Appearing recently on ABC’s This Week. Republican Representative Michael McCaul, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Democratic Senator John Warner, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, criticized the Trump peace plan for the Ukraine War. McCaul said he would advise Ukraine’s leaders not to sign Trump’s plan without more “ironclad” security guarantees. Warner compared the plan to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler.
Now comes New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens, who writes that the recent Ukrainian corruption scandal is yet another reason for the United States to defend Ukraine. Liberals used to call upon our leaders to abandon important security allies that were corrupt—Chiang Kai-shek in China, Diem in South Vietnam, the Shah of Iran, Somoza in Nicaragua, Marcos in the Philippines, to name just a few. Stephens wants us to support a corrupt regime that is not an important security ally. “A nation that can investigate its leaders even as it fights for its existence,” Stephens writes, “is one worth defending.”
Stephens compares Vladimir Putin to Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible. He quotes Churchill—it seems all of Ukraine’s supporters do that. He writes that if we pressure Kyiv to sign Trump’s peace plan, NATO will fracture, Russia’s economy will rebound, and its military will get stronger. “Far be it for a columnist writing from the safety of New York to offer his advice,” Stephens writes, but we abandon Ukraine “at our peril and to our shame.”
What neither of these “statesmen” or columnist Stephens would say is that, to paraphrase Otto von Bismarck, Ukraine isn’t worth the bones of a single American soldier. Bismarck, the great Prussian and German Chancellor who fought three small wars between 1864 and 1870 to create the German empire and then established a structure of peace based on spheres of influence and the balance of power in the late 19th century, predicted that the next great war would result from “some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.” He also said that the Balkans weren’t worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. Yet, after Bismarck passed from the international scene, conflict in the Balkans did indeed ignite the First World War, resulting in the deaths of more than two million German soldiers, more than two million Russians, more than a million French troops, over a million Austro-Hungarian troops, about a million Serbs, more than 900,000 British soldiers, more than 600,000 Italians, and more than 100,000 Americans.
The diplomatic missteps that led to the outbreak of World War I in 1914 stretched back to the 1890s—the American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan wrote about them in two magnificent books, The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order and The Fateful Alliance. The historian Christopher Clark more recently recounted those diplomatic follies in The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Alliances and security guarantees contributed to the cataclysm.
But Americans don’t have to go that far back in history for examples of diplomatic follies leading to war and tragedy. We lost more than 58,000 soldiers in the Vietnam War in an effort to prevent South Vietnam from falling under the control of communist North Vietnam. Today, six decades after President Lyndon Johnson Americanized that war, communist North Vietnam is a de facto U.S. ally in our effort to contain China. What did those brave fighting men die for? A “noble cause,” as Ronald Reagan once said? It was a very high price to pay for a “noble cause.”
Fast forward to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that began in 2001 and 2003 under President George W. Bush. Wars that began for the purpose of retaliating against the forces that attacked the U.S. on 9/11 and to eradicate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were transformed by our “statesmen” into a global crusade to promote democracy. Wars, by the way, that Bret Stephens supported. Nearly 2400 U.S. troops and about 3900 U.S. contractors died, and more than 20,000 were wounded, in the Afghan War. Nearly 4500 U.S. troops died, and more than 32,000 were wounded, in the Iraq War. It was a pretty steep price to pay for a failed global crusade to spread democracy.
We cannot undo the diplomatic missteps—including NATO enlargement and the U.S.-supported “color revolution” in Ukraine in 2014—that have led to the Russia-Ukraine War. Those missteps have been catalogued time and time again by John Mearsheimer, Doug Bandow, Jonathan Haslam, and others. Before and while these missteps were occurring, George Kennan and many other Russia and foreign policy experts warned about the consequences of using Ukraine to poke the Russian bear. But we can avoid compounding the missteps and follies by not providing “ironclad” security guarantees to Ukraine.
Let’s be clear about what McCaul, Warner, Stephens and other proponents of NATO-like security guarantees to Ukraine want: they want the armed forces of the United States to fight, if necessary, to preserve and protect Ukrainian independence. They want to treat Ukrainian independence as a vital national security interest of the United States. That is what is meant by an “ironclad” security guarantee. That is what is meant by portraying anyone who opposes such a guarantee to Neville Chamberlain. That is what is meant by writing that we abandon Ukraine “at our peril and to our shame.”
There is a scene in the movie Nicholas and Alexandra where one of the Czar’s key advisors, Sergei Witte (brilliantly played by Sir Laurence Olivier), counsels Nicholas II to pull-out of the Russo-Japanese War. Witte tells the Czar that a student asked him why Russia was at war with Japan. “‘Because, my boy, we want Korea, but the Japanese would insist on fighting us for it.’ ‘Thank you, sir, but what does Russia need Korea for?’ ‘Because, my boy, we have no ice-free port on the Pacific.’ ‘I see. In that case, sir, it isn’t good enough.’” Witte tells the Czar: “He’s right, sir. It’s not good enough at all. . . . your country taxes you and sends your sons a continent away to die on a piece of land on the Pacific.’” What, the Czar asks, are you advising me to do? Witte responds: “I’m advising you to stop a hopeless war.”
Witte, like Bismarck, was a foreign policy realist who later unsuccessfully attempted to persuade Nicholas to pull back from the brink of war. Witte understood that Korea was not a vital interest of Russia worth the lives of Russian soldiers, just as Bismarck understood that the Balkans were not a vital interest of Germany worth the lives of German soldiers. President Trump appears to understand that Ukraine is not a vital interest of the United States, though he is under intense pressure from the likes of McCaul, Warner, Stephens and much of the American foreign policy establishment to provide some form of security guarantee to Ukraine to bring about a ceasefire. Trump should resist that pressure because not one American serviceman or servicewoman should die for Ukraine, regardless of the advice offered by Congressmen in Washington and columnists in New York.
Francis P. Sempa writes on geopolitics.
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