Comment by whimsicalism
2 years ago
You are assuming I am some Trump American-first Republican. I think you are severely misjudging the politics of Ukraine support in the US, which has collapsed in the last few months.
Perhaps I am opposed to harsh projections of American power in an increasingly multipolar world? The global playing field is leveling, I think that is precisely the wrong time to be making even bitterer enemies.
Yes I am assuming that very much, but it does not matter that much, either you're America first or you agree with their foreign policy anyway on Ukraine. I understand that Ukraine support has been politicised even when it should not be. This says much more about the utterly dysfunctional state of American politics and the decline of American society whereby you're seriously entertaining reelecting Trump next year. It does not say much at all about Ukraine. If it were not Ukraine, it would simply be something else equally irrelevant to domestic American politics but equally politicised.
>Perhaps I am opposed to harsh projections of American power in an increasingly multipolar world?
I don't know, are you? Put another way the USA is helping support a free and independent country against an imperial genocidal conqueror. Isn't that what the USA is kind of supposed to do? Otherwise what exactly does it stand for?
Or another way: In forcing "détente" on Europe, are you happy to trade good relations with most of Europe, your oldest allies, for maybe better relations with Russia, your enemy who hates you and seeks your destruction? Really? Sounds like a shit and moronic deal to me.
>The global playing field is leveling, I think that is precisely the wrong time to be making even bitterer enemies.
It's too late lad. Russia hates you even more than they hate your mother country, my homeland, the UK. In fact Russia hates you more than any other country on the planet. They utterly despise you and Anglo-American cultural hegemony. In for a penny, in for a pound and all that. They've been working to undermine the USA since well before the war started. There is no going back any time soon. Instead you advocate surrender to the same people who wish to destroy you. Weak.
> In forcing "détente" on Europe, are you happy to trade good relations with most of Europe, your oldest allies, for maybe better relations with Russia, your enemy who hates you and seeks your destruction? Really? Sounds like a shit and moronic deal to me.
There won’t be any détente in Europe. There was an opportunity in the early 2000s but both Russia and Western European countries fumbled it. Now the door was closed and Russia’s actions ensured that it won’t open for quite a while. It is difficult to grasp how profound the effects on European politics has been.
This is what is so pathetic about those Americans who delude themselves thinking that if they close their eyes it will be ok. The world is slipping through their fingers and they don’t realise that this is accelerating the disintegration of American power. This war is fundamentally different from Iraq in a way they do not seem to grasp.
It's pretty typically American to only be able to see the world through the lense of their own parochial internal interests and partisan conflicts. Their economy and military and geography of the country are so big that the gravity field of the place is massive, and both liberals and conservatives there rewrite things in terms of their own dysfunctional political cultural battles. Not to say other places in the world don't have ideological blinders, but the US is extreme.
The prime example of this was the nonsense that got Trump impeached ... Trump trying to strong-arm Zelensky into intervening into US domestic politics. "Art of the deal" wasn't so much that, as it was just total blindness to anything outside his own internal interests. American tribal politics were clearly so important that the survival of Ukraine itself was a bargaining chip.
FWIW up here in Canada none of the 5 mainstream political parties have taken a position against supporting Ukraine, financially and militarily. Given the size of the Ukrainian-Canadian population (third largest Ukrainian population after Ukraine and Russia) such a position would be electorally toxic.
> it does not matter that much, either you're America first or you agree with their foreign policy anyway on Ukraine
It does matter because you basically said "if you really cared about maintaining American unipolarity no matter the cost, you would be all in on Ukraine" - and I don't care about maintaining American unipolarity no matter the cost. A multipolar world is an inevitability.
> you advocate surrender to the same people who wish to destroy you. Weak.
Somehow I suspect that I am not the jingoistic nationalist here.
That was a hypothetical. I was just observing that the Ukraine war is amazing for US interests in a strictly Machiavellian, geopolitical sense. We Europeans are getting fucked over by the Russians, Ukrainians most of all and of course Russians are destroying themselves too for the sake of land (as if Russia hasn't got enough...). The USA is laughing here. I mention this because it's clear that it isn't a humanitarian issue for the US isolationists, they just don't want to spend the money (at least in theory, of course it's really all about domestic political tribalism and almost nothing to do with Ukraine for at least one side of the divide in the US), so I am speaking to them here on those terms.
>Somehow I suspect that I am not the jingoistic nationalist here.
Yes indeed how nationalistic of me to checks notes oppose wars of imperial conquest in Europe.