Doc Holliday said:

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There are tens of millions of ppl who still believe Iraq had WMDs, was building nuclear weapons and that 20 years of war was justified. Filthy rich psychopaths pulled that off for profit. It wasn't bad decision making, it was pure corruption. Think about that.

This is going to sound like a conspiracy but it's the truth and it's not one many can swallow as to why we're in Ukraine:

Russia and US are gonna divvy the spoils of Ukraine and neither wants a bunch of militias and tough guys resisting when they bring in their industries. That's the point of this war.

---

That part in bold is just flat wrong. Iraq did have WMDs, the capability to make them, and was trying to retain that capability. I held the relevant intel in the fingers typing this message.

9/11 Commission noted intel stating that Saddam and AQ were in communication....an AQ representative stationed in Iraq who met directly with Iraqi govt officials. The basis of that relationship was explicitly stated in the intel: Saddam had the WMDs but not the ability to attack the USA (I have commented on an example of that elsewhere), while AQ had the demonstrated ability to attack the USA but did not have the WMDs. They recognized the obvious basis for cooperation and were feeling each other out to see where things might go.

That single report noted by the 9/11 Commission justified the war. No POTUS looking across his desk at the bodies being pulled out of the WTC rubble could have read that report and said "nah, no problem..." I would have moved heaven & earth to remove Saddam from power in order to prevent the American people from having to face such a threat.

And so would you.

whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

---

There are tens of millions of ppl who still believe Iraq had WMDs, was building nuclear weapons and that 20 years of war was justified. Filthy rich psychopaths pulled that off for profit. It wasn't bad decision making, it was pure corruption. Think about that.

This is going to sound like a conspiracy but it's the truth and it's not one many can swallow as to why we're in Ukraine:

Russia and US are gonna divvy the spoils of Ukraine and neither wants a bunch of militias and tough guys resisting when they bring in their industries. That's the point of this war.

---

That part in bold is just flat wrong. Iraq did have WMDs, the capability to make them, and was trying to retain that capability. I held the relevant intel in the fingers typing this message.

9/11 Commission noted intel stating that Saddam and AQ were in communication....an AQ representative stationed in Iraq who met directly with Iraqi govt officials. The basis of that relationship was explicitly stated in the intel: Saddam had the WMDs but not the ability to attack the USA (I have commented on an example of that elsewhere), while AQ had the demonstrated ability to attack the USA but did not have the WMDs. They recognized the obvious basis for cooperation and were feeling each other out to see where things might go.

That single report noted by the 9/11 Commission justified the war. No POTUS looking across his desk at the bodies being pulled out of the WTC rubble could have read that report and said "nah, no problem..." I would have moved heaven & earth to remove Saddam from power in order to prevent the American people from having to face such a threat.

And so would you.

---

That's not what the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction showed:

Quote:

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The Intelligence Community's performance in assessing Iraq's pre-war weapons of mass destruction programs was a major intelligence failure. The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community's assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policymakers.

---

• the report notes in several places that the commission's mandate did not allow it "to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence they received from the Intelligence Community on Iraq's weapons programs,"
• One of the main and crucial intelligence sources for the case in Iraq was an informant named Curveball. Curveball had never been interviewed by American intelligence until after the war and was instead handled exclusively by German intelligence agents, who regarded his statements as unconvincing. An October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iraq "has" biological weapons was "based almost exclusively on information obtained" from Curveball, according to the report.
• Information about aluminum tubes to be used as centrifuges in a nuclear weapons program were found by the commission to be used for conventional rockets.
• The Niger Yellowcake scandal was due to American intelligence believing "transparently forged documents" purporting to show a contract between the countries. There were "flaws in the letterhead, forged signatures, misspelled words, incorrect titles for individuals and government entities".
• While there were many reports that Curveball was actually the cousin of one of Ahmed Chalabi's top aides, the IIC, while discovering that at least two INC defectors were fabricators, said it was "unable to uncover any evidence that the INC [Iraqi National Congress] or any other organization was directing Curveball."

whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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Quote:

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Quote:

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Giving a hostile opponent room to maneuver and build a several hundred miles of defensive positions is a recipe for huge losses on both sides. Not to mention the "buffer" that wants to develop and grow, not be a meat grinder for Putin! They have no say in this? That is a ludicrous position. If Ukraine was allowed in when Poland came in to NATO none of this would have happened. Ok let Putin play with the tyrant s on Syria, N Korea and Iran that want a Russian style govt. Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltics see their futures to the west.

---

Don't even get me started on Syria. The US has made a complete wreck of that place. They are lucky to have Russia's help, if nothing else.

---

Speaking of Syria:

[Syria has been at war for more than a decade. Its agony continues, with the U.S. punishing the Syrian people for the sins of their rulers. As Syria's neighbors reconcile with President Bashar al-Assad's government, Washington officials are having a meltdown. They want friendly Arab states to continue following America's ostentatiously cruel yet ineffective sanctions policy.

Syria is an enormous tragedy, the greatest disappointment of the ultimately disastrous 2011 Arab Spring.

Syria suffered traumatic civil war, jihadist depredations, and Turkish aggression. The Assad regime brutally suppressed peaceful protests. An armed insurgency emerged, dominated by radical jihadists. The Islamic State sought to establish an Islamist caliphate. The U.S., Europe, Gulf states, Iran, and Russia intervened on varying sides.]

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-cruelty-of-syria-sanctions/

---

Just a word of perspective on Syria:


Syria can bend over and get effed by a herd of camels, as far as I'm concerned.
Those arseholes are not worth of your sympathy.
They've got it coming, due to a dogged determination to make consistently bad policy decisions.

---

Yes yes

You have consistently shown on this forum that you don't care about the lives of foreigners.

But syria is home to millions of people (including millions of Christians) who's only crime is being born in a place with an unjust ruling class.

Maybe we don't help starve them to death just for that?

---

Christians have been prominent players in the Assad Regime, which is an alliance between the Alawites and Christians, effectively creating a coalition of two very small minorities ruling over a much larger muslim population. Do we spare holding Syria accountable just because Christians have a disproportionate role in Syrian government (and in Syrian foreign policy)?

The world is a cruel place, Red. Some places in the world, peoples form a social contract that greatly help people. Others, not so much. We are in that former category. Syria is in the latter. Now, we can let Syria be Syria unless they start poking us in the eye. We can talk to them about our grievances, but if that doesn't generate some redress, we do have other options, to include bombing the hell out of Syrian government facilities and personnel. Yes, that will have a dreadful impact on the Syrian people. Perhaps the Syrian people should do something about their government. Indeed, that is exactly what our policy was.....to support opposition to the Syrian regime. Sure, we got some target practice on some terror cells from time to time, even a raid or three. But that's not what Syria was about. It was about imposing costs on a proxy of our adversary.....you try to destabilize us or ours, we will destabilize you right back, buddy. If you don't want to end up like Syria, don't act like Syria, OK?

I think that message has been sent.

---

I guess that is one way of saying it.

Funding and supporting a brutal civil war that has lasted 12 long years, killed at least 600,000+ people, and sent at least 6.6 million into exile as refugees.

That is one hell of a "message"...all for the crime of having a government that the ruling class in D.C. does not like.






p.s.

A report by the World Bank says that 1 out of very 3 homes in Syria has been destroyed and that half of all the medical and educational facilities in the country are gone. The country has been destroyed in ways that are hard to fathom.

Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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Quote:

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Quote:

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Giving a hostile opponent room to maneuver and build a several hundred miles of defensive positions is a recipe for huge losses on both sides. Not to mention the "buffer" that wants to develop and grow, not be a meat grinder for Putin! They have no say in this? That is a ludicrous position. If Ukraine was allowed in when Poland came in to NATO none of this would have happened. Ok let Putin play with the tyrant s on Syria, N Korea and Iran that want a Russian style govt. Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltics see their futures to the west.

---

Don't even get me started on Syria. The US has made a complete wreck of that place. They are lucky to have Russia's help, if nothing else.

---

Speaking of Syria:

[Syria has been at war for more than a decade. Its agony continues, with the U.S. punishing the Syrian people for the sins of their rulers. As Syria's neighbors reconcile with President Bashar al-Assad's government, Washington officials are having a meltdown. They want friendly Arab states to continue following America's ostentatiously cruel yet ineffective sanctions policy.

Syria is an enormous tragedy, the greatest disappointment of the ultimately disastrous 2011 Arab Spring.

Syria suffered traumatic civil war, jihadist depredations, and Turkish aggression. The Assad regime brutally suppressed peaceful protests. An armed insurgency emerged, dominated by radical jihadists. The Islamic State sought to establish an Islamist caliphate. The U.S., Europe, Gulf states, Iran, and Russia intervened on varying sides.]

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-cruelty-of-syria-sanctions/

---

Just a word of perspective on Syria:


Syria can bend over and get effed by a herd of camels, as far as I'm concerned.
Those arseholes are not worth of your sympathy.
They've got it coming, due to a dogged determination to make consistently bad policy decisions.

---

Yes yes

You have consistently shown on this forum that you don't care about the lives of foreigners.

But syria is home to millions of people (including millions of Christians) who's only crime is being born in a place with an unjust ruling class.

Maybe we don't help starve them to death just for that?

---

Christians have been prominent players in the Assad Regime, which is an alliance between the Alawites and Christians, effectively creating a coalition of two very small minorities ruling over a much larger muslim population. Do we spare holding Syria accountable just because Christians have a disproportionate role in Syrian government (and in Syrian foreign policy)?

The world is a cruel place, Red. Some places in the world, peoples form a social contract that greatly help people. Others, not so much. We are in that former category. Syria is in the latter. Now, we can let Syria be Syria unless they start poking us in the eye. We can talk to them about our grievances, but if that doesn't generate some redress, we do have other options, to include bombing the hell out of Syrian government facilities and personnel. Yes, that will have a dreadful impact on the Syrian people. Perhaps the Syrian people should do something about their government. Indeed, that is exactly what our policy was.....to support opposition to the Syrian regime. Sure, we got some target practice on some terror cells from time to time, even a raid or three. But that's not what Syria was about. It was about imposing costs on a proxy of our adversary.....you try to destabilize us or ours, we will destabilize you right back, buddy. If you don't want to end up like Syria, don't act like Syria, OK?

I think that message has been sent.

---

I guess that is one way of saying it.

Funding and supporting a brutal civil war that has lasted 12 long years, killed at least 600,000+ people, and sent at least 6.6 million into exile as refugees.

That is one hell of a "message"...all for the crime of having a government that the ruling class in D.C. does not like.






p.s.

A report by the World Bank says that 1 out of very 3 homes in Syria has been destroyed and that half of all the medical and educational facilities in the country are gone. The country has been destroyed in ways that are hard to fathom.

---

Apparently we're supposed to believe the US doesn't make catastrophic mistakes and our intelligence is flawless.

We all saw alphabet groups fabricate Russiagate. We saw the C suite of banks give themselves record bonuses after getting bailed out after the subprime mortgage crisis. But war...no shenanigan's there.

"Saddam has WMDs, he's aligned with bin Laden, we have to stop him before there's a mushroom cloud and we need a patriot act just cos."

whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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RMF5630 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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Quote:

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Quote:

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Giving a hostile opponent room to maneuver and build a several hundred miles of defensive positions is a recipe for huge losses on both sides. Not to mention the "buffer" that wants to develop and grow, not be a meat grinder for Putin! They have no say in this? That is a ludicrous position. If Ukraine was allowed in when Poland came in to NATO none of this would have happened. Ok let Putin play with the tyrant s on Syria, N Korea and Iran that want a Russian style govt. Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltics see their futures to the west.

---

Don't even get me started on Syria. The US has made a complete wreck of that place. They are lucky to have Russia's help, if nothing else.

---

Speaking of Syria:

[Syria has been at war for more than a decade. Its agony continues, with the U.S. punishing the Syrian people for the sins of their rulers. As Syria's neighbors reconcile with President Bashar al-Assad's government, Washington officials are having a meltdown. They want friendly Arab states to continue following America's ostentatiously cruel yet ineffective sanctions policy.

Syria is an enormous tragedy, the greatest disappointment of the ultimately disastrous 2011 Arab Spring.

Syria suffered traumatic civil war, jihadist depredations, and Turkish aggression. The Assad regime brutally suppressed peaceful protests. An armed insurgency emerged, dominated by radical jihadists. The Islamic State sought to establish an Islamist caliphate. The U.S., Europe, Gulf states, Iran, and Russia intervened on varying sides.]

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-cruelty-of-syria-sanctions/

---

Just a word of perspective on Syria:


Syria can bend over and get effed by a herd of camels, as far as I'm concerned.
Those arseholes are not worth of your sympathy.
They've got it coming, due to a dogged determination to make consistently bad policy decisions.

---

Yes yes

You have consistently shown on this forum that you don't care about the lives of foreigners.

But syria is home to millions of people (including millions of Christians) who's only crime is being born in a place with an unjust ruling class.

Maybe we don't help starve them to death just for that?

---

Replace the dictator in charge. It seems your solution is to give the dictator that is creating the situation, and worse, what they want in the name of humanitarianism. How do you think that will change anything? Giving Putin what he wants in Ukraine allows him to consolidate resources and so he can then attack somewhere else! Assad, is just a tyrant. There is a reason when he took power in 2000 the "Damascus Spring" ended.

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If only Assad could be more like those Saudi friends of ours. Such nice people!

---

but they are friendly toward us, so we can afford to be pragmatic.

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Of course we can. Because we're fighting for hegemony, not democracy.

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

There are tens of millions of ppl who still believe Iraq had WMDs, was building nuclear weapons and that 20 years of war was justified. Filthy rich psychopaths pulled that off for profit. It wasn't bad decision making, it was pure corruption. Think about that.

This is going to sound like a conspiracy but it's the truth and it's not one many can swallow as to why we're in Ukraine:

Russia and US are gonna divvy the spoils of Ukraine and neither wants a bunch of militias and tough guys resisting when they bring in their industries. That's the point of this war.

---

That part in bold is just flat wrong. Iraq did have WMDs, the capability to make them, and was trying to retain that capability. I held the relevant intel in the fingers typing this message.

9/11 Commission noted intel stating that Saddam and AQ were in communication....an AQ representative stationed in Iraq who met directly with Iraqi govt officials. The basis of that relationship was explicitly stated in the intel: Saddam had the WMDs but not the ability to attack the USA (I have commented on an example of that elsewhere), while AQ had the demonstrated ability to attack the USA but did not have the WMDs. They recognized the obvious basis for cooperation and were feeling each other out to see where things might go.

That single report noted by the 9/11 Commission justified the war. No POTUS looking across his desk at the bodies being pulled out of the WTC rubble could have read that report and said "nah, no problem..." I would have moved heaven & earth to remove Saddam from power in order to prevent the American people from having to face such a threat.

And so would you.

---

If anyone's not taking your Russia/Ukraine commentary with a big chunk of salt, this post should put them on notice. Wow.

Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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RMF5630 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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Quote:

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Quote:

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Giving a hostile opponent room to maneuver and build a several hundred miles of defensive positions is a recipe for huge losses on both sides. Not to mention the "buffer" that wants to develop and grow, not be a meat grinder for Putin! They have no say in this? That is a ludicrous position. If Ukraine was allowed in when Poland came in to NATO none of this would have happened. Ok let Putin play with the tyrant s on Syria, N Korea and Iran that want a Russian style govt. Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltics see their futures to the west.

---

Don't even get me started on Syria. The US has made a complete wreck of that place. They are lucky to have Russia's help, if nothing else.

---

Speaking of Syria:

[Syria has been at war for more than a decade. Its agony continues, with the U.S. punishing the Syrian people for the sins of their rulers. As Syria's neighbors reconcile with President Bashar al-Assad's government, Washington officials are having a meltdown. They want friendly Arab states to continue following America's ostentatiously cruel yet ineffective sanctions policy.

Syria is an enormous tragedy, the greatest disappointment of the ultimately disastrous 2011 Arab Spring.

Syria suffered traumatic civil war, jihadist depredations, and Turkish aggression. The Assad regime brutally suppressed peaceful protests. An armed insurgency emerged, dominated by radical jihadists. The Islamic State sought to establish an Islamist caliphate. The U.S., Europe, Gulf states, Iran, and Russia intervened on varying sides.]

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-cruelty-of-syria-sanctions/

---

Just a word of perspective on Syria:


Syria can bend over and get effed by a herd of camels, as far as I'm concerned.
Those arseholes are not worth of your sympathy.
They've got it coming, due to a dogged determination to make consistently bad policy decisions.

---

Yes yes

You have consistently shown on this forum that you don't care about the lives of foreigners.

But syria is home to millions of people (including millions of Christians) who's only crime is being born in a place with an unjust ruling class.

Maybe we don't help starve them to death just for that?

---

Replace the dictator in charge. It seems your solution is to give the dictator that is creating the situation, and worse, what they want in the name of humanitarianism. How do you think that will change anything? Giving Putin what he wants in Ukraine allows him to consolidate resources and so he can then attack somewhere else! Assad, is just a tyrant. There is a reason when he took power in 2000 the "Damascus Spring" ended.

---

If only Assad could be more like those Saudi friends of ours. Such nice people!

---

but they are friendly toward us, so we can afford to be pragmatic.

---

Of course we can. Because we're fighting for hegemony, not democracy.

---

Quote:

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"THE SOCIETY THAT brings the spectacle into being does not dominate underdeveloped regions solely through the exercise of economic hegemony. It also dominates them in its capacity as the society of the spectacle.

It frames the agenda of a ruling class..."


The Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord 1967

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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so the stated goal per Russian state tv of wiping a nationality, language, and nation off the map along with the rape and plunder of its assets doesn't count as empire building to your regarded ass?
Russia is in Ukraine for reasons that are very specific to Ukraine. Nothing in their words or actions suggests that it's part of any imperial project or ancestral urge to conquer.

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except for the statements of their leadership, and most of the Russian people, that Ukraine is not a "thing," not a real country, but just part of Mother Russia that needs to return home. Frankly, given that the Russian state was BORN in Kyiv, that view is understandable in context, even if it is wildly discordant with Ukrainian perceptions and preferences on the question.

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And that too is highly specific to Ukraine.

whiterock said:

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trey3216 said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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RMF5630 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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RMF5630 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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RMF5630 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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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?

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Why does Russia have to be a threat for NATO to add nations that are like minded, want to join the EU and want freedom that security brings? Is Russia being a threat the only reason NATO can add? Or a nation that wants t o join NATO can join?

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What common values and "like mindedness" do you think Britain, France, Albania, Canada, Romania, Portugal, Croatia, Turkey, Estonia, Greece, and the USA have?

The "liked mindedness" idea becomes even more hilarious when you look at the government of Turkey and its neo-Ottoman/semi-Islamist autocratic leader Erdogan and the post-national liberal governments of places like Canada.

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And what was Turkey's Government like when they joined? Turkey is also a top 20ish economy and very Capitalist. Even if not, what is wrong with joining for security? You know the real world is not just meet all three or NO.

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In 1952 Turkey had a Kemalist government (same type of guys who mass murdered the Christian Armenians and Assyrian Christians during world war I)

Also committed the anti-Greek Christian pogroms that destroyed the native Greeks of Istanbul who had been there since the time of Constantine the great.


[In 67 September 1955 an anti-Greek pogrom was orchestrated in Istanbul by the Turkish military's Tactical Mobilization Group. The events were triggered by the news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, north Greece the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatrk was born in 1881 had been bombed the day before. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher of the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press conveying the news in Turkey was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb. Over a dozen people died during or after the pogrom as a result of beatings and arson. Jews, Armenians and others were also harmed. In addition to commercial targets, the mob clearly targeted property owned or administered by the Greek Orthodox Church. 73 churches and 23 schools were vandalized, burned or destroyed, as were 8 asperses and 3 monasteries.

The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, and the Istanbul region in particular. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 persons in 1927, to about 7,000 by 1978. In Istanbul alone, the Greek population decreased from 65,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960.]

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So Turkey should be out. The Baltics? Out. Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czech, Eastern Part of Germany, Australia, Romania... Basically, all of NATO should be disbanded and the US maybe pay reparations to most of the world while we are at it? How about adding Texas, NM, AZ and CA to give back to Mexico? Would giving AK to the Russians make up for all the harm we have done? HI needs to be reverted to a Kingdom, throw in the 7th Fleet to make up. That cover it? I am sure if you think about it there is someone else the US has harmed that we can pay. Maybe just dissolve the US. Would that suffice?


There is absolutely NOT ONE THING that NATO and US has done well according to you guys.

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Well of course that is a lie and no one on this thread ever said that.

NATO was a necessary military alliance to stop the spread of Communism and the massive socialist empire called the USSR. The communists being backed up by the Red Army that had 400 division stationed in Europe, 25,000 tanks, and 45,000 nukes. Along with 8 other Warsaw pact countries under communist rule with their armies.

The USSR and the Warsaw pact are now long long gone.

https://www.foreignexchanges.news/p/nato-has-outlived-its-usefulness
[In many ways, NATO was wildly successful in its time. But that time is over, and now it should be dismantled...

The decision to keep NATO operating after the Cold War ensured that it functioned as support for the US hegemon. During the Cold War, as NATO's website proudly affirms, the organization's "forces were not involved in a single military engagement." Instead, to borrow the historian Walter LaFeber's phrasing, NATO was mainly used "as a means to deal with more immediate problems [than a Soviet invasion]the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the West, the easing of Franco-German hatreds, the anchoring of a Great Britain tossed between continental and Atlantic-Commonwealth interests," and other intra-North Atlantic concerns. It was primarily a tool of integration.

But once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO rapidly became an arm of the US Empire. Or as NATO's website benignly puts it, with "changing conditions came new responsibilities. From being an exclusively defensive alliance for nearly half a century, NATO began to assume an increasingly proactive role within the international community." It participated in the Gulf War; the conflicts that rent the former Yugoslavia; the War on Terror; the Afghanistan War; and the Iraq War, to name only a few of its contributions. Indeed, by early 2021, NATO was partaking in operations in Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Mediterranean, Africa, and elsewhere.

The alliance has also grown to thirty members, and now includes many nations that were once in the Soviet sphere of influence, like Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. Unsurprisingly, the organization's wanton expansion into Eastern Europe has provoked Russia imagine how US decision-makers would have felt had Canada or Mexico joined the Warsaw Pact and NATO has been a useful foil for Russian President Vladimir Putin, helping him justify his revanchist foreign policy.

As this all suggests, there are significant drawbacks to NATO's continuing existence.]

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Doesn't the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrate that oldest Russian desires for empire are alive and well?

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No, not really. Russia's position isn't what it was during the time of the czars or the empire. It's not even what it was during the Cold War, when their forces were massed across from NATO with clear paths of attack. To say Russia will always do such-and-such because that's what they did centuries ago is meaningless. It's just another way of saying you don't like or trust Russia.

The explanation for the Ukraine war is in recent history, and it's all too obvious. They're doing what any great power would do in their situation.

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They literally ****ing did it 16 months ago and you're in here saying they're not in the same position. My good man, you're a special kind of special

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We should get Sam to point to a time in history of the last 500 years when Russia was NOT playing the expansion game to secure strategic depth as a way to compensate for indefensible borders, insofar as their budgets allowed.

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It would be more accurate to say Russia and western Europe have been in competition for most of that time. Of course we know seeking strategic depth is only imperialistic when the Russians do it.

whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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Quote:

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Quote:

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Quote:

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If you are the true humanist you clam and want peace, the quickest way to peace is make Ukraine a NATO member. If Ukraine was in NATO when the Baltics and Poland came in, no invasion. Crimea is still part of Ukraine. Capitulation leads to war and massive death.

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Russia is so backward and so incompetent in its military that it could not invade and take Poland or Romanian even if they were not in NATO.

Not to mention they don't even want to do that.

You are under the fantasy and delusion that the Russia of 2023 is the USSR of 1953

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Strong alliances keep the peace. Weak or incomplete alliances promote law. It doesn't matter what their capabilities are, only what their insane leader thinks it is.

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How does poor, broke, and demographically declining Bulgaria make the alliance strong?

You assumption is that reckless expansion is a sure sign of strength

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Would be reckless not to include Bulgaria if available. Here's the benefit:
1) Completes a land-bridge/logistics route from Nato core to Turkey.
2) Denies Russia a land-bridge/logistics route to the Slavic balkan countries.

That is more important than it sounds. Here's why:
Russia co-opts/invades Bulgaria, it accomplishes two objectives. First, it severs completely Greece and Turkey from land connection (ground logistics) to the rest of Nato. It also severs air-bridge connections as well, since Russian air craft and defense systems would effectively deny Nato overflights. That leaves only seaborne logistical connections between the Nato core and its right flank, and those could be interdicted by Russian submarine forces stationed at Tartus, Syria (does the Syrian Civil War make more sense now?) as well as Russian air assets flying from bases in Bulgaria. Net effect is, Nato commo with Turkey/Greece would be forced to depart from western Med ports (Spain/France), the most distant ports from area of need, and run into progressively stiffer threats as they approached Greece/Turkey. Remedy would require an air campaign to regain air superiority over Bulgaria, followed by land invasion to remove the interdictions of air and land logistics, which renders the Russian naval threat to shipping the sole threat to deal with.

That's before we get to the issue of Romania, which is (under your policy) threatened by Bulgaria on the south and Ukraine on the north. If that happens and Romania falls, then Russia owns the Balkans and Turkey/greece is totally isolated. Isolate allies can capitulate, sign a separate peace, etc....allowing your adversary to focus it's total energy on YOU.

So, yeah, your take is myopic. Bulgaria is not a small deal. Everything gets a whole lot easier if you deny Bulgaria to the Russians. With Bulgaria in NATO, all of that Balkan campaign gets quite difficult for Russia (who will have to conduct an amphibious operation to secure it). And it allows Nato to use its offensive capabilities to reduce the sole Russian threat to the Nato Eastern Flank - Tartus - rather than having to use that offensive capability to remove a threat to the most of the southern flank of Nato to include the entirety of Italy, which would be under threat of air/missile attacks from bases in Russian controlled Balkans.

Whatever assets Bulgaria does have will help Nato secure all those threats, rather than help Russia beef up those threats. Where do we want the fight to be....in our yard, or in theirs?

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"War game" thinking is fine as far as it goes, but you consistently ignore the larger context. If having Bulgaria in its orbit gives Russia such an advantage (and I'm not denying that it might), then why didn't they use it when they had the chance? Are they in a better or worse position to do so now than during the Cold War? Are they more motivated now? Why or why not? And so on...

Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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trey3216 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

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?

---

Why does Russia have to be a threat for NATO to add nations that are like minded, want to join the EU and want freedom that security brings? Is Russia being a threat the only reason NATO can add? Or a nation that wants t o join NATO can join?

---

What common values and "like mindedness" do you think Britain, France, Albania, Canada, Romania, Portugal, Croatia, Turkey, Estonia, Greece, and the USA have?

The "liked mindedness" idea becomes even more hilarious when you look at the government of Turkey and its neo-Ottoman/semi-Islamist autocratic leader Erdogan and the post-national liberal governments of places like Canada.

---

And what was Turkey's Government like when they joined? Turkey is also a top 20ish economy and very Capitalist. Even if not, what is wrong with joining for security? You know the real world is not just meet all three or NO.

---

In 1952 Turkey had a Kemalist government (same type of guys who mass murdered the Christian Armenians and Assyrian Christians during world war I)

Also committed the anti-Greek Christian pogroms that destroyed the native Greeks of Istanbul who had been there since the time of Constantine the great.


[In 67 September 1955 an anti-Greek pogrom was orchestrated in Istanbul by the Turkish military's Tactical Mobilization Group. The events were triggered by the news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, north Greece the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatrk was born in 1881 had been bombed the day before. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher of the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press conveying the news in Turkey was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb. Over a dozen people died during or after the pogrom as a result of beatings and arson. Jews, Armenians and others were also harmed. In addition to commercial targets, the mob clearly targeted property owned or administered by the Greek Orthodox Church. 73 churches and 23 schools were vandalized, burned or destroyed, as were 8 asperses and 3 monasteries.

The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, and the Istanbul region in particular. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 persons in 1927, to about 7,000 by 1978. In Istanbul alone, the Greek population decreased from 65,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960.]

---

So Turkey should be out. The Baltics? Out. Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czech, Eastern Part of Germany, Australia, Romania... Basically, all of NATO should be disbanded and the US maybe pay reparations to most of the world while we are at it? How about adding Texas, NM, AZ and CA to give back to Mexico? Would giving AK to the Russians make up for all the harm we have done? HI needs to be reverted to a Kingdom, throw in the 7th Fleet to make up. That cover it? I am sure if you think about it there is someone else the US has harmed that we can pay. Maybe just dissolve the US. Would that suffice?


There is absolutely NOT ONE THING that NATO and US has done well according to you guys.

---

Well of course that is a lie and no one on this thread ever said that.

NATO was a necessary military alliance to stop the spread of Communism and the massive socialist empire called the USSR. The communists being backed up by the Red Army that had 400 division stationed in Europe, 25,000 tanks, and 45,000 nukes. Along with 8 other Warsaw pact countries under communist rule with their armies.

The USSR and the Warsaw pact are now long long gone.

https://www.foreignexchanges.news/p/nato-has-outlived-its-usefulness
[In many ways, NATO was wildly successful in its time. But that time is over, and now it should be dismantled...

The decision to keep NATO operating after the Cold War ensured that it functioned as support for the US hegemon. During the Cold War, as NATO's website proudly affirms, the organization's "forces were not involved in a single military engagement." Instead, to borrow the historian Walter LaFeber's phrasing, NATO was mainly used "as a means to deal with more immediate problems [than a Soviet invasion]the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the West, the easing of Franco-German hatreds, the anchoring of a Great Britain tossed between continental and Atlantic-Commonwealth interests," and other intra-North Atlantic concerns. It was primarily a tool of integration.

But once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO rapidly became an arm of the US Empire. Or as NATO's website benignly puts it, with "changing conditions came new responsibilities. From being an exclusively defensive alliance for nearly half a century, NATO began to assume an increasingly proactive role within the international community." It participated in the Gulf War; the conflicts that rent the former Yugoslavia; the War on Terror; the Afghanistan War; and the Iraq War, to name only a few of its contributions. Indeed, by early 2021, NATO was partaking in operations in Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Mediterranean, Africa, and elsewhere.

The alliance has also grown to thirty members, and now includes many nations that were once in the Soviet sphere of influence, like Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. Unsurprisingly, the organization's wanton expansion into Eastern Europe has provoked Russia imagine how US decision-makers would have felt had Canada or Mexico joined the Warsaw Pact and NATO has been a useful foil for Russian President Vladimir Putin, helping him justify his revanchist foreign policy.

As this all suggests, there are significant drawbacks to NATO's continuing existence.]

---

Doesn't the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrate that oldest Russian desires for empire are alive and well?

---

No, not really. Russia's position isn't what it was during the time of the czars or the empire. It's not even what it was during the Cold War, when their forces were massed across from NATO with clear paths of attack. To say Russia will always do such-and-such because that's what they did centuries ago is meaningless. It's just another way of saying you don't like or trust Russia.

The explanation for the Ukraine war is in recent history, and it's all too obvious. They're doing what any great power would do in their situation.

---

They literally ****ing did it 16 months ago and you're in here saying they're not in the same position. My good man, you're a special kind of special

---

We should get Sam to point to a time in history of the last 500 years when Russia was NOT playing the expansion game to secure strategic depth as a way to compensate for indefensible borders, insofar as their budgets allowed.

---

It would be more accurate to say Russia and western Europe have been in competition for most of that time. Of course we know seeking strategic depth is only imperialistic when the Russians do it.

---

There is one difference that you always overlook. NATO and the EU are voluntary organizations that nations can leave at their own desire. Russia, not so much. Unless, you are strong enough to cause them pain, see agreements with China. China can come and go as they see fit. The Stans, no.

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

trey3216 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

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?

---

Why does Russia have to be a threat for NATO to add nations that are like minded, want to join the EU and want freedom that security brings? Is Russia being a threat the only reason NATO can add? Or a nation that wants t o join NATO can join?

---

What common values and "like mindedness" do you think Britain, France, Albania, Canada, Romania, Portugal, Croatia, Turkey, Estonia, Greece, and the USA have?

The "liked mindedness" idea becomes even more hilarious when you look at the government of Turkey and its neo-Ottoman/semi-Islamist autocratic leader Erdogan and the post-national liberal governments of places like Canada.

---

And what was Turkey's Government like when they joined? Turkey is also a top 20ish economy and very Capitalist. Even if not, what is wrong with joining for security? You know the real world is not just meet all three or NO.

---

In 1952 Turkey had a Kemalist government (same type of guys who mass murdered the Christian Armenians and Assyrian Christians during world war I)

Also committed the anti-Greek Christian pogroms that destroyed the native Greeks of Istanbul who had been there since the time of Constantine the great.


[In 67 September 1955 an anti-Greek pogrom was orchestrated in Istanbul by the Turkish military's Tactical Mobilization Group. The events were triggered by the news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, north Greece the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatrk was born in 1881 had been bombed the day before. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher of the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press conveying the news in Turkey was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb. Over a dozen people died during or after the pogrom as a result of beatings and arson. Jews, Armenians and others were also harmed. In addition to commercial targets, the mob clearly targeted property owned or administered by the Greek Orthodox Church. 73 churches and 23 schools were vandalized, burned or destroyed, as were 8 asperses and 3 monasteries.

The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, and the Istanbul region in particular. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 persons in 1927, to about 7,000 by 1978. In Istanbul alone, the Greek population decreased from 65,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960.]

---

So Turkey should be out. The Baltics? Out. Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czech, Eastern Part of Germany, Australia, Romania... Basically, all of NATO should be disbanded and the US maybe pay reparations to most of the world while we are at it? How about adding Texas, NM, AZ and CA to give back to Mexico? Would giving AK to the Russians make up for all the harm we have done? HI needs to be reverted to a Kingdom, throw in the 7th Fleet to make up. That cover it? I am sure if you think about it there is someone else the US has harmed that we can pay. Maybe just dissolve the US. Would that suffice?


There is absolutely NOT ONE THING that NATO and US has done well according to you guys.

---

Well of course that is a lie and no one on this thread ever said that.

NATO was a necessary military alliance to stop the spread of Communism and the massive socialist empire called the USSR. The communists being backed up by the Red Army that had 400 division stationed in Europe, 25,000 tanks, and 45,000 nukes. Along with 8 other Warsaw pact countries under communist rule with their armies.

The USSR and the Warsaw pact are now long long gone.

https://www.foreignexchanges.news/p/nato-has-outlived-its-usefulness
[In many ways, NATO was wildly successful in its time. But that time is over, and now it should be dismantled...

The decision to keep NATO operating after the Cold War ensured that it functioned as support for the US hegemon. During the Cold War, as NATO's website proudly affirms, the organization's "forces were not involved in a single military engagement." Instead, to borrow the historian Walter LaFeber's phrasing, NATO was mainly used "as a means to deal with more immediate problems [than a Soviet invasion]the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the West, the easing of Franco-German hatreds, the anchoring of a Great Britain tossed between continental and Atlantic-Commonwealth interests," and other intra-North Atlantic concerns. It was primarily a tool of integration.

But once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO rapidly became an arm of the US Empire. Or as NATO's website benignly puts it, with "changing conditions came new responsibilities. From being an exclusively defensive alliance for nearly half a century, NATO began to assume an increasingly proactive role within the international community." It participated in the Gulf War; the conflicts that rent the former Yugoslavia; the War on Terror; the Afghanistan War; and the Iraq War, to name only a few of its contributions. Indeed, by early 2021, NATO was partaking in operations in Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Mediterranean, Africa, and elsewhere.

The alliance has also grown to thirty members, and now includes many nations that were once in the Soviet sphere of influence, like Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. Unsurprisingly, the organization's wanton expansion into Eastern Europe has provoked Russia imagine how US decision-makers would have felt had Canada or Mexico joined the Warsaw Pact and NATO has been a useful foil for Russian President Vladimir Putin, helping him justify his revanchist foreign policy.

As this all suggests, there are significant drawbacks to NATO's continuing existence.]

---

Doesn't the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrate that oldest Russian desires for empire are alive and well?

---

No, not really. Russia's position isn't what it was during the time of the czars or the empire. It's not even what it was during the Cold War, when their forces were massed across from NATO with clear paths of attack. To say Russia will always do such-and-such because that's what they did centuries ago is meaningless. It's just another way of saying you don't like or trust Russia.

The explanation for the Ukraine war is in recent history, and it's all too obvious. They're doing what any great power would do in their situation.

---

They literally ****ing did it 16 months ago and you're in here saying they're not in the same position. My good man, you're a special kind of special

---

We should get Sam to point to a time in history of the last 500 years when Russia was NOT playing the expansion game to secure strategic depth as a way to compensate for indefensible borders, insofar as their budgets allowed.

---

It would be more accurate to say Russia and western Europe have been in competition for most of that time. Of course we know seeking strategic depth is only imperialistic when the Russians do it.

---

There is one difference that you always overlook. NATO and the EU are voluntary organizations that nations can leave at their own desire. Russia, not so much. Unless, you are strong enough to cause them pain, see agreements with China. China can come and go as they see fit. The Stans, no.

---

The -stans and the rest of the Soviet republics all left Russia in 1991. The Baltics and most of the Warsaw Pact countries joined NATO and the EU as well.

pic.twitter.com/h61rFvY5qS

— Franklin (@I_eat_pears) June 4, 2023

Sam Lowry said:

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RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

trey3216 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

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?

---

Why does Russia have to be a threat for NATO to add nations that are like minded, want to join the EU and want freedom that security brings? Is Russia being a threat the only reason NATO can add? Or a nation that wants t o join NATO can join?

---

What common values and "like mindedness" do you think Britain, France, Albania, Canada, Romania, Portugal, Croatia, Turkey, Estonia, Greece, and the USA have?

The "liked mindedness" idea becomes even more hilarious when you look at the government of Turkey and its neo-Ottoman/semi-Islamist autocratic leader Erdogan and the post-national liberal governments of places like Canada.

---

And what was Turkey's Government like when they joined? Turkey is also a top 20ish economy and very Capitalist. Even if not, what is wrong with joining for security? You know the real world is not just meet all three or NO.

---

In 1952 Turkey had a Kemalist government (same type of guys who mass murdered the Christian Armenians and Assyrian Christians during world war I)

Also committed the anti-Greek Christian pogroms that destroyed the native Greeks of Istanbul who had been there since the time of Constantine the great.


[In 67 September 1955 an anti-Greek pogrom was orchestrated in Istanbul by the Turkish military's Tactical Mobilization Group. The events were triggered by the news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, north Greece the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatrk was born in 1881 had been bombed the day before. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher of the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press conveying the news in Turkey was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb. Over a dozen people died during or after the pogrom as a result of beatings and arson. Jews, Armenians and others were also harmed. In addition to commercial targets, the mob clearly targeted property owned or administered by the Greek Orthodox Church. 73 churches and 23 schools were vandalized, burned or destroyed, as were 8 asperses and 3 monasteries.

The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, and the Istanbul region in particular. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 persons in 1927, to about 7,000 by 1978. In Istanbul alone, the Greek population decreased from 65,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960.]

---

So Turkey should be out. The Baltics? Out. Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czech, Eastern Part of Germany, Australia, Romania... Basically, all of NATO should be disbanded and the US maybe pay reparations to most of the world while we are at it? How about adding Texas, NM, AZ and CA to give back to Mexico? Would giving AK to the Russians make up for all the harm we have done? HI needs to be reverted to a Kingdom, throw in the 7th Fleet to make up. That cover it? I am sure if you think about it there is someone else the US has harmed that we can pay. Maybe just dissolve the US. Would that suffice?


There is absolutely NOT ONE THING that NATO and US has done well according to you guys.

---

Well of course that is a lie and no one on this thread ever said that.

NATO was a necessary military alliance to stop the spread of Communism and the massive socialist empire called the USSR. The communists being backed up by the Red Army that had 400 division stationed in Europe, 25,000 tanks, and 45,000 nukes. Along with 8 other Warsaw pact countries under communist rule with their armies.

The USSR and the Warsaw pact are now long long gone.

https://www.foreignexchanges.news/p/nato-has-outlived-its-usefulness
[In many ways, NATO was wildly successful in its time. But that time is over, and now it should be dismantled...

The decision to keep NATO operating after the Cold War ensured that it functioned as support for the US hegemon. During the Cold War, as NATO's website proudly affirms, the organization's "forces were not involved in a single military engagement." Instead, to borrow the historian Walter LaFeber's phrasing, NATO was mainly used "as a means to deal with more immediate problems [than a Soviet invasion]the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the West, the easing of Franco-German hatreds, the anchoring of a Great Britain tossed between continental and Atlantic-Commonwealth interests," and other intra-North Atlantic concerns. It was primarily a tool of integration.

But once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO rapidly became an arm of the US Empire. Or as NATO's website benignly puts it, with "changing conditions came new responsibilities. From being an exclusively defensive alliance for nearly half a century, NATO began to assume an increasingly proactive role within the international community." It participated in the Gulf War; the conflicts that rent the former Yugoslavia; the War on Terror; the Afghanistan War; and the Iraq War, to name only a few of its contributions. Indeed, by early 2021, NATO was partaking in operations in Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Mediterranean, Africa, and elsewhere.

The alliance has also grown to thirty members, and now includes many nations that were once in the Soviet sphere of influence, like Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. Unsurprisingly, the organization's wanton expansion into Eastern Europe has provoked Russia imagine how US decision-makers would have felt had Canada or Mexico joined the Warsaw Pact and NATO has been a useful foil for Russian President Vladimir Putin, helping him justify his revanchist foreign policy.

As this all suggests, there are significant drawbacks to NATO's continuing existence.]

---

Doesn't the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrate that oldest Russian desires for empire are alive and well?

---

No, not really. Russia's position isn't what it was during the time of the czars or the empire. It's not even what it was during the Cold War, when their forces were massed across from NATO with clear paths of attack. To say Russia will always do such-and-such because that's what they did centuries ago is meaningless. It's just another way of saying you don't like or trust Russia.

The explanation for the Ukraine war is in recent history, and it's all too obvious. They're doing what any great power would do in their situation.

---

They literally ****ing did it 16 months ago and you're in here saying they're not in the same position. My good man, you're a special kind of special

---

We should get Sam to point to a time in history of the last 500 years when Russia was NOT playing the expansion game to secure strategic depth as a way to compensate for indefensible borders, insofar as their budgets allowed.

---

It would be more accurate to say Russia and western Europe have been in competition for most of that time. Of course we know seeking strategic depth is only imperialistic when the Russians do it.

---

There is one difference that you always overlook. NATO and the EU are voluntary organizations that nations can leave at their own desire. Russia, not so much. Unless, you are strong enough to cause them pain, see agreements with China. China can come and go as they see fit. The Stans, no.

---

The -stans and the rest of the Soviet republics all left Russia in 1991. The Baltics and most of the Warsaw Pact countries joined NATO and the EU as well.

---

The -Stans are in terrible shape thanks to significant Russian meddling with little economic depth to pull themselves out from under the thumb. But they've helped make Putin and his Oligarch friends very wealthy with their natural resources.

Doc Holliday said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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RMF5630 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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Quote:

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Quote:

---

Giving a hostile opponent room to maneuver and build a several hundred miles of defensive positions is a recipe for huge losses on both sides. Not to mention the "buffer" that wants to develop and grow, not be a meat grinder for Putin! They have no say in this? That is a ludicrous position. If Ukraine was allowed in when Poland came in to NATO none of this would have happened. Ok let Putin play with the tyrant s on Syria, N Korea and Iran that want a Russian style govt. Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltics see their futures to the west.

---

Don't even get me started on Syria. The US has made a complete wreck of that place. They are lucky to have Russia's help, if nothing else.

---

Speaking of Syria:

[Syria has been at war for more than a decade. Its agony continues, with the U.S. punishing the Syrian people for the sins of their rulers. As Syria's neighbors reconcile with President Bashar al-Assad's government, Washington officials are having a meltdown. They want friendly Arab states to continue following America's ostentatiously cruel yet ineffective sanctions policy.

Syria is an enormous tragedy, the greatest disappointment of the ultimately disastrous 2011 Arab Spring.

Syria suffered traumatic civil war, jihadist depredations, and Turkish aggression. The Assad regime brutally suppressed peaceful protests. An armed insurgency emerged, dominated by radical jihadists. The Islamic State sought to establish an Islamist caliphate. The U.S., Europe, Gulf states, Iran, and Russia intervened on varying sides.]

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-cruelty-of-syria-sanctions/

---

Just a word of perspective on Syria:


Syria can bend over and get effed by a herd of camels, as far as I'm concerned.
Those arseholes are not worth of your sympathy.
They've got it coming, due to a dogged determination to make consistently bad policy decisions.

---

Yes yes

You have consistently shown on this forum that you don't care about the lives of foreigners.

But syria is home to millions of people (including millions of Christians) who's only crime is being born in a place with an unjust ruling class.

Maybe we don't help starve them to death just for that?

---

Replace the dictator in charge. It seems your solution is to give the dictator that is creating the situation, and worse, what they want in the name of humanitarianism. How do you think that will change anything? Giving Putin what he wants in Ukraine allows him to consolidate resources and so he can then attack somewhere else! Assad, is just a tyrant. There is a reason when he took power in 2000 the "Damascus Spring" ended.

---

If only Assad could be more like those Saudi friends of ours. Such nice people!

---

but they are friendly toward us, so we can afford to be pragmatic.

---

Of course we can. Because we're fighting for hegemony, not democracy.

---

Quote:

---

"THE SOCIETY THAT brings the spectacle into being does not dominate underdeveloped regions solely through the exercise of economic hegemony. It also dominates them in its capacity as the society of the spectacle.

It frames the agenda of a ruling class..."


The Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord 1967

---

---

Never go full Marxist.

ATL Bear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

trey3216 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

You think there is more reason to expand NATO into the east today than in 1990? %A0What?

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

---

Why does Russia have to be a threat for NATO to add nations that are like minded, want to join the EU and want freedom that security brings? %A0Is Russia being a threat the only reason NATO can add? %A0Or a nation that wants t o join NATO can join? %A0

---

What common values and "like mindedness" do you think Britain, France, Albania, Canada, Romania, Portugal, Croatia, Turkey, Estonia, Greece, and the USA have?

The "liked mindedness" idea becomes even more hilarious when you look at the government of Turkey and its neo-Ottoman/semi-Islamist autocratic leader Erdogan and the post-national liberal governments of places like Canada.

---

And what was Turkey's Government like when they joined? Turkey is also a top 20ish economy and very Capitalist. %A0Even if not, what is wrong with joining for security? %A0You know the real world is not just meet all three or NO.

---

In 1952 Turkey had a Kemalist government (same type of guys who mass murdered the Christian Armenians and Assyrian Christians during world war I)

Also committed the anti-Greek Christian pogroms that destroyed the native Greeks of Istanbul who had been there since the time of Constantine the great.


[In 67 September 1955 an anti-Greek pogrom was orchestrated in Istanbul by the Turkish military's Tactical Mobilization Group. The events were triggered by the news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, north Greece the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatrk was born in 1881 had been bombed the day before. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher of the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press conveying the news in Turkey was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb. Over a dozen people died during or after the pogrom as a result of beatings and arson. Jews, Armenians and others were also harmed. In addition to commercial targets, the mob clearly targeted property owned or administered by the Greek Orthodox Church. 73 churches and 23 schools were vandalized, burned or destroyed, as were 8 asperses and 3 monasteries.

The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, and the Istanbul region in particular. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 persons in 1927, to about 7,000 by 1978. In Istanbul alone, the Greek population decreased from 65,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960.]

---

So Turkey should be out. %A0The Baltics? %A0Out. %A0Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czech, Eastern Part of Germany, Australia, Romania... Basically, all of NATO should be disbanded and the US maybe pay reparations to most of the world while we are at it? %A0How about adding Texas, NM, AZ and CA to give back to Mexico? %A0Would giving AK to the Russians make up for all the harm we have done? HI needs to be reverted to a Kingdom, throw in the 7th Fleet to make up. %A0That cover it? %A0I am sure if you think about it there is someone else the US has harmed that we can pay. %A0Maybe just dissolve the US. %A0Would that suffice? %A0


There is absolutely NOT ONE THING that NATO and US has done well %A0according to you guys. %A0

---

Well of course that is a lie and no one on this thread ever said that.

NATO was a necessary military alliance to stop the spread of Communism and the massive socialist empire called the USSR. %A0The communists being backed up by the Red Army that had 400 division stationed in Europe, 25,000 tanks, and 45,000 nukes. %A0Along with 8 other Warsaw pact countries under communist rule with their armies.

The USSR and the Warsaw pact are now long long gone.

https://www.foreignexchanges.news/p/nato-has-outlived-its-usefulness
[In many ways, NATO was wildly successful in its time. But that time is over, and now it should be dismantled...

The decision to keep NATO operating after the Cold War ensured that it functioned as support for the US hegemon. During the Cold War, as NATO's website proudly affirms, the organization's "forces were not involved in a single military engagement." Instead, to borrow the historian Walter LaFeber's phrasing, NATO was mainly used "as a means to deal with more immediate problems [than a Soviet invasion]the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the West, the easing of Franco-German hatreds, the anchoring of a Great Britain tossed between continental and Atlantic-Commonwealth interests," and other intra-North Atlantic concerns. It was primarily a tool of integration.

But once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO rapidly became an arm of the US Empire. Or as NATO's website benignly puts it, with "changing conditions came new responsibilities. From being an exclusively defensive alliance for nearly half a century, NATO began to assume an increasingly proactive role within the international community." It participated in the Gulf War; the conflicts that rent the former Yugoslavia; the War on Terror; the Afghanistan War; and the Iraq War, to name only a few of its contributions. Indeed, by early 2021, NATO was partaking in operations in Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Mediterranean, Africa, and elsewhere.

The alliance has also grown to thirty members, and now includes many nations that were once in the Soviet sphere of influence, like Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. Unsurprisingly, the organization's wanton expansion into Eastern Europe has provoked Russia imagine how US decision-makers would have felt had Canada or Mexico joined the Warsaw Pact and NATO has been a useful foil for Russian President Vladimir Putin, helping him justify his revanchist foreign policy.

As this all suggests, there are significant drawbacks to NATO's continuing existence.]

---

Doesn't the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrate that oldest Russian desires for empire are alive and well?

---

No, not really. Russia's position isn't what it was during the time of the czars or the empire. It's not even what it was during the Cold War, when their forces were massed across from NATO with clear paths of attack. To say Russia will always do such-and-such because that's what they did centuries ago is meaningless. It's just another way of saying you don't like or trust Russia.

The explanation for the Ukraine war is in recent history, and it's all too obvious. They're doing what any great power would do in their situation.

---

They literally ****ing did it 16 months ago and you're in here saying they're not in the same position. %A0 My good man, you're a special kind of special

---

We should get Sam to point to a time in history of the last 500 years when Russia was NOT playing the expansion game to secure strategic depth as a way to compensate for indefensible borders, insofar as their budgets allowed.

---

It would be more accurate to say Russia and western Europe have been in competition for most of that time. Of course we know seeking strategic depth is only imperialistic when the Russians do it.

---

There is one difference that you always overlook. %A0NATO and the EU are voluntary organizations that nations can leave at their own desire. %A0Russia, not so much. %A0Unless, you are strong enough to cause them pain, see agreements with China. %A0China can come and go as they see fit. %A0The Stans, no.

---

The -stans and the rest of the Soviet republics all left Russia in 1991. The Baltics and most of the Warsaw Pact countries joined NATO and the EU as well.

---

The -Stans are in terrible shape thanks to significant Russian meddling with little economic depth to pull themselves out from under the thumb. %A0But they've helped make Putin and his Oligarch friends very wealthy with their natural resources. %A0

---

It's a bit more complicated than that. Russia has brought at least some stability to a region where it's often in short supply. Who else wants to mediate between Armenia and Azerbaijan? Could we do a better job? History certainly suggests otherwise.

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

trey3216 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

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?

---

Why does Russia have to be a threat for NATO to add nations that are like minded, want to join the EU and want freedom that security brings? Is Russia being a threat the only reason NATO can add? Or a nation that wants t o join NATO can join?

---

What common values and "like mindedness" do you think Britain, France, Albania, Canada, Romania, Portugal, Croatia, Turkey, Estonia, Greece, and the USA have?

The "liked mindedness" idea becomes even more hilarious when you look at the government of Turkey and its neo-Ottoman/semi-Islamist autocratic leader Erdogan and the post-national liberal governments of places like Canada.

---

And what was Turkey's Government like when they joined? Turkey is also a top 20ish economy and very Capitalist. Even if not, what is wrong with joining for security? You know the real world is not just meet all three or NO.

---

In 1952 Turkey had a Kemalist government (same type of guys who mass murdered the Christian Armenians and Assyrian Christians during world war I)

Also committed the anti-Greek Christian pogroms that destroyed the native Greeks of Istanbul who had been there since the time of Constantine the great.


[In 67 September 1955 an anti-Greek pogrom was orchestrated in Istanbul by the Turkish military's Tactical Mobilization Group. The events were triggered by the news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, north Greece the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatrk was born in 1881 had been bombed the day before. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher of the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press conveying the news in Turkey was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb. Over a dozen people died during or after the pogrom as a result of beatings and arson. Jews, Armenians and others were also harmed. In addition to commercial targets, the mob clearly targeted property owned or administered by the Greek Orthodox Church. 73 churches and 23 schools were vandalized, burned or destroyed, as were 8 asperses and 3 monasteries.

The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, and the Istanbul region in particular. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 persons in 1927, to about 7,000 by 1978. In Istanbul alone, the Greek population decreased from 65,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960.]

---

So Turkey should be out. The Baltics? Out. Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czech, Eastern Part of Germany, Australia, Romania... Basically, all of NATO should be disbanded and the US maybe pay reparations to most of the world while we are at it? How about adding Texas, NM, AZ and CA to give back to Mexico? Would giving AK to the Russians make up for all the harm we have done? HI needs to be reverted to a Kingdom, throw in the 7th Fleet to make up. That cover it? I am sure if you think about it there is someone else the US has harmed that we can pay. Maybe just dissolve the US. Would that suffice?


There is absolutely NOT ONE THING that NATO and US has done well according to you guys.

---

Well of course that is a lie and no one on this thread ever said that.

NATO was a necessary military alliance to stop the spread of Communism and the massive socialist empire called the USSR. The communists being backed up by the Red Army that had 400 division stationed in Europe, 25,000 tanks, and 45,000 nukes. Along with 8 other Warsaw pact countries under communist rule with their armies.

The USSR and the Warsaw pact are now long long gone.

https://www.foreignexchanges.news/p/nato-has-outlived-its-usefulness
[In many ways, NATO was wildly successful in its time. But that time is over, and now it should be dismantled...

The decision to keep NATO operating after the Cold War ensured that it functioned as support for the US hegemon. During the Cold War, as NATO's website proudly affirms, the organization's "forces were not involved in a single military engagement." Instead, to borrow the historian Walter LaFeber's phrasing, NATO was mainly used "as a means to deal with more immediate problems [than a Soviet invasion]the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the West, the easing of Franco-German hatreds, the anchoring of a Great Britain tossed between continental and Atlantic-Commonwealth interests," and other intra-North Atlantic concerns. It was primarily a tool of integration.

But once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO rapidly became an arm of the US Empire. Or as NATO's website benignly puts it, with "changing conditions came new responsibilities. From being an exclusively defensive alliance for nearly half a century, NATO began to assume an increasingly proactive role within the international community." It participated in the Gulf War; the conflicts that rent the former Yugoslavia; the War on Terror; the Afghanistan War; and the Iraq War, to name only a few of its contributions. Indeed, by early 2021, NATO was partaking in operations in Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Mediterranean, Africa, and elsewhere.

The alliance has also grown to thirty members, and now includes many nations that were once in the Soviet sphere of influence, like Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. Unsurprisingly, the organization's wanton expansion into Eastern Europe has provoked Russia imagine how US decision-makers would have felt had Canada or Mexico joined the Warsaw Pact and NATO has been a useful foil for Russian President Vladimir Putin, helping him justify his revanchist foreign policy.

As this all suggests, there are significant drawbacks to NATO's continuing existence.]

---

Doesn't the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrate that oldest Russian desires for empire are alive and well?

---

No, not really. Russia's position isn't what it was during the time of the czars or the empire. It's not even what it was during the Cold War, when their forces were massed across from NATO with clear paths of attack. To say Russia will always do such-and-such because that's what they did centuries ago is meaningless. It's just another way of saying you don't like or trust Russia.

The explanation for the Ukraine war is in recent history, and it's all too obvious. They're doing what any great power would do in their situation.

---

They literally ****ing did it 16 months ago and you're in here saying they're not in the same position. My good man, you're a special kind of special

---

We should get Sam to point to a time in history of the last 500 years when Russia was NOT playing the expansion game to secure strategic depth as a way to compensate for indefensible borders, insofar as their budgets allowed.

---

It would be more accurate to say Russia and western Europe have been in competition for most of that time. Of course we know seeking strategic depth is only imperialistic when the Russians do it.

---

There is one difference that you always overlook. NATO and the EU are voluntary organizations that nations can leave at their own desire. Russia, not so much. Unless, you are strong enough to cause them pain, see agreements with China. China can come and go as they see fit. The Stans, no.

---

The -stans and the rest of the Soviet republics all left Russia in 1991. The Baltics and most of the Warsaw Pact countries joined NATO and the EU as well.

---

Yeah, free... Didn't same thing happen with Russia pulling the same thing in Kazakhstan that they are defending the "ethnic-Russians"? Sort of a trial run before Ukraine?

"Who else wants to mediate..."

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-host-armenia-azerbaijan-peace-talk-ilham-aliyev-nikol-pashinyan-charles-michel/

https://www.state.gov/armenia-azerbaijan-peace-negotiations/

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

trey3216 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

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?

---

Why does Russia have to be a threat for NATO to add nations that are like minded, want to join the EU and want freedom that security brings? Is Russia being a threat the only reason NATO can add? Or a nation that wants t o join NATO can join?

---

What common values and "like mindedness" do you think Britain, France, Albania, Canada, Romania, Portugal, Croatia, Turkey, Estonia, Greece, and the USA have?

The "liked mindedness" idea becomes even more hilarious when you look at the government of Turkey and its neo-Ottoman/semi-Islamist autocratic leader Erdogan and the post-national liberal governments of places like Canada.

---

And what was Turkey's Government like when they joined? Turkey is also a top 20ish economy and very Capitalist. Even if not, what is wrong with joining for security? You know the real world is not just meet all three or NO.

---

In 1952 Turkey had a Kemalist government (same type of guys who mass murdered the Christian Armenians and Assyrian Christians during world war I)

Also committed the anti-Greek Christian pogroms that destroyed the native Greeks of Istanbul who had been there since the time of Constantine the great.


[In 67 September 1955 an anti-Greek pogrom was orchestrated in Istanbul by the Turkish military's Tactical Mobilization Group. The events were triggered by the news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, north Greece the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatrk was born in 1881 had been bombed the day before. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher of the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press conveying the news in Turkey was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb. Over a dozen people died during or after the pogrom as a result of beatings and arson. Jews, Armenians and others were also harmed. In addition to commercial targets, the mob clearly targeted property owned or administered by the Greek Orthodox Church. 73 churches and 23 schools were vandalized, burned or destroyed, as were 8 asperses and 3 monasteries.

The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, and the Istanbul region in particular. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 persons in 1927, to about 7,000 by 1978. In Istanbul alone, the Greek population decreased from 65,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960.]

---

So Turkey should be out. The Baltics? Out. Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czech, Eastern Part of Germany, Australia, Romania... Basically, all of NATO should be disbanded and the US maybe pay reparations to most of the world while we are at it? How about adding Texas, NM, AZ and CA to give back to Mexico? Would giving AK to the Russians make up for all the harm we have done? HI needs to be reverted to a Kingdom, throw in the 7th Fleet to make up. That cover it? I am sure if you think about it there is someone else the US has harmed that we can pay. Maybe just dissolve the US. Would that suffice?


There is absolutely NOT ONE THING that NATO and US has done well according to you guys.

---

Well of course that is a lie and no one on this thread ever said that.

NATO was a necessary military alliance to stop the spread of Communism and the massive socialist empire called the USSR. The communists being backed up by the Red Army that had 400 division stationed in Europe, 25,000 tanks, and 45,000 nukes. Along with 8 other Warsaw pact countries under communist rule with their armies.

The USSR and the Warsaw pact are now long long gone.

https://www.foreignexchanges.news/p/nato-has-outlived-its-usefulness
[In many ways, NATO was wildly successful in its time. But that time is over, and now it should be dismantled...

The decision to keep NATO operating after the Cold War ensured that it functioned as support for the US hegemon. During the Cold War, as NATO's website proudly affirms, the organization's "forces were not involved in a single military engagement." Instead, to borrow the historian Walter LaFeber's phrasing, NATO was mainly used "as a means to deal with more immediate problems [than a Soviet invasion]the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the West, the easing of Franco-German hatreds, the anchoring of a Great Britain tossed between continental and Atlantic-Commonwealth interests," and other intra-North Atlantic concerns. It was primarily a tool of integration.

But once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO rapidly became an arm of the US Empire. Or as NATO's website benignly puts it, with "changing conditions came new responsibilities. From being an exclusively defensive alliance for nearly half a century, NATO began to assume an increasingly proactive role within the international community." It participated in the Gulf War; the conflicts that rent the former Yugoslavia; the War on Terror; the Afghanistan War; and the Iraq War, to name only a few of its contributions. Indeed, by early 2021, NATO was partaking in operations in Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Mediterranean, Africa, and elsewhere.

The alliance has also grown to thirty members, and now includes many nations that were once in the Soviet sphere of influence, like Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. Unsurprisingly, the organization's wanton expansion into Eastern Europe has provoked Russia imagine how US decision-makers would have felt had Canada or Mexico joined the Warsaw Pact and NATO has been a useful foil for Russian President Vladimir Putin, helping him justify his revanchist foreign policy.

As this all suggests, there are significant drawbacks to NATO's continuing existence.]

---

Doesn't the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrate that oldest Russian desires for empire are alive and well?

---

No, not really. Russia's position isn't what it was during the time of the czars or the empire. It's not even what it was during the Cold War, when their forces were massed across from NATO with clear paths of attack. To say Russia will always do such-and-such because that's what they did centuries ago is meaningless. It's just another way of saying you don't like or trust Russia.

The explanation for the Ukraine war is in recent history, and it's all too obvious. They're doing what any great power would do in their situation.

---

They literally ****ing did it 16 months ago and you're in here saying they're not in the same position. My good man, you're a special kind of special

---

We should get Sam to point to a time in history of the last 500 years when Russia was NOT playing the expansion game to secure strategic depth as a way to compensate for indefensible borders, insofar as their budgets allowed.

---

It would be more accurate to say Russia and western Europe have been in competition for most of that time. Of course we know seeking strategic depth is only imperialistic when the Russians do it.

---

There is one difference that you always overlook. NATO and the EU are voluntary organizations that nations can leave at their own desire. Russia, not so much. Unless, you are strong enough to cause them pain, see agreements with China. China can come and go as they see fit. The Stans, no.

---

The -stans and the rest of the Soviet republics all left Russia in 1991. The Baltics and most of the Warsaw Pact countries joined NATO and the EU as well.

---

Yeah, free... Didn't same thing happen with Russia pulling the same thing in Kazakhstan that they are defending the "ethnic-Russians"? Sort of a trial run before Ukraine?

---

Russia was defending the legitimate government of Kazakhstan, which has been a close ally despite their differences. What would you have done?

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

trey3216 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

You think there is more reason to expand NATO into the east today than in 1990? %A0What?

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

---

Why does Russia have to be a threat for NATO to add nations that are like minded, want to join the EU and want freedom that security brings? %A0Is Russia being a threat the only reason NATO can add? %A0Or a nation that wants t o join NATO can join? %A0

---

What common values and "like mindedness" do you think Britain, France, Albania, Canada, Romania, Portugal, Croatia, Turkey, Estonia, Greece, and the USA have?

The "liked mindedness" idea becomes even more hilarious when you look at the government of Turkey and its neo-Ottoman/semi-Islamist autocratic leader Erdogan and the post-national liberal governments of places like Canada.

---

And what was Turkey's Government like when they joined? Turkey is also a top 20ish economy and very Capitalist. %A0Even if not, what is wrong with joining for security? %A0You know the real world is not just meet all three or NO.

---

In 1952 Turkey had a Kemalist government (same type of guys who mass murdered the Christian Armenians and Assyrian Christians during world war I)

Also committed the anti-Greek Christian pogroms that destroyed the native Greeks of Istanbul who had been there since the time of Constantine the great.


[In 67 September 1955 an anti-Greek pogrom was orchestrated in Istanbul by the Turkish military's Tactical Mobilization Group. The events were triggered by the news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, north Greece the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatrk was born in 1881 had been bombed the day before. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher of the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press conveying the news in Turkey was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb. Over a dozen people died during or after the pogrom as a result of beatings and arson. Jews, Armenians and others were also harmed. In addition to commercial targets, the mob clearly targeted property owned or administered by the Greek Orthodox Church. 73 churches and 23 schools were vandalized, burned or destroyed, as were 8 asperses and 3 monasteries.

The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, and the Istanbul region in particular. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 persons in 1927, to about 7,000 by 1978. In Istanbul alone, the Greek population decreased from 65,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960.]

---

So Turkey should be out. %A0The Baltics? %A0Out. %A0Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czech, Eastern Part of Germany, Australia, Romania... Basically, all of NATO should be disbanded and the US maybe pay reparations to most of the world while we are at it? %A0How about adding Texas, NM, AZ and CA to give back to Mexico? %A0Would giving AK to the Russians make up for all the harm we have done? HI needs to be reverted to a Kingdom, throw in the 7th Fleet to make up. %A0That cover it? %A0I am sure if you think about it there is someone else the US has harmed that we can pay. %A0Maybe just dissolve the US. %A0Would that suffice? %A0


There is absolutely NOT ONE THING that NATO and US has done well %A0according to you guys. %A0

---

Well of course that is a lie and no one on this thread ever said that.

NATO was a necessary military alliance to stop the spread of Communism and the massive socialist empire called the USSR. %A0The communists being backed up by the Red Army that had 400 division stationed in Europe, 25,000 tanks, and 45,000 nukes. %A0Along with 8 other Warsaw pact countries under communist rule with their armies.

The USSR and the Warsaw pact are now long long gone.

https://www.foreignexchanges.news/p/nato-has-outlived-its-usefulness
[In many ways, NATO was wildly successful in its time. But that time is over, and now it should be dismantled...

The decision to keep NATO operating after the Cold War ensured that it functioned as support for the US hegemon. During the Cold War, as NATO's website proudly affirms, the organization's "forces were not involved in a single military engagement." Instead, to borrow the historian Walter LaFeber's phrasing, NATO was mainly used "as a means to deal with more immediate problems [than a Soviet invasion]the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the West, the easing of Franco-German hatreds, the anchoring of a Great Britain tossed between continental and Atlantic-Commonwealth interests," and other intra-North Atlantic concerns. It was primarily a tool of integration.

But once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO rapidly became an arm of the US Empire. Or as NATO's website benignly puts it, with "changing conditions came new responsibilities. From being an exclusively defensive alliance for nearly half a century, NATO began to assume an increasingly proactive role within the international community." It participated in the Gulf War; the conflicts that rent the former Yugoslavia; the War on Terror; the Afghanistan War; and the Iraq War, to name only a few of its contributions. Indeed, by early 2021, NATO was partaking in operations in Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Mediterranean, Africa, and elsewhere.

The alliance has also grown to thirty members, and now includes many nations that were once in the Soviet sphere of influence, like Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. Unsurprisingly, the organization's wanton expansion into Eastern Europe has provoked Russia imagine how US decision-makers would have felt had Canada or Mexico joined the Warsaw Pact and NATO has been a useful foil for Russian President Vladimir Putin, helping him justify his revanchist foreign policy.

As this all suggests, there are significant drawbacks to NATO's continuing existence.]

---

Doesn't the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrate that oldest Russian desires for empire are alive and well?

---

No, not really. Russia's position isn't what it was during the time of the czars or the empire. It's not even what it was during the Cold War, when their forces were massed across from NATO with clear paths of attack. To say Russia will always do such-and-such because that's what they did centuries ago is meaningless. It's just another way of saying you don't like or trust Russia.

The explanation for the Ukraine war is in recent history, and it's all too obvious. They're doing what any great power would do in their situation.

---

They literally ****ing did it 16 months ago and you're in here saying they're not in the same position. %A0 My good man, you're a special kind of special

---

We should get Sam to point to a time in history of the last 500 years when Russia was NOT playing the expansion game to secure strategic depth as a way to compensate for indefensible borders, insofar as their budgets allowed.

---

It would be more accurate to say Russia and western Europe have been in competition for most of that time. Of course we know seeking strategic depth is only imperialistic when the Russians do it.

---

There is one difference that you always overlook. %A0NATO and the EU are voluntary organizations that nations can leave at their own desire. %A0Russia, not so much. %A0Unless, you are strong enough to cause them pain, see agreements with China. %A0China can come and go as they see fit. %A0The Stans, no.

---

The -stans and the rest of the Soviet republics all left Russia in 1991. The Baltics and most of the Warsaw Pact countries joined NATO and the EU as well.

---

The -Stans are in terrible shape thanks to significant Russian meddling with little economic depth to pull themselves out from under the thumb. %A0But they've helped make Putin and his Oligarch friends very wealthy with their natural resources. %A0

---

It's a bit more complicated than that. Russia has brought at least some stability to a region where it's often in short supply. Who else wants to mediate between Armenia and Azerbaijan? Could we do a better job? History certainly suggests otherwise.

---

There is no mediation. The existence of conflict is what keeps Russia relevant. That's their MO across their spheres. Russia isn't strong enough to manage strong states, so they help keep them in a state of instability so they can be handled. They were consistently doing that in Ukraine until they had some traction with EU membership. Then force was required.

---

Russia isn't strong enough to manage the situation because, as usual, we're lavishing military aid on one side of the conflict with no regard for the consequences beyond weakening Russia. At least they spared the Armenians another round of genocide, which is more than we were willing or able to do.

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

trey3216 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

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?

---

Why does Russia have to be a threat for NATO to add nations that are like minded, want to join the EU and want freedom that security brings? Is Russia being a threat the only reason NATO can add? Or a nation that wants t o join NATO can join?

---

What common values and "like mindedness" do you think Britain, France, Albania, Canada, Romania, Portugal, Croatia, Turkey, Estonia, Greece, and the USA have?

The "liked mindedness" idea becomes even more hilarious when you look at the government of Turkey and its neo-Ottoman/semi-Islamist autocratic leader Erdogan and the post-national liberal governments of places like Canada.

---

And what was Turkey's Government like when they joined? Turkey is also a top 20ish economy and very Capitalist. Even if not, what is wrong with joining for security? You know the real world is not just meet all three or NO.

---

In 1952 Turkey had a Kemalist government (same type of guys who mass murdered the Christian Armenians and Assyrian Christians during world war I)

Also committed the anti-Greek Christian pogroms that destroyed the native Greeks of Istanbul who had been there since the time of Constantine the great.


[In 67 September 1955 an anti-Greek pogrom was orchestrated in Istanbul by the Turkish military's Tactical Mobilization Group. The events were triggered by the news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, north Greece the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatrk was born in 1881 had been bombed the day before. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher of the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press conveying the news in Turkey was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb. Over a dozen people died during or after the pogrom as a result of beatings and arson. Jews, Armenians and others were also harmed. In addition to commercial targets, the mob clearly targeted property owned or administered by the Greek Orthodox Church. 73 churches and 23 schools were vandalized, burned or destroyed, as were 8 asperses and 3 monasteries.

The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, and the Istanbul region in particular. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 persons in 1927, to about 7,000 by 1978. In Istanbul alone, the Greek population decreased from 65,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960.]

---

So Turkey should be out. The Baltics? Out. Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czech, Eastern Part of Germany, Australia, Romania... Basically, all of NATO should be disbanded and the US maybe pay reparations to most of the world while we are at it? How about adding Texas, NM, AZ and CA to give back to Mexico? Would giving AK to the Russians make up for all the harm we have done? HI needs to be reverted to a Kingdom, throw in the 7th Fleet to make up. That cover it? I am sure if you think about it there is someone else the US has harmed that we can pay. Maybe just dissolve the US. Would that suffice?


There is absolutely NOT ONE THING that NATO and US has done well according to you guys.

---

Well of course that is a lie and no one on this thread ever said that.

NATO was a necessary military alliance to stop the spread of Communism and the massive socialist empire called the USSR. The communists being backed up by the Red Army that had 400 division stationed in Europe, 25,000 tanks, and 45,000 nukes. Along with 8 other Warsaw pact countries under communist rule with their armies.

The USSR and the Warsaw pact are now long long gone.

https://www.foreignexchanges.news/p/nato-has-outlived-its-usefulness
[In many ways, NATO was wildly successful in its time. But that time is over, and now it should be dismantled...

The decision to keep NATO operating after the Cold War ensured that it functioned as support for the US hegemon. During the Cold War, as NATO's website proudly affirms, the organization's "forces were not involved in a single military engagement." Instead, to borrow the historian Walter LaFeber's phrasing, NATO was mainly used "as a means to deal with more immediate problems [than a Soviet invasion]the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the West, the easing of Franco-German hatreds, the anchoring of a Great Britain tossed between continental and Atlantic-Commonwealth interests," and other intra-North Atlantic concerns. It was primarily a tool of integration.

But once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO rapidly became an arm of the US Empire. Or as NATO's website benignly puts it, with "changing conditions came new responsibilities. From being an exclusively defensive alliance for nearly half a century, NATO began to assume an increasingly proactive role within the international community." It participated in the Gulf War; the conflicts that rent the former Yugoslavia; the War on Terror; the Afghanistan War; and the Iraq War, to name only a few of its contributions. Indeed, by early 2021, NATO was partaking in operations in Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Mediterranean, Africa, and elsewhere.

The alliance has also grown to thirty members, and now includes many nations that were once in the Soviet sphere of influence, like Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. Unsurprisingly, the organization's wanton expansion into Eastern Europe has provoked Russia imagine how US decision-makers would have felt had Canada or Mexico joined the Warsaw Pact and NATO has been a useful foil for Russian President Vladimir Putin, helping him justify his revanchist foreign policy.

As this all suggests, there are significant drawbacks to NATO's continuing existence.]

---

Doesn't the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrate that oldest Russian desires for empire are alive and well?

---

No, not really. Russia's position isn't what it was during the time of the czars or the empire. It's not even what it was during the Cold War, when their forces were massed across from NATO with clear paths of attack. To say Russia will always do such-and-such because that's what they did centuries ago is meaningless. It's just another way of saying you don't like or trust Russia.

The explanation for the Ukraine war is in recent history, and it's all too obvious. They're doing what any great power would do in their situation.

---

They literally ****ing did it 16 months ago and you're in here saying they're not in the same position. My good man, you're a special kind of special

---

We should get Sam to point to a time in history of the last 500 years when Russia was NOT playing the expansion game to secure strategic depth as a way to compensate for indefensible borders, insofar as their budgets allowed.

---

It would be more accurate to say Russia and western Europe have been in competition for most of that time. Of course we know seeking strategic depth is only imperialistic when the Russians do it.

---

There is one difference that you always overlook. NATO and the EU are voluntary organizations that nations can leave at their own desire. Russia, not so much. Unless, you are strong enough to cause them pain, see agreements with China. China can come and go as they see fit. The Stans, no.

---

The -stans and the rest of the Soviet republics all left Russia in 1991. The Baltics and most of the Warsaw Pact countries joined NATO and the EU as well.

---

Yeah, free... Didn't same thing happen with Russia pulling the same thing in Kazakhstan that they are defending the "ethnic-Russians"? Sort of a trial run before Ukraine?

---

Russia was defending the legitimate government of Kazakhstan, which has been a close ally despite their differences. What would you have done?

---

Of course, legitimate Govt. Is there anything Russia does that you disagree with?

---

It's uncanny. The US is hegemonic, but Russia is protecting "legitimate governments".

ATL Bear said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

Quote:

---

Quote:

---

Giving a hostile opponent room to maneuver and build a several hundred miles of defensive positions is a recipe for huge losses on both sides. Not to mention the "buffer" that wants to develop and grow, not be a meat grinder for Putin! They have no say in this? That is a ludicrous position. If Ukraine was allowed in when Poland came in to NATO none of this would have happened. Ok let Putin play with the tyrant s on Syria, N Korea and Iran that want a Russian style govt. Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltics see their futures to the west.

---

Don't even get me started on Syria. The US has made a complete wreck of that place. They are lucky to have Russia's help, if nothing else.

---

Speaking of Syria:

[Syria has been at war for more than a decade. Its agony continues, with the U.S. punishing the Syrian people for the sins of their rulers. As Syria's neighbors reconcile with President Bashar al-Assad's government, Washington officials are having a meltdown. They want friendly Arab states to continue following America's ostentatiously cruel yet ineffective sanctions policy.

Syria is an enormous tragedy, the greatest disappointment of the ultimately disastrous 2011 Arab Spring.

Syria suffered traumatic civil war, jihadist depredations, and Turkish aggression. The Assad regime brutally suppressed peaceful protests. An armed insurgency emerged, dominated by radical jihadists. The Islamic State sought to establish an Islamist caliphate. The U.S., Europe, Gulf states, Iran, and Russia intervened on varying sides.]

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-cruelty-of-syria-sanctions/

---

Just a word of perspective on Syria:


Syria can bend over and get effed by a herd of camels, as far as I'm concerned.
Those arseholes are not worth of your sympathy.
They've got it coming, due to a dogged determination to make consistently bad policy decisions.

---

Yes yes

You have consistently shown on this forum that you don't care about the lives of foreigners.

But syria is home to millions of people (including millions of Christians) who's only crime is being born in a place with an unjust ruling class.

Maybe we don't help starve them to death just for that?

---

Replace the dictator in charge. It seems your solution is to give the dictator that is creating the situation, and worse, what they want in the name of humanitarianism. How do you think that will change anything? Giving Putin what he wants in Ukraine allows him to consolidate resources and so he can then attack somewhere else! Assad, is just a tyrant. There is a reason when he took power in 2000 the "Damascus Spring" ended.

---

If only Assad could be more like those Saudi friends of ours. Such nice people!

---

but they are friendly toward us, so we can afford to be pragmatic.

---

Of course we can. Because we're fighting for hegemony, not democracy.

---

Quote:

---

"THE SOCIETY THAT brings the spectacle into being does not dominate underdeveloped regions solely through the exercise of economic hegemony. It also dominates them in its capacity as the society of the spectacle.

It frames the agenda of a ruling class..."


The Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord 1967

---

---

Never go full Marxist.

---

True. Marxism in practice is hypocritical and opposite of it's claimed intentions. Commies carried out everything Debord was critiquing.

Debord borrowed this idea from Nietzsche's concept of the mass secret anyways.

The media narrative of the Ukraine proxy war is not truthful, its crafted to hide the truth which is US controlled hegemony of the region, not democracy.

ATL Bear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

trey3216 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

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?

---

Why does Russia have to be a threat for NATO to add nations that are like minded, want to join the EU and want freedom that security brings? Is Russia being a threat the only reason NATO can add? Or a nation that wants t o join NATO can join?

---

What common values and "like mindedness" do you think Britain, France, Albania, Canada, Romania, Portugal, Croatia, Turkey, Estonia, Greece, and the USA have?

The "liked mindedness" idea becomes even more hilarious when you look at the government of Turkey and its neo-Ottoman/semi-Islamist autocratic leader Erdogan and the post-national liberal governments of places like Canada.

---

And what was Turkey's Government like when they joined? Turkey is also a top 20ish economy and very Capitalist. Even if not, what is wrong with joining for security? You know the real world is not just meet all three or NO.

---

In 1952 Turkey had a Kemalist government (same type of guys who mass murdered the Christian Armenians and Assyrian Christians during world war I)

Also committed the anti-Greek Christian pogroms that destroyed the native Greeks of Istanbul who had been there since the time of Constantine the great.


[In 67 September 1955 an anti-Greek pogrom was orchestrated in Istanbul by the Turkish military's Tactical Mobilization Group. The events were triggered by the news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, north Greece the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatrk was born in 1881 had been bombed the day before. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher of the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press conveying the news in Turkey was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb. Over a dozen people died during or after the pogrom as a result of beatings and arson. Jews, Armenians and others were also harmed. In addition to commercial targets, the mob clearly targeted property owned or administered by the Greek Orthodox Church. 73 churches and 23 schools were vandalized, burned or destroyed, as were 8 asperses and 3 monasteries.

The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, and the Istanbul region in particular. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 persons in 1927, to about 7,000 by 1978. In Istanbul alone, the Greek population decreased from 65,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960.]

---

So Turkey should be out. The Baltics? Out. Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czech, Eastern Part of Germany, Australia, Romania... Basically, all of NATO should be disbanded and the US maybe pay reparations to most of the world while we are at it? How about adding Texas, NM, AZ and CA to give back to Mexico? Would giving AK to the Russians make up for all the harm we have done? HI needs to be reverted to a Kingdom, throw in the 7th Fleet to make up. That cover it? I am sure if you think about it there is someone else the US has harmed that we can pay. Maybe just dissolve the US. Would that suffice?


There is absolutely NOT ONE THING that NATO and US has done well according to you guys.

---

Well of course that is a lie and no one on this thread ever said that.

NATO was a necessary military alliance to stop the spread of Communism and the massive socialist empire called the USSR. The communists being backed up by the Red Army that had 400 division stationed in Europe, 25,000 tanks, and 45,000 nukes. Along with 8 other Warsaw pact countries under communist rule with their armies.

The USSR and the Warsaw pact are now long long gone.

https://www.foreignexchanges.news/p/nato-has-outlived-its-usefulness
[In many ways, NATO was wildly successful in its time. But that time is over, and now it should be dismantled...

The decision to keep NATO operating after the Cold War ensured that it functioned as support for the US hegemon. During the Cold War, as NATO's website proudly affirms, the organization's "forces were not involved in a single military engagement." Instead, to borrow the historian Walter LaFeber's phrasing, NATO was mainly used "as a means to deal with more immediate problems [than a Soviet invasion]the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the West, the easing of Franco-German hatreds, the anchoring of a Great Britain tossed between continental and Atlantic-Commonwealth interests," and other intra-North Atlantic concerns. It was primarily a tool of integration.

But once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO rapidly became an arm of the US Empire. Or as NATO's website benignly puts it, with "changing conditions came new responsibilities. From being an exclusively defensive alliance for nearly half a century, NATO began to assume an increasingly proactive role within the international community." It participated in the Gulf War; the conflicts that rent the former Yugoslavia; the War on Terror; the Afghanistan War; and the Iraq War, to name only a few of its contributions. Indeed, by early 2021, NATO was partaking in operations in Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Mediterranean, Africa, and elsewhere.

The alliance has also grown to thirty members, and now includes many nations that were once in the Soviet sphere of influence, like Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. Unsurprisingly, the organization's wanton expansion into Eastern Europe has provoked Russia imagine how US decision-makers would have felt had Canada or Mexico joined the Warsaw Pact and NATO has been a useful foil for Russian President Vladimir Putin, helping him justify his revanchist foreign policy.

As this all suggests, there are significant drawbacks to NATO's continuing existence.]

---

Doesn't the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrate that oldest Russian desires for empire are alive and well?

---

No, not really. Russia's position isn't what it was during the time of the czars or the empire. It's not even what it was during the Cold War, when their forces were massed across from NATO with clear paths of attack. To say Russia will always do such-and-such because that's what they did centuries ago is meaningless. It's just another way of saying you don't like or trust Russia.

The explanation for the Ukraine war is in recent history, and it's all too obvious. They're doing what any great power would do in their situation.

---

They literally ****ing did it 16 months ago and you're in here saying they're not in the same position. My good man, you're a special kind of special

---

We should get Sam to point to a time in history of the last 500 years when Russia was NOT playing the expansion game to secure strategic depth as a way to compensate for indefensible borders, insofar as their budgets allowed.

---

It would be more accurate to say Russia and western Europe have been in competition for most of that time. Of course we know seeking strategic depth is only imperialistic when the Russians do it.

---

There is one difference that you always overlook. NATO and the EU are voluntary organizations that nations can leave at their own desire. Russia, not so much. Unless, you are strong enough to cause them pain, see agreements with China. China can come and go as they see fit. The Stans, no.

---

The -stans and the rest of the Soviet republics all left Russia in 1991. The Baltics and most of the Warsaw Pact countries joined NATO and the EU as well.

---

Yeah, free... Didn't same thing happen with Russia pulling the same thing in Kazakhstan that they are defending the "ethnic-Russians"? Sort of a trial run before Ukraine?

---

Russia was defending the legitimate government of Kazakhstan, which has been a close ally despite their differences. What would you have done?

---

Of course, legitimate Govt. Is there anything Russia does that you disagree with?

---

It's uncanny. The US is hegemonic, but Russia is protecting "legitimate governments".

---

Don't forget that Russia is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and decides to invade its neighbors every few years for economic/demographic/genocidal aspirations.

I mean, why hold them to anything amirite?

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

trey3216 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

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?

---

Why does Russia have to be a threat for NATO to add nations that are like minded, want to join the EU and want freedom that security brings? Is Russia being a threat the only reason NATO can add? Or a nation that wants t o join NATO can join?

---

What common values and "like mindedness" do you think Britain, France, Albania, Canada, Romania, Portugal, Croatia, Turkey, Estonia, Greece, and the USA have?

The "liked mindedness" idea becomes even more hilarious when you look at the government of Turkey and its neo-Ottoman/semi-Islamist autocratic leader Erdogan and the post-national liberal governments of places like Canada.

---

And what was Turkey's Government like when they joined? Turkey is also a top 20ish economy and very Capitalist. Even if not, what is wrong with joining for security? You know the real world is not just meet all three or NO.

---

In 1952 Turkey had a Kemalist government (same type of guys who mass murdered the Christian Armenians and Assyrian Christians during world war I)

Also committed the anti-Greek Christian pogroms that destroyed the native Greeks of Istanbul who had been there since the time of Constantine the great.


[In 67 September 1955 an anti-Greek pogrom was orchestrated in Istanbul by the Turkish military's Tactical Mobilization Group. The events were triggered by the news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, north Greece the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatrk was born in 1881 had been bombed the day before. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher of the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press conveying the news in Turkey was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb. Over a dozen people died during or after the pogrom as a result of beatings and arson. Jews, Armenians and others were also harmed. In addition to commercial targets, the mob clearly targeted property owned or administered by the Greek Orthodox Church. 73 churches and 23 schools were vandalized, burned or destroyed, as were 8 asperses and 3 monasteries.

The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, and the Istanbul region in particular. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 persons in 1927, to about 7,000 by 1978. In Istanbul alone, the Greek population decreased from 65,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960.]

---

So Turkey should be out. The Baltics? Out. Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czech, Eastern Part of Germany, Australia, Romania... Basically, all of NATO should be disbanded and the US maybe pay reparations to most of the world while we are at it? How about adding Texas, NM, AZ and CA to give back to Mexico? Would giving AK to the Russians make up for all the harm we have done? HI needs to be reverted to a Kingdom, throw in the 7th Fleet to make up. That cover it? I am sure if you think about it there is someone else the US has harmed that we can pay. Maybe just dissolve the US. Would that suffice?


There is absolutely NOT ONE THING that NATO and US has done well according to you guys.

---

Well of course that is a lie and no one on this thread ever said that.

NATO was a necessary military alliance to stop the spread of Communism and the massive socialist empire called the USSR. The communists being backed up by the Red Army that had 400 division stationed in Europe, 25,000 tanks, and 45,000 nukes. Along with 8 other Warsaw pact countries under communist rule with their armies.

The USSR and the Warsaw pact are now long long gone.

https://www.foreignexchanges.news/p/nato-has-outlived-its-usefulness
[In many ways, NATO was wildly successful in its time. But that time is over, and now it should be dismantled...

The decision to keep NATO operating after the Cold War ensured that it functioned as support for the US hegemon. During the Cold War, as NATO's website proudly affirms, the organization's "forces were not involved in a single military engagement." Instead, to borrow the historian Walter LaFeber's phrasing, NATO was mainly used "as a means to deal with more immediate problems [than a Soviet invasion]the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the West, the easing of Franco-German hatreds, the anchoring of a Great Britain tossed between continental and Atlantic-Commonwealth interests," and other intra-North Atlantic concerns. It was primarily a tool of integration.

But once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO rapidly became an arm of the US Empire. Or as NATO's website benignly puts it, with "changing conditions came new responsibilities. From being an exclusively defensive alliance for nearly half a century, NATO began to assume an increasingly proactive role within the international community." It participated in the Gulf War; the conflicts that rent the former Yugoslavia; the War on Terror; the Afghanistan War; and the Iraq War, to name only a few of its contributions. Indeed, by early 2021, NATO was partaking in operations in Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Mediterranean, Africa, and elsewhere.

The alliance has also grown to thirty members, and now includes many nations that were once in the Soviet sphere of influence, like Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. Unsurprisingly, the organization's wanton expansion into Eastern Europe has provoked Russia imagine how US decision-makers would have felt had Canada or Mexico joined the Warsaw Pact and NATO has been a useful foil for Russian President Vladimir Putin, helping him justify his revanchist foreign policy.

As this all suggests, there are significant drawbacks to NATO's continuing existence.]

---

Doesn't the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrate that oldest Russian desires for empire are alive and well?

---

No, not really. Russia's position isn't what it was during the time of the czars or the empire. It's not even what it was during the Cold War, when their forces were massed across from NATO with clear paths of attack. To say Russia will always do such-and-such because that's what they did centuries ago is meaningless. It's just another way of saying you don't like or trust Russia.

The explanation for the Ukraine war is in recent history, and it's all too obvious. They're doing what any great power would do in their situation.

---

They literally ****ing did it 16 months ago and you're in here saying they're not in the same position. My good man, you're a special kind of special

---

We should get Sam to point to a time in history of the last 500 years when Russia was NOT playing the expansion game to secure strategic depth as a way to compensate for indefensible borders, insofar as their budgets allowed.

---

It would be more accurate to say Russia and western Europe have been in competition for most of that time. Of course we know seeking strategic depth is only imperialistic when the Russians do it.

---

There is one difference that you always overlook. NATO and the EU are voluntary organizations that nations can leave at their own desire. Russia, not so much. Unless, you are strong enough to cause them pain, see agreements with China. China can come and go as they see fit. The Stans, no.

---

The -stans and the rest of the Soviet republics all left Russia in 1991. The Baltics and most of the Warsaw Pact countries joined NATO and the EU as well.

---

Yeah, free... Didn't same thing happen with Russia pulling the same thing in Kazakhstan that they are defending the "ethnic-Russians"? Sort of a trial run before Ukraine?

---

Russia was defending the legitimate government of Kazakhstan, which has been a close ally despite their differences. What would you have done?

---

Of course, legitimate Govt. Is there anything Russia does that you disagree with?

---

Sure. Is there anything you disagree with that doesn't necessitate risking WW3?

ATL Bear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

trey3216 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

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?

---

Why does Russia have to be a threat for NATO to add nations that are like minded, want to join the EU and want freedom that security brings? Is Russia being a threat the only reason NATO can add? Or a nation that wants t o join NATO can join?

---

What common values and "like mindedness" do you think Britain, France, Albania, Canada, Romania, Portugal, Croatia, Turkey, Estonia, Greece, and the USA have?

The "liked mindedness" idea becomes even more hilarious when you look at the government of Turkey and its neo-Ottoman/semi-Islamist autocratic leader Erdogan and the post-national liberal governments of places like Canada.

---

And what was Turkey's Government like when they joined? Turkey is also a top 20ish economy and very Capitalist. Even if not, what is wrong with joining for security? You know the real world is not just meet all three or NO.

---

In 1952 Turkey had a Kemalist government (same type of guys who mass murdered the Christian Armenians and Assyrian Christians during world war I)

Also committed the anti-Greek Christian pogroms that destroyed the native Greeks of Istanbul who had been there since the time of Constantine the great.


[In 67 September 1955 an anti-Greek pogrom was orchestrated in Istanbul by the Turkish military's Tactical Mobilization Group. The events were triggered by the news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, north Greece the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatrk was born in 1881 had been bombed the day before. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher of the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press conveying the news in Turkey was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb. Over a dozen people died during or after the pogrom as a result of beatings and arson. Jews, Armenians and others were also harmed. In addition to commercial targets, the mob clearly targeted property owned or administered by the Greek Orthodox Church. 73 churches and 23 schools were vandalized, burned or destroyed, as were 8 asperses and 3 monasteries.

The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, and the Istanbul region in particular. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 persons in 1927, to about 7,000 by 1978. In Istanbul alone, the Greek population decreased from 65,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960.]

---

So Turkey should be out. The Baltics? Out. Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czech, Eastern Part of Germany, Australia, Romania... Basically, all of NATO should be disbanded and the US maybe pay reparations to most of the world while we are at it? How about adding Texas, NM, AZ and CA to give back to Mexico? Would giving AK to the Russians make up for all the harm we have done? HI needs to be reverted to a Kingdom, throw in the 7th Fleet to make up. That cover it? I am sure if you think about it there is someone else the US has harmed that we can pay. Maybe just dissolve the US. Would that suffice?


There is absolutely NOT ONE THING that NATO and US has done well according to you guys.

---

Well of course that is a lie and no one on this thread ever said that.

NATO was a necessary military alliance to stop the spread of Communism and the massive socialist empire called the USSR. The communists being backed up by the Red Army that had 400 division stationed in Europe, 25,000 tanks, and 45,000 nukes. Along with 8 other Warsaw pact countries under communist rule with their armies.

The USSR and the Warsaw pact are now long long gone.

https://www.foreignexchanges.news/p/nato-has-outlived-its-usefulness
[In many ways, NATO was wildly successful in its time. But that time is over, and now it should be dismantled...

The decision to keep NATO operating after the Cold War ensured that it functioned as support for the US hegemon. During the Cold War, as NATO's website proudly affirms, the organization's "forces were not involved in a single military engagement." Instead, to borrow the historian Walter LaFeber's phrasing, NATO was mainly used "as a means to deal with more immediate problems [than a Soviet invasion]the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the West, the easing of Franco-German hatreds, the anchoring of a Great Britain tossed between continental and Atlantic-Commonwealth interests," and other intra-North Atlantic concerns. It was primarily a tool of integration.

But once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO rapidly became an arm of the US Empire. Or as NATO's website benignly puts it, with "changing conditions came new responsibilities. From being an exclusively defensive alliance for nearly half a century, NATO began to assume an increasingly proactive role within the international community." It participated in the Gulf War; the conflicts that rent the former Yugoslavia; the War on Terror; the Afghanistan War; and the Iraq War, to name only a few of its contributions. Indeed, by early 2021, NATO was partaking in operations in Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Mediterranean, Africa, and elsewhere.

The alliance has also grown to thirty members, and now includes many nations that were once in the Soviet sphere of influence, like Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. Unsurprisingly, the organization's wanton expansion into Eastern Europe has provoked Russia imagine how US decision-makers would have felt had Canada or Mexico joined the Warsaw Pact and NATO has been a useful foil for Russian President Vladimir Putin, helping him justify his revanchist foreign policy.

As this all suggests, there are significant drawbacks to NATO's continuing existence.]

---

Doesn't the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrate that oldest Russian desires for empire are alive and well?

---

No, not really. Russia's position isn't what it was during the time of the czars or the empire. It's not even what it was during the Cold War, when their forces were massed across from NATO with clear paths of attack. To say Russia will always do such-and-such because that's what they did centuries ago is meaningless. It's just another way of saying you don't like or trust Russia.

The explanation for the Ukraine war is in recent history, and it's all too obvious. They're doing what any great power would do in their situation.

---

They literally ****ing did it 16 months ago and you're in here saying they're not in the same position. My good man, you're a special kind of special

---

We should get Sam to point to a time in history of the last 500 years when Russia was NOT playing the expansion game to secure strategic depth as a way to compensate for indefensible borders, insofar as their budgets allowed.

---

It would be more accurate to say Russia and western Europe have been in competition for most of that time. Of course we know seeking strategic depth is only imperialistic when the Russians do it.

---

There is one difference that you always overlook. NATO and the EU are voluntary organizations that nations can leave at their own desire. Russia, not so much. Unless, you are strong enough to cause them pain, see agreements with China. China can come and go as they see fit. The Stans, no.

---

The -stans and the rest of the Soviet republics all left Russia in 1991. The Baltics and most of the Warsaw Pact countries joined NATO and the EU as well.

---

Yeah, free... Didn't same thing happen with Russia pulling the same thing in Kazakhstan that they are defending the "ethnic-Russians"? Sort of a trial run before Ukraine?

---

Russia was defending the legitimate government of Kazakhstan, which has been a close ally despite their differences. What would you have done?

---

Of course, legitimate Govt. Is there anything Russia does that you disagree with?

---

It's uncanny. The US is hegemonic, but Russia is protecting "legitimate governments".

---

I said it was legitimate, not Democratic.

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

trey3216 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

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?

---

Why does Russia have to be a threat for NATO to add nations that are like minded, want to join the EU and want freedom that security brings? Is Russia being a threat the only reason NATO can add? Or a nation that wants t o join NATO can join?

---

What common values and "like mindedness" do you think Britain, France, Albania, Canada, Romania, Portugal, Croatia, Turkey, Estonia, Greece, and the USA have?

The "liked mindedness" idea becomes even more hilarious when you look at the government of Turkey and its neo-Ottoman/semi-Islamist autocratic leader Erdogan and the post-national liberal governments of places like Canada.

---

And what was Turkey's Government like when they joined? Turkey is also a top 20ish economy and very Capitalist. Even if not, what is wrong with joining for security? You know the real world is not just meet all three or NO.

---

In 1952 Turkey had a Kemalist government (same type of guys who mass murdered the Christian Armenians and Assyrian Christians during world war I)

Also committed the anti-Greek Christian pogroms that destroyed the native Greeks of Istanbul who had been there since the time of Constantine the great.


[In 67 September 1955 an anti-Greek pogrom was orchestrated in Istanbul by the Turkish military's Tactical Mobilization Group. The events were triggered by the news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, north Greece the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatrk was born in 1881 had been bombed the day before. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher of the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press conveying the news in Turkey was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb. Over a dozen people died during or after the pogrom as a result of beatings and arson. Jews, Armenians and others were also harmed. In addition to commercial targets, the mob clearly targeted property owned or administered by the Greek Orthodox Church. 73 churches and 23 schools were vandalized, burned or destroyed, as were 8 asperses and 3 monasteries.

The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, and the Istanbul region in particular. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 persons in 1927, to about 7,000 by 1978. In Istanbul alone, the Greek population decreased from 65,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960.]

---

So Turkey should be out. The Baltics? Out. Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czech, Eastern Part of Germany, Australia, Romania... Basically, all of NATO should be disbanded and the US maybe pay reparations to most of the world while we are at it? How about adding Texas, NM, AZ and CA to give back to Mexico? Would giving AK to the Russians make up for all the harm we have done? HI needs to be reverted to a Kingdom, throw in the 7th Fleet to make up. That cover it? I am sure if you think about it there is someone else the US has harmed that we can pay. Maybe just dissolve the US. Would that suffice?


There is absolutely NOT ONE THING that NATO and US has done well according to you guys.

---

Well of course that is a lie and no one on this thread ever said that.

NATO was a necessary military alliance to stop the spread of Communism and the massive socialist empire called the USSR. The communists being backed up by the Red Army that had 400 division stationed in Europe, 25,000 tanks, and 45,000 nukes. Along with 8 other Warsaw pact countries under communist rule with their armies.

The USSR and the Warsaw pact are now long long gone.

https://www.foreignexchanges.news/p/nato-has-outlived-its-usefulness
[In many ways, NATO was wildly successful in its time. But that time is over, and now it should be dismantled...

The decision to keep NATO operating after the Cold War ensured that it functioned as support for the US hegemon. During the Cold War, as NATO's website proudly affirms, the organization's "forces were not involved in a single military engagement." Instead, to borrow the historian Walter LaFeber's phrasing, NATO was mainly used "as a means to deal with more immediate problems [than a Soviet invasion]the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the West, the easing of Franco-German hatreds, the anchoring of a Great Britain tossed between continental and Atlantic-Commonwealth interests," and other intra-North Atlantic concerns. It was primarily a tool of integration.

But once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO rapidly became an arm of the US Empire. Or as NATO's website benignly puts it, with "changing conditions came new responsibilities. From being an exclusively defensive alliance for nearly half a century, NATO began to assume an increasingly proactive role within the international community." It participated in the Gulf War; the conflicts that rent the former Yugoslavia; the War on Terror; the Afghanistan War; and the Iraq War, to name only a few of its contributions. Indeed, by early 2021, NATO was partaking in operations in Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Mediterranean, Africa, and elsewhere.

The alliance has also grown to thirty members, and now includes many nations that were once in the Soviet sphere of influence, like Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. Unsurprisingly, the organization's wanton expansion into Eastern Europe has provoked Russia imagine how US decision-makers would have felt had Canada or Mexico joined the Warsaw Pact and NATO has been a useful foil for Russian President Vladimir Putin, helping him justify his revanchist foreign policy.

As this all suggests, there are significant drawbacks to NATO's continuing existence.]

---

Doesn't the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrate that oldest Russian desires for empire are alive and well?

---

No, not really. Russia's position isn't what it was during the time of the czars or the empire. It's not even what it was during the Cold War, when their forces were massed across from NATO with clear paths of attack. To say Russia will always do such-and-such because that's what they did centuries ago is meaningless. It's just another way of saying you don't like or trust Russia.

The explanation for the Ukraine war is in recent history, and it's all too obvious. They're doing what any great power would do in their situation.

---

They literally ****ing did it 16 months ago and you're in here saying they're not in the same position. My good man, you're a special kind of special

---

We should get Sam to point to a time in history of the last 500 years when Russia was NOT playing the expansion game to secure strategic depth as a way to compensate for indefensible borders, insofar as their budgets allowed.

---

It would be more accurate to say Russia and western Europe have been in competition for most of that time. Of course we know seeking strategic depth is only imperialistic when the Russians do it.

---

There is one difference that you always overlook. NATO and the EU are voluntary organizations that nations can leave at their own desire. Russia, not so much. Unless, you are strong enough to cause them pain, see agreements with China. China can come and go as they see fit. The Stans, no.

---

The -stans and the rest of the Soviet republics all left Russia in 1991. The Baltics and most of the Warsaw Pact countries joined NATO and the EU as well.

---

Yeah, free... Didn't same thing happen with Russia pulling the same thing in Kazakhstan that they are defending the "ethnic-Russians"? Sort of a trial run before Ukraine?

---

Russia was defending the legitimate government of Kazakhstan, which has been a close ally despite their differences. What would you have done?

---

Of course, legitimate Govt. Is there anything Russia does that you disagree with?

---

Sure. Is there anything you disagree with that doesn't necessitate risking WW3?

---

Do you understand that sometimes the bully on the block needs to be punched in the face. And if he's not punching you, that it's actually ok for a friend or two to teach the punchee how to punch back?

trey3216 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

trey3216 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

You think there is more reason to expand NATO into the east today than in 1990? %A0What?

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

---

Why does Russia have to be a threat for NATO to add nations that are like minded, want to join the EU and want freedom that security brings? %A0Is Russia being a threat the only reason NATO can add? %A0Or a nation that wants t o join NATO can join? %A0

---

What common values and "like mindedness" do you think Britain, France, Albania, Canada, Romania, Portugal, Croatia, Turkey, Estonia, Greece, and the USA have?

The "liked mindedness" idea becomes even more hilarious when you look at the government of Turkey and its neo-Ottoman/semi-Islamist autocratic leader Erdogan and the post-national liberal governments of places like Canada.

---

And what was Turkey's Government like when they joined? Turkey is also a top 20ish economy and very Capitalist. %A0Even if not, what is wrong with joining for security? %A0You know the real world is not just meet all three or NO.

---

In 1952 Turkey had a Kemalist government (same type of guys who mass murdered the Christian Armenians and Assyrian Christians during world war I)

Also committed the anti-Greek Christian pogroms that destroyed the native Greeks of Istanbul who had been there since the time of Constantine the great.


[In 67 September 1955 an anti-Greek pogrom was orchestrated in Istanbul by the Turkish military's Tactical Mobilization Group. The events were triggered by the news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, north Greece the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatrk was born in 1881 had been bombed the day before. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher of the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press conveying the news in Turkey was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb. Over a dozen people died during or after the pogrom as a result of beatings and arson. Jews, Armenians and others were also harmed. In addition to commercial targets, the mob clearly targeted property owned or administered by the Greek Orthodox Church. 73 churches and 23 schools were vandalized, burned or destroyed, as were 8 asperses and 3 monasteries.

The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, and the Istanbul region in particular. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 persons in 1927, to about 7,000 by 1978. In Istanbul alone, the Greek population decreased from 65,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960.]

---

So Turkey should be out. %A0The Baltics? %A0Out. %A0Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czech, Eastern Part of Germany, Australia, Romania... Basically, all of NATO should be disbanded and the US maybe pay reparations to most of the world while we are at it? %A0How about adding Texas, NM, AZ and CA to give back to Mexico? %A0Would giving AK to the Russians make up for all the harm we have done? HI needs to be reverted to a Kingdom, throw in the 7th Fleet to make up. %A0That cover it? %A0I am sure if you think about it there is someone else the US has harmed that we can pay. %A0Maybe just dissolve the US. %A0Would that suffice? %A0


There is absolutely NOT ONE THING that NATO and US has done well %A0according to you guys. %A0

---

Well of course that is a lie and no one on this thread ever said that.

NATO was a necessary military alliance to stop the spread of Communism and the massive socialist empire called the USSR. %A0The communists being backed up by the Red Army that had 400 division stationed in Europe, 25,000 tanks, and 45,000 nukes. %A0Along with 8 other Warsaw pact countries under communist rule with their armies.

The USSR and the Warsaw pact are now long long gone.

https://www.foreignexchanges.news/p/nato-has-outlived-its-usefulness
[In many ways, NATO was wildly successful in its time. But that time is over, and now it should be dismantled...

The decision to keep NATO operating after the Cold War ensured that it functioned as support for the US hegemon. During the Cold War, as NATO's website proudly affirms, the organization's "forces were not involved in a single military engagement." Instead, to borrow the historian Walter LaFeber's phrasing, NATO was mainly used "as a means to deal with more immediate problems [than a Soviet invasion]the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the West, the easing of Franco-German hatreds, the anchoring of a Great Britain tossed between continental and Atlantic-Commonwealth interests," and other intra-North Atlantic concerns. It was primarily a tool of integration.

But once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO rapidly became an arm of the US Empire. Or as NATO's website benignly puts it, with "changing conditions came new responsibilities. From being an exclusively defensive alliance for nearly half a century, NATO began to assume an increasingly proactive role within the international community." It participated in the Gulf War; the conflicts that rent the former Yugoslavia; the War on Terror; the Afghanistan War; and the Iraq War, to name only a few of its contributions. Indeed, by early 2021, NATO was partaking in operations in Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Mediterranean, Africa, and elsewhere.

The alliance has also grown to thirty members, and now includes many nations that were once in the Soviet sphere of influence, like Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. Unsurprisingly, the organization's wanton expansion into Eastern Europe has provoked Russia imagine how US decision-makers would have felt had Canada or Mexico joined the Warsaw Pact and NATO has been a useful foil for Russian President Vladimir Putin, helping him justify his revanchist foreign policy.

As this all suggests, there are significant drawbacks to NATO's continuing existence.]

---

Doesn't the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrate that oldest Russian desires for empire are alive and well?

---

No, not really. Russia's position isn't what it was during the time of the czars or the empire. It's not even what it was during the Cold War, when their forces were massed across from NATO with clear paths of attack. To say Russia will always do such-and-such because that's what they did centuries ago is meaningless. It's just another way of saying you don't like or trust Russia.

The explanation for the Ukraine war is in recent history, and it's all too obvious. They're doing what any great power would do in their situation.

---

They literally ****ing did it 16 months ago and you're in here saying they're not in the same position. %A0 My good man, you're a special kind of special

---

We should get Sam to point to a time in history of the last 500 years when Russia was NOT playing the expansion game to secure strategic depth as a way to compensate for indefensible borders, insofar as their budgets allowed.

---

It would be more accurate to say Russia and western Europe have been in competition for most of that time. Of course we know seeking strategic depth is only imperialistic when the Russians do it.

---

There is one difference that you always overlook. %A0NATO and the EU are voluntary organizations that nations can leave at their own desire. %A0Russia, not so much. %A0Unless, you are strong enough to cause them pain, see agreements with China. %A0China can come and go as they see fit. %A0The Stans, no.

---

The -stans and the rest of the Soviet republics all left Russia in 1991. The Baltics and most of the Warsaw Pact countries joined NATO and the EU as well.

---

The -Stans are in terrible shape thanks to significant Russian meddling with little economic depth to pull themselves out from under the thumb. %A0But they've helped make Putin and his Oligarch friends very wealthy with their natural resources. %A0

---

It's a bit more complicated than that. Russia has brought at least some stability to a region where it's often in short supply. Who else wants to mediate between Armenia and Azerbaijan? Could we do a better job? History certainly suggests otherwise.

---

There is no mediation. The existence of conflict is what keeps Russia relevant. That's their MO across their spheres. Russia isn't strong enough to manage strong states, so they help keep them in a state of instability so they can be handled. They were consistently doing that in Ukraine until they had some traction with EU membership. Then force was required.

---

Russia isn't strong enough to manage the situation because, as usual, we're lavishing military aid on one side of the conflict with no regard for the consequences beyond weakening Russia. At least they spared the Armenians another round of genocide, which is more than we were willing or able to do.

---

Jesus. Your constant lauding of everything Russia and damning everything USA makes me want to pay for your new passport.

---

As if my failure to display the "stand with Ukraine" avatar and name my dog Ze weren't enough.

trey3216 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

trey3216 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

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?

---

Why does Russia have to be a threat for NATO to add nations that are like minded, want to join the EU and want freedom that security brings? Is Russia being a threat the only reason NATO can add? Or a nation that wants t o join NATO can join?

---

What common values and "like mindedness" do you think Britain, France, Albania, Canada, Romania, Portugal, Croatia, Turkey, Estonia, Greece, and the USA have?

The "liked mindedness" idea becomes even more hilarious when you look at the government of Turkey and its neo-Ottoman/semi-Islamist autocratic leader Erdogan and the post-national liberal governments of places like Canada.

---

And what was Turkey's Government like when they joined? Turkey is also a top 20ish economy and very Capitalist. Even if not, what is wrong with joining for security? You know the real world is not just meet all three or NO.

---

In 1952 Turkey had a Kemalist government (same type of guys who mass murdered the Christian Armenians and Assyrian Christians during world war I)

Also committed the anti-Greek Christian pogroms that destroyed the native Greeks of Istanbul who had been there since the time of Constantine the great.


[In 67 September 1955 an anti-Greek pogrom was orchestrated in Istanbul by the Turkish military's Tactical Mobilization Group. The events were triggered by the news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, north Greece the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatrk was born in 1881 had been bombed the day before. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher of the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press conveying the news in Turkey was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb. Over a dozen people died during or after the pogrom as a result of beatings and arson. Jews, Armenians and others were also harmed. In addition to commercial targets, the mob clearly targeted property owned or administered by the Greek Orthodox Church. 73 churches and 23 schools were vandalized, burned or destroyed, as were 8 asperses and 3 monasteries.

The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, and the Istanbul region in particular. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 persons in 1927, to about 7,000 by 1978. In Istanbul alone, the Greek population decreased from 65,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960.]

---

So Turkey should be out. The Baltics? Out. Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czech, Eastern Part of Germany, Australia, Romania... Basically, all of NATO should be disbanded and the US maybe pay reparations to most of the world while we are at it? How about adding Texas, NM, AZ and CA to give back to Mexico? Would giving AK to the Russians make up for all the harm we have done? HI needs to be reverted to a Kingdom, throw in the 7th Fleet to make up. That cover it? I am sure if you think about it there is someone else the US has harmed that we can pay. Maybe just dissolve the US. Would that suffice?


There is absolutely NOT ONE THING that NATO and US has done well according to you guys.

---

Well of course that is a lie and no one on this thread ever said that.

NATO was a necessary military alliance to stop the spread of Communism and the massive socialist empire called the USSR. The communists being backed up by the Red Army that had 400 division stationed in Europe, 25,000 tanks, and 45,000 nukes. Along with 8 other Warsaw pact countries under communist rule with their armies.

The USSR and the Warsaw pact are now long long gone.

https://www.foreignexchanges.news/p/nato-has-outlived-its-usefulness
[In many ways, NATO was wildly successful in its time. But that time is over, and now it should be dismantled...

The decision to keep NATO operating after the Cold War ensured that it functioned as support for the US hegemon. During the Cold War, as NATO's website proudly affirms, the organization's "forces were not involved in a single military engagement." Instead, to borrow the historian Walter LaFeber's phrasing, NATO was mainly used "as a means to deal with more immediate problems [than a Soviet invasion]the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the West, the easing of Franco-German hatreds, the anchoring of a Great Britain tossed between continental and Atlantic-Commonwealth interests," and other intra-North Atlantic concerns. It was primarily a tool of integration.

But once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO rapidly became an arm of the US Empire. Or as NATO's website benignly puts it, with "changing conditions came new responsibilities. From being an exclusively defensive alliance for nearly half a century, NATO began to assume an increasingly proactive role within the international community." It participated in the Gulf War; the conflicts that rent the former Yugoslavia; the War on Terror; the Afghanistan War; and the Iraq War, to name only a few of its contributions. Indeed, by early 2021, NATO was partaking in operations in Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Mediterranean, Africa, and elsewhere.

The alliance has also grown to thirty members, and now includes many nations that were once in the Soviet sphere of influence, like Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. Unsurprisingly, the organization's wanton expansion into Eastern Europe has provoked Russia imagine how US decision-makers would have felt had Canada or Mexico joined the Warsaw Pact and NATO has been a useful foil for Russian President Vladimir Putin, helping him justify his revanchist foreign policy.

As this all suggests, there are significant drawbacks to NATO's continuing existence.]

---

Doesn't the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrate that oldest Russian desires for empire are alive and well?

---

No, not really. Russia's position isn't what it was during the time of the czars or the empire. It's not even what it was during the Cold War, when their forces were massed across from NATO with clear paths of attack. To say Russia will always do such-and-such because that's what they did centuries ago is meaningless. It's just another way of saying you don't like or trust Russia.

The explanation for the Ukraine war is in recent history, and it's all too obvious. They're doing what any great power would do in their situation.

---

They literally ****ing did it 16 months ago and you're in here saying they're not in the same position. My good man, you're a special kind of special

---

We should get Sam to point to a time in history of the last 500 years when Russia was NOT playing the expansion game to secure strategic depth as a way to compensate for indefensible borders, insofar as their budgets allowed.

---

It would be more accurate to say Russia and western Europe have been in competition for most of that time. Of course we know seeking strategic depth is only imperialistic when the Russians do it.

---

There is one difference that you always overlook. NATO and the EU are voluntary organizations that nations can leave at their own desire. Russia, not so much. Unless, you are strong enough to cause them pain, see agreements with China. China can come and go as they see fit. The Stans, no.

---

The -stans and the rest of the Soviet republics all left Russia in 1991. The Baltics and most of the Warsaw Pact countries joined NATO and the EU as well.

---

Yeah, free... Didn't same thing happen with Russia pulling the same thing in Kazakhstan that they are defending the "ethnic-Russians"? Sort of a trial run before Ukraine?

---

Russia was defending the legitimate government of Kazakhstan, which has been a close ally despite their differences. What would you have done?

---

Of course, legitimate Govt. Is there anything Russia does that you disagree with?

---

Sure. Is there anything you disagree with that doesn't necessitate risking WW3?

---

Do you understand that sometimes the bully on the block needs to be punched in the face. And if he's not punching you, that it's actually ok for a friend or two to teach the punchee how to punch back?

---

Nuclear war is a lot more than a punch in the face

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

trey3216 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

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?

---

Why does Russia have to be a threat for NATO to add nations that are like minded, want to join the EU and want freedom that security brings? Is Russia being a threat the only reason NATO can add? Or a nation that wants t o join NATO can join?

---

What common values and "like mindedness" do you think Britain, France, Albania, Canada, Romania, Portugal, Croatia, Turkey, Estonia, Greece, and the USA have?

The "liked mindedness" idea becomes even more hilarious when you look at the government of Turkey and its neo-Ottoman/semi-Islamist autocratic leader Erdogan and the post-national liberal governments of places like Canada.

---

And what was Turkey's Government like when they joined? Turkey is also a top 20ish economy and very Capitalist. Even if not, what is wrong with joining for security? You know the real world is not just meet all three or NO.

---

In 1952 Turkey had a Kemalist government (same type of guys who mass murdered the Christian Armenians and Assyrian Christians during world war I)

Also committed the anti-Greek Christian pogroms that destroyed the native Greeks of Istanbul who had been there since the time of Constantine the great.


[In 67 September 1955 an anti-Greek pogrom was orchestrated in Istanbul by the Turkish military's Tactical Mobilization Group. The events were triggered by the news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, north Greece the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatrk was born in 1881 had been bombed the day before. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher of the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press conveying the news in Turkey was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb. Over a dozen people died during or after the pogrom as a result of beatings and arson. Jews, Armenians and others were also harmed. In addition to commercial targets, the mob clearly targeted property owned or administered by the Greek Orthodox Church. 73 churches and 23 schools were vandalized, burned or destroyed, as were 8 asperses and 3 monasteries.

The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, and the Istanbul region in particular. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 persons in 1927, to about 7,000 by 1978. In Istanbul alone, the Greek population decreased from 65,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960.]

---

So Turkey should be out. The Baltics? Out. Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czech, Eastern Part of Germany, Australia, Romania... Basically, all of NATO should be disbanded and the US maybe pay reparations to most of the world while we are at it? How about adding Texas, NM, AZ and CA to give back to Mexico? Would giving AK to the Russians make up for all the harm we have done? HI needs to be reverted to a Kingdom, throw in the 7th Fleet to make up. That cover it? I am sure if you think about it there is someone else the US has harmed that we can pay. Maybe just dissolve the US. Would that suffice?


There is absolutely NOT ONE THING that NATO and US has done well according to you guys.

---

Well of course that is a lie and no one on this thread ever said that.

NATO was a necessary military alliance to stop the spread of Communism and the massive socialist empire called the USSR. The communists being backed up by the Red Army that had 400 division stationed in Europe, 25,000 tanks, and 45,000 nukes. Along with 8 other Warsaw pact countries under communist rule with their armies.

The USSR and the Warsaw pact are now long long gone.

https://www.foreignexchanges.news/p/nato-has-outlived-its-usefulness
[In many ways, NATO was wildly successful in its time. But that time is over, and now it should be dismantled...

The decision to keep NATO operating after the Cold War ensured that it functioned as support for the US hegemon. During the Cold War, as NATO's website proudly affirms, the organization's "forces were not involved in a single military engagement." Instead, to borrow the historian Walter LaFeber's phrasing, NATO was mainly used "as a means to deal with more immediate problems [than a Soviet invasion]the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the West, the easing of Franco-German hatreds, the anchoring of a Great Britain tossed between continental and Atlantic-Commonwealth interests," and other intra-North Atlantic concerns. It was primarily a tool of integration.

But once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO rapidly became an arm of the US Empire. Or as NATO's website benignly puts it, with "changing conditions came new responsibilities. From being an exclusively defensive alliance for nearly half a century, NATO began to assume an increasingly proactive role within the international community." It participated in the Gulf War; the conflicts that rent the former Yugoslavia; the War on Terror; the Afghanistan War; and the Iraq War, to name only a few of its contributions. Indeed, by early 2021, NATO was partaking in operations in Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Mediterranean, Africa, and elsewhere.

The alliance has also grown to thirty members, and now includes many nations that were once in the Soviet sphere of influence, like Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. Unsurprisingly, the organization's wanton expansion into Eastern Europe has provoked Russia imagine how US decision-makers would have felt had Canada or Mexico joined the Warsaw Pact and NATO has been a useful foil for Russian President Vladimir Putin, helping him justify his revanchist foreign policy.

As this all suggests, there are significant drawbacks to NATO's continuing existence.]

---

Doesn't the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrate that oldest Russian desires for empire are alive and well?

---

No, not really. Russia's position isn't what it was during the time of the czars or the empire. It's not even what it was during the Cold War, when their forces were massed across from NATO with clear paths of attack. To say Russia will always do such-and-such because that's what they did centuries ago is meaningless. It's just another way of saying you don't like or trust Russia.

The explanation for the Ukraine war is in recent history, and it's all too obvious. They're doing what any great power would do in their situation.

---

They literally ****ing did it 16 months ago and you're in here saying they're not in the same position. My good man, you're a special kind of special

---

We should get Sam to point to a time in history of the last 500 years when Russia was NOT playing the expansion game to secure strategic depth as a way to compensate for indefensible borders, insofar as their budgets allowed.

---

It would be more accurate to say Russia and western Europe have been in competition for most of that time. Of course we know seeking strategic depth is only imperialistic when the Russians do it.

---

There is one difference that you always overlook. NATO and the EU are voluntary organizations that nations can leave at their own desire. Russia, not so much. Unless, you are strong enough to cause them pain, see agreements with China. China can come and go as they see fit. The Stans, no.

---

The -stans and the rest of the Soviet republics all left Russia in 1991. The Baltics and most of the Warsaw Pact countries joined NATO and the EU as well.

---

Yeah, free... Didn't same thing happen with Russia pulling the same thing in Kazakhstan that they are defending the "ethnic-Russians"? Sort of a trial run before Ukraine?

---

Russia was defending the legitimate government of Kazakhstan, which has been a close ally despite their differences. What would you have done?

---

Of course, legitimate Govt. Is there anything Russia does that you disagree with?

---

It's uncanny. The US is hegemonic, but Russia is protecting "legitimate governments".

---

I said it was legitimate, not Democratic.

---

Form of government is irrelevant. Your disdain of US hegemony and championing of Russian is the oddity many of us see.

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

trey3216 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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RMF5630 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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RMF5630 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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You think there is more reason to expand NATO into the east today than in 1990? %A0What?

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

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Why does Russia have to be a threat for NATO to add nations that are like minded, want to join the EU and want freedom that security brings? %A0Is Russia being a threat the only reason NATO can add? %A0Or a nation that wants t o join NATO can join? %A0

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What common values and "like mindedness" do you think Britain, France, Albania, Canada, Romania, Portugal, Croatia, Turkey, Estonia, Greece, and the USA have?

The "liked mindedness" idea becomes even more hilarious when you look at the government of Turkey and its neo-Ottoman/semi-Islamist autocratic leader Erdogan and the post-national liberal governments of places like Canada.

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And what was Turkey's Government like when they joined? Turkey is also a top 20ish economy and very Capitalist. %A0Even if not, what is wrong with joining for security? %A0You know the real world is not just meet all three or NO.

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In 1952 Turkey had a Kemalist government (same type of guys who mass murdered the Christian Armenians and Assyrian Christians during world war I)

Also committed the anti-Greek Christian pogroms that destroyed the native Greeks of Istanbul who had been there since the time of Constantine the great.


[In 67 September 1955 an anti-Greek pogrom was orchestrated in Istanbul by the Turkish military's Tactical Mobilization Group. The events were triggered by the news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, north Greece the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatrk was born in 1881 had been bombed the day before. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher of the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press conveying the news in Turkey was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb. Over a dozen people died during or after the pogrom as a result of beatings and arson. Jews, Armenians and others were also harmed. In addition to commercial targets, the mob clearly targeted property owned or administered by the Greek Orthodox Church. 73 churches and 23 schools were vandalized, burned or destroyed, as were 8 asperses and 3 monasteries.

The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, and the Istanbul region in particular. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 persons in 1927, to about 7,000 by 1978. In Istanbul alone, the Greek population decreased from 65,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960.]

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So Turkey should be out. %A0The Baltics? %A0Out. %A0Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czech, Eastern Part of Germany, Australia, Romania... Basically, all of NATO should be disbanded and the US maybe pay reparations to most of the world while we are at it? %A0How about adding Texas, NM, AZ and CA to give back to Mexico? %A0Would giving AK to the Russians make up for all the harm we have done? HI needs to be reverted to a Kingdom, throw in the 7th Fleet to make up. %A0That cover it? %A0I am sure if you think about it there is someone else the US has harmed that we can pay. %A0Maybe just dissolve the US. %A0Would that suffice? %A0


There is absolutely NOT ONE THING that NATO and US has done well %A0according to you guys. %A0

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Well of course that is a lie and no one on this thread ever said that.

NATO was a necessary military alliance to stop the spread of Communism and the massive socialist empire called the USSR. %A0The communists being backed up by the Red Army that had 400 division stationed in Europe, 25,000 tanks, and 45,000 nukes. %A0Along with 8 other Warsaw pact countries under communist rule with their armies.

The USSR and the Warsaw pact are now long long gone.

https://www.foreignexchanges.news/p/nato-has-outlived-its-usefulness
[In many ways, NATO was wildly successful in its time. But that time is over, and now it should be dismantled...

The decision to keep NATO operating after the Cold War ensured that it functioned as support for the US hegemon. During the Cold War, as NATO's website proudly affirms, the organization's "forces were not involved in a single military engagement." Instead, to borrow the historian Walter LaFeber's phrasing, NATO was mainly used "as a means to deal with more immediate problems [than a Soviet invasion]the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the West, the easing of Franco-German hatreds, the anchoring of a Great Britain tossed between continental and Atlantic-Commonwealth interests," and other intra-North Atlantic concerns. It was primarily a tool of integration.

But once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO rapidly became an arm of the US Empire. Or as NATO's website benignly puts it, with "changing conditions came new responsibilities. From being an exclusively defensive alliance for nearly half a century, NATO began to assume an increasingly proactive role within the international community." It participated in the Gulf War; the conflicts that rent the former Yugoslavia; the War on Terror; the Afghanistan War; and the Iraq War, to name only a few of its contributions. Indeed, by early 2021, NATO was partaking in operations in Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Mediterranean, Africa, and elsewhere.

The alliance has also grown to thirty members, and now includes many nations that were once in the Soviet sphere of influence, like Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. Unsurprisingly, the organization's wanton expansion into Eastern Europe has provoked Russia imagine how US decision-makers would have felt had Canada or Mexico joined the Warsaw Pact and NATO has been a useful foil for Russian President Vladimir Putin, helping him justify his revanchist foreign policy.

As this all suggests, there are significant drawbacks to NATO's continuing existence.]

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Doesn't the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrate that oldest Russian desires for empire are alive and well?

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No, not really. Russia's position isn't what it was during the time of the czars or the empire. It's not even what it was during the Cold War, when their forces were massed across from NATO with clear paths of attack. To say Russia will always do such-and-such because that's what they did centuries ago is meaningless. It's just another way of saying you don't like or trust Russia.

The explanation for the Ukraine war is in recent history, and it's all too obvious. They're doing what any great power would do in their situation.

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They literally ****ing did it 16 months ago and you're in here saying they're not in the same position. %A0 My good man, you're a special kind of special

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We should get Sam to point to a time in history of the last 500 years when Russia was NOT playing the expansion game to secure strategic depth as a way to compensate for indefensible borders, insofar as their budgets allowed.

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It would be more accurate to say Russia and western Europe have been in competition for most of that time. Of course we know seeking strategic depth is only imperialistic when the Russians do it.

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There is one difference that you always overlook. %A0NATO and the EU are voluntary organizations that nations can leave at their own desire. %A0Russia, not so much. %A0Unless, you are strong enough to cause them pain, see agreements with China. %A0China can come and go as they see fit. %A0The Stans, no.

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The -stans and the rest of the Soviet republics all left Russia in 1991. The Baltics and most of the Warsaw Pact countries joined NATO and the EU as well.

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The -Stans are in terrible shape thanks to significant Russian meddling with little economic depth to pull themselves out from under the thumb. %A0But they've helped make Putin and his Oligarch friends very wealthy with their natural resources. %A0

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It's a bit more complicated than that. Russia has brought at least some stability to a region where it's often in short supply. Who else wants to mediate between Armenia and Azerbaijan? Could we do a better job? History certainly suggests otherwise.

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There is no mediation. The existence of conflict is what keeps Russia relevant. That's their MO across their spheres. Russia isn't strong enough to manage strong states, so they help keep them in a state of instability so they can be handled. They were consistently doing that in Ukraine until they had some traction with EU membership. Then force was required.

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Russia isn't strong enough to manage the situation because, as usual, we're lavishing military aid on one side of the conflict with no regard for the consequences beyond weakening Russia. At least they spared the Armenians another round of genocide, which is more than we were willing or able to do.

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Weird take. Check Georgia, Moldova, Kazakstan, and Azerbaijan. We're doing nothing militarily in any of those but Russia is/has exerted quite a bit of discord and military control.

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It's Azerbaijan that I was referring to. Already addressed Kazakhstan too. Moldova was a constitutional republic last time I checked. As for Georgia, they've done rather well in terms of prosperity and democratic progress since Russia withdrew from the disputed territories (all of which is difficult to explain under the theory that Russia is bent on the destruction of all things free).