re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict.

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Putin has decided he wants moer of Ukraine.

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If the war ends, so does he... as a lot of military people have said, this either ends with Russia conquering all of Ukraine and then having to immediately attack someone else (highly unlikely), or Putin dying one way or another. Without the excuse of a war effort Russians are at the point where they will be angry at how screwed they are...

and how can an "existential defensive war" against "all of NATO" just be over one day?

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You can call that “NATO” if you want, but it was the USA that did that.

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We've been through this 1,000 times here, but the US set up NATO, and set it up to put the US overwhelmingly in charge and to be much more powerful than everybody else (which is why de Gaulle was always so pissy and uncooperative). We didn't want European nations having wars and creating an opening for the Soviet Union to march forward in the chaos. We didn't want individual European nations, other than the UK and France, to be too strong, militarily.

NATO is good for Europe, and the EU is good for Europe.

Trump effectively pulling the US out of NATO unofficially with Hegseth's announcement just makes Europe more determined to help Ukraine topple Putin before they have to deal with him later.

The nuclear proliferation is the part that bothers me. If you haven't been paying attention, those parliamentary systems can have constant swings and chaos... to borrow a page out of the right's big book or nightmares, what happens if the Muslim Brotherhood takes power in a nuclear country?*


*This nightmarish scenario has to ignore that militant Islamist Pakistan was allowed to go nuclear by Reagan in the early 80s, to guard against the expansion of the Soviet Union from neighboring Afghanistan.

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You can call that “NATO” if you want, but it was the USA that did that

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Correct.

I should have used more precise language and said we could have accomplished the same things NATO has without the baggage that NATO comes with.

We can choose to defend anyone we want at any time.

We could have rolled armor and troops into Ukraine when Russia was mobilizing on the border and completely stopped the current war. We chose not to.

NATO is amazing for everyone who isn't the US. They get to bad mouth us and sandbag on their defense commitments for 95% of NATOs existence with basically no consequences for it.

I believe the US is a global force for good. We can do exactly what NATO obligates us to do anyway, but also have more sway in global affairs without NATO because we arent forced into a suicide pact with countries who are increasingly drifting away from us philosophically. I want to defend most of if not all of the countries in NATO should they ever be attacked, but will I want to in 50 years the way things are going? I'm not sure.

NATO effectively makes us less powerful, not more, because of the way Europe treats us guaranteeing their defense. Or at least has treated it before the last 2-3 years.

harvest season commencing....

Crisis management on state television: Valentina Matviyenko admits that Ruzzland has massive problems with fuel supply for agriculture. A working group is now supposed to fix it in "daily mode."
If the tractors are already standing still in the fields, that affects the entire supply chain. Searching for solutions daily? That above all shows how helpless things have become by now.
The cracks in the foundation are becoming more and more visible.

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The point is it worked. Putting England, Germany, France, Italy, etc. all on the same team agsinst the Commies was key.

You didn’t have Germany after France. Spain after England. England against France. All these alliances. You had two. The West versus the Commies.

Yes, we paid most of the bills, but in return we got a huge, stable market.

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All of this could have and would have been accomplished without NATO.

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seems to be more effective than MLRS...

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We are saying we could have accomplished everything we did with NATO without it and probably been in a better place in the present day because Europe would have taken their own defense more seriously.

Hopefully that gets you up to speed, champ.

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An artful way of saying you don’t have a clue. Nice.

Btw, in the late 40s and early 50s the Europeans were in no position to defend themselves without direct help from the US.

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But it wasn’t.

With the Russians threatening Western Europe what was the best option at the time?

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Well of course the alternative to what happened didn’t happen. That doesn’t mean it would not have been better. I’m not arguing for that, BTW.

But what kept the peace in Western Europe was two things: An American army sitting between the Eastern Bloc and Western Europe, and the fact that all of Western Europe was liberal democracies, which famously don’t go to war with each other. Notice that we’ve had no wars among Canada, the US and Mexico in quite a while.