Writing in The American Conservative Doug Bandow, a former assistant to President Ronald Reagan and a current fellow at the Cato Institute, makes the case for Munich 2022. But “Washington Will Fight Russia To The Last Ukrainian” is valuable mainly as a window on the world as seen by so-called national conservatives or, to give them my preferred designation, postmodern isolationists.
The natcons share with earlier isolationists a desire to wall off America from the troubles of the world. Where they differ from their forebears is in their attitude toward America. The America Firsters of days gone by preached a gospel of American virtue; the natcons preach one of American unworthiness. Our po-mo isolationists of the Right decry America’s decadence, its overweening globalist ambitions, its destructive influence on other nations. By very different paths they’ve arrived on the same ground occupied by the radical Left. America, they argue, is the focus of evil in the modern world. Noam Chomsky, meet Patrick . J. Buchanan.
This, despite his rhetorical concessions to V. Putin’s criminality, is the focus of Mr. Bandow’s argument: The Russo-Ukrainian War, he asserts, is a war of choice—the US government’s choice. By supporting the Ukrainians in the defense of their country, the Biden Administration is merely prolonging a war that could soon be ended if Ukraine would just throw up the sponge:
Obviously, it is up to Ukrainians to decide under what circumstance they will cease fighting. However, the U.S. and European governments should offer at least as much support for peace as war. The allies have long put Western domination in Ukraine above peace with Russia, even when the opportunity for peace presented itself after the 2014 hostilities.
In Bandow’s telling, therefore, American and NATO support for Ukraine is barring the way to a peace settlement that would preserve Ukrainian sovereignty while addressing the legitimate Russian security concerns that played a role in Putin’s decision to launch his war.
This is wishful thinking or, if you prefer, bunk.
As a matter of fact, Russia has no legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine. That country’s independence and increasingly Western orientation threatens Putin’s imperial ambitions, not Russian national security. And the Russian despot’s real problem with NATO is that its expansion protects former provinces and satellites of the defunct Russian imperium against just such aggression as Ukraine is experiencing today.
Zbigniew Brzezinski once remarked that Russia with Ukraine constituted an empire, but that without Ukraine, no Russian empire can exist. This is undoubtedly true, and Putin knows it. Hence his oft-expressed insistence that Ukraine is a fake country with no claim on a sovereign national existence. That, not NATO, is the issue for Putin. His hoped-for restoration of a Russian empire depends first and foremost on the elimination of Ukraine as a sovereign state and ultimately on the eradication of the Ukrainian national identity. From the Russian perspective, that’s what the present war is all about.
And there’s nothing new here. The tsars and the Bolsheviks before him believed as Putin does and sought to suppress Ukrainian nationalism. That was why Stalin's terror famine of the early Thirties had Ukraine as a primary target. Together with the purge that supplemented it, the famine killed some five million Ukrainians, which goes far toward explaining why Ukrainians today are fighting so hard to keep the Russians out. They know what lies in store for them if Putin gets his way.
But contrast these historical realities with Bandow’s take on the war:
It is Ukraine that is being ravaged by war. It is Ukrainians that most need to halt the ongoing conflict. Moreover, they most need a permanent, stable settlement. That is best achieved with an agreement that addresses the causes of the conflict, particularly Russian security concerns. The West wantonly and recklessly ignored both Russian interests and consequent threats, leaving Ukrainians to pay the price. Staging a repeat while reestablishing peace would be foolish.
To “address Russian security concerns” is code for placing a stamp of legitimacy on Putin’s imperial ambitions. It’s not as if he has ever troubled to conceal them. More than once the Russian despot has candidly stated his opinion regarding Ukraine: that ultimately it must vanish from the roster of sovereign nations. Both his statements and the war crimes perpetrated by his legions reveal with crystal clarity that Ukrainians have nothing to hope for from some peace process, i.e. negotiated surrender, designed to assuage Putin’s bloodlust.
And as Bandow calls for a “permanent, stable settlement,” he skates around a patch of thin ice. If the Ukrainians agreed to such a thing, what security guarantees could they expect from the United States, NATO or the so-called world community? Or are they supposed to rely on the good faith of the country that invaded their country, wrecked extensive destruction, and committed numerous war crimes? What is Bandow’s opinion on this? What if any kind of security guarantee does he think that the US, NATO or whomever should extend to Ukraine in the event of a settlement?
Doug Bandow may be sincere in his advocacy of appeasement or he may be indulging in Realpolitik, that bastard child of foreign policy realism. Either way he’s dead wrong, and appeasement is just as bad an idea today as it was in that low, dishonest decade, the 1930s.