How should they have acted differently?
By taking measures designed – and framed as such – to aid the long term stability of a post Soviet Union Russia. And money always talks loudest. I think the idea of a late 20th century Marshall Plan was coherent in principle. Quite possibly, of course, this end was not achievable. We will never know. Same time, do not comments during the 2000s by Putin about Ukraine and NATO clearly indicate that the current situation was not inevitable?
Did not happen. And now the world is probably at one of its three most dangerous dangerous junctures ever.
In fairness that’s hindsight and wishful thinking rolled into one. Any comparison with the Marshall Plan is pure bunkum. Europe and especially Germany was reduced to rubble after the Second World War. So was Japan. Russia wasn’t after the Cold War. It had its own means to become an economic powerhouse and virtually unlimited natural resources. China ( with no Marshall Plan ) came from way behind it in 1990 to dwarf its economy in a decade, with a fraction of its natural resources.
Plus Russia was a still heavily armed undefeated enemy with a strong nationalist streak and a history of expansionism, failed and successful. Does anyone realistically think the USA would have funded them after decades of worrying about World War and mutually assured destruction? What President would have gone out on a limb for that?
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Putin was talking out both sides of his mouth.
- Ukraine can make it’s own decisions
- Ukraine cannot be used as a base for NATO
The Russian mindset from every article I’ve read recently is a culture of strokes for nearly everything.
Backhanders are the norm is all walks of life, it appears to have seeped into the Russian Military machine too looking at the breakdowns & clear shoddy standard of equipment they rolled into Ukraine.
To say pumping money into a Country like that is wishful thinking imo.
It appears clear as day that Putin & Russian forces have been manipulating Elections, social media content & engaging in cyber warfare for the last 15 years. All with the ambition of sowing discord in the West & democracies.
They have sold their resources to such an extent that Western Europe were slaves to cheap energy.
Did Putin improve the living standards of the average Russian whilst doing this? Like fuck he did.
In the anticipation that the West wouldn’t react to his aggression or have the stomach to lose cheap energy Putin made this move.
The only issue was the despot underestimated the Ukrainian spirit & desire to be an Independent nation.
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Well, it is very much in the nature of a crisis to ask what might have averted, or partially averted, said crisis. Nothing strange there.
Fair point about ‘Marshall Plan’ redivivus. Bit sloppy of me to use others’ shorthand. But the core point remains, in whatever amalgam of hindsight and wishful thinking: are we content to have ended up where we have ended up? This concern can only lead, however fruitlessly, to counterfactual speculation. I wonder, for instance, would a successful ‘Remain’ vote in the EU Referendum have made a difference. Given how much energy and money Putin put behind a ‘Leave’ vote, you would have to think a ‘Remain’ vote would have impacted on his thinking. The election of Donald Trump, which should not have happened in the sense that the event was avoidable, is another sliding doors moment. Some people will say the same about Joe Biden’s election.
You obviously think the process over the last 30 years was inevitable. And maybe you are correct. Neither of us will ever know.
None of these observations, even for a millisecond, say anything other than Putin is scum and should not under any circumstances have fired a single shot in Ukraine. Launching this war was evil and unhinged. Putin has not the slightest justification for doing so. I hope he ends up like Mussolini.
You also forgot to mention an american instigated coup in you succinct distillation. Im sure you considered it but found appealing to clowns was much easier
We should have given them more money when their real problem was that they gave away a lot of their natural resources to oligarchs.
The arguments are that we should have given them more money to piss away and also given them the space for their “sphere of influence” to continue.
The real problem it appears is that Russia was not an occupied power- as you say a country armed to the teeth even after they lost the Cold War. It was defeated but not occupied and probably neutered like Germany and Japan. Of course with Russia, that would lead to all sorts of problems in itself given it is basically impossible to occupy.
Perhaps we are simply doomed to have these conflicts with Russia periodically, I’m not going to claim that I have all the answers.
In the blame stakes though I just can’t get behind this idea that it’s the “West’s fault”. The West apparently had to balance Russia’s inability to run their affairs properly all with Russia’s delusional of empire, all the while balancing the interests of Eastern European states and populations with their own goals. Are we really going to claim this when Putin has essays under his own name where he says he doesn’t respect Ukraine’s sovereignty?
The best example of this issue is 2008 where Georgia and Ukraine tried to get into NATO. Yes the US were more comfortable with it, but France and Germany were not. The U.K. brokered the fudge agreement. A little while later, after this fudge agreement was brokered and it was clear as day that’s what it was, Putin invades Georgia anyway. What exactly were the West supposed to do?
I agree with pretty much of all those observations. My point was that the topic Ukraine/NATO has not been a static one over the last two decades. You have to make certain inferences in light of this recognition.
The point about election manipulation is central. Had Putin not mostly succeeded in those aims, would he have been so emboldened in 2022? You would think not. So there were other possibilities than the current situation. I am very much aware of the EU’s imperfections – especially on agriculture – but the main reason I thought a ‘Leave’ vote nuts was that it played into the hands of Putin and the rest.
Pumping money into Russia could not, obviously, have solved anything by itself. My sense is more that the ‘America won The Cold War’ narrative, lauding that narrative as the most important upshot of four decades, was always going to end in tears. What could have been done different? Yes, in fairness, possibly and probably nothing. The world got consumed for nearly 20 years with 9/11 – an event that found a taproot via Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan – when Russia was the true danger, as it turns out, all along.
Equally, as has been observed on here, various Eastern European countries simply do not want to be under Russian influence. They want to be in the EU. I am not pretending to have obvious solutions, retrospective or present.
None of the above, as per last reply, arises out of anything but complete repugnance over what is happening in Ukraine. Zelenskyy, whatever his flaws, is a trillion times preferable to Putin and his associates. If nothing else, he was democratically elected.
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The real reason for the MP was to stop communism taking root in Western Europe
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Also, it strikes me that the tenor of these discussion reflects the intractable difficulties involved. Any suggestion that ‘The West’ might best have acted somewhat differently over the last 30 years is taken as some form of an excuse for Putin. Not in the slightest, as far I am concerned. But I detect on some people’s part – not @carryharry and @Fagan_ODowd – the sort of absolutist thinking engendered by a deep identification with America as the locus of right wing rectitude.
But, yes, on reflection, Putin is unhinged and we were probably always going to end up here, especially after Brexit and Trump.
It’s all total conjecture, but if Zelensky had been more deft diplomatically, he may have been able to avert this appalling slaughter with superficial appeasement or compromise on areas like Donbass with offers of a referendum. It may well have been fruitless. I haven’t a clue, but theres a lot of what-iffery around any catastrophic event.
Welcome onboard buddy. L8ke i always say, even if i only reach one person
This is why they should have been funded. They were defeated. Both in economic terms and in military terms - the latter not by the west, but by Afghanistan. But it was not the total, humbling military defeat on its own soil that Nazi Germany suffered, and it was not the humbling experience of shame and guilt that it had produced the world’s greatest ever evil that Germany had to reckon with, where the only future was atonement.
Russia was a wounded animal. Everybody looked at Russia and rejected them. And for good reason.
Ultimately the aim of the west should have been to create a rule of law based social democratic society and to bring them into both the EU and NATO.
The truth is, Russia could not achieve that society by itself, no more than the Germans could after World War II. It was not capable.
The population had been both repressed and infantilised. Overnight they went from communism to the wild west of anarcho-capitalism. The 1990s were a time of extreme trauma and upheaval for ordinary people in Russia who almost immediately came to crave stability, any stability. Putin created in the Russian public’s minds, a form of stability – a stability of instability, but with the same level of repression and infantilisation that had been there under communism, and probably a greater level of cynicism than had been there even under the communist system. Greater inequality. Much more extreme poverty. And the far right nationalism he unleashed on a wounded nation was even more dangerous than the Soviet idea of empire.
As has been said, all that is in the past, and discussion of it is completely academic. A serial murderer who grew up in poverty and was abused in childhood is still a serial murderer.
You can only deal with the now.
Russia has now grown so toxic that it now looks as if it will have to go through an imposed cleansing process and a process of national shame, guilt and atonement if it is ever to have a future again.
Apologies but I will have to pass. I do not agree with your take on the present crisis. If nothing else, your tone is off.
Funnily enough youve never mentioned my take on it, other than to misconstrue some admiration for putin and reject the very positions you’re now adopting. I dont know where you’re getting the trump brexit stuff from…it seems to be a sort of reflex with people, please do expand though- when you’re at it consider the ramifications of joe and hunter arriving post coup with their promises of unconditional military support etc…in exchange for what exactly?
But you have to laugh at tim and fagan…dismissing the notion that financial aid is in any way significant when money was poured into countries surrounding russia…mostly to boost economies but also with the purpose of funding military action, anti russian militias, a coup etc. The last century gave us the perfect juxtaposition of two post war approaches. One led to carnage, genocide and mass slaughter, the other led to peace and prosperity. Ill forego expressing my contempt for anyone who thinks otherwise…in the interests of tonality etc.
Military coups?
You should have just stopped there.
It says it all about you.
Thread:
Last week, I read critiques of my position on Putin’s rationality and possibility of nuclear war. Many are not realist enough about the nuclear threat or the right response.
I argue in this thread that if we “blink” on Putin’s nuclear threat, we will increase the risk of WWIII.
Nuclear deterrence is based on the belief that any attack with nuclear weapons will immediately trigger a mirror response in kind. For more than 70 years, this conviction – the balance of fear - was shared by nuclear powers and kept WWIII away.
The use of strategic nuclear forces, which Putin ordered to be put on high alert (and apparently nothing happened), is a suicidal act given the policy of mutually assured destruction.
As I explained in my other thread, he is not interested in pressing the strategic nuclear button, but is smart enough to threaten to do it. Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader who was fascinated with nuclear bombs, tried this before.
What if during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Khrushchev believed that JFK wanted to avoid the risk of nuclear war more than he did?
As a result of JFK’s brinksmanship in the Cuban Crisis, WWIII was avoided. The balance of fear worked based on American resolve.
What if Reagan had blinked on the Pershing deployments in Western Europe? Would Mr. Gorbachev tear down the wall then?
For Putin and his team of ex-KGB officers, the Cold War never ended. The collapse of the USSR was just one lost battle in an ongoing contest. They probe the West with limited wars (Georgia), interventions (Syria), cyberwar (Estonia) and disinformation.
The feeble responses to their actions in Crimea, Donbas, and Syria, convinced the Kremlin that the US and the West became decadent and lost the will to resist after declaring the post-Cold War era.
Granted, the united response to the invasion caught them off guard. And the war is not going according to plan, with Western munitions greatly assisting the Ukrainians.
Putin doesn’t like to be on the back foot, so now they’re checking if the threat of nuclear war is effective.
The West willingly provided evidence of its effectiveness. The shameful game of hot potato around Polish MiGs started after Putin’s nuclear threat. Now the Kremlin wants to see what else they can stop with nuclear blackmail: they called Western arms convoys “legitimate targets”.
Putin declared that the economic sanctions were “an act of war.” Can he force the West to ease sanctions with the specter of nuclear war? I don’t see why he wouldn’t try.
I’m not calling for a No Fly Zone or any specific military move in Ukraine. The feasibility and effectiveness of these options is beyond my expertise. But, I am calling out political statements that give away “bargaining power” by ruling out options for fear of nuclear war.
Am not looking for a row. I am conscious that I am sitting in a nice apartment in a nice town, drinking tea and eating tangerines and listening to Bix Beiderbecke while researching a book. Lucky, in other words. So tone is important.
Two wrongs never make a right, although they often make a policy. As @Thomas_Brady noted, Zelenskyy is no altar boy – although he nigh becomes one by comparison with Putin. But there is no justification whatsoever for Putin attacking Ukraine. What Hunter Biden did – or anyone else did – is neither here nor there as of the last few weeks. You demean your point with such equivocation. What exactly do you want me to consider about the Bidens? That they are venial corrupt gobshites. Done. Was already done.
As you will have read, I think there is quite a lot to be said for what you broached about the aftermath of World War II. And your point about money being sluiced into countries in Eastern Europe is undeniable. I think the last post by @Cheasty was well observed. But the whole set of issues remains hideously complex and we are only really pondering them now because Putin declared war. I accept that comparisons between Germany in 1946 and Russia in 1996 are makeable but also that they acutely finite. I certainly do not think others’ objections is to this comparison are laughable. I do think The Cold War persisted in quite a few heads, which became part of the problem.
I would have thought the significance of Trump’s election and Brexit, given how much energy Putin devoted to those matters, speaks for itself.
Anyhow, Putin will now have to be dealt with on 2022’s terms, not on counterfactual terms from 1992. Death is now his garden.