And you should be worried if there are US nukes in you country. That means you’re now in other ICBM-capable countries’ targeting computers, likely for no other reason. When shit hits the fan you’re gonna get nuked. Congratulations.
Kissinger, seriously? I find it typical for neorealists to assume that if you're not also a neorealist, you "don't understand geopolitics". Cutthroat policy making for its own sake.
20M+ _Soviets_, not Russians.
And USSR started that war ON THE SAME SIDE as Hitler, so they can blame themselves for 'trust issues'.
USSR was never “on the same side” as Hitler. It was never a part of The Axis. Stalin was just hoping that capitalist swine would take each other out and then he would roll in and take over. Same as the US was hoping Hitler would fuck up Russia and much of Europe so they could roll in and take over. As far as the spoils of war, the real winner was the US. Britain gave up its last ambitions of being a naval superpower and handed over its navy bases to the US. The US was propelled to the superpower status with relatively little loss of life, and became the dominant industrial power as well. Weakened USSR was denied power in Western Europe. What’s not to like?
You can’t reason about geostrategic considerations in terms of moral high ground. Those dudes were dealing with a very dangerous and volatile situation, and the decisions they made were literally matters of life and death for their respective peoples.
That’s not to absolve anyone of guilt, but if you’re going to be an armchair quarterback, do yourself a favor and study history a bit more thoroughly. At that negotiating table any of us today would have made the exact same choice.
Your passive aggressive comments and your snide smug "look at me everyone, I'm so clever" childish put-downs; grow up. You actually managed to express a coherent and sensible opinion, and then blew it at the end; you just couldn't quite be an adult about it, and you transformed your whole comment from "rational discourse" to "petulant child".
Really? When they were parading captured Poland or conspiring to divide Europe - they were on different sides?
>Weakened USSR was denied power in Western Europe.
Not weakened, far from it. And it was denied _capturing_ Western Europe. Basically they were saved from horrors of soviet 'communism'.
Of course that's a ridiculous comparison given current tensions, but you're assuming that Russia and the USA / NATO somehow have to be enemies by definition and the rest of your argument follows from that. Why would a Russia-Mexico alliance need to be scary? Why would a USA-Ukraine alliance need to be scary? Hey, can't we have Entire-Northern-Hemisphere alliance?
Of course this is not currently realistic, and I'm not actually suggesting all our leaders just hug and be friends. But the only reason that I can see that things are like this is because just about everybody, all the policymakers as well as friendly internet commenters like yourselves, just assume it has to be like this. That makes it sort of a self-fulfilling cycle. Russia and America have a cold war because they have a cold war.
There are plenty of countries in NATO that are about as undemocratic as Russia, or less culturally similar to the founding NATO countries than Russia. If Turkey can be in NATO, why can't Russia? Renaming "NATO" should be the blocker, right. Momentum is the only reason that I can see why these two sides need to be sides.
Really, I don't see why we need to be enemies other than ego tripping politicians doing a penis size contest.
But I'm probably missing something.