Last week, Elon Musk tweeted (you know, the usual forum for high-level diplomacy) a “peace plan” for Ukraine that was simply total surrender and concession to all of Putin’s demands and then some. Then it was revealed that Musk had had a recent phone call with Putin, which I could believe — he’s not a very bright guy, and simply parrots whatever the last person who spoke to him said. Now he denies the phone call, and I can believe that, too. Musk is the kind of ego-driven guy who would claim to have inside info on the plans of powerful people.
Elon Musk has denied the claim he spoke to Vladimir Putin before tweeting a peace plan for the war in Ukraine.
The Tesla CEO’s peace suggestion included Ukrainian territory being handed over to Russia.
Eurasia Group subscribers were sent a report in which Ian Bremmer wrote that Mr Musk told him that the Russian president was “prepared to negotiate” if the Crimean peninsula remained in Russian hands, Vice reported.
Other conditions included that Ukraine retains permanent neutrality and that Ukraine recognises the Russian annexation of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.
Mr Bremmer reports that Mr Musk said that Mr Putin told him that these targets would be reached “no matter what”.
Basically, I can shrug and believe he said things that have little basis in reality, because he is a glad-handing liar. Once you accept that, you can understand the motivation behind all the noise that comes out of his mouth.
I’ll also easily believe that Putin is a liar. The people who have the most experience with Russian neighborliness will tell you that.
Baltic leaders have long argued that Western sanctions adopted in 2014 after Putin illegally annexed Crimea showed the West’s lack of resolve in confronting the Russian president over his land grab. European leaders seemed to think the Baltics were so traumatized by Soviet occupation that they could not be objective.
“Jokingly, you know, we call this ‘West-splaining,’” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said. The West’s message, he said, was that “after 50 years of occupation, it’s understandable that you would have trust issues with a country that occupied you.”
“For us in the Baltics, it all boils down to this notion of appeasement: that basically we can appease Russia,” Landsbergis continued. “For us, it was always very clear, black and white. If a country is eager to cross another country’s border, they’re an aggressor and they will do that again, if they’re not stopped. And they have not been stopped.”
“That notion is quite pervasive, this notion of peaceful settlement with an aggressor,” he added. “I’m really hopeful that it’s now waning.”
Don’t trust imperialist countries. It’s that simple.
I think Central and South America are all clear on that, too.
Xpost from the Infinite thread.
I’ve seen a lot of Musk lately.
The more I’ve seen of him the less I like.
Musk is restricting Ukraine in using his Starlink system. After the USA paid for it.
Which makes the Starlink a lot less useful and makes Musk an unreliable supplier.
The more I’ve seen of Musk, the less I like him, the less I trust him, and the less I respect him. About what you expect from some guy who has 8 kids by three different women.
I will never buy anything from any of his companies on that basis.
As it was pointed out on The Infinite Thread, the Ukraine’s access to Starlink started to have trouble around the same time. Make of that what you will.
Oops… Raven beat me t the punch. Sorry.
Musk and Ukraine, Chamberlain and Poland. One prostituting for gain, the other, a lack of will. Both resulting in war.
History: rife with reruns.
I can’t help but wonder if this conversation involved Russian bots on Twitter somehow, given that Musk seems to want to go through on buying it again.
…a “peace plan” for Ukraine that was simply total surrender and concession to all of Putin’s demands and then some.
Yet another “brilliant visionary idea” parroted by Musk after it’s already been tried by others, and failed miserably. Has this guy read any newspapers since around 2014?
Then it was revealed that Musk had had a recent phone call with Putin, which I could believe — he’s not a very bright guy, and simply parrots whatever the last person who spoke to him said.
Musk would welcome such a call, because it would make him look and feel relevant as a Big Player. And Putin would make the call because he knows this — you don’t have to be a KGB psy-ops veteran to see how vain, stupid, and easily manipulated rich American brats like Musk really are.
I can’t help but wonder how illegal this stunt was. I know we aren’t at war, but this shit stinks to high heaven. If this isn’t treason, it ought to be.
I can’t help but wonder how illegal this stunt was. I know we aren’t at war, but this shit stinks to high heaven. If this isn’t treason, it ought to be.
I can’t help but wonder how illegal this stunt was. I know we aren’t at war, but this shit stinks to high heaven. If this isn’t treason, it ought to be.
@wzrd
History nit picking: Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia in 1938, though I could make a case for it being a rational choice. Part of the deal was that Hitler make no further territorial demands. When the Germans invaded Poland, Chamberlain called for an immediate declaration of war. He may have been hoodwinked in Munich, but was determined not to be a patsy. So far only Ukraine has really stood up to Putin.
Musk also said that Taiwan should become a “special administrative zone” of China, much like Hong Kong after 1997, but with “more lenient” conditions. As you can imagine the Taiwanese government was not amused, and said Musk is ignorant about China and Taiwan.
@11–
Musk is a social grifter, and like all social grifters, he is drawn to power. Hence all the sucking up to dictators (especially ironic since he styles himself as a free-speech absolutist while advocating for the most repressive, state-controlled media nations in the world — surely he is aware that Twitter is blocked by the Chinese government, which means for all his talk about buying Twitter so he can remove censorship, if Taiwan is absorbed into mainland China as he proposes then the Taiwanese will lose their legal access to Twitter!).
@10–
I agree with dbarkdog. Chamberlain gets a bad rap. I don’t agree with his decision to appease Hitler, but it was at least understandable as an attempt to draw a line in the sand, and as soon as Hitler stepped over that line Chamberlain knew that the UK had to go to war.
What is it about people who are successful in one or two endeavors and assume that this means they can be successful in anything, whether it is within their specialty or scope of education or not. Being able to mismanage a large company does not make one capable at running a country, or giving away a country.
Wait. Am I speaking of Elon Chamberlain, or Traitorous Trump? Or Putin?
I wonder what Musk will say if China demands territory currently held by Russia. Or vice versa. Or if Russia demands to bring Alaska back into its empire…
@Leo Buzalsky #5:
Not what you had in mind, but when Musk’s “peace plan” got massively voted down on Twitter, he complained that the (Ukranian) “bots” were out in force. Because how else could that happen?
@Akira MacKenzie #8:
Potentially a Logan Act violation, but as the commentators keep reminding us, no one’s ever been prosecuted for that. (It comes up whenever someone wonders why Trump was never prosecuted for violating it during the 2016 campaign, which he definitely did.)
Akira, you have some bug in the hardware/software that prevents you from seeing when a comment has been successfully posted.
.
Logan act etc – those laws are aimed st powerful or rich people and are thus never enforced.
.
People in Taiwan are by now well acquintanced with the political spasms of the mainland Chinese communist party. No way they are going to trust a government that just put one million Uighurs into concentration camps.
And rich cretins like Trump or Musk do not care about human rights, from their perspective Russia and China are just places where you can do business without meddling labor unions.
Oggie @14: Part of the problem here is that the USA has a longstanding hero-worship of rich and “successful” (mostly white male) people, and the deliberately-conditioned and nurtured belief that rich people, BY DEFINITION, are smarter than the rest of us and deserve to be admired, followed, emulated and adored in everything they do. Libertarian ideologues have been relentlessly pushing this narrative, but it dates back at least to Horatio Alger stories and the old Wild West fantasies; and people like Musk, Trump, Thiel, etc. knowingly milk all this fawning adoration for all it’s worth.
Well yes. If we were that smart we would be rich too. I mean this country is a meritocracy, isn’t it?
Well yes. If we were that smart we would be rich too. I mean this country is a meritocracy, isn’t it?
@15 Putin would be shit out of luck about “reclaiming” Alaska, since the US actually bought it. From imperial Russia. Same as the Louisiana Purchase, which was bought from France.
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/alaska-purchase
Although, along the lines of “reclaiming”…
https://www.euractiv.com/section/europe-s-east/opinion/russia-is-seeking-new-wars-and-kosovo-could-be-the-next-one/
https://www.kyivpost.com/russias-war/russia-opens-pandoras-box-serbia-and-china-threaten-war.html
PZ wrote: “Don’t trust imperialist countries. It’s that simple.”
I agree wholeheartedly. At the risk of more flaming from ‘patriots’, isn’t the united states just a ‘stealth imperialist country’? With all the coercion, invasion and manipulation and governments overthrown by the CIA, all the massive military bases in many dozens of foreign countries, etc., etc. the united states seeks to ‘own’ dozens of foreign countries as much as any other imperialist endeavor.
I think Chamberlain’s bad rap is well deserved. It was evident long before that moment, but certainly by then, that Hitler was a massive liar whose word meant nothing, and his aggressive aims were also clear. Yet in mid-September Chamberlain was asking to visit Hitler in Germany, with his press secretary wiring the German chargé d’affaires in London that he “was prepared to examine far-reaching German proposals, including plebiscite, to take part in carrying them out, and to advocate them in public” (from Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 384).
In August, he actually participated in Hitler’s stage show when he sent Runciman to Czechoslovakia as a fake “mediator,” with the announcement in the House of Commons on July 26 “accompanied by a piece of prevaricating by Chamberlain himself which must have been unique in the experience of the British Parliament,” claiming that he was being sent “in response to a request from the government of Czechoslovakia” when in fact they were totally opposed to this farce (p. 376).
After his meeting with Hitler, Chamberlain could still say “In spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in [Hitler’s] face, I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word” (p. 387). Hitler was astonished at Chamberlain’s credulity.
Chamberlain proceeded to pressure the Czechs to submit to Hitler’s demands and to scold them for escalating (their response refusing to roll over even when it was clear their allies were abandoning them wasn’t included by the British or the French when they later presented documents attempting to justify their actions during this time). Indeed, Chamberlain’s attempts to sell out Czechoslovakia were inconvenient for Hitler since his goal was to conquer Czechoslovakia and this interfered with his pretext. So naturally when Beneš had no other option but to accept the Anglo-French plan after being, in his accurate assessment, “basely betrayed,” Hitler declared that it was now untenable. Chamberlain told Hitler he was – somehow still – “both disappointed and puzzled” (393).
Shirer on Godesberg, September 22-23 (pp. 392-393):
Shirer on Munich (pp. 418-422):
I have no wish to defend Chamberlain, but heaping blame on the appeasers raises the question of plausible alternate courses. What intervention available to Britain and France would have helped Czechoslovakia? The 1939 response certainly was of little use to Poland. Perhaps a full scale invasion of Germany would have succeeded, if western leaders had been willing to be blamed for another Great War. Yes, they got that war anyway, but at least they could point fingers at an aggressor.
The contemporary relevance is the same question faced in 1938. Beyond finger pointing and tongue clucking, what can western nations do to really help Ukraine without bringing on Armageddon? While they have provided real material aid, they have not deterred Putin from escalating deliberate attacks on civilians. I could wish for a more forceful response, and I am very glad that I am not responsible for devising it.
I have no wish to defend Chamberlain, but heaping blame on the appeasers raises the question of plausible alternate courses.
Some people have said the Czechs themselves could have put up a much more credible fight against a Nazi invasion than British and French “leaders” gave them credit for. If not enough to stop the Germans, at least enough to slow them down, bleed them, buy time, and give other nations a chance to: a) realize they could actually win, and b) organize military support for them. Remember, the Sudetenland was rather mountainous, so an invading force couldn’t exactly count on a cakewalk.
Oops, I hit “Post” too soon. As the quotes @23 show, the British and French didn’t just do nothing; they actively pressured the Czechs to go along and cave to the Nazis. If you’re looking for “plausible alternative courses,” I figure NOT PRESSURING THE CZECHS would qualify. They wouldn’t have even had to question their pompous-assed presumption that Czechoslovakia was just “a tiny country of which we know nothing.”
Since Shirer is being quoted: I recall him writing that the Czechs were in fact rather well set up defensively in the Sudetenland, and, well, what Raging Bee @25 said about Hitler’s invasion prospects, so if they’d retained that territory things would have turned out differently. BUT that would still depend on the Western Allies being willing to back them up. Given that they were still tending to the casualties of the last war, it is understandable (if not entirely excusable) that they were in denial about the possible necessity of doing it all over already.
Shirer’s account of the lead-up to WWII is a morality tale of lost opportunities — basically, if the West had stood up to him at any point between the occupation of the Trans-Rhine and the cession of the Sudetenland, Hitler would have been finished one way or another. I believe that Shirer was the first big WWII history to come out; no doubt there’s been a lot of analysis since which might modify that picture, but I don’t know.
dbarkdog @ #24:
First, I was responding to very specific arguments: you @ #10:
and chrislawson @ #13:
As I argued, it wasn’t at all rational to believe and behave as Chamberlain did in light of Hitler’s demonstrated pattern of dishonesty and aggression and his ambitions as stated in numerous public utterances. Even if his larger motives were understandable and admirable, Chamberlain was willfully and tragically gullible and foolish.
Churchill understood this at the time, saying in the Commons:
Second, to the separate question:
Shirer, pp. 423-427:
He continues with testimony from the generals, including Field Marshal von Manstein, about how they couldn’t at that moment have defended their western border, and goes on to question how, since British and French military intelligence must have known this, their leaders could act as stupidly as they did. The leaders, and this is true of many others in Britain and the US at the time, had exaggerated beliefs about German power, particularly but not limited to the Luftwaffe.
He continues:
Also:
It ultimately was of use to Poland, FFS, and would have in the long term liberated them (minus all of the Poles the Nazis had murdered, including the majority of the Jewish population) had they not later sold them out to Russia. I can’t imagine you think it was of little consequence to Poland that the Nazis were defeated militarily.
I find your use of phrases like “heaping blame on the appeasers,” “finger pointing,” and “tongue clucking” fairly annoying, but that aside…
Yes, this history is extremely relevant to the present moment! Putin is a lying liar who lies constantly, has transparently imperialistic aims, and has invaded a sovereign nation. As was the case with Hitler, buying Putin’s hype, appeasing him, or giving into his nuclear threats would be incredibly foolish, immoral, and disastrous for everyone, including the Russian people.
What Western countries can and should do is continue what they’re doing now and expand on it. Keep supplying Ukraine with arms, aid, training, intelligence, and public support; keep making all of that support public; keep demanding the full return of Ukraine’s sovereign territories; keep calling attention to Putin’s lies, bluffs, crimes, miscalculations, and failures; keep building and nurturing alliances and isolating Putin.
Putin is already losing the war in Ukraine badly, in part because other countries have stood strong and come to Ukraine’s aid. And if Putin were to use a nuclear weapon it would be the end of him. He would gain nothing from it, and there would be no World War III (he doesn’t even have any allies!), but it would spell the end of his pathetic dictatorial regime. Which is coming anyway.
I am not a historian, but history classes here in Czechia mention several things about the Munich Betrayal and its downfall:
1) Without the Munich Betrayal, Hitler would have really hard time crossing the Czechoslovak border. The fortifications in the mountains were not completely finished, but they were finished enough to significantly impede his progress and slow him down. We are taught that we could not win on our own, but we could if we got the help that was promised.
2) Without the help of Czechoslovak heavy industry, Hitler would be much slower at actually arming his soldiers and starting the war. The Munich Betrayal gave him for free highly advanced steel and weapons manufacturing industries which he promptly used to make weapons and ammo with which he later attacked Poland and France.
I keep saying that if Putin demands that Russia must have neutral buffer countries along its borders, I suggest the new countries of Krasnodar, Belgorod-Kursk, Smolensk and Pskov. But Russian Dictators have done a thorough job of making sure all of Russia’s territory is filled with loyal Russians rather than ethnic separatists of any sort.
This is both obvious and true.
If Russia/Putin use one or more tactical nuclear weapons, at that second he has lost his war.
The entire world would be against him.
And the USA, the EU, and NATO would finish off the Russian army as fast as they can.
We could do it easily without even using our nuclear weapons.
Russia is 140 million people, a weak army getting smashed weaker by the Ukrainians, and with a small and failing economy.
NATO is…(source ourworldindata) NATO is an alliance of 30 member states. In addition to the USA and Canada on the American continent, these are numerous European states. All member states together cover an area of 24.59 million km² and about 949.06 million people.
Look at the numbers. Russia: 140 million population middling economy versus NATO with 949 million people and a huge and rich economy.
As has been pointed out, we are far stronger than Russia and we need to act like it.
The wild card of course is that if Putin does use nuclear weapons and we respond, which we will, that this could quickly escalate into a major nuclear exchange.
Recent modeling (Nature August) shows that a full scale Russia US nuclear exchange would kill 5 billion people, mostly due to nuclear winter and a decade of crop failures.
If we hand over Ukraine, that risk is still there though.
Putin will just keep putting the USSR back together.
Moldova, Georgia, and Kazakhstan would be next.
After that, who knows.
https://twitter.com/Biz_Ukraine_Mag/status/1580169910512390144
“Elon Musk claims he didn’t speak to Putin but his peace plan directly echoes popular Kremlin talking points. The reference to “Khrushchev’s mistake” is a huge red flag”
(They actually mean “tell” rather than “red flag”)
Cross-posted with the Infinite Thread, good news from the past few hours from today’s Guardian liveblog:
Oh, also, from Reuters – “France to deliver anti-air systems to Ukraine in coming weeks – Macron”:
the question is and has always been as has been shown with this pathetic war now or later?
Do we fight this “ruler” and his army and country now or later? i am also not an historian but it does seem like these wars of conquest always have some king figure some authoritarian strongman some imperialist at the root.
(he doesn’t even have any allies!)
As of this afternoon, in the interest of precision: Belarus, North Korea, Nicaragua, Syria, and…nope, that’s it.
Interesting (YouTube) – “War and Peace in Europe from Hitler to Putin”:
(He doesn’t discuss Munich, unfortunately.)
SC —
Thank you for your posts. You’ve changed my mind on Chamberlain.
I still reserve the right to express frustration when the “peace in our time” meme gets blindly trotted out next time someone wants to start a war.
Thanks, chrislawson @ #39.
@15 Putin would be shit out of luck about “reclaiming” Alaska, since the US actually bought it.
True, but Russia also EXPLICITLY ceded Crimea to Ukraine, in the form of a treaty that they signed, without being coerced in any way. Ukraine bought Crimea (back) with their batch of Soviet ICBMs, just as the US bought Alaska with money. And Putin has explicitly said that Russia has the right to take back what they’d given, because the Tsar giveth and the Tsar taketh away.
@11, 12, etc: Not long after Musk publicly took China’s side vis à vis Taiwan, China gave him a large tax break. Whodathunk.
https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report/tesla-gets-purchase-tax-exemption-in-china-electric-car-list
This is an article on how the Russians are kidnapping Ukrainian children and deporting them to Russia.
They then try to erase their cultural and personal identity.
This is BTW, a war crime and part of their genocidal plans.
Russia has a problem with a falling population and their government is making a huge effort to keep their numbers up. Moscow Times 2022 Russia’s population has been in near-constant decline for decades, and the coronavirus pandemic led to the country’s largest natural population decline since the end of the Soviet Union in 2021.
@41 Ahhh, but nothing succeeds quite like money. There’s a reason cash is king. Also, if Putin (can we stop saying Russia? The rank and file Russians don’t seem to be particularly enthusiastic about this war, for the most part. Yes, there are some lunatic True Believers but there seem to be a lot more Russians fleeing the country if they can, plus the protesters are actually pushing back, despite the personal cost.) wants to “reclaim” Alaska, he’d be going head to head with the US and Canada… at which point the CIA & NSA would probably get serious about dropping a bunker buster or twenty on his head or else making sure he came down with a serious case of high-speed lead poisoning. Right now, the US and Canada haven’t gotten directly involved, just indirectly, because Putin hasn’t engaged them directly but all of that would change the minute Putin made a direct aggressive move against either country through Alaska. I mean, Hitler opened a war on two fronts, with noticeably poor results.
Russia sold Alaska to the US because they didn’t have the war chest and the population to hold it in the mid-1800’s, they have even less of a chance now. Russia made a virtue out of necessity and got a pile of US dollars for something they were never going to be able to hold in the first place.
But back to the “cash is king” part. If Russia reneged on the land-for-cash deal that was the Alaska Purchase, that would be the end for him. No one would ever do business again with him. For anything. Treaties and trades have always been subject to revisitation and revision but there is a certain finality to a cash deal that is generally acknowledged planetwide. Did you buy it with cash? Then it’s yours. (Thanks Phoenicians!) As much as Putin’s allies like China, North Korea, Syria and Iran would love to see Putin harass or embarrass the US, they are also exquisitely aware that the bulk of their food comes from the US, particularly with North Korea and China. China can only afford to produce enough food domestically for 20% or less of it’s population and despite it’s inroads into African agriculture, they are still heavily reliant on US staple crops and will be for the foreseeable future, because African agriculture is notoriously boom and bust, with generally poor infrastructure and droughts that last for years. Allying with Russian against the US would mean that agricultural trade with the US would be cut off. And nothing, literally nothing else, starts civil wars and insurrections like hunger and famine. Hell, the Arab Spring got started ostensibly by a suicidal fruit seller but really by the rising cost of wheat around the world–all because US farmers found more profit in growing corn than wheat for ethanol subsidies. And that wasn’t even real famine, just the overtures. Not saying that people didn’t die or that there weren’t impacts felt worldwide by the change in US crops but it was nothing like what real famine, the Dust Bowl kind, would look like.
A nuclear exchange would likely destroy the US’s ability to feed the rest of the world.
Sure, Iran, Syria, China and North Korea hates the US with a passion but they also know what side their bread (the bread made with US wheat) is buttered on. They like eating more than they hate the US.
FWIW, I agree with you about “the Tsar giveth and the Tsar taketh away” but even Putin isn’t that suicidal. He badly miscalculated, because when he illegally annexed South Ossetia, Georgia and even Crimea, the West didn’t really respond. I suspect he though Ukraine would be more of the same. Nope. Deciding “I want Alaska back” is the equivalent of jumping face first into the woodchipper.