Posted on 02/02/2022 9:32:22 AM PST by caww
During the Cold War the US understood that power politics is a zero sum game. Somewhere along the line those who would be the leaders forgot all that. 50 years defending our way of life, down the crapper, just like that.
And our enemies , within and without, have had 50 years to pull off what we’re seeing today.
Interesting enough Kazakastan could be a problem for China now and then under the former President. More than once he stood his ground to get the best deals he could regarding China. ...especially on the Belt and Road deals. So of course they finally got him out of office.
If we’d simply go full bore with natural gas production here, in a few years some of this excrement would solve itself. Ditto if Saudi (divert some defense and “stir up trouble” $$), Jordan (manpower) and Israel (technical expertise & coastline) would cooperate on massive undersea pipelines to Europe.
Of course this is not a total solution — there are still Iranian nukes (likely soon) and Chinese expansion to deal with, but, Putin would be plenty busy with his own problems and Iran much weakened.
“I’ve not seen a cogent explanation by any of the Putinistas on here of WHY Putin would, rationally in 2022, be so fearful of NATO.”
Very good points.
The core reason is it has everything to do with internal Russian politics and nothing with NATO.
Russia’s economy and society is in the gutter. Putin’s one trick to staying popular is to promise to be restoring Russia to glory.
* Chechnya 1999
* Georgia 2008
* Ukraine 2014
Each time he grabs a bit of former Soviet territory and the Russian people are delighted, but it has been 8 years since Crimea. Russians are beginning to look around at the corruption and decay and wonder if Putin really is their savior.
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