Friends, my latest article, based on some of my reflections on the Russia-Ukraine mess over the last several days, laments just how much we've allowed the U.S.-Western dominated global order to unravel. China was already a major question mark. Now the estrangement between Russia and the West will complicate matters further. You know, NATO has been the bulwark of Western security since the late 1940s. It's one of history's most successful alliances. It's also an alliance that's essentially never been tested. Could it be tested soon? Let's hope not, because I, for one, repose no great confidence in it, and I'm not at all sure that it hasn't outlived its usefulness. Be that as it may, European politics are getting lively and interesting once more, after several decades of relative quietude. That will keep us on our toes.
A Disaster of Our Own Making: How
We're About to Lose a Lot More Than the Friendship of Ukraine
Let's begin with the obvious: Ukraine
is toast. There is little or no chance that the country will be able
to endure, given Russian military superiority. Thus, the Western
“strategy”, such as it was, to tempt Ukraine progressively closer
to NATO and the EU, all while shielding Ukraine against potential
Russian aggression with (mostly idle) threats of “severe economic
sanctions”, has failed, and spectacularly so!
The key question now is: what penalty
will Russia pay for its impertinence, as the West sees it? And how
long will it pay? Will sanctions be mild or severe? Will they last
weeks, months, years, decades?
The U.S. and the West hesitated
initially to place sanctions on Vladimir Putin personally. Moreover,
Russia's access to the SWIFT banking system has not been curtailed.
To me, though, the really important question is whether there will be
any significant disruption to Russian oil and gas sales to the West.
If there isn't – and early signs indicate that Russian sales of oil
and natural gas will continue unabated – then Russia is likely to
weather this storm just fine.
This (lily-livered) approach will
minimize economic pain in the West, of course, by keeping energy
costs down, but it will simultaneously send a clear message to Russia
(and China) that the West's bark is worse than its bite. Simply put,
we may pity those poor struggling Ukrainians, but we won't sacrifice
our own material comforts to ease their plight. Not a chance.
It all makes you wonder what precisely
we'd be willing to do if Putin marched into Warsaw or Riga (the
capitals of NATO members Poland and Latvia, respectively)... The
answer could well be: not much of anything! A sobering thought.
The fate of Ukraine, however, or even
Poland or the Baltic states, is not, and never has been, of paramount
importance to the U.S. and its key Western European allies. In the
midst of the carnage in Ukraine, we should at least try to see
the forest for the trees. Small, weak, impoverished nations are but
playthings in the hands of the great powers. What's far more
important than events in Kiev, therefore, is the long-term arc of
relations between the U.S., Russia, and China – the world's three
biggest powers, by far.
What we appear to be witnessing on
that score is the rejuvenation of Cold War tensions between Russia
and NATO, on the one hand, and increasing signs of an alliance
between Russia and China, on the other – and both of these
developments are highly troubling and hugely consequential.
Russia's intense jealousy of Western
dominance has been evident at least since Vladimir Putin took the
helm of state. China, though, seems recently to be no less aggrieved
by U.S. and Western hegemony, as its peevish communiques about U.S.
policy and even domestic affairs prove.
It's important to recognize, though,
that Russia's estrangement from the West, and its marriage of
convenience to Red China, are the result of a long series of
high-handed and harebrained moves on the part of a succession of U.S.
and European leaders. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, we
treated Russia like a pariah and like a threat. During the Trump
presidency, the Left went as far as to make Russophobia a fashionable
trend, and it became de rigueur among the woke.
Russia, over many years, got the
message: it would never be respected by the West or welcomed into
NATO, the EU, or the global establishment. Simultaneously, Russia got
clear signals from both the Trump and Biden administrations that,
while the U.S. applauded Ukraine's shift towards the West, we would
under no circumstances actively commit ourselves to the country's
defense. The Western shield over Ukraine, in other words, was 80%
rhetorical, 15% economic, and maybe 5% military – consisting of
desultory shipments of armaments and supplies that would never come
close to altering the balance of forces in the region.
The predictable consequence? Russia
has seen these Western protestations and “guarantees” for what
they are: a farce. It has thus invaded Ukraine, and, in the long run,
it will reorient its economy and its military away from the West and
towards a pact of some kind with communist China.
And China may, as some have suggested,
learn a thing or two from this crisis about the rewards for military
aggression, especially strategic and reputational, and about the
pusillanimity of the West, that will make the world going forward a
far more dangerous place. After all, if the West's response to a
Russian invasion of “sovereign” Ukraine is this timid, how much
more feeble would be our collective opposition to a Chinese invasion
of Taiwan, which virtually the entire world recognizes as the
rightful territory of the PRC?
All in all, it is hard to escape the
conclusion that the events of the last days and weeks are highly
injurious to U.S. national security and to the strategic posture of
the West -- and that is doubly unfortunate, because almost everything
that has happened in and around Ukraine, and between the swooning
lovers Russia and China, is the result of U.S. and Western blunders.
There is, in the end, a strong
argument to be made that, despite Russia's proprietorial attitude to
its “near abroad”, the West and Russia ought not to be enemies at
all. On the contrary, we are natural allies, based on our cultural
and historic ties, against China, which promises to be the
single greatest threat to the current, Western-dominated global
order. Instead of circling our wagons and preparing to meet this
unprecedented challenge, the West is reprising the essentially tribal
rivalries and bloodletting that beset us, and our Russian cousins,
during two world wars, and throughout the Cold War. A more congenial
environment for the rise of communist China as a nascent superpower
would be difficult to imagine!
A tantalizing opportunity has thus
been lost – or, more accurately, squandered.
Now, we and the Russians face a grim, uncertain future.
Dr.
Nicholas L. Waddy is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred
and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com.
He appears on the Newsmaker Show on WLEA 1480/106.9.
See this article also at Townhall:
https://townhall.com/columnists/nicholaswaddy/2022/02/26/a-disaster-of-our-own-making-how-were-about-to-lose-a-lot-more-than-the-friendship-of-ukraine-n2603827
***
Here's the latest on the tragic events in Ukraine. I'm impressed that the Ukrainians are fighting so valiantly, but it seems to me that futile resistance is just that: futile. I don't advise anyone to die for a lost cause.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/02/26/russia-ukraine-invasion-update/6947419001/
Did Biden's energy policies enable Putin to attack Ukraine? Quite possibly. The rise in oil and gas prices since Biden took office have given Putin financial leverage, without which he might well have decided that invading was too great a risk.
https://justthenews.com/government/white-house/bidens-energy-policy-emboldened-putin-invade-ukraine-critics-say
Finally, Sleepy Joe has announced his pick for SCOTUS. She's a...(drumroll, please) black woman! She's also a solid, reliable judicial leftist. What a shock!
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/supreme-court-nominee-ketanji-brown-jackson-biden-carrie-severino
