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arymandias
It already was after Iraq, but now they dragged it upstairs to throw it out of the window again, just to make sure it’s really dead.
100% agree, no longer being oil dependent would make the middle east a saver place (as well as having many other advantages).
But even the green revolution needs cheap labor, recourses, and rare-earth metals. Countries that do not want to play game and want to nationalize key industries for instance, will be coerced financially or militarily by greater powers (be it the West, China, or Russia).
So the idea of one country being worse than the other is not really relevant and moreover a known strategy for getting war support. I am happy that I don’t live in Iran or Saudi Arabia, but escalating conflict with either of them will not improve anybody’s life. Look at Syria or Libya.
Remember kids: Iran is the bad Middle East autocracy and Saudi Arabia is the good Middle East autocracy.
US foreign policy has always been and will always be interest based rather than value based, but they will use moral arguments and threat inflation to drum up support for their misadventures abroad.
I’m starting to get the feeling that “X is playing chess while Y is playing checkers” is an indicator species for a terrible take.
They invented the progress piechart.
But they are not gonna leave, and we can’t make them without risking worse (for Ukraine and the world at large).
And of course we can’t force Ukraine to stop resisting (nor should we, it is their right), but I have the impression the west does not want this to end (regardless of the cost of Ukrainian lives), and sees this as an opportunity to weaken Russia.
The world of geopolitics is a world without police, so I agree that the invasion is a war crime, but in practice there is not much we can do that doesn’t make the situation worse.
In my opinion the best we can hope for is peace by means of a balance of power.
The lack of credible enforcement of international law is made very clear by the Iraq war, a war of aggression where the perpetrators were never held to account because the US was powerful enough to prevent that.
I don’t think it’s morally bad to be pragmatic in that sense, if trying to punish Russia leads to nuclear annihilation.
If this is a honest question I will try to give some honest context, I do not represent a Hexbear, so these are just some views that I have that make me sceptical of the narrative that currently exists.
After the cold war there were calls to establish a common security structure including Russia to try to ensure peace in Europe. Instead the US (with pressure from past satellite states of Moscow, Poland, Czechia, etc) chose to maintain NATO and on top of that invite everybody except Russia, many foreign policy experts already warned that this was a recipe for war, but wether it was malice or incompetence they were ignored.
Fast forward to 2008 the US suggests inviting Ukraine (and Georgia) to NATO, and Russia makes extremely clear that this would not happen, that this was a red line for them. Now you can disagree with Russias right to say anything about the military alliances of its neighbours, but the fact that Russia is a military regional power with nukes is something you need to deal with. Again wether it was incompetence or malice is hard to say but the next 14 years are basically a chain of escalatory actions by the US combined with a series of stronger and stronger warnings from Russia that this would lead to war.
During the events themselves it is hard to judge as a civilian what exactly is happening in geopolitics, the US has a very clear trackrecord of treat inflation or simply lying about its true intentions or the truth on the ground. It could of course be that this is one of those rare cases where the US are truly the Good Guys™️ or it could be that this is a ploy to weaken a rival with the only price being the destruction of a country they don't care about and the death of hundreds of thousands of military age males they don't care about.