It would have built confidence. Building confidence is very important. It is quite clear Russia wants to sell things to the west just as we want to buy things. Also Russians want to spend their money here, send their kids to school and university here, buy property here.
Well put it this way perhaps a strong leader is what we need here in the UK.
Such a cliche. The Russian people have rarely had a choice - no one elected the tsars or the Soviet leaders. In fact the only 'strong man' they could be said to have chosen was Putin himself after Yeltsin quit and he made sure they wouldn't get to choose again.
The world - or at least not this country, which is what you really mean - really has not moved to the left at all, we just had Brexit and people voted for protectionism and championing the nation-state. Right now, we are supplying arms to a smaller country in the face of a much bigger and angrier aggressor.
By Western values, do you mean democracy, rule of law, political and religious freedoms, and the right of sovereign nations to join any defence alliance they so choose?
Universal liberalism is a futile endeavour, because it relies on social engineering in countries diametrically opposed to Western values.
Vive la France.
Forced by whom? We do it freely, as we do with myriad countries because it suits our strategic interests. Hence our support of Saudi Arabia and its militarism in keeping terrorism at bay in the Arabian peninsula, and our debt payment to Iran so a nuclear deal will go more smoothly in future.
This You Tube video from 2015 of a lecture by Professor John Mearsheimer gives a very interesting and often prescient perspective on the Ukrainian crisis:
No way.
People protesting autocrats do not always want Western freedoms. Many countries are well apprised of the benefits and drawbacks of liberalism and are content to say "no thank you" and instead practice religions which are fundamentally illiberal, or hold secular but illiberal views. Hundreds of billions of dollars went into trying to found a democracy in Afghanistan for it all to collapse instantly the moment we left.
Thank you for that - listened to the whole.
I think you need to look up the Azov Battalion with regard to the Nazi allegations. Plenty of info on the web. Not everything the west does is wrong but neither is it always right. The best people as always are critical friends.
Trust and confidence of the people are irrelevant while you have a power mad psychopath person like Putin in charge. He has made sure by using every tool he has to lie about nearly everything relating to foreign relations. As a result, only a fool would give you any answer as to what the Russian people think or what they would choose if they had not been subjected to all the years of lies.
There is also plenty of so called information on the web that is incorrect or misleading. Any fool can make allegations.
Have you watched the video, if only from 43-46 minutes? It explains who Professor Mearsheimer believes is ultimately responsible.
It's Russia that's firing missiles and using artillery against Ukrainian cities. It is responsible for wrecking Ukraine.
I have watched the video. It features a self-proclaimed dinosaur 7 years ago talking exclusively about American interests in a way that makes it clear that he has no interest in the people of Europe at all, except as pawns to be pushed around a board. It features a hugely disingenuous map to "evidence" that the people of Ukraine are divided in a way which they are.
By way of scripted counterpoint, I suggest the TLDR news video on the matter:
I could bore everyone with an account of 20th century Ukrainian nationalism, including Stalin's murderous repression of Ukrainian cultural identity from the late 1920s, the famines of the 1930s, and Stalin's alliance with Hitler to rule over all nationalities living in the space between Germany and Russia, and the resulting mass murders and deportations in territory annexed by Stalin from Poland in 1939.
This is the central tenet of his argument, yes. Europe has always been that way. We entered WWI as a way of balancing power and ensuring France was not usurped by Germany. The whole premise of the EU is to decrease conflict by increasing trade and cultural exchange and to ensure European powers are balanced and held in tension. Britain joined the EEC partly in the hope it would become more federalist and less a project of Germany and France.
It’s funny how some Americans forget that the U.S.A. only became powerful (compared to the British Empire) some time after 1916 (that’s a maximum of about 105 years ago, a pretty short timespan really). Until then, the U.S.A. would have been considered to be far, far less important than Europe. And now in terms of economic growth and output China is rapidly on the rise (well, was until relatively recently).
Wait, WHAT!?!?
