More Thoughts on the Russo-Ukraine War

Thanks to Bari Weiss we have evidence of a strange encounter among three foreign policy mavens. (via Maggie’s Farm) One, neo-Hegelian Francis Fukuyama, the man who declared that history had ended in 1989-- and who has not changed his mind since. He is apparently still awaiting the apocalypse. Then, we have Niall Ferguson, a leading economic historian, of the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto. Finally, Walter Russell Mead, foreign affairs columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

Anyway, Fukuyama the neo-Hegelian, has become something of a Biden apologist. He offered this stirring encomium to senile old Joe:

I think he’s done a magnificent job in rallying the whole NATO alliance to oppose Putin by, for example, diverting liquified natural gas supplies to Europe so they could endure a Russian cut-off of gas in the event of a war. He’s probably the person most responsible for the amazing change in German foreign policy: the Germans have abandoned 40 years of outreach to Russia, their hallmark through Angela Merkel’s tenure. Chancellor Olaf Scholz has declared a doubling of the German defense budget and his willingness to ship weapons to Ukraine. Those moves are the result of a lot of diplomacy that was occurring in the weeks-long leadup to the war. 

To which Ferguson responded, by pointing out that the weakness and ineptitude of Biden and his Western European satraps effectively produced the crisis. Recall that when the big bad Trump was in the White House, Russia was relatively peaceful. And yet, with the Obama and the Biden administrations it has seen the chance to seize lands that it wants to seize. Weakness invites aggression, don't you think.

Ferguson said this:

The reason this happened is because the Biden administration slowed down deliveries of armaments to Ukraine, lifted the sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that was supposed to bypass Ukraine, signaled to Russia that the U.S. would not support Ukraine militarily, and therefore made it clear to Putin that he had an opportunity to take military action with only sanctions to fear. The administration’s strategy was to threaten the worst sanctions—as if sanctions were going to deter Putin. Then they tried something even crazier, which was to say, “You’re going to invade, and we know the date”—as if that was somehow going to stop him from invading. And the worst thing they tried was to get the Chinese to dissuade him from invading, when the Chinese had given him the green light on the condition that he didn’t go until after the Beijing Olympics.

This has been a debacle that has allowed a massive war to break out, one that could have been prevented had there not been such clear signs of weakness.

He continues:

The problem is that we created the possibility of Ukraine’s joining NATO and joining the European Union. But our actual attitude was like that New Yorker cartoon of the guy on the phone who says, “No, I can’t do Thursday. How about never?” We never seriously meant for them to join NATO or the EU. We didn’t supply nearly enough armaments for them to deter Russia from attacking. And as a consequence, we have a massive geopolitical crisis that could have been avoided. Telling people that you saw it coming is not an act of strategic genius. It’s an act of strategic feebleness.

And also:

There are two choices, and we chose neither. Either we tell Ukraine to accept neutrality, because otherwise, the Russians are going to invade and we’re not fighting—this is what Henry Kissinger proposed back in 2014—or you have to arm the Ukrainians sufficiently that they can deter the Russians. And we did not.

Walter Russell Mead adds a note, to the effect that the president who failed the most miserably to deal effectively with Russia was Barack Obama. One understands that Biden is working to replace Obama at the top of that list.

I think when the history books finally come, the American president seen to have been the least effective in dealing with Putin will be Barack Obama. If anybody taught Putin to despise the West, it was Obama. Now, Trump’s policies were more anti-Putin than anything Obama did, but his rhetoric was not. And because of his sort of whole crazy defensiveness over Russiagate, he got himself in various tangles. It was just kind of an ugly mess. I think Putin did read from Trump a certain kind of Western weakness—that the European alliance was getting weaker, that America was hopelessly polarized.

Ferguson agrees and adds some points:

I agree that Obama’s policy towards Russia was a disaster. Remember “the 1980s are calling, and they want their foreign policy back”? His was a disastrous record of failure, and I think it set many of these trends in motion that are reaching their terrible terminus right now.

Note well, according to Ferguson, we are offering soft weapons against hard weapons. As I suggested in the prior post, the conflict between authoritarian and democratic states seems to be one between the boys and the girls:

What we’re doing at the moment is almost the exact opposite. We’re offering those powerful weapons of applause, editorials, and speeches rather than the kind of hardware that the Ukrainians need. We’re not really helping them win, and we’re certainly not going to give them victory with fine words. And we’re leaving the Chinese to offer to intermediate, which is just fatal. It’s almost as if all the lessons of diplomatic history have been forgotten.

And, let us end on this note, which we examined yesterday:

I'm not being defeatist. I'm being realistic because the Western media coverage is greatly exaggerating the probability of Ukrainian resistance enduring for more than a few weeks. You have to look at the facts on the ground.

The Europeans have been more impressive in their response and have pushed forward the sanctions agenda. But sanctions aren’t, I think, going to determine the outcome of this war. My sense is that we are in a situation in which the U.S. has lost control of events.