But, the only way to deal with that threat is bull baiting Russia to push the button, as opposed to, say resolving issues diplomatically or economically by fostering economic interdependence through targeted investment and trade, much as the US has over the course of the last three decades with China.
Again, Russia was a US ally during the war on terror, which could very easily have blossomed into a functioning partnership based on a shared love of carrying out war crimes against random Muslims. Russia
was a major trading partner of the US and much of its economy
was reliant on energy exports to Europe. In fact, Russia has spent many, many years deliberately insulating its war economy from economic interdependence, which indicates that the current situation has been planned for a very long time. What you are describing isn't resolving issues diplomatically, it's appeasement. It's ignoring the wholesale abandonment of diplomatic convention in order to pursue territorial expansion through warfare based on the bizarre revanchist claims of 19th century monarchs.
"But Iraq!" "But Afghanistan!" I hear already. What about them? I protested those wars. What kind of a hypocrite would I be, and how liquid would any principles I might hold be if I abandoned those principles now because an even worse regime decided to take the fight to an even more cartoonishly evil group of largely imaginary people.
China's only #3 on the list of countries with the most nukes and a vastly bigger global strategic threat to the US than Russia ever has been or ever will be, yet the idea of a nuclear exchange with China is considered laughable simply on the premise China has no one to nuke but customers.
China is not a failed shell of a state ruled entirely by former members of its security services who operate like organized crime syndicates.
China does not fill its government with far-right nationalist lunatics who openly talk about using nukes in some ridiculous campaign to restore their nation to the glory it enjoyed in some feverishly imagined historical period in which most of the population were literally serfs.. at least not yet.
No, I'm saying whichever country eventually wins the proxy war, the losing power will ensure the victory is pyrrhic at best by inflicting maximal economic damage.
If the US itself is going to be enduring a significant proportion of that damage, what's the point?
How does anyone benefit from this? Other than the timeless, demonic spirit of pure evil that we can conveniently blame the cold war on..
In other words, denying Ukrainian natural resources to the victorious power
You mean the largely underdeveloped natural resources that everyone would have gotten anyway (had they ever been developed) because they would have been exported at low cost.
Again. There is just no benefit to this. It's not even attributable to a sunk cost fallacy because there was never any benefit to it. It's just manichean bullshit with elaborate global shadow governments fighting each other for no reason like the worst Deus Ex remake ever (yes, worse than invisible war), as opposed to the very obvious and well-evidenced fact that Russia wants Ukraine because it used to be part of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union, and a significant proportion of the government's power base consists of nationalists who feel nostalgic about those eras and think of these territories and the people who live there as rightfully belonging to Russia.
Which is troubling because it's also true of the Baltic states, Poland and Finland.
That's my point, realpolitik is fundamentally irrational, having no feasible answer to forever war and cyclical violence.
Neither of those things are required in order to be rational.
But what is required, and what you've failed to explain the absence of, is any kind of reason.
I'm sure you prefer to believe that, as opposed to economic and policy elites simply having shared values, interests, and investments upon which consensus can be built and consent manufactured, while simultaneously suffering from sociopathic myopia.
Where is the appeasement of those values? Where is the expectation of returns on those interests and investments?
Something something cold war something CIA something nazis..
www.theguardian.com
