Comment by mytailorisrich
21 hours ago
It's hard to take this "looming war" with Russia seriously when WWIII didn't happen during the USSR times when Russia was much stronger. It's hard to believe that Russia would want to start WWIII now when they didn't then and when they have shown that they were highly struggling in Ukraine (and they struggled in Chechnya, too).
Along the same line, during the Cold War Sweden was literally facing the Warsaw Pact and yet stayed out of NATO. Now it is surrounded with friends and needs to join NATO.
I am just old enough to remember the end of the Cold War and the fall of it all. To me it is very difficult to consider that the situation now is riskier than then.
A reasonable conclusion is that we are being led up the garden path...
Russia has a stockpile of nukes for defense because they are worried of invasion (history has shown this is warranted). But they know that the military might of the US and NATO would obliterate their conventional forces.
My theory is that there has always been push-back against an EU power-grab to full "statehood" and involvement in military matters, and that this is a pretext to "manufacture consent" in European public opinion.
Now, specifically for the UK, again I think this is largely pandering to the US to attract favours (tariffs, etc)
I think, sure, while Russia is fighting in Ukraine, they would really struggle to attack elsewhere.
But were they to win, which is not that hard to imagine, they would suddenly have a war-time economy and suddenly able to move troops to another border. Russia is always making threats, most recently Putin said at a Russian Economic Forum that "wherever a Russian soldier's boot stood, belongs to Russia".
As for fearing NATO... Russia was always good at salami tactics: take a slice and back off before backlash mounts. If they helped themselves to Estonia, say, over 48 hours, would the US, UK and France send nukes? Send much at all? Possibly not, and Putin knows it.
None of it pertains to the "when" question, but I can easily imagine circumstances where it happens.
> If they helped themselves to Estonia, say, over 48 hours, would the US, UK and France send nukes? Send much at all? Possibly not, and Putin knows it.
They clearly wouldn't send nukes but Russian forces would still be destroyed by conventional means. Ukraine has shown that the Russian air force is weak and poorly supplied (see how the US or Israel operate from the air while Russia sends in ground troops almost immediately) so would lose air control very quickly and then be carpet bombed.
Russia is good at making threats but reality is different. In general, the really powerful don't need to make big threats all the time because they are both confident of their strengths and they know the opposition is fully aware of them, too. Putin threatens nuclear armageddon all the time because, really, that's all he has to appear strong.
I don't think Finland and Sweden would have joined NATO if this were just a pan-European power grab. They want to be separate countries. They joined because they genuinely believe that Putin has his eye on them.
That would be insane, but Putin is taking his playbook from the Cold War "madman" theory. He wants you to be guessing, which scatters your attention and misdirects your forces.
The Soviet Union engaged in plenty of proxy wars with the West, but they always avoided engaging directly with Western Europe. Putin has upped the ante by attacking Ukraine, which the West considers an ally and was moving towards a formal alliance.
That puts the madman theory in play. He makes rhetorical feints at Scandinavia. He knows the West won't ignore them, because they don't know if he's kidding.
I concur that the UK is just sucking up to the US here. The US has become a very unreliable partner and Europe needs to find a way to mollify it while they figure out how they can deal with Putin's continuous needling by themselves.
"Putin has an eye on Sweden" does not pass the most basic smell test, now even less than during the Cold War...
My take is that Sweden wanted to abandon its historical neutrality formally to fully join the rest of the "group" but needed something to make the public agree.
> which the West considers an ally and was moving towards a formal alliance.
No, Ukraine was not an ally and was not going to join NATO.
No-one even wanted Ukraine in the EU because it is so sht (dubbed the most corrupt country in Europe) before the Russian (re-)invasion and now, somehow, it should be fastracked...
This is all the usual murky, dodgy dealings in geopolitics but Europeans have lost their "nose" for propaganda in the media, especially in the West where there is no such thing, right?
> because they don't know if he's kidding*
We know exactly what their strengths and our strengths are, and they know them, too. Russia is not going to invade the EU/NATO anymore than during the USSR times. Basic common sense, again.
> "Putin has an eye on Sweden" does not pass the most basic smell test, now even less than during the Cold War...
It does pass. Invading the Swedish island of Gotland would cut off air and sea routes to the Baltics, while a ground move against the Suwalki gap between Poland and Lithuania would sever land routes. Map: https://warsawinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Balti... Keep in mind that Belarus should also be marked in red, because it hosts Russian forces and allows them free passage.
It is one of the most obvious hostile moves against the EU and NATO, and Europe clearly doesn't have the means nor the will to launch a major war to liberate the countries. Everything hinges on the US, and we all know the state of things there.
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