Comments by "Nicholas Conder" (@nicholasconder4703) on "Whatifalthist" channel.

I think two other reasons for America going crazy now can be summed up in two words, fear and frustration. This falls into several categories: fear of change, fear of losing status, fear of losing power, fear that other people want my stuff, fear of what will happen if we don't get our way as a sociopolitical group, etc. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself". And people are frustrated at their inability to make their voices heard or at the apparent lack of progress towards whatever goal they espouse. More than anything, I think it is these two human emotions that are driving American politics and radicalization, much as what happened in the 1850s in the US. Both then and now, fear and frustration are the forces that drove (and are driving) events.
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10:50 What your map of Georgia does not show is that Russian troops (paratroopers) were already present in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgia, on August 6th. This was the day BEFORE Georgia attacked the breakaway regions. This was confirmed by RUSSIAN journalists reporting on the events. There is also information that the breakaway regions actually started the hostilities by firing on Georgia, at the behest of the Kremlin. So this was a war of Russian aggression to prevent Georgia from entering the EU and possibly NATO (something that ignored the sovereign right of the country to choose its own path forward).
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I think your timeline is off. Putin announced his decision to rebuild the Russian Empire back in 2007 at Munich. He was already well on his way to starting the war in Georgia and invading Ukraine at that point. And global resource prices crashed AFTER Russia invaded both Crimea and the Donbass, so there is no cause and effect here. Putin and his cronies also started "consolidating" the tank and aircraft manufacturers, as well as 4 of the 6 oil and gas companies (the Russian government took over ownership of most of these companies using proxy corporations) starting in 2002. Russia was already heading towards the totalitarian state it is today back as early as 2002. It basically shows that right from the very beginning (in 2000) Putin wanted to rebuild the Russian Empire in the footprint of the Soviet Union and Czarist Empires, and then some (check out Russkiy Mir and "Foundations of Geopolitics" for more info). Putin never had a desire to grow Russia as a society. Putin is a sociopath, someone who sees everyone else as a tool to be manipulated as he pleases. The EU and US response to the invasion of Crimea in 2014, and more particularly Ukraine in 2022 (which showed him the collective West could not be manipulated), must have come as an absolute shock to him.
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