- cross-posted to:
- news
- worldnews@lemmygrad.ml
Does it really matter if anyone has the ‘right’ to do anything? What is this Crusader Kings?
In practice, no. Countries and militaries and other such groups of psychos will always push every boundary they can unless they think the cost is too high.
In theory? Yes. If the rules as written actually mattered, countries would only respond to those that broke rules. In this case Russia would be responding to NATO breaking international law multiple times.
NATO is at war with Russia and using Ukraine as the proxy. This is as true as the idea that the Chinese/NK, Indians and Iranians are all allies of Russia in this war due to the trade of weapons, oil, drones, troops, etc. I also count every US-based MNC that is still doing business in Russia as collaborators.
I'd vastly prefer that we cut the Russians off from the world and anyone else who helps them vs sending billions of dollars of weapons, technology and intelligence that will never be enough to actually defeat them. All doing this has done is led to more Ukranian lives being lost for the same end. Russia was always going to take the land back.
Decoupling immediately would be the best possible outcome for anti-imperialism so yes please do this Trumpist logic.
Ukraine is free to determine that NK, China, and Iran are all parties to the war due to their material support of the Russian operation. Ukraine can decide to declare war against those countries. They can go and prosecute that war, if they so choose.
This is obviously becoming a bloc conflict between G7 and BRICS. The problem that G7 has is that it's a smaller economic bloc that doesn't produce much anything useful at this point. Western economies have become largely financialized with all the meaningful production having moved out to countries aligned with Russia.
Russia attacked Ukraine because of threats to Russian national security. The "legal framework" or "rules based order" that allowed NATO countries to create those threats to Russia created the conditions under which Russia had two choices - follow the rules exactly and let their belligerent opponents (the North Atlantic empire) continue to build up the threat level, or break the rules and protect itself.
This is why for years the conversation around Russia has been a debate between people who say a security framework must guarantee security for all, on the one side, and on the other side, people who said we only need to guarantee our security and we can threaten the security of others and they can't do anything about it.
If we are talking about "the rules" then UA, and as a proxy for the West, failing to implement Minsk II is the primary precursor to Russia invading.
It's more that we won't be reading about full scale unprovoked attack on the US soil going forward.
We should really include "full scale colonial invasion" before every mention about USA getting their current territory.