Vladimir Putin, it seems, hath no bottom. Like a man sinking in quicksand, the more frenzied his efforts to escape, the more deeply he sinks. The great problem is, of course, that he’s threatening to take us along with him.
Putin’s moral culpability is so great, and both his complaints and actions so vicious and grotesque, that it’s difficult to acknowledge that “we” are ultimately responsible for the vast mess that Putin’s deeply wounded ego has created since his monumentally stupid invasion of Ukraine began mere months ago. An American foreign policy based on Republican “toughness” and Democratic “virtue” impelled us to use our immense power to intervene, over and over again, in eastern Europe, with ever greater appetite and force, an area of the world where we had no vital interests and Russia had many, all because we were good and they were bad—and because we were strong and they were weak. A world where Pat Buchanan is wiser than Anne Applebaum is a strange one indeed, but that is where our vanity has placed us.
It's “arguable”, I guess, that our ill-fated adventures in eastern Europe were inevitable—power expands until it reaches its limit, and we had the power. One may as well blame a balloon for expanding until it explodes from the heat of the sun. But it is unfortunate, considering that there are human beings involved.
Afterwords
I have railed on the folly of our “forward” policy in eastern Europe many times. I have railed on, and sometimes praised, Anne Applebaum as well. As for Pat Buchanan, well, not so much.
Peter Beinart points us to both Putin’s hysterical justification of his hysterical actions (linked to above) and Anatol Lieven’s wise words of counsel at Responsible Statecraft for Joe Biden, which are probably far too sensible for Uncle Joe to follow.
