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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

I imagine it must feel great to be able to say something like this if you don't live in the region. Some of us don't have such comfort though.

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The Poles, the Baltic states, etc. know Russia all too well and have an fear of Russian power that is justified. However, NATO is not some simple fix as current events demonstrate. Central Europe is a region between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, Russian imperial propensities are not appeased. On the other, NATO (vel American) incursion and regime change has provided a pretext for grievance and military action.

The only long term stable geopolitical option for the region is the historic option: a powerful regional state and/or bloc that can simultaneously dampen Russian imperialism as well as "Western" ambition, like this one[0] which is a nascent project that I suspect can lead to a high degree of regional solidarity that will stabilize all of Europe and therefore contribute to the stability of the Eurasian landmass.

[0] https://3seas.eu/

Except that almost every single Central and Eastern European country benefit tremendously from interference by the West. The region was mostly left alone after WW1 so we ended up with a bunch of isolated states run by quasi fascist regimes 1930's. And guess how that turned out?

It's a very poor pretext. NATO doesn't threaten European countries to join it and doesn't invade them if they don't. It's the countries themselves who choose to associate with the West, Russian aggression being one of the contributing factors.

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