Fide Women’s Grand Prix Collapses into “Chaos” as Players Withdraw

Interestingly, grandmasters burn ridiculous energy during tournaments.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/22/chess-grandmasters-lose-weig...

For now it appears chaotic, but without collapse, since the tournament is being played.

I am citing polls of the population, from mainstream poll organizations. Pew Research and Gallup published these polls.

I cited Pew Research in 2010 and here is Gallup in 2008 which puts the lie to “open door policy”: https://news.gallup.com/poll/104356/ukrainians-see-more-valu...

My whole point as a libertarian is that these governments fail to serve the people well or even represent the people. The people themselves don’t want to fight and kill the other population, or to escalate. You’re attacking a strawman.

When Yanukovich blocks the EU association agreement, to accept a $15B loan and cheap fuel from Russia, you say he is a stooge of Russia, and support a popular uprising that ousted him and destabilized the country (much like happened in Yemen).

But when Yuschenko his predecessor works to get Ukraine into NATO despite a solid majority of Ukrainians opposing it (as per mainstream polls), you don’t call him a stooge of NATO or a Western puppet. Why?

The labels are just tools of public propaganda. Putin and Assad are called brutal dictators, but the Saudi monarchy who don’t even have the pretense of elections are not called unelected dictators, nor are Saudi war crimes and starving of Yemen described in the same terms by USA as they do for lesser things by our stated enemies (Shias mostly). In short, not only is there “room for debate” but every government + media including our own is super biased and selectively paints some groups as bad while other far worse groups are given a pass.

By any measure, Ukrainians did not want to be in NATO any more than Iraqis wanted to be liberated, or Muslims hated us for our freedoms. These were all slogans cooked up by the politicians during Bush admin (“Islamofascist” didn’t poll well so they changed the rhetoric to fit — that’s what they do.)

USA was always going to push for Ukraine and Georgia in NATO, and oust Assad in Syria, not because of anything they publicly say but because that would take away Russia’s last allies, get them surrounded, and we’d rather they fight Ukraine over there than us over here after they got stronger. That’s the real geopolitical calculus, and same coming up with QUAD in China.

This isn’t even that hard to believe — sadly, no country’s government wants its geopolitical rivals healing divisions with their neighbors and getting stronger. They want them divided and fighting. And if they can increase their own influence around the world, they will do it. This is how every proxy war started.

And frankly, if as you say NATO accepted countries when their governments wanted to join, they’d accept Russia. They officially rejected USSR in 1954 “without discussion” calling the application a joke. After USSR fell apart, Yeltsin did everything the Americans wanted, pushing thru Chicago-school “shock therapy” reforms and even firing on the parliament building and arresting his own parliament in the 1993 constitutonal crisis as a result. The USA proudly meddled in Russian elections in 1996 to get him reelected after a 6% (!!) approval rating and Times Magazine featured Yeltsin holding an American flag with “Yanks to the Rescue” on the cover (imagine the reverse). Surely Yeltsin was so much “our guy” that we’d listen to his security concerns, right? WRONG.

Yeltsin officially protesting NATO expansion during Clinton’s admin was met with “sit down boy and be quiet”. And Putin asking for Russia to get into NATO was rejected. Is Russia less democratic than Turkey, a NATO member? Is it more corrupt than Ukraine and Georgia? All these rationalizations for why Ukraine and Georgia but not Russia — never Russia — are a smokescreen for what I said above. It’s realpolitik.

In the interest of upholding intellectual integrity, I will admit you have a point, that we don’t actually have a recent official request from Russia to join NATO.

On the other hand, to pretend that this process is somehow all about clear rules and truly open door policies, is very disingenuous. Are you saying that this is what Russia would need to do:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W6ofIQi5XVY

Obviously, it’s silly. There are a lot of unspoken considerations for which country gets into NATO and which country is pushed into it despite what their citizens want. Rule #1 is: Russia never gets in, that would be like China getting into QUAD. If Russia joined NATO, its raison d’etre would be obsolete, and moreover, USA (its main member) would be increasingly unnecessary since Russia would be then selling and using its weapons for European security. That is competition USA does not want.

And look, USSR formally applied in 1954, and was rejected without any formal discussion! That is not a lie but simply a fact, and reported by NY Times back then:

https://www.nytimes.com/1954/04/01/archives/soviet-in-bid-to...

Similarly, mainstream outlets also reported as early as 2001 that Putin continuously and repeatedly advocated for Russia to be in NATO:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2001/08/putin-i...

And back in 2001 NYTimes reported how Bush anyway pushed for NATO to go right up to Russia’s border…

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/18/world/cordial-rivals-how-...

My characterization is quite accurate as to the main causes of this. Some even said Bush was pushing to go into Iraq on “day 1”… whether that is true or not is unclear because governments are opaque, but we DO KNOW that Bush was the biggest force behind the push to keep expanding NATO to Russia’s border and get Ukraine and Georgia in, so you downplaying that is disingenuous. It was a very destructive push by Bush. And nearly all of the foreign policy experts in USA, as well as his own ambassadors etc. ALL WARNED BUSH AND CLINTON against this, and predicted this exact outcome.

https://theconversation.com/amp/ukraine-war-follows-decades-...

In June 1997, 50 prominent foreign policy experts signed an open letter to Clinton, saying, “We believe that the current U.S. led effort to expand NATO … is a policy error of historic proportions” that would “unsettle European stability.”

In 2008, Burns, then the American ambassador to Moscow, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

So this reaction by Russia acting like a cornered animal before it is completely surrounded is not “unprovoked”. It was systematically provoked, and tried every other avenue to stop this — except FORMALLY applying to NATO, which I blame Putin for. Of course, Russia’s politicians are just as negligent and dumb as other countries’ politicians. Putin should have applied every year, and publicly lampooned the rejections year after year. He should have worked on having better PR for Russia’s positions to be heard in the West. RT was not enough.

But to blame solely Putin? No, that is simply regurgitating propaganda.

It’s not a fact at all. It is an extremely biased oversimplification and massive equivocation.

“Eastern Europe” is very broad, consisting of many countries. Within a country there are many viewpoints. Anyone can always be found to say “the initiative came” from them, whether it’s Communists in Cuba / Nicaragua / Vietnam whatever, or whether it’s literal fascists like Pinochet’s revolution in Chile, or the Houthi rebels in Yemen, or even the mujahideen in Afghanistan — where we similarly came to “help Afghanistan” in a proxy war that killed 2 million people over there! We did it all for the express purpose of “making the Soviets bleed for as long and as hard as possible” and “creating a Vietnam for them”, not out of any great love for Afghans!

The way proxy wars start, in fact, is that an outside actor emboldens one group in a country that foments a revolution, while another outside actor emboldens another group in the country that launches a counter-revolution. Whether it’s Maidan vs Anti-Maidan, or Houthis vs Saudi Loyalists, or even the Red Army vs the White Army in Russia, we know by now how a revolution can lead to destabilization and a destructive proxy war.

I have SHOWN you that the actual POPULATION of Ukraine was majority against NATO, for the very reasons given by everyone else — they didn’t want war with Russia and they chose economic and military ties with Russia over NATO. So why was Ukraine’s president working with NATO to get Ukraine into NATO?

So now you switched it to “Eastern Europe”. Wow, quite a big switch there, and certainly some other countries, like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania could be said to have had majorities who wanted to join NATO. In fact, that is what the 2001 article I linked to was about. It literally says:

Mr. Bush declared that he wanted NATO to expand up to Russia's border

Russia allowed this with no wars happening. But that was not enough. Soon afterwards it to be Ukraine and Georgia in NATO. It takes a special bias to look at a Reuters headline like

“Bush VOWS to PRESS for Ukraine, Georgia in NATO”

together with polls at the same time showing a solid majority of Ukrainians against it, and somehow conclude that Bush wasn’t pushing for Ukraine to be in NATO: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nato-ukraine-bush-idUSL01...

Everyone in Russia made it clear that this is an absolute red line, not just Putin. They did this for years, in every international forum. Every policy expert WARNED BUSH that this would be the consequence. To say it Russia’s reaction is “unprovoked” is just a total lie. The decision makers in the US simply ignored every single warning, and even now keep telling tons of people in their own government and other institutions to shut up and stop even so much as asking for a peace process. The reason is obvious: this is a push to hopefully surround Russia with members of a hostile alliance once and for all. Because otherwise Russia would be stronger with allies, and we’d rather their own beighbors fight them over there than we have to contend with a significant power with its own alliance on the global stage.