What would you do? Install a favorable dictator? Thanks to warmongering there isn't much of a diplomatic route to peace where we still need it. Petty ulterior motives held by world 'leaders' have made it hard.
"Controversy surrounds that appointment, since it was alleged - first in a Tortoise Media podcast and then in the Sunday Times - that the peerage was granted despite a warning from the security services that it posed a national security risk."
People were very happy to overlook Russian misbehavior so long as the money kept coming.
Some form of action should have been taken when they invaded Crimea in 2014 and Georgia 2008. But even in retrospect its hard to say what except shutting down Nordstream and stopping investments. I still find it difficult for Europe to accept going to war with Russia over Crimea, but I guess this timeline is worse. Sanctions has limits, like we see with North Korea and Venezuela. The worst part of this timeline is that we guarantee that the only way a autocrat is safe, is when he has nukes.
> What would you do? Install a favorable dictator?
Oh, there's a lot between not doing anything at all and repeating the mistakes from Iranian days:
- provide economic / humanitarian aid contingent on progress in democratic values and actually audit where the money goes. This ended being effective around 2010 when China began hitting the global stage though.
- supporting countries or democratic, pro-Western parties/groups that are threatened by an aggressor (e.g. every former Soviet state)
- when supposed "allies" end up funding our enemies (e.g. Saudi-Arabia, who not just financed Bin Laden and is the main ideological driver in fundamentalist madrasas (religious schools) all over the world, thus being the main contributor to Islamist terrorism), cut them off. Hell the Saudis butchered a journalist (a father of U.S. citizens) in an embassy and we didn't do shit. Instead, we allow Saudi-Arabia and Qatar to host fucking World Cups. What a bunch of bullshit.
- aggressive, actually effective sanctions instead of just making the lives of a few oligarchs a tiny bit more difficult
- increase our own security posture in terms of military and provide a credible retaliation threat towards any potential aggressor
- invest into academic research on other countries. That one got shamefully disbanded after the collapse of the USSR and the shift towards prioritizing STEM over humanities - we now lack the academic capacity for actually understanding other countries or provide actual evidence-backed advice to politicians. Instead we got completely dependent on think tanks and consultancies.
- respond in-kind to Russia and China banning Western activities: they effectively force pro-democracy organizations to close shop? Fine, no more Chinese police stations in Western countries. They engage in cyberwarfare? Fine, we cut them off from the Internet. They refuse to allow Western countries fair and equal access to their markets? Fine, we ban investments from China and force-divest existing investments, and raise tariffs on their exports.
The last part is the easiest... over decades we believed in "change by trade", we hoped that they would become similar to us culturally. That worked in certain areas - McDonald's and Coca-Cola show that - but politically, we didn't give a slightest interest in both countries getting ever more authoritarian. And now it's biting us in our collective arses.
> supporting countries or democratic, pro-Western parties/groups that are threatened by an aggressor (e.g. every former Soviet state)
Every one? I am from one of those states, and most of them are even worse democracy-wise than Russia.
The only thing we have over Russia is not going after neighbors' territories, and even that's debatable (see conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan vs Tajikistan).
Your governments do overlook serious human rights violations, though, when it suits them. We had widespread protests in January 2022 that were brutally suppressed by the government, which ended up killing more than 300 protesters (that's according to official figures that are thought to be undercounted).
No fucks given by Western propaganda or government talking heads because several European, US, and Canadian companies have massive investments in our oil, gas, and minerals industry.
About six months ago Macron visited Astana to beg for uranium fuel after France got kicked off from Niger, and a group of political activists tried to seize the rare moment and did everything they could to meet him for a few minutes and talk about human rights violations in our country. You can probably guess the result of that endeavor.
One of the major gas projects (managed by Shell IIRC) ends in 2030, and I have a strong suspicion "human rights violations" will become a permanent theme in our relations right after that moment.
> Every one? I am from one of those states, and most of them are even worse democracy-wise than Russia.
I agree, and part of the cause is that us Western countries don't give a shit. We don't even give a shit about those countries right on our border like Ukraine or Bosnia.
> No fucks given by Western propaganda or government talking heads because several European, US, and Canadian companies have massive investments in our oil, gas, and minerals industry.
Or because they were bought off such as in the case with the massive corruption by Azerbaijan.
> About six months ago Macron visited Astana to beg for uranium fuel after France got kicked off from Niger, and a group of political activists tried to seize the rare moment and did everything they could to meet him for a few minutes and talk about human rights violations in our country. You can probably guess the result of that endeavor.
My opinion of Macron is probably just as low as yours, the only thing the guy can do is talk. All talk, no act.
People talk too easily about countries as if they are a person. I have lived in the east, I have lived in the west: every actual person has problems, everybody thinks their problems should come first, too many people have the tendency to think "outside influence" is very strong and lots of people think they have "the solution" which is different than what their government does.
At the end of the day I think the (boring) truth is that many countries end acting similarly to the average citizen. Including their fears, stupidities, insecurities and knowledge.
Yes, "the west of Europe" does not care as much as some people think about "the east of Europe", same way "the east of Europe" does not care that much about I don't know, Yemen, Myanmar or Sudan (just to name places with horrible conflicts that nobody seems to care about, unless they delay their Amazon package by a couple of days...).
Eh, it wasn't as much a jab against France or Macron in particular, as just an example of the general policy. Pretty much all of Europe (and US, and Canada) behave in a similar way and see us as a well of natural resources to be scooped out dry and then thrown aside. Some people here call it a new form of colonialism. Every country follows their interests and that's fine, as long as we don't hear lectures about this or that thing while those same lecturers behave in a hypocritical way contrary to what they're saying.
Edit: as opposed to China and Russia that pour serious money into large infrastructure projects like the new Silk Road. Russia has only started doing this recently, though. People have their reservations about those countries, but can't help but see the difference between e.g. China that builds railroads and power plants, and Western countries that only suck out money, paying tiny salaries to local workers and circumventing things like air pollution regulations.
Well, the EU could have put a ban on selling riot control gear to Putin's forces back in 2012 when he used it to suppress massive pro-democracy protests in Moscow, not in October of 2022 like they actually did. This set the tone for everything that happened afterwards.
I said this already under a (now flagged and dead) comment, but it's worth repeating — "your" (not your personally) one-sided propaganda and continuing support for Putin (if indirect) have made "you" lose whatever anti-war and pro-West opposition there was in Russia. I only wish we'd seen how convenient Putin is for "the West" a decade earlier. This was particularly obvious in June 2023 during the short and failed putsch of Wagner PMC. If you care at all, you can dig into my comment history from the beginning of 2022 and see how my own opinion has changed. It's a pretty typical example, I think.
Things I would not do. Basically anything that Joe did, do the opposite.
In 2014, when Joe was VP and lead person on Ukraine, I would not have refused to give lethal aid to Ukraine. And when Ukraine used our training to try to take back Crimea, I wouldn't have chastised the Ukraine government for trying to resist Putin.
When Putin built up forces on Ukraine's border to restart hostilities in 2021/2022, I would not have cowardly evacuated all US personnel from the country. I would have surged more in to deter.
When Putin restarted invasion in 2022, I would not have conditioned lethal aid on not shooting across border, tying Ukraine's hands. Instead, I would have conditioned it on attacking any military or military supporting targets anywhere in the theatre of war. Since Russia has defined the boundaries of this as well within their country, they only have themselves to blame for how deep these weapons would reach into Russia. Then we wouldn't have the ridiculous situation we just had where Putin was able to get his forces ready for the Kharkiv offensive in plain view, but Ukraine was not allowed by Joe to attack them until they actually started crossing the border.
