<<<Why not take (Putin's) objection to the Ukraine joining (NATO) seriously?>>>
That assumes that that is Putin's only motivation. Au contraire, I think it is reasonably clear that Putin intends to incorporate the very large and rich nation of Ukraine into his empire. It would by itself catapult Russia from a second to a first rank world power.
Tucker Carlson, and many "conservative" Republicans, argue that America has no significant national interest in intervening on behalf of the Ukraine. I have posted below excerpts of an essay by Dan Hannan that answers this contention by suggesting that the relative absence in the world of serious wars since WWII has been the proliferation of many small, democratic countries.
Britain's Chamberlain rationalized the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938 by speaking of it as "a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing."
But Tucker has another argument against intervention, to wit, that because the Ukraine government has (allegedly) muzzled opposition politicians and publications, it is not "democratic" and therefore not deserving of our support.
This argument that Ukraine is undeserving of support may - for some - have a surface plausibility - but does not hold up upon serious reflection.
Lincoln at the start of our own civil war jailed politicians who were in fact Southern successionists and suppressed their newspapers. President Wilson at the outset of WWI, a war in which America had no great strategic interest, jailed for treason German American, Irish American, and Socialist opponents of that war.
Because the Ukraine has been cruelly dominated by Russia for centuries, it contains significant numbers of ethnic Russians, many of whom have sentimental ties to their "mother" country.
In the name of "democrat" procedure, should that minority have the power to subvert the interests of the majority?
An identical situation of "Russian" minorities exists in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, etc. When Putin seized the Crimea and other areas of the Ukraine several years ago, his explicit rationale was that it was for the "protection" of the Russian minority.
Czechoslovakia in 1938 faced an identical dilemma. It had some 1.5 million Germans in the Sudetenland. Hitler actively was inciting these Germans to subversion. For the Czech government it was a lose-lose proposition: if they suppressed the insurrection, it would give Hitler justification to invade, and if they did nothing, he would not have to invade!
Poland in 1939, with a million ethnic Germans, faced an identical situation. Only Poland was not a "nice" country. Not only was it openly "fascist," but it did - in fact - suppress its German minority by "undemocratic" means.>>>>
by Dan Hannan, Why do countries go to war? The costs, after all, are huge......
So, let’s ask the question in the context of Ukraine. Why are two serious, advanced, literate societies on the brink of an all-out conflict?
From Kyiv’s perspective, the answer is straightforward. Anything, even a destructive war with mass casualties, is better than another Russian occupation. The Holodomor, the deliberate destruction of Ukrainian society through shootings, deportations, and targeted starvation, was the foundational event of modern Ukraine. Every family was touched by the horror. Eyewitness accounts from 1933 are almost unbearable to read. Here is a passage from Timothy Snyder’s book, Bloodlands:
One spring morning, amidst the piles of dead peasants at the Kharkiv market, an infant suckled the breast of its mother, whose face was a lifeless grey. Passersby had seen this before, not just the disarray of corpses, not just the dead mother and the living infant, but that precise scene, the tiny mouth, the last drops of milk, the cold nipple. The Ukrainians had a term for this. They said to themselves, quietly, as they passed: “These are the buds of the socialist spring.”
I could have picked even more harrowing images. Some Ukrainians were driven to killing and cannibalizing some children to keep the others alive. But I don’t want to upset you — I simply want to explain why, from a Ukrainian perspective, an endless guerrilla war might seem preferable to renewed Kremlin rule. And to the extent that the prospect of an open-ended insurrection might deter Vladimir Putin, that policy might be described as rational.
......
A reunification of the three Russias — Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus? ........ Imagine if, using a similar line of reasoning to Putin’s, Germany were to invade Austria, or Spain Mexico. There is a reason the international order rests on a measure of self-determination.
From the perspective of the Russian people, the downsides clearly outweigh any gains. But the incentives of Putin do not align precisely with those of his country. .....Like so many dictators over the years, Putin seeks to deflect criticism by keeping a series of simmering conflicts going at all times — as Shakespeare put it, "to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels."
What most offends him about an independent Ukraine is not...... No, what offends him is the fear of a kindred society on his borders, infecting Russians with notions of multiparty democracy and limited government.
It is not quite true that no two democracies have ever gone to war. ....But such wars are rare. As a rule, democracy aligns the interests of rulers and ruled, and so makes aggressive war less likely.
That is why the rest of us cannot be indifferent to the fate of Ukraine. A world in which Ukrainian sovereignty is snuffed out is a world in which dictators are stronger and democrats are weaker. Such a world, as well as being more wretched, will be more warlike. The spread of representative government, and the emergence of more numerous, smaller, and more democratic states since the 1950s, has coincided with historically low levels of interstate war. We cannot give up on the one without jeopardizing the other.
That is why Ukraine is everyone’s business. |
