02-26-2017, 01:42 PM
(02-25-2017, 10:23 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:Quote:I'm going to cop out a bit and send you to a wikipedia article that seems to have the story straight. It has plenty of references so you can likely find what you want there.
That is not at all adequate. Wikipedia articles about politically contentious subjects are fairly worthless, and there were no real conclusions in the body of the article, just a lot of he said and she said from various analysts.
Quote:Okay, p14 of this (which I found through another Wikipedia article) provides some more detail:
A little heavy on opinion. I also don't see much evidence of a premeditated attack on frolicking peasants by the evil Russians OR Georgians provided. Looks like the runup to a very ordinary sort of conflict.
Sorry, I keep forgetting that as a millenial, when you ask for a source you're expecting something that will resolve the issue for you with incontrovertible proof. As a boomer, I'm used to reading multiple sources and resolving things for myself through judgement and deduction. When you ask for a source from me, please keep in mind it is likely to be data to consider and work into your own world view, not a completely new gestalt to adopt.
Quote:Quote:It's our problem because we're part of NATO. And we want NATO to stick around because, basically, it's an alliance that gives us control over the European military and prevents them from becoming a geopolitical rival.
As I said, the Russian military is not capable of seizing the EU, and any supposed imperial benefits from keeping the Europeans in a subservient state are more than outweighed by the risks of conflict generated by weaker states playing fast and loose with their larger neighbor because they believe we have their back.
The Russian military is easily capable of seizing one EU state at a time until it gets to Germany if we don't have those weaker states' backs. There's no evidence that any of those weaker states play "fast and loose" with Russia unless you count wanting to avoid becoming a Russian puppet state as "fast and loose".
Quote:Quote:Keep in mind that the EU, along with the rest of the world, pay us hundreds of billions in "inflation tax" for our protection and policing of the world in general, and trade routes in particular.
Granted we should use our leverage to negotiate more favorable trade arrangements with the EU, which are currently slanted against us. In retrospect, when globalization was happening after the fall of the Soviet Union, we should have taken more pains to make sure it benefited us rather than just benefiting the rest of the world; we should work on fixing that now.
Most of which is unfortunately recycled back into the US security state, and the currency flows (the "eurodollar") you mention have been instrumental in exacerbating and accelerating the process of deindustrialization and financialization.
I'm not saying we have to cut loose completely and aim for autarchy, only that the Cold War is over and we need to wind up these imperial commitments.
I think you have a distorted view of what the Cold War was like.
The Cold War was not a time of high military commitment on the part of the US. In fact, the balance of terror from relatively cheap nuclear weapons meant that the requirements for conventional military capability expensive both in terms of money and lives was limited to relatively small, contained engagements.
The end of the Cold War greatly reduced the threat of global nuclear holocaust, but the downside was that it substantially increased the scope for conventional conflicts that would previously have been subsumed into the largely peaceful nuclear balance between the US and Soviet spheres. It's no coincidence that within a couple years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the US was invading Iraq.
However, when the Cold War ended, the opportunity arose for the US becoming the hegemon for a global system of maritime commerce. No other nation can do this, as no other regional power has substantial coasts on both the Atlantic and the Pacific.
So we have a choice. We can accept the responsibilities of being a global maritime hegemon and facilitate a prosperous system of global commerce which we can turn to our own advantage to whatever extent we are willing to. Or, we can allow the world to balkanize into less prosperous regions, allow ourselves to devolve to the level of other regional powers like China and Russia, and likely set ourselves up for a subsequent period of interregional warfare as the global regional system shakes itself out.
It doesn't cost us anything to be the global maritime hegemon. Yes, we spend the direct monetary system benefits on military power, but so what? Military power isn't a bad thing, especially if it's free.
As for trading assembly line jobs for higher value knowledge worker jobs in financial services, health care, and the associated information technology, why is that a bad thing?
Abandoning the world is not the solution. Doing a better job of making sure more of the benefits of global free market commerce flow to us and not just to the rest of the world is.
Quote:Quote:There was nothing lazy about it: I pointed out actual parallels. I would agree that "Saddam Hussein is Hitler" was a big stretch back in 1990 - I interpreted it as an aging Bush wanting to relive his glory days - but the parallels here are closer.
What parallels? Like I said before, Hitler annexed multiple countries and started a bid for global conquest within 6 years or so of coming to power. Putin has been in for 17 and has the Crimea (already majority Russian, the host of a major part of the Russian Navy, and a longrunning historical part of the Russian state), plus a few ragtag microstates he's propping up.
Parallels aren't necessarily exact repetitions. Putin has been slower and more constrained in his aggression because the US has been more constraining than Britain was in the 1930s. There's little doubt he would have taken over the rest of Georgia had the US not demonstrated backing for the Georgian government. And let's not forget that the Ruhr was German and Austria and the Sudeten were majority German if you consider Crimea to have been majority Russian. Even Danzig was "a longrunning historical part of the" German state.
None of which is to say we need to destroy Russia. What we should do is continue to prevent him from overreaching so as to prevent him from precipitating another world war.
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Quote: Wrote:The public story on Flynn is not the whole story. If you're interested, I can dig up some references on what probably actually happened.
If you don't mind, I would love to read them. It wasn't something I followed that closely (I have been fairly busy recently).
https://geopoliticalfutures.com/the-flynn-drama1/
Flynn's rumored plan to install a Russia friendly administration in Ukraine I may have read in another source, but while that was a pretty specific rumor, it was still only a rumor.
Really? Look, if you don't have sources, you don't have sources. Please don't claim you do, then serve me up a load of tripe and gossip.
Again, I advertised a source on what "probably" happened, not proof, and that's what I gave you at the link. Friedman is pretty accurate on this stuff, as evidenced by his having founded both Stratfor and GPF, which people actually pay for, unlike the stuff from people here.
If you want absolute proof, then please don't make me go to the trouble of providing sources that I explicitly advertise as "probably" rather than certainties.