I think you are being hyperbolic and ignoring the impact of the entire world watching these protests in real time vs a couple of journalists taking candid photos from hotel rooms and calling in to their home offices.
The world watched ukraine be split in half. The world IS watching the uyghur population in china being enslaved. The world's been doing an awful lot of watching lately...not much acting.
What can the world do? Military action against china? Insane. More trade sanctions? what what will we wear and where will we get batteries and plastics?
You are comparing direct military action to civilian protests.
I don't like what happened in Ukraine, but there is no realistic resolution to that problem without starting a world war. I don't like it but that's how it is.
The Uyghur's are another issue, and I feel like it supports my position more than yours. We wouldn't even know about what is happening to them without social media. The world is watching now.
Same could be said for the Rohinga.
The world sucks, and governments do evil shit all the time. The difference now is that they can't hide behind their lies.
Without starting a flame war, lets check thoroughly if it is actually the case.
1. Who are Russian allies? How many of them? How much will their military capability contribute to fighting force? Answer: 0
2. Can enough Nato forces be deployed to decisively push the front? Yes
3. Can casualty ratio be sustained? Yes
4. Can subsequent enemy counterattack be made wasteful? Can your logistics train support prolonged defense? Yes, Nato militaries' trademark is tenths of kilometres long area denial killzones, enough to outrange even TBMs and nuclear artillery. American military logistics is second to none.
5. Can your gains be secured without you having to push further into enemy territory? Yes, to begin with, it was Russia here that had to operate across natural barriers, and frontline bottlenecks.
6. All of above boils down to conventional positional warfare.
Nato countries had all tools they need to enforce global order all these years, but they didn't because of their weak will.
When the Union collapsed, you saw a wave of all kinds of dictatorships and satrapies falling down or softening up, all because they knew that there is no longer a big guy behind their backs now, and that Nato can to "desert storm" any of them 10 times over.
All and everything was setup for the West to police the world for 3 decades, and use that time to clean the world from rouge states, but no, the West choose to simply walk away from that opportunity.
I think in a conventional war then yeah NATO clearly has the upper hand except that niggling doubt of "Do we really want to kill tens of thousands of soldiers belonging to a country with enough ICBM's to end global civilization".
The risk/reward is out of whack, the US and it's allies aren't going to risk it for a non-NATO allied country (even if we promised that we would after the cold war) because of that.
Since WWII the US and Soviets (then Russia) have never thought even a limited conventional war, it's always been by proxy or the odd pilot never people is US army uniforms shooting at people in Russian uniforms (or vice versa).
There are enough conventional munitions stockpiled by major power to do this 10 times more than with ICBMs alone. A nuclear confrontation will not be the end of any global scale conflict today.
I think you are being hyperbolic and ignoring the impact of the entire world watching these protests in real time vs a couple of journalists taking candid photos from hotel rooms and calling in to their home offices.