http://www.vox.com/...-russia-officer-kidnapped

There has been increased tensions between Russia and USA lately, not only that but Russia supplies other enemies of America with the weapons and military vehicles. Russia supplied Enriched Uranium to Iran, most of N Koreas military is equipped with Russian weaponry and vehicles.

I have a feeling we might be going to war soon.


Does anyone else have an honest opinion?

On the one hand, this sounds an awful lot like certain incidents involving the Sudetenland and Austria and Poland. On the other hand, we have always been at war with eastasia and we will always be at war with eastasia. I don't know what to think any more about this stuff. I wish we had truly strong leadership though, that I do know.

I guess I am waiting for the "peace in our time" money quote to prove we are well and truly fluffed.

Russia and China will war before Russia and USA will war.

first off, the global economy wont allow that war unless something massive happens. i dont think putin is that stupid, he likes his money. what it looks like to me is Russia wanted Crimea, and now it wants the road leading to it. some treaty will be worked out because no one wants this war you are talking about. i doubt we can afford it as a planet either.

2nd off, even if russia and china and a few other lackeys teamed up, the west is just too strong. it would be over fast, but might leave a good mess behind.

but you can see how china is gearing up its global economy. they dont want a world war before they are a superpower, and believe it, they are well on their way.

it isnt going to happen, and i kinda hope you are trolling. Regional conflicts happen all the time, look at russian in Afghanistan, Georgia, or a half dozen other wtfwasthatname former bloc nations. China held onto one of our planes for a couple months, we didnt do fluff about that. why would we go to war with russia over an Estonian officer? it isnt an invasion. i think obama meant he stands by his nato ally

as for Russia supplying our enemies with weapons, its a business. you could say the US supplies the entire western world with weapons. Is it mainly just incase russia attacks? or is it because Boeing and Lockheed Martin like money. The US supplies countries with weapons for government overthrows all the time. World War III aint popped off because of it yet.

penis

Geopolitical rhetoric. Its all been going on since before you were born sk nothing new. It will never stop. There wont be anything other than proxy wars just like we have always had. Lots of money is made for everyone. You even thin out the herds a bit and try out new effective accurate ways to kill or destroy . Win win really.

[q]what it looks like to me is Russia wanted Crimea, and now it wants the road leading to it[/q]

Not sure what you meant up there, but there are around 3000 km from Estonia to Crimea.
And if you meant the ongoing conflict in east Ukraine, is not because Russia wants a road ( which already has - Krasnodar to Simferopol ).

All you see in this part of the world is Ivan saying "enough" to NATO/EU (and indirectly Uncle Sam) extend.

short answer, no there won't be a war between NATO and Russia. Russia knows it loses no matter what -- even in the economic arena their economy will implode if the US presses for cutting Russia off from the globalized economy. Russia is making calculated power plays in a region they have typically dominated since the renaissance. They need to do it before that region is sucked into the west's sphere of influence like other former satellites and while the west is, comparatively, politically and economically weak (sound familiar? :p).

We mainly view this through the prism of the cold war but I think it's important to understand the relationship between Russia and the west in the post-Soviet era. Think back to the 90's and NATO moving into former Warsaw Pact nations (multiple conflicts in the balkans, initial NATO expansion in Poland+Czech Republic + Hungary) where Russia wasn't in a position to really have much push back.

Then after 9/11, the Russians worked closely with the US on their war on terror -- mainly aiding the Northern Alliance forces to fight the Taliban in the early days of the Afghan war. Then NATO expanded to include countries on Russia's border while the US continued to act with impunity and do brash things like invade Iraq and bomb Libya. When Russia stretched it's military muscle in places like Georgia and Chechnya where their real, local interests were "threatened" the west criticized Russia.

So combine that general political situation with a leader like Putin who wants to restore some of Russia's glory and doesn't mind taking calculated risks or using misinformation to mask a covert war and it makes for a throwback conflict. The bottom line is that Putin wants to rebuild Russian greatness; not destroy his nation in a war they will most certainly lose. To me, this feels more like a situation where they wanted to get their strategically important Crimea bases under their control and leave Ukraine in a mess for others to clean up if they won't play ball with Russia.

The fact that sanctions reinforces the narrative about the importance of the Eurasian Economic Union as a way to get off the US-centric system in place today is probably the bigger domestic driver than territorial expansion now that Crimea is firmly under Russia's control and isn't really being contested.

i was talking about the recent russian escalation into Ukraine over the last week, it was all focused on the south along the road along the southern coast. I am well aware of the crossing in the south east, but that is still a bridge/tunnel (not sure which).

I have no clue about Estonia, was probably an intelligence mission gone wrong for all i know, and has nothing to do with Ukraine as i implied the situation.

No chance of an actual war. The nukes would prevent that if nothing else.

Actually Putin is that stupid. Or crazy. He's already grabbed half of Ukraine, a country that both Russia and USA vowed to protect, and he did it quite easily. Why stop there?

This is essentially a continuation of the same cold war that's been going on since the 1890s. The threat of hostilities is quite profitable both politically and economically, but an actual conflict would benefit nobody.

Putin is not stupid, he just knows he can take what he wants right now as long as he confines it to former soviet states.

"I hold in my hand a piece of paper" ~ Neville Chamberlain after meeting with Hitler, 1938



Crimea isn't exactly half of Ukraine, its a small part of the country, along the same relationship as Puerto Rico to the US ... it was illegally given over by Khruschev from Russian to Ukrainian Republics, simply because he wanted it that way.

Putin isn't stupid, nor crazy ... but a fair few of the crowd he has around him are, and are empire-building ultranationalists.
The exact same thing is true of Ukraine.

That would mean that Putin is weak and unable to control the crowd around him. We can argue about him being stupid or crazy but weak he is not.

The Chamberlain quote is spot on. And, worryingly, the history is repeating itself. 1939 - a bored/tired France/UK didn't try to stop an even weaker but bold nazi Germany, Hitler pressed on with his bluffs and he got called eventually, when he invaded Poland (with USSR's help, mind you). Meanwhile USSR just watched and had military and economic pacts with Hitler. It joins the war 2 years later, been hailed as the saviors of the world and conquered half of the Europe in the process. Good business

75 years later. Putin and Merkel do some sort of Chamberlaing Munich pact. Let's imagine that Putin attacks Baltic states (not so much of imagination needed actually), NATO steps in, WW3. China stays neutral but keeps their pacts with Putin. Then somehow joins the war on NATO's side and "liberates" half of the world. Fun.

Not sure how you guys picture a modern war - but for sure it ain`t going to be in tranches or a siege of strategic locations ( such as oil fields, big towns, resourceful areas in general - like in WWII ).
A war nowadays will be finished in less than a month. First days there will be an airborne fight, followed by long range missile battle and maybe some isolated ground combats.

At one point - one of the sides will realize the war is lost and nuclear/chemical will be brought in. Following that, we are all fluffed - no matter where you are positioned in this world.

WWIII = end of the world as we know it. There will be no liberators or good/bad guys because there will be no one left to praise them.

+ hopefully a new reset somewhere deep into the Amazon or Africa.

1984. in order for the bored elite (who have like 10 billion times the things necessary for their continued pathetic existence) create a false conflict that idiots are willing to believe in because they are morons.

You can look at it that way until it reaches your backyard. After that is no longer fun to watch. Is nice and fun to see those ("false conflicts") on TV and debate with your friends. Not fun when you are seeing yourself on CNN.

A lot of people in this world does not know what war means and for them it all resumes at "Rambo" vs AK47 holder. ++ the numerous CNN/Russia-1 debates that will follow. War destabilize a zone for a long period - people suffer because of it even after years or decades.

Be it economical, anti-"terrorism" ( altought i believe the anti-terrorism to be just a scam to justify founds), conquer etc. - war is awful.

Terrorist are a good source of hilarious youtube videos.

http://youtu.be/8cZ40-eHGVk

my backyard? wtf? if you in my backyard without my permission, there's a fair chance i'll turn you into ground beef if you can't get out of the yard 10 seconds after my boots hit the back porch. don't make me buy a walk-in freezer...

Foreigners dont understanf the concept dibs.

nationalism isnt dead yet here in good ole murica, but it is on a cycle

This is the most important thing said in this thread so far.

I did read an analysis awhile ago that basically said Russia and the west are working from two entirely different playbooks: Russia is playing old-school realpolitik while the west is applying liberal values to everything. It makes some sense, as the way Russia is doing things doesn't suggest they're into mass invasions but rather that they want a bunch of client states as buffers between them and NATO.

I'm not saying that excuse what Russia is doing at all, but just to point out that the Hitler comparisons and even the Cold War comparisons are probably the wrong frame of reference here. Russia isn't a superpower looking to extend their hegemony but perhaps is instead a throwback to an even earlier era where many countries has spheres of influence that other powers were supposed to respect.

hmmm... i definitely need to quit using this site, or buy a better device. can't find the quote button. think i remember where the / is. is that the right slash? anyway...

foreigners still doing that fuedal system where you have to pay a Lord for property and beg them to let you use it the way you want? that's just plain crazy.

ok, back to my backyard....

Trespassers: "Oh Please, Please Don't Kill Us Mr. Dibs."
Dibs: "Oh Gawd. Shutup and run faster, ya Bacon Belly Pork By-Products!" ran out of textbox.

its the bubble on right corner.

Now i know 100% you are a retard. Until this point i was only 99% percent sure. IT was a freaking figure of speach you dumb fluff.

you think anti terrorism is a scam to what extent? 9/11 was an inside job? carried out so we can go into iraq and Afghanistan?


i can maybe see iraq and the WMDs, but terrorism a scam? that is a bit of a stretch. more like the US wants to stabilize a region it relies on for resources. granted, they arnt doing the best job, but there isnt exactly a how to manual for this fluff yet.

jesse ventura and many others think that cia orchestrated wtc-strike. jv claimed that walls in ex-cia office (in some wtc-tower) were painted with thermite paint. also no blackboxes of planes were examined (says jv).

Marshal; that you're buying what Jesse Ventura is selling speaks volumes.

something does not fit there. Ossama was CIA man in the Afghanistan war against Ivan. He raised his army and recruits with money and logistic coming from USA. Than - decades latter he just blows WTC with no one knowing about it?.

If i create a network with my money - i`ll make sure i know what that network does, and have people in that network that will report directly to me.

That being said ... it leaves many question marks. A human is capable of doing a lot of harm for money power or history. I think there were persons that knew and did nothing - or even worse, it was an inside-job that guaranteed access to founds of billions for the so called "war on terror".

That is my opinion . Should be threat like an opinion.

i think you either overestimate the capability of the CIA, or underestimate the power of a determined enemy.

You might underestimate the capability of CIA too. If Mosad detects a spy in it`s network, all it`s relatives up to 3rd grade cousins ... vanish. Last traitor/leaker detected there i think dates from 20 years back. Mosad is like the country side brother of CIA.

oh my. Alin has volunteered his totally uneducated qualification that I am a retard. That pretty much means that I am not allowed to be banned anymore and that Alin Bozo ain't allowed to call me a bunch of names anymore because it might interfer with my development of a proper male ego-centric psyche. am i allowed to tell Alin to take a short swallow off of a long fluff, or is my ego too fragile to say such things?

It's been said a couple times in this thread by some clearly intelligent posters that the economy would not allow a large scale conflict such as this. I applaud that insight.

Our world is growing less nationalist and more globalized. I'm not saying nationalism doesn't play, but it had its dawn and it's having its dusk.

Recognize that the single worst thing that can possibly happen (I say possibly because a large scale WMD war is impossible with rational actors) is for nothing to change or progress, for the status quo to be maintained. That is to suggest that we find this sort of thing intriguing because it could - just possibly maybe could - lead to something exciting. Large scale war. Possible annihilation. Fun.

We say this or at least entertain the idea of it in our heads on the one hand while we more rationally think of our children in the other. War to me is intriguing and exciting - as a man I want to persevere and overcome, but as a father, I love my children, and hate war, and violence, and destruction. Relegate those things to video games. I don't want to see good people die.

This is why we never went to war over Cuba. Because we are a nation of fathers and mothers, as is Russia, as is China. Back channels were opened because love was more powerful than pride. There will be small, dumb wars, and yes, there is even the chance that one day, God forbid, there could be a large scale, massively destructive war brought to pass by the hands of key, irrational actors. Like if our favorite narcissistic megafluff Kim Jong-un were magically given arbitrary control of US Strategic Command. But more than likely we will continue to be rational as we have been on the whole, and we will play the game as well as it can be played, and of course we know that annihilating ourselves is not good gameplay. Russia's game is, in my view, good gameplay - justification and ethics aside.

WWII was actually good gameplay on Hitler's part given the situation in Europe at the time. If Hitler hadn't been Hitler and had been more perceptive, hindsight shows us he could have consolidated a great deal of power over a large part of Europe. But our networked world would not allow such a man to rise to power today. Ideas are so much more quickly spread - and people are so much more well enabled to think for themselves. WWII was a product of its time.

But I began this post on a different angle - that just as much as our love for our children and our desire to give to them a stable world full of potentialities steers us away from war, economic interests do as well. I don't mean your interests or mine, but the large economic interests that are concentrated in the hands of those few individuals and groups that control the world's wealth. Few of us have a real concept of what it means to be so wealthy and control so much - to us it can seem dubious that a relatively small cadre of individuals can wield authority over the world not by any trust that may be vested in them by other human beings, but by sheer virtue of the resources at their disposal. So we tend to ignore that narrative until the numbers are right in front of us, allowing no lies.

War may be profitable for a few, but for most it causes business to suffer. Because such a good job is being done of sucking the lifeforce out of so many for so much profit, and because the status quo is so safely entrenched and so wildly beneficial to the wealthy and powerful, the status quo WILL be maintained at all costs.

Of course to you and I it feels wonderful and can certainly be bountiful and easy, and there are those who will say, "What is all this ridiculous talk of changing things?" Because again, we love our children. And as much as we would do anything to avoid war for the sake of our children, we would have it be that our children are never prisoners.

Small wars, sure. Great peace most of the time. A lot of talk about extending prosperity to poor parts of the world, talk which has in it truth but is not all truth. We will never again, however, see large groups of people in developed nations stand up for their rights in ANY way that succeeds in really changing the status quo.

anyway, he was Putin on the toilet,
I was farting 3 sheets to the wind,
when them peaceful demoncrats used violence to win,
the Capital of Ukraine.
y'all really need better leader naming conventions next time... ya pathetic pork belly byproduct demoncrats.

you do realize you are freaking clown? Omg is that peasant, the one and only who manged to skip the mods ban using a proxy ... OMG - is the Einstein of AT.

Live through a war first you dumb fluff - and talk after. do not shoot lame, not educated opinion, back from your couch with 6 pizza and a "diet coke" already consumed. And first of all - learn to fluffing detect a figure of speach before someone dumbs a fluff in your "back-yard".

Awesome. I posted in the middle of a flame war.

last i knew, we got most of our oil from cananda? I could be wrong, and ISIS controls most of the oil fields in iraq. They are making 1-2 million a day on the black market at half the production rate. They are a self sufficent group and we need to push back into iraq, in my opinion. This group from what I understand wants to target our power grids; however, they are rather out dated and if they did it right they could really mess us up.


anyway, if I am wrong please correct me, I read this out of a news artical on my phone one day when I was bored =p

not buying, i think he sees things which don't exist. did cia/nsa/whatever have something to do with wtc-strike or not won't be found out.

Because you can't prove a negative.

Nope not a chance, the reality is we both have interests to gain but not significant enough to gamble the cost of war over. But as Rook mentions above the irrational actors in the world today, and the level of technology that is near freely available for those to access, that is a true threat.

why i want to fight in a war to protect somebody else's billions, when i got enough problems protecting my little pile of junk from my "civilized" neighbors?

So sounds like were all just show-boating and defensive-posturing. I suppose the world just needs entertainment. Otherwise if the world didn't have problems it would be just too dull too enjoy. Amen to problems!

I hope so. I'm getting really tired of these small scale regional wars.

all i can say is that if it does go to WWIII you can all stay the fluff away from New Zealand where im pretty sure we will be relatively safe from everyone since we are not a strategic position and far away from where any nukes will fall.

So fluff off this is my country!

yeah, because no one has ever used an island hoping strategy in the pacific before

http://upload.wikimedia.org/...9/92/MacArthur_Manila.jpg

don`t forget Japan and it`s islands in WWII.

People who remain after WWIII can retire to Nz tought. practicing haka and raising sheep or something...

lol and that war got no where near NZ and was never going to...

This just proves that the old-school US foreign policy axiom that 'the enemy of our enemy is our friend' has pretty much always been an abject failure. We supported Stalin, we supported Pinnochet, Noriega, Saddam Hussain, Bin Laden (indirectly), Prevez Musharif, et. al.

It always seems like a great idea at the time and it always comes back o bite us on the ass. The CIA is simply an implement utilized to further an objective. If the CIA is instructed by the state department to orchestrate a cocaine-hostage-TOW missile menage et trois between the US-Iran-Nicaragua, then thats what its going to do. What its not going to do is make value judgements regarding whether the policies are moral or not. The CIA does not create bad foreign policy, it just implements it.

As much as I despise the neo-cons and as much as I think they deliberately manipulated policy decisions to benefit GWs rich oil buddies, there is absolutely no way that 9-11 was perpetrated from within. Its a novel thought experiment, but its completely irrational on too many levels. There just are not enough fingers in Washington to plug all of the leaks in that idea.

I'd love to drink a beer with Jesse Ventura, but there is no fluffing way I'd ever get caught up in his Agent Orange induced la la land.

because australia was never invaded. if australia fell into enemy hands (the japs were on their way, the navy pushed hard for the invasion, the army opposed, the americans fluffed them up before they could decide) new zeland would of been extremely important.

you are an island off the coast of a major ally of NATO and the west. sure, you arnt strategically important at all!

i never pegged you for an idiot, but maybe you are