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I'm not fool enough to think I can go toe to toe with you on the Russian-American relationship. Legolas Send a noteboard - 08/07/2024 09:33:57 PM

But your timeline with its many dates in five different presidencies with presidents from both parties still makes it pretty clear that singling out the Biden administration for it makes no sense. And based on our previous discussions, I think we're always going to get stuck on our different priorities. I care about the lives, wellbeing and civil rights of citizens of any country or territory including Russia, Eastern Ukraine, Serbia and the various contested territories, but I don't really give a damn about 19th century-style Great Power spheres of influence, I think the people of any nation or people deserve the same rights of self-determination whether it's big or not, and I think if Putin actually gave a fuck about Russia or improving the lives of his subjects, there's a very long list of things that all his military spending would be better spent on.


View original postFirst, it wasn't that the US ended its presence in Afghanistan, which is something Trump was smart to do. The forever wars were expensive, did not yield any positive results, and had to be ended. However, the way that the Biden Administration ended things was the most half-assed, retarded and embarrassing thing that has happened to the US in decades. Citizens were abandoned, a massive amount of military equipment fell into Taliban hands, and those who had worked with or helped US forces were left to die. It was a travesty of a departure, and the Biden Administration is 100% responsible. Trump was right when he said at the debate, "You never fired anyone. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a mess and you didn't fire anyone." He's right. Someone should have been fired (but in my opinion, it was the entire damn Administration starting with Biden).

The most half-assed, retarded and embarrassing thing since president Ford's withdrawal from Vietnam and the fall of Saigon, perhaps? Though I don't want to single out the US there, there's a long list of embarrassing and catastrophic withdrawals from Western armies or colonial administrations from countries they occupied.

Disengaging from a hopeless foreign occupation that's never going to yield the results you want, while still somehow maintaining perfect order and protecting all the locals who supported you during the occupation, is basically impossible.

Now I'm not saying the Biden administration necessarily did everything perfectly and there's no doubt it looked embarrassing to the rest of the world - but that was always going to happen. If Trump had somehow gained a second term instead, so that the withdrawal agreement his administration negotiated with the Taliban was actually carried out during his second term, in what ways would it have gone differently? Would he have brought far larger numbers of Afghan supporters of the American occupation to safety in the US, for instance? Would the brass at the Pentagon and Dept of State who had to do the real work, somehow have been substantially more effective? Would the Afghan government of President Ghani somehow have lasted longer against the Taliban?

View original postSecond, Biden just opened the border. His canard about Congress not passing the law that he wanted that would have memorialized into law letting in up to 5000 illegals a day was political theatre. He had and continues to have the authority under existing laws to stop, deport and control the border. He failed to, and now the US is awash in illegals the way Europe is. At this point we need the National Guard to arrest and deport at least 10 million people, if not more. That's Biden's fault.

There is one very big difference between Europe and the US when it comes to illegal immigration: the ones that come here generally can't and don't go back. You mention 10 million illegal immigrants to be deported - but that number was just the same way back under the GW Bush presidency, because while the US keeps attracting loads of illegal immigrants, many of those return sooner or later on their own volition because they don't actually want to stay permanently.

It's true that the numbers of people apprehended at the border reached record levels under the Biden administration, but the number of illegals that are actually inside the US, i.e. managed to make it past the border controls or actually more often just outstayed their legal visa, not so much. So, 'just opened the border' - well, clearly not.

And as I mentioned in my previous post, the Biden administration maintained policies similar to those of the Trump administration far more than you suggest - keeping Covid-era regulations that made things drastically harder for asylum seekers for far longer than the virus itself really justified, for instance. Given the unprecedented numbers seeking to cross the border, it was probably unavoidable that they'd be harsher than many Democrats would have expected or wanted them to be.

View original postAs for Russia-Ukraine, it's not just the oppression of Russian speakers in Ukraine:


View original post1. 1990 - US promises not to expand NATO eastwards. Breaks the promise by 1997.


View original post2. 1994 - Budapest Memorandum. Guarantees Ukraine sovereignty in exchange for NEUTRALITY. US unilaterally repudiated it in 2013 to back pro-Western Ukrainians.


View original post3. 1999 - "defensive" alliance NATO attacks Serbia, showing that any "humanitarian" pretext works for attacking other countries.

It probably won't surprise you given the above that I care more about this one than the others and am more conflicted about NATO's actions there. But after what the Serbians and their local allies had already done in Bosnia some years earlier, with what they were doing in Kosovo at that time, military intervention of some kind did become a must. I don't know enough about the conflict to judge very well to what extent NATO may perhaps have gone too far in the process, though.
View original post4. 1999 - US funds Chechen jihadi terrorists while attempting to run a Kosovo-style scenario inside Russia.

That one I don't believe I knew about until now.
View original post5. 2001 - Russia allows US to use its bases in Central Asia to fight Taliban, shares intel.


View original post6. 2003 - US refuses to honor Russian contracts in Iraq and invades illegally,.


View original post7. 2003 - US sponsored coup against Georgian President Shevardnadze, replacing him with Saakashvili.


View original post8. 2004 - US sponsored overturning of Ukrainian election results, upsets the apple cart of neutrality


View original post9. 2005 - Us sponsored coup against Akaev in Kyrgyzstan, replacing him with Bakiev.


View original post10. 2007 - US offers Ukraine, Georgia path to NATO and discuss putting missiles and missile interceptors there, potentially starting to invalidate Russian nuclear deterrent


View original post11. 2007 - US encourages Saakashvili to re-take Abkhazia and South Ossetia to resolve territorial disputes to streamline NATO integration; Russia responds when its UN-sanctioned peacekeepers are attacked and formally recognizes Abkhazia and South Ossetia


View original post12. 2013 - US pulls rug from out of Yanukovich, not letting him sign EU and Russia treaties at the same time


View original post13. 2014 - US sponsored revolution in Ukraine, Russia takes Crimea, Donbass war stopped by Minsk Accords (Merkel later admits that US, Germany, France and Ukraine never intended to implement this agreement, only to give Ukraine "time to rearm and upgrade its military" rather than honor the terms)


View original post14. 2021 - Zelensky publicly repudiates 1994 Budapest Memorandum, publicly raises the possibility of Ukraine becoming a nuclear power again; US also withdraws ignominiously from Afghanistan; combined effect of all these actions convinces Putin that now is the time to act


View original post15. 2022 - Putin reaches tentative agreement about Ukrainian neutrality and disarmament, deal scuttled by insane retard from UK (Johnson); Putin no longer believes ANYTHING the West says



View original postFinally, as for North Korea, I think it was a good thing to try to improve relations with North Korea. The peninsula was farthest from war under Trump and has gone back from that position to a situation that can only be described as "worse than ever".

I think the relations between the two Koreas depend far more on what position South Korea is taking at that particular moment, in this case the reconciliatory efforts of former president Moon in those years, than on who is president of the US. But either way, whatever improvement in relations existed in 2017-2018 had disappeared again by 2020. And with regards to North Korea's nukes, an issue that concerns far more people, they just made a bunch more of them during the Trump presidency. So no, I don't see any lasting achievements with regards to North Korea. And along the way he certainly made himself look ridiculous and like a less reliable partner for America's democratic allies, in Asia and beyond.
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