Quote (IceMage @ Nov 5 2023 01:27am)
Uhhh... Russia is a great power that has historically been our foe and it has a leader which has delusions of re-establishing his nation as an expansionist power in Europe. Fighting against his attempt to expand and engage in a genocide of Ukraine makes sense not just for Europe's sake but because his success would show how the post WW2 world order the United States helped create is basically meritless, paving the way for more nations(like this one in Asia called China) to embark on their own expansionist ambitions.
C'mon Bogie, supporting American primacy is classic Reaganism.
In the 1980s, well after the Soviet stagnation had set in, the United States had a (rough) 2:1 advantage in terms of GDP. Both countries spent in the same ballpark on military spending. Demographically, the USSR consistently enjoyed a large advantage in total population. Eastern Europe was entirely populated by Soviet Satellite states, and geographic force multipliers made the Soviet Union a potent threat to American interests in Europe and Asia. Today, the United States has a 14:1 economic lead in GDP, a 10:1 lead in military spending, and a 2.3-2.4x lead in total population. The former Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe are all NATO members, and Russia's force projection is limited mostly to areas which fell within the geographic boundaries of the old Soviet Union. I hope that helps to illustrate why what was true ~40 years ago may or may not be true today.
The post WW2 order saw the Soviet Union in control of half of Europe. To say "Russian influence in Ukraine would destroy the post-WWII order" is contradictory at face value, because neither Ukraine, or Belarus for that matter, were considered independent countries over a majority of that timeframe. In the 1960s, the Soviets invade Czechoslovakia, a nominally sovereign state, and brutally put down pro-liberalization efforts there. It would be more correct to say that the United States is trying to maintain the post-1990 world order, but even that's not quite right, because for most of that timeframe as well Ukraine was under the thumb of Russia and Russian-aligned oligarchs. So what you're really saying boils down to American-led regime change efforts should continue everywhere and anywhere possible. I'm not opposed to that on face value, but we need to be cognizant of what we're able and not able to do. Ukraine since 2014 represents a fundamental overreach.
Quote (IceMage @ Nov 5 2023 01:54am)
Also it's kind of weird to pretend India is a similar threat to the United States or our allies when Russia literally has engaged in a genocidal war against their neighbor. India hasn't done that, China hasn't done it. If they do, I hope we have an American president who knows how to bring nations together to fight against it, like Biden has the past couple years.
The pro-russian counter protests in 2014, the precursor to this entire conflict, flared up in response to the Ukrainian parliament voting to remove Russian (along with other languages) as an official minority language in Ukraine. Was that an attempt at genocide of the ethnic Russian, Russian speaking Crimeans? They certainly seemed to think so. Was it an attempt to erase the cultural identity of large tracts of southern and eastern Ukraine? Again, the people who live there seemed to think so. It's a complicated problem not at all dissimilar to the German diaspora created at the end of WWI. Our goal should be to try and resolve it differently than the last time around.
Quote (IceMage @ Nov 5 2023 01:58am)
I need to add one more thing... for the Trump supporters here who attempt to argue against supporting Ukraine, based on the justification that we need to focus on China, I'm a little confused. Isn't a US-led world order a relic of the neo-con Republican era? Shouldn't the US pull back from upholding this global order, and focus on our own problems? If that's the case, why do you even care about China's rise? Why should we care if China takes Taiwan, or if they exert more influence in their own region? Can you explain to me why we should care?
You're asking why the people who swear by "American first" are ok with a world order where America is first. It's a really strange question to me, but if you're genuinely confused you should get out of your bubble and ask some of them.