Comments by "MarcosElMalo2" (@MarcosElMalo2) on "Ukraine War Updates Part 3: What’s Next for Russia || Peter Zeihan" video.

@duke9555 The threat posed doesn’t go away if Russia gets everything Putin wants. But Ukraine doesn’t constitute a threat to Russia, not even an existential one. It’s a threat to Empire and to the power of a regime, not to the Russian nation. The basic problem is this: You know how in James Bond movies, the international criminal organization S.P.E.C.T.R.E. wants to acquire a nuke so it can blackmail the world? The Russian government is S.P.E.C.T.R.E. And if S.P.E.C.T.R.E. can successfully blackmail the world once, it will keep using the threat. That is the nature of a criminal organization. It’s an open maw that must be endlessly stuffed because it has an insatiable appetite for power. It’s an endless suck. Ukraine isn’t really an existential threat to the people of Russia, but a nuclear armed criminal empire IS a threat to the rest of the world. Russia would be fine if its government stopped trying to be an imperial power. I don’t know how you defang the snake here, but I don’t think you do it by making concessions. Peter is right, however, that we need to be thinking about what happens after hostilities cease, whether or not Ukraine has liberated all of its territories currently occupied by Russia. He’s wrong that no one is thinking about it or discussing it.
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Shannon Kohl, your gut is telling you the truth. The “existential threat” isn’t to Russia, the threat is to a criminal organization which is clinging to its former status as an empire. Worse, they are clinging to a delusional dream of greater empire. “Imperial Russia” is like a shark that must continuously swim forward or die. And it’s been restrained from swimming forward ever since the end of the Soviet Union. It been dying for 30+ years and is in its death throes, thrashing out (and receiving a thrashing, ironically). Russia as a nation can potentially survive this thrashing, but the worse off it will be the longer it’s government clings to power and it’s dream of power. So you’re 100% right on that score. Anyway, I think you just said as much but in different words, from a different perspective. Some people view the larger geopolitical conflict as a clash of two empires (or three, considering China as a separate empire than Russia), but the U.S. was not an empire. It was a hegemonic power, to be sure, and it did benefit from its status as hegemon as the European colonial empires declined and dissolved. Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. was called “the world Policeman”. You might even think it was a corrupt cop in this role if you continue this analogy. But it did manage to keep a lid on the communist empires while avoiding World War III. Along the way the U.S. made a lot of mistakes, propping up dictatorships and intervening against wars of national liberation. But it also shared power with likeminded nations, hence “the Free World” and “the Western Democracies”. Hence NATO. But I also think it is more than willing to step back and relinquish hegemonic power to other democracies and other regional powers (as long as those non-democratic powers stay in their lane and don’t try to destabilize their region).
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