When the public discourse turns to geopolitics, there are always at least two frames of reference in usage at any given moment. Firstly, you have the populist narrative which is given by the media in bitesize chunks for majority consumption (even if their goal was to educate and foster dissent rather than indoctrinate and manufacture consent, on which point I'm open to debate, the sheer volume of material they would have to cover almost debars such attempts). Most of the first frame is dominated by simplistic appeals to emotional sense (scholars of war propaganda will be familiar with the Belgian atrocity stories from the first world war and millions of others before and since). The second, always implicit, frame is geopolitical. Geopolitical strategists, like those who work at state departments around the world, do not live or think in the same frame as the majority of people who get their news from the "news". They instead study maps, troop movements, sociopolitical history, and financial markets. They play the "great game" as a mode of employment (it's what they do, after all). Here's the clash: we, the public, generally do not like to think of it in these terms but geopolitical strategists are not driven by morality but instead by what is optimal for any given state's interest. They speak in terms of the domination of one state (theirs) over another. So here is a good example, which is also prescient as it was written in the 1990s:
If you were to continue reading that book, you would understand that American planners (from all across the spectrum) conceive of conflicts like the current one in terms that are very different/completely removed from the moral frame of reference. They all understand themselves to be competing in the same arena (national/international dominance) and tend to use very similar language despite actual linguistic differences.
Another, related example, from the Financial Times today:
The above is interesting because it frames the first quotation. A lot of simultaneous actions which have many implications beyond any single country. The end of the dollar hegemony is the theme and China's longterm planning for it (understood twentyfive years ago) is the backdrop against which the author is reading the Russian invasion of Ukraine (a hastening or consecration of an inevitable shift in the world order).
The frame of reference for geopolitics is strictly amoral (with a few exceptions: morality is baked into the overall framework as in proportional response theory, but it sits in the background almost never being a forefront issue). As such, it has less to do with with what is right from a moralistic viewpoint and a lot more to do with what is right from a "might is right" point of view ("the strong do what they want, the weak do what they can", as Thucydides said, and that is roughly how state planners engaged in this frame of discourse still tend to think). Or, the dominance hierarchy.
That does not sit well with most people because we like to think that the moral order is primary and the rest is secondary. Reading the newspapers and watching the news, it is the moral frame which is active and the geopolitical is almost always left to the background or brought forward only insofar as it clarifies a given instance of justified morality. Moral views are much truer from a bottom up perspective (it's how we as people, or general public, tend to react) but not from the top down (people who more or less set the tone for political discourse do not think primarily in moral terms). So when people take a view of events from this frame, the one predominantly occupied by state departments, it comes across as amoral largely because it is, technically, amoral: an abstracted, elevated, frame of reference which seeks to understand events in context, both diachronic and synchronic. This does not mean the people are amoral, including state planners or the general person giving an opinion (me in this instance), it just means that two different frames of reference are in play and tend to come into conflict with each other (the reactionary frame criticizes the geopolitical/historical frame as seditious or uncaring and the geopolitical/historical frame criticises the reactionary frame as naive, or generally something along those lines). Often these views are not even mutually exclusive, but appear that way because the centre of one focus is decentered from another.
The point I'm making is probably already understood by most. I am making it here, as the start of a geopolitical thread, because I don't want to derail the Ukraine thread or any other thread with geopolitical "whataboutery" (which is in itself largely the product of two interrelated but temporally distinct frames of reference clashing). I think it's good to have a place where people can put historical and contextual arguments forward, though a live war thread dedicated to updates is definitely not the place for that. So I open this one instead for anyone with any long- or shortform contributions to make about any events that are happening but which contributions are too abstract for the tenor of the tone set by said event (updates are generally what is expected, and that is fair enough).
Not limited to any given conflict, past or present, so no "whataboutery" is possible. I'm primarily interested in understanding the order that is now emerging with Russia/China on one side and US/NATO on the other (with the rest of the world wedged between).
EDIT: This is quite a good video but would threaten to spill into whataboutery as soon as people begin to discuss it in depth and go back a hundred years in history (which is exactly what I mean by two frames that aren't necessarily in disagreement but conflict):