I suspect what gets Carlson het up is
You gotta use the real photo, which was too impressive to originally publish.
None
1723
Command and Conquer: Red Alert 4 confirmed?
ZeTh1
1724
I keep seeing this argument and I don’t buy it, it makes absolutely no sense.
Western powers have always wanted more democracies because they are easier to deal it and invest in. Democracies don’t go to war with each other, they have flexible workers who are willing to move around and fill labour shortages. The rule of the law democracies typically have, helps technology spread easier, faster and improves innovation. Despite all of this, the West wants… a boogeyman to achieve… what exactly?
Historically speaking, Japan and Germany went from hostile authoritarianism to flourishing democracies. The progress in Eastern Europe is slower but it’s still progress and things become problematic when countries step away from the ideas of the modern democracy (Poland, Hungary).
The ONLY people in the West who are happy with the Russian regime are the authoritarians. Don’t take my word for it, just listen to them, they can’t shut up about it. Hungary’s Orban, France’s Le Pen, Trump, Tucker… they all want oppressive regimes similar to Russia’s.
You have a far more sanguine view of the West and its leaders than I do, for sure. From where I sit, the leaders of the Western world are largely greedy capitalist stooges, profiteers, and cynical demagogues who use fear to keep themselves in power and their corporate henchmen funneling money into their bank vaults.
Without the ability to point to an at least plausible threat from the East, it would be rather hard to sustain the military industrial complex at the levels necessary to ensure massive profiteering. A few terrorists in fly speck villages might work for ideological motivation, and for shunting pork barrel contracts to small companies, but the big money is in stuff like jets, ships, and complex combat and logistics systems. Can’t justify that without a good nuclear bogeyman hanging around somewhere.
Timex
1726
But all the defense spending, for as large as it is, is still fairly insignificant compared to the overall American economy. And certainly with other countries in the west, with dramatically lower military spending, this notion kind of erodes, doesn’t it?
For the majority of the western economy, war isn’t a good thing. Conflicts that jeopardize supply chains make it harder for those rich guys you are suggesting run everything in the west, from making money.
Certainly some of them make more money, because they are specifically focused on the industries that feed the conflict, but isn’t it the case that MOST of the economic activity is actually focused on selling good and services to civilians, who tend to buy more stuff when they are happy and secure? Having cheap access to materials and energy tends to feed overall economic growth.
Thrag
1727
That’s what the war on terror was for!
I’m sure that’s true. There’s still a huge amount of money to be made supplying the military with the tools of the trade, and the infrastructure supporting the military and intelligence sector of the economy. More importantly, it’s easier to demonize spending on social programs and infrastructure when you can paint every dollar that goes that route as one that somehow weakens national defense and all that. Most importantly, the perpetual state of fear that is in part sustained by bogeymen like Russia or Al Qaeda or makes it far easier to sustain repressive, divisive, and paranoid politics, all of which create a climate where corporations can run amok.
I mean, we thought that when the wall came down we’d get a peace dividend. Instead, we actively went looking for things to feel threatened by.
If you need a threat from the East, we already have China? Which actually does have the economic/cultural/governmental/technological chops to be a genuine challenge to Western countries. I think with Russia, nobody under the age of 50 cares about them anymore. They’re no longer at the vanguard of any sort of ideological movement, and (besides a world-ending number of nukes) they don’t have the muscle to be a direct threat to anyone except small, unaligned nations.
I think this is just genuinely a case of the Russian oligarchs being giant assholes.
China is bad boogeyman cause it’s actually important. If USA would want a full blockade of Russia tomorrow you won’t notice (EU is a different story). Nobody wants to lose trade with China. They also seem to be significantly less interested in that role.
Timex
1731
I feel like the west doesn’t really want to fight with Russia, but Russia keeps freaking invading countries.
ShivaX
1732
Our position has basically been: “Do whatever you want, we really don’t care,” since the end of the Cold War.
Ironically the people who most wanted a fight with Russia now mostly want us to become Russia.
Thrag
1733
With the recent tensions between Russia and Ukraine, it looks like Spain may be sending forces to the region. I’m not sure if anyone expected this Spanish imposition.
Also according to the article members of the current reign in Spain are considering sending planes.
The planes from Spain fly mainly in Ukraine?
No argument there. My ramblings are more about our own metasituation, such as it is.
China is a weird case. Back in the day, we were really afraid of them; remember flicks like Battle Beneath the Earth, a 1967 “masterpiece” about the Chinese tunneling under the Pacific? MAD magazine would run parodies where the Red Chinese would topple the fat and luxury-loving Americans, stuff like that. But the Chinese in practice never had many nukes, and AFAIK, still don’t. Their land forces threatened, well, pretty much no one but maybe Taiwan, and were largely unwieldy infantry armies for much of the Cold War. The tussle in Korea didn’t help relations perhaps but it bred some mutual respect I believe. The big thing though is that China is a huge economic partner, despite all of the issues we have with Beijing. American companies do billions of dollars of business there, not so much in Russia. College students here have visions of working with or in China, and Chinese immigrants are a prominent part of American life.
Russia is far more alien in many ways, partly because it’s almost European. Culturally, too, it’s far easier to build a Russian bear into a threat than a Chinese dragon. I mean, we play “Dungeons & Dragons,” but we don’t play “Gulags & Bears”!
As I’ve said, you can’t imagine war with China without it being apocalyptic. Most of what Americans use is produced in China at least in some part. With Russia EU will suffer from some natural resources shortages for a while, maybe some non-essential food products maybe. You can entertain the idea of war with Russia with it being scary but not too much to cause real panic.
Of course, we can never discount the power of stupidity. World War One is a good example. Those imperial powers that went at it included two relatively solid democracies, the UK and France, several relatively liberal monarchies, a couple of often authoritarian empires (German, Austria-Hungary) that were nevertheless well within the cultural mainstream of “the West,” and of course the Russians and the Ottomans. There was certainly no good economic reason for those nations to commit mutual suicide via mass industrial war, but they pretty much did. WWII is a bit different, as ideology as such played a far greater role, and political ideology is not known for rationality in most cases, especially the more fervid it gets. But the only country then that actually benefitted from the war was the USA.
That I think is one big reason why Americans still can’t get their heads around multipolar international relations and the deep ambivalence most countries have towards the idea of force as a solution to problems. Our experience in two world wars was pretty much the unicorn–we were able to get the benefits of government-funded industrial growth, conscription-driven erosion of unemployment, and vast gains (at least in the second war) in national power and prestige, all for what is bluntly if brutally a very low price in lives.
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