Nato members have pledged their support for an “irreversible path” to future membership for Ukraine, as well as more aid.
While a formal timeline for it to join the military alliance was not agreed at a summit in Washington DC, the military alliance’s 32 members said they had “unwavering” support for Ukraine’s war effort.
Nato has also announced further integration with Ukraine’s military and members have committed €40bn ($43.3bn, £33.7bn) in aid in the next year, including F-16 fighter jets and air defence support.
The bloc’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said: “Support to Ukraine is not charity - it is in our own security interest.”
Wait, people actually think Russia or China would be any different of they had the US’ influence?
They’ve got different leaders, different economies, and different cultures. Brazil, India, and Indonesia would also be different were they to enjoy US influence.
Any country that ends up with that amount of influence will inevitably resort to bs to maintain that power
There’s a big difference between soft influence and hard military power. In the wake of WW2, the US enjoyed both by being the last major industrial power still standing. This offered their financial sector an enormous amount of sway in how developing/recovering countries reentered the industrial world. Similarly, they only had one remaining international military peer by the end of the war (in part because they helped the USSR rearm in the wake of German continental invasion). So they were free to throw out both banks and military bases on a global scale.
But all of this was a consequence of a unique historical moment, created at the end of the 19th century colonial era and perpetuated by the US/Soviet schism during the Cold War.
We’re no longer in a Cold War, we don’t have a single globe-spanning economic superpower, the US has repeated demonstrated an inability to project its military across hemispheres, and the soft financial power of the western states has eroded significantly since the 2008 financial crisis.
The BS we’re seeing today is not a failure of large influential blocks to maintain influence. Its a failure of a large mercantile system to reconcile with the contradictions of an economy that demands infinite continuous upward growth.
If the US focused on internal development, rather than profit-seeking outsourcing, China and India would be integrated partners rather than rivalrous superpowers. If the US had struck a detante with the USSR and integrated their economies, rather than playing wack-a-mole with anti-colonialist uprisings across Latin America, Asia, and Africa for sixty years, we’d have a more stable industrial base and fewer poverty-driven insurrections. If the US had stopped sucking at the teet of Middle Eastern fossil fuels and pivoted to green/nuclear energy back in the 60s/70s when the time was ripe, we wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of a climate apocalypse that threatens all the capital accumulation we’ve achieved to date. And we wouldn’t have the Radical Islamic Extremism boogeyman to whip everyone into a terrified lather.
There are so many moments when things could have gone differently (for better or worse - I guess we could be living in Nuclear Winter right now). This history is not a given and the future is not set in stone.
