Reply to US has no good options in Ukraine

Forum Index » Political Discussion

Reply to "US has no good options in Ukraine"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m absolutely not willing to make very many sacrifices for Ukraine. I don’t want to pay more than I already do for anything and I damn sure don’t want my husband going to war nor do I want my life upended to make shit in factories for a war effort. Ukraine and Russia aren’t my problem just as I’m not theirs. I don’t feel bad about this either.[/quote]

One of the downsides of the long involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan is that some Americans have no stomach for engagement or involvement even when there are legitimate threats.  I'm curious whether anything other than a direct attack on your neighborhood would be your problem or worth any sacrifice.[/quote]

I mean, historically this is not an outlier opinion. I think we are in an isolationist period in the US right now. Every once in awhile someone pipes up about our exit from Afghanistan, but honestly no one actually cares. It's a political talking point - and we lost 13 soldiers! People are starving to death in Afghanistan right now and we all have collective amnesia that we were there for 20 years.

The US was barely involved in WW I and didn't enter WW II until directly attacked. Strategically, that's probably what allowed the Allies to win, but there was plenty of isolationism in 1939.

[b]I do think we should be concerned that Putin deliberately attacks/provokes NATO once he realizes that NATO and the EU are unilaterally united against him.[/b] You should want to sacrifice with high gas prices, etc. to avoid that. Because once that happens, you may well see your spouse or child drafted.

[/quote]
You’re not serious about life. Do you think Putin doesn’t know that NATO and the EU are his mortal enemies already? Literally nothing in your post makes proactively seeking war with Russia remotely sensible. I’m not going to trouble myself about Eastern Europe until there’s a reason to do so.[/quote]

There's actually been a lot of discussion this past week about how the EU has emerged as a singular power and how Putin was not prepare for that show of unity. [/quote]
These are bad and stupid analyses. The former head of the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, who was a spy, survived the fall of the soviet union, and has ruled a country as ruthless and cutthroat as Russia for over two decades is somehow not savvy enough to see that Europeans who hate him might together? You’re mistaking him for someone as stupid as you![/quote]

I think we can merge the two theories about Putin's degrading paranoia and his erstwhile cunning planning. He had a master plan all along, however due to increased paranoia due to isolation and age, and his well-known pre-existing obsession about Greater Russia humiliating the West, he is not able to accurately assess other countries' reactions anymore. The two are coming together to create our current catastrophe.

[/quote]
PP here. I’ll give it to you. This is a sensible take. The idea that Putin just never had any capacity to understand Europe is so stupid that I can’t take it seriously. Your more nuanced take makes sense. I think it’s a wrong take nonetheless. I don’t think Putin just happened to age overnight and become this doddering, paranoid buffoon whom Americans sitting on DCUM can think around. I think what’s a lot more likely is that we don’t know what exactly he wants from Ukraine. That’s why his actions look irrational. That doesn’t mean his actions are actually irrational. It just means that we have failed at intelligence gathering. [/quote]

PP you replied to. George W. Bush describes his meetings, years ago, with Putin, as talking to "an 8th grader with his facts wrong". Obama recalls long phone conversations where Putin had long lists of historically-inaccurate grievances. Macron just last week had an in-person meeting that was more than 5 hours longs, consisting mainly of Putin monologuing for 5 hours and rewriting 20th century history. I think Putin's mental state has been progressively getting worse, and I believe that the pandemic and subsequent isolation perhaps accelerated the natural process.

I am not a historian nor an international affairs specialist, but I know something about mental health. There is a fine, fine line between the logical processes of a highly intelligent person and the logical processes of that person when they cannot weigh risks and costs as they used to. On the surface, Putin is extremely logical: he wants to unify Russian-adjacent lands into a Greater Russia and restore his country to its former days of glory (when it was an empire and the Russian elite was all-powerful, but the people were incredibly poor peasants). It's "Make Russia Great Again", but with a much more competent person at the helm than our home-grown version.

The current crisis may lead to WWIII because Putin seems ready to use all force necessary, regardless of the reputational and financial cost to himself and Russian citizens. A few years ago, he would not have made this calculation.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics