This is valuable reading, from a military historian frequently posted on HN: https://acoup.blog/2022/02/25/miscellanea-understanding-the-...
Here's one of the many good bits:
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Instead, the clearest understanding of Putin’s complaints about NATO is that they are reflections of his real fears, but that as diplomatic negotiating tools, they were red herrings, designed to create exactly the sort of smokescreen that some media personalities worked to create and exploit domestically. The ‘tell’ here in many ways were the initial demands, which amounted to rolling back NATO positions to pre-1997 status; such demands would be utterly unacceptable to NATO countries (like Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland) who would thus be left outside NATO’s line of protection. Putin – and the Russian Foreign Ministry – knew those demands were obvious non-starters, that’s why they made them – presumably to generate that smokescreen and to try to divide NATO internally. But the demands themselves were never serious, as Putin’s actions this week prove.
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The "promise Ukraine won't join NATO" demand was not made in good faith and conceding it would not have mattered.
Nah. It might do the trick if NATO pulled back and let Russia reassert dominance over the old Warsaw Pact, again.
There aren't easy answers here.
And besides that, NATO or the west should not refrain from having these talks no matter what Putin says.
If Finland or Sweden wants in, they should be allowed to the same day they ask.
NATO is a defensive union. The only reason to fear it is if you’re planning to invade other nations. Putin ostensibly should have no reason to fear NATO expansion unless he has ill intent.
And if the argument is: yes, it is defensive now, but it might turn offensive against Russia at some point. Well, for that you just need an alliance of countries, it does not need to be NATO. A group of countries comprised of NATO and non-NATO members can gang up against Russia any time they want, without any NATO involvement.
I believe Putin only says this because he wants to keep invading other countries on the table as an option, and that is precisely the reason to keep expanding NATO.
Sorry, but this is incorrect. NATO is a security union, of which a co-defense pact is a part.
Your whole argument seems to build on that and it is a faulty one.
There is a good rebuttal, but this isn't the one.
There is no reason to join NATO except for defense. Zero. None. Yes, NATO members do sometimes gang up to invade other countries, but they would also do so if they weren’t NATO members.
- Iraq
- Syria
- Yemen
- Libya
- Afghanistan
Just two days ago NATO countries conducted drone strikes in Somalia. NATO aligned forces have been conducting air-strikes and other forms of aggression against the Palestinians in their native lands. The destruction wreaked, the number of death and maimed, of those ongoing acts of war by NATO and NATO-aligned forces is very substantially higher thank those coming from Putin.
An interesting question is: is it irrational, in the light of this undeniable fact of NATO aggressions, to want to be safe from NATO?
Perhaps more relevantly, a single member, the US, spends more than the rest of the world combined. Remove the US, and NATO is spending less than China. This doesn't seem like an honest argument.
The US spends more than is defensively necessary, but NATO as a whole is absolutely spending proportional to the threat level. Perhaps the US should spend less, and the rest of NATO should spend more.
Taliban weren't friendly with Al-Qaeda, and attempted to surrender in the first week of the war. In the first month of the war, its alleged target ObL decamped to Pakistan. After a decade, someone somewhat resembling ObL who had been living under close Pakistani military supervision a mile from PMA Kakul was allegedly murdered as a campaign event for BHO's reelection, although no corpse was ever examined. After another decade, NATO forces left Afghanistan with tails between legs, while experts assured us that the "government" they had installed would last several years. Realists assumed that meant it would last several months, but even we were surprised when that actually meant several hours.
It seems "way too long" somewhat understates this. There is no sense in which this was a defensive war, and if this were as you say the only thing NATO ever did (perhaps something might have happened in Kosovo?) then that is a complete indictment of NATO.
> Following the September 11 attacks in 2001, then-US President George W. Bush demanded that the Taliban, then-de facto ruling Afghanistan, extradite Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the attacks and who was, until then, freely operating within the country. The Taliban's refusal to do so led to the invasion of the country; the Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies were mostly defeated and expelled from major population centers by US-led forces and the Northern Alliance.
Did someone in Bush's administration ask some Taliban poobah for ObL, at some time before the invasion? Probably! That would have been like asking for a unicorn pony. They didn't have him in custody, and they weren't going to be arsed to engage in whatever deadly combat would have been required to get him in custody. Unlike today, at that time Taliban weren't really a national ruling entity. They ran the courts and the tollways in some of the populated parts of Afghanistan. ObL was holed up in the hills somewhere. USA military didn't have a great deal of luck digging him out either, once they gave it a try.
The proportional action would have been to occupy only those parts of Afghanistan in which one could reasonably imagine ObL had hidden, and hire both Taliban and Northern Alliance to provide security on the condition they not fight each other while USA troops were around. It's not as though Taliban had created aQ, our supposed ally Saudi Arabia did that. Taliban, just like everyone else in Afghanistan, would have been perfectly happy for aQ not to have escaped Sudan.
Somehow the goof troop that got us fighting a war in Iraq also screwed up the operation in Afghanistan. At this point that can't be a surprise to anyone. But you're talking about mistakes made leading up to and in the first several weeks of the occupation. The point of this thread is the following two decades of pointless brutality.
As for why Nato stayed so long in Afghanistan, it is difficult to imagine now, but 20 years ago we had just won a giant string of wars and in most of them democracy was installed and life got better for everyone. We tried to make it work in Afghanistan too, but it didn't work for a multitude of reasons.
Anyway, with respect, I was talking about Article 5 and the defensive alliance that is Nato. Countries within Nato can choose to go to war outside of A5, but they are only compelled to help under it.
Taliban did offer to turn over ObL, and this was known by the public at the time. [0] This may not have been such a realistic offer, given the hiding-in-caves-with-lots-of-guns aspect mentioned above, but they tried to do exactly what you advise and it didn't work. Maybe they learned a lesson about how USA policy is entirely controlled by the military-industrial complex through the sockpuppet war media?
Let's ignore mistakes made over twenty years ago. We could have withdrawn at any time over that twenty years, so I'm more complaining about the mistake made every minute since then.
The point of the thread is that NATO is not "defensive". You offered as a counterexample, NATO's war in Afghanistan. If that's all you've got, we can conclude that NATO is indeed not defensive in nature.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.te...
First, even the article you liked didn't offer to turn over Bin Laden. It offered a discussion, asked for proof, etc. This isn't how international relations with a super power that's just had it's financial sector gutted in a once-in-a-decade event go. There is this retreat to minutiae that often happens in political debates. Sometimes it helps, but it usually does.
1. USA was attacked (for the second time) by a religious extremist.
2. They invoked Article 5, the only time in the history of the alliance that countries involved had a pre-commitment to jointly aid in defence. This isn't to say that individual Nato countries can't join together in other military exercises, like, say the invasion of Iraq. But that isn't Nato. That's UK + USA, it doesn't include Canada.
3. Every major ally of the USA responded by deploying troops to Afganistan. Even France.
You can talk about the "industrial complex through the sockpuppet war media" and yes we have to be careful about how much we trust reporters because black propaganda is sadly a real thing, but the constant denial of ground realities and suspicion of Nato is clearly false on the merits. People are not lining up to immigrate to Russia or China or Afghanistan.
Everyday people know that you have to try pretty hard to piss off Canada and if Canada is part of Nato maybe it isn't because of a giant world sized conspiracy theory. Maybe, just maybe it's because (mostly) peaceful democracies naturally want collective defence.
Someone claiming it was defensive doesn’t make it so.
If Afghanistan can be called a defensive war, Russian „demilitarisation“ of the Ukraine is purely humanitarian operation.