> If they are going after someone, tautologically, that someone is not an ally.
No one in their right mind would describe Canada or Denmark as anything other than staunch allies of the US. Trump's stunts forced the whole collective West to do a full 180 in their relations with the US.
If US allies are doing a full 180 because a democratic country elected someone a bit different then their US relations were founded on delusion and it was never going to end well for anyone. It is easy to fall into the trap of negotiating with a faceless bureaucracy but that isn't how democracies actually work. They rethink the basics from time to time. Particularly when they're under stress and the status quo isn't working. We all know that, democracy has been a thing for more than 2,00 years. This isn't a new thing.
I suppose ultimately it is a question for the US to debate internally how much to string people along; but my advice would be that it is better to root long term relations on a basis of common interests and basic power dynamics. Trump's approach looks pretty typical for someone with a lot of experience negotiating. You can hoodwink someone in good times or for tactical gain, but for a long term working relationship it in necessary to be straightforward about what the interests and goals are.
> If US allies are doing a full 180 because a democratic country elected someone a bit different (...)
The Trump administration is threatening countries with annexation and retaliation.
Elections isn't a magic powder that you sprinkle onto anything to make it good. Even Hitler was elected. And so was Trump.
If you elect a fascist dictator who threatens multiple neighbors with annexation and war, specially staunch allies, of course that the whole world automatically grows cold on you. You are a threat and you are threatening everyone.
You'll notice the election of Hitler didn't have much of an effect on German relations either; they re-fought the same war that they'd been fighting 20 years earlier. The big change was just that the Nazi edition German army was wildly effective compared to the version sent out in WWI.
The US launching random and unprovoked invasion or destabilising their neighbours is normal behaviour. Look at the Afghanistan/Iraq wars for example; or their strategy of provocation leading to the ongoing eventual proxy war against Russia.
If Canada or whoever think they're immune to that because ... who knows what reason makes sense to them then they are being aggressively stupid. They aren't magically immune to US military pressure. The way to achieve safety from the US is trying to convince their military to be less expeditionary, not to adopt appeasement strategies like the US's inner circle of allies tend to do. Although realistically I don't think the US is going to be invading anyone they are close to. The reason these countries are held closely is because when things get serious they tend to fold under US pressure without too much resistance.
> The US launching random and unprovoked invasion or destabilising their neighbours is normal behaviour.
It is not. In which parallel reality do you live where this is normal behavior?
> Look at the Afghanistan/Iraq wars for example;
Are you referring the multi-nation coalitions that built a consensus on military intervention?
Heck, the first gulf war was a coalition of 42 countries which follow a UN resolution after the Iraqui regime invaded a neighboring country. Is this your term of comparison?
And what are you talking about proxy war? Russia, much like Iraq, is trying to annex a neighboring country. If anything, the response is timid.
> If Canada or whoever think they're immune to that because ...
What the hell are you even talking about? Are you comparing Canada with Saddam Usein's Iraq? Are there UN resolutions targeting the Canadian government? What can possibly go through anyone's mind to even suggest there are parallels?
> Are you comparing Canada with Saddam Usein's Iraq? Are there UN resolutions targeting the Canadian government?
Yes & http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3661134.stm - I don't know why UN resolutions would be a factor here. The UN was pretty up front that the invasion was illegal. The US doesn't have time for paperwork. There aren't major differences here. Both Canada and Iraq are sovereign countries, neither done anything to morally justify an invasion. The US has just as much right to go into either of them and if they care about outcomes they should avoid using the military.
> Are you referring the multi-nation coalitions that built a consensus on military intervention?
Yes. And having a gang assist doesn't justify a crime.
> And what are you talking about proxy war? Russia, much like Iraq, is trying to annex a neighboring country. If anything, the response is timid.
After 30 years of provocation as the US geared up for war with a country that is, we might note, a neighbour.
And we see in the aftermath why the Russian military had real concerns. The Ukraine invasion should have been a close parallel to Iraq. A vicious assault; local government folds and then everybody moves on and lets civilians start trying to pick up the pieces.
Instead it turns out that this was indeed something that the US was aiming for and they started ramping up the slaughter because they want to destabilise the Russians. If the US had a history of trying to promote peace and stability among their neighbours then a lot of that bloodshed would never have happened. We're lucky to have Trump back in the big seat pointing that out too. A lot of nervous warmongers in a shambles over that.
> Are you trolling?
Far worse; I'm empathetic with the poor people who were on the receiving end of US policy and and interested in moral consistency. I don't like casual hypocrisy that gets people killed.
> Instead it turns out that this was indeed something that the US was aiming for and they started ramping up the slaughter because they want to destabilise the Russians.
The US has been the main stabilizing force for Russia in this war, ensuring that Ukraine does not lose while also preventing Russia from disintegrating - driven by the same misguided and exaggerated fears that the US government had when the USSR was collapsing.[1]
Had the US wanted to destabilize Russia, it would have had a long list of steps to take to make the city-state of Moscow lose control over its colonized regions, primarily through economic sanctions to prevent Moscow from flooding the rest of the country with oil money to buy loyalties. When the USSR became unable to provide essentials like food and fuel to its population in the early 1990s, every major city and region took matters into its own hands, established local councils to manage essential needs, and outright ignored orders from Moscow until the central government became entirely impotent and ceased to exist in any meaningful way. From this grassroots level, they built a new Russian central government to replace the Soviet one. In the end, the USSR had shrunk to a few office blocks in central Moscow, while the populace had established a new country - the Russian Federation - everywhere around it.
The US tried to prevent the USSR's disintegration into self-governed regions then and is repeating the same mistake now by doing everything it can to keep the Russian federal government in control of the entire country. The narratives about the US "destabilizing Russia" are completely disingenuous fiction, hollow accusations with no substance.
It is amazing to look back at policy from before the USSR collapsed and see how much more sensible it was. That speech is a good example of how, when the US political class were taking the situation a bit more seriously, they understood that Ukraine was important to Russia's interests and they shouldn't be trying to align it with NATO. Had they maintained that attitude in the intervening period instead of the big push to expand NATO that actually happened then this bloody and tragic land war in Europe would have been avoided.
And saying this is stabilising Russia is ridiculous. I may as well go back to motorest and tell him to relax because at worst a US invasion is only going to stabilise Canada. So far the US is the most responsible party [0] for around a million Russian casualties and there are concerning factoids [1] coming out that we had a nuclear near miss.
[0] We're being treated to the dark comedy where Russia doesn't even need to negotiate with Ukraine to get the war ended, they went straight to the US.
Amazing? Far from it. The Chicken Kiev speech was widely seen as a major failure and embarrassment. Not only by his political opponents in the US, but also by the people of Eastern Europe, who were struggling to break free from Russian-controlled dictatorships that had been forced upon them at the end of the WWII. Instead of continuing to live in the prison camp that Gorbachev was offering to reform (with US support), a hundred million people in Eastern Europe regained freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and other basic human rights within months from Bush instructing them "not to rock the boat". The Chicken Kiev speech was quite a downgrade from Reagan's speech a few years prior, in which he challenged Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin wall and let people live as free human beings.
The US and its allies in Western Europe were not carving off parts of the Eastern Bloc and the USSR like some try to depict nowadays, nor did they have any interest in extending mutual defense guarantees to the nations that had just restored their independence.
The desire to live again as free people came first and foremost from within. After independence, membership in the European Council, the European Union, and NATO became the holy grails of foreign policy in most newly independent countries to secure permanent freedom and prosperity. The goal was to integrate with the free world as tightly as possible to make it as difficult as possible for Russia to tear them away again.
The "big push to expand NATO" that you keep repeating is a disgusting lie. Pick up the memoirs of Vaclav Havel, Aleksander Kwasniewski, Lennart Meri, Vytautas Landsbergis, or any other statesman of the era, and you'll usually find entire chapters dedicated to the immense struggle of entering European cooperation frameworks like the EU and NATO: how nobody wanted to see them there and the incredible lengths they had to go to just to be considered potential candidates.
Your entire frame of reference is just wrong. You don't get the basic push-pull factors that have shaped the relations in Europe - what happened, why it happened, and how it happened -, which leads you to blame victims and make excuses for aggressors.
In 1938-1940, Hitler and Stalin cooperated and destroyed every single independent country along a line that ran from the Atlantic coast of France to the Ural mountains so far in the east that they mark the border between Europe and Asia. A key to their success was the foolish belief by smaller nations in Wilsonian concepts of international law and neutrality. Not looking out for each other and failing to support nations under attack enabled Hitler and Stalin to pick countries off one-by-one at their convenience. Neutrality was a fundamental mistake that the generation of national leaders active in the 1990s sought to avoid repeating at all cost. Many of them were old enough to have personal recollections of pre-war Europe and its destruction, and as they write in their memoirs, that greatly influenced their attitudes toward European cooperation. The idea that they were somehow forced or coerced into this by the Americans is, first, not true, and, secondly, has no connection to the actual history and motivations that guided people. They were the most passionate group from the start.
Indeed it is not controversial. Even the USSR's last foreign minister Shevardnadze (1985-1991) and Russian Federation's first foreign minister Kozyrev (1990-1996) have said that they find nothing wrong with the way Eastern Europe joined NATO. According to Kozyrev, the fatal mistake in international relations was not applying enough pressure on Russia to transform it into a modern European country, as other nations did on their own while seeking protection from Russia.
I ask Kozyrev about a debate that has roiled the American foreign policy establishment in the leadup to this war. Did NATO go too far? On the contrary, he thinks it didn’t go far enough.
“Unfortunately, there are many wishful thinkers especially in academia here and intellectuals who have ties to Russia. They go to Valdai [a Russian think tank forum]. They consume caviar and vodka and are treated like kings by those who exist solely to manipulate them. This argument about NATO is just propaganda fed to Americans who then regurgitate it in their opinion and journal essays. The only real analysts who come here from Russia are dissidents. The rest are front people, just like in the Soviet Union, and they manufacture Western champions of the Putin regime, chumps and useful idiots.”
Eastern European countries that joined NATO were not, contra a lot of heated rhetoric on the subject, simply gobbled up by it. “They wanted to be in NATO, and at first America and its partners didn’t want to take them in. But they had no choice, because they couldn’t deny membership for qualified liberal democracies. The same way they can’t deny it for Ukraine.”[1]
Kozyrev is still alive and even has social media presence:
Maria Popova: The "Ru is afraid of NATO attack/encirclement" argument has been conclusively falsified for a while now.
Kozyrev: That is precisely what I was saying from the late 1980s. NATO presents no threat to Russia but provides free-of-charge security along its western borders. Putin's tyranny hates NATO as a tool for protecting democracies.[2]
