Ukraine (closed; covers till August 2014)

[OUTLAW 09]

You can write "UW" as often as you want, but buzzwords bring nothing to the table.

I am a European and there's at least one huge gap in the European security architecture which was meant to not allow war to slip into Europe.
This is a big deal to us.

Look at it from the long-term angle; the Ukraine crisis isn't only about itself, but it's like a computer which got disabled by malware. We ought to scramble to fix the vulnerability to protect other computers.
To save the disabled computer should be secondary to the community.


And sorry, but I don't see anything interesting in what you call Putin's "political warfare". I've seen too much of it in history books. It's normal.

The problem in the Ukraine is that he's staying below a certain threshold, and he does so because the threshold is high for a great power. This is essentially what GWB did to Iraq as well (getting away with an aggression without overt hostile intervention), except that his threshold was much higher due to the alliance situation, so his gang was much more brazen.


We need to lower the thresholds and make sure potential aggressors understand about the lowered level, so they don't mess up by misunderstanding them.

See fuchs---here is the difference between you the European and myself the American having lived say in Germany since say 1967 and understanding the European better than themselves.

What Europeans got in 1989 was the ability to disarm their militaries and to drive down their defense budgets to a level that was "comfortable" meaning militaries were now "cheap" compared to say 1985. Yes some participated in AFG, but again it was not a great investment and in the mean time they continued the disarmament---take Germany and the cutting of their armored brigades last year.

Then the European companies went on a spending and investing binge in Russia as it "appeared" to be the great next business market and they did in fact make great money in their investments and still do today so hey who wants to rock the boat and besides Europeans thought that if one invests a lot in another country then that country would not want to cause a war which seems to have not been true now.

So what is the European answer currently towards Putin---what is the lower threshold you are going to set---what not continue buying his gas.

Putin would really respect Europeans if in fact they placed sanctions on Russia that in fact hurt European businesses as well as that would show him Europeans are willing to sacrifice their money for an ideal---that ain't about to happen believe me,

What you think is a buzz word is exactly what is allowing Putin to stay under a specific level and do not think for a moment that what is being practiced by the "separatists" ie proRussian armed groups is nothing more or less that outright UW at the tactical level.

UW as a strategy gives a country the ability in political warfare to scale up and scale down their responses depending on what the Ukrainians do as well as what the Europeans do.

By the way the term political warfare fell out of use over 30 or so years ago and has not been discussed much since then.

But hey continue believing that buzz words do not count and continue believing that what you are seeing is not UW which seems to be the European way.