As you go on to say, is is instability directly on home borders - it doesn’t matter who’s involved or what the issues are, it has to stop. Europe - NATO - didn’t go headlong into Kosovo because we’re all super-humanitarians, you just cannot have that nonsense in central Europe. How far was that instability from the home border of what was then the world’s largest exporter by value … not acceptable. Even now all you need is the wrong Iranian armoured division to move a few miles the wrong way for the price of oil to shoot up.
In a democracy - even a proto, early Victorian style, or pluto democracy as evolving Russia is, you have to have certainly or the voters, perhaps via the markets, will end you.
We really are talking about basic 101 geo-politics, and that has absolutely nothing to do with which ideology you are inclined towards.
Guys, Europeans looking at the disaster of the American people choosing Trump doesn’t mean they suddenly forget that Putin is Putin.
Loudly crowing that we’ve been protecting the Europeans from the Russians for decades, and then loudly announcing that we’re going to stop doing that, because fuck those Europeans, well, what exactly are we expecting the response from Europe to be?
They ain’t gonna cozy up to Putin. And they don’t exactly critically depend on the United States to stop the Soviet panzers from roaring through the Fulda Gap anymore.
The fact is that Russia is a very poor country with a per captita GDP on par with Mexico and Malaysia. Lists of countries by GDP - Wikipedia. The European Union as a whole has an economy roughly 12 times larger than Russia.
Russia itself is diplomatically isolated. Their best friends in the world are Syria and a few impoverished former Soviet Republics.
The only thing Russia has going for itself right now is that the United States has inexplicably elected a buffoon who admires Putin’s authoritarian style. And this has revealed the hollowness of American leadership. The bad news for Putin is that Trump’s inevitable downward spiral is going to make pro-Russian policies toxic in American politics for another generation.
XT, this is also a very slanted view, and the only countries for which it’s really accurate are Poland and possibly the Baltic states. With respect to the Czech and Slovak republics, Hungary, and southeastern Europe (as well as of course the former Soviet states themselves), opinion about Russia, Communism and the Soviet Union was much more mixed then, and continues to be so today. In a number of these countries successor parties of the old communists continue to do reasonably well (the Bohemia-Moravia Communist Party, for example), and in places like Hungary and Romania you can find a majority of people telling the opinion surveys that their countries were better off under the communists. See for example End of Communism Cheered but Now with More Reservations | Pew Research Center, and Hungary: Better Off Under Communism? | Pew Research Center
The “were most people better off under the communist era” gets 72% people saying yes in Hungary, and that was back in 2009: my guess is that with Hungarian economic stagnation since then, the figure has gone further up.
There are reasons for this of course: Russia was perceived as an imperial conqueror by Polish people going back to 1772, whereas the rest of the Warsaw Pact states didn’t fall under heavy Russian influence until 1945 (the imperial powers they were concered about were traditionally Austria and Turkey).
What really happened was that in the 1990s and early 2000s, eastern European countries were faced with the choice of allying with the west or with Russia. Since Russia was in economic and demographic free-fall at the time, and since hopes were high about liberal democracy, western values, and capitalism, that seemed like an easy choice. Since then, eastern European economies have mostly not done as well as their populace had initially hoped, people have become more aware of the costs of being part of the west (in terms of rising inequality, mass migration, and so forth), and so opinion about the west vs. Russia is much less slanted towards the west than it was in 1991. This is why you get things like this.
Most Slovaks want to be “neutral” between Russia and the west:
In Hungary, the Czech Republic/Slovakia and the Balkans, less than half of people are actively in favour of NATO, most of the rest are neutral about it, and in the Ukraine more people see NATO as a threat than protection: Most NATO Members in Eastern Europe See It as Protection
Most people in former Soviet states, about half of Bosnians, Croats, and Czechs, and a little under half of Hungarians support a strong Russia as a counterweight to western influence:
Even Estonians who you might expect to be terrified of Russia now see immigration, not Russian invasion, as the biggest existential threat to them:
As I said, in Poland your assessment is quite correct, but in the rest of eastern Europe opinion about Russia vs. the west was mixed in the 1990s and remains mixed today (and may have tilted more in the Russian direction as dissatisfaction with the ‘progress’ since 1991 has grown).
Russia is a middle- to upper-middle economy by world standards (I would reserve the epithet ‘very poor’ for, you know, Africa and Southern Asia). And they have a number of allies in Latin America, outside Syria and the former Soviet Union.
How about push for a <I>referendum in Donetsk, Lugansk and Crimea</I> about whether they want to be part of Ukraine, part of Russia, or independent? (Actually let’s even omit the choice of being part of Russia: they can choose independence or to continue as part of the Ukraine). And while we’re at it, how about referendums in South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Transnistria as well.
For that matter, no reason to assume Russia’s borders should be sacrosanct either: how about an independence referendum in Chechnya too.
And no, I don’t think NATO was ever a good idea (even during the Cold War) and it was even less of a good idea after the Warsaw Pact was dissolved.
In a sense, but Putin is actually a lot more pro-western than the median Russian. His most significant opposition, as I noted above, are either communists or ethnic nationalists.
Anyway, your depiction of the situation that the western powers gave eastern European countries the freedom to choose between Russia and the West, and only accepted eastern European countries into NATO under intense popular pressure from those countries, is somewhat less than accurate. The country which chose to ally most strongly with Russia, Belarus, has paid a price in terms of economic and diplomatic isolation from the west. We used quite a bit of economic and political influence to try to ensure that eastern European countries chose our model, and not any of the alternatives on offer.
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XT, this is also a very slanted view, and the only countries for which it’s really accurate are Poland and possibly the Baltic states. With respect to the Czech and Slovak republics, Hungary, and southeastern Europe (as well as of course the former Soviet states themselves), opinion about Russia, Communism and the Soviet Union was much more mixed then, and continues to be so today. In a number of these countries successor parties of the old communists continue to do reasonably well (the Bohemia-Moravia Communist Party, for example), and in places like Hungary and Romania you can find a majority of people telling the opinion surveys that their countries were better off under the communists. See for example 11-23-14 News Interest Topline | Pew Research Center…-reservations/, and http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank...der-communism/
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I admitted it was slanted. That said, I don’t think my characterization that those countries came to NATO and not the other way around is slanted. I honestly don’t know the stories behind why Hungary and the Czech Republic joined. Maybe they really love Russia but decided to join NATO because of some pressure Western Europe put on them to join or something (:dubious:)…or maybe their governments are less fond of the good old days under the Russian boot than the people who long to be back under it. I really don’t know.
Well…why join NATO though? I mean, they could ‘ally’ with the West simply by trading with them. There was no urgent reason to join a military alliance if what they were looking for was economic benefits. It’s not like NATO was holding out a big carrot…join us and you get to trade, don’t join and go pound sand with your Russian buddies! They ASKED to join a defensive alliance that they didn’t have to join unless they had some military reason to do so.
Out of curiosity though, since their populations are seemingly so against it, is there any indications that either country or any other ones want to leave NATO and perhaps go back to an alliance with Russia? Any sort of populist movements or indications the governments are leaning that way?
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It’s a bit myopic to focus squarely on Russia’s behavior in 2008 and 2014 without taking a good hard look at American behavior from 2001 to 2008. When the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, we pulled out of the Moscow Olympics. Yet we’ve been occupying Afghanistan for the last 15 years and counting. We complain about Russia meddling in the affairs of its neighbors, and yet we ignored a UN vote and invaded a sovereign country 8,000 miles away. How does that get reconciled? On top of all that we openly discussed the implementation of a greater military and political presence in the former Russian sphere, including plans for a missile defense system. It would be one thing if after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States had simply committed itself to a stable Europe, but its actions signaled to Russia that it wanted to expand its political, economic, and military influence far beyond what had existed up to that point. And until recently there wasn’t a whole lot that Russia could do about it. All of this was before South Ossetia, before Crimea and the rest of Ukraine.
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But you’d also need to look at Russia’s actions and behaviors in those same periods…and also realize when Putin came into power in Russia. I do agree with your assertion that the missile defense system in Poland (I assume that’s what you are talking about) in 2008 would have been a sore point for the Russians. I don’t really know the details on why we put that in for Poland or why they requested it, so that could certainly be one of those points where it appeared to the Russians that the US/NATO was being aggressive. But Russia’s actions during that period weren’t exactly aggression free either, and though I don’t recall the timeline I know that the Russian’s started their old cold war tricks of flying air missions to ‘test’ allied defenses and show their flag.
Sure, “very poor” maybe isn’t the best descriptor. But “a heck of a lot worse off than Europe” is true. Per capita GDP in Russia is less than a third of Europe’s.
So they’re the Mexico of Europe, if Mexico had thousands of nukes, an aggressive foreign policy, and a history of totalitarian dictatorship.
I didn’t say that people in eastern Europe were ‘so against’ NATO, I denied that they were all that strongly for it. Support for NATO still gets a plurality of support in most of eastern Europe (outside the former Soviet Union), just not an actual majority.
In answer to your question though, Slovakia, Hungary, Moldova and Bulgaria all currently have weakly pro-Russian heads of government, and the Czech Republic has a weakly-pro-Russian head of state, although none of them want to leave NATO. In terms of opposition parties, the third largest party in the Czech Republic (communists, they may become second largest this year), and the second largest party in Hungary (quasi-fascists) both want to leave NATO and presumably ally with Russia. In eastern Europe, as in the west, public opinion in the last few years has been swinging against ‘establishment’ parties, both as a result of disappointing economic performance and because of the mass immigration crisis.
I don’t think leaving NATO is a likely outcome in the near future for any eastern European country, but if the quasi-fascists win an election in Hungary (or maybe if the communists get into a ruling coalition in the CR) that might change. Maybe Bulgaria, who knows.
I think Obama and Clinton were at least making reasonable attempts at solving the problem with Russia, and that Trump is not. Trump is incapable of even attempting it. The sum total of his ideas on the subject are “Russia has nukes, and nuclear war is bad, so we should be friends.”
I also genuinely believe that having the attack on Clinton actually work is not good for the world, either. Because it gave them renewed confidence in an ability to wage cyber warfare.
I also believe that Clinton would listen (and Obama did listen) much better to other people, which also gives us a much higher likelihood of success in this.
This whole argument sounds like the same one made during the election, that both Trump and Clinton are bad, so it doesn’t matter. But it does, because Trump is worse. There are very, very few things where Trump isn’t worse than Clinton.
That’s the whole reason why voting for Clinton was the right choice. Even if she is “evil” (which in this context just means bad), she was clearly, 100%, the lesser of two evils. She’s actually smart enough to do the job, and doesn’t have a mental disorder that would get in the way like Trump does.
And she actually would care, while Trump doesn’t except in how it affects him.