Posted on 03/31/2023 1:48:04 PM PDT by Cronos
If its ability to fight wars is too weak to invade its neighbors and conquer them, then what good is its nuclear weapons except as a final option defense for protecting its own borders?
Attacking Europe with a nuclear war would only mean the end of Russia, not the gaining of territory.
Russia may just have to learn to live with itself and concentrate on bringing its own nation into being a well run livable nation and give up its 1800s imperialist mindset of empire.
You couldn’t explain your post so I still don’t know what you considered a problem with Finland and its finances in regard to NATO, or what you are attaching the 120 billion dollars to.
—> You couldn’t explain your post so I still don’t know what you considered a problem with Finland and its finances in regard to NATO, or what you are attaching the 120 billion dollars to.
Indeed!
… and you couldn’t read, so we are like two ships passing in the night 🚢
It is unrelated.
You posted something you didn’t really know what you were posting and you can’t explain it.
Paul R. explained it to you but I don’t think you ever thanked him or even responded to him.
I do.
what you were posting and you can’t explain it.
I gave you an answer. It required a minute of reading, but you're a zeeper, so... there's that.
NATO has no obligation to Ukraine. Ukraine is not part of NATO and never has been.
Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union until it broke apart in 1989. Prior to that it had been part of the Russian empire for 200 years.
Ukraine is the invasion route that both Napolean and Hitler used to invade Russia. Moscow isn’t going to sit by and watch it join a military alliance formed expressly to target Russia anymore than we put up with Cuba being turned into a Soviet missile base.
People here who have been meddling in Ukraine for years knew this, they wanted the US/NATO in a war with Russia and now they have managed to get it using Ukraine as their proxy.
“Liberal Internationalism” is the old name for the policy of the United States being the World’s Policeman. It’s always popular with those who plan to be in charge.
Wars aren’t cheap. Regular Americans are already paying a price in higher inflation. The price will get much higher if they manage to provoke retaliation.
NATO actually does have an obligation to Ukraine, just not the security guarantee in the Alliance’s founding treaty. Ukraine is an Enhanced Opportunity Partner (EOP) in NATO, - “partner”, not “member”.
NATO didn’t get to use Ukraine’s armed forces in support of NATO missions without a quid pro quo. EOP is the quid pro quo. And besides, the USA and UK obligations to Ukraine go further because they come from the Budapest Memorandum not the UN Charter.
“Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union until it broke apart in 1989. Prior to that it had been part of the Russian empire for 200 years.”
IRRELEVANT. The Soviet Union formally ended in 1991 with the preamble to the Belovezha Accords making that point in the most direct, unambiguous, incontestible way. At the same time, the Warsaw Pact was abolished. Nobody seriously thinks that 30 years after the Belovezha agreement was signed, one political ideology confined to one ex-member country that used to be in the USSR can pull a Mulligan on it.
If you thought you were making a useful and coherent principle point there, then maybe you should consider whether or not the UK has a right to revisit American independence. And maybe America needs to hand more power over to the Latino and Native American people who were settled on the continent first and have been around far longer than the Euro migrants. Perhaps Alaska should be sold back to Russia or leased back to it for a peppercorn rent - or even handed back if it has a county that is predominately Russian speaking, like Putin reckoned ought to happen with the Donbas.
“Moscow isn’t going to sit by and watch it join a military alliance” - TOUGHSHITSKYI. This isn’t the frickin’ 1960s, or even the 1760s. It is the absolute right of every entity with full recognition under the UN Charter as a wholly independent nation to decide its own security apparatus including its alliances. What it can’t do is invade another wholly independent nation with the intention of absorbing the invaded land, assets and peoples into its own country. Putin doesn’t think the most foundational, fundamental tenet of the post-WW2 contract applies to Russia when Russia invades other countries for their assets, in the same way that Saddam Hussein didn’t think it applied to him when he decided to invade Kuwait for its assets.
“formed expressly to target Russia...” WRONG. NATO was formed as a counterweight to the USSR, which no longer exists. For thirty years, the revanchists and right wing isolationists have been arguing we don’t need NATO anymore because the USSR doesn’t exist anymore AND BECAUSE NOBODY WAS TARGETING RUSSIA.
Putin doesn’t get to resurrect the Soviet Union and rip up the “you can ally with whoever you like, but you can’t invade your neighbor just because you covet its land / oil / gas / washing machines / toilets” ground rules just because he’s a butt-hurt paranoid FSB manchild whose head is at best stuck in a “Deutschland 83” timewarp and at worst orbiting an alt-history from a completely different, parallel universe.
It’s nobody’s fault but Putin’s that Russia has regressed into a delusional state of mind where the Russian signatures on the Belovezha Accords are being totally ignored. It’s Putin who thinks the effects of the Belovezha Accords can be reversed thirty years after they were signed.
It’s Putin’s fault that long after the entire community of ex-USSR vassal states UNANIMOUSLY accepted amicable divorce from each other and moved on, there’s an element within Russia that thinks live in that marriage was way better than life outside that marriage. Either they are people who lived appalling lives under the Soviet thumb and have been completely failed by the Russian Federation under Putin to improve their lot, or they are people in power in Russia who want what Stalin had - eleven time zones worth of people too terrified to say “no” to them.
Japan’s plans for WWII we’re not at all rational and their only possibility of victory required the US to carefully follow the script the Japanese had written.
I see a lot of script writing for Russia going on.
If war were a rational exercise it would never happen in the first place.
Read my post again there would be no war if Russia is too weak to fight conventionally.
Launching nukes mean that nukes are launched at you at the same time, Russia would merely be wiped out and China and various people would permanently absorb the remains.
Why would Russia simply commit suicide, Japan thought it could win a war with great rewards.
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