Why is Russia's invasion all the Fault of the U.S.?

[CrackityJones75]

I have to say I am getting really tired of hearing that this invasion is our fault. Maybe that is the point. To beat is down. I don’t know. But listening to “progressive” shows on the radio here I hear more and more about how the United States needs to take responsibility for this invasion. Amy Goodman’s show today is non-atop constant Biden and U.S. bashing.

Then on the right you have the expected Biden bashing but also the fawning over Putin and his brilliance.

I am not saying that our foreign policy isn’t without fault but I am fes up with hearing how every bad thing that happens in the world is our fault.

[Dr. Shepper]

1. I'm a progressive

But whenever one of my fellow lefties blames us for this war, I tune them out as bad faith actors.

No one can look at the trajectory of Putin (whom I have never trusted) and think he and Russia are victims. They have time and time again been aggressors and Putin has become a dictator. No dictator gets any sympathy from me.

There are legitimate criticisms of us being at war for last 20 years, but that is not why Putin does what he does.

[CrackityJones75]

8. Thank you.

When I wrote the OP this morning I didn’t have much time as I had just driven in to work and had to get going but I was super annoyed at the time. Some of you guys are saying it much better than I did, and nailing exactly how I feel.

Thank you!

[Ilsa]

2. I'm glad I missed those threads and posters.

I wouldn't be able to bear it these days.

[IngridsLittleAngel]

3. It's not the fault of the US... At all

Putin was going to do this. Period. He wanted to do this for a long time - hell, I'm shocked he waited this long. He thinks the Cold War is still alive, he wants the USSR back, and he was going to put Ukraine "back where it belongs", no matter what Biden did.

Honestly, I'm shocked he didn't do it in between November 2020 and January 2021, in the name of causing more chaos and trying to keep his puppet Drumpf in the White House.

I'm beyond tired of hearing anyone try to blame Biden for Putin's actions. Putin, and Putin alone, acted out. There was not a single option on the table for Biden that could've prevented this. Take a tough stance? Putin "would've felt provoked." Diplomacy? "You're soft and letting me do this." Send troops into Ukraine ahead of time? Russia probably lobs even more missiles in their direction.

This would be like being on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and your question is "2+2 equals", and the choices are 3, 5, 0, and 1701. You can't answer it because there is no correct option.

This is on Putin. And only Putin. No "both sides." Anyone pointing the finger at anyone but Herr Putin is full of it.

As far as the right... Of course they're praising Putin. They love him, and wish the US had a "president" just like him.

[CrackityJones75]

5. Thank you for putting it this way

Very well said. I think people forget the history in play here.

[IngridsLittleAngel]

7. You're welcome

And you're absolutely right. Anyone wanting to pin any part of this on Biden are either completely forgetting history, or, just itching for an excuse to blame him. Maybe even both.

[sop]

4. I'm a Progressive, too, but I operate in the grey areas where life actually happens, not in the

black and white world where Amy Goodman and others live. Goodman's views are not very useful at this point in our country's history.

[CrackityJones75]

6. Agreed

The thing that bugs me is when they introduce a guest on the show it os always “Author of the book titled….” and I can’t help but think are they just hawking books and so thos is their niche? If so it is almost as bad as the right selling their own hate information.

[Dr. Shepper]

10. I used to listen to her all the time

But had to stop around 2016 when Trump “won” and she had Stephen Cohen on all the time as a Putin apologist. There is nothing in the world that would ever convince me Putin is doing anything other than for himself.

[sop]

21. The "America is to blame for everything bad in the world" crowd's unthinking leftist support of

Russia is just a vestigial response to that country's anti-capitalist, revolutionary, communist past. That and their own geopolitical opposition to decades of US hegemony.  They seem not to have noticed that version of Russia no longer exists. I'd really like to know what they still find so appealing about Russia?

Today Putin's Russia is an ultra-rightwing, fascist, white nationalist, racist, nativist, misogynist, homophobic, totally corrupt, hyper-capitalist criminal enterprise, run by a handful of murderous, thieving oligarchs.  In the 1990's to early 2000's, Russia looked as if it were moving towards a Democracy. That changed after Putin came to power, and turned Russia back towards the autocratic roots of the former USSR, minus all the old leftist stuff.

[The Magistrate]

9. Here Is The Problem, Sir

Some on the 'further left' start with certain assumptions, which not only go unquestioned by those who hold them, but which actually conceal some fairly poisonous attitudes.

The most important of them, and the foulest, is that only the United States, or the capitalist West, is possessed of moral agency. All else, all 'second' or 'third' world entities, simply react to the actions of the United States, and do so automatically, without any real choice in the matter. The United States does thing one, and in consequence Russia or China or whoever it is simply must in response do thing two, and therefore it is the United States that 'really' is responsible for thing two having been done by some other, lesser entity.

For that is the ugly root of this attitude, which will be vehemently denied by most anyone who hews to it. For an analysis of events based on this paradigm to be true, there must be some inherent superiority to the capitalist West, in terms of both maturity and morality. No one else is quite grown all the way up, in this view, and this relieves them of any moral agency, renders them less than wholly responsible for their own actions, like minor children faced by a sharpster with a contract, who by law aren't capable of informed consent, and so cannot be held to their signatures.

[CrackityJones75]

11. Paragraph 2 SPOT ON!

Exactly.

[Dr. Shepper]

13. Never thought of it that way

But, yes, (stating things less articulately than you), the world view that puts us as the center of moral agency is immature and does not account for other nations being responsible for their own choices. Thank you for your thoughts.

[JohnSJ]

15. Exactly

[Biophilic]

17. Wow, that explanation is so far out of my understanding that I don't know how to really get it.

Not that I don't believe you now that I've thought about it, but I simply never, ever would have thought anyone with an iota of sense would have thought that. What you said means that these people think that no one else in the world has any moral agency. That thinking is at least as F'd up as people on the far right. I'm sort of flapping my wings and trying to understand how anyone could think that.

[cinematicdiversions]

20. Excellent analysis. I have noticed this on a couple of different subjects most notably race. NT

[chowder66]

26. +1

[dutch777]

12. It's the easy answer rather than the complexity of the total truth

I don't watch much of the talking heads anymore because they repeat themselves endlessly and rarely get to a solid salient point so I may not fully appreciate what motivates your view. The facts as far as I can divine from multiple news feeds is Putin felt the Ukraine becoming more and more connected to the EU and the US was discomfiting. (Significantly increased trade with EU while less and less tied to RU as one point. Successful democracy as another.) The seizure of the Crimea a few years ago was about strategic access control to the Black Sea and to thumb his nose as the west while playing pretty well in RU domestic politics. Having gotten pretty neatly away with that at a bearable cost, we, the whole west, not just the US, encouraged his thinking that he could do more as we did little. It took time, but as the EU got more and more dependent on RU oil and gas and did less and less to match RU's military modernization, Ukraine looked more and more like a plum ripe for the picking. And as the regime in Belarus is shaky at best, rather than let the democratic and economically independent contagion spread from Ukraine to Belarus, stamping it out and giving the big middle finger to the west seemed like an idea that's time had come. Had we imposed the kind of sanctions we just did back when the Crimea incursion happened, we probably would not be here today. So, we do own more of this debacle than was necessary.

And as far as use of military force, other than possibly a No Fly Zone imposition with UN blessing, it is hard to see any direct intervention that would not lead to a broader and messier war and likely devastating worldwide economic ripples. Even a No Fly Zone scenario can quickly spill across borders as RU air defenses based outside Ukraine could lock targeting radar on UN enforcing aircraft over the Ukraine opening the possibility of targeted suppression to defend the UN aircrews. The no so secret background here is that the EU is deathly afraid of RU turning off the oil and gas flow. This is why there was little action after Crimea and why no interest in direct military action now. There is already much domestic discontent about energy prices and other inflation. Gas prices doubling would not be out of the question in the short term. And while the EU would bear the initial brunt, the US will quickly suffer with even higher inflation. This is a fine mess we in the west have collectively allowed ourselves to get into so certainly Putin is the bad actor but we enabled him to be so.

[JohnSJ]

14. Amy Goodman is so biased it is ridiculous. She wants to blame the US for Ukraine, I blame her

for helping get trump elected by encouraging her viewers not to vote for Hillary in 2016 over trump, because “there is no difference between republicans and Democrats”

In addition, she pushes the same Russian propaganda how it is because of NATO why we forced Russia to invade Ukraine. What bullshit

Her guests are people who support her bias at the time

She is a disingenuous person with an agenda

[vlyons]

16. The only thing that the US is guilty of

is putting TFG in the White House, and allowing Fox News to spew propaganda. Otherwise the Biden administration did everything it could with endless diplomatic meetings with Russia to avoid this war.

So when some talking head says it's the US fault, just change the channel.

[Emile]

18. Amy Goodman is blaming President Biden for Putin's war?

Really?

[BoomaofBandM]

19. It saddens me about Amy Goodman. I had just started watching her in the past year.

[stonecutter357]

22. Amy the clown Goodman !

[Roisin Ni Fiachra]

23. I'm a progressive, and these fools are an embarrassment to

fact and reality based progressives everywhere.

[Amishman]

24. The US, as part of the developed world, has some blame for being too lenient after Crimea

Our response to the Crimean occupation was far to mild. The level of economic pressure now occurring should have happened then.

The US is just one of the many parties to blame for that.

[kwolf68]

25. Dunno one argument

Could be our invasion of Iraq. We did it under auspices of "protecting America". That nation did not attack us, that nation isn't even on our borders. It was an illegal war, justified in our minds that it was the right thing to do. I think the UN even was against it, we did not care. The United States has overthrown many democratically elected leaders and installed puppet heads of states in the chairs to do our bidding.

Please know I am in NO WAY justifying what Russia is doing, they are imperialistic thugs, but look at it from the other side of the pond and you may find America hasn't always been the perfect nation either.

No, because US did it does not "cause" Russia to do it, but maybe that attack gives them cover. I think in one of Putin's speeches he even said something that implied our Iraq invasion.

[Papa-Ron]

27. We as humans tend to have selective long term memories...

I agree with what you said and I am actually surprised we haven't seen more than just Putin trying to take over another country.

[crickets]

28. Unfortunately, the situational similarity is real.

I do cringe a bit at the accusations being hurled at Putin at times. Replace the names with "Bush/Cheney" and "Iraq" and it hits close to home. The US will have to live down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for a long, long time. That's in spite of the fact that many here did not want those wars and vigorously protested them, just as the people of Russia, for the most part, seem to feel and protest the same way about this one.

However - in no way does this absolve Putin. Just because the US jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge doesn't mean any other country has to. Putin pointing to another country and saying, "they did it first!" or "they made me do it!" is like the whining of a small child with no sense of personal or moral responsibility.

Putin will not find the cover he's looking for in that argument.