It's owned by a Russian and is historically a Russian brand - the NH guv said they are banning Russian brands whatever that means. In any case, it's an entirely symbolic gesture that has 0 impact. It just goes to show how little influence we have on anything Russia.
On Thursday, State Department spokesman Ned Price made a stunning admission regarding what this war is really all about. According to Price, Russia and China “also want a world order”, but he warned that if they win their world order “would be profoundly illiberal”… China has given “tacit approval” for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest invasion of Ukraine, in the judgment of U.S. officials, as part of a joint effort to undermine the institutions that American and allied leaders established to minimize conflict in the decades following World War II. “Russia and the PRC also want a world order,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said Wednesday. “But this is an order that is and would be profoundly illiberal. … It is an order that is, in many ways, destructive rather than additive.” It would take an entire book to unpack everything that Price said there. First of all, by stating that Russia and China “also want a world order”, he was tacitly admitting that the United States and other western nations desire to have a “world order” of their own. And he implied that what we are witnessing is a battle over who will ultimately run the “world order”. That should deeply alarm all of us. Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world where nobody had global domination as their goal?
Isn't this a continued carryover from WWII? Neither Germany or Japan have ever built up strong militaries since then.
Yes, it is. No one actually WANTS Germany to build up a military given its past history. But it's fun to then complain about, apparently.
At the same time you just don't want to play that game. We can all speculate on Putins use of nukes but here's the thing - nukes aren't going to get used at the first sign of trouble. It's going to happen in an escalation. One thing leads to another and one side decides to send a message to say they mean business, and it can just keep escalating from there. There's a very good reason that Russian forces and Nato forces have never engaged one another. A reason why it was called the cold war. Both sides understood the gravity of a single engagement - of one attack on one aircraft or one soldier firing a bullet at the other side. If NATO and Russia were to have a war, the side that is losing is going to be highly tempted to use a nuke.
Of course they are using Russia and they don’t want to appear to be aligning themselves with the West either. That doesn’t mean that they are going to want to be seen as actively supporting or defending Russia.
Which would be a major escalation. If someone perpetrated such an act against us or the Europeans, we would respond to that as a virtual declaration of war and the response by us would be fast and probably rather extreme. The Russians will regard this similarly and their retaliation, whatever that consists of, is almost assuredly going to be quite remarkable. These fools are then in all likelihood going to be standing around with their mouths agape, slack-jawed in stunned amazement that the Russians dared to defy them in such an aggressively hostile manner. And then what?
I think it’s been good to see the Ukrainians put up a fight but I tend to agree that’s it’s a matter of time before the Russians gain the upper hand.
