From the Russian perspective, the US promised not to expand NATO eastwards in return for allowing German unification. While Russia was weak, NATO ignored the promise, but miscalculated after Russia strengthened.
Ultimately, you need to understand the Russia reasons, and they had been threatening war since 2008 when Bush announced Ukraine could become a NATO member.
If you rely on Western sources to interpreted Eastern motives, you end up with rubbish like "they hate us for our freedoms".
It is a willful distortion of the so-called 2+4 Treaty from 1990, in which the two German states and the four occupying powers negotiated the terms of reunification. Ultimately, they agreed that only West German military forces would enter East Germany until the withdrawal of Soviet troops, which was to be completed by the end of 1994 at the latest. This is stipulated in Article 4 and Article 5 of the treaty: https://web.archive.org/web/20050222182358/https://usa.usemb...
Great point. Also "because of our love of jesus christ" has been thrown at me a few times when I'm trying to provide more nuanced arguments for why people in other countries might not favor us.
It's also just not the general lesson from history either. Plus you have to recall that in many cases war is about resource acquisition as much as anything else, and sometimes wars are popularized as ideological crusades when they are masquerading as resource disputes in order to motivate a populace.
Something that has become apparent to me is that in our years of somewhat peaceful economic growth, we seem to have forgotten that there are haves and have-nots and that the economic system that was created to hopefully replace war with peaceful competition only works so much as the large powers decide that it works well enough. Those who are have-nots tend to not have the proportional military leverage to do something about their position.
Our rejection of colonialism, mercantilism, and imperialism in favor of a "rules based international order" has blinded us a bit through abstraction and legalese to the reality of how the world works and the limits of resource availability given the size of the planet and the population numbers.
> As such it should be the priority of all democracies to extinguish authoritarians whenever possible.
I used to think this as well, but I recently re-read George Washington's 1796 Farewell Address [1] and it aided me in coming to the conclusion that such a moral crusade is neither wise, nor moral, and least of all practical.
There will always be some nations that have governments, authoritarian in our eyes or otherwise, that we disagree with from a political perspective. But we simply do not have the time, resources, or motivation to do something about all of them, and even as we try to do something about one or more of them we wind up with others popping up. Instead we should seek to treat fairly where possible, and treat not at all where necessary due to immoral behavior and stop trying to control the entire world. That doesn't mean we should never intervene or do anything, as in the case of Nazi Germany or perhaps other atrocities, but a national policy of extinguishing authoritarians seems to me to be one that isn't in our best interest.
I'm not pitching this as a moral crusade, but as a practical one. Authoritarianism is a cancer that invariably spreads and disrupts the global system.
It is simply in our best interest to starve cancer whenever we find it and excise it if possible.
If the goal of buying Russian hydrocarbons was to increase the economic stability of Russia and to foster capitalistic market systems in the country to prevent the rise of authoritarianism then the second they invaded Georgia should have resulted in the cutting of those economic ties.
If the goal of opening trade up to China was to prevent a Chinese-Soviet alliance and to weaken the USSR then the second the USSR fell we should have pivoted to defeating Chinese authoritarianism instead of strengthening economic ties to them which has ultimately provided fuel for an authoritarian economic machine that has grown to surpass the capacity of the US and made the US dependent on it.
We didn't do those things and now we're facing existential economic and military threats.
Are you ready to sign up and go fight in Ukraine or elsewhere and die to stop authoritarianism as a matter of practicality?
It's not a very fair question to ask, I know, but I think we really need to make sure we are honest about what we're asking people to do.
Cutting economic ties in these specific cases isn't enough to actually stop the bloodshed and bring about stability.
There are practical limits to our willpower and resources and we can't just stamp out every dictatorship in the world, remember Iraq and Afghanistan? I fully support our actions in Ukraine, by the way, and in terms of picking fights that's probably one of our better ones to help stop authoritarianism.
> Are you ready to sign up and go fight in Ukraine or elsewhere and die to stop authoritarianism as a matter of practicality?
Not necessarily, as I’m not directly threatened, but I’m more than happy to carve out a piece of my paycheck to give Ukrainians any and every piece of equipment they need to do it for me.
Ok but that's not enough to fight all of these authoritarian regimes that spring up. We don't have enough people, resources, or willpower to defeat all authoritarian regimes militarily forever. We have to be prudent, and sometimes we just have to live with such regimes.
This is circular reasoning. You are pretty much saying democracies should be aggressors first. If you swap `authoritarian` and `democracy` in your statement, it will also ring true.
However, the parent poster paints a different picture. If people in Moscow were economically threatened by reduced trade caused by an invasion, the elite appetite for such a move would be reduced.
The lesson from Russia invading Ukraine is that the presence of authoritarians anywhere is a threat to democracies everywhere.
The kind of people who crush freedom aren't content to just do so within their own borders and will eventually do so to others around them.
As such it should be the priority of all democracies to extinguish authoritarians whenever possible.