"The 1980's are calling to ask for their foreign policy back."

If they're put out of Swift, which they should be, how long before that really bites? These things need to happen quickly so that the effects are felt as early as possible.

Also, as I said before I look forward to a firesale of high-end London property. Boris Johnson needs to be under more pressure on that.

As much as I don't want Putin to win, I hope this situation helps Ukraine realize that the West was never going to fight WWIII to protect them and that they've got to defend themselves. If that means a massive military buildup or going nuclear again, I don't know. But I hope they realize they can't really rely on anyone else.

They are part of NATO, aren’t they? If the rest of NATO doesn’t honor the treaty, the result would be worse.

Nope.

Preventing them from becoming part of NATO is Russia's main goal.

Bolded for emphasis.

Oh, you need to get out the Pravda signal, Rick. Finland is destabilizing Europe!

There is absolutely no mention of NATO in either Minsk I or Minst II text. And the reason it collapsed was it was pointless as long as Putin denied Russian troops were present in Donbas - which has been proven.

Hell, that's a doctoral thesis. It led to a lot of unnecessary death and destruction at times as the US intervened, was unenforceable at others (such as the 12 year French blockade of Argentina). It also was greeted warmly by Simon Bolivar and forced Spain to stop attempting to annex the Dominican Republic, and US pressure was influential in France decided to forego it's attempt to rule Mexico after the US recovered from its own civil war.

Then you can go on to it's many spin-offs - the Big Brother policy, the Olney Corollary, the Roosevelt Corollary (likely the 2nd most damaging interpretation as it led to direct military intervention in Latin America), the Good Neighboor policy of FDR, and the Cold War policy which was definitely the most interventionist and led to the overthrow of several democracies.

But it also became incorporated with Pax Britannia before the US changed the world order in WWII, and the US never attacked Canada b/c of its defensive alliance with the UK.

And once again, anyone saying that Ukraine is a military threat to Moscow is repeating Putin's propaganda. Yes, he sees it as an intervention of his sphere, but that's because he wants to dominate and control these countries.

And that is bad, just like it was bad when the US did it in Latin America. Right, Rick?

I wasn't alive at the time, but considering we withdrew our nukes in Turkey in exchange for the Russian withdrawal in Cuba it probably worked out best for everyone in the end.

Also, and this is really important - we didn't actually invade Cuba. JFK stopped that even though that was the preferred strategy of his war cabinet.

The tanks are rolling now, into a country that the Russians have already conducted a genocide in. And tried to culturally commit genocide by banning Ukrainians be taught their own language.

Of course the Nations of Eastern Europe fear Russian aggression. All these countries lived as conquered states for decades, and the atrocities committed against them by the government out of Moscow are well documented and legion.

Yeah, he did that.

Bidens not up to much but surely as an educated man you realise Trump was way below your own intellectual standard?

In modern insurgencies, the ones you have to watch out for are the hackers - and the chemists.

He did indeed. It's kind of funny, though, in a darker sense. As a narcissist, he was so certain people adored him, that he could just say he was president and it would happen. I'm a firm believer in the notion that all presidents are high on their own supply, but this one was particularly fascinating to watch. Trump is merely a symptom of a much deeper problem in the US. Yeah, racism, it's never left our society, but even more than that is the dissatisfaction people are feeling. Humans are easier to manipulate when they're angry or afraid, as long as the message being given is one that promises action, and as long as the messenger is a man who appears strong. In times of uncertainty, people reach out to strong men, and give them far more authority than any one man should ever have.

The next uprising might succeed in the worst way. While I want revolutionary change, I don't want it to be what Hitler and his brown shirts did to Germany. That is the opposite direction of where I want us to go, but the US seems hellbent on creating an environment more than capable of breeding that fanaticism, if it hasn't already done so (I think it has). Trump's narcissistic play for power failed, but he's not the last who will try it.

It just seems weird to me that anyone in the west would be on Russia's side about the Ukraine invasion.

That Republicans seem to be supporting Russia bugs me because it seems to indicate that they would be happy outright invading another country. And I just can't square that, in 2022 America.

Presumably you expect me to disagree. But of course it is. Russian needs to GTFO. Now.

So, for the most part you're arguing with a figment of your imagination.

Then why bring it up? I never mentioned the Monroe Doctrine, you did.

If that's a figment of my imagination, I'm sorry, Rick. I always assumed you were real.

Wait a minute, why am I talking to myself again?

The US is constantly either invading, droning, or bombing other countries whether they like it or not. We bombed Somalia the other day because we believed there were terrorists hiding there. Took out a whole city block and who knows how many innocents to grab a small group of Al-Qaeda terrorists. The mindset that the world is our backyard is still very much alive in 2022 America, and it's not limited to Republicans, though their reasons are more often nakedly jingoistic than Democrats. It's the disease of Manifest Destiny.

As for why Republicans would be in favor of Russia making such an asshole move on Ukraine, there are a lot of reasons, but the ones that immediately come to mind are that Joe Biden is president. When Trump was being an utter dumb fuck, Republicans championed his actions, and Democrats scolded him for it. Now that Biden's up to his elbows in this bullshit, he gets to be the focus of Republican ire. It could be the exact same actions Donald Trump took, and it will be sold by Fox News, OAN, et. al, as just evil, nasty awful warmonger Biden, because it's team sports. That's all any of this is for people like that. If they're blue it's bad, if it's red they're good, and that so very easily works inversely as well.

There are complicating factors and context to consider.

Cheap oil is good for domestic politics, and is largely beyond the president's control anyway.

Demanding that NATO pay more is a pretext for diminishing the US's role in the alliance, which is good for Putin. It also serves Trump's domestic nativist base.

Selling weapons to the Ukraine is the best argument here in your favor, but Trump has the Republican interest of feeding the military industrial complex regardless.

Still doesn't change the way Trump groveled to Putin publicly, and continues to do so this week. Doesn't change that he wanted to pull the US out of NATO.

I agree with you that Biden's weakness, especially vis a vis Afghanistan, emboldened Putin. But the idea that Trump would have prevented this invasion: the evidence is mixed, and if true, the reasons do not make Trump look like a American patriot.

I knew someone would bite on that, and I don't think it's the same thing. Before you jump on that, two things can be wrong and also be two different things.

Invading another country to occupy it and completely take over governance? Seems like it would be too much, but apparently some people disagree.

All sorts of subtext with that, including :

1) Trump had the GOP remove support for Ukraine from its party platform in 2016
2) Trump's campaign manager Manafort also ran Yanukovych's campaign and owed nearly $20 million to the Ukrainian oligarch known as 'Putin's Chef', and offered to work for Trump for free
3) Trump stopped $400 million in aid to Ukraine, first claiming 'Ukrainian corrupton', then linking it to investigating Biden's son.
4) Additional Javelin sales were also predicated on manufacturing a case against Biden. 'We need a favor, though...'
5) The other part of that was to investigate the unwarranted conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine that hacked the Democratic servers and leaked the data, not Russia.

Yep.

The Republicans and racists started siding with Russia over America the first time Obama and Putin disagreed. "Support the manly straight white Christian leader over the effeminate tranny fucking black secret muslim leader" was the argument I saw frequently back in the day.

This is some good analysis.

Antipartisanship.

Yes. That Republicans, especially the Trumpists, have a hard on for a white, ethno-nationalist, militarist state, led by a masculine strong man and with an economic based on fossil fuels, is well established.

We do it through coups. The US has a long, rich history of funding secessionist movements, contra movements, and helping install powers in countries that would benefit the US global hegemony. We cause death every day, directly, with bombs, drones, surgical strikes, sanctions. We punish small nations that attempt to nationalize their resources rather than sell to us, and there are plenty of people in the US who see that as not even a necessary evil, but beneficial. I argued with someone the other day who believed the US military has done more good in the world, even in countries where we've assassinated their leadership because it works out for us so it must be good for them. We have a population that accepts a very queer military reverence as part and parcel of its culture. Seriously, no other country fetishizes its military like the US, especially to the tune of $800 billion a year. If our culture were placed in a middle eastern country, we'd call them a threat to global peace. We call out, in astonishment, what other countries do to nearby nationstates all the while doing the very same thing.

The United States has only abstained from one major conflict or another, for a total of 17 years in its 246 year history. Again, if we were some small South American nation, the US would be declaring us far too dangerous to trust, and would aid rebels in overturning the government to create a much more USA friendly faction (not a necessarily free nation, just more friendly to the US. Ask Pinochet about what we're willing to do to secure US friendly governments). We're still doing it, it's not something that fell out of practice a generation ago. We still meddle, and we pat ourselves on the back because we're not like other countries that invade (unless you're Hawaii), we'll outsource the work and accept the benefits like a feudal Lord.

Putin is awful. He's an asshole. He's monstrous. He's also in good company across the ocean, it's just he's proud of it as being a strong man, while our culture ensconces it as just the way the world works (though we couch our travesties in softer terms to appeal to the human conscience). I mean, come on, we're the country that votes for the lesser evil thinking good will come of it. That is our mindset. Between the US and Russia, there are no better men, only ones with different ambitions for power.

Yeah, people are seeing through the BS and right into the naked aggression. Nobody wants Soviet Union part deux. Big takeaway - they also refuse to accept the separatist states as legitimate.

And now it's getting serious...

Because they're children with panicky parents?

A nuclear apocalypse won't happen on one condition. The same condition we faced in the Persian Gulf in 1991 and Korea in October of 1950.

When asked why we didn't push on into Baghdad and remove Saddam in '91, then President George H.W. Bush said that's not what the coalition he created would support. They pushed Iraq out of Kuwait and out of striking distance of Saudia Arabia. That was the goal.

When MacArthur asked to bomb the bridges and into China to stop the columns carrying Chinese forces into Korea, he was told he could bomb the "southern half of the bridges."

A proportional response.

If military intervention becomes a thing, and let me state for the record that I hope it does not, so long as the aim is simply pushing Russia out of Ukraine (and Finland), then it won't go nuclear. Nobody but Dayton wants NATO to attempt to seize Russian territory and remove Putin by force.

It would be a proportional response. Forcing Russia out and back to pre-existing borders. Putin is a despotic dictator, but he's not suicidal.