U.S. transferred a record $80.9B worth of military equipment 2023
airandspaceforces.com
airandspaceforces.com
(Not sure: wondering.)
Proponents will speak to deterrence and preservation of ‘liberty’/non-despotism, opponents will speak to the very real death toll inflicted by these weapons.
Markets are unable to lie (as they are deeply/intrinsically connected to reality).
Human beings, in aggregate, tend to be pretty good at predicting some things that individual humans can't (classic examples being number of objects in a jar or weight of an animal) and markets are a weighted and incentived system that exploits this property.
Prediction markets are better at predicting somethings and worse at others and their fallibility is also dependent on how well they're are structured.
We (as the US) had a golden opportunity to reinvest our peace dividend after 1991 but we squandered it in a useless war for nearly 20 years after 9/11. But we have no choice but to reinvest in defense now.
In both cases, the democracies created are flawed, but certainly more democratic than what came before.
Perhaps Iraq wouldn't be a democracy, but our support of Ukraine would be more full-throated, and maybe our political circumstance would be better off.
When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the Ukraine was left with the world’s 3rd largest nuclear weapons arsenal. They gave up every single one of them in exchange for a promise from the western world to help them defend themselves from aggression.
If we don’t live up to that promise, how can we ever hope to limit nuclear weapons proliferation anywhere else?
Moreso, most people did not consider Ukraine a true democracy in the 90s thru to Euromaidan
Nonetheless I do think the non-proliferation argument is a good one for distinguishing the two cases, thanks.
And we don’t have a legal obligation to their security, only a promise. But that makes what we are doing even more powerful, IMO
Obtaining such fissile materials is about 90% of the effort of building nuclear weapons, and preventing the acquisition of them is about 90% of anti-proliferation efforts. I think that Ukraine could have easily deployed a nuclear deterrent in the 2010s if they had warehoused all those Soviet warheads in the 1990s.
This analysis seems a little thin.
The codes to operate those weapons only really control the detonation sequence. At the end of the day, making new detonators from existing bombs is much less hard than collecting the fissile materials needed and assembling bombs from scratch.
A significant portion of these transfers went to Ukraine. Thanks to them, is managing to resist Russia's 3-day invasion for the second years and counting.
Given Putin's repeated threat of nuclear Armageddon and annexing west Europe up to Lisbon, undoubtedly the world feels free thanks to its ability to oppose these imperialist ambitions of a few tin-pot dictators.
in the late 1800s there were some very bitter and clever political cartoons in newspapers showing the distance between investors and the actual conditions that their wars create
nobody wins in war
Profit or not, the price of security is assuredly all the other things we could be doing or focusing our attention on such as medical research, cleaner energy, etc.
But the fact that nobody wins in war, not even the Russian even in victory will acts a deterrence to further conflicts, as it is already a strategic defeat for Russia.
The dissolution of Yugoslavia imo would count as this
It says record, so my question is: Which was bigger, the value of the assets left in Afghanistan in 2021, or the 81 billion transferred in 2023?
The US did, however, take control of nearly all of Afghanistan's foreign currency reserves (between $4.2-9.5 billion, I don't have the energy to parse all of this)[1]. That left them with at most only about $400 million which was stored in cash in the Presidential Palace, assuming Ashraf Ghani didn't take all of it with him to the UAE.
Warning: Source [1] is much more biased than source [0]. There's a lot of misleading verbiage and mealy-mouthed doublespeak.
> From 2021-23, FMS sales averaged $55.9 billion per year, a 21.9 percent increase over the 2020-22 average of $45.8 billion per year.
Followed by:
> Poland was the single largest FMS customer in fiscal 2023, with over $30 billion in transfers.
I wonder if the article boils down to "Poland bought $30B of military equipment all of a sudden".