Here’s a brain teaser for you: When was the last time Russia was invaded by those awful people to the West of them in Europe. You know. The ones who are “encircling” them?
Hint: 1941, when Hitler double-crossed Stalin and staged Operation Barbarossa. And of course, there was Napoleon.
Now. When was the last time Russia invaded one of those countries? Answer: When they invaded Ukraine in 2022, as they had previously in 2014. And then there was Georgia in 2008. And Czechoslovakia in 1968, Hungary in 1956, Estonia in 1941, Finland in 1939, and Latvia in 1944. And they never really left the satellite countries they invaded in World War II until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Tucker Carlson wants to know how we would react if one of our neighbors- say, Mexico- was a hostile power. Interesting; I always thought the Trumpenvolk thought that Mexico was our enemy! Well, two things. First, Ukraine is “hostile” to Russia only inasmuch as Russia would kind of like to gobble it up, and Ukraine is reluctant to be gobbled. And secondly, as Mona Charon pointed out yesterday, whatever would do in that situation, we wouldn’t be massing troops on the Rio Grande preparing to stage a pre-emptive invasion!
Yeah, I know. We kind of did that a long time ago, and Mexico was no more hostile to us than Ukraine is hostile to Russia today. But that was before the Civil War, in which the people who were hungriest to grab Mexican land with which to carve out new slave states lost.
William Buckley pointed out many years ago that it won’t do to draw a false analogy between America’s sphere of influence and Russia’s. A man who pushes an old lady in front of a bus and a man who pushes her away from the bus and to safety are both pushing an old lady around, but their behavior is not morally equivalent. The events in Eastern Europe are not the playing out of some Russian equivalent of the Monroe Doctrine. Not all “spheres of influence” are morally or legally equal. Attempting to dominate one’s neighbor through military intimidation and coercion in direct violation of international law is simply not the same thing as guaranteeing the independence of one’s neighbor against somebody else doing so by the threat or use of military power. The argument that the United States is being hypocritical by maintaining its own sphere of influence while denying Russia’s right to do the same is about as disingenuous as you can get.
Yes, there have been times- the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the CIA-engineered coup against the Marxist but democratically elected Allende government in Chile come to mind- when the United States has acted just as Russia is acting now. But those incidents simply do not justify Russia in doing the same thing, nor do they destroy the distinction between protecting one’s neighbors from outside aggression and committing aggression against them ourselves!
Russia has a history of being an expansionist power. And it has just as long a history of being paranoid about “encirclement” from the West- although how it’s possible to be “encircled” on only one side is hard to see. Vladimir Putin doesn’t really expect NATO to invade Russia, and besides, Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO. At least not yet. But he does want to dominate Europe. That means weakening the EU and especially NATO as much as possible. Donald Trump did a great deal of the work for him when he scoffed at NATO’s significance, lied about the degree to which our NATO allies were contributing to the alliance, and generally undermined our alliances in Europe as well as in the rest of the world. The Nord Stream pipeline drove a further wedge in NATO and Germany seems more concerned with oil than with European security.
This past week I read a letter to some editor or other by a guy who wanted to know why we should care about Ukraine. Well, here’s the thing: if Putin can manage to divide NATO when it comes to the invasion of Ukraine, it won’t simply be a matter of a precedent being set for strong countries to invade and bully smaller ones and get away with it. It won’t simply be a matter of it becoming clear that bad guys can get away with that kind of stuff with impunity and that no effective mechanism exists for getting in the way. It won’t simply be a matter of our hand in Asia being weakened by further evidence that the United States has become an isolationist paper tiger that will let anybody get away with anything and will simply cave in if pushed. It won’t simply be a matter of our economic and geopolitical interests all over the world- and especially in Europe, where the countries with which we have our closest cultural and economic ties are located- being threatened. The mechanisms by which world peace has been maintained, more or less, ever since the end of World War II will be to all intents and purposes destroyed.
This isn’t the Eighteenth Century anymore. However the unrealistic among us might want to decry “globalism,” we are a part of a global economy in a world which jet planes and ICBMS have made uncomfortably small. The nations of the world- including ours- depend on each other, and what happens in one part of the world affects everyone, and not only the people in that particular region. The day is long, long past when the United States can depend upon the oceans on either coast which seperate us from the Old World to protect us from what happens on their opposite shores. World War II was caused to no small extent by the blindness created by the very kind of isolationism and false security which characterizes both political parties and most of the American people right now. If Russia dominates Europe politically and economically, or if China not only dominates Asia but replaces us as the strongest political, military, and economic power on the planet the consequences for the United States and everybody who lives in it will be catastrophic.
Putin and his pipeline have driven a wedge into the NATO alliance, and Ukraine invasion #3 will doubtless weaken the alliance further. Our precipitate bugouts from Iraq and especially Afghanistan (where we had suffered a grand total of 212 combat casualties since 2014) have strengthened the impression around the world that the United States lacks the will to follow through on its commitments; Putin would love nothing more than to cause our allies to waver in their commitment to NATO. Germany is already waffling. The next step: an invasion of one of the NATO member states in the Baltic, also former Soviet satellites.
Ukraine is not at present a member of NATO, and Russia is determined that it should not be. We are not formally obligated to come to the defense of Ukraine, and that’s a good thing, because given the state of our military deployment in Europe (and NATO’s) there isn’t a thing we could do to stop Putin from doing whatever he wants in Ukraine. But an invasion of, say, Estonia would be a different matter. The heart of the NATO alliance is Article Five of the NATO treaty, which obligates all member states to come to the aid of any other member state that is attacked. Estonia is a member of NATO. If Russia invaded Estonia or another NATO member state, and NATO didn’t respond with military force, NATO would effectively cease to exist and Putin would have a free hand in Europe. If some of the members of NATO balked at fulfilling their obligation to Estonia under the treaty, the alliance would be seriously and perhaps fatally wounded.
Donald Trump’s undermining of the alliance and his alienation of the other members of NATO, combined with the growing impression around the world that the United States does not honor its commitments to its allies, has caused members of the European Union to increasingly move in the direction of making their own arrangements for the defense of the continent on the assumption that America simply cannot be relied upon. Doubtless the isolationists who make up such a large proportion of the American electorate would see that as a good thing, laboring as they do under the delusion that Russian expansion would be anything but economically and strategically disastrous for the United States, not only in the area of trade and military relations with the nations of Europe but around the world. China is watching what happens in Ukraine with great interest. So is Taiwan. After all, yet another example of America’s lack of resolution would go a long way toward encouraging Bejing to move against its democratic former province which it longs to bring back into the fold.
There is no doubt that the United States has engaged in some foolish military adventures in past decades. We failed to see the folly of taking over for the French in Vietnam. The second Gulf War was an unmitigated blunder; it was widely foreseen that whatever one might say about Saddam Hussein, his removal would plunge Iraq into chaos. Ironically, Afghanistan- a war we engaged in because the Taliban was sheltering Osama bin Laden and al Quaeda- was one of the least costly wars in our history; we sustained slightly more than two thousand casualties in the twenty years we fought there. Now that the Taliban is back in control, al Quaeda, ISIS, and other Islamic terrorist organizations will once again have an unchallenged and essentially invulnerable base of training and operations. Even so, a case of sorts can be made that we should have been satisfied with deposing the Taliban and driving al Quaeda out of the country (though it’s hard to see what would have been gained by accomplishing that and then allowing them to regain power once we left). The alternative would have been the very permanent garrison in Afghanistan, playing mostly a support role, that both of our last two presidents and apparently the American people thought was too high a price to pay despite the lack of casualties.
Clearly, there was never going to be a democratic Afghanistan, any more than there could have been a democratic Iraq or a democratic Vietnam. Nation-building and the notion that it’s possible to establish democracies in countries with no tradition of democracy has been thoroughly discredited. There are plenty of lessons to be learned from the blunders of the past several decades. But we seem to have learned the wrong lessons. And in the process, we seem to have forgotten the lesson that we should have had etched in our memories for all time by the most disastrous war in modern history.
Instead of learning discrimination and discernment in our use of military power, and its intelligent and careful use to achieve specific, well-defined, achievable and limited objectives, our mistakes seem to have taught us not to use it at all, and to repeat the blunder of withdrawing into Fortress America and sticking our heads in the sand, somehow assuming that what happens on the other side of the world doesn’t affect us. That’s a conclusion which no thoughtful, intelligent person can take seriously in the Twenty-First Century. As the World Wars should have taught us, it wasn’t even a viable proposition in the Twentieth. The world has grown too small, and its nations too interdependent. And there is no going back.
Vladimir Lenin used to talk about the “useful idiots” in the West, who helped advance Russia’s agenda through their naivette and gullibility. Such people helped pave the way for Adolf Hitler in the years leading up to the Second World War. The isolationists of that period even used some of the same slogans we hear today. “America First” was the battle-cry of Hitler’s enablers before it was adopted by the enablers of Vladimir Putin.
The actions of Putin and Xi and the other bad actors in today’s world affect us even more directly in today’s interdependent world than did those of their predecessors in the 1930’s. This is a dangerous world we live in. Forces are on the move which we cannot allow to work their will unopposed. At this point there is little that we can do to deter Putin. He will almost certainly invade Ukraine, and impose a government friendly to Moscow and hostile to the United States and NATO. The divisions in NATO will be exposed, and draw us closer to the day when a move against the Baltic states by Russia will bring about an Article Five crisis which likely will achieve Putin’s goal of effectively destroying the alliance and putting Russia into a position it was unable to achieve throughout the Cold War: effectively becoming the preeminent power in Europe. And only a fool can believe that we will not pay a heavy economic, political, and strategic price for letting it happen, not only in Europe but throughout the world.
We are about to find out that economic sanctions such as President Biden threatens will not be enough to deter Putin. And neither the nations of Europe nor the American people seem to have the stomach for the military buildup and the resolute use of hard power which alone can stave of a hard lesson in why what happens on the other side of the world does affect us and is absolutely our business.
Hopefully, this time we won’t learn that lesson through another world war. We need to revitalize both our commitment to NATO and the alliance itself. We need to vastly increase our military presence in the region and thus our ability to speak to Putin in the only language he understands. However unpopular the axiom, “If you would have peace, prepare for war” might be, history leaves no doubt as to its wisdom. The only way to deter Putin from staging another invasion that actually would trigger Article Five of the NATO treaty and bring about World War III is to make it as clear as we can that it would be a bad idea. And the only way to do that is to present him with a situation in which the cost of invading his neighbors is high enough that he will decline to pay it.
Watersblogged 