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Watched the video but article is login walled and I'm not doing that.
Was there more to what he said? Because he's just making a point that wars end with treaties being signed. Wars don't end with the death of a single leader like Hitler. Germany literally didn't surrender until a week after his suicide. These things do end with treaties and agreements. It's what actually gets troops to stop fighting.
Japan surrender is a more direct example from WW2 he could be referencing too.
But maybe the article explains it more?
I think JD Vance is a moron. But I'm really not seeing what's wrong about him saying wars end with agreements from both sides to stop fighting. Germans, Japanese, and Italians exist today. We didn't just kill them all to end WW2.
Again, that's all I heard him reference in the video. Maybe there is more.
Edit: Someone linked the archive link so I could read it. Thanks.
Article is nitpicking what he said. Sorry, I don't want to defend JD Vance. I really don't. But an unconditional surrender is still an agreement and negotiation between the sides. It's just a case when one side has nothing left to negotiate with. It's not at all counter to the point he was making in that talks and agreements between sides need to occur to end the fighting.
One major agreement of an unconditional surrender is that the troops that disarm won't be slaughtered by the other side when they do.
I'm gonna have to disagree that they are the same. Unconditional surrender, occupation of an opposing force, then negotiation to recover leadership of your own territory is not the same as a negotiated cease fire.
Wars aren't ended with treaties all the time though. For instance North/South Korea haven't signed anything. Russia and Japan never signed anything after world war 2. I would say Russia signed the Minsk Agreements with Ukraine, but clearly that war is ongoing. China and Taiwan haven't signed anything which is ongoing. The U.S. never declared war on Afghanistan or Iraq, so their was never real peace treaties, but rather peace agreements I guess.
I think the question in the 21st century might be, what is war? What is the scope that defines it, and who has to recognize it for it to "exist.". Is Israel at war with Palestine, Serbia, Yemen, Iran? Was Iran at war with India? Is India at war with China? What is a cold war, and is the U.S. thus still at war with Russia and Iran seperately or together now?
What the hell do we call the U.S.'s operations that have taken place either directly, indirectly, or covertly in South America... And are all countries inevitably at war so long as their economies are clashing within a capitalistic structure with finite resources.
To define peace, we may need to first define war, or vise versa
So your response to my comment about this article being nitpicky about terms like: treaties, truce, agreements, etc is to be more nitpicky?
Everything you mentioned had some form of diplomatic talks that ended active fighting (or lead to withdrawal of hostile troops).
It's just odd. You don't need to reach to make JD Vance look stupid. There are plenty of things to shit on him for. But saying "diplomacy is what ends conflicts" is not really one of the things he's said I'd disagree with.
The problem with our Hitler is that even if we got him trapped in a bunker, I don't think he's handy enough to kill himself.
Holy nitpick Batman. Or strawman? The terms of surrender were unconditional. That their troops wouldn't be slaughtered is implicit and was protected under international law. That's not a negotiation.
that's not nit-picking. Reaching a surrender IS DEPLOMACY. I swear to God people think it's like a video game and you kill the main boss and all the henchmen lay down their arms. That's not how wars end.
Okay check yourself with ad hominem attacks, asshole.
Germany's surrender was a military act, not a diplomatic one. It was signed by generals, not diplomats or politicians. Germany's surrender was not a negotiated agreement as they were denied any legitimacy to negotiate.
I swear people are being purposely obtuse.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Instrument_of_Surrender
There is literally a picture of the surrender being signed mate. You don't have to be a politician to do diplomatic actions for your state. This is all that I'm referring to. Wars end with agreements. No matter what you want to call it. Surrender, Treaties, Truce, etc.
No matter how you want to nitpick if it's a "not a politician" or whatever else you dense idiots can't get through your skulls.
Also, ad hominems are when someone insults a person in order to AVOID addressing their argument.
You can call someone an idiot AND address their argument. Which is what I'm doing. It's not an "ad hominem" everytime someone insults you. Get a brain.
Again, unconditional surrender by the military, which was no longer willing to defend its country, is not diplomacy. It is a military act. Unconditional surrender is the result of failed diplomacy, it is failure to negotiate an end to a conflict. It's not an "agreement," it is a one-sided act of capitulation.
This isn't nitpicking, you're making a huge reach to call it diplomacy. If you can show me any published book, dictionary or document that says that unconditional surrender is an act of diplomacy, I'll stand corrected. But I'm pretty sure you'll have a very hard time finding such a thing.
Diplomacy is by definition the management of relations between countries, by representatives of the countries, not between a country and another country's military. Germany was not under military rule, so the military wasn't making a decision for the country, and it was not a diplomatic act.
I mean, it's in the first sentence of what you posted [emphasis mine]
The signatories on the German side were
Notice they're all military, not government representatives. These signatories represent the German High Command (military), not Germany itself, it says so on the first line of the terms.
Now, read the full instruments of surrender here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Definitive_German_Instrument_of_Surrender_(8_May_1945)
The terms are all about orders to the military and how they will perform the act of surrendering. It is a purely military document. There's nothing about the country, nothing about the government, nothing diplomatic about it. There is nothing in the terms that say what the Allies will do.
As I hope you can see now, they weren't performing actions on behalf of the state. They were performing on behalf of the military, and that's a huge difference.
Imagine if the US military signed terms of surrender, or even gave away equipment to another country, on its own, without Congress or the President issuing an order. That wouldn't be considered diplomacy, it would be a military act, and if you can't see the difference, then I guess we're done here.
And ad hominem attacks are used to distract from the weakness of your own argument, which is what you continue to do.
Yeah I'm not reading all that. You're going max autism to ignore a very simple point that started with JD Vance making a vague statement about how "talks" end wars.
You can nitpick all day. But it's a garbage reason to attack JD Vance. Proven by the fact that literally only this click-bait article is talking about it. And I'm not wasting my time reading an essay from someone that doesn't understand that.
There are a thousand better reasons to shit on Vance and I have no reason to care about an exhausting conversation like this. Especially when you can't get that very simple point from my initial comment.
You're reaching so hard to defend JD Vance I wonder what orifice you use to please him every morning.
See, now that's Ad hominem. No rebuttal and pure insult. Glad you're learning.
You don't seem to understand to anything else....
You know that meme where the guys are in a circle and a guy says something, then a guy gives a big thumbs up and they ignore him? Imagine that group is the allies occupying just about all of German territory, and supporting the new nations they are building in the ashes, and the guy who says something is a small group who can "claim" they represent the previous government, but are frequently not even respected by the pockets of shattered resistance spawned by the rotting corpse of that government. Usually it is referred to as Debellatio. Their state had collapsed. No one really negotiated with them. They can call out "surrender" but the allies and the remaining hardliners did not care.
He said every conflict in human history. Its not nitpicking to note the sheer number of times in human history where it ended with one side getting mass murdered.