U.S. policy makers have consistently underestimated the consequences of wresting away 100% of Russia’s ancestral homeland in the Ukraine and reallocating it to others than Russians. In 1994 Russian power was at a low point and its throat exposed to top dogs of the west. The last great try at colonization by the west developed in the Clinton-British axis of annexation. Anyone that had read a Russian history book would have realized that a Russian wish to retake their homeland would emerge not too far in the future after Boris Yeltsin relinquished Ukraine near the end of his life. The time apparently has arrived.
International law goes just so far; it settles disputes between agreeable powers. U.S. Presidents have steadfastly refused to be bound by international law concerning foreign charges they have committed war crimes etc. They are unwilling to sit in the dock at the Hague for judgment and confer immunity from prosecution upon themselves necessarily. As U.S. Presidents they have taken the position that they are above the law, or obey a higher law (cynics might say that is Wall Street mutual funds and sovereign growth funds). Absolute monarchs and others with absolute power claim that sovereign right; it goes to show the problems with international law among disagreeable powers. Real politic isn’t about lawyer claims with paper; instead it acknowledges actual historical and contemporary realities and doesn’t try to turn back the tide because Democrats get a legal injunction banning it from returning. Getting Russia to agree to a good aboriginal land claim settlement like Nixon did with Alaska natives to get the trans-Alaska pipeline built would be an expeditious way to move on with post Cold War rapprochement and economic integration with Europe, America and Russia instead of building a half century of conflict. To fail to recognize Russian aboriginal claims on Ukraine is like failing to recognize French rights to Paris, British rights to London, Italian rights to Rome etc. Alienating and severing those claims may have seemed practical to President Clinton and other British educated lawyer-politicians in 1994 as they sought quick profit severing Ukraine and treating that Rus homeland as if it had been an occupied Eastern European nation that deserved independence as might Poland or the Baltic states. Reasonable foresight would have partitioned Ukraine in such a way that Russia wasn’t skunked. As it is Democrats can finally investigate possible Russian collusion with President Ronald Reagan to end the Cold War.
Brits and Spaniards were pretty good at trampling aboriginal rights in the age of exploration. The U.S. rectified that history to a limited extent in an era before people generally made those concessions. The United States may pursue Clinton-British Russian aboriginal land claims to extinction in Ukraine further leading to renewed Cold War and a permanent state of hostility. Russian national identity includes at least part of Ukraine if not all.
Tribalism is a forerunner of nationalism, yet when nationalism is depreciated in favor of globalism it is tribalism that tends to return via identity politics. Democrats have dumped so much racial/tribalism politics that the word civil rights itself tends to be regarded as race rights aka tribal rights. Nationalism would actually be a step forward from that.
Israel is fundamental a race reservation in the global community with a democracy. Their are compelling reasons why Israel needs a reservation to avoid extinction or genocide as perhaps their may be concerning American Indian reservation. The trouble with reservations is that some advantaged, large tribes within nations don’t like that and seek to eliminated them. If all people are equal before the law in some nations that can mean operative genocide, hence reservations still exist in an age of nations and sometimes a planetary civilization. Russia’s eastern Slavs are a large racial group, and the largely non-Slavic western tribes have long sought to annex the ancestral homeland of the Rus with various degrees of luck. It should have been easy to make a land settlement agreement through negotiation if inertia didn’t drive Democrat party government policy to solely help itself, exert its one-party rule domestic practice abroad and ignore objective justice for-itself.
U.S. leadership recently has made much of a ‘rule-based system’ that has existed since 1945 to support its worldview. In the administration’s opinion, Russia would be said to be violating that system if it actually invades Ukraine. In 1945 Europe was a shambles, and was divided between nations occupied by Communist allies and Western allies. Without the Soviet Union it is doubtful that the Nazis could have been defeated without liberal use of nuclear weapons by the weapons. For the west to achieve victory the Soviet had to defeat the million Nazis attacking eastward into Russia. German troops and aircraft occupied with attacking the east and Leningrad were not available to defend in the west against allied invasions through Italy and France. Without the Soviets the conflict would have taken more years to complete and Germany might have developed jet aircraft and the atomic bomb in the while. To wrest Ukraine away from Russia; the principal Soviet component, was to terminate the system that had existed since 1945 based on rules and regard for national integrity.
The buzz phrase ‘rule based system’ deserves a comment. Logically any form of government has rules and a rule based system. There is no particular merit in having rules in-themselves; they need be good rules to have merit, and are valid so long as they are relevant, functional, practical and just. For example, Genghis Khan had rules; they just weren’t good for Russian interests and Russians didn’t acquiesce in them willingly-dissenting for quite a number of years.
British lawyer-leaders including President Clinton may have regarded Ukraine as comparable to a Poland that should be independently after the end of Soviet post-war occupation of areas liberated from the Nazis, and that was a fundamental error. U.S. lawyer-Presidents of the modern era may view international affairs from the perspective of the adversarial system of justice wherein a lawyer advocated from each side make arguments against the other. If a President is a lawyer he should have a magisterial justice system viewpoint concerning international affairs as an impartial judge considering actual historical facts objectively to decide the merits and advantages of a case between two plaintiffs that are concurrently defendants. It is ironic that President Clinton, educated in Britain that has a magisterial system, took a one-sided point of view and failed to consider the historical facts well enough to establish a long-term balance with fair apportionment of Ukrainian resources. It is good to benefit short term U.S. interests yet not at the expense of long-term public and historical justice. A President should have the wisdom of Solomon in dividing up failing empires if he wants to make international rules himself. If one is acting as an international magistrate one need separate from personal proprietary national interests, for if one does not, one may act as a king, fuhrer etc. with implicit bias.
Washington D.C. may not want to recognize it, but the Soviets were America’s primary strength ally in winning the Second World War. Russia- the Soviets- defeated the Germans on the Eastern side and rolled up their occupied European states right up to Berlin. Stalin wasn’t a nice guy, yet he was brutally tough and able to fight the Nazis more with blood than treasure. The other allies of the United States were important in the war, and Brits too delivered or escorted ships reaching Russia around Scandinavia to deliver supplies, yet it was the 20 million casualties the Russians suffered in their resistance that broke the back of the German war machine as much as the landing at Normandy and campaign through Italy.
Britain was an important instrument for the American victory in the west providing intelligence, soldiers and material. Britain too had supplied the Soviets with tanks and other military equipment before the United State, yet when the U.S. entered the war Britain had retreated from Europe with the military escape across the channel home from Dunkirk. When Hitler launched Operation Typhoon against Russia he gave up maybe a million men (approx) to protracted, losing war and trashed vital and relatively safe East European regions for manufacturing weapons potentially including an atomic bomb factory.
The European states that became part of the rule based system after 1945 were either attacked by Germany, occupied by Germany, or at war with Germany or other axis powers. In short, the American and Soviet-Russian victory rule based system was achieved through war rather than diplomacy. When President Clinton and his British counterpart stole Ukraine they effectively divided the ‘rule-based system that had existed since 1945’ in twain and made a new system entirely ruled by western former allied and former axis powers against our former ally – Russia. The western alliance is primarily ruled by the primary western nuclear bomb power; the United States. The Democrat party believes it can define domestic and international rules itself to benefit Wall Street’s short term interests and Russia must submit. If the United States invades a country or supports foreign civil wars Democrats believe that is consistent with their inherent right to rule as it were, by decree to benefit plutocrats. Democrats haven’t advanced a single environmental bill through congress since the 2020 election and apparently have no plan to before the expiration of the present Congressional term, though they campaigned on the issue, in to benefit Wall Street short-term profits apparently.
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