Comment by matt4077 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matt4077 | Hacker News Reader

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Russia, and Putin specifically, are suffering from a serious case of inferiority complex ever since the USSR broke apart. They could obviously prosper easily by integrating themselves into Europe & the west economically. Instead, they are willing to hurt themselves significantly if it allows them to inflict any harm on their "opponents".

China is powerful, but has actually been rather docile, historically. They have none of the expansionist instincts that still come natural to Russia–the only exception being a few tiny islands. The US, Great Britain: every superpower in history was more aggressive than China today.

Russia has unfortunately proven that they are very much capable of inflicting some serious harm. They are partly responsible for millions of deaths in Syria, they are undermining 70 years of rather successful attempts to make the forcible taking of territory a thing of the past at least among some nations. They are undermining the singularly successful effort to abolish chemical weapons (both with their support in Syria and their executions in GB). There's some real fear that they could test NATO, and that he-who-shall-not-be-mentioned might be willing (eager?) to let NATO fall apart. That would be an existential threat for every independent country east of Germany, and it doesn't entirely not be plausible as an inflection point that future history books cite as the cause for the next big war.

We made a genuine attempt to integrate with the West. We were rebuffed. That seems, just like you say, pretty obvious to me.

Sure, it was all good and dandy for a while, especially in the context of economic cooperation and dismantling communism. But when you look at deeper issues like national security, you can't deny that Russia got completely tuned out by the West. I still don't understand what the US was thinking when they tried to expand NATO into Georgia and Ukraine, two critical security frontiers for Moscow (even as they said they wouldn't do it [1]).

And in case you missed it, we voiced our opposition to NATO expansion loudly, bitterly, and repeatedly over the last two decades. You just chose to ignore it. And now the West collectively acts like the resulting conflict is some kind of unexpected flare-up of Russian paranoia/empire syndrome/general wickedness. John Mearsheimer put it best [2], so I don't want to keep beating a dead horse.

In the end, if you are trying to build a more integrated and safer world, you have to take the interests and sensibilities of all major stakeholders into into account. That's how you build mutual trust. If you don't thread carefully you risk signaling disingenuousness and opportunism. So you get what you get.

PS As a side note, I do find the cartoonization of this conflict very bizarre. Russian are the orcs, completely alien and wicked, Putin is the omnipotent Sauron, US is the noble and selfless Aragon, Trump is turncoat Saruman, and Europe and the wider world in general are apparently hobbits, plucky but completely clueless on their own. It's like an echo chamber.

[1] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017...

[2] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-08-1...

> tried to expand NATO into Georgia and Ukraine, two critical security frontiers for Moscow (even as they said they wouldn't do it [1]).

There's _nothing_ about NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine in that link.

That was actually a promise about NATO expansion to _East Germany_ and it was to a President of USSR, who was deposed in couple of years.

That's entirely not true. The link specifically discusses promises made regarding areas outside of Germany. Directly from the link:

>The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory.

And that's like the second paragraph in the link. So apparently you didn't read the link (?).

edit:

You make one good point. The promises were made to Gorbachev in his capacity as leader of the USSR. And just few years later USSR blinked out of existence, so whatever promises were made to Gorbachev were non-binding in relation to Russia, technically a new state. The problem here, is that just 2 years later Yeltsin was made similar promises. Throughout the 1993-1996 period American officials went to great lengths to convince Yeltsin that direct NATO expansion was not on the table [1]:

>[In] a conversation that took place in Moscow in October 1993. U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher had traveled to Moscow to explain in advance of the January 1994 NATO summit that the United States would not support new members joining the alliance, but would rather develop a Partnership for Peace that would include all states of the former Warsaw Pact. Yeltsin’s relief was palpable. He thought he had dodged the NATO enlargement bullet at a time at which he was in a raging political battle against hardliners at home. A year later, when he discovered that enlargement was not only on the table but would in fact be proceeding, Yeltsin was apoplectic.

We can go back and forth with how non-binding and ambiguous these conversations were, but we can agree that Russians feel mislead. Furthermore, they now attribute active malice on the part of the West. Ultimately, this conflict didn't come to be in 2014 (or 2008), as some momentary caprice of Putin's. It was brewing since the late 1980s.

[1] https://warontherocks.com/2016/07/promises-made-promises-bro...

And your quote actually stated that promises were _not_ made there, author just tried to bring concerns of some anonymous 'multiple national leaders' as a confirmation.

Anonymous leaders?... That article identifies specific Western leaders by name, and goes through their interactions with Gorbachev.

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