> If the US had foreseen had powerful China would be today, I expect Russia would have been 'enlisted' into NATO.
Lol no, they would not have sabotaged their defensive alliance against a very real, belligerent, immediate enemy for the sake of defending against a potential enemy decades in the future. In any fantasy where the West has that much foresight, they have lots of better options.
Russia doesn't need to be submissive. All Russia has to do is stop starting violence with its neighbors and around the world. Don't mess with Ukraine. Don't mess with Syria. Try actually making their people's lives better instead. (I can already hear you complaining "but the US--" stop. Tu quoque is a fallacy.)
The bar is embarrassingly low. Even after they annexed Crimea, the rest of the world was willing to pretend Russia was a reasonable actor. But it wasn't enough for Russia, mostly for Putin himself I suspect.
Tu quoque can be a fallacy but in this case it demonstrates that the US not only expects, but demands, that other countries to behave in a way far and away from how it itself behaves. And that is important because it gets back to the point of the US trying to assert itself as having a position of dominance.
And also, I think many people have a rather distorted view of the world. When you say 'the rest of the world' I assume you are speaking as most do when they use this term - the Anglosphere, Europe excluding Russia/Belarus, and then the handful of oddballs like Japan and sometimes South Korea. What percent of the world do you think this is? It's less than 15%, and trending downward.
Truly sovereign nations can be expected to act in their own best interest. Russia responded to the US deciding to expand a military alliance all the way up to Ukraine, one of their most vulnerable points, exactly how the US would respond if Russia tried to form a military alliance with Mexico. I mean we brought the world to the verge of nuclear armageddon over the USSR establishing weaponry in Cuba, which doesn't even have a land route to the US!
That's why you don't do things like this, unless you're actively working to both establish and demonstrate your dominance over another country, which we were. I just don't think the moralizing angle can be argued in good faith. If you want to see 'starting shit' - we just mostly randomly invaded Venezuela and kidnapped their president which is pretty lol. This moralizing angle is just disingenuous or naive.
> I mean we brought the world to the verge of nuclear armageddon over the USSR establishing weaponry in Cuba, which doesn't even have a land route to the US!
Oh I see, you really are just clueless. Do you think missiles need a "land route" to be dangerous?
You're still leaning on tu quoque too. I don't disagree that the US had behaved badly. That continues not to make Russia any smarter.
The point is that missiles are a subset of land logistics (or invasion) of which Ukraine offers both. So the US expanding into Ukraine was substantially more strategically threatening than the USSR expanding into Cuba. And the US response to Cuba was not particularly irrational, nor was Russia's to Ukraine. In the end the only way we will ever maintain a stable world order is when the giants of this world respect each other's reasonable self interest.
Oh sure, giants should respect each other's self interest, but Ukraine and it's people can get fucked as long as it's in Russia's interest. It's pathetic how you try to impugn my moral standing via US actions I don't defend, while you're the one actively pushing a morally incoherent position.
I'm not impugning your moral standing in the least. I'm saying that the moral argument you were concocting wasn't reasonable because you were implicitly expecting a great power to abide a standard which no great power ever would.
I am basing my arguments entire on realpolitik - great powers can be expected to act in their own self interest. It's consistently reliable and helps explain (and predict) things that are otherwise incomprehensible if you try listening to anybody's rhetoric. Countries do not act morally.
When a relatively weak and strategically important country tries to align itself against a giant on its doorstep, that's never going to lead to happy things for that country in the longrun. One of the countries that may be next on the chopping block for the US is Cuba, which I think makes our likely motivation behind this whole thing somewhat more clear.
Lol no, they would not have sabotaged their defensive alliance against a very real, belligerent, immediate enemy for the sake of defending against a potential enemy decades in the future. In any fantasy where the West has that much foresight, they have lots of better options.
Russia doesn't need to be submissive. All Russia has to do is stop starting violence with its neighbors and around the world. Don't mess with Ukraine. Don't mess with Syria. Try actually making their people's lives better instead. (I can already hear you complaining "but the US--" stop. Tu quoque is a fallacy.)
The bar is embarrassingly low. Even after they annexed Crimea, the rest of the world was willing to pretend Russia was a reasonable actor. But it wasn't enough for Russia, mostly for Putin himself I suspect.