I had not wanted nor expected to resume this blog after a year's silence with a war on our hands. Nevertheless, no one can deny the Soviet elephant in the room (or across the border).
In Ukraine, Russian President for Life Putin has unleashed a war of occupation, with all the human misery, death, and destruction that entails, against a peaceful neighboring state.
Knowing a little something about the Russia and about Putin, when people asked me two weeks ago what I thought we should do, I said that Biden needed to say loud and often that we would blast away the first Russian troops that crossed that border into Ukraine, say it like he meant it, and then do it when the inevitable occurred. None of that happened. That promise (to destroy Russian troops) was not made; and even if it had been, Biden could not possibly have made it sound like he meant it. Instead, he suggested that a small (undefined) incursion would not meet with Allied resistance, or even sanctions.
We waited for the war to start, and then started applying sanctions, but not those that would really hurt the Russians. Continue to let Russia sell oil? Ridiculous. Do nothing to provide Ukraine with defensive air capabilities it did not have itself? Absolute folly. We are told that sanctions were only applied slowly, and that some of the more serious ones were withheld entirely, because our European allies could not agree to them.
Biden deserves full credit for a providing a limited, if predictably effective, response while having kept the NATO alliance together. But is that really our goal? Should it be our goal? Personally I would have said our goal should be to prevent that war.
To Biden and especially more to our European allies, one must pose a simple question: Did you ever hear of a little trio involving Hitler, Chamberlain, and appeasement? If not, please go google it, because this was no different and even more blatant. How could you miss the similarities? Putin massed his troops, and then told us he wasn't planning to invade, and we (I mean actually YOU, NATO leaders) believed him. Believed him because "we" wanted to, because the alternative seemed so er.., unpleasant.
There's a lot to answer for here. Have "we" looked at a map of Europe to see how many more countries will border the new expanded "Russia" after Putin completes his occupation of Ukraine? When "we" looked at the potential downsides for Europe, we fully considered Putin cutting off the gas, but did we consider him reinvading Poland? I'm no warmonger (our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were unnecessary and doomed to failure). But sometimes, gentlemen, there is a higher calling than the price of gas. One example may have been when we went to war to free Kuwait from an illegal Iraqi occupation. I think the Ukraine situation is one of them, too, and that a clear and hard military response was probably the only thing that might (might!) have made Putin think twice.
What if I'm wrong and Russia dissolves into a puddle of red ink and Putin turns tail and goes home tomorrow? (He won't, I'll wager.) How do we now get back to the status quo ante? How long will it take us to unkill the Ukrainian dead, repatriate the refugees, rebuild cities, undo the Russian occupation of Crimea, and push Russian nationals living in Ukrainian territory back across the border into Russia? (Sure, I added a couple of items to the wish list - a dictator must pay a price, after all.) We failed to learn the lesson of appeasement. We should have recognized it for what it was, and cut it off immediately.
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