After seeing the Ukraine situation, and hearing Prof. Mearsheimer's take on it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4), I've begun to look at the world through a balance of powers political lens. Many of the countries we think of as independent nations, are only pseudo-independent. Much of the Western world has ceded its defense to the United States under NATO in the wake of WW2 and then again after the collapse of Soviet Union.

Ukraine is a pawn, unfortunately. A strategic middle ground wedge point from which NATO hopes to box Russia in and prevent it from redeveloping as a peer competitor. Russia wants to be a peer competitor so that it can have self-sovereignty, and dominating oil fields and the Black Sea is critical for them to achieve that. China does too, that's why it wants Taiwan, as a strategic location in the south China Sea.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, etc. these were all deemed strategic geography by the neo-cons and neo-libs that run the United States. They're playing chess with other people's homelands. The goal, from their perspective, is to contain threats (Iran, North Korea, etc) and prevent other great powers and peer competitors from emerging unless they agree to cede some sovereignty.

The thought is that these sort of behavior will prevent another world war. If you can spread democracy around, after all, it's extremely rare that two democracies that actively trade with each other do war with each other. But I think this grand experiment has proven to be a failure. Not all countries have the culture for democracy. And culture matters a great deal. For these countries, introducing democracy (or puppet democracy, as the CIA is wont to do) is often simply destabilizing.

I honestly hate my country's meddling around the world. I think it was something we reluctantly took on in the wake of WW2, but the whole military-industrial-technocratic-espionage apparatus that has developed in our country as a result of decades of this sort of policy has undermined our own democracy at home. And we're rapidly approaching a new world in which we are far from the 40s where we had 45% of the world GDP. And we've wrecked more countries than we've helped, in my opinion.

But at the same time, I am kinda anxious about a world where the U.S. leaves a vacuum for others to fill. We really won't have a choice, in the near future, though. The financial gravity of this situation will hit us sooner or later, and we'll have to scale back. We've already ceded ground to the Russians and Chinese on hypersonic, EMP, and submarine weaponry.

And I feel for the people stuck in the middle. The world is reverting back to a multi-polar state of affairs. I hope we do not repeat the 1930s and 40s as a result.