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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2843 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 2, 2025

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Is there an ELI5 reason why Russia wasn’t fully brought into the fold of NATO/EU/“the Western world” after the collapse of the Soviet Union? I’m pretty ignorant of the full history here, but I would think that given the politicians there were willing to peacefully dissolve the USSR that they wanted to fully integrate with the US/Europe. I would also think that the US/Europe would be eager to integrate Russia given that they’ve done so for most of the former eastern bloc countries, but obviously it hasn’t turned out that way.

You need to start with the NATO-Russia Founding Act signed in 1997 that outlined how Russia and NATO were supposed to cooperate and live in peace and harmony. (https://www.nato.int/cps/su/natohq/official_texts_25468.htm)

But the good feelings were short lived as the expansion of NATO into former Warsaw Pact countries and Operation Allied Force in 1999 were seen by Moscow as a betrayal of the agreement. Things got a bit better after 9/11 when there was a common enemy, but that again was quickly undone by Moscow’s view that NATO was sponsoring Color Revolutions in its periphery.

There was certainly windows of opportunity for closer cooperation, but there was a lot of mistrust and misunderstanding that stopped it from becoming a meaningful partnership.

STRATFOR’s George Friedman has said that America’s chief goal for Europe was to prevent an alliance of German intelligence / manufacturing and Russian raw materials / manpower, as this would pose a threat to American global hegemony. Source

That’s a pretty questionable translation. Might be worth putting it into a more modern tool.

Also, the author predicted a shooting war with Japan and Russian and Chinese collapse by the 2020s. I think he might be one of those alt-history guys.

Im pretty sure it originally was english? Besides, this seems more like a current iteration of heartland theory then an invention of his.

I see from the footnote that it’s a transcription of a YouTube video. I don’t know what “sott.net” does, but I can make an educated guess if they’re prognosticating “Zio Anglo American plans for world domination.”

Most historical fantasy isn’t particularly original. That doesn’t make it a credible forecast!

“sott.net”

Didnt even see that one lmao. Btw, re our modmail conversation, Ive tried to respond to you, and again, and then made a new thread. Do you see any of that? Zorba said last time that modmail is bugged.

Yeah, and I tried to respond. I don’t think it sends notifications correctly.

On YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=21Gouq6hp-0

A lot of people thought that there would be a conflict with Japan at this time. Hilariously, when I went to find a source for my recollection of “1980s fear of Japan”, the first was themotte back on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/dclpo3/understanding_1980s_american_worries_about_japan/

Another: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/1dwju3n/was_japan_seen_as_a_economic_rival_to_the_usa_in/

STRATFOR has been called a “shadow CIA”: https://www.barrons.com/articles/SB1002927557434087960 , https://www.reuters.com/article/business/wikileaks-targets-global-risk-company-stratfor-idUSL5E8DR01/

Like mall ninjas, but for the deep state.

Coca Cola, DOW Chemical, Goldman, Nestlé, Shell are clients to STRATFOR. Yale relies on a UPenn report to advise students to aim for a job there. So they appear to be decent mall ninjas. Although, I don’t think the CIA would pass on the opportunity to make money and advise American companies at a “non-affiliated”, “totally independent” think tank. So they might just be ninja ninjas, dressed up as mall ninjas, because who would ever think the mall ninja was the real ninja all along?

Russia was first too ramshackle and corrupt to integrate and then too authoritarian to integrate.

I guess there would have been a window specifically around 2004-2006, but that's a pretty small window.

That makes sense but what went differently in the late 90s/early 2000s in Russia compared to other post-soviet countries that did integrate around that time (Poland, Hungary, Romania etc.)? All started out as ramshackle and corrupt but around that time went in a different direction. Was the resistance to integrate more from the Russian elite/Putin not wanting to? Or was the resistance more on the western side?

Hundreds of years of history. Until the October revolution, Russia was for ruled for hundreds of years by a Tsar with absolute authority that was considered to rule by a divine feat. Stalin returned the country to de facto absolute rule after a brief interruption and that only ended with his death in 1953. 40 years of communism and a decade of chaos followed until Putin restored normalcy by assuming absolute rule.

Poland, Hungary and Romania didn’t have a similar centuries long tradition of absolute rule and had a history that wasn’t all that different from Central European countries until WW2 and thus had both a similar tradition and compatibility with western style society. Notably they all had a strong internal desire to join the west as soon as that became an option.

You could say both Russia and Poland / Hungary / Romania reverted to their previous trajectories after the fall of communism. It’s just that those trajectories were completely different.

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