Where are we exactly? Your prediction has not been proven correct. Even as much as things are escalating, war does not appear imminent nor certain.
We’re much closer than we were 20 years ago.
Nobody believed Russia would actually invade Ukraine; nor that Xi would be foolish enough to scare away Taiwan by muscling in on Hong Kong.
Unless the CCP forces Xi out, their hardliners and the middle-kingdom mindset have all but made some level of warfare certain.
Who is 'Nobody' in this context? Because most analysis on this since Russia took Crimea in 2014 have predicated that Russia would make further attempts at capturing Ukrainian territory. Even the U.S defense establishment knew this and were preparing the Ukrainians for since 2015.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/qa-what-is-risk-war-bet...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/how-real-is-the-thr...
vs.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/01/us-warns-russi...
for example.
News editors don’t enact policy. Who cares what they thinks.
Your argument is that "the government didn't take Russia seriously enough"
Proper evidence would be an study of government officials in power and their position at the time.
It is not 3 hand-picked private industry news articles.
It reflects public sentiment.
Analysts aren’t the ones in power. Public sentiment and leadership’s will to bend the public sentiment are what matters.
See GWB’s bullshit invasion of Iraq.
on that point, I seem to remember all (most) of the analyst think-tanks for public policy (RAND corporation, etc) pointing the administration at the time towards the idea of war and 'obvious' WMD proliferation.
Also public sentiment was pretty on-board with (apparent) retribution after 9/11. The country got tired of the war effort quick, but the trumpets were blowing pretty loud for a long time after 9/11, both from government and the people around me at the time.
The analyst groups supporting that decision just sped the steamroller.
I remember the UN inspectors unable to convince the US leaders that evidence was lacking.
> Also public sentiment was pretty on-board with (apparent) retribution after 9/11. The country got tired of the war effort quick, but the trumpets were blowing pretty loud for a long time after 9/11, both from government and the people around me at the time.
My point exactly. A bullshit war was waged by persuasion with only tenuous evidence: https://www.vice.com/en/article/9kve3z/the-cia-just-declassi...
It’s leaders and public will, not analysts.
That’s very much untrue.
It was hard for experts to form a solid opinion after the Crimean invasion. It had some characteristics which the current one doesn’t have which made it rational from a realpolitik point of view.
The invasion had a clear strategic benefit: keeping access to Sevastopol, came at a time when the relationship between Russia and Ukraine was quickly shifting and was made easier by the complicated relationship between Crimea and Ukraine.
None of these applies to the current conflict.
Nobody wanted to admit a "full blown invasion would happen" is better wording.
Russia invaded and was meddling with Ukraine back in 2014. It invaded Georgia in an actual war back then over the same act.
EU vetoed related action and was preaching that everything is going to be fine because Germany was using all their power to not ruin their profitable trade with Russia.
We have to call things with their own name.
Related to the average Joe's beliefs: they would believe their leaders telling them everything is fine and nothing bad will happen because they want to believe it. No thinking or prediction was involved in any of this.
That’s still a spectacular failure in its own right.
It means we’re not willing to admit the obvious until it becomes a far bigger problem.
A weakness of a democratic process without the right leaders.
Because as far as I know, the right people expected something to happen — there is just the issue of “well, what do you do about it?”
That’s quite a leap of logic there. I think it’s enough to recognize that many believed a full invasion wasn’t in the cards.
> Because as far as I know, the right people expected something to happen — there is just the issue of “well, what do you do about it?”
The main issue here is that we let down our guard against hostile leaders and nations. And there still seems to be a a large portion of Western civilization in denial.
But a deadman-switch NATO membership? Prop up their defensive capabilities? Put pressure on Germany with regards to gas and overly cozy relationships with Russia?
Hindsight is easy and I’m sure others have better ideas; that’s besides the point.
Do you not remember this whole thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_missile_defense_...
Or the talk about nations joining NATO?
Or the discussion about how because we expect Russia to do something, we actually are not sure about NATO anymore because we don't want to be obligated to enter in a war?
Here's an 2021 article about US pressure on Germany to stop the import of more Russian gas before Ukraine happened (2022): https://www.marketplace.org/2021/04/19/germany-under-u-s-pre...
The US did all the things that you are complaining that it didn't do.
Strange. Do you believe the US is the entire Western civilization?
And do you believe if the entire US believed Russia was going to invade, that we wouldn’t have pressured Germany even more?
You also made the point that a weakness of democracy is that it follows the general sentiment, but clearly the US govt didn't give a damn that a lot of people didn't care about Russia or weren't even aware of the things the US govt was doing -- like trying to put US missile installations in other sovereign nations. We tried and tried... for a very long time.
If Germany had an authoritarian leader, it doesn't mean that they would have taken Russia any more seriously. I've heard that Angela Merkel supported the shutdown of nuclear reactors after Fukishima because she wanted to shore up her popularity. An authoritarian leader could have done exactly the same thing -- who doesn't want to look good?
There is a limit to the amount of pressure that the US can put on a country. Crimea already happened and if that wasn't good enough, what was?
Even after Russia did invade Ukraine, the US had to pressure Europe to really look into alternative energy sources (especially after the shutdown of those nuclear reactors) even through winter was coming up and the writing was on the wall. In the end, the US ended up becoming the world's biggest (or 2nd biggest -- don't recall) natural gas exporter this winter just to shore up Europe's heating supplies (which also meant my natural gas bill went up like 3x!).
Ultimately, I don't think democracy can be blamed. We can blame bad leadership in some cases, but that is a problem endemic to every political system.
I never implied this is a weakness.
Instead…
> but clearly the US govt didn't give a damn that a lot of people didn't care about Russia or weren't even aware of the things the US govt was doing -- like trying to put US missile installations in other sovereign nations. We tried and tried... for a very long time.
I’m saying this is a clear failure of leadership.
> I've heard that Angela Merkel supported the shutdown of nuclear reactors after Fukishima because she wanted to shore up her popularity. An authoritarian leader could have done exactly the same thing -- who doesn't want to look good?
Then that’s a clear failure of leadership. In this instance, instead of persuading the public she let the public persuade her.
Still, if Merkel genuinely believed that Russia was a threat, I doubt she would have done this. Of course, we now believe German intelligence was compromised by Russia.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/germany-soft-target-russi...
> Ultimately, I don't think democracy can be blamed. We can blame bad leadership in some cases, but that is a problem endemic to every political system.
We enabled our enemies because leadership believed that the market would liberalize our enemies. We let our guard down.
While late, it’s now leaderships’ job to persuade the public of the threats at hand.
Because a quick google search will easily disprove that notion.
Plenty of people believed that Russia would launch a major invasion as part of their war with Ukraine launched in 2014. As a general concern it was raised many times by many people during the period after 2014, and that went into overdrive in the months before the actual invasion.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union settled, it has been the most peaceful time in human history (at least for semi-developed nations). A moderate amount of hostility is to be expected as China has approached superpower status. This is still no where near Cold War levels.
>Nobody believed Russia would actually invade Ukraine
This was always a possibility after Crimea. People just assumed that Putin wasn't stupid enough to through with it.
>nor that Xi would be foolish enough to scare away Taiwan by muscling in on Hong Kong.
Ever since the British gave up Hong Kong, China has agreed that they will allow it to be autonomous until 2047. We're already at the half way point, so China is slowly tightening it's grip on them.
One big difference between Taiwan and Ukraine is that Russia shares a large land border with it. Traditional wisdom dictates that you need at least 1 troop for every 40 inhabitants, which is over half a million for Taiwan. China simply does not have the navy to move that number of personale. If they ever hope to invade Taiwan, they would have to prepare for a D-Day level of operation, which would be immediately obvious to intelligence.
They are not self-sufficient: https://ap.fftc.org.tw/article/2570
Isolation practice: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-03-08/taiwan...
China has a strategic need for ocean access, regardless of who is in charge, and everyone else is looking for a military confrontation on that.
If china controlled the whole US east coast's access to the Atlantic ocean, and the US needed Chinese permission to go to sea, the US would have attacked already
A potential threat does not count. China potentially threatens the destruction of the west coast by nukes, so by your argument the US should have gone to war long ago if potential threats count.