HAVE WE LEARNED?

That is the question we need to keep asking. So far, we’ve had three presidents after the war-mongering Bush-Cheney administration, and happily there have been very, very few “boots on the ground.” In fairness to the hapless ex-President W, let’s note that he couldn’t have dragged us down that hopeless road without the fervent backing of Democrats; 40% of House Dems and 60% of Dem Senators went along for the ride, including both HRC and Joe Biden, a major reason I supported Bernie twice, though I am fine with President Biden’s handling of this threat from Putin. It’s clear to me President Biden learned from his wrong vote in favor of the Iraq War.  Neither party had yet learned the lesson they should have learned from the disastrous Vietnam War, and thirty plus years later, they were both living a delusion. We have now shifted to a strategy of air strikes and drones, and have hopefully abandoned the impossible task of “nation building.”

It’s a difficult balance to defend ourselves and support a peaceful world, but the alternatives are unthinkable. Teddy Roosevelt (“TR”) had the right idea when he said “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Time Magazine publisher Henry Luce, a relatively moderate Republican, urged a “Pax Americana” after WWII, where the world’s then only superpower would keep the kid on things; that ended when the USSR possessed nuclear weapons. This lead to the strategy of “Mutual Assured Destruction,” which meant the USSR and the USA knew what would happen if there were a nuclear war, so they developed safety nets like the hot line and increased diplomacy to make sure that policy worked. Maybe it worked with relatively rational communists like Brezhnev, Yeltsin and Gorbachev, but now we’re facing Putin, who is not the leader of a world power in the way those men were, and he has little interest in maintaining order and avoiding conflict; to the contrary, he thrives on violence, genocide, and physical violence against his neighbors. (By 1980, the USSR had learned in Afghanistan what we learned decades later.) Unlike the misguided and reckless involvements in prior wars, Putin’s violence and aggression present a clear and present danger to all of Europe, and thus, to America. So something had to be done, and the nations of the West came together to aid Ukraine without fighting ourselves.

Thus far, the unified West is doing a fairly good job of opposing Putin without getting involved in battle. We have seen the Russian army exposed as a fraud and horribly ruined by poor strategy and poor equipment, with soldiers spending every waking moment planning to desert. The unified NATO alliance strategy is working far better than our failed strategies in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Let’s stick with the plan. If the West hadn’t stood up to Putin, our NATO troops in Germany would face a substantial likelihood of armed conflict with Russia. We would have kicked their asses, of course, but not without horrible loss of life and destruction of much of Western Europe. Yes, it costs money to aid Ukraine, but if Russia prevaled, it would cost us a lot more in every way. I’m quite certain TR would approve of what we are doing with our allies.