On the other hand, we can't tell if the US has a goal or not in the middle east or if destabilising countries is the geostrategy unto itself.

People really need to dial down the hype, engage with the real world where large countries get to have a sphere of influence and start talking realistically about what behaviour is tolerable. I still haven't heard anyone make a case for why we keep hitting the Russians given what acceptable US foreign policy looks like. One of the two is worse and it isn't the policies written in Cyrillic.

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pjc50 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> why we keep hitting the Russians

1) "we" (the US) are not hitting the Russians, "we" (Europe including the UK) are providing them with weapons for their self-defence, since it is in our interest to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe happening on the Polish border. I am no longer clear what, if any, assistance the US is providing. It is also very important in this that no NATO or EU forces are engaged directly with Russian forces yet, despite persistent incursions into EU airspace and occasional sabotage operations in Western Europe.

The UK is developing special US ITAR-free missiles for this purpose: https://www.thedefensenews.com/UK-Develops-Three-Low-Cost-Lo...

2) "start talking realistically about what behaviour is tolerable": I think we're past the point of pretending that international law applies evenly, and back to Mao's "power comes out of the barrel of a gun".

If we go back to a Cold War multipolar world between China, the US, Europe, and Russia, the only one of those which hasn't made public statements threatening European territorial integrity is China.

(at this point I would expect India to start asking whether they get to be a world power or not and what they're going to do with that, too)

	▲	roenxi 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> since it is in our interest to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe happening on the Polish border. If your argument is preventing trouble on the Polish border, why is the strategy dumping billions and billions of dollars in weapons into the most corrupt country in Europe, who happens to be on the Polish border? Keeping a conflict worthy of WWII smouldering in the area for more than 4 years now? The sensible thing to do would have been to encourage a Ukrainian surrender early on and send them some food/whatnot in a care package, then fortify the Polish border. This strategy actually employed seems like the most direct way to trigger a humanitarian catastrophe on the Polish border. It looks very destabilising. It is also one of the very few paths that could reasonably see Poland or countries in that general region getting nuked. Can we please be honest about our motivations here? We're all more likely to get what we want. Ideally peace and prosperity.

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0dayz 31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Right, so genocide is better than diplomacy?

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cpursley 6 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

What do you mean “we can’t tell”? For those who aren’t aware, the war against Iran (direct, they don’t have nukes yet) and Russia (via Ukraine proxy, Russia has nukes) as well as Venezuela (infiltrate their power structure and bribe off) are actually the same war: they are multi front (financial, energy, technical, kinetic) geopolitical “containment” strategies. The US/UK/EU think tank and others influencing policy have written about it non-stop since forever, it’s not like a grand conspiracy - it’s all out in the public if you lift back the on the surface news narrative. You can literally pull down and read the policy papers, read the transcripts of those (in power and adjacent to power) pushing this “primacy” view of US led hegemony.