I'm really not here to argue with people who make excuses for Putin.
Whatever. I'm done trying to explain the difference between:
- Making the case for less Imperialistic motivation behind foreign policy, in favor of humanitarian/diplomatic bridge building
and
- Justifying crimes against humanity by the dictators
that Imperialism feedsApparently that level of nuance is just impossible to comprehend after the War Machine shuffles its queue cards a few times. Another Power that the US/NATO have been xenophobically ostracizing for a century, no matter what they did, finally did something openly and globally unacceptable and consequential. So that must mean the US/NATO were right all along, and that we all need to stand behind every decision they make in response. Anything suggesting that there were/are other options at any time are clearly just Pro-Putin propaganda.
Now don't get me wrong, there's plenty of Pro-Putin bullshit floating around out there, too. I even see some Lefties who rose to fame under Trumpism just openly pushing stuff that's either inconsequentially anti-US (The arguments they were making were weak or minor in comparison to other more important arguments. This clearly demonstrates intentional pandering.), or pretty bluntly pro-Putin in the form of "Putin did nothing wrong, the US/NATO didn't give anyone a choice," which is taking my argument to a stupid extreme.
I just think it's utterly bullshit that "We had other options, we have other options, we are ignoring all options that relate to realistic diplomacy - and at the cost of increased tension and lower and middle-class suffering" gets lumped in with all of that. It's an insult to healthy dissent.
But there is no justification for US/NATO explicitly choosing the path of most escalation every time a decision needed to be made on the crisis.
That's obviously not happening. The current refusal to implement a no-fly zone, and the US not facilitating the donation of Polish MIGs is not "the path of most escalation".
Even if the Invasion has nothing to do with Ukraine's NATO membership, for 20+ years, US/NATO have been giving Putin every bit of ammunition he could possibly want to justify an invasion.
No, they haven't given Putin "every bit of ammunition he could possibly want." Offering immediate NATO membership, or stationing NATO troops in Ukraine would be much better than Putin's stated justification of "de-nazifying Ukraine". Which is, frankly, pretty lame.
I consider that irresponsible, and justification for the label of "complicit".
No matter what the action movies tell you, the US is not responsible for maintaining the peace of the world.
(Which could be resolved if the US pushed and fed Leftist Organized Labor Movements in Russia and Ukraine.)
I've noticed that the people who accept the narrative that NATO is responsible for the invasion also tend to have an idealistic view of socialism or communism. It's probably an artifact of where they go to get their news.
I know if WE were fighting a Fascist nuclear superpower on our doorstep, I wouldn't want the rest of the world to continuously escalate on every bluff that superpower made.
It's a good thing the rest of the world isn't continuously escalating, then. (Financial sanctions aren't an escalation, they're retribution).
I would just want them to keep some pressure on and provide resources to extend the Defense.
That's what's happening.
The fact that Russia is currently targeting civilian structures, which they would need to expend resources to rebuild if they were intending to absorb them into an Empire, demonstrates to me that they really do consider the NATO membership aspect to be an existential threat (Their words.). They're decimating Ukraine to ensure it's no longer a threat.
Russia's slow progress in the invasion suggests that they badly underestimated Ukraine. They thought this would be over in a few days. That's not the kind of judgement you make of someone you consider a "threat". Destroying Ukraine wasn't part of the original plan; rather, it's Putin's alternative to losing. His first choice was a subdued, mostly intact client state, with his goons in control of the government. His second choice is doing whatever it takes to hold onto power, up to and including scorched earth. Because if he loses this war, he'll lose his presidency, if not his life.
We need to decide soon if we want to entertain other options besides further escalation, and letting them burn all of Ukraine to the ground.
"We" are already executing other options.
This is mostly just Straw Men, or completely missing the point/making bad assumptions about my position. I might respond to it piecemeal, later.
One thing I did find disturbing, although not surprising due to the fairly unified War Propaganda flowing around, is that you identified Sanctions as "retribution." If I didn't know any better, I'd consider the statement xenophobic, but these are somewhat unique times and I'll let it slide.
Unless specific assets/markets can be used to target those in Power (And they are just starting to do so successfully now, over the last few days.), Sanctions only really directly impact the general population, and are intended to slow/halt the conflict by putting general economic pressure on the country and, subsequently, its leadership. All of these companies/Blue-Checks suddenly demanding we don't do business with Russian civilian companies and organizations, etc. is honestly fucking disgusting. The Russian civilians, victims of a pretty brutal dictatorship, are now also being forced out of the global economy for Putin's actions and pushed into socioeconomic decline that will likely take decades to recover from. That's of course assuming that the sanctions are removed after the conflict. Last I checked, NATO/US don't have a really good rollback record on Sanctions, although I'll take evidence of the contrary.
Neither the Russian People, nor the global population
deserve the socioeconomic pressure from massive sanctions on a highly globalized economic Power. Was it the safest way to end the conflict? I'm sure History will say so. But regardless of where you stand on that debate, sanctions like the ones implemented guarantee that millions of innocent people will suffer, and that's nothing to be proud of - Nothing worth considering to be "retribution," as if most of those affected "had it coming," or even played a role in the conflict.
When you're in the upper echelons of Global Power Structures, the lower-level consequences of your actions are generally reduced to impersonal numbers in the form of "acceptable collateral risk" to aid their compartmentalization and coping mechanisms. News Media that's closest to those Power Structures design their narratives to further depersonalize the results to make them more palatable for the rest of us. This filtering, when we don't combine it with some healthy re-evaluation and historical context, leads to recklessly positive views of our State Leadership's actions. As a result, our State Leadership rarely concedes anything in diplomacy. They ignore humanitarian requests by the World that it finds inconvenient, and brutally dominates countries who openly dissent, or supports their domination if they happen to be enemies of our allies in conflict. If our general view of US Foreign Policy wasn't always unanimous support, our leadership would have a higher chance of doing something morally acceptable to other countries. I would imagine that if that kind of pattern was more consistent, we would have less countries throughout the world in conflict, and in need of exclusive military alliances.
