I notice you mentioned neither “democratic” nor “undemocratic.” Is that not an element that matters?
I’d agree with that, I think. Putin is doing it for romantic reasons (not that he’s a romantic himself, but many in his inner circle are, and it certainly boosts his popularity with the Russian people).
I am a bit surprised and troubled though that Russia’s closest ally, Belarus, has been very critical of the Donbass adventure. I would have expected they’d be supportive, since Lukashenko is no friend of the EU or America either.
Granted, but we have reasons to believe their electoral results are totally on the level because… ?
We don’t. 
Should we annex a part of Canada or Mexico?
Baja might be a decent addition to the collection, but let’s wait until after hurricane season. I understand Cabo San Lucas took a pretty serious hit last month, and there’s maybe a couple more storms coming their way.
Not to me.
More precisely, I guess, to the extent it matters to me, it probably matters in the opposite direction it matters to you.
Well, if it helps the people who are drawing comparisons to the Cold War, we should just do a remake of Top Gun.
Uh huh. I’d say proxy wars have lost their shine because they are expensive, pointless and needlessly divisive. But you know … follow that warhawk, see where it goes. The world is just so eager to reswallow all that american jizz about truth, freedom and apple pie again. Yup, you can bet on that.
This.
I am sorry, but they were not “recruited” - they were pleading to be let in. The former Warsaw Pact members do not remember their years under Moscow’s leadership fondly. They feared - and frankly, not without reason - that while Russia on its own might have trouble returning to superpower status, they’d be quite capable of putting military pressure on smaller neighboring nations.
If Russia is petrified of skin contact with Western-style nations, that’s Russia’s problem.
NATO isn’t “skin contact”, it’s a promise to go to give full military aid and defense to other countries. It’s a promise to go to full nuclear war over a country. To be able to stage a vast amount of forces in that country. To equip its infrastructure to support the warmaking capability of the military force of NATO.
Imagine the US lost the cold war somehow, and in an era of peace and reform, Russia integrated Mexico and Canada into the Warsaw pact. Would the US be ridiculous to feel threatened and to need to exert regional power over its own back yard, to start building up its military again?
Russia was defeated. They were reforming. There were old Soviet hardliners who wanted to continue the cold wart, to continue the Soviet union and to fight for buffer zones around it. But they were pushed out of power. Remember that the main social aim of Soviet foreign policy was to secure buffer zones against western invasion. They were existentially terrified of that. They wanted to keep potential enemies far away so that it wouldn’t be Russian territory that was being fought over in the event of a conflict.
So what do we do to a peaceful, reforming, disarming Russia? We encroach onto their territory. We integrate their nearby former allies into our military alliance. We eliminate that buffer zone and threaten to encroach upon their territory further.
It seems like there are those in the US who had a hardon for the cold war too, and looked at the end of the cold war as a moment of Russian vulnerability and wanted to both gain strategic advantage in it, and to rub our victory in Russia’s face. “Recruited” or not, those states should’ve never been allowed into NATO. It offers little in the strategic interest in NATO countries, and is obviously and justifiably provocative towards Russia at a time when the expansionists and militarists were out of power. Now they’ve used the threat of western encroachment to regain power, and we’re headed to another cold war.
In a perfect world, the borders of Russia and the Moscow city limits would match.
This is absolute bullshit. Nobody has encroached on a single inch of Russian territory since 1991.
The territory we’re talking about is not Russian. It’s Polish and Estonian and Hungarian and Uzbekistani and Romanian and Georgian and Ukrainian. It’s their land not Russia’s.
The reason so many of these countries were eager to join NATO was because Russia thinks it owns these other countries and will take back control as soon as it suits them. These countries didn’t want to be Russia’s buffer zone so they asked for protection.
Russia has created its own problem by being a threat to its neighbours. The United States and NATO did nothing to cause that.
Russia apologists are here.
So you don’t think that, in the event that the US lost the cold war, its economy dramatically collapsed/changed, and lost its superpower status, that if Russia were to accept Canada and Mexico into the Warsaw pact, possibly effecting coups for Pro-soviet governments, that the US would not view that as a provocation and a need to rearm and change their foreign policy?
Russia faced very real existential annihilation by foreign invaders in living memory. What Russia did to overcome that was the greatest feat a nation has ever undertaken in the course of human history. The toll was unbelievably large, the sacrifices great.
Cold war propoganda has people in the US believing that Russian is merely imperialistic and expansionist, wanting to conquer its neighbors for power. But the defining Russian trait in their foreign policy is actually fear. Fear of another invasion, fear of another existential threat, fear of being wiped out. They weren’t set to potentially attack NATO because they wanted to conquer the world - they postured to invade Europe because they decided that if a war was inevitable, that they would take the offensive and ensure that fighting was done away from Russia.
Before and after the time of the Soviet collapse, Russia was defined by a power struggle by old Soviet hardliners and reformists. The reformists had to believe that the West had no intention of encroaching on Russia and threatening their existence to justify their peaceful revolution and disarmament. The hardliners opposed this, fearing that military threat. At the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, the west wisely gave them those assurances that let the reformists come to power. Russia disarmed and didn’t have a provocative and aggressive foreign policy.
In the years following this period, hawkish US forces decided to expand NATO’s reach and influence amongst countries in the Russian sphere of influence, and within close proximity to Russia. It’s not as if NATO were making gestures to improve relations with Cuba, halfway around the world, they were trying to establish a full military alliance with countries near Russia’s borders.
Why was this done? What was the benefit to the West? I’m not sure I can answer that question in full. There were still people in power whose lives were defined by the cold war, and perhaps it was gratifying to them to rub it in Russia’s face that we could win over their former satellites. Perhaps there was hawkish influence from people who stood to make a lot of money from stirring up a new cold war.
But undoubtedly the expansion of NATO and possible influence on a pro-Western revolution in Ukraine is absolutely provocative towards Russia. It empowers the old hardliners who want to return to Russian military strength and a superpower status, and weakens the peaceful reformist platform.
To call this Russian apologism, to assume that the West is not provoking Russia at all and that Russia is just a big bully just totally out of the blue, is to have a view roughly as nuanced as thinking “the terrorists hate our freedom” as the explanation for radical Islam’s position on the west.
It was nonsense the first time you wrote it and it doesn’t become more sensible when you repeat it.
I don’t believe Canada or Mexico would have joined the Warsaw Pact if the United States had lost the Cold War. Because they wouldn’t have been afraid of an American invasion. (You’ll notice we didn’t invade Cuba after 1991 when they lost their Soviet ally and were essentially defenseless.) But if Canada or Mexico had decided to join the Warsaw Pact, so be it. They’re sovereign nations and the United States doesn’t have the right to tell them they can’t join an alliance if they want to. We don’t claim these countries belong to us the way you’re claiming Russia’s neighbours belong to Russia.
I’m not claiming the neighbors belong to Russia. I’m claiming that a close military alliance with what was formerly the main adversary and still remains the main threat to Russia will influence their foreign policy. That you think Canada and Mexico joining a hypothetically disarmed US wouldn’t affect US foreign policy or military levels is absurd.
Your view is rather simplistic and lacks nuance. Russia does not need to own countries for the policies and alliances of those countries to affect Russia. And to think that Russia is just a schoolyard bully with no legitimate concerns about the increasing influence of its main threat and instead is just being a dick runs contrary to historical Russian foreign policy concerns.
The second sentence here is ambiguous; which “they” do you mean when speaking of “their foreign policy?”
If you meant the Baltic States, Poland, etc., well, yes, of course it will. It gives them more latitude to act independently. It allows them to have open and free relations with all sides, knowing their independence is assured, rather than having to act in fear of the enormous military power that once brutally controlled them. It allows them to negotiate trade deals with either Russia or Europe, as they choose.
If you meant Russia, well, yes, of course it will. It will deter Russia from insane adventures of conquest. It might not stop them; they might just go balls-out into Latvia, hoping that NATO would collapse rather than fight. But it will certainly have some deterrent effect against Russian aggression.
All of these influences are positive, at least for the NATO countries, old and new.
If NATO ever became as brutally oppressive as the Warsaw Pact, then the new members would be very badly off again. This doesn’t seem very likely.
Your opinions are still nonsense. If the United States had wanted to attack Russia, we had the opportunity to do so back in the nineties when Russia was disrupted and weak. But we didn’t attack Russia. It is not our goal to threaten Russia. All we want is for Russia to not threaten other countries.
Russia is acting like a schoolyard bully and other countries are responding to Russia based on that. If Russia wants peaceable relations it should try acting peaceably.
Really? The US would’ve just attacked Russia in 1991 instead of Iraq? The Russia that would’ve still had over 7000 nuclear warheads at the time? And the fact that the US did not just attack Russia out of the blue, igniting WW3, indicates that they’ve done nothing provocative towards them since then?
Did you get your understanding of the nuances of history and foreign policy from playing a Civilization game?
The US and Russia have battled through influence over allied states and various other proxy mechanisms for over 60 years now. Just as Russia’s support, influence, and military ties to Cuba was a big fucking deal to US policy in the 1960s, so is encroaching into Eastern Europe with NATO.