I’ve seen different perspectives say its either a winning strategy ( they stand to alienate little brother Europe from daddy US, and possibly make them dependent on US natural gas ), or that its a losing strategy ( that in the long term it will only stand to unite China, Russia, India, etc more closely, contribute to de-dollarization, etc)
Do you think the west’s strategy is sound, or are they merely making mistakes typical of dying empires?
I think the strategy was to find an enemy that they could paste all over the news and so they could justify spending a trillion dollars every year on military budgets. (The combined NATO budget is about 1 trillion, and the USA is ~80% of that)
I think they were having a hard time getting China to take the bait with Taiwan and manufacturing consent with Xinjiang was starting to wear off as people very slowly figured out it wasn’t true, though it’s still a huge problem with misinformation.
Russia has been warning NATO for years that if they kept pushing their membership closer to Russian borders then they’d have to take action and I think NATO wanted that to happen.
That also might lead to the question… is Russia incorrectly taking the bait? Are they maybe going to get involved in an expensive quagmire, and this is what the US wants? Kind of the cold war strategy w/ respect to Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc.
Yeah, I think Russia made a mistake. Though this is entirely ignoring any motives or objectives that Russia/Putin have in this situation and only considering the NATO side.
The only thing is if this conflict ends fairly quickly, as in not another 20-year Afghanistan, which was S tier for the military contractors who profited from it.
They might be okay if they stick to the Donbass, create the new republics, and like you said, don’t let this drag on for too long. I’m sure they don’t wanna have to go through this mess again tho even after those republics get created, and ukraine keeps sending nazi troops.