DAVE LINDORFF: Real Russian Threat--invading or trading with neighbors?

[yurbud]

Why would Russia be planning to invade their neighbors when they are investing heavily in trade infrastructure with Europe, which likely would want nothing to do with them if they invaded other countries?

The realpolitik of what's going on with Russia is our government doesn't want to see the economic integration of Eurasia from China to Europe that make the US a regional power without the ability to control and profit from the largest landmass on Earth.

Henry Kissinger, now a Trump advisor, thinks we can break that up by turning Russia against China while Democrats seem to want put Russia in the doghouse (but apparently still demonize China too).

The reality is sanctions, covert action, and even wars don't change the course of history--they just delay or accelerate it.

We fought two wars in the 20th century to keep Germany from being the dominant economic power in Europe and won both.

Today, Germany calls the shots in Europe (albeit as our junior partner for now).

America "lost" the Vietnam War. Today, they make our Nikes for 50 cents an hour.

We can slow down the integration of Eurasia for a few years or even decades, but at what cost to us and them in lives and wealth?

And what will it gain the average American?

At the height of the British Empire, the average Brit was working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, living in filthy slums.

We are at peak empire right now and how is that helping average Americans?

Most people here know Nazi leader Hermann Goering's quote about how to gin up a war, but fewer know what he prefaced it with:

"Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?"

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/goering.asp

Those who are selling conflict with Russia do not have the best interest of average Americans at heart.

And before someone bothers to call me a Putin or Trump lover, corporate Democrats have agreed with Republicans on far more and far more damaging issues than me from privatizing public education to starting unnecessary wars.

Democrats have one, maybe two elections to get their shit together and be a real opposition party to the Republicans.

Demonizing Russia and anyone who doesn't do the same is a recipe for beating the GOP to the ash heap of history.

This is all by way of getting to a larger point. The hysteria about Russian hacking of the US election — an action which while it might have happened, is by no means proven — is a meaningless diversion, because there is no evidence at all that Russia is an aggressive nation. While the US is moving Abrams battle tanks and nuclear-capable mobil artillery up close to the Russian border in the waning days of the Obama administration, forcing Russia to respond by beefing up its own national border defenses, no one could argue seriously that Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin, have any interest whatsoever in invading any country of Europe, however small and weak.

What possible advantage could come to Russia from such an action? Even if Russia could succeed in invading Poland and grabbing a piece of that country, or invading one of the Baltic countries that were former Soviets, such an action would make developing trade relations with the rest of Europe impossible, and would force Russia to engage in a costly occupation which it can ill afford.

Why, one has to ask, would Russia be building, with up to $100 billion in Chinese financing, a bunch of super high-speed rail lines from eastern China and eastern Siberia all the way to rail hums in Germany and other European countries, to facilitate vastly expanded trade overland, if it were also secretly planning to conquer and occupy parts of Europe again, as it did in the pre-1990 era?

A cynic — or realist — might suspect that it is precisely this goal of economic integration of Europe and Asia, with Russia at the center, which lies at the root of US antipathy and hostility towards both Russia and China.

If the US continues to cling to the insane, megalomaniacal idea of maintaining strategic dominance — military and economic — at all costs over all current and potential rivals around the globe, there is a certain logic to trying to ruin this grand plan for economic convergence on the Eurasian continent.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/11/democratic-hysteria-on-russia/

[geek tragedy]

1. Dave Lindorff preferred Ron Paul to Barack Obama, so it makes sense this psycho hate monger

would write pieces fellating Vladimir Putin.

P.S. Russia invaded Ukraine and Georgia, two European countries. That's how Russia has always rolled, and will always roll. The bear is as it always has been.

[yurbud]

2. so you never agreed with Republicans on anything...like those who are piling on Russia now too?

[geek tragedy]

3. Russia is a rightwing ethnonationalist mafia state, regardless of whether

Little Marco likes them or not.

[yurbud]

8. that doesn't determine whether our government likes them or not and never has

[billh58]

4. Right on!

Lindorff is at best, a Libertarian, and at worst a RWNJ.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. Speaking as a European (and I don't think you're one), I don't want integrating with Russia

especially in its current homophobic, religion-pushing, insanely economically unequal state. And I resent others telling me I should welcome my new overlord when it's a murdering fuck like Putin, whether he plans to achieve this integration by military means, or by economic force.

[yurbud]

6. Who says they would be overlords? And what economic force is there? Europe's economy is 7x bigger

Europe has been buying oil and gas from Russia as long as they've been sucking it out of the ground.

The other sources of oil and gas like our allies in the Middle East aren't exactly the most enlightened either.

I would rather that all countries turn to alternative fuels.

I am not so much pro-integration as observing that it looks like the way things are going, just as my comments about Germany leading Europe aren't a preference but an observation.

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. It's Putin's methods

He objects to Ukraine becoming more economically tied to the EU (which was peaceful) with threats about cutting off its gas, and then he militarily takes Crimea, and send soldiers and weapons into eastern Ukraine to lead a rebellion. He did roughly the same with Georgia.

People like Lindorff are just brown-nosing an authoritarian nationalist. The Middle Eastern dictators aren't trying to disrupt EU states like the Baltics. Germany is a liberal democracy. If your attitude is "Putin will inevitably succeed, so there's no point in trying to stop him", it's a nihilistic abdication I want no part of.

[yurbud]

12. It's not necessarily Putin who will succeed, but in the longer view of history it's the way things

will play out.

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. So what you're advocating is "ignore anything that Putin does, and hope Russia turns into a

nice place sometime."

[yurbud]

14. no. I'm advocating taking words of people who have wasted a lot of our money and gotten a lot of

people killed with a huge grain of salt. The heads of our intelligence services (not the foot soldier analysts) have a track record of lying on command.

Our government doesn't have conflicts with other governments because they have cruel, undemocratic leaders.

They do so because it benefits someone calling the shots.

Likewise, other leaders, no matter how evil they personally are, are unlikely to do something openly suicidal, as Putin trying to retake the Baltic and various other schemes he's accused of here, just as Saddam Hussein wouldn't have launched the nukes he didn't have in the first place because it would have been the last thing he ever did.

[muriel_volestrangler]

15. And yet, he sent troops into Ukraine and Georgia

Why, unless fellow NATO countries actually warn him against it, would he think that retaking the Baltic states is 'openly suicidal'?

The Baltic states themselves take the threat of Putin seriously.

[yurbud]

7. If tension with Russia flares into a shooting war, Europe will be the battleground

Just like a war between the US and North Korea, the US could win, but the country the war is fought on would lose the most lives and wealth.

Not incidentally, some of those looking to extend the American century realized that we did so well economically after World War II because the rest of the major powers in the World had been beaten to a pulp and needed a couple of decades to rebuild.

Those who fancy themselves masters of the universe think another major bloodletting like that would put them back on top.

[LanternWaste]

10. Hence, the Georgian anschluss, the Crimean annexation and Ukrainian invasion.

"think another major bloodletting like that would put them back on top...."

Hence, the Georgian anschluss, the Crimean annexation and Ukrainian invasion as part of the attempt to put Putin and Moscow on top.

[yurbud]

11. Putin could argue that those countries are like Latin America for us

where our government intervenes more or less at will, especially when we thought the Soviets might be gaining influence.

Crimea was part of Russia until it was transferred to Ukraine by bureaucrats in the Soviet era. Russia has bases there and they held a referendum on rejoining Russia.

I don't approve of all their actions, but it seems like our government's problem with Russia, China, and even Cuba before the thaw was not as much that they were a direct threat to us but that they had their own foreign policy and pursued their own interests even when it conflicted with our business and banking interests.