Exactly. Alternatives to swift are already growing and will continue to do so. What’s more important, protecting Ukraine, Taiwan and anywhere else under threat, or slowing down the erosion of something already being eroded. Lives matter, swift will do just fine without Russia.
This asshole is at war with us. It’s about time we went to war back. Yes it would be costly, but it would have been a lot less costly if we’d done more than wring our hands over Crimea. The cost of dithering is going up and up, so what’s the answer? More dithering?
>What’s more important, protecting Ukraine, Taiwan and anywhere else under threat, or slowing down the erosion of something already being eroded. Lives matter, swift will do just fine without Russia.
I might be completely clueless, but Ukraine doesn't have anywhere near the same amount of strategic or economic importance that Taiwan does. As I understand it, what should have been done was for NATO to promise to not add Ukraine and keep it as a neutral zone between Russia and the US. Adding Ukraine to NATO was effectively putting US troops on Russia's doorstep and I can see why that makes Russia nervous. It seems pretty clear that Ukraine wasn't going to get NATO membership anyways.
I don't know if the promise would have given Putin the gall to invade, but the way I see it being ambiguous about it didn't help at all.
Instead, the clearest understanding of Putin’s complaints about NATO is that they are reflections of his real fears, but that as diplomatic negotiating tools, they were red herrings, designed to create exactly the sort of smokescreen that some media personalities worked to create and exploit domestically. The ‘tell’ here in many ways were the initial demands, which amounted to rolling back NATO positions to pre-1997 status; such demands would be utterly unacceptable to NATO countries (like Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland) who would thus be left outside NATO’s line of protection. Putin – and the Russian Foreign Ministry – knew those demands were obvious non-starters, that’s why they made them – presumably to generate that smokescreen and to try to divide NATO internally. But the demands themselves were never serious, as Putin’s actions this week prove.
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The "promise Ukraine won't join NATO" demand was not made in good faith and conceding it would not have mattered.
This is a very good and thorough article. The truth is I am clueless - it seems the writing was on the wall for a very long time for anyone who was paying attention
I’ve reflected on this argument recently but I struggle to see the real logic behind it. Putin claims he wants Ukraine as a neutral zone between russia and NATO. He then proceeds to invade Ukraine … if successful, territory under his control (whether explicitly shown or not, he could instil a puppet government) will now border NATO countries. How does that provide him with any security ?
Proximity to the Russia heartland presumably. Flight time of missiles to key military positions within Russia.
I'm no military strategist but how is this not obvious?
It's not about a neutral zone, it's about a buffer zone between more sensitive areas and where NATO can place troops, tanks, and missile systems. I mean a sea separates Alaska from north-east Russia and those places are deep into permafrost territory and then there's the entirety of Western and Central Russia between Moscow (say) and there. Russia is huge. 90% of the Russian population live in the 10% of Russia that is considered part of the European continent.
It's like nobody bothers to study geography or geopolitics before they open their mouth these days.
There are multiple NATO countries that already border Russia. If Putin takes Ukraine it will nearly double the amount of NATO countries that will border Russia.
That is true now, but what about 23 years from now (23 years being how long it was between the defeat of Germany in WWI and the Germany's invasion of Russian lands)?
Putin thinks Russia's military strength will decline relative to the US, which is why he is widening Russia's buffer to invasion now even though it will probably be many years before it is needed.
> This asshole is at war with us. It’s about time we went to war back.
This just shows how blind you are to the shortcomings of Western liberal cosmopolitanism, which is entirely defined by its lack of sense of responsibility for anything at all. It’s a post-modern mindset that just presumes everyone else will always play the same delusional game that it plays, simply because if they don’t then they will be forced to. So, when Putin shows that he is not going to play along, they simply have no plan. They never made a plan, not only because they never thought they needed one but primarily because they had their heads so buried up their own asses.
> What’s more important, protecting Ukraine, Taiwan and anywhere else under threat
Ukraine, Taiwan, etc are under "threat" because the West is using them as political/military pawns. If NATO/West didn't exist, there would be no invasion of ukraine. Taiwan would have unified with China already. It's going to anyways. We are just bleeding Taiwan as much as we can before china takes it back. It's silly the amount of useless weapons we are forcing taiwan to buy.
> This asshole is at war with us. It’s about time we went to war back. Yes it would be costly, but it would have been a lot less costly if we’d done more than wring our hands over Crimea.
You have it backwards. We are at war with him and he finally decided to stand up for himself. We invaded ukraine first. We broke our promises first. It's NATO expansion that is the threat to the world. Not russia.
Is it China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar, Venezuela, Haiti, etc the problem or is it the West? Think about it. The world has a common problem. It isn't "China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar, Venezuela, Haiti, etc". It's the imperial west.
Just because the US/West is in the lead of the empire game at the moment doesn't mean the other empires aren't a problem. We aren't the first empire and won't be the last. China, in particular, is in a massive expansion into Africa. If there was not competition from US/West for power, it would be moving much faster and more aggressively/violently as it had in the past.
The ideal for the common person would be no empires. If that is a fantasy, then the next best thing would be some sort of minimally violent stalemate.
This moral issue is really easily resolved - what do the people of Ukraine and Taiwan want? It's quite easy to ask them.
The answer is "not Russia" and "not China". That's why the Ukrainians are fighting for their lives now, and why the democratically elected government of Taiwan is prepared to do the same.
> This moral issue is really easily resolved - what do the people of Ukraine and Taiwan want? It's quite easy to ask them.
What did the southerners want? What did the native hawaiians want. What did the aborigines want. What did the inuits in alaska want? What did the samoans want? What did the maoris want?
The ukrainians wanted russia. They voted for a pro-russian president. In 2014, the US/EU staged a coup and forced out a democratically elected president. Funny how people forget that.
As for taiwan, 1.4 billion chinese vs 20 million chinese. You do the math. And of course nobody is interested in what the aborigines in taiwan want. Taiwan lost the civil. Just like the south lost our civil war. It's only our imperial foolishness that delayed the unification.
> That's why the Ukrainians are fighting for their lives now,
They aren't. Instead of watching propaganda all over traditional and social media, go watch some real footage on the war. It's harder to find now that most social media is propagandized, but it's there. 99.99% of ukrainians are not fighting. And miles of trucks, tanks, etc abandoned by ukrainian soldiers at the first sound of war.
Go look at footage of kiev or any other ukrainian city. Nobody ( civilians or soldiers ) is preparing for the defense of the cities. And russia is doing this not with millions of troops, just thousands.
Sounds like someone actually knows some basic history and political theory instead of just blabbering whatever the Western media is saying at any given moment.
(Speaking of Gorbachev) “… you have to agree not only not to bring NATO troops into the eastern portion of uh of Germany but you can't bring NATO troops east of the Elbe, you can't go into Poland, you can't do do this. And uh and he was given assurances and everybody said well it's just verbal, we now find out it's in writing um that this wouldn't happen. So you know right off the bat we have an expansive NATO, now NATO says that's okay you don't be worried about an expansive NATO because we're a defensive alliance. Really? Then why did they bomb Belgrade in 1999, there was nothing defensive about that, that was offensive military action against a Slavic state. Why did they, why did NATO send a training mission to Iraq in 2004? Why did NATO members participate in the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003? Um you know they say well it's just a training mission. No, it's a training mission in an occupied state that was occupied uh you know from an illegal war of aggression so you're facilitating, you're legitimizing, an illegal war of aggression. That's what NATO did. Why did NATO go into Afghanistan what business is Afghanistan of NATO's? None. Zero. Um you know and what did NATO do to Libya? Offensive aggressive military operations but it's not just these examples it's a transatlantic organization. Why then did they start a partnership in North Africa where they were seeking to expand their sphere of influence (there's a word we're not allowed to use) in North Africa? Why did they set up offices in um in the United Arab Emirates to create a sphere of influence in the Persian Gulf? Why are they talking about a North Atlantic Treaty Organization operating in the Pacific to create a sphere of influence to counter china? They're not a defensive organization it's an offensive minded expansive organization with a proven history of carrying out regime change operations in countries they view as a threat. Who's the number one threat today per NATO's own words? Russia. So you know NATO not only has no reason to exist NATO is a suicide pill for Europe.”
A couple of comments about this.
We, in the West (I live in Western Europe), can pretend that NATO is a force for good in the world, that it is some sort of benign defensive pact but our adversaries do not see it that way. And our adversaries are correct. They do not have the luxury of pretending that NATO is something that it is not. If they were to then that would spell the end of them. The reason people in the West don't see NATO for what it is is because they see themselves as the good guys and their adversaries as the bad guys. It's that simple. Even though people throughout the West are critical of their governments domestically when it comes to matters of foreign policy even though people say they care about peace and that they care for the people of Ukraine, they don't in actual fact care about peace and they don't care about the people of Ukraine. If they did then they would have asked their governments why NATO wasn't disbanded in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Empire and with it the Warsaw Pact. NATO was created to counter the Warsaw Pact countries. When that alliance disbanded and German was reunified NATO should have been consigned to the dustbin of history as they say. But it was not. With the Soviets out of the way NATO emboldened by its success began to expand its remit, expand its sphere of influence. That's fine, but at least admit that the nature of the organisation has changed. That's fine, but don't be surprised when your sphere of influence overlaps with a nation that has its own sphere of influence is its own independent agenda. It's at times like these the the narrative that most in the Western media pump out day after day is revealed to be at odds with reality. The West, when it comes to foreign interventions, is morally compromised – it has no business telling others what they cannot do when it does those very same things year in year out and has done for decades. The hypocrisy at times like these is, frankly, nauseating.
I recommend watching that entire interview. Ritter does not varnish reality, and that's a good thing. People in the West need to wake to what is being done in their name and own the consequences of their actions. See also Max Blumenthal's analysis on the Jimmy Dore Show[3] and Russell Brand's take[4].
[1] William Scott Ritter Jr. (born July 15, 1961) is a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He later became a critic of United States foreign policy in the Middle East. Prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Ritter stated that Iraq possessed no significant weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities, becoming according to The New York Times "the loudest and most credible skeptic of the Bush administration’s contention that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction."
Hmm... The interview in [2] starts out with them seemingly taking different sides, but about 6 minutes in Scott Ritter starts arguing that the invasion was a reasonable response to problems with right-wing extremists in the Ukrainian military (which I've heard is a problem in many countries, not only in Ukraine).
The interviewer appears to be a writer for RT. Is this interview some kind of good cop/bad cop routine to make the propaganda go down easier?
Ritter was born into a military family in 1961 in Gainesville, Florida. He graduated from Kaiserslautern American High School in Kaiserslautern, Germany in 1979, and later from Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with a Bachelor of Arts in the history of the Soviet Union and departmental honors. In 1980 he served in the U.S. Army as a private. Then in May 1984 he was commissioned as an intelligence officer in the United States Marine Corps. He served in this capacity for about 12 years.[2] He served as the lead analyst for the Marine Corps Rapid Deployment Force concerning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran–Iraq War. Ritter's academic work focused on the Basmachi resistance movement in Soviet Central Asia during the 1920s and 1930s, and on the Basmachi commanders Fazail Maksum and Ibrahim Bek.[3][4] During Desert Storm, he served as a ballistic missile advisor to General Norman Schwarzkopf. Ritter later worked as a security and military consultant for the Fox News network. Ritter also had "a long relationship [...] of an official nature" with the UK's foreign intelligence spy agency MI6 according to an interview he gave to Democracy Now! in 2003.
That's Scott Ritter's background. What's yours? Oh, we can't tell because you've used a throwaway account, which of course is your right. But I would suggest that if you go around insinuating about a person's character you'd better have some sort of proof or evidence to back it up. But the best you can do is:
> The interviewer appears to be a writer for RT.
So he's written op-eds for Russia Today. The way you state it without elaboration it's like we're meant to fill in the blanks. I'm sorry, are we not allowed to write for news organisations any more? Yes, we all know what you're implying, Russia Today is some kind of unAmerican news corp. Tell you what, let's bring back the House Committee on Un-American Activities and drag Scott before them.
God damn it, humans are so disappointing. As to:
> Scott Ritter starts arguing that the invasion was a reasonable response to problems with right-wing extremists in the Ukrainian military (which I've heard is a problem in many countries, not only in Ukraine).
Listening comprehension much? He never said that. He said, contrary to what the regular media is portraying there are actually neo-Nazi elements within Ukrainian military which (given the Russians history with Nazism – you know, how they more or less single-handedly beat back Nazis until the UK and USA got their shit together) explains what Putin meant in his hour long speech pre-invasion and allied to the eastward expansion of NATO shows that the Russian response while a gross violation of Ukrainian sovereignty is entirely rational, and given Putin's demands, entirely predictable.
But because we (the West) have to be the good guys – our adversaries must, by definition, be either evil or tyrannical or insane or any combo of all of these characteristics.
Heaven forbid that we might have a hand in all this, also heaven forbid that we look critically at our own part in all of this. And heaven forbid we try to imagine other people around the world as human beings like us with concerns (whether legitimate or not it doesn't really matter) about national security like us.
This asshole is at war with us. It’s about time we went to war back. Yes it would be costly, but it would have been a lot less costly if we’d done more than wring our hands over Crimea. The cost of dithering is going up and up, so what’s the answer? More dithering?