No. of Recommendations: 26
But when it comes time to get around to doing that, you don’t want to do anything that requires a difficult choice. You’d rather “wait it out” and hope that Putin just up and quits. Never mind that the Ukraine is being beat to sh1t every single day.
The main point of the 300-post thread was to see what the libs on this board were willing to do to get Putin to stop. The answer was and is…nothing.
The libs on this board are willing to do a lot to get Putin to stop. After all, we're already doing a lot to get Putin to stop. We're not just "waiting it out" and hoping Putin quits, but continuing to exert the massive economic and military pressure that's being placed on him by our current actions.
But relevant to the topic of this thread, you're seeing exactly why we opposed secondary tariffs - they've made things worse. Right? They didn't get Putin to stop. They're not going to get Putin to stop, because they've improved Putin's situation. India's not reducing their oil purchases from Russia. They didn't respond to our "us or them" ultimatum by choosing us. To the contrary, Modi's now sidling up to Putin under the auspices of China - a process that will result in the BRIC alliance getting tighter while our own relations with India get worse.
That's the point, Dope. We didn't oppose the secondary tariffs because we want Ukraine (not "the" Ukraine, just Ukraine) to fail. We opposed secondary tariffs because they were a dumb idea. Just because the status quo is bad doesn't mean that a proposed idea is a good one, or can't make things worse - and that's exactly what happened here. Combined with the tariffs on Brazil and Trump's idiotic summit with Putin (which has put a stake in any efforts to diplomatically isolate Russia), Trump's been doing little but strengthening China (and Russia) for the last several months. We've shown ourselves to be an unreliable economic partner and an inconstant ally, and one that it is fundamentally dangerous for any world leader to trust. Modi was made to look a fool by Trump, who put higher tariffs on Indian than even China - and he knows it. The India-China relation is fraught (yes, I was capable of understanding Jedi's three sentences of post), but we've now made it vastly more beneficial for India to improve their relations with China at the expense of the U.S.
Trump is making it worse. He's making our efforts to contain China worse, he's making our efforts to push Putin out of Ukraine worse, and he's nuked several decades of diplomatic efforts to keep India in the Western fold rather than trying to accommodate China.
