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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
I am less concerned about the ethnicity of the various people in Russia and more concerned about the lack of human rights.
Putin wants to export his awful regime to outside Russia’s borders. This is a concern, in my opinion.
I like the Thomas Jefferson quote: “We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but the guarantors only of our own.”
That still leaves a lot of room for determining how far we should go in our friendship, but I would worry that if our friendship is completely passive and uninvolved, that we are not in the right frame of mind for guarantying our own liberty.
Nobody “put” Stalin in charge. He was merely the most ruthless and the most free from “bourgeois” scruples of the ruling elite, and killed all rivals. Or are you thinking of some other Georgian?
Nikita Khrushchev was born to Russian parents in southern Russia, near the Ukrainian border. In his teens, he moved to eastern Ukraine to join his father, who had found work there. The experience seems to have left him with fond memories of Ukraine, but you can’t call him a Ukrainian. Or are you thinking of somebody else?
I suppose we in the United States could just pretend that everything that is happening outside the United States doesn’t really impact us, that is doesn’t matter if Japan is an authoritarian dictatorship similar to North Korea’s dictatorship or a democracy such as it is now.
We can hope that the alligator eats other nations but never attempts to eat us. That seems short-sighted in my view.
Your musical interlude for the occasion:
Technology has made the world too small for isolationism to be a sensible policy, today or going forward. Remember, after the Cold War we decided we no longer needed to pay attention to Afghanistan. Unfortunately Afghanistan went on paying attention to us!
Countries, even great powers, can’t just walk away from their history in other parts of the world simply because they get bored. It’s thoughtless.
Edited to add:
I should have said walk away confident of no consequences.