I wrote about the unexpected success of economic sanctions against Putin — unexpected both in degree and in kind. Which adds to my puzzlement at the weird aversion much of the foreign-policy commentariat seems to have to success 1/ nytimes.com/2022/05/19/opi…
I'm seeing more and more pieces that seem weirdly distressed, even panicked, by the possibility that Ukraine will win a clear military victory. Not my usual arena, but I have a guess about what's going on 2/
It looks to me as if many foreign-policy pundits suffer from the same delusions that afflicted many "centrist" domestic pundits until recently (and still does, for a few): refusal to acknowledge that we're not dealing with politics as usual 3/
For years, many of my pundit colleagues kept wanting to believe that the GOP was still a normal political party; bipartisanship was their holy grail, and anyone pointing out right-wing radicalization was "shrill" 4/
The equivalent in foreign affairs, I'd suggest, is wanting to see Putin's Russia as a normal power, respecting the kinds of limits — e.g., no outright wars of conquest — that were pretty much universally enforced under the Pax Americana 5/
Given that view, they want to give Putin an out, letting him save face and avoid humiliating defeat; the idea is that he will henceforth behave himself. Or as Susan Collins might say, that he will have learned his lesson 6/
But of course that's not what Putin or Putinism is. We're talking about an imperialist, authoritarian regime that is also at the center of a global anti-democratic, ethnonationalist movement. If he gets away with this, he and similar-minded people will just be encouraged 7/
So it's very much in the interest of allies of democracy to see Putin defeated, clearly and unmistakably — to provide an object lesson that wars of aggression don't pay, and also to demonstrate that unfree societies are weaker, not stronger, than democracies 8/
Concretely: Why is Putin entitled to keep the territory he seized in 2014? As a practical matter, regaining all that territory, Crimea in particular, may be unrealistic — although predictions from military "realists" haven't been great lately. 9/
But in principle, we should want to send the message that military conquest will not stand. And the desire to make nice with war criminals and would-be conquerors seems just bizarre 10/
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