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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

Strong disagree. There is no diplomacy to be had when one side insists of war, because that's what they want. See Ukraine, everyone who is anyone tried to prevent the war, but Putin still went ahead with it. The leaked call with Macron is a good example, it's circling on Youtube and a variety of news outlets.

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> See Ukraine, everyone who is anyone tried to prevent the war

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).

That's not a rumour, there were several peace talks already, it was all over the news at the time but people seem to always forget every time.

Wikipedia has a list of all of them so far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_negotiations_in_the_Russ...

I think it is incredibly fascinating how easily smart people can be confused by simple, repetitive propaganda. And they are big talkers about the narrative, but can be silenced (the only remaining option being a downvote), essentially without exception, with the mere unusual usage of language.

Imagine if someone was to weaponize, and then scale, this simple trick.

There's always some sort of peace deal available to any participant in a war: surrendering to your opponent's demands. War happens when those demands are not acceptable. Roughly speaking the difference between Ukraine's and Russia's demands is that Russia wants Ukraine to remain isolated from the west and militarily weak (which would make it easy for them to just go for it again), and Ukraine wants to align as tightly with the west as necessary to ensure Russia doesn't invade again, or failing that build up a credible enough deterrence themselves to achieve the same result.

Yes, but there is also sometimes more than one. And, sometimes in such cases people say or imply there isn't.

War is the end of diplomacy. Name a single effective Western diplomat capable of preventing wars?

Do you think that diplomacy is just some magical spell that automatically makes everyone agree? It's not actually possible to just diplomacy harder in all situations and make things OK.

Diplomacy is able to prevent wars stemming from miscommunication / misunderstandings. There's not much you can do if both sides understand the other side's strategic aims correctly and still want to go to war.

There can still be things to be done, just not always.

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.

The nuance here is that it's not the diplomats saving the peace (they obviously can't make such offer on their own), it's the NATO countries dramatically changing their strategic posture (willing to become economic vassals) and diplomats communicating the change. Putin would likely agree to such proposal since it would still further his goal of Russia becoming a dominant power on the continent.

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.

If anybody prevented war, it wasn't some last minute magic but rather slow and tedious effort years and decades before. Not something you get famous for.

It is also possible for war to be prevented by last minute magic deplomacy, albeit I would agree that it's the much less likely of the two options.

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.

Grandpa Buff

> Name a single effective Western diplomat capable of preventing wars?

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.

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