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Both - my apologies if I came off too hostile. I've recently been somewhat sleep deprived and that may have made my words a bit harsher than would be ideal.
As someone who doesn't live in Europe, I got the mistaken impression you were ignoring the relevance of the far larger region of the world which I actually live in. Mea culpa.
I agree with you here - foreign policy should be tailored to a specific situation and total consistency isn't always the best way to go about it. But that's very much not the case when it comes to proposed norms.
I agree with you here too - I'm on record as supporting a single state solution with full franchise and democracy. I disagree with the idea that they're a good anchor or ally, but I think that's a bit beyond the scope of this discussion.
I even agree with you that a norm against wars of aggression and conquest are a good thing, but your proposed norms just aren't fit for purpose. If Israel can do what they do with the full support of the US without violating these norms then they're just completely worthless. All Russia would have to do to comply with your norms is put on a figleaf and announce that they're donating materiel, training and expertise to the Donbass republic. Absolutely nothing would change on the ground and the war would still be taking place, but your norm would be satisfied due to the loophole that you're leaving in to allow the US to continue to aggressively wage war. China would still be able to reconquer Taiwan, they'd just have to announce they're supporting the faction of Taiwanese who want reunification - and your norm would be satisfied despite the war it was meant to prevent taking place.
Foreign policy does not have to be totally consistent - but that is absolutely not the case for proposed norms. If the US says that wars of conquest are bad and then proceeds to fund, support and profit from a war of conquest then you aren't actually proposing a norm, you're proposing a set of rules which handicap other great powers but don't prevent you from engaging in the proscribed behavior. It is explicitly bad faith negotiation, and the morally correct response for other great powers is to tell you to fuck off. "You don't get to change your borders through military force" is a perfectly fine norm - but it is universal or it does not exist.
I guess I have Israel loosely modeled as a middle player and local Palestinians as a small bit player. Israel-Iran as a conflict I view as something we should be worried about, Israel-Lebanon, not as much, Israel and mid/post-collapse Syria, also not so much. I'd model Russia-Ukraine as a big vs medium conflict so a medium vs small conflict just doesn't feel like it's in the same category. In this sense, I'm evaluating these in terms of power first, particulars second; you seem to be saying "war of conquest" is the first or maybe only filter. Medium vs small conflicts, war of conquest or not, are part of the natural course of history and of only incidental and practical concern to the big powers.
Very roughly speaking: big vs big conflicts, big vs medium, and medium vs medium conflicts all strongly benefit from a norm-based paradigm in a way that big vs small, medium vs small, and small vs small conflicts do not. A large part of this seemingly-arbitrary division is involved in "how likely is conflict to spread?" and "how devastating would a serious conflict be (to the norm-makers and bystanders)?" As a cynical but authentic example, if Russia pushes around Moldova instead of Ukraine, even militarily, although I would find that worrisome and bad, it's not a critical world threat and norms are not the be-all and end-all. Though, full disclosure: I'm still a bit on the fence about "how much should another big player care" in big vs small conflicts particularly. I guess I did invoke Georgia as an example of where Russia was maybe headed, which was certainly a big vs small kind of deal? I might be persuaded to include big-small as in the former category, but my initial feeling is to count it in the admittedly euphemistic but perhaps apt phrase "letting off steam".
I somewhat disagree. First, I think the modest but real direct Russian support tipped the scales in 2014 a bit more strongly than it otherwise would have, meaning the conflict didn't get resolved as 'authentically' and furthermore, obviously if the norm were upheld better Russia never would have directly invaded later. I called out some of their specific grey-zone tactics there as something that should fall on the 'prohibited' norm list precisely because of their effectiveness surpassing some (admittedly not bright, but nonetheless real) line. Russia's 2014 actions were not organic in any sense - rather they deliberately took advantage of norms that are usually used to allow for some plausible deniability, and cynically manipulated that grey zone in a manner completely contrary to why the grey zone even exists, stretching them to an extreme. All of these words to say that yes, if you drop the coordinated cyberattack and don't directly deploy your own troops, I think Russia's 2014 actions would have still been, well not desirable but at least vaguely within the norms up to that point. It's still possible e.g. Crimea secedes, but it's no longer guaranteed. We are in the realm of concern, not crisis. We don't have all this talk of escalation and war and direct conflict.
Similarly, China merely announcing support for a separatist Taiwanese party is not in and of itself a violation. They still have a mostly-functioning democracy, it could always backfire, and if they genuinely decide to join China it's a massive mistake but their right, I suppose. The question of economic pressure, even embargo, is a much more thorny question that current norms don't quite have a great answer to, at least not a direct one (the vibes might still matter).
More broadly... something I've been sitting on for a while and still don't quite have an answer to, is the idea of secession in general. It feels like 'we' (Western thought?) reached some kind of vague idea about when revolutions are okay-ish, but it doesn't feel like anyone (or any ideology) has a good answer to when secessionism is, and if so, what form it ought to take (or can be allowed to take). At least, not in any kind of universal way. It still feels like there should be a universal answer, though. Something for a top-level post sometime.
No, I'm disagreeing with your entire premise. Your perspective here is fatally flawed and I can sum that flaw up in two words - proxy war. To use an older example where passions have cooled and the fog of war has largely lifted, were you aware that the US was never technically a party to the Vietnam war? You can go look it up - there was no actual declaration of war by the US congress. Sure, US soldiers and conscripts were fighting and dying, using US military equipment, but technically the US wasn't involved and so there was no norm violation. This is the kind of situation I was talking about when mentioning hypothetical Russian support for the conflict - in the alternative world where they abided by your norms, they would simply use the same strategy the US did in the Vietnam war. Absolutely nothing on the ground would change, but your norm would be satisfied. This is why I make the claim that it has to be universal or not at all - because we have already seen the gigantic loophole left in there to allow the US to continue to wage war largely unrestricted.
To repeat my point, I'm talking about China arming a separatist faction and providing support in the same way they provided support to the South Vietnam government.
The answer to this question is that secession is allowed when it is in the interests of the US empire, and condemned when it is not. That's the only dividing line in the moral condemnation provided, and I challenge you to find a counterexample that isn't completely irrelevant to US interests.
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