Back in 1989 and henceforth for years, I called for NATO to invite the newly independent Russia to join NATO when even Gorby wanted to. (From my subterranean perch then known as Sacratomato.) The Guardian piece is right on, especially until it became an impossibility, sometime during the Obama administration. Why? Defense industry profits. It is also clear a negotiated settlement is the only sane way forward as concluded by the article. But then there is Trump and Putin to contend with and only capitulation by Zelensky is on the table now with Trump's wagering armed support for peanuts in return. (Reminds me of what Gary Wills, or some such, said of Nixon: "He would dive into his mother's womb for nickels.")
Hopefully the next administration will respond to a European demand, another Paris Peace Conference where the Great Powers table ideas like a new comprehensive security instrument to replace NATO to include both Ukraine, Russia, and China, some kind of economic union or free trade area open to all, and also a climate accord with FANGS. That would be something worth a few Nobel Peace Prizes! I know, not likely, but derived from first principles of Western political theory and the second law of thermodynamics with its consequences. Is Greta the only wannabe Gandhi, Lincoln, Mandela, Buddha, Metternich, out there? May I remind you young'ns, Rodney King wisely and sadly is famous for something like this, "Can't we just all get along?" We all need to be bold in the right without righteousness. Surely some wise man, or more likely a woman, has said "politics is too important to be left up to politicians only."
Mother Earth is suffering from the curse of manopause. The sad part of raping her and each other is climate change, her immune system at work, is unfortunately going to take out millions of innocent species too, if not thousands already.
But I'm ranting now to the climate cognoscenti.
At the end of the Cold War George HW Bush had a plan to send aid to Russia and the other former Soviet republics to prop up the new regime that wanted peace. Congress was short sighted and didn't back him up. As a result, when the euphoria died down, Russia's economy hit the skids and gangsters took over the country. They are in power today and Putin is relatively popular because he's a strong man who makes Russians feel strong.
One of the biggest problems the US has had through the last century is the country tends to screw up the peace after a conflict. The exceptions were Europe and Japan after WW II and South Korea after the Korean War. We should have learned something from the Marshall Plan. It helped Europe rebuild and helped make the entire continent peaceful for 70+ years. Of course there was a deeper political motive there: beat the Russians, but it worked.
The US has plenty of political will to spend money on ever bigger sticks, but ignores the benefits of offering carrots. If the US had sent in people who actually understood the Middle East who wanted to rebuild Iraq properly after the US invasion in 2003, ISIS would have never happened. There was a book
Imperial Life in the Emerald City about how the US screwed up the peace.
https://www.amazon.com/Imperial-Lif...erial+life+emerald+city&qid=1574080846&sr=8-1
I knew it was bad, but even I was surprised at just how bad the US screwed the pooch after the war.
Al Qaeda happened because the US abandoned the Afghanis after the Russians pulled out. Sending aid on the level of what we loose in the couch cushions would have prevented bin Laden from turning on the US. If we had done a Marshall Plan light in Russia, Putin never would have come to power and Russia would be inside the tent as an ally today.
Well ... most Americans are still wedded to Wilsonian American exceptionalism. They don’t even know we have an empire, let alone that it’s over extended.
That surpringly makes it easy to wind down. Bring the troops back home is popular in political theatre. Even though the military industrial complex hates it - they want to continue sending poo’ folks kids to die in far away wars.
The whole American exceptionalism is something most people misunderstand, and even leaders who use it today get it wrong. The exceptionalism originally didn't mean that the US was somehow superior to other countries, it was founded on principles that were an exception to the norm in world politics. Most countries are founded on a homeland for a certain ethnic group. Japan is the country for the Nippon people. Germany is for the Germans, etc.
The US was not founded as a homeland for Americans. The invaders were well on their way towards exterminating or driving off the Americans. The US was founded on an idea instead of a place for one ethnic group. Some Americans now seem to think they are the American ethnic group, but they are a small minority. Most Americans feel completely comfortable telling others they are Irish, or Japanese, or whatever ethnicity their ancestors were.
Being American and some other ethnicity is a natural concept for most Americans. To Americans they are two different things, but they aren't for most of the world. There are other countries now that are multi-ethnic including our neighbor Canada which has always had a mix of Anglophones and Francophones, but also now have people immigrating from all over the world. European countries are also having to deal with the native ethnic population having to share space with new immigrants who don't look like them and have very different cultural roots. Singapore has also been a polyglot culture for a long time.
But the US was the first country to embrace this idea. When the US was formed, Canada had the French minority but they were a conquered people, not a recognized culture shared with the dominant English one.
