The U.S. Government in sponsoring Ukraine’s war with Russia labeled Russia the aggressor, as if that was all the logic required. Blame and prosecute without second thought for fining peaceful coexistence and economic partnership. The war could still be swiftly, peacefully settled with each side halting in place and permanent borders made thereat. The U.S. Government prefered a fictitious rationale that is a convenient half-truth to justify its posture as it did with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and W.M.D.’s for the Second Iraq War. The Ukraine is former western Russia. Russia invaded it when no other remedies were available to recover it from the Clinton-Yeltsin swindle. It was not like invading Poland, France, Finland or Germany. U.S. policy has a stench about it, of accomplishing for the Central Powers the taking of Crimea and Ukraine, a task the Central Powers could not permanently accomplish for themselves.
The U.S. Government has a cognitive deficit in failing to recognize historical western Russia and believes the Ukraine is an independent state equal to that of England, France or Denmark. Basically the U.S. Government and Democrat party leadership have bought into the Soviet Union’s boundaries as the real ones and those of historical Russia put down by the Soviets as fiction.
Russian claims on Ukraine extend backward to the founding of Kiev. Yet in the modern world since 1800 the Ukraine or borderlands were part of Russia including the Crimean Peninsula. Germany invaded Ukraine (and Russia) during the 20th century in the Deutchland Uber Alles era that may be returning presently with expanded German military budgets and close war partnership with Ukraine. It may be just a matter of time before Germany develops a high quality nuclear weapons program with an array of high tech weapons to counter the Russian ‘threat’. An arms race of an Unholy Roman Empire that is the new European community may follow a German-Ukrainian victory versus Russia in the present Ukraine-Russian conflict. A nuclear weaponized Germany may present tactical challenges to Democrat Party national security theorists, if such exist, if they put down their burritos to think about it.
When the Cold War 1.0 ended Boris Yeltsin was the Soviet Union’s last leader. President Clinton made a deal with Yeltsin swindling Ukraine from Russia. At the time Russia was an oppressed nation that was only in the gestation stage of being reborn after seventy years of subjugation to the Communist Evil Empire. President Clinton preferred to abort the nascent Russian revival and deem it a big rump state. At the time Russian military and political power was at it’s lowest point in history. Completely ebbed, the ungoverned land may have looked to Clinton like the near east looked to Alexander the Great; ripe for the taking. Russia had no army or even leadership to oppose the west’s rapacious desire to take as much Russian land for-itself as possible. Decades would need to pass before Russian leadership could seek to reassert control over western Russia occupied by a pro-western government forces.
Bill Clinton was an Oxford trained lawyer leading the world’s greatest military alliance. He could rightly claim that western law was world law and that if Boris Yeltsin agreed to give up the Ukraine to independence then it was so...a fait accompli defensible with the ultimate reason of western military power. Even the World Court was located in a friendly leftist European nation that has values unlike those of much of the world. Ukraine President Zelinsky would clamor for war crimes charges against Russia leadership and the United States piled every sanction it could imagine upon Russia to prevent any possibility of a peaceful settlement to the conflict.
Yet the deal or swindle was unrealistic. Based on ignorance of Russian history and national character, taking western Russia and labeling it independent Ukraine was like taking title to a floodplain without an awareness that a river would eventually rise to cover the land. The Russian river of blood returned to the Ukrainian flood plain as the natural flow to drive out those that claimed and built upon it. The Biden administration has spent a quarter of a trillion dollars to dike the natural flow. Its post war economic planning would be to construct levy’s with N.A.T.O. along the floodplain. Since the rise of blood floods to the era is natural the event may be recurring in the future if the Russian political and military surge loses this season because of insufficient blood waters.
It’s not a communist river. It is not an effort to restore the boundaries of the former Soviet Empire. It is the rise of historical Russia seeking its former western land. Russia is a capitalist nation developing democracy. The President was given super-powers in time of external threat to pursue Russian national interests. Restoration of Russia’s western lands was an inevitable desire that should have been recognize and addressed a priori in the early 1990s. Taking the Crimean Peninsula away from Russia was an unthinkably dense, maladroit political mistake. Yet with other bodies to spend in the effort to prop up bad historical judgment maybe the calculations of the early 1990s seemed reasonable. The Russian desire to recover the Crimea and the rest of Ukraine was predictable, easy to recognize and the conflict simple to avoid with right political reasoning well informed by history.
I suppose that it may be possible to avoid a nuclear conflict that is an offspring of the protracted conflict. It is also possible that western investment in the war may actually secure something of a victory. Even if the west did achieve its immediate aims it may be the case that decades of adverse relations will follow between the west and Russia. Those are dangerous adverse relations with substantial opportunity costs, security and economic externalities. Paradoxically one might not be surprised if regardless of who the technical winners are, the natural flow of trade between Russia and Europe will eventually return and the losers will be those that had friends and family killed or wounded in the conflict..
It would be in the interest of the United States to negotiate an end to the war in place with a free trade zone without taxes made throughout a demilitarized zone extending several miles on either side of a new permanent border. Returning to a normal economic condition as soon as possible is the best way to let the world move forward. The United States had learned that good terms for ending a war for both sides...and especially the losers, serves to build peace instead of future war. The lesson was learned after the hard terms given to Germany at the conclusion of World War One may the final battle of that war named World War Two inevitable. The lesson evidently was lost to the west.
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