• hark@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    North Korea is all bark and no bite. North Korea benefits China by acting as a buffer and benefits the US by strengthening ties between the US and South Korea and Japan. There is no interest in changing this arrangement.

    Russia didn’t get this way over night. The USSR collapsed and the US capitalized on the situation by enforcing markets in a way to grab wealth. There were many opportunities to rehabilitate and allow Russia to participate in the world as a peer but that went against the US need for an enemy and to dominate them, as evidenced by the Wolfowitz doctrine. Russia’s economy was terrible and Putin did well for himself betting on oil which gave the Russian economy some stability and which is how he got popular. You’ll find that the price of oil collapsed in 2014 and the protests were happening in Ukraine around that time threatening the puppet he had there.

    Just watch as the plan is spelled out for you on American television: https://www.cc.com/video/8067fc/the-colbert-report-crisis-in-ukraine-gideon-rose

    As for ISIS: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isis-syria-iraq

    • BombOmOm@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      There were many opportunities to rehabilitate and allow Russia to participate in the world as a peer but that went against the US need for an enemy and to dominate them

      Germany was actively buying and expanding their gas imports from Russia, Russia’s largest export good. Germany was quite happy with this arrangement until Russia invaded Ukraine, cut gas exports, and started actively bragging about how they would freeze Europe. Russia could have continued raking in the piles of cash from their gas exports to Europe, but, that isn’t what Russia wanted. Russia didn’t want to participate on the world stage as an equal, they wanted to dominate Ukraine and take what Ukraine had for themselves.

      • hark@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        A decent chunk of Russia’s gas runs through Ukraine and Russia had their puppet in Ukraine overthrown in 2014. Their gas business was already in danger from a long time ago and was constantly being attacked on all fronts, including sanctions and fearmongering campaigns against the nord stream pipelines. You can point to the current situation and say the fear was justified, but it took a lot to get to this point.

        Shutting off their largest export is a move of desperation which they made while smugly pretending they were more indispensable than they actually are. Heck, invading Ukraine was a move of desperation itself. As you can see from the Gideon Rose interview I posted, the US was actively moving to isolate Russia for a long while. It doesn’t justify Russia’s actions, but also these actions didn’t crop up out of nowhere. The US has overthrown governments over oil (even when they have plenty of other countries to get oil from) and here is Russia having its main export threatened.