FROM AN EXPERT....FIONA HILL,PUTIN AND POWER...LONG READ
Hill: Yes, but also like Kaiser Wilhelm in World War I as well. Look, exactly 100 years before Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, in 1914, the Germans invaded Belgium and France and World War I was fought as a Great Power conflict to eject Germany from Belgium and France. And World War II in Europe, of course, was a refighting territorially of many of the outcomes of World War I.
Part of the problem is that conceptually, people have a hard time with the idea of a world war. It brings all kinds of horrors to mind — the Holocaust and the detonation of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the dawning of the nuclear age. But if you think about it, a world war is a great power conflict over territory which overturns the existing international order and where other states find themselves on different sides of the conflict. It involves economic warfare, information warfare, as well as kinetic war.
We’re in the same situation. Again, Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014, exactly 100 years after Germany invaded Belgium and France — and just in the same way that Hitler seized the Sudetenland, annexed Austria and invaded Poland. We’re having a hard time coming to terms with what we’re dealing with here. This is a great power conflict, the third great power conflict in the European space in a little over a century. It’s the end of the existing world order. Our world is not going to be the same as it was before.
Germany was an aggressor nation trying to conquer foreign lands. Russia is just trying to reclaim lands they owned for hundreds of years. Most Ukranians speak Russian, especially in the occupied territories. You think it is a smart idea to poke a bear who has nuclear weapons.
I think America and NATO should back off.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
