There’s also no Santa. And – brace yourself – no Tooth Fairy.
I know, this hurts but we need to stay strong and bear life in the cruel, cruel world without Santa.
Christmas elves are totally real, though.
The Cruel World
Opinions, art, debate
Clarissa's Blog 
Clarissa, the problem that I see with this breakdown of this rules-based international order that the US created is that smaller nations will be absorbed by larger nations.
I increasingly feel that Trump is going to completely abandon not just Ukraine, but the whole of Europe. His latest salvo of tariffs against our closest neighbors and allies should make that beyond clear. If that’s how you treat your immediate neighbors, why do we even care what happens to Ukraine? That’s Russia’s sphere of influence. US possibly do the exact same thing and just take Greenland by force, then force Canada into submission and do the same.
For good or bad, Trump is pushing the US into the next era of a multi-polar world, where might is right and the weak get absorbed. That’s why he clearly wants to carve out the Americas for the US, and let China and Russia have the rest. Pulling all security guarantees, globalization, etc. with it.
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It was always exactly like this. We’ve seen it during the Cold War where, as one example among many, Guatemala was engulfed in a 30-year civil war because it was convenient to the USSR. Once the USSR fell apart, the war ended. El Salvador was waging its own civil war for 12 years for the same reason. It ended in the same way. I recently wrote about Rhodesia that was pushed out of existence by Great Britain. We can go on and on with examples that there was never any rules-based international order.
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What do civil wars have to do with Russian invading Ukraine? Are you saying the Russian-Ukraine conflict s a civil war?
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“What do civil wars have to do with Russian invading”
Oh sweet child of summer…. russia supplied one side of the civil war to keep it going. What do you think was going on in Syria? Africa from the 1960s-80s was full of outside interference.
Competent western-oriented leaders would find a soviet-backed insurgency happening in their country and more left-leaning competent figures would find US backed insurgents…
russia portrays their invasion as the deathknell of what they call the ‘rules based international order’ (aka US as global defender of maritime trade and global cop). For all its faults and missteps (esp Afghanistan, Iraq) the US as global policeman was mostly very restrained and mostly hoped that countries would like to join its maritime order as countries that had joined (incl Germany, Japan, China) experience more prosperity than they ever had before.
A big blind-spot of the US was thinking that most/all countries _want_ prosperity when it’s very clear that many do not. russia can absolutely not exist in its current state if it were prosperous (which is why the russian government keeps most of the population in poverty). China has decided that it wants to expand more than it wants prosperity (and is financially teetering on the edge of the abyss).
Part of what Trump is doing is, I think, aimed at showing russia what an unrestrained US could do.
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Financing a proxy war in a country’s civil war is far different than some nuclear armed country invading and trying to annex a smaller non-nuclear country. Apples and oranges.
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“far different”
Both are abrogations of any kind of rules in the area of international relations… pure power politics.
Again… russia doesn’t regard annexing most/all of Ukraine as any kind of goal in and of itself… it’s the first step in their much larger goals. Clarissa doesn’t spell out everything she knows about russian goals and aspirations (and like woke politics… people that don’t know it’s true tend to simply not believe what russia openly states are its goals, they’re just that crazy… which doesn’t stop them from being extremely dangerous).
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This is exactly how it is. I find it useless even to mention what Russians are actually trying to do. It’s like the fact that there are 15% trans people in female federal jails. Nobody believes it, and it gets tiresome to have people roll their eyes at you.
I understand why nobody wants to know. It reduces anxiety to think that there’s an easy solution, a rational self-interest, a deal to be made. People lie to themselves to avoid facing unpleasant things. It’s sad but what can one do?
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