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Majorian
Jul 1, 2009

Inverted Offensive Battle: Acupuncture Attacks Convert To 3D Penetration Tactics Taking Advantage of Deep Battle Opportunities

Xandu posted:

Saudi Arabia is none too happy with this article, and has pretty much accepted that their relationship with Obama is done.
http://www.arabnews.com/columns/news/894826

Inshallah.

Seriously, I'm very glad they're acting like such whiny babies about this. Hopefully this will just strengthen the administration's pivot towards Iran.

e:

quote:

Or is it because you have pivoted to Iran so much that you equate the Kingdom’s 80 years of constant friendship with America to an Iranian leadership that continues to describe America as the biggest enemy, that continues to arm, fund and support sectarian militias in the Arab and Muslim world, that continues to harbor and host Al-Qaeda leaders, that continues to prevent the election of a Lebanese president through Hezbollah, which is identified by your government as a terrorist organization, that continues to kill the Syrian Arab people in league with Bashar Assad?

Not sure this is the most compelling argument a Saudi prince could be making...

Majorian fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Mar 14, 2016

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Kristov
Jul 5, 2005

Discendo Vox posted:

My impression is that one of the main reasons the administration backed away from the Red Line was that Russia appeared unusually willing to support the Assad regime.

Yeah, plus that whole stopping Iran from getting nukes thing. If you take out their only buddy in the region they're probably just going to double down.

Majorian
Jul 1, 2009

Inverted Offensive Battle: Acupuncture Attacks Convert To 3D Penetration Tactics Taking Advantage of Deep Battle Opportunities

Discendo Vox posted:

My impression is that one of the main reasons the administration backed away from the Red Line was that Russia appeared unusually willing to support the Assad regime.


Kristov posted:

Yeah, plus that whole stopping Iran from getting nukes thing. If you take out their only buddy in the region they're probably just going to double down.

Exactly, and it's encouraging to see the President recognizing that, right or wrong, the Kremlin views this facet of their foreign policy as a "vital interest." We don't. So...advantage Kremlin in that regard.

That said, Putin is saying he's withdrawing troops from Syria, which is a pleasant surprise:

quote:

Putin, at a meeting in the Kremlin with his defense and foreign ministers, said Russian military forces in Syria had largely fulfilled their objectives and ordered an intensification of Russia's diplomatic efforts to broker a peace deal in the country.

But the Russian leader signaled Moscow would keep a military presence: he did not give a deadline for the completion of the withdrawal and said Russian forces would stay on at the port of Tartous and at the Hmeymim airbase in Syria's Latakia province.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin had telephoned Assad to inform him of the Russian decision. The move was announced on the day United Nations-brokered talks between the warring sides in Syria resumed in Geneva.

We'll see what that means, though, obviously.

KaptainKrunk
Feb 6, 2006


I have my criticisms of Obama's foreign policy, but I think he's given us much more flexibility. Our relationship to Saudi Arabia and Israel wasn't healthy and it took a lot of guts to stand up to them.

A lot of the confusion about our foreign policy comes from the fact that most of his advisers and both of his secretaries of state don't really agree with his basic premise of retrenchment and the relative decline in U.S. power. An unhealthy number of elite foreign policymakers think that we can continue to act like we're still in the 90s.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

KaptainKrunk posted:

I have my criticisms of Obama's foreign policy, but I think he's given us much more flexibility. Our relationship to Saudi Arabia and Israel wasn't healthy and it took a lot of guts to stand up to them.

A lot of the confusion about our foreign policy comes from the fact that most of his advisers and both of his secretaries of state don't really agree with his basic premise of retrenchment and the relative decline in U.S. power. An unhealthy number of elite foreign policymakers think that we can continue to act like we're still in the 90s.

That's the thing, it's not really a decline in US power. It's not employing hard power in risky ways where soft power seems much more effective. "Don't do stupid poo poo" is actually a pretty comprehensive policy when most things being proposed are stupid.

Tesseraction
Apr 5, 2009

Xandu posted:

Saudi Arabia is none too happy with this article, and has pretty much accepted that their relationship with Obama is done.
http://www.arabnews.com/columns/news/894826

Very classy of them to invoke Yemen when it's report after report of them committing war crimes against civilians there.

Main Paineframe
Oct 27, 2010

Volkerball posted:

My view has nothing to do with the US in particular. I just believe in the responsibility to protect. Sovereignty is conditional, and the condition is that a nation must protect its citizens. If it isn't doing that, then the burden of protecting its citizens falls upon the international community. And I advocate based along those lines as a citizen of a democratic nation with the strongest military on earth. Now whether or not a country is adequately protecting its citizens is subjective of course, but I do think at a certain extreme, there's not much debate to be had. I doubt anyone would say that it would have been violating Nazi Germany's sovereignty to attack it if the primary reason for the attack was based around the operation of concentration camps, because that position would be accurately described as pro-holocaust. So there's a line that everybody draws at a certain point. In my opinion, the Syrian government is on the wrong side of that line. That's the fundamental aspect that dictates that Assad's claim to rule Syria is no more legitimate than my own. That's not even close to saying the US should be allowed to act with impunity wherever it wants.

The problem with a so-called "right to protect" that invalidates national sovereignty and becomes a legitimate causus belli for the overthrow of a government is that it becomes a political tool. Since it isn't an obligation (and fundamentally can't be, since there is no body that can compel compliance and never will be) then nations will only intervene when it suits their interests, even if it means refusing to acknowledge obvious human rights abuses (for example, the way the US refused to admit the coup in Egypt in order to avoid legal restrictions on backing anti-democratic coups). On the other hand, if a nation wants an excuse to intervene for their own interests, they might concoct a humanitarian crisis where none exists and use it as an excuse to attack, since there is no body with the authority to judge such claims and never will be (for example, WMDs in Iraq). It simply becomes an excuse for the same old political shenanigans. It's not new, either. You cite the Nazis as a potential target of such concepts, but Nazi Germany itself claimed similar rights in some of its territorial acquisitions (for example, demanding the Sudetenland in response to made-up claims of oppression against Germans), while the international community went along with such claims.

Volkerball posted:

I tried to specify so you wouldn't make that first argument, but here we are. Assuming the Nazi's hadn't espoused aggressive expansion as an ideology, what then? Do you respect their sovereignty and let them do as they please with the Jewish people who were living within Germany? What about Rwanda? Should we have recognized their government as legitimate while it was a figurehead for the ruling militias that were out massacring people in the streets? They were in fact the leaders of Rwanda, after all.

Should Belgium have been invaded for the excesses of the infamous Congo Free State? If the German Empire had invaded Belgium six years earlier, when hand-collecting under the brutal rule of Leopold II was still the norm, should the British have refused to honor their commitment to Belgian neutrality or even invaded Belgium themselves? Should Britain have invaded America in the 1850s to depose the government over the continuing existence of slavery or the ongoing extermination of the Native Americans? Or should it have invaded the US in 1942 to protest the internment of Japanese-Americans? As it turns out, the questions get a lot more difficult when you don't use "literally the Nazis" as your test case.

crabcakes66 posted:

Why doesn't your country?

Because the US, as well as most European countries, would intervene in favor of Israel? The first rule of international politics for the last hundre-fifty years or more is that going against a Great Power is doomed to failure unless you have the support of another Great Power. Also, for various political reasons, most Western governments pretend there aren't any human-rights abuses there.

radmonger
Jun 6, 2011
It's always worth remembering that the official nazi justification for invading Poland was legitimate self defence in response to an unprovoked attack.They even bothered to pick up a corpse from the morgue to parade as a casualty.

If you have a bunch of lying madmen who want war, changing the details of the lie they tell achieve little.

A more useful question is assuming you are trying to avoid war, how can you do so,? I mean, few would doubt that was obamas main priority over Syria,l. But what he got was a bigger war than bush ever managed.

crabcakes66
May 24, 2012

by exmarx

Main Paineframe posted:

Because the US, as well as most European countries, would intervene in favor of Israel?

The poster I was quoting being from one of those countries that would intervene. A country with its own long history of doing horrible things all around the world. Including plenty of responsibility for the shitshow that is the middle east.

Mc Do Well
Aug 2, 2008

by FactsAreUseless

crabcakes66 posted:

The poster I was quoting being from one of those countries that would intervene. A country with its own long history of doing horrible things all around the world. Including plenty of responsibility for the shitshow that is the middle east.

USA USA USA

KaptainKrunk
Feb 6, 2006


Tesseraction posted:

Very classy of them to invoke Yemen when it's report after report of them committing war crimes against civilians there.

To be fair, we helped them, contrary to international and domestic law, to carry out those war crimes. There were plenty of policy options we had to lessen the carnage. Continuing to authorize the sale of billions of dollars worth of both guided and unguided munitions after ample evidence of war crimes emerged doesn't send a very strong signal.

KaptainKrunk fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Mar 15, 2016

Fojar38
Sep 2, 2011


Sorry I meant to say I hope that the police use maximum force and kill or maim a bunch of innocent people, thus paving a way for a proletarian uprising and socialist utopia


also here's a stupid take
---------------------------->

KaptainKrunk posted:

I have my criticisms of Obama's foreign policy, but I think he's given us much more flexibility. Our relationship to Saudi Arabia and Israel wasn't healthy and it took a lot of guts to stand up to them.

A lot of the confusion about our foreign policy comes from the fact that most of his advisers and both of his secretaries of state don't really agree with his basic premise of retrenchment and the relative decline in U.S. power. An unhealthy number of elite foreign policymakers think that we can continue to act like we're still in the 90s.

There hasn't been any relative decline of US power in any meaningful sense.

Mc Do Well
Aug 2, 2008

by FactsAreUseless

Fojar38 posted:

There hasn't been any relative decline of US power in any meaningful sense.

Yup we still have the nuclear triad

Fojar38
Sep 2, 2011


Sorry I meant to say I hope that the police use maximum force and kill or maim a bunch of innocent people, thus paving a way for a proletarian uprising and socialist utopia


also here's a stupid take
---------------------------->
"Relative decline" is a phrase that has been in vogue among foreign policy folks for the past few years but it's mostly pessimism brought on by the financial crisis combined with the myth of the BRICS, which is deteriorating as we speak. It's also a really simplistic argument when it comes down to it. "The USA can't get 100% of what it wants all the time, therefore US decline," which ignores that there has never been a point in history where any country anywhere has been able to get everything it wants all the time.

Haystack
Jan 23, 2005





Given that the USA hit its stride right after WW2 when basically the entire rest of the world was either a smoldering ruin or colonial shitheap... Yeah, we've lost relative power. We had lead, and now it's smaller.

Fojar38
Sep 2, 2011


Sorry I meant to say I hope that the police use maximum force and kill or maim a bunch of innocent people, thus paving a way for a proletarian uprising and socialist utopia


also here's a stupid take
---------------------------->

Haystack posted:

Given that the USA hit its stride right after WW2 when basically the entire rest of the world was either a smoldering ruin or colonial shitheap... Yeah, we've lost relative power. We had lead, and now it's smaller.

Okay, but that happened back in the late 20th century. Most people point to the 70's.

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Haystack posted:

Given that the USA hit its stride right after WW2 when basically the entire rest of the world was either a smoldering ruin or colonial shitheap... Yeah, we've lost relative power. We had lead, and now it's smaller.

The Soviet Union was at the peak of its power in 1945. I don't actually think the US has meaningfully changed in power dynamics with regards to the rest of the world over the last 100 years. It's never been omnipotent in the sense that lots of neocons made it out to be in 1991. But it's also not declining in the broad scheme of things in any meaningful way.

Majorian
Jul 1, 2009

Inverted Offensive Battle: Acupuncture Attacks Convert To 3D Penetration Tactics Taking Advantage of Deep Battle Opportunities

icantfindaname posted:

The Soviet Union was at the peak of its power in 1945. I don't actually think the US has meaningfully changed in power dynamics with regards to the rest of the world over the last 100 years.

We did have nuclear supremacy from '45-'49 actually...

Tesseraction
Apr 5, 2009

KaptainKrunk posted:

To be fair, we helped them, contrary to international and domestic law, to carry out those war crimes. There were plenty of policy options we had to lessen the carnage. Continuing to authorize the sale of billions of dollars worth of both guided and unguided munitions after ample evidence of war crimes emerged doesn't send a very strong signal.

Look, Obama had his red line and he used it in Syria. That line is in Syria right now and it's too dangerous to go and pick it up again, so we can't put it down in Yemen until Syria tidies up a bit so we can send in a courier.

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Peel
Dec 3, 2007

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNrjtYd_BsM

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