Submitted by M Tovey (United States), Jul 5, 2022 at 11:11
Is this the real reason(?):
"Putin justifies his war on Ukraine on the alleged threat to Russian security by NATO expansion in Central Europe and some Western political analysts (e.g., John Mearsheimer) support this argument."
Post apocalyptic analysis; proffering that the esteemed Richard Pipes may not necessarily have been precognitive in an assesment of the Russian leadership's willingness to take on a paranoid rage against a western led defensive block that is still wary of the Russian Leader's proclivities towards former-Soviet style of totalitarian agression: the proof is in the Putin pudding: is this agression not modelled after the reason the nations that formed NATO were correct in ther perceptions, just as Richard Pipes would have forecast?
It is exactly the reason.
But there are greater implications. Why does it make sense that the Russian press a war that ultimately, would not end well; that even if it were predisposed to end in a draw (exquisitely unlikely), all it wouldhave managed to do is expose that which was evident from the very first actions of the Putin leadership, further expose his tendencies towards re-establishing that which he knows intimately and is more than willing to sacrifice anything to regain and obtain a retrofitted hold on Soviet style dominance both in military control and then psychological enforcement of his own economic advantage in world energy markets: thus the control of the Middle East. The second part is the lesson he learned when observing how quickly the oligarchic mechanism got hold of the remnant background apparatchik that were the cause of the failure of the Soviet economic model's inability to maintain parity with the world's ability to sustain NATO and President Reagan's adoption of a Macarthur-styled economic assault that drove the Soviet Union to distraction and eventual disolvency for not having enough conrol over the resources necessary to remain dominant. This is what the Russian is actually after; regaining dominance that matches his ego and controlling the world's resources in spite of NATO. It is the ultimate in avarice and arrogance. See if this matches Richard Pipes' assessment when the Soviet Union collapsed and whether the oriental ideologies of a central Asian mindset would ever embrace Western styled governance that has always been controversial.
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