Second Childhood

Second childhood? Has he ever left his first one?

Something of a repeat of Wilson before WW I. He signaled a “peace at any price” and Germany picked up on that. It was only after events made it impossible for the US to avoid war because of Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare did he finally rise to the occasion. He Teddy Roosevelt been elected in 1912, Germany would not have been quite so bold.

Let’s plant a NATO flag with weapons right on paranoid Russia’s front porch.. what could go wrong?

The only portions of Russia’s border which are adjacent to a NATO country are a 300 mile stretch along the eastern boundary of Latvia and Estonia and a 260 mile stretch around the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad (a piece of territory they insisted on annexing in 1945, having expelled its German inhabitants and replaced them with Russians). There are about 2,500 NATO troops in Latvia and Estonia (which, between them, have a population of about 3 million). Latvia and Estonia have been members of NATO without incident since 2004.

We should have been gracious when the Soviet Union fell, and we were not.

They weren’t mistreated. Stop lying.

Early on Putin asked to become part of NATO and was denied.

Thanks for the factoid. Now cite an actual set of memoranda, an actual proposal, and explain just what would have been the purpose of having Putin in NATO.

Treating Germany badly after WW1 caused WW2.

No it didn’t. The ambitions of the Japanese and German governments caused WWii. Japan behaved atrociously during the period running from 1941 to 1942, even though they were on the winning side in World War I. Revanchism was the preference of only on odd minority in Germany prior to 1930; it took three discrete blows to the stature of the German establishment for the German electorate to consider the Nazi Party.

The President of Russia has just explained his reasoning in plain terms: the Ukraine is Russia’s, and the preferences of the resident population there are of no account. (He also said the Ukrainian government is infested with Nazis). That’s not a mentality into which he was tricked by American diplomats and politicians.

“Let’s plant a NATO flag with weapons right on paranoid Russia’s front porch.. what could go wrong?”

Let’s remember Russia’s long ledger of repression and atrocities against the neighbors which prompted them to lunge at NATO membership. My brother helped train Latvian troops during his hitch in the Army. They were raw but enthusiastic men who were grateful for the tutelage.

You can be sure that the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians sleep much more soundly right now thanks to the tripwire forces their NATO membership entitles them to.

We should have been gracious when the Soviet Union fell, and we were not.
“They weren’t mistreated. Stop lying.”

Never, I hope…. in my opinion and from what I can see…. we treated Germany and Japan much much more graciously after WW2, then the USSR after their defeat in the Cold War.

Treating Germany badly after WW1 caused WW2.
“No it didn’t. The ambitions of the Japanese and German governments caused WW2.”

Well then, let’s just crush Russia into poverty and total hatred of the West, give rise to a strong man better than Putin, with access to nuclear weapons and see what happens. No wait, except for the part about nuclear weapons, Europe already did that to Germany at the close of WW1. I’m not saying Putin’s not a thug, what I am saying is that in many cases we have acted stupidly. And as always it’s what ever best serves the democrat-deepstate-industrial-military-complex narrative. Russia-russia-russia… so we can all cheer Biden at his State of the Union. I’ll pass. Thank you.

Don, Those are good points, but I don’t believe that tells the entire story, or proportionally how we could’ve acted. RI still celebrates VJ Day, but RI stopped hating Japan a long time ago.
Let’s agree to disagree.

Well then, let’s just crush Russia into poverty and total hatred of the West, give rise to a strong man better than Putin, with access to nuclear weapons and see what happens. No wait, except for the part about nuclear weapons, Europe already did that to Germany at the close of WW1. I’m not saying Putin’s not a thug, what I am saying is that in many cases we have acted stupidly. And as always it’s what ever best serves the democrat-deepstate-industrial-military-complex narrative. Russia-russia-russia… so we can all cheer Biden at his State of the Union. I’ll pass. Thank you.

You haven’t named one thing the United States government did which injured Russia. You’re not even being coherent.

“Why in Heaven’s name would we do that?”
To make a friend rather than continue a deeper enmity.

“You mean the freeing of their slave states? I wish we could claim credit for that, but that was a mostly peaceful process of the Soviet Union, and its Warsaw Pact allies…”
The US won, but Gorbachev not Reagan, Russia not the US, deserves credit for the war’s peaceful end. We were not as gracious, as the loser was.

“If anything we have been too tolerant of truly rotten behavior by Russia.” Maybe so, but they do have the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Russia is a country that, once a global power, emerged from the slavery of Communism with only a gas station and a military. Could we have helped them become more after the war? I think so. But that didn’t feed the media-industrial-military-complex.

The US won, but Gorbachev not Reagan, Russia not the US, deserves credit for the war’s peaceful end. We were not as gracious, as the loser was.

I think your fallacious reasoning in this thread begins there.

Absent attempting to massacre millions of people, he had no choice in the course followed

I don’t think his choices were that constrained. Cuba bumps and grinds along.

The idea was that the command economy was not generating innovating technological adaptations and they couldn’t get the west to simply transfer the technology. So, he gambled on a number of modifications to how production decisions were made and to how public discussion was conducted. Paul Hollandar’s thesis was that with public discussion of problems now permitted, you had people who were aware of trouble in their own domain able to reflect on the widespread trouble across sectors, and this caused a catastrophic loss of confidence among Russia’s political class. It was much more disruptive in the Soviet Union than it was in eastern Europe because the eventual implication was that the state itself disintegrated. The production process up to that time was crucially dependent on central planning. That system was falling apart while production managers had scant experience working in a market system. The economic depression which hit much of eastern Europe during the period from 1988 to 1995 was horrendous (compounded by intramural warfare in Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, and Tajikistan and by mass outmigration of skilled labor throughout Central Asia). The countries who proved most adaptable (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Roumania, Slovakia) managed to break even during 1995-98. For the modal post-communist state, it took until 2004. With a few exceptions, all of the post-communist world is better off absolutely and relatively than they were 35 years ago, but the transition costs were tremendous. Bad advice from characters like Jeffrey Sachs may have made things worse than they otherwise would have been and there may be some literature on that.

I have no clue why people fancy the principal interlocutors of Mikhail Gorbachev bear no responsibility for the agreeable aspects of this transition, except that their thinking is rather stereotyped, which is to say they are not doing any thinking.

Note, for all that the post-communist countries suffered, there hasn’t been much obtrusive revanchist sentiment contra western powers. Russia’s pretty singular in this regard.

Wasn’t Boris Yeltsin something of a mixed bag for Russia?

A fellow who blogs under the handle ‘mkent’ offers this interpretation: Russian nationalists discuss and aspire to Russia’s ‘natural borders’, which would be simpler to defend. That, in their view, means the Gulf of Bothnia, the Oder and Niesse, the Carpathians, and the Black Sea, meaning the subjugation of Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, much of Roumania, and Bulgaria (in addition to the Ukraine and White Russia). The rage contra NATO and the threats directed contra a menu of NATO members are because NATO stands in the way of the borders they really want. Note, the area in question has a population of about 120 million and a domestic product of about $3 tn. If that actually is an aspiration of the senior officialdom, that is very disquieting. The degree of mobilization and coercion required to execute such a program renders it Hitler-level lunacy.