The West sat on their side of the line while the USSR/Warsaw Pact clobbered Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The West showed it respected that line, and any disputation of that fact only came from the USSR’s “metal-eaters alliance” (their military-industrial complex) as self-serving rhetoric.
I predict that Putin will accept a deal whereby Ukraine is blackballed from NATO, but Ukraine stays on the West’s side of the line. The West gets them as their problem, corrupt government and past-due gas bills and all. American factory farm corporations take over, and Ukrainian farmers aren’t allowed to fix their own John Deeres any more than Iowan farmers are.
Here’s a small glimpse of what that might have looked like.
That’s an interview with MTG in which she talks about why she thinks Biden is siding with Ukraine. Yes, it involves Hunter Biden.
The good news is that it seems we’re past the old capitalism vs. communism thing. The bad news is that we’re now in the authoritarianism vs. democracy stage of world conflict.
Honestly, if we could defuse this crisis just by pledging to forever exclude Ukraine from NATO… I’d support making that pledge.
Because currently, we are free to give all kinds of military support to Ukraine, but we are not obliged to treat an attack on Ukraine as an attack on the US. And in the specific case of Ukraine, that’s where we should remain.
(But I actually don’t think such a concession would be enough for Putin.)
I really hope there’s a diplomatic solution like that. I don’t care if Ukraine is in NATO. I just don’t want Russia invading independent democracies, but so far, unfortunately NATO seems to be the only successful organ to guarantee that sort of thing.
My fear is that Putin knows that in an election year, Biden isn’t going to risk any pre-emptive military action to oppose Russia. Russia is going to roll through, establish naval bases on the Black Sea, and park military formations on the Polish border. We’ll be in a dramatically more dangerous security situation.
It will definitely cost Democrats in 2022 and 2024, and Russia is very likely to get a Republican president who is willing to say “you know what, fuck NATO, just help yourself to whatever seems fair.” American politics isn’t the center of everything, but I have to think it’s factoring into this situation to someextent.
I agree that wouldn’t be enough for Putin. From what I understand, wasn’t that pretty much what the situation actually was prior to this recent Russian threat?
Well, in 2008, Ukraine started moving toward membership in NATO. The process was interrupted in 2010 when a more Russian-leaning politician became president.
NATO has an “open door policy” that any European democracy has the right to apply for membership and that no outside country should have a veto on that.
ETA: one problem NATO has at this time is that by agreeing to ban Ukraine now would be effectively giving Russia veto power over NATO membership. So even if NATO was unlikely to take Ukraine in anyway, they are reluctant to commit to it in the face of Russian saber-rattling. Meanwhile, the Russians view this from the opposite perspective.
“We pledge that Ukraine will never be a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.” (two days later) “We have dissolved the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and formed the New Antiauthoritarian Treaty Alliance and we welcome Ukraine’s membership.”
Russia was participating in NATO operations and training sessions, and was a co-head of a subgroup within the organization.
NATO stopped being an anti-Russia force after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It only resumed that status when Russia decided that it liked being the enemy of the world, rather than a friend. I suspect that, if Putin had simply continued to increase trade, visa acceptance, etc. between his country and Ukraine, the two countries would have progressively gotten closer and inseparable. Instead, his approach was like a guy who likes a girl, so he pushes her against the wall and tries to stick his tongue down her throat. He completely destroyed his future prospects.
Russia could have continued to climb higher in NATO and continued to join on, helping to keep peace across the planet.
None of Russia’s fall from grace had anything to do with anyone else. Putin just flushed it all down the toilet because he prefers to be the only guy in power.
As your cite mentions, that ship sailed in 2014. Russia’s response was “It’s a different country now and therefore the agreement doesn’t count, and also No U.”
Also a popular tactic by Russia.
Because they know that it doesn’t matter if anyone likes them, as long as they get what they want.
I’m not sure this is true. NATO is dominated by countries who have viewpoints which can be antithetical to Russian views and interests.
One major example of this is the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, a conflict in which the Russians were allied with their ethnic Slavic kinsmen, the Serbs, and which post-dated the collapse of the Soviet Union. NATO’s attitude was not especially interested with Russian concerns and they proceeded to crush and flatten the Serbs.
From the perspective of a Westerner who thinks “hey, the Serbs were wrong”, well that might not seem like much of anything. But from the perspective of Russians who viewed that conflict differently, that could be very threatening.
And something that seems lost on Putin, but certainly is in play here:
All those nations in eastern Europe didn’t run to the EU and NATO’s arms because of the decades of respect shown them by the Soviet Union. You spend 40 years with your boot on Hungary’s neck and big surprise, they run into the arms of another.
I thought the bigger issue is that Russia is demanding that NATO kick out Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Poland, which of course NATO isn’t going to do.
I am not aware of this supposed Russian demand. Perhaps you have some sort of cite for this.
But in any event, the NPR article that I linked said that guaranteeing that Ukraine never joins NATO was a key Russian demand, and one that NATO refused to accede to. This contradicts your claim that “that [was] pretty much what the situation actually was prior to this recent Russian threat”. (Unless your claim is that NATO changed its stance on this in response to the Russian threat?)