(Thread IKs:
fatherboxx)
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StumblyWumbly posted:It sounds like a good simplifying model, particularly for dealing with a lot of the IR deals and long term things that don't make the news, but it sounds like Realism tries to take the people out of the picture and you cannot get a good reasoning for Russia's invasion without taking into account Putin's possible brain problems, the bad information he was receiving, and the tools he uses to stay in power. If all that comes under the umbrella of "National interest" then the term gets pretty meaningless, and in the hands of someone like Mearshmeier it seems to boil down to "Of course they did it, they had to" regardless of what "it" was. That's the feel I get, that it's a neat Pol-sci 101 model that then gets plugged in as-is by professionals studying and predicting real-world conflicts. It's like if engineers were building farm equipment that assumed cows were spherical and frictionless because dammit that's how physics problems work.
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Jul 2, 2023 18:57
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Morrow posted:Actually, let me circle back to something: the big flaw in Mearsheimer's arguments is that he regards Russia as a Great Power. If he actually adjusted his inputs for the facts on the ground where it's a vestigial empire coasting off Soviet arsenals, then his theoretical framework does a much better job. that "regional power" burn was perhaps the one Obama foreign relations thing i liked
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Jul 2, 2023 19:25
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thekeeshman posted:Also talking about states like they're entities with their own minds is silly when the people actually making the decisions are leaders who have their own interests which are different from those of their country's. It's not in Hungary's interest to weaken NATO and the EU by sucking up to Russia, but Orban thinks it's in his interest to do so and so that's what happens. Leaders do stupid poo poo that damages their own countries all the time, how do realists explain Bush Jr's decision to invade Iraq? Assuming you take the Bush Jr administration's claims about needing to take pre-emptive action seriously (which admittedly is a big ask considering all the blatant lies about WMDs) then it can be explained as a mistaken belief about what is necessary to maximize US security. The fact that neorealists mostly believe states will generally try to maximise their security in a rational way does not preclude states making mistakes when dealing with flawed information. Edit: And in the context of Bush Jr, because there effectively were no international constraints on American power at the time Bush made those decisions which meant Bush had a degree of freedom to act on internal political pressures in the international arena that the USA did not have during the Cold War. For an example of a realist espousing such a view see this interview Kenneth Waltz gave a few months before the invasion of Iraq. In fact it's an interesting interview in general both for what he gets right and what he gets majorly wrong about how the next two decades would shake out. Honestly, it's a shame that Waltz wasn't the one to outlive Mearsheimer. While Waltz's views on nuclear proliferation were, uh, optimistic bordering on insane considering how many times humanity came one fuckup away from extinction during the Cold War he was a much, much more eloquent ambassador for neorealism and at the very least I suspect we'd be seeing much more interesting press interviews. Hidingo Kojimba fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Jul 2, 2023 |
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Jul 2, 2023 19:31
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hey mom its 420 posted:This was the original debunking with good data to back it up https://oalexanderdk.substack.com/p/blowing-holes-in-seymour-hershs-pipe Thank you! That's what I was trying to find. Thanks to the other poster on mearshimer as well! Lots of misinformation/disinformation floating around, sadly.
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Jul 2, 2023 19:32
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BBC has an interesting article about remains of 8 Lend-Lease WWII Hawker Hurricanes found near Kyiv while demining (from that war, not current one, it seems): https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65955365 ... apparently they got broken up to avoid paying back for them.
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Jul 2, 2023 20:30
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I don't want to interrupt making GBS threads on IR for being consistently wrong and having absolutely zero predictive power whatsoever, because dunking on IR is well-deserved, but… New Perun on Coups: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP8VPkWXOfU
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Jul 2, 2023 21:18
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Antigravitas posted:I don't want to interrupt making GBS threads on IR for being consistently wrong and having absolutely zero predictive power whatsoever, because dunking on IR is well-deserved, but… I love how Perun gets 230k views on his hour long PowerPoint within ten hours of posting, considering he has “merely” 450k subscribers. Just goes to show how much people love his dry humor and Australian accent, myself included. Very soothing. The NYTimes has a new article detailing a Ukrainian assault on a village. The main surprise is that the army relief on infantry infiltration, rather than heavy armor, since it’s harder to spot. It seems like an awful result for Russian troops if they’re getting beaten on defense with troop counts of 2:1 in their favor. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/02/world/europe/ukraine-russia-counteroffensive.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare ”NYTimes” posted:Instead of using tanks, which could easily be seen from the air or heard on the ground, the Ukrainians entered the village quietly, on foot and in small groups of infantry, after a World War I-style artillery bombardment.
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Jul 2, 2023 23:17
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The Ukrainians are doing "human wave attacks" now too? Go figure. I guess that's the logical thing to do instead getting picked off by ka52s in the middle of a minefield. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jul 3, 2023 00:06
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adebisi lives posted:The Ukrainians are doing "human wave attacks" now too? Go figure. No. quote:the Ukrainians entered the village quietly, on foot and in small groups of infantry Here's a video on a similar attack tl;dw Constant sneaky attacks by infantry with precision fire support are having great success against even well-prepared Russian positions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EQ67Siwra4
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Jul 3, 2023 00:19
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adebisi lives posted:The Ukrainians are doing "human wave attacks" now too? Go figure. Infiltration tactics are pretty much the opposite of human wave tactics. Basically if there's a bunch of trenches and minefields and what not, the idea would be to send small groups of soldiers on foot in at night to get past the fortifications without being seen. Then they can either group up and take the defenses by surprise or just avoid them and cut them off. As I understand it this requires very well trained and lead soldiers, and doesn't work well against advanced optics, but Ukraine might have the former and Russia probably doesn't have a lot of the latter.
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Jul 3, 2023 00:19
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Due to western aid, Ukraine probably has an advantage with night vision goggles, which would obviously help a lot.
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Jul 3, 2023 00:25
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Wouldn't Ukraines (or any country being invaded) response be the same under realism or neo liberalism? And NATOs response, at least in the short term, be the same?
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Jul 3, 2023 00:44
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Bremen posted:Infiltration tactics are pretty much the opposite of human wave tactics. Basically if there's a bunch of trenches and minefields and what not, the idea would be to send small groups of soldiers on foot in at night to get past the fortifications without being seen. Then they can either group up and take the defenses by surprise or just avoid them and cut them off. This is basically how the haudenashaunie depopulated the lower peninsula of Michigan during the beaver wars
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Jul 3, 2023 00:46
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BillsPhoenix posted:Wouldn't Ukraines (or any country being invaded) response be the same under realism or neo liberalism? Neoliberalism is primarily a loose set of economic postures, not an international relations theory in competition with international realism. Neither body of theory makes robustly falsifiable predictions.
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Jul 3, 2023 00:50
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Any proper Realist in the community these days needs to learn how to ignore any history of declining or indolent empire going hog wild on new ways to act completely contradictory to self interested ideals in Realist predictions. Like you gotta be all like "there's no credibility to the assumption the emperor would have the army out collecting beach detritus or whatever these reports are; assuming a perfectly spherical autocratic mechanism"
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Jul 3, 2023 00:58
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mearsheimer has completely sold out in case it wasn't already abundantly obvious
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Jul 3, 2023 01:02
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Bremen posted:Infiltration tactics are pretty much the opposite of human wave tactics. Basically if there's a bunch of trenches and minefields and what not, the idea would be to send small groups of soldiers on foot in at night to get past the fortifications without being seen. Then they can either group up and take the defenses by surprise or just avoid them and cut them off. Sneaking up on Russians in the dark was the entire Ghost Recon franchise until they got bad. I assert preemptively that discussing ghost recon does NOT count as clancychat
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Jul 3, 2023 01:05
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Discendo Vox posted:Neoliberalism is primarily a loose set of economic postures, not an international relations theory in competition with international realism. Neither body of theory makes robustly falsifiable predictions. Right on, that makes more sense. What qualifies as robustly falsifiable predictions? I.e. would the Russian and US pre war military assessments that Kiev falls in a week be a falsifiable prediction? Or is this more about systems and less about specific events?
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Jul 3, 2023 01:05
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Staluigi posted:Any proper Realist in the community these days needs to learn how to ignore any history of declining or indolent empire going hog wild on new ways to act completely contradictory to self interested ideals in Realist predictions. Like you gotta be all like "there's no credibility to the assumption the emperor would have the army out collecting beach detritus or whatever these reports are; assuming a perfectly spherical autocratic mechanism" That particular note happened 340 years before the fall of the western Roman empire. And it made perfect political sense at the time, because a core pillar of the Roman government was the perceived divine support of the Roman state. It was a direct response to a sudden storm sinking a roman fleet, so literaly acting like that was a declaration of war by the gods of the sea and going to humiliate them and take spoils, while rather absurd, was a politically rational action. It was only KIND of completely crazy. Kind of like how due to political decorum, despite not actual being 100% in the immediate best interests of any particular nation, no nation can be seen not going to international climate summits and being 'very concerned'. IR is still about as accurate as applying macroeconomic models without accounting for the fact people can make severe mistakes or that wealth, power, and economic laws can change position based on anything from a sudden death to a drunken shitpost.
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Jul 3, 2023 01:15
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Surprised this wasn't posted earlier, https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1674937327565656065?s=20 This makes a ton of sense to me, push towards cutting Crimea off from the mainland but it kind of feels like pre-2014 borders aren't happening.
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Jul 3, 2023 01:29
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Surprised this wasn't posted earlier, Let's get in front of that first line of trenches before talking about what may or may not happen by the fall.
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Jul 3, 2023 01:39
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I like my realists to not be realists. Anyway revisiting Niebuhr I saw this which has some relevance to the thread as it’s describing a justification that still comes up even though the is no longer a Soviet Union. “Imperialism is a perennial problem of human existence; for powerful nations and individuals inevitably tend to use the weak as instruments of their purposes. If the ambitions of the powerful are not purely exploitative, as they frequently are not, they are nevertheless never as purely paternal as they pretend. The Marxist theory, by identifying this imperialist tendency with the capitalist system, enables a new type of imperialism to relate itself to the weakness of the non-industrial world, under the cover of an ostensibly pure benevolence. In theory Russian politics are the expression of solidarity between the sacred center of a political religion and its various mission fields. Thus the Marxist channeling of the resentments of the recently emancipated, or not yet fully emancipated, colonial peoples not only accentuates the primary animus of their rebellion but also, ironically, predisposes them to court enslavement to a new master, under the illusion that he is an emancipator.”
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Jul 3, 2023 01:41
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Discendo Vox posted:Neoliberalism is primarily a loose set of economic postures, not an international relations theory in competition with international realism. Neither body of theory makes robustly falsifiable predictions. I mean there is a theory of international relations that's sometimes called neoliberalism but it's not really the same thing at all as what political scientists are normally talking about when they talk about neoliberalism in relation to e.g. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Just to be extra confusing.
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Jul 3, 2023 02:27
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Surprised this wasn't posted earlier, I kind of assume that was the idea is try to retake Melitopol by October and open negotiations. After that point it's clear they're just going to eventually kick them out of 2022 territory as a matter of when and not if. On top of that once they have Melitopol there probably isn't much Russia can realistically do to stop them from bombarding the Kerch bridge to rubble and making a precarious logistics system even more strained. The fact they haven't seriously tried tells me that's more useful as an off-ramp in negotiations. Nelson Mandingo fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Jul 3, 2023 |
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Jul 3, 2023 05:25
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https://www.reuters.com/world/cia-says-russia-is-recruiting-opportunity-disaffection-with-war-rises-2023-07-01/ Burns says its a golden opportunity to recruit spies in Russia, good way to stoke paranoia I guess. https://www.ft.com/content/d3e5c2df-3ba2-4420-a115-e437214ad509 Russia is attempting to use the grain deal as a way to get a backdoor into the global financial network. Wonder if the EU will bite.
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Jul 3, 2023 06:36
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Surprised this wasn't posted earlier, This has been my assumption for a while now. Crimea is the main prize for Russia and I suspect the primary value of the rest of the occupation is mostly just as a buffer for Crimea. As long as Ukraine cannot credibly threaten Crimea, Russia has no real motivation to negotiate; they already have everything they want from Ukraine. If Ukraine achieves a position where it can start casually shelling Crimea then it can use not doing that as a bargaining chip.
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Jul 3, 2023 06:48
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Discendo Vox posted:Neoliberalism is primarily a loose set of economic postures, not an international relations theory in competition with international realism. Neither body of theory makes robustly falsifiable predictions. International realism proponents distinctly made very specific predictions that turned out to be false - westerners only care about their pocket and will never support Ukraine, the west won't do anything in general, Germany will freeze to death. The error isn't just obvious now, in retrospect, when it failed, it was obvious at that point too because the assumptions it makes are wrong and borderline infantile - world is realists and moralists, countries only care about X, no one cares about Y, etc
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Jul 3, 2023 07:40
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It’s just the typical faults of academics who fall in love with a simplified, elegant model and then ignores when reality is messier and more complex. See: pretty much every economist model based on every single person and entity being rational, beep-boop robot actors (with ”rational” meaning acting acording to what the economist deems rational).
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Jul 3, 2023 09:02
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Somaen posted:International realism proponents distinctly made very specific predictions that turned out to be false - westerners only care about their pocket and will never support Ukraine, the west won't do anything in general, Germany will freeze to death. The error isn't just obvious now, in retrospect, when it failed, it was obvious at that point too because the assumptions it makes are wrong and borderline infantile - world is realists and moralists, countries only care about X, no one cares about Y, etc Individual realism proponents have made false predictions, but because it's an interest-based framing, it's effectively immune to comprehensive falsification, because it can be used to justify or explain any particular action. BillsPhoenix posted:Right on, that makes more sense. What qualifies as robustly falsifiable predictions? A falsifiable prediction is one that has clear falsification criteria; the predictions that Kiev would fall in a week is an example of a falsifiable prediction. The problem of international realism is that there's not a concrete relationship between the theory and specific claims or events; this means it can't make falsifiable predictions. Theories that cannot be tied to specific falsifiable claims necessarily lack explanatory value; they're useless or meaningless. The more that a theory can be directly tied to falsifiable claims (in other words, the more that it can be falsified or tested), the greater its potential explanatory value. This is all sort of logic 101; there are additional shades of complexity, but it's a straightforward way to illustrate why some "schools" of theory aren't well-regarded. Unfalsifiable frameworks can have some utility, but basically only as the first step in building more concrete, specific, and falsifiable theoretical frameworks. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 09:19 on Jul 3, 2023 |
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Jul 3, 2023 09:15
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In general what we call "high IR theory" is a thing that is dead in terms of new, interesting research and grad school prospects but still feels alive because many of its practitioners are late career guys with endowed chairs who get asked for quotes by the media, and also because it's the main way undergraduate students who take one course in IR learn the field. Empiricism -- including EITM (empirical implications of theoretical models) -- is how most IR practitioners are doing work today. You can debate the quality of the empiricism since much of it is using the same 200 countries * 100 years canonical datasets like Correlates of War or dyadic country-country variants. But it is empiricism. Probably the best hope for IR is that a new generation of scholars with good data skills are assembling large bespoke datasets, sone of which even have something other than a country as the unit of analysis. Or at least that's what I tell myself as a non-IR person who got drawn somewhat against my will into an IR/IPE research group...
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Jul 3, 2023 10:20
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I’m more of a Security Studies dude but I’m def IR. I don’t wanna be a dumb dumb, how do I do this thing and not become a mearshimer?
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Jul 3, 2023 10:30
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TheWeedNumber posted:I’m more of a Security Studies dude but I’m def IR. I don’t wanna be a dumb dumb, how do I do this thing and not become a mearshimer? Try operating on reality and a set of facts instead of pushing the narrative that has been discredited by observable events
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Jul 3, 2023 10:38
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fatherboxx posted:Try operating on reality and a set of facts instead of pushing the narrative that has been discredited by observable events if only the people I've come across had those capabilities. Now they're quoting kyiv independent, which isn't exactly strongly credible is it?
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Jul 3, 2023 10:41
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notwithoutmyanus posted:if only the people I've come across had those capabilities. Now they're quoting kyiv independent, which isn't exactly strongly credible is it? Indeed, there is a lot of garbage and extremely wishful thinking in the other camps with agenda as well.
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Jul 3, 2023 10:44
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We should just ask ChatGPT for analysis, AI has no bias.
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Jul 3, 2023 11:35
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MikeC posted:Civ Div has posted some helmet cam footage of what daily fighting in the south looks like. Small units poking up, getting spotted, shelled, and then falling back. Very interesting, thank you. I don't know this channel, so anyone know what the details behind him / this unit is? An american or english speaking unit of the normal Ukrainian line?
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Jul 3, 2023 11:57
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Bar Ran Dun posted:
Edit - sorry I see people asked you a bunch of questions, but if there’s anything you feel hasn’t been said I’m all ears. The Artificial Kid fucked around with this message at 12:48 on Jul 3, 2023 |
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Jul 3, 2023 12:43
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Nosre posted:Very interesting, thank you. I don't know this channel, so anyone know what the details behind him / this unit is? An american or english speaking unit of the normal Ukrainian line? He's an American volunteer who fought with the Kurds against ISIS and fought as a volunteer with Ukraine in early/mid-2022. He's not a member of the Ukraine Foreign Legion, and has been very transparent about his status. He left Ukraine sometime late 2022 and returned a few months ago (maybe in very late 2022?) to serve as an instructor at a non-profit run training camp. The training seems to mostly be individual soldier skills (marksmanship, first aid, etc.). He fundraises fairly hard for medical care for other non-Ukrainians he fought with and were injured. He seems legit, though I have not investigated the training non-profit or his wounded friends' collections at all.
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Jul 3, 2023 12:50
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Staluigi posted:Any proper Realist in the community these days needs to learn how to ignore any history of declining or indolent empire going hog wild on new ways to act completely contradictory to self interested ideals in Realist predictions. Like you gotta be all like "there's no credibility to the assumption the emperor would have the army out collecting beach detritus or whatever these reports are; assuming a perfectly spherical autocratic mechanism" Power cycle theory says that countries start wars when they are either a growing power or a shrinking power and their leaders perceive other countries as not giving them their due respect.The biggest critique I can think of is that growing or declining powers don't always start wars with other perceived peers, but it's a convenient, hand-wavey explanation for why several wars have started, including WWI, WWII, and the current Russian war in Ukraine.
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Jul 3, 2023 14:35
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Wanting "respect" is generally a good way of thinking about Russia since the country has massive complexes about perceptions in the extended Europe.
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Jul 3, 2023 14:47
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