Comment Re: Trump's fault (Score 1) 289
So we spent over $100b to degrade an already degraded and out of date military? Why? What great threat were they to the world? Who went to bed at night worried the Russians were going to rebuild the USSR and take over Western Europe?
Because it wasn't at all obvious that it was degraded. They didn't have anywhere near this much difficulty rolling over Georgia, and that was in 2008, just a handful of years ago.
No one was going to bed worried that Russia would invade Western European. A whole lot of people went to bed at night worried that Russia would invade Eastern Europe. Most of those people live in.... Eastern Europe.
Putin is smart enough not to have attack a NATO country.
Is he? He's been pursuing a losing war for a year longer than he should have, with years yet to go. His decision-making is manifestly not the greatest.
If he triggered article 5, his forces would get rolled up and demolished.
Yes, we know that now. Before the current debacle, no one knew that. Russia had armored battalions. Russia had an air force. Russia had at least some of a fleet. They looked like a world class military. They allegedly had all the elements. No one knew that had been systematically looted and destroyed from the inside for the last 15 years.
Why were we degrading their already pitiful military?
Foreign policy. That poker game where everybody is cheating. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has disrupted the global wheat market to a much greater degree than you'd expect. Economic retaliation for it has disrupted the global natural gas market. The US is sending the message to everyone watching that you don't get to do that. And incidentally securing their own military ascendancy by seeing to it that the Russian military is humiliated and obliterated for all the world to see, which will affect the foreign policy of dozens of countries.
In that poker game where everybody is cheating, Russia had bluffed the world into thinking they held a straight flush. Now their busted flush is on the table for everyone watching. It changes the game, everywhere. And no, stopping the push to Kiev at the beginning of the war wasn't enough. That was a good start, but it was a signal to seize the opportunity, not only to expose the real state of the Russian military, but to expose the state of the Russian economy. The US invaded Afghanistan and came out at the end of it richer than it went in. Russia... isn't. And the world is noticing.