The worst-case scenario is now a possible one: European troops fighting off an invasion largely alone.
It’s by no means clear the Europeans would succeed. Romanian and other European officials at the exercise in Cincu, about 260 kilometers (162 miles) north of Bucharest by road, voiced concerns about how long it would take for NATO allies to make it to the front.
French four-star General Philippe de Montenon said he’s confident Europe could prevail, even without the US on side. “The direction of history is a progressive disengagement of the United States from the European continent,” he said.
How is getting bullied without fighting back a good position?
How about engaging in deescalation by not pushing for military escalation against our neighbor? How about entering commercial relations with neighboring countries instead of antagonizing them?
Already tried that. We hoped that by buying massive amounts of Russian oil and gas they would see that peace is worth a lot more than war.
But they decided war anyways. And suddenly we had to find a replacement for all that energy.
And Russia responded to that positively. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, there were even negotiations to make Russia enter the European Union. Those hopes for Russia were shattered when Europe and the US kept interfering in its sphere of influence (Georgia, Ukraine, etc) through colour revolutions and propaganda. The culminating point where Russia saw there was no possibility was when in 2014, the democratically elected president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovich was removed by a US-sponsored colour revolution (see Victoria Nuland’s leaked phonecalls), that’s actually what triggered the invasion of Crimea. It was Russia’s way of saying “I cannot win the soft-power competition against the US, so if my only way to maintain a sphere of influence is through military power, so be it”.
If you still don’t believe allowing for a Russian “sphere of influence” is an important geopolitical item if we want worldwide peace, imagine how USA people and their government would react to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Cuba, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Colombia and Peru entering a military alliance with Russia and China and started to import military material from said countries and have Chinese and/or Russian military bases. Last time something similar happened with Cuba, the world was on the brink of nuclear war.
Yeah, how about no escalation? No hybrid war tactics? No drones in foreign airspace? No threats to neighbouring countries?
Cool, I agree that all of those things should stop. How about we engage in actual negotiations with Russia instead of grinding down Ukrainian young men in trenches as a form of diplomacy?
Because appeaemt doesn’t work?
They’re not willing to engage in good faith. If they were they never would have started the “special operations” in the first place. Nor would they be asking to keep all of their gains in the war.
They were more than willing to engage in good faith from late 1990s to early 2010s, it’s the constant western meddling in Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova and other Russian sphere of influence countries, coupled with the expansion of NATO, that pushed Russia to isolation. Russia doesn’t have the economic or soft power to fight the US+EU in that field, so either US+EU accept Russia peacefully having its own sphere of influence, or Russia will naturally attempt to do so militarily.
The USA doesn’t need to militarily engage in Mexico because it already belongs to its sphere of influence, in Venezuela they don’t enjoy that so the natural response is to threaten with military invasion (as it’s doing now). It’s basic geopolitics.
Aww poor Russia, they were just trying to “peacefully have its own sphere of influence”.
Give me a fucking break.
And what the US is doing in Venezuela is not a “natural response” to anything, and to try to point to it as a justification for Russia’s actions is actually insane.