The countryside around Dublin is green alright, Im on the western seaboard now, not quite as lush.
Hope Tallaght was kind to you.
Geopolitics
- Thread starter Mciahel Goodman
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The countryside around Dublin is green alright, Im on the western seaboard now, not quite as lush.
Hope Tallaght was kind to you.
The last posts feel like watching The Bachelor. 
The last posts feel like watching The Bachelor.
OK, you can visit too.
I've just learned not to mention it up front.
But this was going on a bit longer already, right? Or at least, I remember reading an analysis in my Dutch newspaper a few months ago about how Turkey is turning its foreign policy around. Their reading of the situation was that Turkey's attempts from the pas few years to be bullish and intimidating effectively alienated everyone from them and isolated them globally. That's not helpful for a country that sees itself as a (potential) local superpower (if that's not a contradiction in terms), and of course potentially dangerous in a volatile world; so they're going back to being friends with everyone.
No issues I always carry an AK-47 in my back pocket.
Ah, very sneaky. Sorry to have ruined it for you.
Bringing a gun to a chainsaw fight.
Yes I think that’s basically correct. I think a few regional developments - Karabakh war, demise of Netanyahu, etc. - have probably helped move things along.
Having said that, I think “friends with everyone” / “zero problems with neighbors” is an unattainable goal in Turkey’s position.
Well, those Turkish drones are surely becoming popular so perhaps Turkey is eyeing a bigger export market.
But yes, pretty much, I'm anti imperialist lefty from a post colonial country so it's close to me.
I read somewhere the other day that fear is stronger than empathy and that might explain the reaction to Ukraine.
I don't know if I'm more empathic or just principled or some crazy ideologue. I don't know but I have a more consistent level of interest and awareness and empathy than the media and therefore a lot of people I know.
I am sure that without a doubt I have a much more consistent attitude to citizens arming themselves against invasion oppression and imperialism. I have principles that apply, and whether they are wrong or right, they are consistent.
As you can imagine, I get invited to fewer and fewer dinner parties.
With Ukraine it’s pretty black & white, an agressor invading their neighbor without any justification. The troubles in Palestine & Israel are far far more complex and far less black & white. Even within Israel and Palestine there are a lot of fractions and differences. Nevertheless, naturally I would expect somebody of Arabic ethnicity or a Muslim to spend more attention on the issue of Palestine than Ukraine. As I would an European to spend more attention on a war that’s happening within Europe. To start calling out people for being selective is just ridiculous. Are we going to criticize the West for reacting to the invasion of Ukraine just because the Palestinian issue doesn’t get enough attention? That’s a flawed attitude if you ask me.
If we are going to criticize the West then I would be more inclined to mention the invasion in Iraq, which was immoral and basically a flag up operation based on the lie that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (just as Putin is doing with Ukraine). The West sort of lost the moral highground on that one.
Yeah, I'm simplifying it a bit of course.
I thought Erdogen was positioning himself to become leader of the next Caliphate.
I don't think the use of the word selective is aimed at people really, just institutions.
And I don't think the reaction to Ukraine is at all questionable, that's not the point. It's a good reaction to this sort of aggression.
And I pretty much fully agree with you in the main.
Tough gig right now, think he may have accepted it’s beyond him for the time being.
Why's that?
I’d say his instinctive ambitions have exposed some limitations Turkey faces as a regional power over the last decade. These would be economic - the lira seems to lurch from crisis to crisis under his mismanagement; demographic, as a massive chunk of Turkish society has little interest ideologically-speaking in Turkey as an “Islamic” power; and especially political.
At home the AK Party has suffered a reverse in fortunes in recent elections. Regionally, involvement in Syria early on carried blowback in the form of a PKK entity on the southern border and ISIS attacks at home, along with a massive refugee crisis to deal with; hostility to Israel encouraged an anti-Turkish alliance in the Eastern Med which threatened Ankara’s energy policy; support for regional Muslim Brotherhood affiliates drove antagonism with the Saudis, UAE and Egypt. And by extension, these latter two issues created problems with Washington. The plus side of the balance sheet - closer relations with Iran, Qatar, and Russia - really hasn’t been worth the trouble, especially since Ankara has found itself in opposition to Moscow in Libya and to Tehran in the Karabakh conflict (and to a certain degree to both of them in Syria).
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Funnily, I always thought Putin wanted to be the new caliph, but by proxy.
I would guess that the economic situation in the country, combined with Russia’s ever increasing presence in the Black Sea combined and the experience of dealing with Russia in Syria has made Erdogan realize that he’s been backing the wrong horse the last 10 years?
Sad times that this needs its own thread apparently. I have been listening to Mearsheimer since beginning of the conflict, really interesting. I like how he describes his view of the world as 19th century and it shouldn't be lost that in 2014 when he talked about the Ukraine conflict then his predictions about how things would play out over the next years was quite remarkably accurate. Maybe a '19th century lens' is the best one to take when it comes to understanding and assessing geopolitics. I would take US as the global hegemon over say Russia or China all day long personally. That being said the idea of liberal democracy in the US and UK particularly is completely oversold with our two party no choice, first past the post system and a bought up media actively engaged in the engineering of social attitudes towards the aims of an elite class.
Guess this lands me in the whataboutery camp. Maybe someone can compile an analyser that assigns posts a morality score and then at the end of the day posters can be cheered or booed as per their score and we can make the process smoother and more amenable.
Guess this lands me in the whataboutery camp. Maybe someone can compile an analyser that assigns posts a morality score and then at the end of the day posters can be cheered or booed as per their score and we can make the process smoother and more amenable.
Agree on each point (might argue that liberal democracy is imperfect for the reasons given above, but it isn't imperfect from the perspective of those who have brought it to this state, with Citizens United and various other laws being very much intentional, so from the perspective of that class, these traits are ideal, not imperfect).
John Mearsheimer is a Political Scientist and international relations scholar.
His talk takes up to 45 minutes. The rest is Q & A.
This recording was done Feb 15th 2022. The invasion happened 9 days later.
It totally debunks the propaganda we have heard from cable news media.
You’re being a tad cynical.
Care to summarise for those of us tuned to the propaganda channel.
I agree. They remember history well. Domestic social harmony is their primary objective.
This is certainly in line with how it’s being reported in the Netherlands & UK. I don’t think think Ukraine was joining NATO any time soon but the fact their government was looking to join the EU and NATO was more than enough reason for the Russians to invade Ukraine. Still doesn’t excuse invading a foreign sovereign country, the Russians should be asking themselves why Ukraine was looking to the West rather than Russia.
Spot the contradiction
Mearsheimer is a decrepit old man who's so wedded to his simplistic theory of international security that he can't acknowledge basic facts about the whole situation. I think @Raoul posted an interview Isaac Chotiner did with him for the New Yorker where he looks incredibly stupid. He insists that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is "geopolitics!!!" and not imperialism. He also insists that Russia won't invade all of Ukraine, despite the fact that it is doing just that.
The Russians have been all over Mearsheimer's nuts because his view of realism posits that Russia should be guaranteed its sphere of influence, regardless of what the people around Russia believe. People in the Baltics, Ukraine, Poland, Belarus? Yeah, their freedom and sovereignty don't matter because they should be in Russia's sphere of influence.
For people who reject geopolitics, what motivated Russia to invade Ukraine? How do you all understand it? Putin woke up one day and went insane?
Certain points in that Mearsheimer argument that are absolutely overlooked by the media (the fact of western involvement in the Maidan coup, being one, and the de facto "natofication" of Western Ukraine being another).
It's hard not to be.
Are you actually going to make a point in here or just keep looking from your high horse. Honestly, you deserve a thread ban for wumming because you are not even trying to explain your position.
you mean you cannot listen to a youtube video.
There are multiple theoretical lenses that you can look at it from.
1. Neo-Realism - In an anarchic international system, states are incentivized to engage in "self-help" by pursuing their strategic goals
2. Liberal Intergovernmentalism - There is complex economic interdependence within the international system, which allows the most powerful economic actors to penalize less economically powerful states when they behave as Putin's Russia has.
3. Constructivism - Putin's interactions with his inner circle, his seclusion during covid and subsequent paranoia and insecurity of hitting the age of 70, have led him on an irrational invasion of Ukraine in a desparate attempt to build a legacy and be remembered as a great Russian leader, as his hero Peter the Great.
There are also ways to frame this through feminism, post-structuralism, and several other angles. Each of these theoretical frameworks are simply analyzing the same problem through very different lenses. Personally, constructivism is far more explanatory than the other major theories. Putin's behavior (and by extension, Russia's behavior) is simply down to his personal experiences and interactions with those around him, that have led him to believe this was a good time to conquer Ukraine. He was obviously wrong and probably proceeded on emotion rather than a coherent strategy, just as when Brezhnev ordered the invasion of Afghanistan following an emotional reaction during which he had been drinking. Most wars that are started in authoritarian systems are easily explained through constructivism because power is generally centralized within one person, whose personal emotions and experiences lead to them initiating military actions.
I don't have a problem with constructivism but you have also to provide the historical framework upon/within which the individual choice is made. For example, Putin's behavior may have grown more unhinged during Covid, but it wasn't so unpredictable that legions of diplomats and scholars couldn't predict the likely outcome many years ago, commenting upon it in spells (like 1997, 1999, 2008, and 2014). Mearsheimer's framing precedes Putin but so does that of Kennan and Chomsky.
In 2008, Putin made his first statement on the issue via Georgia. In 2014, he made another (in response to the Maidan coup in which we know the US had some involvement) by annexing Crimea. The strength of constructivism is that it doesn't take away from personal actors, but its weakness is that it seems myopic or in fact prone to forgetting various events upon which new events emerge. Whatever framework you prioritize, I think it's disingenuous to a) ignore the historical context which bears directly upon the present, and b) to focus solely upon the historical to the extent that individual motive is erased. The best analysis will be found by merging the individual's actions within the collective totality of the structural framework (which feminist theory, for example, does both implicitly and explicitly). A constructivism which takes 2008-2014 (desire for Western-facing post-Soviet states as well as Western cultivation of that desire) into account would be worthwhile. You could then say that with all the historical factors (NATO, post-Soviet desire to move west), a 70 year old Putin after two years of isolation made a personal decision which does not discount the broader context.
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If you're looking at things through constructivism then the events you cite are also the result of personal interactions amongst those who initiated them, both Putin and western leaders. Its not making a moral call on who is right or wrong, its simply distilling macro-level events down to interactions among very small groups of elites who make them.
Another example would be the 2003 decision to invade Iraq, which was largely made off of very narrow groupthink among a small group of senior Dubya advisors, where no one wanted to be the odd man out by promoting an alternate view, therefore everyone was incentivized to agree with Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Rumsfeld's postions. You can combine constructivism with structural realism to create an even broader framework.
This topic has been discussed at length over a week ago. Go look up the old posts as they answer a lot of what you apparently just discovered today.