Nice mixing of clearly justified actions with unjustified ones, as if the US policy has been uniform.
Unfortunately, there is a cabal of Leftists, who when they get in power, are perfectly willing to destroy the USA, for their own purposes. Hence the stupid "wag the dog" war in former Yugoslavia, on the side of the Muslims, the stupid war against Libya, when Kaddafi had been tamed and was pretty much on the side of the USA. But the war in Iraq was clearly against Iraqi takeover of Kuwait and the threat to take over Saudi Arabia. Iraq II was only and extension of Iraq I, because Sadam would not keep his promises made in Iraq I.
Syria is a mix, but was mostly caused by Obama in his stupid push for an "Arab Spring" to advance Muslim anti-western ideology.
And the armed putsch of 2014 in Ukraine was also under Obama’s watch and instigated by the same bunch now in power (Biden, Nuland, Sullivan, et al). Same as Libya and Syria. Biden was all in on our doings in former Yugoslavia. How I despised him back then, him and Lived both.
As for justified, the Russians think they are justified, same as we thought we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Lots of people in other countries thought Iraq II was not justified because of the WMD claim. As for Saddam “not keeping his promises”, one could say the same re the promises made in Minsk. So if we were justified by unkept promises on the target of our military aggression, why isn’t Russia? Sure, we see ourselves as the good guys, meanin’ no harm, and all, but don’t we look like hypocrits?
While we, as Americans, can blame our “stupid” wars on a “cabal of leftists”, how do you think our “ stupid wars” look to the rest of the world? Does NATO look like the “purely defensive” force it claims to be after Kosovo and Libya? How about all our “regime change” operations, whether achieved through hard (military) or soft (color revolution type stuff) power? We bombed the Serbs and Libya, used soft power in countries like Egypt and Ukraine. As we have seen, soft power can result in very bad outcomes, including violence and death, for the peoples we use it on.
Just what other countries do you think Putin is going to invade “if we don’t stop him in Ukraine”? He truly has no interest in conquering Poland, the Baltics, etc. He does see Crimea as an existential interest (with good reason) and all the loose talk about turning Sevastopol into a NATO port and parking missiles in Ukraine near the Russian border were seen as existential threats to Putin. Not entirely unreasonably.
If you read the stuff coming out the think tanks Nuland, Sullivan, Biden, the Kagans, etc., subscribe to, it’s easy to see their agenda. They imagined they could instigate a color revolution in Russia to topple Putin after the 2014 putsch in Ukraine (and then Russia would break up and cease to exist in its present borders), and now they think the war in Ukraine will topple Putin and break Russia into pieces. They even have plans for going after the pieces.
Me, I think we’ve been foolish. Had we acted responsibly in former Yugoslavia and not treated Russia like a beaten dog back in the 1990s, Putin may well never have come to power. We could have had Russia as a quasi-ally vis-à-vis China, our true rival. But we acted stupidly, and now, however this war ends up, the Europeans will have a Sino-Russian alliance on their border, not just poor old Russia. Quite a feat, as the Russian people desperately wanted to join the West and have democracy and all that back in the 1990s. But we showed them what we were really all about: building up China (their longtime natural quasi-enemy) and kicking down Russia. Stupid, stupid, stupid on our part. I always thought so.
It’s all very sad. Poor Ukraine was a very fragile democracy and had never been its very own country before 1991 (and no one called himself a “Ukrainian” (even as a merely ethnic identity) or called his language “Ukrainian” much before the 1920s. It was the most corrupt republic of the former USSR (with Kiev rivaling Moscow in that department), much to overcome. Whether leaning westwards or eastwards, its leaders before 2014 pretty much tried to walk a neutral line between Russia and the West.
Had Ukraine stuck to a neutral stance, it could have served as a bridge between East and West and, if it could have tamped down the corruption, perhaps flourished in that role. Kinda like Turkey. I must say Turkey has done well for itself playing off the West, China and Russia, yes, done very well by itself in the process. But no, we had to get all “Russia-Russia-Russia” and make an enemy out of Russia and poor Ukraine became like a rag doll being torn apart between us and Russia.
My heart breaks for the Ukrainian people. They voted overwhelmingly for peace in their last election, but Zelensky either could not or would not deliver (I’ve posted here before about “could not” vs “would not” and leave it as a question mark in my mind). So here we are now. I make no predictions about the outcome of this war, only that however it turns out, China will be the big winner and the Ukrainian people the big losers.
As for Putin, some here who have drunk the neocon koolaid see him as Hitler. Some as a sort of evil genius. Those who lap up the Russian propaganda see him as some sort of crusader for Christian and conservative values fighting against the WEF “cabal”. I don’t see him as any of those things, so I guess leaves me the odd man (actually woman) out.
He’s certainly intelligent, but no super genius. He’s not very imaginative and has not been able to come up with a unifying vision for his vast, sprawling hodgepodge of a country (which sorely needs one — under the USSR, there was international communism, now there’s not much of anything). He did clean up the lawlessness and cruelties inflicted on his people by the various mafias (operated mainly by the oligarchs, similar to situation in Ukraine, only it affected ordinary people more cruelly in Russia during the Yeltsin years), so he gets major points for that. I don’t think he’s particularly Christian (or even moral in the sense we on FR would mean that word, although he does seem to subscribe to a code of sorts). He can do cold, vicious, sinister things when it suits his purpose, even thuggish things. I do think he is a Russian patriot and does care about his country, though. He’s certainly deeply flawed in many ways, but he’s not a madman, nor bloodthirsty, and no Hitler out to conquer Europe. He’s fairly pragmatic. He guessed wrong when he sent that little (emphasis on “little”) “special operation” force into Ukraine at the beginning. So he’s hardly the 5-D chess-playing uber-genius some claim. He way underestimated the neocons hatred of Russia and their utter dedication to their plan to tear apart Russia no matter what it cost Ukrainians. (Not that I think their plan will work. What matters is they think it will.) He thought them more moral than they are. He really should have known bettsr. They’ve been showing their cards for three freaking decades now.
Anyway, everyone can see the Russians are barely up to whooping up on Ukraine, let alone succeeding in “gobbling up” more countries. And Putin can see it too — even if he wanted to do that, which he doesn’t. Putin has enough headaches keeping his hodgepodge country together without adding recalcitrant Poles, Lithuanians, etc., to the mix — or Western Ukrainians. This “Putin has to be stopped before he gobbles up more countries like Hitler” stuff is silly. If you want to be pro-Ukraine and anti-Russian, there are far sounder arguments for your case.