It sucks of course but it is what it is. That is all he is saying.
The people of Ukraine have overturned a fraudulent election, overthrown a president who betrayed his commitment to his people, and are now fighting tooth and nail to defend their country. But it's all 'just' power politics?
It's more accurate to say that some ukranian people have ousted the president and let US decide whom to put in place
The country was split nearly 50/50 between pro-us and pro-russian. Surely enough the second half was cancelled after the coup (change in language laws for instance).
My estimate for maidan times is based on preceding elections where "pro-russian" yanukovich won by a small margin.
I'm not a fan of Mearsheimer here (he was wrong on whether Russia would go to war for one thing; for another, he extrapolates way too far in ascribing motives to Putin/Russia that he doesn't have evidence for) and I think states are generally security maximizing and not power maximizing.
But Mearsheimer's book title of "The Tragedy of Great Power politics" is apt. Because the tragedy is that states have different interests than the well being of the people that live in them. I don't think pointing that out is immoral, quite the opposite; hard truths are still truths.
That sounds unlikely to me.
First of all, we have nukes. Why would we care if Russian troops showed up on the border. If they cross that line, their country gets wiped off the map. The same dynamic exists with Ukraine and Russia.
Also, you analogy completely ignores the economic relationships that the West has been trying to build with Russia for the last few decades. Western doctrine has been largely focused on building international trade and economic relationships as a method for maintaining peace. There is a reason we exported a good chunk of our manufacturing after all.
The only way your analogy holds is if Russia and Canada had been spending decades trying to build peaceful economic relationships with the US. And they openly express little interest in invading the US. But then the US starts saber rattling at Canada and claims that they feel their security is threatened. I think most people would agree that the US is behaving belligerently in that scenario and that Canada would be justified in building up defenses.
Who would you blame?
But what if the Russian military didn't even have any significant presence in Canada but the US invaded anyway? Then I'd absolutely blame the US primarily.
I wouldn't blame Russia in that situation.
Who would you blame then?
A future of a pro-Putin Canada is just absurd in its own right. Why not North Korea or Iran? It only really makes sense to talk about realistic possibilities. However, if they wanted to align closer to European powers, such as UK and France, again, I don't think the US would be invading Ontario.
Note: I have no bone in this fight, just trying to clarify what I think is a decent argument.
If the US became a worse option for Canada than Russia, none of this discussion would be relevant. For one thing, Putin wouldn't be running Russia. And the US would be a very different place as well. Either that or Canada would have to have been overrun by an incredibly anti-American streak that doesn't really seem natural in the country right now.
The Monroe doctrine is important, but it is currently nothing like what Mearsheimer claims Ukraine owes Russia, which is fealty. I can see many places where the cold-war order has gone away. Perhaps in 1983, someone like Evo Morales would not have been allowed to run Bolivia. Ortega came back to power and was not opposed by a new batch of Contras. Brazil suggested that it was friendly to Putin and was not sanctioned for it. I think the times when Latin America was dominated by a few US multinational corporations backed by the Marines have passed and now the dynamic is much more like the relationships of smaller independent countries around their larger neighbors. When we are describing what relationship Ukraine deserves with Russia in the modern world, it should be much more like the US-Mexico relationship or the US-Canada relationship than the pre-2014 Russia-Ukraine relationship.
It was only a US invasion in the sense that the US entered World War II in 1939 and in the sense that the US is currently at war with Russia.
Canada is not compatible with Russia, so forming a military alliance is a crazy idea.
Putin is the aggressor who has invaded an European country just because their actions did not suit him.
There are no acceptable excuses for the invasion, it's a very dangerous game he is playing as Russia cannot live with the sanctions in the long run.
At the very best he can hope to get away with an agreement that Ukraine will never join EU or NATO, and will stay neutral forever.
Even then, there is no 100% guarantee that Ukraine will not go back on that deal in the future.
Would the Americans' actions be 'wrong' from Canada's point of view? Of course. Would they be 'right' from America's point of view? Absolutely! That's the point here. Both sides are simultaneously both right and wrong, from each other's perspectives.
Once again, it sucks, but it is how it is.
That only happens in cartoons.