[dctoedt]

> This is nothing more than "containment" policy, an attempt to restrict another power's freedom of action, which only works as long as they're weak enough to be imposed on.

Containment worked with the Soviet Union — it can work again with Putin's Russia.

[alienicecream]

It can work, or it might not, in which case you or your children will be dying for some town in Eastern Ukraine you've never heard of and you can't pronounce.

[dragonwriter]

Yeah, and the one lesson we should certainly take from the past is that taking a pass on containment to appease powerful, aggressive states never leads to those doing so (including, but limited to, Americans) paying a very high, avoidable price in blood and treasure overseas as a consequence when not trying to contain aggression surprisingly does not contain the aggression.

[alienicecream]

I can see this conversation is leading to Hitler. But sometimes containment leads to a stupid quagmire which you should never have been in in the first place, like Vietnam, and security guarantees to backwards unstable countries leads to larger, more all consuming wars like WW1. Ukraine and Georgia are Russia's back yard, we have no business there.

[dctoedt]

> [Containment] can work, or it might not

Well then if it might not work, I suppose we should just let Tsar Vladimir — abetted by his kleptocratic henchmen and his millions of state-media-deluded followers — do whatever TF seems good to His Imperial Majesty. Because heaven forbid we should take any risks to try to preserve a rules-based world order.