True they just invade their neighboring countries and say the people living in those places wanted them to help

Banana Republic. Cuba. Let's not pretend the world superpowers don't all do this stuff to advance their position. Russia does it to advance it's national position. China does it to advance it's national position. US does it to advance their corporate position (largely tied to national position, just a vaguely alternative setup of the same stuff).

Tribalism, to feudalism, and any point in between we see the same situations play out. Look at all the empires over the ages. We're all just incrementally advancing the same playbook each time.

I don't have any suggestion as to how this cycle would ever be changed. The only thing that differs is the move makers. The moves all look pretty similar. One nation crumbles, proffers change, wants to avoid repeating/continuing discovered atrocities, another nation/empire is ready to take it's place.

We can call out the atrocities globally as we see them. Try to fight each individual fire. There's no pretending that every nation isn't guilty of trying to advance it's position by any means necessary. Offering the humanitarian excuse as a "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" deal is universal. Doing what you can to avoid the aforementioned "calling out".

Whereas the USA just invades [wherever] and says "its because you're not democratic/have too many terrorists/whatever".

This is not what happened at all.

In eastern Ukraine and Crimea, that is almost exactly what happened.

It's honestly not even close. Have you read about the events in detail? I too was under that impression until looking more into it. Are you aware of the unknown sniper agitators?

Looks like our Russian friends strongly disagree with you.

When was the last time the US invaded a "neighboring" country?

The USA has a policy of not invading local countries, because they're too close to home. So, its mostly power projection "fighting them over there, so we don't have to fight them .. here".

Really, this is a fundamental issue to understand. USA is not a peace-bringing nation - it is a war-projection nation. In the same way that one can use fire to fight fires, the USA thinks its war-making is actually bringing peace to the world.

I know - it doesn't make any sense. But, the military-industrial complex which runs the USA doesn't care if you think it makes sense. It only cares about dropping bombs, clearing the shelves of inventory with short half lives, and replacing it with new inventory.

EDIT: the claim that USA's wars are "just, righteous wars" is highly specious and, frankly, risible. The USA has toppled more democratically elected officials than any other nation in the history of mankind. I urge you to consider the hubris of the statement: "the USA only fights good wars", because there is fiction, and there is fact.

The fact is, a lot of people in democratic societies around the world feel that the USA hasn't fought a good war since WW2, and in fact that the opposite is true: the USA fights to put its own dictators into power. Even a casual investigation of this fact yields more than enough evidence to support the statement: the USA is up to no good.

The wars the US has involved itself in post-WW2 have almost always been wars with the aim of:

1. Preventing the spread of Soviet backed Authoritarian Communism.

2. Removing brutal dictators from power.

Both noble and justifiable goals.

Can you define "almost" more clearly ?

I'm not going to judge the people that did it, bceause it was another time, but I hope the US public opinion has evolved so that some of US antics in that period could not happen now.

e.g.: involvement in the fall of Mossadegh, support to the Pinochet regime, support to the Shaddam regime, including the sale of chemical weapons during the Iran-Irak war, support to the contras...

Panama (1989) was an invasion with troops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Pana...

Yes, almost 30 years ago the US invaded Panama to depose a dictator who had turned Panama into an international money laundering and drug smuggling center.

Well, you did ask...

.. and more to the point, it didn't work. Panama is still a festering cesspool of money laundering and drug trafficking.

Its just that, the USA has its hand in the pie now. And that is the true reason for that heinous war.

Operation Just Cause (we felt like it)

Usually it's a salvation to be occupied by US compared to Russia - they just kill, steal and trash territory making it doomed (Transnistria, Osetia, Ukraine teritories, Kuril islands) - a true Mordor.

So .. where is all that good ol' American-supported living in .. Libya?

Syria?

Iraq?

Afghanistan?

Cambodia?

Pakistan?

Yemen?

Nigeria?

Japan

Germany

South Korea

Every Western nation supported by the Marshall plan

You're right, but it goes both ways and not 100% one way or the other

Yeah, the USA did do some good for the world. 80 years ago.

But what it is doing today is a terrible, atrocious tragedy, and its far beyond the point where the means justify the ends.

I mean that as someone who follows closely the cost of American warfare, and as someone who refuses to ignore the human tragedy it is bringing to current generations of people who really, really do not deserve to have had their infrastructure utterly destroyed, their lives ruined, their children left in rubble, on a daily basis, because some smart American decided it had to be so.

The problem is, we wanted to do Iraq and Afghanistan and get out. If we had done a Marshall Plan in Iraq, we would have had maybe 100,000 troops there for a decade, but it would have been stable when we left.

The problem is, you thought it was acceptable to be there in the first place.

Fuck, its 2017, are we really still explaining this? Of course we are. We must.

> we would have had maybe 100,000 troops there for a decade

The US has had north of 100k troops in Iraq for 7 years, then about 50k for 3 more years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_troop_surge_of_2007#/...

The U.S. doesn't leave. Pretty much any where we send troops, we tend to set up bases there and remain indefinitely.

Just look at Germany, Japan, Korea, Iraq, ...

Syria, Ukraine/Crimea, Georgia/Ossetia, Chechnya/Dagestan... they brutally (not used lightly, Google it) put down N. Caucus uprisings and they've flat out stolen land from Western border countries. That's not counting their own cyberwarfare efforts, which is presumably where they are investing heavily out of a recognition of the asymmetries. They sell weapons all over the world and are 2nd worst in that respect to the US.

I have no idea why people need to set up good/bad dualities. Whatever bad things the US has done, none of them make Russian any better.

Russia is not invading and destroying foreign sovereign nations around the world. It is protecting its borders and its local territory.

The USA has invaded, and destroyed, far, far more territory, resulting in 100x more human suffering and misery.

Its not a duality - but if you want to be honest about the hostile intentions of nations, you have to look at the most hostile state there is: the USA. The stats are not pretty.

Nice twisted rhetoric, really.

For a split second I did believed you, that Russia haven't invaded Ukraine, it merely 'protected it's local territory'.

What part of "Russia needs the Black Sea to protect its sovereignty" do you not understand?

What part of "Iraq is essential to the sovereign protection of the borders of the USA" do you .. not understand?

I'm not trying to justify Russia's military action in Ukraine - living quite close to this action, it horrified me. But, on the other hand, I'm not ever going to be compelled to agree with someone who says that the mass destruction of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen .. and so on .. is vital to the defence of the USA. Because, I know where those places are on a map, and they are nowhere near the USA ...

> What part of "Iraq is essential to the sovereign protection of the borders of the USA" do you .. not understand?

What are you talking about? Iraq was not mentioned in the original comment.

Also, this "The USA has invaded, and destroyed, far, far more territory, resulting in 100x more human suffering and misery." is grossly untrue. Neither country is free of fault here, but for every Afghanistan, or Iraq, there is a North Korea or East Germany.

The point is, Russian military action in Ukraine was for the purpose of protecting its sovereign borders and access to the Black Sea. While I agree that it was a heinous action, it is more justifiable than any military action the USA has projected, if but for the simple fact that it was close to home - literally on Russias' doorstep.

America, however, projects power around the globe - not for its own protection of sovereign assets, and certainly not as a consequence of needing to defend its sovereign border. Rather, American power projection is done in order to interfere with nations that the USA has decided, for some other reason, mostly psychology, is its enemy.

>"The USA has invaded, and destroyed, far, far more territory, resulting in 100x more human suffering and misery." is grossly untrue.

Sorry, but a lot of the world see it as being very, very true.

Perhaps you should pay more attention to the refugee children walking across Europe to get away from American wars.

> Russian military action in Ukraine was for the purpose of protecting its sovereign borders and access to the Black Sea.

Without Crimea Russia won't have access to Black Sea? Or it will lose her borders?

Please clarify.

Are you ignorant to the fact that the port of Sevastopol is host to Russia's Black Sea Fleet? Do you realize that Sevastopol was founded as a Russian naval port in 1783 and that Crimea has been Russian for over 250 years?

Russia as a country exists only for ~25 years.

Also even it had Crimea for thousand years before, it still won't matter - they've signed numerous international agreement s which stated that Crimea belongs to Ukraine.

I wish you the best of luck in all that you do

"Protecting its sovereign borders" by stealing from others' sovereign borders? Sorry, not buying it.

I don't agree that Russia should have done what it did to Ukraine, and its territories. No, sir.

But I find the argument that "USA is not bad, because Russia did bad" to be highly specious.

Russia, and the Russians in the region that was invaded, can justify its mis-deeds as protection of its sovereignty.

America, and thus Americans, cannot.

There were no Americans to protect in Iraq. In Afghanistan. In Syria, Yemen, Libya.

Seriously, Americans are liable for some deep, deep shit. Russians, less so.

>Russia, and the Russians in the region that was invaded, can justify its mis-deeds as protection of its sovereignty. America, and thus Americans, cannot. There were no Americans to protect in Iraq.

And there was no Russians to protect in Crimea, so stop whitewashing Kremlin lies.

Ummm, Crimea has been majority ethnic Russian for over 100 years, Ukranians weren't even the dominant minority in the region for most of the last two centuries. You really should learn some history before commenting

"Ethnic Russian" != "Russian", though. No matter what ethnicity, they were citizens of Ukraine.

And I completely deny that Russia has the right to speak for ethnic Russians of other nationalities, and to invade their countries on their behalf.

Lol you completely ignore the fact that the Ukraine as a country did not exist until 1991, and the only reason Crimea was made a part of the Ukraine after the dissolution of the USSR, is because of a fluke of history whereby Crimea was transferred from the Russian Soviet Federation to the Ukrainian Soviet Federation as meaningless token in celebration of 300 years of the Ukraine as a part of the Russian Empire.

Prior to Russo-Turkish war Crimea was a part of the Ottoman Empire, after Russia won that war it conquered Crimea and absorbed it into the fold in 1783. Crimea has not been a traditional part of the Ukraine since before the existence of the United States of America.

Failure to grasp reality does not change the fact that a Crimea filled with ethnic Russians, host to Russia's Black Sea Fleet, in a city founded over 250 years ago by Russia, which holds extreme strategic importance to the nation could never be allowed to fall under the sphere of NATO.

You might want to brush up on your history, mainly the part where the Ukraine has been part of Russian territory for most of the last 350 years, and while you're reading maybe you'll discover the reason Russia had to act with regards to Crimea.

Had to? No. Chose to.

Right, they could have made the choice to let their strategic naval base in Crimea fall under the sphere of NATO, despite the obvious problems with that

It wasn't _their_ naval base in Crimea.

It truly is astounding, the level of dire ignorance that defenders of America's right to destroy nations, seem to employ in their effort to hinder truth. Astounding, and also, enlightening. No wonder their nation is allowed such free hand to destroy other nations: their citizens truly do not give enough of a damn to gain any insight into the history of the world.

> the Black Sea Fleet has run out of there under the Russian Flag

That was most wonderful comment so far.

So you're not aware that fleet's flag was changed at least 4 times during last 100 years and half of the time it was nothing to do with Russia?

>but it hasn't deployed $Trillions of military assets around the world in order to project power

They would definitely have done this, if they could. At the expense of social programs, schools and healthcare, like they always do [1]. They just don't have $Trillions, only $Billions. A big chunk of which goes into botnets, orchestrated propaganda and cyber-sabotage.

[1] https://themoscowtimes.com/news/russia-to-increase-military-...

Did you forget about the Cold War?

Yes, I did. Because its over. The West won, in 1991. Its only the USA still fighting it.

"Russia did nothing wrong!" (If you forget everything before 1991 and Georgia/Crimea/Donbass/Syria,etc).

Nice straw man. Russia has done plenty, wrong.

But the USA has erred by a factor of 500x the sins of Russia, yo. If you can't understand that, I've got 1000 kilometres worth of walking refugee children to show you ..

The death toll from soviet communism was pretty steep: they killed millions and committed genocide and ethnic cleansing on many opinions. stop spreading this stupid whataboutism

Communism died decades ago.

The one doing all the killing and murdering of innocent civilians, now, is America and its allies, the so-called "Coalition", who have decided that only they have the right to start world war three. And, so they did.

"Whataboutism" = we are talking about the situation where America has invaded and destroyed countless sovereign nations over the last 4 decades, willingly and with utter contempt for international law. Russia defended its territorial integrity, and thus sovereignty, during the Crimea crisis - and little else.

America, however, has done nothing in defence of its sovereignty, and everything in attack of other sovereigns. It is a wholesale exporter of death, destruction, and injustice in the world, and .. once again .. I must remind my American readers that the facts on the ground are not pretty. America's statistics are not great. It is a dire, evil situation, and the continued 'whataboutism' from Americans (coz: "Soviet Russia") is precisely one of the ways this evil persists.

American citizens - Australian, Canadian, British and Kiwi too - MUST start accepting responsibility for the crimes of their states. The war is coming to you, whether you like it or not, eventually.

The same power that has kept the world peace for the last 50 years? How is that a bad thing?

> world peace for the last 50 years

I think you might have a different definition of "peace" than many people because we haven't had "world peace" for 50 years at all. Just look at how many conflicts are currently ongoing in the world (and how many of those are caused by US meddling...)

In fact, a larger majority of the world consider that the USA is the very power that has kept the world at war for the last 80 years .. and they're kind of right.

Ask the orphans of Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria how peaceful the U.S.is

Remember peace is most probably a byproduct of total US hegemony. Russia and China have been very peaceful last 30 years and they were not dominated. So I wouldn't attribute the peace of the world to the "invisible US hand"...

> world peace for the last 50 years

By 'world' you mean Mars, right?

>"In order to project power"

You mean in order to safeguard the global peace. Peaceful nations around the world depend on US support to ensure their defense from hostile nations like Russia

This is very incorrect. The USA is a bully - most of the nations wanting "USA protection" are really just asking to not be bullied.