Comment by cmrdporcupine
4 days ago
I agree with your overall sentiment, except:
"Like, in Europe we already live in a completely safe society in historical and geographic terms"
Russia. Putin.
4 days ago
I agree with your overall sentiment, except:
"Like, in Europe we already live in a completely safe society in historical and geographic terms"
Russia. Putin.
The chances of Russia invading a NATO country are essentially zero simply because it would, almost certainly, lead to nuclear war. The idea that nukes wouldn't come out is contradicted both by decades of wargaming. In fact this is exactly what led to the end of the Cold War.
At one time the US thought we could end the Cold War by waving a bigger stick. But Proud Prophet [1] was an extremely elaborate war game played out in the 80s that demonstrated that literally every single aggressive strategy, regardless of how innocuous, invariably spiraled rapidly towards nuclear war and the depopulation of the Northern Hemisphere.
This led the US to sharply scale back rhetoric against the USSR, drop ideas of successfully fighting a nuclear war, and a sharp shift towards de-escalation and away from strong-arming. 7 years later the first McDonalds would open in the USSR. The next year, the USSR would collapse.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Prophet
This has nothing to do with anything. Nobody said anything about nuclear war or formal invasion.
Let's review.
Russia shot down a civilian airliner, killing all 298 people onboard, mostly Dutch nationals.
Russia performed a radioactive poisoning attack on British territory, contaminating British civilian areas and
Russia also used a deadly nerve agent twice within a few months on British territory, including poisoning two non-Russian British nationals, killing one and injuring the other.
And they actively fund far right and white supremacist organizations in western European countries and blatantly interfere in local politics, and also run active bot farms for the purpose of undermining social solidarity and democratic governance.
Those are just a few things we know about.
The threat from Russia is not external or invasive. It is internal and ongoing.
The fact that they haven't nuked and won't nuke the entire western hemisphere is a bit of a strange bar to set.
His comment said that "in Europe we already live in a completely safe society in historical and geographic terms." And in the past Europe dealt with never-ending wars which culminated in a war that left tens of millions dead. And even after that war, there was the never-ending threat of nuclear annihilation that was 100% justified as both sides lined up their nukes at one another and very nearly fired them. Nothing in your list is anywhere near the same scale. The only thing that would suffice is a fear that Russia invades a NATO country and effectively triggers WW3.
none of the countries that Putin could and would invade, e.g. Finland, the Baltics, Poland, have nukes.
It would depend on the UK, France, and the US to back them with nuclear weapons. Would the UK electorate be willing to trade their existence -- potential nuclear holocaust -- for Latvia?
And the US is under Putin's puppet, so they're not launching nukes.
Would Britain and France go to war over an invasion of Poland? They did once, and didn't have a great time...
I think there are three big factors that make involvement almost guaranteed. The first is that in modern times political leaders prefer to believe what they want to believe, instead of what is genuinely most probable. They won't see it as trading their existence for anything. They'll convince themselves that they'll decisively win, or that Russia won't retaliate, or won't be able to retaliate.
The second is that the leaders of these countries are very unpopular. Starmer has an approval rating of 22% which is somehow twice as high as that of Macron who has reached a simply impressive 11% approval rating. Politicians love nothing more than war when they're unpopular, because it gives the electorate something to focus on outside of their own internal problems -- Diversionary War Theory. Also I certainly disagree regarding our insecure 'peace president' who has an affinity for bombs and a trend towards megalomania.
And finally there is the wargaming results. Some of the actions that led to nuclear holocaust were relatively innocuous, including performative nuclear strikes intended to 'send a message' rather than actually cause much real damage. It doesn't even sound like a bad idea, at first. Make it clear that you're serious and this is the path we're going down.
But it fails to consider the most probable response. You want to send me a message? Okay, here's your answer. How do you like my message? And of course you can't let such a provocation then go unmet. It's easy to see how what sounds like a reasonable idea is in reality a very bad one, but modern political leaders in the West make endless poor decisions with predictably poor results. You've gotta be something special to have an approval rating of 11%. Were such things measured in the past, even Caligula would probably be looking down at you!
I'm talking about our society internally, not potential external attacks on it. It's reasonably high trust and crime is rare outside a few outlier cities. We could not be further from warranting these sort of fascist style crackdowns. Ironically yes we could be spending funding used for domestic surveillance and bureaucracy on buying more Himars.
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What a surprise a 2 hour old throwaway post parroting barely coherent Russian propaganda.
This "joke" is neither funny nor original as it comes up on social media everytime someone mentions Russia as a threat to Europe.
Oh, look at that. A fresh account just to make this comment. What a coincidence.