Normally when western powers are involved in a war they at least pretend they support the people in the enemy nation and just oppose its government. With Russia they're just "No, fuck your music, fuck your food, fuck your books, fuck your cats, fuck everything about all of you."

?

The word "detente" has been deliberately scrubbed from the western lexicon. This has created a false dichotomy where everyone thinks the only choices are either escalate until we have a nuclear war or "OMG SO JUST GIVE PUTIN WHATEVER HE WANTS AND LET HIM TAKE OVER EUROPE???"

Any time you oppose freakish world-threatening escalations that's the response you always get: "So just give into the bully and let him have everything?? That's appeasement!" They're sincerely unaware that there's a third choice between World War 3 and crowning Putin Emperor of Planet Earth.

This is by design, because detente and US unipolar hegemony are mutually exclusive. You can't dominate the entire planet and also let Russia be its own nation; it's either one or the other. Detente was a popular concept back when we lived in a multipolar world, during the USSR, but since it's been dominated by one single superpower that word has been phased out of public awareness. Now that US unipolar hegemony is the normalized mainstream consensus ideal within the western empire, any talk of working toward peaceful solutions that don't subjugate one power to the other show up before indoctrinated minds as outrageous heresy.