this happened once in syria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khasham
Crazy! I didn’t hear about that when it happened.
“Hey we’re being attacked, this you?”
“Nope, not us.”
“Cool, cause we’re about to fuck shit up.”
"Wait… no! Not like that!”
I remember hearing about it when it happened and found it hilarious. Wagner mercs realizing that papa Putin doesn’t care if they die (there was some audio clip circulating). Wagner mercenaries have been known to be pretty nasty (not unique to them of course, Americans have Blackwater and its successors).
Immediately after it happened trump withdraw US soldiers from Syria. I guess Vlad got really upset.
Wiped the floor with them too. ZERO casualties vs 100-200 deaths - brutal.
Like the US will go to war with Russia, it’s become a vassel state as of late.
Well not for Ukraine that’s for fucking sure.
So…
Is the US supposed to be the world police or not?
I mean you could replace the Stars and Stripes here with French Tricolour or Union Jack and I still think it works. The point is more that the lukewarm response to the Crimean invasion emboldened Russia into attacking mainland Ukraine.
Maybe it’s a filter of my English-speaking internet circles, but I’ve never seen memes like this about France or the UK. So you could replace the flags… The point is that it doesn’t seem to happen.
Depends on the day and personal beliefs of the person advocating for it. So, Schroedinger’s World Police. As a USian, I would prefer the EU took over the world police job. It’s not worth the effort.
That is a very short-sighted view. The US’ role as world police allowed it to station troops all over the world, projecting power and influence in every corner of the world. Every deal any country in the world made, always at least considered a US deal. The US was able to influence politics without actually having to flex the military muscle. They could always still do that if diplomacy didn’t work. The projection of scientific and cultural power was also part of that influence.
And why can’t the EU step up? The EU chose to let the US become the world police because they thought it would easier and cheaper. And now they are pissed about it.
The EU is legitimately currently trying to be the region police (not world police) as we speak. Part of that involves building up our own military industry. The US government is not happy about that, to put it mildly.
“Currently trying”. Well, that only took several generations to pull their collective heads out of their asses. Imagine what that industrial/military complex is going to eventually cost EU citizens. Once you get on that particular horse, it’s hard to get off.
They did not choose to. The EU wasn’t even a thing when the USA became the de facto world police. And after WW2 the USA was so dominant that any such attempt by Europes stronger countries would have been in vain
True, the EU didn’t exist when they first started to get comfortable with the US being the world cop. But get comfortable with it they did. Comfortable enough to cut military budgets and putting their reliance on the idea the that the US would intervene for them. Standing idly by during the formation of the Iron Curtin. It got so bad, that they proved incapable to get a handle on the Bosian War in their own back yard. It finally took the intervention of the US to give them enough spine to complete breaking up the ethnic cleansing. They had a generation to wind down the US world cop protection and did nothing.
It was never a good idea. And in the end, they have gotten what they should have known would have happened.
Budapest memorandum entitles Ukraine to assistance in this case.
Considering that Russia attacked them, I think any entitlements in the memorandum are null in their eyes. The agreement is effectively nullified. From what I’ve briefly read, the document is not forcing any party to assist Ukraine, beyond advocating for them at the UN security council.
I’d say the main difference here is that Ukraine probably wanted the “support” of the US. I think we did alright giving them access to money, weapons and training to defend themselves early on, and the major shortcoming was limiting the targets that they could strike with the weapons we sold. Turnabout is fair play, if Vlad wants to start throwing hands, he has to accept that he may get punched in the face.
No it does not. Not even a little bit.
The Budapest memorandum A) isn’t even a binding treaty. And B) only guarantees assurances from the US, UK, and Russia that they won’t invade Ukraine.
There are absolutely ZERO provisions for the US giving military defense to Ukraine in the event they are invaded.
The US and UK have upheld that. Neither have ever invaded Ukraine.
We’re not supposed to. But in the instance of Ukraine, we signed a treaty with Ukraine, Russia and ourselves that if Ukraine dismantled their nuclear weapons that the US would defend Ukraine if Russia invaded. And Russia would defend Ukraine if US invaded.
but i guess international law is nonexistant and nobody gives a damn if a country makes a promise
This was already address in another thread. Short summary…
It’s not a treaty, but a memorandum, it really only “mandates” that we will support them in the UN security council, it’s not enforceable, and Russia already shit all over it.
Did Ukraine ask for help?
yes
Then it’s simple. The US should help Ukraine. They’re being invaded and are asking for help. For the “pragmatists”, any nation what helps Ukraine with have an easier time doing business with them afterwards.
The US has.
Ukraine has explicitly NOT asked for direct military assistance. They have not asked for troops or US airstrikes.
They have asked for weapons, logistics, intelligence, and ammunition. All of which have been provided by the US and European NATO nations.
Ukrainians repeatedly asked to close the sky, which is de-facto a sort of direct help. Also talks about NATO troops being stationed on the West part. Still no balls.
Second paragraph - only after 2022. Ukraine was denied even buying Western equipment in 2014. Obama is an asshole.
It’s basically Chamberlain++.
Chamberlain’s appeasement for fear of kicking off WWII was bad enough, but now nuclear missiles are on the table, so there’s much more fear.
There’s never a good time to kick off WWIII, so most nations are going to bend over backward to not do so.
I do not believe that Russia has working nukes and I bet most nation’s intelligence don’t believe they do either, but no one wants bet on that.
Also, I believe we’re already in WWIII. At least at some point in the future, the start of it will be retroactively decided to have happened before now.
I do not believe that Russia has working nukes and I bet most nation’s intelligence don’t believe they do either, but no one wants bet on that.
That’s a huge stretch. Working ICBMs are 1960s tech’. Russia has repeatedly demonstrated they’re perfectly capable of employing 1960s tech’ reliably enough to function sometimes.
It doesn’t take a 2026 nuke to hit a country in 2026. The more modern, the more likely it hits, but they have so many.
Also, I believe we’re already in WWIII. At least at some point in the future, the start of it will be retroactively decided to have happened before now.
You’re being pedantic about the term WWIII. We both know what I meant.
Nukes don’t store forever. They require more upkeep then other types of military equipment and Russia has proven to be lacking by their initial invasion. Keen eyes noticed that the trucks they were using were sitting for years by the dryrot wear on the tires.
This is pretty much the dilemma the US government faces, right? On the one hand, the public doesn’t like intervention. On the other, they can totally do it, and in many cases it will save a lot of lives, or at least seems like it will.
The new MAGA school is basically to disregard the humanity of anyone who’s not a (white) American citizen, which solves it neatly. At great cost in terms of basic morality, of course. The other one was neoconservativism, where you’re openly the world police. Theoretically, unilaterally disarming is also an option, but almost nobody is talking about that.
The Democrats, and blue Americans in general, have yet to pick a lane.
The trick is to have a US-controlled strategic interest there. See Syria, Russians attack a US-defended oilfield, Russia denies they are Russian regulars, US turn 200 of them into moist ash with artillery and JDAMs
The US and other countries not protecting Ukraine sends a massive signal to everyone else that you can only depend on yourself for protection, and that means everyone needs to have WMDs. So take that how you will.
So the US should be the world police.
This also ignores that the US has intervened aggressively, just in its usual fashion of profitable arms sales and supporting fascist militias.
Interestingly no country gave this correct responde. Or even took a passing interest.
I’m pretty sure my country’s then-leader was very interested but was fobbed off with a deal for cheap Russian gas, subsequently growing our industry almost fully dependent on that discounted energy. Great deal, Angela. Well done.
I hate to defend her but before the invasion of Ukraine by Russia (i.e. pre 2014), using Russian gas to soften the dependency on fascist-murica seemed like a good option.
Trump was elected in 2016. Obama was still president in 2014. While the problems with American imperialism obviously go back a very, very long way, their overt slide into fascism had not begun in 2014. If you’d tried to talk about “American Fascism” pre-2016 people would have assumed you were a very specific kind of racist who is probably deeply concerned about FEMA for vague and implausible reasons.
Ish? Personally, gamergate was my alarm bell, especially when I saw some of the stuff people were saying in the weirder corners.
There were plenty of alarm bells, but that’s not the point in contention here. The person I replied to was trying to claim - effectively - that it was public policy in Germany to cut ties with “fascist America” in 2014 and that’s just not remotely true.
That’s absolutely not what I said at all. I said the decision to add some contracts with Russia seemed like a good decision at the time, and fascist murica was entirely my opinion/assessment. I last set foot into fascistan in 2010 and I will not do so again ever. So much damage done, it can’t be repaired in a single lifetime.
Magastan became Magastan in 2016 (2020 depending on how you look at it). But many of the country’s policies were fascist long before. Not sure how you get from despising 'murica to racism though.
You don’t, and I didn’t say that. What I was pointing out was that the people throwing around the term “fascism” to describe America in Obama’s tenure were primarily racist weirdos who believed that FEMA was going to round them up into internment camps. That was kind of a major part of the right-wing discourse at that time.
America sucked in 2014, but broadly speaking the idea of the US being fascist, or being a threat to their allies (esp Europe and Canada) was not remotely a part of public discourse. Obama did a lot to repair the public image damage Bush had inflicted, despite how little he actually did to fix any of the bad stuff America was doing.
Okay, I think we’re in agreement on all points. I think Obama was really charismatic (still is) and I had high hopes, but I cringed at the premature peace nobel price, and I had to admit in hindsight that many really bad foreign policies continued under his administration. So thinking about interventions in South America (e.g. Salvador Allende), Cambodia (the only person I wished to have to endure eternal hellfire is Kissinger), Vietnam and Iran (Mohammed Mossadegh) - I said that Magastan policies were always fascist.
But you didn’t say that. You said;
I hate to defend her but before the invasion of Ukraine by Russia (i.e. pre 2014), using Russian gas to soften the dependency on fascist-murica seemed like a good option.
At no point did I claim that America was a shining beacon of goodness and light in 2014. On that point we agree.
But you tried to present the claim there was a strong public opinion in 2014 - at least in Germany if not elsewhere - that nations needed to cut ties with “fascist America”, and that’s not even remotely accurate. While a lot of people were broadly concerned about the US’ behaviour, and the behaviour of their electorate, there was never any real public impetus towards cutting ties, or fear that they would badly mistreat their allies until the last few years. Sure, a lot of leftists might have been arguing for those things, but that’s not the same thing at all.
The anti-war coalition that got Obama elected by giving the party a pivot from the stain of voting for Bush’s wars were long accustomed to using that terminology.
It was always used for the Bush administration post 9/11.
Obama got a bit of a pause but the troop surge in 2009 really fractured that coalition.
It was during Obama’s terms that criticism of policy could be automatically slapped with a racism charge, mostly due to all the overt racism being leveled at Obama at the time.
But, yeah, I don’t think it was common in German or European discourse to consider America overtly fascist in 2014.
Meh. Germany had a good initial run of renewable energy expansion which was almost ground to a halt when this happened the first time around 2008 and Putin bought Merkel’s rejection of a Ukrainian accession into NATO. It was already detrimental then if you had some foresight, and it was absolutely devastating the second time.
In 2008 Ukraine’s accession into the club of war criminal monsters a.k.a. NATO was absolutely not a good idea. NATO leadership is very much responsible for the shitshow we see today and every single one of them should be hung, drawn and quartered for making world peace basically impossible. NATO was always about getting European bootlicket nations to provoke the Soviet Union, later Russia, and to slowly gain the upper hand in geopolitics.
Had NATO leaders even shown a shred of decency towards Gorbachev in the 90s, post German reunification, maybe Russian hardliners wouldn’t have been able to grab power. And we might have a better world today. Fuck Putistan, but Russians as a people are no worse or better humans than the rest of us. We could peacefully coexist in harmony, but that doesn’t agree well with max profits in the military industrial complex.
I’d say go for it, even with Putin’s threat of nukes.
With how much Russia’s oligarchy plundered their own war-chest over the years, to the point where they had to rely on Iran for weapons, I actually question if any of Russia’s nukes actually work.
I wonder if dead hand* is even real at this point lol
The Russian impulse to centralize makes Dead Hand a certainty.
Uh, maybe I’m unfamiliar with the engineering behind nukes. Do they expire? Or are you joking that they’ve just stripped the parts?
They do expire. Problem is that there’s a lot of them. Fire 100 nukes, and even if 99% fail, that’s at least one mushroom cloud in the most fertile land on earth. And the ones that did expire become essentially dirty bombs.
That’s pretty much why I was asking, I figured that no level of neglect would make one of these not dangerous. Which also makes it pretty clear that someone who’s so comfortable with their use is likely confident that they would not be victims of that use.
Neglect measured on the scale of centuries might make them effectively safe…you need to have all the conventional explosives in the implosion shell fail to explode. If some of them fail, you likely won’t reach criticality in the warhead itself, in which case you just detonated a regular bomb that had enriched uranium shrapnel.
That being said, most modern explosives become less stable and more sensitive over time, not inert. So the implosion timing is gonna be off, which means no criticality. Just spreading radioactive material.
Do you have a source to read further on this at all?
Umm. Not really? I’m kinda pulling together basic implosion-type nuke design, where you have a nuclear core surrounded by conventional shaped charges that are supposed to detonate and compress the nuclear core just prior to the nuclear reaction.
As you would expect, most governments are a bit touchy on details about military explosives that they use…I just happen to have done a decent amount of explosives R&D in the past. Picked up a few things.
How interesting! Can you tell me how one would theoretically build a cobalt bomb inside their garage…for educational purposes of course.
/j and in Minecraft
I don’t want to get banned for trying to do warcrimes again.
Honestly mostly just the latter. Was joking that they would’ve maintained them so badly that none of the nukes would make it out of their silos, even if they were still capable of detonation.
While I was aware the warheads require maintainance, @impairedimperator@lemmy.zip definitely said it better than I could.
I remember that time. Putin said that the Russian Army had not invaded Ukraine, not that there weren’t Russian troops there. There were plenty of Russian military members who took a leave of absence to help restore democracy in Ukraine after the Euromaidan riots threatened the elected government into resigning. That was the official Russian position.
Maybe the correct respond is something like the missile need to take their annual paid leave and eastern ukraine sounds like a good place to be.
They do have mineral reserves and if the US threw their weight into supporting Ukraine, their businesses would be very willing to work with the US. Even from a self benefiting, pragmatic perspective, the US should be supporting them.
That’s why I’m so confused about the lukewarm support. From a purely capitalist lens, Ukraine could have been exploited to hell and back once Russia was BTFOd. But now they’re looking at a decades long demining operation which is gonna hurt the
exploitation effortbottom linebillionaires pocketsuhhhhh something.We were pretty much onboard with helping Ukraine, and were providing intelligence and selling them arms.
But Trump is totally a Russian asset, or was at the time. (Russia spent a lot of resources and manpower on Trump’s 2016 campaign.) Nowadays, Trump might be catching on that Putin has absolutely no respect for him.
Well our capitalists are really really bad at capitalism, and are much more proficient at cronieism…cronism?..cronyism? Oh ok it’s the last one
this is a reference to the Battle of Conoco Fields.
And deny a symmetrical warfare environment to develop the next generation of drones? Never!
Raytheon’s index price wasn’t even $70 in 2014!
It’s worth noting that in the 1990’s while the rest of easter EUR, particularly PO, RO, and CZ tweaked their economies and societies in whatever way was necessary at the time in order to get their asses into NATO and the EU, Ukraine spent 30 years dawdling, unsure if they wanted to face east or west. Shame on them for that. They created their own monster by being irresolute, unlike the Poles and Romanians who also HATE Russia, know history, in some respects share a common history with all of eastern EUR, and see very clearly. A fair amount of UKR’s indecision was due to Russian meddling in politics there, but by the time UKR woke the fuck up about Russia’s nature and intentions it was almost too late. That timeline takes us to the year 2022, approximately. UKR is still corrupt as fuck, nobody knows who can be trusted and they are putting tremendous effort into reforming their legal system, politics and military structures to conform with EU/NATO norms. If they had been this decided (instead of divided) back in 2014, they’d have been in the EU AND NATO by now. They are paying the price for their dawdling and indecision, fuelled mainly by post-soviet corruption mentality which they are rueing and repenting of almost too late…
I say this as someone who actually supports Ukraine. But I am not blind to their faults, either.
Don’t take this the wrong way but as someone who has lived and worked in many of the countries you mentioned - you’re full of s**t and your hyper-simplified version of history is as cute as it is cartoonish.
well maybe you can enlighten us all with some of your insights if you know so much about these things.
that’s a lot more work than calling people names. you down?
Bruh Ukraine is no more corrupt than Romania/Hungary/Bulgaria. Even during the war civil society was able to defend anticorruption institutions.
The decision not to take Ukraine into EU/NATO is purely based on politics - specifically being afraid of russia.
there was a 20 year window where RU was to weak to threaten anybody with any thing. That would have been the time, if UKR had seen the opportunity like the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Romanians did. A costly mistake.
Well they had the downside of the russian army being at their borders and a massive russian speaking minority …
this is also true. but they also lacked direction and a national sense of self… right up until the last minute when Russia was about to swallow them and the jaws were closing. If they had that sense 10 or 20 years earlier they’de be in a different situation. Russia’s actions are Russian/Commie imperialism 101… take an ethnically or politically divided state and invade it. slowly. Maybe UKR will be better as a divided state. For some bizarre reason, the further south and east you go in EUR the more the Slavs in those regions love their mono-ethnic states, for some reason. Even to the degree of cutting off their noses to spite their faces. Something fundamentally warped about the Slavic mind.
This would only happen if it was in Israel’s interest.
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