Russia - US | Ukraine “peace negotiations”

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BlueSmoke said:
And I suppose the Soviet Union would have fallen on its own if we said early on "who cares who wins the cold war"?

I rather doubt in the end we would have saved all that money should it not have fallen on its own.
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I say who cares if the Soviet Union fell. Are the people in Russia better off today? I mean maybe a few oligarchs are richer but they still have a dictatorship. They still don't have freedom of speech.

So we spent a bunch of money and they spent a bunch of money and everything is pretty much in the same place today as it was before the Soviet Union fell. The Baltics are probably an exception, but the vast vast majority of former Soviet citizens aren't that much better off. I realize that some of that is hindsight is 20/20 but at this point it's not hindsight anymore.
 
gtyellowjacket said:
I say who cares if the Soviet Union fell. Are the people in Russia better off today? I mean maybe a few oligarchs are richer but they still have a dictatorship. They still don't have freedom of speech.

So we spent a bunch of money and they spent a bunch of money and everything is pretty much in the same place today as it was before the Soviet Union fell. The Baltics are probably an exception, but the vast vast majority of former Soviet citizens aren't that much better off. I realize that some of that is hindsight is 20/20 but at this point it's not hindsight anymore.
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Poland is better off. Czech and Slovakia are better off. East Germany is better off. Romania and Bulgaria are better off. The Caucuses are better off. The Baltics, as you mention, are way better off. In general, the world is better off when Russia is not exerting a sphere of influence over its neighbors.
 
Calheel said:
Poland is better off. Czech and Slovakia are better off. East Germany is better off. Romania and Bulgaria are better off. The Caucuses are better off. The Baltics, as you mention, are way better off. In general, the world is better off when Russia is not exerting a sphere of influence over its neighbors.
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Okay, but remember that the iron curtain fell before the Soviet Union fell. I won't argue that those countries aren't better off but that's not really the situation right now. The situation right now is Russia. I'm happy to spend money to help the ukrainians but I can't imagine why we need to spend money to keep bases in Germany, or the UK, or Spain. Italy, I kind of get to keep some air bases and naval assets near North Africa but it's an awful lot of troops for the mission.
 
gtyellowjacket said:
I say who cares if the Soviet Union fell. Are the people in Russia better off today? I mean maybe a few oligarchs are richer but they still have a dictatorship. They still don't have freedom of speech.

So we spent a bunch of money and they spent a bunch of money and everything is pretty much in the same place today as it was before the Soviet Union fell. The Baltics are probably an exception, but the vast vast majority of former Soviet citizens aren't that much better off. I realize that some of that is hindsight is 20/20 but at this point it's not hindsight anymore.
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"and everything is pretty much in the same place today as it was before the Soviet Union fell". GT

Ask yourself what would have happened if the Soviet Union had not fallen because we gave up fighting the cold war ten to fifteen years before 1989? And I'm focused on the outcome for the United States. Not concerned about anyone else but us.
 
gtyellowjacket said:
Okay, but remember that the iron curtain fell before the Soviet Union fell. I won't argue that those countries aren't better off but that's not really the situation right now. The situation right now is Russia. I'm happy to spend money to help the ukrainians but I can't imagine why we need to spend money to keep bases in Germany, or the UK, or Spain. Italy, I kind of get to keep some air bases and naval assets near North Africa but it's an awful lot of troops for the mission.
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It was all part and parcel of the same process. The Wall fell in '89, but Russia let that happen. And the USSR fell in 1991. To me, it is all part of the same thing and it is to Putin, as well. He is trying to recreate a USSR-lite.
 
gtyellowjacket said:
I certainly agree we did get some positives but if I could just compare it to what we could have had... Medicare for all, more infrastructure, government paid for college. It was just so much money.
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This has an inking of truth, in a vacuum, within the bounds of basic arithmetic. However, this completely misses the calculus of geopolitical stability, trade relationships, domestic military spending, etc. that the US military AND democracy have facilitated, worldwide. Yes, we’ve likely significantly overspent on military planning, armaments, infrastructure, etc. but you can’t reasonably claim “if x wouldn’t have existed, y would’ve been possible.”
 
gtyellowjacket said:
So we spent a bunch of money and they spent a bunch of money and everything is pretty much in the same place today as it was before the Soviet Union fell.
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Sigh. Always wrong, never in doubt. Living standards in Russia are considerably better than in the Soviet Union. They have much more freedom than they did -- it's not Western style freedom, but it's not Soviet repression either.

We can afford free college education, Medicare for All, and better infrastructure. We choose not to. It's true that we spend way too much money on defense, but Clinton tried to invest the peace dividend in universal health care and the health care industry said, nope. It wasn't about affordability. It was about ideology and also the number of people who hated Hillary because she wasn't baking cookies.

It's a choice to let billionaires pay so little in taxes. It was a choice to distribute money to wasteful states instead of planning actual programs. It was a choice to attack Iraq. It was a choice never to upgrade our electric grid because Texas and tax cuts. It has been a choice to spend so much effort keeping people out and kicking them out instead of welcoming them as contributors. We could have long ago eliminated the "border" issue simply by raising our racist immigration caps (and yes, they were explicitly racist when passed). We've chosen bad policies.

And we continue to do that, because of the peculiarly fucked up American political system. We've never tried to undo the mistake of the Senate and the EC. That has been catastrophic, especially in the Midwest -- as young people fled states like Iowa in favor of cities, it merely made those left behind (generally an uneducated lot, which is why they couldn't leave) more politically powerful.
 
BlueSmoke said:
"and everything is pretty much in the same place today as it was before the Soviet Union fell". GT

Ask yourself what would have happened if the Soviet Union had not fallen because we gave up fighting the cold war ten to fifteen years before 1989? And I'm focused on the outcome for the United States. Not concerned about anyone else but us.
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Pretty much the same thing. We can't rerun history so it's impossible to know but when Boris Yeltsin came to visit the United States in 1990, he said we've lost the Cold war. He didn't say that because he was touring a military base. He was touring a grocery store. And the fall of the Soviet Union didn't happen because all that money we spent on tanks and fighter jets. It was because the Soviet people decided they didn't want to live like that anymore.

So if you're just concerned about us, if we hadn't been fighting the Cold war, we save save a bunch of money, we don't reduce our University spending, there is a push for universal healthcare right around the time of Clinton, and we get lower taxes.
 
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