You're being downvoted for engaging in whataboutism, which is a variation of the tu quoque logical fallacy [1]. It's been overused in recent times (especially in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and people are growing tired of it (and rightly so, as it merely derails discussion and fuels flame wars - contrary to the spirit of HN).
It doesn't seem whataboutism in the comment, as the author says "Russia is a bad actor", so it's not about someone did something before, so it should be accepted now. It's more about non equal treatment of the same bad situation done by different parties. Correct me if I'm wrong here.
I have been around political discourse long enough to realize that people saying "whataboutism" is a shibboleth that is used to excuse extreme double standards and hypocrisy.
If you are running a sports competition, and you are told "please ban these Russian athletes, because Russia's invasion of Ukraine is unprovoked and unjustified", I do not think it is a logical fallacy to ask "can I also ban US athletes for the same reason"? Or to ask "why doesn't the same principle apply across the board?"
I have heard ideoogically based people on all sides of an issue use "whataboutism" to escape having to discuss basic logic. If someone is trying to convince you that it's imperative you do X, it's not fallacious to inquire about what the principle behind the imperative is. And why the principle is being applied in this one particular case and not across the board. Otherwise it is "rules for thee, not for me". "But why not for thee too?" "Hey, stop the whataboutism!"
But it's even worse than that. Because if US goes halfway around the world and bombs countries to smithereens which present no threat to it, then that's objectively worse than trying to prevent a former ally from joining an enemy alliance and putting nukes on your border. The correct analogy would be the Cuban Missile Crisis, when USA sponsored the Bay of Pigs invasion, Cuba asked USSR for help, USSR placed nuclear missiles on it, and USA blockaded it and threatened war. One could totally understand USA in that scenario. That's the analogy. Going halfway around the world to bomb countries that don't present a threat to you, is SO MUCH MORE NEEDLESS than what Russia did in Ukraine, that it is all the more deserving of, oh I dunno, 1 athlete being banned somewhere?
> I have been around political discourse long enough to realize that people saying "whataboutism" is a shibboleth that is used to excuse extreme double standards and hypocrisy.
Trust me, not only did I read it, but I also thought through these issues over the years.
"Yes, Politician B did do this-or-that immoral thing, but then again so do other politicians. So what's the big deal?"
This is not what's being said. What's being said is:
We typically want to stay neutral among conflicts. You are pressuring us to take an unprecedented step of banning athletes from country X because country X did an extremely egregious thing B. Sure, let's do it. Can we also ban country Y who did B times 10?
No, you can't. If you try we will retaliate!
So, you aren't really concerned about the principle. You first pick a target country (e.g. Israel) and then you come up with some spurious reasons which you don't actually believe in, just to bully us into taking this action
It's not about "whether it's not a big deal". It's about comparing apples to apples. Having a sense of proportion.
"You must eject this person from the group. They farted. That's beyond the pale."
"But you have been farting far more, and also punching people in the face, and you are still here. Should I eject you too?"
"Stop your Whataboutism! We are only talking about this one person!"
Actually no, it's about moral shifts. The morality of today is very, very, very different from what it was a mere thousand years ago. Brigandry (killing travelers on the road so that you can take their stuff) was once considered a noble profession, for example.
But the world moves on, and morality has a tendency to move in tectonic shifts. Suddenly (it seems), what was okay is no longer okay, because the people say so. "Suddenly", it's not okay to kill passers-by and take their stuff. "Suddenly", it's not okay to treat children any way you please as their parents and masters. "Suddenly", it's only natural that a man doesn't need to be of noble birth to vote. "Suddenly", it's even a woman's right to vote. "Suddenly", apartheid isn't okay anymore. "Suddenly", you're not allowed to kick your dog anymore.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is one of those "suddenlys". Wars of conquest (i.e. invading and annexing a neighboring country) fell out of favor in the 19th century, with the last major hurrah in the 1930s. The world has moved on, and it's no longer okay to do that. We condemn Russia because we don't allow that sort of behavior anymore. But throwing "what about America doing X and Y?" around would be like protesting anti-apartheid campaigns against South Africa just because racial inequality and violence hadn't been solved in America (in fact, there was a fair bit of whataboutism by those who opposed changing the South African order). It just comes off as crass and self-serving in the end.
If you want real change, you push for a movement and solidarity against evil. That's what these Ukrainian woman have done, and it's beautiful to see. The whataboutism that tears down their supports on the other hand, is a most insidious evil, because you're basically telling Americans that they have no right to stand against Russia's evil acts (the call of hypocrisy, tu-quoque). You shame potential allies into inaction against a clear and present evil, which is a horrible thing to do on so many levels.
The question is simple. Would it be beautiful for you to see people banning US athletes? At this point, I think it would, for many people. Why don't we see it anywhere? That's the question.
I think that speaks for itself. What is the year when it became "not ok to invade, occupy and bomb other countries that present no threat to you and are not even within 1000 miles of you"? Because that's kind of the thing that matters, right? You mentioned 1930. Since then, USA has been involved in 80% of the wars, and has 800 bases around the world while the rest of the world combined has 30. Who needs "conquest" when you can intimidate everyone into doing what you want?
Do you not see the issue here? It's simple ... if we all suddenly grew a conscience, great! So will you join people in calling for sanctions on USA and ostracism of US athletes? Can you link us to a post about that? Here is Mehdi Hassan doing it -- will you?
> Would it be beautiful for you to see people banning US athletes? At this point, I think it would, for many people. Why don't we see it anywhere? That's the question.
This does reach the crux of the matter. Why don't we see Cubans boycotting American athletes and gaining major international support? Why aren't Syrians raising hell at every athletic competition, protesting that Americans and Turks are allowed to compete? Everyone's free to join in and boycott, so why don't they? Answer: Because on the whole it's not important enough to them to warrant the investment of effort and time. Because America's behaviors aren't that far out of the international norm of today (sad to say). That "suddenly" hasn't happened yet, and probably won't for quite some time.
And that's how we measure moral shifts. One day the shittier things America does today will be protest worthy, but our morality has not moved that far yet, and we still have much bigger fish to fry.
So to answer your question: I feel strongly about one case but not the other because they are not equivalent. And worrying about all the little problems before starting to solve the big ones makes the perfect the enemy of the good.
And that's the beef I have over whataboutism: It makes storms in teacups. That's what it's designed for, and why it's rightly called a logical fallacy.
> Answer: Because on the whole it's not important enough to them to warrant the investment of effort and time. Because America's behaviors aren't that far out of the international norm of today (sad to say).
And to elaborate on “important enough” it’s about how beneficial for them is this to take the fight, and not about the moral or how "far out of the international norm". X can be amoral, but if powerful country X is doing it I will loose a lot in this fight, so I won’t take it. But if less powerful country Y is doing the same, there is high chance of winning and I will take the fight.
Asking “How about X?” is highlighting the issue - the more powerful country you are the more amoral things world can tolerate you doing. (The author of the comment doesn’t try to justify the bad actions, but tries to highlight the inequality of treatment).
What Russia is doing is analogous to what USA did in the Cuban Missile Crisis. You can't allow a neighboring country, especially one that was a former ally, to join an enemy military alliance and pose an existential threat to some of your citizens, by, say, pointing nuclear missiles at you -- neither now nor in 15 years. Any country would react to being surrounded and cornered, including today's USA. That at least has some relation to self-defense and preservation: you don't want to take the chances that a "purely defensive alliance" which already bombed destroyed Yugoslavia and Libya will now stop bombing and destroying.
So what you said honestly seems backwards to me on every level, including logical, ethical, and reality.
Logical: You say we should not "worry about all the little problems before starting to solve the big ones." So are you trying to say that going halfway around the world, bombing, invading, occupying and destroying multiple countries, and resulting in over a million deaths, is a much smaller problem, than invading one country to prevent it from joining a hostile alliance? The number of countries is larger. The death toll is also larger. The destruction is larger. But you have it backwards somehow. If you applied your principle, it would mean we would actually have to prioritize preventing USA from doing this anymore, not Russia. I am saying we should do both.
Ethical: How is going halfway around the world to attack countries that pose literally ZERO threat to your country, less worthy of moral condemnation, than getting militarily involved around your own localized borders in order to stop that same "globetrotter" from flipping your neighbor against you? One has an actual connection to self defense, and the other literally does not. But you have it backwards, again.
Reality: billions of people recognize that NATO's expansion led to this, USA's own experts predicted it, and even the Ukrainians themselves did NOT want to be part of NATO, when George W Bush vowed to bring them into NATO kicking and screaming anyway. Every sound bite you are you told to repeat, including "open door policy", "purely defensive" and "unprovoked and unjustified", is backwards.
I could go on... but my point is it's backwards. This is plain and simple a way for USA to push through a surrounding of Russia at Ukraine's expense ... if they can get it done, great. If not, well Ukraine paid the price, they "wanted to fight" after all.
Aaaaand now we've taken a hard-right into propaganda territory, so I'll get off here.
I would suggest consulting Timothy Snyder, Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University, specializing in the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_D._Snyder
So no amount of logic, moral argumentation matter, and links to mainstream sources, words of the very political involved in brokering peace, or polls sampling billions of people are dismissed as "propaganda"? Can you please define what you mean by "propaganda" here -- you seem to be making a category error.
I don't understand. Are all Indians susceptible to propaganda, but you and Timothy Snyder know the actual truth? I can certainly listen to Dr. Snyder (I haven't) but it's going to be one opinion, one data point, for me. Not an absolute authority.
Can you at least answer my questions from a logical and moral point of view?
PS: Just in case your "hard right" implies that somehow this is a right-wing conspiracy or propaganda, I should point out that "the war could have been avoided and we should have peace talks" is understood by people on all sides of the political spectrum. The pope is on the left. The progressives in US Congress are lefties. Noam Chomsky is a leftist. They all say the same thing. Heck even the World Socialist Website highlights thousands of people in Spain protesting the NATO summit in Spain: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/05/02/ydws-m02.html
Propaganda... you keep using that word... I don't think it means what you think it means.
> So no amount of logic, moral argumentation matter, and links to mainstream sources, words of the very political involved in brokering peace, or polls sampling billions of people are dismissed as "propaganda"?
Your long, bitter and whiny rants are based on random scraps and fall apart on closer inspection. For example, saying that GWB was forcing Ukraine into NATO is incorrect and absurd; NATO is a very exclusive club hesitant to accept any new members, because it increases commitments of existing members and provides access to their internal defence information.
The initiative to join NATO has always come from Eastern European governments, not somehow forced upon them. This is clear, obvious, well documented. Claiming anything else is either ignorance or malicious lying akin to saying that Bob Hope was the 40th president of the US -- plain wrong without any room for debate.
My whole point as a libertarian is that these governments fail to serve the people well or even represent the people. The people themselves don’t want to fight and kill the other population, or to escalate. You’re attacking a strawman.
When Yanukovich blocks the EU association agreement, to accept a $15B loan and cheap fuel from Russia, you say he is a stooge of Russia, and support a popular uprising that ousted him and destabilized the country (much like happened in Yemen).
But when Yuschenko his predecessor works to get Ukraine into NATO despite a solid majority of Ukrainians opposing it (as per mainstream polls), you don’t call him a stooge of NATO or a Western puppet. Why?
The labels are just tools of public propaganda. Putin and Assad are called brutal dictators, but the Saudi monarchy who don’t even have the pretense of elections are not called unelected dictators, nor are Saudi war crimes and starving of Yemen described in the same terms by USA as they do for lesser things by our stated enemies (Shias mostly). In short, not only is there “room for debate” but every government + media including our own is super biased and selectively paints some groups as bad while other far worse groups are given a pass.
By any measure, Ukrainians did not want to be in NATO any more than Iraqis wanted to be liberated, or Muslims hated us for our freedoms. These were all slogans cooked up by the politicians during Bush admin (“Islamofascist” didn’t poll well so they changed the rhetoric to fit — that’s what they do.)
USA was always going to push for Ukraine and Georgia in NATO, and oust Assad in Syria, not because of anything they publicly say but because that would take away Russia’s last allies, get them surrounded, and we’d rather they fight Ukraine over there than us over here after they got stronger. That’s the real geopolitical calculus, and same coming up with QUAD in China.
This isn’t even that hard to believe — sadly, no country’s government wants its geopolitical rivals healing divisions with their neighbors and getting stronger. They want them divided and fighting. And if they can increase their own influence around the world, they will do it. This is how every proxy war started.
And frankly, if as you say NATO accepted countries when their governments wanted to join, they’d accept Russia. They officially rejected USSR in 1954 “without discussion” calling the application a joke. After USSR fell apart, Yeltsin did everything the Americans wanted, pushing thru Chicago-school “shock therapy” reforms and even firing on the parliament building and arresting his own parliament in the 1993 constitutonal crisis as a result. The USA proudly meddled in Russian elections in 1996 to get him reelected after a 6% (!!) approval rating and Times Magazine featured Yeltsin holding an American flag with “Yanks to the Rescue” on the cover (imagine the reverse). Surely Yeltsin was so much “our guy” that we’d listen to his security concerns, right? WRONG.
Yeltsin officially protesting NATO expansion during Clinton’s admin was met with “sit down boy and be quiet”. And Putin asking for Russia to get into NATO was rejected. Is Russia less democratic than Turkey, a NATO member? Is it more corrupt than Ukraine and Georgia? All these rationalizations for why Ukraine and Georgia but not Russia — never Russia — are a smokescreen for what I said above. It’s realpolitik.
Again, you offer nothing but a barrage of lies. Lets take one lie at a time:
> And Putin asking for Russia to get into NATO was rejected.
Never happened. According to Putin's top advisor on foreign policy at the time, Putin asked Lord Robertson for invitation into NATO. Robertson replied that Russia would have to go through the same integration process as everyone else. Putin got offended by that, replied that he was "not going to stand in line with countries that don't matter", and that was the end of it.
It was never a serious goal that Putin and Russia worked towards, as it was in other Eastern European countries that set NATO membership as their main foreign policy goal and began building a relationship with NATO with the ultimate goal of becaoming a full member. NATO membership comes with political, legal and military obligations that Russia never even set out to meet. You don't get a seat at a collective defense organization and access to allied military information just by asking someone nicely at a formal dinner. In Eastern Europe, it took a decade of relentless political and military reforms to get there.
In most of Eastern Europe, consecutive governments all agreed to this goal and there was no domestic indecision to stall the process. In Ukraine, public support was much smaller indeed, some parties were for NATO membership, others were against it, and as a result, without continuous work towards becoming a member, Ukraine did not become one, even though key figures like GWB signaled willingness to support that bid.
In Russia, there was no work towards NATO membership at all. In contrast, Lithuanian parliament adopted a resolution calling for NATO membership as early as December 1993, reiterated the position throughout key foreign policy documents (such as the law on national security, adopted 19th December 1996), joined all sorts of NATO programs and committees, went through a shitload of reforms under NATO guidance and finally achieved full membership in 2004. What did Russia do at the same time? Asked NATO secretary general Lord Robertson a free pass and that's it? That's the whole rejection? Has Russian Duma even once voted NATO membership into their foreign policy doctrine?
In the interest of upholding intellectual integrity, I will admit you have a point, that we don’t actually have a recent official request from Russia to join NATO.
On the other hand, to pretend that this process is somehow all about clear rules and truly open door policies, is very disingenuous. Are you saying that this is what Russia would need to do:
Obviously, it’s silly. There are a lot of unspoken considerations for which country gets into NATO and which country is pushed into it despite what their citizens want. Rule #1 is: Russia never gets in, that would be like China getting into QUAD. If Russia joined NATO, its raison d’etre would be obsolete, and moreover, USA (its main member) would be increasingly unnecessary since Russia would be then selling and using its weapons for European security. That is competition USA does not want.
And look, USSR formally applied in 1954, and was rejected without any formal discussion! That is not a lie but simply a fact, and reported by NY Times back then:
My characterization is quite accurate as to the main causes of this. Some even said Bush was pushing to go into Iraq on “day 1”… whether that is true or not is unclear because governments are opaque, but we DO KNOW that Bush was the biggest force behind the push to keep expanding NATO to Russia’s border and get Ukraine and Georgia in, so you downplaying that is disingenuous. It was a very destructive push by Bush. And nearly all of the foreign policy experts in USA, as well as his own ambassadors etc. ALL WARNED BUSH AND CLINTON against this, and predicted this exact outcome.
In June 1997, 50 prominent foreign policy experts signed an open letter to Clinton, saying, “We believe that the current U.S. led effort to expand NATO … is a policy error of historic proportions” that would “unsettle European stability.”
In 2008, Burns, then the American ambassador to Moscow, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
So this reaction by Russia acting like a cornered animal before it is completely surrounded is not “unprovoked”. It was systematically provoked, and tried every other avenue to stop this — except FORMALLY applying to NATO, which I blame Putin for. Of course, Russia’s politicians are just as negligent and dumb as other countries’ politicians. Putin should have applied every year, and publicly lampooned the rejections year after year. He should have worked on having better PR for Russia’s positions to be heard in the West. RT was not enough.
But to blame solely Putin? No, that is simply regurgitating propaganda.
> we DO KNOW that Bush was the biggest force behind the push to keep expanding NATO to Russia’s border and get Ukraine and Georgia in
This is simply not true. The initiative (or lack of) has always come from Eastern Europe and that has been the main factor that determined which countries ended up in NATO and which ones did not. Nobody has been dragged into NATO "kicking and screaming", as you put it.
Your whole narrative falls apart once you admit this simple fact.
Subverting their democracies and regime-changing their leadership to flip them against Russia is dragging them. If they can't do it by hook, they'll do it by crook. In 2021 they also tried to do the same in Belarus and Kazakhstan, and I'm sure the same narrative would be used: "a silent majority wanted it, they were just afraid to say it, we helped liberate them".
Back in 2008 we see this: NATO leaders promised Ukraine and Georgia on Thursday they would one day join the Western defence alliance after rebuffing U.S. demands to put the former Soviet republics on an immediate path to membership.https://www.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-32818020080403
Some NATO leaders had to rebuff US demands to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. Can you admit that Bush and the US were pressing for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO at a time when solid majorities of their actual people were against it? Why?
I have told you the reason: they wanted to flip Russia's allies to instead join a hostile military alliance, and eventually host weapons there aimed at Russia. They once had nuclear missiles, which NYTimes says were "all aimed at the United States". To quote them in 1994:
Ukraine, politically and economically unstable since it became an independent state after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, has 176 intercontinental missiles armed with some 1,240 nuclear warheads--all aimed at the United States. It also has 592 nuclear warheads aboard bombers, which would be covered by the agreement.https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-01-11-mn-10675-...
My explanation of US motivations is simple and clear, and makes sense. You keep ignoring it, and talking about how "anyone is free to do what they want." US straight up helped foment a revolution in 2014, sending very top people to encourage protestors to cut ties with Russia, and they ended up partnering with the far-right to overthrow their government:
Look, I think that Russia is encouraging the same thing in Moldova and Slovakia at this very moment. I don't doubt that CIA in Ukraine, and FSB in Moldova, are always actively trying to regime-change those countries to be more favorable. You speak nothing about this. You act like it's off-limits and dishonest to even put forward basic explanations for why "great powers" do what they do. But we have seen it in proxy wars for centuries. We know how it goes. What makes this time any different?
US failed in 2008 Ukraine, they failed in 2008 Georgia (because of Russian invasion), they succeeded in Ukraine 2014, then both Russia and NATO financed and perpetuated a proxy war in Ukraine since 2014. Russia's invasion isn't "unprovoked", it is the result of 8 years of warnings and peace agreements (Minsk II) that were never implemented, and the CIA was already training an insurgency in Ukraine, training neo-nazi paramilitaries, just as Russians had been doing in Donetsk paramilitaries, for years:
Did I mention NATO in 2009-2011 also coordinated the world's largest disarmament project, by DISARMING UKRAINE OF DEFENSIVE WEAPONS, and then presenting themselves as a solution? They admit it right on their own website, but they spin it as "well, we didn't want the aging Ukrainian weapons to fall into the wrong hands."
NONE of this looks like your (perhaps unintentionally) dishonest characterization of "democracy as usual" in these countries. It's not the majority of civilians choosing to arm far-right militia, nor overthrow their government, nor get pumped full of NATO weaponry. It shouldn't be surprising, since Ukraine was not very democratic and quite corrupt. (The same can be said for Russia.)
> Can you admit that Bush and the US were pressing for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO at a time when solid majorities of their actual people were against it?
This is a lie, no matter how many times you repeat it. For example, you quoted a Reuters headline:
> “Bush VOWS to PRESS for Ukraine, Georgia in NATO”
Yet if you read past the headline, GWB was pressuring other NATO allies (mainly France and Germany) to allow Ukraine start membership negotiations, not pressuring Ukraine to join as you represented it.
Your sources do not support what you are claiming.
Your conspiracy theory hinges on the obvious lie of countries being forced into NATO. Remove this lie, and the narrative of "big scary America preying upon poor little Russia" falls apart, because suddenly NATO membership becomes the initiative of Eastern European governments, and if you ask why, then you'll get a long list of crimes against humanity committed by Russia in those countries in the 20th century (and now 21st century too) highlighting the need for defense cooperation in Eastern Europe to prevent it from happening again.
I never said “big scary America is preyinf upon poor little Russia”. I said USSR, USA, and China have played these games for years and destroyed countries in proxy wars.
But let’s just use your one-sided rhetoric, and see how ridiculous it is. Sure, you’ve convinced me! Big Bad Russia has done things much worse than China and USA have ever done to their neighbors. Their neighbors all want to join an alliance against Russia, unlike all the neighbors of great and benevolent USA and China.
Of course, USA cares deeply about Ukraine’s safety from Russia since 1994, which is why it worked to make sure Ukraine would give up its nukes.
USA and George W Bush cared deeply about Ukraine’s security which is why they pushed NATO to accept the Ukrainian president’s bid to join NATO, even when Ukraine’s own population was against it. They didn’t know what was for their own good. That’s how democracy works, after all.
After Yanukovich was elected and ended this, NATO cared so deeply about Ukraine’s remaining defensive weapons ending up in the wrong hands, that they undertook the largest disarmament program in the world, to rid it of these weapons.
In 2013, USA felt really bad about Ukraine’s economy. They didn’t want Ukraine to have to keep doing business with a neighbor like Russia, who have done bad things like Holodomor and suppressing the Ukrainian language for hundreds of years. So John McCain and other top people went to Ukraine, to help liberate it from the Russian sphere of influence. This was purely out of concern for the Ukrainian people, especially the ones in the West of Ukraine who had voted 30-37% for the far-right Svoboda party. After all, they better some far-right Russophobic ideologies than the fifth column of Russophiles in the east. Ukraine’s destiny lies in Europe!
It is, after all, to improve Ukraine’s own democracy that USA fomented a revolution that overthrew its corrupt, sitting president, who was simply a stooge of Mr Putin. The far-right groups that helped make this happen were merely incidental to what was effectively a people’s uprising — totally different than, say, January 6th in USA. In fact, they were the true patriots, who had Ukraine’s best interests at heart unlike the anti-Maidan protestors, who were astroturfed by Russia.
Russia’s house of cards fell apart. With its stooge gone, it became clear that the vast majority of Ukrainians never really wanted ties with Russia, direct flights with Russia, (not even to visit their 11 million relatives there) to do business with Russian clients, nor even to let people in the Donbas keep speaking Russian in their schools. The USA had finally liberated Ukrainians from having to pretend they liked anything Russian… and Russia should just allow Ukraine to join NATO and stop being such a bully.
But Russia didn’t back down. They armed insurgents in the Donbas because Putin wanted to take over the entire Ukraine and restore the Soviet Union. It was his unspoken dream, because he never says what he really thinks. Thankfully, NATO kept arming the true government of Ukraine, as well as the true patriots (far right paramilitary) who could defend the motherland from the country which had long abused them, and where they had many relatives — and after years of training eventually got the brave Ukrainians to beat the second best army in Ukraine: the Russians, who they always knew were so weak they’d never be able to overrun the country in a few days. It’s not like the CIA planned a destructive Afghanistan-style guerilla war to tear the country apart as long as it can “make the Russians bleed for as long and as hard as possible.” The Russians were know to be weak, and have been losing since 2022, or maybe since 2014. They’ve run out of ammunition and tanks long ago, and are using shovels.
Of course, this is just as preposterous as believing that USA has the best interests of Afghans in mind when the CIA funded the Mujahideen, and waves of Afghan Arabs to tear apart the country. We KNOW that in nearly every other case since Laos, the CIA played a role in fomenting these conflicts in order to weaken their rivals (Russia, China, etc) and not out of a concern for the country.
Look, even if they HAD deep concern for Ukrainians, sending them weapons only makes them LESS safe. Did gulf countries and Iran sending weapons to Gaza ever make the PEOPLE of Gaza safer? The Hamas top leaders weren’t even in Gaza during some of the heaviest bombings — but the civilians were. It’s obscene to volunteer OTHER people to perish in large numbers to achieve some imperialist geopolitical ambitions, if you aren’t actually willing to go and sit under bombs with your family yourself, but force others to! That’s my view.
Entry of Eastern Europe into NATO is now so far in the past that we have a good amount of memoirs and personal recollections in addition to all sorts of documented evidence like laws, policy papers, studies and assessments available from that time. Most of the people who were directly involved are still alive too. But the best you can offer to "prove" that countries were forced into NATO is a small number newspaper snippets blatantly taken out of context. The rest of your long posts is pure rhethorics without any factual substance.
You have made up an alternative reality, which is easy to do if you're on the other side of the globe and have no personal connection whatsoever with those events. But I lived through them and I remember everything very well. I remember the discussions about NATO membership, from the earliest ideas to fully formulated policies, as well as early doubts whether we have any hope of attaining that goal. I remember the stances different parties held in my country. I voted for parties that supported joining NATO, as most people did, and those parties got elected into the government and lead the very long and demanding accession talks that were ultimately fruitful. To say that we were dragged into NATO "kicking and screaming" is plain wrong without any wiggle room.
The memory of atrocities committed against us by Russians in the 20th century, as well as the Russian savagery in Chechen wars in 1990s and 2000s (that reminded us that nothing had changed) were top reasons why joining NATO had near-universal support.
And the current war has only cemented that support. NATO is the reason why Russians can't bomb our cities, can't rape our women, can't kidnap our children, can't take away our land like they are doing in Ukraine. The combined strength is too big for Russia to challenge. Even countries like Finland and Sweden that maintained large armies and neutrality for more than 200 years have re-evaluated their foreign policy and joined NATO to deepen mutual cooperation.
Well, now we see each other’s bias. I am in the USA and see what my country does all over the world and see our propaganda. You are in a Baltic country and were actually a part of the movement to join NATO.
Each of us has biases. Yours is that you didn’t really experience much the opinions of 40% of Russian speakers in your country who are also citizens. If you were in Western Ukraine, you’d also be very frustrated with Eastern Ukrainians who like Russia despite all the horrors of past decades.
Not being in USA or Turkey or China, you are unaware of similar things done by them to their neighbors. Many Christian neighbors of Turkey remember genocides and genocidal rapes for instance. In regard to USA, neighbors remember stuff like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_...
However, there are still many in the country that want to maintain ties with the imperialidt country despite this, who have family in that country, etc. In fact, they are breathing a sigh of relief that things got better and do not want to join a hostile alliance for fear that their relations with their neighbor will deteriorate badly and they’ll get invaded again. Cuba was in fact invaded, for instance (bay of pigs invasion) and then called for USSR to help. This led to an escalation and standoff and it is GOOD that it got deescalated. That is what I keep saying.
The factors you bring up are neither exhaustive nor determinative. They are just that — factors among other factors.
Your experience is certainly valuable but it is the experience of many nationalist groups in the world, whether they have their own state or are aspiring to get one (Kurds in Iraq, for instance, or Catalonians). The outcome of NATO expansion was predicted by tons of experts and they were right. Regardless of how much you keep repeating a one sided narrative, Russia’s invasion was not “unprovoked”.
I have tried to address every point of yours directly and show you the larger picture, whereas you’ve IGNORED almost every single one of my points in my posts. You’re welcome to reply to the post right above the one I’m replying to, point by point for once, without again dodging.
> Regardless of how much you keep repeating a one sided narrative, Russia’s invasion was not “unprovoked”.
That's a fringe opinion. Not a single government in Europe shares this view.
If anything, Western Europe has walked on eggshells since 1991, always trying to accommodate Russia at the expense of the security Eastern Europe, constantly downplaying fears and refusing to take defence of Europe seriously.
The narrative if NATO being hostile and encircling Russia is very hard to justify if you look at the key facts:
MILITARY SPENDING of Europe had been and continued to steadily decrease since the end of the Cold War. In 2006, the total spending was 190 billion. By 2014, it was down to 162 billion.[1] As a percentage of GDP, Cold War era spending was 3-5%, now it's 1-2%.
EUROPEAN MILITARY CAPABILITIES were in steep decline too. In 1990, German Army had 308 000 personnel, 5045 tanks, 2136 IFVs. To cut costs, Germany disbanded most of its army and sold off its equipment all over the world, as far as Chile. By 2015, only 61 312 personnel, 225 tanks and 406 remained.[2] The same trends were mirrored in other countries.
AMERICAN MILITARY presence in Europe was also in decline. In 1987, the US had 80 military bases in Europe. 30 years later, less than half remained.[3] Furthermore, these bases are a shadow of their former self: the number of US military personnel deployed to Europe is at the lowest since WW2, down from 320 000 during the 1980s to around 60 000 nowadays, stationed predominantly in Germany and Italy.[4] In 1989, US Army had 5000 tanks in Germany alone. In 2013, the last twenty American tanks departed Europe.[5]
NEW DEPLOYMENTS TO EUROPE were ridiculously small, mainly light infantry for host nation training purposes: as of 2017, a single non-permanent battalion with 800 personnel and 4 jets in Estonia, a 1200-strong battalion in Latvia and another in Lithuania with 4 jets, and 4000-strong armored battalion in Poland. Plus 4 jets in Romania for three months in the summer.[6]
Speaking of MISSILES, NATO and Russia agreed in the founding act of 1997 that NATO would not station any missiles in Eastern Europe. NATO has upheld that commitment for a quarter of a century. The only missiles in Eastern Europe are Russian Iskanders and Kalibrs in Kaliningrad.[7] The hypothetical often repeated "Cuba armed to teeth with missiles" scenario already exist in Europe, with short-range Russian nuclear missiles pointed at Europe. And yet no-on is crying about provocations and proposing that Europe should preemptively bomb Moscow.
Until Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, Europe was unilaterally disarming itself to the extent that Germany didn't even have enough equipment for joint exercises with other countries.[8] Any notion of existential threat to Russia from such armies is severly misguided to put it mildly. If Russia was worried about security, it only had to wait.
And in a way, it did. Russia waited until Europe became weak enough (in their assessment) not to pose a credible threat to Russian plans, and then used the power vacuum to do what they wanted to do. But it turned out to be a miscalculation. Unlike previous blitzkriegs, Russia is now bogged down in unwinnable war and Putin has damned Russia for a generation, and Europe is re-arming for the first time since the end of the Cold War. Historically the most pacifist party in Germany is now the strongest advocate for military aid to Ukraine. Finland and Sweden I already mentioned, their abandonment of neutrality is a shift of historic proportions. Calls for appeasement towards Russia used to be in the mainstream, now they have become a career suicide for European politicians.
In ten or fifteen years' time, conspiracy theorists will be writing books on how Putin was a CIA agent sent to weaken Russia and again blaming the west, because that will be the most plausible explanation for the utterly destructive actions over the past two decades. And Russia itself will go through hardships comparable to early 1990s. Not to mention that hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians are dead on both sides of the Russian-Ukranian border, and just today Putin announced another mobilization to send another few hundred thousand to death, and for what? What are they dying for? Russian society will implode once it comes to terms with the fact that Putin has brought them 10 Afghan war worth of losses in a single year because Putin, isolated from everyone due to Covid, hallucinated in his bunker that 800 marines in Estonia and 4 fighter jets in Romania were encircling Russia.
> That's a fringe opinion. Not a single government in Europe shares this view.
This is not a fringe opinion. The fact that European governments don't share this view is just because they are obediently following the master's guidelines.
Ask people in the streets and you will find out that lots of people will think that in many, many European countries.
It’s not a fact at all. It is an extremely biased oversimplification and massive equivocation.
“Eastern Europe” is very broad, consisting of many countries. Within a country there are many viewpoints. Anyone can always be found to say “the initiative came” from them, whether it’s Communists in Cuba / Nicaragua / Vietnam whatever, or whether it’s literal fascists like Pinochet’s revolution in Chile, or the Houthi rebels in Yemen, or even the mujahideen in Afghanistan — where we similarly came to “help Afghanistan” in a proxy war that killed 2 million people over there! We did it all for the express purpose of “making the Soviets bleed for as long and as hard as possible” and “creating a Vietnam for them”, not out of any great love for Afghans!
The way proxy wars start, in fact, is that an outside actor emboldens one group in a country that foments a revolution, while another outside actor emboldens another group in the country that launches a counter-revolution. Whether it’s Maidan vs Anti-Maidan, or Houthis vs Saudi Loyalists, or even the Red Army vs the White Army in Russia, we know by now how a revolution can lead to destabilization and a destructive proxy war.
I have SHOWN you that the actual POPULATION of Ukraine was majority against NATO, for the very reasons given by everyone else — they didn’t want war with Russia and they chose economic and military ties with Russia over NATO. So why was Ukraine’s president working with NATO to get Ukraine into NATO?
So now you switched it to “Eastern Europe”. Wow, quite a big switch there, and certainly some other countries, like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania could be said to have had majorities who wanted to join NATO. In fact, that is what the 2001 article I linked to was about. It literally says:
Mr. Bush declared that he wanted NATO to expand up to Russia's border
Russia allowed this with no wars happening. But that was not enough. Soon afterwards it to be Ukraine and Georgia in NATO. It takes a special bias to look at a Reuters headline like
Everyone in Russia made it clear that this is an absolute red line, not just Putin. They did this for years, in every international forum. Every policy expert WARNED BUSH that this would be the consequence. To say it Russia’s reaction is “unprovoked” is just a total lie. The decision makers in the US simply ignored every single warning, and even now keep telling tons of people in their own government and other institutions to shut up and stop even so much as asking for a peace process. The reason is obvious: this is a push to hopefully surround Russia with members of a hostile alliance once and for all. Because otherwise Russia would be stronger with allies, and we’d rather their own beighbors fight them over there than we have to contend with a significant power with its own alliance on the global stage.
> I have SHOWN you that the actual POPULATION of Ukraine was majority against NATO, for the very reasons given by everyone else — they didn’t want war with Russia and they chose economic and military ties with Russia over NATO. So why was Ukraine’s president working with NATO to get Ukraine into NATO?
Because he thought it was the best way forward. The population didn't think so, so they elected another president who stopped further integration into NATO and ultimately Ukraine didn't end up joining. This is how politics, governance and elections work.
As I've said, whether countries joined NATO or not was up to them. The door was open, but nobody was dragging them in by force as you wrote. That's a lie.
Increase in whataboutism I think is caused by unequal treatment for the same evil actions.
Imagine there is a crime done by a person of a race X who gets a warning and the same crime done by a person of a race Y who goes to jail. Now by amplifying how bad person of a race Y did and asking for a death penalty you only increase that inequality of treatment.
How do you see we push for a movement and solidarity against evil in an equal for all manner in a world where some countries may not have economic power to put sanctions and other countries can ignore UN because of their power?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque