re: #181 Gus

I can’t think of what else can be done. Crimea is good enough for RU right now to continue direct support for their Black Sea fleet. The time for RU to invade UKR is long past and really wouldn’t make sense to do so right now. UKR has the pipelines but that for RU oil and gas. UKR was already a RU puppet state and an invasion or direct annexation would only make it official. Why in the world would RU want to annex a nation and inherit another location with over half a population that would oppose them? RU would want to inherit that mess?

I think that Putin’s being driven by domestic political necessity; having created this nationalistic myth for Russia, he’s having to live up to it by going in and ‘rescuing’ the ethnic Russians in Crimea. I think that’s why he had to do it, even though it’s costing Russia credibility, capital, and influence. There really doesn’t seem to be any other explanation—I’ve heard ‘warm water port’ enough times to make my ears bleed but this isn’t WWII, it’s really not that important, especially when compared to just having a country that’s completely economically dependent on them, as was the case before.

I think that after we ‘won’ the Cold War, the US has experienced a lot of bafflement of frustration when we haven’t been able to dominate everything and have everything come out the way we want. After beating the USSR, I think we got this feeling that we were masters of geopolitics and could determine the fate of the world—the Plan for the New American century and all that.

Crimea and Russia is a reminder that these kinds of things are incredibly complex, and it’s easy to criticize inaction but nearly impossible to come up with an actual action that’s both possible and helpful.