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?

---

ATL Bear said:

---

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.

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

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.

---

Both Russia and the US expect their zones of security under the post-war order. The big difference is that we're the ones doing the encroaching. Putin's view is closer in that sense to the letter and spirit of NATO.

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

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.

---

Both Russia and the US expect their zones of security under the post-war order. The big difference is that we're the ones doing the encroaching. Putin's view is closer in that sense to the letter and spirit of NATO.

---

Russia's encroachment in Ukraine is the issue. Something that's happened for 20+ years.

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

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.

---

Both Russia and the US expect their zones of security under the post-war order. The big difference is that we're the ones doing the encroaching. Putin's view is closer in that sense to the letter and spirit of NATO.

---

Russia's encroachment in Ukraine is the issue. Something that's happened for 20+ years.

---

Ukraine is their neighborhood. When they get a foothold in Mexico, let's talk about Russian encroachment (assuming there's time to talk before American tanks start rolling).

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

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.

---

Both Russia and the US expect their zones of security under the post-war order. The big difference is that we're the ones doing the encroaching. Putin's view is closer in that sense to the letter and spirit of NATO.

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

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.

---

Both Russia and the US expect their zones of security under the post-war order. The big difference is that we're the ones doing the encroaching. Putin's view is closer in that sense to the letter and spirit of NATO.

---

Russia's encroachment in Ukraine is the issue. Something that's happened for 20+ years.

---

Ukraine is their neighborhood. When they get a foothold in Mexico, let's talk about Russian encroachment (assuming there's time to talk before American tanks start rolling).

---

Maybe consider what the world would think and how they'd react if we rolled tanks into Mexico. Lots of non neighbors of Mexico would be interested.

---

trey3216 said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock 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?

---

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.

---

Red. We did not do any of that. A civil war did. A directly engaged Russian artillery corps assisting the local government actually did 99% of it. We did not snap our fingers to cause the civil war. We participated with allies in the region (who actually came up with the idea). If conditions were not ripe for the civil war, it would have fizzled like the Bay of Pigs. So it's not like we have Svengali mind-control over the players in these conflicts and generate & perpetuate them at will.

I mean, geez. Here's your argument in a nutshell: Russia invades Ukraine? It's our fault for not having given Ukraine to them in the first place. Ukraine, surprisingly, hands the Russian army pieces of its own anatomy?. We are incredibly irresponsible for arming the Ukrainians to imbue them with the pipedream they can win. Russia retreats from it's northern axis and redeploys to a long campaign of attrition warfare in the South, even bringing in THE SAME RUSSIAN GENERAL WHO CREATED THAT PICTURE YOU POSTED to command the effort, and they do a lot of destruction, but capture effectively zero new ground? It's all our fault for not forcing the Ukrainians to negotiate. Then the Ukrainians launch a counteroffensive which rolls back a substantial portion of Russian controlled territory in the east? It's our fault for escalating dangerously by providing HIMARS. Then, Russia launches a winter offensive, which stalls at the first encountered villages and descends into mindless human wave attacks that indeed flatten a lot more real estate but also decimate the Russian Army? That is our fault, of course, because, well, we're an empire and should be forcing this thing to peace on Russian terms immediately.

Then the argument diverts to allegations of empire elsewhere, like Syria. Even though we've never invaded anyone for conquest, and never invaded Syria to control them or force regime change, or even a punitive raid (all of which would be reasonable, given their history). All we've ever done is sanction them for use of terrorism as an instrument of state policy, and occasionally launch the pro forma barrage of Tomahawks at carefully selected govt. buildings when we catch them red-handed at something truly barbaric against us. When Arab neighbors come up with the idea of a civil war, and we support it? Of course that only proves we are an evil pseudo-terroristic war machine ourselves. Then, when the Syrian regime brings in the Russians, who apply to Aleppo what would later been seen in Mariupol - massed cannonade against a civilian population? Yes, of course that is our fault too. (because, see, we're an evil empire.)

At no point do you allow agency for anyone else in the world to be responsible for any piece of the various messes made BY OTHERS in the world. It's always the fault of USA empire building (even though not only are we not now nor have ever been an empire by any classical understanding of the word, but have actually been a constant force for delivery of oppressed peoples into democracy over and over and over.....).

This is a pathological line of emotive reasoning you're on here.

---

He's still vehemently angry at the US for stamping out the CSA

---

ron.reagan said:

---

Are you about to break out your confederate flag themed family crest?

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

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.

---

Both Russia and the US expect their zones of security under the post-war order. The big difference is that we're the ones doing the encroaching. Putin's view is closer in that sense to the letter and spirit of NATO.

---

Porteroso said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

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.

---

Both Russia and the US expect their zones of security under the post-war order. The big difference is that we're the ones doing the encroaching. Putin's view is closer in that sense to the letter and spirit of NATO.

---

You have to know how skewed your perspective is when you start saying Russia is acting in the spirit of NATO as it reclaims former Soviet territory.

You have taken the obvious, that the US is not pure good, and run with it across the half court and scored in your own basket. You scored but it doesn't mean what you think it does.

Yes, we are the good guys in protecting Ukraine. Russia is the bad guys. It really is that simple.

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

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.

---

Both Russia and the US expect their zones of security under the post-war order. The big difference is that we're the ones doing the encroaching. Putin's view is closer in that sense to the letter and spirit of NATO.

---

Russia's encroachment in Ukraine is the issue. Something that's happened for 20+ years.

---

Ukraine is their neighborhood. When they get a foothold in Mexico, let's talk about Russian encroachment (assuming there's time to talk before American tanks start rolling).

---

Maybe consider what the world would think and how they'd react if we rolled tanks into Mexico. Lots of non neighbors of Mexico would be interested.

---

If Russia or China helped over throw the government of Mexico and installed a anti-American government…we would indeed roll our tanks into Mexico.

I mean we have invaded it before.

And we helped bring down the Mexican Empire and with it killing Emperor Maximillian.

Oh and took sides against the government of Porfirio Daz. And invaded Mexico again to fight northern rebels like Pancho Villa.

Don't sit there for one second and act like who rules in Mexico City is not of extreme importance to Washington

We would never accept such interference in our sphere of influence.

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

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.

---

Both Russia and the US expect their zones of security under the post-war order. The big difference is that we're the ones doing the encroaching. Putin's view is closer in that sense to the letter and spirit of NATO.

---

Russia's encroachment in Ukraine is the issue. Something that's happened for 20+ years.

---

Ukraine is their neighborhood. When they get a foothold in Mexico, let's talk about Russian encroachment (assuming there's time to talk before American tanks start rolling).

---

Maybe consider what the world would think and how they'd react if we rolled tanks into Mexico. Lots of non neighbors of Mexico would be interested.

---

If Russia or China helped over throw the government of Mexico and installed a anti-American government…we would indeed roll our tanks into Mexico.

I mean we have invaded it before.

And we helped bring down the Mexican Empire and with it killing Emperor Maximillian.

Oh and took sides against the government of Porfirio Daz. And invaded Mexico again to fight northern rebels like Pancho Villa.

Don't sit there for one second and act like who rules in Mexico City is not of extreme importance to Washington

We would never accept such interference in our sphere of influence.

---

Horrible take. The "US coup" of Ukraine is one of the most misused ideas in this whole conflict. And Mexico and/or rebels were literally invading the US in those century old examples you provide.

Our neighbors live in relative peace for a reason, and it isn't because our boot is on their throat. Not so for Russia, and anyone who wants to escape that suffers in a wide range of efforts.

---

Redbrickbear said:

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Porteroso said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

RMF5630 said:

---

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.

---

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.

---

Both Russia and the US expect their zones of security under the post-war order. The big difference is that we're the ones doing the encroaching. Putin's view is closer in that sense to the letter and spirit of NATO.

---

You have to know how skewed your perspective is when you start saying Russia is acting in the spirit of NATO as it reclaims former Soviet territory.

You have taken the obvious, that the US is not pure good, and run with it across the half court and scored in your own basket. You scored but it doesn't mean what you think it does.

Yes, we are the good guys in protecting Ukraine. Russia is the bad guys. It really is that simple.

---

I don't know if it's that simple…well I should say that Russia taking the step of invading a neighbor has simplified it at least in large part. Their actions are a violation of the UN charter and a gross violation of international law.

But we can not just forget that the USA invaded Iraq (it's own violation of international law) and was directly responsible for overthrowing the previous government of Ukraine. Then not being content with a new anti-Moscow government in Kyiv we also encouraged them to make war on the people of Donbas for 8 years.

I still have not heard a good reason why Victoria Nuland and her associates were allowed into the power keg that is Ukraine to start lighting matches.

Now we are in a very dangerous situation were all of NATO could be dragged into a large scale European war…a war that could turn global and catastrophic if China gets involved.

---

ron.reagan said:

---

Congrats on being the first ****** in your ancient family

---

Porteroso said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

Porteroso said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

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.

---

Both Russia and the US expect their zones of security under the post-war order. The big difference is that we're the ones doing the encroaching. Putin's view is closer in that sense to the letter and spirit of NATO.

---

You have to know how skewed your perspective is when you start saying Russia is acting in the spirit of NATO as it reclaims former Soviet territory.

You have taken the obvious, that the US is not pure good, and run with it across the half court and scored in your own basket. You scored but it doesn't mean what you think it does.

Yes, we are the good guys in protecting Ukraine. Russia is the bad guys. It really is that simple.

---

I don't know if it's that simple…well I should say that Russia taking the step of invading a neighbor has simplified it at least in large part. Their actions are a violation of the UN charter and a gross violation of international law.

But we can not just forget that the USA invaded Iraq (it's own violation of international law) and was directly responsible for overthrowing the previous government of Ukraine. Then not being content with a new anti-Moscow government in Kyiv we also encouraged them to make war on the people of Donbas for 8 years.

I still have not heard a good reason why Victoria Nuland and her associates were allowed into the power keg that is Ukraine to start lighting matches.

Now we are in a very dangerous situation were all of NATO could be dragged into a large scale European war…a war that could turn global and catastrophic if China gets involved.

---

Conservatives are bending over backwards on this because they can't stomach the libs being on their side. Just take solace in that fact that if not for the Trump/Russia media narrative, libs would not care one whit for Ukraine, and conservatives could take all the moral high roads as the USA defends freedom.

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

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.

---

Both Russia and the US expect their zones of security under the post-war order. The big difference is that we're the ones doing the encroaching. Putin's view is closer in that sense to the letter and spirit of NATO.

---

Russia's encroachment in Ukraine is the issue. Something that's happened for 20+ years.

---

Ukraine is their neighborhood. When they get a foothold in Mexico, let's talk about Russian encroachment (assuming there's time to talk before American tanks start rolling).

---

Maybe consider what the world would think and how they'd react if we rolled tanks into Mexico. Lots of non neighbors of Mexico would be interested.

---

If Russia or China helped over throw the government of Mexico and installed a anti-American government…we would indeed roll our tanks into Mexico.

I mean we have invaded it before.

And we helped bring down the Mexican Empire and with it killing Emperor Maximillian.

Oh and took sides against the government of Porfirio Daz. And invaded Mexico again to fight northern rebels like Pancho Villa.

Don't sit there for one second and act like who rules in Mexico City is not of extreme importance to Washington

We would never accept such interference in our sphere of influence.

---

Horrible take. The "US coup" of Ukraine is one of the most misused ideas in this whole conflict. And Mexico and/or rebels were literally invading the US in those century old examples you provide.

Our neighbors live in relative peace for a reason, and it isn't because our boot is on their throat. Not so for Russia, and anyone who wants to escape that suffers in a wide range of efforts.

---

I am not making the argument that American intervention in Mexico is wrong. Or that trying to over throw the communist government of Cuba is wrong.

It's vital that the USA have friendly governments in the nations that surround us…extremely vital.

You and others on this thread simply refuse to accept the idea that other large states might feel the same way.

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Porteroso said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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ATL Bear said:

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RMF5630 said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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RMF5630 said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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RMF5630 said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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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?

---

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.

---

Both Russia and the US expect their zones of security under the post-war order. The big difference is that we're the ones doing the encroaching. Putin's view is closer in that sense to the letter and spirit of NATO.

---

You have to know how skewed your perspective is when you start saying Russia is acting in the spirit of NATO as it reclaims former Soviet territory.

You have taken the obvious, that the US is not pure good, and run with it across the half court and scored in your own basket. You scored but it doesn't mean what you think it does.

Yes, we are the good guys in protecting Ukraine. Russia is the bad guys. It really is that simple.

---

Sam Lowry said:

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Porteroso said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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ATL Bear said:

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RMF5630 said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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RMF5630 said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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RMF5630 said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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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?

---

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.

---

Both Russia and the US expect their zones of security under the post-war order. The big difference is that we're the ones doing the encroaching. Putin's view is closer in that sense to the letter and spirit of NATO.

---

You have to know how skewed your perspective is when you start saying Russia is acting in the spirit of NATO as it reclaims former Soviet territory.

You have taken the obvious, that the US is not pure good, and run with it across the half court and scored in your own basket. You scored but it doesn't mean what you think it does.

Yes, we are the good guys in protecting Ukraine. Russia is the bad guys. It really is that simple.

---

Let me say it again. It's the United States, and not Russia, that has rejected the international order.

---

Alternate headline:

The West Has Blatantly Whitewashed Ukraine’s Nazi Elements to Fight Russia https://t.co/MTdBxZR4Ua

— Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) June 5, 2023

NYT inventing new levels of cope:

Nazi iconography has "meanings unique to Ukraine."

Nazi symbols "should be interpreted by how Ukrainians viewed them, not by how they had been used elsewhere." pic.twitter.com/eKzdPtRMZA

— Clint Ehrlich (@ClintEhrlich) June 5, 2023

NATO quickly deleted a tweet yesterday that featured a photo of a Ukrainian soldier wearing the Neo-Nazi Black sun patch. Remember we're constantly told that neo Nazis in Ukraine are an insignificant fringe and if you point to it, you're a Putin stooge or worse. https://t.co/CPkdvl1T0b

— Rupa Subramanya (@rupasubramanya) March 9, 2022

This is Schrödinger's New York Times:

Azov, which the newspaper correctly described as a "Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary organization" in 2019, is now a cuddly "pro-democracy" group of moderate rebelshttps://t.co/rz1ZgNWdB8

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) June 5, 2023

China is betting on the US not wanting to fight a war on two fronts. China wants the Ukraine war to last as long as possible to deplete Western military capacity before invading Taiwan. It’s working. Strike a deal now. Achieve peace and stop the China-Russia military alliance… pic.twitter.com/UV4qp6Op8p

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) June 6, 2023

Redbrickbear said:

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trey3216 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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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.

---

Red. We did not do any of that. A civil war did. A directly engaged Russian artillery corps assisting the local government actually did 99% of it. We did not snap our fingers to cause the civil war. We participated with allies in the region (who actually came up with the idea). If conditions were not ripe for the civil war, it would have fizzled like the Bay of Pigs. So it's not like we have Svengali mind-control over the players in these conflicts and generate & perpetuate them at will.

I mean, geez. Here's your argument in a nutshell: Russia invades Ukraine? It's our fault for not having given Ukraine to them in the first place. Ukraine, surprisingly, hands the Russian army pieces of its own anatomy?. We are incredibly irresponsible for arming the Ukrainians to imbue them with the pipedream they can win. Russia retreats from it's northern axis and redeploys to a long campaign of attrition warfare in the South, even bringing in THE SAME RUSSIAN GENERAL WHO CREATED THAT PICTURE YOU POSTED to command the effort, and they do a lot of destruction, but capture effectively zero new ground? It's all our fault for not forcing the Ukrainians to negotiate. Then the Ukrainians launch a counteroffensive which rolls back a substantial portion of Russian controlled territory in the east? It's our fault for escalating dangerously by providing HIMARS. Then, Russia launches a winter offensive, which stalls at the first encountered villages and descends into mindless human wave attacks that indeed flatten a lot more real estate but also decimate the Russian Army? That is our fault, of course, because, well, we're an empire and should be forcing this thing to peace on Russian terms immediately.

Then the argument diverts to allegations of empire elsewhere, like Syria. Even though we've never invaded anyone for conquest, and never invaded Syria to control them or force regime change, or even a punitive raid (all of which would be reasonable, given their history). All we've ever done is sanction them for use of terrorism as an instrument of state policy, and occasionally launch the pro forma barrage of Tomahawks at carefully selected govt. buildings when we catch them red-handed at something truly barbaric against us. When Arab neighbors come up with the idea of a civil war, and we support it? Of course that only proves we are an evil pseudo-terroristic war machine ourselves. Then, when the Syrian regime brings in the Russians, who apply to Aleppo what would later been seen in Mariupol - massed cannonade against a civilian population? Yes, of course that is our fault too. (because, see, we're an evil empire.)

At no point do you allow agency for anyone else in the world to be responsible for any piece of the various messes made BY OTHERS in the world. It's always the fault of USA empire building (even though not only are we not now nor have ever been an empire by any classical understanding of the word, but have actually been a constant force for delivery of oppressed peoples into democracy over and over and over.....).

This is a pathological line of emotive reasoning you're on here.

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He's still vehemently angry at the US for stamping out the CSA

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Your stick is really getting old. Next you will be saying that me wanting peace in Eastern Europe or Syria is an example of me being anti-Semitic or anti-black

p.s.

Did your ancestors even fight in that war Trey? We're they even here in the USA at the time?

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whiterock said:

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muddybrazos said:

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China is betting on the US not wanting to fight a war on two fronts. China wants the Ukraine war to last as long as possible to deplete Western military capacity before invading Taiwan. It’s working. Strike a deal now. Achieve peace and stop the China-Russia military alliance… pic.twitter.com/UV4qp6Op8p

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) June 6, 2023

I find myself agreeing with most all of what this dude has to say. I think he would be a great VP choice for Trump.

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He is making a valid point, an actual strategic benefit from settling the Russo-Ukrainian War. It does, however, sound a little bit like......."well, let's cut this deal now....Yes, it's a lot less than we hoped for, but if we take a small win today, we can chase a grander objective tomorrow."

Ever heard that one before, Republicans?.....anyone?....

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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muddybrazos said:

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China is betting on the US not wanting to fight a war on two fronts. China wants the Ukraine war to last as long as possible to deplete Western military capacity before invading Taiwan. It’s working. Strike a deal now. Achieve peace and stop the China-Russia military alliance… pic.twitter.com/UV4qp6Op8p

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) June 6, 2023

I find myself agreeing with most all of what this dude has to say. I think he would be a great VP choice for Trump.

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He is making a valid point, an actual strategic benefit from settling the Russo-Ukrainian War. It does, however, sound a little bit like......."well, let's cut this deal now....Yes, it's a lot less than we hoped for, but if we take a small win today, we can chase a grander objective tomorrow."

Ever heard that one before, Republicans?.....anyone?....

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Why is cutting a deal framed as a bad thing?

Geo-politics requires cutting deals.

Especially when the alternative is a long drawn out war that is destroying the future of Ukraine to ever be a prosperous nation....not to mention killing lots of people.

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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muddybrazos said:

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China is betting on the US not wanting to fight a war on two fronts. China wants the Ukraine war to last as long as possible to deplete Western military capacity before invading Taiwan. It’s working. Strike a deal now. Achieve peace and stop the China-Russia military alliance… pic.twitter.com/UV4qp6Op8p

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) June 6, 2023

I find myself agreeing with most all of what this dude has to say. I think he would be a great VP choice for Trump.

---

He is making a valid point, an actual strategic benefit from settling the Russo-Ukrainian War. It does, however, sound a little bit like......."well, let's cut this deal now....Yes, it's a lot less than we hoped for, but if we take a small win today, we can chase a grander objective tomorrow."

Ever heard that one before, Republicans?.....anyone?....

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Why is cutting a deal framed as a bad thing?

Geo-politics requires cutting deals.

Especially when the alternative is a long drawn out war that is destroying the future of Ukraine to ever be a prosperous nation....not to mention killing lots of people.

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Ukrainian sabotage of Kakhovskaya dam is said here to threaten water supply to Crimea. A result consistent with Ukro-nazi strategy.
This is major escalation in US -NATO sabotage. https://t.co/V1rYbnhAHV

— Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) June 6, 2023

Doc Holliday said:

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We're gonna find out whose right.

If this thing continues for the next two years or surpasses a trillion dollars...ya'll have some explaining to do.

BTW none of this is going as planned:

Ukrainian sabotage of Kakhovskaya dam is said here to threaten water supply to Crimea. A result consistent with Ukro-nazi strategy.
This is major escalation in US -NATO sabotage. https://t.co/V1rYbnhAHV

— Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) June 6, 2023

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