And that made sense, as there was a point in time that Russia did seem like it had a chance of becoming a normal democracy. At some point even the idea of the EU membership was floating around.
By the 2008 attack on Georgia it was clear that there is no democratisation of Russia, but some people didn't want to believe it for a long time, not even after 2014 attack on Ukraine.
EU membership was never feasible. Russia is too large population-wise, it would have threatened franco-german leadership of the EU. The EU, as it was back then was hanging in a delicate balance, where France and Germany usually had to agree on something to get things done, but other countries could form blocks of convenience to push their own demands through (eg. UK, Nordics and the Netherlands on fiscal discipline, or the Baltics, Visegrad and countries from the Balcans on immigration). France and Germany would not have wanted to lose that much influence, Poland would not have wanted to be between Russia and Germany again (politically speaking), and hatred of Russia runs rather deep in countries of its former empire.
The US has had normal relations with places as radical as Saudi Arabia for many decades. Ideological, political, and other differences do not preclude normal relations. There's really an absolutely phenomenal article on the deterioration of Russia-US relations here. [1] In general, the problem is that after the collapse of the USSR, the US was left as the defacto ruler of the world. And we wanted to cling onto that position permanently. Germany, for example, is a country that could be independently great but has made no efforts towards such and has largely been content to remain deferential to the US, so it retains extremely positive relations with the US, so far as such a relationship can be called positive.
But as Russia started to regain strength in the early 2000s, they specifically aimed for positive relations with the US, but also were not happy with a Germany style relationship and wanted to be treated as equals. This led to us doubling down on hostilities towards them. But this deterioration of relations inevitably led to where we are today, but fortunately not where we could have ended up - which is in the nuclear wasteland that was briefly called WW3.
This also ties right back in to Georgia. Back in 2008 at the Bucharest summit the US was openly encouraging and supportive of Georgia's efforts to join NATO. France and Germany were strongly opposed to such, arguing that such a move would needlessly provoke Russia, but we aimed to move ahead with it anyhow. The Georgia-Russia war would start a few months later.
It’s extremely relevant when you’re talking about why liberals would think we should be friendly to this country. I haven’t seen a lot of liberals in favor of being friendly to Saudi Arabia.
Well, there was a point when everybody, including European politicians, wanted to normalize relations with Russia. But the guy had a different view and chose to invade Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. At that point some people still chose to believe that he can be civilized. It backfired badly in 2022. So now Trump trying the same thing and pretending to be Putin's buddy and trying his best to make Ukraine miserable is just sad.
Russia didn't pivot its policy in 2008, it did so a decade earlier, when the second Yugoslavian war was carried out without buy-in from it (the first one was, to an extent, a joint NATO-Russian operation).
And then the coalition of the willing invaded Iraq[1], again, against Russia's protests, and by that point, that's like two countries attacked (one invaded and occupied) by NATO/most of its members, and you'd have to be an idiot to look at that and not notice that it shifted from a purely defensive alliance to an offensive one. [2]
Putin isn't an idiot, he looks at this and starts surrounding himself with buffer states, through both soft and hard power. Unfortunately, soft power isn't working out great in this, for various reasons.
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[1] It's weird how when you mention Iraq in isolation, people think it's indefensible, but when you mention it in the context of Russian anxieties, all of a sudden, we are all bending over backwards to explain how it was perfectly justified, and it wasn't unprovoked aggression against an uninvolved country.
[2] It's been 14 years since NATO attacked a country, though (Libya in 2011 - if you squint hard enough, Syria might not count), so I guess we could once again reframe it as a defensive alliance. [3]
[3] It the US continues on it's insane trajectory and withdraws, it will definitely become a defensive alliance, simply because it will lack the ability to project power.
“It's weird how when you mention Iraq in isolation, people think it's indefensible, but when you mention it in the context of Russian anxieties, all of a sudden, we are all bending over backwards to explain how it was perfectly justified, and it wasn't unprovoked aggression against an uninvolved country.”
Wat? I’ve never heard anything like that. I’ve heard people try to justify it on the basis of believing the WMD lie or removing Saddam from power, but Russia is never even mentioned in this context.
Obama’s dig at Romney was well after the invasion of Georgia. what Obama correctly understood is that Russia’s designs on Eastern Europe don’t actually matter to America.
Obama's 100% correct point was that Russia was incredibly weak economically. Obama never said we should disengage "with the rest of the world military." Bush, Clinton, W. Bush also tried to normalize with Russia. Everyone hoped Putin was sane. Obama strengthened our alliances. And he has been proven right. Ukraine has depleted Russias military stockpiles and their National Wealth Fund. Russia was weaker than people thought.
>Bush, Clinton, W. Bush also tried to normalize with Russia. Everyone hoped Putin was sane.
Bush Jr, who unilaterally withdrew from the START treaty in 2002[1], and pushed to establish ABM sites in eastern Europe in 2007? That's considered "normalizing"?[2][3] And Putin, who protested both of these actions as destabilizing, is somehow considered the not-sane one in this narrative?
>Ukraine has depleted Russias military stockpiles and their National Wealth Fund. Russia was weaker than people thought.
"Russia is never as strong as she appears....and Russia is never as weak as she appears." -- multiple attributions including Bismark and Churchill
Russia was supposed to run out of ballistic missiles...in summer 2022.[4] They've also likely taken more casualties than the entire active duty strength of the UK, French, and German land forces combined (73K + 118K + 63K ~= 250k) while still keeping a cohesive force capable of offensive combat operations in the field, which has GROWN since the war started to somewhere around 550-650K (up from ~200-350K in 2022).[5][6] Russia only appears weak by the standard established by the US 1990-2005....but the US is essentially a super-saiyan and functioned on a different plane of existence from every other military in the world.
The article in Telegraph is not about ballistic missiles, but about a very specific type of cruise missile, Kh-55, which is a nuclear capable missile.
There are other cruise missiles that Russia makes, and there is still production of ballistic, aero ballistic and hypersonic ones.
I am in no way defending their conduct but they did simply ask for a firm No NATO in Ukraine and they were rebuffed before he 2022 invasion and during initial post invasion negotiations.
They absolutely positively did not. They wanted to roll back of NATO membership as a start and were uninterested when Ukraine was trying to avert the possibility of a larger scale invasion (not to mention when Russia violated both Minsk treaties then pretended it didn't apply to them).
Russia knew that Ukraine had little chance of getting into NATO in early 2022 and wasn't even persuing it after the revolution of dignity before the 2014 invasion
> You must have been traveling in some neocon circles a decade ago. But normalizing relations with Russia and disengaging with the rest of the world military was the goal for us liberals back then
I don't know which is more wrong, the broad claim here or the claim that you are a liberal.
I mean, what you describe was generally the case...but between the fall of the USSR and the start of the new US-Russia Cold War around 1998-1999, with the belief that Russia was on a path that, while rocky, led to Western-friendly democracy with the right support.
From 1999-2014 (but generally declining through that period) engagement was viewed as useful, in part because Russia’s hostile turn was seen by some as curable with reassurance, but more because Russia was seen as a generally hostile generally but having useful alignments of interest in some parts of the world.
But by a decade ago, 2015? “Normalizing relations with Russia and disengaging with the rest of the world militarily” was certainly not a common, much less the dominant, American liberal position on foreign policy.
