Douthat once again broadcasts his rightie domestic politics onto an unrelated foreign policy issue, just like in Afghanistan last year. None of this is true:
"Putin sees a window of opportunity in the pandemic’s chaos, America’s imperial overstretch,
I challenge anyone to provide serious casual evidence of this. This is about as silly as saying Ukraine was driven by the cancellation of XL, another ridiculous right-wing talking point
We're out of Afghanistan; we're not rushing into Ukraine; we not over-committing around China; we're pushing the allies to help with CN (the Quad); interest rates are low; GDP growth is good. CN is 2-3 decades behind us militarily.
S Korean left's presidential candidate just blamed Zelensky for getting Ukraine invaded, the same Zelensky showing extraordinary courage by staying in Kiev as the Russians come for him and his family:
"A novice politician who only has 6 months of political experience became
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the country's leader and caused a major clash by inciting Russia with a hasty promise of Ukraine's NATO admission."
for the most insipid reasons - validation from dictators that he too was a tough guy; bc Obama got a Nobel, Trump had to have one too, bc O mocked him at press dinner 10 years ago; validation from world leaders and the media that he was qualified to be POTUS and not the
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incompetent, no-nothing, arriviste serious commentary long since tagged him as.
While toadying to dictators, he proved his 'hawkishness' by punching down at small US allies.
This isn't what US hawks, in any recognizable usage of that word, do. Trump talked like a macho bully
So this is the kind of neocon logic that fills anglophone op-ed pages - esp @washingtonpost & @FT - in every crisis, and which we desperately need to replace with other models of aggression & response. Western opponents are rarely unlimited revisionists like Hitler, Napoleon,
Reading them that way encourages overreaction and provocative escalation as in Vietnam, Central America in the 80s,or the war on terror.
Putin is indeed a gangster and a predator. And his command of a great power army and predilection for anchluss-es is
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reminiscent of the 30s. Which is why Biden is taking this so seriously.
But the odds against Russia are much worse than against Nazi Germany. The West is pretty united, and Russia is badly isolated. Even the Chinese don’t want an unabashed Russian invasion, and an open war
Everything here is wrong for reasons typical of lazy, knee-jerk MAGA analysis:
1. Deterrence is deeply structured by local & historical factors. Defeats in one place don’t necessarily drive expansionism elsewhere. The Soviets also withdrew from Afghanistan, in the 80s. That
didn’t encourage the US to attack Mexico or West Germany to attack E Germany. When the US withdrew from Vietnam, the only dominoes to fall were Laos and Cambodia. All the credibility fears of the 60s were overblown. The US right’s fetishization of US presidential ‘weakness’ as
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a driver of foreign dictators’ bad behavior is really just a tell of their American parochialism - everything must be about us! - and their ignorance of other countries & the particulars of their conflicts. In this case, Putin’s been banging on against Ukrainian independence