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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> The only way to stop the endless cycle of imperial nationalism, Mr Navalny argued, is for Russia to decentralise power and turn itself into a parliamentary republic.

I love a decentralised parliamentary republic as much as the next person, but to say that reduces the risk of imperial nationalism is madness. The reason to use decentralised parliamentary systems is because they are much more effective at picking, fighting and sustaining wars with a strong economy.

A very significant reason the world transitioned from British Empire to American Totally Not An Empire All These Military Bases Are Normal is because they are the most successful decentralised parliamentary systems.

Dictators win wars against smaller dictators, and sometimes manage to take out a rotten democracy that has overcentralised. But democracies are military beasts and totally compatible with imperial ambitions.

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However, democracies tend to only fuel popular wars, and wars of aggression lose popularity when information is freely available.

Check out Jeffrey Sach's recent take on that. You can skip right to 4:50. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP_SpW-DyQg&t=318

He was instrumental in the neo liberal conversion of the Soviet union.

This is great: "Jeffrey stop, I'm your moderator, it's enough"

("democratically at home and ruthlessly imperialist abroad")

Democracies have powerful propaganda machines to make wars of aggression popular...

> However, democracies tend to only fuel popular wars, and wars of aggression lose popularity when information is freely available.

What's your basis for saying that so generally? It's probably true for a war of aggression that you're losing, but I'm not sure if it would hold for one you're winning.

Also, I suspect you're also probably making an assumption that a democracy will invariably settle on an ideological outlook similar to elites in present-day western democracies, but I don't think that's very solid.

I did actually write a second sentence about when you're losing, but removed it because I needed to think about it. I think there's some contextual stuff to consider - I was thinking about this specific situation. It's not going very well for Russia, especially for their soldiers. If people are dying in an unnecessary war then they'd vote to stop it, and one party is likely to capitalise on that in a democracy.

Second is maintaining the propaganda about Ukraine in the face of free information. It's not like the Vietnam war where culture and language was very different and other, especially at that time when people were not so globally connected. It's more like America invading Canada. Similar language, shared culture and history, large numbers of people of each country in each country etc. I think if the war could be talked about in Russia there would be a pressing question: why the f are we there, what will we even gain? The gain is for Putin to maintain power, a democracy wouldn't see any benefit. Maybe there would be another reason, but that's not what we're discussing.

> losing ... winning

not 'losing or winning' but upholding the principle of 'no aggression' is what is (hopefully) popular?

If this war had begun under a parliamentary democracy (that in itself is not certain but let’s assume it’s the case for the sake of argument), the government would almost certainly have been forced to find ways to pull out of it before the “partial mobilization”. There’s no way a parliamentary democracy would have survived that.

There is a lot of truth to that. But I do want to raise the obvious point that the War in Afghanistan [0] was almost seen buying alcohol legally.

Democracies are great at sustaining long aggressive wars despite it being a really stupid thing to do (the US destroyed a lot of its own wealth & the opportunity costs were jaw dropping). There was never really a question of the US army being unable to achieve military objectives.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001-2021)

I agree with most of your points in this thread, but with regard to Afghanistan the objectives of the US Army were frankly really nebulous and ill-defined to the point of total confusion. We'd waver back and forth between "destroy the enemy with no mercy" and "be nice, don't shoot unless shot at, make sure to talk about schools and democracy to the Taliban".

In the same general parameters of your critique on this post, if the US had actually treated Afghanistan like an Imperial Colony I actually think the outcome would've been much more palatable to all involved. Treat the country like a colony, and make them pay taxes for administering their security, forcibly educate (meaning: re-educate) the populous, hand off administration of the government in pieces over about 50 years as the civil infrastructure and information coordination systems mature. Alas, this would've been maybe 10x more expensive than what we already paid, and for reasons that should be obvious the model we used in Japan and Germany really doesn't quite fit in that place.

The war in Afghanistan has very few American deaths. Like, less then 2500 soldiers dead total over 20 years. All of them professionals, literally none of them mobilized.

The impact on USA was minor to non existent. Impact of this war on Russia is massive.

I wouldn't say 2.3 trillion dollars are a minor impact.

It was absolutely fine. Read "War is a Racket" by Major General Smedley Butler.

https://archive.org/details/WarIsARacket

(yes, yes, this is a "/s" for those who can't figure it out.)

These are pretty confident, extremely sweeping claims. I don’t think societal level forces can be so easily reduced.

Let's look at the last 3 superpowers in history and compare the USSR to the US, or China to the US.

Which of the 3 would be best described as an imperial nationalist?

- USSR voluntarily disbanded. Moskow currently can't even assert military dominance over the Ukraine. Sole claim to global relevancy for Moscow is the soviet era nuclear arsenal.

- China might practically be able to invade a small island off their coastline, but it isn't obvious that they could tolerate the backlash. The quality of their army is largely unknown because they haven't used it seriously in decades.

- US has flattened multiple Middle Eastern countries in the last few decades, the world meets in New York to conduct diplomacy regardless and barely makes an issue of this. Has had a comparable number of soldiers stationed in Germany to the German army (at least it did recently, I think that changed under either Trump or Biden). The US dollar is used for international trade and the people who move off it get invaded for unrelated reasons. Technically they did voluntarily shrink their empire too though, because of that business with the Phillipines, but they are still the undisputed military hegemon and set the pace of global affairs. By far the most invasive worldwide spy network.

Now this may well be a good state of affairs but the parliamentary democracy is not the timid and delicate flower in this picture. It is the most imperialist of the 3, by far. I can speak in sweeping generalisations because this is a big, obvious and hard to miss state of affairs.

Democracies are just more effective than dictators at building and maintaining an empire.

> because of that business with the Phillipines

At the time, the Philippines had the same status as Hawaii. Hawaii was a non-state during WW2 that became a full state 14 years later, and the Phillippines became independent instead. I wonder who has it better now? Who would like to switch places with the other one?

Let's ask the opposite question. Why was Hawaii absorbed but not the Philippines? Who's in Hawaii today that's happy with the status quo, and whose sacred lands are being turned into a road? Did the native population choose to join as a state or was that imposed on them?

> or was that imposed on them

How exactly imposed? A candidate state needs to hold a referendum in order to ask for statehood status. If the people of the territory don't want to join, nobody will force them to join. It's the other thing that happens: people of a territory want to join and Congress does not grant them statehood. Just ask Puerto Rico.

Remember that "them" above refers to the native population in Hawaii in the post it's taken from. The reason the referendum succeeded was a big decline in the native population combined with large amounts of immigration from the U.S. Today only 6% of the population are native Hawaiians or 21% if we include part-Hawaiians. That population has doubled since Hawaii became a state.

> The reason the referendum succeeded was a big decline in the native population combined with large amounts of immigration from the U.S.

Is that a fact, or just your conjecture?

All I could find was that in 1940 about 46 thousand people voted in favor of becoming a state, and 22 thousand against. Are you saying there's evidence the native population voted preponderantly against?

In any case, it took 19 years from that referendum until the Congress approved the statehood. There was a final vote in Hawaii to approve the statehood. There were 132 thousand yeses vs 8 thousand nos. Was that a fake vote, like the Russians just did in the occupied territories in Ukraine?

[1] https://guides.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/c.php?g=105252&p=687...

> US has flattened multiple Middle Eastern countries in the last few decades

Which ones? As far as I know, US military operations in the Middle East have generally involved very little of anything you could call flattening.

Well, the US flattened some Wagner Group dudes in Syria

One’d think the countless bombings of the region to be quite ‘flattening’.

Well no, US doctrine generally relies on precision strikes instead of anything you could reasonably describe as “flattening”.

In all of the Middle-Eastern conflicts, civilian death tolls through direct US action have been very low.

The Gulf War comes to mind. From Wikipedia:

> Coalition bombing raids destroyed Iraqi civilian infrastructure. 11 of Iraq's 20 major power stations and 119 substations were totally destroyed, while a further six major power stations were damaged.[49][50] At the end of the war, electricity production was at four percent of its pre-war levels. Bombs destroyed the utility of all major dams, most major pumping stations, and many sewage treatment plants, telecommunications equipment, port facilities, oil refineries and distribution, railroads and bridges were also destroyed.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_air_campaign

Groznyj, Alepo, Mariopol ...

I don’t think the US was that deeply involved in any of those conflicts. Certainly not so much in the flattening part.

Those are names of the cities Russia actually flattened. Infrastructure, houses themselves, turned from cities full of life to nothing.

Not, like, some part of it, but almost all of it.

Whataboutism..

Indeed, the Gulf war can fairly be described like that. As far as I can tell, none of the other US Middle Eastern conflicts can.

But at least with the Gulf war it’s obvious that the coalition did the right thing, intervening to stop a war of aggression by Iraq.

> - USSR voluntarily disbanded.

That's a stretch. Several of the constituent republics declared independence prior to the final dissolution, and these were militarily (if ineffectually) contested. The final dissolution itself was instigated by a failed coup that saw the Soviet president lose all political capital in favor of the Russian president.

> Sole claim to global relevancy for Moscow is the soviet era nuclear arsenal.

They retain a permanent, veto-wielding seat on the UN Security Council. They are one of the largest suppliers of troops to foreign countries--I believe the largest if you exclude those countries who would get squeamish about raping the local civilian populace or the like. Again, one of the largest supplies of arms to other countries, and you have only to look at UN resolutions to confirm that that does convey an amount of soft power. They are also one of the largest energy exporters in the world, and (with German acquiescence) that has given them a noose tied around Europe's neck that may prove painful indeed in the 2023-2024 winter.

> The US dollar is used for international trade and the people who move off it get invaded for unrelated reasons.

Who? Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran haven't been invaded... Oh right, you're talking about those countries which didn't move off of it but talked about it like once a decade before the unrelated invasion.

I don't feel any need to argue any particular point because I could abandon 90% of my points and it still wouldn't be a contest. Of the 3, if we ask "which of these is closest to being an imperial nationalist power?" the answer is the US. It isn't remotely close. There is no Russian empire. There is no Chinese empire. They are struggling mightily to promote their interests abroad because of all the US bases people keep tripping over, and US-based systems of global governance. Their armies are struggling to move more than a few hundred kilometres from the borders that the US recognises. The US military goes where it wants and does what it wants.

A dictatorship just couldn't sustain a global empire the way a democracy like the US does (or the British before them). Dictatorships don't have the economic and military nous. If Russia wanted to win more wars it'd need to use a political system more like the US's - China too.

Fun fact: I didn't actually know what nationalism meant before today's article so I looked it up in Wikipedia. The definition is something like "nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation".

> Of the 3, if we ask "which of these is closest to being an imperial nationalist power?" the answer is the US. It isn't remotely close.

Of the 3 countries, one of them is currently engaged in a war which is explicitly about achieving its imperial ambitions, which is actually the fourth or fifth such war (depends on what you consider separate wars) it has conducted in my lifetime. Instead, you have picked one of the two countries that has yet to conduct one such war in my lifetime (the invasion of Panama was before I was born).

> They are struggling mightily to promote their interests abroad because of all the US bases people keep tripping over, and US-based systems of global governance. Their armies are struggling to move more than a few hundred kilometres from the borders that the US recognises. The US military goes where it wants and does what it wants.

If you're focusing on the results of attempted wars, even classifying all US military actions in recent decades as imperialistic wars (which is a mistake), you'll find that the US has been less successful than even Russia (which is actually 3-for-5 in its recent wars). The idea that the US (/US-allied) bases are deterring Chinese and Russian influence is also pretty laughable--see, for example, Mali, Djibouti, Solomon Islands for things I can think of the top of the head.

> A dictatorship just couldn't sustain a global empire the way a democracy like the US does (or the British before them).

The Roman Empire lasted about 270 years as a dictatorship, which is longer than the combined British/US hegemony [1], even if you take the charitable view that the period of British global hegemony starts from the end of the Seven Years' War. Of course, individually, our two model democracies each don't manage to last 100 years before fissures in their hegemony appear.

> If Russia wanted to win more wars it'd need to use a political system more like the US's

Why should Russia learn from a country that has a worse win rate than it? The US hasn't been successful in its recent military escapades, whereas Russia has had moderate success.

[1] The US does not have an empire, it has a hegemony. Yes, there is a difference, and it matters.

> The US does not have an empire, it has a hegemony. Yes, there is a difference, and it matters.

So what, if Russia was asserting hegemony over Ukraine instead of a Special Military Operation that'd be cool? Or is it more that the US invasion of Iraq was seceretly welcomed by Iraqis because the US was only invading hegemonically rather than imperialistically?

If I were going to chose who is in charge I'd much rather have Americans because they tend to be competent. But sending in the army is sending in the army, and starting a war is starting a war.

> Of the 3 countries, one of them is currently engaged in a war which is explicitly about achieving its imperial ambitions, which is actually the fourth or fifth such war (depends on what you consider separate wars) it has conducted in my lifetime...

You must be what, in your 20s? Late teens?

If you were over 30 you'd note that Russia's progress on imperial ambitions have undergone a startling shrinkage. It isn't feasible for them to reform to their 1989 expanse and nobody is claiming they can. You'll note Putin's justifications spend a lot of time talking about NATO.

I haven't seen any evidence of 'imperial ambition' more serious than my ambitions to become King of Everything. Sure they'd like that outcome, they don't have a plan to get to it. There recent activity looks a lot more like desperate panic from being hemmed in by NATO. That is what makes sense from the sidelines, justifies the mobilisation a lot better and it lines up with what the Russians are saying.

> That is what makes sense from the sidelines

Except it doesn't. Before the invasion in 2014, Ukraine's chances to join NATO were mostly nonexistent. Now Sweden and Finland are joining and Ukraine will likely join too once it successfully defends itself and ends the war, all thanks to Putin.

> There recent activity looks a lot more like desperate panic from being hemmed in by NATO.

Which is why Russia is embarking a course of action that directly precipitated a neighboring country and a near-neighboring country to join NATO, and if the war achieved Russia's full aims, would have increased the number of NATO countries by another three countries (Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania are all NATO). It also turned down a peace deal early in the war where Ukraine would have permanently forsworn NATO membership. More recently, the sham annexations of Ukrainian territory are hard to square with any claims that it's all about NATO.

> - China might practically be able to invade a small island off their coastline, but it isn't obvious that they could tolerate the backlash. The quality of their army is largely unknown because they haven't used it seriously in decades.

Give them time, and they'll most likely be able to "flatten[...] multiple Middle Eastern countries," too. They also have something like 4.5 times the population of the US, and have gained the economic characteristics that made the US so powerful after WWII. China is now the "workshop of the world, while the US's manufacturing capacity has withered.

> USSR voluntarily disbanded. Moskow currently can't even assert military dominance over the Ukraine. Sole claim to global relevancy for Moscow is the soviet era nuclear arsenal.

Afghanistan twice, Chechnya twice, keeping Belarus as puppet state and meddling in it for years, trying to same in Ujraine foe years. Still claiming it has right to rule the whole region and decide which alliance other countries enter.

Disbanded because I had to and trying to get it back. Oh, genocide, leveling whole cities to the ground in multiple countries

Russia is as imperial as it gets.

China invaded Tibet and still controls it, seems like an empire to me. Also wants to invade Taiwan.

Russia took over half of Europe in WW2 and was horrible to the citizens of those "territories", another empire. They have also invaded Georgia/Ukraine in recent memory.

There is also the ongoing Uyghur genocide.

> A very significant reason the world transitioned from British Empire to American Totally Not An Empire All These Military Bases Are Normal is because they are the most successful decentralised parliamentary systems.

The US has a presidential system, not a parliamentary system. The US implemented parliamentary systems in Germany and Japan, likely at least in part to preempt further imperialism from these countries. Of course the parliamentary system has advantages other then that.

Democracies are totally capable of starting wars, but there is a stable way out when they have made a big mistake; the next election. George W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson both lost popularity, and then their faction lost power, because they had picked a bad war to fight in. It doesn't mean the next faction is any smarter or wiser, but it does at least provide them the opportunity to pretend that they would never have gotten us into such a mess, and exit (although in this respect, Obama was far wiser than Nixon). It's largely forgotten now, but the first President Bush had gotten the U.S. into a war in Somalia, but the incoming President Clinton knew a quagmire when he saw one, and was able to cut and run quickly, because he was not (as Putin is now) forced to pretend that it had been a good idea in the first place.

If there were a parliamentary way for Putin to exit stage left, Russia could just admit that they've lost and get out. Because they do not and cannot, they must try to find some way to pretend that it can still be won.

> It's largely forgotten now, but the first President Bush had gotten the U.S. into a war in Somalia, but the incoming President Clinton knew a quagmire when he saw one, and was able to cut and run quickly, because he was not (as Putin is now) forced to pretend that it had been a good idea in the first place.

This is an extremely extremely extremely misleading characterization of a United Nations humanitarian action that started after Clinton was elected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Task_Force

"American troops had first entered Somalia during the Bush administration in response to a humanitarian crisis and civil war. Though initially involved to assist humanitarian efforts, the Clinton administration shifted the objectives set out in the mission and began pursuing a policy of attempting to neutralize Somali warlords." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton#Somalia

It's essentially the complete opposite of what you said.

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