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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   25097 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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Russia is certainly not doing great, but they've successfully avoided having a knife to their throat. Which was their stated goal. And it didn't cost them total war.

They traded the distant possibility that a future Ukrainian state might join NATO for the certainty that Sweden and Finland did, I suppose.

I don’t think we’re likely to see the Russians allying with the US in a US-China conflict. They’ve had their differences but unless it seemed overwhelmingly likely the Chinese would completely wipeout US global hegemony forever (unlikely I’d say) Russia would have nothing to gain by helping the US.

Russia would have nothing to gain by helping the US

Not having a large military alliance against you and access to the western economic sphere is not "nothing".

Making enemies of them is a choice. Hell you could have satellited them the same way you did the rest of Europe after the wall fell. You just decided not to.

Hell you could have satellited them the same way you did the rest of Europe after the wall fell. You just decided not to.

If they decided to, how would they accomplish it?

Russia was completely destroyed in the 90s and the US was a unipolar hyper power. Economic investment was one way to buy their loyalty. After all that is how they aligned Germany, and Japan.

They did make gestures towards that during the Yeltsin era but only spend about a billion in economic aid (about 2B inflation adjusted). This war alone cost 40 times that.

After all that is how they aligned Germany, and Japan.

These were defeated by military means, and still there are American armies in both of these countries. Would just economic investment work without boots on ground? (more data points: Iraq, Afghanistan)

There aren't any such bases in France (anymore) and it was still thoroughly aligned through solely economic means. I'll easily grant you that it's much easier to reconstruct a country you already occupy.

I'm convinced you could totally have introduced the US military to Russia though, or at least slowly made it part of the Western network of alliances.

Yelstin himself willed this, and he warned Bill Clinton in his 1993 letter specifically against organizing the defense of Europe solely through an against-Russia version of NATO.

Not only the opposition, but moderate circles as well [in Russia], would no doubt perceive this as a sort of neo-isolation of our country in diametric opposition to its natural admission into Euro-Atlantic space.

Eventually he got the door of detente slammed shut in his face and then started bemoaning "subordinating, if not abandoning, integration [of Russia] to NATO expansion" which eventually would lead to our current events.

Wasn't France already in good relations with USA for alliances in WW1, WW2? also, regarding events of 2022-2023, many French brands did not pull out of Russia. I did not investigate it in detail but seems that France is less aligned with USA than either Germany or Japan.

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