My concern is if western Europe can be convinced to detente with Russia (unlikely but who tf knows). In that case, I just hope the rich Russian man’s universal urge to retire to southern France/northern Italy is offset by the fear that the Russian populace will tie them up by their toes like a piñata for selling out the country to western business interests twice in one life time.
Conscription is a questionable gambit considering recent austerity movements—if euro’s bourgeoisie arm their unwilling working class with military weapons and teach them to fight, they can’t also put the screws to them at home. Well, not without inciting revolution anyway.
I still can’t tell if the Trump admin have any positive policy positions (that is actually wanting something) as opposed to their negative policy position of undoing ‘liberal policy’ without any consideration of the consequences because lib policy is inherently harmful and any apparent benefit is actually just harm the Trump folks don’t know how to describe yet.
Bush’s war on terror was the attempt to convert Cold War soft power intro a traditional hard power empire and it was a complete catastrophe. That’s why all the former Bush guys, Bolton and his allies., were so intent on preventing Trump from doing this. Obama and co made it their mission to intensify soft power because that’s the best way to meet americas goals. I’m not convinced this isn’t just reactionaries undoing everything the non-white president did. There certainly isn’t a thoughtful reason to be doing this. Moving towards hard power is simply an objectively wrong move and this is doubly true from the perspective of an American populace that has no interest in joining the military let alone fighting and dying.
So it’s an ideological consideration certainly, combined with Elon having some issues with both agencies negatively impacting his businesses—for example, payments received by Elon’s starlink company were being investigated by USAID.
Blaming the proxy when it doesn’t work out, and claiming the issue is cost is just cope to make NATO countries feel confident it’s the dum dum Slavs fault and not the reality that NATO has little to no tech or strategic advantage over anyone who is actually a rival military. NATO doctrine during the ‘war on terror’ involved using as many munitions as possible in “shock and awe” attacks but maybe NATO wasn’t willing to extend the use of that tactic to a lowly proxy. Or maybe NATO doctrine only applies to farmers with 1950s weaponry defending their homes
I think folks can lose sight of this. The US is not and has never been a democracy. And even insofar as the sham elections go, as the AP byline shows again, both relevant parties have essentially identical foreign policy. Even now, Trump and co just appear incapable of getting the job done—it’s not as though they want America’s imperial grasp to weaken.
I’m inclined to agree. This seems like the first time (at least in my memory) where no one with significant influence in US gov’t fundamentally understands what has been US foreign policy since Monroe. All the idiot business guys who think the US sends money to forcibly underdeveloped countries out of the kindness of their hearts—folks simply intellectually unequipped to continue the post-Soviet international order—are the only ones at the reigns. On top of that, they got some weirdo Canadian-South African billionaire with no understanding of US consumer culture (and the US citizens’ complete aversion to any inconvenience) to come impose harsh anarcho-capitalist austerity measures at home. “There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen” seems especially apt right now.
I’ve never been especially swayed by concerns of capital flight, though clearly the Russian economy is especially well insulated. I was just being flippantly facetious about Putin et al, who at one point really went way beyond any reasonable sense to try and have nice relations with the west. But, the broad coalition needed to keep the Communists out of power is far too fragile for Putin to do anything too purely self-interested—despite western insistence on his infinite dictatorial powers.