The good guys are winning for a change

Donald Trump is backtracking from his assertion that Vladimir Putin is a “genius” for invading Ukraine. Tucker Carlson actually admits that he was wrong about Ukraine- although it’s Joe Biden’s fault that he’ was wrong.

America and the world have united behind a brave people determined to remain free and their heroic citizen-president. Russia thought overrunning Ukraine and putting a puppet in President Zelenskyy’s place would be easy. It’s turning out not to be.

Putin has been fighting with one hand behind his back. He’s been trying for propaganda reasons to at least appear to be exercising restraint. The more frustrated he becomes, the more likely that he takes the gloves off and fights dirty like he did in Chechnya. He will be even more discredited in the eyes of the world, but it won’t be pretty to watch much less experience. Not that it’s actually pretty now.

Putin has stepped in it. This invasion may be his undoing. But the odds are still overwhelming that Ukraine will be overrun. I don’t think President Zelenskyy will leave, and I’m very much afraid that Putin will have him killed. May God protect him.

But the salient reality is that Ukraine is going to be impossible for Russia to hold. The people of Ukraine won’t accept Russian occupation. A continuing insurgency will make Ukraine a hell for Russia. It will only be a matter of time before Ukraine recovers its independence.

Even Switzerland is joining in the sanctions. Germany has overcome its traditional reluctance to be actively hostile to Russia. Finland and Sweden are considering joining NATO. And barring a return of the Cheeto Benito to the Oval Office, NATO will not only survive but will be stronger and more united than ever.

Brave people are dying and will continue to die. The valiant people of Ukraine are suffering terribly and will probably continue to suffer for a long time. But what looked a couple of weeks ago like it was going to be another bleak triumph for authoritarianism and the bullies of the world seems to have turned completely around and rallied the world to the cause of humanity and democratic values.

However much suffering they inflict, it seems clear that at the moment the bullies are on the run. The forces of illiberalism and reaction are reeling. Right now, the good guys appear, at least in the long term, to be winning. It’s been a long time since that was the case, and it feels good.

Slava Ukraini!

Russia must howl

The invasion of Ukraine- you know, the one Vladimir Putin wasn’t going to order- is underway. Predictably, so is the idiocy from the MAGAverse.

Donald Trump- who never met an authoritarian he didn’t like- just loves Vladimir Putin. He fawned over Putin throughout his presidency, defending him from charges that Russia was involved in hacking the computers of both major American parties during the 2016 campaign despite conclusive evidence to the contrary obtained by the American intelligence community. He enabled Putin’s ongoing goal of undermining NATO by insulting and even lying about other members of the alliance and openly questioning whether NATO was even necessary now that the Cold War is over.

Putin, on the other hand, takes a different view, whether he admits it or not. This invasion is motivated by Putin’s objection to the possibility that Ukraine might someday join NATO. Despite the fact that every invasion over the border between Russia and the rest of Europe since World War II has been an invasion staged by Russia (this is Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine, and he’s recently attacked Georgia and has virtually taken over Belarus), Putin sees the expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union as “encirclement.” This fits well with Russia’s historic paranoia about invasion from the West, even though the West has far greater reason in recent history to fear invasion by Russia!

Nevertheless, Russia sees the presence of a country allied with the United States on its border as somehow a provocation. And international law aside, he believes he has every right to invade any such country and- well, make it not aligned with the United States. Tucker Carlson’s odd nightly attempts to justify this by suggesting that we would be justified in invading Canada if it were aligned with Russia make sense only to those who don’t stop to reflect that no, we wouldn’t be justified in doing that and that moreover, we would be unlikely even to consider it. The Putin/Carlson view of the matter makes sense only to the paranoid and those not in the habit of thinking much before forming their opinions.

Putin’s overarching goal is to undermine and, if possible, destroy the Atlantic alliance. Donald Trump, of course, is on board. It’s worth reflecting that on one occasion while he was president Russian state television jokingly referred to him as a Russian “asset,” and suggested that, in view of his service to the Rodina, he be offered an apartment in Moscow to move into when he left the White House.

Ukraine is not, at present, a member of NATO. There were no plans for it to become a member of NATO any time soon. If it were, we would face an even darker situation tonight- that is, if Putin invaded Ukraine at all. If Ukraine were a current member of NATO, he probably wouldn’t. The reason is simple: under Article Five of the NATO charter, an attack on any member of the alliance would obligate all of the other members to treat it as an attack on each of them, and respond accordingly. If Ukraine were currently a member of NATO, Putin’s invasion would be tantamount to a declaration of war on the United States, Germany, the UK, France, and the rest of the Atlantic alliance. We would be obligated to respond accordingly.

Putin has already sliced off a piece of Ukraine- the Crimea- in a previous invasion. He seized nearly a quarter of Georgia. We did very little about either. This invasion is the next step in his ongoing quest- which Mr. Trump is apparently fine with- to reassemble the Iron Curtain, establishing Russian hegemony over Eastern Europe once again and creating a buffer zone of client states between itself and the rest of Europe. He has, again, no justification in recent history for thinking that he needs a buffer zone; he’s the guy who does all the invading. Whatever happened in Operation Barbarossa, today’s Germany is unlikely to repeat it any time soon!

But here’s the problem: Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia- pretty much all of the remaining states of the old Soviet empire- are member states of NATO, as, of course, is Germany. Among other things, the invasion of Ukraine is a test case of NATO’s resolve. We did little when Crimea and much of Georgia were conquered or when Belarus was virtually annexed. This is a test case of our resolve. The next step in Putin’s long-term plan will almost inevitably be to move against one of the former satellite states- probably Estonia or one of the other Balkan nations- that are members of NATO. An invasion of one of them would trigger Article Five, and one of two things would happen. Either the United States and its NATO allies would come to the defense of the member state that was attacked, resulting in a major war that might well turn into World War III, or they wouldn’t. And if they didn’t, NATO would be revealed as a toothless paper tiger, and effectively collapse- and Russia would effectively dominate the European continent.

The European Union would be of little use in preventing that. For centuries, each of the European states has had as its primary foreign policy goal the prevention of any one of the others from dominating Europe. France managed it for a little while during the Napoleonic era. Germany managed it during World War II. It didn’t turn out well for anybody else either time. The EU is a delicate balance of power in the political and economic realms; everybody is anxious to prevent any one nation from assuming clear and undisputed leadership. And while Donald Trump and the neo-isolationists don’t seem to grasp the point, that’s why the only powerful Western democracy that isn’t a part of Europe has to lead NATO. That’s why the existence of NATO is vital to European security and stability, and to world peace. And that’s why the United States has to lead it.

Mr. Trump is notoriously ignorant when it comes to international relations, as is the case with many other things. He doesn’t realize all this. And insofar as the only apparent organizing principle of his foreign policy seems to be a fondness for authoritarians and bullies, that’s why he’s rooting for Russia in its war with Ukraine. I doubt that Tucker Carlson even has a reason for siding with the bully, other than that it’s what Trump does. The same is true of a good many MAGA neo-isolationists.

That, and the utterly clueless argument that what happens in Europe is “none of our business,” and “doesn’t affect us.” Of course, it does affect us. It affects us profoundly. The economic consequences of a Russian-dominated Europe for the United States alone would be catastrophic, just as would be the case if China achieved hegemony in Asia. And unless we come out of the current war in Ukraine with Russia deterred from continuing Putin’s quest to undermine NATO and achieve European hegemony, the only alternative would be a strong possibility that sometime in the near future the United States and Russia are going to come to blows militarily.

Which, by the way, literally nobody is advocating at the moment. Despite all the voices being raised to warn against our intervening militarily in Ukraine, literally nobody is suggesting that. Nobody. Although I am intrigued by Jonathan V. Last’s suggestion that while we shouldn’t attack any Russian naval vessels, it might not be out of place for the U.S. Navy to send the yachts of some of the Russian oligarchs who make up Putin’s power base and happen to be docked in foreign ports to Davey Jones.

President Biden is being blamed by Trumpworld simultaneously for not doing enough to push back against Putin and for doing too much. The illogic is typical, considering the source; opponents of the orange god-king subject themselves to the disapproval of the cult not for the substance of their actions or positions, but merely for opposing Trump. In Trumpworld, as among extremists generally, emotions rather than logical arguments drive people’s attitudes, and it’s unnecessary to make sense. When you live in an alternate universe, truth is the least of your concerns, Any fact that disagrees with what one wants to believe is either false or irrelevant and any lie that supports it- however bizarre and transparent- is the truth.

But for honest people in contact with reality, any consideration of the situation has to begin with praise for Mr. Biden because at least he’s standing up to Putin. That’s refreshing after four years of a president who was Putin’s lapdog and who seems actually to be on board with Putin’s ambition to destroy NATO. The heroic people of Ukraine will fight bravely for the cause of freedom while many Americans either stand by apathetically or even, like Tucker Carlson, openly root for a bully and tyrant. But the thoughtful among us realize that America’s interests are deeply affected by the events in Eastern Europe, and those who are truest to our founding values will be rooting for the good guys.

The people of Ukraine will fight and die and inevitably lose. This war is a mismatch. There is no question as to its outcome, and tragically, we can’t help Ukraine avoid the inevitable. The democratically-elected government will be deposed, and a puppet regime with Putin pulling the strings will take its place. It’s too late to prevent that. Bolstering our military presence in Eastern Europe might have made a difference at some point as a token of our resolve. It might have made Putin think again. But it’s too late for that now.

All we can do is honor and pray for the heroic people of Ukraine, and resolve to make Vladimir Putin howl with sanctions so crippling that he gives up his ambition to recover Russian dominance of Eastern Europe and destroy NATO. That, and make sure that his orange lapdog doesn’t get anywhere near regaining a position from which he can help Putin achieve those objectives.

We can hope that Joe Biden is tougher and more resolute than Barack Obama and Donald Trump were. And maybe torpedo a yacht or two, if that’s what it takes to make Putin and the kleptocrats who keep him in power think again before repeating this crime.

Useful idiots

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.