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Comment by devoply | Hacker News Reader

Sanctions are a type of war on civilians. Great power adversaries are no worse than allies like Saudi Arabia. American unilateralism is evil, and it has to end. The sooner the better!

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Russia invades another country. You are the President of the US. Your options are:

1.) Do nothing. Poland, and the parts of Germany that used to be East Germany, might not like the long term consequences of this plan.

2.) Start a nuclear war, killing hundreds of millions of people. A few disadvantages to this plan as well.

3.) Economic sanctions. You can certainly say this will kill people by way of depressing GDP growth. Will it kill fewer people than a full nuclear exchange between the US and Russia?

You forgot to mention the 4th scenario: turning Iran into another Afghanistan or Iraq. smh!

The USA invades at least as many countries as Russia.

Purely statistically you cannot even compare them:

    |US invasions| >> |Russia invasions|

But maybe it is because of the difference in GDP:

    |US invasions| / GDP ~= |Russia invasions| / GDP

So you're saying that having a large GDP is a justification to invade other countries?

He or she is using |Invasions| / GDP as a measure of predisposition to invading. claiming that russia would invade more countries if it had the money.

Why '/' but not '*'?

Please tell me, what countries had their parts annexed by USA in last century?

4.) Work with the international community and act together

what does that even mean? "Act together" would just take the form of sanctions, no?

Probably, but there's a difference between "US doing whatever it feels like whenever it feels like it" and "US acting in concert with the rest of the world".

yeah, the difference is that allies will comply, enemies will not and neutral countries will trade favours for compliance. How is that an improvement? It's just going to be politicking. International affairs are not generally an exercise in everyone teaming up to stand up to the baddies.

In 1)-3) you assume that US is the world's global policeman who is always right because it is right.

4) The democratic way: ask people in this "another" country and if the opinions split then restructure it: either convert it peacefully into two countries (like Czechoslovakia) or confederation/federation.

Except in reality, countries close to Russia are desperate to have as much NATO and American presence as possible. Why? Because the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire preceding it were a universal net negative.

So what these countries are currently doing is replacing the "Russian Empire" by the "NATO Empire" (NATO/US invasion) instead of simply turning into a democracy and asking people how they want to live.

False equivalency. These countries want freedoms and stability. Not the nightmare of Russian occupation.

Voting to elect a government won't stop the Russian tanks from rolling in.

There's good and bad to America being able to do things unilaterally. The bad is stuff like the Iraq War. But two examples of its good are the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which has global reach and has been used in enforcement actions against international businesses operating internationally, and more recently the Magnitsky Act.

Both of these are the best exports of American influence and require the US to be at the center of all things financial.

It is not one country's place to police the world.

Both of these are the best exports of American influence and require the US to be at the center of all things financial.

That was all nice and fine. Unfortunately it's no more sustainable with a president, who can kill a country's economy with an early morning twitter tantrum.

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