ProudKangaroo wrote on Feb 23
rd, 2025 at 10:39am:
Jasin wrote on Feb 23
rd, 2025 at 8:09am:
Armchair_Politician wrote on Feb 23
rd, 2025 at 7:32am:
Trump seems to have learned nothing from history. I keep coming back to that famous quote by former US Secretary of State Dean Rusk, where he said, "appeasement only makes the aggressor more aggressive". Trump is taking the US, Ukraine and the world down a very dangerous path by bending the knee to Putin in an effort to appease him. Trump is just like those sick groupies who drool over mass murderers and rapists.
You would be a crap poker player.
Trump is playing good guy to Putin and thus forcing Putin to save face and play good guy back. Politics for peace, not war.
Trump did the same with Xi and Xi was forced to put on the biggest Chinese welcome for an American President yet and Trump also got Xi to force North Korea to stop firing it's missiles near Nihon.
Seems Trump's tactics work for Peace, not war... much to your Lefty dislikes.
Also, did America like Soviet inclusion on their Cuban doorstep long ago? I'm sure Russia doesn't like Biden's input in Ukraine on their doorstep as well. Think about it.
Crimea.
We tried that with Crimea.
Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.
There is a lot of compressed history here but the gist for our purposes is that Crimea was never a genuine Ukranian territory. It was a Russian territory, and before that, an ottoman conquest.
Crimea's strategic position led to the 1854 Crimean War and many short lived regimes following the 1917 Russian Revolution. When the Bolsheviks secured Crimea, it became an autonomous soviet republic within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. It was occupied by Germany during World War II. When the Soviets retook it in 1944, Crimean Tatars were ethnically cleansed and deported under the orders of Joseph Stalin, in what has been described as a cultural genocide. Crimea was downgraded to an oblast in 1945.
In 1954, the USSR transferred the oblast to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic on the 300th anniversary of the Pereyaslav Treaty in 1654.
After Ukrainian independence in 1991, most of the peninsula was reorganized as the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. The Soviet fleet in Crimea was in contention, but a 1997 treaty allowed Russia to continue basing its fleet in Sevastopol. In 2014, the peninsula was occupied by Russian forces and annexed by Russia, but most countries recognise Crimea as Ukrainian territory.[2]
The thinker about that part of the world is that they have long histories and long memories.