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If the people of Ukraine ask for assistance
What do we do if the people of Palestine ask for assistance? Or the people of Yemen?
What we do is ignore them and sell arms to the people who are opressing them and killing them. We, or more precisely, our government, has a choice when it is asked to do something and it exercises it based on what it thinks is our, or its, interest.
There is no grand principal of helping the opressed to fight back against a bully and there never has been.
The UK practically used the freedom to choose how to respond based on pure self-interest without any discernible principle as the main plank of its foreign policy for a hundred years up to the start of the first world war. 'Perfidious Albion', etc - because the French in particular, whenever they did anything to try to contain the threat they saw from Germany, never knew whether we were going to support them or oppose them.
frank9755-
There is no grand principal of helping the opressed to fight back against a bully and there never has been.
Maybe now's a good time to start then.
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The UK practically used the freedom to choose how to respond based on pure self-interest without any discernible principle as the main plank of its foreign policy for a hundred years up to the start of the first world war. 'Perfidious Albion', etc - because the French in particular, whenever they did anything to try to contain the threat they saw from Germany, never knew whether we were going to support them or oppose them.
I'm aware of the term Perfidious Albion and the reasons why it exists, but thanks for the history lesson.
On a practical front, what do you think the UK should do when the democratically-elected and, at present, apparently wildly popular government of Ukraine asks for military assistance?
'Negotiations and an end to the war' is not an answer. It's the equivalent of 'thoughts and prayers'. Negotiations are already unway. The end of the war is an objective. If you want to reach that objective, you have to have a plan on how to get there. And I hope we'd agree that asking the Russians nicely if they'll just go home isn't going to work.
So, do you think we should refuse requests for military aid from the democratically elected government of Ukraine because we haven't helped other oppressed people in the past, and we'd like to keep a level playing field?
Do you think we should refuse, because we're Perfidious Albion and that's a track record we're proud of?
Or do you think we should refuse because we're in the happy position of not being invaded ourselves, so we can just sit on the sidelines and bask in our own moral superiority while doing nothing except spouting warm words about negotiations and peace?
Brommers
It's also possible that they have the ability to think for themselves, don't want to occupied by Russia, and would rather fight than surrender. If the people of Ukraine ask for assistance it would be patronising in the extreme to tell them that this isn't really want they want.