By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal
With the Ukraine war now one year old, have opinions regarding it changed in the United States? The answer: not much.
Most left-of-centre print and other media remain steadfast supporters of the war. On the right, there is more division. The neoconservatives, including establishment Republicans and “NeverTrumpers,” echo the Democratic Party’s view of the war.
But those who are more isolationist – they are sometimes called paleo-conservative -- and who were glad that Donald Trump kept the United States from getting embroiled in eastern Europe, remain opposed. These dissenters write for periodicals such as the American Conservative, American Greatness, American Thinker, Chronicles, and Taki’s Magazine.
Their thinking goes like this: With Trump in the White House, Russian President Vladimir Putin had a sympathetic ear to his geopolitical concerns. But President Joe Biden’s win in 2020, allowed the return of the neoconservatives as policy makers, which allowed Ukraine to take advantage of the new administration.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky saw a chance to regain the separatist Russian areas in Donetsk and Luhansk, so Putin, they maintain, concluded he had to nip NATO expansion into Ukraine in the bud.
The isolationists don’t understand why Washington is involved in this war. Russia matters little to the U.S. economically and is a distant geopolitical actor. They argue that this is an eastern European dispute and none of America’s business.
They also take Ukraine’s insistence that Kyiv is on a mission to protect democracy with a grain of salt, asserting that Ukraine’s most distinguishing features are thefts of economic aid and natural resources. They also suggest that Zelensky provoked the conflict to open up the cash spigot -- and it worked. Total American aid has now passed more than $100 billion.
People understand that the sanctions against Russia are just as much sanctions against them. They see runaway inflation and think, “Why should I be paying for this?” When, the critics ask, did the internal political arrangements of foreign nations become a primary concern of the country?
After all, this is a war on Russia’s borders, thousands of kilometres away, and against a state that has been greatly diminished since the 1990s, having lost its own east European empire (and even large parts of its own territory, including Ukraine).
The war’s opponents maintain that Kyiv failed to realize that peace is the product of mutual security. Ukraine’s drive to join NATO ignored thirty years of warnings that NATO’s eastward expansion posed an existential threat to Russia.
So, for the war’s opponents, this intervention only makes sense if America wants to become an unchallenged super-power. Many of the isolationists are also bothered by those who are using the war in order to pursue regime change: they wish to overthrow the present Russian government and install one that is more congenial to “woke” Western values.
Also, some maintain, should the U.S. dismantle what’s left of the old Soviet Union into smaller units, it might also scare China into thinking twice before it challenges Washington over Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia.
In any case, they feel Crimea will certainly be a red line for Russia -- and this is doubtless true. Already in the 1990s, Russian president Boris Yeltsin was demanding its return from Ukraine to the Russian republic. (The USSR transferred it to Ukraine in 1954.) It’s easy to forget that this conflict really began in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine.
Some isolationists suggest it was clear that Crimeans themselves overwhelmingly desired to rejoin Russia long before Russia invaded Ukraine. An official 1994 referendum had found that nearly 80 per cent of Crimeans desired greater regional autonomy.
That same year, Yuriy Meshkov was elected President of Crimea, at the time an autonomous region of Ukraine, with 72 per cent of the vote. His campaign had one major plank: unity with Russia.
The government in Kyiv responded to the referendum by scrapping Crimea’s constitution. Ukraine abolished the office of president of Crimea, arrested Meshkov, and exiled him to Russia.
As for Luhansk and Donetsk, in 2019, the Kyiv Post, a pro-Western newspaper, found that just five per cent of residents hoped Ukraine would retake the region, while over 60 per cent wanted to join the Russian Federation.
Really, this isn’t at all surprising. These people are ethnically Russian, speak Russian, and are Russian Orthodox Christians. They would rather be part of Russia again. Is that so remarkable? Why should Washington support Ukraine’s claim?
A Russia flat on its back in the 1990s could not prevent the United States and its allies from doggedly enlarging the West’s voluntary sphere of influence to former Warsaw Pact countries and some Soviet republics that requested inclusion, but Putin openly and methodically rebuilt the wherewithal to push back.
So the isolationists are now concerned that NATO might soon face an unpleasant choice: risk a war with Russia by sending in troops to reinforce Ukraine’s ranks, or let Russia prevail, with consequences that are likely to impact how Americans live for years to come.
More mainstream Republican Party politicians have also become more critical of Washington’s support for the war. President Biden’s surprise trip to Ukraine on Monday drew a variety of attacks from congressional Republicans who criticized his support for the war-torn country and accused him of neglecting issues back at home.
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