It is never a good idea to believe ones own propaganda. The 'weakness' of Russia is a fallacy that need not be tested, ever, with aggression.
A far better use of ones time is to wonder where all the diplomacy has gone.
A far better use of ones time is to wonder where all the diplomacy has gone.
Currently, Ukraine and Russia's diplomatic goals are still incompatible, and both believe they will be able to shift the balance of the war in their favor.
Sorry but that is just plain nonsense. The purpose of diplomacy is to avoid war. War destroys any reason for diplomacy.
Diplomacy is distinctly not "just talking nicely".
War starts when the cost/benefit analysis of violent means comes up better than the alternative (peaceful) means. War ends when the opposite happens, and the cost/benefit of the continuation of violence starts to come down in comparison with peace.
The benefit component is for the most part a zero-sum game (fixed land area), while the cost component is variable and growing with time. One way to force peace is to impose great costs on one or both warring sides.
You can ask - was Putin's decision to invade Ukraine rational given his values, priorities, risk aversion, willingness to bear the costs and information he had? Apart from the last, they're all subjective and thus it doesn't make sense to judge them as (ir)rational. The last one is objective, but having wrong information is not irrational either.
Can you make some examples of war where fighting itself was the primary goal?
> that definition would make every action 'rational'.
As mentioned above, goals themselves are not something we can evaluate as rational or not.
But given you have a goal, you can question whether the actions you undertake to achieve that goal are rational. Let's say you want to start a family and want to buy a house. Going into a casino and throwing money into the slot machines is not a rational way to achieve it, esp. since there is plenty of information available explaining in painstaking detail that this won't work.
It's possible that we're seeing one now in Ukraine. The Russian army isn't exactly made up of economic elites, being composed largely of men from outlying territories who are either a possible long-term threat to Putin's vision of Soviet-era revanchism or impoverished people who are literally more trouble to feed than they're worth. From Putin's point of view, a meat grinder may be just what the (mad) doctor ordered.
Certainly that dovetails with Kim's motivation to send his own hungry soldiers to the Ukraine front. Now that he has nukes, what does he need such a large army for? Like the ragtag derelicts and criminal elements who make up the Russian armed forces, those troops are more of a liability to Kim than an asset.
See also concerns about China's surplus of young men who will never find mates thanks to the effects of the regime's one-child policy. A literal incel army. It's not hard to imagine that Beijing might find a war to be a convenient way to rebalance the population and remove a potential source of agitation.
More people like to glibly quote Clausewitz than have actually read and understood Clausewitz.
It's still a useful way to look at how the world works.
What? We've already seen a real-world test of Russia's military prowess. It's why every customer of Russian military kit that has the option to replace them is.
For example had NATO countries all offered 50% of their GDP for the next decade as gifts to Russia in return for Putin calling all his troops out of Ukraine, it's very likely he would have ended the war on day two.
Of course, that's not an offer NATO countries would have been willing to make (and even if they had made a deal like that, at a price less ridiculously high than 50% of GDP, it could easily lead to Russia starting the exact same war a decade later, now with much better funding).
I'm not suggesting the above as a serious "this should have been the way to deal with it", just as a random, over-exaggerated example that there are diplomatic options above and beyond preventing wars that stem from miscommunication / misunderstandings.
This nuance is important, because sometimes people blame "weak diplomats" etc, but it's not their fault, they can't find equilibrium of strategic interests where there's none.
But it's also something that's much less likely to become public knowledge. Slow and tedious efforts over years and decades contains plenty of discussions of the sort that often can be made public to make both sides look good (or for each side to make themselves look good to their domestic audience), while last minute, last ditch deals to prevent a war that was about to happen is much more likely to involve deals/threats/whatever that one or both parties require remain classified for many decades.
I mean all of them? Today the USA is not bombing London, Berlin is not bombing Paris, Switzerland is not bombing Sweden, Finland is not bombing Norway, Turkey is not bombing India.
If you only count the wars which happened then you ignore all the ones which were prevented.
Another rumour is that a peace deal of some sort deal was available to Ukraine but "the West" advised otherwise.
Who knows what the truth of the matter is, but what can be known is that we don't know, although that requires certain skills and some conscious effort, which seems to be a bit much to ask of people when the war drums are banging (state propaganda, 2nd order citizen propaganda like on HN, etc).
Wikipedia has a list of all of them so far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_negotiations_in_the_Russ...
Imagine if someone was to weaponize, and then scale, this simple trick.