I hate how “anti-war” has been hijacked by these people to mean, let imperialist countries invade whoever they want with no consequences. (in the case of tankies, any imperialist country that isn’t in NATO).
Which is fundamental misunderstanding of international politics according to Political Realism. Hegemonic powers never care about these de jure arguments anyway and will practicality always act in accordance to int’s own intressets, leaving weaker nations to navigate it.
Hegemonic powers
You can just say Russia you know. And yes, we know Russia doesn’t care about de jure arguments, they only understand power and violence. De-jure arguments are just a tool to them to give talking points to useful idiots in the West, in order to sow division and weaken us.
Political Realism
The question really is: do we accept a world where a third-rate regional power gets to trample all over its neighbors, using unimaginable violence and cruelty if those neighbors refuse to act as submissive client states?
From a moral and legal point of view, it’s a no-brainer to argue that we should not accept this, but even from your a-moral “real politik” point of view we should not accept it either because it goes squarely against our own interests to let a rogue state Russia regain its former superpower status by conquering major client states. Europe and the US are much stronger than Russia, so even your Political Realism dictates that we should help Ukraine defeat Russian aggression.
So yeah, there is no world in which “bUt UkRaInE pRoVoKeD RuSsIa” is a valid argument. If you think there is, you can burn in hell with Kissinger for all I care.
You can just say Russia you know.
Alright. Consider it done and now your response is some sort of recognition that that what i said is the case but this well established, hundreds of years old field of political theory is devilish trick by our enemies to devise us. Which does nothing to strengthen your shallow view on national sovereignty.
As already hinted at: Political Realism is a fucking theory of international relations. It’s used to explain things in reality. So you have to understand that it’s true for every hegemonic power. It’s not unique to Russia. Do you think that the US lead invasion of Afghanistan was respecting their sovereignty? They had no obligation to extradite Bin Laden and we got to see what it meant to not dance to their pipe. The list can go on ad nauseam, we have a couple of thousand years of ‘whatabouts’ here. There is no need to pretend that this is some weird trick of our enemies to divide and fool you, it’s an observable fact about international politics. And it absolutely does you no favors to have this self-sealing mind in the face of it. Weaker nations have always, and will continue, to curtail their own sovereign choices in favor of navigating the interests of greater powers and kept as much sovereignty as they can. Sure they have the radical free will to do anything, but in reality things happens as a result… even if you don’t like it. And hence a field of science to understand this process, that looks a-moral due to a lack of having it observed.
Heck, I see that you sort of get the principles of the political theory. As you said, it’s in the west interest to not have Russia attack her neighbors. So it manages to describe both Russias actions and the West response to it. It will even describe the limits of our support.
So a better counter to “bUt UkRaInE pRoVoKeD RuSsIa” is to say yes, but I want a want a weak Russia.
