• usernamesaredifficul [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    That wisdom is called appeasement and has failed again and again. Empires will empire, if you give them a finger they’ll wait for a bit and then take an arm.

    No it’s called a sphere of influence and it’s just playing by the old cold war rules.

    If they are unemployed and homeless then let them be independent and deal with problems on their own. The fuck.

    countries are not people.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      No it’s called a sphere of influence

      You say that as if geopolitical realism was the truth to end all inquiry, the insight to end all history.

            • barsoap@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Why should we still play the old war game? How do realists decide which country is a poker chip and which is a player (one area where US and European realists differ btw: In the European view, Russia is not a player)? What do you do if a country doesn’t want to be a poker chip? Can you really ignore internal forces, can it all be boiled down to power politics? Why stick to a theory that was completely blind-sided by the end of the cold war and after that argued to subsidise the east so that it can continue?

              That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

              • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                we play the old game for the same reason we started in the first place because the major powers have the ability to demand concessions because of the power of their militaries and economies.

                Russia is a player because it has a vast army and nuclear weapons

                if Ukraine wants to not do as they are told by Russia they are more than welcome to fight them. America and the other powers involving themselves in that fight risks major war however also it has proved ruinously expensive to the actual populations of those countries.

                Internal politics only matter if they are backed up by something

                this theory wasn’t blindsided by the end of the cold war. At the end of the cold war Russia was weak from crisis (incidentally largely because the Ukrainian local government so badly fucked up running a power plant and the early stages of a disaster that all the money in the soviet union was required to clean up the mess) anyway when Russia was weak and eating itself they couldn’t enforce the rights they had because of their strength now they are strong again they can