"The 1980's are calling to ask for their foreign policy back."

Yeah, unfortunately I still expect Russia to take Ukraine.

Whether or not they can hold it long term is an open question, but people should be ready for it to get worse.

So we are responsible for Ukraine's invasion? Trump was right?

I'm not seeing the downside of giving Putin what he wanted. I'm guessing it was guarantees that Ukraine wouldn't join Nato?

You imagine WW2 would have been winnable without it?

Absolutely. France alone could have captured the Ruhr, Germany's industrial heartland, in 1939. Imagine WWII with the Nazis unable to utilize their technical proficiencies. Germany got stronger, much stronger, for the next few years, not weaker.

But what that required was being willing to commit to war in the West, where the Western allies could actually project power, instead of allowing the Nazis to consolidate their gains in the East, which greatly strengthened their position.

By sitting behind their defensive line and not acting France made the expansion of WWII inevitable.

Their one probe east, the Saar Offensive, was immediately abandoned. They had overwhelming local superiority: 2-1 division superiority, 400 tanks vs none for the Nazis (all deployed in Poland, and oh, yeah, inferior to the French models), 4700 artillery pieces vs 100 for the Nazis (same). They even had air superiority, as virtually the entire Luftwaffe was engaged in Poland. They timidly poked around and then retreated to their line. Their command stated not to fly air operations in Germany even to cover their advance!

The 1939 Nazi army was a shell of what it would become. Even the year of the Sitzkreigh, the Phony War, gave the Germans a chance to make the Panzer III their main battle tank. In 1939 it was a mix of Panzer Is and IIs, both light tanks outgunned by their French and British rivals.

And the UK was the largest empire in the world at the time, with the most resources it could bring to bear.

It should have begun rearmament in 1935, after the German reannexation of the Rhineland. The Nazis were well under way by that point, and had made their plans quite clear. They explicitly stated that they were rearming and ignoring the limitations of the Versaille treaty.

I mean, hell, they didn't even sanction Nazi Germany for annexing the Sudetenland and leaving Czechloslovakia a client state of the Germans.

He wanted that guarantee because he always planned to eventually do this. And, oh by the way, Ukraine never did join NATO.

He wants the resources and to secure his Crimean naval base. He'd prefer a proxy puppet, but if necessary he clearly has shown the willingness to do it the old fashioned way.

The fact it's not working means he's on to part III - level the nation so it will take decades before it can try to reassert control of the breakaway regions or more importantly Crimea.

This article from Forbes does a good job of explaining how the allies dropped the ball several times leading up to 1939.

Sanctions rarely work anyway, often producing more civilian harm than they prevent.

I dispute that the French were in any position to act other than defensively and fight as an insurgency. The evidence for that is historical, they'd long since let Ruhr go by the time anyone was even cognizant of a realistic WW2 and by the time Hitler was invading Poland they had no logistical chance of making it happen.

Shortly after that they were occupied themselves and fighting as a resistance movement.

Had Britain been able to fight the Luftwaffe head on at that point (not to mention the Nazi land military) we would have done so.

We couldn't and didn't because even after the time Chamberlain bought us we were still decades behind German technology and tactics despite having scaled up enormously from what you describe as the "height of our power".

We were partially ready for Naval warfare but still required lend lease. We had an outdated army explicitly armed and structured to fight in trench warfare whose projected success even in that arena would depend on mass conscription.

Against modern German armour and decentralised tactical decision making we stood no chance of even mobilising effectively, much less putting up anything more than a token defence on French soil.

Quite simply the fact of the channel kept us from being overrun because that armour could not be deployed and the Luftwaffe were operating at the end of their effective range. British planes could remain in the fight longer, coordinate better, refuel and re arm quicker and benefit from ground based air defences.

Without those advantages we would have lost even after expanding our military capacity.

Sans the Battle of Britain as fought the RAF couldn't have gone on to launch raids over Europe against an overstretched and straining Luftwaffe (or do anything else for that matter), further weakening German infrastructure.

Likewise had we already been beaten through unreadiness there would have been much less chance of a US intervention being successful. What better staging ground could have been dreamed of?

They rarely produce regime change. They can however limit a nation's ability to expand it's arsenal.

They lacked the will to do so. When Germany marched into the Rhineland they did so with 3000 troops. Over 100,000 French soldiers were on the border. It would have been child's play for France to slap that down - indeed, German generals were concerned that they'd lose the entire Reich. In 1939 they held significant advantages against a Germany once again fighting a war on two fronts. Sufficient momentum could have even extended Poland's life, perhaps even prevented an immediate attack by the Soviet Union, whose own army had been decimated by Stalin during the Red Army purges.

It's understandable they didn't want a war on their own home soil, but once again, they allowed that to happen. By fighting on German soil they could have changed the reality, and perhaps even modified the perception of the war among a populace still shell shocked from WWI.

But not only was their leadership weak and their personnel demoralized, they had been captured by German propaganda to believe Germany was already a mighty nation. When indeed every military historian will tell you that by this point the Germans still had significant shortfalls in their military.

Yeah, that's just wrong. It was 9 months later, which is a significant amount of time in WWII. The Germans seized Denmark and Norway during this time. All of Operation Bagration, the largest military offensive in history, occurred in three months. In the Western theater, D-Day, Caen, the break out at St.Lo, the encirclement of Nancy, Operation Market Garden, Patton's attack on Metz, and the Battle of the Bulge all occurred in a six month time frame.

French inertia allowed them to be outflanked and beaten in detail.

I understand why, and I sympathize, but it was absolutely the wrong thing to do.

Decades? Ridiculous. The problem was conservatism and economy - many of the thought leaders on the concept of blitzkreig came from the West, particularly Great Britain. An anti-intellectual movement defeated it. But Britain literally invented the tank, and Liddell Hart and JC Fuller were writing books on concentrated, independent tank warfare in the early 1920s. Tuckhavechesky in the Soviet Union came along in the early 30s. Stalin had him executed in '37.

The first modern mechanized regiment that could carry out independent deep strikes? United Kingdom, 1927. It was disbanded in '28. First armored division? France, 1934.

And once the Ten Year Rule was abrogated the West strained under the Great Depression. UK military spending in 1919 was nine times higher than 1932.

Even then, they were only a year behind in aviation, with their monoplanes the Hawker Hurricane and the more famous Spitfire being as good as any in the world. These were coming online as of '39.

On Sept 1st, British and French military was nearly at parity with the Germans. They actually had more airplanes, their tanks were equal in number but much heavier, including the commonwealth they had considerably more men under arms.

But they had more territory to defend and much worse leadership, which also dulled their doctrine.

It wasn't an inevitability that things went as badly as they did. Much of it was due to unforced errors.

The 'modern German armour' is a myth. That came later - hell, the Allies had the advantage up to '43. When the Lees and Shermans came into play they were better than their German counterparts, just like the Somua-35 before them. It wasn't until '44 that the Nazis actually gained mechanical advantage in the capability of their tanks. The German's biggest superiority was in anti-tank capability, where the Pak88s were used with brutal efficiency. The biggest problem was doctrine - the UK and France both chose not to prepare for a war of maneuver, despite their own military theorists telling them it was coming for over a decade. There was an entire generation growing up with this knowledge that was ignored - in the US it was Patton, in the UK Hart and Fuller, in France Etienne and de Gaulle.

Mobilization is a separate issue, independent of armored doctrine. The British had the greatest power projection capability in the world in 1939. The problem was the lack of resources put into their army when it came to a land battle on the continent.

And lend-lease became necessary largely in part due to that failure. The British navy had complete dominance on the sea. If they could have kept the Germans bottled up in the North Sea then the U-boat war would have been very similar to the Great War, WWI - a threat but not an existential one. The ineptness in dealing with Norway, which was a naval invasion the Admiralty completely missed on and should never have happened, and then the fall of France provided dozens of U-boat bases to come into being over the next year. Across a width of region that even the greatest navy in the World for the last 400 years with an indomitable naval tradition couldn't overcome. Blocking sallies past the British isles from the Helgoland blight was child's play in comparison.

Well, that and absolute dominance in naval surface warfare and operating the only carriers left in the ATO. The Germans and Italians never developed them, the one French carrier was seized by America and was not allowed to return to Vichy France. Even if the Germans won the Battle of Britain it's doubtful they could have successfully prosecuted Sea Lion with one battleship and two battlecruisers vs Britain's naval might, let alone resupply a successful beachhead.

Yes, by yourself the British would have lost a continental military conflict. But then, that was never their goal. It was primarily up to the French, and they failed. But if different choices had been made, that might not have happened, and it was never inevitable.

Agreed there. If Britain fell, it would have been either a Russian or German continent for decades. The likelihood of that happening though was slim - a major policy review by Sandhurst with the best military minds in the West in the early 2000s saw that the problems faced by Hitler in '40/41 were too large. It really only could have been done if he didn't attack the Soviets, or much later in the late 40s/early 50s if he had done so and won.

But the preponderance of data indicates that Western nations faced defeat was more likely, not less, through appeasement.

Lots of mistakes were made, and while we are analyzing Western Europe, clearly they were also made in the US and throughout the world. The US was even more unprepared for the war that was coming.

I have sympathy for Neville Chamberlain, I understand why he did what he did and can empathize with the place he was in. Ramsay faced similar problems - he too wanted to expand war production more quickly.

But decisive action could have averted the worse that followed, and there's little doubt in hindsight that their actions were far too timid in the face of unrelenting ambition and absolute disregard for the human price paid.

It's not a direct parallel to what we face today - Putin has to worry about nuclear deterrence. But it's understandable why the subject comes up.

Also, this:

South African Apartheid disagrees!

C'mon, spot... you're smarter than this.

Sanctions may not always curb a country's bad behavior, but they add a cost for it. The leaders of a sanctioned country have to deal with discontented citizens, a weakened economy, and regional competitors/adversaries who are not similarly weakened.

This seems big.

A great read is Herman Wouk's Winds of War (which ends with the Pearl Harbor attack) and it's sequel War and Remembrance. It's fiction and should not be regarded as a definitive source, but it's a great overview of the runup to WW II and it's conclusion. While it is fiction, Wouk worked very hard to get the dates and places of major events right and while history majors might find some nits to pick it seems broadly accurate. The lead character is a career naval officer who gets sent to Berlin in 1939 as a military attache. Through his eyes, Wouk makes the argument that England and France could have settled Hitler's hash early on, but fumbled the opportunity through a lack of will, even though they had clear advantages on paper in materiel. That said, I came across a brief bio of Chamberlain on Youtube. Whilst Chamberlain makes a convenient scapegoat for Hitler's rise there were reasons (good or bad reasons is debatable) for what he did. Appeasement did not come out of a simple lack of moral fiber.

Let's hope that comes off (the MiG transfer Anc mentioned).

Mother Jones raised the fact that Putin does have options short of nukes i.e. chemical/biological weapons. He's seen already that the US backed down from punishing even non-nuclear Syria from using those, so he might gamble that they won't push the matter if he deploys them in Ukraine.

It's an old problem.

You don't want to strike until you have to, but if you wait until you have to, it may already be too late.

The Israelis pre-emptively attacked Egypt in the 1967 Six-Day War and, even though it's absolutely clear that the Arab states were preparing to invade Israel, they still took heat for being the aggressors.

Russia has already started laying the groundwork claiming there were US funded bioweapon labs in eastern Ukraine.

Right-wing media is eating it up:
https://thewashingtonstandard.com/is-ukraine-destroying-evidence-of-us-funded-bioweapons-program/

If they aren't busying peddling the idea that the whole invasion is a hoax:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/60589965

Word on the twitters is that Putin has banned all exports to the 48 countries that have sanctioned Russia.
Haven’t seen anything official.

Seems a bit like a ‘You can’t fire me, I quit!’ move but we’ll see.

Poland's gonna be racking up the vodka sales if Smirnoff and Absolut are off the shelves.

Pessimistic but worth reading....

Also this...

Long but good read:

This seems like a good idea:

Zelensky wins Ronald Reagan Freedom Award for "courageous fight against tyranny"

Eh, not really.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...k-at-push-to-advance-ukraine-s-membership-bid

We should know more later this week.

[edit] He is also really misrepresenting Boris Johnson’s statement:
“The truth is that Ukraine had no serious prospect of NATO membership in the near future”


https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/opinion/boris-johnson-russia-putin-ukraine-war.html

Seems lil Kim and Saddam didn't get the message. They were strengthened by the public perception of outside oppression.