[flagged]
What would stop other nations from pursuing their own nukes if that's the case? It also would make any military alliance such as NATO moot, there are only 3 nuclear powers in the alliance, any other country in the alliance which gets invaded by a nuclear power wouldn't be able to call for help since we want to avoid nuclear confrontation.
This only spirals more and more, countries without nukes are at a massive disadvantage, they will naturally seek nukes to protect themselves, just increasing the odds that a nuclear exchange will happen by sheer statistics.
> This is why I will be voting for the candidate who was not endorsed by Dick Cheney.
Proving my point that you don't think very rationally at all.
I'm claiming that continuing the proxy war between a jingoistic US government and a (probably) jingoistic Russian government could spiral into a nuclear exchange, and that the US government should be less jingoistic. Being jingoistic doesn't reduce the chance of nuclear war.
I doubt we're going to convince each other, so I would challenge readers of the two claims to decide for themselves what makes more sense for preventing nuclear armageddon.
The "long term" vision you're proposing is a decades long entrenched conflict with multiple nuclear states. Literally every single foreign policy disaster of the past 40 years has been orchestrated by following this exact playbook, by the exact same people.
The "long term" vision I propose is normalizing relation with these nuclear states and we do business with them all without telling everyone how to live.
This is actually how long term peace is achieved. We shouldn't be the world's policeman. We do much better as the world's businessman.
You are only considering a narrow point in time, think ahead in terms of 20-50 years the repercussions of allowing an annexation to happen uncontested.
Right now it's Ukraine, let's say next is Iran acquiring nuclear weapons over the next 20 years and moving towards Basra in Iraq + Kuwait for their oil fields, in this scenario they are a nuclear power, arming themselves for 20 years (and they already have ballistic missiles), to avoid a nuclear escalation between Iran and USA + Israel a negotiated peace happens. The Saudis see that happening and now they feel the need to arm themselves with a nuclear weapon, just in case Iran thinks of continuing this campaign.
Multiply this across many other nations under similar low-level confrontations, African nations fighting for water sources, one of them arms themselves with a nuclear weapon (let's say Sudan) to have leverage to control a massively important water source, what's going to stop others around it to not arm themselves (like Eritrea) to not get invaded?
It's a spiral, the moment you allow a nuclear power to use that status to force the hand of an opposing nation at war you open a can of worms. Since 1945 the world has been trying to control proliferation through other means, wars of annexation have been shunned, you really don't want that to come back into a world armed with nuclear weapons.
I don't have an answer, I don't think anyone does. Putin has changed the world with this invasion, you are choosing to vote for Trump on a flimsy argument, you don't even know what the fuck he will do since he's a massive liar. On top of that you're jeopardising your country's democracy based on wishful thinking of what you project Trump will do, it's all from your head, not from his words.
You also have an example of what happens when some countries are more powerful than others: the veto at the UN Security Council. The UN is essentially unable to do anything that is against the interest of US, Russia or China (it just happens that France and the United Kingdom usually agree with the US). Imagine US, Russia and China having the same power but with 1) the actual ability to wipe enemies off Earth, instead of just blocking UN processes; 2) anybody able to join the club "just" by investing into nuclear proliferation. Doesn't seem good.
China also used it a lot more sparingly than Russia and the United States, I must say, but probably that's also because some China issues don't even reach the Security Council.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-revokes-russias-r...
Since we're off-topic already can I just emphasize this point? Pretty much everybody I know who has or will vote for Trump is like this. For example, I knew one guy who voted for Trump because he thought Trump would legalize marijuana.
If Trump actually liked working and writing laws, he'd have probably legalized marijuana.
His second term will be filled with fanatics rather than Bush-era appointees.
Trump's running as hard as he can (which isn't very, he isn't convincing) from the proudly published (and terrifying!) Project 2025 stuff, but they aren't running from him, and there are reasons for that.
Dick Cheney is voting for Harris, that's the equivalent of Norman Osborn voting for Peter Parker.
I don't think he'll succeed that quick, but that's way better than pushing for further conflict.
And again, under his administration we saw more peace than any president since at least Clinton.
Over a bunch of neoliberal theories proposed by the architects of the last number of catastrophic wars? No thanks.
The left/Democrats/progressives used to be anti-war. But they've been entirely co-opted as a result of Trump derangement syndrome.
He's more jingoistic than Dick Cheney?
At least Trump's lies have killed less people than Victoria Nuland's
The world is not black and white.
And that also gives you the right to choose what part of the grayscale you want to be, good on you!
It's difficult to say how you can stop such wars if you don't know what the war is.
When you start getting attacked personally, you know whoever's attacking you is losing the argument.
Short story: current regime in the Russian Federation quite definitely is, may more so in fact, and has fascist, revanchist, genocidal ideology to boot. You may want to look further into its history (and that of the Russian/Soviet empires, which it sees itself as the natural successor to), and into the writings/thinking of the folks the helm of that regime in more detail sometime.
Sabotaging negotiations in Turkey
That's a myth, as you will easy verify for yourself by doing adequate research into the topic.
Forget about Dick Cheney. Instead look into who's been drip-feeding you false narratives like the above, and why.
Davyd Arakhhamia, Ukraine’s chief negotiator at Istanbul, said "[Boris] Johnson brought two simple messages to Kyiv. The first is that Putin is a war criminal; he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they [the NATO powers] are not"
We've all been drip-fed by the military industrial complex since at least 9/11 that war is necessary. Look what it got us- millions dead in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza. Not to mention our countless soldiers killed and injured on the line of duty.
It's evil, no I will not forget Dick Cheney.
Rather, it's a characterization of what he said -- whose original provenance seems to be difficult to track down, and there are conflicting versions available, which of course got copy-pasted all over in both left- and right-wing outlets (as well as by the Kremlin of course). But both Johnson and Arakhmiya have strenuously denied this characterization in any case, when directly asked about the topic:
“This is nothing more than nonsense and Russian propaganda,” Johnson said in an interview with the Times.
His words were confirmed by the head of the pro-presidential Servant of the People party faction, David Arakhamia, who headed the Ukrainian delegation at the Ukraine-Russia talks in Istanbul in March 2022. ... Arakhamia denied that the Ukrainian delegation was allegedly ready to sign such a document, and Johnson stopped Kyiv.
It's evil, no I will not forget Dick Cheney.
You can build an anti-shrine to him on your bedroom wall, and throw darts at it every night if you want to. The unfortunate point here is that it seems you've allowed him to become a bogeyman, just like the big bad old MIC. And when I'm saying "forget about him", I don't mean in the literal sense. Of course we have to remember assholes like Cheney and the evil they did, what Eisenhower said way back when and all that.
But the bigger point is: that doesn't mean we have to let these ghosts not only dictate our narratives, but completely override our understanding of events in the present moment. More to the point -- if you'd like to yourself a huge favor, and just forget about all these good/evil narratives altogether. Instead focus on the facts of who said what, and when, and what really happened as a result.
Which in the case of the current Ukraine war, really aren't that complicated or hard to figure out.
At some point a name was put to the anonymous source, could be one of the many journalists who have investigated this quote, as you yourself admit there are lots of sources on this topic.
But that single quote aside, it's not like they're saying this in secret. Even Victoria Nuland and Foreign Affairs said some version of the same thing.
Nuland says the West didn't want to basically disarm Ukraine, and Foreign Affairs did an investigation of the negotiations (Ukrainska Pravda's investigation was better) and said the West didn't want to provide security guarantees to Ukraine.
And they all say it out loud that they don't want give an inch.
Good/evil moral compass is enormously important, especially when faced with war. It's precisely this flippant view towards morality that leads normal people to justify horrific acts of violence.
Murder, war, invasion bad.
Family, health, love, business good.
It really is that simple and the moment you stray from that, you stray towards everything we want to avoid.
I understand there are moments you MUST go to war. If I were Ukrainian I would be 100% on the war effort.
But I'm not Ukrainian. I'm American. Russia didn't attack America and I have a say in where my tax dollars go.
The claim that the West forced Ukraine to back out of the talks with Russia is baseless.
All I can say at this point, and which I feel I'm entitled to, is: "Now let that sink in". (Can't delve into Nuland angle right now, maybe another day).
You're pushing forward a neoliberal wet dream that he wants the whole eastern bloc.