brimstoneSalad wrote: ↑Sat Nov 09, 2024 3:04 am
They're not yet, Russia is still burning through its war chest. It has to be depleted first, and after that sanctions will slow down how fast it can produce and fund infantry and munitions IF Russia can't evade them effectively enough. Ultimately it may even result in economic depression and a coup and change of leadership (though this is something the U.S. does not want).
The main problem is that the U.S. is trying to a thread a needle, avoiding escalation or destabilization of Russia while undermining Russia's war effort, which is making the war take longer.
If the U.S. would go all in, defeating Russia in Ukraine with conventional weapons should be trivial given the relative power of the countries, particularly now that Russia is so weakened. But the current administration doesn't want Russia to lose because (in my understanding) they're worried about all of those Nukes that might find it into bad hands should the regime be destabilized.
Some of Putin's recent rhetoric has gotten me thinking about this. It looks like a lot of whether or not we will have nuclear armageddon depends on how "suicidal" Russia gets to be feeling. With Putin threatening to use nuclear weapons in response to increased U.S. Military support for Ukraine, he's basically saying, "let me have this war, or I'm going to kill myself and take you down with me". That's a pretty pathetic way to assert your power on the world stage, but I guess that's what he's going for. It's probably also a way to get Americans more riled up against the Democrats before Trump takes office.
This problem of mutually assured destruction is a hard one to solve, and it's difficult to even imagine exactly what a "solution" might look like. I think there are two possible routes to disarmament, one social and one technological. The social one, I imagine, may result from a peaceful change in leadership once Putin dies, and the gradual de-militarization of Russian society, though this is something that may take multiple generations to complete. For the moment I can't really see another leader having the same kind of status and influence as Putin, so I'd like to think that things will settle down a bit once Putin is dead. But who knows, perhaps another one will pop up and assert himself as the "next Putin", and be just as bad or even worse. And I might just be associating this war to closely with Putin as an individual. He might just be someone who is quite willing to present himself as the face of existing problems in Russian government/society, which will persist long after he dies. But, still, I would really like to hope that that's not the case and that this is really just a Putin thing. Russia's been down bad since the end of the Cold War, but they do have a good chance at redeeming themselves if they become more cooperative with the West. The way that governments are, I think, in large part reflect the character of the societies they govern, and I would like to believe that the younger generation of Russians -- that is, those that
do survive the war -- will be somewhat more peacefully inclined. But really I have no idea.
Perhaps more realistically, global nuclear disarmament may come about as a result of technological advancement. The U.S. could develop ICBM interception technology along the lines of an "Iron Dome" or "Brilliant Pebbles", and, once it has proved its ability to protect itself from nuclear attacks, force Russia to comply with some kind of policy of enforced disarmament. I think it's pretty unlikely that Russia will be able to develop any such technology. Perhaps they could have had a chance of doing so if they didn't throw themselves into the war with Ukraine and focused more on scientific collaboration with China and other countries, but as it stands I don't see any interesting new technology in this area coming out of Russia for the next few decades at least. So there probably won't be any kind of "arms race" here. Obviously, one enormous challenge will be developing this kind of technology, I've seen the problem of ICBM interception compared to shooting a bullet out of the air. So the U.S. Government's official policy on the matter may currently just be "let's try to buy ourselves enough time until AI can solve this problem for us". Deployment is another huge challenge, it would have to be deployed in secret, all at once, and on a global scale. The development of any such defenses would also have to be done in complete secrecy, and they would ideally want to find a way to demonstrate their effectiveness to the Russians in a way that does not involve nuclear escalation.
People also seem to be quite concerned about Russia and Trump sending us into the next world war, but I'm not particularly worried about that
per se. Any kind of "World War III" would probably just be a short bout of conventional warfare that is really just a dramatic prelude to global nuclear destruction. When pitted against Russia, China, North Korea, and the Middle East, the West would win pretty quickly, at which point Russia would just send out its nukes and we will all be dead anyways.
