[vkou]

NATO is just a mainly defensive alliance. So far, it has fought exactly zero defensive wars, but a number of offensive ones. I assume that means that the defensive part of it is working really, really well - nobody seems keen on attacking it.

The problem here is that both sides are in the wrong, but for different reasons. NATO expanding eastwards is scary and destabilizing to everyone in the world. Putin, meanwhile, is behaving like an utter savage, and is also scary and destabilizing, to both his immediate neighbours, and also to everyone in the world. Ukraine got burnt, badly from both directions - one pushed it under the bus, the other is in the middle of invading it.

Are these the same level of wrongs? No. Does one excuse the other? Also no. Would I prefer everyone involved to have stopped escalating this, starting two decades ago? Yes. Did poor judgement in the past severely constrict our ability to reach better outcomes in the present? Also yes.

Remember 9/11, and how poor ME policy lead to it? Remember what was in the short term, a reasonable response, in the long run resulted in self-inflicted damage that was orders of magnitude worse?

NATO moving east may well be that short term win. We will see whether the long-term losers will be limited to former Soviet republics.

[scotty79]

> The problem here is that both sides are in the wrong, but for different reasons. NATO expanding eastwards is scary and destabilizing to everyone in the world.

I can't imagine how scary it would be for Polish people right now if we weren't in NATO, because Russians practiaclly mention us along with Ukraine on a single breath.

It was called a Warsaw pact. Warsaw is Polish capital.

[vkou]

But that's the problem. Would Russia has gone on a saber-rattling course, starting in '08, had NATO not gone eastwards?

We can't know, it's alt-history speculative wankery. But what we can know is that the latter left the former with very few options.

[qsort]

We can't know that hadn't Poland joined NATO Russia wouldn't have invaded Ukraine but we can definitively know that Poland joining NATO is certainly the cause of this war?

You have very interesting priors, I must say.

[scotty79]

> Would Russia has gone on a saber-rattling course, starting in '08, had NATO not gone eastwards?

Yes. Reestablising soviet empire was Putins life long project from the moment he gained significant power. Vibes of it are easy enough to notice in his speeches predating '08

Those are not words of a man in fear. Those are the words of a man with a dream.

[vkou]

> Vibes of it are easy enough to notice in his speeches predating '08

NATO went east in 1999, which was before Putin. '08 was when the war in Georgia took place.

[dragonwriter]

> NATO went east in 1999, which was before Putin.

You might want to look up who Russia’s head of government (not chief of state) was in 1999.

Though, on the other hand, the process of NATO expansion into the former Iron Curtain (beyond German unification) actually started in 1991, almost immediately after the fall of the USSR, with requests from a number of ex-Warsaw Pact, including ex-Soviet, republics for an onramp to NATO (including, it might be noted, the Russian Federation, which was also one of the initial members, in 1994, of the NATO-onramp Partnership for Peace program. Which is among the very many reasons that the recent debate about a supposed 1989 commitment to not expand NATO into former Warsaw Pact territory is nonsense: even if such an informal non-treaty assurance was binding, and inherited from the USSR by Russia, Russia’s subsequent active and formal participation in the NATO expansion process would have repudiated it, in any case.)

[AnimalMuppet]

> NATO expanding eastwards is scary and destabilizing to everyone in the world.

I call BS on that one. Just for an extreme example, take Uruguay. How is NATO expansion eastward scary or destabilizing for them?

Or take Estonia. Is NATO expansion destabilizing for them? Or is it stabilizing? I claim it is the latter; it keeps Russia from coming back.

Was it destabilizing for Ukraine? Insufficient data. If NATO had never gone past united Germany, would Russia have invaded Ukraine? Maybe. Would it have been this bloody? Maybe not. It might have been like the Russian interventions is Belarus and Kazakhstan. Is it better, or worse to be under their heel for the next N decades, but initially have fewer dead bodies?

[vkou]

> How is NATO expansion eastward scary or destabilizing for them?

It's scary and destabilizing in the sense that Uruguay doesn't really give a rat's ass about where the borders between east and west are drawn in Europe, but would really, really, really prefer that NATO and Russia don't get into a shooting war.

Same thing with threats to the MAD balance of power, like anti-missile defenses. Anyone standing on the sidelines doesn't really care about where the borders are, they just don't want one side to scare the other to the point of nuclear war.

[dragonwriter]

> NATO is just a mainly defensive alliance. So far, it has fought exactly zero defensive wars

1 in direct mutual self-defense, actually.

> but a number of offensive ones

NATO has conducted, I believe, two operations that were neither mutual self-defense under Article 5 nor at the invitation of the government in whose territory they were conducted nor under a direct call for military forces by the UN Security Council under its notionally-compulsory authority regarding matters of international peace and security, the operation in Libya (which was to enforce Security Council resolutions, but not itself in response for a call by the Council for armed force) and that in response to the Kosovo situation.

[soco]

It's scary and destabilizing to Russia, that is. I mean a country so scared and destabilized that it just invaded a neighboring country. I can't recall right now anyone else bothered by the expansion. Is there any other "everyone in the world" you care to mention?