> I wonder how the people in power form their opinions about what actions are necessary, and how the people making these decisions climb higher and higher into

> I wonder how the people in power form their opinions about what actions are necessary, and how the people making these decisions climb higher and higher into positions of power and decision making when the results all seem so awful. I suppose I'm only hearing about the bad outcomes, not the successes. Maybe paying more attention to geopolitics would yield this answer to you. The base of most conflicts is usually a resource war or outright coups to enable imperialism. With your example of Ukraine, the finding of large oil and gas fields under the east, west and Crimean regions in 2012 sealed it's fate. The Maidan revolution 2 years later was nothing more than a coup setup by Jonn McCain and Lindsey Graham. Then Shell moved in to look at how to extract said resources. Then it would have been likely Ukraine would be used as a base to cut off Russia's access to the middle east through the Volgograd Gap in order to more easily topple Assad, allowing the Qatar-Turkey pipeline to complete it's route through Syria, thus giving Europe an out from the Russian gas monopoly. Of course the Russians couldn't stand for any of that, so they formed their own opinions about what actions were necessary. The action they chose ended up hurting them with Germany being forced into, (not even forming their own opinions), the necessary actions of dropping the Nord Stream pipelines, adding $100bn to their military budget and signing a deal with Qatari's for access to the yet to be completed Qatar-Turkey pipeline. Of course all of this benefits the respective populations and corporations allowing them to climb into higher positions of power. We like to think that politicians don't think further than the next election cycle and it's mostly true. But the deeper structures in the respective state, the states needs, and corporate profit ARE in fact playing the long game, causing the politicians to almost stumble upwards in some twisted version of natural selection. When you take into account that US war corps get to test new weapons systems against a near peer adversary without having to sacrifice US lives, it's a perfect storm. Like that old Bill Hicks bit... "Bring up G12 Tommy; says here it destroys everything but the fillings in their teeth!"