Posted on 12/05/2018 7:00:43 PM PST by Pining_4_TX
The recent clash between Russian and Ukrainian naval vessels in the Kerch Strait has generated a flurry of alarm. NATO was compelled to call an emergency meeting with Ukraine and the UN Security Council convened an urgent session to discuss the crisis. Exercising their usual tendency to oversimplify murky geopolitical rivalries, Western officials and journalists embraced the knee-jerk narrative that the incident is yet another case of Vladimir Putin’s blatant aggression and “outlaw behavior” against its peace-loving, democratic neighbor. Right on cue, CNN, MSNBC, and other media outlets dispatched stridently anti-Russian editorials masquerading as news stories.
In reality, the Kerch Strait incident involves a complex mixture of factors. They include the tense Russian-Ukrainian bilateral relationship, Kiev’s broader foreign policy objectives, and Ukraine’s volatile domestic politics.
(Excerpt) Read more at theamericanconservative.com ...
[“When a country that is already the largest on Earth, by far (i.e. almost 2x), decides to expand its territory, we are by default interested in the outcome, as a matter of national security.”
That assertion is entirely debatable by serious people.
And being interested in the outcome is not the same thing as having a core, essential, real interest.]
And when I say we are interested, I mean in the sense of having an essential, real interest. When a country this big wants to expand its territory, its ambitions are insatiable. It was one thing for Germany, at 1/35th Russia’s land area, to want lebensraum. It’s quite another for Russia to do so.
“we are by default interested in the outcome, as a matter of national security”
We disagree that there is an essential US National Security interest at stake.
The Ruskies are everywhere! Protect your precious bodily fluids! /sarc
I actually KNOW that movie!!! It was...interesting!
There is never going to be another war like WWII. This is the age of nukes and drones, not land tank battles. Proxy wars are the order of the day and they resolve nothing but at great cost to the small nations where they are fought. The Ukraine is of no importance to the US.
Europe is committing suicide by 3rd world immigration and Islam. Russia is the least of their problems. NATO should have been dissolved long ago.
Says the guy with the Chinese screen name, desperately trying to convince people that its in American interests to provoke a war with a nuclear armed super power.
You'd be well advised to stay up range with that twatter.
[Says the guy with the Chinese screen name, desperately trying to convince people that its in American interests to provoke a war with a nuclear armed super power.
You’d be well advised to stay up range with that twatter.]
Frankly, I think the Communist movement in Russia and China were the best thing that happened to the rest of the world that did not actually fall under Communist rule. Both Russia and China have what I’ll call the will to universal empire. As long as we keep them penned up, they’ll eventually turn on each other. The best case outcome is they destroy each other, and end up broken up into many dozens of nations. China and Russia with 100m and 10m people respectively would be a lot more manageable, from a security standpoint.
Out of curiosity, though, are you Russian, a Slavic Russophile or just another Pat Buchanan acolyte?
Note that I don’t think ethnic affinity is such a bad thing. Lindbergh was an epic figure, and even he felt the pull of his Teutonic heritage, such that he volunteered to fight the Japanese, the sideshow in WWII, rather than Germany, the major threat. I think you’d have to be inhuman not to feel the pull of ethnic kinship. Ancient armies made allowances for this - given ethnic units on opposite sites of a conflict were seldom asked to fight their kinsmen.
Relax. The FR force is strong with Russian Trolls and amiable dunces doing the bidding for Putin’s Soviet KGB remnant.
“And it IS in the interests of the USA to stop the Russian effort to reoccupy the former Soviet slave states.”
Bingo. You are correct. There is much Propaganda and Russian Trolling here.
“The Ukraine is of no importance to the US.”
Free people are of utmost importance to the US. We do not sit on our hands as free people are attacked and enslaved by barbarians like the Russians and their gangster-state oligarchy.
Russia may have nuclear weapons but they are no longer a superpower.
They have exactly no functioning aircraft carriers, more than half of their ‘active’ submarine fleet is along side and rusting in port, their surface combatant fleet is hurting for spare parts and trained crews, their tank forces are a shell of what they used to be especially now that Ukraine no longer repairs Russia’s tanks, and even their nuclear capabilities are questionable when the procurement section of the RVSN RF is flooded with requests for all things related to corrosion in the silos.
They are a faded power that is struggling to recapture their glory days by predating on their weaker neighbors like Georgia and Ukraine.
If the US is charged with making people free, there is a lot of work to be done in South America and Africa.
No, not our fight. Let Europe take care of Europe.
Why Russia isn't the expansionist threat that dopey neocons make it to be?
I'll take Globalist Lies and Misnomers for 700 Megan...
The evidence in Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine show otherwise.
And they have made multiple threats to other nations, as they are doing now, spewing propaganda and using their lies as rationale for further forceful and illegal taking of land.
It doesn't. But Ukraine has never had any blind support. In fact, barely any.
I wonder when your crowd would get satisfied ? America has been doing basically nothing for Ukraine. Is doing nothing so provocative, Russophobic, globalistic and so on ? What do you expect Trump to do ? Send in Marines to fight against Ukraine ?
“There is never going to be another war like WWII...Ukraine is of no importance to the US...NATO should have been dissolved long ago.” [Pining_4_TX, post 45]
Mindless repetition of mistaken notions doesn’t make them any less erroneous.
Are West Euro nations less than perfect? Of course. They are what we have to work with, and it’s a fool’s errand to cut them loose. Countries in Eastern Europe - former Warsaw Pact countries, former Soviet “Republics” - can be useful additions: they are the unwilling owners of more-recent memories of being invaded, occupied, and oppressed by the Russians. Tends to focus attention on realistic strategies for surviving and countering the threat.
Isolationists haven’t got a lot of room to talk. Not after the marginal role played by the United States in suppressing the Barbary Coast pirates (where the Royal Navy did most of the work), stepping on the Filipinos for years after the Spanish-American War, refusing to support the League of Nations, ignoring the rise of Nazi Germany, disdaining modern Israel, leaving Cuban anti-communist expats in the lurch, and abandoning South Vietnam.
Who knows? Allies and other nations might juts decide that the United States isn’t worth the trouble, when the next crisis comes along: we’re wimpish, moralizing navel gazers with short attention spans - not sufficiently adult to stick with any policy for very long.
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