On 2/28/2022 7:07 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
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 agree. The biggest disaster that Trump visited upon us was to
withdraw the U.S. from the TransPacific Partnership. It's an
organization that could have contained Chinese expansionism.
Brent
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
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