That is what withdrawing looks like; armies don't tend to pull back because their occupation is going swimmingly. You already mentioned Ramstein, for example - the US have been in Germany for the better part of a century and the German's weren't welcoming them when they walked in. Armies withdraw because it is untenable to remain.

And you can see the Russian's have learned from that with things like the '08 invasion of Georgia. They only occupied portions of the country instead of the whole thing and it sounds like they're maintaining the legal fiction that they are independent.

> There were no permanent American "military resources" in Estonia, or anywhere else in Eastern Europe, before Russia invaded Ukraine.

So? I doubt there was much if anything in the way of permanent military resources in Ukraine and we've seen around half a million Russian causalities so far. That sort of outcome is a much bigger problem for them than whether the resources in Estonia are permanent or temporary.

If you don't want to explore the question of why the US had/has troops in Estonia of all places then don't bring it up. But I suspect that is a question of great interest to the Russian generals because it is hard to come up with alternatives to it being an anti-Russia encirclement.

> China has military installations on Cuba

Not much of a comparison though. Cuba doesn't have land borders with the US so any aggression has to go through the US Navy first, and China isn't in a position to supply Cuba with more materiel because that would also have to go through the US Navy and Cuba is on the wrong side of the America for easy access. Plus the US military budget is still something like 2-3x China's.

It is hard to see how the Cubans, even with the military might of the Chinese behind them, can leverage that position into half a million dead US citizens. What is the battle plan supposed to be to achieve that?

> The entire Europe tolerates nuclear missiles aimed at them from Kaliningrad.

And there is a lesson there - once the missiles are emplaced there isn't much you can do about them. The important thing is to either negotiate them away or not let hostile powers establish themselves.

> Here's Gorbachev calling it directly a myth...

1) I've watched enough politics that I don't believe a 2-minute out-of-context translated clip to be evidence.

2) I doubt Russians have paper commitments for every possible way that the US can get missiles on their border either. You could just as easily be back in 2040 explaining that the nuclear battery in Estonia was never specifically banned by a treaty because [reasons]. If they'd realised they were signing up for 30 years of NATO expansion they would have asked for more guarantees in writing.

> I don't. Put it into words, if you can.

In the 1990s the Russians reached the point where they couldn't maintain their status as an international superpower. The US response has been to spend 30 years encircling them with a hostile military alliance with both the threat and now reality of killing 10s if not 100s of thousands of Russians.

This is what would be termed "aggressive posturing". As an alternative, defensive posturing involves not advancing and not orchestrating meat grinders.

> All in all, your position appears to stand on known falsehoods:

I still don't think you can articulate the argument here. I don't think 1 is true at all - the hope by everyone when the USSR fell was that those countries would be welcomed into international organisations.

2. To sign up with NATO the US has to agree that it is in their interests. But I also agree that the countries involved were signing up enthusiastically. No-one is claiming they were compelled.

3. This seems like an accurate characterisation on first read, but I'm also obviously correct in the argument here. he US has been pouring materiel into Ukraine. It is reasonable to say that the Ukraine war is being fought with NATO weapons.

4. That isn't an accurate characterisation of my position - every country gets humiliated, mistreated and ignored and that isn't a cause of war. The Chinese just came out of the so-called century of humiliation and so far they have been effectively pacifists given how large they are.

I'm going to restate what I'm saying here in short:

Unless the Russian planners are stupid they will have detected the approach of the large, hostile military alliance and are responding to that approach. The US shouldn't have allowed NATO to expand because we'd expect it to provoke something like the Ukraine war and there isn't any upside in exchange for the provocation. These deaths are mostly meaningless and strengthening bystanders like China at the expense of Europe and the US.

Furthermore, our diplomatic position on Ukraine should be "the precedent here is the US invasion of Iraq, we should treat this similarly and work to re-establish the peace. NATO's leadership took a bad situation, made it worse and they should be replaced".

And I can tell that you don't believe NATO is hostile although how you square that with the number of deaths they have caused in Ukraine I don't know. I suspect the Russians don't know how to square that either. NATO is aggressive, violent and hostile. They can't opportunistically organise half a million casualties the way that the US has and pretend to be neutral or friendly - again, we have precedent for how this is expected to play out from all the times the US has launched random invasions of small players over the last few decades.