Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

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ron.reagan said:

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Most of you haven't gotten over how we got involved with stopping Hitler. Same cowards, different generation.

---

We got involved with that war because on thursday 11 December 1941 Germany declared war on the United States.

Has some nation declared war on the United States?

---

We're at the opposition to Lend Lease phase now. Quite a bit of ground to cross and events to occur before we're at the December 11, 1941 phase.

---

So you admit we are on the path to war

---

No. But to Ron.Reagan's point, you admit and use the same points used to oppose lend lease.

---

Luckily every single geo-political situation is not World War II and Nazism…no matter how much liberals would love to replay the only war they love that America has fought.

---

Totally agree with your first point, but as far as your second point goes, liberals are perfectly fine with war as long as their "team" is in power and calling the shots. It's only when leftists are out of power that they suddenly become passionately all about "peace and love". It's largely why they're all in as far as the war in Ukraine goes.

Johnny Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ron.reagan said:

---

Most of you haven't gotten over how we got involved with stopping Hitler. Same cowards, different generation.

---

We got involved with that war because on thursday 11 December 1941 Germany declared war on the United States.

Has some nation declared war on the United States?

---

We're at the opposition to Lend Lease phase now. Quite a bit of ground to cross and events to occur before we're at the December 11, 1941 phase.

---

So you admit we are on the path to war

---

No. But to Ron.Reagan's point, you admit and use the same points used to oppose lend lease.

---

Luckily every single geo-political situation is not World War II and Nazism…no matter how much liberals would love to replay the only war they love that America has fought.

---

Totally agree with your first point, but as far as your second point goes, liberals are perfectly fine with war as long as their "team" is in power and calling the shots. It's only when leftists are out of power that they suddenly become passionately all about "peace and love". It's largely why they're all in as far as the war in Ukraine goes.

---

I never heard anyone from either side that wants to go all in with Ukraine. Also, most conservatives agree that sending military aid to Ukraine is a good idea.

The crowd that doesn't want to send aid are far left communist sympathizers and the same conservatives that have complicated relationships with their cousins.

Has Ukraine defeated Russia yet like the Grammers told us?

ron.reagan said:

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Johnny Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ron.reagan said:

---

Most of you haven't gotten over how we got involved with stopping Hitler. Same cowards, different generation.

---

We got involved with that war because on thursday 11 December 1941 Germany declared war on the United States.

Has some nation declared war on the United States?

---

We're at the opposition to Lend Lease phase now. Quite a bit of ground to cross and events to occur before we're at the December 11, 1941 phase.

---

So you admit we are on the path to war

---

No. But to Ron.Reagan's point, you admit and use the same points used to oppose lend lease.

---

Luckily every single geo-political situation is not World War II and Nazism…no matter how much liberals would love to replay the only war they love that America has fought.

---

Totally agree with your first point, but as far as your second point goes, liberals are perfectly fine with war as long as their "team" is in power and calling the shots. It's only when leftists are out of power that they suddenly become passionately all about "peace and love". It's largely why they're all in as far as the war in Ukraine goes.

---

I never heard anyone from either side that wants to go all in with Ukraine. Also, most conservatives agree that sending military aid to Ukraine is a good idea.

---

So Biden was just kidding when he said we're supporting Ukraine "for as long as it takes"?? And most conservatives support actually having a strong leader in the White House (with a fully functioning brain) that would've kept this war from ever happening at all.

Ukraine didn't defeat Russia but Russia already lost to the west without even showing up.

https://news.yahoo.com/russia-lost-two-thirds-tanks-135030051.html

Johnny Bear said:

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ron.reagan said:

---

Johnny Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ron.reagan said:

---

Most of you haven't gotten over how we got involved with stopping Hitler. Same cowards, different generation.

---

We got involved with that war because on thursday 11 December 1941 Germany declared war on the United States.

Has some nation declared war on the United States?

---

We're at the opposition to Lend Lease phase now. Quite a bit of ground to cross and events to occur before we're at the December 11, 1941 phase.

---

So you admit we are on the path to war

---

No. But to Ron.Reagan's point, you admit and use the same points used to oppose lend lease.

---

Luckily every single geo-political situation is not World War II and Nazism…no matter how much liberals would love to replay the only war they love that America has fought.

---

Totally agree with your first point, but as far as your second point goes, liberals are perfectly fine with war as long as their "team" is in power and calling the shots. It's only when leftists are out of power that they suddenly become passionately all about "peace and love". It's largely why they're all in as far as the war in Ukraine goes.

---

I never heard anyone from either side that wants to go all in with Ukraine. Also, most conservatives agree that sending military aid to Ukraine is a good idea.

---

So Biden was just kidding when he said we're supporting Ukraine "for as long as it takes"?? And most conservatives support actually having a strong leader in the White House (with a fully functioning brain) that would've kept this war from ever happening at all.

---

I don't think he was kidding. I'm on my diet for as long as it takes but I've certainly never been all in.

ron.reagan said:

---

Ukraine didn't defeat Russia but Russia already lost to the west without even showing up.

https://news.yahoo.com/russia-lost-two-thirds-tanks-135030051.html

---

Oh really? I guess I missed the news story about Russia's full withdrawal from Ukraine.

Johnny Bear said:

---

ron.reagan said:

---

Ukraine didn't defeat Russia but Russia already lost to the west without even showing up.

https://news.yahoo.com/russia-lost-two-thirds-tanks-135030051.html

---

Oh really? I guess I missed the news story about Russia's full withdrawal from Ukraine.

---

You still clinging onto Vietnam as well?

Johnny Bear said:

---

ron.reagan said:

---

Ukraine didn't defeat Russia but Russia already lost to the west without even showing up.

https://news.yahoo.com/russia-lost-two-thirds-tanks-135030051.html

---

Oh really? I guess I missed the news story about Russia's full withdrawal from Ukraine.

---

That poor little tank has gotten more of a workout in the Western media than it did in Putin's parade. Listen to all the breathless journo kids, and you'd think the whole war depended on it.

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Osodecentx said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

How the United States was transformed from guardian to spoiler of the postwar international order. An excellent summary from Harper's magazine.

Quote:

---

Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris
by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington's NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests--or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington's message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests--the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War--was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO's writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other's interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what's reasonable and legitimate--not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its "unipolar moment," Washington demonstrated--to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow--that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a "focus on relations within nations, on a nation's form of governance, on its economic structure."

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America "the indispensable nation"--and which Gorbachev said defined America's "dangerous winner's mentality"--it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states--and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values--the post-Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/

---

---

Good article, difficult questions. I don't know the answer

---

Again, we see the isolationist argument that we caused a war in which we had no interest. Both are patently false premises. Russia would have NEVER invaded or usurped Ukraine if Nato hadn't been meddling? Pfft. If NATO hadn't expanded eastward, Russia would have expanded westward. The issue at hand is merely about where the razor wire will be strung. NATO was slow, deliberate, and cautious in its move eastward, out of deference to Russia. And it is instructive that EVERYONE (except Belarus) wants to be on the west side of the wire.

---

You continue to use the propagandist term of "isolationist"....and of course non-intervention and not engaging in war mongering adventurism is of course not the same as isolationism.

We are the major economic power on earth and have a two ocean navy along with bases in 80+ countries and territories around the world. No one has even said we should dismantle those fleets or bases.

What people have said is that we should not get involved in bloody conflicts that we have no vital interest in or that do not involved a ally of the USA. Ukraine is not a NATO ally.

And your argument that Russia (with a poverty level and per captia GDP like Mexico) is going to expand Westward is laughable...and then you contradict yourself by saying correctly that no one wants join them.....so then how can they expand Westward? Talk about grasping for reasons to get into a conflict with a nuclear power...fantasies of "imminent expansion into the West" lol

---

Russia doesn't have to invade and defeat NATO, as your analysis presumes. Russia will try to undermine it from within, facilitated by gunboat diplomacy on NATO borders to make all players in the frontline states be more cautious in their pro-Nato/anti-=Russia policies. Then. One election. One coup. And we will have the prospect of Russia and Nato poised on opposite borders of a Nato state preparing to come to the rescue of a new government calling for help. THAT is something to lose sleep over, friend. And the only way to prevent it is to keep Russian armies IN RUSSIA.

---

Russia had a similar predicament in Ukraine. Had we admitted such an unstable country to membership in NATO, and its government decided to take Crimea, Russia would have found itself at war without having lifted a finger.

---

I have spoken often about the risks of admitting politically unstable states to Nato. Nato itself recognizes that risk. That's why it has not admitted Ukraine to membership, and only elevated it to partner status in 2020 (joining several other countries - Sweden, Finland, Australia, Jordan, Georgia). NATO is signaling unwavering support for Ukraine, as link demonstrates:
https://news.yahoo.com/nato-elevate-ukraine-partner-status-212000077.html
Some of that is genuine, and some of that is diplomatic posturing to keep up pressure on Russia....to force them to the table before the entirety of Ukraine slips away.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine unfortunately may well result in a faster-track to Ukraine Nato membership. I would prefer to put that off until after the war is won and we have a chance to observe a couple of election cycles, to ensure Ukraine can demonstrate that it is capable of peaceful transition to power. But Russia's weakness and looming defeat will be a powerful enticement to expand, which in retrospect perhaps should have been done 30 years ago when Russia was too weak to resist it.

Nato is itself engaging in mission creep, from a defense of Western Europe from Soviet attack, to a defense of democracy from attacks by autocracy. The admission of Jordan and Australia would be your clue.

---

"Democracy," i.e. recycled Marxism warmed over by Western NGOs and served to an ungrateful populace.

Russia doesn't need to be dragged into modernity. They've been there already.

---

That is not spin. That is detachment from reality.

Are you OK?

---

You just told me, apparently without irony, that our foreign policy has something to do with sorting out democracies from autocracies and acting as the selfless champion of the former.

Are you okay?

---

Unlike you, completely lucid. Tell us the rationale for Australia belonging to NATO.

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

How the United States was transformed from guardian to spoiler of the postwar international order. An excellent summary from Harper's magazine.

Quote:

---

Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris
by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington's NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests--or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington's message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests--the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War--was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO's writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other's interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what's reasonable and legitimate--not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its "unipolar moment," Washington demonstrated--to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow--that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a "focus on relations within nations, on a nation's form of governance, on its economic structure."

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America "the indispensable nation"--and which Gorbachev said defined America's "dangerous winner's mentality"--it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states--and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values--the post-Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/

---

---

I get all that.

So, the question I have is about the Nations that don't want to be part of Russia and ask the west to join. They are f-ed? Doesn't matter if Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Czech, Ukraine or Georgia want to be part of the west? Their voices and opinions don't count in this equation? Yeah, that's American...

---

Like any alliance network we would have to evaluate the potential benefits and cost of membership.

The Baltic States, Poland, Romania, and Czechia of course were determined to be apparently decent choices for inclusion in NATO membership...and to have minor costs in terms of conflict with Russia. And fundamentally Moscow while it might have grumbled was ok with them joining the Western bloc.

But that is not the case with Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia.

Russia has said time and time again that they would react very very negatively to those 3 joining a hostile alliance network.

So why do it? Why attempt to bring Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia into NATO when it will 100% cause conflict?

This is a similar situation to the one in the Pacific with China.

Many nations in that region might be interested in joining a USA led anti-China defense alliance. But we would have to be very very careful in determining which of those nations would be in our interest to ally ourselves with and which would or could potentially led to massive conflict.

Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, S. Korea, Japan....would not be a problem and would offer positives for membership.

Mongolia, K. Korea, or Taiwan would be redlines for China and spark conflict.

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Osodecentx said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

How the United States was transformed from guardian to spoiler of the postwar international order. An excellent summary from Harper's magazine.

Quote:

---

Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris
by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington's NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests--or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington's message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests--the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War--was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO's writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other's interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what's reasonable and legitimate--not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its "unipolar moment," Washington demonstrated--to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow--that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a "focus on relations within nations, on a nation's form of governance, on its economic structure."

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America "the indispensable nation"--and which Gorbachev said defined America's "dangerous winner's mentality"--it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states--and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values--the post-Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/

---

---

Good article, difficult questions. I don't know the answer

---

Again, we see the isolationist argument that we caused a war in which we had no interest. Both are patently false premises. Russia would have NEVER invaded or usurped Ukraine if Nato hadn't been meddling? Pfft. If NATO hadn't expanded eastward, Russia would have expanded westward. The issue at hand is merely about where the razor wire will be strung. NATO was slow, deliberate, and cautious in its move eastward, out of deference to Russia. And it is instructive that EVERYONE (except Belarus) wants to be on the west side of the wire.

---

You continue to use the propagandist term of "isolationist"....and of course non-intervention and not engaging in war mongering adventurism is of course not the same as isolationism.

We are the major economic power on earth and have a two ocean navy along with bases in 80+ countries and territories around the world. No one has even said we should dismantle those fleets or bases.

What people have said is that we should not get involved in bloody conflicts that we have no vital interest in or that do not involved a ally of the USA. Ukraine is not a NATO ally.

And your argument that Russia (with a poverty level and per captia GDP like Mexico) is going to expand Westward is laughable...and then you contradict yourself by saying correctly that no one wants join them.....so then how can they expand Westward? Talk about grasping for reasons to get into a conflict with a nuclear power...fantasies of "imminent expansion into the West" lol

---

Russia doesn't have to invade and defeat NATO, as your analysis presumes. Russia will try to undermine it from within, facilitated by gunboat diplomacy on NATO borders to make all players in the frontline states be more cautious in their pro-Nato/anti-=Russia policies. Then. One election. One coup. And we will have the prospect of Russia and Nato poised on opposite borders of a Nato state preparing to come to the rescue of a new government calling for help. THAT is something to lose sleep over, friend. And the only way to prevent it is to keep Russian armies IN RUSSIA.

---

Russia had a similar predicament in Ukraine. Had we admitted such an unstable country to membership in NATO, and its government decided to take Crimea, Russia would have found itself at war without having lifted a finger.

---

I have spoken often about the risks of admitting politically unstable states to Nato. Nato itself recognizes that risk. That's why it has not admitted Ukraine to membership, and only elevated it to partner status in 2020 (joining several other countries - Sweden, Finland, Australia, Jordan, Georgia). NATO is signaling unwavering support for Ukraine, as link demonstrates:
https://news.yahoo.com/nato-elevate-ukraine-partner-status-212000077.html
Some of that is genuine, and some of that is diplomatic posturing to keep up pressure on Russia....to force them to the table before the entirety of Ukraine slips away.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine unfortunately may well result in a faster-track to Ukraine Nato membership. I would prefer to put that off until after the war is won and we have a chance to observe a couple of election cycles, to ensure Ukraine can demonstrate that it is capable of peaceful transition to power. But Russia's weakness and looming defeat will be a powerful enticement to expand, which in retrospect perhaps should have been done 30 years ago when Russia was too weak to resist it.

Nato is itself engaging in mission creep, from a defense of Western Europe from Soviet attack, to a defense of democracy from attacks by autocracy. The admission of Jordan and Australia would be your clue.

---

"Democracy," i.e. recycled Marxism warmed over by Western NGOs and served to an ungrateful populace.

Russia doesn't need to be dragged into modernity. They've been there already.

---

That is not spin. That is detachment from reality.

Are you OK?

---

You just told me, apparently without irony, that our foreign policy has something to do with sorting out democracies from autocracies and acting as the selfless champion of the former.

Are you okay?

---

Unlike you, completely lucid. Tell us the rationale for Australia belonging to NATO.

---

Australia doesn't belong to NATO.

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

How the United States was transformed from guardian to spoiler of the postwar international order. An excellent summary from Harper's magazine.

Quote:

---

Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris
by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington's NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests--or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington's message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests--the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War--was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO's writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other's interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what's reasonable and legitimate--not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its "unipolar moment," Washington demonstrated--to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow--that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a "focus on relations within nations, on a nation's form of governance, on its economic structure."

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America "the indispensable nation"--and which Gorbachev said defined America's "dangerous winner's mentality"--it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states--and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values--the post-Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/

---

---

I get all that.

So, the question I have is about the Nations that don't want to be part of Russia and ask the west to join. They are f-ed? Doesn't matter if Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Czech, Ukraine or Georgia want to be part of the west? Their voices and opinions don't count in this equation? Yeah, that's American...

---

Like any alliance network we would have to evaluate the potential benefits and cost of membership.

The Baltic States, Poland, Romania, and Czechia of course were determined to be apparently decent choices for inclusion in NATO membership...and to have minor costs in terms of conflict with Russia. And fundamentally Moscow while it might have grumbled was ok with them joining the Western bloc.

But that is not the case with Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia.

Russia has said time and time again that they would react very very negatively to those 3 joining a hostile alliance network.

So why do it? Why attempt to bring Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia into NATO when it will 100% cause conflict?

This is a similar situation to the one in the Pacific with China.

Many nations in that region might be interested in joining a USA led anti-China defense alliance. But we would have to be very very careful in determining which of those nations would be in our interest to ally ourselves with and which would or could potentially led to massive conflict.

Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, S. Korea, Japan....would not be a problem and would offer positives for membership.

Mongolia, K. Korea, or Taiwan would be redlines for China and spark conflict.

---

So, you think that Ukraine and Georgia would not produce long term benefits if western investment, technology and practices were allowed to flow? Ukraine has the potential to be a powerhouse, why do you think Putin is doing this? You don't invade desert land that wants to break away, the Stans were let go pretty easily because there is no value.

Belarus isn't going anywhere. Maybe Georgia and Ukraine don't want to be Belarus. What Russian area, including Russia, has flourished? Why would any nation want to align itself with Russia? Iran and North Korea the only 2 worst living conditions in the world, Russia looks good to them...

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

How the United States was transformed from guardian to spoiler of the postwar international order. An excellent summary from Harper's magazine.

Quote:

---

Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris
by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington's NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests--or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington's message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests--the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War--was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO's writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other's interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what's reasonable and legitimate--not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its "unipolar moment," Washington demonstrated--to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow--that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a "focus on relations within nations, on a nation's form of governance, on its economic structure."

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America "the indispensable nation"--and which Gorbachev said defined America's "dangerous winner's mentality"--it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states--and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values--the post-Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/

---

---

I get all that.

So, the question I have is about the Nations that don't want to be part of Russia and ask the west to join. They are f-ed? Doesn't matter if Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Czech, Ukraine or Georgia want to be part of the west? Their voices and opinions don't count in this equation? Yeah, that's American...

---

Like any alliance network we would have to evaluate the potential benefits and cost of membership.

The Baltic States, Poland, Romania, and Czechia of course were determined to be apparently decent choices for inclusion in NATO membership...and to have minor costs in terms of conflict with Russia. And fundamentally Moscow while it might have grumbled was ok with them joining the Western bloc.

But that is not the case with Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia.

Russia has said time and time again that they would react very very negatively to those 3 joining a hostile alliance network.

So why do it? Why attempt to bring Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia into NATO when it will 100% cause conflict?

This is a similar situation to the one in the Pacific with China.

Many nations in that region might be interested in joining a USA led anti-China defense alliance. But we would have to be very very careful in determining which of those nations would be in our interest to ally ourselves with and which would or could potentially led to massive conflict.

Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, S. Korea, Japan....would not be a problem and would offer positives for membership.

Mongolia, K. Korea, or Taiwan would be redlines for China and spark conflict.

---

So, you think that Ukraine and Georgia would not produce long term benefits if western investment, technology and practices were allowed to flow? Ukraine has the potential to be a powerhouse, why do you think Putin is doing this? You don't invade desert land that wants to break away, the Stans were let go pretty easily because there is no value.

Belarus isn't going anywhere. Maybe Georgia and Ukraine don't want to be Belarus. What Russian area, including Russia, has flourished? Why would any nation want to align itself with Russia? Iran and North Korea the only 2 worst living conditions in the world, Russia looks good to them...

---

Well you have to ask the question if brining in nation X into the Western alliance is worth mass bloodshed and potential nuclear war.

So no...I don't think Mongolia, N. Korea, or Taiwan are worth that. And I don't think Ukraine or Georgia are worth that.

And in fact U.S. policy planners came to that same conclusion in the 1990s at the fall of the Iron curtain and specifically advised U.S. leaders that moving NATO borders right up to Russia's front door would be a terribly foolish and potential disastrous policy to follow.

I have said on this forum many times that I think we need a NATO like organization in the Pacific...but I have also been clear on what nations that can NOT include.

There has to be reasonable limits to the expansion of alliance networks and we have to respect the sphere of influnce of other nations.

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

How the United States was transformed from guardian to spoiler of the postwar international order. An excellent summary from Harper's magazine.

Quote:

---

Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris
by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington's NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests--or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington's message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests--the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War--was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO's writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other's interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what's reasonable and legitimate--not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its "unipolar moment," Washington demonstrated--to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow--that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a "focus on relations within nations, on a nation's form of governance, on its economic structure."

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America "the indispensable nation"--and which Gorbachev said defined America's "dangerous winner's mentality"--it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states--and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values--the post-Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/

---

---

I get all that.

So, the question I have is about the Nations that don't want to be part of Russia and ask the west to join. They are f-ed? Doesn't matter if Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Czech, Ukraine or Georgia want to be part of the west? Their voices and opinions don't count in this equation? Yeah, that's American...

---

Like any alliance network we would have to evaluate the potential benefits and cost of membership.

The Baltic States, Poland, Romania, and Czechia of course were determined to be apparently decent choices for inclusion in NATO membership...and to have minor costs in terms of conflict with Russia. And fundamentally Moscow while it might have grumbled was ok with them joining the Western bloc.

But that is not the case with Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia.

Russia has said time and time again that they would react very very negatively to those 3 joining a hostile alliance network.

So why do it? Why attempt to bring Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia into NATO when it will 100% cause conflict?

This is a similar situation to the one in the Pacific with China.

Many nations in that region might be interested in joining a USA led anti-China defense alliance. But we would have to be very very careful in determining which of those nations would be in our interest to ally ourselves with and which would or could potentially led to massive conflict.

Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, S. Korea, Japan....would not be a problem and would offer positives for membership.

Mongolia, K. Korea, or Taiwan would be redlines for China and spark conflict.

---

So, you think that Ukraine and Georgia would not produce long term benefits if western investment, technology and practices were allowed to flow? Ukraine has the potential to be a powerhouse, why do you think Putin is doing this? You don't invade desert land that wants to break away, the Stans were let go pretty easily because there is no value.

Belarus isn't going anywhere. Maybe Georgia and Ukraine don't want to be Belarus. What Russian area, including Russia, has flourished? Why would any nation want to align itself with Russia? Iran and North Korea the only 2 worst living conditions in the world, Russia looks good to them...

---

What does aligning with Russia mean? Neutrality? Good relations with East and West? Former Soviet republics maintaining old trade relationships? Not supporting regime change? You're glossing over a lot of details.

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

How the United States was transformed from guardian to spoiler of the postwar international order. An excellent summary from Harper's magazine.

Quote:

---

Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris
by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington's NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests--or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington's message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests--the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War--was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO's writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other's interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what's reasonable and legitimate--not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its "unipolar moment," Washington demonstrated--to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow--that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a "focus on relations within nations, on a nation's form of governance, on its economic structure."

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America "the indispensable nation"--and which Gorbachev said defined America's "dangerous winner's mentality"--it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states--and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values--the post-Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/

---

---

I get all that.

So, the question I have is about the Nations that don't want to be part of Russia and ask the west to join. They are f-ed? Doesn't matter if Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Czech, Ukraine or Georgia want to be part of the west? Their voices and opinions don't count in this equation? Yeah, that's American...

---

Like any alliance network we would have to evaluate the potential benefits and cost of membership.

The Baltic States, Poland, Romania, and Czechia of course were determined to be apparently decent choices for inclusion in NATO membership...and to have minor costs in terms of conflict with Russia. And fundamentally Moscow while it might have grumbled was ok with them joining the Western bloc.

But that is not the case with Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia.

Russia has said time and time again that they would react very very negatively to those 3 joining a hostile alliance network.

So why do it? Why attempt to bring Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia into NATO when it will 100% cause conflict?

This is a similar situation to the one in the Pacific with China.

Many nations in that region might be interested in joining a USA led anti-China defense alliance. But we would have to be very very careful in determining which of those nations would be in our interest to ally ourselves with and which would or could potentially led to massive conflict.

Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, S. Korea, Japan....would not be a problem and would offer positives for membership.

Mongolia, K. Korea, or Taiwan would be redlines for China and spark conflict.

---

So, you think that Ukraine and Georgia would not produce long term benefits if western investment, technology and practices were allowed to flow? Ukraine has the potential to be a powerhouse, why do you think Putin is doing this? You don't invade desert land that wants to break away, the Stans were let go pretty easily because there is no value.

Belarus isn't going anywhere. Maybe Georgia and Ukraine don't want to be Belarus. What Russian area, including Russia, has flourished? Why would any nation want to align itself with Russia? Iran and North Korea the only 2 worst living conditions in the world, Russia looks good to them...

---

Well you have to ask the question if brining in nation X into the Western alliance is worth mass bloodshed and potential nuclear war.

So no...I don't think Mongolia, N. Korea, or Taiwan are worth that. And I don't think Ukraine or Georgia are worth that.

And in fact U.S. policy planners came to that same conclusion in the 1990s at the fall of the Iron curtain and specifically advised U.S. leaders that moving NATO borders right up to Russia's front door would be a terribly foolish and potential disastrous policy to follow.

I have said on this forum many times that I think we need a NATO like organization in the Pacific...but I have also been clear on what nations that can NOT include.

There has to be reasonable limits to the expansion of alliance networks and we have to respect the sphere of influnce of other nations.

---

We are not disagreeing by much. I think Ukraine does add to NATO and is worth the investment. Not US troops, but like we are. Yes. Same with Tawain. Mongolia, not so much. It has to make some sense.

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

How the United States was transformed from guardian to spoiler of the postwar international order. An excellent summary from Harper's magazine.

Quote:

---

Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris
by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington's NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests--or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington's message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests--the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War--was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO's writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other's interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what's reasonable and legitimate--not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its "unipolar moment," Washington demonstrated--to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow--that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a "focus on relations within nations, on a nation's form of governance, on its economic structure."

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America "the indispensable nation"--and which Gorbachev said defined America's "dangerous winner's mentality"--it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states--and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values--the post-Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/

---

---

I get all that.

So, the question I have is about the Nations that don't want to be part of Russia and ask the west to join. They are f-ed? Doesn't matter if Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Czech, Ukraine or Georgia want to be part of the west? Their voices and opinions don't count in this equation? Yeah, that's American...

---

Like any alliance network we would have to evaluate the potential benefits and cost of membership.

The Baltic States, Poland, Romania, and Czechia of course were determined to be apparently decent choices for inclusion in NATO membership...and to have minor costs in terms of conflict with Russia. And fundamentally Moscow while it might have grumbled was ok with them joining the Western bloc.

But that is not the case with Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia.

Russia has said time and time again that they would react very very negatively to those 3 joining a hostile alliance network.

So why do it? Why attempt to bring Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia into NATO when it will 100% cause conflict?

This is a similar situation to the one in the Pacific with China.

Many nations in that region might be interested in joining a USA led anti-China defense alliance. But we would have to be very very careful in determining which of those nations would be in our interest to ally ourselves with and which would or could potentially led to massive conflict.

Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, S. Korea, Japan....would not be a problem and would offer positives for membership.

Mongolia, K. Korea, or Taiwan would be redlines for China and spark conflict.

---

So, you think that Ukraine and Georgia would not produce long term benefits if western investment, technology and practices were allowed to flow? Ukraine has the potential to be a powerhouse, why do you think Putin is doing this? You don't invade desert land that wants to break away, the Stans were let go pretty easily because there is no value.

Belarus isn't going anywhere. Maybe Georgia and Ukraine don't want to be Belarus. What Russian area, including Russia, has flourished? Why would any nation want to align itself with Russia? Iran and North Korea the only 2 worst living conditions in the world, Russia looks good to them...

---

Well you have to ask the question if brining in nation X into the Western alliance is worth mass bloodshed and potential nuclear war.

So no...I don't think Mongolia, N. Korea, or Taiwan are worth that. And I don't think Ukraine or Georgia are worth that.

And in fact U.S. policy planners came to that same conclusion in the 1990s at the fall of the Iron curtain and specifically advised U.S. leaders that moving NATO borders right up to Russia's front door would be a terribly foolish and potential disastrous policy to follow.

I have said on this forum many times that I think we need a NATO like organization in the Pacific...but I have also been clear on what nations that can NOT include.

There has to be reasonable limits to the expansion of alliance networks and we have to respect the sphere of influnce of other nations.

---

We are not disagreeing by much. I think Ukraine does add to NATO and is worth the investment. Not US troops, but like we are. Yes. Same with Tawain. Mongolia, not so much. It has to make some sense.

---

I understand your reasoning.

But U.S. policy planners looked at the issue and basically said anything east of the Bug river in Europe was of little value to the United States or our key partners in Europe (UK, France, Germany, Italy)...and was more than likely to be something that could risk war with Russia over.

Also, even if an area would be beneficial to the Western bloc for inclusion...say Taiwan...is it worth that if it risks war with a nuclear armed State?

For me Taiwan and Ukraine are a bridge to far and unnecessary/high risk additions to our alliance system.

And Beijing and Moscow have made their position clear and have shown that they will use force to prevent those areas from becoming bases to U.S. troops.

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

How the United States was transformed from guardian to spoiler of the postwar international order. An excellent summary from Harper's magazine.

Quote:

---

Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris
by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington's NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests--or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington's message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests--the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War--was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO's writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other's interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what's reasonable and legitimate--not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its "unipolar moment," Washington demonstrated--to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow--that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a "focus on relations within nations, on a nation's form of governance, on its economic structure."

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America "the indispensable nation"--and which Gorbachev said defined America's "dangerous winner's mentality"--it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states--and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values--the post-Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/

---

---

I get all that.

So, the question I have is about the Nations that don't want to be part of Russia and ask the west to join. They are f-ed? Doesn't matter if Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Czech, Ukraine or Georgia want to be part of the west? Their voices and opinions don't count in this equation? Yeah, that's American...

---

Like any alliance network we would have to evaluate the potential benefits and cost of membership.

The Baltic States, Poland, Romania, and Czechia of course were determined to be apparently decent choices for inclusion in NATO membership...and to have minor costs in terms of conflict with Russia. And fundamentally Moscow while it might have grumbled was ok with them joining the Western bloc.

But that is not the case with Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia.

Russia has said time and time again that they would react very very negatively to those 3 joining a hostile alliance network.

So why do it? Why attempt to bring Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia into NATO when it will 100% cause conflict?

This is a similar situation to the one in the Pacific with China.

Many nations in that region might be interested in joining a USA led anti-China defense alliance. But we would have to be very very careful in determining which of those nations would be in our interest to ally ourselves with and which would or could potentially led to massive conflict.

Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, S. Korea, Japan....would not be a problem and would offer positives for membership.

Mongolia, K. Korea, or Taiwan would be redlines for China and spark conflict.

---

So, you think that Ukraine and Georgia would not produce long term benefits if western investment, technology and practices were allowed to flow? Ukraine has the potential to be a powerhouse, why do you think Putin is doing this? You don't invade desert land that wants to break away, the Stans were let go pretty easily because there is no value.

Belarus isn't going anywhere. Maybe Georgia and Ukraine don't want to be Belarus. What Russian area, including Russia, has flourished? Why would any nation want to align itself with Russia? Iran and North Korea the only 2 worst living conditions in the world, Russia looks good to them...

---

Well you have to ask the question if brining in nation X into the Western alliance is worth mass bloodshed and potential nuclear war.

So no...I don't think Mongolia, N. Korea, or Taiwan are worth that. And I don't think Ukraine or Georgia are worth that.

And in fact U.S. policy planners came to that same conclusion in the 1990s at the fall of the Iron curtain and specifically advised U.S. leaders that moving NATO borders right up to Russia's front door would be a terribly foolish and potential disastrous policy to follow.

I have said on this forum many times that I think we need a NATO like organization in the Pacific...but I have also been clear on what nations that can NOT include.

There has to be reasonable limits to the expansion of alliance networks and we have to respect the sphere of influnce of other nations.

---

We are not disagreeing by much. I think Ukraine does add to NATO and is worth the investment. Not US troops, but like we are. Yes. Same with Tawain. Mongolia, not so much. It has to make some sense.

---

I understand your reasoning.

But U.S. policy planners looked at the issue and basically said anything east of the Bug river in Europe was of little value to the United States or our key partners in Europe (UK, France, Germany, Italy)...and was more than likely to be something that could risk war with Russia over.

Also, even if an area would be beneficial to the Western bloc for inclusion...say Taiwan...is it worth that if it risks war with a nuclear armed State?

For me Taiwan and Ukraine are a bridge to far and unnecessary/high risk additions to our alliance system.

And Beijing and Moscow have made their position clear and have shown that they will use force to prevent those areas from becoming bases to U.S. troops.

---

I get the too far and anything more than what we are doing now, I am not on board.

However, unless there is an agreement I can't find, the Bug River was WW2! Don't you think a policy should be updated every 80 years or so???

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

How the United States was transformed from guardian to spoiler of the postwar international order. An excellent summary from Harper's magazine.

Quote:

---

Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris
by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington's NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests--or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington's message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests--the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War--was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO's writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other's interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what's reasonable and legitimate--not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its "unipolar moment," Washington demonstrated--to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow--that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a "focus on relations within nations, on a nation's form of governance, on its economic structure."

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America "the indispensable nation"--and which Gorbachev said defined America's "dangerous winner's mentality"--it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states--and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values--the post-Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/

---

---

I get all that.

So, the question I have is about the Nations that don't want to be part of Russia and ask the west to join. They are f-ed? Doesn't matter if Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Czech, Ukraine or Georgia want to be part of the west? Their voices and opinions don't count in this equation? Yeah, that's American...

---

Like any alliance network we would have to evaluate the potential benefits and cost of membership.

The Baltic States, Poland, Romania, and Czechia of course were determined to be apparently decent choices for inclusion in NATO membership...and to have minor costs in terms of conflict with Russia. And fundamentally Moscow while it might have grumbled was ok with them joining the Western bloc.

But that is not the case with Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia.

Russia has said time and time again that they would react very very negatively to those 3 joining a hostile alliance network.

So why do it? Why attempt to bring Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia into NATO when it will 100% cause conflict?

This is a similar situation to the one in the Pacific with China.

Many nations in that region might be interested in joining a USA led anti-China defense alliance. But we would have to be very very careful in determining which of those nations would be in our interest to ally ourselves with and which would or could potentially led to massive conflict.

Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, S. Korea, Japan....would not be a problem and would offer positives for membership.

Mongolia, K. Korea, or Taiwan would be redlines for China and spark conflict.

---

So, you think that Ukraine and Georgia would not produce long term benefits if western investment, technology and practices were allowed to flow? Ukraine has the potential to be a powerhouse, why do you think Putin is doing this? You don't invade desert land that wants to break away, the Stans were let go pretty easily because there is no value.

Belarus isn't going anywhere. Maybe Georgia and Ukraine don't want to be Belarus. What Russian area, including Russia, has flourished? Why would any nation want to align itself with Russia? Iran and North Korea the only 2 worst living conditions in the world, Russia looks good to them...

---

Well you have to ask the question if brining in nation X into the Western alliance is worth mass bloodshed and potential nuclear war.

So no...I don't think Mongolia, N. Korea, or Taiwan are worth that. And I don't think Ukraine or Georgia are worth that.

And in fact U.S. policy planners came to that same conclusion in the 1990s at the fall of the Iron curtain and specifically advised U.S. leaders that moving NATO borders right up to Russia's front door would be a terribly foolish and potential disastrous policy to follow.

I have said on this forum many times that I think we need a NATO like organization in the Pacific...but I have also been clear on what nations that can NOT include.

There has to be reasonable limits to the expansion of alliance networks and we have to respect the sphere of influnce of other nations.

---

We are not disagreeing by much. I think Ukraine does add to NATO and is worth the investment. Not US troops, but like we are. Yes. Same with Tawain. Mongolia, not so much. It has to make some sense.

---

I understand your reasoning.

But U.S. policy planners looked at the issue and basically said anything east of the Bug river in Europe was of little value to the United States or our key partners in Europe (UK, France, Germany, Italy)...and was more than likely to be something that could risk war with Russia over.

Also, even if an area would be beneficial to the Western bloc for inclusion...say Taiwan...is it worth that if it risks war with a nuclear armed State?

For me Taiwan and Ukraine are a bridge to far and unnecessary/high risk additions to our alliance system.

And Beijing and Moscow have made their position clear and have shown that they will use force to prevent those areas from becoming bases to U.S. troops.

---

I get the too far and anything more than what we are doing now, I am not on board.

However, unless there is an agreement I can't find, the Bug River was WW2! Don't you think a policy should be updated every 80 years or so???

---

I will go back and look at the policy paper but the Bug river was there recommendation border for Post-Cold war areas of potential NATO expansion....so early 1990s.

They did advise for instance bringing in Poland into NATO that would secure the border with Germany and forever lock Moscow out of central Europe. (Same thinking applied to Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary)

But they said nothing else in Eastern Europe was worth the potential conflict over.

Certainly no one was advocating bringing Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia into NATO in the 1990s...everyone knew that would be madness and would spark off massive conflict.

Obama let Victoria Nuland and the other ghouls at the State Department and Pentagon run wild.

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

How the United States was transformed from guardian to spoiler of the postwar international order. An excellent summary from Harper's magazine.

Quote:

---

Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris
by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington's NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests--or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington's message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests--the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War--was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO's writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other's interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what's reasonable and legitimate--not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its "unipolar moment," Washington demonstrated--to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow--that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a "focus on relations within nations, on a nation's form of governance, on its economic structure."

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America "the indispensable nation"--and which Gorbachev said defined America's "dangerous winner's mentality"--it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states--and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values--the post-Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/

---

---

I get all that.

So, the question I have is about the Nations that don't want to be part of Russia and ask the west to join. They are f-ed? Doesn't matter if Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Czech, Ukraine or Georgia want to be part of the west? Their voices and opinions don't count in this equation? Yeah, that's American...

---

Like any alliance network we would have to evaluate the potential benefits and cost of membership.

The Baltic States, Poland, Romania, and Czechia of course were determined to be apparently decent choices for inclusion in NATO membership...and to have minor costs in terms of conflict with Russia. And fundamentally Moscow while it might have grumbled was ok with them joining the Western bloc.

But that is not the case with Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia.

Russia has said time and time again that they would react very very negatively to those 3 joining a hostile alliance network.

So why do it? Why attempt to bring Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia into NATO when it will 100% cause conflict?

This is a similar situation to the one in the Pacific with China.

Many nations in that region might be interested in joining a USA led anti-China defense alliance. But we would have to be very very careful in determining which of those nations would be in our interest to ally ourselves with and which would or could potentially led to massive conflict.

Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, S. Korea, Japan....would not be a problem and would offer positives for membership.

Mongolia, K. Korea, or Taiwan would be redlines for China and spark conflict.

---

So, you think that Ukraine and Georgia would not produce long term benefits if western investment, technology and practices were allowed to flow? Ukraine has the potential to be a powerhouse, why do you think Putin is doing this? You don't invade desert land that wants to break away, the Stans were let go pretty easily because there is no value.

Belarus isn't going anywhere. Maybe Georgia and Ukraine don't want to be Belarus. What Russian area, including Russia, has flourished? Why would any nation want to align itself with Russia? Iran and North Korea the only 2 worst living conditions in the world, Russia looks good to them...

---

Well you have to ask the question if brining in nation X into the Western alliance is worth mass bloodshed and potential nuclear war.

So no...I don't think Mongolia, N. Korea, or Taiwan are worth that. And I don't think Ukraine or Georgia are worth that.

And in fact U.S. policy planners came to that same conclusion in the 1990s at the fall of the Iron curtain and specifically advised U.S. leaders that moving NATO borders right up to Russia's front door would be a terribly foolish and potential disastrous policy to follow.

I have said on this forum many times that I think we need a NATO like organization in the Pacific...but I have also been clear on what nations that can NOT include.

There has to be reasonable limits to the expansion of alliance networks and we have to respect the sphere of influnce of other nations.

---

We are not disagreeing by much. I think Ukraine does add to NATO and is worth the investment. Not US troops, but like we are. Yes. Same with Tawain. Mongolia, not so much. It has to make some sense.

---

I understand your reasoning.

But U.S. policy planners looked at the issue and basically said anything east of the Bug river in Europe was of little value to the United States or our key partners in Europe (UK, France, Germany, Italy)...and was more than likely to be something that could risk war with Russia over.

Also, even if an area would be beneficial to the Western bloc for inclusion...say Taiwan...is it worth that if it risks war with a nuclear armed State?

For me Taiwan and Ukraine are a bridge to far and unnecessary/high risk additions to our alliance system.

And Beijing and Moscow have made their position clear and have shown that they will use force to prevent those areas from becoming bases to U.S. troops.

---

I get the too far and anything more than what we are doing now, I am not on board.

However, unless there is an agreement I can't find, the Bug River was WW2! Don't you think a policy should be updated every 80 years or so???

---

I will go back and look at the policy paper but the Bug river was there recommendation for Post-Cold war areas of includcne....so early 1990s.

They did advise for instance bringing in Poland into NATO that would secure the border with Germany and forever lock Moscow out of central Europe. (Same thinking applied to Czechia, Slovak, Hungary)

But they said nothing else in Eastern Europe was worth the potential conflict over.

Certainly no one was advocating brining Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia into NATO in the 1990s...everyone knew that would be madness and would spark off massive conflict.

Obama let Victoria Nuland and the other ghouls at the State Department and Pentagon run wild.

---

Is that the same Bucharest Agreement that says we will defend them if they give back the Nukes? You know, the non-binding one. Or, is this clause the only binding thing that took place in the 90's?

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

How the United States was transformed from guardian to spoiler of the postwar international order. An excellent summary from Harper's magazine.

Quote:

---

Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris
by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington's NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests--or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington's message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests--the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War--was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO's writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other's interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what's reasonable and legitimate--not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its "unipolar moment," Washington demonstrated--to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow--that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a "focus on relations within nations, on a nation's form of governance, on its economic structure."

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America "the indispensable nation"--and which Gorbachev said defined America's "dangerous winner's mentality"--it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states--and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values--the post-Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/

---

---

I get all that.

So, the question I have is about the Nations that don't want to be part of Russia and ask the west to join. They are f-ed? Doesn't matter if Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Czech, Ukraine or Georgia want to be part of the west? Their voices and opinions don't count in this equation? Yeah, that's American...

---

My reservations concern the tripwire, i.e. interlocking treaty obligations. If Russia attacks Moldova we would be required to go to war.
We had 2 world wars that were initiated by treaty obligations. I would not go to war for Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Czech Republic, or Moldova, but the NATO Treaty would require it of us.

50/50 chance the United States will be at war with either Russia, China, or North Korea before the 2024 elections.

Osodecentx said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

How the United States was transformed from guardian to spoiler of the postwar international order. An excellent summary from Harper's magazine.

Quote:

---

Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris
by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington's NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests--or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington's message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests--the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War--was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO's writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other's interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what's reasonable and legitimate--not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its "unipolar moment," Washington demonstrated--to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow--that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a "focus on relations within nations, on a nation's form of governance, on its economic structure."

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America "the indispensable nation"--and which Gorbachev said defined America's "dangerous winner's mentality"--it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states--and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values--the post-Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/

---

---

I get all that.

So, the question I have is about the Nations that don't want to be part of Russia and ask the west to join. They are f-ed? Doesn't matter if Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Czech, Ukraine or Georgia want to be part of the west? Their voices and opinions don't count in this equation? Yeah, that's American...

---

My reservations concern the tripwire, i.e. interlocking treaty obligations. If Russia attacks Moldova we would be required to go to war.
We had 2 world wars that were initiated by treaty obligations. I would not go to war for Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Czech Republic, or Moldova, but the NATO Treaty would require it of us.

---

At what level? In addition, the US will have a huge say in what the Alliance does.

If you are talking UN levels, a US brigade sized element might be required. We do that now and have done so forever, I remember the Siani with the 82nd. Even WW1 our expeditionary force was not the bulk of the forces. But to think that we will not be involved, by treaty or not is not realistic. If there is a war in Europe, the US will be there.

RMF5630 said:

---

Osodecentx said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

How the United States was transformed from guardian to spoiler of the postwar international order. An excellent summary from Harper's magazine.

Quote:

---

Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris
by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington's NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests--or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington's message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests--the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War--was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO's writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other's interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what's reasonable and legitimate--not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its "unipolar moment," Washington demonstrated--to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow--that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a "focus on relations within nations, on a nation's form of governance, on its economic structure."

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America "the indispensable nation"--and which Gorbachev said defined America's "dangerous winner's mentality"--it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states--and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values--the post-Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/

---

---

I get all that.

So, the question I have is about the Nations that don't want to be part of Russia and ask the west to join. They are f-ed? Doesn't matter if Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Czech, Ukraine or Georgia want to be part of the west? Their voices and opinions don't count in this equation? Yeah, that's American...

---

My reservations concern the tripwire, i.e. interlocking treaty obligations. If Russia attacks Moldova we would be required to go to war.
We had 2 world wars that were initiated by treaty obligations. I would not go to war for Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Czech Republic, or Moldova, but the NATO Treaty would require it of us.

---

At what level? In addition, the US will have a huge say in what the Alliance does.

If you are talking UN levels, a US brigade sized element might be required. We do that now and have done so forever, I remember the Siani with the 82nd. Even WW1 our expeditionary force was not the bulk of the forces. But to think that we will not be involved, by treaty or not is not realistic. If there is a war in Europe, the US will be there.

---

We were not obligated by treaty to enter either WW 1 or 2. If someone attacks Moldova we are obligated by treaty to go to war. I have reservations about that & don't like it. The next world war would be nuclear. For which of those countries are you willing to die? For which of those countries would you have your family die? I've thought about and my answer is none.

If there is a war in Europe, maybe we are involved, maybe not. It would be our choice, not a legal obligation.

Why do they hate Putin for invading Ukraine, but not Saudi Arabia for smashing Yemen w/our help? Because Saudis don’t remind them of anyone they hate here at home. Simple. They don’t care about Ukrainians, they care that Putin is emotionally-connected w/Trump for them.

— Martyr Made 🦉🪓 (@martyrmade) May 30, 2023

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Osodecentx said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

How the United States was transformed from guardian to spoiler of the postwar international order. An excellent summary from Harper's magazine.

Quote:

---

Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris
by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington's NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests--or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington's message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests--the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War--was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO's writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other's interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what's reasonable and legitimate--not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its "unipolar moment," Washington demonstrated--to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow--that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a "focus on relations within nations, on a nation's form of governance, on its economic structure."

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America "the indispensable nation"--and which Gorbachev said defined America's "dangerous winner's mentality"--it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states--and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values--the post-Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/

---

---

Good article, difficult questions. I don't know the answer

---

Again, we see the isolationist argument that we caused a war in which we had no interest. Both are patently false premises. Russia would have NEVER invaded or usurped Ukraine if Nato hadn't been meddling? Pfft. If NATO hadn't expanded eastward, Russia would have expanded westward. The issue at hand is merely about where the razor wire will be strung. NATO was slow, deliberate, and cautious in its move eastward, out of deference to Russia. And it is instructive that EVERYONE (except Belarus) wants to be on the west side of the wire.

---

You continue to use the propagandist term of "isolationist"....and of course non-intervention and not engaging in war mongering adventurism is of course not the same as isolationism.

We are the major economic power on earth and have a two ocean navy along with bases in 80+ countries and territories around the world. No one has even said we should dismantle those fleets or bases.

What people have said is that we should not get involved in bloody conflicts that we have no vital interest in or that do not involved a ally of the USA. Ukraine is not a NATO ally.

And your argument that Russia (with a poverty level and per captia GDP like Mexico) is going to expand Westward is laughable...and then you contradict yourself by saying correctly that no one wants join them.....so then how can they expand Westward? Talk about grasping for reasons to get into a conflict with a nuclear power...fantasies of "imminent expansion into the West" lol

---

Russia doesn't have to invade and defeat NATO, as your analysis presumes. Russia will try to undermine it from within, facilitated by gunboat diplomacy on NATO borders to make all players in the frontline states be more cautious in their pro-Nato/anti-=Russia policies. Then. One election. One coup. And we will have the prospect of Russia and Nato poised on opposite borders of a Nato state preparing to come to the rescue of a new government calling for help. THAT is something to lose sleep over, friend. And the only way to prevent it is to keep Russian armies IN RUSSIA.

---

Russia had a similar predicament in Ukraine. Had we admitted such an unstable country to membership in NATO, and its government decided to take Crimea, Russia would have found itself at war without having lifted a finger.

---

I have spoken often about the risks of admitting politically unstable states to Nato. Nato itself recognizes that risk. That's why it has not admitted Ukraine to membership, and only elevated it to partner status in 2020 (joining several other countries - Sweden, Finland, Australia, Jordan, Georgia). NATO is signaling unwavering support for Ukraine, as link demonstrates:
https://news.yahoo.com/nato-elevate-ukraine-partner-status-212000077.html
Some of that is genuine, and some of that is diplomatic posturing to keep up pressure on Russia....to force them to the table before the entirety of Ukraine slips away.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine unfortunately may well result in a faster-track to Ukraine Nato membership. I would prefer to put that off until after the war is won and we have a chance to observe a couple of election cycles, to ensure Ukraine can demonstrate that it is capable of peaceful transition to power. But Russia's weakness and looming defeat will be a powerful enticement to expand, which in retrospect perhaps should have been done 30 years ago when Russia was too weak to resist it.

Nato is itself engaging in mission creep, from a defense of Western Europe from Soviet attack, to a defense of democracy from attacks by autocracy. The admission of Jordan and Australia would be your clue.

---

"Democracy," i.e. recycled Marxism warmed over by Western NGOs and served to an ungrateful populace.

Russia doesn't need to be dragged into modernity. They've been there already.

---

That is not spin. That is detachment from reality.

Are you OK?

---

You just told me, apparently without irony, that our foreign policy has something to do with sorting out democracies from autocracies and acting as the selfless champion of the former.

Are you okay?

---

Unlike you, completely lucid. Tell us the rationale for Australia belonging to NATO.

---

Australia doesn't belong to NATO.

---

Correct. They have partner status along with Jordan. Same question applies. Why?

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

How the United States was transformed from guardian to spoiler of the postwar international order. An excellent summary from Harper's magazine.

Quote:

---

Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris
by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington's NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests--or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington's message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests--the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War--was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO's writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other's interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what's reasonable and legitimate--not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its "unipolar moment," Washington demonstrated--to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow--that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a "focus on relations within nations, on a nation's form of governance, on its economic structure."

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America "the indispensable nation"--and which Gorbachev said defined America's "dangerous winner's mentality"--it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states--and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values--the post-Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/

---

---

I get all that.

So, the question I have is about the Nations that don't want to be part of Russia and ask the west to join. They are f-ed? Doesn't matter if Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Czech, Ukraine or Georgia want to be part of the west? Their voices and opinions don't count in this equation? Yeah, that's American...

---

Like any alliance network we would have to evaluate the potential benefits and cost of membership.

The Baltic States, Poland, Romania, and Czechia of course were determined to be apparently decent choices for inclusion in NATO membership...and to have minor costs in terms of conflict with Russia. And fundamentally Moscow while it might have grumbled was ok with them joining the Western bloc.

But that is not the case with Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia.

Russia has said time and time again that they would react very very negatively to those 3 joining a hostile alliance network.

So why do it? Why attempt to bring Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia into NATO when it will 100% cause conflict?

This is a similar situation to the one in the Pacific with China.

Many nations in that region might be interested in joining a USA led anti-China defense alliance. But we would have to be very very careful in determining which of those nations would be in our interest to ally ourselves with and which would or could potentially led to massive conflict.

Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, S. Korea, Japan....would not be a problem and would offer positives for membership.

Mongolia, K. Korea, or Taiwan would be redlines for China and spark conflict.

---

So, you think that Ukraine and Georgia would not produce long term benefits if western investment, technology and practices were allowed to flow? Ukraine has the potential to be a powerhouse, why do you think Putin is doing this? You don't invade desert land that wants to break away, the Stans were let go pretty easily because there is no value.

Belarus isn't going anywhere. Maybe Georgia and Ukraine don't want to be Belarus. What Russian area, including Russia, has flourished? Why would any nation want to align itself with Russia? Iran and North Korea the only 2 worst living conditions in the world, Russia looks good to them...

---

Well you have to ask the question if brining in nation X into the Western alliance is worth mass bloodshed and potential nuclear war.

So no...I don't think Mongolia, N. Korea, or Taiwan are worth that. And I don't think Ukraine or Georgia are worth that.

And in fact U.S. policy planners came to that same conclusion in the 1990s at the fall of the Iron curtain and specifically advised U.S. leaders that moving NATO borders right up to Russia's front door would be a terribly foolish and potential disastrous policy to follow.

I have said on this forum many times that I think we need a NATO like organization in the Pacific...but I have also been clear on what nations that can NOT include.

There has to be reasonable limits to the expansion of alliance networks and we have to respect the sphere of influnce of other nations.

---

We are not disagreeing by much. I think Ukraine does add to NATO and is worth the investment. Not US troops, but like we are. Yes. Same with Tawain. Mongolia, not so much. It has to make some sense.

---

I understand your reasoning.

But U.S. policy planners looked at the issue and basically said anything east of the Bug river in Europe was of little value to the United States or our key partners in Europe (UK, France, Germany, Italy)...and was more than likely to be something that could risk war with Russia over.

Also, even if an area would be beneficial to the Western bloc for inclusion...say Taiwan...is it worth that if it risks war with a nuclear armed State?

For me Taiwan and Ukraine are a bridge to far and unnecessary/high risk additions to our alliance system.

And Beijing and Moscow have made their position clear and have shown that they will use force to prevent those areas from becoming bases to U.S. troops.

---

I get the too far and anything more than what we are doing now, I am not on board.

However, unless there is an agreement I can't find, the Bug River was WW2! Don't you think a policy should be updated every 80 years or so???

---

I will go back and look at the policy paper but the Bug river was there recommendation border for Post-Cold war areas of potential NATO expansion....so early 1990s.

They did advise for instance bringing in Poland into NATO that would secure the border with Germany and forever lock Moscow out of central Europe. (Same thinking applied to Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary)

But they said nothing else in Eastern Europe was worth the potential conflict over.

Certainly no one was advocating bringing Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia into NATO in the 1990s...everyone knew that would be madness and would spark off massive conflict.

Obama let Victoria Nuland and the other ghouls at the State Department and Pentagon run wild.

---

So a thirty year old assessment cannot be reevaluated?

What would a 1960 assessment have looked like in 1990?

Osodecentx said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

How the United States was transformed from guardian to spoiler of the postwar international order. An excellent summary from Harper's magazine.

Quote:

---

Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris
by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington's NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests--or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington's message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests--the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War--was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO's writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other's interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what's reasonable and legitimate--not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its "unipolar moment," Washington demonstrated--to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow--that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a "focus on relations within nations, on a nation's form of governance, on its economic structure."

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America "the indispensable nation"--and which Gorbachev said defined America's "dangerous winner's mentality"--it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states--and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values--the post-Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/

---

---

I get all that.

So, the question I have is about the Nations that don't want to be part of Russia and ask the west to join. They are f-ed? Doesn't matter if Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Czech, Ukraine or Georgia want to be part of the west? Their voices and opinions don't count in this equation? Yeah, that's American...

---

My reservations concern the tripwire, i.e. interlocking treaty obligations. If Russia attacks Moldova we would be required to go to war.
We had 2 world wars that were initiated by treaty obligations. I would not go to war for Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Czech Republic, or Moldova, but the NATO Treaty would require it of us.

---

We have no treaty requiring us to go to war over Moldova. They're not EU, not NATO.

They do, however have a Donbas situation going on in Transnistria. Best defense against escalation there is to deny Russia a land bridge via a pliable Ukraine.

QED…..

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

How the United States was transformed from guardian to spoiler of the postwar international order. An excellent summary from Harper's magazine.

Quote:

---

Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris
by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington's NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests--or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington's message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests--the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War--was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO's writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other's interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what's reasonable and legitimate--not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its "unipolar moment," Washington demonstrated--to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow--that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a "focus on relations within nations, on a nation's form of governance, on its economic structure."

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America "the indispensable nation"--and which Gorbachev said defined America's "dangerous winner's mentality"--it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states--and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values--the post-Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/

---

---

I get all that.

So, the question I have is about the Nations that don't want to be part of Russia and ask the west to join. They are f-ed? Doesn't matter if Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Czech, Ukraine or Georgia want to be part of the west? Their voices and opinions don't count in this equation? Yeah, that's American...

---

Like any alliance network we would have to evaluate the potential benefits and cost of membership.

The Baltic States, Poland, Romania, and Czechia of course were determined to be apparently decent choices for inclusion in NATO membership...and to have minor costs in terms of conflict with Russia. And fundamentally Moscow while it might have grumbled was ok with them joining the Western bloc.

But that is not the case with Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia.

Russia has said time and time again that they would react very very negatively to those 3 joining a hostile alliance network.

So why do it? Why attempt to bring Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia into NATO when it will 100% cause conflict?

This is a similar situation to the one in the Pacific with China.

Many nations in that region might be interested in joining a USA led anti-China defense alliance. But we would have to be very very careful in determining which of those nations would be in our interest to ally ourselves with and which would or could potentially led to massive conflict.

Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, S. Korea, Japan....would not be a problem and would offer positives for membership.

Mongolia, K. Korea, or Taiwan would be redlines for China and spark conflict.

---

So, you think that Ukraine and Georgia would not produce long term benefits if western investment, technology and practices were allowed to flow? Ukraine has the potential to be a powerhouse, why do you think Putin is doing this? You don't invade desert land that wants to break away, the Stans were let go pretty easily because there is no value.

Belarus isn't going anywhere. Maybe Georgia and Ukraine don't want to be Belarus. What Russian area, including Russia, has flourished? Why would any nation want to align itself with Russia? Iran and North Korea the only 2 worst living conditions in the world, Russia looks good to them...

---

Well you have to ask the question if brining in nation X into the Western alliance is worth mass bloodshed and potential nuclear war.

So no...I don't think Mongolia, N. Korea, or Taiwan are worth that. And I don't think Ukraine or Georgia are worth that.

And in fact U.S. policy planners came to that same conclusion in the 1990s at the fall of the Iron curtain and specifically advised U.S. leaders that moving NATO borders right up to Russia's front door would be a terribly foolish and potential disastrous policy to follow.

I have said on this forum many times that I think we need a NATO like organization in the Pacific...but I have also been clear on what nations that can NOT include.

There has to be reasonable limits to the expansion of alliance networks and we have to respect the sphere of influnce of other nations.

---

We are not disagreeing by much. I think Ukraine does add to NATO and is worth the investment. Not US troops, but like we are. Yes. Same with Tawain. Mongolia, not so much. It has to make some sense.

---

I understand your reasoning.

But U.S. policy planners looked at the issue and basically said anything east of the Bug river in Europe was of little value to the United States or our key partners in Europe (UK, France, Germany, Italy)...and was more than likely to be something that could risk war with Russia over.

Also, even if an area would be beneficial to the Western bloc for inclusion...say Taiwan...is it worth that if it risks war with a nuclear armed State?

For me Taiwan and Ukraine are a bridge to far and unnecessary/high risk additions to our alliance system.

And Beijing and Moscow have made their position clear and have shown that they will use force to prevent those areas from becoming bases to U.S. troops.

---

I get the too far and anything more than what we are doing now, I am not on board.

However, unless there is an agreement I can't find, the Bug River was WW2! Don't you think a policy should be updated every 80 years or so???

---

I will go back and look at the policy paper but the Bug river was there recommendation border for Post-Cold war areas of potential NATO expansion....so early 1990s.

They did advise for instance bringing in Poland into NATO that would secure the border with Germany and forever lock Moscow out of central Europe. (Same thinking applied to Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary)

But they said nothing else in Eastern Europe was worth the potential conflict over.

Certainly no one was advocating bringing Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia into NATO in the 1990s...everyone knew that would be madness and would spark off massive conflict.

Obama let Victoria Nuland and the other ghouls at the State Department and Pentagon run wild.

---

So a thirty year old assessment cannot be reevaluated?

What would a 1960 assessment have looked like in 1990?

---

You think there is more reason to expand NATO into the east today than in 1990? What?

You think modern Russia is more of a threat than the super power that was the USSR?

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

How the United States was transformed from guardian to spoiler of the postwar international order. An excellent summary from Harper's magazine.

Quote:

---

Why Are We in Ukraine?
On the dangers of American hubris
by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington's NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests--or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington's message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests--the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War--was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO's writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other's interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what's reasonable and legitimate--not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its "unipolar moment," Washington demonstrated--to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow--that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a "focus on relations within nations, on a nation's form of governance, on its economic structure."

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America "the indispensable nation"--and which Gorbachev said defined America's "dangerous winner's mentality"--it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states--and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values--the post-Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/

---

---

I get all that.

So, the question I have is about the Nations that don't want to be part of Russia and ask the west to join. They are f-ed? Doesn't matter if Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Czech, Ukraine or Georgia want to be part of the west? Their voices and opinions don't count in this equation? Yeah, that's American...

---

Like any alliance network we would have to evaluate the potential benefits and cost of membership.

The Baltic States, Poland, Romania, and Czechia of course were determined to be apparently decent choices for inclusion in NATO membership...and to have minor costs in terms of conflict with Russia. And fundamentally Moscow while it might have grumbled was ok with them joining the Western bloc.

But that is not the case with Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia.

Russia has said time and time again that they would react very very negatively to those 3 joining a hostile alliance network.

So why do it? Why attempt to bring Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia into NATO when it will 100% cause conflict?

This is a similar situation to the one in the Pacific with China.

Many nations in that region might be interested in joining a USA led anti-China defense alliance. But we would have to be very very careful in determining which of those nations would be in our interest to ally ourselves with and which would or could potentially led to massive conflict.

Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, S. Korea, Japan....would not be a problem and would offer positives for membership.

Mongolia, K. Korea, or Taiwan would be redlines for China and spark conflict.

---

So, you think that Ukraine and Georgia would not produce long term benefits if western investment, technology and practices were allowed to flow? Ukraine has the potential to be a powerhouse, why do you think Putin is doing this? You don't invade desert land that wants to break away, the Stans were let go pretty easily because there is no value.

Belarus isn't going anywhere. Maybe Georgia and Ukraine don't want to be Belarus. What Russian area, including Russia, has flourished? Why would any nation want to align itself with Russia? Iran and North Korea the only 2 worst living conditions in the world, Russia looks good to them...

---

Well you have to ask the question if brining in nation X into the Western alliance is worth mass bloodshed and potential nuclear war.

So no...I don't think Mongolia, N. Korea, or Taiwan are worth that. And I don't think Ukraine or Georgia are worth that.

And in fact U.S. policy planners came to that same conclusion in the 1990s at the fall of the Iron curtain and specifically advised U.S. leaders that moving NATO borders right up to Russia's front door would be a terribly foolish and potential disastrous policy to follow.

I have said on this forum many times that I think we need a NATO like organization in the Pacific...but I have also been clear on what nations that can NOT include.

There has to be reasonable limits to the expansion of alliance networks and we have to respect the sphere of influnce of other nations.

---

We are not disagreeing by much. I think Ukraine does add to NATO and is worth the investment. Not US troops, but like we are. Yes. Same with Tawain. Mongolia, not so much. It has to make some sense.

---

I understand your reasoning.

But U.S. policy planners looked at the issue and basically said anything east of the Bug river in Europe was of little value to the United States or our key partners in Europe (UK, France, Germany, Italy)...and was more than likely to be something that could risk war with Russia over.

Also, even if an area would be beneficial to the Western bloc for inclusion...say Taiwan...is it worth that if it risks war with a nuclear armed State?

For me Taiwan and Ukraine are a bridge to far and unnecessary/high risk additions to our alliance system.

And Beijing and Moscow have made their position clear and have shown that they will use force to prevent those areas from becoming bases to U.S. troops.

---

I get the too far and anything more than what we are doing now, I am not on board.

However, unless there is an agreement I can't find, the Bug River was WW2! Don't you think a policy should be updated every 80 years or so???

---

I will go back and look at the policy paper but the Bug river was there recommendation border for Post-Cold war areas of potential NATO expansion....so early 1990s.

They did advise for instance bringing in Poland into NATO that would secure the border with Germany and forever lock Moscow out of central Europe. (Same thinking applied to Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary)

But they said nothing else in Eastern Europe was worth the potential conflict over.

Certainly no one was advocating bringing Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia into NATO in the 1990s...everyone knew that would be madness and would spark off massive conflict.

Obama let Victoria Nuland and the other ghouls at the State Department and Pentagon run wild.

---

So a thirty year old assessment cannot be reevaluated?

What would a 1960 assessment have looked like in 1990?

---

You think there is more reason to expand NATO into the east today than in 1990? What?

You think modern Russia is more of a threat than the super power that was the USSR?

---

How many rounds of Russian arty were fired in anger in the European theater from the founding of NATO to the demise of the USSR?

Doesn't matter whether Russia weaker or not than at any time in the past. Only matters what they can and are willing to do. And in that regard, Russia's actions in Ukraine are the most alarming and destabilizing thing Russia has done since 1853.

The parallels with 1853 are eerie.

Russia will lose this one, too. The only question is how we manage the aftermath.

[The United States has committed itself to expanding NATO to Russia's borders. NATO, of course, stands for "North Atlantic Treaty Organization." A nave onlooker might ask why countries like Bulgaria, Finland, and Poland would be included in such a treaty. The answer is pretty simple: NATO has nothing to do with the North Atlantic. It is an anti-Russian military alliance.

Russia knew (or, rather, knows) that Ukraine has been courting both the European Union and NATO. Kiev wants to unite itself politically, economically, and militarily to the West. That would mean the United States has a right to place more troops and artillery on Russia's border. Russia didn't like that, and so it lashed out.
But the question is why does the United States want to put troops and artillery on Russia's border? Why has it maintained and, indeed, expanded this anti-Russian alliance, even though its original objective (i.e., the destruction of the Soviet Union) has been accomplished?

Our leaders have been clear on that point. To quote Richard Moore, the current chief of MI6: "With the tragedy and destruction unfolding so distressingly in Ukraine, we should remember the values and hard-won freedoms that distinguish us from Putin, none more than LGBT+ rights."
This isn't Kremlin disinformation. These are the words coming from the horse's mouth. We hate Russia because they are mean to the gays.
Deacon Nicholas Kotar, the great novelist and translator, gave a wider view:

Quote:

---

What the Russian government is doing is setting a red line to the spread of NGO-style liberal democracy. And Ukraine, unfortunately, has been a buffer zone, and a kind of test-case, for the spread, not of a political system, but of a system of values, that is espoused by the elites only....The problem is that with all these colored revolutions, no matter how you look at it, the thing that comes in together with the money is an insistence, unfortunately, on the adoption of the Western liberal cultural milieu. It happened in Georgia, it happened in Ukraine, it happened everywhere.

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Ultimately, this isn't about Russia. It's not even about Ukraine. It's about us. Western elites want us to believe that the triumph of "NGO-style liberal democracy" is inevitable everywhere. But it's not. Russia is living proof of that.]

Redbrickbear said:

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[The United States has committed itself to expanding NATO to Russia's borders. NATO, of course, stands for "North Atlantic Treaty Organization." A nave onlooker might ask why countries like Bulgaria, Finland, and Poland would be included in such a treaty. The answer is pretty simple: NATO has nothing to do with the North Atlantic. It is an anti-Russian military alliance.

Russia knew (or, rather, knows) that Ukraine has been courting both the European Union and NATO. Kiev wants to unite itself politically, economically, and militarily to the West. That would mean the United States has a right to place more troops and artillery on Russia's border. Russia didn't like that, and so it lashed out.
But the question is why does the United States want to put troops and artillery on Russia's border? Why has it maintained and, indeed, expanded this anti-Russian alliance, even though its original objective (i.e., the destruction of the Soviet Union) has been accomplished?

Our leaders have been clear on that point. To quote Richard Moore, the current chief of MI6: "With the tragedy and destruction unfolding so distressingly in Ukraine, we should remember the values and hard-won freedoms that distinguish us from Putin, none more than LGBT+ rights."
This isn't Kremlin disinformation. These are the words coming from the horse's mouth. We hate Russia because they are mean to the gays.
Deacon Nicholas Kotar, the great novelist and translator, gave a wider view:

Quote:

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What the Russian government is doing is setting a red line to the spread of NGO-style liberal democracy. And Ukraine, unfortunately, has been a buffer zone, and a kind of test-case, for the spread, not of a political system, but of a system of values, that is espoused by the elites only....The problem is that with all these colored revolutions, no matter how you look at it, the thing that comes in together with the money is an insistence, unfortunately, on the adoption of the Western liberal cultural milieu. It happened in Georgia, it happened in Ukraine, it happened everywhere.

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Ultimately, this isn't about Russia. It's not even about Ukraine. It's about us. Western elites want us to believe that the triumph of "NGO-style liberal democracy" is inevitable everywhere. But it's not. Russia is living proof of that.]

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except that part in bold is not true. We do not have a right to place our weapons on the sovereign territory of any country, including NATO members. A country, including a Nato member, must agree to it. Further, NATO has always been an anti-Russian alliance. Russia has always been an expansionist power. It's ambitions in East Europe and the Caucasus have sparked wars several times. By contrast, when NATO expanded into the former Warsaw Pact nations and the Baltics, no permanent bases with standing maneuver units were stationed there. When Putin invaded in Feb 2022, we had to support combat air patrols over Romania from bases in Italy and Germany, with incredibly long lines of logistics. All refueling for those CAPs were provided by KC-46 from Italy & Germany (first hand info). So NATO not only did not place units on the Russian border, it did not place units on the Ukrainian and Belarusian borders, DESPITE the NATO members in question requesting permanent bases.

And yes, your last two paragraphs are correct. This is indeed about allowing any nation which wishes to belong to the western order, i.e. liberal democracy, to do so. That is not a threat to anyone, except expansionist totalitarian states. All they have to do to make that threat go away is to adopt liberal democracy. Or they can sit and stew in their own corrupt and incompetent systems. Liberal Democracy is not going invade and FORCE them to do either option. But neither is Liberal Democracy going to allow the likes of Russia to threaten liberal democracy with invasion. Would be insanity to do so.

Look at the premise of your argument.....Russia has a right to not only remain a totalitarian system, but a right to prevent its neighbors from establishing liberal democracy? A totalitarian system has a right to exist which includes the ability to impose totalitarianism upon OTHER sovereign nations which desire otherwise? How big of a cocoon are we obligated to provide to totalitarianism?

Does cancer have a right to not just exist in situ, but to expand into adjacent areas as necessary to survive?
Keep in mind, the doctors avoided touching any tissue around the cancer, for fear of provoking metastasis.
But the cancer broke out anyway.
And now, some are blaming the doctors.