Bush, Obama / Hillary, and Biden are no different than Putin, if not far worse. They deserve no more trust from Americans than a serial killer who took out members of your family for fun. They are reckless abusers, for greed and continued power.
(With one huge caveat, both the Middle Easterners and the South Americans are perfectly capable of starting various shit themselves. Don't deprive them of agency by painting them as blind and obedient puppets of Washington. Especially the Middle East is a very ancient civilization with a tradition of backstabbing and betrayal going deep into the Antiquity. They don't have to learn that from some Westerners.)
But in the context of European security, the main problem of the last decades was either the USSR or Russia, not the US. It was Soviet tanks that rolled through Czechoslovak cities in 1968 to crush our attempt at political independence, not American ones.
Context matters, and for former Soviet Bloc nations, Americans are an ally against potential reestablishment of Russian rule.
In 2023, a trusted, world-renowned expert — Bill Gates — stated that Ukraine is one of the single most corrupt nations in the world, and that he feels very sorry for the people there. [1] That says a lot, doesn't it?
Zelenskyy shuts down churches, imprisons political protestors and American journalists, and launders money back to the U.S. war machine after we "fund" them every month or less — to the order of $113 million per day now. How could anyone not see clearly what's happening there? It seems that people are so blinded by their hatred for Russia, that what the people are suffering in Ukraine on Ukraine's own accord isn't enough of a problem, despite how gaping it is.
Ukraine is corrupt. So what? Ukrainian corruption is a threat to no one. Not a single nation from Finland to Bulgaria considers itself vulnerable to Ukrainian military aggression, because they aren't an imperial nation and don't seek to dominate others. They were perfectly fine within their 1991 borders and never attempted to annex any extra territory by any means.
It is Russia's problem, in the words of great Václav Havel, that it does not know exactly where it ends.
All the hatred for Russia stems from their former heavy-handed rule of other nations. If they sincerely tried to make amends, it would slowly go away. They are now trying to rebuild their former imperial system. OF COURSE that nations which escaped their tyranny once are going to hate them.
It is freaking simple: we, as in Estonians, Latvians, Poles, Czechs, Rumanians, Ukrainians, Georgians etc. DON'T WANT TO BE THREATENED OR ATTACKED BY RUSSIA. That's it. We have had enough experience with Russian rule. It is primitive and brutal at the same time. Never again.
As a "Middle Easterner" (a colonialist term by the way), I didn't realize that the "Middle East" was one conglomerate culture. Thank you for teaching me about my history /s
We also speak of Western civilization, even though it doesn't equal to one conglomerate culture either.
As for 'colonialist' term ... sigh, do I care how people call Europe on Arabic or Turkish forums? Every cultural region has some lingo that reflects its history.
'Europe' itself is a Phoenician word that means "country of sunset". From their perspective, it was. Hereby I am forgiving old Phoenician colonialists (and they indeed colonized much of the Mediterranean) for naming some continent according to their local perspective. That is what people tend to do.
