* It’s like a replay of the LBJ attack ad on Goldwater in which a little girl was picking the pedals off a daisy while a voice was counting down from 10 in a nuclear launch. The implication was that LBJ was the one to trust with the nukes. It does look like the dems are using this against Trump. On a few blogs I read the trolls are bringing this up a lot. They seem oblivious to the retorts that Hillary, not Trump, seems intent on baiting Russia.
* The idea of expanding NATO endlessly — not sure where that came from. It strikes me as a zombie idea … you can’t kill it. No one (other than Russia) wants to say no. And it gets muddled with the expansion of the Eurozone. But the idea of expanding Europe Eastward never goes away.
One requirement for NATO expansion is that the candidate country can’t have current border disputes. Sort of like an insurance company not underwrite a burning building.
So … There are breakaway territories in Georgia and Moldova. Which precludes their admission, which is exactly what Russia wants. And now Ukraine is ineligible. The reason it doesn’t/hasn’t happened more is that the border dispute qualification isn’t carved in stone, and there is always the chance that the ultra hawks will get their way and expand into a dispute. Someone always brings it up, so maybe it is considered best to not overuse the tactic.
Moldova is the poorest country in Europe and it is hard to imagine anyone really wanting it. Furthermore, the breakaway area, Transdniester, is one of the least desirable parts of Moldova.
When you look at these places, it is obvious that they aren’t worth any serious investment of anything. Why bother? It is also possible that people might look at a map and see that they are in the middle of nowhere.
I also have a hunch that even the US is ok with it. At worst, it creates a minor problem that can then be put in the pile of stuff that will never get done. And at least some people in the US are smart enough to see it as a solution to the never ending expansion.
* It was the Bush Regime that first pushed NATO to the borders of Russia in 2004 with the addition of:
Bulgaria
Estonia
Latvia
Lithuania
Romania
Slovakia
Slovenia
* Speaking of the Olympics, apparently they have a “Refugee Team” now. Is this supposed to guilt westerners into taking in more refugees? Can people get any crazier? WTF.
* This reminds me of the Chicoms who love to talk about the Opium Wars and the Rape of Nanking but not so much about the much more recent Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which killed more Chinese than the foreign invaders ever did. Historical memory tends to be very selective – in the US it’s always 1954 and Rosa Parks is always being asked to move to the back of the bus.
Apparently the Chinese have been taking their loss to the Philippines in the international tribunal on the South China Sea issue out on the Americans (the Philippines is seen as an American proxy) and specifically they have been demonstrating against that bastion of American imperialism, KFC. The Chicoms normally suppress any whiff of dissent but hating on the Americans is seen as a safe outlet for popular discontent, just as Hillary would rather that you demonstrate against racist white cops than against Goldman Sachs.
* Stalin was a shrewd operator who knew his homeland well. The minority nations had little interest in a Russian empire, whether run by the tsar or the Bolsheviks. They had to be put down by force in the Civil War era, and again during WWII.
If you look at the boundaries of the old Soviet Republics you can see they were often designed to include a “poison pill”, another minority that would resist being placed under the governance of a larger neighbor. In turn that would give the Soviet authorities a basis to intervene and and an ally. S. Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabach, Transdnistra, etc are features not bugs.
Not that I think any of ‘em are worth a Texas National Guardsman’s bones.
* The US was not happy with the Russian territorial advances at the end of WWII but it was not willing to start another war over them. Then nuclear weapons made starting another war unthinkable. Then at the end of the Cold War , Russians finally retreated, much to the relief of all the occupied countries. Now Putin would like to come back. Should the people of the territories involved have any say in this this time? Is it wrong for them to turn to the US to prevent the Russian from giving them another “bear hug”?
Honestly, the US would have no interest in places like Lithuania except for the fact that the Russians keep trying to reestablish their “sphere of influence” in places where they are not welcome and will never be welcome.
* At heart, the elites are globalists rather than Europeans or Atlanticists. They could have proposed a free trade, passport-free travel zone comprised of, say, the eight European countries with the highest GDP per capita, and there would never have been a Brexit.
But they are compelled to bundle the good with the sh*t, because they want the proles to eat sh*t. It’s the same here. They could have had an immigration comprise years ago, with more tech visas in return for ending immigration of 4th grade dropouts from Chiapas and Jihadists from Somalia and Pakistan. But they want to rub your nose in the sh*t too.
* Trump should subtly remind everyone that the only world leader ever to resort to nuclear weapons was not in his party.
