This is a really interesting thread! Lots of valid observations... Here’s my two cents.
Any independence battle that took place before the establishment of the League of Nations let alone the United Nations is irrelevant ancient history - what matters far more than “what they did” is “what were the lasting repercussions of what they did going unchecked”. Ukraine marks the ultimate in where you eventually end up after turning a blind eye to the sheer stupidity of the whole world repeating the mistakes that were made with the creation of the League of Nations, in the digital age, for three decades.
Putin’s “Novorussyia” dream is a Russkie version of Manifest Destiny. But today’s Russia is a new nation with modern borders just the same as Ukraine is. If Ukraine’s borders can be reasonably declared illegitimate by Russia despite almost thirty years of their complete international recognition (even by Russia - Budapest Memorandum) then it follows Russia’s own borders are no more sacrosanct than Ukraine’s, and America’s borders aren’t either.
Why can’t you apply this retrospectively to American independence? Simple: Manifest Destiny pre-dated the smorgasbord of international agreements following the two World Wars that uphold the right of an internationally recognised nation state to NOT be invaded by another. America, and the UK, weren’t signed up to the League of Nations or United Nations founding principles when all that happened.
If Britain, France and others had UPHELD the principles of the League of Nations instead of choosing the path of appeasement and arbitrary nation border modding, then maybe we wouldn’t have had Japan vs Manchuria (1932), Italy vs Abyssinia (1935) and of course Axis vs Allies (1938-1945), and while that means we probably wouldn’t have Israel in its current form we wouldn’t have had decades of Palestinian hatred, or the Shah deposed in Iran. Would Afghanistan be the basket case that it now is? Would we have needed NATO? Would Russia have needed the Warsaw Pact? Nobody knows, and nobody bothered to ask.
There’s a complete disparity of reaction when one country attacks another, depending on whether or not a UNSC member approves of it.
Such cherry-picking enables all kinds of proxy warfare too - the Islamic State was funded and formed by Saudis with friends in high places in the USA; we already knew that when we warred on IS but we didn’t do a thing to punish Saudi Arabia for exporting militant Wahabbism around the world. If anything, Saudi is conducting genocide in Yemen with our tacit approval.
And on top of that, it enabled the corporate takeover. Some call it the Deep State, some call it Globalism, some call it the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwaaab!!!!). But I call it the utterly predictable consequence of the Third Industrial Revolution.
If you watch Robocop 3, you can see the Kanemitsu takeover of OCP followed OCP taking over everything on the ground in America and even the politicians end up totally in thrall to a shadowy corporation that operates above national or international regulations - that fictional trope is now over seventy five years old and we’re still acting surprised or shocked that it exists in the real world.
We’re a stupid, stupid species. It’s been obvious for the last 100 years that what the world really needs is an international agreement that amounts to Zero Tolerance for Nazism in any of its guises, zero tolerance for Lebensraum in any of its guises, and guaranteed equality of due process under international law whenever a separatist region or nation state wants to exercise its right to independence and recognition as a new sovereign state. We also need to extend that principle to NGOs, multinational corporations, and entities that only exist in cyberspace.
Maybe, once the dust settles in Ukraine, the whole darned world will get with the programme. I doubt it, though - unless we actually do have a small nuclear war in the next couple of weeks. If we don’t escalate this to the very point of potential planetary seppuku, we’ll just end up with a rinse and repeat of Tony Blair’s “we need an ethical foreign policy” - easily said and easily forgotten the minute an expedient reason to have an UNETHICAL foreign policy pops up.