Comment by _djo_
3 months ago
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.
My argument is that Russia was compelled to attack both Georgia and Ukraine because of NATO expansion, or rather preventing NATO expansion, not because of "Putin is crazy, wants to be a Tsar".
Your argument is that Russia wants to occupy territory just for the sake of expanding Russia, which is really not logical or reasonable.
My argument is that if Mexico or Canada joined a military pact with Russia, the US would invade those countries immediately.
Your argument is that any country can join a mutually defence pact without any consequences, as should be the case for Ukraine.
Is this correct?
Buddy, pal, even if it wasn't absolutely craven to attack a country for fear they'd join a defensive pact because they were afraid you'd attack them, you're already begging the question that Ukraine was about to join NATO, which has been shelved for two decades, and even more off the table for the last decade since joining NATO would have required relinquishing its claim on Crimea.
There was a 0% chance of Ukraine joining NATO in the next N years prior to Russia's invasion of them in 2021.
Even if by some twisted logic that were pretext for a quote-unquote "just war", it cannot be a justification for the land grab Russia is making in Ukraine today, killing civilians and committing various war crimes on the daily to do it.
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This fails to explain why Russia attacked both countries after NATO had decided not to offer them a path to membership.
Putin's intense hostility toward NATO stems from the fact that NATO stands in the way of invading Europe. The blitzkrieg against Ukraine also failed largely because of military support from European NATO members, who used established NATO communication channels to coordinate their efforts - exactly the thing NATO was established for!
If Russia were a normal European country, it would have nothing to lose and much to gain from bordering NATO. NATO membership comes with oversight and separation requirements that make member states stable and predictable. A former, pre-Putin foreign minister of Russia described this as "free-of-charge security on Russia's western border".
It is a problem for Putin only because he seeks to invade Europe; NATO stands in the way.
It is perfectly reasonable when you look at who holds power in Russia: the old revanchist KGB clan seeking to restore the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. This is the world they grew up in and were indoctrinated into in KGB schools. For them, it is a "normalcy" to which they must return.
There is no need for guessing games when Cuba was actually in a military pact with the USSR until 1991 and hosted jets, bombers, missile cruisers and other conventional weapons for decades after the missile crisis. You can read about Soviet warships conducting missile drills off the coast of Florida in old newspapers. This is far more than anyone has done for countries that have joined NATO since the end of the Cold War. And yet, the US did not invade Cuba.
Russia has repeatedly, in writing, pledged to respect the sovereignty of other European countries, including Ukraine, and their freedom to join military alliances. There's nothing to discuss - unless you want to turn Europe into a landscape of semi-sovereign nations ruled by Russia, which raises the question: why should Russia, in particular, be the European master race? Shouldn't the Franco-German alliance, with its much larger economy, bigger population, and numerous allies, instead dictate what Russia can and cannot do?
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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.