Notwithstanding that (it smells like) the United State’s propaganda machine is trying hard to control our European media once more, let’s try to get as much information from both sides of the story this time.
I thought that since U.S. is supporting Georgia there would be some control over the situation in South Ossetia and that there would be a peaceful solution to the conflict. But what is happening there now it’s not just war, but war crimes. George Bush and [Georgian president] Mikhail Saakashvili should answer to the crimes that are being committed – the killing of innocent people, running over by tanks of children and women, throwing grenades into cellars where people are hiding,
— Joe Mestas. A United States citizen in the conflict zone, according to Russia Today [video footage].
As this conflict escalates both sides are as usual trying to politically involve the European Union. I think Europe should restrain from supporting Georgia as it clearly committed war crimes. I’m quite certain we will soon see hard proof of this coming from the Russians. Proof that will be ten times more accurate than an idiot like Colin Powell throwing away his career and credibility a few years ago.
The European population wont support supporting a war criminal. Hanging our European flag in your office while doing a speech on World Television, is ridiculous and didn’t convince serious people in Europe at all.
Militarily seen, it’s a not even a question: You can’t fight Russians a few kilometers from their own border. It would mean a military humiliation.
Europe is not a war continent anymore. If you want lasting peace with Europe, the only way is by doing business with us. Supplying us with what we need (which in case of Russia is energy in the form of gas), buying from us what you need (which in case of Russia are European investments in their country and culture).
What Europe can do about this conflict would be to decrease the amount of European investment in Russia. Just stopping the gas supplies from Russia would probably destroy Germany’s economy in a few months and would that way drastically weaken any kind of power Europe has. This is not the kind of stuff that we want (in Europe), and we are not naive enough (anymore) to be convinced that this is what should be done.
My conclusion is that the rest of the world better stops hoping that Europe will help a Georgian war criminal.
Although I know that I shouldn’t drag the U.S. in this conflict, I’m quite confident that behind the scenes it’s pretty obvious that this is Russia showing its newly gained might to the U.S.
The New World Order line that the Bush administration seems to have tried by falsely promising to support Georgia if Georgia would send troops to Iraq turned out to be a foolish one.Then again, we are getting used to foolish U.S. strategy with Cheney and Bush trying to play poker with the rest of the World.
As a result Russia has a moral ground to do what they are doing (in the end, they had a peacekeeping mandate over the region). The United States can only watch and suffer as Easter European countries will now have learned that all what Bush senior had build up as political trust, is now unveiled as pure U.S. rubbish.
That is likely going to be the end conclusion of the foreign policy of the administration that has ruled the U.S. for the last decade. That all the achievements of Bush senior will have been flushed through the toilet.
Russia is and will keep gaining power. China is and will keep growing its economy and energy consumption. Iran is and will keep gaining more power over the Middle East (the U.S.’s propaganda about their nuclear weapons programs is among the weakest I have ever received). Etcetera.
In a curious way a New World Order is forming indeed. Regretfully for the Neoconservatives they will most likely not play the role of World Leaders. At least not as a coherent group.
I blame their own incompetence for that.
Their “New World Order”-meme was both strategically and diplomatically supported by weak people. They played poker while the game on the table was Chess. And they lost.
The money they did win turned out to be printed by the Federal Reserve as it was needed. That inflated the Dollar and is increasing the gap between rich and poor in their own country. Meanwhile it enriched the super elite involved in the war machine while the sons of poorer patriotic families got sent to the battle ground.
The man in the streets in the United States is paying for all this.
I think this new conflict in Georgia wont be the last thing we’ll see as a result of the poker and Chess games of 200n.
ps. Planet.gnome picks the categories it wants to syndicate from my blog. I don’t send blog items to planet.gnome myself. Instead, planet.gnome picks them. I have a category specifically dedicated to technology. This item is specifically not categorized in a technical category. Don’t blame me for political content on planet.gnome.
tell the planet.gnome admin to subscribe to your technology-tagged feed so your anti-american screeds don’t get reproduced all over the place
hehehe. Okay, good luck Europe, with “we’re not a war continent anymore”. Especially if the idea for avoiding that is to appease Russia by abandoning democratic countries to it. There’s no question that Russia won a major geopolitical victory here, and that the US looks weak. It’s bizarre to think that this is a victory for Europe, though.
Funny how Kosovo was one thing and now Georgia matter is treated as another thing by USA and their ‘allies’.In 1999 let s bomb Serbia campaign no one saw excessive use of power while TV stations where bombed, bridges in Vojvodina torn down, yet now bombing of military bases in Georgia is categorized as excessive by CNN and others…Hope people from US will pull their heads from their asses and see where their country is heading with Bush,Chainey,Rice and all other money/oil/power monkeys.
You might find this take on the whole matter interesting: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2008/08/russias-hostile.html
+1 Insightful
Dejan,
Honestly, I don’t think Americans will catch on until we can’t afford the electricity to run the flatscreens anymore.
I suggest that you wait for the credible confirmation of these alleged war crimes, or at least of their actual scale – and preferably from many sides; blindly believing Russia or Georgia would be a huge mistake. See the latest HRW statement:
http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2008/08/10/georgi19581.htm
Beware that Russia is and has always been very much martisan about this conflict, and not a real peacekeeper in the sense that we see from UN. Most South Ossetian leadership are imported from Russia.
And yet Russia maintains nonintervention is key on a host of other issues of international moral concern? Which way is it going to be?
Sorry, this is typical politics as usual. You can’t turn a blind eye to bloody massacres in Zimbabwe and then mount a massive military adventure in Georgia and claim the moral high ground. The same goes for the US.
There is plenty of blood on everyone’s hands here.
@john: yeah, good idea! Go ahead and ask him. His name is Jeff Waugh. His nickname is jdub on GimpNET. Afaik, just join jdub and gnome.org together to form his E-mail address. … But don’t complain here. (you can interpret this like this in slang English: This is my blog and I write whatever I want. If you don’t like that, piss off and be lucky I kept the comments open for you)
@Dejan: somewhat agree. Especially the part that most of the war-reporting television networks give a one-sided view. BBC is usually a little bit good at at least giving a little bit more balanced view on the story. But not quite as balanced at is should/could be.
@Michael: agree that there is plenty of blood on everyone’s hands. But the blood on country’s hands is not really the point of this giant Chess game, in my opinion. Killing thousands of people is a statistic. Killing one person is a disaster (I think that’s a quote from Stalin).
Although I don’t think Russia can claim the moral high ground, indeed. That doesn’t mean that Georgia wasn’t promised support by the U.S. (and that this probably has played a role) and has killed harmless and defenseless civilians. Which is something that is hardly being illustrated in our Western media. At least they are trying hard to cover that up somehow. Or to downplay it. Killing ~2000 civilians is not something you can downplay. That’s as much civilians as the 9/11 attacks. Are American lives twenty times more important than Ossetian lives? Or what? Because I’ll disagree. But that’s just me and my opinion of course (I wont be the only European disagreeing with that, though).
@James Cape: Regretfully, that’s pretty much near the truth, indeed. The same counts for a lot of Europeans too, by the way.
@Artem Vakhitov: I agree that blindly believing any state is probably always a huge mistake. I’m also not really trying to pick sides here. Although so far I find the Georgian story mostly bullshit, indeed. That of course doesn’t mean I’m in full agreement with Russia’s actions. But I’m also not going to just blindly believe any by- United States injected media anymore either.
And although the politicians where imported from Russia into Ossetian, a recent referendum illustrated that the population over there preferred the mixed political status over letting Georgia fully rule it. The refugees are also fleeing to Russia and not the Georgia. These are all things that (for me) are a strong indications that perhaps this time … something is quite fishy about the Georgian leadership vs. Ossetia.
I have not been there when it all started. So yeah, I’m talking out of my ass. I’m opening my eyes and ears very very wide, however.
@pvanhoof, Your basic point that it would be hard for the average viewer to make sense of these events from the way that they are being reported is correct. In the US, the tone is more like, “Those Russians are doing something crazy to those poor Georgians, and we know nothing about it except we want it to stop.” The part that’s hidden is that the US has a stake in this game.
On the other hand, your blog post is neglecting the larger point: that Russia is taking the position that everywhere that there are ethnic Russians (or “Russian citizens” as they keep saying) is essentially Russia. That means Ukraine, the Baltic republics, etc. One of the Georgian claims that I don’t know how to evaluate is that these separatist areas in Georgia were ethnically “cleansed” of non-Russians. I don’t know if that’s true, but we’ve seen this pattern in Tibet, Palestine, etc.
I think there’s large agreement if we admit that Russia has been just as cynical about endangering civilians as Georgia. The Georgians did to Tskhinvali what the Russians did to Grozny and the Israelis did to southern Lebanon they destroyed the city to get at guerillas firing missiles from there. The American assault on Fallujah was similar. The Russians clearly told the separatists that this was a good time to provoke the Georgians; we don’t know how many of 2,000 were combatants; we don’t know how much of the damage to the city was caused by Russians firing on Georgian soldiers; and the Russians clearly had a plan for capitalizing on their gains.
General: Once again and for all times: People who don’can’t bear political statements should not read planet.gnome.org. Full stop.
Maybe Europe is not a war country, but it is not peaceful either.
There are conflicts in Northern Ireland, Belgium, Corsica, Basque, two or three countries called “Bosnia and Hercegovina”, Catalonia, “Kosovo” and probably others I’ve forgotten.
The USA having pushed and planned independence of “Kosovo” (e.g. by declaring independence on a sunday) entirely destroyed any consequent policy towards parts of countries that want to become independent against the will of its federal government.
So people everywhere now start thinking “If Kosovo can become independent with that argumentation, why not my area too?” That will be the problem for the next years…
Hmm, there are no military conflicts in Belgium (at all). Political turbulences, yes, military conflicts .. most certainly not. You wrote conflicts, not military conflicts, indeed. Just want to make sure people know this ;)
Re-reading the original post and method’s responses (which if I’m not mistaken you haven’t responded to) it strikes me that you’re picking the wrong side here. Even if there were war crimes committed in Georgia (which may or may not be true but can be granted you for the sake of argument), a sovereign state – a democratically elected one, even – has been invaded by a hostile and expansionist power. Having read a few of your opinions on the Iraq war, I’m stunned that you’ve failed to equivocate here. Why would you accept Russia’s actions here when you did not accept the USA’s before. It’s not as if Hussein never committed war crimes, after all (albeit only on US-allies, and not the US itself). If one is wrong, are not both? Also, note here, I myself am only equivocating for the sake of argument – I don’t think the two are morally equal at all. Anyway. Curious to hear your take on it. I do thoroughly agree that Bush Jr. has doomed Sr.’s new world order.
Let us all remember that during the 20th century alone, more than 200,000 Georgians were murdered by the various Russian regimes (during peace time, I’m not counting the 350,000 killed during WWII.. So, let me express sincere doubts at any information coming out of Moscow. What I see here is a small democratic country struggling on the border of an empire, trying to pry itself free.
Trying to deal with Russia by economic sanctions has proven fruitless every time, their leaders have never been shy of starving their population to death to achieve their geostrategic aims. Russia must be dealt with force, thats the only language their leaders understand.
Its pretty clear what the Russian goal is here, its to destroy the democratically elected president (who replaced the corrupt Russian puppet deposed during the Rose Revolution) and replace him with another puppet.. It is the duty of western democracies to protect other democracies (as a Belgian, you should understand, Belgium couldn’t protect itself from anyone without its allies..). We failed to protect Georgia and we should be ashamed.
@Ian: I never said that I ‘accept’ Russia’s actions. I just portrayed how I see why and how this conflict was/is done and how few of our media are really keeping us informed in a balanced way.
My only real (opinionated) point is what we agree on: that Bush Jr. has doomed Sr.’s new world order.
@Tester: I hope that you will fight your war with Russia far far away from Europe, though. I certainly don’t want anything to do with any war against Russia.
If we start talking about statistics, I too can come up with interesting numbers coming from within the borders of Iraq since the U.S.’s invasion of that country. I too can show you video footage of the U.S. army using phosphor bombs against civilian targets. Video footage that is quite hard to fake and where reporters went to see the aftermath the day after: bodies of civilians burned from inside out (typical for phosphor).
I guess phosphor is the new Napalm? Oh right, no Napalm’s successor is MK-77. Also being heavily used in Iraq. Go check:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_77_bomb#Use_in_Iraq
Let’s just be fair and say it the way it is: all of us have blood on our hands. It’s also not stopping in modern times either. And countries like the U.S. are most certainly no innocents.
So to say … let’s attack Russia military because … ! Because what? Because of the exact same things that other big nations do too?
“@Ian: I never said that I ‘accept’ Russia’s actions. I just portrayed how I see why and how this conflict was/is done and how few of our media are really keeping us informed in a balanced way.”
Yet you state Russia has moral grounds to do what they’re doing? Which is it? None of the above? The trouble I’m having with your post now is outside of some statements on geopolitics, your opinion on this is totally unclear – especially with regard to the morality of Russia’s actions. Can you explain what you think of all this in clear terms?
I’m going to sound like a right winger here (though I’m not one), but one of the things I find interesting – and maddening – is the tendency on the left to use moral equivocation as an excuse to dodge difficult geopolitical questions. Yelling “a pox on both their houses!” is cathartic but not very helpful in honing your own moral compass.
@ian: I wrote ‘a moral ground’, because they had a peacekeeping mandate. By that I mean that you could see their actions as part of them executing their mandate as a peace keeper (if you take into account what the Georgian government first did to people living in Ossetia). I’m saying you could, not that I am seeing it that way.
I personally have no opinion on the morality of all this and I don’t think morality has a lot to do with it. It’s the kind of political game all big players on the scene of World Politics play.
On top of that isn’t my personal opinion going to matter anyway.
“Morality about military action” is what you get when your propaganda succeeds. It depends on the eye of the beholder.
It’s also funny to start talking about morals. As if the US has great morals somehow and as if we Europeans should acknowledge those great morals and should indeed blindly accept that no other country could possibly have morals the way the US has.
Nuclear bombs, Vietnam, Subversion in Panama and recent years the Iraq conflict (just to keep the list short, because it’s a much longer list of atrocities) has shown us that no country in this world has any morals whatsoever.
I never said Europe has high morals. In fact, our countries and cultures have known thousands of years of conflicts and great wars.
You don’t need to teach us about ‘bad’ vs. ‘good’ nor ‘morals’. We know about it. It’s our culture, thousands of years of culture.
—
Well, my generation didn’t have a great propaganda machinery that portrayed Russia as the worst kind of evil imaginable and that portrayed the great United awesome States of America as the most diamond form of purity in mankind humanly imaginable (and even imaginable by God himself).
Perhaps that explains why I might have a different POV about ‘morals’.
It’s hard to respond to your post because it’s a strawman. I’ve only mentioned the USA in the context of its hypothetical moral equivalence to Russia (hardly an argument of a right wing propogandist!), and I haven’t even used the word “Europe” in any of my posts at all. Kneejerk much?
The core of my answer on the morality of these Russian actions is that I have no opinion about it, that I don’t think there are many countries on this planet that can claim ‘higher morality’, that the countries that do have a good propaganda machinery in place that makes their population ‘believe’ that they indeed have some sort of ‘higher morality than others’ and that this is the only reason they get away with it and that …
It’s not the point of the games being played anyway. Well it is … sort of.
People like Vladimir Putin in public comments have made clear that the Western World is disturbingly good at portraying things as black/white. Especially when it comes to their so called morality. It’s all a bunch of bullshit that “morality talk”, if you ask me. And not ‘really’ the point.
The point is rather: ‘what’ country ends up defining this “morality”.
When it comes to propaganda it’s not about the content of the facts, nor about ‘naked morality in its purest sense’. It’s about who the population will trust and believe. What country it’ll allow defining “morality”.
Which is why my eyes and ears are wide open about this conflict, and why I want to listen to both sides of the story. For some reason, I want to be closest to the truth rather than closest to the country defining morality.
Yet you just ask me about moral values.
Righto. Given that there’s no moral issues one way or another, what do you think Europe’s response ought to be, then? You allude to soft power (which is great), but how do you apply your soft power when your physical power (in a literal sense) is coming from the nation you’re trying to pressure? This would seem to be a difficult thing to manage. On the other side of the Atlantic there’s the opposite problem – that the ordinarily capable military is… busy. What to do?
Nothing except diplomacy. Which can be about future relations, future investments, talking about what we need and what they want.
But right now? We can watch the events unfolding and suffer. Because militarily there’s nothing either the US nor Europe can do.
It’s a bit more complicated than you suggest. It appears that Bush was privately telling the Russians that it would be OK to whack the Georgians in a limited way, but then he got upset when the Russian troops moved beyond the separatist provinces and started attacking the rest of Georgia. But that was in private; he also plays to an audience of neocon wackos what wants to treat the whole thing like Munich 1938. And John McCain, who’s even more of a hawk than Bush, falls into that category.
It’s doubtful that the Georgian president is a “war criminal” by any standard that wouldn’t make Putin a war criminal for what he did in Chechnya. He was reckless, and thought that the US would back his recklessness. And apparently he has a paid American lobbyist who’s close to John McCain who might have led him believe that the US would back his attempt to reconquer Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
The West lost its moral standing to object to Russia supporting the aspirations of Georgian separatists when we (US and most of the EU) backed independence for Kosovo. It was no accident that Spain dissented; they have the Basques and the Catalans to deal with.
Philip : the problem with your style of discussion is that you can’t let go of your hatred towards US politics. It’s fine you feel that way, but it makes your arguments weak. They tend to be along the line ‘yeah whatever about the Russions/Georgians, but I know one thing : the US is worse’. That is just not a helpfull starting point for a honest discussion.
Either you want to argue that the US is an internation force for the worse and then have a go at it (for example by highlighting their actions in Iraq or Guantanamo Bay) or you want to argue wrongs and rights of the different parties (Georgie, S-Ossetie, Russia and the US) in this particular conflict. But taking claims of the former to support a discussion in the latter is quite confusing.
At least I (and I feel others here) have no clear idea about what your stance actually is on Russia/Georgia. Well, in your latest responses you say to have no idea but I find that strange for an outspoken guy like you who obviously thinks more about geopolitics than most people…
@bart: my point of view is that these actions by Russia where done to make a statement. They did that in a very ingeniously engineered way at the exact right timing. Unlike other times, they also did it relatively clean (there are not hundreds of thousands of deaths and they claim to invest in rebuilding the area, helping fleeing people, etc).
Ingeniously engineered because else Vladimir Putin wouldn’t have stopped yesterday (although let’s see what happens, because all possibilities are still open). Right now a lot of European citizens are just happy that the war stopped (relatively) in time. Nobody will keep hating Russia a lot for what happened. They saw a cute France president solving it. So they’ll identify themselves with the solution. Which means Russia will enjoy continued investments from European companies in their country and culture. I’m pretty sure Vladimir Putin welcomed that French president with a big big smile on his face as it meant that he could show the world that …
“You can talk with Russia nowadays”, “It’ll have an influence”, “You can be part of the solution if you solve it together with Russia, too”
Also meanwhile they made their statement. What they have said is basically this:
“You will go no further. This is the line. Here it stops (i.e. your European expansion). If you cross this line, Russia is prepared for military actions, even against a nation that is preparing to become a member of NATO.”
That line is not a clear line geographically seen. Politically, it’s very f. clear.
Our generation has gotten the choice of centuries:
– Either we piss Russia off big time and we’ll have a decades long war with them
– Or we start seeing them as a big and f. important player in World Politics.
My opinion on that is that yes, the European Union better listen to this one. Unless we want to end up in a huge war again. It wouldn’t be a nice war. Iraq, Afghanistan and even Vietnam will look like child play. My pick is the second option, indeed. There’s no winning a war with Russia. Nobody can win such a war, not even the United States, but Russia would certainly play it. And we’d suffer as a culture, as a area on the planet, as a world power, as a generation of Europeans. It would set back mankind several hundred years too. Again (the history book on the shelve will repeat itself).
That’s not a sacrifice I want to make for some Neoconservatives’s “new world order” bullshit. They can stand on their heads and jump around. Still I wouldn’t sacrifice what we have achieved in Europe for the last few decades.
The future for Europe is not a U.S. militarily one. The future of Europe lies in being a center culture of this planet (by being a successful mixture of cultures ourselves). Which means that we must learn to work together with all cultures of the world in a relatively peaceful way. Nothing more, and certainly nothing less.
Pissing off Russia is not in our interest. American “morals” are not even the point. It’s not a black/white issue. It’s not Evil against Good. It’s about how Europe is learning that the World is going to stay cultural and political heterogeneous. It’s a big gray thing. Just like how Europe learned that for its own cultures, there’s no way in successfully making Europe homogeneous. It’s the nation and culture (or mixture of cultures) that learns how to cope with this, that will be and is the real center of the world.
So let’s do business with Russians. That’s what Europe is good at. Right?
It’s not like a football match if you can’t win it.
Perhaps US finds it hard to understand the “we must learn to work together with all cultures of the world in a relatively peaceful way” …It s much easier to use the bomb our way through method…I wonder what happened to native Americans-so called Indians? guess it was peaceful cooperation and cultural exchange!?
Yeah, it was ancient past, but same peaceful cultural exchange can be seen in Iraq nowadays, specially exchange in terms of oil barrels.
“That’s not a sacrifice I want to make for some Neoconservatives’s “new world order” bullshit. They can stand on their heads and jump around. Still I wouldn’t sacrifice what we have achieved in Europe for the last few decades.”
Bush Sr., who coined the phrase “a new world order”, was no neocon. He was an internationalist and realist. You’re railing against a strawman again, this time in response to bart’s post. No amount of geopolitical acumen gets you credit if you can’t stay on topic for even one post.
“The future for Europe is not a U.S. militarily one. The future of Europe lies in being a center culture of this planet (by being a successful mixture of cultures ourselves). Which means that we must learn to work together with all cultures of the world in a relatively peaceful way. Nothing more, and certainly nothing less.”
Nations that never choose force end up on the receiving end of it.
Now, you’ve already admitted that Europe’s soft power vs. Russia is reduced to diplomacy alone as long as Russia supplies its energy, so the idea that the EU has, through the use of that soft power, stopped Russia, is kind of silly. Russia got what it wanted here, by your own admission. I fail to see why anyone other than Russia gets any credit. We’re all impotent.
So now, what’s to stop Russia from doing this to the Ukraine, or any former Soviet republic? What about their former satellites in eastern Europe? Diplomacy? That didn’t work this time – why would it the next?
@Philip : is anyone seriously proposing not to engage Russia or stop doing business with it? Why make such a big deal out of that. But at the same time while we should continue to do those things, we must not forget that the neo-nationalists that currently run Russia don’t share some of the values that Europe has acquired the hard way in its bloody past. Most notable the multiculturalism and tolerance that you rightfully cherish gets little consideration in the east.
Russian politics is as cynical, megalomaniac and willing to shed innocent blood through bombing its way out of conflicts as any out there (and that includes the American neo-cons).
@Ian : I think you look at it onesided. Yes, Russia takes the upper hand here, mainly because due to the incompetence of the Georgian president. However, many times Western influence prevailed, like recently in Kosovo. Most often still, European and Russian interests have coincided. For example in bringing the huge gas reserves of Siberia to European consumers. Diplomacy doesn’t work with irrational states like N-Korea or Zimbabwe.
You ask what prevents Russia from invading Ukraine? Well, for one its president is not striking first against Russian dominated areas inside Ukraine…
“Nations that never choose force end up on the receiving end of it”
Europe, which is a nation that tries never to use force, has not really been on the receiving end of it.
Also note that Europe’s soft power vs. Russia is not only reduced to diplomacy. NATO is still among us. Its headquarters are ~ 2 hours drive from my home.
I also pointed out that Russia allowed the French president to get the credits for ‘solving’ this one, just so Europeans would identify themselves with the solution (read what I wrote).
Why you think I’m trying to give somebody other than Russia credits here is also something I don’t really get.
I don’t think anything is going to stop Russia from regaining power in certain former Soviet republics. At least to a certain extent.
I guess for a Eastern European country that being part of NATO at this moment is a blessing if you don’t want Russia to soon rule you.
I think the best solution is to slowly integrate Europe and Russia economically.
@bart: I agree that Russia’s current leadership doesn’t always share the same values with Europe. We have learned, the hard way, that the United States has for the last eight-or-so years also made enormous blunders when it comes to said ‘European values’.
Yet we manage to cope with the United States’s crap too. We allowed their ridiculous propaganda too, didn’t we? It wouldn’t hurt if we’d get a few other point of views in our media. Let both little children compete for our European trust? Why not?
China is another growing economy we will have to learn to do business with. We have started doing this already, and we must continue doing this.
Globalization is a slow but definite peace keeper too. Just make all people in all those nations hunger for privately owned wealth. Let them care about making money instead of letting them care about guns and killing other tribes.
In the end, if we need to resolve all of the world’s issues militarily … what will we end up with? A place where you want to live? I don’t.
I repeat, it’s not like a football match if the game can’t be won.
“You ask what prevents Russia from invading Ukraine? Well, for one its president is not striking first against Russian dominated areas inside Ukraine… ”
Exactly. If the United States wants to train a Georgian dog, they better learn it to bark properly.
Especially near the Russian border you better make sure that your idiots are not going to mess it up the way this one did.
It was pure incompetence from the Georgian leader. And now it’s quite a mess, indeed.
“Europe, which is a nation that tries never to use force, has not really been on the receiving end of it.”
I don’t understand how you can write this now that the former Soviet satellite states – who suffered upwards of four decades of Soviet force – are members of the EU. If you only mean Western Europe, sure. But it wasn’t soft power that prevented it – it was a credible threat of war.
We’re witnessing Russia’s attempt to retake by force its former empire, and to dissuade it there’s neither any credible threat of war nor any practical use of soft power.
I have a difficult time looking at the bright side of this, but I suppose one good thing is you now have to be *insane* to consider reducing oil dependence anything but mandatory. It’s damned hard to apply soft power to a dictator when you’re sucking his teat.
Yes, Europe will have to:
1) Invest heavily in alternative energies
2) Create a credible unified military either inside NATO or independently
3) Define its own “lines in the sand”, through gamesmanship if necessary
Then you can do all that laudable heterogeneous center stuff. Europe should decide which countries to take under its wings and then act very hawklike in defense of those countries. For instance, Finland and the other Scandinavian countries are going to have conflict with Russia over the Arctic oil. Europe doesn’t have to be provocative, but it should be firm and reasonable in its dealings. _Not_ coordinating with the US as much could help that goal, but see 2).
Note. Georgia is not part of either Eastern nor Western Europe. In this conflict no European country got attacked.
Europe buying gas from Russia can also be seen as a strategic move: bringing the two nations closer to each other by doing business with each other.
Did you think we wanted to keep maintaining a state of Cold War for the rest of Europe’s existence? No we don’t.
About those accusations where you portray Russia as a (dangerous) dictatorship.
It’s again typical fear propaganda that we’ve been receiving from the U.S. for years in a row. I assure you that this kind of nonsense is not sticking anymore here (not since a few decades anymore, but perhaps you were not aware of how Europe is today). At least not as much as you might think.
But anyway … let’s debunk it nevertheless.
We do business with the United States too. Measured by the opinion of a lot of Europeans is the United States currently being ruled by what we could call a dictator, too.
Is the United States really respecting the privacy of its citizens with all that wiretapping in the name of anti-terrorism? Hasn’t the United States not tortured people in Guantanamo Bay in the name of anti-terrorism?
For many Europeans those things “equal” dictatorship.
And finally … with big media corporations and huge companies being the ones who “define & decide” who’ll get to become the next president … is it really a democracy? I know Europe isn’t a real democracy, but that doesn’t mean the United States is.
A democracy nowadays is this: “a government that is approved by and the United States and Europe. – But just by the United States will suffice -“. It doesn’t “really” have to be a ‘real’ democracy. And a lot of real democracies are being called dictatorships in our Western media “just because” the government in power is not pro the United States.
A little reality check on this subject can do wonders, Ian.
So, about your dictatorship called Russia … you try to explain me that the US’s propaganda is successful in persuading people to believe that Russia is a dictatorship and that their’s is the greatest democracy of all times? Or what? And so what?
Let’s turn it to another topic.
Why would Russia attack Europe? Wouldn’t that be quite a stupid move?
You don’t think they are selling us their gas so that they can buy weapons, do you? So that they can prepare the big invasion of Europe? You don’t seriously believe that, right? Because that’s quite a silly way to do that. If you want weapons, you just make them. Look at how the United States continuously makes weapons it just doesn’t need.
In a dictatorship you can just force your people to start building massive amounts of weapons. There’s no need to sell a strategic product like gas to your ‘enemy’ for that.
Right?
I kinda agree with method’s three points in his last post.
My response: indeed.
But we are not there yet. Look at your points 2) and 3). We are working very hard on the first point, though. We have the ITER project, and for example cars in Europe are increasingly becoming a lot better when it comes to energy consumption.
Hybrid cars are also appearing on the roads. Although they are still somewhat an exception. The tax systems in the European countries are giving a lot of benefits for products like cars that have lower than average CO2 output (or other pollution).
It’s a start.
Phillip,
I think you’re being accused of being softhearted, even naive, toward Russia. It doesn’t mean that you have to give up a neutrality or even an appeasement position, but you should acknowledge what the Russian Federation really is.
Putin, who regarded the fall of the Soviet Union as a tragedy, reconstructed Soviet-style command and control of society with capitalist economics. He consolidated the news media under government control. Journalists who express unpopular opinion are shot (it doesn’t matter by whom, the effect is the same). He prosecuted a war in Chechnya in an utterly brutal fashion. He is supported by paramilitary youth groups. Umm, Russia blatantly poisoned a British citizen. They blatantly poisoned the former elected leader of Ukraine. Somebody in Russia shut down Estonia’s Internet, the same somebody who is attacking Georgia now. It’s not necessary to call Russia a dictatorship because ethnic Russians love him enough to elect him or his handpicked successor. Ethnic Chechens don’t seem to like him as much. The Russian nationalism that Putin has promoted has gone hand in hand with increased xenophobia and racism in Russia: “Russia for Russians”.
Now Russia is rich because of oil. The RF has a nice business model because the government is primary stakeholder in all the oil companies. Their motivation for selling oil to Europe is that it makes them a ton of money. Which they will use to build their military. They will use their military to achieve their objectives. In the short-term Russia’s main objective seems to be to get the former Soviet Union back under its sphere of control. Their other objective is to get access to more oil.
You can say some but not all of these things about the US (we don’t shoot journalists, seriously), but the bottom line is that whatever imperialist ambitions the US has (or had, our power is waning) they are not as likely to affect Europe as Russia’s ambitions will.
Well, I see we’re back to equivocating. That’s OK, it’s where I assumed we’d be the whole time. Couple things, suppose I grant you that the US is also a dictatorship – then what? Where has European soft power stopped the US dictatorship from doing, well, whatever the fuck it wants? I can’t think of many examples, and this is exactly the criticism I’m making. Please correct me if I’ve misread your worldview, but as far as I can tell you seem to be saying European soft power can handle hostile foreign powers even while the USA and Russia invade sovereign nations with impunity. Can you not see the problem with your reasoning?
And we’re back to another strawman here:
“Why would Russia attack Europe? Wouldn’t that be quite a stupid move?
You don’t think they are selling us their gas so that they can buy weapons, do you? So that they can prepare the big invasion of Europe? You don’t seriously believe that, right? Because that’s quite a silly way to do that. If you want weapons, you just make them. Look at how the United States continuously makes weapons it just doesn’t need.”
I’ve said nothing of the sort, and I’m finding this kind of thing typical of you. During the cold war the Soviet Union dominated parts of what’s now the EU. The rest of Europe was bound together and protected by their credible threat of war.
I only mentioned it at all because, again, you seem to think a nation can deal with hostile neighbors with soft power alone, when in fact with sometimes the only counter to hard power is hard power. What is the EU doing about that? I’m not asking out of disdain for Europe! Rather I’m asking as somebody that hopes the world’s single largest economy will finally start competing in its own weight class.
Additionally I find it bizarre that you can consider European dependence on Russian oil as anything but a major weakness. It completely negates the EU’s soft power in relation to Russia, and I believe for the enlarged EU’s sake this is a very bad thing!
@philip : I don’t think it is helpful to play semantic games around the word democracy. When someone says Russia is a dictatorship, pointing to the massive support its leaders enjoy is enough to show their fallacy. Twisting the meaning of well established concepts just undermines your own credibility.
Yes but bart, all you talk about is my credibility.
So what about my credibility? Is it really the point here anyway?
Sure if I wanted to replicate my memes in the most successful way, I would have to care about my own credibility. Various idiots on this planet are proof that you don’t need to have a lot of credibility to get your memes to replicate successfully, however. I could name a few, but I’m not going to do that (to protect my own credibility at the supporters of those idiots).
I’m more into trying to publicize my mind than I am into trying to make sure that people like you think my credibility is okay.
If you disagree, then you disagree. If you don’t believe me, then you don’t believe me.
But neither you disagreeing nor you not believing or trusting me has anything to do with the truth.
Just your truths.
I guess I’m just not good at propaganda (the art of making people trust you, the art of consent). Sure, that’s ok. Not my goal anyway.
@Philip : ok, I misunderstood. I thought you wanted to engage in a back-forth argument instead of a braindump that is not meant to convince.