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citaat Douglas Macgregor, Aug. 01.2023: > > > > In February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin opted for incrementalism in his approach to the “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine. Putin committed fewer than 100,000 Russian troops to a shallow penetration attack on a broad front into a country the size of Texas. Having failed over a period of nearly 15 years to persuade Washington and the collective West of Moscow’s opposition to NATO’s advance to the east, Putin seems to have concluded that Washington and its NATO allies would prefer immediate negotiations to a destructive regional war with unknowable potential for escalation to the nuclear level.
Putin was wrong. He made a false assumption based on rational choice theory. Rational choice theory attempts to predict human behavior based on the assumption that individuals habitually make choices in economics, politics, and daily life that align with their personal best interest.
The problem with the theory is that human beings are not rational. < < <
Douglas Macgregor: Make Peace, You Fools! America’s proxy war with Russia has transformed Ukraine into a graveyard. In: The American Conservative, Aug 1, 2023
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Douglas Macgregor: Last Hope Destroyed!!
Very Very Dangerous! The Russians Will NOT Tolerate It
Aug. 5, 2023 – SCOTT RITTER || “ The Russo-Ukrainian Conflict: Understanding the Tensions”
“Ukraine’s army is being ANNIHILATED thanks to NATO’s plan” – Scott Ritter | Redacted News
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Putin isn’t a Fool – The Mother of all Miscalculations | Dmitry Orlov
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Citaat Michael W. Doyle (1997): > > > > Eminent practitioners Of Realist diplomacy regularly invoke Thucydides’s [460-404] authority.
Thucydides is essentially a Realist, who believed that none of the traditional moral norms linking individuals across state boundaries have reliable effect. Interstate relations in his view exist in a condition where war is always possible, a state of war such as that “hard school of danger” that persisted between Athens and Sparta during the “peace” that preceded the actual outbreak of hostilities. To Thucydides, as to later Realists, international anarchy precludes the effective escape from the dreary history of war and conflict that are the consequences of competition under anarchy.
But unlike some later Realists, Thucydides did not seek to reduce world politics to some causal essence. For him, world politics was caught in a web of antinomies. He did not think that states were the only significant actors in international politics. Individuals, such as Alcibiades, played important and sometimes independent roles in the determination of the course of international events; but their characters, mistakes, and misperceptions did not independently or essentially define world politics.
Nor did Thucydides think that state interest could or should be defined solely in terms of the rational pursuit of power. No abstraction or structurally determined model of political behavior could successfully supersede a more complex explanation drawing on the actual variety of ends (“security, honor, and self-interest”) that animated political leaders and citizens. Polities did systematically differ, but their differences did not allow for a transformation of the state of war.
The “complexity” of Thucydidean Realism suggests that the important events of interstate politics can be explained by examining the roles of leadership, state regimes, and international structures. At the same time, it cannot be explained by any one factor alone – not by the character of individual leaders or the proclivities of certain types of states or the imperatives of the balance of power. Only by considering all together can we gain a sense of why wars and peace occur, why some states achieve victory, and some are defeated.
But his lessons are not simple or straightforward; instead he asks us to learn through a critical rethinking of each historical development and the careful consideration of the various interactions of all the actual participants. < < < <
Michael W. Doyle (1997:50-53) Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism ISBN 0 393 96947 9 (het citaat is geredigeerd; vet en cursief toegevoegd)