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Military action is not judged in the absolute but relative to the available alternatives. Orderly retreat is a success.
Russia is certainly not doing great, but they've successfully avoided having a knife to their throat. Which was their stated goal. And it didn't cost them total war.
I think they're correctly allocating their ressources. The biggest risk was that the Western economic sanctions would actually have some bite, and they did not.
It's sad, but indeed nobody actually seems to care about Ukrainians lives. Not even Ukrainians.
I won't pretend I do. I hate this senseless waste, but ultimately the fate of some far away people is not my problem.
From America's point of view? I think this whole endeavor was a long term blunder. Antagonizing Russia, which was never really a threat, as should be all too evident now, does not serve long term American interests. It just pushes them and China closer together, when the opposite is desirable and would likely have been achievable were the State department not made up of moralist morons and cold war relics.
If there is a large scale China-US conflict, the full extent of the mistake of further aligning China with a country that has large amounts of natural ressources, loads of nuclear weapons and engineers that know how to make aircraft engines will be felt pretty hard.
Don't get me wrong, this whole affair is still a great coup for the US, but it has nothing to do with undermining Russia and everything to do with kneecapping Europe.
Still, spending 75B to make sure your allies never get uppity just seems petty. And that's yet more people that won't come to your help in any significance if there is a big war. Hell, they're already declining to help put down a handful of Iran backed irregulars.
And there lies russia’s error. On the strength of their stalingrad cred, all the old american cold war warriors bought the myth of the unbeatable red army, russia could have stolen pots indefinitely. Their assumed strength was way higher than their actual strength, so they never should have let it come to a showdown. They’re never getting the baltic russians now that everybody knows they could never in a million years get past the bug and the vistula.
I was never fooled – gdp is destiny – but the suckers at the table, americans who never updated their fulda gap division calculations, and german pacifists, would have let putin bluff them indefinitely.
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They traded the distant possibility that a future Ukrainian state might join NATO for the certainty that Sweden and Finland did, I suppose.
I don’t think we’re likely to see the Russians allying with the US in a US-China conflict. They’ve had their differences but unless it seemed overwhelmingly likely the Chinese would completely wipeout US global hegemony forever (unlikely I’d say) Russia would have nothing to gain by helping the US.
Not having a large military alliance against you and access to the western economic sphere is not "nothing".
Making enemies of them is a choice. Hell you could have satellited them the same way you did the rest of Europe after the wall fell. You just decided not to.
If they decided to, how would they accomplish it?
Russia was completely destroyed in the 90s and the US was a unipolar hyper power. Economic investment was one way to buy their loyalty. After all that is how they aligned Germany, and Japan.
They did make gestures towards that during the Yeltsin era but only spend about a billion in economic aid (about 2B inflation adjusted). This war alone cost 40 times that.
These were defeated by military means, and still there are American armies in both of these countries. Would just economic investment work without boots on ground? (more data points: Iraq, Afghanistan)
There aren't any such bases in France (anymore) and it was still thoroughly aligned through solely economic means. I'll easily grant you that it's much easier to reconstruct a country you already occupy.
I'm convinced you could totally have introduced the US military to Russia though, or at least slowly made it part of the Western network of alliances.
Yelstin himself willed this, and he warned Bill Clinton in his 1993 letter specifically against organizing the defense of Europe solely through an against-Russia version of NATO.
Eventually he got the door of detente slammed shut in his face and then started bemoaning "subordinating, if not abandoning, integration [of Russia] to NATO expansion" which eventually would lead to our current events.
Wasn't France already in good relations with USA for alliances in WW1, WW2? also, regarding events of 2022-2023, many French brands did not pull out of Russia. I did not investigate it in detail but seems that France is less aligned with USA than either Germany or Japan.
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