If the US is truly unwilling to actively defend Ukraine in the event of an invasion then we’ve lost. Not just this fight against Russia but against China in Asia, as JVL alluded to. Taiwan is toast. It’s a full signal to the rest of the world that we either can’t or just won’t maintain the global system we and “the West” enjoy, and that …
If the US is truly unwilling to actively defend Ukraine in the event of an invasion then we’ve lost. Not just this fight against Russia but against China in Asia, as JVL alluded to. Taiwan is toast. It’s a full signal to the rest of the world that we either can’t or just won’t maintain the global system we and “the West” enjoy, and that second-tier non-peer states can basically do whatever they want.
Settling for just a different kind of sanctions regime instead killing Russian regulars in large numbers on Ukrainian soil is what decline looks like. I hate to put it like that but that’s obviously what it takes, and a world where we shrug off the mantle of hegemon (aka the world we’re living in right now) scares the absolute shit out of me.
The nature of our political system, which has an essentially baked-in sea change of domestic and foreign policy attitudes at a common interval of eight years means that our capacity to make security guarantees is very, very limited. We should therefore be very, very cautious about making them in the first place.
We just saw that we're only ever one bad election away from electing a wrecking ball into an executive branch that has accumulated the powers of a somewhat-restrained constitutional monarchy. In terms of tangible response our word is largely meaningless and other states should regard it as such.
If the US is truly unwilling to actively defend Ukraine in the event of an invasion then we’ve lost. Not just this fight against Russia but against China in Asia, as JVL alluded to. Taiwan is toast. It’s a full signal to the rest of the world that we either can’t or just won’t maintain the global system we and “the West” enjoy, and that second-tier non-peer states can basically do whatever they want.
Settling for just a different kind of sanctions regime instead killing Russian regulars in large numbers on Ukrainian soil is what decline looks like. I hate to put it like that but that’s obviously what it takes, and a world where we shrug off the mantle of hegemon (aka the world we’re living in right now) scares the absolute shit out of me.
The nature of our political system, which has an essentially baked-in sea change of domestic and foreign policy attitudes at a common interval of eight years means that our capacity to make security guarantees is very, very limited. We should therefore be very, very cautious about making them in the first place.
We just saw that we're only ever one bad election away from electing a wrecking ball into an executive branch that has accumulated the powers of a somewhat-restrained constitutional monarchy. In terms of tangible response our word is largely meaningless and other states should regard it as such.