With a nod at everything Kb said the real mistake was not getting Ukraine and Gorgia into NATO or some other strong alliance (fuck it make a new one) sooner. It's an almost iron clad rule that every country views it's natural boarder as the largest historical boarder it ever possessed. It's was inevitable that at some point Russia would start to try and claw back some of it's lost territory, especially when governed by an powerful authoritarian. Ukraine is the cradle of the Russian state, the center may have moved cause the Mongols but traditionally (like seven hundred years worth of tradition) it's all the same place. Sach's position that this probably would have worked out if we had just played a weaker hand is pretty laughable when you think about who Vladimir Putin is. Sachs is a United Nations lets talk it out like reasonable people guy, Vlad is a Realpolitik guy, he loves the talkers. The U.S. couldn't, wouldn't and shouldn't have been able to suck enough dick to get Putin to not decide that Russia's natural state is to control those places that have traditionally been in it's orbit of power. Are spheres of power real? Should the U.S. sometimes allow countries to wield power in ways we don't like in someone else's sphere or power? I think that before too long we are going to have to come to some accommodations with China over U.S. interference in their backyard. Do we need to and should we do that with Russia? Sach's says yes, the Ukrainians say no. I vote no, the Russians are a washed up power and letting run roughshod over one place guarantees that they will keep doing the same thing in others. I thought we should have intervened in Georgia cause I was sure that not doing so was going to lead to bigger problems down the line and what do you know.
I have been on the ragged edge of doing a dual review: Bill Browder's Red Notice and Adam Curtis' Traumazone. The former is an investment banker's discovery of ethics as he transitions from corporate raider to political dissident; the latter is a skilled but heavy-handed documentarian's near-total removal of his influence over a subject told almost entirely through carefully selected BBC News B-roll of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Browder, notably, doesn't ever figure out that creating a kleptocratic paradise in the ashes of the world's largest state economy might end badly until he finds himself detained by the FSB... and doesn't really seem interested in doing anything about it until his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky is tortured to death. Curtis, on the other hand, rubs your fucking nose in the fact that we spent 10 years whistling past the graveyard, pretending that every warning sign we saw was a blazing red flag prophesying the return of the Tsars. I think we made the same mistake we made with China: give every advantage of a free market to a market that isn't free and the cagiest and most sophisticated in the ecosystem will make out like bandits while the hoi polloi develops extremely-well-justified hatred for your entire way of life. Browder's book illustrates the Upton Sinclair maxim “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" while Curtis points out just how complicit the rest of the world was in creating the modern failed state of Russia.
I don’t see how that’s better. If you allow a country into NATO that means that we go to hot war with any country that invades it (in this case Russia) no matter what. Add in that we’d basically be surrounding Russia, and I think we be at a hot nuclear war.
Russia doesn't want to go to war with NATO. No one wants a nuclear war. I don't know what it is you don't see that I see. The Russians have always been conflict adverse, they barely had the courage to ship most their comrades small arms during the cold war, let alone stand up to the west. Their tactical dogma is built around the assumption that they are being invaded, which is part of the thing that's put them back on their heels in Ukraine. The only aggression they have ever offered is against weaker foes. In contrast the US is not all that conflict adverse and has often shown up to help weak "allies". NATO doctrine is pretty aggressive and the US is more aggressive than that. I don't see what advantage could ever be gotten by playing a weak hand against Russia.
Sort of a chicken/egg problem, eh what? IF: Ukraine was in NATO THEN: Russia would risk a hot war invading it. LIST OF COUNTRIES THAT BORDER RUSSIA: - Azerbaijan - Belarus - China - Estonia (NATO since 2004) - Finland (NATO since Russia invaded Ukraine) - Georgia - Kazakhstan - North Korea - Latvia (NATO since 2004) - Lithuania (NATO since 2004) - Mongolia - Norway (NATO since 1949) - Poland (NATO since 1999) - Ukraine IF: Expansion of NATO = "hot nuclear war" THEN: The world ended in a gigantic cataclysm on March 29, 2004 and again just this past April. Or maybe Russia is a paper tiger, and always has been. If you allow a country into NATO that means that we go to hot war with any country that invades it (in this case Russia) no matter what.
Add in that we’d basically be surrounding Russia,