Thread by @Noahpinion

The critics of NATO expansion are overplaying their hand. We DID leave Russia a sphere of influence: Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Current and recent events are just the verification of that new sphere-of-influence equilibrium.

You can argue that we shouldn't have included the Baltics -- that all Soviet successor states should have been left within Russia's sphere of influence (though this would have sucked for the Baltics obviously).

But Poland? Romania? No, those were always going to join the West.

Russia invading Ukraine and Georgia and sending troops to Belarus and Kazakhstan is just the inevitable confirmation of the resolution of the Cold War -- that Europe gets to expand to include the old Warsaw Pact, but (mostly) not the old Soviet Union.

And yes this sucks. Russian foreign policy is awful!! (Astronaut meme goes here.)

Great-power spheres of influence are bad things in general, and are *especially* bad things for the countries caught on the wrong side, as Ukraine is.

But the world of geopolitics is an inherently ungoverned, anarchic space. There will never be real rules unless we have a one-world government. Barring that, great powers will always divide the world between them. This isn't what *should* happen, but it is what *will* happen.

Unless and until we get a one-world government, all we can do is try to make each of the great powers as liberal as possible, and to increase the power of the relatively more liberal powers.

And unfortunately, Russia is not choosing to be very liberal right now.

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