You probably won’t take this advice, but you should really start making peace with the fact that the US is completely incapable of accomplishing any of these warped fantasies of yours.

The vast majority of the world is celebrating the self-evident decline of US-centric unipolarity. But those of us who live here have some hard years ahead.

That's the thing. Even if we were to suggest that the parent's ideas had merit (big "if"), it's pretty laughable to think that the US is capable of doing this properly. Looking back, it's hard to find American successes in this sort of meddling, all the way back to WWII.

True, and the US didn’t even properly defeat the Nazis (see, for instance: Adolf Heusinger, Operation Paperclip, and the many Nazis who happened to find themselves in positions of power in West Germany).

Thanks god Russia has nukes, otherwise American liberators would have already liberated us. (I don't justify Ukrainian conflict, it's another issue).

You do seem to be having some difficulty liberating yourselves.

Living without free press is better than being dead. And it doesn't matter to me whether good or bad guys kill me.

I don't believe in liberating anyone from authoritarianism that doesn't want to have a free and democratic system. That's why mideast liberation hasn't worked. No one was asking. The Russians want a better life, just ask the ones that come here to study, find mates, and never go back. I know plenty of them from my university, happily married to whoever from wherever, and residing in the US or Canada, working and living peacefully as contributors to society. Russians are quite intelligent people too.

The Russians are probably the least likely to want liberating from what I've seen of all Europeans, but I do think a plurality of Russians would want this. Which justifies it. That said, without this invasion of Ukraine and the danger I feel it presents to my homeland (the US), I wouldn't even be bringing this up. The Russian Federation would be on their own. It's just that the leadership over there is now a danger to everyone else.

Well I think in an ideal world "liberating" would not involve mass murder of the "liberated" population. I am aware that this is a historical weak spot.

Even still - I don't see a problem with countries rescuing other countries from despotism, in principle. I eagerly include my own country in this - if a Putin-like figure arose and I was not permitted to speak out or face death, it would comfort me to know that help was coming. The terror of an oppressive regime is its inescapability.

Today is just a large prisoner's dilemma/tragedy of commons.

The ideas have to be out there or they'll never get traction. We have major influence recently. The path of the world was changed dramatically with the election of Biden over Trump. I can't imagine how emboldened Putin would be had Trump won. I realize others say everyone was scared of the rich man's son, but I don't see it. He withheld 400 million in military aid from Ukraine, says it all as far as the path we'd be down.

I’m sure Putin is really afraid of the guy who can barely get a coherent sentence out. Trump reportedly wanted to exit NATO, which would have avoided this conflict altogether.

>I can't imagine how emboldened Putin would be had Trump won

I am a bit confused. It seems like Putin was not emboldened when Trump was president. Why do you think his second term would have been different?

Putin attacked Georgia when Bush was president. Putin attacked Ukraine when Obama was president. Putin attack Ukraine when Biden was president.

The only US president in the last 20 years that was in power when Putin didn't attack a neighboring country was Trump.