If 1 good thing will come out of this russian war is the firm realization globally that russia is a solid dictatorship still/again actively opposing democracy anywhere in the world, with absolutely 0 regard for its own population and generally being very, very far from typical western values on which they frown as subpar, weak and a threat.
There was some solid naivity not only in EU in past few decades, merkel et al completely ignored warnings from baltic members or Poland that russia can't be trusted yet. Current german leadership still doesn't treat this as their top urgency, they naively hope russians will get bored or scared from human losses and do just tiny glacial moves. This won't ever happen, just look at WWII, they still have the same mentality. They have to literally run out of equipment to stop at this point, they won't run out of men, not a country of 150 millions of which many are barely literate and fed propaganda every day.
I think it's more nuanced than naivety. Germany was willing to turn a blind eye for the cheap energy their powerful industrial economy relies on. I don't think it's wrong to take the cheap energy knowingly from your enemy -- you just can't lose sight of it.
Fundamentally it's ok to arbitrage with your opponent if it means more prosperity for you -- it gets complicated when you're doing it on the back of large deficits, and do it for long enough that you forget it was a gambit to begin with and now it's a dependency. Oops.
> solid naivity not only in EU in past few decades
I think there were some naïveté on the US side of thing, just like both were naive on how mainland China would turn to democracy as it opened to outside trade and industry
Yes. It wasn't inevitable that Russia would take this route. There were a few years of freedom, but with a broken economy. Then the era of the oligarchs. That didn't work out too well either. So now there's a strongman.
That it would be a strongman who wants to go back to the era of the tsars was unexpected.
I wouldn't call it naivete on the US side - most people with a functioning brain weren't snowed by that. However, the money men who make theirs on the backs of success OR failure trumpeted that it was a new dawn for democracy and capitalism in China because it was in their best interests to do so despite what centuries of history and decades of dialog told everybody who would listen.
> If 1 good thing will come out of this russian war is the firm realization globally that russia is a solid dictatorship still/again actively opposing democracy anywhere in the world...
"Realization" implies truth. I bet you couldn't even try to prove your theory.
> ...not a country of 150 millions of which many are barely literate and fed propaganda every day.
If you keep posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments, we're going to have to ban you. We've warned you countless times already, and it's not good that you're still doing it.
Flamebait I have no issue with (the "fact of the matter" as it is aspect of it; that mildly strict epistemology is necessarily flamebait on a forum of this (alleged) caliber, on subjects involving literal life and death, that I do have an issue with; also the misleading "and/or" connector, but I'll assume that's a copy/paste artifact).
The "unsubstantive" part is another matter. Stop and look at the actual quality of my counterparts' comments Dang. Is it (solely) me who is deserving of a scolding?
These are not minor or inconsequential topics being discussed here. If no community takes a stand and takes thinking more seriously especially when it matters, humans will continue to be tricked into forever war, indefinitely.
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
There was some solid naivity not only in EU in past few decades, merkel et al completely ignored warnings from baltic members or Poland that russia can't be trusted yet. Current german leadership still doesn't treat this as their top urgency, they naively hope russians will get bored or scared from human losses and do just tiny glacial moves. This won't ever happen, just look at WWII, they still have the same mentality. They have to literally run out of equipment to stop at this point, they won't run out of men, not a country of 150 millions of which many are barely literate and fed propaganda every day.