Oh everyone else understood this is what you meant.
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There is tons of information out there about what’s going on in Xinjiang, all you have to do is look, I’m not going to debate this, it was a bad idea popping into this thread
Your posting was fine. Victor is trolling.
Would you say the countries would… fall like dominoes?
There is a fair amount of electioneering going on with the China rhetoric at the moment, the incumbent conservatives are in trouble and one of their strategies is smashing the “Fear” button.
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Many people are saying that this is one of the best theories of all time!
That the NY Times dug deep enough to fabricate the story of Wang Yongzhi 王勇智 is so amazing that we ought to consider resistance to their lies futile.
NY Times (my words): Wang was a high-level local party official in Yarkand assigned to carry out the Strike Hard campaign. Eventually he came to find it ridiculous and counter-productive to have such a high quota for detaining Uyghurs that the policy was to detain anyone who owned a Quran. He was fired from his post, kicked out of the party, disappeared and “gave” a confession that has been sent out as a warning to other cadres.
Chinese articles you can literally find via Google: Wang was a drunk and lavishly spent public funds on food for himself. He also, uhh, opposed some, uhh, party policies.
Good ole Dutton - looks like Voldemort and shares most of his views
Pretty funny that he gets tossed around as a leadership contender. I mean there are a lot of reptiles in Australia but they aren’t allowed to vote.
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Lol. I guess that’s a fair enough question if serious. Domino theory was clearly wrong, not sure how unreasonable it seemed at the time, although killing everybody lest they enact policy that’s suboptimal for US businesses is pretty cleary why most of the world hates America.
All I’m talking about here is a recognition of what Russia’s security strategy has consistently been for the last 250 odd years. Strategically, Ukraine matters to Russia because it’s between Moscow and where Moscow wants it’s border to be. That’s part of why this has so quickly escalated to genocide - they don’t need the people, the cities, the infrastructure, the natural resources. They just need to control the land.
I tend to think that Russia by and large accepts that Poland and the Baltics are gone for good, at least for the foreseeable future, but of course I can’t prove this. Even if I accepted that they dreamt of reconstituting the USSR/Warsaw Pact, there’s the small matter of capability. I think the idea that Putin would just openly attack a NATO country is bananas, they are not even coping with Ukraine, they would make it about four feet into Polish soil before getting demolished.
What I’m getting at with the domino comment is that this idea of “it’s war now or war later so might as well just go for war now” doesn’t have a proud history. The reason it’s always 1939 every time someone makes that argument is that Hitler is like the one time in history this was correct (and I think it’s an open question whether taking a harder line against Hitler earlier would have changed much). I’m very grateful that policymakers did not take this attitude towards a hot war against the USSR.
I think there are always people willing to take this “inevitability of grand conflict” line and that it’s almost always bullshit. Remember the “clash of civilizations” ideas after 9/11? I find The Belmont Club’s “Three Conjectures” post to be a useful reminder of how insane the rhetoric was at the time. I view Putin’s Russia as closer to a larger and more troublesome North Korea than to the Third Reich and this opinion has been strengthened by the pathetic performance of Russian armed forces in the Ukraine war. My expectation was that they would occupy Ukraine and then - much as in Iraq or Afghanistan for the US - prove unable to bend the population to their will in the longer term, but they have not even gone close to accomplishing Step One.
This is mostly an academic argument right now because I am fine with what NATO’s response has been so far and am agnostic on the question of whether Western European and US policy contributed to the outbreak of war.
I don’t think Putin is hellbent on reconstituting the Russian empire at all costs. Instead, I think he’s looking to pluck the lowest hanging fruit to that end. One could perhaps quibble if Ukraine is the lowest of the hanging fruit, but its natural resources may well make it the most enticing non-NATO, not-currently-vassal target. I don’t have the article handy right now, but a Russian official put out a statement the other day that they were looking at retaking Kazakhstan, a country with zero NATO ambitions and that is already a close ally of Russia. They’re also saber rattling about Finland.
I’m not sympathetic to domino theory with neighboring countries succumbing to the allure of communism or “Russianism” for lack of a better term, but I do think that had Russia taken Ukraine as easily as many thought they would, that wouldn’t be the end of their imperial ambitions, because there is still more low hanging fruit on their borders. Putin wants to take what he can, and he viewed Ukraine as both soft and valuable. I think by helping the Ukrainians fight a war they want to win, that has the added effect of making it less likely that Russia strikes at other neighbors, both because of damaging their immediate war capabilities and instilling fear w.r.t. arms coming into a target they perceived as soft.
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Maybe Putin would support an American presidential candidate who would withdraw from NATO and weaken or dissolve that organization. Would that make Poland more vulnerable?
If only he could find someone like that…
Maybe the goal should be to turn Russia into a pariah state like North Korea.
I think Ukraine occupies a special position in Russian nationalism and that there’s a widespread belief that Ukraine ought to be part of Russia in a way that doesn’t apply to, say, the Baltics. I think that’s been well-documented on here and even used by many posters (though not you I think?) as evidence that Russia would have eventually invaded Ukraine regardless of Western policy. I think the evidence for designs on a grander reconstitution of the USSR is a hell of a lot thinner and basically falls victim to Occam’s Razor; Russian policy towards Ukraine is easily explained without needing recourse to that.
Edit: Although I’m happy to agree that if Putin could snap his fingers and bring the USSR back under Russian control he would probably do it, I mean he is a Russian nationalist and maximalist. I guess the debate is more around whether he sees that as even slightly realistic. I think if you gave him a truth serum and asked him what he thought the chances were of Russia annexing the Baltics in his lifetime he would say 0% or very close to it. I think he is much more apt to draw lines in the sand when it comes to Ukraine and to an extent Georgia and Moldova than he is for any of the rest of the former USSR or Warsaw Pact.
That was just innuendo on the part of a talk show host (Keosayan), not a Russian official. Admittedly he has close ties to the Kremlin (his wife runs RT) but I think it’s an ongoing mistake on this forum to interpret everything in Russian state media as being the official Kremlin line. It’s more like the Kremlin sets the Overton window and what you see on state media is entertaining and propagandizing the population within those boundaries. It’s the same as Hannity and NewsMax and OANN are propaganda outlets for Trumpism, with Hannity frequently actually speaking to Trump, but it would be a mistake to expect what you see on those shows to be 100% officially Trump-approved content.
I don’t think that works very well in terms of bringing about regime change, but I think they’re similar in that the policy should be containment rather than confrontation.
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I’m fine with containment and no regime change, leaving the Russian people as the only ones who Putin can punish as he seeks an outlet for the pain caused by the humiliation of being a loser.
You’ll have to keep wondering, I’m afraid.
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Yeah, I agree it’s almost always total bullshit. but that’s not quite what I’m arguing, nor am I saying that Putin has some romantic dream to reconstitute the USSR.
Russia have a deeper sense of history than we do. And they’ve been invaded a lot. Like 9 or 10 times in the last couple hundred years. And Europe (up until 1945) has always been the most violent region of the world. The military strategy that has worked for Russia is to have their borders at reasonably defensible geographical features. But Moscow is on the steppe (as is most of Ukraine and Belarus). It’s flat for hundreds of miles around. So, in order to have a defensible border they push the borders out to the mountain passes (or other impassible features things like swamp) at the edge of the steppe, which is in what’s currently Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Chechnya, Moldova, Romania, Poland, Latvia. This is how Russia defends itself for 250 years. Napoleon and Hitler invaded in the summer, by the time the got to Moscow it was winter and supply lines were untenable.
I think what we’ve been seeing for 25 years is Putin pursuing a strategy of retaking those defensive positions. That’s why invade Chechnya and Georgia. That’s why Russian ‘peacekeepers’ in Nagorno-Karabakh. The millions spend on propaganda and directly to isolationist political parties and politicians all over Europe (with appalling success in UK, France, Germany) and the US is to split NATO not just for its own sake but to soften the ground for the inevitable expansion after Ukraine. What do you think Russia is doing occupying the ‘breakaway republic’ Transnistria (Moldova between the Dneister and Ukraine)? They clearly thought they’d roll through Ukraine, murder the political class and install a quisling government, then same in Moldova. Then in a couple years when there is a breakaway republic in the southeast of Poland – if Trump in power? And LePen? and Germany’s economy will collapse without Russian gas?
Sure that all looks much less practical now, but only because we have armed and prepared Ukraine enough to matter, and Russian military has been revealed to be the disaster that it is, and Biden has rallied NATO. It could easily have gone much differently.
So anyway yeah, I agree scaremongering about clash of civilizations, domino theory etc. is pretty much always wrong, and the way I phrased it does echo that. But what we see here is Russia executing a rational, coherent, long-term strategy to occupy or otherwise control its historical (and to their mind, absolutely necessary) defensive positions. And those positions aren’t in Ukraine, they’re on the other side. That’s why I say it’s war now or war later, Russia can’t stop at Ukraine. They never have. In that direction, Russia can’t stop until Bessarabia and the Vistula.
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I’m undecided on this, personally. I’m familiar with the rhetoric, but it’s hard to really know how much that is the real draw vs. natural resources, strategic positioning, etc. Currently, it seems to be being used mainly as a reason to exterminate the entire Ukrainian culture rather than estranged cultural friends trying to reunite, so the argument is not exactly being put forth in good faith.
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this is a mess that contains multiple errors.
domino theory aside, the biggest danger for putin is a burgeoning democracy and a growing economy next to the totalitarian russia. not only is it a large piece that russian corruption would have fewer levers of influence, but it would also serve as a launchpad for anti-putin opposition (made worse by russia’s own actions 2004-2014 before the invasion, but virtually irreversible since). this view adds more relevant context to the conflict than napoleon or hitler invasions from 210 and 80 years ago.
Ok, what is in error?
I agree that’s an important factor. I’m saying that geography still is, too.