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ChristianKl comments on Open thread, Dec. 1 - Dec. 7, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Overconfidence is a huge problem. Knowing that you don't understand how the world works is important. To the extend that people believe that they can learn significant things from history, "weak evidence" can often produce problems.
If you look at the Western Ukraine policy they didn't make a treaty to accept Russian annexion of the Krim in return for stability in the rest of Ukraine. That might have prevented the mess we have at the moment.
In general political decisions in cases like this should be made by doing scenario planning.
It on thing to say that Britian and France should have declared war on Germany earlier. It quite another thing to argue that the West should take military action against Russia.
Might have, but my money isn't on it. You think Putin cares about treaties? He's a raw-power sort of guy.
And yes, the scenarios are not identical - if nothing else, Russia has many more ICBMs than Hitler did. Still, there's ways to take action that are likely to de-escalate the situation - security guarantees, repositioning military assets, joint exercises, and other ways of drawing a clear line in the sand. We can't kick him out, but we can tell him where the limits are.
(Agreed on your broader point, though - we should ensure we don't draw too many conclusions).
Putin does care about the fact that Ukraine might join NATO or the EU free trade zone. He probably did feel threatened by what he perceived as a color revolution with a resulting pro-Western Ukrainian government.
At the end of the day Putin doesn't want the crisis to drag on indefinitely so sooner or later it's in Russia's interest to have a settlement. Russia relies on selling it's gas to Europe.
Having the Krim under embargo is quite bad for Russia. It means that it's costly to keep up the economy of the Krim in a way that it's population doesn't think the Krim decayed under Russian rule and there unrest.
On the other hand it's not quite clear the US foreign policy has a problem with dragging out the crisis. It keeps NATO together even through Europeans are annoyed of getting spied at by the US. It makes it defensibly to have foreign miltary bases inside Germany that spy on Germans.
Do you really think joint exercises contribute to deescalation?
As far as repositioning military assets goes, placing NATO assets inside Ukraine is the opposite of deescalation.
The only real way to descalate is a diplomatic solution and there probably isn't one without affirming Crimea as part of Russia.
There's a certain type of leader, over-represented among strongmen, that will push as far as they think they can and stop when they can't any more. They don't care about diplomacy or treaties, they care about what they can get away with. I think Putin is one of those - weak in most meaningful ways, but strong in will and very willing to exploit our weakness in same. The way to stop someone like that is with strength. Russia simply can't throw down, so if we tell them that they'd have to do so to get anywhere, they'd back off.
Of course, we need to be sure we don't push too far - they can still destroy the world, after all - but Putin is sane, and doesn't have any desire to do anything nearly so dramatic.
Putting gains inner politcs strength from the conflict.
That assumes that you can simply change from being weak to being strong. In poker you can do this as bluffing. In Chess you can't. You actually have to calculate your moves.
Holding joint military exercises isn't strength if you aren't willing to use the military to fight.
Bailing out European countries is expensive enough. There not really the money to additionally prop up Ukraine.
Only as long as he's winning.
NATO is, far and away, the strongest military alliance that has ever existed. They have the ability to be strong. When the missing element is willpower, "Man up, already!" is perfectly viable strategic advice.
Accept an annexation in return for promises of stability? Hmm, reminds me of something...
That's partly the point, we didn't go that route and now have the mess we have at the moment.
And what happened the last time we DID go that route?
Making decisions because on a single data point is not good policy.
Also the alternative to the Munich agreements would have been to start WWII earlier. That might have had advantages but it would still have been very messy.