Russia invades Ukraine
I woke up at three o’clock in the morning only to discover that threatening sanctions isn’t quite the deterrent the White House thought it was. I sat up in bed, grabbed my iPad, and read the news that Russia had launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine.
Not a “minor incursion,” a full-scale attack – by air, sea, and land, from the east, the south, and the north.
Russia invades and what does Biden do? He tells Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky that he will urge other world leaders to condemn Russia’s actions.
Well, that’ll stop the invasion.
The only thing that would work better is a strongly-worded letter to the Kremlin.
Now, it would be easy to blame all of this on the Biden administration. It certainly is fair to say this administration’s weakness and fecklessness made the situation in Ukraine worse.
But according to writer Peter Hitchens, the current crisis we find ourselves in was three decades in the making.
Yesterday I happened across a column by Hitchens, in the UK Daily Mail of all places, titled “Why I blame the arrogant, foolish West for the Ukraine crisis.” And while I never thought I would see myself write this about anything in the Daily Mail, you absolutely should read Hitchens’ column.
In a nutshell, Hitchens outlines the mistakes Western leaders made in their approach to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and how that set the stage for Vladimir Putin’s aggression.
The whole column is excellent, but I wanted to share a few things from it:
We have treated Russia with amazing stupidity. Now we pay the price for that. We had the chance to make her an ally, friend and partner.
Instead we turned her into an enemy by insulting a great and proud country with greed, unearned superiority, cynicism, contempt and mistrust.
Hitchens goes on to describe what it was like for him living in Moscow when the Soviet Union fell, which is really fascinating.
He then notes that, unlike when the West worked to rebuild post-World War Two Germany, when the USSR collapsed, there was no “Marshall Plan” for Russia.
Instead, led by the United States, NATO moved to expand into Eastern Europe.
Hitchens writes that the warnings against NATO’s eastward expansion weren’t coming from the Kremlin, but from “highly intelligent and experienced independent figures,” including the “architect” of the United States’ policy of containment toward the former Soviet Union, American diplomat George Kennan.
Kennan had warned then-President Clinton thirty years ago that NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe was a “tragic mistake” that would kick-start “a new Cold War.”
“We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.”
Hitchens writes:
After 1991 Russia had, for the first time since the Bolshevik putsch of 1917, got the chance to build a new and free society.
As Mr Kennan put it, Nato expansion was an insult to Russian democrats.
“We are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.”
Hitchens argues that with these actions, the West set the stage for the current crisis we see in Ukraine.
What’s worse, Hitchens writes, Western leaders are “such lightweights that they enjoy the chance to posture and threaten – and do not realise this is deadly serious.”
(Did anybody else get a mental picture of Kamala Harris?)
To Hitchens’ way of thinking, the West willfully ignored all the times over the last three decades Russia demanded the West treat it with “the most basic respect,” adding:
Our response has been to react with mistrust and abuse, and with blatant attempts to worsen the situation in Ukraine and Georgia, two incredibly dangerous flashpoints where real war might all too easily begin.
I know I’m quoting quite a bit of this column, but it is still worth your time to read it in its entirety.
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