In the NY Times:
Nearly every Ukrainian I spoke to in Kyiv was at once exhausted by the war and passionately determined to recover every inch of their Russian-occupied territory — but no one had clear answers about the road ahead, the painful trade-offs that await, only certainty that defeat would mean an end to Ukraine’s democratic dream and a smashing of the post-World War II era that had produced a Europe more whole and free than ever before in its history.There have been, in my adult lifetime, two wars that I have supported with absolute enthusiasm and determination. The first was the first Gulf war, reversing Sadam Hussein's conquest of Kuwait, and the second is the war in Ukraine. To me the point in both cases in the same: I do not wish to live in a world where evil dictators can wreck nations and lives on a whim while the rest of the world looks away. The world should come together to stop that. That much of the world does not see the adhorrent evil of what Putin is doing disgusts me, and the cautious hedgers who are looking to limit the conflict and find some kind of compromise make me mad. Yes, it will probably end in some kind of negotiated settlement, but that is no excuse to weaken Ukraine now.
What Putin is doing in Ukraine is not just reckless, not just a war of choice, not just an invasion in a class of its own for overreach, mendacity, immorality and incompetence, all wrapped in a farrago of lies. What he is doing is evil. He has trumped up any number of shifting justifications — one day it was removing a Nazi regime in power in Kyiv, the next it was preventing NATO expansion, the next it was fending off a Western cultural invasion of Russia — for what ultimately was a personal flight of fancy. . . .
Putin lately has stopped even bothering to justify the war — maybe because even he is too embarrassed to utter aloud the nihilism that his actions scream: If I can’t have Ukraine, I’ll make sure Ukrainians can’t have it, either.
“This is not a war in which the aggressor has some vision, some outline of the future. Rather, on the contrary, for them, everything is black, formless, and the only thing that matters is force,” Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian, remarked on a panel we did together at a conference in Kyiv last weekend.
Being in the city has been clarifying for me in three regards. I understand even better just how sick and disruptive this Russian invasion is. I understand even better just how hard, maybe even impossible, it will be for Ukrainians to evict Putin’s army from every inch of their soil.
Perhaps most of all, I understand even better something that the former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski observed almost 30 years ago: “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”
Most Americans don’t know a lot about Ukraine, but I say this without any hyperbole: Ukraine is a game-changing country for the West, for better or for worse depending on the war’s outcome. Its integration into the European Union and NATO someday would constitute a power shift that could rival the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification. Ukraine is a country with impressive human capital, agricultural resources and natural resources — “hands, brains and grains,” as Western investors in Kyiv like to say. Its full-fledged integration into Europe’s democratic security and economic architecture would be felt in Moscow and Beijing.
What is at stake is this: can humans come together to build a better world, or not? If we cannot fight the most obvious, horrific, blatant, soulless evil, what chance to do we have of achieving anytihng?
What is at stake is this: can humans come together to build a better world, or not? If we cannot fight the most obvious, horrific, blatant, soulless evil, what chance to do we have of achieving anything?
ReplyDelete>looks at American history and politics
Uhhh... about that whole... fighting obvious and blatant evils, thing...
To be less flippant, my view is largely your own - we CAN and SHOULD fight these obvious evils.
ReplyDeleteBut the pattern of history, in every era and on every continent, has always been that our collective virtue is tempered by our collective selfishness.
We could end world hunger right now, in a scant few years. But we don't - that would offend the sensibilities and lighten the pockets of too many millionaires, shareholders, politicians, etc.
We could eradicate homelessness. We could end war. We could ensure dignity and justice and fairness and prosperity for the entire globe. But there are those who want those things, and those who prefer the imbalances of the status quo because such imbalances are in their favor. And then there's a large third segment who just don't care, for any number of reasons ranging from being too ignorant, to being too beaten down, to simply lacking sufficient empathy.
And it's always been like this - which is actually the reassuring part, because despite that inclination, we are clearly progressing, even if slowly. Two steps forward, one step back.