rebuilding all that has been destroyed, of lost wealth and lost lives (i.e. lost tax base and economic demand). So, yeah, a war with Russia in Poland would involve trillions of dollars. I mean, look at the inconsistence of your argument. How could you dismiss the expense of major power conflict in the same paragraph where you cite the fact that we spent trillions on counter-insurgency in very small, almost powerless places?

And we spent $3 trillion on the Iraq war....again with D.C. never telling the American people it was going to cost that much.
We did not go into Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan intending for things to turn out the way they did. We DID get a benefit in all three places. And we did make mistakes with mission creep and/or failing on the peace part rather than the war part.

3. Money aside....the Russian Federation is not going anywhere. Any more than the USA is going away. And Ukraine is going to continue to be in the back yard of Moscow and they will continue to be there involved in the country hundreds of years from now. Russia will always take a interest in Ukraine....the same way the USA will always be involved with Canada or Mexico.
The USSR went away. The Russian Federation is under far more stress than you suppose. Sure, there will always be a Russian people and they will always have a government they dominate. But it doesn't have to be THIS iteration, or more importantly, THIS particular head of state. Regime change in Russia over the war in Ukraine is actually desirable. It would caution the next Russian head of state against military adventurism.

At the end of the day D.C. has limited interest in Ukraine and will eventually get tired of dealing with the place and has major priorities elsewhere on earth.
Wrong. Ukraine is not Mexico (despite the constant false comparisons to it). It is not Poland, either. But it is also not irrelevant. Russian intentions are obvious, and every one of the arguments made about Russian interests in Ukraine apply to NATO. No serious power of any size would argue it is wise to allow your largest single national security threat, your very raison d'etre, to move its armies 600mi closer to your more of your borders.

Moscow will not get tired of caring about Ukraine.
nor should it. But it can get tired of trying to bully its neighbors rather than dealing with them constructively.

---

Your arguments on Ukraine/Russia defy the millennia old reality of geopolitics in general and Russia specifically. In some ways, your position is actually rooted in ***uyama's "end of history," a perspective your worldview is otherwise not terribly fond of. Russia is not in some new incarnation trying to move beyond its past. It is the same old Russia - a corrupt and backward power seeking to use territorial expansion to defend itself against wealthier and more advanced societies which it believes do not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Russian bullying.

The Cold War was nothing special in terms of great power competition throughout the ages. Sure, it involved nuclear weapons and heavy ideological trimmings, but the same nations were engaging in the same game over the same geography. And that same game and geography are at play today. Russia wants Ukraine and nobody in the neighborhood wants it to happen. The difference is, Russia is relatively weaker than it has been in many centuries. Russia is not oblivious to that, but it invaded anyway because it misread Ukraine, it misread Nato, and it misread the USA.

if you think a Russia successful in Ukraine would not also misread Nato and misread the USA all over again over a land bridge to Kaliningrad (i.e. Lithuania and Poland), you are not thinking clearly. The root cause of almost every war is one side misreading the other, to the point of actually misreading its own national interest. Russia should not have invaded Ukraine. It should have waited for Ukraine to make a natural turn back toward toward Russia. But Putin wanted to regain former glory and he did not respect Biden, so here we are.....

---

I agree that the geopolitical/security desires of a Moscow lead State have always been the same...regardless if the State was Czarist, Marxist, or Nationalist

(But ideologically the Russian Federation is a new creation and different from the USSR for the record)

So the desires of Moscow to control its sphere of influence is the same...we agree on that....how does expanding NATO or overthrowing Moscow allied governments around Russia help us not get info conflict?

NATO was supposed to exist to stop communist USSR expansion....its now been repurposed to stop Russian expansion. Fair enough its a good organization and keeps Central and Western Europe well protected.

But Moscow was already in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia. (always has been)

Again, how does messing around with coups, proxy wars, and possible NATO expansion candidacy in those countries keep the peace? If anything it encourages Russian to have a siege mentality and lash out in an attempt to defend is periphery

---

It is but it isn't. Whether Authoritarian Czarist, Authoritarian Marxist, or Authoritarian Nationalist, Russia is a strongman expansionist country simply because they are always gonna bend authoritarian.

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

It's not going to cost trillions to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and it will cost a helluva lot less than direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

---

1. Its not a binary choice.

"fund this proxy war or Russia invades NATO"

Russia knows very well it can not fight a war against the massive military alliance that is NATO.
you've got logical error in each of those sentences. Whether or not to engage in Ukraine is indeed a binary choice. You would stand by, do nothing, and let Russia have it all. That would most certainly involve a loss of deterrence. That would most certainly turn Russia into Belarus and move Russian armies 600mi closer to Nato (at minimum). It would most certainly have emboldened Russian policy toward Poland and the Baltics. Again, policy critics have not once explained how letting Russia have its way in Ukraine benefits any of Nato, anyhow, any time, any place, etc.....

2. Will it cost trillions...probably not....but lets not forget we did spend $2 trillion on the failed Afghan war. And no one said it would cost that much.
The money we've spent now is just financial cost of running the Ukraine govt and keeping not flush but operable with weapons & ordnance. It does not calculate the cost of rebuilding all that has been destroyed, of lost wealth and lost lives (i.e. lost tax base and economic demand). So, yeah, a war with Russia in Poland would involve trillions of dollars. I mean, look at the inconsistence of your argument. How could you dismiss the expense of major power conflict in the same paragraph where you cite the fact that we spent trillions on counter-insurgency in very small, almost powerless places?

And we spent $3 trillion on the Iraq war....again with D.C. never telling the American people it was going to cost that much.
We did not go into Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan intending for things to turn out the way they did. We DID get a benefit in all three places. And we did make mistakes with mission creep and/or failing on the peace part rather than the war part.

3. Money aside....the Russian Federation is not going anywhere. Any more than the USA is going away. And Ukraine is going to continue to be in the back yard of Moscow and they will continue to be there involved in the country hundreds of years from now. Russia will always take a interest in Ukraine....the same way the USA will always be involved with Canada or Mexico.
The USSR went away. The Russian Federation is under far more stress than you suppose. Sure, there will always be a Russian people and they will always have a government they dominate. But it doesn't have to be THIS iteration, or more importantly, THIS particular head of state. Regime change in Russia over the war in Ukraine is actually desirable. It would caution the next Russian head of state against military adventurism.

At the end of the day D.C. has limited interest in Ukraine and will eventually get tired of dealing with the place and has major priorities elsewhere on earth.
Wrong. Ukraine is not Mexico (despite the constant false comparisons to it). It is not Poland, either. But it is also not irrelevant. Russian intentions are obvious, and every one of the arguments made about Russian interests in Ukraine apply to NATO. No serious power of any size would argue it is wise to allow your largest single national security threat, your very raison d'etre, to move its armies 600mi closer to your more of your borders.

Moscow will not get tired of caring about Ukraine.
nor should it. But it can get tired of trying to bully its neighbors rather than dealing with them constructively.

---

Your arguments on Ukraine/Russia defy the millennia old reality of geopolitics in general and Russia specifically. In some ways, your position is actually rooted in ***uyama's "end of history," a perspective your worldview is otherwise not terribly fond of. Russia is not in some new incarnation trying to move beyond its past. It is the same old Russia - a corrupt and backward power seeking to use territorial expansion to defend itself against wealthier and more advanced societies which it believes do not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Russian bullying.

The Cold War was nothing special in terms of great power competition throughout the ages. Sure, it involved nuclear weapons and heavy ideological trimmings, but the same nations were engaging in the same game over the same geography. And that same game and geography are at play today. Russia wants Ukraine and nobody in the neighborhood wants it to happen. The difference is, Russia is relatively weaker than it has been in many centuries. Russia is not oblivious to that, but it invaded anyway because it misread Ukraine, it misread Nato, and it misread the USA.

if you think a Russia successful in Ukraine would not also misread Nato and misread the USA all over again over a land bridge to Kaliningrad (i.e. Lithuania and Poland), you are not thinking clearly. The root cause of almost every war is one side misreading the other, to the point of actually misreading its own national interest. Russia should not have invaded Ukraine. It should have waited for Ukraine to make a natural turn back toward toward Russia. But Putin wanted to regain former glory and he did not respect Biden, so here we are.....

---

(But ideologically the Russian Federation is a new creation and different from the USSR for the record)
a distinction without a difference, right?

So the desires of Moscow to control its sphere of influence is the same...we agree on that....how does expanding NATO or overthrowing Moscow allied governments around Russia help us not get info conflict?
Well, firstly there is the false dilemma that TALKING about expansion is the same as expansion. In reality, Ukraine at no time in the past nor in the specific timeframe in question met the requirements to qualify for Nato membership.

Russia had a siege mentality during the Cold War.

---

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

It's not going to cost trillions to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and it will cost a helluva lot less than direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

---

1. Its not a binary choice.

"fund this proxy war or Russia invades NATO"

Russia knows very well it can not fight a war against the massive military alliance that is NATO.
you've got logical error in each of those sentences. Whether or not to engage in Ukraine is indeed a binary choice. You would stand by, do nothing, and let Russia have it all. That would most certainly involve a loss of deterrence. That would most certainly turn Russia into Belarus and move Russian armies 600mi closer to Nato (at minimum). It would most certainly have emboldened Russian policy toward Poland and the Baltics. Again, policy critics have not once explained how letting Russia have its way in Ukraine benefits any of Nato, anyhow, any time, any place, etc.....

2. Will it cost trillions...probably not....but lets not forget we did spend $2 trillion on the failed Afghan war. And no one said it would cost that much.
The money we've spent now is just financial cost of running the Ukraine govt and keeping not flush but operable with weapons & ordnance. It does not calculate the cost of rebuilding all that has been destroyed, of lost wealth and lost lives (i.e. lost tax base and economic demand). So, yeah, a war with Russia in Poland would involve trillions of dollars. I mean, look at the inconsistence of your argument. How could you dismiss the expense of major power conflict in the same paragraph where you cite the fact that we spent trillions on counter-insurgency in very small, almost powerless places?

And we spent $3 trillion on the Iraq war....again with D.C. never telling the American people it was going to cost that much.
We did not go into Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan intending for things to turn out the way they did. We DID get a benefit in all three places. And we did make mistakes with mission creep and/or failing on the peace part rather than the war part.

3. Money aside....the Russian Federation is not going anywhere. Any more than the USA is going away. And Ukraine is going to continue to be in the back yard of Moscow and they will continue to be there involved in the country hundreds of years from now. Russia will always take a interest in Ukraine....the same way the USA will always be involved with Canada or Mexico.
The USSR went away. The Russian Federation is under far more stress than you suppose. Sure, there will always be a Russian people and they will always have a government they dominate. But it doesn't have to be THIS iteration, or more importantly, THIS particular head of state. Regime change in Russia over the war in Ukraine is actually desirable. It would caution the next Russian head of state against military adventurism.

At the end of the day D.C. has limited interest in Ukraine and will eventually get tired of dealing with the place and has major priorities elsewhere on earth.
Wrong. Ukraine is not Mexico (despite the constant false comparisons to it). It is not Poland, either. But it is also not irrelevant. Russian intentions are obvious, and every one of the arguments made about Russian interests in Ukraine apply to NATO. No serious power of any size would argue it is wise to allow your largest single national security threat, your very raison d'etre, to move its armies 600mi closer to your more of your borders.

Moscow will not get tired of caring about Ukraine.
nor should it. But it can get tired of trying to bully its neighbors rather than dealing with them constructively.

---

Your arguments on Ukraine/Russia defy the millennia old reality of geopolitics in general and Russia specifically. In some ways, your position is actually rooted in ***uyama's "end of history," a perspective your worldview is otherwise not terribly fond of. Russia is not in some new incarnation trying to move beyond its past. It is the same old Russia - a corrupt and backward power seeking to use territorial expansion to defend itself against wealthier and more advanced societies which it believes do not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Russian bullying.

The Cold War was nothing special in terms of great power competition throughout the ages. Sure, it involved nuclear weapons and heavy ideological trimmings, but the same nations were engaging in the same game over the same geography. And that same game and geography are at play today. Russia wants Ukraine and nobody in the neighborhood wants it to happen. The difference is, Russia is relatively weaker than it has been in many centuries. Russia is not oblivious to that, but it invaded anyway because it misread Ukraine, it misread Nato, and it misread the USA.

if you think a Russia successful in Ukraine would not also misread Nato and misread the USA all over again over a land bridge to Kaliningrad (i.e. Lithuania and Poland), you are not thinking clearly. The root cause of almost every war is one side misreading the other, to the point of actually misreading its own national interest. Russia should not have invaded Ukraine. It should have waited for Ukraine to make a natural turn back toward toward Russia. But Putin wanted to regain former glory and he did not respect Biden, so here we are.....

---

I agree that the geopolitical/security desires of a Moscow lead State have always been the same...regardless if the State was Czarist, Marxist, or Nationalist

(But ideologically the Russian Federation is a new creation and different from the USSR for the record)
a distinction without a difference, right?

So the desires of Moscow to control its sphere of influence is the same...we agree on that....how does expanding NATO or overthrowing Moscow allied governments around Russia help us not get info conflict?
Well, firstly there is the false dilemma that TALKING about expansion is the same as expansion. In reality, Ukraine at no time in the past nor in the specific timeframe in question met the requirements to qualify for Nato membership. And Putin's 2014 grab of Crimea put it out of the question - territorial disputes are an absolute bar to membership. So the entire argument that Putin had to invade, seize, subsume all of Ukraine to satisfy Russian concerns about Nato membership is patently absurd.

That's before we get to the reality that " (the the west/Nato/we) overthrew the government in Kyiv" is not just patently false, it obscures the fact that the Maidan was an entirely organic response to Russian meddling in Ukraine!

NATO was supposed to exist to stop communist USSR expansion....its now been repurposed to stop Russian expansion. Fair enough its a good organization and keeps Central and Western Europe well protected.
the Russian invasion of Ukraine is textbook Russian expansionism, is it not?

But Moscow was already in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia. (always has been)
It has been in/out of those areas and a lot more over and over and over throughout the last 1000 years. Russian armies have invaded Iran been as far south as Kerman (roughly on the latitude of Basra, Iraq). Russian armies have besieged Constantinople. And annexed Upper Manchuria from China. Russia gets around.....to places a LONG way from Moscow.

Again, how does messing around with coups, proxy wars, and possible NATO expansion candidacy in those countries keep the peace? If anything it encourages Russian to have a siege mentality and lash out in an attempt to defend is periphery
Well, we didn't mess around with a coup in Kyiv. We supported the Ukrainian government that emerged from the coup (just as Russia had "supported" the Ukrainian government before the coup). Neither policy is grounds for and invasion of Ukraine..... Neither are public statements about possible Nato expansion grounds for war. Russia knew full well it would not happen.....could not happen.

Russia had a siege mentality during the Cold War.

---

We are in a war because Russia perceived Western weakness, a weakness of willpower.
We are in a war because of Deterrence lost.

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

It's not going to cost trillions to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and it will cost a helluva lot less than direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

---

1. Its not a binary choice.

"fund this proxy war or Russia invades NATO"

Russia knows very well it can not fight a war against the massive military alliance that is NATO.
you've got logical error in each of those sentences. Whether or not to engage in Ukraine is indeed a binary choice. You would stand by, do nothing, and let Russia have it all. That would most certainly involve a loss of deterrence. That would most certainly turn Russia into Belarus and move Russian armies 600mi closer to Nato (at minimum). It would most certainly have emboldened Russian policy toward Poland and the Baltics. Again, policy critics have not once explained how letting Russia have its way in Ukraine benefits any of Nato, anyhow, any time, any place, etc.....

2. Will it cost trillions...probably not....but lets not forget we did spend $2 trillion on the failed Afghan war. And no one said it would cost that much.
The money we've spent now is just financial cost of running the Ukraine govt and keeping not flush but operable with weapons & ordnance. It does not calculate the cost of rebuilding all that has been destroyed, of lost wealth and lost lives (i.e. lost tax base and economic demand). So, yeah, a war with Russia in Poland would involve trillions of dollars. I mean, look at the inconsistence of your argument. How could you dismiss the expense of major power conflict in the same paragraph where you cite the fact that we spent trillions on counter-insurgency in very small, almost powerless places?

And we spent $3 trillion on the Iraq war....again with D.C. never telling the American people it was going to cost that much.
We did not go into Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan intending for things to turn out the way they did. We DID get a benefit in all three places. And we did make mistakes with mission creep and/or failing on the peace part rather than the war part.

3. Money aside....the Russian Federation is not going anywhere. Any more than the USA is going away. And Ukraine is going to continue to be in the back yard of Moscow and they will continue to be there involved in the country hundreds of years from now. Russia will always take a interest in Ukraine....the same way the USA will always be involved with Canada or Mexico.
The USSR went away. The Russian Federation is under far more stress than you suppose. Sure, there will always be a Russian people and they will always have a government they dominate. But it doesn't have to be THIS iteration, or more importantly, THIS particular head of state. Regime change in Russia over the war in Ukraine is actually desirable. It would caution the next Russian head of state against military adventurism.

At the end of the day D.C. has limited interest in Ukraine and will eventually get tired of dealing with the place and has major priorities elsewhere on earth.
Wrong. Ukraine is not Mexico (despite the constant false comparisons to it). It is not Poland, either. But it is also not irrelevant. Russian intentions are obvious, and every one of the arguments made about Russian interests in Ukraine apply to NATO. No serious power of any size would argue it is wise to allow your largest single national security threat, your very raison d'etre, to move its armies 600mi closer to your more of your borders.

Moscow will not get tired of caring about Ukraine.
nor should it. But it can get tired of trying to bully its neighbors rather than dealing with them constructively.

---

Your arguments on Ukraine/Russia defy the millennia old reality of geopolitics in general and Russia specifically. In some ways, your position is actually rooted in ***uyama's "end of history," a perspective your worldview is otherwise not terribly fond of. Russia is not in some new incarnation trying to move beyond its past. It is the same old Russia - a corrupt and backward power seeking to use territorial expansion to defend itself against wealthier and more advanced societies which it believes do not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Russian bullying.

The Cold War was nothing special in terms of great power competition throughout the ages. Sure, it involved nuclear weapons and heavy ideological trimmings, but the same nations were engaging in the same game over the same geography. And that same game and geography are at play today. Russia wants Ukraine and nobody in the neighborhood wants it to happen. The difference is, Russia is relatively weaker than it has been in many centuries. Russia is not oblivious to that, but it invaded anyway because it misread Ukraine, it misread Nato, and it misread the USA.

if you think a Russia successful in Ukraine would not also misread Nato and misread the USA all over again over a land bridge to Kaliningrad (i.e. Lithuania and Poland), you are not thinking clearly. The root cause of almost every war is one side misreading the other, to the point of actually misreading its own national interest. Russia should not have invaded Ukraine. It should have waited for Ukraine to make a natural turn back toward toward Russia. But Putin wanted to regain former glory and he did not respect Biden, so here we are.....

---

I agree that the geopolitical/security desires of a Moscow lead State have always been the same...regardless if the State was Czarist, Marxist, or Nationalist

(But ideologically the Russian Federation is a new creation and different from the USSR for the record)
a distinction without a difference, right?

So the desires of Moscow to control its sphere of influence is the same...we agree on that....how does expanding NATO or overthrowing Moscow allied governments around Russia help us not get info conflict?
Well, firstly there is the false dilemma that TALKING about expansion is the same as expansion. In reality, Ukraine at no time in the past nor in the specific timeframe in question met the requirements to qualify for Nato membership. And Putin's 2014 grab of Crimea put it out of the question - territorial disputes are an absolute bar to membership. So the entire argument that Putin had to invade, seize, subsume all of Ukraine to satisfy Russian concerns about Nato membership is patently absurd.

That's before we get to the reality that " (the the west/Nato/we) overthrew the government in Kyiv" is not just patently false, it obscures the fact that the Maidan was an entirely organic response to Russian meddling in Ukraine!

NATO was supposed to exist to stop communist USSR expansion....its now been repurposed to stop Russian expansion. Fair enough its a good organization and keeps Central and Western Europe well protected.
the Russian invasion of Ukraine is textbook Russian expansionism, is it not?

But Moscow was already in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia. (always has been)
It has been in/out of those areas and a lot more over and over and over throughout the last 1000 years. Russian armies have invaded Iran been as far south as Kerman (roughly on the latitude of Basra, Iraq). Russian armies have besieged Constantinople. And annexed Upper Manchuria from China. Russia gets around.....to places a LONG way from Moscow.

Again, how does messing around with coups, proxy wars, and possible NATO expansion candidacy in those countries keep the peace? If anything it encourages Russian to have a siege mentality and lash out in an attempt to defend is periphery
Well, we didn't mess around with a coup in Kyiv. We supported the Ukrainian government that emerged from the coup (just as Russia had "supported" the Ukrainian government before the coup). Neither policy is grounds for and invasion of Ukraine..... Neither are public statements about possible Nato expansion grounds for war. Russia knew full well it would not happen.....could not happen.

Russia had a siege mentality during the Cold War.

---

We are in a war because Russia perceived Western weakness, a weakness of willpower.
We are in a war because of Deterrence lost.

---

"We" if you mean the American people are not at war.

(Even if D.C. is actively using our tax dollars to fund a proxy war)

*ps

Its also debatable if it was "Western weakness" or if it was "Western inference in Ukraine politics" that sparked off this conflict.

Moscow seemed to be fairly content when Viktor Yanukovych was President of Ukraine.

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FLBear5630 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

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ATL Bear said:

---

Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

It's not going to cost trillions to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and it will cost a helluva lot less than direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

---

1. Its not a binary choice.

"fund this proxy war or Russia invades NATO"

Russia knows very well it can not fight a war against the massive military alliance that is NATO.
you've got logical error in each of those sentences. Whether or not to engage in Ukraine is indeed a binary choice. You would stand by, do nothing, and let Russia have it all. That would most certainly involve a loss of deterrence. That would most certainly turn Russia into Belarus and move Russian armies 600mi closer to Nato (at minimum). It would most certainly have emboldened Russian policy toward Poland and the Baltics. Again, policy critics have not once explained how letting Russia have its way in Ukraine benefits any of Nato, anyhow, any time, any place, etc.....

2. Will it cost trillions...probably not....but lets not forget we did spend $2 trillion on the failed Afghan war. And no one said it would cost that much.
The money we've spent now is just financial cost of running the Ukraine govt and keeping not flush but operable with weapons & ordnance. It does not calculate the cost of rebuilding all that has been destroyed, of lost wealth and lost lives (i.e. lost tax base and economic demand). So, yeah, a war with Russia in Poland would involve trillions of dollars. I mean, look at the inconsistence of your argument. How could you dismiss the expense of major power conflict in the same paragraph where you cite the fact that we spent trillions on counter-insurgency in very small, almost powerless places?

And we spent $3 trillion on the Iraq war....again with D.C. never telling the American people it was going to cost that much.
We did not go into Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan intending for things to turn out the way they did. We DID get a benefit in all three places. And we did make mistakes with mission creep and/or failing on the peace part rather than the war part.

3. Money aside....the Russian Federation is not going anywhere. Any more than the USA is going away. And Ukraine is going to continue to be in the back yard of Moscow and they will continue to be there involved in the country hundreds of years from now. Russia will always take a interest in Ukraine....the same way the USA will always be involved with Canada or Mexico.
The USSR went away. The Russian Federation is under far more stress than you suppose. Sure, there will always be a Russian people and they will always have a government they dominate. But it doesn't have to be THIS iteration, or more importantly, THIS particular head of state. Regime change in Russia over the war in Ukraine is actually desirable. It would caution the next Russian head of state against military adventurism.

At the end of the day D.C. has limited interest in Ukraine and will eventually get tired of dealing with the place and has major priorities elsewhere on earth.
Wrong. Ukraine is not Mexico (despite the constant false comparisons to it). It is not Poland, either. But it is also not irrelevant. Russian intentions are obvious, and every one of the arguments made about Russian interests in Ukraine apply to NATO. No serious power of any size would argue it is wise to allow your largest single national security threat, your very raison d'etre, to move its armies 600mi closer to your more of your borders.

Moscow will not get tired of caring about Ukraine.
nor should it. But it can get tired of trying to bully its neighbors rather than dealing with them constructively.

---

Your arguments on Ukraine/Russia defy the millennia old reality of geopolitics in general and Russia specifically. In some ways, your position is actually rooted in ***uyama's "end of history," a perspective your worldview is otherwise not terribly fond of. Russia is not in some new incarnation trying to move beyond its past. It is the same old Russia - a corrupt and backward power seeking to use territorial expansion to defend itself against wealthier and more advanced societies which it believes do not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Russian bullying.

The Cold War was nothing special in terms of great power competition throughout the ages. Sure, it involved nuclear weapons and heavy ideological trimmings, but the same nations were engaging in the same game over the same geography. And that same game and geography are at play today. Russia wants Ukraine and nobody in the neighborhood wants it to happen. The difference is, Russia is relatively weaker than it has been in many centuries. Russia is not oblivious to that, but it invaded anyway because it misread Ukraine, it misread Nato, and it misread the USA.

if you think a Russia successful in Ukraine would not also misread Nato and misread the USA all over again over a land bridge to Kaliningrad (i.e. Lithuania and Poland), you are not thinking clearly. The root cause of almost every war is one side misreading the other, to the point of actually misreading its own national interest. Russia should not have invaded Ukraine. It should have waited for Ukraine to make a natural turn back toward toward Russia. But Putin wanted to regain former glory and he did not respect Biden, so here we are.....

---

I agree that the geopolitical/security desires of a Moscow lead State have always been the same...regardless if the State was Czarist, Marxist, or Nationalist

(But ideologically the Russian Federation is a new creation and different from the USSR for the record)
a distinction without a difference, right?

So the desires of Moscow to control its sphere of influence is the same...we agree on that....how does expanding NATO or overthrowing Moscow allied governments around Russia help us not get info conflict?
Well, firstly there is the false dilemma that TALKING about expansion is the same as expansion. In reality, Ukraine at no time in the past nor in the specific timeframe in question met the requirements to qualify for Nato membership. And Putin's 2014 grab of Crimea put it out of the question - territorial disputes are an absolute bar to membership. So the entire argument that Putin had to invade, seize, subsume all of Ukraine to satisfy Russian concerns about Nato membership is patently absurd.

That's before we get to the reality that " (the the west/Nato/we) overthrew the government in Kyiv" is not just patently false, it obscures the fact that the Maidan was an entirely organic response to Russian meddling in Ukraine!

NATO was supposed to exist to stop communist USSR expansion....its now been repurposed to stop Russian expansion. Fair enough its a good organization and keeps Central and Western Europe well protected.
the Russian invasion of Ukraine is textbook Russian expansionism, is it not?

But Moscow was already in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia. (always has been)
It has been in/out of those areas and a lot more over and over and over throughout the last 1000 years. Russian armies have invaded Iran been as far south as Kerman (roughly on the latitude of Basra, Iraq). Russian armies have besieged Constantinople. And annexed Upper Manchuria from China. Russia gets around.....to places a LONG way from Moscow.

Again, how does messing around with coups, proxy wars, and possible NATO expansion candidacy in those countries keep the peace? If anything it encourages Russian to have a siege mentality and lash out in an attempt to defend is periphery
Well, we didn't mess around with a coup in Kyiv. We supported the Ukrainian government that emerged from the coup (just as Russia had "supported" the Ukrainian government before the coup). Neither policy is grounds for and invasion of Ukraine..... Neither are public statements about possible Nato expansion grounds for war. Russia knew full well it would not happen.....could not happen.

Russia had a siege mentality during the Cold War.

---

We are in a war because Russia perceived Western weakness, a weakness of willpower.
We are in a war because of Deterrence lost.

---

"We" if you mean the American people are not at war.

(Even if D.C. is actively using our tax dollars to fund a proxy war)

*ps

Its also debatable if it was "Western weakness" or if it was "Western inference in Ukraine politics" that sparked off this conflict.

Moscow seemed to be fairly content when Viktor Yanukovych was President of Ukraine.

---

But Ukraine wasn't. You keep leaving Ukraine out of any decisions.

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trey3216 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

It's not going to cost trillions to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and it will cost a helluva lot less than direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

---

1. Its not a binary choice.

"fund this proxy war or Russia invades NATO"

Russia knows very well it can not fight a war against the massive military alliance that is NATO.
you've got logical error in each of those sentences. Whether or not to engage in Ukraine is indeed a binary choice. You would stand by, do nothing, and let Russia have it all. That would most certainly involve a loss of deterrence. That would most certainly turn Russia into Belarus and move Russian armies 600mi closer to Nato (at minimum). It would most certainly have emboldened Russian policy toward Poland and the Baltics. Again, policy critics have not once explained how letting Russia have its way in Ukraine benefits any of Nato, anyhow, any time, any place, etc.....

2. Will it cost trillions...probably not....but lets not forget we did spend $2 trillion on the failed Afghan war. And no one said it would cost that much.
The money we've spent now is just financial cost of running the Ukraine govt and keeping not flush but operable with weapons & ordnance. It does not calculate the cost of rebuilding all that has been destroyed, of lost wealth and lost lives (i.e. lost tax base and economic demand). So, yeah, a war with Russia in Poland would involve trillions of dollars. I mean, look at the inconsistence of your argument. How could you dismiss the expense of major power conflict in the same paragraph where you cite the fact that we spent trillions on counter-insurgency in very small, almost powerless places?

And we spent $3 trillion on the Iraq war....again with D.C. never telling the American people it was going to cost that much.
We did not go into Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan intending for things to turn out the way they did. We DID get a benefit in all three places. And we did make mistakes with mission creep and/or failing on the peace part rather than the war part.

3. Money aside....the Russian Federation is not going anywhere. Any more than the USA is going away. And Ukraine is going to continue to be in the back yard of Moscow and they will continue to be there involved in the country hundreds of years from now. Russia will always take a interest in Ukraine....the same way the USA will always be involved with Canada or Mexico.
The USSR went away. The Russian Federation is under far more stress than you suppose. Sure, there will always be a Russian people and they will always have a government they dominate. But it doesn't have to be THIS iteration, or more importantly, THIS particular head of state. Regime change in Russia over the war in Ukraine is actually desirable. It would caution the next Russian head of state against military adventurism.

At the end of the day D.C. has limited interest in Ukraine and will eventually get tired of dealing with the place and has major priorities elsewhere on earth.
Wrong. Ukraine is not Mexico (despite the constant false comparisons to it). It is not Poland, either. But it is also not irrelevant. Russian intentions are obvious, and every one of the arguments made about Russian interests in Ukraine apply to NATO. No serious power of any size would argue it is wise to allow your largest single national security threat, your very raison d'etre, to move its armies 600mi closer to your more of your borders.

Moscow will not get tired of caring about Ukraine.
nor should it. But it can get tired of trying to bully its neighbors rather than dealing with them constructively.

---

Your arguments on Ukraine/Russia defy the millennia old reality of geopolitics in general and Russia specifically. In some ways, your position is actually rooted in ***uyama's "end of history," a perspective your worldview is otherwise not terribly fond of. Russia is not in some new incarnation trying to move beyond its past. It is the same old Russia - a corrupt and backward power seeking to use territorial expansion to defend itself against wealthier and more advanced societies which it believes do not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Russian bullying.

The Cold War was nothing special in terms of great power competition throughout the ages. Sure, it involved nuclear weapons and heavy ideological trimmings, but the same nations were engaging in the same game over the same geography. And that same game and geography are at play today. Russia wants Ukraine and nobody in the neighborhood wants it to happen. The difference is, Russia is relatively weaker than it has been in many centuries. Russia is not oblivious to that, but it invaded anyway because it misread Ukraine, it misread Nato, and it misread the USA.

if you think a Russia successful in Ukraine would not also misread Nato and misread the USA all over again over a land bridge to Kaliningrad (i.e. Lithuania and Poland), you are not thinking clearly. The root cause of almost every war is one side misreading the other, to the point of actually misreading its own national interest. Russia should not have invaded Ukraine. It should have waited for Ukraine to make a natural turn back toward toward Russia. But Putin wanted to regain former glory and he did not respect Biden, so here we are.....

---

I agree that the geopolitical/security desires of a Moscow lead State have always been the same...regardless if the State was Czarist, Marxist, or Nationalist

(But ideologically the Russian Federation is a new creation and different from the USSR for the record)
a distinction without a difference, right?

So the desires of Moscow to control its sphere of influence is the same...we agree on that....how does expanding NATO or overthrowing Moscow allied governments around Russia help us not get info conflict?
Well, firstly there is the false dilemma that TALKING about expansion is the same as expansion. In reality, Ukraine at no time in the past nor in the specific timeframe in question met the requirements to qualify for Nato membership. And Putin's 2014 grab of Crimea put it out of the question - territorial disputes are an absolute bar to membership. So the entire argument that Putin had to invade, seize, subsume all of Ukraine to satisfy Russian concerns about Nato membership is patently absurd.

That's before we get to the reality that " (the the west/Nato/we) overthrew the government in Kyiv" is not just patently false, it obscures the fact that the Maidan was an entirely organic response to Russian meddling in Ukraine!

NATO was supposed to exist to stop communist USSR expansion....its now been repurposed to stop Russian expansion. Fair enough its a good organization and keeps Central and Western Europe well protected.
the Russian invasion of Ukraine is textbook Russian expansionism, is it not?

But Moscow was already in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia. (always has been)
It has been in/out of those areas and a lot more over and over and over throughout the last 1000 years. Russian armies have invaded Iran been as far south as Kerman (roughly on the latitude of Basra, Iraq). Russian armies have besieged Constantinople. And annexed Upper Manchuria from China. Russia gets around.....to places a LONG way from Moscow.

Again, how does messing around with coups, proxy wars, and possible NATO expansion candidacy in those countries keep the peace? If anything it encourages Russian to have a siege mentality and lash out in an attempt to defend is periphery
Well, we didn't mess around with a coup in Kyiv. We supported the Ukrainian government that emerged from the coup (just as Russia had "supported" the Ukrainian government before the coup). Neither policy is grounds for and invasion of Ukraine..... Neither are public statements about possible Nato expansion grounds for war. Russia knew full well it would not happen.....could not happen.

Russia had a siege mentality during the Cold War.

---

We are in a war because Russia perceived Western weakness, a weakness of willpower.
We are in a war because of Deterrence lost.

---

"We" if you mean the American people are not at war.

(Even if D.C. is actively using our tax dollars to fund a proxy war)

*ps

Its also debatable if it was "Western weakness" or if it was "Western inference in Ukraine politics" that sparked off this conflict.

Moscow seemed to be fairly content when Viktor Yanukovych was President of Ukraine.

---

THey especially liked when he bent over for them to abide by their whims. They invaded after the majority of the country didn't want that.

---

Redbrickbear said:

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trey3216 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

It's not going to cost trillions to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and it will cost a helluva lot less than direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

---

1. Its not a binary choice.

"fund this proxy war or Russia invades NATO"

Russia knows very well it can not fight a war against the massive military alliance that is NATO.
you've got logical error in each of those sentences. Whether or not to engage in Ukraine is indeed a binary choice. You would stand by, do nothing, and let Russia have it all. That would most certainly involve a loss of deterrence. That would most certainly turn Russia into Belarus and move Russian armies 600mi closer to Nato (at minimum). It would most certainly have emboldened Russian policy toward Poland and the Baltics. Again, policy critics have not once explained how letting Russia have its way in Ukraine benefits any of Nato, anyhow, any time, any place, etc.....

2. Will it cost trillions...probably not....but lets not forget we did spend $2 trillion on the failed Afghan war. And no one said it would cost that much.
The money we've spent now is just financial cost of running the Ukraine govt and keeping not flush but operable with weapons & ordnance. It does not calculate the cost of rebuilding all that has been destroyed, of lost wealth and lost lives (i.e. lost tax base and economic demand). So, yeah, a war with Russia in Poland would involve trillions of dollars. I mean, look at the inconsistence of your argument. How could you dismiss the expense of major power conflict in the same paragraph where you cite the fact that we spent trillions on counter-insurgency in very small, almost powerless places?

And we spent $3 trillion on the Iraq war....again with D.C. never telling the American people it was going to cost that much.
We did not go into Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan intending for things to turn out the way they did. We DID get a benefit in all three places. And we did make mistakes with mission creep and/or failing on the peace part rather than the war part.

3. Money aside....the Russian Federation is not going anywhere. Any more than the USA is going away. And Ukraine is going to continue to be in the back yard of Moscow and they will continue to be there involved in the country hundreds of years from now. Russia will always take a interest in Ukraine....the same way the USA will always be involved with Canada or Mexico.
The USSR went away. The Russian Federation is under far more stress than you suppose. Sure, there will always be a Russian people and they will always have a government they dominate. But it doesn't have to be THIS iteration, or more importantly, THIS particular head of state. Regime change in Russia over the war in Ukraine is actually desirable. It would caution the next Russian head of state against military adventurism.

At the end of the day D.C. has limited interest in Ukraine and will eventually get tired of dealing with the place and has major priorities elsewhere on earth.
Wrong. Ukraine is not Mexico (despite the constant false comparisons to it). It is not Poland, either. But it is also not irrelevant. Russian intentions are obvious, and every one of the arguments made about Russian interests in Ukraine apply to NATO. No serious power of any size would argue it is wise to allow your largest single national security threat, your very raison d'etre, to move its armies 600mi closer to your more of your borders.

Moscow will not get tired of caring about Ukraine.
nor should it. But it can get tired of trying to bully its neighbors rather than dealing with them constructively.

---

Your arguments on Ukraine/Russia defy the millennia old reality of geopolitics in general and Russia specifically. In some ways, your position is actually rooted in ***uyama's "end of history," a perspective your worldview is otherwise not terribly fond of. Russia is not in some new incarnation trying to move beyond its past. It is the same old Russia - a corrupt and backward power seeking to use territorial expansion to defend itself against wealthier and more advanced societies which it believes do not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Russian bullying.

The Cold War was nothing special in terms of great power competition throughout the ages. Sure, it involved nuclear weapons and heavy ideological trimmings, but the same nations were engaging in the same game over the same geography. And that same game and geography are at play today. Russia wants Ukraine and nobody in the neighborhood wants it to happen. The difference is, Russia is relatively weaker than it has been in many centuries. Russia is not oblivious to that, but it invaded anyway because it misread Ukraine, it misread Nato, and it misread the USA.

if you think a Russia successful in Ukraine would not also misread Nato and misread the USA all over again over a land bridge to Kaliningrad (i.e. Lithuania and Poland), you are not thinking clearly. The root cause of almost every war is one side misreading the other, to the point of actually misreading its own national interest. Russia should not have invaded Ukraine. It should have waited for Ukraine to make a natural turn back toward toward Russia. But Putin wanted to regain former glory and he did not respect Biden, so here we are.....

---

I agree that the geopolitical/security desires of a Moscow lead State have always been the same...regardless if the State was Czarist, Marxist, or Nationalist

(But ideologically the Russian Federation is a new creation and different from the USSR for the record)
a distinction without a difference, right?

So the desires of Moscow to control its sphere of influence is the same...we agree on that....how does expanding NATO or overthrowing Moscow allied governments around Russia help us not get info conflict?
Well, firstly there is the false dilemma that TALKING about expansion is the same as expansion. In reality, Ukraine at no time in the past nor in the specific timeframe in question met the requirements to qualify for Nato membership. And Putin's 2014 grab of Crimea put it out of the question - territorial disputes are an absolute bar to membership. So the entire argument that Putin had to invade, seize, subsume all of Ukraine to satisfy Russian concerns about Nato membership is patently absurd.

That's before we get to the reality that " (the the west/Nato/we) overthrew the government in Kyiv" is not just patently false, it obscures the fact that the Maidan was an entirely organic response to Russian meddling in Ukraine!

NATO was supposed to exist to stop communist USSR expansion....its now been repurposed to stop Russian expansion. Fair enough its a good organization and keeps Central and Western Europe well protected.
the Russian invasion of Ukraine is textbook Russian expansionism, is it not?

But Moscow was already in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia. (always has been)
It has been in/out of those areas and a lot more over and over and over throughout the last 1000 years. Russian armies have invaded Iran been as far south as Kerman (roughly on the latitude of Basra, Iraq). Russian armies have besieged Constantinople. And annexed Upper Manchuria from China. Russia gets around.....to places a LONG way from Moscow.

Again, how does messing around with coups, proxy wars, and possible NATO expansion candidacy in those countries keep the peace? If anything it encourages Russian to have a siege mentality and lash out in an attempt to defend is periphery
Well, we didn't mess around with a coup in Kyiv. We supported the Ukrainian government that emerged from the coup (just as Russia had "supported" the Ukrainian government before the coup). Neither policy is grounds for and invasion of Ukraine..... Neither are public statements about possible Nato expansion grounds for war. Russia knew full well it would not happen.....could not happen.

Russia had a siege mentality during the Cold War.

---

We are in a war because Russia perceived Western weakness, a weakness of willpower.
We are in a war because of Deterrence lost.

---

"We" if you mean the American people are not at war.

(Even if D.C. is actively using our tax dollars to fund a proxy war)

*ps

Its also debatable if it was "Western weakness" or if it was "Western inference in Ukraine politics" that sparked off this conflict.

Moscow seemed to be fairly content when Viktor Yanukovych was President of Ukraine.

---

THey especially liked when he bent over for them to abide by their whims. They invaded after the majority of the country didn't want that.

---

Amazing how you just pretend a violent coup in downtown Kyiv was the will of the people.

(instead of a violation of the 49.5% of the Ukrainian voters that voted for Yanukovych)

I mean you talk very negatively about the Jan. 6 riot a the Capitol in DC

Did you think that was justified and the will of the people of America to try and prevent Biden from taking power.

"Violent coup in Kyiv....good old fashioned democracy in action

Violent protest in DC....those fascist MAGA thugs need to be put down to save our democracy"

That is basically the take Liberals and Neo-Cons have on these kind of street muscle protests....over their is good...over here is bad.

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trey3216 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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trey3216 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

It's not going to cost trillions to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and it will cost a helluva lot less than direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

---

1. Its not a binary choice.

"fund this proxy war or Russia invades NATO"

Russia knows very well it can not fight a war against the massive military alliance that is NATO.
you've got logical error in each of those sentences. Whether or not to engage in Ukraine is indeed a binary choice. You would stand by, do nothing, and let Russia have it all. That would most certainly involve a loss of deterrence. That would most certainly turn Russia into Belarus and move Russian armies 600mi closer to Nato (at minimum). It would most certainly have emboldened Russian policy toward Poland and the Baltics. Again, policy critics have not once explained how letting Russia have its way in Ukraine benefits any of Nato, anyhow, any time, any place, etc.....

2. Will it cost trillions...probably not....but lets not forget we did spend $2 trillion on the failed Afghan war. And no one said it would cost that much.
The money we've spent now is just financial cost of running the Ukraine govt and keeping not flush but operable with weapons & ordnance. It does not calculate the cost of rebuilding all that has been destroyed, of lost wealth and lost lives (i.e. lost tax base and economic demand). So, yeah, a war with Russia in Poland would involve trillions of dollars. I mean, look at the inconsistence of your argument. How could you dismiss the expense of major power conflict in the same paragraph where you cite the fact that we spent trillions on counter-insurgency in very small, almost powerless places?

And we spent $3 trillion on the Iraq war....again with D.C. never telling the American people it was going to cost that much.
We did not go into Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan intending for things to turn out the way they did. We DID get a benefit in all three places. And we did make mistakes with mission creep and/or failing on the peace part rather than the war part.

3. Money aside....the Russian Federation is not going anywhere. Any more than the USA is going away. And Ukraine is going to continue to be in the back yard of Moscow and they will continue to be there involved in the country hundreds of years from now. Russia will always take a interest in Ukraine....the same way the USA will always be involved with Canada or Mexico.
The USSR went away. The Russian Federation is under far more stress than you suppose. Sure, there will always be a Russian people and they will always have a government they dominate. But it doesn't have to be THIS iteration, or more importantly, THIS particular head of state. Regime change in Russia over the war in Ukraine is actually desirable. It would caution the next Russian head of state against military adventurism.

At the end of the day D.C. has limited interest in Ukraine and will eventually get tired of dealing with the place and has major priorities elsewhere on earth.
Wrong. Ukraine is not Mexico (despite the constant false comparisons to it). It is not Poland, either. But it is also not irrelevant. Russian intentions are obvious, and every one of the arguments made about Russian interests in Ukraine apply to NATO. No serious power of any size would argue it is wise to allow your largest single national security threat, your very raison d'etre, to move its armies 600mi closer to your more of your borders.

Moscow will not get tired of caring about Ukraine.
nor should it. But it can get tired of trying to bully its neighbors rather than dealing with them constructively.

---

Your arguments on Ukraine/Russia defy the millennia old reality of geopolitics in general and Russia specifically. In some ways, your position is actually rooted in ***uyama's "end of history," a perspective your worldview is otherwise not terribly fond of. Russia is not in some new incarnation trying to move beyond its past. It is the same old Russia - a corrupt and backward power seeking to use territorial expansion to defend itself against wealthier and more advanced societies which it believes do not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Russian bullying.

The Cold War was nothing special in terms of great power competition throughout the ages. Sure, it involved nuclear weapons and heavy ideological trimmings, but the same nations were engaging in the same game over the same geography. And that same game and geography are at play today. Russia wants Ukraine and nobody in the neighborhood wants it to happen. The difference is, Russia is relatively weaker than it has been in many centuries. Russia is not oblivious to that, but it invaded anyway because it misread Ukraine, it misread Nato, and it misread the USA.

if you think a Russia successful in Ukraine would not also misread Nato and misread the USA all over again over a land bridge to Kaliningrad (i.e. Lithuania and Poland), you are not thinking clearly. The root cause of almost every war is one side misreading the other, to the point of actually misreading its own national interest. Russia should not have invaded Ukraine. It should have waited for Ukraine to make a natural turn back toward toward Russia. But Putin wanted to regain former glory and he did not respect Biden, so here we are.....

---

I agree that the geopolitical/security desires of a Moscow lead State have always been the same...regardless if the State was Czarist, Marxist, or Nationalist

(But ideologically the Russian Federation is a new creation and different from the USSR for the record)
a distinction without a difference, right?

So the desires of Moscow to control its sphere of influence is the same...we agree on that....how does expanding NATO or overthrowing Moscow allied governments around Russia help us not get info conflict?
Well, firstly there is the false dilemma that TALKING about expansion is the same as expansion. In reality, Ukraine at no time in the past nor in the specific timeframe in question met the requirements to qualify for Nato membership. And Putin's 2014 grab of Crimea put it out of the question - territorial disputes are an absolute bar to membership. So the entire argument that Putin had to invade, seize, subsume all of Ukraine to satisfy Russian concerns about Nato membership is patently absurd.

That's before we get to the reality that " (the the west/Nato/we) overthrew the government in Kyiv" is not just patently false, it obscures the fact that the Maidan was an entirely organic response to Russian meddling in Ukraine!

NATO was supposed to exist to stop communist USSR expansion....its now been repurposed to stop Russian expansion. Fair enough its a good organization and keeps Central and Western Europe well protected.
the Russian invasion of Ukraine is textbook Russian expansionism, is it not?

But Moscow was already in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia. (always has been)
It has been in/out of those areas and a lot more over and over and over throughout the last 1000 years. Russian armies have invaded Iran been as far south as Kerman (roughly on the latitude of Basra, Iraq). Russian armies have besieged Constantinople. And annexed Upper Manchuria from China. Russia gets around.....to places a LONG way from Moscow.

Again, how does messing around with coups, proxy wars, and possible NATO expansion candidacy in those countries keep the peace? If anything it encourages Russian to have a siege mentality and lash out in an attempt to defend is periphery
Well, we didn't mess around with a coup in Kyiv. We supported the Ukrainian government that emerged from the coup (just as Russia had "supported" the Ukrainian government before the coup). Neither policy is grounds for and invasion of Ukraine..... Neither are public statements about possible Nato expansion grounds for war. Russia knew full well it would not happen.....could not happen.

Russia had a siege mentality during the Cold War.

---

We are in a war because Russia perceived Western weakness, a weakness of willpower.
We are in a war because of Deterrence lost.

---

"We" if you mean the American people are not at war.

(Even if D.C. is actively using our tax dollars to fund a proxy war)

*ps

Its also debatable if it was "Western weakness" or if it was "Western inference in Ukraine politics" that sparked off this conflict.

Moscow seemed to be fairly content when Viktor Yanukovych was President of Ukraine.

---

THey especially liked when he bent over for them to abide by their whims. They invaded after the majority of the country didn't want that.

---

Amazing how you just pretend a violent coup in downtown Kyiv was the will of the people.

(instead of a violation of the 49.5% of the Ukrainian voters that voted for Yanukovych)

I mean you talk very negatively about the Jan. 6 riot a the Capitol in DC

Did you think that was justified and the will of the people of America to try and prevent Biden from taking power.

"Violent coup in Kyiv....good old fashioned democracy in action

Violent protest in DC....those fascist MAGA thugs need to be put down to save our democracy"

That is basically the take Liberals and Neo-Cons have on these kind of street muscle protests....over their is good...over here is bad.

---

Becasue Yanukovych bent over for Putin after the fact and that's not what they voted for.

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trey3216 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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trey3216 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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trey3216 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

It's not going to cost trillions to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and it will cost a helluva lot less than direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

---

1. Its not a binary choice.

"fund this proxy war or Russia invades NATO"

Russia knows very well it can not fight a war against the massive military alliance that is NATO.
you've got logical error in each of those sentences. Whether or not to engage in Ukraine is indeed a binary choice. You would stand by, do nothing, and let Russia have it all. That would most certainly involve a loss of deterrence. That would most certainly turn Russia into Belarus and move Russian armies 600mi closer to Nato (at minimum). It would most certainly have emboldened Russian policy toward Poland and the Baltics. Again, policy critics have not once explained how letting Russia have its way in Ukraine benefits any of Nato, anyhow, any time, any place, etc.....

2. Will it cost trillions...probably not....but lets not forget we did spend $2 trillion on the failed Afghan war. And no one said it would cost that much.
The money we've spent now is just financial cost of running the Ukraine govt and keeping not flush but operable with weapons & ordnance. It does not calculate the cost of rebuilding all that has been destroyed, of lost wealth and lost lives (i.e. lost tax base and economic demand). So, yeah, a war with Russia in Poland would involve trillions of dollars. I mean, look at the inconsistence of your argument. How could you dismiss the expense of major power conflict in the same paragraph where you cite the fact that we spent trillions on counter-insurgency in very small, almost powerless places?

And we spent $3 trillion on the Iraq war....again with D.C. never telling the American people it was going to cost that much.
We did not go into Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan intending for things to turn out the way they did. We DID get a benefit in all three places. And we did make mistakes with mission creep and/or failing on the peace part rather than the war part.

3. Money aside....the Russian Federation is not going anywhere. Any more than the USA is going away. And Ukraine is going to continue to be in the back yard of Moscow and they will continue to be there involved in the country hundreds of years from now. Russia will always take a interest in Ukraine....the same way the USA will always be involved with Canada or Mexico.
The USSR went away. The Russian Federation is under far more stress than you suppose. Sure, there will always be a Russian people and they will always have a government they dominate. But it doesn't have to be THIS iteration, or more importantly, THIS particular head of state. Regime change in Russia over the war in Ukraine is actually desirable. It would caution the next Russian head of state against military adventurism.

At the end of the day D.C. has limited interest in Ukraine and will eventually get tired of dealing with the place and has major priorities elsewhere on earth.
Wrong. Ukraine is not Mexico (despite the constant false comparisons to it). It is not Poland, either. But it is also not irrelevant. Russian intentions are obvious, and every one of the arguments made about Russian interests in Ukraine apply to NATO. No serious power of any size would argue it is wise to allow your largest single national security threat, your very raison d'etre, to move its armies 600mi closer to your more of your borders.

Moscow will not get tired of caring about Ukraine.
nor should it. But it can get tired of trying to bully its neighbors rather than dealing with them constructively.

---

Your arguments on Ukraine/Russia defy the millennia old reality of geopolitics in general and Russia specifically. In some ways, your position is actually rooted in ***uyama's "end of history," a perspective your worldview is otherwise not terribly fond of. Russia is not in some new incarnation trying to move beyond its past. It is the same old Russia - a corrupt and backward power seeking to use territorial expansion to defend itself against wealthier and more advanced societies which it believes do not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Russian bullying.

The Cold War was nothing special in terms of great power competition throughout the ages. Sure, it involved nuclear weapons and heavy ideological trimmings, but the same nations were engaging in the same game over the same geography. And that same game and geography are at play today. Russia wants Ukraine and nobody in the neighborhood wants it to happen. The difference is, Russia is relatively weaker than it has been in many centuries. Russia is not oblivious to that, but it invaded anyway because it misread Ukraine, it misread Nato, and it misread the USA.

if you think a Russia successful in Ukraine would not also misread Nato and misread the USA all over again over a land bridge to Kaliningrad (i.e. Lithuania and Poland), you are not thinking clearly. The root cause of almost every war is one side misreading the other, to the point of actually misreading its own national interest. Russia should not have invaded Ukraine. It should have waited for Ukraine to make a natural turn back toward toward Russia. But Putin wanted to regain former glory and he did not respect Biden, so here we are.....

---

I agree that the geopolitical/security desires of a Moscow lead State have always been the same...regardless if the State was Czarist, Marxist, or Nationalist

(But ideologically the Russian Federation is a new creation and different from the USSR for the record)
a distinction without a difference, right?

So the desires of Moscow to control its sphere of influence is the same...we agree on that....how does expanding NATO or overthrowing Moscow allied governments around Russia help us not get info conflict?
Well, firstly there is the false dilemma that TALKING about expansion is the same as expansion. In reality, Ukraine at no time in the past nor in the specific timeframe in question met the requirements to qualify for Nato membership. And Putin's 2014 grab of Crimea put it out of the question - territorial disputes are an absolute bar to membership. So the entire argument that Putin had to invade, seize, subsume all of Ukraine to satisfy Russian concerns about Nato membership is patently absurd.

That's before we get to the reality that " (the the west/Nato/we) overthrew the government in Kyiv" is not just patently false, it obscures the fact that the Maidan was an entirely organic response to Russian meddling in Ukraine!

NATO was supposed to exist to stop communist USSR expansion....its now been repurposed to stop Russian expansion. Fair enough its a good organization and keeps Central and Western Europe well protected.
the Russian invasion of Ukraine is textbook Russian expansionism, is it not?

But Moscow was already in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia. (always has been)
It has been in/out of those areas and a lot more over and over and over throughout the last 1000 years. Russian armies have invaded Iran been as far south as Kerman (roughly on the latitude of Basra, Iraq). Russian armies have besieged Constantinople. And annexed Upper Manchuria from China. Russia gets around.....to places a LONG way from Moscow.

Again, how does messing around with coups, proxy wars, and possible NATO expansion candidacy in those countries keep the peace? If anything it encourages Russian to have a siege mentality and lash out in an attempt to defend is periphery
Well, we didn't mess around with a coup in Kyiv. We supported the Ukrainian government that emerged from the coup (just as Russia had "supported" the Ukrainian government before the coup). Neither policy is grounds for and invasion of Ukraine..... Neither are public statements about possible Nato expansion grounds for war. Russia knew full well it would not happen.....could not happen.

Russia had a siege mentality during the Cold War.

---

We are in a war because Russia perceived Western weakness, a weakness of willpower.
We are in a war because of Deterrence lost.

---

"We" if you mean the American people are not at war.

(Even if D.C. is actively using our tax dollars to fund a proxy war)

*ps

Its also debatable if it was "Western weakness" or if it was "Western inference in Ukraine politics" that sparked off this conflict.

Moscow seemed to be fairly content when Viktor Yanukovych was President of Ukraine.

---

THey especially liked when he bent over for them to abide by their whims. They invaded after the majority of the country didn't want that.

---

Amazing how you just pretend a violent coup in downtown Kyiv was the will of the people.

(instead of a violation of the 49.5% of the Ukrainian voters that voted for Yanukovych)

I mean you talk very negatively about the Jan. 6 riot a the Capitol in DC

Did you think that was justified and the will of the people of America to try and prevent Biden from taking power.

"Violent coup in Kyiv....good old fashioned democracy in action

Violent protest in DC....those fascist MAGA thugs need to be put down to save our democracy"

That is basically the take Liberals and Neo-Cons have on these kind of street muscle protests....over their is good...over here is bad.

---

Becasue Yanukovych bent over for Putin after the fact and that's not what they voted for.

---

The pro-Russia guy (and party) they voted for ended up being pro-Russian….shocker

Let's be honest…the 45% of the electorate that did not vote for him (centered in Kyiv and Lviv) staged a coup

They used violence to overthrow the elected President.

And you don't have any problem with it.

---

his own government, going with the promised move towards Europe, through him out after the Putin bend over…at the behest of the people who elected the admin for the shift to Europe and the immediate Putin bend over.

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trey3216 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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trey3216 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

It's not going to cost trillions to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and it will cost a helluva lot less than direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

---

1. Its not a binary choice.

"fund this proxy war or Russia invades NATO"

Russia knows very well it can not fight a war against the massive military alliance that is NATO.
you've got logical error in each of those sentences. Whether or not to engage in Ukraine is indeed a binary choice. You would stand by, do nothing, and let Russia have it all. That would most certainly involve a loss of deterrence. That would most certainly turn Russia into Belarus and move Russian armies 600mi closer to Nato (at minimum). It would most certainly have emboldened Russian policy toward Poland and the Baltics. Again, policy critics have not once explained how letting Russia have its way in Ukraine benefits any of Nato, anyhow, any time, any place, etc.....

2. Will it cost trillions...probably not....but lets not forget we did spend $2 trillion on the failed Afghan war. And no one said it would cost that much.
The money we've spent now is just financial cost of running the Ukraine govt and keeping not flush but operable with weapons & ordnance. It does not calculate the cost of rebuilding all that has been destroyed, of lost wealth and lost lives (i.e. lost tax base and economic demand). So, yeah, a war with Russia in Poland would involve trillions of dollars. I mean, look at the inconsistence of your argument. How could you dismiss the expense of major power conflict in the same paragraph where you cite the fact that we spent trillions on counter-insurgency in very small, almost powerless places?

And we spent $3 trillion on the Iraq war....again with D.C. never telling the American people it was going to cost that much.
We did not go into Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan intending for things to turn out the way they did. We DID get a benefit in all three places. And we did make mistakes with mission creep and/or failing on the peace part rather than the war part.

3. Money aside....the Russian Federation is not going anywhere. Any more than the USA is going away. And Ukraine is going to continue to be in the back yard of Moscow and they will continue to be there involved in the country hundreds of years from now. Russia will always take a interest in Ukraine....the same way the USA will always be involved with Canada or Mexico.
The USSR went away. The Russian Federation is under far more stress than you suppose. Sure, there will always be a Russian people and they will always have a government they dominate. But it doesn't have to be THIS iteration, or more importantly, THIS particular head of state. Regime change in Russia over the war in Ukraine is actually desirable. It would caution the next Russian head of state against military adventurism.

At the end of the day D.C. has limited interest in Ukraine and will eventually get tired of dealing with the place and has major priorities elsewhere on earth.
Wrong. Ukraine is not Mexico (despite the constant false comparisons to it). It is not Poland, either. But it is also not irrelevant. Russian intentions are obvious, and every one of the arguments made about Russian interests in Ukraine apply to NATO. No serious power of any size would argue it is wise to allow your largest single national security threat, your very raison d'etre, to move its armies 600mi closer to your more of your borders.

Moscow will not get tired of caring about Ukraine.
nor should it. But it can get tired of trying to bully its neighbors rather than dealing with them constructively.

---

Your arguments on Ukraine/Russia defy the millennia old reality of geopolitics in general and Russia specifically. In some ways, your position is actually rooted in ***uyama's "end of history," a perspective your worldview is otherwise not terribly fond of. Russia is not in some new incarnation trying to move beyond its past. It is the same old Russia - a corrupt and backward power seeking to use territorial expansion to defend itself against wealthier and more advanced societies which it believes do not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Russian bullying.

The Cold War was nothing special in terms of great power competition throughout the ages. Sure, it involved nuclear weapons and heavy ideological trimmings, but the same nations were engaging in the same game over the same geography. And that same game and geography are at play today. Russia wants Ukraine and nobody in the neighborhood wants it to happen. The difference is, Russia is relatively weaker than it has been in many centuries. Russia is not oblivious to that, but it invaded anyway because it misread Ukraine, it misread Nato, and it misread the USA.

if you think a Russia successful in Ukraine would not also misread Nato and misread the USA all over again over a land bridge to Kaliningrad (i.e. Lithuania and Poland), you are not thinking clearly. The root cause of almost every war is one side misreading the other, to the point of actually misreading its own national interest. Russia should not have invaded Ukraine. It should have waited for Ukraine to make a natural turn back toward toward Russia. But Putin wanted to regain former glory and he did not respect Biden, so here we are.....

---

I agree that the geopolitical/security desires of a Moscow lead State have always been the same...regardless if the State was Czarist, Marxist, or Nationalist

(But ideologically the Russian Federation is a new creation and different from the USSR for the record)
a distinction without a difference, right?

So the desires of Moscow to control its sphere of influence is the same...we agree on that....how does expanding NATO or overthrowing Moscow allied governments around Russia help us not get info conflict?
Well, firstly there is the false dilemma that TALKING about expansion is the same as expansion. In reality, Ukraine at no time in the past nor in the specific timeframe in question met the requirements to qualify for Nato membership. And Putin's 2014 grab of Crimea put it out of the question - territorial disputes are an absolute bar to membership. So the entire argument that Putin had to invade, seize, subsume all of Ukraine to satisfy Russian concerns about Nato membership is patently absurd.

That's before we get to the reality that " (the the west/Nato/we) overthrew the government in Kyiv" is not just patently false, it obscures the fact that the Maidan was an entirely organic response to Russian meddling in Ukraine!

NATO was supposed to exist to stop communist USSR expansion....its now been repurposed to stop Russian expansion. Fair enough its a good organization and keeps Central and Western Europe well protected.
the Russian invasion of Ukraine is textbook Russian expansionism, is it not?

But Moscow was already in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia. (always has been)
It has been in/out of those areas and a lot more over and over and over throughout the last 1000 years. Russian armies have invaded Iran been as far south as Kerman (roughly on the latitude of Basra, Iraq). Russian armies have besieged Constantinople. And annexed Upper Manchuria from China. Russia gets around.....to places a LONG way from Moscow.

Again, how does messing around with coups, proxy wars, and possible NATO expansion candidacy in those countries keep the peace? If anything it encourages Russian to have a siege mentality and lash out in an attempt to defend is periphery
Well, we didn't mess around with a coup in Kyiv. We supported the Ukrainian government that emerged from the coup (just as Russia had "supported" the Ukrainian government before the coup). Neither policy is grounds for and invasion of Ukraine..... Neither are public statements about possible Nato expansion grounds for war. Russia knew full well it would not happen.....could not happen.

Russia had a siege mentality during the Cold War.

---

We are in a war because Russia perceived Western weakness, a weakness of willpower.
We are in a war because of Deterrence lost.

---

"We" if you mean the American people are not at war.

(Even if D.C. is actively using our tax dollars to fund a proxy war)

*ps

Its also debatable if it was "Western weakness" or if it was "Western inference in Ukraine politics" that sparked off this conflict.

Moscow seemed to be fairly content when Viktor Yanukovych was President of Ukraine.

---

THey especially liked when he bent over for them to abide by their whims. They invaded after the majority of the country didn't want that.

---

Amazing how you just pretend a violent coup in downtown Kyiv was the will of the people.

(instead of a violation of the 49.5% of the Ukrainian voters that voted for Yanukovych)

I mean you talk very negatively about the Jan. 6 riot a the Capitol in DC

Did you think that was justified and the will of the people of America to try and prevent Biden from taking power.

"Violent coup in Kyiv....good old fashioned democracy in action

Violent protest in DC....those fascist MAGA thugs need to be put down to save our democracy"

That is basically the take Liberals and Neo-Cons have on these kind of street muscle protests....over their is good...over here is bad.

---

Becasue Yanukovych bent over for Putin after the fact and that's not what they voted for.

---

FLBear5630 said:

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trey3216 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

trey3216 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

It's not going to cost trillions to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and it will cost a helluva lot less than direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

---

1. Its not a binary choice.

"fund this proxy war or Russia invades NATO"

Russia knows very well it can not fight a war against the massive military alliance that is NATO.
you've got logical error in each of those sentences. Whether or not to engage in Ukraine is indeed a binary choice. You would stand by, do nothing, and let Russia have it all. That would most certainly involve a loss of deterrence. That would most certainly turn Russia into Belarus and move Russian armies 600mi closer to Nato (at minimum). It would most certainly have emboldened Russian policy toward Poland and the Baltics. Again, policy critics have not once explained how letting Russia have its way in Ukraine benefits any of Nato, anyhow, any time, any place, etc.....

2. Will it cost trillions...probably not....but lets not forget we did spend $2 trillion on the failed Afghan war. And no one said it would cost that much.
The money we've spent now is just financial cost of running the Ukraine govt and keeping not flush but operable with weapons & ordnance. It does not calculate the cost of rebuilding all that has been destroyed, of lost wealth and lost lives (i.e. lost tax base and economic demand). So, yeah, a war with Russia in Poland would involve trillions of dollars. I mean, look at the inconsistence of your argument. How could you dismiss the expense of major power conflict in the same paragraph where you cite the fact that we spent trillions on counter-insurgency in very small, almost powerless places?

And we spent $3 trillion on the Iraq war....again with D.C. never telling the American people it was going to cost that much.
We did not go into Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan intending for things to turn out the way they did. We DID get a benefit in all three places. And we did make mistakes with mission creep and/or failing on the peace part rather than the war part.

3. Money aside....the Russian Federation is not going anywhere. Any more than the USA is going away. And Ukraine is going to continue to be in the back yard of Moscow and they will continue to be there involved in the country hundreds of years from now. Russia will always take a interest in Ukraine....the same way the USA will always be involved with Canada or Mexico.
The USSR went away. The Russian Federation is under far more stress than you suppose. Sure, there will always be a Russian people and they will always have a government they dominate. But it doesn't have to be THIS iteration, or more importantly, THIS particular head of state. Regime change in Russia over the war in Ukraine is actually desirable. It would caution the next Russian head of state against military adventurism.

At the end of the day D.C. has limited interest in Ukraine and will eventually get tired of dealing with the place and has major priorities elsewhere on earth.
Wrong. Ukraine is not Mexico (despite the constant false comparisons to it). It is not Poland, either. But it is also not irrelevant. Russian intentions are obvious, and every one of the arguments made about Russian interests in Ukraine apply to NATO. No serious power of any size would argue it is wise to allow your largest single national security threat, your very raison d'etre, to move its armies 600mi closer to your more of your borders.

Moscow will not get tired of caring about Ukraine.
nor should it. But it can get tired of trying to bully its neighbors rather than dealing with them constructively.

---

Your arguments on Ukraine/Russia defy the millennia old reality of geopolitics in general and Russia specifically. In some ways, your position is actually rooted in ***uyama's "end of history," a perspective your worldview is otherwise not terribly fond of. Russia is not in some new incarnation trying to move beyond its past. It is the same old Russia - a corrupt and backward power seeking to use territorial expansion to defend itself against wealthier and more advanced societies which it believes do not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Russian bullying.

The Cold War was nothing special in terms of great power competition throughout the ages. Sure, it involved nuclear weapons and heavy ideological trimmings, but the same nations were engaging in the same game over the same geography. And that same game and geography are at play today. Russia wants Ukraine and nobody in the neighborhood wants it to happen. The difference is, Russia is relatively weaker than it has been in many centuries. Russia is not oblivious to that, but it invaded anyway because it misread Ukraine, it misread Nato, and it misread the USA.

if you think a Russia successful in Ukraine would not also misread Nato and misread the USA all over again over a land bridge to Kaliningrad (i.e. Lithuania and Poland), you are not thinking clearly. The root cause of almost every war is one side misreading the other, to the point of actually misreading its own national interest. Russia should not have invaded Ukraine. It should have waited for Ukraine to make a natural turn back toward toward Russia. But Putin wanted to regain former glory and he did not respect Biden, so here we are.....

---

I agree that the geopolitical/security desires of a Moscow lead State have always been the same...regardless if the State was Czarist, Marxist, or Nationalist

(But ideologically the Russian Federation is a new creation and different from the USSR for the record)
a distinction without a difference, right?

So the desires of Moscow to control its sphere of influence is the same...we agree on that....how does expanding NATO or overthrowing Moscow allied governments around Russia help us not get info conflict?
Well, firstly there is the false dilemma that TALKING about expansion is the same as expansion. In reality, Ukraine at no time in the past nor in the specific timeframe in question met the requirements to qualify for Nato membership. And Putin's 2014 grab of Crimea put it out of the question - territorial disputes are an absolute bar to membership. So the entire argument that Putin had to invade, seize, subsume all of Ukraine to satisfy Russian concerns about Nato membership is patently absurd.

That's before we get to the reality that " (the the west/Nato/we) overthrew the government in Kyiv" is not just patently false, it obscures the fact that the Maidan was an entirely organic response to Russian meddling in Ukraine!

NATO was supposed to exist to stop communist USSR expansion....its now been repurposed to stop Russian expansion. Fair enough its a good organization and keeps Central and Western Europe well protected.
the Russian invasion of Ukraine is textbook Russian expansionism, is it not?

But Moscow was already in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia. (always has been)
It has been in/out of those areas and a lot more over and over and over throughout the last 1000 years. Russian armies have invaded Iran been as far south as Kerman (roughly on the latitude of Basra, Iraq). Russian armies have besieged Constantinople. And annexed Upper Manchuria from China. Russia gets around.....to places a LONG way from Moscow.

Again, how does messing around with coups, proxy wars, and possible NATO expansion candidacy in those countries keep the peace? If anything it encourages Russian to have a siege mentality and lash out in an attempt to defend is periphery
Well, we didn't mess around with a coup in Kyiv. We supported the Ukrainian government that emerged from the coup (just as Russia had "supported" the Ukrainian government before the coup). Neither policy is grounds for and invasion of Ukraine..... Neither are public statements about possible Nato expansion grounds for war. Russia knew full well it would not happen.....could not happen.

Russia had a siege mentality during the Cold War.

---

We are in a war because Russia perceived Western weakness, a weakness of willpower.
We are in a war because of Deterrence lost.

---

"We" if you mean the American people are not at war.

(Even if D.C. is actively using our tax dollars to fund a proxy war)

*ps

Its also debatable if it was "Western weakness" or if it was "Western inference in Ukraine politics" that sparked off this conflict.

Moscow seemed to be fairly content when Viktor Yanukovych was President of Ukraine.

---

THey especially liked when he bent over for them to abide by their whims. They invaded after the majority of the country didn't want that.

---

Amazing how you just pretend a violent coup in downtown Kyiv was the will of the people.

(instead of a violation of the 49.5% of the Ukrainian voters that voted for Yanukovych)

I mean you talk very negatively about the Jan. 6 riot a the Capitol in DC

Did you think that was justified and the will of the people of America to try and prevent Biden from taking power.

"Violent coup in Kyiv....good old fashioned democracy in action

Violent protest in DC....those fascist MAGA thugs need to be put down to save our democracy"

That is basically the take Liberals and Neo-Cons have on these kind of street muscle protests....over their is good...over here is bad.

---

Becasue Yanukovych bent over for Putin after the fact and that's not what they voted for.

---

He fled to Russia, end of story. He was a plant.

---

trey3216 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

FLBear5630 said:

---

trey3216 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

trey3216 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

It's not going to cost trillions to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and it will cost a helluva lot less than direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

---

1. Its not a binary choice.

"fund this proxy war or Russia invades NATO"

Russia knows very well it can not fight a war against the massive military alliance that is NATO.
you've got logical error in each of those sentences. Whether or not to engage in Ukraine is indeed a binary choice. You would stand by, do nothing, and let Russia have it all. That would most certainly involve a loss of deterrence. That would most certainly turn Russia into Belarus and move Russian armies 600mi closer to Nato (at minimum). It would most certainly have emboldened Russian policy toward Poland and the Baltics. Again, policy critics have not once explained how letting Russia have its way in Ukraine benefits any of Nato, anyhow, any time, any place, etc.....

2. Will it cost trillions...probably not....but lets not forget we did spend $2 trillion on the failed Afghan war. And no one said it would cost that much.
The money we've spent now is just financial cost of running the Ukraine govt and keeping not flush but operable with weapons & ordnance. It does not calculate the cost of rebuilding all that has been destroyed, of lost wealth and lost lives (i.e. lost tax base and economic demand). So, yeah, a war with Russia in Poland would involve trillions of dollars. I mean, look at the inconsistence of your argument. How could you dismiss the expense of major power conflict in the same paragraph where you cite the fact that we spent trillions on counter-insurgency in very small, almost powerless places?

And we spent $3 trillion on the Iraq war....again with D.C. never telling the American people it was going to cost that much.
We did not go into Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan intending for things to turn out the way they did. We DID get a benefit in all three places. And we did make mistakes with mission creep and/or failing on the peace part rather than the war part.

3. Money aside....the Russian Federation is not going anywhere. Any more than the USA is going away. And Ukraine is going to continue to be in the back yard of Moscow and they will continue to be there involved in the country hundreds of years from now. Russia will always take a interest in Ukraine....the same way the USA will always be involved with Canada or Mexico.
The USSR went away. The Russian Federation is under far more stress than you suppose. Sure, there will always be a Russian people and they will always have a government they dominate. But it doesn't have to be THIS iteration, or more importantly, THIS particular head of state. Regime change in Russia over the war in Ukraine is actually desirable. It would caution the next Russian head of state against military adventurism.

At the end of the day D.C. has limited interest in Ukraine and will eventually get tired of dealing with the place and has major priorities elsewhere on earth.
Wrong. Ukraine is not Mexico (despite the constant false comparisons to it). It is not Poland, either. But it is also not irrelevant. Russian intentions are obvious, and every one of the arguments made about Russian interests in Ukraine apply to NATO. No serious power of any size would argue it is wise to allow your largest single national security threat, your very raison d'etre, to move its armies 600mi closer to your more of your borders.

Moscow will not get tired of caring about Ukraine.
nor should it. But it can get tired of trying to bully its neighbors rather than dealing with them constructively.

---

Your arguments on Ukraine/Russia defy the millennia old reality of geopolitics in general and Russia specifically. In some ways, your position is actually rooted in ***uyama's "end of history," a perspective your worldview is otherwise not terribly fond of. Russia is not in some new incarnation trying to move beyond its past. It is the same old Russia - a corrupt and backward power seeking to use territorial expansion to defend itself against wealthier and more advanced societies which it believes do not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Russian bullying.

The Cold War was nothing special in terms of great power competition throughout the ages. Sure, it involved nuclear weapons and heavy ideological trimmings, but the same nations were engaging in the same game over the same geography. And that same game and geography are at play today. Russia wants Ukraine and nobody in the neighborhood wants it to happen. The difference is, Russia is relatively weaker than it has been in many centuries. Russia is not oblivious to that, but it invaded anyway because it misread Ukraine, it misread Nato, and it misread the USA.

if you think a Russia successful in Ukraine would not also misread Nato and misread the USA all over again over a land bridge to Kaliningrad (i.e. Lithuania and Poland), you are not thinking clearly. The root cause of almost every war is one side misreading the other, to the point of actually misreading its own national interest. Russia should not have invaded Ukraine. It should have waited for Ukraine to make a natural turn back toward toward Russia. But Putin wanted to regain former glory and he did not respect Biden, so here we are.....

---

I agree that the geopolitical/security desires of a Moscow lead State have always been the same...regardless if the State was Czarist, Marxist, or Nationalist

(But ideologically the Russian Federation is a new creation and different from the USSR for the record)
a distinction without a difference, right?

So the desires of Moscow to control its sphere of influence is the same...we agree on that....how does expanding NATO or overthrowing Moscow allied governments around Russia help us not get info conflict?
Well, firstly there is the false dilemma that TALKING about expansion is the same as expansion. In reality, Ukraine at no time in the past nor in the specific timeframe in question met the requirements to qualify for Nato membership. And Putin's 2014 grab of Crimea put it out of the question - territorial disputes are an absolute bar to membership. So the entire argument that Putin had to invade, seize, subsume all of Ukraine to satisfy Russian concerns about Nato membership is patently absurd.

That's before we get to the reality that " (the the west/Nato/we) overthrew the government in Kyiv" is not just patently false, it obscures the fact that the Maidan was an entirely organic response to Russian meddling in Ukraine!

NATO was supposed to exist to stop communist USSR expansion....its now been repurposed to stop Russian expansion. Fair enough its a good organization and keeps Central and Western Europe well protected.
the Russian invasion of Ukraine is textbook Russian expansionism, is it not?

But Moscow was already in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia. (always has been)
It has been in/out of those areas and a lot more over and over and over throughout the last 1000 years. Russian armies have invaded Iran been as far south as Kerman (roughly on the latitude of Basra, Iraq). Russian armies have besieged Constantinople. And annexed Upper Manchuria from China. Russia gets around.....to places a LONG way from Moscow.

Again, how does messing around with coups, proxy wars, and possible NATO expansion candidacy in those countries keep the peace? If anything it encourages Russian to have a siege mentality and lash out in an attempt to defend is periphery
Well, we didn't mess around with a coup in Kyiv. We supported the Ukrainian government that emerged from the coup (just as Russia had "supported" the Ukrainian government before the coup). Neither policy is grounds for and invasion of Ukraine..... Neither are public statements about possible Nato expansion grounds for war. Russia knew full well it would not happen.....could not happen.

Russia had a siege mentality during the Cold War.

---

We are in a war because Russia perceived Western weakness, a weakness of willpower.
We are in a war because of Deterrence lost.

---

"We" if you mean the American people are not at war.

(Even if D.C. is actively using our tax dollars to fund a proxy war)

*ps

Its also debatable if it was "Western weakness" or if it was "Western inference in Ukraine politics" that sparked off this conflict.

Moscow seemed to be fairly content when Viktor Yanukovych was President of Ukraine.

---

THey especially liked when he bent over for them to abide by their whims. They invaded after the majority of the country didn't want that.

---

Amazing how you just pretend a violent coup in downtown Kyiv was the will of the people.

(instead of a violation of the 49.5% of the Ukrainian voters that voted for Yanukovych)

I mean you talk very negatively about the Jan. 6 riot a the Capitol in DC

Did you think that was justified and the will of the people of America to try and prevent Biden from taking power.

"Violent coup in Kyiv....good old fashioned democracy in action

Violent protest in DC....those fascist MAGA thugs need to be put down to save our democracy"

That is basically the take Liberals and Neo-Cons have on these kind of street muscle protests....over their is good...over here is bad.

---

Becasue Yanukovych bent over for Putin after the fact and that's not what they voted for.

---

He fled to Russia, end of story. He was a plant.

---

If Zelensky gets overthrown where to you think he will be running off to?

If he ends up in New York or Tel Aviv it does not mean he was a CIA operative or Mossad agent

---

To you it would mean he's another foreigner taking up jobs for hard working Americans if he came here.

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Just curious. How many U.S. soldiers have died in combat in the last 50 years (1974-2024) vs how many died in combat in the 50 years prior to that (1924-1973), or the 50 years prior to that (1873-1923), or even the 50 years prior to that (1822-1872)?

---

Are you trying to argue that we are getting better at fighting wars with less casualites?

Or just pointing out that we have not been fighting peer competitors lately?

The ability of the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, or Grenada Marxists to inflict mass casualties on the powerful U.S. military was/is always low.

In fact I actually assume our casualty rates are very similar to the 1873-1923 era (if you take out WWI) when we were fighting banana wars in Latin America and Regime Change operations around our sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

[The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. The military interventions were primarily carried out by the United States Marine Corps, which also developed a manual, the Small Wars Manual (1921) based on their experiences. ]

---

Maybe the fact we don't have to fight those peer wars is the relative peace the globe needs. I know it's not perfect or devoid of conflict, but as the saying goes, it's better to fight the small wars to avoid the big ones.

---

No doubt not fighting wars against peer competitors will keep loses down....we certainly agree that peace on the globe is better than world wars.

But you then lean info the idea that fighting endless small wars in the 3rd world is somehow preventing big wars from taking place.

A very very neo-con argument.

And one not really back up by the facts.

We might very well stumble into a nuclear war with Russia because of a very stupid proxy war in ukriane.

Another "small war" that could go very big very quickly

---

I wasn't arguing endless small wars, only that small wars are better than the alternative. The balance is between the ability to keep relative peace across an interconnected globe by various tactics against rogue actors. Some have been failures, but haven't resulted in broader war, while others have helped uphold it. And to point out the obvious, the restraint by outside actors in Ukraine and leaving it at proxy is somewhat proof of a tenuous understanding by all what's at stake. You certainly can't argue this could already be much more escalated.

---

We....the Western Alliance.....have done a splendid job of avoiding the big global WWIII-type conflagration.. Decades of relative peace, with odd flare ups in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq which were contained to very theaters

Which is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be allowed to stand. They must emerge from the war chastened severely about doing such again.

---

Unfortunately at the cost of trillions along with governments abusing their middle classes and replacing their populations with immigrants.

If you're a man of god you know this all becomes a one world anti Christian government eventually.

---

It's not going to cost trillions to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and it will cost a helluva lot less than direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

---

1. Its not a binary choice.

"fund this proxy war or Russia invades NATO"

Russia knows very well it can not fight a war against the massive military alliance that is NATO.
you've got logical error in each of those sentences. Whether or not to engage in Ukraine is indeed a binary choice. You would stand by, do nothing, and let Russia have it all. That would most certainly involve a loss of deterrence. That would most certainly turn Russia into Belarus and move Russian armies 600mi closer to Nato (at minimum). It would most certainly have emboldened Russian policy toward Poland and the Baltics. Again, policy critics have not once explained how letting Russia have its way in Ukraine benefits any of Nato, anyhow, any time, any place, etc.....

2. Will it cost trillions...probably not....but lets not forget we did spend $2 trillion on the failed Afghan war. And no one said it would cost that much.
The money we've spent now is just financial cost of running the Ukraine govt and keeping not flush but operable with weapons & ordnance. It does not calculate the cost of rebuilding all that has been destroyed, of lost wealth and lost lives (i.e. lost tax base and economic demand). So, yeah, a war with Russia in Poland would involve trillions of dollars. I mean, look at the inconsistence of your argument. How could you dismiss the expense of major power conflict in the same paragraph where you cite the fact that we spent trillions on counter-insurgency in very small, almost powerless places?

And we spent $3 trillion on the Iraq war....again with D.C. never telling the American people it was going to cost that much.
We did not go into Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan intending for things to turn out the way they did. We DID get a benefit in all three places. And we did make mistakes with mission creep and/or failing on the peace part rather than the war part.

3. Money aside....the Russian Federation is not going anywhere. Any more than the USA is going away. And Ukraine is going to continue to be in the back yard of Moscow and they will continue to be there involved in the country hundreds of years from now. Russia will always take a interest in Ukraine....the same way the USA will always be involved with Canada or Mexico.
The USSR went away. The Russian Federation is under far more stress than you suppose. Sure, there will always be a Russian people and they will always have a government they dominate. But it doesn't have to be THIS iteration, or more importantly, THIS particular head of state. Regime change in Russia over the war in Ukraine is actually desirable. It would caution the next Russian head of state against military adventurism.

At the end of the day D.C. has limited interest in Ukraine and will eventually get tired of dealing with the place and has major priorities elsewhere on earth.
Wrong. Ukraine is not Mexico (despite the constant false comparisons to it). It is not Poland, either. But it is also not irrelevant. Russian intentions are obvious, and every one of the arguments made about Russian interests in Ukraine apply to NATO. No serious power of any size would argue it is wise to allow your largest single national security threat, your very raison d'etre, to move its armies 600mi closer to your more of your borders.

Moscow will not get tired of caring about Ukraine.
nor should it. But it can get tired of trying to bully its neighbors rather than dealing with them constructively.

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Your arguments on Ukraine/Russia defy the millennia old reality of geopolitics in general and Russia specifically. In some ways, your position is actually rooted in ***uyama's "end of history," a perspective your worldview is otherwise not terribly fond of. Russia is not in some new incarnation trying to move beyond its past. It is the same old Russia - a corrupt and backward power seeking to use territorial expansion to defend itself against wealthier and more advanced societies which it believes do not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Russian bullying.

The Cold War was nothing special in terms of great power competition throughout the ages. Sure, it involved nuclear weapons and heavy ideological trimmings, but the same nations were engaging in the same game over the same geography. And that same game and geography are at play today. Russia wants Ukraine and nobody in the neighborhood wants it to happen. The difference is, Russia is relatively weaker than it has been in many centuries. Russia is not oblivious to that, but it invaded anyway because it misread Ukraine, it misread Nato, and it misread the USA.

if you think a Russia successful in Ukraine would not also misread Nato and misread the USA all over again over a land bridge to Kaliningrad (i.e. Lithuania and Poland), you are not thinking clearly. The root cause of almost every war is one side misreading the other, to the point of actually misreading its own national interest. Russia should not have invaded Ukraine. It should have waited for Ukraine to make a natural turn back toward toward Russia. But Putin wanted to regain former glory and he did not respect Biden, so here we are.....

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(But ideologically the Russian Federation is a new creation and different from the USSR for the record)
a distinction without a difference, right?

So the desires of Moscow to control its sphere of influence is the same...we agree on that....how does expanding NATO or overthrowing Moscow allied governments around Russia help us not get info conflict?
Well, firstly there is the false dilemma that TALKING about expansion is the same as expansion. In reality, Ukraine at no time in the past nor in the specific timeframe in question met the requirements to qualify for Nato membership.

Russia had a siege mentality during the Cold War.

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1. An ideology of international communist expansion vs oligarchy/nationalist localism is important difference.

The USSR was literally trying to spark off Marxist revolutions everywhere on the Planet....modern Russia is not.

That made the USSR and existential threat to the USA/Europe.
And then there's BRICS, an open challenge to western financial hegemony. And there's Russian meddling in the Sahel, in the Americas, etc...... We STILL have Russia threating to nuke us, sailing their navy along our coasts, intercepting our fighters in international air space, etc..... (and all of that started before Ukraine.....) The urgency level might have changed, but the basic geopolitics not so much. That's because autocratic Russia STILL sees the western liberal order as a threat standing in the way of Russian interests.

2. The desire of certain Neo-Cons and Liberal interventionists in our government was always to eventually bring Ukraine into NATO (and move the alliance closer to Moscow while denying them their black sea naval base in Crimea)

A good plan if you think modern Russia is an existential threat....a bad plan if you are wanting peace.
We brought in Finland and Sweden and didn't get war. We brought in the Baltics (a bicycle ride from Russia's 2nd largest city) and we didn't get war.

Russia invaded Ukraine because it wanted it and thought NATO would not be willing or able to respond. Nato membership for Ukraine is just a contrived justification. Ukraine had been a NATO partner since 1992, and had not even applied for full membership (because it did not then, and still does not now qualify for it.)

You really should consider dropping the Nato straw man. It's provable nonsense.

3. I would say Moscow had an radical revolutionary/messianic Marxist mentality in the Cold War and less of a siege mentality. It literally thought it was going to lead the world wide Red revolution of the proletariat

But its debatable
I won't quibble with that. But we're not talking about Russian support for one faction or the other in Chile or Cambodia. We're talking about a major land war in Europe clearly not driven by ideological nonsense, just national ambition.

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