Exactly. And if they are paranoid, — FreeEmotion

Yeah so paranoid that they signposted and labeled exactly what to not do at every point, joined in by a chorus of Western notaries who similarly warned against very specific actions. Strange definition of paranoid.

It's a world in which everyone is out to exploit everyone else and you can't even trust your immediate family, friends and co-workers. — Srap Tasmaner

That's the difference between right-populism (to give a name to what you're describing) and socialism: it's not that everyone's out to exploit everyone else; it's that there's a specific class - we call them capitalists - who is out to exploit - and is in fact stupendously successful at it - another specific class - we call us workers. Liberal democracy is a sham to the extent that these class relations are not - in fact cannot be - substantively addressed within that framework.

I mean, there's a reason why gas flows from Russia to Germany via Ukraine at now at record rates (google translate the first paragraph). Or why Biden needs to give a free pass to Credit Suisse thanks to their $100k in bribes to him, despite their being pals with the very Russian 'oligarchs' that everyone has lost their collective mind over.

That's why it's really not everyone out to exploit everyone else - because anyone with eyes can see that there is no stronger bond of solidarity and unity than among capitalists themselves. There is plenty of unity and brothery love. Dead Ukrainians be damned.

Haha, nice. Lots of them, since you asked so nicely.

Irreverent.

their heart was never in it. — Olivier5

Because they knew from the beginning how utterly stupid and economically insane the idea of monetary union was to begin with.

Greece's collective ass was saved by Europe — Olivier5

Loooooooool. Make another joke.

So building a defense within your own nation is considered an offensive act warranting getting offensive acts of invasion or threats of violence against you? That's your logic, right? — Christoffer

No I literally rejected the very terms in which you framed the problem, so maybe before we get to 'logic' we can ask if you are capable of literacy first. Baby steps.

Mm, and I wonder why the UK left and Greece and Spain are now debtors prisons and fascism is on the rise across the continent.

But this is about blaming NATO for what Putin is doing. — Christoffer

No, this is about blaming NATO for what NATO has done. Again, if you feel the need to choose a team, that's your problem.

You all don't seem to understand the difference between defence and offense — Christoffer

You don't seem to understand that these words are meaningless in the real world where these words are abstractions that only apply to the latest Nintendo release.

A longer view of how we got here:

When such an opportunity [for Russian democracy] was available, it was subverted not by Putin and his kleptocratic milieu, but by the West. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union 30 years ago, American economic advisers convinced Russia’s leaders to focus on economic reforms and put democracy on the backburner – where Putin could easily extinguish it when the time came. This is no trivial historical contingency. Had Russia become a democracy, there would have been no need to talk about NATO and its eastward expansion, no invasion of Ukraine, and no debates about whether the West owes Russia’s civilization greater respect. (As a German, I recoil at that last proposition, which has clear echoes of Hitler and his self-proclaimed leadership over a “civilization.”)

...Surrounded by a small group of Russian reformers and Western advisers, Yeltsin used this unique historical moment to launch an unprecedented program of economic “shock therapy.” Prices were liberalized, borders were opened, and rapid privatization began – all by presidential decree. Nobody in Yeltsin’s circle bothered to ask whether this was what Russia’s citizens wanted. And nobody paused to consider that Russians might first want a chance to develop a sound constitutional foundation for their country, or to express through an election their preference for who should govern them.

The reformers and their Western advisers simply decided – and then insisted – that market reforms should precede constitutional reforms. Democratic niceties would delay or even undermine economic policymaking. Only by moving fast – cutting the dog’s tail with one blow of the ax – would Russia be put on a path to economic prosperity and the Communists be kept out of power for good. With radical market reforms, the Russian people would see tangible returns and become enamored with democracy automatically. It was not to be.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/1990s-shock-therapy-set-stage-for-russian-authoritarianism-by-katharina-pistor-2022-02

Incidentally this is effectively the same shit that the EU does to countries today, who come under its ambit.

Who cares what they feel is aggression — Christoffer

Anyone who doesn't think world politics is a video game.

In real life, people need to act and react based on what others do and think and say, justified or not. Because typically people are not utter morons who can afford to entirely ignore their strategic environment out of some high-minded sense of principle, although NATO and the EU seem not to have got the memo.

You don't get to tell Russia what counts as an act of aggression towards them or not. This is how the real world works.

So, basically, victim blaming? — Christoffer

Oh yeah poor poor NATO, total victims in this situation, maybe organize a cookie bake for them out of solidarity.

Look, literally none of your moralizing matters. Not one bit. What matters are consequences. And the consequences of NATOs actions, justified by whatever bit of feel-good post-hoc rationalizations, have led, concretely, to a war. No one cares if Russia has 'rights' to do what it does, or if Ukraine happens to fit NATOs bureaucratic criteria, of if NATO is normatively justified in doing what they did. Completely, utterly irrelevant. Russia's feelings are not NATOs fault. NATO acting in full cognizance of those feelings are.

So we are to blame for Russia's actions because we don't allow them to control our independent choices as nations? — Christoffer

I don't know who the fuck 'we' are in this situation because I don't happen to be a bootlicking cheerleader who thinks this is a spectator sport to take a side in and wave flags for. I am not your fucking 'we', thanks.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine

Interview with Mearsheimer - putting aside his fantasies about the US even attempting to spread democracy and his insanity about China - gets the point across nicely:

Q: You said that it’s about “turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.” I don’t put much trust or much faith in America “turning” places into liberal democracies. What if Ukraine, the people of Ukraine, want to live in a pro-American liberal democracy?

M: If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a member of nato, and a member of the E.U., the Russians will consider that categorically unacceptable. If there were no nato expansion and no E.U. expansion, and Ukraine just became a liberal democracy and was friendly with the United States and the West more generally, it could probably get away with that. You want to understand that there is a three-prong strategy at play here: E.U. expansion, nato expansion, and turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.

Q: You keep saying “turning Ukraine into a liberal democracy,” and it seems like that’s an issue for the Ukrainians to decide. nato can decide whom it admits, but we saw in 2014 that it appeared as if many Ukrainians wanted to be considered part of Europe. It would seem like almost some sort of imperialism to tell them that they can’t be a liberal democracy.

M: It’s not imperialism; this is great-power politics. When you’re a country like Ukraine and you live next door to a great power like Russia, you have to pay careful attention to what the Russians think, because if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they’re going to retaliate. States in the Western hemisphere understand this full well with regard to the United States.

Okay?

What threats has NATO done to Russia? As in my answer to Isaac above, how would you argue for NATO's guilt in all of this, like if we were in court, how would you, in defense of Russia, argue for NATO's guilt? What did they do? Be specific — Christoffer

It literally doesn't matter. Not one bit. Not one iota. Russia told NATO to fuck right off, and NATO did the exact opposite of that, in full cognizance of multiple people in the West telling them that this is a terrible, awful, war-engendering move and lo and behold, and now there's a war. This isn't an issue of morality or law or principle, it's a simple calculation - do you do the thing that the weaponized, nuclear aggressor literally just told you to not do, on pain of war, yes or no? NATO - and again, not just NATO but the EU in general - answered the question with a 'yes'. When you make a decision knowing the consequences of that decision, that's what people call responsibility. Putin is an aggressor and if he dropped dead tomorrow, the world would be a better place. But this white knighting for an institution which looked at war in the face and said 'yep, we'd like a bit of that thanks' - and now gets a war - is totally, absolutely culpable for dead Ukrainians. When you fly straight into the fucking sun and die, you don't get to excuse yourself because the sun was hot.

Putin's war is unjutified and unjustifiable. But acting in full cognizance of the deadly results of an unjustified demand does not let you off the hook. Again, world politics does not work like Harry Potter. Actors don't need their stories to line up, for the sake of your narrative ease-of-mind.

Literally every single one of your questions are irrelevant.

Given a country which is going to provide massive opportunities for corruption-ridden investments, a supply of oil which can be controlled by influencing a single person, and an almost permanent bogeyman to fuel the enormous arms industry (not how many tanks to we need, how many tanks is it possible for us to need) - what sensible capitalist government, doing its job, turning its cogs, is going to remove such a component? — Isaac

Yep. The West has been happy to hand out golden passports to Russian oil and gas tycoons while using their money to prop up housing markets in order to sustain an global economy in terminal failure. People keep lamenting the fact that the Russians can't be fully sanctioned because of Europe's utter dependence on their gas and oil - i.e. Europe's dependence on these corrupt pieces of shit, including Putin, who may well be one of the richest people in the world thanks to European money dumped straight into his bank accounts, and now, now when it's inconvenient to them, Putin is suddenly a bad guy despite them literally paying him to be one for decades. "Liberal democracy" literally sustains itself off the back of corrupt thugs like Putin, which is why it finds it so hard to actually do anything about him when push comes to shove - because such pushing would push those self-same liberal democracies off a cliff as well. You're exactly right - it's not a matter of 'counter-point' - it is exactly as you said - counter-part.

Liberal capitalists have 'room to maneuver' because people in Russia - not to mention entire swathes of the planet - do not.

It's nice how you said this as though it meant anything at all as a rejoinder.

From one of my fav Euro commentators:

Thus Western unity was back, greeted by the jubilant applause of the local commentariats, grateful for the return of the transatlantic certainties of the Cold War. The prospect of entering battle in alliance with the most formidable military in world history instantly wiped out memories of a few months before, when the US abandoned with little warning not just Afghanistan but also the auxiliary troops provided by its NATO allies in support of that once-favoured American activity, ‘nation-building’. No matter also Biden’s appropriation of the bulk of the reserves of the Afghan central bank, to the tune of $7.5 billion, for distribution to those affected by 9/11 (and their lawyers), while Afghanistan is suffering a nationwide famine. Forgotten too is the wreckage left behind by recent American interventions in Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Libya – the utter destruction, followed by hasty abandonment, of entire countries and regions.

Now it is ‘the West’ again, Middle Earth fighting the Land of Mordor to defend a brave small country that only wants ‘to be like us’ and for the purpose desires no more than being allowed to walk through the open doors of NATO and the EU. Western European governments dutifully suppressed all remaining memories of the deeply rooted recklessness of American foreign policy, induced by the sheer size of the United States and its location on a continental-sized island where nobody can get to them, regardless of the mess they make when their military adventures go wrong – and, astonishingly, gave the United States, a far-away non-European declining empire with different interests and a host of problems of its own, full power of attorney in dealing with Russia over nothing less than the future of the European state system.

What about the EU? In short, as Western Europe is returned to ‘the West’, the EU is reduced to a geo-economic utility for NATO, aka the United States.... So the winner is… the United States? The longer the war drags on, due to the successful resistance of Ukrainian citizens and their army, the more it will be noticed that the leader of ‘the West’, who spoke for ‘Europe’ as the war built up, is not intervening militarily on behalf of Ukraine. The US has given itself a special leave of absence, as Biden made clear from the start. Looking at its record, this is nothing new: when their mission gets unmanageable, they withdraw to their distant island.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/fog-of-war

i.e. imagine trusting the US, the most incompetently stupid, murderous, and cowardly nation on the face of the planet, to deal with this.

Strategic by the nation asking or NATO — Christoffer

Oh yes, I forgot that this thing called communication exists. Clearly, once a nation asks, NATO just has to let them right the fuck in if they fit the bureaucratic criteria. That's clearly, totally how things work, and not a fucking cartoon picture.

They accept so long as it's a unanimous decision to accept as well as the nation being a stable nation that is also dedicated to helping other members of NATO, primarily, have shown good diplomacy with these nations in the past — Christoffer

Jesus Christ. Listen. I've come into alot of money recently because my uncle is an Australian prince from the Irwin dynasty, and he left me all this money in his will, and I need someone to store it for me while I sort out some accounting stuff. If you give me USD $50,000, I promise I will give you like, USD $2 million in return. It's just for a bit. If you can DM me your account details, that'd be great.

I just figure if you actually believe this utter naive bullshit that you wrote, I may as well give this a go.

NATO is a defensive alliance that accepts anyone who wants to join who both are accepted by all members of NATO and also shows itself to be a stable nation. — Christoffer

Yeah, and I bet they also hand out free rainbows and unicorns to those who write nice letters to them too. Poor poor NATO, clearly had no idea what they were doing this whole time. Just a cute little defensive alliance, clearly not chock full of people whose entire existence is devoted to thinking carefully about the moves they make, armed to the fucking teeth, continually doing what Russia told it to stop doing and which they had no need to do, and Ooops, war! Silly NATO! He he he.

How does NATO expand? In practice, how does it expand? Are they forcing themselves into nations or are nations joining them?

And why are they joining NATO or want to join NATO? — Christoffer

I'll tell you how it doesn't expand - it doesn't expand by countries asking "hey can you let me in?" and NATO going "mmmm, OK since you asked so nicely, yeah totally". It's not a fucking gentlemen's club. It's a strategic decision, and ideally, one not made by morons who, knowing full well that Russia has literally been to war over this very issue before, think, ah fuck it, lets keep arming Ukraine and making moves to expand the European sphere of influence Eastward. Oops, turns out, these decisions *are* made by morons [PDF - this paper has the answer you're looking for, incidentally], morons who you would like to exculpate in order to flag-wave your Voldermort Theory of international politics. This notion of an innocent, doe-eyed NATO (and EU) just waving people in willy-nilly because they asked nicely is just as stupid as your Harry Potter theory of Mad King Putin.

If you're saying capitalism=neoliberalism, then we aren't talking about the same thing. — frank

Neoliberalism is what you get when capitalism roams free. If you don't understand that the former is the ideological complement and product of the latter, then you understand neither.

They need to be a Sauron-like It to serve your purposes. — frank

Except the entire point is that they don't. Literally the whole point.

What are calling genocide? — frank

Just about any US foreign intervention will do. In any case, off topic.

There isn't a Neoliberal Mastermind somewhere telling the US government what to do. — frank

You don't need a neoliberal mastermind when a generalized and entirely impersonal profit imperative - we call it capitalism - will do. That's the difference between idiot psychologizers who think politics functions like Harry Potter, and an understanding of state power in service of a dominant class structure with a century of entrenchment. You can equivocate between a literal single person and globally spanning empire with mutiple, recorded genocides on its hands if you like, but let's be clear that the equivocation is yours and yours alone.

The average American senator voting for mitary aid to Ukraine or Poland doesn't understand any of that. At least I don't think they do. — frank

Mm, and who do you think the think tanks think for exactly? American Senators are not paid to understand. They are paid to implement policy.

I think Putin overcame the 1990s pretty well. Free markets did help them recover from the Soviet collapse. — frank

To become the crony capitalist state it is today? Not convinced by that.

The Russian economy is a ‘one-trick’ pony, relying mostly on energy and natural resources exports. After a short boom from rising energy prices from 1998 to 2010, the economy has basically stagnated. Although Russia’s economy is larger than it was in 2014 in real terms, final domestic demand is still at its pre-2014 level. And cumulative GDP growth over this period was only positive because exports were 17% higher in real terms in 2019 than in 2014. Russia’s capital stock is still lower in real terms compared to 1990, while the average profitability of that capital remains very low.

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2022/02/27/russia-from-sanctions-to-slump/

You know how you know you're a fucking pscyho? When you make an 'axiom' out of a person who was never once even mentioned in the post you're replying to. Maybe consider that your insane projections are yours alone.

I don't think Europe or the US has ever seen central Europe as some great prize. — frank

Mm, a great prize or no, the aim of market creation and neoliberalization (i.e. privatization, austerity, destruction of workers rights and security) - which is not just an 'aim' but something actively happening and continuing to happen in Central Europe - is high up on the agenda. Very few people have been talking about Ukraine's opening up of it's agriculture to foreign capital, and how, in Michael Roberts' words, institutions like the World Bank were "positively drooling at this opening up of Ukraine’s key industry to capitalist enterprise: [quoting the WB]: 'This is without exaggeration a historic event, made possible by the leadership of the President of Ukraine, the will of the parliament and the hard work of the government'."

And this to say nothing about 'structural adjustment' in Central European countries like Romania, Estonia and Latvia, praised to high heaven by neoliberals in the EU; or the glee that the US must now feel about European energy dependence about to swing evermore to the West; or the weapons manufacturers who will can only be overjoyed at Germany's $100b rearmament, moving from 7th to 3rd in the world ranking of armed states.

And speaking of 'free markets and democracy', let's not forget how anglo neolib 'shock therapy' was directly responsible for Russia being shitty country it is today:

But the fucking clowns above me would rather just talk about how Putin Bad herp drep, more war pls, leave the poor, poor, US alone. Didn't realize these people like the taste of Empire's boots so much that they'd deepthroat them every chance they got.

That seems naïve to me. As if the US and Europe do not have active and ongoing imperialist interests apart from some kind of leftovers from the 1990s. That you had to literally falsify a simple count - or more charitably, you read into it what you wanted to see - to make your point speaks to this as well.

If by 'a fair amount' you mean 'a minority' then sure, I saw them.

A fair amount of that criticism was from the 1990s — frank

??

Kissinger - 2014
Mearsheimer - 2015
Chomsky - 2015
Cohen - 2014
Pozner - 2018
Burns - 2008
Frazer - 2014
Gates - 2015

I stopped scrolling beyond that for this.

You see, the smartest thinkers not only saw that NATO expansion would get the Russian Bear angry. They also saw the obvious imperialism aspirations that Russia has too. Especially when it came to Ukraine. — ssu

Okay?

Okay?

The number of influential and knowledge people in the West who understood that what the West was doing would lead to fucking tragedy, is mind boggling. Yet utter morons who are totally fixated on Putin as a personality - while ignoring decades of history and politics - would like to sanctify a West which very well knew its own role in bringing this about:

I don't know, but I know that the only advantage of blaming the West for this war, is to exculpate Putin. — Olivier5

This is a stupid thing to say, said only by stupid people.

---

Anyway.

Russia’s military offensive against Ukraine is an act of aggression that will make already worrisome tensions between Nato and Moscow even more dangerous. The west’s new cold war with Russia has turned hot. Vladimir Putin bears primary responsibility for this latest development, but Nato’s arrogant, tone‐​deaf policy toward Russia over the past quarter‐​century deserves a large share as well. Analysts committed to a US foreign policy of realism and restraint have warned for more than a quarter‐​century that continuing to expand the most powerful military alliance in history toward another major power would not end well. The war in Ukraine provides definitive confirmation that it did not.

...Western (especially US) leaders continued to blow through red warning light after a red warning light, however. The Obama administration’s shockingly arrogant meddling in Ukraine’s internal political affairs in 2013 and 2014 to help demonstrators overthrow Ukraine’s elected, pro‐​Russia president was the single most brazen provocation, and it caused tensions to spike. Moscow immediately responded by seizing and annexing Crimea, and a new cold war was underway with a vengeance.

History will show that Washington’s treatment of Russia in the decades following the demise of the Soviet Union was a policy blunder of epic proportions. It was entirely predictable that Nato expansion would ultimately lead to a tragic, perhaps violent, breach of relations with Moscow. Perceptive analysts warned of the likely consequences, but those warnings went unheeded. We are now paying the price for the US foreign policy establishment’s myopia and arrogance.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/28/nato-expansion-war-russia-ukraine

I'm in no position to assess this but it is well worth being skeptical about the triumphalism over just how seemingly bad the war is going for Russia right now:

Full thread is worth a gander.

What if he actually is as delusional as some speculate, as some have speculated on analyzing his behavior the past weeks.

...

I don't grab these scenarios out of my ass. — Christoffer

"What if [wild speculation]? [ I totally don't make shit up]."

but the immediate threat is happening right now. — Christoffer

The 'immediate threat' has been underway for years, but because you seem intent on plugging your ears at any mention of the US or NATO, you're structurally incapable of framing any solution in any terms other than immediate blame, and, it seems, sheer escalation.

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-89-russias-financial-meltdown?utm_source=url

More good shit from Tooze on the economic front.

And how do we do that? — Christoffer

I don't know. You want easy answers, and then get mad when the world doesn't offer them to you. It is not so crazy to not want the advent of nuclear war. I'm quite willing to admit that 'what needs to be done' is the kind of thing more suited to others better versed in the situation. Some principles of action include minimizing harm, stopping war, and deescalating as much as possible - how they can be, and are translated, I'm not so sure. But what I know for sure is that it is not suited to fantasists like yourself who dream of putting Putin in the Hague, or paint him like a cartoon villain who 'shoots staff to blow off steam'. Your need for some kind of 'punishment' or 'payback' and 'blame' - which seem to be the principles animating what you say - is literally genocidal. No one who treats the world like a fucking Disney movie ought to be offering any opinions whatsoever.

"I know people are suffering and getting killed but...." — Christoffer

...maybe let's not engender more people suffering and getting killed?

It's true because my time-frame is a century or so.

You mean that the actions "the west" is taking here are just "bloodlusty" agitations? Yeah, helping Ukraine defend themselves against murderers trying to claim their nation for themselves is "bloodlusty". And let's look at the Russian army of kids, not even sure why they're there. Cannon fodder for the grinder, yeah, don't do anything, don't try anything, don't make any effort to try and pressure Putin to back off. — Christoffer

And there it is - the Marvel comic book picture of international politics.