The US should compromise on NATO to save Ukraine | Hacker News Reader

The US should compromise on NATO to save Ukraine

jeffsachs.org

11 pointstokyopanda17 comments

I don’t think taking security advice from an economist that also happens to fly in the face of all the security experts is really what we need at the moment.

We now have huge amounts of evidence that appeasement as a strategy in general doesn’t go well with dictators and we have a huge amount of evidence that appeasement doesn’t work in particular with this exact dictator.

It’s a bad idea and I would even argue an immoral one.

We equally have huge amounts of evidence that NATO aggression leads to turmoil and chaos.

Those paying attention to NATO's wars over the last twenty years see the writing on the wall, very clearly. Iraq lost 5% of its population to NATO members' aggression .. NATO never prosecutes its war criminals, and neutralizes anyone who points out the very real evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

If you're not factoring this into your assessment of the Russians' position, you're doing yourself - and anyone who reads your point of view - a massive disservice, and should remove any references to 'morality', since it is clearly deficient in your argument.

NATO did not wage war in Iraq, it was the USA and the coalition of the willing. On the other hand NATO did engage in Afghanistan.

NATO bases were used to wage war on Iraq. War on Iraq wouldn't have happened if NATO bases weren't entirely supportive of the effort. Allied Command Europe played a major role in supporting those NATO member states "threatened" by the conflict.

This disingenuous attempt at defending NATO's honor with regards to crimes against humanity and war crimes committed under its purview is ineffective in light of the endless streams of human beings still out there, still living in refuge from America's and NATO's wars. YOU may not like to admit it, but there are millions and millions of INNOCENT people out there for whom NATO and its membership is very, very definitely an aggressor.

I was talking about the conflict with Hussein led Iraq. Not the later situation with ISIS and others.

The distinction you are trying to make is very glib.

Iraq lost 5% of its population to aggression from NATO member states in the last 20 years.

The conception of NATO as some USA-ruled bloc that almost annexes Eastern European states that have no say in the matter, is absurd. They joined because they wanted to be defended from Russian attacks, as is their sovereign right and decision.

Neither the USA not Russia should get a veto power over that. The fact that Russia is trying to force that very veto on Ukraine with tanks and troops is wrong.

>USA-ruled bloc .. is absurd

From which bases have the US and its allies been launching countless bombing campaigns all over the Middle East, resulting in literally millions of peoples lives being utterly ruined? From which bases is America prosecuting its heinously racist, vile wars? MILLIONS of people have been murdered by NATO-aligned forces in the last twenty years. Is this not clear to you?

So .. It is not absurd at all. NATO has been an aggressive, murderous entity for twenty years and has not demonstrated, in the slightest bit, the willingness or even ability to prosecute its own war criminals.

>They joined because

NATO protects nobody, and has in fact been the worlds #1 aggressor for the last twenty years. Nations join it now because their politicians are corrupt and want the rewards that the CIA confers on its assets... if you can't see that fact, you're simply not looking hard enough, or indeed with any honesty at all.

NATO is not the protective organization that Western propaganda leads us to believe it is. If it were, it wouldn't be hiding its war crimes and massive, massive crimes against humanity, from its own people.

“I believe the perception caused by civilian casualties is one of the most dangerous enemies we face.” U.S. General Stanley A. McCrystal in his inaugural speech as ISAF Commander in June 2009

Undisputed UN figures show that 1.7 million Iraqi civilians died due to the West’s brutal sanctions regime, half of whom were children. In his paper for the Association of Genocide Scholars at the University of Manitoba, Professor Nagi explained that the DIA document revealed “minute details of a fully workable method to ‘fully degrade the water treatment system’ of an entire nation” over a period of a decade. The sanctions policy would create “the conditions for widespread disease, including full scale epidemics,” thus “liquidating a significant portion of the population of Iraq”.

The Russians read these reports, even if the American people do not. The people of Iraq know how many lives were lost because of aggression launched from NATO bases, even if Americans don't.

You're conflating completely unrelated things. NATO has a single purpose, and in no way was NATO invoked around Iraq even if states that are nembers of NATO did cooperate in doing something at the time as a coalition of the willing. NATO was, and remains, a narrowly tailored defensive organization. No one need worry about NATO that isn't expansionist in nature.

>West Sanctioning? Not NATO. Countries do what countries do, and soft power through weaponized control of financial system access is a very powerful weapon of international diplomacy which has exactly zero to do with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

>Horrendous war plans Good lord, you haven't even scratched the surface of horrendous war plans. Have you looked at Project Pluto? MKULTRA? COINTELPRO? I don't know much of other country's dirty laundry, but I assure you, everyone runs atrocity factories and develops war stratagem in anticipation of the worst case scenario. Welcome to life. No nice things allowed. No exceptions.

Even if a member state has some atrocity cooking, guess what, still not NATO! NATO is an implementation of inter-nation coordination and signaling whereby one member state can notify other member states they are being invaded, thereby mustering a collective pushing in of the aggressor's crap. After the signaling is done, the rest of the implementation isn't on "NATO", it's on the member states doing things themselves.

Good lord, I'm shouting at clouds again, but God bless.

If you want to complain about the West; at least get your abstractions straight.

I strongly suspect parent is a Russian troll. I don't believe any HN poster can criticise the existence of NATO in good faith after literally seeing the fate of a nearby country that wasn't a part of it.

This tired trope needs to die. Just because you encounter a viewpoint that is not aligned with what you were told to think about things by the talking heads on the television, doesn't mean there was a Russian agitprop campaign involved. Try to actually expand your understanding of the world, just a little bit.

I'm simply a civilian member of a 5-eyes state, have traveled extensively around the world including eastern Europe and the Balkans, speak multiple languages, have a great deal of interest in cultures not my own - including those I've been told by autocrats that I should 'hate', and as a result of decades of applying constant, vigilant attention to the Wests' war crimes, I am simply quite well-informed about the very real, actual war crimes and crimes against humanity that have been committed by NATO member states in the last twenty years, as well as the criminal actions of Western governments in suppressing any attempt to prosecute the very real war criminals who committed these crimes against humanity, in my name. Informing myself about the crimes committed in my name is something I consider of vital importance to existence in the modern world.

Why aren't you equally informed? What investment do you have in the Wests' ability to commit war crimes with impunity?

It's a tough thing to do, tbh. In my younger days, I've been blinded by rage at seeming atrocity gone unmet, only to realize later in life that given the way things are structured, and how reality works, there was simply no way to actually facilitate the desired change in the world without learning how it actually works. It's a sovereignty thing, and different places will see it differently,

We have to temper the urge to stonewall with a willingness to pass on the requisite knowledge to initiate the uninitiated into an understanding of how things work.

Then again, only so many hours in a day. I've said my piece.

Good job. Enjoy your well earned blood Rubles.

Maybe offer a ten-year guarantee of no NATO entry, swapped for sped-up EU accession. Call it a draw. But then over the long run, a westward-looking Ukraine is the end of Russia's obsession of an empire to abuse and exploit.

The EU is also a mutual defence alliance, Article 42.7

I'm somewhat startled that Sachs subscribes to exactly the same reasoning as me. The U.S. would never have allowed Mexico or Canada to become Communist allies during the Cold War, no matter international law says, we would've invaded.

Also, not letting Ukraine join NATO is not a sign of appeasement. It's just showing consideration of how important the joining of a former Soviet state is to Russia.

The U.S. has quietly been prodding former Soviet states to join NATO. Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia, all being poor are easy converts in that sense.

We tried it also with Kazakhstan, but that country being affluent due to its oil-reserves isn't so easily turned and has pushed back. It wants to continue to have good relations with its Northern neighbor.

Maybe we should compromise by letting Ukraine join the EU, but not NATO.

"in return for a full withdrawal of Russian forces from the Donbas region and an end to Russian support for the independence of the two Moscow-backed separatist regions in eastern Ukraine, a demobilisation along the Russia-Ukraine border and an assurance of Ukrainian sovereignty"

And what's the guarantee Putin wouldn't attack Ukraine anyway after few years? Russia did assure Ukrainian sovereignty in the past and apparently it wasn't worth the paper it was written on.

Anyway, that's not compromise Russia would have accepted, back in December they demanded essentialy reverting NATO to its 1997 state.

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