So, uh, considering the fact that Putin basically rigged a US election, how effective were sanctions and threats of cyber warfare?
What would have worked – better diplomacy maybe?
I think you answered your own question?
As I said, the West has sanctions…Russia has malware. We have our tools of warfare, and Russia has theirs. We can frame “sanctions” in the noblest terms possible, but to the regime that’s receiving them, “sanctions” are acts of war. An act of war can be effective if the opponent can’t fight back, but in this case, the opponent, Putin, can indeed fight back. He’s been preparing himself for war with the West for 15 years. The attacks on Ukraine have seriously impacted Ukraine, which sends a message to them. But there’s also a message to the United States as well. It could be our own financial system next. It could be American hospital patients. Air traffic control systems. Train traffic. Electric grids.
Maybe it’s time to understand the ‘enemy’ and start negotiating on the level. Again, this doesn’t mean you have to like Putin or accept what he does. I’m about as anti-Trump a person as you’ll find and I’ve got no doubt that his cozying up to Putin has more to do with his own financial interests than our national interests, but he’s somehow accidentally right about a few things. One of which is the fact that the Dept of State and US foreign policy has been horribly ineffective in assessing and dealing with Russia going back since at least the Clinton years, if not sooner. The other is maybe it’s time to actually sit down and work out some shit with Russia. I disagree that Putin is some reckless suicidal imperialist megalomaniac. He’s absolutely a corrupt, thuggish KGB militarist who has basically built his own political system to ensure his own personal survival. But like it or not, we will be dealing with Vlad for a long time to come because losing power might well mean losing his fortune and even his life in Russia. There’ no way he gives that up without ensuring that he and/or his loyalists survive in power. And any attempt to break him will be met with a viciously forceful response. The key is to figure out how the West and Putinland can somehow coexist.
Wrong. The wide majority of American spying I’ve heard about in France was related to industrial spying (by the US government on behalf of US companies, I mean) in sensitive domains or when there was a competition for important contracts.
I’m not sure why you’d assume that the USA wouldn’t try to give data to businesses for competitive advantage. That seems highly naive to me.
Various US government officials through the years have categorically denied that it engages in espionage in order to pass trade secrets to U.S. companies. I’m not aware of any contradictory information. U.S. intelligence agencies spy on foreign businesses, of course, and some people have jumped to the errant conclusion that the only reason to spy on businesses is to give those secrets to U.S. businesses. In actuality, all indications are that the U.S. government uses those secrets for routine intelligence purposes (e.g., we may collect information from a Chinese computer company to learn vulnerabilities of their technology, but not give Google or Cisco the information so they can improve their products).
And this is an easy one to confirm too. I could list a whole host of knock off products that have been reverse engineered from obviously stolen data from US companies. Hell, there are at least a dozen iPhone 6 knockoffs in China alone, some of which use the exact IOS and circuit designs. And this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg…it’s so pervasive that you can’t swing a dead cat in China without hitting a knockoff product from the US or a European country. Conversely, I’ve never seen evidence of US companies using information gleaned from US intelligence sources from foreign companies. And I haven’t seen much evidence that this happens in Europe either, not to the systemic degree it happens in China. If there is such evidence I’d be happy to take a look, but US intelligence simply doesn’t work this way…hell, they don’t even like to share intelligence information in the US among other intelligence agencies, let alone give it to private companies.
It’s funny that you always think you are the educated one when it comes to history and that anyone who disagrees with you is just a dumb American who only watches the History Channel and laps up US propaganda. 
It’s worth mentioning that the majority of Ukrainians speak Ukrainian, that most of the ethnic Russians (who make up about 30% of Ukrainians today, and who are mainly the ones who would like closer ties to Putin et al) in the Ukraine were force colonized after Stalin deported the indigenous population (after killing over 10 million), that after the breakup of the Soviet Union the Ukrainian people (including a majority in the Crimea) voted for independence from the new Russian state, and that this situation is more complex than that the capital of Kiev is ‘the birthplace of “Russia”’.
FWIW, I’ve always found this video on YouTube to be a pretty good run down on things (up to 2014 when the video was made), and I’m inclined to the second narrative the guy discusses, though I understand the first one as well.
Oh, and unlike Ravenman who actually does have a background in history, I really like the History Channel. 