Some of the comments on the link by James_Miller exactly six months ago provided very specific estimates of how the events might turn out:
James_Miller:
- The odds of Russian intervening militarily = 40%.
- The odds of the Russians losing the conventional battle (perhaps because of NATO intervention) conditional on them entering = 30%.
- The odds of the Russians resorting to nuclear weapons conditional on them losing the conventional battle = 20%.
Me:
"Russians intervening militarily" could be anything from posturing to weapon shipments to a surgical strike to a Czechoslovakia-style tank-roll or Afghanistan invasion. My guess that the odds of the latter is below 5%.
A bet between James_Miller and solipsist:
I will bet you $20 U.S. (mine) vs $100 (yours) that Russian tanks will be involved in combat in the Ukraine within 60 days. So in 60 days I will pay you $20 if I lose the bet, but you pay me $100 if I win.
While it is hard to do any meaningful calibration based on a single event, there must be lessons to learn from it. Given that Russian armored columns are said to capture key Ukrainian towns today, the first part of James_Miller's prediction has come true, even if it took 3 times longer than he estimated.
Note that even the most pessimistic person in that conversation (James) was probably too optimistic. My estimate of 5% appears way too low in retrospect, and I would probably bump it to 50% for a similar event in the future.
Now, given that the first prediction came true, how would one reevaluate the odds of the two further escalations he listed? I still feel that there is no way there will be a "conventional battle" between Russia and NATO, but having just been proven wrong makes me doubt my assumptions. If anything, maybe I should give more weight to what James_Miller (or at least Dan Carlin) has to say on the issue. And if I had any skin in the game, I would probably be even more cautious.
A lot of former colonies are now self-governed and a lot of them became independent without armed struggle. That was what the principle of self-determination was about. The British lost their empire over the principle.
It wasn't really about giving the Scottish or the Basques a right to hold a referendum to get independence.
On the other hand the principle of immutability of borders as written down in the Hague Conventions isn't that well respect either. The borders of Ukraine changed frequently since the Hague Conventions was made and I don't see a real reason why they should now be immutable when a majority of Crimeans doesn't want to belong to Ukraine.
The Soviet states also did became nations in a way that did violate the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union without a war.
Those colonies became independent states with borders decided by the accidents of previous colonial conquest, or drawn arbitrarily post-conquest without regard to local interests or ethnic, economic and cultural divisions (e.g. India and Pakistan).
Similarly, in the British-administrated post-WW1 mandate territories (which they divested du... (read more)