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could you give me a contemporary example of a small country close to the US that is practically independent and is not meddled with ?You asserted that small states cannot stably border weak states. I am saying that’s obviously untrue.
You’re now adding a “practically independent and is not meddled with” condition, which is impossible to show for any state in human history since part of geopolitics is mutual meddling, you could literally describe any act of statecraft this way.
> there is one thing that he certainly isn't, an idiot. Neither is Lavrov
Putin was an idiot and surrounded by idiots when he launched the invasion. His intelligence was clearly no better than America’s, given he not only expected victory in days but didn’t bother to contingency plan. And his knowledge of his own military was clearly flawed given he attempted combined-arms strategy (like lightning warfare) without a military that practiced combined-arms maneuver outside special ops.
But Putin hasn’t been an idiot for his own interests. Putin and Lavrov’a families have extracted enough wealth that they’ll be fine. So have the oligarchs. This, of course, is lovely for American and British and Gulf financiers who get to extract and manage that wealth from Russia.
That’s why I didn’t say Putin or Lavrov are idiots, I said “Moscow is ruled by idiots.” The Moscow elite are corrupt to the point of self destruction. They’ve allowed themselves to be played by Washington and Beijing into selling out their country’s status as a global power in exchange for minor battlefield headlines. They continue a war that keeps getting them played, the latest phase which will involve their energy export competitors bankrolling the razing of Russia’s energy export infrastructure.