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Well no, there are other options: the US could have tried to integrate Russia into NATO, or simply not tried to project power past Berlin. The former seems very hard to get but has incredible payoff, and I am sorry it didn't seem to get much serious consideration from the West (perhaps there were good reasons it was a nonstarter – but I can't help thinking that if we can put up with having Turkey in NATO Russia could surely have been shoehorned in somehow.)
There were attempts to build better relations between Russia and the West during the 90s, then briefly during Obama's first term. They never came to much because Russia never gave up the dream of dominating Eastern Europe.
Refusing to grant NATO entry to countries east of Berlin would have just made them easy targets when Russia regained its strength. The Baltics would almost certainly have been either invaded, or pressured into becoming defacto Russian client states by this point.
Also under Bush. The US has repeatedly attempted a rapprochement with Russia but from what I can tell continues to refuse to make vital concessions to them. Which might be good! But it's not surprising rapprochement fails.
From an American realpolitik perspective it would be infinitely better to have a good relationship with Russia and have Eastern Europe as Russian client states than it is to have Russia as an enemy and be rolling the dice on Eastern European states. However, obviously, some of this is with the benefit of hindsight and also presupposes a stable US-Russia alliance which frankly I think would be a very delicate thing, perhaps an impossible one (Russia has no friends only interests etc. etc.) I don't think it's fair to tell Bill Clinton he goofed up by not anticipating that we would need to pivot to the Pacific badly in 20 years. Obama, however...
An alliance with Russia would be basically impossible if they were gobbling up democratic European states, and even if the US ignored what they were doing I don't see why they wouldn't just become hostile to the US again once they reassembled the borders of the USSR. Putin's Russia is stilly highly ideologically opposed to the US just like the USSR was, but instead of Communism it has negativity towards democracy and hallucinating that the CIA has a 100% effective anti-Russian brainwashing technique in the form of "color revolutions".
Even just having Poland on the US's side is a great deal because they're a fantastic foil for tinpot dictators. It's not inaccurate to think that Ukrainians looked at how Poland was doing, and how Belarus was doing, and said "I think I'll take some of the former, thanks".
And isn't needed, for what I am talking about. If the United States wants to contain China, it needs to prevent alliance formation; forming its own alliances is one way of doing this, but not the only way. China and Russia are not natural allies, but their mutual dislike of the United States pushed them closer together now than they were for much (perhaps all) of the Cold War, when they were ostensibly ideologically aligned.
I don't think this is true. Russia and democratic countries like India, Israel, France, Germany, South Korea all have or have had recently cordial relations, including mutually beneficial trade deals, sometimes for sensitive items such as military equipment. Shoot, after the end of the Cold War, Yakovlev assisted Lockheed Martin with VTOL technology for the F-35B.
In fact, let's talk about Israel. Israel has refused to send military aid to Ukraine or sanction Russia, not because they aren't a US ally (they ostensibly are) or because they are a Russian ally (they aren't) but because they want to maintain good relations with Russia and think they have a lot to lose by angering them. If the United States wants to compete with China, it is in its best interest for Russia to have a similar relationship with it - not necessarily one that is hostile towards China, but one that is not willing to participate in broader coordinated action against the United States. However, I think the ship has sailed on that, but it hadn't probably as late as the Obama administration.
And I don't think that's an insane world. Imagine a simple counterfactual where the US had listened to diplomats like Kennan in the 1990s, drawn a hard line at NATO expansion further east (at a minimum, ruling out Georgia, Finland and Ukraine) and instead promoted trade and investment both between itself and NATO and others (such as Germany) while generally keeping its hands off of former SSRs, perhaps telling Russia that NATO's ranks remaining closed its contingent on Eastern Europe remaining peaceful. Fast forward to the Sino-American War of 2027, and now Russia, instead of having already been hit by every sanction imaginable (and surviving), does brisk trade with the West, still uses SWIFT, has some degree of economic and geopolitical integration with most former SSRs, and does not view the West as a threat. Going to Russia under such a situation and saying "hey just sit this one out, we know you are friends with China, but don't give them your satellite imagery or any new arms deals please and thank you" probably wouldn't be a heavy lift! (From what I understand, Putin, who spent some of his formative years in Germany, is probably pro-Western moreso than pro-Asian in terms of his instinctive biases.)
Now, you can argue it wouldn't be worth Poland getting the Belarus treatment or whatever, sure, but the United States losing a war with China is potentially a Very Big Deal, probably much worse than Ukraine losing the war to Russia, and if that's your #1 priority you're going to want as many ducks in a row as you can get. From where I sit, it really looks like the US tried to have its cake and eat it too and as someone who lives here I am more than a bit concerned that we bit off more than we could chew.
Russia obviously knows this is not true or Putin would have been color revolutioned by now. They are concerned both about color revolutions, however, as well as military threats from NATO.
Am I missing something here? I don't typically think of Poland as being a particularly good foil for tinpot dictators. More like a magnet (no offense to the longsuffering Poles).
Sure. I mean, I don't blame countries for wanting their own sovereignty. But this ultimately means that when, say, Iran tries to get nuclear weapons I'm like "well I can't blame them" and when Israel tries to stop them - yeah, can't really blame them either.
In realpolitik terms, there was no realistic scenario where better relations with Russia would make much of a difference in a US-China conflict. Such a war would be dominated by sea + air power, which Russia is anemic in. Russia would be helpful in terms of sending raw materials to China, so having them embargo China during a conflict would indeed be useful for the US, but there was never a realistic chance for US-Russia relations to be good enough to where Russia would consider that rather than simply profiting and staying neutral while continuing to trade. Even if Russia joins China relatively explicitly, how much of a difference would that make? It might help China with marginal things like initial missile stockpiles and intelligence gathering. Those aren't nothing, but they'd be highly unlikely to turn the tables. And they'd be well worth the trouble if it meant the US had a stronger European contingent of allies to call on, even if they're mostly limited to just economic sanctions against China.
Well, first off, Russia is not anemic in sea power. They are anemic in surface sea power. Their submarines are quite good, and they have more than a few of them. Which ties in to my next point –
You wave off "intelligence gathering", but intelligence gathering is VERY important. US intelligence is quite possibly the difference from Russia consolidating control over Hostomel and not. Without the US SIGINT apparatus, there actually was a decent chance the opening Russian bumrush of Ukraine worked. Intelligence wins wars.
And it's arguably even more important in a conflict dominated by sea + air power. A conflict where Russia is giving China targeting data on our aircraft carriers (the way they are allegedly supporting the Houthis now) potentially puts the United States in a position where it can just meekly accept that China will be able to target our ships or attack Russian assets. It's infinitely better to not have to face that dilemma. It's nearly certain we will be faced with it now.
Being able to locate carriers means you can target them; being able to target them means you can sink them; being able to sink them might be decisive.
So, even without even a situation where China and Russia go to open war jointly and Russia does something like "invading Estonia" to tie up US air power in Europe, or "sinking US ships preparing to transit Suez or Panama" to cripple US attempts to surge naval assets to the Pacific, I think Russia could actually be not only important but actually decisive in a conflict.
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Politically the hardest part about it is that at least Poland and the Baltic states were always going to apply for NATO membership at one point or another. So the US government either has to engage in political 4D chess to prevent that from even happening or reject such requests publicly, which then obviously opens one up to denunciations from the domestic opposition.
And also Greece, which was a military dictatorship for a period and generally a basket case.
Yeahhhh but from a purely realpolitik perspective Poland and the Baltic states are zip compared to getting Russia on your side. I think the real problem is if it's a two-sheriffs one-town situation, and likely it would have been. Sad!
See, if we could get GREECE AND TURKEY into the SAME military alliance we could get Poland and Russia in one. Surely the CIA has a magic mind-control ray that could make that work, or maybe USAID could gainfully employ the entire intelligentsia of Eurasia on the condition that they meme NATO-CSTO into being.
That's actually a rather good point I never thought about before.
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