On the 10th anniversary of the Snowden revelations

How so? Hollywood wants to make money. And most Hollywood decision makers want to brag about having Important Friends in High Places (like the DoD). Producing anti-war movies (or otherwise making the DoD look bad) would get them ~nothing that they really want.

Ah, yes, the technical correct, best kind of correct.

Remind me, why the country an ocean away has it's troops in these countries?

And while we are it, can you explain why the country with only two countries on it's borders (one is allied, the other one is clearly not hostile) has a standing Army (not navy, not air force) of 460k+ active personnel?

Since lying to Congress is a crime, who was charged?

>judging by the repeating content and style of writing in comment section

This is how reddit always has been.

So let me get this straight. Since you are Ukrainian, Chomsky, Snowden, Greenwald, and others are threatening you by expressing views on the Ukraine war that diverge from the mainstream? Doesn't that sound awfully similar to George W Bush who claimed that everyone who isn't with us (the US) in the "war on terror" is against us?

Does reading taibbi or thinking the snowden revelations were a good thing make someone a MAGA person? Is Taibbi running Russian disinformation campaigns?

I don't fault you for your position one bit, but this stuff seems a little conspiratorial to me. And what Peterson are you talking about?

I think it is astute to look at things in these terms, and avoid the lazy but quite common exercise of labeling motivations and actions you don't understand as "not understandable."

George Kennan, who came up in a recent HN post [0], has a fair bit to say on the subject. Namely, that throughout its history, Russia has been obsessed with expanding and securing its border for perfectly understandable strategic reasons. Especially regarding Ukraine and Crimea. Something along the lines of their western borders being completely open and strategically terrible to defend, thus the desire to push them out to more defensible locations. Of course you also have key routes for shipping, military bases, and oil flow in Ukraine that make it an incredibly appealing strategic objective. Kennan actually defined this mentality of western territorial expansion as an essential part of the Russian character, that it should be used as a backdrop to inform analysis of Russia 's motivations and contextualize strategic decisions (this was a key part of his analysis that ultimately lead to the whole "containment" strategy in the cold war).

It seems as though Western expansion has become completely ingrained basically to the point of a cultural imperative for any aspiring politician or political operator in Russia. Kind of like the requirement that any US politician must publicly proclaim their love of freedom and God in more or less equal measure (from what I can gather we've had exactly two openly atheist congress members, out of >11,000 members throughout history). In this way, it doesn't necessarily have to be rational in any absolute sense, it is rational in terms of national politics, beyond the point of expediency and into the territory of a binary whether or not you fit the hard requirements.

In 1992, Kennan wrote that NATO expansion towards former Soviet states in Western Europe including Ukraine, “ would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era... Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations; and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

He seems to have been largely ignored, not for the first in his career, up until Putin lead Russia to the annexation of Crimea. An act which seems to have taken heads of state and the international relations people by surprise, and perhaps undermined their optimistic beliefs about Putin having been coaxed into political/military partnership with the Western world (through economic incentives, international relations norms, etc). There was a lot of stock put on this idea that through economic incentives, trade agreements, and such, both Russia and China could be "brought into the fold" of neoliberalism and Western democratic principles. People were quite shocked to find out it didn't play out like a Disney movie with regards to Putin, and it's looking more and more like China isn't going to continue playing along with the tune set by the West when it is no longer in their strategic interest to do so.

Everyone from Obama to John Kerry to Angela Merkel were so perplexed over Russia's move in 2014 that their only explanations (including to each other in private, apparently) revolved around Putin being divorced from reality. However, as Henry Kissinger noted, the demonization of Putin is a stand-in for foreign policy analysis when there is nothing better at hand to guide us. So perhaps it is our lack of understanding of his real situation and objectives rather than his (of what is in both his and Russia's strategic interest) that is driving this urge to paint him as a irrational lunatic.

It seems likely that, as Kennan predicted, NATO expansion and general American/European policy caused a return of cold-war thinking and relations.. but only in the mind of Putin and Russian politicians. The rest of the world was out of step, and apparently wouldn't realize their error and catch up to reality until after that key moment in 2022, when just about everyone except US intelligence agencies didn't really believe the invasion was going to happen.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37374013

Also worth noting that it is strongly in his interest to craft and filter his public dialogue with the interests of the Russian state in mind. It is a basic fact of his existence, whether it is something he thinks about explicitly and often or not. Of course Russia isn't going to execute him or throw in in a gulag, since he is more valuable to them as a political set-piece that somewhat undermines America's moral high ground. However, that doesn't mean they can't lean on him considerably and make his life severely unpleasant in myriad subtle ways. There is no way he isn't acutely aware of Russia's reputation for brutal coercive tactics regarding their political enemies and targets, especially domestic ones.

He is completely at their mercy and he knows it. What is he going to do, cry out to the world that Russia is hounding and harassing him, or otherwise making his already beleaguered situation even less tenable? First of all, who is going to care that can do anything about it, second, it will delight people he almost certainly views as his enemy for him to make any such pleas and thirdly, it starts down a path of no return to start calling out Russia for abuses while you are stuck there with no allies and no way out.

Being on reasonably amicable terms with the power-elite in Russia is pretty much the last, best hope he has in this world. Whether consciously or not, the severe ramifications of burning that bridge are going to weigh on every decision and proclamation he makes. Of course he may always consider this effect and choose actions that upset Russia/Putin without regard for personal consequences. But it becomes increasingly easy to justify the path that doesn't lead to the complete crushing of your spirit the longer you have lived your life staring down the barrel of 5 or 10 different shotguns trained right between your eyes.

And of course it gets easier still when you feel wronged and martyred by the enemy of your friend, even if that friend is born purely out of necessity and circumstance. Anyway, all that is to say, thought I am grateful for his attempt to protect American citizens' constitutional rights and hold the government that professes to fight always for freedom to a higher standard... I have to take anything he has said in recent years as extremely biased and a product of "soft" but very serious coercion (from multiple fronts).

> Arrogance does not disprove earnest belief.

I'm not saying I'm absolutely positively 100% sure that he intentionally shills for Russia, but consider that he has been in Russia for quite some time now but only got the passport after he started tweeting from pro-Russian angle.

> But many others said similar things.

Yeah, but I kinda expected more from him than "US bad, then Russia must be good".

> Did he say anything about the war in 18 months?

I'm not aware of anything after his initial "okay, I won't talk about it anymore since you ghouls are concern-trolling me after I got this one wrong", but I'm not really tracking his hot takes on social media anymore. I think he recently switched to well-articulated and insightful commentaries on US preparing to attack China or something...