I so often disagree with Dan that I sometimes try to apologize for it, but his recent post, The war in Ukraine is going badly for everyone, is depressingly spot on. Dan ends his incisive piece with the following grim paragraphs:
We have entered a new Cold War, which is not something I say lightly. I am old enough to remember that the first iteration of that conflict involved a lot of white knuckles. Putin’s response to failure will probably be to attempt further escalation. The risks of accidental (or intentional) escalation are only going to get worse
Right now, Americans are cheering on Ukrainian resistance and hoping that protests will lead to an ouster of Putin. That could happen, but anyone familiar with how this century has gone so far should be pessimistic. It is far more likely that Putin clamps down further at home and orders a more savage form of warfare in Ukraine.
No one will win this conflict. There are only losers in geopolitics this week.
The U.S. has already been wasting hundreds of billions of dollars a year on needless and in fact counter-productive defense spending ever since the “old” Cold War ended—since if you’ve got you’ll want to use it—and Putin’s latest and most egregious folly all but guarantees that we’ll be wasting even more in the future, as will practically every other major nation.
As Dan points out, Putin’s desperation, and the deep reaction in the West against it, will dramatically increase the already pronounced movement away from “globalism” and the whole idea of truly global society, the only way, in my opinion, that humanity can achieve a stable and fulfilling future.
The U.S. bears a very heavy responsibility for the current state of affairs. As I have written many times, it was foolish and repeated U.S. interventions in eastern Europe that convinced Putin that he could not trust the United States, a conviction, one might say, that is quite accurate, since U.S. foreign policy is often determined by arrogant caprice, a “we make ‘em so we can break ‘em” approach to the supposed “rule-based order” that we modify frequently on the basis of our domestic concerns.
Most depressing of all is the unwillingness of our foreign policy elite to admit mistakes. I would bet that 90% of our “experts” say of George W. Bush’s 1983 invasion of Iraq “Doggone it, I thought for sure that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction”, ignoring such inconvenient truths as the following: 1) Biological and chemical weapons though terrifying, are not weapons of mass destruction; 2) that when Saddam not only had chemical weapons but used them brutally against hapless civilians, the U.S. said and did nothing; 3) that Saddam had no involvement in the 9/11 attacks and presented no threat to American security.
A new Cold War solves lots of problems for some of the most powerful institutions in the USA today: the Republican Party, the Pentagon, the foreign policy establishment, the defense industry—all these groups will welcome a new Cold War. It gives them purpose and gives them careers. Who could ask for anything more?
