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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Chessboard
This shows how big the potential of the EU is. The USA cannot allow a strong EU to emerge.
They used to have a specific strategy for accomplishing this:
The USA provided military security for Europe so that Europe would not have any need to spend money for military. The USA's goal was to minimize EU countries' military spending so that USA would remain an uncontested military hegemon. That gives it a lot of influence that can be translated into actual cash.
At the same time, EU countries saved several percents of their GDP and could use it for the good of their own populations. It was a win-win situation.
But then the Russia organized this movement called "MAGA", and that movement successfully cancelled the arrangement. (Funnily enough, the abbreviation "maga" comes from "make America great again", which would suggest strategies for increasing USA's influence, not diminishing it. But what do I know.)
That is because the MAGA/P2025/neofascist plan is not to maintain hegemony against near-peers (which is expensive on the citizen), it is to return to the mythologized post-war boom by letting the rest of the world go to shit again and then to swoop in to "save" everyone (again) while selling them weapons and industrial stuff (but not to let them reindustrialize again, like during the cold war).
What is preverse is that it was the reindustrialization and social state of Japan, Germany/EU that was the poster child that helped keep these blocks from turning fully socialist and win hearts and minds abroad during the cold war. I guess that was too successful and is making russia/US look bad.
PS: btw, this "strategy" is risky, because there is no way to guarantee that WW3 won't reach US soil this time, you can't just sit it out.
They saved it in US government bonds which gave the US the money to finance the weapons.
Which could make one wonder if the US politicians are that stupid. There would be one reasonable reason to end the arrangement: if there is another war to be fought.
China is the bigger threat to US hegemony and the way things are, we will fight with the US against China and Russia. All the drama exists to prevent the population from objecting to a war that inevitably will become nuclear.
Not stupid; cowardly. Nobody dares to challenge the herd.
Rump is incredibly stupid. A very very very very stupid man, who believes most of his own bullshit. But he understands how stupid racist Americans think and it's very plausible to those ears.
Are you sure it's not "Muzzle America for Global Autocrats"?
There is a much more obvious country that has a vested interest in dividing western democracies, and weakening organizations that unite them, such as NATO and the EU, a country that's currently in a proxy and hybrid war with Europe, and a country that has long understood the importance of information warfare: Russia.
Of course with the Trump administration, you never know, but then you could also ask yourself: if Trump was a Russian agent, how different would his actions be? Not very different I think.
Trump wouldn't have sent arms like Javelins to Ukraine in 2018 and he would have stopped messing around in Syria.
Only in the short term, to gain advantage in the war. Which other option than cooperarion would have been better for Russia? As the other submission about carving up Russia by China shows, China is only the second best option.
https://feddit.org/post/23648591
Putin had no reason to stop Trump from doing that.
Remember, until February 2022 Putin knew that Ukraine will become a part of the Russia in 2022. He had a lot of intel from actual Ukrainians living in Ukraine. He had spent billions for bribing various Ukrainian military officials. He knew that those Javelins will all be in the inventory of the Russian armed forces in spring 2022. Why would Putin have forbidden Trump from sending them?
Of course, Putin had not understood how much 2014 changed the Ukrainian thinking. The Russia was still more or less a friend until that. After it attacked Crimea, it absolutely was not. And suddenly very very few people would coöperate with the Russia even to the least extent. It's difficult to explain how abrupt the change was! It was not possible for Putin to understand what had actually taken place, because the Russian heart is so very different from the Ukrainian heart. Russians would never have had a Maidan. It would absolutely not fit the Russian culture to do anything like that. The feelings behind that were simply unfathomable for a member of the nation Putin hails from. But in any country there are a few percents of the population that really wants to see shit where there is none. And those felt uncomfortable in Ukraine. And those people really did think their country was going to hell and that's what they told Russians. That was really how for example Medvechuk saw things. While extremely unrepresentative of Ukrainians, those people were practically 100 % of those who gave any intel to the Russia.
And of course...
Putin rules through corruption. He gives people power by electing that for certain people no corruption will ever be noticed by the authorities. And at the same, he has the power to make the authorities see the corruption whenever Putin needs to get rid of those people. But if you choose only public officials who are corrupt, of course they will steal all the billions they were supposed to use in Ukraine. Especially since Putin told everyone around him, even Shoigu, that there will not be an attack against Ukraine – that everything is just training for the worst of the worst case scenarios. Preparation in case that EU goes crazy and attacks. And everybody knew EU won't attack and they trusted Putin when he said he has absolutely no plans to attack anything in the western direction.
But yeah, Putin has done his homework. He had made a lot of effort to get it right. And therefore he knew it doesn't matter what weapons Ukraine has. He "knew" that Ukrainians overwhelmingly want to join the Russia and he "knew" that all military districts in Ukraine had been bought with those billions he had spewed there. The more weapons Ukraine gets in 2018, the more weapons the Russia has in 2022 when it's time for the next step of the plan – the Suwałki gap, next to which there had been several very very big wargames when the future events of 2022 seemed crystal clear to Putin.
It's just... Sometimes you put a huge effort into your homework and still get a wildly incorrect answer, if you have unknowingly slept through the most crucial lessons.
That sounds too much like a story in which everything just happens to happen as needed. It's still possible and I am grateful for the insights but I cannot imagine that much ignorance.
To mention one thing, the USSR must have insisted on controlling the Suwałki gap because they knew that the Capitalists were out to get them. But why conquer the gap now if that triggers the war that the gap is supposed to prevent?
Putin suggested the economic union from Atlantic to Pacific. He must know that it will lead to a dissolution of the nations so he can't be that hung up on Russia.