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Comment by thasfTR | Hacker News Reader

Things were fine in Germany under the moderate Merkel government, which emphasized deescalation with Russia until the Cowboys Lindsey Graham, Victoria Nuland and John McCain came along and fanned the flames.

After the illegal and horrible Russian invasion (which was provoked nonetheless) the EU got progressively drawn into the US proxy war. They were criticized for not doing enough in 2022 by the US. In 2025 on the other hand they were criticized for wanting to prolong the war by Trump.

The EU pays the bill, the US reaps its benefits from weakening Russia, which is the entire goal of the slow moving war of attrition. Successes include US dominance in Syria, attempted dominance in Venezuela and possible Greenland.

Ruining the EU's social systems will achieve nothing. This is an energy problem and the US tries to control all choke points of energy delivery to the EU.

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> Things were fine in Germany under the moderate Merkel government

Disagree completely.

I would put significant part of the blame for the whole Ukraine disaster on western reaction in 2014, when Crimea was annexed (thats not to say that Putin isnt an imperialistic asshole, just that this could have been avoided regardless).

The "Merkel policy" (link EU/Russia by trade to prevent war) is a solid long-term plan, but the EU needed to demonstrate willingness to reduce that trade (even when it hurt themselves) to punish expansionism/destabilizing behavior.

It failed to do this almost completely. This made it clear to anyone that a (successful) annexation of the whole Ukraine would have gone (mostly) unpunished.

In this case, I blame the Merkel government for putting the financial well-being of its citizens over ethical principles, but a big part of the problem is that most voters are too stupid and uninformed to even realize that such a tradeoff is being made anyway, and react to economical signals only.

> In this case, I blame the Merkel government for putting the financial well-being of its citizens over ethical principles,

Its much worse than that in terms of realpolitik: the gains were short-term, the costs will be paid for over decades, and disproportionately allocated to germanys eastern neighbors like the Poles and Estonians who are at increased risk of Russian aggression.

It really was such a bad tradeoff and I don't think this is hindsight: Russia is basically doing what is has been doing for centuries.

Complete failure of the German political system between 1990-2020+

Ukraine itself traded with Russia from 2024-2025 and collected transit fees for Russian gas.

Nuland and others were active in Ukraine before and during the Maidan revolution.

But please, continue to blame Germany, blow up its pipelines, send 1,000,000 refugees who collect social security (the topic of this subthread, do the slash-social-security hawks here want to evict the Ukrainians and send them to the front lines)?

> which was provoked nonetheless

This is misinformation.

> the US proxy war

This is misinformation.

Use your favorite search engine to find the "rand corporation overextending and unbalancing russia" paper. There are dozens of similar papers, also from Brookings: "path to persia"

By the way, the Trump administration also perpetuated this "misinformation" when they pretended to seek peace in January 2025.

> the "rand corporation overextending and unbalancing russia" paper.

This document does not say what you said it says.

> also from Brookings: "path to persia"

This document is about Iran, and has nothing to do with Ukraine.

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