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Notes -
Iraq and Libya, though I guess Syria sort of counts.
Great powers do not like it if hostile great powers expand into their sphere of influence. The US seems to think Russia doesn't deserve a sphere of influence - the Russians disagree. This could have been avoided if the US had just accepted what even their own CIA chief Burns said in "NYET MEANS NYET: RUSSIA'S NATO ENLARGEMENT REDLINES" and done nothing. It was a can of worms that shouldn't have been opened.
And this 'taking away Russia’s ability to dominate' strategy has failed on its own terms. European security is far worse than in 2014 or 2008. Russia is mauling Ukraine to the point where Macron's been floating sending French troops to Ukraine.
If the US really thought that Russia was this rampant, expansionist power, why didn't they foresee this war and plan to win it? Why is Russia outproducing the entire West, let alone the US in shells? Nobody seemed to think about producing large numbers of munitions until 2022, which is exactly what you'd do if you thought that Russia was this aggressive imperial power. I'm not sure if US leaders were thinking at all, aside from Burns that is. I think they assumed 'we're invincible, we don't need to prepare, compromise or make any special effort'.
I do not blame Bush for Putin invading Ukraine but he illustrates the thoughtlessness in US foreign policy that has led to all kinds of bad outcomes.
Libya voluntarily stopped its nuclear weapons program.
Saddam most definitely did not. His reactors got bombed into oblivion and then he pretended to still have a program and didn’t cooperate with inspectors, even though it got him invaded. Basically everyone thought he had one going and he kept up the pretense to appear strong.
The US and NATO providing security guarantees is not something Russia has to like. But the fact that they don’t like it so much is kinda the whole reason countries want to join, and that case seems stronger than ever. Reasonable people can disagree about what exactly was the best way to handle Russian aggression, but please don’t pretend the West caused Putin to regress to the USSR/imperial mean. He has agency.
European incompetence is immense on many fronts, security and foreigner policy high among them. If I thought some US policy stance could fix it I would advocate for it.
I don’t think you understand how the US viewed Russia. No one was thinking Putin was going to try to conquer Ukraine until suddenly that’s what he was doing. Sure, a little invasion here and there to annex a slice of any given country, but not a full-on war. Being a Russia hawk went out of style a while ago (except for Mitt Romney in 2012), then Trump screwed up the traditional US political stances on top of that.
Once it was clear an invasion was coming, almost everyone thought Putin was going to win pretty quickly. The Ukrainians have outperformed expectations immensely, and the Russians underperformed. Unfortunately, that means a bloody quagmire for the indefinite future. (Which they judge better than being Putinized.)
The US military has not been very focused on countering a Russian land war for over 30 years. We are trying to focus on China after so much time in the Middle East. We let our traditional artillery production fall off too much during that time and rebuilding capacity doesn’t happen instantly.
You phrasing things as if we think “we’re invincible” is not even wrong. We, the United States of America, are not being threatened by Putin. We have never had more of a military advantage over Russia in century or more because Putin is burning up so much of his military in Ukraine. You’re simply assigning beliefs to the US national security apparatus with little bearing on reality. We spend an immense amount of money on the military, but no one was excited to spend that on artillery production capacity (old, boring) and not say an F-35 (new, exciting).
Russia invading its neighbors is a tale as old as time and the US is almost an irrelevant variable, except for the part where becoming a formal member of The West is an alternative and insurance policy for counties at risk of Putinization. Ukraine was moving towards the EU and Putin did not want that trend to succeed.
He cooperated with inspectors when threatened with war, which made it rather awkward for the US when they wanted to invade regardless.
But you are the one who said this is what Russia always does and that any other view is 'simply not justified by any understanding of Russian foreign policy for the last century'. How can it be stupidly obvious that Russia is this perennially imperialist power but nobody cottoned onto an invasion of Ukraine? That's exactly what they'd expect if they took their own model seriously!
Or, if they expected Ukraine to get crushed in three days, why would they not come to some kind of diplomatic solution before the war, where they agreed not to expand NATO into Ukraine? That's what Putin asked for and they refused.
Mearsheimer put the pieces together and said 'if we proceed down the NATO expansion road with Ukraine then the Russians will wreck the country so we should just do nothing' back in 2014, his foresight is unmatched. But nobody bothers to listen to Mearsheimer, despite being correct on all the issues. He even foresaw that the Russians would struggle to take the whole country. Yet he's routinely derided and ignored by the whole security establishment because he doesn't want to get into these dangerous, expensive conflicts.
We can't go around undermining and dissecting Russia's friends, be seen installing new anti-Russian regimes on Russia's borders, fabricate stories about Russian election interference and not make enemies with Russia. That's just not how it works.
Prior to the coup, Ukraine was moving towards Russia.
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