Quote:
Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague
I really do not know what you are confused about. The USA contributing fighter jets - either directly or indirectly - is a clear provocation to Russia and it's totally understandable why they wouldn't want to take that step to escalate tensions beyond where they already are. In terms of defending NATO, they've been very clear and consistent: you don't attack NATO. Well, NATO hasn't been attacked.
It's as if you've somehow come to think that "Russia doing horrible things and committing war crimes" must be something that results in NATO going in and stopping them from doing those things. This fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of NATO. NATO is a defensive military pact. It is not a global police organization. It does not prevent, or respond to, war crimes. It does not keep the peace or intervene to stop conflicts once they've started. It's essentially a promise that if you attack someone in NATO, you will be vaporized, potentially along with the rest of humanity... so don't do it.
And, since vaporizing all of humanity is a very big thing to threaten, the "trip wire" that causes that result needs to be very clear and very simple: do not attack NATO countries. There's no "well, maybe if you attack someone who isn't in NATO we'll still respond, but maybe not, and maybe if you commit war crimes, and they're bad enough, and it's all over the news, then we'll intervene". No. It's simple: we only act if you attack us.
So again - with all of that in mind - what exactly is it about NATO's behaviour to date that you find confusing?
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Not the poster you are replying to, but I want to chime in.
Here is what is confusing to me, and what Kasparov posed the other day during a talk. How does anything you said compute if you suppose that russia
does attack a NATO country?
What does NATO do
then? Because the fear of a nuclear war is
precisely the same as it is if NATO were to intervene now, defending a non-NATO country.
This is the confusing part. It's not like when a NATO member is attacked, the aggressor's nuclear arsenal disappears. Therefore, the distinction between defending a NATO member or a non NATO member looks arbitrary.