Less people being willing to go fight and die in pointless wars is at least a small positive sign for society.
It's easy to have no military, as long as you don't mind being completely controlled by a country with one.
TL;DR: Costa Rica has no threatening armies around it, so they don't need one.
There's also a bit about Panama being chill (possibly because of all the business generated by the canal), and Nicaragua basically held in place by international law.
Not being prepared to be violent makes you harmless. Having the capacity for violence and choosing not to use it makes you peaceful.
If you speak softly, but don't carry a big stick, then you are just speaking softly.
Might might not make right, but it determines who gets to make the rules.
In order to have a capable military, it needs to fight wars. Hence all the countries joining the US in Afghanistan to achieve valuable on the field training.
What use is a big stick, other than intimidation, when you just carry it around, not knowing how to actually use it?
Future recruits will also need to be good at E-sports, as they'll increasingly be in charge of drone operations.
As per North Korea, they were able to come up with 1 million artillery shells for their friends the Russians, while the West couldn't do the same for their friends the Ukrainians [1], I'd say that North Korea got the better of the West here.
[1] https://unn.ua/en/news/it-seems-that-north-korea-is-a-more-e...
At the moment it's not NKs shells that keep the war rolling but the huge Russian population which allows for a seemingly endless supply of corpses to be.
Those foreigners are negligible compared to all those actual Russians.
When people say "Russian" they have an expectation. What is the difference between these foreigners and there ethnic groups in your eyes?
>They surely have Russian documents and were allowed to vote in Russia for their president.
I'm not sure if you were trying to be funny but you are.
Their nationality, obviously.
Additionally, in this conflict, often the fact that the foreigners have a choice to join the war.
> I'm not sure if you were trying to be funny but you are.
I'm aware of the diplomatically said, "flawed democracy" which is the Russian political system, but the fact remains valid.
Depends what's the most important missing item on Ukraine's wish list; Ukraine did get rocket artillery, SAM systems, tanks, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
To me, it suggests that shells are something that NK knows it can spare (and the same for all the stuff everyone else collectively is providing Ukraine, it's stuff the donors know they can spare).
I'm not sure what you're arguing here. Are you saying that the US has historically been taking a neutral position? I suppose they haven't been prosecuting any particular vision with their pointless wars, but that seems a bit weird.
But no question not having any power to back up their whims will defang the US and make them victims of external actors. Hopefully the threat of this happening is enough to reign in the warmongers in the US government and make them negotiate towards a pro-US policy instead of the anti-random-victims strategy to date.
In a war the strongest party also usually wins, so it's totally rational to not incur the opportunity costs of risking one's life by joining a war.
Left alone, communism eventually fails in almost every case. China being the main exception but that's because we pump a half a trillion dollars into their economy every year buying cheap goods.
Before that their economy was a complete non-event. All of their rapid growth really started in the mid-90’s, and the West started paying attention even later.
We collectively agreed on a national jobs program (via the military), so we should consider redirecting a significant portion of those jobs to a national jobs program that actually helps with domestic infrastructure with an emphasis on learning skills that translate into private sector opportunities.
Then let those that do want to fight be the ones to sign up, and make more effective use of them. I'm still not a fan of the military industrial complex but national defense will always be necessary and should be staffed for defense rather than just keeping people off the dole.
Similarly so much of Russia's current war propaganda is repurposed anti-war themes from Iraq and Afghanistan. The US has screwed around aggressively intervening around the globe for so long, that it's all too easy to pigeonhole what actually appears to be reasonable support for a would-be ally into the same bag. And now the chief opponents of such aid are actually the same party that led us into those useless wars! "Can't get fooled again"
Those wars really were a total waste of our country's resources, international stature, and so much of our future. It was seen by so many at the time, including our allies. But the war boosters ruled the day, drunk on corporate/nationalist propaganda and those fucking yellow "support our troops" bracelets, as if the soldiers coming home wouldn't end up being some of the strongest anti-war voices. And now here we are.
This seems to imply that Soviet intervention into an American war declared over the Cuban Missile Crisis would have been fairly characterized as "reasonable support for a would-be [in this case, already formalized] ally".
Having a strong military may result in fewer deaths.
Russia's human waves were just means to reduce the prison population: practical stalinism 101. They are phasing out prisoner benefits as the recruiting pool is getting smaller. Also there is an increased chance Putin might order be mass mobilization after he wins the elections in May.
Increased but still highly unlikely. The Russian military inducts ~260,000 men annually just from conscription. Now that the Ukrainians have exhausted their supplies of ammunition, manpower, and funding, it's unlikely that the AFU can sustain its ability to attrite Russian manpower faster than it can be replaced.
A surprisingly straightforward article from Xinhua correspondent Zhang Zhang:
"The central locations involved in the drill are the Baltic nations, identified by NATO as particularly vulnerable to a possible Russian assault. Other areas include Norway and Romania, situated on the outskirts of the alliance; Poland on the alliance's eastern flank; and Germany as a central hub for reinforcements."
https://english.news.cn/20240128/95fbdec4ab7b4285b8f017ffeb1...
This is a very wrong take.
A big continental war like this one in Ukraine is fought with artillery and with enough men capable of holding the territory (already under control or conquered), i.e. the story of WW1 and the WW2 (when it came to the Eastern Front). You don't have that, you lose. Trouble for Ukraine (and for the West supporting Ukraine) is that they're running out of artillery shells and they're running out of Ukrainian men.
I guess the Germans or the Brits didn’t get the memo that the Greek aviation would be enough of an opposing force.
Why there’s not more Western defense of Ukraine I can’t explain except for present greed over future problem solving, but nothing is that surprising.