Mitch McConell says the quiet part out loud.
Exact full quote from CNN:
“People think, increasingly it appears, that we shouldn’t be doing this. Well, let me start by saying we haven’t lost a single American in this war,” McConnell said. “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.”
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4085063
Ok, according to what you’re saying, Mexico can never join BRICS if the US says no. Is that what you think? The US can be a pretty rabid animal too, as you say.
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What component of BRICS is a military alliance? That’s a nonsensical comparison.
And the Mexican president just said that Mexico is unable to join BRICS because of the geopolitical situation.
NATO and BRICS are fundamentally different. You cannot compare them in good faith. NATO exists for the explicit purpose of destroying Russia. BRICS does not exist for the explicit purpose of destroying NATO, or America for that matter. It’s an extremely bad faith comparison.
Also yeah America would flatten the Mexico City if Mexico tried to join BRICS. They’ve already agitated for a coup a number of times in the last decade.
What do you think would happen if, hypothetically speaking, a nearby state such as, let’s say, Cuba started hosting the military assets of a hostile power?
What about even a distant nation such as oh I don’t know maybe Iran or one of the koreas started making weapons the US felt threatened by?
Just thinking aloud here I don’t know.
Nobody is offering Ukraine nukes, that’s what the Budapest memorandum was all about, knock it off.
Cuba had its revolution and had its own arsenal provided by the USSR and has survived everything the US threw at it so far and Ukraine will survive russia too, but a moat would be handy :)
The point being the US threw a lot of shit at it because of course the US wouldn’t tolerate those missiles being there, and Russia won’t tolerate NATO being in Ukraine.
If China made a defensive alliance with Mexico that included a military base in Tijuana, Mexico would suddenly be in need of some democracy and freedom.
Continuing to deny this basic reality means your position isn’t connected to reality.
Peace requires a sustainable security situation for Russia not just for Ukraine and for Russia that means no NATO since NATO is hostile to Russia. It’s clear and denying this is just putting your head in the sand.
Yes, but the point is with Cuba, missiles were removed, peace deal was reached.
Does the US have to place nukes in Ukraine so that by removing them russia will stop attacking it?
But by all means, if Trump starts threatening Mexico with some bullshit invasion to clean out the cartels, they should by all means ask China and anyone else to help out, sure! That’s how it works in a bipolar world (there is no multipolar world, russia’s empire is gone and China+US will make sure it never returns)
NATO is not hostile to russia, NATO prevents russia from invading its western neighbours, which is obviously a bummer to russia.
The sustainable security solution is: russia respects borders and other countries’ sovereignty. The end.
You get that in this analogy Ukraine is taking the place of Cuba, right? Like NATO is using Ukraine as a disposable proxy to bleed Russia… okay well the metaphor falls apart because the details are really different, but Cuba was threatening the US in a vaguely similar way to how Ukraine is threatening Russia, and the peace deal was that Cuba would remove all the missiles and in exchange the US would remove it’s missiles from Turkey and not massacre the Cuban population. So the equivalent would be Ukraine agreeing not to join NATO (not that NATO was ever going to let them), disarm, and stop trying to wipe out Russian speaking Ukrainians.
NATO’s explicit purpose is and always have been the destruction of the Russian state and the pillaging of it’s resources and it’s beyond bad faith to state otherwise.
Yeah so the obvious conclusion is that peace in Cuba required satisfying the US’s demand to not have a Soviet military presence there.
Likewise peace in Ukraine requires not having a NATO military presence there.
Pretending that NATO isn’t hostile to Russia is also simply disconnected from reality. You need to connect your world view to reality.
Also we have been punishing Cuba with an embargo which has crippled their economy ever since just because we can.
Well, the weapons are still in Cuba, thank god :) and Cuba has an air force, which I suppose was given/sold to Cuba by the USSR/China, so maybe the US can also give some F16 to Ukraine. The USSR also sent planes and soviet crews to fight the Americans in Vietnam, so there is precedent for all that.
NATO is hostile to russia’s imperial ambitions and so are all of its neighbours.
Cuba still has weapons at all, but the crisis was over the nuclear missiles, which were removed. It’s a very direct comparison here.
What are you talking about? The Cuban missile crisis was resolved by the missiles being removed and the soviet military presence ended in Cuba.
You’re factually wrong when you seem to say the soviet missiles are still there. They were removed.
The US’s security interests demanded they were removed from the nearby Cuba, and US missiles that threatened the USSR were removed from Turkey.
Peace was achieved by withdrawing the military threat from each others borders.
Likewise peace in Ukraine can only be achieved if Russia doesn’t feel threatened by a NATO presence there.
It’s easy to understand.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m7MZs-QdrFI
Ukraine’s coup government was threatening to construct nukes shortly before the US proxy war there began. I would cite my sources but I know you won’t care 😉
If Mexico was given an army by China and started bombing Texas and committing ethnic cleansing, it would not be imperialism to try and stop that
If the lines on a map are an issue for you, just imagine a world where the Us broke up and lost Texas to Mexico before the ethnic cleansing started
NATO and BRICS are just not comparable? Like… they’re both acronyms I guess.
Well, BRICS isn’t really a formal alliance but if it were? Yeah, joining a hostile alliance while sharing a border with the US is asking for trouble, and the US has committed all matter of atrocities in latin america. I do think an outright invasion would be less likely than their usual method of military coups and death squads.
So just to reiterate, you are okay with America invading Mexico to enforce its will on them?
Half of Mexico is still under US military occupation, they already have a buffer zone between them.
Mate, it’s not hard.
It’s a yes or no question.
Your question wasn’t for me. And no, USA should give back all the land they stole from Mexico. And until they do that, it’s ridiculous for them to expect Russia to return land that’s populated with Russian ethnics to a fascists state that tried to exterminate them before the war.
When did the last military coup in Latin America, orchestrated by CIA ,happen? I am not saying that the US is great but at some point, we need to talk about the present. And at the present(and recent past), the US is not trying to overthrow a government, at least not by using military force in Latin America.
As far as the war in Ukraine in concerned, the US is doing the right thing, even if they are doing it because it benefits them. This is the only time since WW2 that the US is doing the right thing. Have you ever wondered why historically neutral countries like Sweden want to join NATO now? What caused that change?
Mexico has every right to join the Warsaw Pact and i would be on Mexico’s and Russia’s side if the US invaded Mexico for wanting to join an alliance.
Now let’s talk about how NATO is threatening Russia. How would that happen? If Ukraine joined NATO, do you think NATO would invade Russia? You do realize that Russia has nukes, right? NATO is not about invading Russia, it’s about preventing Russia, a big country with nukes, from invading smaller countries with no nukes.
In 2014, Brazil, the coup on Dilma Roussef from the Worker’s Party received backing from the USA. In 2018, the unlawful conviction of Lula from the same party, was not only backed but also had strategical support from the USA through instructions on how then judge Sergio Moro should conduct the trial and how he should work with and favour the prosecution, even by the use of fake witnesses and evidence.
They also had the heaviest of hands against Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela a few years later.
So the USA never stopped meddling and forcing their way on South America, really.
Did the US deploy military troops in Brazil?
It’s not necessary to have a military base or troops in order to threaten the sovereignty of a country. This is not only a bad faith argument, but it’s incredibly braindead as well.
And if you’re insistent on semantics, yes, the USA deployed troops for a “joint training” with Brazilian troops during (far-right USA backed) Bolsonaro’s government.
It’s not semantics. True, you can overthrow a government without a military invasion but doing a military invasion is much more serious and more “bad”. My point is that the US hasnt recently done the “more bad” thing(except for Libya but not even Russia gave a fuck about that), while Russia is actively doing the “more bad” thing.
The expanding of NATO depends on democratically elected governments of sovereign countries choosing to join an alliance. NATO didnt roll tanks over those countries forcing them to join NATO. If NATO did that, i would agree that it would be a very bad thing.
There are a lot of degrees of interactions between countries. Soft power, hard power, hybrid warfare, etc. Not all of them are equal or destructive. Just because Russia is currently doing the worst kind of interaction(invasion), you cant equate all negative interactions between countries to rationalize “but all countries are doing bad stuff”.
Russia had very little soft power and with this invasion, they wasted large chunks of it. They proved to everyone that ultimately, they are willing to use military force to achieve their objectives. The fact that the US did/does it, doesnt justify it. Both sides can be bad and in this specific situation, one side is clearly in the wrong while the other side is supporting the “good” side(for their own reasons).
Do you not think that we should respect country borders and their governments, especially when they are democratically elected? The whole “it was a coup, thats how Zelensky got elected” is bullshit that was started by Russia AFTER the invasion.
I went back and checked the russian statements after the latest ukranian elections, where the actual antirussian candidate(Poroshenko) had lost. The Kremlin was tendative but hopeful since their main “bad guy” had lost. Kremlin didnt say anything about staged elections, didnt say anything about CIA conspiracy to elect Zelensky or anything like that. Kremlin was “well, at least that asshole(Poroshenko) lost, maybe we can find some common ground with Zelensky”.
But Russia lacked the soft power to do that. So they overplayed their hand and used hard power to achieve it.
I mean the US is training people from other countries and when it comes to Latin America, those people are usually far right. Is this a good thing? No. But this isnt as bad as invading a country. Again, it is a spectrum. There is a difference between Russia training for example people from Donbas(bad), or giving them Buk missiles(more bad) or straight up invading(most bad) or straight up going after Ukraine’s capital instead of just liberating/securing the separatist regions(you have gone full disney bad guy).
This is what i am talking about Russia overplaying their hand. You cant really talk about “protecting the people of Donbas”, when you are literally speed marching(literally airlifting and dropping) to Kiev. You dont give a fuck about Donbas, you just want a regime change(through violence, against the democratic results) in Ukraine.