The point is countries are not people and morality that may be valid for people do not apply to countries. Mearsheimer as a realist doesn't deal with what's right and what's wrong or who's guilty and who's innocent. He deals in "if you do A, then B will happen down the track" and he said if NATO expand eastwards then there's going to be a war in Ukraine. Was he not correct?
I am not Melissa Chan, and I don't represent her.
I don't see why you seem to be writing as if I am obliged to defend her views or statements.
When I was apparently asked, I explained why I thought Melissa Chan wrote what she did.
Without delving into the details of John Mearsheimer's position, I shall briefly explain my own.
Ukraine seems like Canada in the sense that there are two major linguistic communities.
Canada has a federal system, allowing for enough autonomy for Francophone Quebec that an
independence movement there has not gained majority support so far.
I thought that Ukraine should have steered toward being a neutral bridge between Russia (with which it shared
important economic links from the Soviet era) and the European Union. Ukraine should have considered giving its
Russophone minority a status similar to that of Francophone Canadians, with Ukrainian and Russian as official languages.
I understand why Russia perceived NATO's expansion eastward as threatening, though I don't believe that there
was any immediate concern of NATO using Ukraine to threaten Russia. In my view, NATO's real raison d'être
ended when the Warsaw Pact and the USSR came to their ends. Then NATO should have been disbanded.
After 1991, NATO has been used largely to provide political cover for US imperialism.
Was NATO's potential future expansion into Ukraine a *proximate* cause or justification of Russia's invasion?
No, because any potential threat to Russia was too far removed and could have been addressed first without war.
One should not kill a child, for instance, simply because one's afraid that he will grow up into a terrorist.
