Comment by mapt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mapt | Hacker News Reader

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That is a very particular use of the term 'escalation' which is bound to mislead people.

Normally, if we show up at the flagpole at noon to confront each other, and you throw a punch, you have escalated things to a fistfight, and then my return punch is not an escalation. If I pull a knife, I have escalated things to a knife fight. We escalate from fist to knife to gun. Reciprocation - self defense - does not count.

The only way to torture the term into contextual use is to suggest that Russia is not firing rockets at NATO because Ukraine is not NATO, but NATO is firing rockets at Russia because all these missile systems are not Ukrainian, but NATO. This is Putin's framing, and it incorporates the idea that the missile systems are actually being manned but US & EU soldiers.

If you are not adopting that frame, "escalation" only really works if you explicitly define the context as a Great Powers proxy war with a potential nuclear endpoint, where Ukraine is stipulated for the sake of argument to have no agency.

> That is a very particular use of the term 'escalation' which is bound to mislead people.

I am not the OP, but I think your interpretation is not as obvious as you make it to be. This often leads to misunderstandings.

AFAIK military analysts use the term escalation as a morally neutral term. Escalation is anything that goes up on the 'scala' (= "ladder", the Latin root of the word). In this interpretation, D-Day would be an e_scala_tion (climbing up the ladder) simply because opening a new front means number_of_fronts_today > number_of_fronts_yesterday. In this interpretation, self-defense and escalation are not mutually exclusive.

Apparently, the term changed meaning. Many people now treat it the way you do (if I understand you correctly) as something associated with aggression. Therefore, they assume that when someone labels something like an escalation, they mean it is an act of aggression, unjustified, something you should not be allowed to do, and not morally neutral.

I am not saying you are wrong. I am just pointing out that when people talk about escalation, it is worth checking whether they mean the same escalation.

Right. URSS putting nuclear missiles in Cuba was not an escalation then.

I only learned about this a few years ago. Before the Cuban Missile Crisis (where Russia installed nuclear missiles in Cuba), the US installed nukes in Italy and Turkey. This made USSR very upset. Plus, the US was heavily meddling in Cuban domestic affairs. The first two paragraphs are very instructive here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis

My point: I think USSR (and Cuba) had a good reason to install those missiles. It wasn't an unprovoked action.

And as I understand it, part of the solution to the Cuban Missile Crisis involved the US quietly agreeing to abandon the placement of nukes in Turkey.

There is some analogy here for the Ukraine NATO situation.

Definitely! I think the obvious quid-pro-quo would be if Russia and Ukraine both agree to stop targeting anything behind the current front lines.

Arguably, this would even be in Russia's favor, given its manpower advantage. But Ukraine might agree to it to stop civilian terror and power infrastructure attacks.

If a robber is holding an innocent at gunpoint and the innocent pulls out a gun and starts pointing it at the robber, has the situation escalated?

I mean, maybe. If the robber is using a replica firearm, the innocent may have successfully deescalated the situation.

The question in this thread is more along the lines of "if the robber shouts 'fighting back is a red line!', should we avoid fighting back?"

Whether or not the innocent should avoid fighting back and whether or not fighting back would result in an escalation are two separate questions

Only sorta; they've heavily linked.

The current war in Ukraine is a direct result of the international community not making much fuss when Russia, largely unopposed, took chunks of Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine over the last few decades.

As with appeasing Hitler, we prioritized short-term quiet for longer-term encouragement of aggression.

Ukraine is very clearly a proxy war between NATO and Russia, merely framed as a plucky country defending it's sovereignty, though it is that too, of course.

With all the backlash here, I feel like some kind of radical, but here is a BBC article from 2 DAYS AGO that basically says what I'm saying: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2nrlq1840o

Although they miss out the bit about a media campaign, and so on, of course.

This is the BBC, pretty much the mouthpiece of the UK government.

And although they frame recent actions as trying to give Ukraine an advantage in any Trump negotiations with Russia, the truth is that these missiles will probably not advance Ukraine's military position, but will certainly change Europe and America's standing, possibly to the point of derailing any possibility of negotiation.

Your link backs up what people here are trying to get across to you:

> Russia has set out “red lines” before. Some, including providing modern battle tanks and fighter jets to Ukraine, have since been crossed without triggering a direct war between Russia and Nato.

This is the latest of a long list of small, slow, racheting-up responses to unilateral Russian aggression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_lines_in_the_Russo-Ukraini...

no.

And no-one has been 'getting anything across to me', inferring that I'm 'not getting it'. They've been throwing incomplete or irrational arguments, like yours, or simply downvoting.

Sure there have been 'red lines' by Russia, and the US has continuously pushed across them.

But this one was also a US 'red line'. Consistent with keeping a proxy-war in-theater.

Why have they crossed it, now?

What do they hope it will achieve?

Most likely very little militarily.

But maybe quite a lot in shaping or constraining future US policy.

> But this one was also a US 'red line'. Consistent with keeping a proxy-war in-theater. Why have they crossed it, now?

For the same reason they crossed all the others - continued Russian aggression.

Each expansion of US aid or reduction in restrictions on how that aid is utilized has followed logically from Russian actions. Obama started with non-lethal aid; we've initially balked at every single step since that before eventually going "ok, now it's warranted".

It's very clear the US is keeping responses small and incremental to take the wind out of Russian bluster about nuclear holocaust if they do this one more little thing to piss Putin off. It's also very clear the Russian "no don't send Javelins/HIMARS/Patriots/Abrams/MiGs/F-16s/ATACMS, we'll be very mad" has lost a lot of its potency.

So what, would you say, triggered the US to cross their own red line, and a rather obvious principle of proxy warfare?

And, backtracking, how aware have you been about the situation in Ukraine, or baltic sea infrastructure, in the past few months (even year), compared to the last week? Just a marginal increment, no doubt.

> So what, would you say, triggered the US to cross their own red line...

I'd first reject the use of the term "red line" entirely for the ATACMS situation.

"No, not ever" is a red line. The Russians love issuing these for other people, but it's embarassing when they're crossed without significant consequence.

"No, not now" is not a red line. The US tends to shy away from issuing them - one of Obama's biggest mistakes was proclaiming one in Syria and then looking a bit feckless when they violated it. (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/the-president-bli...)

Letting Ukraine hit Russian territory with ATACMS is like the fourth or fifth expansion of how they're permitted to use that weapons system so far, as was giving them ATACMS in the first place after HIMARS (which saw a similar set of gradually reduced limitations; https://www.defensenews.com/land/2022/07/08/us-to-send-more-...).

> And, backtracking, how aware have you been about the situation in Ukraine, or baltic sea infrastructure, in the past few months (even year), compared to the last week? Just a marginal increment, no doubt.

I've closely followed the situation in Ukraine since Euromaidan.

"I'd first reject the use of the term "red line" entirely"

No doubt, but the fact is the US told Ukraine they couldn't use ATACMS to target Russia, and now, they can.

And it's really more than an incremental change in US involvement in the war. The fact that Ukrainians are supposedly operating these weapons is almost incidental.

I tell my kids they can’t play on their phones yet. They have homework to do.

It would be silly to claim, that evening, that I violated my own red line by letting them have phone time after dinner.

You continue to mix up “not now” and “not ever”.

But they didn't say you can't play on your phones yet.

They said you may not use phones for social media. At all.

And then changed their mind.

> though [Ukraine] is [a plucky country defending it's sovereignty] too, of course

No "too"

It is only that.

If Russia retreated behind its internationally recognized borders and returned Crimea today, Ukraine would stop attacking it today.

That tells you everything you need to know about who the aggressor and escalator is in this conflict.

Anything else is a Russian talking point in service to their trying to lose fewer troops while invading a neighboring country.

Here is a BBC article from 2 DAYS AGO that basically says what I'm saying

Which says nothing at all about the conflict being "a proxy war".

nitpick.

It exactly states that Biden might be stirring things up in anticipation of Trump sueing for a freeze.

Which still says nothing about the conflict being fundamentally a proxy war.

I mean the fact that the US is dictating what can and cannot happen in the war makes is a proxy war almost by definitiion.

But the article itself addresses only the context of ATACMS. Not whether the US is "dictating what can and cannot happen in the war" generally.

Either way -- according the definition in Wikipedia, it is a proxy because one side is strongly supported by an external power. Sounds reasonable, and I can go with it (on at least a technical basis).

Where people go wrong (not saying you here) is when they accept the term "proxy war" and assume (or insinuate) that it means or supports the idea that Ukraine is simply a puppet state, not really fighting out of its own motivations.

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