quote Originally posted by blackrams: So, we're headed into another but more intense coldwar with even less support from our NATO Allies? Rams

Much of Europe is /very/ socialist and sympathetic to communism. This was a war that was fought, and lost, during the 1950s and 1960s. Even with the fall of the Berlin wall, and the obvious failure of the USSR... Russia's investments in these countries were wildly successful.

During the 1950s-1970s, Russia and the US spent 100s of billions (yesterday's value) on propaganda. The USSR sponsored the Communist party in every country they could get one to actually stick. They infiltrated political groups everywhere they could, and pushed hard. Alternately, the United States was always on the defense... and they sponsored anyone that we felt would be competitive against the Communist party. In many cases, this meant sponsoring the Socialist leaning parties.

What resulted? We now have an extremely liberal society in both South America and Western Europe, created by both Russia and the United States.

I don't know that we had any alternative, quite honestly... would we just allow the USSR to fund the Communist party unabated? What would Europe look like now? What we have now was the alternative.

Unfortunately, they're wildly sympathetic to Russia, and they always have been. When I was growing up, I used to visit the Netherlands every summer since that's where my dad was from, and I had dozens of cousins... I mean a lot. My dad had 5 siblings, and each had 2-3 kids. They loved coming to America because everything was big... (everything from boobs to big semi trucks, which they'd never seen before). But it never stopped my cousins from telling me how they felt Russia was better than the US. They said... "Russia will take over the US..." etc. This was in the 1980s of course, so the propaganda was still rampant in their schools.

But these people are all adults, all my age... in their early 40s. They are the ones now making decisions for Europe, and in government.


That's a long way of me saying that I totally agree with you, we will likely go into another cold war, with significantly less support to our allies. We'll probably eventually be looked upon as the French are to the United States. Even though the French helped us win the Revolutionary War through their significant support to the Continental Army, we look at them today as fools and idiots (common consensus in the United States)... because no one remembers.


The good thing is, Russia is a shadow of its former self (as you well know yourself) when they were the USSR. They are a poor nation desperately seeking relevance. Even with our berated, demoralized, and woke military brass, Russia still wouldn't hold a candle to us. As an example, last time I checked, they only have two air craft carriers. One of them isn't running, and the other has significant fire damage. Both are from the 1980s and are ski-slope carriers. For countries like this, they have to focus their efforts on things they can allow themselves to be superior on... like hyper-sonic missiles and other technology that can give them an edge where sheer power fails. The overwhelming vast majority of their nuclear weapons are 1980s or older-era technology. They've recently begun redeveloping some new stuff with hyper-sonic technology, but they simply don't have that in numbers... though it might not matter if we cannot intercept these. End of the day, a nuclear war with them means absolute death for their entire country, and only some devastation for us.


Gone are the days when Russia had the power and money to build air bases all over the world:



Personally, my opinion is that we should have begun arming Ukraine and supporting them with better conventional hardware and surface to air missile intercept deployments. We should have done this from the very beginning. We don't have to get involved in a fight per-se, but we can leverage our power to ensure one does not happen. What Biden seems to be doing is basically telling Russia... if you want to come across, we won't do anything. And as MJ has stated, don't expect any support from Germany and the rest of Europe other than some harshly written PDF letters sent by e-mail.

[This message has been edited by 82-T/A [At Work] (edited 01-21-2022).]

[This message has been edited by sourmash (edited 01-21-2022).]

[This message has been edited by MidEngineManiac (edited 01-21-2022).]