[int_19h]

If Mexico was constantly threatened with an invasion from US, I would expect them to try really hard to join some kind of military alliance that could counter that, and if US were to respond to that the way Russia did, it would absolutely have been in the wrong. But this hypothetical, while amusing to consider, is not what we're dealing with, and ignoring this whole part about historical occupation and forced assimilation that ended recently enough that many people alive in Ukraine today still remember it, is extremely misleading as analogies go.

And yes, this whole bullshit about "they're not a real nation" etc was very much a thing in Russia before 2022, and before 2014 even. I should know; I grew up there. I remember reading "Эпоха мертворожденных" in 2008, and that's pretty much what Russia actually did in 2014 (except of course the whole "NATO occupation" of the non-separatist parts turned out to be imaginary). But I remember hearing similar sentiments in the 90s as a kid, as well. And since Ukrainians are well within the Russian cultural orbit, they were aware of those trends, too - and took appropriate precautions. This notion that invasion wouldn't have happened if they didn't seek NATO membership is wrong.

[somenameforme]

Haha, you might want to look at the history of US-Mexico relations. If you're going to speak of historical things it's relevant that the relations there have an oddly large amount in common. Texas was a part of Mexico! A reasonable wiki page to start the crawl would probably be Mexican Texas. [1] You've got all the good stuff: ethnic conflict, weaponized migrations, separatist movements supported by a foreign government, brutal wars, annexation referendums, and so on. And Cuba indeed - one of the compromises at the end of the nuclear stand-off is that the US would stop trying to invade Cuba!

Reading Plato and other great philosophers is interesting (The Republic in particular is an amazing read) because they can often sound like prophets - predicting the future with such extreme accuracy at a time that ostensibly had basically nothing in common with ours. But I think their 'secret' is simply that they were great objective observers of the behavior of humanity. Because history is not especially creative, it keeps repeating itself endlessly, because humanity doesn't change except as a product of technology changing.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Texas

[int_19h]

I'm well aware of the history of US-Mexico relations, but no, it's not an equivalent. For one thing, there is not a multi-century history of attempts by US to fully occupy and annex Mexico (there were people advocating for this back during the Mexican-American War, but they were a minority even then, which is why it didn't happen). For another, Mexico is itself a colonizer state in all the territories which US took away from it. But, most importantly, last time there was an armed conflict between the two states was over century ago.

[somenameforme]

Well there's not a multi century history, because the US hadn't existed for multiple centuries, or even a century before it started going to war with everybody around it! We even went to war with Canada! Literally every single nation which has ever had power is a "colonizer state". Friggin Sweden and Norway used to be sprawling empires! You have "colonizer states" and you have "vassal states."

And this reality of the world remains true to this day. It's just that the means change. Alexander the Great wisely stabilized his massive empire largely by letting areas under his control maintain an exceptional degree of sovereignty, minimizing overt resistance to his control. The US took this to the next step by not even directly claiming nations, but instead simply remotely controlling the governments of these nations, and simply overthrowing/replacing them when they became uncontrollable - and repeating the process. Made even easier with democracy, which has a paradoxical tendency to elevate unpopular people on the take, rather than popular ideologues, to power.

Whenever there's any need - we can easily compel the various defacto vassal states under our control to act, even when directly against their own self interest. See: Germany for the most overt illustration of this. Extracting wealth from vassals became somewhat less relevant with the introduction of fiat currency. So long as we force the world to use our money, we can simply print money as needed, export the inflation to other countries, and it effectively functions as real growth - at least until the whole system inevitably collapses in on itself in a debt filled void.