Our support of Saudi Arabia is inexcusable. Us turning a bling eye to the injustice happening in Yemen is inexcusable. The way our media day and night demonized Assad and Russia in Syria meanwhile completely ignoring what's happening in Yemen is a disgrace. I wouldn't have such a huge problem with demonizing Russia if we weren't so damn hypocritical.

Russia annexed Crimea because we overreached in Ukraine and that's understandable. We used Cold War tactics, pouring billions into Ukraine to inch even closer to Russia, just like we used our soft power to draw more and more eastern states into the NATO alliance. If an alien world was spectating earths geopolitics it would conclude that we are the Hegemon with military bases all over the world on Russias borders, on Irans borders, on Chinas borders, etc.

I live in the US and love the US but i simply can't ignore realities and ascribe to propaganda that we are somehow the good guys and anything and everything we do is for the good meanwhile all our adversaries are some Bond type villains.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Jan 20 2018 11:02am

America wasn't the aggressor, Hillary Clinton was. That's perhaps a subtle point, but an important one, because its critical to understanding Putin's actions- Hillary accused him of rigging his election and he accused her of meddling in his election and pushing cyber propaganda inside Russia. And then Putin very conspicuously did not retaliate against America back in 2011. Obama and Biden washed their hands of Hillary (and soon chucked her out of the administration), and the world leader so famously mired in cold war tit-for-tat mentality failed to dish out any 'tats' against America. But when Hillary ran for president five years down the line, Putin exposed Hillary rigging her own elections, his poetic revenge, and pushed cyber propaganda inside America.

See, these are the kinds of nuances that would be important in understanding geopolitics because they paint not only the motivations behind world powers, but also the schism between Obama and Hillary.

No, I'm not pretending that. I am American though, and I am on my countries side, and Russia has an adversarial relationship with us as Asian regional power. I don't dislike actual Russian people, even if their cultural is kind of weird and cold.

There shouldn't be wars between us.

To reiterate:

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2018

The United States used to be "The Leader of the Free World". It was a title we wore with pride. We were the country that stood up against the Iron Curtain and the oppressive forces of oligarchy powered planned economies that absorbed a lot of its neighbors while it was a superpower before it was relegated to regional power. It now is reasserting itself in former Warsaw Bloc countries that fought hard to be free and the former Warsaw Bloc nations that never became free are as belligerent as ever. We want to defend our NATO allies, and Ukraine has the right to self determination as well. Russia is responsible for acts of terrorism in the area as well, even the shooting down of a civilian airliner is blood on their hands there. Supporting Assad at the point they did was unconscionable, considering he attacked peaceful protesters to begin with and used chemical weapons on civilian centers of population, including barrel bombing hospitals. All to keep a client-state. The US hasn't done anything that insane since Vietnam and Chile, decades behind us. Yes we use soft power, and Russia is putting boots on the ground places and Germany is leader of the Free World.

This post was edited by Skinned on Jan 20 2018 11:57am

Nikki Haley is the political wonder woman and you call yourself a champagne socialist?

Look at the Donald, about the save the day by calling in an airstrike.

Again with the western centric hypocrisy, yes decades ago... You point to Russia boots on the ground in Syria but fail to realize who exactly caused the power vacuum that this shit storm spawned from. Euro and American hawks point to Russia as weaponizing immigration from the ME but who were the countries that took out Hussein and as a result created the chaos there? Who were the actors that took out Gaddafi and created a gateway to Europe from Africa? Was it Russia? Was Russian meddling in the ME that spawned ISIS? This type of doublethink really annoys me. It's the same type of thought that says "Russian meddling is a threat to our democracy" meanwhile what does that meddling actually mean? Exposing the corrupt DNC collusion? Why is literally no one talking about what the DNC did? Is that not an actual threat to our democracy? It's exponentially more harmful & impactful to our democracy than a handful of Russian hackers but it's swept under the rug and the narrative is the evil, oppressive, imperialistic Russians just want to weaken us.

You may like Russians as people but you have no understanding of their way of thought or why they feel threatened by American power creep. Take it from someone that has been to Russia, speaks Russian and who's ancestors actually suffered at the hands of the Soviets after WW2. Russia feels threatened by the eastward expansion of NATO. We went to these little eastern EU nations and basically offered them the carrot of capitalism and investment and they gladly took it and honestly i don't blame them. I'm very happy that my homeland is part of the EU, i mean the standard of living went up, there's more freedom, etc. But from the Russians perspective it's a much different story. We keep building bases closer and closer to their border. We keep installing THAAD systems that have the capability to be retrofitted with nukes in hours pointed at Russia. There was peace for a very long time during the cold war precisely because of the MAD principle but after the collapse of the Soviets we basically thought we can creep into their backyard and they should would just accept our world superiority which upset the balance created by MAD. And now that China, Russia, Iran are starting to assert their regional clout we feel threatened. Point is look at the whole mosaic, like Goom said, most things in this world have cause and effect. These countries, regimes and leaders are smarter and purposeful, more than you guys want to give them credit for. Even N Korea's regime is behaving rationally to assure that they don't get taken out by us.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Jan 20 2018 01:20pm

twitter debates
i'll make fun of you for sourcing huffpo and wapo but don't you dare criticize brietbart!

If Eisenhower was alive, Democrats would criticize him for being too nice to Hitler

This post was edited by EndlessSky on Jan 20 2018 06:52pm

Throwback.