Comments by "gerhard7" (@gerhard7323) on "China's Role in Ukraine | Peter Hitchens #CLIP" video.

China's turbocharged economic ascent was powered less by the West's lofty desire to seed democracy there and far more by the desperation that followed the financial crash of 2008 and its need to keep its massively over-indebted consumer economies afloat on the cheap.
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Hitchens echoes the point that's been made repeatedly for years about Western cherry picked moral relativism vs moral absolutism. Little wonder that much of the world outside the West, certainly in terms of sheer numbers, refuses to outright condemn Russia's actions in Ukraine.
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People seem to forget that a still economically broken, but still militarily powerful Russia around 1994 made positive noises around joining NATO. Though many Europeans were reportedly keen on the idea the US dismissed the idea out of hand.
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@HelenA-fd8vl It would have been under his first presidency, yes. It was also under Clinton that NATO sought to expand eastwards in spite of earlier alleged assurances from both Baker and Bush Snr to Gorbachev that this would not happen if the Soviet Union pledged not to oppose the reunification of Germany.
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@HelenA-fd8vl Certainly one way of looking at it and arguably the way that has led us to where we are today. There were arguments, good arguments, that when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Warsaw Pact alliance disappeared there was really no longer any need for NATO to exist. Arguments made by a good many American politicians and intellectuals incidentally. Nato has long been seen as a way of keeping America in Europe, the Russians out and the Germans down. Make of that what you will, but there are consequences for that approach and Ukraine is one of them, for good or ill.
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@ollymark11651 Yes, I strongly suspect that was one of the reasons. A resource rich, still militarily powerful, nuclear Russia 'in Europe' would have been seen as a potential threat to the US both militarily and economically.
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@charleswu1541 True, but Germany's economy has been heavily reliant on Chinese growth and Russian energy up till now.
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@elektrotehnik94 True, but our politicians seem intent in the West in presenting our decisions to our own peoples and the rest of the world as the 'morally correct' ones when, in fact, they are so very often made in our own self-interests to the obvious detriment of others. There seems to be this prevailing mindset in the West then, certainly amongst the populations and its media, that the rest of the world is too backward and/or dumb to see these actions for what they truly are. I have no problem with the idea of realpolitik whatsoever, but what I have come to increasingly resent is the way in which these harsh choices are dressed up in a cloak of morality and respectability by our politicians and media. Our societies, generally, are more open, safe, secure and prosperous than others not least because we have leant to continually exploit and undermine others far weaker and less so outside the blessed fold.
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@HelenA-fd8vl Of course they don't. They can't possibly. As PH puts it though, 'giving a man a Mercedes doesn't suddenly make him a democrat'. The one thing I would say is that Bill Clinton got many, many things wrong but by the time they manifested themselves he was long gone. Sowing the seeds of the subprime crisis and letting China into the WTO were the real biggies there and two things which, I believe, are now inextricably linked and we are now enduring the consequences of.
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