Comment by _djo_
3 months ago
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.
> Nothing should or would happen.
"nothing should" is correct; "nothing would" is fantasy
> The issue with Cuba was the stationing of nuclear missiles in Cuba, not merely its membership of a pact with the USSR.
Yes, putting nukes there brought things to a serious crisis, but the issue with Cuba
> The US didn’t invade Cuba, it assisted Cuban exiles to do so
Come on, let's be real here. Sure, _technically_ the US didn't invade Cuba. But it funded and assisted a mercenary force in a (very poor) attempt to do so. And that wasn't the only time the US tried to force regime change in Cuba, just like it did in Chile.
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Please read about the Monroe Doctrine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine
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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).
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> 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.
Pardon me, you have gotten yourself dragged into a tu quoque defense of Russia.
It is best not to engage in these arguments, because they are almost never conducted in good faith.
The goal is partially to make the claim that "the US is just as bad/worse, therefore, Russia is acting morally/logically/blamelessly", but primarily to simply turn the conversation into one where you are defending everything the US has ever done wrong, instead of discussing whatever Russia is currently doing, which is where the bad faith comes in.
If you do feel compelled to engage, I recommend at most acknowledging whatever the US did previously, before pivoting back to discussing the actual current situation. Otherwise, you're playing into the strategy.
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The argument is that these rules that you describe that any country can join any mutual defence pact without any repercussions is just plain wrong, mainly because the US would be immediately working against that even with military interventions. Its the same thing with how the US's stance for foreign policy is to push democracy where it suits them if they have big influence with one of the parties, and to push favourable dictatorships if not. There's double standards and twofacedness by the US foreign policy which really everyone else sees besides US citizens themselves, mostly because the average american barely even knows anything about domestic politics let alone foreign ones (except the few propaganda topics we get from the three letter tv channels).
Just answer this question, would the US object to, possibly with military intervention, if Mexico or Canada would join a military defence pact with China or Russia, or India, or say really any other country besides the US, even Brazil. We both know the answer to this.
Now lets do even easier. Would the US object to any South American countries joining a mutual defence pact with Russia / China? We already have the answer to this.
So you're saying another country would only find mutual defense pact threatening if they wanted to invade them?