Stefano1972 wrote: ↑02 Jan 2024, 5:45pm
Agreed, everyone has their own ideas and it is right that we should all respect honest different points of view.
I would ask you just one thing, just so I can have more enrichment, what doesn't convince you in Koffler's article?
Okay, since you asked: generally, I find the entire article full of vague rhetoric but lacking in detailed analysis or factually verifiable claims. A lot of it reads like Koffler just personally dislikes Biden. The key paragraphs seem to be this:
Putin's strategy, which he developed over the course of 20 years, sought to exploit U.S. vulnerabilities, studied by Russia for decades, in order to keep Washington from entering conflict on Russia's periphery. Moscow was determined to reestablish its strategic security perimeter lost in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR. Those vulnerabilities included threats like blackout warfare—using cyberattacks, space weapons, electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) strikes, cutting undersea internet cables, and if all else fails, launching nuclear weapons.
There's no evidence presented about how the Biden administration has failed to deal with vulnerabilities, just as a basis of evaluating the administration's job. I guess the insinuation is that the Biden administration couldn't do these things
and support Ukrainian resistance, but that's extremely silly. The U.S. has huge amounts of resources at its disposal to do all of the above and still support Ukraine and the author doesn't provide any evidence at all for her claims that the Biden administration has failed in addressing any or all of those vulnerabilities. She made the claim, it's her obligation to provide the evidence.
Closing these vulnerabilities or developing counter-measures would require serious intellectual firepower and significant funding. Instead, Biden chose to use the American people as the cash cow and Ukrainians as the flesh to throw in Putin's meat grinder. To cover up for its failures while sucking U.S. taxpayers dry, Washington deployed a propaganda narrative insisting that it was helping Ukraine fight for its democracy. Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe, is no more of a democracy than Russia is.
The hyperbole about U.S. spending is misleading at best. The total aide (including non-military humanitarian aide we've sent to Ukraine by end of 2023 is $75 billion. For comparison, the state of Virginia's budget is $81 billion. By share of GDP, our contribution to Ukraine's war effort is below Lithuania. It's simply immaterial to U.S. budgeting, which is an apparently pretty important piece of Koffler's argument, which is that we've overspent on this fight and can't do the
real work to deter Russia that's needed.
Also, the assertion that Ukraine and Russia are both equally undemocratic has no measurable or quantifiable support. All systems that attempt to capture these things find Russia significantly more autocratic and less democratic than the (quite imperfect) government of Ukraine. Here's just one such system (which places Ukraine as the 92nd - mixed governance - most democratic country listed and Russia as 144th and an autocracy):
https://www.democracymatrix.com/ranking
There's also a bunch of assertions that Ukraine is losing the war, which is all evidence-free. The long term trends of the conflict are that the battle lines have gotten entrenched and neither side is making much progress. Koffler also omits all context for the delay in the next Ukraine funding package, which is that Republicans
who support funding Ukraine want the funding tied with draconian anti-immigrant immigration policies. That's not a good thing!
And this is more just an opinion, I also think it's weird that she approvingly cites the Monroe Doctrine as the analogous policy that Russia is modeling its own "sphere of influence" policies on. But of course the Monroe Doctrine was quite evil! The left position, properly, was to support opposition to the U.S. when it was exercising that doctrine. Being anti-Monroe Doctrine was anti-imperialist! Now, Russia may be creating it's own Monroe Doctrine in East Europe but as leftists and anti-imperalists aren't we supposed to oppose such efforts? Similarly, the hypothetical of Mexico hosting Chinese or Russian weapons. if that happened, it would be a grotesque moral monstrosity for the United States to invade Mexico! And I'd look warily at any supposed leftists or anti-imperalists who claimed the real blame lay with Mexico or Russia/China and not the
country doing the invading. I seriously can't belive that in a scenario where the United States decided to invade Mexico for not being subservient enough to its neighbor state, that the anti-imperalist position would be to justify U.S. actions.
I think overall I don't find the great power/sphere of influence stuff compelling because we should be opposing those power formulations!
Sorry, there may be more around Ukrainian self-determination which the author steamrolls over but the little guy just woke up from his nap so duty calls. You get the idea, anyways.