Thread by @althecat

If @FareedZakaria is right about Putin. Then if America responds to some form of additional provocation wrt to Ukraine with extreme economic sanctions, gambling that the EU follows the US lead, precipitating an energy crisis in Europe… then Putin gets what he wants.

I.E either Europe breaks with the US, thereby creating at least a fracture in NATO. Or at best (for Putin), a significant political split in between the EU and both the UK and US, his old Cold War enemies.

Europe is unusually weak at present for numerous reasons. Brexit related mostly. And reasons which the US and UK understand poorly, and which to a large part Putin engineered. sophisticated Russian active measures were involved in facilitating Brexit and the Trump election.

This explanation from @FareedZakaria provides for Putin’s actions in (what can now be seen as) a remarkably subtle diplomatic/military strategy also shows the path to avoid it.

Putin is exercising all this military pressure to force the EU and US into negotiations.

If you look at all this from optimistic/hopeful perspective, this is actually an opportunity to actually significantly reverse the negative trajectory of great power relationships.

While the US will interpret an independent Europe actively economically engaging with Russia in an orderly manner as a negative. This is not necessarily a dominant view in fractured post Brexit European FP Policy circles.

Russia west of the Caucases is Europe. And historically Russia East of the Urals is also part of Europe politically.

The Royal families of Russia, Germany, Austria, (and pre-revolutionary) France and the UK are all closely related.

At this point in time, a sane, practical diplomatic resolution to this crisis may be exactly what is needed. Not just for Europe and Russia, but also for the world at large.

In the relatively near future China will complete a rail network integrating Central Asia & Europe.

And after that happens, peacefully and consensually, arguably all the great power games in the Northern Hemisphere will become primarily ones of economic and technological competition.

And this would be a world which almost all the world’s people would welcome, and which (more importantly) might actually stand a chance of addressing the carbon/climate crisis.

But politically in the short term, this first step, a negotiated solution in Europe, will not go down well in American Neo Conservative/Imperial circles. And that may complicate things for @joebiden.

/ends

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