Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
Alaska is a peninsual attached to the Canadian mainland. Does this mean that the US should give Alaska to Canada? Maybe, I guess?
Imo they maintained any such fictions because they wanted the extra votes at the UN.
And they weren’t (mostly) connected to Russia because they had been conquered by the Red Army. They were part of the Soviet Union because it inherited them from Imperial Russia. In Ukraine’s case, however you draw Ukraine’s borders, from Catherine the Great.
In 1991 there was a referendum in the Soviet Union on whether the Soviet Union should be preserved or not. Courtesy wiki:
The light green section (including Ukraine) voted to preserve the Union 70-75%.
The Baltics, Moldova, Georgia and Armenia abstained.
The darker green places voted to preserve the Union between 80 and 100%. (The darker the colour, the higher the ‘preserve’ vote.)
And most of those places then voted for independence in 1992.
Just saying that Cold War propaganda is not a good source of information (or understanding).
It’s still reasonable to call those nations captive given that when they actually had an opportunity to vote for independence, they did vote for independence.
If you keep someone captive in your basement for 40 years and then give them a chance to vote on whether they shall continue in your basement and they vote for independence, it’s fair to say that that person was captive, not a willing occupant of your basement.
I think Putin’s Russia should pay a price for its aggression against Ukraine for a reason similar to why we think that a murderer should pay a price for committing murder: deterence.
If Xi Jinping sees Putin’s military frustrated in its attempt to conquer Ukraine, it could deter Xi from attempting to conquer Taiwan.
Weakness is provocative.
Perhaps, but don’t confuse nation with country.
Do you feel similarly about the United States and its aggression? Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia come quickly to mind.
Is the South comprised of Captive States? They did fight a war, after all.
There are similarities and differences.
I would say that the slaves were captive and had a right to secede from their slaveholders. But I don’t think that Southern secession was legitimate.
Why not? Why different from Ukraine’s? Or Donbas’? Or Crimea’s?
The leaders of Southern secession argued that secession was needed to defend chattel slavery. A nation built for the purpose of enslaving people lacks legitimacy, in my view.
In the case of Donbas and Crimea, they are part of a larger nation that has a democratic process that the people who reside in Donbas and Crimea can participate in.
That was Trump’s goal, but Putin didn’t play. Without the fraudulent election who knows how that would have played out, but if they can steal the next one as well, China wins and the US is over.
Both Republican and Democrat presidents over the past 20+ years have tried to construct a good relationship with Putin (George W. Bush, Obama, Trump), but all such efforts have failed because of the nature of Russia’s regime.
You are kidding, right? Ukraine is so democratic that it bans opposition parties, closes down opposition media, and jails opposition leaders. Opposition mayors are also assassinated.
Ukraine is a democracy and Russia is a dictatorship.
Except for Texas, which joined the United States voluntarily, no part of the Confederacy had ever been an independent nation; nor had any of the states of the Confederacy been brought into the United States by force. The existence of a secessionist movement doesn’t retroactively convert a nation state into a colonial empire — or we’d have to consider just about every country a colonial empire!
The only “opposition” party banned from the 2019 Ukrainian election was the Communist Party; in the same spirit that Germany has banned the Nazi Party for 70 years but is still considered a democracy.
The United States in the 1960s was also considered a democracy, even though a few political assassinations occurred, here and there. And in the 1860s, when an “opposition leader” or two was arrested. But you’ll have to be more specific as to who and what you’re referring to.
Putin’s defeat and humiliation may be the best hope democracy has in Russia. Remember that Margaret Thatcher’s humiliation of the Argentine junta in the Falklands War brought about the restoration of democracy to Argentina.
The US reluctantly intervened in Serbia to prevent genocide. Afghanistan and Iraq had both attacked the United States, by promoting terrorism against it and, in the case of Iraq, sending a hit squad after Pres. Bush the elder. Iraq is also suspected of involvement in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, in revenge for getting kicked out of Kuwait by Bush.
Washingtonian isolationism was wise in its time.
The Pax Americana was wise (and necessary) in its time.
Now we need something in between.
@zafar — “A referendum on the Act of Declaration of Independence was held in Ukraine on 1 December 1991. … An overwhelming majority of 92.3% of voters approved the declaration of independence made by the Verkhovna Rada on 24 August 1991.”—Wikipedia. You’re saying there was an earlier referendum the same year with the opposite result? What is your source?
“Imo they maintained any such fictions [of separate nations] because they wanted the extra votes at the UN.” Given that the Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian SSR’s were founded in or before 1922, while the United Nations was founded in 1945, Lenin must have been psychic! (The other 12 SSR’s didn’t have seats in the UN.)
That was the case in Krushchev’s time.
If you look at a map, you will see that Russia has recently built a magnificent road/rail bridge over the mouth of the Sea of Azov connecting to Russia proper. So they already had a perfectly good land bridge from Russia to Crimea.
The same as yours. Follow the link.
When you put it that way it seems unlikely.
So why did Ukraine get a seat while for eg Uzbekistan – which has far more history of independent kingdoms – did not?
Why do you think Uzbekistan has far more history of independent kingdoms than Ukraine? (I don’t know much about the history of Uzbekistan other than what I have read about Russian expansion, and I presume you mean “kingdom” in a fairly broad sense.)
Courtesy Avantour:
https://www.advantour.com/uzbekistan/history/ancient-history.htm
Its messy, but states of a sort start to emerge early.
Ukraine and Belarussia got UN seats as a compromise because members of the British Commonwealth were getting seats. The Soviets claimed that they would be puppets of Britain just as Ukraine and Belarussia would be puppets of the USSR. (Of course, they didn’t put it like that, but that’s what they meant.)
Washington wasn’t an isolationist. He wanted good relations with all nations. He wanted the United States to have active diplomatic intercourse with all nations. He wanted commerce with all nations – not sanctions like we keep doing today. (How many countries do we sanction?) He did not want entangling alliances with one nation for the benefit of another nation – which he recognized that the United States would be played and it was another country that would benefit and the United States would be left with the bill.
That’s the problem with United States foreign policy at the moment – it’s for some other country’s benefit. It’s not for ours. There is no America First foreign policy and hasn’t been since Woodrow Wilson.
Yes, I guess that goes back before the 900s. (I had never connected any of that history with modern Uzbekistan, but should have.)
It depends on how you interpret ‘isolationism’, I suppose…..in case there’s any confusion, I was talking about avoiding ‘foreign entanglements’, otherwise known as alliances, not something resembling a more peaceful version of North Korean diplomacy.
We tried taking a detached attitude towards global affairs after World War One. But then after World War Two the US decided to stay engaged in the world. Instead of simply defeating Germany and Japan and walking away, the US expended much effort to influencing post WW2 Germany and Japan towards democracy and a similar approach was taken to all of Western Europe.
It was a victory when the nations of Eastern Europe that had been either part of the Soviet Union (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania) or part of the Warsaw Pact (Poland, East Germany, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary) became democratic and allied with the US.
I agree, but those successes unfortunately influenced expectations regarding more recent conflicts; as it turns out, it takes enabling circumstances that cannot simply be created or imposed to successfully carry out nation-building projects, which are hideously expensive besides (40 billion is a drop in the bucket in comparison). Our policies post Cold War and post-WW2 were (for the most part) the right ones, but they cannot be used as a precedent or guide for most modern conflicts.
Of course, neither can the Peloponnesian wars; classic structural realism needs enabling conditions* to be applicable as much as the Democratic Peace theory does, and there is at least as much of a realist imperative to support Ukraine as there is to ignore it.
*Namely, the absence of factors which lead to the applicability of other theories-in other words, the human factors encompassing embedded social, cultural, and institutional frameworks that are at odds with structural realist’s expectations.
My first thought was that it had something to do with the fact that nonwhites were third-class citizens in the Soviet Union. (Non-Russian whites were second-class citizens.)
Another possibility is that in 1947 Belarus was — or was believed to be — the third largest country in the USSR, population-wise. Russia and Ukraine were numbers one and two, of course.
If non-Russians were second class citizens, then why did they put Georgians and Ukrainians in charge?
Nobody put Stalin in charge. He just took it.