[bitt]

LONG BUT ....

[Harpotoo]

Dems think ww3 war time prezzy is a shoein:-)

Only thing is how many DIE for a dem to stay in power!

[PGR88]

Kennan was considered the intellectual architect of “Containment” after WWII, but he only meant it to apply to fortifying and protecting key western societies and weakened industrial countries of Japan, Germany and Italy from communism.

He thought fighting every local rebel in backward places like Africa, Vietnam (or even Korea) was foolish

[Bonemaker]

Nature seeks equilibrium, ie a balance of power between nations, and abhors a vacuum. America has become a vacuum and dark forces must fill it.

[taxcontrol]

It is a conflict between the US central banking system and the BRICS central banking system.

[Jim Noble]

an “axis” of autocracies (Russia, China, Iran, and perhaps North Korea) are collaborating to undermine the global order

A "global order" that excludes 2/3 of the globe is a cause of war.

[Sequoyah101]

We might not have entered WWI so quickly if so much of the money of US industrialists was not at risk of repayment had Germany prevailed.

With the world's largest defense budget the US will undoubtedly propose to increase it to meet the threat of a new Axis Alliance. Hard to imagine how it is possible to squander an even greater amount of money. What do they do with it all?

Money, power and evil make it all happen. Nobody ever learns or gets enough of any of these.

[sauropod]

.

[Pelham]

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[PUGACHEV]

In my view, WW1 would have happened even if neither Gavrilo Princip nor Franz Ferdinand had ever been born. Wars on that scale occur because the contradictions in the existing paradigm reach a point beyond which they cannot be resolved in any other way. That is, unfortunately how History moves forward. As T.S. Elliot put it "Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnaturnal vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by impudent crimes." - Gerontion, 1922.

[pierrem15]

The last Russian troops left Poland and Lithuania in 1993, and did not leave Germany, Estonia and Latvia until 1994.

NATO didn't seek to expand: the former Warsaw Pact states clamored to get in after two centuries (on and off) of Russian occupation and brutalization. Paris, Berlin and Washington dragged their feet about their admission. Poland was not admitted until 1999.

NATO also did not intervene when Lukashenko gained power in 1994. The West also did nothing during Russia's brutal suppression of Chechnya, respecting Russia's internationally recognized borders. The only questionable case was the war over Kosovo, simply because Kosovo was internationally recognized as part of Serbia.

In the 2000s NATO effectively disarmed, substantially reducing the size of it's militaries. Putin's responses were to violate the INF treat, the Conventional Forces Europe treaty, the invasion of Georgia and the 2014 invasion of Ukraine.

The author also claimed that the US intervened in the Middle East in the 2000s simply out of misguided "nation building." This is of course nonsense, as the Afghanistan invasion was undertaken precisely because Afghanistan was a co-belligerent with al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq War was started because Hussain was firing on US aircraft, not respecting the UN inspection regime and still threatening Kuwait, all of which were violations of the Gulf War cease fire. The transformation of these conflicts into "nation building" was the misbegotten offspring of Bush's goody-two-shoes Methodism, which led him to grossly increase the objectives and costs of the wars while he simultaneously sought to reduce the US effort to achieve those objectives. This approach was, of course, doomed to failure from the moment upon which it was decided.