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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> Ukraine is not a member of NATO, so options are somewhat limited

Ukraine not being in NATO means we aren’t obligated to intervene. We regularly intervene in various things without a treaty requiring it.

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Absolutely. But if a NATO member is attacked, then member states are obligated to come to the member's aid. It's essentially tantamount to saying, if you are at war with a NATO member, you are at war with the whole bloc, which includes USA, UK, France (somewhat in/out member over the decades), Germany, Turkey, and so on. It's a formidable group that acts as a deterrent to any would-be aggressor.

The US is not obligated to intervene in Ukraine, plain and simple. The US has a strategic partnership with Ukraine, I think, but it's not an ally. https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/Story/Article/1... https://www.state.gov/u-s-ukraine-charter-on-strategic-partn...

The scary thing is if NATO decide to get involved, and it turns into war between NATO and Russia, then the security of the Baltic States plummets.

Currently, as NATO members, they are not likely to be attacked, but if NATO declares war then that deterrent is gone.

Hopefully not a likely scenario, but who knows.. There's been a lot of tension lately, especially with the likes of Belarus bussing migrants across the border into Lithuania etc, but no idea where this will end.

NATO is a defensive alliance, so there has to be a provocation for them to act.

Not necessarily see their previous involvement in conflicts. What kind of defence was nato doing in Afghanistan

The attack on Afghanistan was literally an invocation of NATO's Article 5, the only time this has happened:

"Article 5 provides that if a NATO Ally is the victim of an armed attack, each and every other member of the Alliance will consider this act of violence as an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the Ally attacked."

So, the 9/11 attacks were considered an armed attack on the United States, and the alliance deemed it necessary to overthrow the Taliban in order to prevent Al-Qaeda from perpetrating similar attacks again.

One can disagree with the rationale behind the decision, or the cost-benefit ratio. But it did follow the protocols of the alliance.

I think it's very naive to think that us invaded afganistan to protect itself or prevent similar attacks. It was pure irrational vengeance by bush. It may follow their protocols but by no means you can consider invading and occupying a foreign country for 20 years as defensive. In effect u cannot call nato a defensive organization by their involvement in wars where no defense was required

You're looking at it in retrospect, but decisions to involve NATO in responding to an attack on a member aren't made with the benefit of hindsight.

> us invaded afganistan to protect itself

... is a very different thing than ...

> occupying a foreign country for 20 years

When NATO invaded the towers were still smoking, the war-on-terror intelligence apparatus had yet to be built, and we (I) had no idea whether another attack was forthcoming. It felt pretty damn reasonable at the time.

Whether you believe it was right or wrong to get involved in Afghanistan, NATO’s involvement there (not Iraq) was a direct response to the 9/11 attacks and the government (at the time) of Afghanistan’s refusing to allow the US to directly target the group responsible that was based there.

Their response was invading a country for 20 years, you can hardly count it as defensive. Invading afghanistan was always about more than 9/11, it was far more than that.

The difference between a defensive response and an offensive is not how long it lasts.

The idea was that the Taliban was harboring Al-Qaeda, so NATO members were assisting the US in response to the 9/11 attacks.

Apparently, the department of defense doesn't need a provocation for them to act.

Like in Libya in 2011? In Kosovo in 1999? This fairy tale has been dead for decades now.

> if a NATO member is attacked, then member states are obligated to come to the member's aid. It's essentially tantamount to saying, if you are at war with a NATO member, you are at war with the whole bloc,

This is the deterrent—and it also rhymes with the Triple Entente v. Triple Alliance tensions that set off the Great War.

> if a NATO member is attacked, then member states are obligated to come to the member's aid

Are they really?

> So while the use of armed force is one way to respond to aggression, the NATO has several options, for example:

> Nothing. They might decide that the best way to "restore and maintain security" is to just let the attacker have that country.

https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/32686

Well, in this case, Biden vowed to defend ‘Every Inch’ of NATO Territory so I don't think we have to worry about that.

Note that every member can decide how it aids.

Germany aid to Ukraine was to send them 5k helmets.

Those helmets didn't do anything against Russia's missiles.

---

That is, attacking a member of NATO just means that all other members must help it, but how they help, is up to them, and that help can be just a pat in the back.

Turkey has complained for years that NATO would be required to help them with this or that conflict in the area, and it didn't.

In the end, there is no supranational tribunal for military allegiances - in matters of conflict, Hobbes' jungle is still very much there.

Intervening militarily invites a counter response from Russia and could lead to outright war between NATO and Russia. It's one thing to assist Kuwait, quite another to send troops to fight a nuclear-armed adversary.

Totally agree. Just clarifying that the limiting factor on international responses isn’t Ukraine’s NATO nonmembership.

I think people are implying "obviously we'd like to avoid direct military conflict with Russia if possible", so given that there's nothing strongly compelling us to intervene directly (like Ukraine being in NATO), we're obviously not.

(I'm unclear on how true the silent implication is, but seems reasonable).

So we wait until they're doing this in Poland? I think I've seen this one before. Doesn't end well for anyone involved.

Better to hit an enemy when they're not expecting it.

The logical conclusion of this is the "first strike" doctrine of MAD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-emptive_nuclear_strike).

Every major power has had 50 years to prepare for it, and it won't work.

You want to respond proportionally, and make it hurt. But you also want to leave room for more pain, to give incentive for the behaviour to stop. And you need to make sure that your adversary believes that you'll keep hurting them. This is why we use some, but not all of the economic sanctions available:

1. If things get worse, we can make the sanctions worse. 2. We're much more likely to be able to maintain sanctions than soldiers in foreign wars.

They have already encircled a sovereign nation with their army and are moving in. Our "proportionate" response so far has been to shut down a couple of banks.

I'm not talking about a nuclear strike. All out nuclear war is clearly in nobody's interest (what's the point in ruling over a nuclear wasteland). Putin is relying on the fact that we are all so scared about that scenario that we will be weak in our support of Ukraine (and Latvia, Lithuania, Poland....).

China talks a good game now but how long do you think China will tolerate Russia bombing their most valuable customers?

depends on how much of the south china sea, bits of India and other neighbors they can grab while the west is busy in Europe.

I don't mean to pick on you in particular, but the popular narrative pretty severely misunderstands what was so controversial about pre-WWII appeasement. The problem isn't that Chamberlain tried to avoid going to war or applied insufficient sanctions to prevent Hitler from conquering the Sudetenland - he approved of it, personally flying to Germany to give him permission, and then talking afterwards about how Hitler's a peace loving guy who'll never invade anyone again. He didn't even wait for Hitler declare the war first! It's very dissimilar to the current scenario, where everyone involved agrees that Putin isn't peace loving and has no legitimate grievances.

More flippantly, I think there are some serious questions to ask yourself if you find yourself staking out a more pro-war position than architects of the Iraq War, none of whom think NATO should send in troops here.

I was against the Iraq war at the time. Still think it was a bad idea. I'm generally anti-war. But in this case, as in WW2 it's the only thing that will stop an agressor hell-bent on an idiological mission to restore the Soviet Union.

> and then talking afterwards about how Hitler's a peace loving guy who'll never invade anyone again.

We've had that stage already. It started in 2016. And instead of Chamberlain it was Trump.

Look at what he is saying. The parallels with "lebensraum" are there for all to see. What makes anyone think he will stop at Ukraine? If he is successful here, Poland will be next, mark my words.

My impression is that Chamberlain was rearming as well, he just didn't publicize it.

NATO drew their line in the sand. Intervene when it's crossed. It's better to not bait and switch a nuclear power into war.

We drew a line in the sand when we persuaded them to get rid of their own nukes, ensuring that we'd have their back.

That we don't actually have their back will be noted by despots the world over.

You realize that we can’t control the response of the enemy we “hit” unexpectedly, right? They make one miscalculation, launch a nuclear warhead, and in 30 minutes several exchanges of missiles are launched, millions of people are dead, and cities in America and Russia destroyed. It’s not a board game.

Hitler didn’t have nuclear weapons. The calculus of war changed in 1945 after the US dropped nuclear bombs on Japan.

The Russian people are already pretty angry with Putin over Ukraine. And they are going to be a lot angrier about the coming sanctions, then it doesn't really matter if they are angry with Putin or the west.

There is no way Putin will say after this war "Thank you sir, may I have another?" He'll be hard pressed to keep financing his military...

Are they? I am sure that some are, but I get the impression that he has a fair bit of support from the country.

That might fade when/if the sanctions become serious, but thus far I have the impression that he's generally popular (if not as popular as rigged polls would suggest) for his hard-line stance against the US, NATO, and Europe.

Am I wrong about that?

He enjoys support, but even from those who support him there are people who disagree with a war and the death and destruction it will bring. Nothing works like dead family members and economic hardship to sow doubt in a political leader's support. Heck, there are probably people who buy the peacekeeping bullshit but still don't want a war

There are already anti-war protests in Russia, and the war has barely started!

Anecdotally, even intelligent people I know seem to be buying the Russian propaganda about it merely being a peacekeeping mission to stop the human rights violations in Donbas.

I'm really curious about this - what do those people think of the fact that tons of world leaders (POTUS and NATO leaders, obviously, but also those in Lithuania, the European Commission, Germany, the UK, and Finland[1]) are all considering it to be an invasion? Do they think that each and every one of those countries is spreading propaganda in the same unified effort?

(if they do, I'm also curious for any analysis of their psyche that you have, because that seems to me like borderline insanity)

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/02/23/reac...

we've been watching for 20 years as the "West" ate itself for foolish reasons, nothing our governments say is true anymore.

We are not in the same civilizational project, I guess you just don't realize it

Costs money and political capital. What it buys is defense of Ukrainian sovereignty and escalates conflict with a dangerous, poor nuclear superpower.

Ukraine is being handed to Putin. He gets to flex his strongman ego and the world gets to not be ended (today).

Which sounds disturbingly like British/French response to the Rhineland/Austria lead up to WWII.

Indeed. Some things are different today. Nukes, cyber weapons, NATO borders being tougher than the League of Nations, the imperial country having a weak economy, and the whole thing is a war without a cause.

Russia invading a NATO country would be akin to walking on a landmine. Putin's not a fool, so it is very unlikely to happen.

Well, he could've led Russia on the same path as China, making it a true world power that other countries massively depend on. Instead the fascist government chose isolationism. So, the foolishness of Putin is quite debatable.

Sudetenland

America will do nothing except 'strongly condemn' what's happening, just like the rest of the world. The simple fact is that there is no real upside to risking actual war with Russia - that the Russians will dominate the Ukraine while walking away with a bloody nose (in the form of minor troop losses of its own) is a foregone conclusion. Without more, that's a localised conflict that Russia rather hilariously can try to claim the moral high ground about (NATO encroachment, historical alliances, American instability and foreign meddling), but if America or indeed any of the other nuclear powers gets involved, the risks increase massively very quickly. If two nuclear powers went at it properly here - I don't care which two - we enter into long-tailed territory and it's something we've simply never seen. There's absolutely no chance America or the UK risk that - they can get their wheat from somewhere else.

On the one hand, I feel bad for Ukrainians. On the other hand, the whole world saw it coming, just like we can see China invading Taiwan at some point in the future, and the calculus will be the exact same: Taiwan means more to China than it does to America, and the Ukraine means more to Russia than it does to the West.

It is perilous to fight somebody, whether it's Putin or Xi, with vested emotional interests in the subject matter of the fight when all you've got is ideology.

And so nothing will come of this except 'strong condemnations'. As if any strongman ever gave a fuck.

> China invading Taiwan at some point in the future

And that's the perspective this should be viewed from.

The US may not have a firm interest in Ukraine. The US has a fairly firm interest in Taiwan. The US has a serious interest in Korea, Japan, and the countries bordering the South China Sea.

You have to strongly and unconditionally support international order re: Ukraine, so that Xi takes away the right message.

I think the stronger message is that the US is trying to move chip manufacturing to the US so it will not care about Taiwan.

After decades of cheerfully deindustrializing and giving up the source of ordinary people's prosperity, the US is waking up to the stupidity of doing this. It's very visible in the chip industry because it's very visibly dominated by just a couple of firms and because a large range of seemingly simple things can not function without sophisticated integrated circuits.

Alternative interpretation: they are trying to undo the total idiocy that was putting all your microchip eggs in one basket. It doesn't matter how cost-effective it is to centralise production, if the result is that the production capability for the single thing we need the most to continue our lifestyle (high-performance integrated circuits), is in peril from a natural/man-made disaster occuring in a small geographical area.

> The US has a fairly firm interest in Taiwan.

Why only "fairly firm"? I've heard arguments that if Taiwan is invaded and TSMC falls under PRC control, then the US faces massive chip shortages for years (possibly leading to riots and a destabilized government), and those seem plausible to me.

Because previous process nodes are alternatives. The world doesn't stop. It just stops getting better, and there's a lot of pain as supply chains readjust to available capacity and retarget parts.

Previous process nodes are alternatives, but it takes months to years to redesign and manufacture devices using available parts. What if the new car supply (because cars have a crazy number of processors in them) suddenly dropped to 5% of current rates? What if you weren't able to purchase a new computer (or any parts - DRAM, GPUs, motherboards) for five years? What about appliances - if your microwave breaks, and you can only buy a used one for 4x the new price, what do you do?

It is my understanding that TSMC has made arrangements to scuttle their facilities in this eventuality, denying invaders the technology.

a chip shortage means i keep my current cellphone for a few more years, and make do with older computer and new cars won't have a shitty infotainment system, or an ARM SoC in some gadget that doesn't need to be smart. not something that causes me to riot.

What if there were no new cars, TVs, or phones made for five years? That would cause rioting - and that's pretty close to what scenario we would actually have, because it would take years to design and manufacture these very complex devices without any parts at all from TSMC.

The question obviously is if Ukraine compares to Hitler taking Austria or part of Czechoslovakia and condemnation is just appeasement until an assault on the next country...

> America will do nothing except 'strongly condemn' what's happening, just like the rest of the world.

People don't want a 'world police' anymore.

Then they're going to have to remember what a world without police looks like.

I wasn't intending to suggest that America or anybody else should take action or 'police' anything, but I do find the 'all bark, no bite mentality' currently being paraded about by the world's leadership to be, at best, disingenuous and at worst cowardly.

I suppose somebody might ask what I would prefer the US State Department say, and I guess I'd personally want more realpolitik: "Putin's a megalomaniacal piece of shit with nationalist historical aspirations that stretch back to Peter the Great; NATO's contributed to all this to the extent that it's been dick swinging in Eastern Europe for the past 20 years; the Ukrainians should probably just surrender since they're all basically (and historically were) Russian anyway, and they stand no chance of actually resisting, and no other country on Earth is going to risk nuclear war over them."

Not exactly feel good material for a bolded NYT headline, but at least it's honest.

The sanctions are extremely tough and not entirely painless for the US and other western countries.

Also the US has delivered weapons to Ukraine.

They don't want to engage in a war with Russia, and that decision I think is the right one for now. A couple years down the road, if the sanctions don't succeed in containing Putin's aggression, we might have a different discussion.

Putin is going on seventy already. A couple years down the road, with some luck he'll be six foot under.

>A couple years down the road, if the sanctions don't succeed in containing Putin's aggression, we might have a different discussion.

Yeah well we tried that back in 2014 when it was the Crimean Penensula. I think its time we have that discussion NOW.

Any direct confrontation with Russia may go nuclear. The NATO doctrine understandably requires a direct attack on a NATO member to run that risk.

In my opinion, Russia will not have a lot of appetite for further aggression after all those sanctions. Invading NATO members and setting off a huge, unwinnable conflict should be pretty far down the list of priorities in the next few years.

“People” don’t want their regular neighborhood police either, but take it away and people start appreciating it.

The defund the police rhetoric caused politicians in my city to poll the populace and it was found that 85% wanted more police.

Maybe a better way to phrase it is “people don’t remember why it was good to have world police”.

What people are you talking about exactly? Those in Ukraine?

Ukraine hasn't requested any foreign military aid so far.

Of course they have, privately, all the while knowing they were never going to get it.

“Of course” according to what?

Of course according to the repeated pronouncements of everyone ranging from their President to Foreign Minister to Defense Minister to the ambassadors.

See this report for a brief example: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN07...

The US and UK governments have been formally and repeatedly asked for help.

This information is also constantly in the news. The US has provided almost $3 Billion in military aid to Ukraine in the past several years alone. The UK has also provided significant amounts of aid. Ditto for NATO. All of these are not 'forced' on Ukraine!

My bad. I've not followed the situation closely enough to see these information before. Thanks for the enlightenment.

I hope that beside strong condemnations, the US will also help with money (wars are expensive!) and stuff useful at war, from medical supplies to maybe weapons like Stingers and Javelins.

I also hope that the US will share intelligence information; US's abilities here are far greater than Ukraine's.

The time for the US to stop acting as the world police has gone, why does the US need to intervene in a former buffer state ~10000 km away? NATO will presumably step in when the threat comes close enough.

I wonder how resolve would shift if Putin were to come down with a case of polonium poisoning, or other tricks from his own repertoire?

That would be a pretty terrible escalation in the spy game. There is an uneasy balance where government officials and their families are off limits for any physical harm. That means that CIA officials can live relatively peaceful lives just as FSB agents do.

If you let that genie out of the bottle, it better be a prelude to a winnable war, or you had better be happy to have all your government officials, diplomats, and their families on permanent lockdown.

Some would blame it on the CIA. The more likely perpetrator would always be someone in Russia trying to replace Putin.

Assassinating or targeting political leaders is a war crime. The CIA might have done that - quite a while in the past, mind you - but never against an adversary like Russia. At the very least you would expect a few US politicians to drop dead if there ever were such an attempt.

I do not think the US does political assassinations (I may be utterly wrong here, if so, please post examples!) It does use assassinations against terrorists or quasi-political figures such as Qasem Soleimani, but I doubt that eliminating Putin is even being contemplated here.

Fidel Castro is an obvious example. There were at least 638 (!) failed CIA political assination attempts against him. [0]

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

Lol. Taking out mob hits on Castro, that's just epic!

I totally forgot the "Communist Stooges" category that America had a special loathing for. I'm sure they were a no-holds-barred category!

Exactly Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia

It is still an independent state and a member for a long term of un. Can one just take one like japan say if it is not part of nato.

If no one has the will to stop it… yes. But Japan is a bad example because the US & Japan maintain mutual defense agreements. If it’s invaded the US will act.

There is a scenario where North Korea feels an invasion is imminent and uses short and medium range nuclear missiles against US bases, for example in Japan. With the calculation that this would nip any kind of invasion in the bud, and the US military might refrain from nuclear retaliation because North Korea would threaten the east coast with long range nuclear missiles.

But that kind of calculation "oh, the US won't have the stomach to fight a useless war if you hit them hard enough first" was exactly what doomed the Japanese Empire.

> because North Korea would threaten the east coast with long range nuclear missiles.

I don't think NK has currently credible launch systems to make it to the east coast (of the US)?

Also, the past century shows the US had the stomach to fight useless wars, so I'd hope NK has noticed that.

I sometimes get the two coasts confused, in this case because the west coast is east of North Korea...

In any case, the state and capability of their missile arsenal isn't widely known. The issue here is that it's not so much the will to fight an expensive war but rather to risk nuclear strikes at home just for the benefit of revenge on North Korea.

no they cant hit the east coast yet, but they could hit Seattle, Portland, Honolulu, Anchorage, possibly San Francisco. I would rather the west coast not glow in the dark thank you.

NATO is just one of the several defense alliances the US has. The US is basically the guarantor of security for a number of East Asian countries, Middle Eastern countries, you name it... We are not called the World's Policeman for nothing.

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