R Wing
SENIOR MEMBER
- Joined
- May 23, 2016
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That's a completely misguided view. Sometimes you're backed into a geopolitical corner and you have no choice but to fight out of it. The "blunder" was the USSR adopting a defective socio-economic system and not being able to maintain the gains they made in WWII. Putin is just trying to clean up this historic mess.
Russia doesn't want NATO on its border, but it doesn't have a choice in the matter. There's no amount of "nice" Russia can be that will cause NATO to move away from the border. Yeltsin was a Western stooge yet NATO still expanded. Self-defense is never a blunder.
Russia is going to get NATO on its border no matter what it does. The best it can do is strengthen its position as much as it can.
Thank you for being one of the only sane voices here. Not enough people have studied the realist school of thought and grand strategy.
NATO was coming to Russia's borders anyway. Iraq didn't have nukes yet still got screwed. When the US decides it wants to try and screw you, it'll find a way - a fake intelligence report, a false flag attack, whatever it takes. So, you have two bad options and just have to pick the less bad one, which in this case was calculated to be this attack.
People keep looking at it through shockingly narrow lenses or as if history started a few years ago. This is post Cold War history that's still alive and well. This is a story of incessant NATO/US encirclement of Russia despite commitments and warnings --- and the eventual reaction, for which nobody will pay more than the current Ukrainian regime and many of its people.