Nor is it limited to drawing a line just this side of Ukraine.
...after years of tiptoeing around the question of how much military support to provide to Ukraine, for fear of provoking Russia, Biden officials have recently warned that the United States could throw its weight behind a Ukrainian insurgency should Mr. Putin invade Ukraine.
That is always an option, although not one generally acknowledged publicly by the President himself. Normally you have think tanks and other outsiders warn about that possibility, trusting your opponents' intelligence services to read those white papers and pass the warning along. Open acknowledgement undermines the chief advantage of such a strategy, which is plausible deniability.
Nor is this theoretical.
More than 150 U.S. military advisers are in Ukraine... [including] Special Operations forces, mostly Army Green Berets, as well as National Guard trainers from Florida’s 53rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team.Military advisers from about a dozen allied countries are also in Ukraine, U.S. officials said.... In the event of a full-scale Russian invasion, the United States intends to move its military trainers out of the country quickly. But it is possible that some Americans could stay to advise Ukrainian officials in Kyiv, the capital, or provide frontline support, a U.S. official said.
Emphasis added. Sometimes we deploy forces as a 'tripwire,' daring enemy forces to engage them because it would mean engaging the United States military. The ongoing mission in South Korea is of that sort. Yet these forces are pledged to be withdrawn in the event of a Russian invasion, unless they stay to provide 'frontline support' to the opposition according to this nameless official.
That is exactly the kind of lack of clarity that provoked the Korean conflict. We are well behind the power curve if we want into this fight -- those fifty thousand men can't be there for a long time, and the initial commitment will only be a few battalions. Ships take a while to float. Divisions take a while to shift into place, and they can't get there too far ahead of the logistical sustainment elements they will require.
If we don't want the fight -- if letting Russia (and probably China) reassert their older claims to a larger sphere of influence than they have enjoyed during the era of the Pax Americana -- then we should be clear about where our lines really are now. There's no point whining about the Russians rolling into Ukraine if we have decided they can have it for the moment; and neither Russia nor China has the demographics to hold these extended claims for more than a generation or so.
We would not be here, of course, if the Biden administration had not come into power; their willful destruction of American energy independence, their devastation of our economy, and their humiliation of our military in Afghanistan are at the back of the present moment of weakness. Yet it is what it is; retrenchment may be necessary for the present moment. A second Korean war in eastern Europe serves no one's interests, not even Ukraine's.
6 comments:
Miranda Devine tells us that the Ukrainian bribes paid to the Biden family came from RUSSIAN-oriented Ukrainians.
Will Joey remember?
...neither Russia nor China has the demographics to hold these extended claims for more than a generation or so.
Against whom would Russia or the PRC be holding these extended claims after that generation or so? They're not the only ones with demographic--or domestic political or economic--problems.
Related to that is Biden-Harris' repeated playground threats of "boy, oh boy, when I get you"-style supposedly devastating economic sanctions. Such threats reveal a couple of dangerous misconceptions. One is that Putin has Biden-Harris', or Western's generally, value set, so that he'd actually consider those sanctions, even if effectively enforced, to be painful by his lights.
And they won't be. Aside from open support from the PRC, Germany has already shown it's in the tank for Russia courtesy of its energy dependence on Russia. The situation isn't helped by our own growing dependence on Russia for oil--1% today, which is trivial (except for the badly needed dollars going into the Russian budget), but already increase 10-fold in just Biden-Harris' first year in office.
The other is that Biden-Harris is missing the fact that, by the time those sanctions, even if effectively enforced, start to have any impact, he'll have already conquered and occupied Ukraine. He'll have no reason to give it back, and he'll easily hold it for that generation or so.
It's even more the same with the PRC. Putin's successful move into Ukraine will hand the Republic of China to Xi on a cheap pewter platter. After a generation or so, the PLA will be thoroughly entrenched, population contraction or no, and there will be no economic power remaining that would be capable of pushing the mainland back out.
Our own economy will have been deeply shrunk throughout that generation by the PRC's control of the sea lines of communication that (will have used to) feed so many trillions of dollars of trade to our West Coast and from constricting the supply, originating in the PRC, of so many security-related critical items.
Eric Hines
Against whom would Russia or the PRC be holding these extended claims after that generation or so? They're not the only ones with demographic--or domestic political or economic--problems.
I am thinking chiefly of revolutionary independence movements among, eg, the Uighur or Taiwanese or Ukrainian-language speaking west of that nation. But decline is relative; the PRC, almost unimaginably, may end this century with fewer people than the USA.
I am thinking chiefly of revolutionary independence movements among, eg, the Uighur or Taiwanese or Ukrainian-language speaking west of that nation.
The Uighur independence movement isn't going all that well. The RoC's original independence movers--if such they were--the Kuomintang, are mostly gone and weren't very effective, anyway. The other ROC independence movers, the indigenes, have mostly been absorbed into the current body fabric. There's no doubt in my mind that the current RoC population would resist their PRC occupiers with everything they have, but the PLA has shown it doesn't care about casualties, and it has the numbers simply to out-attrit the RoC citizens.
Ukrainians will fight heavily, but they'll be overwhelmed in 5 days to a week, and their independence struggle will be largely unarmed as the rest of Europe and Biden-Harris simply stand on the sidelines and cluck and wag their fingers at Putin. Civil disobedience and disruption, a la Ghandi or the People Power Revolution in the Philippines, requires a civilized overlord. That won't obtain with a Russian conquering and occupation of Ukraine.
My impression of independence movements, generally, is that they generally fail, if success is defined by freedom for the population. Generally, they result in the revolutionary leaders being the new dictators. Our own was an outlier.
But decline is relative; the PRC, almost unimaginably, may end this century with fewer people than the USA.
I'm not that sanguine that that will be the outcome. I wouldn't be at all surprised, if the PRC suffers that catastrophic a population decline, if it were to take us down with them through nuclear strikes. They're already developing a first strike capability, if not for demographic leveling reasons, and I don't see them being as reluctant to roll those dice as the USSR was, and that was a polity that had developed what it considered a viable prolonged nuclear war doctrine.
Eric Hines
If it's going to cost this little and do that much, sure! We want in! But...
Re my recent post: in the long run we should estimate that military action will cost ten times as much and only be one-fourth as effective as advertised. Do we still want to? Maybe.
I suspect at the bottom of it, it's all about the oil, gas, and uranium.
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