Comments by "hedgehog3180" (@hedgehog3180) on "Putin and The West: The Full History" video.

  1. A lot of criticisms of NATO fundamentally misunderstand how it functions, there's a tendency to adopt a very simplistic model of imperialism where America is treated as the sole actor with agency and everyone else are just its pawns. It is without a doubt true that America is the most influential member of the alliance and that it does use said influence for its own gains but said influence doesn't exist solely through NATO. The reason why NATO often acts in unison and seemingly in alignment with American interests is not because the other member states have no agency but rather because the interests of all the member states tend to be aligned or the US can apply enough pressure to align them. NATO member states have fairly closely integrated economic systems so this often means that they share interests, obviously most of the coalition is part of the EU and has a shared market so they're very closely integrated. Basically NATO states go along with the US often because they believe it is in their own interest. Now how did this come about? Well basically the Marshall Aid in two words. NATO might exist with very little coercion today but it wasn't exactly created without it, a lot of European states post-WWII wanted to remain neutral in the coming cold war and thus were hesitant to join NATO. Especially in the light of the fact that western powers had previously had a terrible record of holding up their end of security agreements and the US had been fairly isolationist now. However the US often conditioned Marshall Aid upon a country joining NATO and so they did. The Marshall Aid succeeded in building up strong capitalist economies in Western Europe that were closely tied to the American one and as such it created this shared interest. However NATO membership and the Marshall Aid also carried obvious benefits to the individual nations that joined, they became part of the first world and small countries like Denmark or Norway that had previously been at the whim of neighboring major powers for the first time experienced lasting peace. This wealth of course often came at the expense of the third world but seen purely from the perspective of individuals living in a country it was a win-win. This is of course why NATO membership looked so attractive to Eastern European countries after the end of the Cold War. At this point NATO had a proven track record of providing peace and the US generally left member states alone to do what they wanted internally so long as the free market remained. Not to mention you could also join the EU and get access to something similar to the Marshall Aid but on a more permanent basis. NATO works not because the US is hegemonic within it but rather because the US makes sure to align the interests of all the allies with it's own. And I'm saying this as a major critic of NATO and the US and I do believe both are imperialist. But NATO is part of that imperialism, NATO countries get to share in the spoils and so remain loyal to the US. But as observers might have noticed cracks are starting to form in this relationship with the rise of the EU as a new player on the world stage which has interests that don't necessarily always align with those of the US. Right now the Ukraine war has temporarily aligned everyone's interest but before then you could clearly see them diverging as the US became more focused on China while the EU didn't see it as a major threat.
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  2. One correction. The Soviet Union was arguably a lot more open to the west than the Tsarist regime, the Tsar had used very similar propaganda to what Putin is currently using to try to cement his rule and Nicholas himself was a staunch traditionalist. The only difference is that the Tsar blamed the jews while Putin blames the queers or wokes or whatever the fuck it is these days. The Soviet Union might have been at odds with some western countries due to the civil war and differences in ideology but initially it seemed like that might be forgotten, a trade treaty was established with the UK for example and during a major famine the US was instrumental in supplying aid to the USSR and everyone seemed to get along more or less. Relations did start to break down in the interwar period for many complicated reasons including internal politics on both sides but the USSR did still "look west" in that as part of it's industrialization program it imported a lot of western methods and technology and generally embraced western styles of administration. This sounds less odd when you remember that universal suffrage was a very new concept in the west at the time, and most Soviet citizens thought that their country was heading in the same direction, it would just take some time because they had to rebuild after the civil war. Stalin was the biggest driver in changing this, he started undoing a lot of the liberal reforms that had initially happened in the wake of the revolution though then WWII did happen and the west and the USSR did genuinely get along again for a while.
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