Putin calls the US a hoax in Ukraine

Russia has amassed significant forces along the Ukrainian border. Negotiations between Russia and NATO seems to have been broken. Members of Washington’s foreign policy establishment are beginning to suggest the need to respond to any Russian military move against Ukraine with a vigorous show of force.

How did we get here, appearing to be on the right track either in direct military confrontation with a nuclear-armed nation nearly 5,000 miles off the coast of the United States, or ready to step back and retreat when face a head-on challenge to a military alliance led by the United States. ?

The answer is that we got here by deception – and the obvious decision of Russian President Vladimir Putin to call our scam. One possible response to this unhappy situation is to keep lying in the hope that Putin will eventually blink. The other, much more sensible route is to re-evaluate the decisions that brought us here in the first place and move forward with less sustainable hubris.

With the end of the Cold War, the United States began to extend formal and informal security guarantees to remote corners of the globe. These were based on older guarantees stemming from the West’s decades-long confrontation with the Soviet Union and its many satellite states and customers.

The United States has officially committed to the defense of Western Europe through NATO, as well as Japan and South Korea. Our agreement with Taiwan is not clearer, but everyone understands that we will hardly be able to turn a blind eye to any move by China to invade the island.

The US response to Iraq’s invasion of neighboring Kuwait just months before the eventual disintegration of the Soviet Union demonstrates that the US intends to use its military and diplomatic might to contain the outbreak. of cross-border military conflict in the Middle East – and punish governments that violate such strict regulations.

Then, in the late 1990s, NATO began to expand eastward, and NATO projected power beyond its borders into the Balkans to prevent terrible bloodshed in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. The spectacular 9/11 terrorist attack planned by Al Qaeda in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, which prompted the US and its NATO allies to project power even further, has now reached South Asia. The subsequent invasion and occupation of Iraq, conducted by the United States and selected non-NATO allies, was deemed necessary to eliminate an unacceptable threat to the United States and its allies in China. Winter. Eight years later, NATO projects power in the Mediterranean Sea, toppling the government of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya.

Each move is an expansion of America’s military reach, and many of them signal NATO’s transformation from a defensive alliance to an sometimes offensive one. With each step, the United States and its allies demonstrate their willingness to use military force to challenge and defeat weaker global powers. In doing so, we began to build what looked like a rudimentary worldwide police force with the United States at the forefront.

But there are undeniable downsides.

However, a foreign policy aimed at punishing “villains”, to use the language of former President George W. Bush after 9/11, has left us with a series of messes. We became the ones directly responsible for the security of the places we infiltrated. And instead of those countries learning to take care of themselves over time, they become dependents, forcing the United States and our allies to expand their domestic and foreign security commitments. , with the only alternative being eventual collapse into civil war or dictatorship. We have seen different versions of this scenario play out on different time scales in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan over the past two decades.

But this is not the only downside, or perhaps the worst, to America’s foreign policy approach since the end of the Cold War.

We were able to fight a series of small (if incurable) wars around the world because, in each case, The opponent is much weaker than us. But we have also extended implicit security guarantees to places where a strong or rising power in the region has competing interests. And we have handled such situations by acting as if we were ready to defend certain countries against formidable military threats when we were never really prepared to do so. so.

This approach to conducting foreign policy has worked so well that no one calls us bluffs. Our willingness and ability to project power into the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa is proof of our determination everywhere.

But our geopolitical opponents are no longer prepared to make peace with us under any circumstances. For example, Putin seems willing to test the assertion that Russia is more at risk near foreign countries (in Ukraine as well as in Georgia and Belarus) than we are – and the outcome will most likely be decisive. intended to benefit him. Recently YouGov . Poll For example, commissioned by the Charles Koch Institute, only 27% of Americans would support going to war with Russia if it invaded Ukraine. Its not even clear that the European Union would have the ability to impose new economic sanctions on Russia in retaliation for an invasion – all of which means that Putin could prevail in an attempt to stem the expansion. of NATO.

This has not prevented some analysts in favor of us expanding the hoax further, fearing that backing down would prompt China to conduct its own test of its willingness to defend Taiwan. us before an invasion. (Some even have go as far as suggested, against any good reason, that allowing Russia to invade Ukraine without military consequences would destroy NATO completely and put us on the path to world war.) get ready to defend against the threat of war and make this determination clear to our geopolitical adversaries.

We cannot guarantee security in Eastern Europe and Middle East and North Africa and South Asia and East and Southeast Asia. But we maybe use our still formidable economic and military power to influence the course of events in select locations. What should those places be? America has done a lot around the world since the end of the Cold War. But we haven’t made enough of the hard choices that any finite power needs to make.

The crisis in Ukraine should be seen as an opportunity to begin the painful but necessary process of choosing our battles more wisely.