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We Need a President Who Keeps His Eye on the Ball
I haven’t done President Biden the courtesy of looking up his full remarks, context and all. But I’ll risk jumping to the conclusion that he is an idiot for saying that Russia must pay a “long-term price.”
The main objective should not be Putin, and should not be Russia. The objective should be helping Ukraine to be free, democratic, and independent, and helping it to get rid of corruption, whether that corruption comes from Russian interference, interference by U.S. Vice Presidents, or is homegrown. If that can be done by making Russia pay only a short-term price, that would be far better than making it pay a long-term price.
Russians want to make their country great again and that’s a worthy objective that we should support, so long as Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic countries can be great nations, too. I don’t see how mouthing off about making Russia suffer long-term is going to help bring that about. Let’s help Ukraine get this war over quickly instead of dragging out the suffering over the long term.
Published in Foreign Policy
*** Checks notes ***
Who was it crossed whose borders? And whose cities are in rubble?
I agree with President Washington on this issue, and disagree with you. It makes no difference to us whether Russia is oppressing Ukrainians, or oppressing Russians. Russia was doing so for the first 200-odd years of our existence as a country, and it mattered not at all to us.
I think that your view is a very, very, very bad idea. It leads to our country intervening in many places around the world, at high cost in both blood and treasure, where we have no important interest. The interventions are often costly failures, as in Afghanistan, and rather than acknowledge that the intervention was foolish, the failure is used as a strange justification for continuing the same misguided policy.
I did used to support this type of thing. I am a recovering Neocon.
You are incorrect about the so-called guarantee to Ukraine. First, they were never Ukraine’s nukes. They were Russian nukes on Ukraine’s claimed soil. We were never going to allow an independent Ukraine with nukes, for obvious non-proliferation reasons. Nor did we promise to do anything other than consult.
I reject the “honor” argument — especially as you start with the dishonorable tactic of misrepresenting some supposed promise that we made, which we did not make, and which would not be enforceable anyway without an actual treaty obligation. And we can break treaties too, as President Washington did when an alliance with France proved inconvenient in changed circumstances.
This situation is so strange. You claim that we need to keep our word, yet Ukraine is not in NATO, and we have no obligation to defend Ukraine. Somehow, our foolish extension of the NATO obligation to countries bordering on Russia is then taken to imply that we have to defend countries that are not even in NATO. Where does it end?
I truly hope that we are not so foolish as to allow Sweden and Finland into NATO. Especially Finland, which has a long and indefensible border with Russia. If it’s important to keep our word, then it’s even more important not to make foolish promises, and not to bluff.
Your rape analogy is childish. This is geopolitics. Ukraine must account for the interests of its powerful neighbor, as Mexico must account for our interests.
I was referring (without quote) to Taras’s assertion that Russia is a colonial empire. Obviously, Ukraine already broke off of it… so that wasn’t part of the question.
But thanks for assuming the worst and your bad faith accusation.
Parts of Ukraine may want to be part of Russia. Does that make Ukraine a colonial enterprise?
Good question for Tara’s to answer, but I don’t want to mission creep into a rehash of the Lilek post.
Extending NATO membership to the Baltics, instead of provoking war, has prevented Russia from invading and annexing those countries, which has in turn crippled the potential capacity of Russia to dominate Europe. More broadly, the extension of NATO membership into Eastern Europe (allowing for the rise of allies like Poland) cemented the collapse of Russia (the Soviet Union was almost as much of a Russian nationalist project as it was an ideological empire) as a global superpower that had threatened us for decades, imposing limits on how much they could threaten us in the future. This in no way prevented friendship with Russia had they desired it*, and even if it had, the far-fetched hope that Russia would become a reliable ally was never worth allowing the possibility of Russia attaining projectable power approaching that of the Soviet Union ever again.
NATO expansion was not foolish, it merely precludes isolationism, which is not the only alternative to neo-Conservative interventionism and nation-building projects. Wise as Washington was, he could not foresee the rise of globalism, and the exponential capacity of inimical international interests to threaten the United States-our greatest threat still lies within, but that is no reason to ignore threats from without until they become much greater than they need be.
*Which would have been the safest way to advance their rational material and security interests, but not their emotional desire to carve out a position of international greatness, at the expense of their neighbors.
I will guard against the missioncreep tendency within.
As far as that goes, the Russia we have today is the result of the Russian Empire (like the Soviet Union was) – that is to say, of wars of conquest. That’s true of most older countries. The fact that Ukraine, the Baltics, Poland, Kazakhstan were kept as notionally separate rather than a part of Russia like Circassia or Chechnya or Kazan is due to historical accident rather than any intrinsic greater difference or similarity. During Soviet times it literally didn’t matter wrt the Baltics or Ukraine or Kazakhstan and it mattered not that much wrt Poland. Those lines on a map were just lines on a map – and they changed a lot, and sometimes kind of randomly, like when Krushchev gave Crimea to Ukraine.
With Ukraine, we are extending NATO benefits to countries who are NOT in NATO .
Which is a valid criticism. He then questions the wisdom of committing ourselves to defending a defenseless border wrt Finland.
Try to address his actual point.
Right, and the same applies to the USA.
Quite possibly.
I hear the term “National Divorce” batted around here fairly often.
Well I’m in favor. My question is are the die hard Russo-phobes in favor?
Given the lines drawn in in previous debates, I don’t think it’s a given.
And given that the Donbas and Crimea ostensibly voted for same with Ukraine and it isn’t honored…
Well, you know. Election fraud only exists in Ukraine.
Yes, it is. You are assuming that our political class are all Clintonian schemers, when a fair number of them are spiteful bratty children.
A lot of the actions from Biden were driven by ORANGEMANBAD!!1! from his handlers. Trump is the embodiment of all evil to ever exist, and therefore anything he did must be opposed. That’s why they are going for the Iran deal.
Everything pertaining to Finland applied to the Baltic states as well, and he was clearly stating an opinion in opposition to post-Cold War NATO expansion in general, which I also addressed.
Also, we are not extending NATO benefits to Ukraine, or else we would have automatically been in a physical conflict with Russia for the past three months; we are extending aid to the Ukrainians in support of their own self-defense, and debating the wisdom of doing so.
Noting that extending NATO membership to Finland poses risks is indeed valid, as it noting that failure to do so poses risks of its own.
Democrat support for the Iran deal actually predates Trump; barring complete idiocy in thinking this would discourage Iranian development of nuclear weapons, my best guess is that they assume a nuclear-armed Iran is inevitable, and are far more concerned about knee-capping any Israeli response. In the meantime, the sanctions are bothersome to many corporate interests, and they seek to end them for its own sake.
I was thinking about this some more this afternoon while doing some fence-rebuilding to keep deer and varmints out of our vegetable garden. It helps to have hammers and cutting tools in hand when thinking about this stuff.
Anyhow, George Washington reminded us that alliances are not based on friendship, but on interest. This was back when some felt that we owed support to France for the support it had given us during the Revolutionary War. Washington reminded people that France wouldn’t have helped our country if it hadn’t been in its interest to do so. Friendship had nothing to do with it, and we didn’t have a moral obligation or any other kind of obligation to take France’s side against England.
If at some point it’s in both Russia’s interest and ours to act together against China, we’ll do that regardless of the fact that we oppose each other elsewhere. Such “alliances” can be made more difficult by long-term hatreds that develop during wars, but they seem to happen anyway. Note how Poland and Ukraine are now acting together, even though Poles and Ukrainians were ethnically cleansing each other within living memory. It’s now in their interest to be allies.
So making nice with Russia and ignoring its aggression against its neighbors is going to do approximately nothing to help us ally with Russia against China, if need be.
Carl Bildt claims that a lot of the corruption regarding Ukrainian gas got cleaned up back in 2013-2014 when Yanukovich was ousted and fled to Russia, though that still left a lot of corruption that hadn’t been cleaned up.
We may not be interested in Russia, but Russia is obsessed with us. Not to the degree that it is obsessed with Ukraine, but it doesn’t stop thinking about us. So it’s good that we can help Ukraine without getting American lives involved. Treasure, but not blood.
There are definitely some Ukrainians who want to be part of Russia. But you’re on less solid ground in thinking that parts of Ukraine want to. It isn’t even clear that Crimea wants to.
What accusation?
I bolded it for you. Your side needs to stop with this in all its forms. Just because you think everyone in the world should share your view doesn’t make those dissenters supporters of Putin.
How is it an accusation? I identified it as a Soviet, Putinist notion, which it is. I thought you’d like to know where that idea comes from, just as I appreciate knowing where my ideas like that came from. At least I appreciate it after I get being done annoyed about it and going through the usual 7 stages of grief. Not that I’d expect you to take my word for it, but I thought you’d want to at least know that there is an issue. Norman Davies points out one reason those points of view tend to dominate in America is that our university slavic-studies departments, or east-european departments, are dominated by Russians. And I don’t think he necessarily means that in a sinister, accusatory sense. Those people may have grown up hearing those things and just accepted them.
If I called you a Putin-paid schill, that would be an accusation. But I doubt there are any on Ricochet. Even those people who take their Putin propaganda straight are not acting as conscious Putin agents. At least I don’t have any reason to believe so.
The majority of my views on this conflict have come from taking very basic facts that both Ukraine and Russia agree on and putting them through the “American Exceptionalism” filter. Ie, if we do it then it must be good.
Consistency matters to me. If Russia is evil for certain acts, we are evil for those same acts. That is it. I demand logical consistency.
Beyond that, my views on foreign policy play a huge role in my views and those do NOT originate with Russian propaganda. I have had those views of foreign policy, rejecting the modern zeitgeist of a post-war world, global citizenship, and UN global government for at least several years now. Those views are at least compatible with Meersheimer and our Ricochet’s Hoplight’s own views on foreign policy. So maybe you are wrong that only Russia propagates those views.
When I heard Meersheimer call himself a 19th century man, it resonated because I think in those terms, too. I get old World foreign policy and diplomacy better than this strange and naive 20th century post WWII version.
No, it isn’t only Russia that propagates those views. I thought I explained that. But they originate from Russian propaganda and nowhere else.
I don’t remember where I heard it first. Well, historian Norman Davies pointed out that some of the things I had once thought I knew about Eastern European history involving Poland and Ukraine, were in fact Soviet propaganda roughly to the effect that Poland and Ukraine were not real countries. But the Russian Soviets had a lot invested in the Ukrainian question. Some of it was propaganda that even preceded the Soviets. I had not even known they were contested issues, so thoroughly had our educational system imbibed the Soviet point of view, sometimes innocently and sometimes not.
I have mentioned how I was amused by Olga Reznikova’s YouTube channel in the early days of the war, when she put out a video called, “How Russia stole Ukraine’s History.” I figured it was probably a simplified, exaggerated version that was taught to Ukrainian schoolchildren, but was intrigued and wanted to learn more. (A few days ago she put up a new episode showing how she and her family have returned from Denmark to Ukraine, even though it isn’t completely safe yet. Since almost no gas is available for civilian consumers in Ukraine, they bought as many jerry cans as they could to hold enough gas for the drive home.)
Anyhow, I’ve since been reading and watching as much as I can. Norman Davies and others did point out that Ukraine and Russia have had very different histories that account for Ukraine’s more west-facing outlook vs Russia’s traditional authoritarianism. Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister of Sweden, gave a good intro to the whole Ukraine-Russia conflict going back to the time of Kievan Rus’. Here’s the 2018 YouTube video: Carl Bildt: The history of Ukraine is different from the history of Russia.
For more details, almost too many more details, I’ve been reading Sergii Plokhy’s book on “The Origins of Slavic Nations.” From his name you will notice that Plokhy is Ukrainian. I learned about him from his very informative book on Chernobyl, and have some of his others in queue.
I should also go back and look at Timothy Snyder’s books to see if he was trying to explain any of this, only I was too dense to understand. It wouldn’t have been the first time.
And I am sure President Washington’s advice was very good. In 1796. When it took months to travel from Ukraine to the United States, and the British Empire ruled the seas.
In 2022, however, his advice must be interpreted with great caution.
@arizonapatriot — Jerry, you normally set much store by Professor John Mearsheimer, and he doesn’t agree with you …
After the end of the Soviet Union, the newly independent Ukraine had a large arsenal of nuclear weapons on its territory. However, in 1994, Ukraine agreed to give up nuclear arms and become a member of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty; within two years, it had removed all atomic weapons. Almost alone among observers, Mearsheimer was opposed to that decision because he saw that Ukraine without a nuclear deterrent would likely be subjected to aggression by Russia. … As early as 1993, he suggested that Ukraine should retain its nuclear weapons as a deterrent. — Wikipedia.
At the time, Ukraine was already independent. The Soviet Union no longer existed, and Ukraine was acknowledged to have inherited Soviet property in Ukraine. No one made the absurd claim that Russia, after having been merely one of the USSR’s many constituent republics, inherited all Soviet assets everywhere. However, the U.S. and other countries made giving up its nukes a prerequisite for economic aid to the needy country; and after a bitter political argument the Ukrainian government reluctantly agreed.
N.B.: This is at least the third time I’ve made you acquainted with these facts. So far you’ve never tried to refute them. Apparently you just wipe them from your mind.
Just as having control of Belarus permitted Putin to use its territory to invade Ukraine, so controlling Ukraine would permit him to move against other targets in Europe. This is why Sweden and Finland are desperate to join NATO, and why Germany is no longer lackadaisical about its NATO membership, and is belatedly doing what it can to free itself of its dependency on Russian oil.
If you look at a map, you will see that Khrushchev gave Crimea to Ukraine because Crimea is a peninsula attached to the Ukrainian mainland. Indeed, one of the goals of Putin’s war is to steal enough Ukrainian territory to create a land bridge from Russia to Crimea.
Funny, all these “historical accidents” without “intrinsic greater difference”. In reality, the Soviets were recognizing that these were nations with histories of their own and languages of their own. By making them separate republics, they maintained the fiction that these nations had joined the Soviet Union voluntarily rather than being conquered by the Red Army — not a good look for an “anti-imperialist” power. That’s why they were called Captive Nations in the West.
By whom?
Russia is the successor state to the Soviet Union. This is accepted as so because Russia took responsibility for the (enormous) debts of the Soviet union as well as its (nuclear, among other) assets.
None of the other consituent parts of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, showed any appetite for manning up and taking on a share of the debt. For easy reference:
So there’s that.
Jerry can speak for himself, but…
Last week Ted Cruz gave a speech on the Senate floor explaining why he was supporting the 40 billion dollar aid package for Ukraine.