We've been doing everything but sustaining neutral relations with Russia. Our foreign policy has been explicitly anti-Russian for decades. The Ukraine war is the blowback.
Like every dictator before him, Putin has fashioned a victimhood narrative. Trump does the same, as did Castro, Mao, Stalin, Hitler, etc. etc. etc. All these people always claim to be the victim.
There are so many things to comment on in that video and I really don't have the time or interest. but I will comment on one thing: the US bombed Yugoslavia to stop a campaign of genocide.
"Never again" also applies to the Balkans.
Europe and the US did everything they could to NOT intervene. If anything, I think it's an embarrassment we didn't do more sooner. You could argue a little bit about whether it really should have been NATO (rather than the EU or US) that undertook the campaign, and details like that. But I don't think it's very important to the of it.
Of course, that is left out by Sachs. He's repeating a fake victimhood narrative stringed together by half-truths, exaggerations, strategic forgetfulness, and outright nonsense.
Your comment really underscores the issue with the NATO project as a supposed defensive alliance. You think if there is a moral reason for doing something, then that renders all other constraints moot. But because intervening in Yugoslavia was deemed the moral course of action, that shouldn't indicate to Putin or anyone else that NATO will act offensively if they deem some act moral coded. But NATO doesn't get to decide when its actions are precedent-setting and when they aren't. NATO's own history undermines the claim that it is purely a defensive alliance.
That you outright ignore that there was an objective real genocide campaign going on says a lot. The notion they attack nations for all sorts of dubious reasons is just bollocks. This is no better than "remember when the Americans invaded Europe in 1944?!" The context matters.
I'm not ignoring it, it's just that it doesn't alter the calculus for every other nation who might be the target of NATO at some point in the future. NATO only needs to engage in an offensive action once for the precedent to be set permanently. How justified the action was just doesn't matter.
It also underscores the point that there is no objective moral standard to which we can appeal to simultaneously allow an intervention without also permanently altering the power balance in relevant regions. The US right now says genocide is beyond the pale thus warranting intervention. In the future they may say cracking down on political dissent is beyond the pale thus warranting intervention in Russia. Moral impetus tend to be subject to scope creep at the behest of current national interest.
We've been doing everything but sustaining neutral relations with Russia. Our foreign policy has been explicitly anti-Russian for decades. The Ukraine war is the blowback.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1ghs32...