War's ultimate purpose is to shift the situation into a point where diplomacy can happen. It occurs when both sides disagree on the situation strongly enough that they prefer war to any diplomatic option available, and it continues until a diplomatic option can be agreed.
Currently, Ukraine and Russia's diplomatic goals are still incompatible, and both believe they will be able to shift the balance of the war in their favor.
Clausewitz said it best - war is just politics executed with other means.
War starts when the cost/benefit analysis of violent means comes up better than the alternative (peaceful) means. War ends when the opposite happens, and the cost/benefit of the continuation of violence starts to come down in comparison with peace.
The benefit component is for the most part a zero-sum game (fixed land area), while the cost component is variable and growing with time. One way to force peace is to impose great costs on one or both warring sides.
That is not what Clausewitz said. He said that war is a paradoxical trinity of policy, rage, and chance, and that each war is a chameleon that takes on its own unique form.
More people like to glibly quote Clausewitz than have actually read and understood Clausewitz.
Goals are not rational. Neither Putin's goal of controlling Ukraine nor Ukraine's desire for independence are rational, they're subjective preferences.
You can ask - was Putin's decision to invade Ukraine rational given his values, priorities, risk aversion, willingness to bear the costs and information he had? Apart from the last, they're all subjective and thus it doesn't make sense to judge them as (ir)rational. The last one is objective, but having wrong information is not irrational either.
Some people just want to fight. As a goal by itself. Sure you can say that if they want to fight, fighting is the rational choice, but that definition would make every action 'rational'.
> Some people just want to fight. As a goal by itself.
Can you make some examples of war where fighting itself was the primary goal?
> that definition would make every action 'rational'.
As mentioned above, goals themselves are not something we can evaluate as rational or not.
But given you have a goal, you can question whether the actions you undertake to achieve that goal are rational. Let's say you want to start a family and want to buy a house. Going into a casino and throwing money into the slot machines is not a rational way to achieve it, esp. since there is plenty of information available explaining in painstaking detail that this won't work.
Can you make some examples of war where fighting itself was the primary goal?
It's possible that we're seeing one now in Ukraine. The Russian army isn't exactly made up of economic elites, being composed largely of men from outlying territories who are either a possible long-term threat to Putin's vision of Soviet-era revanchism or impoverished people who are literally more trouble to feed than they're worth. From Putin's point of view, a meat grinder may be just what the (mad) doctor ordered.
Certainly that dovetails with Kim's motivation to send his own hungry soldiers to the Ukraine front. Now that he has nukes, what does he need such a large army for? Like the ragtag derelicts and criminal elements who make up the Russian armed forces, those troops are more of a liability to Kim than an asset.
See also concerns about China's surplus of young men who will never find mates thanks to the effects of the regime's one-child policy. A literal incel army. It's not hard to imagine that Beijing might find a war to be a convenient way to rebalance the population and remove a potential source of agitation.
Even in the scenarios you describe, the wars would be based on political goals (even if the goal is killing your own citizens by sending them to war), not because anyone is "wanting to fight". Very different things.
The purpose of diplomacy is to achieve national goals in the international field. Wars happen when two nations have incompatible goals and diplomacy isn't able to resolve them. The wars are fought to achieve national goals, or change the other nation's goals. Diplomacy is ultimately what resolves wars by making the new national goals compatible. Every single treaty or armistice ending a war is a result of diplomacy, even unconditional surrenders.
What do you think diplomacy is? Why do you think it accomplishes anything? It certainly does, but you are discussing it as though it is not something that is formed against a backdrop of self-interest, geography, history, and military capability.
Diplomacy is distinctly not "just talking nicely".
> 'weakness' of Russia is a fallacy that need not be tested
What? We've already seen a real-world test of Russia's military prowess. It's why every customer of Russian military kit that has the option to replace them is.
Strong disagree. There is no diplomacy to be had when one side insists of war, because that's what they want. See Ukraine, everyone who is anyone tried to prevent the war, but Putin still went ahead with it. The leaked call with Macron is a good example, it's circling on Youtube and a variety of news outlets.
> See Ukraine, everyone who is anyone tried to prevent the war
Another rumour is that a peace deal of some sort deal was available to Ukraine but "the West" advised otherwise.
Who knows what the truth of the matter is, but what can be known is that we don't know, although that requires certain skills and some conscious effort, which seems to be a bit much to ask of people when the war drums are banging (state propaganda, 2nd order citizen propaganda like on HN, etc).
There's always some sort of peace deal available to any participant in a war: surrendering to your opponent's demands. War happens when those demands are not acceptable. Roughly speaking the difference between Ukraine's and Russia's demands is that Russia wants Ukraine to remain isolated from the west and militarily weak (which would make it easy for them to just go for it again), and Ukraine wants to align as tightly with the west as necessary to ensure Russia doesn't invade again, or failing that build up a credible enough deterrence themselves to achieve the same result.
I think it is incredibly fascinating how easily smart people can be confused by simple, repetitive propaganda. And they are big talkers about the narrative, but can be silenced (the only remaining option being a downvote), essentially without exception, with the mere unusual usage of language.
Imagine if someone was to weaponize, and then scale, this simple trick.
Do you think that diplomacy is just some magical spell that automatically makes everyone agree? It's not actually possible to just diplomacy harder in all situations and make things OK.
Diplomacy is able to prevent wars stemming from miscommunication / misunderstandings. There's not much you can do if both sides understand the other side's strategic aims correctly and still want to go to war.
There can still be things to be done, just not always.
For example had NATO countries all offered 50% of their GDP for the next decade as gifts to Russia in return for Putin calling all his troops out of Ukraine, it's very likely he would have ended the war on day two.
Of course, that's not an offer NATO countries would have been willing to make (and even if they had made a deal like that, at a price less ridiculously high than 50% of GDP, it could easily lead to Russia starting the exact same war a decade later, now with much better funding).
I'm not suggesting the above as a serious "this should have been the way to deal with it", just as a random, over-exaggerated example that there are diplomatic options above and beyond preventing wars that stem from miscommunication / misunderstandings.
The nuance here is that it's not the diplomats saving the peace (they obviously can't make such offer on their own), it's the NATO countries dramatically changing their strategic posture (willing to become economic vassals) and diplomats communicating the change. Putin would likely agree to such proposal since it would still further his goal of Russia becoming a dominant power on the continent.
This nuance is important, because sometimes people blame "weak diplomats" etc, but it's not their fault, they can't find equilibrium of strategic interests where there's none.
If anybody prevented war, it wasn't some last minute magic but rather slow and tedious effort years and decades before. Not something you get famous for.
It is also possible for war to be prevented by last minute magic deplomacy, albeit I would agree that it's the much less likely of the two options.
But it's also something that's much less likely to become public knowledge. Slow and tedious efforts over years and decades contains plenty of discussions of the sort that often can be made public to make both sides look good (or for each side to make themselves look good to their domestic audience), while last minute, last ditch deals to prevent a war that was about to happen is much more likely to involve deals/threats/whatever that one or both parties require remain classified for many decades.
> Name a single effective Western diplomat capable of preventing wars?
I mean all of them? Today the USA is not bombing London, Berlin is not bombing Paris, Switzerland is not bombing Sweden, Finland is not bombing Norway, Turkey is not bombing India.
If you only count the wars which happened then you ignore all the ones which were prevented.
A far better use of ones time is to wonder where all the diplomacy has gone.