Can everyone else not see what is wrong with this? What is it that we are throwing away?
The years since World War II have been the most peaceful in human history. As Steven Pinker showed, we have been proportionately less likely to die in an interstate war over the past 80 years than in any previous era.
That did not happen because human beings suddenly became nicer. It happened because the Good Guys had won. After 1945, the democracies were in the ascendant, and they were determined to prevent a recurrence of the 1930s.
During Auden’s “low, dishonest decade”, dictators had mocked the idea of obeying treaties or rules. All that counted was their national virility, raw power. As Mussolini put it: “The League [of Nations] is very fine when the sparrows twitter; it is worthless when the eagles scream”.
The Germans called it “Machtpolitik,” power politics, and it was that system the Western powers had fought to defeat. As President Harry S. Truman put it in 1945, “We must make certain that no nation will ever again be able to begin a war. We must substitute for the jungle of international anarchy a rule of law based on justice.”
What makes the Russian annexation of parts of Ukraine so unusual is that it is a straightforward land grab. The oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk were not contested territory, marked differently on maps printed in Moscow. While Russia may have had a historical claim on Crimea, it did not have, and did not establish until long after the fighting had started, any claim on the Donbas. It was, in other words, behaving as a 1930s rogue regime, grabbing land simply because it could.
Nothing new there, you might say, Russia has always been a rogue regime. True. What is new is that the ultimate Good Guys, the Americans, have switched sides. They are pushing, not for peace, but for a Russian victory.
There is no longer any pretense about this. All of President Donald Trump’s threats of “very severe consequences” for Vladimir Putin if he did not agree to a ceasefire have been dropped. Every time Trump called on the Russian leader to show restraint, Putin escalated.
Does anyone imagine that, if Putin ignores even the current plan, the US will turn against him? Surely we are past all that by now. Yet the terms proposed are not peace proposals. They are the exactions that a victorious power wrings from a conquered rival. Limits on the size of the Ukrainian army. A ban on Nato membership. No Western troops on Ukrainian soil. No U.S. aircraft, even in neighboring Poland.
Russia will not disgorge a single grain of illicitly annexed soil. It will not even push its frontier to the existing front lines. No, it will actually be awarded territory currently held by Ukraine, formally extending its rule over the entirety of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and acquiring some 250,000 new subjects as well as Ukraine’s chief line of defensive fortifications.
For the United States, which pledged in 1994 to uphold Ukraine’s territorial integrity, to be pushing for such terms is not just the abandonment of an ally. It is the abandonment of Pinker’s Long Peace. It is a return to “Machtpolitik,” to the law of the jungle.
Many Trump officials argue that alliances are ineffective and that the U.S., as the world’s preeminent power, should refrain from foreign entanglements. Some are consistent isolationists of the Ron Paul stripe. Others, like Elbridge Colby, want to withdraw from Europe to focus on China. Most are simply feeding the president’s paranoia, his sense that allies are somehow sponging off the U.S.
BREXIT CAN MAKE THE BRITISH ECONOMY MORE AMERICAN
Yet any rational assessment would conclude that the postwar order worked better for Americans than for any other people on Earth. Yes, the U.S. paid for a large military. But look at the return it got on that investment. Undisputed world leadership, the dollar as a reserve currency, foreign governments rearranging their domestic affairs around American interests, and, not least, a peaceful and prosperous global order.
All that is now crumbling, like Ukrainian streets under Russian missile attacks. There is a reason that the countries backing Russia are, by and large, the ones that loathe America and everything it stands for: Belarus, Iran, North Korea, and so on. How extraordinary to see the United States lining up with them. The new order that these autocracies seek is darker and grimmer than anything we have known. We will rue the day that we facilitated it.