Pragmatically, because most of the worlds population is tribal ethnic minorities have to be accommodated somehow in the short run. But in the long run ideally, since the world is organized politically on the basis of geographical nation-states the solution is to promote assimilation and form thick national identities for individuals regardless of blood kinship, including immigrants.

This doesn’t mean promoting some generic cosmopolitanism—there will always be local loyalties and special interest groups but encouraging the formation of more porous pseudo-ethnic identities that track geopolitical lines more closely and are, at least to some extent, voluntary.

Nothing remarkable in what Stalin did there; it was a very simple game – to pit Hitler against the other side and let them bleed – and in the end they all lost. But it has nothing to do with anything here.

Not nonsense at all. Almost everybody agrees that Stalin was caught with his pants down and that the SU military was in a terrible state.

because it wasn’t worthy of an answer.

Why? I thought he made a perfectly reasonable point.

Everything is a gamble, maybe (probably) Stalin expected Germany to invade the British Isles and planned to attack Germany himself at that time. If that had happened, would it then validate his strategy as brilliant? Nobody knows the future.

How much better could the Red Army have done with four weeks’ warning of the invasion, rather than four hours?

But to the Russians, Stalin’s still a hero. Which, in a way, answers the question above about why the West is still apparently so determined to constrain Russia – because they’re bloody dangerous, that’s why.

Though the political philosophy (or whatever the discipline is) issue being discussed here is hardly relevant to Europe circa 1939. I dunno, it just seems silly to bring it up; you know, like: was it despicable for Genghis Khan to invade China?

And the whole “buffer” argument is pretty much admitting that the whole thing was bunk. Suppose for a crazy second that the Guatemalans got crazy and US started to worry about them and said “ok, look Mexico, we’re worried about the Guatemalans so we’ll just take half your country as a “buffer”“. Now maybe the US fears of the crazy Guatemalans would be justified. But why should they get a buffer at Mexico’s expense?

If you’re gonna call everything that states do “politics” – as long as they’re acting roughly in their own self interest – then what’s the point of this discussion? You can look after your own interest and do so in ways that aren’t despicable, and then, you can look after your own self interest in ways that trample on others. It’s silly to pretend the two are in the same category.

(and yes, yes, yes, it’s not a black or white sort of thing)

To avoid the whitewashing altogether, one could note that everybody collaborated with the Nazis: the UK, the US, France, Switzerland, the Soviet Union, Zionists, probably Poland too. They all were trying to manipulate the Nazis to their advantage: get them to move East, to move West, to get their money, to expel Jews to Palestine, etc. If there was some political entity in Europe that didn’t collaborate with the Nazis, that’s only because they couldn’t find a way.

That’s called ‘politics’.

Because it wasn’t worthy of an answer.

My personal point of view is that both the Balkans
“problem” and the Palestinian “problem” are due to
all parties involved ignoring a basic law of Physics, i.e., two bodies cannot simultaneously
occupy the same point in time and space. But of course, they intuitatively full well realize
such things without a PhD in particle physics—hence all plans A-Z inevitably fall back on the “God is on the side of the bigger battalions” theorem. A theorem that has stood the test of time at least as well as anything Newton or Einstein managed to conger up.