Quote (fender @ 25 May 2023 21:42)
so your "argument" shifted from 'NATO membership means certain death' (chicken is killed after it can't lay eggs any longer) to 'economically, countries can develop without NATO' (no shit, as it isn't an ECONOMIC alliance, but a military one), lol?
guess that's what happens when your analogy gets completely rekt by history. also, you might want to compare standards of living in former warsaw pact NATO members (like poland and czechia for example) with those of belarus and russia for example, if you want to have an actually meaningful indicator of what it means to ally with the west vs. what it means to be in the russian sphere of influence.
My argument stands.
s hen analogy holds up pretty well.
I believe that if, theoretically, this conflict would result in a loss for Russia and regime domestically was to change into pro-american democracy - Ukraine would suddenly become irrelevant in western mass media and everyone would start to bash them again for being an emerging market with corruption and hilarious nationalism issues. Their role as a tool in this proxy war would be complete. After all there is no free lunch. Why would Americans rebuild Ukranian economy once Russia loses. They have so many domestic issues and a war with China to prepare for.
NATO - is a military alliance. It started out as purely defensive to protect Western Europe against possible attack by USSR. Since the collapse of the USSR - NATO has somewhat lost its meaning as Russia no longer presented a threat and actually wanted to join - (see May 1997 Russia-NATO partnership act) fearing an expansion of the rising China which can lay claim to eg Russian Far-East. This has been denied, which sent a pretty strong signal domestically, especially after the alliance was expanded eastward and went on on several foreign interventions severely stretching and expanding what can be called a “defensive” mandate.
Was Operation Allied Force or Operation Unified Protector a defensive mission because an alliance member was attacked by a sovereign state? How about Operation Resolute Support (which was arguably unanimously approved by UN SC, but executed by NATO alliance).
Since Russia was denied NATO ambitions, but all kinds of small and irrelevant countries (like eh Georgia) were being welcomed - this raised the degree of paranoia, which coupled with recent NATO foreign interventions abroad - made Russian politicians and military leaders think they will be the next target under a made-up
casus belli ala WMDs in Iraq - once NATO figures out how to neutralize Russian nuclear deterrent.
Please tell me I’m wearing my crazy hat and I’m pulling facts together on a string. I truly want to be disproven.
This post was edited by Malopox on May 25 2023 02:16pm