I’m not disputing that the US government thinks helping Ukraine fight Russia is in the US national interest. My opinion is different, and so is Mearsheimer’s. Which is why the quoted text from Mearsheimer’s book isn’t a contradiction: inaction isn’t appeasement if the aggression isn’t infringing on core US national interests.
OK? I’m not doing that.
We’re not going to play this game. Every time you do this from now on, it will be ignored.
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Right, you’re not going to get into any specifics. I’m very wrong about many many things. How do we know this? Because you keep repeating it. Very compelling.
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@MrWookie you have a warning for a personal attack for saying SenorKeeed doesn’t care about Ukrainian lives.
i’m bad at spelling but im pretty good at judging russian imperialism. so we are even on ignorance
How much does one really care about ongoing genocide, if he thinks that the US or anyone else in the west should not have gotten involved at all?
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SK cares about the Ukrainian people so deeply that he’s willing to do absolutely nothing to help them.
Wars have often been sold on humanitarian grounds, but if that’s the actual rationale of the US government for waging this proxy war, that’ll be a first. And if a positive humanitarian outcome is the actual effect of the intervention, another first.
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So kosovo was?
For one, doing the right thing for the wrong reasons can still be the right thing. For two, the US can have more than one motivation.
And I’ve got US intervention in WWII as a net positive at the very least.
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My point is that humanitarian justifications for war generally turn out to be propaganda that sells the war to a compassionate public and obfuscates the real rationale. Here I think that the real rationale for the war is to weaken and harm Russia.
So what? Is the genocide a lie? Or is it not being stopped as the Ukrainians recapture their territory?
And for two, I think it’s absolutely fine to want to weaken and harm aggressive states that instigate wars of aggression and that commit war crimes and genocide, both to teach those states a lesson and as a lesson to other would-be aggressors.
If Russia is upset by all the weakening that is happening, they should just go the fuck home, and it’ll stop.
I don’t think that US support for Ukraine has anything to do with concern for Russian war crimes.
OK, but since this is the realism thread, let’s talk about the epistemologically knowable. Is there genocide, and is it being stopped? Did the Russians commit war crimes? And for one moral question, does Russia deserve punishment for those things?
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to a degree, that’s why the west failed to react to crimea by arming ukraine. and why they are supporting ukrainian military in donbass and in 2022. the conflict became violent, with thousands of dead, and millions displaced.
Do you believe it is morally questionable for people with a legitimate humanitarian justification for war to ally themselves with people who have a fake humanitarian justification for war?
No? But that doesn’t have anything to do with me here. I don’t question that most people are supporting Ukrainians out of a genuine concern for their plight. That doesn’t change the core fact that I don’t see any compelling US national interest at stake in Ukraine. And since I think that’s a necessary prerequisite for getting involved in a war, I don’t think the US should have gotten involved in the war.
You’ve been given numerous reasons for the US to be interested on multiple occasions, and you just don’t acknowledge them.
I mean, the genocide itself is a legitimate reason. You just imagine that it’s not real based on nothing but your gut.