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Well...
For the equal partner bit they'd probably have had to respect election results and stop murdering political rivals.
And that would just be a step too far.
Barely. They were in the G8. Even after being kicked out trade kept going as normal, new pipelines were being built, nuclear power plants were being shut down because who needs a fallback?
Saudi Arabia gets full honors on the international stage, despite publicly executing people for criticizing the government or having independent thought, and cutting up a journalist in a consulate abroad.
Not too sure about that. We're pals-y with plenty of authoritarian states. Even in the late 2000s and early 2010s we were so desperate to include Russia, corruption and authoritarianism and all, in the international order.
Above everything, you can get in good with the current international order simply by not making trouble for other countries. Russia, apparently, couldn't abide by even that minor restriction.
Honestly if Russia didn't do a full scale invasion and just annexed the lands they were originally aiming for I think the west would have probably ignored it like all their other activities in the region.
I suspect the irritation over the previous annexation of Crimea and Ukraine's increasingly pro-Western orientation would have led to a Western response even if the invasion wasn't full scale, but it's certainly not impossible that the West would've prioritized keeping things 'calm' over protecting Ukraine's sovereignty in such a scenario.
desperate to include Russia
This is not historically accurate
As long as they kept it to murdering political rivals within the country they would have been fine.
Everybody still does business with PRC, Saudi Arabia, etc
And that would just be a step too far.
Eh. Through the history of the 90s, it looked like they might have a shot at establishing a free and stable democracy.
Then privatization and mishandled foreign aid created their oligarchs, quality of life fell through the floor in basically all the post-Soviet states, people got mad, tired, and scared, Putin stepped in to "stabilize the situation"— Then the politicians and journalists started dying, crazy siloviks and vatniks fully captured what was left of their political institutions I guess, and now they're doing a lot of evil murder and various interesting atrocities.
There might have been/probably were underlying cultural factors that made it impossible for Russia to ever stabilize as a "normal" country at that point. But those are hard to see from an outside perspective, and I guess they're probably pretty hard to see from inside as well.
Sadly not a new story, most of the world considered Hitler a great man (He made the cover of Time Magazine) and had an "Aww shucks" attitude to most of the negatives what he did... then he started invading other countries, and even then the first one (Poland) got a shrug at first
"Not In My Backyard!" types have let all kinds of fuckery grow until it became their problem
It's worth reading the actual Times article that they ran with that cover.
https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,760539,00.html
Führer of the German people, Commander-in-Chief of the German Army, Navy & Air Force, Chancellor of the Third Reich, Herr Hitler reaped on that day at Munich the harvest of an audacious, defiant, ruthless foreign policy he had pursued for five and a half years. He had torn the Treaty of Versailles to shreds. He had rearmed Germany to the teeth— or as close to the teeth as he was able. He had stolen Austria before the eyes of a horrified and apparently impotent world.
It's not complimentary. Time's Man of the Year is based on influence. It's not saying that influence is good.
Same reason Trump was on it during his presidency iirc. Quoting them:
TIME has a long history of featuring presidents on the cover and Trump, whose presidency defied precedents and fractured norms, has been no exception. Eight of the top 10 people to appear most often on TIME’s cover are U.S. presidents.
Nixon, Reagan, and Bill Clinton have all been on more than Trump.
Fascism always winds up having to reach outside of its own borders.
Spain kept it going internally for decades.
Only because they didn't have a choice. The civil war destroyed their already mediocre industry and it was easier to just ally with the capitalists against the communists in exchange for financial aid.
Make no mistake, if it were possible for Franco to invade his neighbors he would have.
yeah what a paradise that turned into
Evil is uncontainable. If you accept bribe money, corruption will haunt your country.
Eating Chinese pussy is also good.
That's different topic mate. 😅
I'm just saying, if we're already sucking the dick... why not diversify our genital portfolio a little.
The implication here is that the west has a good relationship with Russia at some point, and that has never been true.
There were a few years of hope of a genuine partnership after the wall fell. That hope remained but arguably became delusional once Putin took charge.