Never mind. Communication breakdown.
But, in this case, the goal is just to push Russian forces back into Russia. Sure, if NATO was marching on Moscow you could expect a nuclear deterrent. Would Putin risk a nuclear counterattack to avoid pulling out of Ukraine? Seems less likely.
That said, I don’t see US/Europe engaging in military action in Ukraine. They’re not part of NATO and I suspect that the US/Europe part of the conflict will be via sanctions and financial means.
This issue was raised the last time Russia invaded Ukraine. The consensus was that the Budapest Memorandum only obligated the other signatories - Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States - to not invade Ukraine in exchange for them giving up nuclear weapons. It did not obligate the signatories to defend Ukraine if another country invaded.
Trump is the chamberlain of today. He took the word of Russia over his own intelligence agencies, disclosed top security information to Putin, practically fellated Putin on the world stage, held meetings with no American translator present, and likely laundered oligarch money.
Tucker Carlson comes in second.
Never have I ever thought I’d see the day that a significant and vocal part of the republican party thinks Putin is doing the right thing, and it’s just A-OK to let him take over the Ukraine.
And I expect that from his perspective, this is not just a grab but an attempt to stop the grabs of NATO/US
Whether he admires and his jealous of Putin’s governing, or “Have film of girls peeing”, I think Trump would be on the side of Russia about Ukraine. “They love each other. You will see no greater love than Ukraine and Russia”, blah, blah, blah.
Surely.
Why isn’t Ukraine eligible to join NATO? They seem to have free elections. Someone somewhere said that the USA has a problem with Ukraine’s human rights.
A few reasons:
First off, Ukraine brings almost nothing of value to NATO. They would be of little to no asset to NATO, but a huge liability. They don’t have a powerful economy or military, but their membership would drastically raise the likelihood of NATO finding itself at war with Russia someday. (To a certain extent, though, the same argument could have applied to the Baltic states, and yet they got to join.)
Secondly, nations that have preexisting conflicts that are ongoing can’t join (kind of like how, prior to Obamacare, patients with preexisting conditions couldn’t get insurance to pay for their condition.)
Thirdly, the borders of what are and aren’t Ukraine aren’t even well-defined these days. If Ukraine joined, would NATO be obligated to protect everything that isn’t the splittist provinces, or is the required-line-of-NATO-protection somewhat further west? The alliance would want all of that to be crystal-clear and defined before signing off on membership, lest Ukraine demand that NATO go to war for something the rest of NATO doesn’t agree with.
Fourthly, as mentioned, Ukraine has a big problem with corruption, undemocratic stuff and human rights and all that, and NATO doesn’t like that.
Because many of the countries currently in NATO would see Ukrainian membership as a liability. Why step into a situation that’s poised for war?
And any country in NATO can veto the admission of a new country, so it would only take one country to say “No, thanks.”
Out of curiosity, how many NATO members does it take to vote a member nation out? Say, for instance, NATO decided it didn’t want Turkey to be in the club anymore.
Though that last bit they’ve been willing to overlook at times in the past.
One of the flaws of the NATO charter is that there is no mechanism for expelling a member. A work-around that has been proposed is that members vote to suspend the charter and place wordage into the reactivation that excludes the offending member.
Can’t imagine what it must have been like to hear this broadcast as it happened
“If poison gas is used…”
Jesus.
If he really thinks that, he’s a poor student of history. NATO has never grabbed land. The last time the US grabbed any land was back in the 19th century when presidents like James Polk and Andrew Jackson were taking land from Native Americans. Invading countries to annex their territory is not something the US and modern democracies do.
He may well have an idea of what US/NATO encroachment looks like that is different from the “invade and grab” model you suggest. Empires differ in how they proceed. “Coca-colonization” depends more on money than brute force, and so yes, is different from earlier empires, but this is a matter of historical development, not a difference in aim. Putin has an entire lifetime wrapped up in fear of the US and its attempts to destabilize, contain, and constrain the USSR/Russia and expecting him to see NATO sitting where the USSR used to be undoubtedly feels like an encroachment. Let’s not forget, the US was fighting an active war in Afghanistan, which is pretty close to Russia and its vital interests. It would, from a Russian perspective, be foolhardy to assume the US was not doing some sabre-rattling with this. The “domino effect” may have been a dumb policy for the US, but it was a guiding principle for many years–thus Vietnam–and a similar domino effect may well (mis)guide Russia now.
And in 1938 they thought it was 1914 all over again. But it wasn’t. It would be a mistake to oversimplify the situation by applying prior historical patterns.
One could also compare it to the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia too, but that would also be inaccurate.
There is some work on the Cuban missile crisis that suggests many of the generals and advisors around JFK were quick to use “Munich” as the historical metaphor, with the obvious solution, “bomb the fuckers now!” Kennedy had recently read Tuchman’s The Guns of August, which argues everyone more or less blundered into World War I, and Kennedy was prompted to ask, “what if this isn’t Munich? What if it’s Sarajevo?” and pushed for different reasoning and solutions.
There is a very good book, Thinking in Time, that talks about reasoning historically and the problems that can cause if not done with a lot of work, attention, and open-mindedness.
Putin may very well think that the US would grab countries just as Russia has in the past, and apparently still wishes to.
A little later than Polk and Jackson. We grabbed a lot of territory during the Spanish-American War and still have some of it.
On the other issue, Putin may see NATO itself as an American empire; the equivalent of how the Soviet Union used the Warsaw Pact as a de facto empire. I would disagree with this equivalence. Putin may also not really believe this. But it’s an argument he can make to the Russian people that many of them will support.