> The war in Ukraine, amplified by the West's anemic and at best useless sanctions, have likely led to a famine which will effect millions of people.
I'm the _last_ person to defend the actions of states, but I don't see an obvious way the "West" - meaning the US/NATO/Europe - could have responded in a way that avoided this once it began.
> I'm sorry to be so cynical about this, but it has been like watching a slow motion, unending train wreck see the last year of foreign policy nightmares coming out of The United States.
Sigh. After regretfully defending the actions of states, I now find myself in the same position with regard to Trump. Trump's foreign policy - as odious as many people found it at the time - seems to have been quite effective at promoting international stability. I'll point out that it was in place for less than four years, so it's a fair criticism to say that this may have been at most a short-term condition, but... we didn't face the real possibility of global thermonuclear war during that time.
> Our foreign policy laziness/ineptitude has led to a situation where the leader of a nuclear armed, hostile superpower (Russia) has two choices: win his war against the west, or die.
I'll take issue here. Russia's actions - specifically, Putin's actions - have lead to this choice. Putin committed Russia to a war that was obviously going to be uniformly denounced by the international community. The invasion of Ukraine was poorly planned, poorly supplied, and had no reasonable victory condition. It was predicated upon the rapid collapse of the Ukrainian state. There was no fallback plan for how to handle things if it didn't crumble in a matter of hours or days.
I can consider the argument that our foreign policy set up the preconditions to allow Putin to be so completely reliant upon his own biased perspective, but I really don't think that holds water. If his perception of the Ukrainian state and people were so far removed from reality, who is to say that his perceptions of our foreign policy wouldn't be similarly warped?
> these absolutely idiotic sanctions we are imposing on Russia will lead to none of our stated foreign policy goals, and only suffering for the poor.
I disagree here.
The sanctions will lead to moving toward our FP goals and suffering of the poor.
We don't like to be so blunt about it, but the fact is that the very intent of sanctions are to cause people who are otherwise uninvolved to suffer. The idea is that those uninvolved people will then be incentivized to _become_ involved, disrupting the political and economic support of the target.
In other words... the purpose of these sanctions is to cause suffering among the Russian people, which in turn will make it more difficult for the Russian state to pursue military action. Given time, sanctions can even ignite revolution.
Finally: you're 100% correct to say that Putin has no good options at this point. "Win or die". Sanctions, long term, will ratchet that pressure up further and further until he is forced to make a choice. Forcing Putin to decide between losing and taking everything else down with him may not be in the best interests of the world...