Roger writes: < Putin is enforcing Russian approved aspirations in Ukraine. >
Which are at odds with EU and US interests, many of which are business interests. These business interests are not so abstract. They are, for example, intertwined with our retirement investments. Work and Life are deeply intertwined in the West, for better or worse. Other business, strategic, and ideological interests run counter to these interests. When the US spreads its ideology with the rest of the world, that’s a way of putting out some propositions (something like a principal component of) “our” values to make it clear where conflict could occur and then negotiate or bully a favorable resolution. Brazil, India, and China do it too. Sometimes it is subversive or has multiple motivations like in Iraq. We can put aside the morality (ideological interests) if you want and think of containing Putin as zero-sum game. Our relatively liberal, diversified, powerful economies or his autocratic no-future extractive economy. What I find annoying about Mearshimer, or Chomsky for that matter, is the latent assumption that there is something moral and right and we all know what it is. Humans do what we do, and exercise of power one of the main things -- either as individuals or tribes. From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow Sent: Tuesday, March 8, 2022 11:03 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Enamine I found Mearshimer's argument a persuasive point of view. What else has the US done that might make other countries anxious? Engineered regime changes in Iran and Chile, supported failed regime changes in Cuba and Nicaragua, fought wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, intervened in Panama, Grenada, and Somalia, no-fly-zones in the Balkans and Syria, pursued economic sanctions against Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and Russia, expanded NATO twice into eastern europe, training police and counter-insurgency forces god knows where. That's just in my lifetime working from my eroding memory. If you want to live in the US sphere of influence, you'd best not poke the eagle in the eye, you'd best adapt or mask your aspirations to the ones the US approves. We protest that our interests are supporting democracy and providing humanitarian aid, because that feels good. Pay no attention to those cozy contracts between occupied Iraq and the western oil companies. That tasty piece of kleptocracy wasn't in any way a motivation for the completely made up reasons for invading Iraq. (Rumsfeld knew that he knew that Iraq had oil reserves, it was a known known.) And don't get all tedious counting the collateral casualties from our drone wars, we only bomb wedding celebrations when it's absolutely necessary, and we are sincerely sorry for your losses, so, please, stop crying over spilt milk, it really harshes the vibe. Good for the goose is good for the gander. Putin is enforcing Russian approved aspirations in Ukraine. And Mearshimer's point is that Putin isn't making up his reasons, he's stated them often. Until the Ukrainians capitulate, he will continue to level the country, one apartment block, school, hospital, university, police station, city hall, and factory at a time. We can hope there won't be any accidents with nuclear power plants or hydroelectric dams. There will be no Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea for British destroyers to visit in the future while flashing their bums at Sebastapol. And we're going to fight him to the last Ukrainian standing, like we fought the Sandinistas to the last Contra standing, and we fought Cuba to the last Cuban exile standing on the beach at the Bay of Pigs. There wasn't any air cover there, either. Mearshimer's point of view is not pretty, and fairness is not part of its calculus, but it's the way of the world that we, the United States of America, have made. And when we screw up in our enthusiasm for truth, justice, and the amurkan way, we should not blame others for the consequences. And most especially when blaming the other is both politically expedient and a way of escalating the conflict that our enthusiasms created in the first place. And mostest especially when we're escalating toward a tactical nuclear war in europe. Broadwell's rebuttal was so ironic that I couldn't listen to it. "We didn't do that. We couldn't do that. We would never do that." Sure, Ray, we're pure as the driven snow, and anything we did or didn't do that helped "that coup" happen was an innocent mistake, which Putin should have laughed off. But Putin isn't laughing. In fact, he looks awful. Marcus' observation that "what's the point of a huge defense budget if all you can do is cower?" might well be Putin's mantra. -- rec -- On Tue, Mar 8, 2022 at 6:37 AM David Eric Smith <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Yes, Mearsheimer’s POV is a hard one for me to get my head around, and to describe in some way that would be “fair”. I don’t want to say it is entirely amoral or immoral. I think, within his view that certain conclusions are foregone, he has a sense that ordinary people can work out some conditions of living under several different systems, with compensations that they decide work for them, of several different kinds. And within that constraint, a first priority should be to avoid conflicts that kill them, destroy places to live and ways of living, etc. But I also have a structural problem with the way he makes arguments. In a way, one could use argument of that form to say that any time when any powerful actor is motivated and capable of impact, that motive takes on some kind of legitimacy simply by existing. So legitimacy gets written out of the framing of questions. On shorter, tactical timescales, I can see that in a way. But on longer timescales, when structure can change, it seems like an inadequate and foreshortened frame. I should try to say this by way of an example, to try to be more explicit about what I mean by “the structure of that kind of argument”. CEOs like to piously worry about instability as a risk to their workers. I largely view that as manipulation. Workers can be retrained, as the Swedish mining industry has nicely illustrated. To the extent that they have basic competence, some skills, and productive attitudes, they can move laterally among industries and be about as well off after the move as before. Not exactly, not in all cases; but overall there is not a good argument that industries need to be locked forever into one form in order for workers to survive. A society and economy that seeks to protect workers rather than specific job-roles can largely do so. The ones whom there is not a need to transfer laterally are the CEOs. Once, in the past, maybe they competed in some fair field, and by whatever combination of luck or skill or talents, won something. But the river moves on, and someone who is very successful and lucky in one fair, novel event has no reason to expect to be comparably lucky in regular events afterward. What changes is that they can dig into positions and become rentiers, as the 19th century economists used to cast it. It is, as the Aesop fable says of the goat taunting the wolf, not they, but the roof on which they stand, that is the source of their safety. So the main ones threatened by industry change are the ones who are shielded from competition and don’t want to go back. Yet the Mearsheimer framing would say that, because the CEOs are highly motivated, because their motives can be articulated, and because they have the capacity for impact, that gives a kind of tautological legitimacy to their wishes to stay in power and freeze industries in place, no matter what the cost to those who wouldn’t share that choice. A country is not one thing. Russia has clearly identifiable four large groups (at least). There are the former KGB, not necessarily ultra-wealthy but accumulating wealth to try to re-establish a past government where agency remains with them. There are the oligarchs, who live as a kind of parasitic outgrowth of oligarchs worldwide, but in a less productive society. Then there are the populist nationalists going around wearing Zs on their shirts. And then there are the other several layers of society who could consider Boris Nemtsov a spokesman for them. Mearsheimer’s expressions “Russia wants XYZ” are, in the sense of decision makers, "the KGB-cabal of Russia wants XYZ", and it can solidify a network of oligarchs and Zs to backstop and facilitate the decisions in which the KGB-cabal are the decisionmakers and prime movers. That, to me, seems like a foreshortened notion of what “Russia wants”. Of course, there is another sort of bizarre Louis XIV disease that has bothered me in those who love power and live in academic places as long as I have got to experience them directly. Even if one wanted to fully adopt Mearsheimer’s frame, it is only sequitur if the next 100 years, ecologically and climatologically, will look more or less like the past 100. That that will not be the case is the thing we can be surest of, in all this conversation. But the power brokers, I think, haven’t internalized the view that there are things in the world bigger than them. In some superficial cognitive way they have, maybe, but I feel like not really. Eric On Mar 7, 2022, at 5:05 PM, Marcus Daniels <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: I guess Mearsheimer would say this poor guy is brainwashed by his Western puppet masters, or an elite acting against the interests of his (non) countrymen? 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