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Comment by epicureanideal | Hacker News Reader

> defensive alliance

I almost spit out my coffee I laughed so hard.

That's how the alliance markets itself, but that's not how everyone in the world, especially their potential adversaries, perceives it. And its potential adversaries have been saying so, publicly, for decades.

As I'm sure you understand, all military alliances, even if they start out defensive in nature, can easily become offensive in nature.

> if they feel threatened enough

Exactly, they felt threatened, because they did not and do not perceive NATO as a defensive alliance.

I highly recommend watching the videos I linked in my earlier comment.

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The only ones pretending that it isn't a defensive alliance are the ones who have some territorial claim they're hoping to take military action against. For whom it is very inconvenient that there's this group of countries who would very much rather they didn't.

Everyone else sees very clearly that an alliance which only invokes when attacked and requires the resolution of territorial disputes prior to gaining membership is not going to just invade them first.

Half of the members were literally dependent on Russia for their energy needs, many of them thinking that the US was the warmongerer for being constantly paranoid about Russia's intentions, with defense budgets trending downwards and the former American president having openly questioned the need for NATO. There is no reasonable way to argue that they were at all going to be attacking Russia as an alliance in that state.

This is a Good Post, and honestly your last point includes one of the things that I (as an American, and generally critical of our own foreign adventurism) am most astonished by. We have culturally never expected much of NATO to stand up to Russia; the saber-rattling felt like it was frequently working against Europe. That Russia could push too far and stiffen European resolve so sharply seemed off the table.

The cynic in me sometimes thinks that part of it, and the American response as well, is perhaps as much that it's a European country being bullied and not somewhere far away (read: brown), but that it's happening at all is any port in the storm.

I don't really think you're being cynical for thinking that. The entire "war has returned to Europe" narrative from the start of the war kind of confirms that as part of the reason for the response.

I disagree that it was due to racism though (in the sense that they're explicitly thinking that "brown people's lives are less valuable"), it's simply that Europe naturally cares more about problems closer to home and the US has the context of its relationship with Russia.

On top of that, both of them have a lot of historical "trauma" from the part of WW2 which was fought by big powers in Europe. I think there would be a similar reaction from Japan, South Korea, and America in response to an invasion of Taiwan by China due to their own history on that front.

It’s that it’s happening close to large strategic allies.

The historical Russian counterpart to NATO was the Warsaw Pact, which was pretty clearly solely an instrument by which the USSR exerted its will over its members --its primary intervention was to invade a country that wanted to leave.

So it's not entirely unreasonable for a Russian to look at the NATO as potentially acting like the Warsaw Pact did, although, as you note, the fact that much of NATO doesn't share the same foreign policy as the US (indeed, often criticizes the US's foreign policy aims!) should disabuse them of that notion.

There was rather a lot of NATO coordination in the US-led invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan. None of the military missions in these countries were in response to the Article V mutual defense clause of the NATO treaty. It's very easy to see how these operations (and therefore the NATO alliance) would be seen as aggressive to these countries.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq wasn't the same group as NATO. France and Germany opposed the US's "coalition of the willing". [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_willing_(Iraq...

Whether they feel threatened or not still is no justification for their war in Ukraine. Not to mention their attempts to annex Donbas etc, or their annexation of Crimea.

Ukraine was no threat to Russia. By invading, Russia just proved to everyone else in the world that Russia is the threat.

Which interestingly leads to even more "Russophobia" because apparently having enough Russian speakers in your area is justification enough for Russia to come in and invade.

It's all ridiculous and shameful behavior on Russia's part. I feel bad for all those having to live under their current regime.

>> That's how the alliance markets itself, but that's not how everyone in the world, especially their potential adversaries, perceives it.

Not since 1990, at least. Cold War era defensive structures were dismantled when Warsaw Pact dissolved and Russia never established any comparable defensive structures on its own borders.

In terms of military doctrine, composition and placement of armed forces, preparations of border defenses, early warning systems etc, Russia has not prepared for invasion in any way. Why, if they perceive this as a threat like you say? With virtually all of Russia's fighting force in Ukraine, the road to Russia is wide open. There isn't even a wire fence on Russian side of border with NATO countries Norway, Finland, Estonia, and Latvia! Where do you see any signs of belief in threat from NATO to Russia?

Countries that border Russia, in contrast, have made extensive preparations to fight off another Russian invasion.

Correlation does not imply causation. Of course countries that are already involved in a joint-forces defensive military alliance are going to be more likely to enter into other external wars together. That doesn't mean the defensive alliance is somehow a contributing factor to that external war.

Countries in an existing defensive alliance are likely using similar gear, have similar doctrine, have similar values, and have alignment strategic interests.

The defensive alliance exists as an outcome of these alignments, as does the cooperation on the external war. The alliance doesn't cause the external war.

Australia is not part of NATO, yet it's followed America into basically every war it's had in the last 60 years because of these preexisting alignments, not because of NATO.

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