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> There are two ways for a war to end: One way is for one side or the other to be basically destroyed. And the Russians are not going to be destroyed. So that means one way is for Ukraine to be destroyed.
> The other way is some negotiated settlement. If there’s a third way, no one’s ever figured it out.
The third way is for the war to be too costly to continue for the agressor. I believe the USA is aiming for that by giving massive aid to Ukraine. I am a bit surprised Chomsky forgot about that one since it’s how the USA usually loses the wars it loses.
Technically you’re correct and I think he should have mentioned this. Would have been interested to see what kind of arguments he’d bring forth…
As I said in another comment though, making war costly is basically just waging war. Maybe it will become too costly in one month, maybe one year, maybe five. Maybe Russia will lob a couple of tactical nukes in the direction of Ukraine. Maybe China and India or India and Pakistan get into a hot war because Russia is distracted.
Exhaustion is not a precise strategy and it’s not a short-term or even mid-term strategy when one looks at the Soviet-Afghan war or the Vietnam war. Years of death and destruction can hardly be called a strategy.
But that were pretty much pro forma, after the Occupier pretty much signaled they were ready to throw in the towel.
And long after the average Jane and Joe on the street could be expected to care even a whit about about what was happening in that far-off nominal protectorate, or why.
I feel like we're just chasing are tails with definitions. Even countries like North and South Korea have discourse. I guess the original article was a little rigid with its 2 definitions. Since countries have stopped declaring war, formally ending Wars how to become a lot less clear
I find the idea of 'globalization', where somehow countries that don't have huge stockpiles of weapons think that they stand on an equal footing with the 'big boys' hilarious because what, if they get out of line we won't trade with them anymore? We'll cut them off from the Internet?
Er, what?
I mean, you're welcome to believe whatever you like. You can believe the sky is yellow if you like but it doesn't necessarily make it true. And definitely your belief that the sky is yellow should not factor in to major decisions regarding the future of countries, continents, humanity.
All countries are not and will never be equal, so long as any one of them has a bigger stick than the others. Water is wet. Snow is cold. This is reality.
There are two ways for a war to end: One way is for one side or the other to be basically destroyed. The other way is some negotiated settlement
History readily provides an infinite number of counterexamples, more or less along the theme of "mutual, or one-sided exhaustion (but still far short of one-sided destruction)". WW I, the US/Soviet failures in Afghanistan and most colonial occupations for that matter immediately spring to mind.
Mutual or one-sided exhaustion is indistinguishable from regular war until it happens and at least in this case the hope of reaching such a state is based on continuous escalation.
Negotiated settlement is very broad and would include such “exhaustion” cases. Should it be treated separately? For a theoretical discussion on how to end war, perhaps. But in this particular case, the US is playing a dangerous escalatory game and it neither can it be guaranteed that it will achieve the stated purpose, nor that this is indeed the actual purpose. Perhaps the actual goal is regime change, or taking back Crimea or another thing which has totally different implication from exhausting an opponent.
Lots about the US, not much about Ukraine. Ukraine isn't a pawn on a board for two nations to play with, it's a country.
NC makes good points if that's how you see the world but his opinions are outdated. People deserve to have self-determination now that it's a modern, globalized world (I mean they always did, but nation states matter even less now).
> People deserve to have self-determination now that it's a modern, globalized world
What do you mean by "people" and "self-determination". If 51% of the southerners decided to secede from the US, should they be allowed? What about the rights of the 49% southerners who want to remain with the US? Are they not people? What about the rest of americans? Do we not get a say? Besides, in the modern world, the supreme court has already ruled "self-determination" is illegal.
It's nice to say people deserve self-determination, just like it's nice to say universal human rights, but it meaningless in the real world.
Crimean people want to be part of russia. Eastern ukrainian people wants to be part of russia. Western ukrainian people don't want that. Which people deserve self-determination?
Native hawaiians want their islands back. Non-native hawaiians want to remain part of the US. Which people deserve self-determination?
10 million taiwanese want independence. 1.4 billion chinese want taiwan returned to china. Which people deserve self-determination?
At the end of the day, might makes right. And in a modern globalized world, it has never been more true. The modern globalization is the reflection of might makes right. Might created the modern globalized world.
No. Might makes it happen, but it doesn't make it right. That's the difference between "is" and "ought".
The alternative is that we have no category for "ought" or "should be" - that "is" is all there is, that there is no hope to improve the world, nor any way to suggest a direction to improve it in. That's a pretty hopeless outlook, and one that I reject.
But you're right that "should" or "ought" often needs to have some might behind it before it becomes an "is"...
Sorry but this is a simple binary: the person with no gun will always do what the person with the gun tells them to, or they will get shot and probably die. That's reality.
For the last 20 years or so we've been living in a world where the US called the shots pretty much everywhere, and we were cool with it because (most of us here) were on the US 'side'. 'Globalization' during this period was and is a complete sham, meant to sell people on the idea that their countries were independent and not subject to the Pax Americana.
But make no mistake, they were absolutely subject to the Pax Americana.
And now, China is challenging that, Russia is challenging that, and we're back to the people with the biggest guns win, as it has always been.
If you had hope it was a false hope, an illusion, sold to you by Uncle Sam, who was secretly manipulating the policy of most of the governments on the planet while spruiking 'democracy' and 'independence' that only exists so long as you do what Sam wants.
I don't think this comment addresses the (very philosophical) point of the parent poster when they try to explain the difference between "is" and "ought" by doubling down on details of the "is".
To me it looks like this comment describes in detail how international relations work through realpolitik (which I agree is basically how it's done if you want any semblance of predictive power, as opposed to focusing on any stated moral values of players).
Sentences in passive voice always obscure the true meaning. For example when people say “everyone deserves healthcare” that means “taxpayers should pay for other people to have healthcare.” So what do you mean in this context, expressed as an active voice sentence?
It’s quasi-passive voice—a sentence grammatically in the active voice but where the subject is purely passive. Such as “honey is sweet” is really an assertion about what happens when a person tastes honey.
The “people” here are purely passive; the sentence is an assertion about what an implicit actor should or should not do with respect to people.
> There are some simple facts that aren’t really controversial. There are two ways for a war to end: One way is for one side or the other to be basically destroyed. And the Russians are not going to be destroyed. So that means one way is for Ukraine to be destroyed.
Well this isn't true. Russia could just give up without negotiating a settlement. Or it could declare victory and leave. Or Ukraine really could destroy, not Russia as a state, but the ability of the Russia to keep an offensive army in the field. Russia isn't supposed to be sending conscripts to the front and so far it mostly isn't. It can't maintain some of the fictions it's been preaching about the war so far if it did so. That severely limits the amount of troops it has available for the war. Yes, Ukraine is not going to be able to march on Moscow and end the Russian state, but that doesn't mean that they won't be able to keep fighting and force Russia to end the war on more favorable terms.
Chomsky is trying to frame this in such a way that the best possible outcome is for Ukraine is they capitulate in some way in order to appease Putin. That's a false framing and ignores most of the subtleties of the conflict.
> We can, however, look at the United States and we can see that our explicit policy — explicit — is rejection of any form of negotiations.
It is not the United States' place to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine. It would be both unjust and impossible for the United States to force Ukraine to quite this conflict for its convenience. Ukraine has been negotiating with Russia since nearly the beginning of the war and so far both have been unwilling to budge. Any agreement that the Unites States would come to with Russia would just result in the US ceasing aid and leaving Ukraine on its own. The US could not guarantee that Russia would not violate its side of the agreement and in fact would leave Ukraine much more vulnerable if Russia did decide to violate its agreement. That would be a repeat of the Munich Agreement.
> Well, something has to be done about Donbas, the proper reaction, which maybe the Russians would accept, would be a referendum, an internationally supervised referendum to see what the people of the region want. One possibility, which was available before the invasion, was implementation of the Minsk II agreements, which provided for some form of autonomy in the region within a broader Ukrainian Federation, something like maybe Switzerland or Belgium or other places where there are federal structures — conflict, but confined within federal structures.
The problem with this approach is that it would give Russia veto power on Ukraine's foreign policy, in other words, a total capitulation. Russia administers the the breakaway region in the Donbas and unless that treaty would force Russia to leave, which it wouldn't do, Russia would be able to directly control Ukraine's foreign policy. Add that it would force Ukraine to forswear any military assistance from other countries, it would make Ukraine vulnerable to Russian invasion, all the while providing no guarantees that Russia would have to respect Ukraine's sovereignty. Chomsky wants to frame this a reasonable compromise, but in fact it's not a compromise, it's a trap disguised as a compromise drafted by Russia, and Ukraine recognizes this. Minsk II was rejected by Ukraine, not the US.
Just to be clear, minority/contrarian views aren't the issue—it would be the same if the account was promoting majority views. HN is not a site for ideological or political or nationalistic battle—it's a site for intellectual curiosity, and it's not possible to have both of those things at the same time.
I've therefore banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.