Comment by saalweachter
3 months ago
Even if Ukraine were about to join NATO, why would joining a mutual defense pact be threatening, unless, you know, you were planning to invade them?
3 months ago
Even if Ukraine were about to join NATO, why would joining a mutual defense pact be threatening, unless, you know, you were planning to invade them?
Excellent point. Ukraine, like any sovereign country, can join whatever alliances it wants too.
There is no right in international law that allows its neighbours to invade if it picks one they don’t like.
Add to that that it’s a mutual defence pact and the argument becomes more absurd.
What would happen if Canada joined a mutual defense pact with Russia? Or Mexico? Think about this scenario, would the US invade immediately?. Something similar actually happened with Cuba in the 60s, and the US invaded them, doing a total naval siege [1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis
Nothing should or would happen.
The issue with Cuba was the stationing of nuclear missiles in Cuba, not merely its membership of a pact with the USSR.
The US didn’t invade Cuba, it assisted Cuban exiles to do so in the embarrassing Bay of Pigs disaster which took place before the naval blockade as part of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Naturally, Bay of Pigs should never have happened, and it’s one of the things that led to the CIA’s powers and freedom from oversight being drastically curtailed the following decade.
Furthermore, the world and international law has moved on since the 1960s. That sort of brinkmanship has been much reduced.
6 replies →
You are conveniently omitting the reason why all those Eastern European states wanted to join NATO, which is that they were previously invaded and occupied by USSR and/or Imperial Russia, in some cases more than once (e.g. Poland).
[flagged]
> any sovereign country, can join whatever alliances it wants too
unless you're Cuba, or Vietnam, or Nicaragua, or Chile, and the list goes on
but yes, in theory you're right; in practice history shows that if they are small and powerless then they cannot, not without consequences
Cuba I have addressed.
The US was invited into South Vietnam to help defend them against an invasion from North Vietnam. We can debate the morality of the resulting war, which was questionable, but it was not a US invasion.
The US invasion of Nicaragua was in 1912, long before the modern post-WWII era of stronger international law.
Chile was not invaded by the US.
If these are the examples you have, you don’t have a strong argument.
14 replies →
So you're saying another country would only find mutual defense pact threatening if they wanted to invade them?
What would happen if Canada joined a mutual defense pact with Russia? Or Mexico? Think about this scenario, would the US invade immediately?. Something similar actually happened with Cuba in the 60s, and the US invaded them, doing a total naval siege [1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis