You raise some interesting points. Some I wish I could disagree with although I can’t. Principally that the US should avoid this conflict as much as it can, including fighting off the temptation to arm and train Ukrainians.
But unfortunately you are also making some of the exact points that Prime Minister Chamberlain made after the peace conferences with Hitler before the Poland (oh dear, accidental Hitler reference. I promise it’s the only one) invasion.
My point is that every so often in Europe there is a power that seeks stability and a buffer between itself and “instability”. Now we are calling it Putin but before we have called it Napoleon or Kaiser. Western and Eastern European countries have seen this played out before. The appeasement tactic has been tried before. It doesn’t always work. It doesn’t always fail.
Brings us back to the million Ruble question, what the fuck does Putin want?! My guess, he wants to surpass Peter Grozny as the iconic Russian leader. It’s not about land (that’s just how you keep score), it’s not about economic or military security (that’s just how you identify your opponents) - it’s about winning the respect of Russians that will be born hundreds of years from now. historically you do that by building them an empire.
“The West should negotiate a new status quo with Russia that is acceptable to both sides and does not result in a series of war zones and frozen conflicts remaining along the periphery of Europe.”
You’re joking, right? The notion that Russia wants anything other than frozen conflicts along it’s periphery is not true. I can’t honestly see Lavrov and Putin seriously “hammering-out” those issues. The simmering conflict is the point.
I’ll go one further, despite the Kremlin’s protestations to the contrary the NATO alliance has been the single greatest stabilizing power to Putin’s regime. Do you think Putin goes to bed thinking German tanks are going to roll into his country? No, quite the opposite.
Putin likely woke up repeatedly in the George W. Bush years of Iraq entanglement and the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” with a sense of existential dread - NATO was working so well that the EU itself would assert itself more outside of the framework of an American led security arrangement. He didn’t want that.
It’s no coincidence that the last American tank left Germany the same year as the Kremlin’s Crimean seizure. The Kremlin was most assuredly worried about NATO’s success (decades of stability and the soft landing of the USSR collapse) fostering a more assertive EU. The NATO alliance’s collective action against the murderous Gaddafi regime was the last straw.
You raise some interesting points. Some I wish I could disagree with although I can’t. Principally that the US should avoid this conflict as much as it can, including fighting off the temptation to arm and train Ukrainians.
But unfortunately you are also making some of the exact points that Prime Minister Chamberlain made after the peace conferences with Hitler before the Poland (oh dear, accidental Hitler reference. I promise it’s the only one) invasion.
My point is that every so often in Europe there is a power that seeks stability and a buffer between itself and “instability”. Now we are calling it Putin but before we have called it Napoleon or Kaiser. Western and Eastern European countries have seen this played out before. The appeasement tactic has been tried before. It doesn’t always work. It doesn’t always fail.
Brings us back to the million Ruble question, what the fuck does Putin want?! My guess, he wants to surpass Peter Grozny as the iconic Russian leader. It’s not about land (that’s just how you keep score), it’s not about economic or military security (that’s just how you identify your opponents) - it’s about winning the respect of Russians that will be born hundreds of years from now. historically you do that by building them an empire.
An excellent proposal for a negotiation framework, brought to my attention by a reader: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/09/a-four-step-off-ramp-for-resolving-the-ukraine-crisis-00006769
“The West should negotiate a new status quo with Russia that is acceptable to both sides and does not result in a series of war zones and frozen conflicts remaining along the periphery of Europe.”
You’re joking, right? The notion that Russia wants anything other than frozen conflicts along it’s periphery is not true. I can’t honestly see Lavrov and Putin seriously “hammering-out” those issues. The simmering conflict is the point.
I’ll go one further, despite the Kremlin’s protestations to the contrary the NATO alliance has been the single greatest stabilizing power to Putin’s regime. Do you think Putin goes to bed thinking German tanks are going to roll into his country? No, quite the opposite.
Putin likely woke up repeatedly in the George W. Bush years of Iraq entanglement and the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” with a sense of existential dread - NATO was working so well that the EU itself would assert itself more outside of the framework of an American led security arrangement. He didn’t want that.
It’s no coincidence that the last American tank left Germany the same year as the Kremlin’s Crimean seizure. The Kremlin was most assuredly worried about NATO’s success (decades of stability and the soft landing of the USSR collapse) fostering a more assertive EU. The NATO alliance’s collective action against the murderous Gaddafi regime was the last straw.