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A deeper discussion of why and what we owe Ukraine [1]
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Date: 2022-12-13
I want to clarify and take responsibility for my positions, as well as respond to some generated criticisms of my previous article. Please note that I am NOT intending to degenerate those holding opinions other than my own. Everyone gets to have their own ideas. Mine are strongly held.
Here are some of the criticisms generated by my article:
It’s “absurd to think Putin would be in a rush to repeat the unmitigated disaster this war has been”.
Putin has nukes, so we must do “whatever we can to push both parties to the negotiation table”.
“...we are not Ukraine and our interests are not the same.”
Chamberlain and The Munich Agreement have been used repeatedly to justify “every single bullshit conflict the American people have been duped into”.
My reference to Neville Chamberlain (and by implication The Munich Agreement by which Germany annexed the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia) was lazy and lacked nuance.
The Budapest Memorandum did not legally obligate us to provide assistance to the signatories (e.g. Ukraine, et al). It says if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used” our obligation is to “seek immediate United Nations Security Council action ”.
Here are my responses:
My article was intended to speak to our ethical, not our legal, obligations. I should have been more explicit about this.
It would be reasonable to take the position that Ukraine was duped by the non-binding nature of the wording we helped craft in The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances into becoming a signatory to The Lisbon Protocol, thereby committing itself to relinquishing weapons that may well have deterred Russia from their aggression.
The words “Security Assurances” in the title of the Budapest Memorandum are not to be disregarded. Security assurances are the stated purposes of the document to which both Russia and the U.S. are signatories.
It is more than reasonable to say that by our signaled ambivalence we bear responsibility for encouraging Russian aggression. Putin and U.S. negotiators certainly were aware that Russia’s veto power likely would neuter our commitment to “Seek immediate Security Counsel action to provide assistance to the signatory...”. For us now to say we are not legally obligated to support Ukraine is to reinforce that signal to Putin.
We do ourselves and all democracies damage when we resort to legal ‘niceties’ in order to dodge our support of those fighting for their own democracy. Perhaps we should remember the critical support France gave us.
To say “we are not Ukraine and our interests are not the same” is to willfully (and shortsightedly) ignore the significant overlap we have with them.
When we, the oldest democracy on the planet, will not defend nascent democracies, we weaken ourselves and give comfort to our domestic fascists and theocrats.
Choices to abandon democratic nations under siege have consequences every bit as monumental as choosing to support them.
Ceding to Russia Ukrainian territory (as already happened with Crimea) is significantly unlikely to appease Putin any more than abandoning Czechoslovakia to the Nazis did Hitler. [i.e. Insanity = creating the same causes while expecting different results.]
Re the idea that “it’s absurd to think Putin would be in a rush to repeat the unmitigated disaster this war has been” I must say: Putin has been extremely clear that he plans to reconstitute the U.S.S.R.
Putin has been clear that he wants to be known as a Tsar on par with Peter The Great.
Even though we allowed Putin to illegally annex Crimea, he hasn’t stopped this nearly nine year invasion.
Putin has shown zero compunction about throwing his young men into meat grinders.
Putin has clearly said that he plans to eliminate Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.
Putin has forcibly kidnapped Ukrainians, taking adults and thousands of children to Russia where many of those same children are being forcibly ‘adopted’. (See Franco and Pinochet for historical examples.)
Putin’s troops have been committing war crimes and there is no reason to think that absent our support of Ukraine torture and murder will cease.
If Putin is suicidal enough to use nuclear weapons, being conciliatory will not change or avoid that. The fact that he has backed off his threats indicates some understanding that it would seal his personal death.
It is less than helpful to group the conflict in Ukraine with other ill-concieved conflicts that were justified by cynical references to Munich [e.g. Iraq].
The amount of time it would take Putin to reconstitute his forces is irrelevant to his intention to pursue his aggression, and the stronger the defeat he experiences the more likely he will hesitate in the future.
The notion that we have the right “to push both parties to the negotiation table, where all wars end” betrays a colonial mindset wherein we entitle ourselves to tell Ukrainians that they must abandon their fellow countrymen, women, and especially children to the less than tender mercies of a murdering narcissist (a noblesse oblige/manifest destiny concoction.)
Pushing Ukrainians to negotiate precisely when they are winning is the same sort of national selfishness embodied by Henry Kissinger’s supposed ‘realism’, one that has already eroded trust in any sort of ‘security assurances’ we give.
[END]
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/13/2141573/-A-deeper-discussion-of-why-and-what-we-owe-Ukraine
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