ForeignAffairsMag在2022-11-28~2022-12-04的言论
- 319: The Hard Truth About Long Wars: Why the Conflict in Ukraine Won’t End Anytime Soon, submitted on 2022-11-29 23:46:46+08:00.
- 320: Xi Jinping in His Own Words, submitted on 2022-12-03 04:20:54+08:00.
- 321: [deleted by user], submitted on 2022-12-03 04:35:11+08:00.
319: The Hard Truth About Long Wars: Why the Conflict in Ukraine Won’t End Anytime Soon, submitted on 2022-11-29 23:46:46+08:00.
—– 319.1 —–2022-11-29 23:50:02+08:00:
[SS from the essay by Christopher Blattman, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Columbia University.]
Fundamentally, this war is also rooted in ideology. Russian President Vladimir Putin denies the validity of Ukrainian identity and statehood. Insiders speak of a government warped by its own disinformation, fanatical in its commitment to seize territory. Ukraine, for its part, has held unflinchingly to its ideals. The country’s leaders and people have shown themselves unwilling to sacrifice liberty or sovereignty to Russian aggression, no matter the price. Those who sympathize with such fervent convictions describe them as steadfast values. Skeptics criticize them as intransigence or dogma. Whatever the term, the implication is often the same: each side rejects realpolitik and fights on principle.
Russia and Ukraine are not unique in this regard, for ideological belief explains many long wars. Americans in particular should recognize their own revolutionary past in the clash of convictions that perpetuates the war in Ukraine. More and more democracies also look like Ukraine—where popular ideals make certain compromises abhorrent—and this intransigence lies behind many of the West’s twenty-first-century wars, including the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. It is seldom acknowledged, but closely held principles and values often make peace elusive. The war in Ukraine is just the most recent example of a fight that grinds on not because of strategic dilemmas alone but because both sides find the idea of settlement repugnant.
320: Xi Jinping in His Own Words, submitted on 2022-12-03 04:20:54+08:00.
—– 320.1 —–2022-12-03 04:21:53+08:00:
From Matt Pottinger, Matthew Johnson, and David Feith: “At the party congress, Xi was granted a third term as the CCP’s top leader—an unprecedented development in the contemporary era and a crucial step in his effort to centralize authority. But perhaps even more significant was the way the congress served to codify a worldview that Xi has been developing over the past decade in carefully crafted official party communications: Chinese-language speeches, documentaries, and textbooks, many of which Beijing deliberately mistranslates for foreign audiences, when it translates them at all. These texts dispel much of the ambiguity that camouflages the regime’s aims and methods and offer a window into Xi’s ideology and motivations: a deep fear of subversion, hostility toward the United States, sympathy with Russia, a desire to unify mainland China and Taiwan, and, above all, confidence in the ultimate victory of communism over the capitalist West. The end state he is pursuing requires the remaking of global governance. His explicit objective is to replace the modern nation-state system with a new order featuring Beijing at its pinnacle.”
321: [deleted by user], submitted on 2022-12-03 04:35:11+08:00.
—– 321.1 —–2022-12-03 04:35:56+08:00:
From Matt Pottinger, Matthew Johnson, and David Feith: The contest between democracies and China will increasingly turn on the balance of dependence; whichever side depends least on the other will have the advantage. Reducing Washington’s dependence, and increasing Beijing’s, can help constrain Xi’s appetite for risk—and when coupled with U.S. cooperation with Australia, Japan, and Taiwan to field an unmistakably superior and well-coordinated military presence in the western Pacific, constrainment offers the best way to prevent the “stormy seas of a major test” that Xi seems tempted to undertake as he begins his second decade as China’s dictator.
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