Usually we concur with Sunday News columnist Gil Smart, but our views diverge over US involvement in the Ukraine.
Smart says in his column “US should butt out of Ukraine” that “We don’t have the right to intervene in situations we don’t understand. We don’t have the right to insist that other nations are out of bounds for doing the exact same things we have done, or would do in similar circumstances.”
Smart continues: “The news last week was dominated by Russia’s invasion of the Crimea, in Ukraine. And all week long, a simplistic moral outrage, its flames fanned by the media, raged.
“Secretary of State John Kerry, apparently failing to see the irony, even went so far as to say, ‘You just don’t invade another country on phony pretexts in order to assert your interests.’
“It’s really as if the war in Iraq never happened, isn’t it?”
We agree with Smart that the concept of “American exceptionalism” is a myth, the modern equivalent of jingoism.
But we do not equate the situation in Ukraine with the senseless adventurism of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld by invading Iraq and their attempt at ‘nation building’ in Afghanistan.
As Charles Kenny points out in “The Upside Of Down”, as prosperity spreads throughout the world, a nation of 300 million cannot long expect to be dominant by itself in comparison with China and India, each with populations of more than a billion and before many decades a much larger economy.
As a counterbalance to the emerging economic mammoths and potential , even if unlikely, aggressors, the USA will need to be part of the ‘West’, a block consisting largely of the USA, Canada, likely Mexico, England, France, Italy, Germany, perhaps Switzerland, Poland, conceivably Israel, Scandinavia, and some of the other Eastern European nations.
Through these alliances, the West will be equal in size and power to the groups centered on the Muslim Middle East, China, India /Japan, Africa, and South America.
So where does this put the Russian Federation, which straddles both the European and the Asian continents?
Is Vladimir Putin seeking to largely resurrect the former Soviet Union?
Is Putin seeking domination over much of Europe, thus isolating the USA and dividing what would and should be the West?
Will Russia post Putin ultimately become part of the West?
We experienced the bitter fruit that resulted from appeasement in 1938 when England’s Prime Minster Neville Chamberlain met with Germany’s Fuhrer Adolph Hitler in Munich and acquiesced to Hitler seizing portions of Czechoslovakia. Upon his return to England, Chamberlain was cheered for announcing he had achieved “Peace for our time”.
In contrast, Winston Churchill told the Commons, “England has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame, and will get war.”
There has been an understanding following the Second World War that no European nation shall infringe on the sovereignty of another. We need to defend that notion, albeit not by military action but by both the ‘bully pulpit’ and, over the year and years to come, by ostracizing Putin’s Russia and through various international economic and diplomatic efforts, cause them to pay a large price for their aggression.
As reported in the Washington Post: “The United States should have three goals in the current crisis, in [Donald] Fata’s view: Russia must be deterred from attempting to advance any further into Ukraine; the United States must reassure its allies and partners in the region that their security will be guaranteed; and Russian gains must be rolled back.”
So both insight into the future and a lesson from history instruct us that we do have an interest in protecting the integrity of Ukraine and preventing it from falling into Putin’s orbit.
It is not for us to “butt out” but rather to perpetuate what had long been the situation, a neutralized Ukraine with economic but not military ties to the West.
