161–170 of 209 posts
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Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow them in the future: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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> two of the more plausible candidates for the beginning of this whole thing are [...] the American invasion of Serbia Are we talking about 1999?
Yeah. Those initial airstrikes really freaked Russia out. Relations were never the same after them. NATO's first military attack really shook them.
There have been... a lot of momentous geopolitical events since 1999.
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Yeah, but the popular narrative now is that China is the real super power because they have a strong autocratic leader and aren't bogged down by democracy, and don't have to deal with other people's uneducated opinions. Not that they have a mountain of shadow debt built upon the biggest housing bubble the world has ever seen (by far) and an absolute demographic time bomb about to blow up their future...
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The fact that there's a major land war in Ukraine, which the US did not start and had no power to prevent, has come at a huge cost. This is true. Given that Ukraine patently was not just going to roll over, and even if the US hadn't supported them, much of Europe absolutely would. I think it's petty plain the war would still be raging fiercely anyway. Most likely Russia would be on the skirts of or in Kyiv and Odessa…
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You have been misinformed. The sovereign institution in Ukraine is the Verkhovna Rada, the parliament, which overwhelmingly approved an association agreement with the European Union. Yanukovych refused to sign it, and after extensive popular protests in favour of the association agreement, on 22 February 2010 the parliament voted overwhelmingly to remove Yanukovych from office. Crucially he then issued an official statement of resignation.
The constitutional situation is messy, for sure, but the guy resigned. He didn't have to do that, but he did. The fact he went crying to mommy in Moscow and then tried to un-resign himself is rather sad, but doesn't change the facts.
>The reality is, the military industrial complex, which is in complete control of foreign policy, has been pushing for this for years
So the military industrial complex in the USA have been pushing for Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. I'm not sure I understand how that works. Could you explain?
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The US is the largest oil producer in the world, one of the largest producers of food, one of the top innovators, has relatively healthy demographics, is surround by allies (one of which produces oil and fertilizer), and has the most dominant military on the planet. Your outlook is significantly more gloomy than reality
All true! It's too easy to focus on the downsides, but there are significant upsides as this comment points out. There's an excellent discussion by Geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan here [1]; he talks about China vis a vis the US with respect the geographic, demographic, and economic advantages/disadvantages. Worth a watch in this context. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS4Vw6cuW4M
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>we just backed a coup to overthrow Ukraine's pro-Russian government in 2014 You have been misinformed. The sovereign institution in Ukraine is the Verkhovna Rada, the parliament, which overwhelmingly approved an association agreement with the European Union. Yanukovych refused to sign it, and after extensive popular protests in favour of the association agreement, on 22 February 2010 the parliament voted overwhelmin…
The next few weeks/months are going to be very interesting. Saudi Arabia has doubled down on its new direction. Japan/EU seems at edge with the war in Ukraine. China is making new moves in the global financial scene. The US has accumulated significant political debt in the recent years. They have significantly abused their position with the US dollars hegemony. In this recent conflict, the cost burdened Europe and th…
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>we just backed a coup to overthrow Ukraine's pro-Russian government in 2014 You have been misinformed. The sovereign institution in Ukraine is the Verkhovna Rada, the parliament, which overwhelmingly approved an association agreement with the European Union. Yanukovych refused to sign it, and after extensive popular protests in favour of the association agreement, on 22 February 2010 the parliament voted overwhelmin…
These "popular protests" were violent. The vote was at gunpoint, that's what makes it a coup.
> the military industrial complex in the USA have been pushing for Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. I'm not sure I understand how that works. Could you explain?
Sure. They lobby the legislative and executive branch to aggressively expand NATO, to send NATO trainers into a military on Russia's border, they lobby to have the US sabotage the Minsk accords, so that anti-Russian forces in Ukraine spend 8 years killing thousands of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.
It's like everyone taking the State Dept/arms industry bait on this conflict hasn't heard of the Monroe Doctrine. If another country did in Mexico 1/5th of what we've been doing in Ukraine for the past 15 years we would have turned Mexico into ashes.
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Purely speculative conspiracy theory here.
But of course it's conspiracy theory, let's just label it and ignore smoking gun.