This is a key point. Eastern European countries wanted to join NATO because they didn't want to be invaded by Russia. ISTM Putin's problem with the expansion of NATO is it left fewer and fewer small countries that he could invade with impunity. OTOH, Mexico and Canada are not terrified of an expansionist USA.
The US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were travesties. I was against them. I am also against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On top of that, Russia vastly outmatched the US in terms of genocide and horrific war crimes. And perhaps the biggest difference is the US planned to eventually leave or mostly leave both Iraq and Afghanistan while Putin has made it perfectly clear he wants to make Ukraine a permanent part of Russia and use it as a springboard to move on and conquer other countries.
IMO there are two kinds of people who create endless, needless problems around a CEO who is in the news a lot: those who think he can do nothing right, and those who think he can do nothing wrong. The same is probably true of the USA and of Russia. Going on and on about how $X can do nothing right (or nothing wrong) is tiresome and unhelpful. Saying something is wrong (or right) merely because $X did it makes no sense. We are all imperfect beings in an imperfect world.
I thought the initial operation in Afghanistan was justified, but the US should have gone in, gotten Al Qaeda leadership and got out. They screwed the pooch because when they did get Al Qaeda's leadership cornered, too many troops had been drawn off into the upcoming Iraqi campaign and they didn't have the troops they needed to close the deal. Whether they managed to get the leadership or not, after that phase of the operation was over, the US should have pulled the plug and got out.
Iraq was flat out wrong from the start. I strongly suspected the whole WMD claims were fabricated. The whole thing reeked of a wag the dog operation. When I got the numbers the US were planning on using, I knew it was doomed. The invasion needed to have 540,000 troops or a insurgency was inevitable. The entire strength of the US Army was 500,000 at that time. Then the neo-cons chosen to run the occupation were picked more for their loyalty to the party rather than any expertise. They screwed things up from the start.
There was a book written about the occupation,
Imperial Life in the Emerald City. I knew the occupation was botched, but the book made it clear that it was worse than I imagined.
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The US had no reason to go into Iraq and should have just let Saddam Hussein wither and die on the vine. I said at the time that it was probably the worst strategic mistake the US had ever made.
But all that said, US military operations since 1898 are for other reasons than military conquest. The US led world order since WW II has frowned upon wars of conquest. The US has done military operations for dumb reasons, but they have not gone to war to add territory to the US since WW II. And wars of conquest have been frowned on by the bulk of the world.
The war in Ukraine is the first war conducted by a major power since WW II to attempt to take over another country and keep it.
Let me play this a different way and see how this rhymes with you:
If Cuba an independent sovereign nation decides they want to be a full blown communist country and moves towards a strong diplomatic and military alliance with Russia (or CPC) opening its borders to military bases, the western US frauds in the name of "democracy and freedom" and their minions gets no say whatsover about that. Simple as that.
I will tell you what US would do. In a blink of an eye, missiles will be raining down on Havana and ground troops will be entering Cuban shores, long before the ink is dry.
Replace Cuba-Russia against US, with Taiwan-US against China, or with Sri Lanka-China against India - you would get the same reaction from the closest big neighbor. The bigger neighbor is not going to be twiddling their thumbs as their immediate vicinity is being gobbled up by enemy forces through coercion and diplomacy.
Cuba is a full blown communist country. It's been that way since1959.
The US is somewhat hypocritical, but the Monroe Doctrine still holds. The US considers the western hemisphere its sphere of influence and no outside power is to interfere. Overall the other countries of this hemisphere like the arrangement. It has kept them relatively free of European interference for 200 years. The US has done some military land grabs (Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War), but both of those were in the 19th Century. In the modern era, the US does not invade any other country in this hemisphere and shields the other countries from interlopers from the outside.
If Russia were to try and get Cuba onto more of a war footing with the US, the US would probably not invade Cuba, or even attack them directly. The US would likely establish a blockade of Cuba and prevent anything going in or out.
Back in 1961 Khrushchev thought that if the US could base missiles in Turkey than Russia could base them in Cuba, but they learned about the Monroe Doctrine. Russia would probably not do that again.
But there is a big difference between the way the US behaves and the way Russia behaves. Russia has carved out pieces of other neighboring countries in this century. They have taken a stance of being belligerent with their neighbors. A lot of countries that border Russia are nervous about Russia's next move for good reason. Russia's track record says they will eventually come for those smaller countries if they aren't in a strategic military alliance with somebody much bigger.
On the other hand, the US may not like what Cuba is doing, or what other western hemisphere countries are doing, but the US leaves them alone militarily. The Bay of Pigs was a US backed effort to get pro-US Cubans to take back their own country. The US military was not putting boots on the ground there. The US has sent special forces into other western hemisphere countries, but nobody is worried about the US coming to take over. As far as nation state military action, North and South America are the two quietest continents on Earth.
In military parlance there is the concept of the force in being. Having a large military force sitting there that can go into action against anything that triggers it can serve as a damper on anyone trying anything. In WW II the British kept a large part of their fleet at Scapa Flow as a force in being prepared to go up against the Kriegsmarine surface forces if they ever put to sea. It kept the German surface ships bottled up in port for most of the war. It also tied down a large part of the Royal Navy, but they could afford it because they had the larger navy and starting in 1942 they had flank support from the US Navy.
One reason the US has not been giving Ukraine everything it can is to maintain a force in being to deter anyone in the world from doing anything crazy. That included Taiwan. The US is taking the military threat from China very seriously. The US has always had a series of war plans based on any contingency. In WW II they started executing War Plan Orange on Dec 8, 1941. There were many different colored plans including one for the scenario where the British decide to try and take back their breakaway colonies in North America. This plan actively worked on as late as the late 1930s.
The modern US military is built to be engaged in two major conflicts in widely separated theaters at the same time. There is not enough active equipment nor troops to be actively engaged on the ground with both China and Russia at once, but there is enough air and naval power to do it. Activating reserve equipment and building up the army would take time. But US air power can be on station within a few days of the US having to get engaged in conflict.
People like Ramaswamy are either throwing bombs at the current administration because they are playing politics instead of policy or they are just idiots who think they know more than they really do. I can make my guesses about who is doing which, but in the end the result is the same.
The Biden administration has taken on China far more substantially than Trump's administration did with a long term plan to strengthen US advantages. One move is the CHIPS Act which is bringing key IC manufacturing back to the US. The first goals are to secure the supply chain for military parts, but commercial parts will be made in these new plants too. In other areas the US is industrializing as fast as it did during WW II. Lots of manufacturing is being built up in the US which will over the long term take manufacturing back from China.
The answer from the Trump administration is to impose ever greater tariffs which are a tax on Americans. Trump insists they aren't, but anyone who understands tariffs knows that it's a tax on Americans. Tariffs do nothing directly to bring manufacturing back to the US. The incentives in the infrastructure bills Biden got through do directly encourage American manufacturing. Some tariffs while domestic manufacturing is spinning up might help nudge the needle over, but tariffs alone aren't going to do the job.
The US has a fully formed war plan for dealing with a move by China on Taiwan. China is not ready to try an invade Taiwan right now and there are no signs that they are doing anything more than harassing Taiwan. China also has a severe problem in initiating military operations that almost no other country with a large military has: they have zero experience actually fighting a war. And Taiwan would be an amphibious operation, which is difficult to pull off even for a power with lots of naval experience.
When a country goes to war, there are a zillion things that they don't know they don't know. They learn them by making mistakes and learning from them. When the US went to war in 1941, it hadn't fought a war since 1918, but there were old hands who knew something about fighting a war. The US had some very painful lessons to learn before the end of the war, but there was a base to build on with the learning curve. China going to war is starting with all second hand knowledge. The last officers who went to war have retired and any lessons learned from that war are obsolete because their military today is a completely different force with a completely different mission.
The world is taking China seriously as a threat because they are a large force in being. Once they commit to an actual military operation, they lose the advantages of having a force in being. It becomes a committed force making real world mistakes in a real world war. Nobody, including China knows how their military will perform in a real shooting war and that uncertainty makes everyone cautious.
The world has some idea what to expect from the US in a real shooting war because the US was at war as little as three years ago. But the US also being a force in being keeps everyone who would oppose them cautious.
Putting someone in charge that the rest of the world considers an idiot might encourage someone to do something. As much as the media talks about Biden being senile (he isn't), the rest of the world knows he is competent and he has competent people in his administration. They don't always get it right, but they react much more like other US administrations have in the past before Trump.
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