Yeah I agree on most counts, but I have been thinking and reading for years about what the decline of the American empire will look like. It’s too soon to talk about how benevolent it was, because we don’t know how much irrational behavior it will engage in as it declines.
Of course, we might never see what the US empire would have looked like over the next 20 years, if Russia starts redefining what an “existential threat” to the state looks like, and starts lobbing nukes.
And by the way, Mearsheimer was correct was he not? Ukraine’s fate is going to be decided by Russia, like it or not. Do you prefer a Quisling regime or a genocide, because those seem to have been the only realistic options. No matter the written agreements, no matter what’s right or wrong. If Ukraine tries to turn to Europe and leave Russia behind, Russia will wreck the country. That’s what he said, and that’s what’s happening.
I guess NATO should have sent peacekeeping forces in after the revolution in 2014, or after Russia took Crimea. The only thing that could have stopped this was a strong military presence. Of course that’s easy to sayin hindsight.
Of course he wasn’t. Look at that RIA editorial, the Russians made it perfectly clear that the 1991 independence of Ukraine was the actual red line for them, so that puts the apologetic “NATO expansion” theory at rest. Mearsheimer was an useful idiot at best.
Not anymore. Russia is still mentally the USSR but they do have neither the manpower nor (ironically) the economic power of the latter. They only have a 4x total population advantage over Ukraine and the unending masses of Soviet infantrymen (many of the Ukrainian) are a thing of the past. What’s missing is the 400k trucks (yes, four hunderd thousand) that the US supplied to the mighty Red Army in WW2, not to mention other materiel. The Red Army of WW2 was running on US equipment.
Incidentally, the Russian public still believes they can get the desired outcome - genocide on the cheap, expending only “lesser” manpower - Caucasians, Asians and rural white trash. Putin is very careful not to involve anyone from major population centers.
They’re already doing their worst - wrecking the country as we speak, and committing genocide. If we exclude nuclear and chemical weapons, there’s not much else to do conventionally in addition to what they’re doing already doing right now.
“Stab the desired thing with a bayonet. If it’s hard pull back. If it’s soft, keep pushing” - V.I. Lenin.
Mutti Merkel increased Germany’s gas dependency by twenty percent post Crimea. If that wasn’t the message to Putin to keep pushing the bayonet, I don’t know what was.
Yes they are, as predicted. NATO-expansion is a red herring, I’m not talking about NATO expansion. Russia will have its sphere of influence or die trying, apparently. So Mearsheimer was correct in that, and whatever rhetoric they try to use to justify it is irrelevant.
I like how you brush off nuclear and chemical weapons as if Russia won’t use them. They will.
Not, a sphere of influence, an Empire. And with the demographic collapse looming plus 1,3 million excess deaths from Covid, they figured this was their last chance to grab some white Slavic bodies to stave off the inevitable collapse into a Chinese dependency.
I’m not saying they won’t use them. I’m saying that they cannot do conventionally anything else that they haven’t done by now.
I’m just saying the “realist” hard power politics view is correct. Fuck treaties, they aren’t worth the paper they are written on. The realists like Mearsheimer said that Russia will wreck the country, most of the other analysts said that there could never be a conventional invasion. So he was right about that.
Is it the west’s fault for “leading Ukraine on” (as if this was high school or some shit), well I don’t think so. Would things have played out with less bloodshed if the west completely left it up to Ukraine and Russia to solve their own problems? We don’t know. I guess I would rather have gone all in one way or the other. Complete commitment to defend them, or completely hands off.
Edit: Being realist goes both ways though, Mearsheimer just understood one side of the equation, what Russia would be willing to do. The Americans, taking the view of Mearsheimer, should be blamed for not supporting Ukrainian NATO membership hard enough to deter the Russians from attacking.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly the feeling these globalist left-wing type want you to have. The west has been no innocent by-stander in all this mess, that’s for sure. Especially biden, who has a lot of crooked dealings in Ukraine. But we have a constitution and therefore hope that the cult of wokeism, leftism, critical theory can fall by the wayside as it falls out of favor and fashion and can then return to something resembling reality when it’s finally over.
Barrack gave biden Ukraine to deal with, to give biden something to do in a forgotten part of the world. 8 years later we are on a razors edge of war, partially because biden used it as a personal bank and made decisions that compromised the countries security as he extracted wealth in return for a bunch of false promises of security and protection. Which led to Ukraine being bolder than they really had reason to be, which led to a whole bunch of other shit, which leads to now.
Atrocities such as those committed by the Russians are exactly the type of thing that can suck us into the war. Will we have a choice? Can we stand by idly as these atrocities occur? That’s the moral dilemma.
Apparently, atrocities are only okay if your adversary is make our oligarchs rich as hell, case in point, China. But Russia hasn’t been paying off our oligarchs and are committing horrible actions… What do we do?
No, because in Russian Imperial mindset the subject peoples - in this case Little Russians - have to be poorer than their imperial overlords. And weird as it sounds, even the poorest Ukrainian countryside is richer that the Russian one. That’s why Russian soldiers that are recruited from such shitholes are freaking out over Nutella jars, asphalt roads, street lights and other “luxuries” they find in Ukraine.
So Ukrainians would have to be reduced to starvation level poverty, in order for the Russians to be “richer”. And Ukrainians had eight years to see how that looks like in the self-proclaimed republics which are literal post apocalyptic hellholes ran by psychotic mass murdering meth heads such as the late Arsen Pavlov aka Motorola.
I know quite a few Russians and Ukrainians, but these concepts seem alien to them. These are educated people from the cities though, which I guess accounts for the disconnect. Moscow, Petersburg, Odessa etc. None of them give two shits about the imperial glory of Russia, or even seem to follow what’s going on. None of them are nationalist, but rather very individualistic. They care for their families and friends, but not much about their country. The state is corrupt so you should just look for ways to get by. Cheating the state is great if you can.
I hope every one of these m*******g butchers gets their due. And since the happy selfie crowd from Bucha is being transferred to Donbas, that’s very likely.
Dumb as rocks…
They look more like North Koreans than what I think of as Russian.
Asians have been Asianing all over what’s modern Russia for a really long time. Horses + Steppes = nomadic lifestyles and highly effective horse archers employing maneuver warfare. This over the span of millennia has made much of Russia and the surrounding countries into one of the planet’s great mixing pots of populations.
That’s how relatively recent terms like Turko-Mongolic come about. Look at a map to see how far apart modern Turkey and Mongolia are. Horse archers were only truly rendered obsolete when the modern breechloading rifle was invented, and I’ve met people who (now deceased) are nearly as old as that late 19th century invention.
A Persian chronicler claimed Genghis Khan had red hair. Nobody really knows for sure, but it wasn’t unheard of in the population. I’ve got Polish relatives with eyes that look more Asian than European.
Saying someone looks Russian is about the same thing as saying someone looks American.
Obese then.
Makes obvious sense when put like that. Russia needs 300 million people and multiple countries to give up their sovereignty in order for Russia to feel secure. Yeah, no.
Still, the ones who said Russia will go to war over it were correct. Strategic blunder of epic proportions by those who thought otherwise.
Actually let me rethink that again, lol.
It’s not a myth exactly to say that Russia is invading Ukraine because of nato expansion. It’s just the wrong way to frame the question. It’s more that Russia won’t accept any situation at all that doesn’t have its neighbors defenseless and subordinate to it. NATO expansion does create a situation Russia won’t accept, it’s just that it isn’t really because it feels under threat of attack, but under threat of losing its dreams of imperial glory.
Do you know if she’s single?
If you’re Putin’s billionaire buddy who likes to project a macho image and wants to be called “the prince of darkness”, man up for your mugshot and try not to look like a pathetic rat that you actually are. And at least try to comb your hair.
There is only one Prince of Darkness.
