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[Nicoletta Mithra]

While we all have faults and certainly much blood and shame on our collective hands, I will in general hold the record of the capitalist democratic western nations against Russia in most things.  People weren't running across the Berlin Wall from the West to get into the soviet union. People aren't in rafts from Miami heading into Cuba, etc.

Well, people are coming to Europe (and Europe is taking far more people in than the US nowadays) because we destroyed their economies. The climate change is pretty much made by the 'West' and so those people fleeing the Sahel do so mainly because we made life there unbearable for them: Not so much because we live so much better here. The Greek people coming to Germany do so mainly because we exploited their economy - the same goes for Spanish and Portugese people. I'm pretty sure that the USA didn't work on mutually beneficial trade with Cuba.

So, if these people are coming it's more because the West has a) been very successful at exploiting the resources of others or even squandering them and b) follows a model that - while not really sustainable - is able to outperform more sustainable economies in the short run.

Thus, I'm not quite sure whether we should uncritically take the direction of migration as a sign of the 'West' having such a great track record. It might be just as much the sign of a very unreasonable economy that values short-time gain over long-time prosperity.

As to glass houses and stones: That's exactly my point. It's quite easy to condemn the Russians for annexing Crimea, if one ignores history. It's nothing the USA didn't do, it's nothing the European nations didn't do. It's not like there's something that should make us believe that any of the nations in the world wouldn't do it, given opportunity and a percieved net gain in doing so.

And lastly: As I said I'm not at all convinved that the US is selflessly having their troops in foreign countries to promote peace, freedom and democracy. It doesn't make sense to say: We have to behave in such an imperialistic, agressive manner to prevent others from doing so - unless one believes that the USA is especially justified in this, while others are not.

Somehow, miraculously, the USA is maintaining military presence all over the globe for purely altruistic reasons, while given the opportunity all other nations (like China and Japan in your example) would only fill any power vacum the USA could leave with malintent and egoism? What is making the USA not acting in it's own interest, but in the common interest of humankind in such a wondrously twist?

This sounds like quite the sort of exceptionalism that is also some form of exemptionalism, which amounts to the double standards which explain while doing the same things is OK if the USA is the actor, but not if anyone else. It's measureing not by objective standards, but it's judging a priori that whatever the others do is bad, because they are morally impure and that what the USA is doing - whatever it is - is good, because they possess some moral purity that others lack. It#s having double standards.

It's my strong conviction that the USA doesn't have some divine mandate to police foreign countries. I'm also quite sure that the USA isn't maintaining their military presence in Asia for the altruistic sake of preventing "Korea, China and Japan shitting on each other" - that is merely a more convenient semi-justification than honestly admitting that the USA is securing their very own, selfish interest in the Pacific and eastern hemisphere.

(And that's of course true for any country. The German forces dispatched to Afghanistan weren't there out of purely altruistic motives of making the world a better place - they were there to secure German interests.)

The US isn't using their military to prevent awful things from happening - unless you count the USA not getting what is in their interest as 'awful thing'.

[Lyn Farel]

Well, for Portugal and Spain, their economies seem to have taken off again and doing fairly well now. I have even heard of people coming from northern Europe there because they actually have a shortage in expertise in some fields (construction, etc). Also, investors.

[Nmaro Makari]

[Nicoletta Mithra]

Well, for Portugal and Spain, their economies seem to have taken off again and doing fairly well now. I have even heard of people coming from northern Europe there because they actually have a shortage in expertise in some fields (construction, etc). Also, investors.

The last data I have seen is suggesting little change for the people. Unemployment rates are still high - especially for young people. Portugal managed to get the over all unemployment rate down to about 13.7% in May form the 17.5% at the start of the second quarter of 2013 (Statistics Portugal) and youth unemployment went down to 33.3% in may from 40.7% (Eurostat) - now that's still every third young person without a job. Spain got their unemployment rate lowered to 23.78% from its all time high of 26.94 percent in the first quarter of 2013 (National Statistics Institute (INE)). The youth unemployment rate is at 49.30 percent in May of 2015 from it's an all time high of 55.80 percent in July of 2013 (Eurostat) - that's every second of the young people there being unemployed.

I'd think that's still a good step away from doing fairly well. Just think about your circle of frinds and imagine every third or second of them would be 'unemployed'. Imagine further that that's not only true for your friends, but all people in that age segment. Would you say under those conditions that your country 'is doing good'?

Yes, they are taking in people in certain fields, especially engineering, because previously all the young people in those fields left for 'greener pastures'. It's not because they have such a great need of people in those fields: It's because they have no one left at home who can do the job.

Anyhow, both Spain and Portugal seem to do better, slowly. I hope it will remain like that. Yet that's not really changing that to good part their problems stem from the mercantilist politics of Germany.

[Lyn Farel]

I mentioned their economies, not their social situation. You may be extrapolating a bit on what I said, I never said that their countries are doing well, but I will freely admit that what I said was rather vague...

[Vikarion]

Quite frankly, I would dearly love to see the U.S. leave NATO and abandon its member countries to whatever Putin wants.

We've spent a shitload of money and lives since 1942 trying to fix or prevent problems in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. I think it has been a bad investment, probably from the start, at least in terms of what we've gotten out of it. Some of it was necessary, yes, but I'd rather we were spending the money here, rather than on bases in Germany, Japan, Poland, and the Baltics, just so we can get snippy comments about how imperialist we are.

Everyone gets mad at us if we act as "world policeman". And, (see Bosnia, Rwanda, Syria, and Iraq currently) everyone gets mad at us if we don't. I suggest that America would be better off letting everyone be mad at us and not spending any money on anyone else. For a long time, we've essentially served as the greater part of Europe's armed forces, since almost no country in Europe has a military that would last longer than a fly against a windshield versus Russia. Well, it's about time they pulled their own weight.

As far as I'm concerned, if Putin decides that he wants to summer in Paris with the Russian army, I don't really give a fuck. I wish that my government felt the same.

[Lyn Farel]

If Putin really wants to come invade Europe, I really don't think that our armies would just not 'last longer than a fly'... Anyway, the whole scenario sounds pretty ludicrous to me in the first place. That kind of things would just lead to full nuclear war...

Also, respectfully, I do not think the US was here to fix or prevent problems in Europe or the rest of the world. It's about interests and power projection. It's what makes your country influential and basically feeds the comfort of your population at the end of the chain. It's what provides you access to resources that you do not have on your territory, and overall, it's international leverage. Be the dominant country, reap the fruit.

In the cold war, it was about preventing the other side to spread its influence. Now, it's about defending national interests. You can sugarcoat it under ideological beliefs or not, the main process behind remain the same. I just happen to think that the US do it wrong at times. I see France doing the exact same thing, albeit to a smaller scale, but the country has been doing it for centuries more than the US and it still reeks of colonial smells. I wouldn't be surprised to see the british doing the same thing, though... Not sure. Anyway, it's ethically as debatable as what the US does, but it's done in a much subtler and less inflammatory manner. 

So yes, speaking about what I know best, France too does it everywhere in North and central Africa (and used to do it in Indochina). Valuable uranium mines (and some that didn't meet the expectations and ruined Areva), among other things, are national interests. We may camouflage it under peace missions sent to prevent civil wars and African national coups (which is true), but the true story is about national interests. We do 'police' the world too, and while the US umbrella takes the brunt out of it, I also think that's because the US tends to go where they are not actually wanted.

That, and the US, being the leader of NATO, have started to do it seriously wrong since Vietnam, which were the first cracks that started to show in the american empire (and don't tell me the US are not an empire, they totally are but in name, they even bear the symbol). Since then, the US have a clear issue with the denial of their progressive loss of power and projection over the world, much like France has itself a stuck up issue of denial and taboo with strategic national projection and interests since the defeat in 1940.

The thing is, the US use strategic intervention like a hammer, so every problem is being treated with a hammer. Strategic interests in a country like Iraq ? Smash it with a hammer. Terrorist issues in Afghanistan ? Smash it with a hammer. Then it spread to NATO and lap dog presidents like Sarkozy and they do it again with Lybia. The result ? ISIS and its various subgroups.

Who managed to start the whole islamic modern Jihad ? Not necessarily Lawrence of Arabia or anything, but the british colonial empire, followed by the most damageable action the US did - and granted, was probably hard to foresee, can't blame them - when supporting the Afghan rebels against the soviet invasion in the 80s. It spreaded like dominos until it put ablaze the minds of the whole middle east, with consequences that we are dealing with to this day.

There is also another factor that directly counts in national interests: the weapon industry of every dominant country. Those industries are strategic assets under the care of their own nations and also have to sell their shit so that they remain able to develop more and pay for a part of the defense national budget. If your country remains cloistered and isolated, nobody buys. You have to showcase the performance of your shiny toys so that they sell properly. The most recent example for us was the Dassault Rafale, that suddenly got many contracts after a whole decade of absolutely nuts (which was not helped by the concurrence and US lobbying its own national interests). Why do we came into absurd scenarios like in the first Iraq war or the Falklands where NATO or the UK suddenly fought against exocet missiles and french fighter planes ? Because they are desperate to sell and enforce their national interests, especially when everybody else is already pressured by other NATO industrial interests, or just outright Russia...

You will tell me that Russia doesn't do that and hasn't seen a war in ages (maybe not with their presence in Ukraine now). But they play it very smart. How many countries (ex soviet or not) have bought cheap outdated russian gear, or more advanced gear, and are fighting against each other with ? Or more importantly, fighting against NATO industrial military weapons ? How has this not turned into some kind of sick playground between weapon manufacturers of both sides to test them without getting involved (especially Russia), as a mean to showcase their performances, and to sell them ? Why does Russia systematically backs up NATO's declared enemies in the UN (Iran a few years back, Syria, etc) ? They all buy Russian. They are all Russian strategic interests.

Also, why is the US to this day trying so hard to push a 30 years old transatlantic treaty again on the EU ? Because it benefits their national interests they have here and perfectly know they are losing their grasp on Europe with the EU getting stronger and more defined every day. They also know that the EU is now the world most powerful economy and also surpasses them in demography.

If you really want the US to revert to isolationist, you will just lose your dominant edge in... everything.


Edit : is this necessarily all bad if the US choose that ? No, I don't think so. I think your ideas have merit in themselves and they are what defined the US in most of the first half of the 20th century until Pearl Harbor happened. But the times have changed, and the devil is out of the box now, so to speak. Backpedaling sounds a bit... hard to me.

Edit 2: also, whether they want it or not, the US are with Europe at the forefront of the ideological battle of today (Postmodernism vs Trationalism), against the opposite leader of that war, who is Putin.

[Vic Van Meter]

If Putin really wants to come invade Europe, I really don't think that our armies would just not 'last longer than a fly'... Anyway, the whole scenario sounds pretty ludicrous to me in the first place. That kind of things would just lead to full nuclear war...

Also, respectfully, I do not think the US was here to fix or prevent problems in Europe or the rest of the world. It's about interests and power projection. It's what makes your country influential and basically feeds the comfort of your population at the end of the chain. It's what provides you access to resources that you do not have on your territory, and overall, it's international leverage. Be the dominant country, reap the fruit.

In the cold war, it was about preventing the other side to spread its influence. Now, it's about defending national interests. You can sugarcoat it under ideological beliefs or not, the main process behind remain the same. I just happen to think that the US do it wrong at times. I see France doing the exact same thing, albeit to a smaller scale, but the country has been doing it for centuries more than the US and it still reeks of colonial smells. I wouldn't be surprised to see the british doing the same thing, though... Not sure. Anyway, it's ethically as debatable as what the US does, but it's done in a much subtler and less inflammatory manner. 

So yes, speaking about what I know best, France too does it everywhere in North and central Africa (and used to do it in Indochina). Valuable uranium mines (and some that didn't meet the expectations and ruined Areva), among other things, are national interests. We may camouflage it under peace missions sent to prevent civil wars and African national coups (which is true), but the true story is about national interests. We do 'police' the world too, and while the US umbrella takes the brunt out of it, I also think that's because the US tends to go where they are not actually wanted.

That, and the US, being the leader of NATO, have started to do it seriously wrong since Vietnam, which were the first cracks that started to show in the american empire (and don't tell me the US are not an empire, they totally are but in name, they even bear the symbol). Since then, the US have a clear issue with the denial of their progressive loss of power and projection over the world, much like France has itself a stuck up issue of denial and taboo with strategic national projection and interests since the defeat in 1940.

The thing is, the US use strategic intervention like a hammer, so every problem is being treated with a hammer. Strategic interests in a country like Iraq ? Smash it with a hammer. Terrorist issues in Afghanistan ? Smash it with a hammer. Then it spread to NATO and lap dog presidents like Sarkozy and they do it again with Lybia. The result ? ISIS and its various subgroups.

Who managed to start the whole islamic modern Jihad ? Not necessarily Lawrence of Arabia or anything, but the british colonial empire, followed by the most damageable action the US did - and granted, was probably hard to foresee, can't blame them - when supporting the Afghan rebels against the soviet invasion in the 80s. It spreaded like dominos until it put ablaze the minds of the whole middle east, with consequences that we are dealing with to this day.

There is also another factor that directly counts in national interests: the weapon industry of every dominant country. Those industries are strategic assets under the care of their own nations and also have to sell their shit so that they remain able to develop more and pay for a part of the defense national budget. If your country remains cloistered and isolated, nobody buys. You have to showcase the performance of your shiny toys so that they sell properly. The most recent example for us was the Dassault Rafale, that suddenly got many contracts after a whole decade of absolutely nuts (which was not helped by the concurrence and US lobbying its own national interests). Why do we came into absurd scenarios like in the first Iraq war or the Falklands where NATO or the UK suddenly fought against exocet missiles and french fighter planes ? Because they are desperate to sell and enforce their national interests, especially when everybody else is already pressured by other NATO industrial interests, or just outright Russia...

You will tell me that Russia doesn't do that and hasn't seen a war in ages (maybe not with their presence in Ukraine now). But they play it very smart. How many countries (ex soviet or not) have bought cheap outdated russian gear, or more advanced gear, and are fighting against each other with ? Or more importantly, fighting against NATO industrial military weapons ? How has this not turned into some kind of sick playground between weapon manufacturers of both sides to test them without getting involved (especially Russia), as a mean to showcase their performances, and to sell them ? Why does Russia systematically backs up NATO's declared enemies in the UN (Iran a few years back, Syria, etc) ? They all buy Russian. They are all Russian strategic interests.

Also, why is the US to this day trying so hard to push a 30 years old transatlantic treaty again on the EU ? Because it benefits their national interests they have here and perfectly know they are losing their grasp on Europe with the EU getting stronger and more defined every day. They also know that the EU is now the world most powerful economy and also surpasses them in demography.

If you really want the US to revert to isolationist, you will just lose your dominant edge in... everything.


Edit : is this necessarily all bad if the US choose that ? No, I don't think so. I think your ideas have merit in themselves and they are what defined the US in most of the first half of the 20th century until Pearl Harbor happened. But the times have changed, and the devil is out of the box now, so to speak. Backpedaling sounds a bit... hard to me.

Edit 2: also, whether they want it or not, the US are with Europe at the forefront of the ideological battle of today (Postmodernism vs Trationalism), against the opposite leader of that war, who is Putin.

Again, I'm not sure why everyone figures the US government has any part of this.  If anything, they're being incredibly passive.  All they'll do is facilitate arms sales to the east European countries using Putin as a scarecrow.  But they're otherwise remaining mum on the issue, which they didn't have to do.  They could have sent a strategic bombing campaign or strafed eastern Ukraine and turned it into a proxy war, but they haven't.

The time when the world looked at America as the sole protector and adjudicator is long since passed; the EU doesn't need them for anything except hired muscle at this point.  Also the time when you could point at them and try to pin the world's geopolitical machinations on them is over.  As I've been saying, that's trying to point back at an American/Soviet conflict that does not exist anymore.

It's not everyone else's fault, though.  That's exactly what Putin did, and he's paying for it now.  His consolation prize is essentially a money sink; Crimea survives on government aid.  Meanwhile, Russia's economy got axed right at a crucial moment for oil prices.

Don't buy the hype, step back and look at the real winners and losers.  Politicians are always good at spinning public image, so everyone might come out of this smelling at least rosy, but it's pretty clear who's gained and who's lost here.  And the one country that's gained absolutely nothing except potential markets is the US.  Don't chase after the red herring.

[Nicoletta Mithra]

[Vic Van Meter]

Ooooh, sounds scary, doesn't it?   

Hint:  think about what the deep red countries have in common.

[Vikarion]

Lyn, Russia has 700k active military, at least, with 2 million in reserves. If Putin decided he wanted to be in Berlin, and went straight through Poland, he'd be there in probably not much more than two weeks, assuming no U.S. intervention or use of nuclear arms.

For example, Germany is a great country, economically, and perhaps socially, if you like that system, but in terms of military might, well, you guys (Europeans) are militarily sophisticated, but your sheer military force isn't even third-rate compared to the PRC or Russia. At a certain point, even in modern warfare, numbers will tell. And German weaponry, while good, is not good enough to go up against 1.5 million Russians. Sorry, it just isn't.

And that's Germany. Let's not talk about some of the others.

That's why, incidentally, the U.S. has pushed NATO so hard. It really isn't - if you look at past history and actions - just about a sphere of influence or selling weapons...although one would have to be blind and deaf to think that isn't part of it, true. It's been about the fact that the USSR really was an aggressive foreign policy player (not claiming that we weren't), and there is no way to deter a country the size of Russia from doing what it wants in Europe without all of the smaller nations following a "attack one, you attack us all" policy.

Should we want to deter Russia from increasing its influence on Europe? Well, that's for Europeans to decide. Most of the people who actually live close to Russia don't seem to like the idea.

As for the E.U., saying that the E.U. is more powerful than the U.S. only works if you believe that statistics outweigh reality. The E.U. is a loose coalition of independent states, often fractured, usually heading in several different directions, and, currently, rather in a bit of trouble. The whole system reminds me of the Articles of Confederacy that the U.S. colonies tried before the Constitution.

The reason that the U.S. has been having so much trouble in terms of military actions recently has nothing to do with declining power. Indeed, the U.S. is more powerful now than every before - the perception of declining power is due to the fact that other states are catching up, to a degree. That said, to portray this as an inevitable decline in American power is questionable - others are catching up, but, so far, not very much. Right now, assuming no nuclear war, the United States could easily crush any of its potential competitors, and probably two at once.

Rather, the problem the United States has is that it has been trying to embrace a humanitarian sort of war, a war in which, if you are not actually avoiding collateral damage, you can at least look like it. If you were to put someone with the war morality of the 1940s in control of the U.S. tomorrow, there would be no ISIS. There might be rather a lot of dead civilians, but ISIS would be gone.

I'm not arguing for that. I simply maintain that trying to interfere, without being willing to go all the way, is a fools errand. I don't argue that the U.S. should become isolationist, I argue that we should leave NATO because protecting Europe isn't worth the cost, whatever happens to Europe. Besides, France and the U.K. have nukes, let them deter Putin. Or not. It's not our problem, and if Putin ends up as master of Europe somehow, we can just trade with him.

I also don't think that we should be running around the world trying to prevent genocides or overthrow regimes. Every time we do, we either kill way more innocent people than might have died otherwise, or we create the circumstances for an even worse regime later. This is not always the case, but it is enough of the time to convince me it's a bad idea. So if we decide that we have a national interest in Iraq, for oil for example, we don't go in trying to liberate people and set up a government. We go in, take the oil, and kill anyone who tries to stop us. Or, you know, we can buy the oil for less than the cost of invasion. 

As it is, we went in, and we didn't get the democratic government we wanted, or the oil either. Yay.

Incidentally, if you want to know what I would do as the leader of the U.S...well, I would pull out of pretty much every foreign country except Korea. I would focus on maintaining dominance within our own hemisphere, and I would open the U.S to unlimited immigration (but not emigration) from around the world.

As for Empire...you had better damn well hope the U.S. never becomes a true empire. The U.S. has so far acted more like the old Roman Republic, so far as I can see. More of an emphasis on alliances, and persuasion. Get an analogue of someone like Titus Vespasian in charge, and the world would be a much nastier place. That's true for the PRC as well, btw. Both the U.S. and PRC have behaved much more diplomatically than they technically have to, given the disparity of strength between them and their neighbors. That's not to say that they've acted morally, it's just to say that, compared with the British Empire or the Roman Empire, they've been far less, well, imperial.

[Vikarion]

Incidentally, I may be coming off as a bit hostile towards Europe. I'm not. I want to visit it, I'm trying to learn French, and I find its history genuinely interesting.

But I also see us spending vast amounts of money running military bases around the world (but especially in Europe and the Middle East), and conducting training exercises with allies, and then getting blamed for virtually every foreign policy problem in the world, including those that we really had nothing to do with, like Ukraine and Georgia and Rwanda.

Meanwhile, Europe is building CERN and funding health plans better than ours and spending almost zilch on their military, because, hey, we've got their backs.

Well, that's great, but I live here, and I'd rather other countries were paying for their own defense, and that we were using that money to build particle accelerators and subsidize healthcare and go to Mars. I mean, France keeps talking about a 35 hour work week, and average (as opposed to one-percenters) Americans are paying rather large total income taxes + entitlement taxes + sales taxes while working 60+ hours a week. For what? So we can "protect" the rest of the world? If that's the price of protecting the rest of the world, the rest of the world can fend for itself.

[Gwen Ikiryo]

People talking about Russia invading western Europe or vice-versa or America taking over the planet or any sort of total warfare scenario weird me out. The age where that sort of stuff could happen is done, and everyone involved knows it. All this fight is over is political projection and reputation, and a semi-nebulous financial benefit.

Nobody wants any sort of serious conflict, because they know that even the detonation of a modest amount of nuclear weapons (like the UK or Frances arsenals) would totally collapse the environment and lead to half the people on the planet dropping dead.

It's all about shifting the status quo a little bit in a direction favourable to you without breaking it completely.

[Nicoletta Mithra]

People talking about Russia invading western Europe or vice-versa or America taking over the planet or any sort of total warfare scenario weird me out. The age where that sort of stuff could happen is done, and everyone involved knows it. All this fight is over is political projection and reputation, and a semi-nebulous financial benefit.

Nobody wants any sort of serious conflict, because they know that even the detonation of a modest amount of nuclear weapons (like the UK or Frances arsenals) would totally collapse the environment and lead to half the people on the planet dropping dead.

It's all about shifting the status quo a little bit in a direction favourable to you without breaking it completely.

That's more or less what people following the appeasement policy prior to WWII said.

[Nicoletta Mithra]

Ooooh, sounds scary, doesn't it?   

Hint:  think about what the deep red countries have in common.

Well, just seems to me that the US did a bit more than just arms sales to Poland...