Behaving Erratically

I wanted to call your attention to what I think is a very good piece by Sean McMeekin at Compact on what he refers to as our “erratic Russia policy”. Here’s a snippet:

The lack of historical or material ties between America and Ukraine notwithstanding, defending Ukraine’s territorial integrity is now, judging by countless pronouncements by official Washington, a cardinal principle of US foreign policy, even as Russia’s most essential interest, judging by countless pronouncements by Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials, now requires waging war against Ukrainians because they are American-supported.

Does any of this make sense?

I wanted to make two points. The first is that I don’t think you can explain our policy with respect to Russia without understanding how little it is affected by national interests and how much affected by personal interests. For the last 30 years and in all likelihood substantially longer our posture has been heavily influenced by people making money based on our relations with Ukraine, Georgia, etc. or by people who are otherwise interested—Polish-Americans, Ukrainian-Americans—or both financially and otherwise interested.

The second observation is that over the last 30 years there have been several of what you might think of as “inflection points”. The first of these inflection points was our engagement in Yugoslavia. That marked the end of NATO’s existence as a defensive alliance and its transmogrification into, well, something else. To this day the Chinese consider our bombing of their embassy in Belgrade during that engagement as deliberate.

We can’t plead opposition to genocide. If that were the case we would be attacking China, Myanmar, and many other countries in which genocides are still taking place.

The second is our invasion of Iraq. We removed Saddam Hussein, largely on the pretext of his possession of weapons of mass destruction, basically because we could. He wasn’t a threat to us; he wasn’t supporting our enemies. Iran is a considerably greater threat to us and we haven’t invaded Iran. Ultimately, our invasion of Iraq enabled a genocide which almost wiped out the Yazidis in northeastern Iraq.

The third is our involvement in the removal of Moammar Qaddafi in Libya. Although, unlike the previous two examples, there was a Security Council resolution which authorized our protecting civilians there, reasonable observers conclude our degradation of the Libyan military which enabled his overthrow to have gone substantially beyond our mandate there. Interest didn’t justify it; neither did international law. What did was the hypothetical and bloodthirsty “responsibility to protect”.

There are many other examples but those are the most blatant.

What we need to understand about these actions of ours is that the United States is that guy yelling and behaving erratically doing Michael Jordan impressions in the subway car. What prevents somebody from wrestling us to the ground is that we’re too big and strong.