In my opinion, the US should be ranked above Britain and the EU. American meddling in Ukraine is the entire reason this war is happening. The whole point of the Russian attack is to keep Ukraine out of the American bloc. The United States is a world empire with a promethean ambition to reshape every society on earth in its own political and cultural image. Its military combatant commands claim the entire world as their theater of operations. This empire may be in decay, but for now, its ruling class still think the world is theirs.
I agree that the object-level claims should be debated. The tone renders me pretty pessimistic about anything useful coming out of responding to this comment in particular.
The tone in the first comment seems fine to me. (Not commenting on subsequent discussion.)
If I were nitpicking, I might suggest a phrasing that sounds less hyperbolic and charged, like:
In my opinion, the US should be ranked above Britain and the EU. American meddling ininvolvement with Ukraine is the entire reasonfar and away the largest counterfactual reason this war is happening. The whole point ofoverriding reason behind the Russian attack is to keep Ukraine out of the American bloc. The United States is a world empire with a promethean ambition to reshape every society on earth in its own political and cultural image. Its military combatant commands claimseem to think of the entire world as their theater of operations. This empire may be in decay, but for now, its ruling class still think the world is theirs.
… but I do consider this a little nitpicky.
‘X is the entire reason for Y’ is obvious hyperbole, but I could believe that Mitchell genuinely thinks it’s, say, 95% of the reason? If Mitchell’s actual models are extreme, then there’s value in him phrasing stuff in extreme-sounding ways in order to accurately communicate what a huge gulf there is between his models and other commenters’ models here.
Maybe a disclaimer ‘epistemic status: phrasing things a bit too strongly so I can concisely get my gist across’ or ‘cw: colloquial / imprecise language’ would help here?
Possibly this is just the wrong comments section for this sort of discussion. The two main things I want to be cautious of are (1) using downvotes here to express disagreement with a prima-facie ‘OK’ view of the world that hasn’t yet been discussed, and (2) using tone norms to make it hard to express certain world-models at all. Some world-models are inherently contentious-sounding, but might still be true.
(None of this, obviously, is me weighing in on whether Mitchell is in fact correct. It just seemed to me on a quick skim like a comment that should be at 0-12 karma, rather than at −21.)
(1) using downvotes here to express disagreement with a prima-facie ‘OK’ view of the world that hasn’t yet been discussed
To clarify: I think it’s OK to some degree to downvote stuff for being false—we do want to incentivize accuracy, after all. But I don’t think otherwise-OK comments should be downvoted for the −20 level merely for being mistaken. (Especially when they’re expressing a novel/interesting view that’s false for subtle reasons.)
I’m confused because the comment is at −12, and was around there when I left my first comment as well. Possibly you strong upvoted it, which doesn’t seem unreasonable to me because I agree −12 and −21 are pretty different, but it would mean we’re responding to moderately different context.
I’ve also seen lots of people describe reasons Russia/Putin might have felt that this was a defensive war, ways the US uses Russel conjugates to absolve itself while condemning the same behavior in other countries, etc. This is happening mostly on twitter, where I’ve done my best with my bubble but is not a medium known for facilitating nuance or a gentle tone. What those tweets did have was specific data for why they believe certain things (e.g. “here’s specific things the US did that are equivalent to Russia’s recent actions”, “here are NATO’s actions over the last 5 years and why Putin would reasonably find them threatening”). Those are specific epistemically legible claims that can be debated.
The original comment here doesn’t have any of that. If I were badly misinformed and wanted to learn, this doesn’t give me any hooks to investigate on my own, and it signals that asking questions of the author will be taken poorly. I would vastly prefer the comment be rewritten with more vitriol and more specific claims than that it get your more hedged version.
My “tone” comment could have been a lot more precise. I didn’t mean the overconfidence (which I agree is pretty easy to translate, although I hate that still leaves ambiguity about exactly how strongly they mean the claim), but the “this is so obviously true I can be mean to you for not understanding it” tone, which I think is basically poison even when someone is 100% correct.
Yep, I strong-upvoted the comment (to move it closer to +5, which is around what I think it deserves). It was at around −20 karma when I did so, and would still be at around −20 karma if I withdrew my vote.
I’ve also seen lots of people describe reasons Russia/Putin might have felt that this was a defensive war, ways the US uses Russel conjugates to absolve itself while condemning the same behavior in other countries, etc. This is happening mostly on twitter, where I’ve done my best with my bubble but is not a medium known for facilitating nuance or a gentle tone.
I guess it’s less useful to have a discussion on LW if it’s already happening on Twitter. (If that’s your point.)
At the same time, the claim that the US and NATO have a lot of responsibility seems plausible on its face, and ‘What would the norms ideally be around Russia’s behavior?’ is an interesting question.
I certainly don’t like the idea of LW being even worse than Twitter at good discussion and inquiry. The main message I inferred from the −20 downvotes was ‘any endorsement of this point of view will be downvoted to oblivion so that others can’t readily see or discuss it; but the reverse point of view is fine to take for granted here’. Twitter without any legibility or source-citing is already way better than that.
If the reason for the downvotes is to try to protect LW’s epistemic purity… well, take into account that others might read the −20 the same way I did, and for the sake of LW’s epistemic purity, be unusually clear and explicit about why you’re opting to hide the comment.
What those tweets did have was specific data for why they believe certain things (e.g. “here’s specific things the US did that are equivalent to Russia’s recent actions”, “here are NATO’s actions over the last 5 years and why Putin would reasonably find them threatening”). Those are specific epistemically legible claims that can be debated.
How many of the comments on this page meet that standard of rigor? I think if we were applying normal LW standards to the comment in question, then someone would step in to challenge the comment (ask for arguments/evidence), but we wouldn’t instantly downvote it to hell without any conversation.
Some reasons for the ‘you can say weird stuff and not be insta-downvoted’ norm:
It would just inhibit ordinary conversation too much to require everyone to cite all their possibly-disputable comments to that degree. It often makes more sense to wait for someone to request sources/arguments, rather than spending an hour doing a lit review only to find out no one cares.
Merely knowing that there’s disagreement about an important topic can be valuable, even if you don’t know why the disagreement exists. (Assuming it’s informed disagreement between LWers in good standing.) There are many, many cases where I’d rather someone post a contentious view to LW (without defending it) than that they stay silent (because they don’t want to write the comment if it’s that much of a time investment).
the “this is so obviously true I can be mean to you for not understanding it” tone, which I think is basically poison even when someone is 100% correct.
I’m still not seeing it. The comment seemed critical of the US government, but my mental model would have expected someone who wrote that comment to respond to pushback in a friendly and cordial manner.
I think there are a bunch of subtle things that make the tone feel very mild to me: the “In my opinion”, the moderately-short evenly spaced sentences ending in periods, the fancy aristocratic language (“promethean ambition”), etc. Even the shortness of the comment maybe makes it feel more relaxed to me; someone whose comment is that pithy is less likely to be having Angry Rant feelings.
I just read Mitchell’s second comment in the thread, which seems perfectly cordial and clear, and matches what I’d have predicted from the initial comment. (The second comment also stands at −4 karma, bizarrely.)
I feel much more confident now that the votes are just straightforwardly bad and partisan, and a poor reflection of LW’s core values.
Mitchell’s original comment now stands at 0, which is quite strong evidence to me that the existence of this discussion has itself led people to upvote it; which in turn further indicts the original downvotes, since a robust, defensible voting pattern should not be so easily overturned by a meta-discussion like this one.
For what it’s worth, when I first encountered Mitchell’s comment three days ago, it was at −4, and I strong-upvoted it only for it to then receive multiple strong-downvotes, further sinking its karma score; there was also a now-deleted response from user “lc” consisting of a single sentence to the effect of “I believe the invaders should die”, which, if memory serves correctly, had been upvoted to +7 at one point before deletion.
I think this is pretty obviously terrible, and find myself rather disappointed by the performance of the LW userbase in this case. Politics is the mind-killer, but it seems there are people here who are no less susceptible to mind-killing than the general population, which is frankly embarrassing.
In fairness, it only takes a few passionate downvoters to downvote something a lot, and a few passionate upvoters to cancel them out; it could be that I convinced a couple people but that the equilibrium will still be elsewhere.
I think this is pretty obviously terrible, and find myself rather disappointed by the performance of the LW userbase in this case. Politics is the mind-killer, but it seems there are people here who are no less susceptible to mind-killing than the general population, which is frankly embarrassing.
“It is the least annoying role I have ever played. If Lord Voldemort says that something is to be done, people obey him and do not argue. I did not have to suppress my impulse to Cruciate people being idiots; for once it was all part of the role. If someone was making the game less pleasant for me, I just said Avadakedavra regardless of whether that was strategically wise, and they never bothered me again.” Professor Quirrell casually chopped a small worm into bits. “But my true epiphany came on a certain day when David Monroe was trying to get an entry permit for an Asian instructor in combat tactics, and a Ministry clerk denied it, smiling smugly. I asked the Ministry clerk if he understood that this measure was meant to save his life and the Ministry clerk only smiled more. Then in fury I threw aside masks and caution, I used my Legilimency, I dipped my fingers into the cesspit of his stupidity and tore out the truth from his mind. I did not understand and I wanted to understand. With my command of Legilimency I forced his tiny clerk-brain to live out alternatives, seeing what his clerk-brain would think of Lucius Malfoy, or Lord Voldemort, or Dumbledore standing in my place.” Professor Quirrell’s hands had slowed, as he delicately peeled bits and small strips from a chunk of candle-wax. “What I finally realized that day is complicated, boy, which is why I did not understand it earlier in life. To you I shall try to describe it anyway. Today I know that Dumbledore does not stand at the top of the world, for all that he is the Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation. People speak ill of Dumbledore openly, they criticize him proudly and to his face, in a way they would not dare stand up to Lucius Malfoy. You have acted disrespectfully toward Dumbledore, boy, do you know why you did so?”
“I’m… not sure,” Harry said. Having Tom Riddle’s leftover neural patterns was certainly an obvious hypothesis.
“Wolves, dogs, even chickens, fight for dominance among themselves. What I finally understood, from that clerk’s mind, was that to him Lucius Malfoy had dominance, Lord Voldemort had dominance, and David Monroe and Albus Dumbledore did not. By taking the side of good, by professing to abide in the light, we had made ourselves unthreatening. In Britain, Lucius Malfoy has dominance, for he can call in your loans, or send Ministry bureaucrats against your shop, or crucify you in the Daily Prophet, if you go openly against his will. And the most powerful wizard in the world has no dominance, because everyone knows that he is,” Professor Quirrell’s lips curled, “a hero out of stories, relentlessly self-effacing and too humble for vengeance. Tell me, child, have you ever seen a drama where the hero, before he consents to save his country, demands so much gold as a barrister might receive for a court case?”
“Actually there have been a lot of heroes like that in Muggle fiction, I’ll name Han Solo just to start-”
“Well, in magical drama it is not so. It is all humble heroes like Dumbledore. It is the fantasy of the powerful slave who will never truly rise above you, never demand your respect, never even ask you for pay. Do you understand now?”
“I… think so,” Harry said. Frodo and Samwise from Lord of the Rings did seem to match the archetype of a completely non-threatening hero. “You’re saying that’s how people think of Dumbledore? I don’t believe the Hogwarts students see him as a hobbit.”
“In Hogwarts, Dumbledore does punish certain transgressions against his will, so he is feared to some degree—though the students still make free to mock him in more than whispers. Outside this castle, Dumbledore is sneered at; they began to call him mad, and he aped the part like a fool. Step into the role of a savior out of plays, and people see you as a slave to whose services they are entitled and whom it is their enjoyment to criticize; for it is the privilege of masters to sit back and call forth helpful corrections while the slaves labor. Only in the tales of the ancient Greeks, from when men were less sophisticated in their delusions, may you see the hero who is also high. Hector, Aeneas, those were heroes who retained their right of vengeance upon those who insulted them, who could demand gold and jewels in payment for their services without sparking indignation. And if Lord Voldemort conquered Britain, he might then condescend to show himself noble in victory; and nobody would take his goodwill for granted, nor chirp corrections at him if his work was not to their liking. When he won, he would have true respect. I understood that day in the Ministry that by envying Dumbledore, I had shown myself as deluded as Dumbledore himself. I understood that I had been trying for the wrong place all along. You should know this to be true, boy, for you have made freer to speak ill of Dumbledore than you ever dared speak ill of me. Even in your own thoughts, I wager, for instinct runs deep. You knew that it might be to your cost to mock the strong and vengeful Professor Quirrell, but that there was no cost in disrespecting the weak and harmless Dumbledore.”
This is an analogy from HPMOR that I think should explain why I responded in the way I did. Frankly, I don’t know if I even disagree with the above poster. But my suspicion is that people like Mitchell feel obligated to blame the actions of Putin on the U.S., fundamentally, because they view the U.S. as their “slave nation”. There is an isolated demand for both competence and selflessness when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. In practice, Americans and their government are talked about like heroes in a Marvel movie, whom are simply expected to act optimally and then get criticized by their partners when they don’t. Authoritarian cabals like Putin’s are, at best, treated like a force of nature, and, at worst, instinctually respected for having the “courage” to just remove any external or internal dissent by force.
I try to bring up the invaders because the tendency is to treat the people who actually chose to invade Ukraine like they aren’t old enough to make their own decisions. Putin is not a CIA agent. He decided to invade Ukraine for very specific, political, reasons; reasons that I do not think have any serious underlying motivation in national security for Russia, and instead were almost entirely attributable to the success and popularity of his previous annexation of Crimea. I’d like to keep this comment up @lsusr, so tell me if it’s too political for the thread.
Lord Voldemort is the villain of HPMOR, not the hero. His words are those of a snake.
My priorities in moderating this comment thread are to ① maintain a welcoming environment to people living in countries on all sides of this conflict and ②to cultivate productive discourse. My commenting guidelines are instrumental toward achieving the aforestated objectives.
Discussing what the US and Putin should or shouldn’t do (from a geopolitical perspective) is allowed. Discussing what the US and Putin do or don’t get criticized for is off-topic because every famous person and institution gets lots of unjustified criticism. It happens when you’re a saint. It happens when you’re a supervillain.
The way to keep criticism from poisoning your mind and turning you into Lord Voldemort is to speak in the positive. Criticizing others’ criticism is unproductive.
But my suspicion is that people like Mitchell feel obligated to blame the actions of Putin on the U.S., fundamentally, because they view the U.S. as their “slave nation”.
Mitchell has not used the phrase “slave nation”.
I’d like to keep this comment up @lsusr, so tell me if it’s too political for the thread.
I have already deleted one of your comments, not because it was political but because it was hateful.
I am hesitant to ban you from commenting on my posts because some of your comments have been very high quality. Alas, moderating your comments takes 100× the effort of moderating the average comment (which takes approximately zero effort). I am not a moderator and I do not want to become one. I will hold you to a higher bar than other commenters. If you write another comment that breaks the rules or which I feel is likely to lead to unproductive territory, I will ban you from commenting on my posts. This is your second warning. You will not get a third warning.
I will allow your comment to stay up. This conversation thread is now over.
To be clear: I’m not advocating for debating Mitchell in this comment section. I don’t know what folks’ opportunity costs are; there may be more useful conversations for you to have, here or elsewhere. I’d be fine with a comment like this getting ignored-but-not-downvoted.
This may be a part of the reason, but far from “the entire reason”.
For example, you ignored all the bad experience Ukraine already had with Russia, which might have contributed to their desire to try something else for a change.
The other countries in the region decided to join NATO on their own (they were not invaded by USA, at least not literally). Any guess why? Looking at other nearby countries which are neither in NATO nor in EU, does it seem like their territories are getting somewhat smaller during the recent decades?
I am also curious, do you consider Western Europe to be “reshaped in American political and cultural image”? Like, sure they watch lots of Hollywood movies, but other than that, what specifically do you imagine would be different if USA isolated itself from the rest of the world? Because from my perspective, Western Europe seems to have enough independence and high quality of life (considering things like healthcare, perhaps even better quality of life than USA); and the people in Eastern Europe… well, dream about having the same.
The way the “realist” political scientist Mearsheimer puts it, is that small countries between large ones, need to be very careful about crossing the red lines of their powerful neighbors; and that the US has encouraged Ukraine to do just that, where Russia is concerned. He speaks as if it is due to shortsighted righteousness on the part of today’s American politicians and strategists; but enough of them also say that American policy opposes any single power achieving Eurasian hegemony, and hate Russia specifically, that one can reasonably view the policy of bringing Ukraine into western institutions, and arming it, as an anti-Russian policy; and whether Russia goes along with this, and is weakened, or resists it and gets tied down, will be viewed as a success. Creating problems next door to great-power rivals is a basic geopolitical gambit, e.g. Chinese support for Pakistan against India or for North Korea against Japan can probably be viewed this way, and I am sure history contains dozens of other examples.
One may ask, if some American Bismarck had explicitly said, after the cold war, we have enough NATO, and it shall not expand beyond Germany, or Poland, or wherever, would Ukraine still have ended up in a shooting war with Russia. I suppose it has some degree of possibility; but in this world, the US was always heavily involved,
As for American universalism, I don’t know if I am capable of listing all the ways in which American elites, especially liberals and progressives, think that American values and practices are for everyone. Political and economic systems, attitudes towards religion and race… From Woodrow Wilson in 1918, to the transformation of occupied Germany, Japan, and (much more recently) Iraq and Afghanistan, even through to European concerns today about missionary “wokeism”… To some extent the world was Europeanized after the industrial revolution, and one could argue that the world has been Americanized during the information revolution. One may again argue about cause and effect—was it sheer historical fortune (a fresh continent, a can-do culture) that gave America the potency to become what it is, or did specific cultural factors (religious and ideological universalism, intense commercialism) also presuppose it towards becoming this kind of power—but I don’t see how you can deny the universalism in American thinking.
One may ask, if some American Bismarck had explicitly said, after the cold war, we have enough NATO, and it shall not expand beyond Germany, or Poland, or wherever, would Ukraine still have ended up in a shooting war with Russia.
On the other hand, Abkhazia, Alania, Chechnya, Dagestan, Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan did not apply for NATO membership, and yet Russian Federation had armed conflicts with them. So, whatever would happen in a parallel universe is difficult to predict, but I would say that being a former Soviet republic gives you a significant chance of Russia wanting some piece back, sooner or later.
As for American universalism, I don’t know if I am capable of listing all the ways in which American elites, especially liberals and progressives, think that American values and practices are for everyone.
Speaking for myself, I was born and still live in Eastern Europe, grew up during socialism, both my parents were communists… and yet I strongly prefer the “American values”. Perhaps people in other parts of the world are also psychologically capable of enjoying freedom, or whatever specifically you consider to be exclusively “American”. Just like they can enjoy pizza despite not being Italians.
Do you believe that e.g. black Americans are genetically incompatible with “American values”? Because, you know, Eastern Europeans (such as Ukrainians) are genetically closer to white Americans than the black Americans are. Heck, even the Russians are closer.
Or do you assume it is all cultural? Well, sometimes cultures change. For example, Czechoslovakia wasn’t in the Russian sphere of influence before WW2; then it was; and then it wasn’t again. Is it wrong if Czechoslovakia after 1989 reverted to the values it had before WW2, just because by historical coincidence they happen to be similar to the American values? (Is there some rule like “once you were touched by Russia, you must remain culturally Russian forever”?)
I don’t see how you can deny the universalism in American thinking
The question is whether the “American values” are completely arbitrary, as you seem to assume. Like, some people prefer freedom, other people prefer slavery, neither is inherently more enjoyable, it’s all just a question of cultural brainwashing—if you believe that freedom is somehow preferable to slavery, apparently you were watching too many American movies.
Or maybe some of those values are just things that resonate with human nature, maybe with some hunter-gatherer egalitarian insticts that were for millenia suppressed but not completely eliminated by the forces of agrarian society, and now in the industrial society we can pay more attention to them again. Maybe no one ever really enjoyed being a serf, but for millenia people didn’t have much of a choice, and now they kinda do. And Americans were just the first who made this officially their national applause light; maybe because they founded their country at the right time, historically. (Actually, “liberty” was also an applause light of the French Revolution. So, maybe such ideas just happen naturally when you establish a country without a king, or an official equivalent of a king.)
Consider the fact that even in Russia today, thousands of people are in the streets, despite the fact that it will cost them a lot. So it makes sense to extrapolate that maybe hundreds of thousands also do not like the system, but are afraid to oppose it openly. In other words, you wish to protect people from something they want. You want them to stay in a system they hate. (Of course, not all of them. People are different. Just like in USA.) They should not be allowed to taste freedom, because Americans already have it copyrighted; and they should not be allowed to taste pizza, because Italians already have it copyrighted; no cultural appropriation!
Perhaps the Germans should revert to Nazism, because that is natural for them; that is what they would do in a parallel universe where Americans did not intervene, I guess. The Japanese should return to feudalism, the Indians should start burning widows again (okay, that was a British intervention, not American; but colonialism is bad either way, right?), and everyone outside of USA should disconnect from internet. That would make the world a much nicer place. /s
tl;dr—yes, Americans assume that the preference for “life, liberty, and pursuit for happiness” is a human universal, and although I am not an American, I personally happen to agree with them. I am not saying that all people are like that, but rather that in many cultures many people are naturally like that, and cultures typicallly have mechanisms to suppress this preference by force… which kinda proves that the preference has always existed, i.e. the Americans have natural cultural allies everywhere
On the other hand, Abkhazia, Alania, Chechnya, Dagestan, Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan did not apply for NATO membership, and yet Russian Federation had armed conflicts with them. So, whatever would happen in a parallel universe is difficult to predict, but I would say that being a former Soviet republic gives you a significant chance of Russia wanting some piece back, sooner or later.
I appreciate the concrete examples. Quickly having a look at them, it seems like the most recent conflict (involving Abkhazia and Georgia, starting 2008) was, in fact, immediately preceded by Georgia applying for NATO-membership, and NATO creating a plan for how they would become members, according to wikipedia.
It looks like the Chhechnyan, Dagestan, Moldovan, and Tajikistan conflicts all happened 1990-2000, which makes them slightly less relevant for predicting what might’ve happened today. (Though I could have missed some more recent events.) I couldn’t find info on Alania.
There are a lot of human values. It would be a profound and worthy achievement to understand the many civilizations of world history, in terms of which kind of values were foremost in their various sensibilities, successes and failures. Figuring out the ideal mix is even relevant to Less Wrong’s big picture—isn’t that what AGI alignment is about?
I don’t think anything I said is in contradiction with your assertion that the American civilization elevates certain values that have widespread appeal. My main point is that it is a missionary civilization which believes in actively spreading its favored values and social institutions, to all humanity if possible, and which uses all the Machiavellian tools of statecraft to do so.
If we compare America with China, then yes there is a huge difference, China seems to be happy enforcing its values within its historical territory, without much desire to expand. (I think so; maybe I missed something.)
If we compare America with Russia (and former Soviet Union), in my opinion Soviet Union / Russia is even more missionary… only less successful at doing so, but certainly not because of lack of trying.
Just look at the cold war in Europe. How often did Soviet Union intervene militarily in its vasal countries, just because they tried some outrageous idea such as “socialism with human face”? (Ironically, if you were a member of Warsaw Pact, you were more likely to be invaded by the Warsaw Pact than by NATO.) On the other hand, if a country in Western Europe tried something like “capitalism with universal health insurance”, America was cool about it.
So seems to me that although both countries are quite missionary, Russia is much more of a micromanager, and probably that is why it gets more resistance. If you are generally allied with America, then America is usually happy about it. If you are allied with Russia, once in a while you will still have Russian tanks rolling on your streets to remind you that you got some detail wrong. So it is quite difficult to be friends with Russia, even if you try.
In a different context, sure, let’s talk about how USA sucks. But in a context of Russia, such comparisons are absurd, because whatever bad thing USA has, Russia has as least twice as much of it. (Even the slavery? Ha! There were ethnic groups in Soviet Union who would have loved to get an opportunity to be merely enslaved.)
I am not so sure whether it makes sense to put Russia and the SU in the same category when it comes to being missionary. The ideology of the SU was basically universal—an ideal end state would have been the conversion of every country in the world to communism. For Russia I don’t see that. Getting the former parts of the Russian empire back, yes, maybe being the leading slavonic country (especially an important motivation until 1917). But would Russia care how, e.g., Spain was governed? I don’t think so (SU or USA would care).
Ok, this makes sense. After the fall of Soviet Union, Russia got defensive rather than missionary. Still “the best defense is a good offense”, but the ambitions to conquer other countries are now proportional to their geographical distance.
I think that is an important distinction you are making. Russia’s (and Putin’s) motivations for aggression seem to be primarily defensive, made from a position of weakness, of vulnerability (which can make them extremely dangerous). That wasn’t the case with the SU.
Russia was the dominant force in the USSR. It is perfectly reasonable to treat the USSR as red paint over a Russian Empire, especially considering the geopolitical framework from which I wrote the original post.
“but I don’t see how you can deny the universalism in American thinking. ”
I don’t think you can deny the universalism in any other big power’s thinking either. I mean, in a time where you have an autocrat risking nuclear war for an sheer power grab (no, I don’t think Russia has anything to fear from NATO with a 7000 nuke arsenal, that’s 19th century talk, no one buys that excuse), your timing couldn’t be more ironic blaming it all on the US.
I’m glad for the Europeanization of the world. It wasn’t done properly in the first centuries, but if it wasn’t for it the millions of people living in the rest of the world wouldn’t have a tenth of the quality of life that they have today. I’m glad that Europe has conquered the world culture, because not only it drastically improves the average person’s life, it also prevents other less desirable cultures from doing it. Try to put any other big power in the place of it… We’d be living horrible lives today. (And I can assure you they’d have done it, and in a way less desirable way in many aspects).
In 2000, Putin considered joining NATO. According to some sources, we weren’t to keen on it. Massive mistake. Today we wouldn’t be on the brink of a large war, and China wouldn’t be half the threat.
I am curious, how would the “Putin in NATO situation” actually work?
Imagine that Putin invades Moldova, Moldova fights back… are now all NATO members obligated to attack Moldova? Or do you assume that in the parallel universe, Putin would not invade Moldova?
In other words, could Putin simply leverage his NATO membership into conquering the former territories of Soviet Union? What exactly would have prevented him from doing so?
NATO is a defensive organization. Article 5 says “an attack on a member is an attack on all members”. So far is was only activated once, due to the 9/11 attacks. Yet the US has been in many wars since it joined NATO.
Yes, according to the NATO treaty there is only support for a victim of an attack. Here is the relevant Article 5 of the NATO treaty:
“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.” (NATO) [emphasis by me]
My understanding is that if Greece and Turkey decide to go to war over Cyprus NATO would not be compelled to intervene one way or the other. Presumably neither country would be silly enough to try invoking article 5 in the first place and the rest of the block would be heavily pushing the peace process.
I believe their last war ended 1922. But there were times when a next war between them seemed quiet likely and NATO spend a lot of energy discouraging both sides from open hostilities, if I remember correctly.
Yes, two NATO members were involved on different sides in a civil war in a third (independent & non-NATO) country. I think that lies outside the scope of NATO’s Article 5.
If Russia were part of NATO, then something like that could have happened, too, e.g.: Romanian and Russian troops fighting each other in a civil war in the Republic of Moldova.
I don’t think it was a massive mistake. Putin would still be the autocrat he is, his countrymen would still be supporting him on his military adventures. If anything Russia would be emboldened by their NATO membership status.
Look at how much headache Turkey has already caused. NATO would most likely have de facto fallen apart with a trojan horse as big as Russia, with the US falling back on bilateral defense treaties. Which I think was Putin’s true motivation anyway.
The US has had plenty of military ventures too, and not once was NATO called in, except for 9/11. NATO is only called in when you’re attacked first.
On one hand it’s not cool to have dictators on the board (still they are in the UN). But what we would gain: no current war on Ukraine (tragedy for Ukrainians and massive danger for the world), no China being half as much a threat (also a danger to the world). What we would lose: nothing, the downsides would be the same as they are today more or less.
Also, I don’t think NATO means “you can do what you want, we forgive you” either.
After all most of his bad deeds are from fear of losing ground to the West.
In my opinion, the US should be ranked above Britain and the EU. American meddling in Ukraine is the entire reason this war is happening. The whole point of the Russian attack is to keep Ukraine out of the American bloc. The United States is a world empire with a promethean ambition to reshape every society on earth in its own political and cultural image. Its military combatant commands claim the entire world as their theater of operations. This empire may be in decay, but for now, its ruling class still think the world is theirs.
I think this comment should be debated rather than downvoted.
I agree that the object-level claims should be debated. The tone renders me pretty pessimistic about anything useful coming out of responding to this comment in particular.
The tone in the first comment seems fine to me. (Not commenting on subsequent discussion.)
If I were nitpicking, I might suggest a phrasing that sounds less hyperbolic and charged, like:
… but I do consider this a little nitpicky.
‘X is the entire reason for Y’ is obvious hyperbole, but I could believe that Mitchell genuinely thinks it’s, say, 95% of the reason? If Mitchell’s actual models are extreme, then there’s value in him phrasing stuff in extreme-sounding ways in order to accurately communicate what a huge gulf there is between his models and other commenters’ models here.
Maybe a disclaimer ‘epistemic status: phrasing things a bit too strongly so I can concisely get my gist across’ or ‘cw: colloquial / imprecise language’ would help here?
Possibly this is just the wrong comments section for this sort of discussion. The two main things I want to be cautious of are (1) using downvotes here to express disagreement with a prima-facie ‘OK’ view of the world that hasn’t yet been discussed, and (2) using tone norms to make it hard to express certain world-models at all. Some world-models are inherently contentious-sounding, but might still be true.
(None of this, obviously, is me weighing in on whether Mitchell is in fact correct. It just seemed to me on a quick skim like a comment that should be at 0-12 karma, rather than at −21.)
To clarify: I think it’s OK to some degree to downvote stuff for being false—we do want to incentivize accuracy, after all. But I don’t think otherwise-OK comments should be downvoted for the −20 level merely for being mistaken. (Especially when they’re expressing a novel/interesting view that’s false for subtle reasons.)
I’m confused because the comment is at −12, and was around there when I left my first comment as well. Possibly you strong upvoted it, which doesn’t seem unreasonable to me because I agree −12 and −21 are pretty different, but it would mean we’re responding to moderately different context.
I’ve also seen lots of people describe reasons Russia/Putin might have felt that this was a defensive war, ways the US uses Russel conjugates to absolve itself while condemning the same behavior in other countries, etc. This is happening mostly on twitter, where I’ve done my best with my bubble but is not a medium known for facilitating nuance or a gentle tone. What those tweets did have was specific data for why they believe certain things (e.g. “here’s specific things the US did that are equivalent to Russia’s recent actions”, “here are NATO’s actions over the last 5 years and why Putin would reasonably find them threatening”). Those are specific epistemically legible claims that can be debated.
The original comment here doesn’t have any of that. If I were badly misinformed and wanted to learn, this doesn’t give me any hooks to investigate on my own, and it signals that asking questions of the author will be taken poorly. I would vastly prefer the comment be rewritten with more vitriol and more specific claims than that it get your more hedged version.
My “tone” comment could have been a lot more precise. I didn’t mean the overconfidence (which I agree is pretty easy to translate, although I hate that still leaves ambiguity about exactly how strongly they mean the claim), but the “this is so obviously true I can be mean to you for not understanding it” tone, which I think is basically poison even when someone is 100% correct.
Yep, I strong-upvoted the comment (to move it closer to +5, which is around what I think it deserves). It was at around −20 karma when I did so, and would still be at around −20 karma if I withdrew my vote.
I guess it’s less useful to have a discussion on LW if it’s already happening on Twitter. (If that’s your point.)
At the same time, the claim that the US and NATO have a lot of responsibility seems plausible on its face, and ‘What would the norms ideally be around Russia’s behavior?’ is an interesting question.
I certainly don’t like the idea of LW being even worse than Twitter at good discussion and inquiry. The main message I inferred from the −20 downvotes was ‘any endorsement of this point of view will be downvoted to oblivion so that others can’t readily see or discuss it; but the reverse point of view is fine to take for granted here’. Twitter without any legibility or source-citing is already way better than that.
If the reason for the downvotes is to try to protect LW’s epistemic purity… well, take into account that others might read the −20 the same way I did, and for the sake of LW’s epistemic purity, be unusually clear and explicit about why you’re opting to hide the comment.
How many of the comments on this page meet that standard of rigor? I think if we were applying normal LW standards to the comment in question, then someone would step in to challenge the comment (ask for arguments/evidence), but we wouldn’t instantly downvote it to hell without any conversation.
Some reasons for the ‘you can say weird stuff and not be insta-downvoted’ norm:
It would just inhibit ordinary conversation too much to require everyone to cite all their possibly-disputable comments to that degree. It often makes more sense to wait for someone to request sources/arguments, rather than spending an hour doing a lit review only to find out no one cares.
Merely knowing that there’s disagreement about an important topic can be valuable, even if you don’t know why the disagreement exists. (Assuming it’s informed disagreement between LWers in good standing.) There are many, many cases where I’d rather someone post a contentious view to LW (without defending it) than that they stay silent (because they don’t want to write the comment if it’s that much of a time investment).
I’m still not seeing it. The comment seemed critical of the US government, but my mental model would have expected someone who wrote that comment to respond to pushback in a friendly and cordial manner.
I think there are a bunch of subtle things that make the tone feel very mild to me: the “In my opinion”, the moderately-short evenly spaced sentences ending in periods, the fancy aristocratic language (“promethean ambition”), etc. Even the shortness of the comment maybe makes it feel more relaxed to me; someone whose comment is that pithy is less likely to be having Angry Rant feelings.
I just read Mitchell’s second comment in the thread, which seems perfectly cordial and clear, and matches what I’d have predicted from the initial comment. (The second comment also stands at −4 karma, bizarrely.)
I feel much more confident now that the votes are just straightforwardly bad and partisan, and a poor reflection of LW’s core values.
Mitchell’s original comment now stands at 0, which is quite strong evidence to me that the existence of this discussion has itself led people to upvote it; which in turn further indicts the original downvotes, since a robust, defensible voting pattern should not be so easily overturned by a meta-discussion like this one.
For what it’s worth, when I first encountered Mitchell’s comment three days ago, it was at −4, and I strong-upvoted it only for it to then receive multiple strong-downvotes, further sinking its karma score; there was also a now-deleted response from user “lc” consisting of a single sentence to the effect of “I believe the invaders should die”, which, if memory serves correctly, had been upvoted to +7 at one point before deletion.
I think this is pretty obviously terrible, and find myself rather disappointed by the performance of the LW userbase in this case. Politics is the mind-killer, but it seems there are people here who are no less susceptible to mind-killing than the general population, which is frankly embarrassing.
In fairness, it only takes a few passionate downvoters to downvote something a lot, and a few passionate upvoters to cancel them out; it could be that I convinced a couple people but that the equilibrium will still be elsewhere.
Now who could’ve seen that coming.
Politics is the mind-killer, period. No ‘if’s and ’but’s
This is an analogy from HPMOR that I think should explain why I responded in the way I did. Frankly, I don’t know if I even disagree with the above poster. But my suspicion is that people like Mitchell feel obligated to blame the actions of Putin on the U.S., fundamentally, because they view the U.S. as their “slave nation”. There is an isolated demand for both competence and selflessness when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. In practice, Americans and their government are talked about like heroes in a Marvel movie, whom are simply expected to act optimally and then get criticized by their partners when they don’t. Authoritarian cabals like Putin’s are, at best, treated like a force of nature, and, at worst, instinctually respected for having the “courage” to just remove any external or internal dissent by force.
I try to bring up the invaders because the tendency is to treat the people who actually chose to invade Ukraine like they aren’t old enough to make their own decisions. Putin is not a CIA agent. He decided to invade Ukraine for very specific, political, reasons; reasons that I do not think have any serious underlying motivation in national security for Russia, and instead were almost entirely attributable to the success and popularity of his previous annexation of Crimea. I’d like to keep this comment up @lsusr, so tell me if it’s too political for the thread.
Lord Voldemort is the villain of HPMOR, not the hero. His words are those of a snake.
My priorities in moderating this comment thread are to ① maintain a welcoming environment to people living in countries on all sides of this conflict and ②to cultivate productive discourse. My commenting guidelines are instrumental toward achieving the aforestated objectives.
Discussing what the US and Putin should or shouldn’t do (from a geopolitical perspective) is allowed. Discussing what the US and Putin do or don’t get criticized for is off-topic because every famous person and institution gets lots of unjustified criticism. It happens when you’re a saint. It happens when you’re a supervillain.
The way to keep criticism from poisoning your mind and turning you into Lord Voldemort is to speak in the positive. Criticizing others’ criticism is unproductive.
Mitchell has not used the phrase “slave nation”.
I have already deleted one of your comments, not because it was political but because it was hateful.
I am hesitant to ban you from commenting on my posts because some of your comments have been very high quality. Alas, moderating your comments takes 100× the effort of moderating the average comment (which takes approximately zero effort). I am not a moderator and I do not want to become one. I will hold you to a higher bar than other commenters. If you write another comment that breaks the rules or which I feel is likely to lead to unproductive territory, I will ban you from commenting on my posts. This is your second warning. You will not get a third warning.
I will allow your comment to stay up. This conversation thread is now over.
(speaking as a LW mod, I super appreciate lsuser putting the time into moderating their posts on a tricky topic)
To be clear: I’m not advocating for debating Mitchell in this comment section. I don’t know what folks’ opportunity costs are; there may be more useful conversations for you to have, here or elsewhere. I’d be fine with a comment like this getting ignored-but-not-downvoted.
This may be a part of the reason, but far from “the entire reason”.
For example, you ignored all the bad experience Ukraine already had with Russia, which might have contributed to their desire to try something else for a change.
The other countries in the region decided to join NATO on their own (they were not invaded by USA, at least not literally). Any guess why? Looking at other nearby countries which are neither in NATO nor in EU, does it seem like their territories are getting somewhat smaller during the recent decades?
I am also curious, do you consider Western Europe to be “reshaped in American political and cultural image”? Like, sure they watch lots of Hollywood movies, but other than that, what specifically do you imagine would be different if USA isolated itself from the rest of the world? Because from my perspective, Western Europe seems to have enough independence and high quality of life (considering things like healthcare, perhaps even better quality of life than USA); and the people in Eastern Europe… well, dream about having the same.
The way the “realist” political scientist Mearsheimer puts it, is that small countries between large ones, need to be very careful about crossing the red lines of their powerful neighbors; and that the US has encouraged Ukraine to do just that, where Russia is concerned. He speaks as if it is due to shortsighted righteousness on the part of today’s American politicians and strategists; but enough of them also say that American policy opposes any single power achieving Eurasian hegemony, and hate Russia specifically, that one can reasonably view the policy of bringing Ukraine into western institutions, and arming it, as an anti-Russian policy; and whether Russia goes along with this, and is weakened, or resists it and gets tied down, will be viewed as a success. Creating problems next door to great-power rivals is a basic geopolitical gambit, e.g. Chinese support for Pakistan against India or for North Korea against Japan can probably be viewed this way, and I am sure history contains dozens of other examples.
One may ask, if some American Bismarck had explicitly said, after the cold war, we have enough NATO, and it shall not expand beyond Germany, or Poland, or wherever, would Ukraine still have ended up in a shooting war with Russia. I suppose it has some degree of possibility; but in this world, the US was always heavily involved,
As for American universalism, I don’t know if I am capable of listing all the ways in which American elites, especially liberals and progressives, think that American values and practices are for everyone. Political and economic systems, attitudes towards religion and race… From Woodrow Wilson in 1918, to the transformation of occupied Germany, Japan, and (much more recently) Iraq and Afghanistan, even through to European concerns today about missionary “wokeism”… To some extent the world was Europeanized after the industrial revolution, and one could argue that the world has been Americanized during the information revolution. One may again argue about cause and effect—was it sheer historical fortune (a fresh continent, a can-do culture) that gave America the potency to become what it is, or did specific cultural factors (religious and ideological universalism, intense commercialism) also presuppose it towards becoming this kind of power—but I don’t see how you can deny the universalism in American thinking.
On the other hand, Abkhazia, Alania, Chechnya, Dagestan, Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan did not apply for NATO membership, and yet Russian Federation had armed conflicts with them. So, whatever would happen in a parallel universe is difficult to predict, but I would say that being a former Soviet republic gives you a significant chance of Russia wanting some piece back, sooner or later.
Speaking for myself, I was born and still live in Eastern Europe, grew up during socialism, both my parents were communists… and yet I strongly prefer the “American values”. Perhaps people in other parts of the world are also psychologically capable of enjoying freedom, or whatever specifically you consider to be exclusively “American”. Just like they can enjoy pizza despite not being Italians.
Do you believe that e.g. black Americans are genetically incompatible with “American values”? Because, you know, Eastern Europeans (such as Ukrainians) are genetically closer to white Americans than the black Americans are. Heck, even the Russians are closer.
Or do you assume it is all cultural? Well, sometimes cultures change. For example, Czechoslovakia wasn’t in the Russian sphere of influence before WW2; then it was; and then it wasn’t again. Is it wrong if Czechoslovakia after 1989 reverted to the values it had before WW2, just because by historical coincidence they happen to be similar to the American values? (Is there some rule like “once you were touched by Russia, you must remain culturally Russian forever”?)
The question is whether the “American values” are completely arbitrary, as you seem to assume. Like, some people prefer freedom, other people prefer slavery, neither is inherently more enjoyable, it’s all just a question of cultural brainwashing—if you believe that freedom is somehow preferable to slavery, apparently you were watching too many American movies.
Or maybe some of those values are just things that resonate with human nature, maybe with some hunter-gatherer egalitarian insticts that were for millenia suppressed but not completely eliminated by the forces of agrarian society, and now in the industrial society we can pay more attention to them again. Maybe no one ever really enjoyed being a serf, but for millenia people didn’t have much of a choice, and now they kinda do. And Americans were just the first who made this officially their national applause light; maybe because they founded their country at the right time, historically. (Actually, “liberty” was also an applause light of the French Revolution. So, maybe such ideas just happen naturally when you establish a country without a king, or an official equivalent of a king.)
Consider the fact that even in Russia today, thousands of people are in the streets, despite the fact that it will cost them a lot. So it makes sense to extrapolate that maybe hundreds of thousands also do not like the system, but are afraid to oppose it openly. In other words, you wish to protect people from something they want. You want them to stay in a system they hate. (Of course, not all of them. People are different. Just like in USA.) They should not be allowed to taste freedom, because Americans already have it copyrighted; and they should not be allowed to taste pizza, because Italians already have it copyrighted; no cultural appropriation!
Perhaps the Germans should revert to Nazism, because that is natural for them; that is what they would do in a parallel universe where Americans did not intervene, I guess. The Japanese should return to feudalism, the Indians should start burning widows again (okay, that was a British intervention, not American; but colonialism is bad either way, right?), and everyone outside of USA should disconnect from internet. That would make the world a much nicer place. /s
tl;dr—yes, Americans assume that the preference for “life, liberty, and pursuit for happiness” is a human universal, and although I am not an American, I personally happen to agree with them. I am not saying that all people are like that, but rather that in many cultures many people are naturally like that, and cultures typicallly have mechanisms to suppress this preference by force… which kinda proves that the preference has always existed, i.e. the Americans have natural cultural allies everywhere
I appreciate the concrete examples. Quickly having a look at them, it seems like the most recent conflict (involving Abkhazia and Georgia, starting 2008) was, in fact, immediately preceded by Georgia applying for NATO-membership, and NATO creating a plan for how they would become members, according to wikipedia.
It looks like the Chhechnyan, Dagestan, Moldovan, and Tajikistan conflicts all happened 1990-2000, which makes them slightly less relevant for predicting what might’ve happened today. (Though I could have missed some more recent events.) I couldn’t find info on Alania.
There are a lot of human values. It would be a profound and worthy achievement to understand the many civilizations of world history, in terms of which kind of values were foremost in their various sensibilities, successes and failures. Figuring out the ideal mix is even relevant to Less Wrong’s big picture—isn’t that what AGI alignment is about?
I don’t think anything I said is in contradiction with your assertion that the American civilization elevates certain values that have widespread appeal. My main point is that it is a missionary civilization which believes in actively spreading its favored values and social institutions, to all humanity if possible, and which uses all the Machiavellian tools of statecraft to do so.
If we compare America with China, then yes there is a huge difference, China seems to be happy enforcing its values within its historical territory, without much desire to expand. (I think so; maybe I missed something.)
If we compare America with Russia (and former Soviet Union), in my opinion Soviet Union / Russia is even more missionary… only less successful at doing so, but certainly not because of lack of trying.
Just look at the cold war in Europe. How often did Soviet Union intervene militarily in its vasal countries, just because they tried some outrageous idea such as “socialism with human face”? (Ironically, if you were a member of Warsaw Pact, you were more likely to be invaded by the Warsaw Pact than by NATO.) On the other hand, if a country in Western Europe tried something like “capitalism with universal health insurance”, America was cool about it.
So seems to me that although both countries are quite missionary, Russia is much more of a micromanager, and probably that is why it gets more resistance. If you are generally allied with America, then America is usually happy about it. If you are allied with Russia, once in a while you will still have Russian tanks rolling on your streets to remind you that you got some detail wrong. So it is quite difficult to be friends with Russia, even if you try.
In a different context, sure, let’s talk about how USA sucks. But in a context of Russia, such comparisons are absurd, because whatever bad thing USA has, Russia has as least twice as much of it. (Even the slavery? Ha! There were ethnic groups in Soviet Union who would have loved to get an opportunity to be merely enslaved.)
I am not so sure whether it makes sense to put Russia and the SU in the same category when it comes to being missionary. The ideology of the SU was basically universal—an ideal end state would have been the conversion of every country in the world to communism. For Russia I don’t see that. Getting the former parts of the Russian empire back, yes, maybe being the leading slavonic country (especially an important motivation until 1917). But would Russia care how, e.g., Spain was governed? I don’t think so (SU or USA would care).
Ok, this makes sense. After the fall of Soviet Union, Russia got defensive rather than missionary. Still “the best defense is a good offense”, but the ambitions to conquer other countries are now proportional to their geographical distance.
I think that is an important distinction you are making. Russia’s (and Putin’s) motivations for aggression seem to be primarily defensive, made from a position of weakness, of vulnerability (which can make them extremely dangerous). That wasn’t the case with the SU.
I can’t see how this is argument in good faith. Your choice of using Russia instead of USSR feels intentionally misleading.
Was Russia not the dominant force within USSR, the “unbreakable union of free republics, forever united by Great Russia”?
(Yes, I know that Stalin was not ethnicaly Russian. Anything else?)
Russia was the dominant force in the USSR. It is perfectly reasonable to treat the USSR as red paint over a Russian Empire, especially considering the geopolitical framework from which I wrote the original post.
Have you heard about Communist Party?
“but I don’t see how you can deny the universalism in American thinking. ”
I don’t think you can deny the universalism in any other big power’s thinking either. I mean, in a time where you have an autocrat risking nuclear war for an sheer power grab (no, I don’t think Russia has anything to fear from NATO with a 7000 nuke arsenal, that’s 19th century talk, no one buys that excuse), your timing couldn’t be more ironic blaming it all on the US.
I’m glad for the Europeanization of the world. It wasn’t done properly in the first centuries, but if it wasn’t for it the millions of people living in the rest of the world wouldn’t have a tenth of the quality of life that they have today. I’m glad that Europe has conquered the world culture, because not only it drastically improves the average person’s life, it also prevents other less desirable cultures from doing it. Try to put any other big power in the place of it… We’d be living horrible lives today. (And I can assure you they’d have done it, and in a way less desirable way in many aspects).
In 2000, Putin considered joining NATO. According to some sources, we weren’t to keen on it. Massive mistake. Today we wouldn’t be on the brink of a large war, and China wouldn’t be half the threat.
I am curious, how would the “Putin in NATO situation” actually work?
Imagine that Putin invades Moldova, Moldova fights back… are now all NATO members obligated to attack Moldova? Or do you assume that in the parallel universe, Putin would not invade Moldova?
In other words, could Putin simply leverage his NATO membership into conquering the former territories of Soviet Union? What exactly would have prevented him from doing so?
NATO is a defensive organization. Article 5 says “an attack on a member is an attack on all members”. So far is was only activated once, due to the 9/11 attacks. Yet the US has been in many wars since it joined NATO.
I expect there are rules in NATO’s treaties for this kind of problems. And NATO membership, just like EU membership, comes with strings attached.
Yes, according to the NATO treaty there is only support for a victim of an attack. Here is the relevant Article 5 of the NATO treaty:
“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.” (NATO)
[emphasis by me]
As far as I remember, Turkey and Greece, NATO members, were at war with each other.
My understanding is that if Greece and Turkey decide to go to war over Cyprus NATO would not be compelled to intervene one way or the other. Presumably neither country would be silly enough to try invoking article 5 in the first place and the rest of the block would be heavily pushing the peace process.
I believe their last war ended 1922. But there were times when a next war between them seemed quiet likely and NATO spend a lot of energy discouraging both sides from open hostilities, if I remember correctly.
I was talking about the war in Cyprus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_invasion_of_Cyprus
Yes, two NATO members were involved on different sides in a civil war in a third (independent & non-NATO) country. I think that lies outside the scope of NATO’s Article 5.
If Russia were part of NATO, then something like that could have happened, too, e.g.:
Romanian and Russian troops fighting each other in a civil war in the Republic of Moldova.
I don’t think it was a massive mistake. Putin would still be the autocrat he is, his countrymen would still be supporting him on his military adventures. If anything Russia would be emboldened by their NATO membership status.
Look at how much headache Turkey has already caused. NATO would most likely have de facto fallen apart with a trojan horse as big as Russia, with the US falling back on bilateral defense treaties. Which I think was Putin’s true motivation anyway.
The US has had plenty of military ventures too, and not once was NATO called in, except for 9/11. NATO is only called in when you’re attacked first.
On one hand it’s not cool to have dictators on the board (still they are in the UN). But what we would gain: no current war on Ukraine (tragedy for Ukrainians and massive danger for the world), no China being half as much a threat (also a danger to the world). What we would lose: nothing, the downsides would be the same as they are today more or less.
Also, I don’t think NATO means “you can do what you want, we forgive you” either.
After all most of his bad deeds are from fear of losing ground to the West.