71–80 of 94 posts
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Wikipedia suggests it is also connected through Frankfurt and Tokyo.
I guess that makes it unsurprising that Sweden, Germany, and Japan are all pretty valued allies to the US these days.
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Switzerland spends half as much as Sweden on its annual military spending as percentage of GDP (also less in absolute terms), and they can credibly stay out of NATO, so why couldn't Sweden? Geographics? I don't buy it. Also, if Sweden wanted to join tomorrow morning, they would have the application granted after lunch the same day. NATO has been salivating at the thought for decades now, and considering Sweden's mili…
> Switzerland spends half as much as Sweden on its annual military spending as percentage of GDP (also less in absolute terms), and they can credibly stay out of NATO, so why couldn't Sweden? Geographics? I don't buy it. I think you should go look at that map again and think about the strategic value of Sweden vs Switzerland.
Sweden and Turkey can both make naval operations more difficult and expensive for Russia, particularly those operations it might prefer to keep secret. Switzerland isn't exactly a place you might ordinarily want to go through on your way to somewhere else, unless you really like climbing over mountains (or digging under them). Militarily, it's almost always easier to go around Switzerland than through it. So you would only ever attack Switzerland if they, specifically, had something that you wanted, or were threatening your flanks or rear.
Sweden-Denmark, Egypt, Panama, and Turkey, and to lesser extents, Malaysia, Canada, and Spain-Morocco-Gibraltar all preside over strategic bottlenecks to aquatic vessels. They have huge strategic value.
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Yeah, even Reagan (Grenada & Panama) and the Bushes (Panama & Iraq) pretty much installed democracies. The world is slightly different after Kissinger left office (Argentina)... realpolitik is really more of a Euro-Russian thing than a US thing. Although that could change again with the new president.
>> Bushes (Panama & Iraq) pretty much installed democracies. I would use the word "democracy" pretty loosely when it comes to Iraq. A consistent insurgency with widespread sectarian violence and much of the Sunni population not taking part in the elections, it was hardly what anybody would deem a "democracy".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Socialist_Ba%27ath_Party_...
>In June 2003, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority banned the Ba'ath Party, and banned all members of the party's top four tiers from the new government and from public schools and colleges, a move which some criticised for blocking too many experienced people from participating in the new government. Thousands were removed from their positions, including doctors, professors, school teachers and bureaucrats. Many teachers lost their jobs, causing protests and demonstrations at schools and universities.
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Revolutions are reasonably predictable, after all, history rhymes. From my point of view I would agree that Libya was better off with Gaddafi. Gaddafi was negotiating a surrender with free elections but Hillary Clinton blocked it because she wanted him dead and needed to boost her foreign policy resume. She then bragged about it afterwards. Libya is unlikely to recover in a meaningful way for the duration of the mode…
That was yet another long list of extreme claims without references! Edit: No references in the answer to this, as expected. (I can only blame myself for arguing with what looks like an extra account created to troll people someone don't agree with.) (At least about modern, mainly international, politics -- what the Brits did before WWII seems quite irrelevant to anything by now. Edit: WWII started almost 80 years ag…
I comment on topics that interest me and I cycle my account on a regular basis to preserve anonymity - which, for reasons, is important to me.
The idea that time makes someone less deserving of blame is nonsensical. The idea that people should simply get over past wrongs, especially WWII, will only serve to invite repeat abuses.
It is also impractical, as past wrongs are very effective tools for propaganda and thus will be evoked whenever convenient. A good example is China use of the West's involvement in the Opium Wars to stir up anti-western sentiment. Similarly they use the Rape of Nanking to stir up anti-japanese sentiment. This is to lay the groundwork for a future war with the US. These past events are very relevant to our future. And asking them to get over it isn't going to work.
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Revolutions are reasonably predictable, after all, history rhymes. From my point of view I would agree that Libya was better off with Gaddafi. Gaddafi was negotiating a surrender with free elections but Hillary Clinton blocked it because she wanted him dead and needed to boost her foreign policy resume. She then bragged about it afterwards. Libya is unlikely to recover in a meaningful way for the duration of the mode…
That was yet another long list of extreme claims without references! Edit: No references in the answer to this, as expected. (I can only blame myself for arguing with what looks like an extra account created to troll people someone don't agree with.) (At least about modern, mainly international, politics -- what the Brits did before WWII seems quite irrelevant to anything by now. Edit: WWII started almost 80 years ag…
I was curious about your strange obsession of references as a crutch for arguing so I did a search to see if that was a repeating pattern.
http://google.com/?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%22berntb%2...
You need help man. All the best.
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>> the number of available democracy-democracy pairs is so small compared to thr number of pairs of countries that the expected number of wars between them is, rounded to the nearest integer, zero. There are literally dozens of modern democracies that have been free since WWII, how can that be too few "pairs"? >> Certain, since the wars in the Balkans from the 1990s, the Democratic Peace theory is even less defensibl…
> There are literally dozens of modern democracies that have been free since WWII, how can that be too few "pairs"? There's a little under 200 countries now. The number of democracies by any definition that leaves no inter-democracy wars is a small fraction of that (though, yes, in the dozens). The ratio of democracy-democracy dyads to total dyads is smaller (for reasons which should be mathematically obvious) than t…
Milosevic's popular support was likely around 10% at the end. The country was governed by a weird coalition of financial interests that made up a ruling class of a few tens of thousands of people - many ex-communists.
In terms of success as a kleptocrat, Milosevic is only beaten out by Suharto, Marcos and a small number of others - he likely stole in excess of a billion.
That said - the Balkan wars do present another case of democracy v democracy at war as at some points Croatia and Bosnia (the Muslim canton) were at a state of war yet both were democracies (altho also arguably ruled by strongmen).
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That was yet another long list of extreme claims without references! Edit: No references in the answer to this, as expected. (I can only blame myself for arguing with what looks like an extra account created to troll people someone don't agree with.) (At least about modern, mainly international, politics -- what the Brits did before WWII seems quite irrelevant to anything by now. Edit: WWII started almost 80 years ag…
BrentB; I hope you see this. I was curious about your strange obsession of references as a crutch for arguing so I did a search to see if that was a repeating pattern. http://google.com/?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%22berntb%2... You need help man. All the best.
(How many troll accounts have you used in just this discussion?)
Try to get a good life instead of trolling, kid.
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A revolution is scary, the dice are thrown in the air and you have no clue how they fall. It didn't go well in Libya, so far. But mainly Putin and his employees seem to think that it was bad to support an uprising to get rid of the previous junta in Libya (and they are probably mostly upset because Gadaffi was a good customer). And about Syria -- how many tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of civilians have t…
What ought to weigh on your mind and on Obama's are the "many tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of civilians" that the "moderate Islamist" we're supporting have killed and tortured. And do keep in mind that without the interventions in Libya and Syria, Europe would not be dealing with the immigration crisis it's facing now.
The consensus is that the Assad junta is responsible for much more death/torture than even ISIS. They have the ability to use barrel bombs and artillery on civilians.
And I do think you know both points above.
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> There are literally dozens of modern democracies that have been free since WWII, how can that be too few "pairs"? There's a little under 200 countries now. The number of democracies by any definition that leaves no inter-democracy wars is a small fraction of that (though, yes, in the dozens). The ratio of democracy-democracy dyads to total dyads is smaller (for reasons which should be mathematically obvious) than t…
I know a lot of scholars count Serbia as a democracy, but it wasn't until 2001. Milosevic was a classic post-soviet Eastern European autocratic strongman. While Serbia had a parliament, electoral fraud was rife. Milosevic's popular support was likely around 10% at the end. The country was governed by a weird coalition of financial interests that made up a ruling class of a few tens of thousands of people - many ex-co…
Also, Croatia/Bosnia/Serbia were civil wars.
Anyway, how many free elections had Croatia and Bosnia had at that time, to be defined as democratic? :-)
How many peaceful transitions of power had there been at the time (the real gold test)? :-)
If just one reasonably free election is needed, then Hamas in Gaza is a democratic government... :-)
Irrelevant question but... Has nobody noticed this article is dated in the future?
Note the qualifier "ISSUE," which would hint that it's not a daily.
For weeklies, editors probably have their print runs prepped for the publishers a few weeks in advance, with some variable slots left ambiguous for flexibility, in case they want to pre-empt a soft story with significant breaking news.
This piece doesn't seem to be a run up of current events, like the latest Trump tweets or whatever active shooter incident du jour. It's really a research piece that probably took several months to compile, edit and sweeten. Figure the broad strokes and the idea of the article were crafted over the summer, maybe.