Historically, when has a sanction worked?

[Circe]

While that is true, it's tough to build a Navy that large without people noticing.

Okay, but you are assuming that we would have an intact Navy and country when invaded by China through Mexico. I am not assuming that; that is implausible, I think. Divided into six polities by secession and civil war, however, parts could be picked off.

 

[Couchpotato]

Okay, but you are assuming that we would have an intact Navy and country when invaded by China through Mexico. I am not assuming that; that is implausible, I think. Divided into six polities by secession and civil war, however, parts could be picked off.

So in this scenario we have moved far beyond where we are today then. You're 3-4 degrees past what has/is likely to happen.

 

[Circe]

It led to us having to do with Europe. They could have nipped it in the bud, they didn't. We can nip this in the bud, if Putin is actually eying other areas, but right now we aren't.

The thing is with Nukes we might not be able to go in after and clean up. Different equation than WWI and WWII

Yours is the central issue, I know. Nip it in the bud, or deal with nukes flying.

You are assuming we COULD stop Putin while he hasn't soaked up more than three or four countries. (Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine, I suppose Belarus is the obvious next step, as it would be easy.) I don't assume that.

And I can't predict the future, because it hasn't happened yet. I am hoping that the fact that Putin is 70 will be relevant. I feel much the same way about Trump -------

 

[Circe]

So in this scenario we have moved far beyond where we are today then. You're 3-4 degrees past what has/is likely to happen.

Sure. No one is going to invade us through Mexico as things are now! Even leftists might fight if that happened. But time passes, and things have already changed out of recognition. This country is weak now.

 

[Godboy]

I see the back peddling starting already. Ok if that is one way of stopping Putin, is it a call that you would make? Send 100k of our finest over there… president godboy?

Back peddling? Ok, you need to go back and read the coversation that prompted that post. Until then youre just an uninformed fool.

 

[martybegan]

Yours is the central issue, I know. Nip it in the bud, or deal with nukes flying.

You are assuming we COULD stop Putin while he hasn't soaked up more than three or four countries. (Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine, I suppose Belarus is the obvious next step, as it would be easy.) I don't assume that.

And I can't predict the future, because it hasn't happened yet. I am hoping that the fact that Putin is 70 will be relevant. I feel much the same way about Trump -------

We are seeing the same thing the French and the British saw in 1939, we don't want war, but the other side does. I respect isolationist/America First sentiments, but I've read too much history where waiting led to larger costs of life than doing something right away.

Putin is a healthy 70, and who know is the 2-3 people under him waiting in the wings are better or worse.

 

[pknopp]

I can't agree with that! You are buying into the silly idea that the world was so mean to Germany that Hitler just had to get some revenge for the poor little krauts.

Germans had a WHOLE lot less to lose after the total defeat of WWII, and they haven't made a peep since. They learned. I don't think you have read much about Berlin, 1945.

Because they decided the actions after WWI were the correct actions to take after WWII does not mean what I said was wrong. Some people can learn from their mistakes. It's rare but it does happen now and then.

 

[Circe]

They are the biggest economy in Europe, why shouldn't they have a leadership position. Gaining control economically is the fair way of doing it, not using tanks.

I forgot the exact chapter, but what you described vis a vis WWI and WWII was what Clauswitz was getting at. If you don't remove the REASON for the conflict via victory, you get just a break.

An example translated to politics is the Abortion argument, Roe wasn't a Clauswitzian victory, just an armistice.

So it seems, all of the above. I can remember when 137% of people said that Roe v Wade was totally settled forever law. I still think it won't be much impaired, because I have observed that ALL ALL ALL social laws in the last, what, 75 years? are antinatalist. Because of gross overpopulation, people are moving in an incoherent, inchoate bloc to prevent births. Easy divorce; women working; small families; late marriage; homosexuality promoted; now "changing sex" promoted, which always prevents reproduction by those people (eugenics, too, in that case); and easy legal abortion. I could be wrong, but the antinatalist direction of society is so obvious that I will be surprised if abortion is outlawed.

Leaving that side issue, I would disagree that the important thing is to remove the reason for the conflict. What Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin agreed was to totally smash in utter defeat the Germans, and then no one would have to care what they might still want, unrepentantly. It certainly worked for the Romans, although they usually took a short cut and just killed all the enemy people. Which does work, after all, and frees up the land.

I am not real sympathetic with the idea that one needs to pet and pamper the enemy and make sure he is getting what he wanted in the first place. What he wants is almost always totally bad and aggressive. I think it's key to destroy the enemy or so defeat them that just getting the water back on will occupy their minds for the next several years.

 

[Slade3200]

Back peddling? Ok, you need to go back and read the coversation that prompted that post. Until then youre just an uninformed fool.

Deal and done. You’re still dodging the question. How would you handle it?

 

[Circe]

What a bullshit.

I see you are not capable of conversation, and not a native English speaker, either. So, out.

 

[Circe]

No one goes into a conflict thinking they are going to lose.

Remember what Bin Laden's goal was, get US out of Saudi, depose the House of Saud, take over and rule Mecca to bring on the 2nd coming of the Caliphate.

Lord, I didn't even remember all that. I'm sure you are right, but it's not something we need to care about helping him with once he bombs New York.

 

[gipper]

NATO was, and is, an outdated notion, it’s existence and and expansion is the cause of this issue. No interest vital to the US is harmed by whatever happens in those places.

So true. The mistakes made after the USSR fell are coming back to haunt us. At asshat Poppy Bush or BJ Clinton terminated NATO, this wouldn’t be happening. Had the warmongering Nobel Peace prize winner Ears not committed a coup in Ukraine, this wouldn’t be happening.

 

[martybegan]

So it seems, all of the above. I can remember when 137% of people said that Roe v Wade was totally settled forever law. I still think it won't be much impaired, because I have observed that ALL ALL ALL social laws in the last, what, 75 years? are antinatalist. Because of gross overpopulation, people moving in an incoherent, inchoate bloc to prevent births. Easy divorce; women working; small families, late marriage, homosexuality promoted,; now "changing sex" promoted, which always prevents reproduction by those people (eugenics, too, in that case); and easy legal abortion. I could be wrong, but the antinatalist direction of society is so obvious that I will be surprised if abortion is outlawed.

Leaving that side issue, I would disagree that the important thing is to remove the reason for the conflict. What Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin agreed was to totally smash in utter defeat the Germans, and then no one would have to care what they might still want, unrepentantly. It certainly worked for the Romans, although they usually took a short cut and just killed all the enemy people. Which does work, after all, and frees up the land.

I am not real sympathetic with the idea that one needs to pet and pamper the enemy and make sure he is getting what he wanted in the first place. What he wants is almost always totally bad and aggressive. I think it's key to destroy the enemy or so defeat them that just getting the water back on will occupy their minds for the next several years.

That removed the reason for the conflict, i.e. German militarism and expansionism. Between smashing them, occupying them, and getting them to sign treaties recognizing borders, as well as unifying them under Allied control, the "German Question" plaguing Europe since the fall of the Holy Roman Empire was settled.

In the Pacific, the same thing was achieved. The Japanese goal of expansion and empire was crushed, and replaced with a goal of integrating peacefully into the Western world and economy.

Actually the Romans did that from time to time, i.e. Carthage, but mostly they absorbed the people in the area by absorbing anyone who would go along with the Romans. In exchange they became the ruling class in the area, and Rome left them on their own save foreign policy and taxation.

 

[martybegan]

Lord, I didn't even remember all that. I'm sure you are right, but it's not something we need to care about helping him with once he bombs New York.

We weren't going to help him. He assumed a hard strike on us would result in some face saving attacks on his organization, and we would find an excuse to get out of the middle east.

He though the old "one swift kick and the whole rotting mess will come crashing down" meme would apply to us. He was wrong at the time.

 

[zaangalewa]

I've read "On War," I have it, but didn't recall that quotation. But I think it a lot: the war in 1914 could not be settled in 1918 not only because Germany didn't believe it had lost (and I would partly agree with that --- they climbed out of trenches in a foreign country and walked home! That's no defeat.) But also because the central issue in 1914 was that Germany wanted hegemony and indeed control and rule all over Europe,

The idea of the so called "Great German empire" was an idea which followed the "Holy Roman empire of German (=united) nation" which had been eliminated because of the wars of Napoleon Bonaparte. The "Holy Empire" had been by the way never holy nor had it been an empire in sense of the English word for empire, nor was it Roman (but under rule of law) nor lived only Germans in it. "Great German empire" meant not hegemony over Europe - It meant that all Germans should live together in a common state. What the Prussians did do with Germany was a totally other form of empire - they excluded for example Austria and made other German countries to "colonies" of Prussia - what found a desastrous end in the Brit William 2nd, whom I call personally "Prussian emperor over Germany" and not "German Emperor". He tried to make out of Germany another kind of Great Britain. Indeed it looks like the Anglo-American world made war against the own ideas when it destroyed Germany.

It's by the way said that Germans soldiers just simple left the battle fields of World War 1 and went home. They decided "war is over" on their own, went home and eliminated the influence of the nobles in Germany, because they saw in them more worse monsters than in the soldiers of the other nations in the battlefields. History science reports something else - but this is what I heard from some old people.

as Napoleon also intended before them. Since they left WWI with an Armistice (not a defeat) that cause of the conflict was never resolved and Hitler took it right up again.

My favorite quote on that was Ludendorff, who said, finally, "Get me an Armistice. Get an Armistice, and in five years we'll go again."

It was more than five years, but yeah --- it just wasn't over.

I suppose you could say the cause of WWI was STILL never resolved, but Germany does control Europe now, of course.

That's still bullshit.

They've had to use soft power instead of Blitzkrieg because we are watching them all the time.

"Blitzkrieg" is a word the Brits used. This was never an intention - but perhaps a result not to like to live for years in a fire trench together with other rats and to get a psychopath under such "living conditions" - better to say "dying conditions".

 

[Circe]

Because they decided the actions after WWI were the correct actions to take after WWII does not mean what I said was wrong. Some people can learn from their mistakes. It's rare but it does happen now and then.

It has happened twice in modern times: Germany and Japan, both so soundly defeated, and dramatically defeated in the case of Japan (Kaboom), that they promptly turned pacifist.

I think it used to happen a lot with the Romans, too. When you kill nearly all the Gauls for 70 miles around, the few left start keeping a low profile.

It's not a question of them repenting! It's a question of persuading them that if they don't do better, all will be leveled, the men killed, everyone else enslaved and sold, and the land sown with salt. Like Carthage. Carthago delenda est!

 

[pknopp]

It has happened twice in modern times: Germany and Japan, both so soundly defeated, and dramatically defeated in the case of Japan (Kaboom), that they promptly turned pacifist.

I think it used to happen a lot with the Romans, too. When you kill nearly all the Gauls for 70 miles around, the few left start keeping a low profile.

It's not a question of them repenting! It's a question of persuading them that if they don't do better, all will be leveled, the men killed, everyone else enslaved and sold, and the land sown with salt. Like Carthage. Carthago delenda est!

It isn't going to be fun when someone decides again to teach us a lesson.

 

[whitehall]

Historically, FDR's oil embargo sanctions against Japan didn't turn out so good. The problem today is that we have a weak president and global warming activists running the show who actually want high energy prices to punish Americans for our comfortable lives. That's what we are going to get until we kick the bums out next November.

 

[Circe]

We weren't going to help him. He assumed a hard strike on us would result in some face saving attacks on his organization, and we would find an excuse to get out of the middle east.

He though the old "one swift kick and the whole rotting mess will come crashing down" meme would apply to us. He was wrong at the time.

I like. I'm making a small collection of peoples who thought we could easily be backed off, and I think Japan was the only example in my album so far. Now I have two, with Bin Laden.

It's just hard to SEE Bin Laden could have had such an idea, because it was so crazy! But that's what war does, you see what you want, not what's there, I guess. I just read Barbarossa, and German estimates of Soviet troop strength was 80 divisions just before June 22, 1941. It went up and up and up till a rather disheartened German general facing defeat said that intelligence had said he was up against 200 divisions now, but he had counted 360.

 

[zaangalewa]

We are seeing the same thing the French and the British saw in 1939, we don't want war, but the other side does.

Hitler prepared a war against Russia - better to say against Stalin, his Soviet contrahent, and also for "Lebensraum" (living space) - not against the French and Brits.

I respect isolationist/America First sentiments, but I've read too much history where waiting led to larger costs of life than doing something right away.

Putin is a healthy 70, and who know is the 2-3 people under him waiting in the wings are better or worse.

I'm very dissappointed about Putin. Thought this man has something like greatness. But I was wrong. He's a criminal like all others. The Russians are not able and/or don't like to stop him - so others will have to do so. The strange thing: What he is doing now is very bad for Russia and very bad for Europe - but he doesn't care. Perhaps it makes fun to murder on no reason to have to do so. No idea. It's said "might corrupts" and "absolute might corrupts absolute".