Ukraine

[CWSmith]

Re: Ukraine

That. Only substitute "the West" for Ray-gun.

I hold the west responsible, but it was Reagan and the Republicans that took the victory lap.

[mizzenman]

Re: Ukraine

I think Russia would be way harder to rebuild than Germany, sice Russia was never as developed as Germany or Japan in the first place. Just my thought.

[skuthorp]

Re: Ukraine

Vlad seems to have issued a list of demands, the next step if precedent is any guide is action……...

[Garret]

Re: Ukraine

I think Russia would be way harder to rebuild than Germany, sice Russia was never as developed as Germany or Japan in the first place. Just my thought.

Just a bit bigger too.

[Garret]

Re: Ukraine

Good article here on Putin's demands last December: https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/10724...a-nato-ukraine

What right does Russia have to decide whether or not a country can join NATO? I may be naive, but I thought a country got to decide (right or wrong) what organizations it wants to join. Does Putin get to tell Ukraine's leaders what color shoes to wear too?

[JimD]

Re: Ukraine

Putin is an a$$hole and Ukraine deserves freedom, but...



Like Iraq and Afghanistan could determine their own alliances over the past two decades?

Or like Latin American countries are free to do so today?

Xactly. But it's only wrong when Russia does it.

[George.]

Re: Ukraine

What right does Russia have to decide whether or not a country can join NATO? I may be naive, but I thought a country got to decide (right or wrong) what organizations it wants to join.

So Cuba, let's say, could join an alliance with Russia without fear of retaliation from any other power?

Oh, wait...

[Garret]

Re: Ukraine

So Cuba, let's say, could join an alliance with Russia without fear of retaliation from any other power?

Oh, wait...

Fair point

[Nicholas Carey]

Re: Ukraine

Putin wants to rebuild the glory of the USSR. Nobody can be surprised by this.

At the end of WWI the allies extracted punitive concessions from the losers. Those concessions are widely agreed to have led to WWII.

At the end of WWII the allies rebuilt Japan and Germany so that today they are major allies.

What did we (Ronald Reagan) do to rebuild Russia after winning the Cold War? Why did we not learn the lesson from history that either we helped rebuild it as a modern democratic state, or the old forces would reassert themselves?

We did not do a good job of even trying to rebuild the ex-Soviet Union or to [re-]incorporate it into the community of nations.

Francis Fukuyama's August 1989 essay, "The End of History?", published in the neo-con rag The National Interest did not help, arguing as it did that a blissful liberal democratic capitalist utopia was nigh at hand. Published a couple of months later, this article from the Sunday NYT magazine, What Is Fukuyama Saying? And to Whom Is He Saying It?, talks about the reaction to that essay.

This op-ed piece from the NYT in 2017 pretty much lays it all out:

The Cold War and America’s Delusion of Victory
By Odd Arne Westad
Aug. 28, 2017

Odd Arne Westad, a professor of United States-Asia relations at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, is the author, most recently, of “The Cold War: A World History,” from which this essay is adapted.

"...the Cold War as an ideological struggle disappeared only in part, despite Communism’s implosion. On the American side, not so much changed on that day. The Cold War was over, and the United States had won it. But most Americans still believed that they could only be safe if the world looked more like their own country and if the world’s governments abided by the will of the United States.

Ideas and assumptions that had built up over generations persisted, despite the disappearance of the Soviet threat. Instead of a more limited and achievable American foreign policy, most policy makers from both parties believed that the United States could then, at minimal cost or risk, act on its own imperatives.

America’s post-Cold War triumphalism came in two versions. First was the Clinton version, which promoted a prosperity agenda of market values on a global scale. Its lack of purpose in international affairs was striking, but its domestic political instincts were probably right: Americans were tired of foreign entanglements and wanted to enjoy “the peace dividend.”

As a result, the 1990s was a lost opportunity for international cooperation, particularly to combat disease, poverty and inequality. The most glaring examples of these omissions were former Cold War battlefields like Afghanistan, Congo and Nicaragua, where the United States could not have cared less about what happened — once the Cold War was over.

The second was the Bush version. Where President Bill Clinton emphasized prosperity, President George W. Bush emphasized predominance. In between, of course, stood Sept. 11. It is possible that the Bush version would never have come into being had it not been for the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington carried out by Islamist fanatics (a renegade faction, in fact, of an American Cold War alliance).

The Cold War experience clearly conditioned the United States response to these atrocities. Instead of targeted military strikes and global police cooperation, which would have been the most sensible reaction, the Bush administration chose this moment of unchallenged global hegemony to lash out and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq. These actions had no meaning in a strategic sense, creating 21st-century colonies under the rule of a Great Power with no appetite for colonial rule.

But the United States did not act out of strategic purpose. It acted because its people were understandably angry and fearful. And it acted because it could. The Bush version was directed by foreign policy advisers who thought of the world predominantly in Cold War terms; they stressed power projection, territorial control and regime change.

The post-Cold War era was therefore not an aberration but a continuity and confirmation of an absolute historical purpose for the United States. Gradually, however, over the course of the generation that has passed since the Cold War, the United States has become less and less able to afford global predominance.

As America entered a new century, its main aim should have been to bring other nations into the fold of international norms and the rule of law, especially as its own power diminishes. Instead, the United States did what declining superpowers often do: engage in futile, needless wars far from its borders, in which short-term security is mistaken for long-term strategic goals. The consequence is an America less prepared than it could have been to deal with the big challenges of the future: the rise of China and India, the transfer of economic power from West to East, and systemic challenges like climate change and disease epidemics.

If the United States won the Cold War but failed to capitalize on it, then the Soviet Union, or rather Russia, lost it, and lost it big. The collapse left Russians feeling déclassé and usurped. One day they had been the elite nation in a superpower union of republics. The next, they had neither purpose nor position. Materially, things were bad, too. Old people did not get their pensions. Some starved to death. Malnutrition and alcoholism shortened the average life span for a Russian man from nearly 65 in 1987 to less than 58 in 1994.

If many Russians felt robbed of a future, they were not wrong. Russia’s future was indeed stolen — by the privatization of Russian industry and of its natural resources. As the socialist state with its moribund economy was dismantled, a new oligarchy emerged from party institutions, planning bureaus and centers of science and technology and assumed ownership of Russia’s riches. Often, the new owners stripped these assets and closed down production. In a state in which unemployment had, officially at least, been nonexistent, the rate of joblessness rose through the 1990s to peak at 13 percent. All this happened while the West applauded Boris Yeltsin’s economic reforms.

In retrospect, the economic transition to capitalism was a catastrophe for most Russians. It is also clear that the West should have dealt with post-Cold War Russia better than it did. Both the West and Russia would have been considerably more secure today if the chance for Russia to join the European Union, and possibly even NATO, had at least been kept open in the 1990s.

Instead, their exclusion has given Russians the sense of being outcasts and victims — which, in turn, has given credence to embittered jingoists like President Vladimir Putin, who see all the disasters that have befallen the country over the past generation as an American plot to reduce and isolate it."

[Osborne Russell]

Re: Ukraine

We did not do a good job of even trying to rebuild the ex-Soviet Union or to [re-]incorporate it into the community of nations.

Poor exhausted imperialists, we didn't help them.

The post-Cold War era was therefore not an aberration but a continuity and confirmation of an absolute historical purpose for the United States.

However, the United States is not NATO; NATO is no threat to Russia; and no one but Russia is stopping Russia joining the community of nations

[CWSmith]

Re: Ukraine

...and no one but Russia is stopping Russia joining the community of nations

This is true.

[skuthorp]

Re: Ukraine

But the US called the shots, wanted to call them, insisted on calling them until……….. it didn't.

I believe it could still, if it wanted to. If. It's on the cusp with a pronounced lean to the negative at present. Around the world people don't believe it has the bottle any more, and maybe the US doesn't either.
There being a power vacuum two dictators come to the fore waving sticks. The US still has bigger ones but adter several OS disasters may not have thr will to wave it effectively any more because the internal power struggle has a while to run and no one is sure of the finish.

[Nicholas Carey]

Re: Ukraine

Poor exhausted imperialists, we didn't help them.

Nothing about imperialist or anything else really, save a sense of somewhat enlightened self-interest and possibly some sense of noblesse oblige. A kleptocracy run by an autocrat thug, having an impoverished populace, and armed with nuclear weapons, is a threat to all.

Following the implosion of the Soviet Union, it would have been in the best interest of the community of nations as a whole, if we, the resource-rich West had helped rebuild the remains of Russia and its ex-Soviet satellite states.

[sandtown]

Re: Ukraine

Following the implosion of the Soviet Union, it would have been in the best interest of the community of nations as a whole, if we, the resource-rich West had helped rebuild the remains of Russia and its ex-Soviet satellite states.

In fact, I heard a retiring NATO commander, John Galvin, say this in the early 1990's. He was visibility saddened that it looked like it was not going to happen. Unfortunately, he was right.

[Osborne Russell]

Re: Ukraine

Nothing about imperialist or anything else really, save a sense of somewhat enlightened self-interest and possibly some sense of noblesse oblige. A kleptocracy run by an autocrat thug, having an impoverished populace, and armed with nuclear weapons, is a threat to all.

Following the implosion of the Soviet Union, it would have been in the best interest of the community of nations as a whole, if we, the resource-rich West had helped rebuild the remains of Russia and its ex-Soviet satellite states.

There is Russia in Ukraine, and there is the rest of the world. The idea that the ROTW owes Russia something, because the ROTW didn't pursue its own interest, is nonsensical. Bizarre. Even in the abstract, it adds not a whisper to the Russian side of the scale.

As for who actually owes whom for what:

1. The Russian people owe the ROTW a responsible nation state. This is the corollary of the right to self-government: the duty of self-government. This means all their blubbering bull S about "Mother Russia" needs to go straight down the toilet, along with American Exceptionalism.

2. A duty to rebuild Russia?

This argument of course avoids the issue of legal authority to do jack in Russia; and Russia's willingess to allow jack to be done; and where the money would come from. We're going to teach the heirs of Imperial Russia how to run their outfit, from Kamchatka to Bulgaria, and pay them to do it? Japan and Germany allowed themselves to be rebuilt, having had the imperialism beaten out them, severely.

In contrast -- who caused Chernobyl to F up? Who lied about it, and actively prevented the ROTW from dealing with it? Who paid, and continues to pay, to fix it? What has Russia rebuilt in Ukraine, the Ukraine supposedly bound to them by all this spiritual stuff?

By all means, let's talk about the self-interest of the ROTW. Chernobyl all by itself would justify indefinite occupation of Ukraine by the ROTW; arguably, invasion of Russia to uncover and deal with all other colossal, world-threatening F ups they're lying to the world about. Here comes the ROTW, acting in their interest, S birds. Stand aside. Who pays the piper calls the tune.

Meanwhile they've managed to rebuild themselves to the point where they have invaded Ukraine and Georgia. If other things needed rebuilding, those needs were subordinated to Russian imperialism.

The Russian empire is not going to be rebuilt and the bills sent to the ROTW. And Russia is not going to rebuild it. Referendum after referendum is coming to central Asia. Independence. Are we then going to hear about the mystical bonds between Kirghizstan and "Mother Russia"?