Originally Posted by
Skroe
It's not about the Russians really. It's really about ourselves (Americans specifically, Westerners in General).
Russia should be punished for it's games, but that's a side point.
The most importnat issue, as I see it, is that the mess that the international situation has become is the culmination of 25 years of an absolutely bullshit post-Cold War mindset. American policy makers, particularly foreign policy and economy policy makers, and their European breatheren spent 25 years convinced (and convincing themselves) that everybody outside our little Western club wanted to be like the West, held the same values (or just hadn't gotten here yet) or played by the same rules (or would like to).
So what do we do? We tolerate things like China joining the WTO and renegging on all it's commitments. Why do we tolerate that? Because we really really want China to be a (buzzword here) "responsible stakeholder" in the international system. And we've convinced that, like a bad WoW guild leader, if we continuously turn the other cheek, they'll eventually come around to doing things our way, you know "the right way" so to speak.
We've done this with Russia for years. It's been 10 years since the Bush Administration first caught Russia cheating on the INF Treaty. It's been four years since the "final report" was published. It's been two years since the Obama Administration first called them out.
Or Iran, and it's nuclear program. There is no incentive in the World the US could ever give that will get them to give up their nuclear program. But we've convinced ourselves that if we negotiate to death, offer them the kind of things WE WOULD WANT if we were in their place, maybe they'll be compliant. And when they violate, we don't hold them accountable for violations before we would rather have the image of them playing by our standards rather than the reality of it.
The list goes on and these aren't even necessarily the worst. But the West, and America in particular must drop, once and for all this self-defeating delusion that Russia, China and so many other countries in the world have the same values or what the same things as us. The fact that Putin managed to make the Syrian meat grinder even worse, to no ill effect for his own interests, shows the hollowness of Barack Obama and other's soaring oratory about the fiercy urgency of the human rights situation in Syria. Putin does not care, and we need to not operate under the assumption that he gives a shred about refugees or human lives involving Syria.
We should never Trust the Russians, the Chinese and whoever else not just because of specific bad behavior, but because intrinsically their cultures, their political interests, their national interests and economic interests have far less overlap with the West than we would like to believe.
It became an article of faith in the 1990s among America's elite that the Cold War was an aberration from the historic norm and that the power the West held over half the world was a rather embarrassing aberration that should be cycled down. It became believed that the post-Cold War paradigm, where countries could come together for mutually beneficial outcomes, was an ideal and stabilizing model. Take this recent thing that Obama considered cutting America's nuclear arsenal by a third, unilaterally. Why? Moral authority that doesn't matter in the nuclear chess game. What kind of bullshit, sick as fuck theory of international relations prioritizes giving up, of all things NUCLEAR LEVERAGE for disarmament. Just to make ourselves feel better? More moral? Nonsense. We should do that, if Russia does the same. That is how this works. A chip for a chip. And when Russia cheats, as they factually are on NewSTART and INF, we should actually make use of the legal avenues we have the right to use, rather than, as we have for 10 years, pretty much sat on our hands and hope that if we don't raise much of a ruckus, Russia will come back into the fold.
Well we've painfully seen, in the South China Sea, in Ukraine, in Syria what happens when the other team says "fuck your rules". We play by an internationalist "greater good" paradigm. They play by a Zero-Sum paradigm. We'll always lose until we play the game as it is designed to be played.
That's really why I say never trust the Russians. Because they are not Americans/Westerners. They do not aspire to be American and Westerners. And we're lying to ourselves if we operate from a position that we can somehow cajole them into acting like Americans and Westerners.
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