Cory1848

NATO is a treaty alliance, not a patron/client relationship. Close to half of NATO countries are paying “their share” (i.e., 2 percent of their GDP on their own respective militaries), or very close to it, and every frontline NATO country has already achieved that 2 percent threshold. NATO is such a strong deterrent that it has maintained peace in Europe, for the most part, for the past eighty years. Historically, isolationism has never worked as a viable strategy for the United States; active deterrence has proven to be better at containing conflict. And I am so sick and tired of people parroting the refrain “protect your own borders and not someone else’s”: just a week or two ago the Republican House refused to consider a bill that would have imposed extremely strict border controls and provided foreign aid at the same time. Their reason: it is not politically expedient for Republicans to “protect the border” at this time.

I agree that that’s a valid concern, and there’s a pretty big difference between 78 years old, when Biden first took office, and 86, the age at which he’d finish his second term. I would be happier if the Democrats had put someone else forward a year ago. But if Biden starts to deteriorate rapidly during a second term, I have no misgivings about Harris serving in his stead, and frankly I’ve never understood all the hatred toward her; I find it irrational if not racist/misogynistic. As for Biden right now, despite his gaffes and stumbles in public, all reports are that he remains in full control of his faculties, with a firm grasp of facts, where it counts -- in meetings where policy and strategy are actually determined. His presumptive opponent, on the other hand, has gaffed and stumbled a great deal more in public, and in private he’s even worse, all temper tantrums and lunatic ideas with no basis in reality. In the end, I don’t care who the Democratic candidate is, because as I stated, the alternative is unthinkable.

What's sad about that? He's done a good job, and the alternative is unthinkable.

Exactly. And what you lay out is the argument most often used by Putin apologists looking for some way to blame the West for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. As if all those tens of millions of people who live in eastern and Baltic Europe are incapable of deciding for themselves which way they want to go.

Quite right. Six NATO countries in Europe, however, are paying at least 2 percent of GDP on defense, and four of them are frontline countries, seen as most vulnerable to Russian aggression (the three Baltic states and Poland). (The other two are Greece and the UK.) Finland apparently falls just short of 2 percent, and they’ve increased their defense spending rapidly the past two years so are also likely to exceed 2 percent in 2024. So if, say, the Russians were to attack the Suwalki corridor between Poland and Lithuania (as is often speculated), Trump’s “but they don’t pay their bills” argument wouldn’t work. But, of course, Trump doesn’t know any of this. How would he? He’s a total moron.

Following your narrative that Trump’s only reason for making these unhinged comments is to trigger the libtards, the fact that you seem to applaud such behavior from a former president who’s running for office again says a lot about you, doesn’t it. The national political arena is not a nursery school; it requires a minimum level of maturity, which neither Trump nor, it appears, many of his followers are able muster.

You’re completely ignoring the most important factor: What do the Ukrainians themselves want? They have been able to travel to Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, where they see rapid gains in quality of life and personal freedom since the fall of communism. They can also travel to Russia, where they see a new descent into authoritarianism. They would be nuts not to want what the Poles and Czechs have gained. Sure, Eisenhower was quite right to warn about the military industrial complex; he was in a position to know. And the pure greed of “disaster capitalism” as described by Naomi Klein, and of neoliberal capitalism more generally. But it’s not as cut-and-dried as that; these are not the only forces that drive world events. And nobody in the West (other than, I’m sure, a few crackpots) was proposing marching on Moscow; there was no threat. That was the whole point of NATO’s Partnership for Peace program established in the 1990s, to build mutual trust. Many original PfP members joined NATO, but many still haven’t. We wouldn’t have this conflict if Putin hadn’t marched his armies into Ukraine.

When facts and history just don't work, the only kind of response that's left is full sarcasm.

The amount of incoherence I've read in this thread is truly astonishing.

Yes, I am so relieved that Mr. Putin expressed his lack of desire to invade the whole of Europe, that he has no more “territorial demands.” The expression I’m looking for, I think, is “Peace for our time”! And his calm demeanor, too, is reassuring to those of us who doubted his wisdom and humanitarian-ness. He’s not shouting into a microphone or foaming at the mouth or wearing a funny, military-looking uniform, so he can’t be a dictator! The good cop/bad cop scenario that you lay out is a good one. So smart! Medvedev and Lavrov can go all public with their doomsday talk, but Tucker’s sharp questioning during his interview has so made me feel better that Mr. Putin has a firm handle on things!

Uh, no. That's not it.

Someone writes that Putin is a mass murderer and you deflect to Bush. Someone says that Carlson lies and you deflect to CNN. I say that Carlson is not a journalist and you deflect by asking me to name journalists. Sorry, deflection is the last resort for someone who doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

Journalism? What on earth are you talking about? When Carlson was still with Fox News and was sued for defamation, his Fox News bosses got the case dismissed by arguing that no reasonable person would take Carlson for his word -- essentially, that he is not a journalist but an entertainer, and that his job is not to investigate news stories but to generate ad revenue. All of which is perfectly fine, if you enjoy that sort of entertainment. But please don’t call it “journalism.”

What's TDL?

Excuse me? Who “owned what lands”? That’s past tense -- who cares who “owned” those lands. What matters is, what do the people who live there NOW want for themselves? I read a great deal of history; you clearly read nothing but propaganda.

So you're one of those people who "does his own research." Don't make me laugh.

I'm just repeating your own words back to you, dude.

You praised the interview, you congratulated Tucker Carlson, you evidently believe Putin’s statements (by saying that he “confirmed” what you already “knew”), and you say that Putin “only” wants Ukraine as though that were a positive thing. If you truly dislike wars, you should condemn Putin as a liar, a demagogue, and a warmonger rather than praise interviews that he grants to fanboys.

I’m not sure where you’re coming from here, but you seem to be saying, if a country wants their neighbor’s resources, you’re cool with that country stealing them, while slaughtering people who stand in their way and laying waste to their towns and cities. Sounds pretty medieval to me. Remind me never to be your neighbor.

What you and other Putin trolls don’t seem to accept is that the hundred million plus people who actually live in the swath of territory between the Baltic and the Balkans have their own agency. They had all, at some point in history, been oppressed by Russian imperialism, and given a brief window of Russian dormancy in the 1990s, they clamored to join Western institutions, primarily the EU and NATO, as they saw that their best future was there. Did the US and western Europe encourage them? Sure, if they qualified for membership, and for some it took longer than others, but it was entirely at the initiative of the applicant countries, who sought security against future Russian revanchism (and rightly so, as it turns out). Try reading some history, and some actual news reportage out of Ukraine and elsewhere in eastern Europe. Clearly your sources of information are leading you down the wrong rabbit hole.

Exactly. But, as I understand it, Merrick Garland had the power to excise Hur’s “editorializing” before the report was released, and he chose not to, not wanting to appear partisan (thinking of Bill Barr’s flagrant mishandling of the Mueller Report during the previous administration). When one side cheats at every opportunity and the other bends over backward trying to play fair, this is going to happen; Garland may have made a good Supreme Court justice, but he’s a weak attorney general.

Hur did not give a professional analysis; he's a lawyer, not a psychiatrist.

I’m not sure why Harris gets such a bad rap; maybe she should have been attorney general (a job the incumbent is clearly not qualified for), which would have given her more opportunity to establish a record that she could have run on later for higher office if she wanted.

Right, the US and the West pushed Russia so far as to force it to brutally invade a sovereign country, murder tens of thousands of its civilians, destroy its cities, and lay plans to erase its ethnic identity. You have no clue what you’re talking about.

Nothing says democracy like locking up criminals.