Yeah. I posted that video here. The complete one on YouTube not the snippet on Twitter. Before the conflict started.
I posted a link to a PDF with the Melian Dialogue written by Thucydides. When these pre-war talks were happening.
You should also watch the links to YouTube videos I put on this thread where Scott Ritter is talking. He knows this stuff really well.
It should give you a good idea of the game plan of the US with regards to Ukraine and how we got here.
The West was not "fractured". They prattled while Trump did his wild west act of shooting on all sides. They had some bickering then fell into line two years after that. When Biden and the new German government with the Greens got into power it all fell into place.
The proof of this is obvious. EU not signing trade deal with China. NordStream 2. EU did not bother to convince Ukraine into fulfilling Minsk 2. EU is largest donor of aid to Ukraine after Ukraine cut most of their trade with Russia post 2014. EU had all the levers at their disposal and then some. Look at how Biden got Ukraine to do its bidding by threatening to withdraw IMF loan.
Yet Germany never totally left this alliance? Remember Angela Merkel almost supplicant to Trump that the US would not take its troops out of Germany? Do you think that is how a major power would act? Germany knows its power is all economic. They dismantled their conventional army. Their nuclear deterrent uses US weapons. It would mean their subordination to France and they were not ready to accept it. Not when they think they are winning it all economically. Jacques Chirac and Helmut Kohl would have just told Trump to f off.
Japan is in a much similar position to Germany where they cannot have an independent foreign policy. And worse they have no local allies to form a defensive block in Asia that would stand on its own. They had a plan in 1980/90s to fund investments all over Asia. But then their economy collapsed and they focused inward. The UK leaving the EU is immaterial to Atlanticist efforts since the Balts, Poland, etc are perfect spoilers on their own. They will never allow the EU to have good relations with Russia. They cancelled visa free travel for Russian citizens to the EU before 2014 even happened because of them for example. This caused EU to lose massive tourism revenues.
You can ask Erdogan what he thinks of that woman.
I would not bet on it. Cyprus is claimed by both Turkey and Greece. It was invaded by Turkey, I think in the 1970s, and is in the EU.
Letting Ukraine into EU is dangerous for Russia because the treaty includes a mutual defense clause and there are NATO countries in it.
Merkel told Putin that Russia was "too big" to be in the EU when he asked for it.
There is a chance the UN will lose its relevance in favor of regional power structures like the African Union and SCO.
It if was me I would do like the Israelis do with Lebanon. I would cordon the West off and regularly bomb it into submission.
It is going to be used as spawn pool for an insurgency. In fact the US did just that in the late 1940s when it armed insurgents in Ukraine. This resulted, I think, in 20,000 Soviet servicemen dead, and 200,000 Ukrainians over many years. This conflict is little talked about. Nikita Khrushchev was the First Secretary of Ukraine and Stalin was leader of the USSR. And it was all funded by the CIA using an infiltrated agent network originally created by the Nazis in WW2 chock full of Banderite Nazis. The US only stopped funding this network in 1990. Watch Scott Ritter on this.
