Quote:
Originally Posted by jfman
The problem is if you ask nurses they say we need to spend more on healthcare, you ask teachers they say education, you ask the military industrial complex and they say defence. Scaremongering stories about what could happen elsewhere ignore that the Ukraine issue (Russian narratives or otherwise) was a decade in the making.
The short story, while an entertaining read, seems to ignore that it’s not the absence of troops or equipment preventing intervention - it’s not having an independent foreign policy from the United States (Article 5 or otherwise).
I don’t think there’s anything 4D chess about straightforward extortion. Trump could have picked up the idea from countless TV movies about “the mob”.
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Surprisingly, on these points, we are in substantial agreement
---------- Post added at 09:28 ---------- Previous post was at 09:16 ----------
I should add by the way that Mike Martin’s ‘short story’ was actually a Xitter thread compiled by a thread-reader app, which may have given the impression that it was presented as a more substantial piece of analysis than it was intended to be. As a threaded series of posts on Twitter it should be taken for what it is - a simple set of observations. His proposal is that we don’t realise how quickly Art.5 could crumble in the current climate and I think his outline scenario demonstrates that. The strategic failings that brought us here aren’t ignored, they’re just part of a different discussion he happens not to have addressed here.