Wash Post columnist David Ignatius is widely regarded as the mouthpiece of the Washington establishment. If it’s conventional wisdom you’re after, Dave is full of it. In a recent column, “NATO’s New Perils, Dave displays, rather despite himself, an awareness that past conventional wisdom is, shall we say, full of it as well.
“The NATO alliance seems stuck at a crossroads on Ukraine, unsure whether to move toward greater confrontation with Russia or accept the deadlocked “frozen conflict” that has emerged there.
“It’s a unified morass, at least, with President Obama sharing the reluctance of European leaders to escalate the crisis by providing defensive weapons to Ukraine or tightening sanctions against Russia. The United States tacitly backs the decision made by European leaders here last week to maintain the status quo — and link any easing of sanctions to implementation of the Minsk agreement that has brought a shaky truce in Ukraine.”
A less snarky way of putting would be “the president and his counterparts in Europe recognize that sending arms to Ukraine would be both provocative and futile, accomplishing nothing more than prolongation of a bloody war that Ukraine would inevitably lose. The question of who controls eastern Ukraine is simply far more important to Russia than to the West. We were, in fact, foolish to have struggled to wrest Ukraine from its Russian orbit in the first place.”
Okay, that’s way too much truth for Dave and CW buddies to consciously handle, so he sugarcoats it by assigning all responsibility to Western leadership without acknowledging the basis for their decisions. He then continues his covert heresies by casting doubt on one of the most sacred arrows in the quiver of the West, sanctions!
“[I]t’s hard to see how current sanctions policy will lead to a true deescalation, unless Russian President Vladimir Putin has a sudden conversion. Russian analysts here say it could take years for sanctions to bite so much that they force a policy change.
“Leaving aside whether a Russian economic breakdown would really be in the West’s interest, sanctions may have a perverse outcome in the near term: Rather than encouraging Putin and his cronies to change course, they may instead empower the most corrupt and conservative forces in Russia.
“Sanctions had just this unintended outcome in Iraq during the 1990s, when controls that were meant to punish the regime of Saddam Hussein enfeebled the mass economy but enriched elite regime cronies who could evade sanctions. Russians here warned that just such a process may be underway in Russia.”
Yes, sanctions did have just that unintended outcome in Iraq back in the 1990s, which was in fact obvious to folks at the time, but Madeleine Albright was having so much fun kicking butt that she didn’t care how many kids she killed1, and Bill Clinton didn’t care what happened as long as he could keep “the Right”2 from getting to his right on foreign policy.
Prolonged deviationism can be dangerous to the brain, and after throwing out yet another heterodox thought—that a prosperous Russia might be better for Europe than a poverty-stricken, unstable one—Dave scuds back to safety by discovering new “dangers” that Russia is posing—“hybrid warfare”—that definitely need to be guarded against. Hey, Dave’s no sissy! He’s not advocating peace! No way!
Afterwards
Even after alerting us to the new dangers ahead, Dave’s bold “remedy” for the situation is to call for “much more discussion.” Well, I’m in favor of that.
- In an infamous 1996 interview, Albright said “yes” when asked if the death of half a million Iraqi children had been “worth it”—had been worth imposing the sanctions. In fact, the imposition of the sanctions gained the U.S. nothing and helped set the stage for the disastrous Second Gulf War. It’s striking to me that Albright lacked even the presence to deny the death toll, which, though high, probably wasn’t half a million. (Reason’s Matt Welch explains the politics of dead children here.) ↩︎
- I would define “the Right” here, in descending order of partisanship, as the ever-opportunistic Newt Gingrich, Bill Kristol and his band of AEI plug-uglies, AIPAC, the CIA, and the Pentagon. Gingrich simply sought to make trouble for Clinton. Kristol and AEI wanted a new Gulf war with, ultimately, an American army in the Middle East. AIPAC wanted no agreement with Arafat, while the CIA and the Pentagon mostly wanted “respect,” autonomy, and fat budgets. ↩︎
