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Comment by ossobuco | Hacker News Reader

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Mate, we tried that for 20 years. And in especially in the later years, against better judgement and forgiving of A LOT of bad faith behaviour from the Russian government. And an outright dictatorship in the EU? lolno.

The EU wanted to embrace Russia, desperately so.

Many Europeans live with this notions "it's better if we all stop fighting and get along". That was certainly the prevalent attitude when I was growing up in the 90s in a post-cold war world. And they're right too, it is better for everyone. But some people aren't interested in what's better for everyone or even their country, they're only interested in what's best for them. Very sad a small group of assholes can just mess things up for so many people, but here we are.

I think that's the hard lessons many Europeans have learned over the last few years, or are in the process of learning (myself included).

>Mate, we tried that for 20 years.

We've been doing everything but sustaining neutral relations with Russia. Our foreign policy has been explicitly anti-Russian for decades. The Ukraine war is the blowback.

https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1ghs32...

Like every dictator before him, Putin has fashioned a victimhood narrative. Trump does the same, as did Castro, Mao, Stalin, Hitler, etc. etc. etc. All these people always claim to be the victim.

There are so many things to comment on in that video and I really don't have the time or interest. but I will comment on one thing: the US bombed Yugoslavia to stop a campaign of genocide.

"Never again" also applies to the Balkans.

Europe and the US did everything they could to NOT intervene. If anything, I think it's an embarrassment we didn't do more sooner. You could argue a little bit about whether it really should have been NATO (rather than the EU or US) that undertook the campaign, and details like that. But I don't think it's very important to the of it.

Of course, that is left out by Sachs. He's repeating a fake victimhood narrative stringed together by half-truths, exaggerations, strategic forgetfulness, and outright nonsense.

Your comment really underscores the issue with the NATO project as a supposed defensive alliance. You think if there is a moral reason for doing something, then that renders all other constraints moot. But because intervening in Yugoslavia was deemed the moral course of action, that shouldn't indicate to Putin or anyone else that NATO will act offensively if they deem some act moral coded. But NATO doesn't get to decide when its actions are precedent-setting and when they aren't. NATO's own history undermines the claim that it is purely a defensive alliance.

That you outright ignore that there was an objective real genocide campaign going on says a lot. The notion they attack nations for all sorts of dubious reasons is just bollocks. This is no better than "remember when the Americans invaded Europe in 1944?!" The context matters.

I'm not ignoring it, it's just that it doesn't alter the calculus for every other nation who might be the target of NATO at some point in the future. NATO only needs to engage in an offensive action once for the precedent to be set permanently. How justified the action was just doesn't matter.

It also underscores the point that there is no objective moral standard to which we can appeal to simultaneously allow an intervention without also permanently altering the power balance in relevant regions. The US right now says genocide is beyond the pale thus warranting intervention. In the future they may say cracking down on political dissent is beyond the pale thus warranting intervention in Russia. Moral impetus tend to be subject to scope creep at the behest of current national interest.

That’s ridiculously naive. This WAS the path we were on. But EU didn’t reject Russia. Russia rejected EU. EU liberal democratic culture was a threat to Putins power. He did not want Russia or their immediate neighbours (which could influence Russia) to get any ideas about liberal democratic values.

I agree that bringing Russia into EU - or at least being a good friend of EU - is the path to peace and safety. But EU can’t do this if Russia doesn’t want any part of it. In hindsight Russias economic integration was mainly an attempt to make EU think twice about responding when Russia harasses its neighbours.

Russia is an imperial state with imperial ambitions. Every day on Russian state TV (with Putins implicit approval) they’re talking about how they will bomb and or take over Germany again. That the Baltic states and Ukraine rightfully belong to them. That Ukraine is full of nazis. How can you just ignore that and think everything will be all right if we just asked Russia very kindly to be friends again?

And no, this has nothing to do with NATO expansion. Russia has nukes. NATO is not a credible military threat to Russia. Putin knew VERY well that his actions would push Finland and Sweden into NATO which completely invalidates the idea that he cares at all about NATO. You know… except that getting Ukraine into NATO would have removed the option of annexing Ukraine territory which was obviously unacceptable.

Lol. Yeah well if we are willing to trade our last shreds of integrity and capitulate that dictatorship is the winning strategy then sure. I mean, not to bring WW2 in the discussion, but back in that time people thought giving them what they want would lead to peace.

These things also span decades or centuries so I think there will be time when Russia and the West will be closer again. It's just they have to stop their imperialism and grabbing land. Think they have enough already.

Giving big Chamberlain energy.

Giving big history ignorant energy.

Yeah right, no sane person in the EU wants to be in any union with those thugs.

Why not? We're already in union with the US, which also invades other countries when it feels like it, and nobody sees that as a problem. If anything, we should get along better with Russia because we share frontiers.

You’re getting there! If we were independent from the US right now, we would not be calling for a union right after they invaded a country on our doorsteps.

The US does not want to conquer Europe. That's evidenced by the fact that they basically conquere and re-conquered (from the Germans) France, Italy and most of Germany in 1944-45, and then left, leaving those countries be. In the same time, Russia re-conquered Poland, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, East Germany - and never left. They were happy occuping those areas.

> and most of Germany in 1944-45, and then left

Then left? Well, considering the US has like 40 military bases in Germany, like almost 50.000 stationed personnel there, and there are still some restrictions on what Germany can or cannot do, I won't say they left. Heck, they can also bug the chancellor's phone for decades or blow up their energy infrastructure and nothing happens when it comes to light.

I'm sure Russia would be more than satisfied if they could have kept all of that in their former satellite states including Ukraine.

Left in the sense that Germans were allowed to govern themselves. Whereas countries reconquered by Russia were ruled by local cronies whose loyalty was to Moscow as much as to their home country. And, if those guys tried getting some independent ideas, Russian tanks rolled in to remove them from power (Budapest 1956, Prague 1968).

That's true, however we don't know what would happen if the German people elected somebody contrary to the interests of the US. To this date, no German government has implemented any "independent ideas" that bothered the US. When they tried, like with the NS2, they were warned of the consequences, and ultimately agreed to comply.

Germany or France didn't go to the Iraq war as a part of the "coalition of the willing", and said would vote against it in the UN. If Poland tried doing that to the USSR, there'd be a huge risk of Russian tanks in Warsaw and a government change. In fact, almost all major decisions Polish authorities made had to factor in the risk of Russian backlash and invasion. For example, they decided to institute martial law in 1981 and squash Solidarity, because they the alternative (Solidarity squashed by Russian tanks) would be much more bloody.

> and nobody sees that as a problem.

Actually, many many people see that as a problem

I do! I'd much rather see that than a general war with Russia, thank you.

Only the insane believe this war could end in anything but extinction or decades of misery and conflict.

They're large by territory, but small in terms of economy. Russians put a lot of weight on the former, but it's not very relevant in this day and age, especially considering how uninhabitable a huge chunk of it is.

In any case, I'm surprised this is an issue for you, considering this war revealed how inept Russia's military actually is.

I never felt the need to become friends with the biggest bully in high school. Why start now?

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