I mean, everyone knows what would happen if Mexico or Republic of Ireland announced an agreement with Russia to let them send in weapons and military personnel and set up
military bases, right? I just ask that we don’t kid ourselves.
The main difference is that the US and NATO are not aggressors. At no point has there ever been a threat of them invading Russia.
Meanwhile, Russia has invaded Ukraine and has set its sights on other former USSR countries.
You're trying to apply false equivalence.
Besides, how is your "thought experiment" relevant to Ukraine?
In any case Russia has many bases in foreign countries, and as far as I can remember there's only ever been a risk of direct conflict over it once, with Cuba, and that was specifically over nuclear missiles, not jut having a military base.
Then also, NATO already risked direct confrontation in Ukraine, sending large training units to a country at war with Russia. As we speak US AWACS is providing early warning across large swaths of western Ukraine and the Black Sea, one wonders if missile sites actually use their early warning radars in the case where they most likely have a notebook with a nice situation log besides their soviet terminals.
In this situation I wonder why noone is pushing conspiracy theories around the Moskva sinking (which could still be Ukrainian luck combined with Russian ineptitude) which embed these facts. Apparently this ship was hit at the extent of the Neptunes range. Is it that much of a stretch to think that such thing might have been made much easier, when the ships SatNav was spoofed by a Globalhawk leading it towards shore, while the Ukrainians knew exactly where to look when they flared up their targeting radar?
Western military aims in Syria are not to change the regime, they're just to support allies and suppress enemies like IS. There is no way US operations in Syria could possible be described as seriously attempting to topple Assad or drive Russia out of the country, that's simply not tenable. As you point out, US and Russian forces, when in the same vicinity, backed off from each other.
As Ukraine amply shows when one side, either the west or Russia, heavily commits militarily to a country the other side limits itself to interference operations only. That's been true ever since the Cuban missile crisis. Nobody wants a repeat of that.
This is relevant to Ukraine because obviously it was allowing America to expand its military reach right up to Russia’s doorstep.
Did that happen with Cuba? (I know about the Bay of Pigs invasion, when it happened and what kind of force was used for it)
you mean US or GB would announce that those countries/nationalities are an artificial creation and have never historically really existed, and that Mexicans or Irish people don't ethnically exist, that they are just "little/sub Americans" or "little/sub Englishmen", and US or GB would go to perform ethnical cleansing and genocide there?
> send in weapons and military personnel
that happens all around the world by pretty much all countries.
> set up military bases
you forgot to add major point of Russian propaganda here - development of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons DNA targeted to Russian DNA as well as breeding birds and dogs who only sh!t on and byte only Russians - all that with the direct help and financing by American imperialists.
Oh wait...
Not that the US didn't try have their way with Cuba, but it's telling that in the only instance of your imagined scenario actually happening the US gave up when they realised the deed couldn't be accomplished with just ~1500 Cuban exiles as soldiers.
What if the US invaded Canada back in 2014, taking southern Ontario (the industrial heartland) and southern Alberta (the oil region), and set up two US puppet states called "The Republic of Ontario" and "The Republic of Alberta"? What if since then the US repeatedly said things like "Canada doesn't exist as a country", "Canadians are really USAians", and "Canada is full of Nazis and needs to be purged"? What if the US held yearly large-scale military drills on the Canadian border? Do you think that Canada might be alarmed enough to go looking for allies, even if the ally was Russia? Do you think they would be right to do so?
What if Mexico saw all that, and decided that they had better find some allies too?
Countries trying to join NATO didn't happen in a vacuum...
Certainly it would be a horrific act regardless of the invading country- autocratic, democratic, socialist, capitalist, communist, western, eastern, whatever. And yes, the US government has done some horrific things in the past.
None of that makes the current bloodshed by Russia any less terrible, or excuses it in any way, right? I just ask that we don't kiss ourselves on that either.
NATO was not the cause of this conflict. NATO would have stopped this conflict had Ukraine been a member.
NATO is a force of stability.
Russia is waging a war of extermination on Ukraine. Their sin was that they wanted to align with the west. Russia wants to genocide away all nations it consider taints Russian soil, what ever the international borders say.
Either you choose to go along with this (Fine, destroy their cultural identity, go ahead, it's your right. Let them kidnap the children, rape the women and - steal their washing machines?) or you do something to counter the Russian threat.
I presume most would prefer to live in a world that at least attempts to stop genocide.
There are two options here - NATO or nuclear proliferation.
Ukraine war showed that barring obvious superiority in conflict, nuclear threat is the only guarantor of state sovereignty.
Without more nukes, NATO is a necessary guarantor of state sovereignty at each state bordering Russia by providing credible force.
Russia has proved this theory themselves by assaulting every non-NATO country at it's borders.
How could countries like Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia defend themselves without a NATO alliance? Should they get a nuke? Or should they just yield to Russian rape, pillage and annihilation of cultural distinctiveness?
For those who like Star Trek - This is EXACTLY a situation where the Russian states behaves like the Borg. You oppose the Borg. Not say "yeah, you have right to do that because you are ... mean?"
The Russian state also behaves like a fascist villain but that's kind of obvious already.