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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   25051 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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How seriously should we take this reproach? Is it just another tactic to extract concessions from Ukraine before sitting down with them to negotiate a potential deal?

Trump has a history of dealing extremely generously with Putin and taking him at his word. If Putin or his representatives told him it was really Ukraine's fault, I would expect Trump to repeat that. It's probably not helping that Zelenskyy recently pointed this out, since Trump is notoriously fragile.

“You should have never started it,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Ukrainian leaders who, in fact, did not start it. “You could have made a deal.”

The other half of this is that Trump has the mind of a thug. When the powerful threaten you, you make concessions. If you don't, it's your fault for whatever happens.

The other half of this is that Trump has the mind of a thug. When the powerful threaten you, you make concessions. If you don't, it's your fault for whatever happens.

This is how geopolitics works. There's no higher authority to appeal to. It's anarchy.

Antagonizing the guy with the bigger stick is an idiotic policy in a world where the weak suffer what they must. But people have this naive sense that one can appeal to "international law" or other such fictions, as if they aren't another word for the will of the hegemon.

Saying "that's how it is" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The US is, for the moment, part of a military coalition that has pretty effectively suspended international anarchy (at least for its members). It doesn't have to be how it is, but Trump and his supporters are moving us back in that direction because they apparently can't conceive of anything other than the most short-sighted self-interest.

Like, this is not an attitude that pays off for the US in the long run. (And, of course, it doesn't require bending over for Russia - Trump does that for free)

part of a military coalition that has pretty effectively suspended international anarchy (at least for its members)

I think what you mean here is that has protected its members through strength. But China has protected its people through strength without being a military coalition. You don't need a military coalition, you need strength.

NATO members are not exempt from international anarchy, but because they are in a position of strength they participate by causing it, not by experiencing it. Everyone understands the UN Security Council can't do anything about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, despite the fact it has been condemned by the General Assembly, because Russia sits on the UN Security Council. What people forget is that this absurd situation also was true of the US invasion of Grenada.

I think what you mean here is that has protected its members through strength.

Okay, sure. But crucially:

a) NATO members don't get invaded by external foes
b) NATO members do get into disputes with each other, but don't threaten each other with war over disagreements. Germany doesn't insist that the Netherlands and Denmark have pro-German governments on pain of invasion. Hungary is a toxic cyst inside the EU and NATO and the consequences are that other leaders complain a lot about Orban.

This adds up to NATO members not living in the jungle.

because they are in a position of strength they participate by causing it, not by experiencing it

There's no distinction between the two.

The USA blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines was an act of war against Germany.

b) NATO members do get into disputes with each other, but don't threaten each other with war over disagreements.

Yes they do! Turkey and Greece feud over territory in the Aegean and their current leader of Turkey says things like "well of course our missiles can reach Athens!" In fact, Greece actually shot down a Turkish F-16 in 1996, killing the pilot! English leadership started reassuring everyone that they would use military force against Spain in 2017 because Spain sensed an opportunity to get Gibraltar back! And I'm sure that's not an exhaustive list.

There's no distinction between the two.

I think there is – if you are strong enough you can create chaos and remain largely unaffected by the consequences. But perhaps I phrased myself poorly.

I am underwhelmed. Greece denies the shootdown incident, and while I don't believe them it points towards them seeing it as a big-time fuckup, not an embrace of violence as a tool for inter-state, intra-NATO conflict resolution. The Gibraltar kerfluffle is even less impressive. Per the article: Spain doesn't threaten to invade Gibraltar, the UK defense secretary says "if they attack, we'll defend our territory", and then May laughs off the issue.

So you think Greece's outsized defense spending (as a percentage of their GDP) is due to their grave concerns about Russian aggression, eh?

a military coalition that has pretty effectively suspended international anarchy (at least for its members)

This proposition is self-refuting.

If you haven't monopolized violence, you have abolished jack shit. You're just another temporary alliance between States who have "no friends, only interests".

I am here reminded of those maps of "the international community" that only include the West. Anybody can claim to have a universal empire if anybody that's outside of it is definitionally a barbarian. But if you don't see that as a transparent power play, I don't know what to tell you except "Gott mit uns".

If you are the hegemon though, people can appeal to you. People are appealing to Trump to pick the side of Ukraine but it doesn't seem in his nature to ever support an underdog.

'Might is right' is an ultimate fact, not an ultimate morality.

We may still be the most powerful country, but we're not capable of enforcing our will on all things. For about ten years after the fall of the Soviet Union this was perhaps the perception, but the new adventures in the Middle East revealed this was no longer the case, and perhaps it never was.

I think that time has passed actually. The US is still the most powerful military power, but they are no longer uncontested, which means that they have to start acting pragmatically instead of ideologically. Hence the pivot to the east, hence letting go of Ukraine, hence signalling that Europe should start to worry about itself.

How is it more advantageous to fight the powerful and risk losing more?

If I'm being mugged, I can hand over my wallet or I can fight. If I fight I might get beaten up and still lose my wallet. If the mugger is some 150 kg, tattooed musclebound thug known for his huge gun collection (while I am unarmed and substantially smaller), then it's very likely I'll lose. Getting helpful advice and some second-hand brass knuckles from onlookers isn't likely to change the outcome. It's likely to end with me bleeding out, unconscious on the ground.

Nothing about what's happening should be surprising. It is very rare for small states to defeat big states in industrial wars where both sides are determined to win. Observe that the conclusion of the Winter War was Finland losing all the land that the Russians demanded and more. Size matters.

Bless you for actually reading past the part where the badass Finnish sniper shot hundreds of hapless Russian mooks!

This was an extremely common argument on this board just before and during the early stages of the Ukraine war.

It would have resulted in fewer overall deaths but has plainly been disproven by what actually happened.

The longer the war drags on the worse it gets for Ukraine, but with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight they made the right call to fight.

That remains to be seen, it depends on the peace deal they get and the real casualty figures, which we don't know.

'What actually happened' is still in a state of flux from the point of view of us observers who aren't privy to the secrets of the universe. It may be that the media is broadly accurate arguing that Ukraine enjoyed favourable casualty ratios due to high-tech western weapons and clever tactics. Or it may be that they were drafting men, shoving them into a trench and basically feeding them to Grad, Mista and Kalibr to buy time, that they suffer unfavourable exchange ratios. My suspicion is that the latter is more accurate, considering the preponderance of firepower on the Russian side and strong incentives for the media to lie in favour of Ukraine. If that is the case then Russia has a winning hand, they have suffered non-trivial losses and will be inclined to impose much harsher terms given the costs endured.

You're correct that we don't know, and I suspect the value of the war to Ukraine reached its apex earlier than today. Unfortunately I also agree with the rest of your post as well.

I suppose as a baseline though I still believe the value of Ukraine standing up for itself made it a net positive at some point in the past few years.

with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight they made the right call to fight.

How do you mean? I think they could have gotten out early giving up just the disputed Donbass areas plus land access to Crimea -- it's not great, but now they are in a situation where Russia has little reason to stop nibbling away so 'current lines of control' seems like the most they can get. That + a bunch of dead people and 2 years lost rebuilding time doesn't seem worth the squeeze to me.

I think giving up that early would have emboldened Russia or required enough compromises to make it effectively a vassal state. Not a foreign policy expert, just my impression.

I don't have an opinion either way on that -- seems to me to require advanced Kremlinology at best, literal mindreading at worst.

At this point on the other hand, I don't see any reason for Russia to want to stop what they are doing -- all the international capital has been burnt already, and direct war losses seem pretty sustainable for them. So they will need to either be offered something significant over and above what they've already taken (Zelensky seems reluctant) or threatened -- which Trump will probably try and might work, but there's a hard cap on how much they can be threatened for MAD reasons.

Obviously whether or not they made the right call to fight is actually a values question and I am not going to second-guess Ukraine if they think it was worth it.

But just from an economic perspective I think Ukraine would probably have walked away in vastly better shape if they had made a peace deal.

It appears that for all the blood and treasure spent since the early war peace deal was derailed, they're probably getting the terms of the early war peace deal.

That model is missing crucial components that make it inaccurate:

  • R's not a random mugger, but more like a neighbouring family / household. R has a history of forcefully occupying rooms that "belong" to others. R's also likely to come knocking at U's door (and at some other "owners'") later if U just gives away the current room that R's trying to snatch.
  • if R does manage to snatch away the current room, it'll become easier for it to snatch even more rooms from others later on.
  • if R does manage to snatch away the current room, others will become more likely to adopt a similar strategy too.
  • to U, it may be more preferable to keep fighting now and lose some family members, rather than for them to become trapped in the captured room and be slowly tortured / killed there under the guise of "peace".
  • apartment building "owners" have had kinda previously agreed on a "code of conduct" of sorts. There was a chance it would protect U from R, so U's decision to keep fighting was not entirely uncalculated.
  • the whole building is booby-trapped, and R, USA, and some others each hold a button that can blow it all up. So just stepping in and using direct force against R isn't viable.
  • USA and many others have bipolar disorder.

There are probably some more that this list is missing in turn.

"Don't resist oppression because you'll lose anyway" is a tactical argument which may or may not be correct depending on circumstances; "it's your fault for trying to resist" is a moral argument. Most people would not say that if the mugger tries to move into your house, it's your fault for trying to kick him out instead of giving him the living room and kitchen in the hopes he doesn't ask for more.

Faced with a rational adversary, you should only resist if you can make it more costly to take from you than the value of what's being taken. In this Zaluzhnyi's long war strategy at least made some sense, but Ukraine is no Finland, the geography simply doesn't permit it to have the same sort of politics.

Most people don't live in anarchy, and have thus no good sense of how to behave correctly under such circumstances. Criminals are about the closest anybody can get to the condition of a Nation, and they bloody know that if you don't offer respect to the man who is more powerful than you, you get what you deserve.

I think this perspective misses the concept that the criminal might just rob, rape, and kill you anyways, regardless of how much resistance/obedience one puts up. How does one determine if an adversary is an Anton Chigurh versus a Viktor Sayenko?

Well there is a caveat at the beginning. Faced with an irrational adversary you should instead fight as hard and as viciously as possible. But I don't think this is relevant dealing with Russia in this case.

Observe that the conclusion of the Winter War was Finland losing all the land that the Russians demanded and more.

The result of the Winter War was that Finland did not become a Soviet puppet state and suffer under communism for half a century. I consider that a victory and worth the blood that was shed, and I am guessing most Finns would as well, even if from a tactical point of view it was a guaranteed defeat.

Why are starting from the assumption that the Soviet intent was to annex the whole of Finland?

I was not. My assumption was that Finland would have become a Warsaw Pact member under a nominally independent communist government if they had lost the war more completely.

Of course retaining independence is valuable but if you're giving up significant amounts of territory where much of the population lived, then it has to be considered a defeat. Finland was probably wise to fight and lose. But they still lost. That should be the expected outcome.

There is a possibility of an unarmed man inflicting significant harm on a big, strong attacker.

But this is not a general rule, it's a special exception.

Many, many, many Ukrainians would be alive if this principle was fully understood by leading figures in their government. Russia is not a totalitarian communist regime. It's not significantly more corrupt than Ukraine.

Finland was probably wise to fight and lose.

This is an interesting perspective, particularly when contrasted with Ukraine's repeated statements that Crimea needs to be returned (which to be fair could be part of a bargaining maneuver but it's...not very persuasive.)

Of course it's significantly more corrupt than Ukraine. Just look at the openness of Ukrainian elections versus Putin murdering his rivals.

They’ve had precisely two elections since the revolution in 2014, and the winner of the latter election has suspended elections until further notice. At this point it is impossible to tell the difference between ‘Ukraine is less corrupt than Russia’ and ‘the only other post-revolution president didn’t have enough of a power-base to pull it off’.

Yeltsin didn’t murder his rivals either.

‘the only other post-revolution president didn’t have enough of a power-base to pull it off‘

Or, you know, a war of conquest being waged on his country and half of it being occupied territory at the moment of supposed elections.

Sure, that’s what I’m saying. It’s too early to tell.

"You should have never started it,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Ukrainian leaders who, in fact, did not start it. “You could have made a deal.”

Man, I hate this modern trend of journalists smugly injecting their own opinion into reporting. I want to hear what happened and what was said, not what some midwit journalist thinks about it.

That Ukraine didn't start the war is a fact, not an opinion. You could, if you were so inclined, argue that Russia had a good reason for starting the war, but the only way to argue that Ukraine started it is to be very confused about which country is which.

Part of what happened is that Ukraine did not, in fact, start it. This is not a disputed fact. Trump is just lying.

"Donald Trump today announced that Incanto was a notorious paedophile and had been taken into custody" and "Donald Trump today falsely accused Incanto of being a notorious paedophile and took him into custody" are very different stories. You should respond to them differently. If a newspaper is able to distinguish between them in its reporting, it should.

"Who started it" is in general a notoriously slippery concept and not something a journalist should be so breezily "fact-checking". They can quote the Association of Very Serious People for a contrasting view if they want.

I think there are two separate issues.

  1. Unnecessary snarkiness that establishes the journalist as an unreliable narrator.

  2. Journalists inserting inaccurate or uncharitable fact checks, or fact-checking opinion.

Both things could potentially be solved by journalists having better training and professional standards. For example, they could have said something like this:

"You should have never started it,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Ukrainian leaders who, in fact, did not start it. “You could have made a deal.” But (insert expert here) has said Trump's remarks are inaccurate, pointing out that it was Russia who invaded Ukraine in February of 2022.

It's not that hard to adopt a neutral tone if you try.

But honestly, I don't even mind. Before, far leftists were skilled at smuggling their politics into journalism under the guise of neutral reporting. Today, they reveal their power level so quickly. Within a few sentences they will say something that lets me know to stop wasting my time.

Journalists are paid to try and find the ground truth, not to act as stenographers for the two sides.

If we had a decent news media (and I agree we mostly don’t) the whole point of reading the news rather than watching the tendentious blowhards on social media is that the news media do shoe-leather journalism and get information about what is actually happening that I can’t get for myself. “Tendentious blowhard X says that black is white, pointy-headed academic Y disagrees” is low-effort slop, not journalism.

Ideally, but we were having issues with this a century ago. Look at all the journalists who were blacklisted for talking about the Holodomor, vs the ones who talked about how lovely and equitable Stalin’s Russia was.

In the absence of mechanisms to compel objectivity, I prefer ‘neutral’ journalists to do data gathering without commentary, and to get commentary from level-headed partisans on my team.

Depends on how you're defining "it"

"Russia invaded Ukraine" Is a fact.

"Russia started it" (the invasion) Is a fact.

"Russia started it" (the war) is not a fact.

The definition of starting something isn't as clearly defined and the cause of the Ukraine war is more complicated than who threw the first major blow. They were already in a frozen proxy war after the events of 2014 with occasional shelling prior to the larger invasion.

Finding the exact causes for historical conflict is always more complicated. This is why the propaganda machine keeps trying to reduce it to simplistic terms. "Mommy! Timmy punched me!!!" type child reasoning. Any unbiased adult with any experience with people is going to question what Jimmy did to piss off Timmy.

Like Incanto I find the patronizing obnoxious.

As a parallel I’d bring up other wars.

Look at any narrative about the Six Day War / Third Arab-Israeli War that isn’t written by open anti-Zionists. None of them dispute that Israel started the war, in the narrow sense of the word, with a massive surprise attack. They also mostly see it as self-evident that Israel was merely preventing an impeding war of extermination by her Arab neighbors. In other words, they agree that Israel is either blameless or at least shares only part of the blame for the entire war, even though militarily they attacked first.

Or look at Atlanticist or Atlanticist-adjacent narratives about the South Ossetian War of 2008. It’s accepted as fact that the Georgians attacked first but also had no other acceptable choice.

Russia started the war in 2014 by invading Crimea. This should be a question of little doubt.

NATO started the war in 2014 by instigating a color revolution and replacing the elected leadership of Ukraine with western puppets. This should be a question of little doubt. Round and round.

Whether one considers the pre-Crimea events in Ukraine as a coup, a revolution or something else, they were, in the main, internal events within Ukraine, not war. The Russian invasion of Crimea, on the other hand, was a clear act of aggression by one state against another (and, counter to the Russian narrative of bloodless takeover, there were several clashes between Russian and Ukrainian troops), meaning that is when fighting between the states, i.e. war, started.

No.

When we instigate a revolution, it's in support of the people, of democracy and of freedom. When we invade foreign countries, it's to topple dictators and stop warlords. When Russia instigates separatism, it's aggressive hybrid warfare. When Russia invades a country, it's imperialism.

It's not difficult.

Seriously though, given that both sides do questionable things, can't they just all be bad?

No, that’s the propaganda. No country on Earth is so virtuous and only acting in the defense of others.

We’ve been mostly a benign empire, but make no mistake, we are an empire in the same sense as most other empires. Most of the “removal of dictators” and “support for democracy” have been in defense of our global hegemony. In fact, the biggest predictor of us removing a dictator is not what they do to their own people, or how they treat their neighbors. The invasions come when a dictator goes against our hegemony. Duerte can be as brutal as he likes, we don’t care because he’s a Western aligned dictator.

I think @Southkraut is being sarcastic.

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Mongols started it when they invated Kievan Rus, in my opinion.

Kiev was always burning since the world was turning.

It depends on how you see the recent history of Ukraine.

First of all, Ukraine (with generous help from the West) had a color revolution in 2014. This was eventually to lead to Zelensky taking power in Ukraine. This leads to Ukraine becoming much more friendly to the West, and petitioning and working toward membership in the EU and protection from NATO. That’s a big shift from Ukraine as before it had a Russian friendly government and was aligned to Russian interests.

The "eventually" here involves Russia removing a large part of the constituency for pro-Russian parties by invading Ukraine and occupying the territory where their voters lived. Yanukovych was a viable candidate in an intact Ukraine (at least until he tore up the EU association agreement that was the only sane economic policy for Ukraine). Zelensky was the least anti-Russian candidate that was viable in a Ukraine that did not include Crimea or the Donbass.

If you uncritically accept Russia's position that they have the right to dominate Ukraine, then the Ukrainians did start it by not applying their tongues to Russian boots with sufficient vigor. However, I refer you to my remark about thuggish worldviews. Russia has no more right to demand subservience from Ukraine than the US does from Canada or Mexico.

It's hard to see how a change of government in a neighboring country justifies invading them (twice!) and engaging in naked land grabs.

with generous help from the West

What exactly does this mean? The "Euromaiden was fake/astroturf" position runs aground on the absolutely massive, cross-spectrum popular participation.

It’s just quite simply reality. No state on Earth is going to allow a country on its border to make an alliance with a foreign country that it find hostile. We invaded Cuba because of missiles on our border, and Cuba is separated from the USA by the Gulf of Mexico and was and is a much weaker state. Had it been Canada or Mexico gone full communist and been importing weapons and getting trained by the USSR, it would be considered an act of war.

Ukraine is the same thing for Russia. It sucks for the post-Soviet states of Eastern Europe, but because they exist next to Russia, they’re not entirely free to do anything they want. If they get too friendly with the West, they’re getting the same thing. And on the other hand, Europe, Mexico, Canada, and South America are in our sphere of influence and we don’t allow them to get too far off reservation. We’re powerful enough to do so mostly by sanctions and soft power, but the longevity of a regime in our sphere of influence that openly sides with our enemies isn’t that long.

We invaded Cuba because of missiles on our border

No, we didn't. Bay of Pigs predated the Missile Crisis, and there was no subsequent invasion. Cuba is still communist. If the best equivalence one can draw is a failed covert op sixty years ago against a recently established dictator, America is looking pretty good by comparison.

Cuba isn't even a good comparison. Cuba was openly authoritarian and there's a fairly obvious asymmetry between nuclear missiles and a trade deal with the EU. A more appropriate one would probably be the coup targeting Arbenz in Guatemala. And, you know, the coup in Guatemala was completely unjustifiable. It didn't advance US interests or security in any meaningful way - it was simply a manifestation of anti-communist paranoia and extremely petty corporate interests.

Europe, Mexico, Canada, and South America are in our sphere of influence and we don’t allow them to get too far off reservation.

The reservation must be pretty fucking massive, then, because we've had anti-American governments in Latin America for decades. European governments routinely ignore US desires and if they told the US to get out the we would do so.

And yet we failed to overthrow the government of Cuba and it remains communist to this day. Just because every country wishes they had a sphere of influence and will take steps to obtain one doesn't mean we are under any obligation to give it to them. European nations freely ignored the Monroe Doctrine for decades after it was promulgated until they were too weak relative to the US to do so.

Russia has no more right to demand subservience from Ukraine than the US does from Canada or Mexico.

You're just wrong on the face of it. It's realpolitik, lets not indulge in transparent lies. If China decided to have a little color revolution of their own in mexico, the us would be taking that government over faster than you can blink.

If you were Canada & Mexico would you be spinning up a nuclear weapons program right now? I ask because I can't imagine a world where Poland,Turkey,Greace and Germany are not arming themselves with at least 200 warheads each over the next 10 years.

If you were Canada & Mexico would you be spinning up a nuclear weapons program right now?

Right now? No. That window has closed.
A few years ago? Absolutely.

(The tricky bit about spinning up a nuclear weapons program is that it invites immediate reprisal, but dissuades longer-term reprisal. Spinning up a nuclear weapons program when your neighbor is dropping thinly-veiled hints of invasions is already too late.)

Now... quietly making sure you have the CFD horsepower available, and the people with CFD expertise available for said research, and ideally as much design and development as you are confident you can get away with doing quietly without the physical fissile material? Absolutely. Tricky bit here being that sims are a whole lot harder to do without calibration data that neither Canada nor Mexico have access to.

I’m not uncritical of the Russian version of the story. Both versions are likely at least somewhat true in the sense that while the Revolution seems to have been organic, it was helped along by the West. But to my mind, you really can’t engage with the war and the causes or likely outcomes unless you can explain what all sides actually believe is going on and why they’re making the decisions they’re making. The most important part of the Russian version of the color revolution story is that this is what Russia believes about the color revolution.

If I want to understand Vietnam and the American war in Vietnam, im going to have to know what Americans thought they were fighting for and what they believed was going on. Does that make Domino Theory true? No. But refusing to engage with that theory just means I don’t understand it.

it was helped along by the West

Again, in what way? Specifically. I suppose you could say that the EU created friction by offering Ukraine a trade deal that was liable to agitate Russia, but that just brings us back to the issue of Russia feeling entitled to dominate Ukraine.

But to my mind, you really can’t engage with the war and the causes or likely outcomes unless you can explain what all sides actually believe is going on and why they’re making the decisions they’re making.

When Trump says "You should never have started it", he's not engaging in cold-blooded causal analysis and I see no reason to pretend that he is. Like, yes, obviously Russia/Putin has a perspective on why the war is justified, but there isn't actually that much divergence between pro and anti-Russian positions on why Russia invaded Ukraine, just in how seriously you take their justifications.

Again, in what way? Specifically

Up to 2014 the US had spent at least ~$5 billion on 'pro-democracy', 'civil society' and 'independent journalism' operations directly and via NGO of the sorts to see their funding cut recently.

He is not engaging in causal analysis at all, he is criticizing Ukrainian leadership for not making a deal. This is literally his next sentence. Trump is not a guy who speaks precisely, you can’t read so deeply into his throwaway comments.

His 'throwaway comments' are backed up by a 'peace negotiation' where to all appearances he is planning on selling out to Russia. He's also doubled down on this line, so apparently more than just a throwaway comment.

More broadly, Trump is President of the United States. People are going to take him seriously, and they should take him seriously. That Trump says ten insane things a day and he only means three of them is not an indication that you should write off what he says.

It is, however, a perfect example of how (not) to engage in media coverage over him.

The domino theory was, quite literally, true- Laos and Cambodia became communist in addition to south Vietnam.

What exactly does this mean? The "Euromaiden was fake/astroturf" position runs aground on the absolutely massive, cross-spectrum popular participation.

That something was a color revolution doesn't imply that the participants were altogether fake.

Every country has its dissidents. An intelligence agency can help them to fund their activities, grow their networks, spread their message, etc. I would say that for something to be a color revolution it wouldn't have happened but for the covert participation of another state.

"Color revolution" is a just a term for a post-soviet/communist protest movement. Ukraine had a color revolution in 2004 as well (also involving Yanukovych, though that time it was about election fraud, not his backing out of an EU trade deal, but both cases involved the underlying perception of Russia violating Ukrainian sovereignty).

Every country has its dissidents

The Euromaidan protests involved hundreds of thousands to millions of active protestors from basically every part of the Ukrainian political spectrum except the pro-Russia faction. This is more that "dissidents > 0". Defending the claim that it was instigated by Western powers in a meaningful way is going to take more than allusions to possible foreign involvement.

I don’t think that means they didn’t get Western support though. Obama did support Euromaidan. And while I don’t think they instigated the events, I think they helped the people organizing the movement both morally and materially.

Russia has no more right to demand subservience from Ukraine than the US does from Canada or Mexico.

And yet the United States has a long, long history of demanding subservience from both:

•Invading Canada twice in 1777 and 1813 for not sufficiently supporting the American revolutionary project

•Sponsoring and funding a breakaway republic from Mexico in 1836, then officially recognizing that breakaway republic

•Launching a Special Military Operation against Mexico in 1848 and extracting massive territorial concessions because Mexico tried to destroy that breakaway republic

•Threatening to invade Canada in 1862 because their mother-state was providing aid to America’s own attempted breakaway republic

•Allowing foreign insurgents to stage in Minnesota and perpetrate multiple massive cross-border terrorist attacks into Canada between 1866 and 1871 resulting in hundreds of deaths

•Invading Mexico in 1913 to try to rendition a high value target that perpetrated a cross-border terrorist attack against the US

•Seizing the port of Veracruz in Mexico in 1912 to ensure access by military shipping

•Stationing numerous troops and military facilities in Canada

•Extracting trade concessions from both Canada and Mexico

Sponsoring and funding a breakaway republic from Mexico in 1836, then officially recognizing that breakaway republic

The U.S. never officially recognized the republic of Texas. Annexing the republic of Texas came about because democrats needed a victory vs the whigs; the country supporting Texas nationalism full throttle was actually France.

There’s an interesting alternative history where the USA votes against annexing Texas. I’ve thought about writing it up and posting it on, like, a Friday fun thread. But the long and short of it is that president Tyler wanted to annex Texas to shore up a pro-slavery position, and the democrats in the next election successfully framed it as a referendum on US territorial expansion while they whigs wanted to punt the issue to try to avoid talking about slavery. Mexico in this era had many breakaway republics and it was generally thought that Britain and France would seek to weaken the Mexican empire to carve out new world spheres of influence by taking the breakaways as Allies; these were the two major backers of the republic of Texas, which spent its entire existence at war and heavily indebted.

And yet the United States has a long, long history of demanding subservience from both:

And? Leaving aside some of the dodgy specifics herein, it would be pretty brazen to suggest that, e.g. Canada was really at fault for the Fenian Raids. If the point is merely that sometimes powerful nations bully weaker ones, no one was contesting that.

The point is that powerful nations take an interest in the behaviour of their neighbours, especially when those neighbours are aligning themselves with rival nations, and act accordingly. America is no exception. See e.g. Bay of Pigs, or the medieval friction between England and the Scots (because the latter often allied with France).

America has lately been able to act as though it would never do this only because it's had no major rivals for 30 years and its neighbouring nations are thoroughly cowed. If Mexico or Canada start entertaining an alliance with China, perhaps involving the stationing of Chinese troops, America will change its tune VERY quickly.

I reiterate: And?

The problem with the thug's worldview is that they create the world they think they are merely describing. Nobody in Eastern Europe would be clamoring for an alliance with Uncle Sam if not for Russia's own behavior.

And therefore American politicians are hypocrites (wittingly or not) when they say that large countries like Russia have no right to exert influence on their neighbours.

If they believe the same for America (which I doubt, they’ve never been shy about steering their vassals allies away from getting involved with geopolitical rivals, see Nord Stream 2) it is because they are the proverbial man in a gated community patrolled by police who believes that nobody has the right to self-defence.

Now, it may be that you personally would strongly oppose any such behaviour by America as strongly as you oppose it when done by Russia. But I don’t think many Americans would, and I certainly don’t think America’s government would.

Personally, as an Englishman I would vote for taking action should Ireland or a hypothetical independent Scotland start discussing alliance with enemy nations for example. Letting yourself be put into a position of weakness just because nobody has actually used it against you yet is stupid. So I can hardly order that nobody else does so. Of course, one hopes it never comes to that, but part of making sure it doesn’t is that everyone has to take care not to tread on each others’ toes.

And therefore American politicians are hypocrites

And?

it is because they are the proverbial man in a gated community patrolled by police who believes that nobody has the right to self-defence

This is the strangest conceptualization of self-defense I've seen in a while.

More comments

It's hard to see how a change of government in a neighboring country justifies invading them (twice!) and engaging in naked land grabs.

The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs Invasion would like to have a word with you.

If Russia started positioning missile batteries, and putting military bases in Canada and Mexico, and the governments of Canada and Mexico were not responsive to our protest, I have zero illusions that a competent administration wouldn't practice "diplomacy by other means" to stop it.

We used to understand that countries had legitimate security interest inside their sphere of influence. We didn't have to like it, we just had to be realistic that it's not always (or hardly ever) in America's national interest to intervene in every conflict on the face of the Earth.

The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs Invasion would like to have a word with you.

At least with that one, we did have to go to the negotiating table a little sooner, and it also played into the conspiracy theory narrative of "JFK was so burned by Bay of Pigs that he considered disbanding the CIA, who in turn set up his assassination as punishment."

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