"and I really don’t know who started it": This is as laughably funny as Lavrov the Laughed At Liar in New Delhi: https://twitter.com/search?q=lavrov%20G20&src=typed_query
"Both sides could have brought an intention of peace to the table. They did not." --Russia denies Ukraine exists. How do you negotiate your own existence with a giant genocidal bully who denies it? https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rhetoric-against-ukraine-a-collection/
If Mr. Dunn sends me his address, I’ll buy him this “expansion is non-negotiable” sweatshirt from the NAFO Fellas charity site: https://nafo-ofan.org/products/nafo-reds-crewneck-sweatshirt All proceeds donated to defenders of Ukraine.
"everyone that I have ever seen who has engaged in escalation to solve their problems, becomes unhappy."--No, they're quite happy while they're winning and before called to account by a power that can defeat them. All of the 20th century's dead empires had to lose colonial wars to be convinced to leave their colonies (Britain in Kenya, Malaya, France in Algeria and Indochina, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Ottomans in Arabia and the Balkans).
The US, the UK and the USSR were very happy with the outcome of WWII on May 8th and 9th, 1945. Unconditional surrender, not de-escalation, was the right strategy. Take one look at the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square to see how happy Americans were on the day Japan surrendered.
"whatever they do to others, can be done to them"— Actually, the Germans who levelled the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 and the rest of Warsaw in August-October 1944 knew that the Jews and the Poles could not do to them what the genocidal Germans were doing to their victims. Same for the Japanese who murdered 300000 Chinese in Nanjing and engaged in beheading contests later publicized in Japanese newspapers. For de-escalation to work there must be symmetry of power. In human conflict between irreconcilable opposites in which only one side has a future there is no de-escalation therapy solution, rendering this writer's customer service skill set useless. Only narcissistic hubris would induce anyone to believe in possession of a universal joint of geopolitical conflict resolution.
"Everyone wants to go to sleep knowing they did the right thing."--This imputes moral motives and denies that the narcissistic personality disorder driven addiction to power of men like Putin, Hitler, Mussolini, Idi Amin, Mao, Trump (Musso-mini), Stalin. The difference in the body counts between them is not psychological or moral but of scale, circumstance and opportunity.
Men of power like this see this writer's moral categories as a form of weakness, of losers.
Interpreting every geopolitical conflict or war between irreconcilable opposites as a therapy problem, when one side recognizably and self-declared genocidal, denies the existence of evil. Misapplied to Ukraine, it's the odious ideology of moral equivalence and ahistorical ignorance of Russia's 500 year history of expansion through genocidal conquest.
