In the USA and Europe at the moment, there is no shortage of chickenhawks, eager to escalate our near war with Russia into an actual, direct conflict.
Consider, for example, this recent piece in The Hill, written by contributor Joseph Bosco:
“Biden must abandon his ‘half-assed’ Ukraine policy, before it’s too late”
“Too late”…or what? What is the bottom line here? That Ukraine and Russia become the same country again?
That is what they were for 200 years, from the 1790s until 1991. While that may not be an ideal outcome, it doesn’t represent an existential threat for the West. It certainly didn’t before, from the time of Catherine the Great until the end of the Soviet Union.
(And from the standpoint of Ukraine, the West’s “fight until the last Ukrainian” strategy has been an unmitigated disaster. We have accomplished nothing but the senseless killing of Ukrainians through the prolongation of an unwinnable war.)
But nuclear war with Russia would be an existential threat, for all of us.
Bosco, like many armchair warriors in the West, wants to empower an unpredictable third-party country (Ukraine) to use US weapons against cities deep within the interior of Russia.
That amounts to a US declaration of war on Russia.
Russia, I will remind the reader, has not attacked us, and does not seek war with us. Russia has a beef with Ukraine over the status of a handful of territories in the former USSR.
When I was a kid, it was all the Soviet Union; and no one lost any sleep over that reality. I’m beginning to think that the world would be better off today if some liberal, federalized form of the Soviet Union had survived, under Mikhail Gorbachev and his ideological heirs.
Does Ukraine need more long-range US weapons and blank checks to use them? Perhaps. But what Kiev needs, most of all, is people willing to fight for the Zelensky government on the front lines.
Ukrainians themselves have shown a decidedly mixed opinion on this matter. There are an estimated 700,000 to 900,000 Ukrainian men of draft age living abroad.
To put that in perspective, around 50,000 American men left the USA in the late 1960s and early 1970s to avoid service in the Vietnam War. This suggests that American men were far more eager to serve in Vietnam in 1968 than Ukrainian men are to serve in Ukraine in 2024.
Charity, as they say, begins at home. So does fighting other people’s wars. If anyone in the West believes that the matter of which flag flies over Crimea and/or Donbas is a question of paramount importance, then he should personally take action.
The Ukrainian government has a long-established framework whereby foreign nationals may fight for Ukraine’s cause. One does not need to have prior military training. One does not need to learn Ukrainian first. The only real requirements are that one be between the ages of 18 and 60 years of age, be in basically good health, and not have a criminal record.
That should cover a lot of the folks in the West who are screaming for an escalation of NATO’s proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. Including the aforementioned contributor for The Hill. Let those who want war with Russia lead us by example.
-ET