"he almost mocked the inability of the west’s $40tn economy to organise a battlefield defeat of Russia’s $2tn economy." <- this really bothers me. There is no will here for Ukraine to succeed.

Very interesting link, thank you.

He argued: “There is one actor that has reorganised its strategic engagement to fight a war and the other has not. One side is not participating in the battle. You have hosted conferences supporting Ukraine and then do nothing more. But when it comes to action, Russia 2.0 is grinding forward.

“It tells countries like us that if something like this were to happen in the Indo-Pacific, you have no chance against China. If you cannot defeat a $2tn nation, don’t think you are deterring China. China is taking hope from your abysmal and dismal performance against a much smaller adversary.”

This, in a nutshell, is where the world is headed ... unless the self-proclaimed defender of democracy (USA) and the EU pull up their britches and start taking Russian aggression seriously.

I think about this often and it’s very scary

The problem with learning from history is that everyone has their own idea about what those lessons are that we should be learning.

I've played that hoi4 scenario as Czechcoslovakia and the only reason it's winnable is because it's a game and the ai makes huge mistakes.

I've been comparing this invasion of ukraine to Czechcoslovakia since almost the start, but there are differences. Not really between the justification or the foreign policy that the Russian government is using. Between the relative strength of Czechcoslovakia v nazi Germany and ukraine v russia. Also between ukraine's negotiated treaties. Ukraine appears stronger than Czechcoslovakia but never obtained a defensive pact with a single other country. The Czechoslovaks had a defensive pact, but it was quickly abandoned. I still see letting them fall as akin to appeasement, some vying for leadership positions have suggested that abandoning defense pacts is justified sometimes. If it's justified sometimes you may try to find a hole to make it justified all the time. All ukraine had been promised was weapons and we may be in a position where we tell ourselves we did our part even if we didn't do enough.

Fast forward to where pooty pants shoots himself in the head in a bunker

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The proximate causes of the current conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, the South China Sea and even Armenia might be different, but the bigger picture showed an interconnected battlefield in which post-cold war certainties had given way to “great-power competition” in which authoritarian leaders were testing the boundaries of their empires.

In a sign of the times, Michael Roth, the SPD chair of the Bundestag foreign affairs committee and a supporter of arming Ukraine, is quitting politics, saying he found it was like stepping into a refrigerator to hold the views he did inside his own party.

Critics say this fatalistic narrative – dovetailing with Russia’s main objective, which is to convince the US that further aid is futile – also makes little attempt to identify the lessons of the past two years about the failure to organise a war economy in Europe.

Liberal market economies are inherently likely to be slower to adapt to war than their authoritarian counterparts, but one of the lessons of the 1930s, and those locust years, is that organising for rearmament entails planning and not just false reassurances, which were the stock in trade of Chamberlain and his predecessor Stanley Baldwin.

Incredibly, the adviser to the Polish chief of staff, Krzysztof Król, admitted to a conference last month that after two years “we have not yet created proper conditions for a Ukrainian victory with our plans because political leaders had not yet told them the objective”.

It will take two meetings, one involving the G7 leaders in Italy next week and then the 75th anniversary Nato summit in Washington in July, to reveal whether the west wishes not to contain Putin, but to defeat him – with all the risk that carries, including for China.

The original article contains 3,179 words, the summary contains 292 words. Saved 91%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

It seems odd to me how the author compares Ukraine to an alternative reality of 1938 imagined by their favorite historian.

Flat comparing 2020s to 1930s is already tenuous enough.

Literally 1938

Just out of curiosity, can anyone name one war the US has been involved in since WWII where a high ranking government official did not compare it to WWII to drum up support?

How does this argument work, the military spending of the Nazis was insane in the build up to the war, up to 40% in 1939, no such numbers in Russia. Even now it’s just estimated at 10% and they clearly need all of it just to fight the war in Ukraine. How are they ever gonna steamroll Nato with those numbers, there is no tangible proof that they are planning for this.

The Putin is Hitler mantra also doesn’t make any sense, he has been a moderate (all be it an authoritarian) politician for decades, and now he suddenly is the rebirth of Hitler. Just looking at his politics he’s clearly not a fascist.

We’ve been sold that Ukraine can win this war militarily, and the collective west can cripple the Russian economy with sanctions alone. Now that this turns out to be complete BS, they (a subset of western politicians) are looking for a way out, and clearly their preferred way is further escalations. So now they are selling us even more BS to justify this.