With all the news about Ukraine, it’s possible to talk more specifically about what the reversal of America’s World War II gains will look like.
Some months back, I asked whether the loss of Crimea constituted America’s Suez moment — a strategic loss that international diplomacy prevented the imperial power from stopping. The war has only gone worse for America’s ally as the months have gone by.
The two major US allies swinging in the Russian direction are Germany and China. It seems that almost no one in the American think tanks or the government proper fully understand what is at risk. One does, but the general opinion is more aligned towards the nonsensical American war narrative that calls for greater armaments for Ukraine, something that NATO military authorities and Merkel besides have undermined with their own rhetoric.
It’s not entirely clear what sort of rational justification that this war might have had, but the haphazard moral justification was that it was in favor of true democratic self-determination for Ukraine. None of you probably buy that justification, but it is something that both the mainstream left and right tend to believe in fervently. German intelligence leaked that it estimates that 50,000 people have died in the conflict already, but the US press continues to report false numbers.
The US is in a difficult situation: financially, morally, militarily, and diplomatically. The reckless wars, the international spying scandal, and more have made the US a more unreliable international partner. After World War II, Europe embraced the US as a necessary counterweight to the USSR. After 1991, the US tried to dominate both Eastern Europe and Russia in the same way that it had done further west. That policy is unraveling quickly due to over-reach, and forgetting that diplomacy has to go both ways.
The additionally silly thing is that the US is not even behaving like a rational power, in that most of its interventions do not serve any reasonable definition of the ‘American national interest.’ This is because the US has a corrupt government which alternately panders to factions of oligarchs and the masses of hungry people, while mollifying the productive minority with television and other forms of trash media.
This can’t last for much longer. What will give it the extra several pushes are the increasingly open repudiations by America’s former postwar allies.
Thank you for doing this. You and some of the other NRx folks on twitter are an absolute joy to read. Yourself, Ricky Vaughn99 and The New Heresy are way ahead of your time.
I will enjoy this right up until they outlaw crimethink.
God bless you.
He just posted this today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/opinion/dont-arm-ukraine.html
It was liked in the article
No, you linked to something he wrote March 13, 2014. I can’t find the link in your article, but then being colorblind I have a lot of trouble finding hyperlinks in your posts.
You are correct. I linked the wrong article, while intending to do the one from yesterday. This is now fixed. Thank you for finding my error.
You are ever a gracious host.
I’m mostly reliant on the comment section to call me out when I make typographical, editorial, technical, and factual mistakes, so it behooves me to be polite to everyone who comments except for peppermint.
All right. OK. We’ve learned. From Carter to Obama, Weakness is provocative. We show ourselves as weak, and bad things happen. We look crazy and mean, and other nations don’t feel comfortable provoking us, I don’t like it, but the evidence is suggestive. Lenin even told us. “Advance with bayonets. If you meet steel, withdraw. If you meet mush, continue to advance.”
Can we come up with a cheaper way?
DAB
Could someone explain to me why Russia is considered an enemy? I understand that during the cold war they were promoting communism world wide, but now they are simply playing in their back yard. They are only trying to wield their influence in areas that are historically linked to them and contain a lot of ethnic Russians.
Besides, they are no longer communist. They are indeed becoming more and more Christian. Hmmm… I wonder if that has anything to do with it, considering how Christians generally fare after our interventions.
History is full of irony, is it not. From a largely Christian America calling for defeat of Godless Communism, to a now largely Godless America calling for defeat of a resurgent Orthodox Russia.
A top US foreign policy goal since the re-unification of Russia and especially since the replacement of the US-friendly Yeltsin has been to expand NATO as far east as has been feasible. This is argued as being in the American interest.
That is the ‘realist’ motivation. The ‘idealist’ motivation has been to spread western style governance as far east as possible.
In reality, neither motivation is terribly consistent, because foreign policy in the US is a constant muddle and compromise effort, which is to say that it is not competently thought out or executed.
The war in Ukraine was a blunder that was not well thought out, much like most of the other actions that the US involves itself in.
Russia is a politically correct enemy. White and Christian, headed by a unrepentant masculine man, our elites cannot help themselves. It gives the Democrats a natural enemy, and allows the sniveling, spineless turds in the Republican party an excuse to thump their chests and express mindless war-mongering flag waving “patriotism” for the American empire.
“History is full of irony, is it not. From a largely Christian America calling for defeat of Godless Communism, to a now largely Godless America calling for defeat of a resurgent Orthodox Russia.”
As most of the Godlessness in America is being spread by undeniable cultural Marxists the turnaround seems almost total, but America is still more civilized than Russia.
Could we not influence Russia more by being friendly to them? They now have a more “western” arrangement, they aren’t godless communists any more. Are our leaders really that stupid, grunting “Soviet bad, so Russia bad”? Also the Eastern European countries are now western style democracies. We “won.” So why poke the bear? What do we need NATO for now, anyway?
The pithy response is that criminals control the American state, which is inhabited by a corrupt general population which is easily bribed and misdirected.
There are countless conceivable better possible diplomatic responses to Russia.
I suppose it’s bureaucratic stasis. A bunch of self important well paid functionaries must justify their existence.
They don’t see themselves that way, but that is the case.
“Are our leaders really that stupid, grunting “Soviet bad, so Russia bad”? ”
I wish that it was that simple. This might be the motivation for some of the more simple-minded Republicans, but a lot of the leftists who are now in the van of the “Hate Russia” movement made excuses for the old Communist USSR. They hate Russia and Russians because they “killed the dream” – they gave up on Communism, and turned back to Christianity. For this, the Left can never forgive them.
There’s also the fact that Russia is outside the post-war banking system. It was a major US project after 1991 to integrate Russia into the international financial system.
Putin scuttled this project and embarrassed many highly-placed Americans. For this, there’s a sense of anger and betrayal in the upper American echelons that is not necessarily shared by the broader American people, except when they are whipped into a frenzy by the media.