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Change "Western" to American and there's no way to view this other than a colossal victory for the elites who planned it.
They have massively bled a once powerful enemy at a cost of zero lives and with economic damage entirely concentrated in Europe, which has the added bonus of pushing European states into greater reliance on American natural resources, and the destruction of the nordstream pipelines will prevent any quick recovery in economic relations. They have perhaps permanently cut off diplomatic ties between Europe and Russia, driving Europe further towards America and bringing yet more nations into NATO, further encircling Russia.
Other than the fantasy scenarios of liberal Russians rising up to remove Putin and fully embrace the West, what more could the US military want to achieve?
What did they win? A client state much bigger in France that is going to be an endless black hole for resources? They have the worst demographic pyramid in recorded history and infrastructure in shambles. They have a military 2.5 the USMC that is going to have to be rebuilt and retrained from ruins once this is over at an enormous cost. Propping up Afghanistan was pricey, this is just next level.
Empires don't fall because they get steamrolled, they fall because they have too many issues going on at the same time. Project Ukraine managed not only to send interest rate soaring while the US pays its interest with new loans, it also became a big black hole for weapons. As for Russia they have managed to ramp up arms production several times over.
The US isn't going to be able to handle a militarized Russia, colonial projects in the middle east and trying to defend Taiwan.
The best the US could hope for is learning what the Romans did at setting up sensible and easily defensible borders.
You don't understand the US government - they like spending money. The prospect of pouring ten trillion dollars into a Ukraine-shaped hole in the ground gives them unimaginable pleasure, just as it pleases them to squander billions of dollars on missiles to destroy antique Russian tanks. Americans don't want to be rich, though they are - they want to feel rich.
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Why does any of this matter to the US? Sounds like a Ukraine problem. Maybe if Russia had actually achieved any military objectives, instead of being embarrassed over and over.
The influences on international finance hit the globe equally, this isn't just a US issue. Forget about interest and arms production and just look at the economies. The US remains a hegemon with unparalleled economic power; if they wanted they could sink Russia in materiel but what would be the point when they're already achieving their aims? Russia is already militarized and is failing to make any noticeable headway in, as you say, a next-level Afghanistan. It's a funny comparison actually, since Ukraine sinking the Russians just as Afghanistan did looks quite likely.
Your province your problem unless you are starting to let the empire fall apart. If you don't rebuild their massive military your empire has nothing defending that front.
Except much of the world doesn''t sanction Russia and many countries are buying products for bellow the rate sold in the west.
China has more manufacturing capacity than the US by a long shot and BRICS has a higher GDP by PPP than G7. China alone outcompetes NATO when it comes to military ship building.
The point is that they can't find Russia, colonize the middle east and fight China.
They managed to create a giant resource sink for NATO that is going to be impossible to fill with other commitments. For example Ukraine is consuming SAM at a far higher rate than they are produced. Meanwhile China has the most advanced missiles in the world and is producing them at the highest rate.
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I don't disagree with the take on who geopolitically benefits, but I'm to this day still surprised by how many of those developments described occurred over US opposition rather than as a result of US design.
If the NATO-expansionist wings had had their way, if there was a Ukraine War in the first place, it would be one with the US lives being lost in great numbers.
If the American warnings of the dangers of Russian energy dependence had been heeded, Europe could have built the LNG import terminals years or even decades in advance and had long-term stable contracts from globally distributed providers rather than relying on the US and American-influencable allies to surge export capacity to unanticipated demand.
If the American pivot from Europea and the Middle East to Asia had gone forth as desired, the Europeans would likely have disengaged to prioritize economic interests over a conflict they had no military capacity to contribute to, allowing Russia a premium opportunity to divide the European-American alliance at a time fewer and fewer Americans saw a moral remain invested.
I guess this is just the nature of a democracy. To the extent that there was a consistent long term strategy involving Russia and Ukraine, it would have come from Generals/DoD/CIA/etc. Senators, Congressmen, think tanks and the like might all have their own opinions without necessarily having any power to influence strategy, which can give the appearance of confusion, particularly compared to authoritarian and very foreign nations like Russia and China. This is perhaps the steelman of the "deep state", in that it allows democracies to execute long term strategic plans even in the face of changing opposition and a multitude of opinions.
The problems with Europe is just a reflection of having to manage a coalition of nations instead of just one. America ultimately cannot force European countries to align with their objectives.
You make it sound like a failure but this all sounds like a success from the perspective of US policymakers. Europe is the way they want them - poor, dependent. Russians are dying. They get to spend lots of money. What exactly is the problem?
My original comment was suggesting that this was a policy success for the US, sorry if that wasn't clear
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I agree with the later, but would disagree(?) that there was a consistent long-term strategy involving Russia and Ukraine.
From my perspective of having watched EU eastern expansion from the 2000s onward, Ukraine has been far less a US-strategy point and more a context of German post-cold-war strategy that reached a point the Americans supported but the Germans were unprepared / unwilling to lead, and then it transitioned into an American national security premise post-2014 Crimea invasion when Russia interjected a military rather than economic-political issue.
It's generally forgotten / glossed over now, but post-Cold War Germany not only had a major focus on re-integrating Eastern Germany, but all of Eastern Europe. Germany took relatively systemic efforts to execute influence-expanding investments across the region, ranging from the overwhelming ownership of Polish media to Baltic incorporation into German supply chains to Russian energy. These efforts were general and broad, aligned with the European (and especially French) efforts at trying to integrate eastern europe and even Russia into the European Union economize zone (where Russia was a potential counter-balance to the Americans), and Ukraine was not exempted even as it was fertile soil. While the Americans generally supported the Europeans in EU expansion (for a variety of reasons, from the ideological benefits of spreading democracy to the willing to economic interest to strategy in watering down German/French influence over the EU), the cultural dynamics of EU-positivity and democratic liberalism that sparked Maidan was fundamentally EU, and German, driven and funded.
The strategic handoff came with that while the Germans were interest in the eastern expansion in general, they weren't interested in doing so at the expense of their Russian economic relations under Merkel, and so Putin made Russia EU/Eurasian Union alignment a massive issue, Germany entered a strategic paralysis as the factors it had encouraged and sympathized and in some cases funded grew, but the government's interest was not to lead. So the Germans didn't, and without the Germans who had been the institutional leaders the EUropeans floundered, and into that western power vacuum stepped the US. Many forget now due to the Nuland conspiracy theory that Nuland debating opposition members for inclusion into Yanukovich's government after his invitation for such was proof of a coup against Yanukovich, but Nuland's infamous transcript was initially a scandal for its impolitic language on the Europeans.
The transitions have faded with time and popular memory, but US/western military interest in Ukraine was never a consistent interest, and in many respects quite late. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s, you had the Clinton Era in the 90s where there was no particular interet beyond nuclear proliferation, you had the Bush era in which NATO expansion was an interest as a part of general NATO expansion sympathies but Bush was decisively curtailed by the 2006 European vetos, and then you had the Obama era in which Ukrainian NATO was not a topic of pursuit. US military aid / training / assistance to Ukraine only started after the occupation of Crimea and the Russian intervention after the failed Nova Russia campaign, which was also the first time the Ukrainian body politic started to come to a military security consensus on Russia being the threat.
A lot of this probably comes down to how you would define "Long-term" and "consistent". I would imagine that military aims for Ukraine were practically non-existent up until 2014, with the ousting of Yanukovich and invasion of Crimea opening up the possibility. Most likely, Euromaiden was led by CIA and CIA linked assets, but any further military goals coming from that would be opportunistic. Could you call this a consistent strategy? And 2014 means <10 year, is this long-term?
I think if you're talking long-term and consistent, then it would be the aim of expanding NATO membership to fully encircle Russia. Ukraine would just be one part of this, up until the relatively recent events brought it much more to the fore.
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