That’s the perspective from New Delhi, Varanasi and Chennai, as reported by NYT guy Roger Cohen in his long post, Russia’s War Could Make It India’s World, suggesting that the Biden administration’s moralizing attempt to turn the current world situation into Cold War II isn’t playing too well beyond the Atlantic community of nations, almost as if white people don’t know everything.
There’s far more to Mr. Cohen’s piece than the little moral that I want to extract from it, that Cold War II (or III, really, since Bush II tried the same thing 20 years ago, with stunningly disastrous results, an inconvenient fact that America’s military intellectual complex is still unwilling to address) is not going to work, so you could very easily just stop reading this piece and go directly to Mr. Cohen. But if you are still here, I can warn you that I’m going to make a few points that, for the most part, I’ve made before, because I think they’re, you know, important.
First of all, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is outrageous and certainly deserves to be resisted, largely as the Biden administration has done. But the unhappy fact is that, barring a complete Russian collapse, which I regard as extremely unlikely, the war will not end in a manner satisfactory to Ukraine. The Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939 was similarly outrageous, and, in the beginning, similarly embarrassing to the Soviets, but eventually the great disparity in size and power between the two countries came to tell, and Finland lost. There is a line beyond which the U.S. should not go in supporting Ukraine and punishing Russia, regardless of how “evil” one wishes to consider Vladimir Putin to be. The U.S. has compromised with evil countless times in the past and must be willing to do so again.
There is a great temptation to the Biden administration to use its support for Ukraine for domestic political gain. For the most part, the American public is strongly sympathetic to Ukraine, and the media always delights in “heroism”, which in Ukraine’s case is often real. As a bonus, the question of support for Ukraine is splitting the Republican Party in a particularly embarrassing way, since many of the skeptics, as exemplified by the omnipresent Tucker Carlson, seem determined to find their own moral, viz, that President Zelensky et al. are schmucks and Uncle Sam is a sucker for supporting them, a “message” anathema to the old neocon folks, both anti- and semi-Trumpers, who may find themselves driven entirely from the Republican Party into an utter no-man’s land.
The Biden administration remains weak. The Democratic Party is almost as divided as the Republican Party. No one knows for sure if Biden will run again—no one can say for sure that he will be physically able to run again—so the temptation to treat the entire war as an exercise in morality and nothing else is strong, but it needs to be resisted. The world has changed radically in the 21st century, something the U.S. is largely loath to recognize. During the original Cold War the U.S. could count on a remarkable level of support in its “long war” against the Soviet Union because the two great industrial power centers outside the U.S. itself and the Soviets—western Europe and Japan—deeply feared the power of the Soviet Union and, in fact, often viewed the Russians with both loathing and contempt, as literal barbarians. Throughout the rest of the world, the middle classes of Latin America and the Muslims of the Middle East had a similar fear of the Soviets’ revolutionary atheism.
There is no similar “glue” in the modern world. China and Russia, who have become allies thanks to America’s misguided, moralizing interventionism, beginning with the first Iraq invasion back in 1991, are integral parts of the world’s economy. Nations around the world are not going to stop doing business with them just because a small country is being sat on. Small countries get sat on all the time. Just ask Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. The record of American hubris is dismal from any aspect, inflicting massive damage on the entire world community. It has even been a disaster at the polls. Over and over again, the party that starts a war, whether it wins the war or loses it, ultimately loses at the polls. President Biden was furiously accused by many of “losing” Afghanistan. Yet as far as one can tell, the Democrats suffered very little at the polls for this “humiliation”. Joe should take a look at his own record before passing out any blank checks to Ukraine. Winston Churchill supposedly said of anti-Semitism that it was good starter but a bad finisher. He could have said the same thing about war.
