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.

(end)

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More from @Noahpinion

Jan 18
At age 6 I was obsessed with the idea that nuclear disarmament could be achieved by having Godzilla eat all the nuclear warheads.
Crazy thing is that I didn't even think of using Godzilla to make nuclear power more sustainable by feeding him all the radioactive waste.
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@LittleKeegs0 @JosephPolitano @ckrlft @TristamPratori1 The story since the 70s has been:
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* Working hours ⬇️, so individual annual earnings only ⬆️ a little
* Govt benefits & investment income⬆️ so individual income ⬆️
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@LittleKeegs0 @JosephPolitano @ckrlft @TristamPratori1 So overall story: Your average worker is consuming a lot more and working a lot fewer hours, but now women have jobs
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The ratio of median home price to median personal income has increased since 1980, but only by about 15%. Image
Here you can see median home price and median income side by side, relative to their 1980s levels.

Home prices and incomes track each other very well until around 2003, then diverge, then come back again, then diverge a bit after 2012. Image
But also note that the type of homes people have been buying have not stayed constant. The median size of a single-family house, for example, has increased by about 13% since 2000. Image
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"Americans don't have health care" is one of those things that, if you said it in real life, would cause people to look at you as if you were crazy, but which 1000 people will dogpile you on Twitter if you contradict
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dropbox.com/s/l6qr9x1zhvc4…
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1/Let's revisit my post from January 6, 2021: "Japanese lessons for the American coup".

In this post, I went through Japan's history of rightist coup attempts in the 1930s, and what lessons America can learn from this history.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/japanese-les…
2/Japan had five significant coup attempts in the 1930s.

All failed to topple the government.

But in the end, they forced the government to do what the coup perpetrators wanted -- invade and attempt to conquer the rest of Asia.
3/In the post, I go through all 5 coup attempts. But the best direct comparison for America's 1/6 coup attempt is the March Incident of 1931.

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