Am Mo, 28. Feb 2022, um 11:56, schrieb smitra: > NATO membership may not all be that relevant in practice. Russia isn't > performing all that well in Ukraine. Sweden and Finland should have > little difficulty in stopping a conventional Russian attack.
NATO membership is a deterrent to conventional attacks, exactly of the type that is happening in Ukraine. If Ukraine were a NATO member, then NATO would be obliged to respond as if all of the NATO countries were under attack. Which means that Putin would not have started this to begin with, unless he is even more deranged than he looks. And maybe then he would be taken care of internally. As the old saying goes: "Russian love their children too". NATO is based on an obvious game-theoretic solution that has been working spectacularly well so far. Also Sweden and Finland are EU members, which makes them de-facto NATO members. There is no way in hell that Europe would tolerate such a move on an EU member and not get military directly involved if needed. This is precisely the reason why NATO and EU are constantly under attack by its enemies. The more the likes of Putin and Xi Jinping try to undermine these transnational organizations, the more I believe that they work in my best interest, despite their many flaws. I believe that Russia has been very successful in the last decade in helping to divide the west, and they were particularly successful in convincing significant parts of the US and UK electorate that Europe is their real enemy. But now I believe that he overplayed his hand. In one single weekend he managed to end Swedish neutrality, end German anti-militarism and trigger the first ever military action by the EU, which is not buying fighter jets to support Ukraine. And now most of his neighbors will be more likely to be accepted under the blanket of NATO and EU. He is a total failure, just like Trump and all the other imbeciles who think that we are still in the XX century. > And there > is no question that a nuclear attack by Russia on any country would > trigger a nuclear counterstrike. I am not so sure. Nuclear strikes and counter-strikes are the human psychology equivalent of black holes in physics. Normal intuitions no longer apply. We will only know for sure what happens once it happens. I hope that we never find out. Telmo -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/866c271b-73a3-48fa-b22e-291f3a3ed902%40www.fastmail.com.
