Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax] Chronicle Herald
What we all saw, in real time, in the Feb. 28 meeting in the Oval Office between Donald Trump and J.D. Vance squaring off against Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky, was extraordinary. A meeting initially intended to be about a U.S.-Ukraine minerals agreement turned into a shambles. How did it come to this?
Vice President Vance, far more aggressive than President Trump, represents the realist foreign policy tendency in this administration. He thinks that the United States does not have the resources at this point to worry very much about Ukraine. He and Trump want to break Washington’s addiction to unipolar hegemony.
Vance grew up in an Appalachia forgotten while America after 2001 fought endless wars around the world for “democracy.” First of all, this has cost hundreds of billions -- in fact trillions -- of dollars, and second, it didn’t make a dent in bringing “democracy” or anything remotely close to any of these entities. Look at Afghanistan, Iraq, even Somalia, today; it tells you all you need to know.
The interest payments on the U.S. national debt is now greater than the Pentagon’s budget. You don’t need an economics degree to realize this can’t go on. That message, delivered by Vance at the recent Munich Security Conference, rankled America’s European allies.
But Europe is their continent, not America’s, and if they don’t increase their readiness to confront what they perceive as an existential threat, why should Washington? They need to get serious about defence budgeting. At present the U.S. does not just pay 16 per cent of NATO’s budget but also patrols sea-lanes and deters terrorists and rogues states that otherwise might interrupt Europe’s commercial networks abroad, as well as de facto including Europe under a nuclear umbrella.
Trump’s controversial defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, represents a generation embittered by what used to be called the War on Terror, and which is bent on ditching the bipartisan consensus that led America to take up regime change and nation-building. Hegseth points to the following results: “Iran effectively controls Iraq, the Taliban effectively controls Afghanistan.”
The famous last line from the 1944 film noir “Double Indemnity” comes to mind: Fred MacMurray’s character Walter Neff tells his boss Barton Keyes, played by Edward G. Robinson, at the conclusion of the movie, “Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money and a woman. I didn’t get the money, and I didn’t get the woman.”
Donald Trump came into office promising to end all this. Liberal internationalism and idealism have, for the moment, run their course. This is an inflection point like that of the year 1919, at the end of World War I. America became so disillusioned at the way the parties to the Versailles peace conference acted that it turned away in disgust.
President Woodrow Wilson’s “war for democracy” ended with American isolationism and refusal to join the new League of Nations. So far Trump hasn’t quit the United Nations -- but he has little use for it.
Ukraine is a huge country, the biggest in Europe after Russia itself, and the Russians have had immense difficulty after three years of fighting even holding those parts – mainly Russophone -- they captured. The idea that Putin wants to follow up and conquer Europe, including heavily armed France, Germany, and – especially -- Poland, as a new version of Hitler, is ridiculous. It reminds me of the domino theory back in the 1960s, where the “hawks” claimed that the Vietnamese Communists, if victorious, would soon land on the beaches of California!
Let’s face it: Russia won’t give up the Crimea and probably will keep most of the Donbas. These are demographically and historically Russian, and the internal boundaries of 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed were those drawn by the Communist rulers, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, and then messed up further by Nikita Khrushchev, who in 1954 inexplicably “gave” Russian-majority Crimea to Ukraine.
They intentionally enlarged Ukraine’s borders to dilute what they feared as “Great Russian chauvinism.” There should have been border adjustments following referenda after 1991. There was nothing sacrosanct about these boundaries.
I’m not even going into Ukraine’s actual lack of democratic political culture, which includes postponed elections, the outlawing of opposition media and parties, and the suspension of habeas corpus, because that is their own internal matter. But I don’t think this conflict merits a world war. It has already killed hundreds of thousands of people and needs to end, and fast.
No comments:
Post a Comment