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 ...
“...Going back a little further Ukraine doesn’t even exist...” [mac_truck, post 33]
Not the case.
From the 9th through the 13th century, what’s now Ukraine was just one part of the Kievan Rus, a confederation of East Slavs and some Finns, plus dependencies, stretching from the Black Sea to the White Sea.
Kiev was the capital city.
Holy Roman Emperor Charles V didn’t show up until the 16th century.
Our so-called allies are only allies as long as they need us. Time for the US to take care of our real national security interests and stop sending our people to fight other nations’ wars.
“Our so-called allies are only allies as long as they need us. Time for the US to take care of our real national security interests and stop sending our people to fight other nations’ wars.” [Pining_4_TX, post 62]
Insisting that “We won’t support any other nation until they come up to our moral standards” is in essence an excuse to avoid doing anything: both ends of the political spectrum in the USA have “moral standards” that nobody in the real world could ever meet. It’s also an attitude of mind-bending condescension.
It also ignores the cautionary principle that it’s smarter to deal with a problem before it gets impossibly large, or imprudently close. Or both.
All of it rests on the notion that we can fence everyone else out. It’s false; in an isolationist sense, all we would really be doing is fencing ourselves in (None of which should be taken to mean I’m against border security for this nation, or any other. On the contrary, I deem the security measures contemplated by the Trump administration and supported by other conservatives to be much too weak).
If by supporting, you mean spending our money and sending our good people to fight other nations’ wars, then, yes, I am an isolationist. What happens in the Ukraine has nothing to do with US security, and it is foolish to keep pimping with Russia. The leader of the Ukraine is as much of a thug as Putin is.
“If...you mean spending our money and sending our good people...I am an isolationist...The leader of the Ukraine is as much of a thug as Putin is.”
So the bottom line is, Americans are too good to bother with anyone else? Apparently, being moral means more to you than being effective.
That combination of prissiness and condescension is calculated to bring us more of the same: timidity among unaligned nations, and skittishness on the part of erstwhile allies - nations with more at stake than we’ve got, who will look at our long history of inconstancy, and dismiss our endless moralizing as so much talk.
Mind you, they’re not going to be dazzled by our glittering moralistic example, and fall in line spontaneously.
Effective? You mean like all the botched operations and wars in the past 60 years or more? The US has no obligation to send our sons and daughters to fight for other countries, none.
“...The US has no obligation to send our sons and daughters to fight for other countries, none.” [Pining_4_TX, post 66]
The strategic importance of a particular action has nothing to do with the likelihood of its successful completion. Each attribute is measured along a different axis.
“Gee, this action turned out to be tougher than we expected, so its utility in the service of national interest wasn’t worth the effort we’d originally guessed might be needed” is the lowest, most despicable form of after-the-fact reasoning: barely deserves the epithet “puerile.” A case of “sour grapes”?
“Doing nothing” - withdrawing from the world - is not a course of action real people can actually choose to take, in the real world. Nevertheless, many of our fellow citizens want to run things that way. The fact that so many deem it possible, or morally preferable, says more about their deficient and immature understanding of reality, than about their abilities to take stock of the national interest and frame feasible policy goals to advance such.
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