https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/08/putin-war-ukraine-forgotten-lessons-of-history-europe
Some analysts believe Kyiv is buying the west time on the precipice of a world war. Is it being used wisely?
Interesting article that talks about the similarities between now and 1938, and the sort of lessons we can learn from history.
Yes. Exactly this. Russian interests trying to expand beyond their borders because they think they deserve it. Same as all the Axis Power countries. They think they "deserve" it.
Fuck this mentality.
Putin has been actively destabilizing neighboring countries for months by using propaganda and funding militant pockets. He’s tenderizing his meal in hopes Trump wins in the fall.
He also continues to claim that eastern Poland belongs to Russia. I’m not convinced he has the balls to do anything about it, but taking Ukraine and leveraging support from Belarus would be the way to do it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The proximate causes of the current conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, the South China Sea and even Armenia might be different, but the bigger picture showed an interconnected battlefield in which post-cold war certainties had given way to “great-power competition” in which authoritarian leaders were testing the boundaries of their empires.
In a sign of the times, Michael Roth, the SPD chair of the Bundestag foreign affairs committee and a supporter of arming Ukraine, is quitting politics, saying he found it was like stepping into a refrigerator to hold the views he did inside his own party.
Critics say this fatalistic narrative – dovetailing with Russia’s main objective, which is to convince the US that further aid is futile – also makes little attempt to identify the lessons of the past two years about the failure to organise a war economy in Europe.
Liberal market economies are inherently likely to be slower to adapt to war than their authoritarian counterparts, but one of the lessons of the 1930s, and those locust years, is that organising for rearmament entails planning and not just false reassurances, which were the stock in trade of Chamberlain and his predecessor Stanley Baldwin.
Incredibly, the adviser to the Polish chief of staff, Krzysztof Król, admitted to a conference last month that after two years “we have not yet created proper conditions for a Ukrainian victory with our plans because political leaders had not yet told them the objective”.
It will take two meetings, one involving the G7 leaders in Italy next week and then the 75th anniversary Nato summit in Washington in July, to reveal whether the west wishes not to contain Putin, but to defeat him – with all the risk that carries, including for China.
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I would say 1934 would be more accurate. Putin isn't Hitler. Trump is, we'll find out in November if he becomes dictator or not.