UPDATED: The paradox of supporting Ukraine while entering down the path of appeasement
UPDATE: Russian missiles hit targets in Poland, leaving two dead
Dispatches
1) María R. Sahuquillo, “Jersón o cómo la mayor victoria de Putin va camino de ser su máxima derrota; Rusia disfraza la retirada de la ciudad portuaria bajo la intención de “preservar la vida” de sus tropas, pero esta humillación puede derivar en una oleada de críticas, sobre todo de los ultranacionalistas y de los afectados por la movilización,” El País, el 9 de noviembre 2022 (23:40: actualizado el 10 de
2) Gordon Lubold, Nancy A. Youssef, Laurence Norman,and Drew Hinshaw, “As Ukraine Retakes Kherson, U.S. Looks to Diplomacy Before Winter Slows Momentum; American arms are flowing, but officials in Washington question how much territory either side can win; Ukrainian cities including Kyiv have turned off streetlights to conserve energy after Russian attacks on power plants,” Wall Street Journal, November 13, 2022 (updated at 1:31 p.m. ET);
UPDATES
3)Roland Oliphant, Joe Barnes, Matthew Day, Danielle Sheridan, and Nick Allen, “Russian missile hits Nato member Poland, leaving two dead; Warsaw locked in urgent talks after explosion near village of Przewodow, five miles from border,” The Telegraph, November 15; 2022 (9:14 pm);
4)Katrina vanden Heuvel, ”How to end the war in Ukraine? Sit down and talk. It’s time,” Washington Post, November 15, 2022 (8:02 p.m. EST);
Analysis
There is something admirable but also something repulsive about U.S. policy toward Ukraine and Russia since the nuclear superpower invaded its much smaller neighbor on February 24, 2022.
What is admirable is the extraordinary amount of military and economic aid the U.S.has given Ukraine.
What is repulsive is the way the U.S. seems willing to fight the war of self-defense against Russia down to the last Ukrainian soldier and the last Ukrainian civilian.
As the article in the Wall Street Journal makes clear, a key goal of the U.S. has been to not get directly involved militarily in the conflict, and to avoid a nuclear war. An accompanying goal has been to avoid a Ukrainian defeat. The U.S. has never clearly articulated the goal of securing a Ukrainian victory.
European countries and others, including the Observer, view the war differently, as a war to uphold the U.N. Charter and international law, particulaely the principle prohibiting the international use of force and the principle prohibiting the acquision of territory by military conquest. Ukraine has explicitly tied its war aims to these principles.
Now comes the U.S. to pressure Ukraine to enter negotiations with Russia.
Even General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Sraff, has weighed in favoring negotiations. Secretarty of State Antony Blinken and apparent Ukraine policy czar National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan have pushed Ukraine to show a willingness to enter negotiations with Russia. Sullivan, in a highly unusual move for a National Security Asviser, recently traveled to Kyiv to deliver the message to President Volodymyr Zelenski in person.
General Milley, for his part, seems to have learned nothing about civil-military relations from his walk in full uniform across Lafayette Square with President Donald Trump to make a highly political point, with Trump holding a bible upside down.a
Either Milley should be replaced for insubordination by making political statements far out of his lane, or he was the conscious tool of a Biden Administration willing to violate bedrock principles of civil-military relations to advance its political objectives.
Both should take a remedial course in civil-military relarions.
The position of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is not a political position. Milley should either shut up or resign.
Milley’s statement that both Russia and Ukraine have suffered about 100,000 casualties each is not consistent with other reporting, and even if true represents the release of highly classified information–which Ukraine clearly doesn’t want released–for highly tendentious political purposes.
The picture that emerges is one of a highly disorganized and undisciplined national security team, which has anomalies such as Jake Sullivan engaging in secret back-channel discussions with Vladimir Putin ‘s aides.
The bad policies and decisions that have emerged from this process have not been inconsequential. They have cost and are costing Ukrainian lives.
The U.S. policy of pressuring Ukraine to enter negotiations with Russia at this point in time reveals either that the U.S. is clueless about the mandatory principles of international law that preclude the making by Ukraine of “territorial concessions”, or that the Biden administration does not view them as being of overarching importance.
The latter was the posture of Neville Chamberlain of Britain and Ėdouard Daladier of France when they signed the Munich Pact in October, 1938. The “territorial concession” they forced upon Czechoslovakia then was giving the Sudetenland to Germany under the threat of a German military invasion.
Appeasement in 1938 didn’t work out so well.
Appeasement in 2022 or 2023 isn’t going to work out well either, or even in 2025.
The consequences of the U.S. and allied countries treating the war as Ukraine’s war and not their own have been fateful. They now argue that one reason to seek negotiations between Ukraine and Russia is the fact that their stocks of munitions are being depleted.
It is their fault. They had ample warning that if they wanted to uphold the U.N. Charter and defend international law, and indeed our entire civilization, they would have to ramp up war production—in a manner similar to what was done in the U.S. in WW II.
Now the U.S. wants to push Ukraine into negotiating territorial concessions with Russia in order to end the war. This means the U.S. is thinking about pressuring Ukraine to satiate the Russian aggressor through appeasement,
All the fancy word smithing from Jake Sullivan and the White House does not obscure this one brutal fact. Washinton is treading down the path of appeasement.
The Trenchant Observer
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See also “Why I care about the war in Ukraine,” Trenchant Observations, June 26, 2022.