I acknowledge them, I just don’t agree with them.
That’s… not how realism works. That’s not how any of this works. It seems like your base ideology isn’t realism, it’s that the US is wrong.
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How does realism work?
I mean, one important part is:
The primary concern of all states is power and security
And it’s pretty easy to see that weakening Russia furthers US power and security. You reject this out of hand, however, and keep telling us how little Ukraine matters, even while granting that Russia wants Ukraine to further its own power and security, as if that doesn’t come at US expense.
I absolutely reject that out of hand. Russia being a little stronger or a little weaker has zero impact on the security of the US. The US is an incredibly secure country, and Ukraine being in Russia’s sphere of influence rather than the Western sphere of influence doesn’t effect US security one bit. And this intense proxy war in Ukraine makes the US less secure since it raises the risk of direct confrontation with the Russians, which could easily turn into a catastrophic nuclear war.
So having another country in the US orbit…doesn’t increase US power? It’s not potentially more dollars and weapons in NATO? It’s not a new site for bases to project power?
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Not appreciably. Ukraine has the same GDP as Alabama. The US doesn’t need to run every corner of the world.
This is where it becomes clear that you’re not a realist, but an isolationist or simply anti-US. Realism doesn’t care about the comparative size of the orbits of Russia and the USA.
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I’ve said I’m not a realist!
You’ve just hitched your wagon to one? What is your overarching theory here other than USA bad?
I feel like I’ve made my opinions quite clear, read the thread.
Wow.
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Although circling back to this, I guess it makes your beliefs intellectually consistent, in that perhaps Germany’s invasion of most of the rest of the world was in fact due to the rest of the world making it fear for it’s safety and encroaching upon traditional Prussian territories and spheres of influence? And in turn I suppose the U.S. intervention in preventing Germany from conquering the world was not justified as a result? If that was your position then I suppose I could see you stating that no US intervention has ever had a humanitarian positive result, and I could see how you could arrive at the same conclusion with Ukraine.
Were there any humanitarian reasons for fighting the Civil War?
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Sure.
So the exceptions to my probably too over-broad statement might be the Civil War and world war 2. Civil war was kind of the reverse of the normal war propaganda, in that it was mostly about slavery the whole time but Lincoln had to insist that it wasn’t. And then WW2, which was already the biggest humanitarian catastrophe in world history when the US entered. Was it better that the US fight and win WW2 rather that some other outcome? Yeah, sure. But if you look at the history of US intervention you’re not going to see many good humanitarian outcomes. There’s a lot of humanitarian catastrophes though.
Kosovo
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this doesn’t even account for personnel losses.
