Russia has pulled its top ambassador after commentary made by Biden. The article also talks about Biden dredging up 2016 election issues for seemingly no good reason at all, unless the Facebook ads really upset him that much.
Seems fine, Russia is basically testing the line for war on the Cyber front. Finally we have a commander in chief who won’t sack his chief intelligence officers for even speaking to the problem.
This is a weird thread. Who is trying to hit a home run with Russia?
Seems like a mistake for Biden to me. Not exactly reestablishing American diplomacy, more like a sound bite for domestic politics. I’m not for coddling Russia for personal vanity either, but this seems less productive than I would hope.
Let’s say you believe Putin is not just a killer in the ordinary, commander-in-chief way like you, but actually personally mixed the novichok that was put in Navalny’s underpants (socks first wouldn’t help), yet you don’t have the proof to back it up. What good does it do to label him a killer, as opposed to couching it in more diplomatic language?
Good thought. I think saying mean things about the bad-guys is a way to publicly signal that you want to build a public good-guy alliance against them.
I don’t know if that’s better than trying to say nice things about your enemy. Both are kind of pointless.
By “hits a home run”, I meant “made stupid public comments that benefit no one and only harm relations in a provocative way”.
diplomacy with russia? methinks big stick is the only way
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putins response to being called a killer was “takes one to know one”
what u talkin bout putin?
In Russia home hits you when you run
That depends on whether you think relations with Putin are worth having.
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It isn’t just a question of relations with Putin. Do you want to continue the brand of needlessly inflammatory language and demagoguery that recently characterized US “diplomacy” or do you want to return to something more thoughtful?
Completely agree. Russia will never be the friendliest place for the US, but not having diplomatic relations with a country of over 145M people is absurd. And it wasn’t over anything provocative that Russia did; it was simply Biden saying “Russia will pay for meddling in 2016”, as if both: they somehow changed the outcome, and that the US hasn’t meddled in plenty of foreign affairs.
Trump wasn’t a particularly great leader, to say the least, but at least he wasn’t storming our military all over the world in various police actions like pretty much every administration before him. If this is what we can come to expect from Biden, maybe that lowered cognitive capacity that I thought was fake news needs to revisited a little…
Nearly every individual sentence in this post is dishonest, irrational, or centered around bad assumptions.
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I think some level of relationship is valuable. But you don’t need to always be sweet to each other. We’ve had a lot treaties with enemies in the past (Iran most recently) while at the same time admitting that they are evil.
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Feel free to elaborate. I re-read my post to look for typos, and I found none.
The fact that we meddle in other people’s elections doesn’t mean we should excuse others meddling in ours. It is an act of aggression, like bombing. We bomb other countries, that doesn’t mean we should passively allow other countries to bomb us.
It was the 2020 election that Biden referred to, not 2016.
It’s completely unknowable whether Russia changed the outcome of the 2016 election. They used fake news, hacking attempts, the Clinton email dump, and a large army of internet trolls. It’s the trolls I think that probably did the most damage, that we have no real way of measuring.
It’s hard to tell, but I don’t think Trump chose to “police” or “not police” any more than any other US president. He generally didn’t have the same opportunities as past presidents.
And while I agree it’s necessary to have relations with Russia, I don’t think that necessitates refusing to admit that Putin is a killer.
Yeah, I’m sure all those Facebook ads are really what put Trump over the top, and not the fact that Hillary was just a bad candidate.
:whynotboth:
Did you even read the articles that published the ads? They weren’t aimed at any candidate in particular. Some of them were just funny, some absurd. The thought that they would influence anything in any meaningful way is laughable and naive. I think Russia may have been doing some experimenting with the effects of social media, but counting on those ads changing the result of the election? GTFO
Anyways, this is way off from the main point of the thread. We don’t need to be making unprovoked actions which cause major countries to pull their ambassadors. That’s not smart diplomacy, and it’s not good for anyone.