"Again, Russia was opposed to NATO's expansion because it wants to dominate its neighbours. The countries that joined NATO, notably, are the ones least under threat of being dominated, which is precisely the reason that they -- of their own free will -- applied for membership in the alliance. And NATO remained very popular in border countries prior to the 2022 invasion for that reason" So very much this.
In case anyone has missed it, Boris Johnson wants to become the secretary general of NATO. Given that time he left a NATO meeting, ditched his security detail and flew to Italy and met up with an ex KGB operative, who is close to Putin, I really don’t think that this is a good idea. https://news.yahoo.com/boris-johnso...u8xObkCjtHgdBK1Hr00r_NZJJA3sv3KLEqO5bnQmXuBRn
At last a grown up Tory Prime Minister. Now **** of Spaffer and take your ERG mates with you. You have done enough damage to country to last many lifetimes.
Call me naive, but what is to stop goods imported to NI through the Green Lane just being driven over the border into the ROI? How does that protect the Single Market standards?
Think they're going to paint the roads red and green and if Boris had had his way and we had the foresight to build his bridge across the Irish Sea the red and green lanes could've been extended over the bridge....don't think we appreciated his genius at the time.
One of the funny things about this article, is that the author and the paper that it comes from, are the same that slated everything Donald trump did and painted him as an evil racist. When in actual fact, Donald trump pointed out absolutely everything said here during his whole presidency, and was called a lunatic for it. He put sanctions on the Russian pipeline in 2019, and warned the G7 about over-reliance on Russian gas & oil. Trump got a lot wrong, but the reason I like him and would have voted for him if I was American is his anti-war stance. He didn’t want to shed any American blood. The exact opposite of the military industrial complex led by Obama, Biden and the EU liberal globalists who pretend to be the good guys but instead work to undermine peace at every opportunity.
Quroa question. Does ‘trump’ mean fart in English slang?? Indeed, Fart = Trump. It is significant that both can cause obnoxious smells and unless released with care can cause unwanted problems. It is important to realise that the former POTUS was indeed a bad smell emanating from the USA and his release from office should be handled cautiously. Any further ‘accidents’ could lead to the US wearing brown trousers for some time. Also it's interesting is that both the UK and US had leaders whose surnames are slang in each other’s countries. We have a Johnson and the US has a Trump.
Fart jokes aside. He is one of the only western politicians in recent history with a direct & stated goal of trying to prevent wars. I concede that he did fail at this, but at least he tried. I am extremely sceptical, however, that the article LTL posted was trying to paint Barack Obama, Bush, Clinton, Biden and that whole cabal of crooks as the “good guys”, when the West is actually statistically worse than Putin: “Over the past twenty years, as documented in the table below, U.S. and allied air forces have dropped more than 337,000 bombs and missiles on other countries—an average of forty-six strikes per day.“ This is the sort of quantitative data that people should think about before they blindly swallow the pro-war messaging from the establishment. The West is NOT the good guys on the geopolitical stage, and we haven’t been for a long time. There are no “good guys” like in the movies, there are just old psychopaths playing games to stay in power.
Not really, Os. To be fair to Syed, he does say that Trump was correct in his dealings with China (which by hook or by crook he was), and he suggests Obama and the UK/EU were far too passive in dealing with Putin (which they were).
What he's saying there is "we invited this lot into our back garden, thinking they'd play nice. That was silly". And it was.
That was my point.. Trump explicitly tried to push China away. And he also explicitly told Germany to stop relying on Russian gas as it will be used against them. The democrats and establishment literally laughed in his face.
More than anything, western leaders miscalculated how shrewd Putin was. He had an aura as a master tactician, and as a consequence a lot of western leaders believed that he understood that the cost/benefit in an interdependent economic environment was heavily skewed against a full-scale war. But people close to Putin have been aware that he'd long since become incredibly paranoid, insular and obsessed with his own legacy. https://www.ft.com/content/c039db89-7201-4875-b31f-b41a511496f1?shareType=nongift Which is why there's a bit of a danger in suggesting this could have been headed off if the west did ________. Even as it stands, we alternately get the explanation that the west was too passive toward Putin, endlessly seeking negotiation while his actions became more brazen, and that the west was too aggressive, forcing conflict rather than negotiating. I'm not saying either is strictly incorrect, but you can easily imagine a scenario where Europe winnowed its dependence on Russian petrochemicals, followed by an invasion of Ukraine, with the post facto explanation being that removing the EU-Russia economic interdependence left Russia with nothing to lose.
And then there was. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/27/brexit-done-northern-ireland-protocol-sunak It was all going to be so easy. It's not all over yet brexshit w.ill never be done. There may be a hope that the UK will join the customs union and single market though that would upset the ERG, Farage the gatemouthed gobshite and other loony fringes.
Rishi Sunak, who, let’s not forget, campaigned for Brexit, has pointed out that if the Windsor Agreement can be implemented, the people of Northern Ireland will be in the unique position of having a free trade agreement with not only the rest of the UK, but with the European Union Single Market as well! The utter imbecility of this situation is beyond belief. Does he even realise the implications of what he has said?
Scotland will want something similar, plus let's not forget he was Boris's Chancellor during the previous lash-up. He supported and was party to The Liar's policies.
