If your goal is to prevent NATO expansion, the Ukraine invasion makes no sense. In its wake it has caused multiple neutral countries to explore membership (Finland, Sweden) and has caused an otherwise austere Germany to increase defense spending. It has also laid-bare problems in the Russian military on the global stage. Massive unforced error.
The counterfactual where Russia never invaded Ukraine in 2022 or 2014, we'd still be talking about leaving NATO - something Trump was floating in 2016. There were rumblings about dissolving it prior to these actions. If Putin had simply waited, further entangled Europe into its fossil fuel industry, and continued overtures to western right-wing parties, he could have probably eliminated NATO as a "threat" to Russia within a decade. Without a single shot fired, without a soldier stepping foot on foreign soil.
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/21/world/soviet-disarray-yel...
Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.
Because NATO works by consensus not majoritarianism, that would have given Russia a NATO veto, in effect. Despite that, Russia was on the NATO onramp from almost immediately after independence from the USSR until Putin demanded that Russia bypass the readiness criteria being applied to other new members and be immediately granted membership (and still technically was on the onramp after that, though no real progress was made between that point and when relations seriously started to degrade with Russia’s invasions of various of neighbors that were also, and more serious, NATO aspirants.)
At 70, I wonder if Putin thinks he doesn't have a decade to wait.
1) Contrary to what US intel is saying, Russia isn't going to invade Ukraine
and then it became:
2) Kyiv was expected to fall within a week
These two events, in rapid succession, gave a bunch of people expectation whiplash. I'm not an expert, but it seems like they are in for a very bloody stalemate.
> Maybe Uncle Sam is getting neutered? We all ought to consider the possibility.
The US has strengthened its alliance with the (1st? 2nd?) largest economic bloc (The EU). Meanwhile, China itself has put itself in an awkward position with western Europe.
Personally, I wouldn't consider zerohedge a reputable outlet as even its own former staffers claim they are instructed to spin every article to suit the political views of its founder. [1]
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-29/unmasking...
And why would you believe Ukraine defensive capabilities are running out given all the weapons that flow into it from outside. Don't you think if they were running out of fuel they'd just ask and get as much as they need? NLAWs and Switchblades are still a tad more expensive than gas.
Is western media biased? Yes. But so is China. They're biased very heavily on the side of not having to condemn Russia. (They're also biased on the side of the invasion going well. If Russia can't do this, it calls into question China's ability to take Taiwan.)
In fact, from where I sit (also biased), western media is more willing to tell the truth than China is.
Despite what USA is telling on every occasion about China to get it somehow involved in this conflict, China appears like they have no horse in this game and calls a spade a spade better than Vatican does without trumping up the narrative to global conflict level. Besides I think China is way more preoccupied with internal matters like covid outbreaks to be able to really nake any strong effort to profit from this conflict.
India is way more pro-russian at the moment, given that the west was very unwelcoming to Indian ambitions and it was Russia who had their back.
this is just hyper-masculine posturing - because the US seems soft, optically, and yet we are somehow simultaneously hegemons, we are both reponsible for the war and also doomed to lose.
China is choosing a stance of non-neutrality. They seem to think that destabilizing all the regions outside of China is somehow going to help, or that a weaker Western bloc is somehow to their advantage. I obviously can only speculate but that is how it looks to me. I think it is a major error, because I think we could do better by repatching globalism and trying to de-fang nationalism, instead of going back to the dark ages and hoping to simply out-survive the other losers of global war.
Baker's un-written assurances may have bound him (Baker) to personally help ensure his assurances held, if only to preserve his credibility in other negotiations, but all parties involved understood they were not being written into the agreement and therefore were not a formal agreement. These words had meaning, even when not written into the agreement, because Baker was telling Gorbachev the truth, which was that the US understood that moving the borders of NATO east would be a bad idea. Gorbachev heard that the US understood this. It wasn't a binding legal agreement, it was a statement about the political landscape at that time.
Baker is long gone from the diplomatic landscape and so is that assurance. This isn't actually a surprise.
Diolomatic agreements serve one purpose, to enable future diplomacy and their importance should be evaluated through that lens.
Of course, as you say, those aren't really binding either. The written promises sometimes are worth the paper they're written on. Verbal promises are worth less than that.
Written agreements are usually cherry on top of the cake made entirely out of verbal promises and real world balance of force.
I don't know what this sentence means, but you're not supposed to write arguments like this on HN. You can make your point without casting aspersions across entire populations.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Yeah, pretty much all of the world recognizes that there is a pretty big difference, especially as to applicability several decades later, between different governments (one one side not even of the same entity, but instead the entity that was a leader among those overthrowing the one directly involved in the initial conversation) between something one official said to another in the course of negotiation and a signed and ratified treaty.
(Not that even a signed and ratified treaty between Russia and every single member of NATO in 1989 being violated would be, under international law, a justification for invasion of Ukraine—who is not in any version of any story a party, except perhaps as co-inheritor of Soviet interests, to the alleged commitment—in violation of the UN Charter and, in the case of the original 2014 invasion, Russia’s treaty obligations to Ukraine, and not that even if there was a legal justification for the invasion it would justified Russia’s rampant war crimes during the invasion.)
I recently noticed the same thing. That this idea of innocent because of insufficient evidence (by some conveniently chosen, case by case, definition of insufficient) is pervading some Americans thinking on the variety of subjects including US foreign policy but also for example corporate responsibility.
The word of an administration is only good for the duration of that administration, assuming said administration is even trustworthy. If it isn't written down it's a pinky swear. To hold future administrations accountable for the 30 year old pinky-swears of previous administrations is just contriving excuses to blame America/NATO.
Did the the west screw over Russia? Sure, in many ways (support for color revolutions, not properly supporting Russia during it's economic transition in the 90s, denying it NATO membership, etc). But this latest bout of violence is all Putin's ego and Russian national insecurity. So long as they maintain the world's largest nuclear arsenal, no one is marching on Moscow regardless of where their borders are, and independent nations like Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic States should be free to make their own decisions without being held to the standard of Russian paranoia.
This is actually a point of friction between settlers and North American Indigenous communities.
As predominantly oral communities, your word holds as much weight as a written contract. They got burned by written contracts in the past wrt land usage too.
Woe betide a naive bureaucrat who makes empty promises to a First Nations / American Indian community. Speak carefully, because people will remember.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017...
Not once, but three times, Baker tried out the “not one inch eastward” formula with Gorbachev in the February 9, 1990, meeting. He agreed with Gorbachev’s statement in response to the assurances that “NATO expansion is unacceptable.” Baker assured Gorbachev that “neither the President nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place,” and that the Americans understood that “not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.”