by jmyeet | 2026-01-13 15:49:43+00:00
> The US warned Europe of dependence on Russia all the while promoting policies that antagonized Russia in Europe (e.g. NATO expansion)

I think there's a certain amount of historical revisionism going on with this. It is complicated however.

You can point to George W. Bush opening the door to NATO membership in 2006 [1] as a turning point but NATO had been gobbling up former Communist bloc countries for more than a decade.

Another noteworthy event is the 2014 revolution that ousted Russian puppet Viktor Yanukovych as the president of Ukraine, culminating in the Minsk Agreement (and Minsk II) to settle disputes in the Dombas and elsewhere.

Russia does have legitimate security concerns int he region such as access to the Black Sea and not having NATO on their border. And by "legitimate" here I simply mean that Europe and the EU do the exact same thing, most notably when the US almost started World War 3 over Soviet influence in Cuba (which itself was a response to the US installing nuclear MRBMs in Turkey). Also, in terms of the threat of a conventional land war, Ukraine is basically a massive highway into Russia, previously used by both Hitler and Napoleon. Not that it worked out well for either.

Whatever the case, having another Belarus in Ukraine was ideal for Russia and I think their designs on this long predated any talk of Ukraine joining NATO, which was DOA anyway. Germany, in particular, were always going to veto expanding NATO to share a border with Russia.

My point here is I'm not convinced that any promises of neutrality by Ukraine would've saved Ukraine from Russian designs.

> Europe is as affluent as ever

Based on what? Personal anecdotes? The EU acknowledges a housing crisis [2].

> It shocks me that people like you think Russia is a serious threat to all of Europe,

It is a serious threat. Not in the conventional land-war a la WW2 sense but we're dealing with the world's other nuclear superpower (China doesn't have the nuclear arsenal Russia does, by choice). But Putin's playbook is oddly reminiscent to Hitler's playbook leading up to the war. That is, Hitler argued he was unifying Germans in Austria, the Sudetenland, etc. Similarly, Putin is using ethnically Russian populations in a similar way: as an excuse to intervene and take territory.

There is a significant Russian population in Latvia who are stateless. IIRC it's estimated there are more than 200,000 of them.

American security and energy guarantees are really the only things holding Europe together right now. If NATO splinters, what's to stop Russia from seizing parts of Latvia?

This situation is precarious.

> they just can't accept that the system has been working well in Europe for workers for all this time

No, they don't care that it works. In fact, they've been doing everything they can to make it not work. We now have a generation of people in many European countries (and I include the UK here) who have never not known austerity and constant government cutbacks. Satisfaction with the NHS deteriorates as it's been deliberately starved for 15+ years.

This is a well-worn and successful playbook called starving the beast [3]. It's laying the groundwork for a push for privatization. It'll be partial privatization to start with and just creep from there.

I'm not sure you truly appreciate just how much US foreign policy is designed to advance the interests of American corporations.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/01/nato.georgia

[2]: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/housing-crisis/

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast