William A. Galston devotes his Wall Street Journal column to a plea to help the Ukrainians more in their war against Russia:
In the coming weeks, it is likely that the Russian army will encircle and besiege many of Ukraine’s largest cities. The inhabitants of these cities will be left without food, water and electricity, as they already are in Mariupol. The Russians will batter these cities with bombs, missiles and artillery, making no effort to distinguish between military targets and civilians. The longer Ukrainians resist, the more their cities will resemble Grozny and Aleppo. As the chief of the confederacy that fought the Romans in Scotland said of the imperial invaders’ strategy, according to Tacitus, “they make a desert and call it peace.â€
President Biden insists, rightly, that America should not fight World War III in Ukraine. But there is a lot of daylight between nuclear armageddon and our current stance. For example, the U.S. is preventing the transfer of Polish aircraft to Ukraine on the grounds that doing so would be “escalatory.†Translation: It would entail risks that America should not take.
I’m not the only one to wonder whether this is true. Let’s assume that the Ukrainian government dispatches its pilots to fly these plans across Ukrainian airspace to a Ukrainian airfield that remains operational. How does this differ in principle from the other defensive weapons that NATO is sending to Ukraine?
There may be technical or operational reasons to reject this transfer. But the degree of risk the U.S. would run is not high enough to justify blocking it.
I don’t honestly know what President Putin’s reaction to such a transfer would be or whether it would be effective. I suspect we will be receiving many such pleas as the days wear on and the Russians begin overwhelming the Ukrainian military.
As I write this the Ukrainian president is delivering an emotional plea to the U. S. Congress.
What is the correct posture for the United States?
I don’t think there is a bright line between provocation and prostration. Direct intervention or no fly zones are clearly provocations. However, we seem to be much closer to prostration.
If Joe Biden is so scared of tough stances, and accepts an argument that providing military aid to a nation attempting to defend itself is a provocation just because a tyrant says so, then he should resign. What next, the Baltics, Poland, Taiwan? Ther are risks to passivity as well as a tough posture.
We have a tired old man as President, a true idiot as VP, and a sloshed old lady as Speaker. Wonderful.
Although it requires some mirror-imaging, which is usually problematic, I think it’s useful to consider how we would react if the roles were reversed. Let’s say, for example, that Russia gave tons of advanced weapons to Iraq in 2003 and facilitated the transfer of aircraft from Kazakhstan? What would Galston’s reaction be to that? Or maybe Russian intelligence aircraft and ships in the Med feeding tactical intel to Quaddafi’s Libya?
I think there would be screams of “act of war!” from the people who would turn around and suggest that anything we do to aid Ukraine short of participating in hostilities is not an act of war.
I think Americans, especially American pundits, underappreciate the perception of American hypocrisy around the world, which can sometimes work against our interests. I don’t mind the US playing hard-ball and power politics in pursuit of our interests, but it’s just dumb and naive to think there aren’t tradeoffs or that everyone will be drinking our koolaid.
America sent planes and pilots to China under some legal fiction before Pearl Harbor — the Flying Tigers. I think the men resigned from active duty and the planes were repainted. Still the risk of doing this today bears a much greater risk of expanding the conflict to NATO countries.
I dont think Japan was pretending it was not at war and claiming it was having special operations. I think it is risk/reward. At what point does Putin decide it is enough provocation to escalate further? Beats me but but WW 3 is likely the last war for a long, long time. We are already providing lots of support that could be considered a provocation. As Andy points out if done against us it would definitely count.
Ambivalent about the Polish planes. Doubt they make that much difference TBH.
Steve
I think his calculus is very different from what an American politician’s would be.
I’m not justifying that or proposing a course of action. As usual I think we should pursue our interests, narrowly construed.
I continue to find it mind boggling that we are completely enmeshed in the Ukrainian border invasion 5 thousand miles away, while completely ignoring, falsely reporting on and/or minimizing the nearby invasion of our own southern border. In fact, there are those who assert the democrat administration is primarily using Ukraine’s incursion as a way to shift blame of a U.S. economy on the skids on Putin’s latest land grab aggression, rather than Biden’s economy-killing policies. This thinking is supported by noting Ukraine’s vulnerability and issues have been on the back burner for years, and lightly dealt with until COVID hysteria suddenly dropped out of the headlines, and a new issue was needed as a distraction from the US’s more immediate problems
Those problems include having a PPI in unchartered territory, consumer confidence lower than at the height of the lockdowns, inflation insanely rising, worries about a recession in the midst of stagflation, and signs the dollar is being threatened to be relieved of it’s prime reserve currency status – being challenged by the tightening relationship between Russia and China. Nonetheless, corporate media and politicians block all this out in favor of emotionally highlighting everything Ukraine.
Lastly, the coalition forming between neoliberals and neocons, embracing provocative war-like actions to quell Russia’s own warring actions, seems suicidal. Where are the calm, deliberate, bigger-picture minds leading this country? We are in the age of nuclear weapons, emp attacks, super sonic missiles, and yet we resort to blustering tactics as a way to remedy what is actually a territorial dispute between two countries. And, while i admire the Ukrainian people’s courage, empathize with their suffering, and Zelensky’s verve, I think he was over the top in his speech to Congress, using 911, Pearl Harbor, adapting MLK’s civil rights words to the attacks on Ukraine (as almost a theatric ploy) to wring out more guilt and thus more support for his country’s plight.
The correct American responses would have been to insist the Minsk accords were implemented by Ukraine, and to agree to discuss Russia’s security concerns. Having miserably failed both of those requirements for peace, we now have to stay out of it.
I have said before, and I really believe it, we have one of the worst Ruling Classes in known history. They are ignorant, stupid, arrogant, delusional, corrupt in every possible way (including pedophilia), and they are actively, though unknowingly, dismantling the post WW II American hegemony. The possibility that they will cause a very large scale European and North American war is substantial. I do not hear a single voice of reason in our Elites. They want to kill Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard.
I definitely think there is a problem with overconfidence bias and the Dunning-Kruger effect.
This is a point I’ve tried to make over at OTB and other places to lots of pushback. A lot of people are angry about the Ukraine invasion and think any response we make is inherently legitimate and any potential counter-response by Russia is inherently illegitimate.
But our perception about what is illegitimate or not is not an iron law. That is why, IMO, it is so important to consider how Russia and other actors view things so that we can understand the effects of our actions or potential actions.
And that’s one of my frustrations with the last decade. It was clear that Russia would go to war to prevent Ukraine from becoming aligned against Russia and we acted like it was all a bluff, like this outcome was not possible.
I’ve been trying to do just that for years. It upsets people. “Don’t the Russians have any agency?” they say. Don’t we?
“It was clear that Russia would go to war to prevent Ukraine from becoming aligned against Russia”
Yet almost every former Soviet country has persistently asked to join the EU and NATO. I suspect that they understand Russians/Putin better than we do. That makes me think they have been convinced all along that Russia would try to reform the USSR, or at least part of it. Almost as if they knew that”Russian President Vladimir Putin called the collapse of the Soviet empire “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.†Not WW1 or WWII or the famine that Russia caused. The collapse of the USSR. Which Putin talks about a lot.
I think you can make a good case Putin was going after Ukraine and the other countries he went after whether or not Poland, etc joined NATO. Maybe NATO just gives Putin a plausible excuse.
Steve