- Ukraine destroyed columns of waiting Russian soldiers with HIMARS, a Ukrainian commander said.
- He said Ukraine targeted them as soon as it got permission to use allied weapons across the border.
- Military experts say Ukraine’s ability to use Western-supplied weapons in Russia is aiding its fightback.
The only thing that modern diplomacy teaches nation states today is that they need to get nukes as quickly as possible
No it doesn’t. The US especially has spent a ton of money building up countries it has defeated in war.
The prime minister decides that their only course of action is to declare war on the United States. Expecting a quick and total defeat (since their standing army is tiny and equipped with bows and arrows), the country confidently expects to rebuild itself through the largesse that the United States bestows on all its vanquished enemies
Yes it does, in direct reply to what you said
There’s no world police to prevent Russia from nuking everyone.
The only reason we’re slow rolling Ukraine is because Russia has nukes. Here’s a great study on it. https://assets.cambridge.org/97811071/06949/frontmatter/9781107106949_frontmatter.pdf
Nukes are good, but in fact full arsenal, from home-produced small mortars to MRBMs, and a standing military. Actually, if possible, all the means of power projection the big guys have. Including even proxy militants. Because the big guys back up their words with the blood of the small guys anyway.
You’re speaking about the means of which to project military power on the ground with direct action, I’m talking about the nature of nuclear weapons as a deterrent and how that changes the way soft and hard power is applied.
Nukes make it so that no direct combat need ever take place, look at NK or the inverse where we are applying sanctions against Iran for a current parallel.
It requires very rigid discipline to threaten your enemy with MAD. The more tasks you can solve without testing your own faction’s discipline, the better. If every parking place argument gets to threats of nuking the opponent, because you can’t threaten anything else, either eventually you’ll have to use MAD for such a small cause, or you’ll step back on that and then there’ll be something a bit more important over which you’ll threaten MAD.
And so on, until MAD is in practice useless for you.
