re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict

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I just happened to be listening to Peter Zeihan,the geopolitical expert, being interviewed.

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He knows demographics and history quite well.

He knows next to ZERO about oil and gas, pipelines, refining and chemicals for starters.

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Russia wouldn't accept just those terms though

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How do you know? We aren't negotiating with them. Certain Western governments undermined peace talks earlier in this conflict because they thought continuing the war could get better results. The West does not even suggest openness to settlement talks now outside of total Russian withdrawal. You don't know what agreements can be arranged if you dismiss talks out of hand. Then when you come back later due to a worsening situation on the ground, the other side is likely to give you less, just like you attempted to do when you had more leverage.

Either way, the lack of settlement talks guarantees continuation until a decisive military outcome is achieved and that can mean a lot more devastating war and unforeseen escalation and chaos. I'm not seeing how that looks beneficial at the moment unless you want direct NATO entry into the fighting, which is counterintuitive to the whole purpose of supporting Ukraine's continued resistance in the first place.

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Hogwash, but then again maybe you aren’t old enough to remember Vietnam.

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Born in the 80's but I'm quite familiar with Vietnam. There was a massive resistance in the United States to both the Vietnam War and the Second Iraq War. The media is in the tank for this conflict and detractors to U.S./NATO support are befuddlingly dismissed as "Pro-Putin" or "Russian agents" even though the accusations are quite illogical. The our state and intelligence narratives are pushed uncritically by the media apparatus.

And I think it's safe to say that the notion that Putin has the aspirations of an Adolf Hitler is quite a bit different than how Ho Chi Minh and Saddam Hussein were viewed/portrayed in respect to how necessary our intervention was.

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As I have said before, I knew Mike Johnson very well when he and I were both members of Parkview Baptist Church in Baton Rouge in the early 2000s. The last in-depth conversation that I had with Mike in 2017 was about some detailed issues inside the Southern Baptist Convention. Mike cares very, very much about his fellow Baptists who face persecution around the world

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A devout Southern Baptist who is going to vote for Joe Biden and bared transgender breasts on the WH lawn... that's our good mate GOPe_Tiger.

"No big deal, Ukraine can import power"

-RUlsu

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called this after the strikes on Russian oil rigs ramped up and was told I was crazy

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No you were told that energy infrastructure has been and continues to be a target for Russia regardless of Ukrainian attacks on refineries and then crawfished saying you didn't say that was the reason Russia was attacking energy infrastructure and called everyone else stupid

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But international affairs is basically a Mafia scenario, and at the end of WWII we became the Godfather.

If we abandon that role, will the next Godfather be "better" for the world than we are? Who and Why? if you can answer that... and how will the next Godfather emerge and solidify that position? China doing it "peacefully?"

We tried the isolationist "whatever..." position and the result was Pearl Harbor and the hell that was WWII, and the devil's bargain that created the Soviet Empire in eastern Europe.

Also... you seem to miss the Russians constantly stating they will not stop with Ukraine. Pay more attention to their own statements as posted in this thread.

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The international arena has no single overarching authority. This makes it relatively anarchical. Sometimes there are periods where a single state entity has a domination of power but they are usually short lived. The U.S. stepped into the role of hegemon at the end of WWII because the British Empire collapsed as a result of its participation in the conflict. The British entered the war in order to protect their relative power and in the end defeated the state they thought threatened their position as hegemonic power and then completely lost their geopolitical position as such as a result. The British Empire disintegrated as a result of the war. This should prove a significant warning for us but we typically don't see these lessons because of our simplistic narrative surrounding the World Wars.

The U.S. also had to fill this role because the Soviet Union became an existential threat to all of Western Civilization as a result of their massive ascent in power stemming from the Second World War. We actually helped to turn them into this fearsome beast. Another "unintended consequence" of warfare. Keep in mind that those seem to occur over and over. We fought to ostensibly eliminate a threat to Europe (though preservation of the power balance was the true motive) and created an even stronger threat that now occupied all the countries whose sovereignty was the casus belli for Britain's war entry.

If you think the United States can remain the single global hegemonic power into perpetuity you have an ignorance of history and common sense. Our Founders rightly warned against these ambitions. 1945-1991 provided a unique context in which actively partaking in this role was sensible for the United States and I think it can be argued that it was also quite harmful to our society in many ways as a result. The world has been multipolar for the vast majority of civilization and is currently so. If you think the United States should start intervening militarily and politically in other state's affairs merely to preserve our position as hegemonic power (or to maintain our current relative power position) then you are actually promoting a fundamental disrespect of the principle of national sovereignty and reciprocity and an imperialistic foreign policy. I don't believe this course to be particularly sound, moral, or sustainable and will lead to more war and chaos, including domestic.

And I unequivocally reject your premise that "isolationism" is what caused WWII or created the Soviet Empire and their control of half of Europe. I also reject the false premise that anything short of active U.S. involvement in global international conflicts that do not have a vital national interest to the United States constitutes "isolationism" but it sure is as popular as ever in its rhetorical usage to dismiss policy detractors.

And as for the Russians' true ambitions, how about instead of assuming they will invade NATO, we respond in the instance that they actually do invade NATO, instead of facilitating a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's kind of the whole point of the institution, no? You would think if this threat was so serious we would see levels of rearmament in Europe not seen since the late 1930's, but we don't. I also don't assume the Russians are irrational actors since war with NATO offers no path to victory for them and would put them at extreme risk of nuclear annihilation.

Jay in Kyiv
@JayinKyiv

Unprecedented.

Due to unrelenting Russian missile massacres in Ukraine, EU Parliament spontaneously and overwhelmingly votes to freeze government until 7 Patriot missile batteries are delivered to Kyiv.

This while the US has totally walked away from the democratic world.

overwhelming majority...

Stormy McCain so heckin mad rn