[goldstategop]

Russia is a nuclear superpower.

And it can field a well-equipped, well trained professional army.

This is not your grandfather’s Red army.

The point stands - what are our our vital interests in taking on Russia as the protector of the pro-Russian population in its Near Abroad?

I can’t think of any reason we want to get involved militarily in someone else’s civil war.

And no Russia is not going to back down on its right to police its own backyard in accordance with its own version of the Monroe Doctrine.

It will not allow NATO to finish its creep up to its borders. In Ukraine, for Russia, those are the stakes.

[ansel12]

You are sure correct that this isn't the global power that we were facing during the Reagan years, we barely save the world from that all powerful military.

Today they are smaller and weaker, as post 3 shows, much of that Russia is now NATO.

You must be very young to call it my "grandfather's Red Army" and you have things basackwards as far as when they were a threat, and your strategy to allow them to start conquering and enslaving, and becoming that threat again, is also basackwards.

This is the Russia that many here were facing under Reagan.

[tcrlaf]

“This is not your grandfather’s Red army.”

A point I have been trying to make since this all began.

The Russians haven’t been sitting still for the last 12 years. They have been upgrading hardware and bringing new systems online, and adding a whole bunch of tech.

Cooperative programs with China have produced real results, and the “Decentralization of Command from officers to NCO’s has been going on longer than that.

They don’t have the tech or amounts anymore to take us on heads-up and “Win”, that would require nukes. It’s all about forcing “political” solutions.

[Grzegorz 246]

“This is not your grandfather’s Red army.”

Of course not. His grandfather’s Red army was at least 20 times more powerful.

[1rudeboy]

The U.S. version of the Monroe Doctrine did not involve invading small countries and making them States.

[AxeofCrom]

Not here, but to those that I know, I’ve stated from the beginning that we should blockade the Dardanelles/Black Sea and remove the motivation for this Ukrainian nonsense in the first place - that is WARM WATER PORTS.

That’s the only reason Putin did this, in my opinion. Warm water port at Odessa to get their oil out. It’s been the impetus for Russian foreign policy for many a moon going back to Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.

Take that away from them and there’s no reason to be there.