arymandias

What do you think started, and kept WWI going, narrative. Every party believed or was sold that they could win this thing if they just kept climbing the escalation ladder. With the result that an entire generation of boys and men was gone for basically nothing.

What if I put a couple of my friends on the border of your house, and explicitly said, hey if you try to do X Y or Z then I might have to kill you.

For a start I would not do X, Y and Z, this is the whole idea of realism, accept the world as is. Threats work, I'm sorry. If your response is to call the police, there is no police in the world of international politics, you have to play the hand you're dealt.

And in the case of Ukraine this was sadly a very bad hand, that is why I don't blame Ukraine for much. You could of course blame Ukraine for being lured by the power of the US, and that they could thus safely ignore dire warnings from Russia. But as they say, with great power comes great responsibility, so I choose to put the blame at the hands of Russia and the US.

I’m not trying to represent all of Hexbear, my views differ from the norm (just as yours seems to differ from the lemmy.world norm).

Second, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m certain on everything. It just seems very clear to me that the current narrative is dangerous and risks leading to escalation beyond Ukraine and has already caused a lot of suffering, (I think in this I echo Mearsheimers views, see the recent interview on the Spectators Americano podcast). Wether it was intentional or accidental I purposely left open in my original comment because, like I said, it’s very hard to judge at this point. But given the US trackrecord it’s probably a healthy dosis of both overconfidence in their power as well as cynical intent.

To me it’s hard to imagine that after Russia put their army on the border and explicitly said, Ukraine stays neutral or war, that the US wasn’t aware of the consequences. Clearly Ukrainian lives were not on the forefront of their decision making process at that point. So then the question is what was.
But these are my personal opinions, and I’m happy to be convinced otherwise (but calling me a Russian bot is not very convincing I find).

You are defending US foreign policy.

This is not a whataboutism, I’m saying two imperial states are destroying a country as part of their power politics, as a counter argument to Russia are the bad guys and the US can be trusted.

The US has done everything you (correctly) accuse Russia of in Iraq, Vietnam, and South America (either directly or via proxies). What does that make the US?

Imperialist states do imperialist things, the least we can do (coming from a European perspective) is to try to maintain peace by a combination of international law and pragmatic ad hock peace deals where international law is unattainable.

And about the NATO thing, what do you think would happen if Mexico and Canada tried to join a military alliance with China?

I’m not victim blaming, I’m blaming the US and Russia for playing cynical geopolitical games and destroying a country along the way.

John Mearsheimer among others, were do you get your views from?

This is such destructive rhetoric, everything you disagree with is Russian propaganda. Yes of course Russia is trying to influence western opinion with war propaganda, because that is what countries at war do. But the US has shown so clearly in the past that they can not be trusted to be the single source of truth, because spoiler alert: they are also a country (de facto) at war.