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Comment by nabla9

14 days ago

Russia wants to end NATO without going to war with NATO.

NATO's political unity and ability to respond is tested with these attacks. Russia does them one after another gradually escalating. Russia maintains plausible deniability or does so small operations that they can always walk them back.

Eventually, some country invokes Article 4 or 5 consultations. Russia hopes that US, Hungary, or Germany waters down NATO response. The conflict continues, but between individual countries not under NATO. NATOs as a organization may continue, but raison d'être is gone.

Russia and these NATO countries being probed are like the two siblings in the back seat. Mom, he's touching me. Stop touching your brother. Mom, he's holding his finger right next to me. Dad eventually says, don't make me pull this car over and start a global thermonuclear war

  • Not quite. Be careful, Russia invests a lot in disinformation campaigns and spreading (conflicting, but that is part of their doctrine) narratives. Bothsidisms and False Equivalency are some of the common tools in muddying the information sphere.

    NATO and Europe did quite a lot to normalize relations with Russia. Russia was invited and became participant of the NATO program Partnership For Peace [0].

       The program contains 6 areas of cooperation, which aims to build relationships with partners through military-to-military cooperation on training, exercises, disaster planning and response, science and environmental issues, professionalization, policy planning, and relations with civilian government
    
    

    Very nice, but the secret services that took over the empire did and does not fancy a rule-based, harmonious order based on mutual relations, human rights, freedom of press etc. As any autocracy or kleptocracy understands, that is very much a threat to their power, beacuse

      - Population will demand political influence.
      
      - Mindset. A criminal thinks in terms of I win, you lose. Might makes right. Complete opposite of what makes up the dna of the free world. 
    
    

    The imperative is on us to understand that message really well. It goes slowly unfortunately. It is hard for us to grok.

    Notice how on our part, helped via tech oligarchs, there is an incessant bombardment to undermine support for those values. Kremlin troll factories are a thing, but the Chinese are speading up rapidly in the information sphere too. Especially youngsters are targeted.

    The war has already begun, but we don´t want to see it. And that is dangerous.

    ___

    0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partnership_for_Peace

    • > Be careful, Russia invests a lot in disinformation campaigns and spreading (conflicting, but that is part of their doctrine) narratives.

      You may also want to be careful (or not):

      - all countries engage in these things

      - how things are seem like how they seem, but this is very often not the case...and rather than consciousness raising warnings for such situations, it very often does the opposite

      As always, I recommend a meta-perspective on geopolitical stories, it is much more fun than being a Normative, poorly constrained imagination actor like the vast majority of people.

      10 replies →

  • Except its always Russia instigating. We never sent someone to look at the spire of Saint Basil (the pathetic excuse offered for explaining the presence of GRU officers in Salisbury carrying out chemical warfare), or really struck at their weak points.

    • Are you actually saying the US has never engaged in propaganda within another country or attempted to influence the outcomes of their elections or influence their populace to rise up against their leaders?

      You cannot be serious with that kind of belief

      3 replies →

This is strange to me because this is basically forcing drills that better prepare their enemy.

  • Sound the fire alarm over a birthday cake candle once, and you've got a drill making people get better at evacuating.

    Sound the fire alarm over a birthday cake candle several times a week, and people learn the alarm means there's no fire, no need to rush, they've got time to finish that e-mail and grab their coat.

  • If you never go to war with your enemy, your enemy's continued preparations are wasted money and resources (both political and economic), aren't they?

    • The type of preparations being forced are things the government should be doing regardless as part of their national defense.