When I see reports of Assad sending thousands of troops to support Putin's campaign of war crimes in Ukraine or of the use of Wagner Group mercenaries or Russia's bringing in some of their most brutal veterans of Chechnya...
...or of the Kremlin employing other approaches drawn from their prior violations of international law in Chechnya, Syria, Georgia, Crimea & Eastern Ukraine, I can't help but think of the role bad U.S. and Western policy decisions played in making this catastrophe possible.
Not holding Putin to account in the past, not standing up to him in the past, not respecting our own "red lines" in the past, & of course, having one POTUS who actively did Putin's bidding to help Russia, weaken Ukraine and weaken NATO, definitely helped set the stage for this.
So, of course, did European inertia & of their longstanding patter of putting commercial interests ahead of national security imperatives. Collectively the West (& the last three presidencies...most notably Trump's) did not do enough, did not show enough foresight or moral fiber.
But having said that, the primary responsibility for the current war, the atrocities taking place, and for the past wars that led us here lies with Putin and then, next, with war criminal collaborators like Assad.
In fact, of all the mistakes the West made, the gravest was failing to realize the profundity of the threat posed by Putin and for consistently trying to rationalize, normalize or just forget his behavior.
One would think the scale of the horrors perpetrated by Putin in Ukraine would ensure that collectively the int'l community never makes that mistake again. But then you would have thought that turning Grozny to dust or the savaging of Syria would have had that effect before.
That is one of my greatest concerns here. That we fall victim to our impulse to too quickly turn the page, our unwillingness to tackle the really tough problems of holding a world leader like Putin accountable, that we just want to put this all behind us.
Peace as soon as possible is a mercy we must all seek for the innocents of Ukraine. But how we resolve this must also take into account the lesson of two decades of experience with Putin and centuries of experience with similarly bloodthirsty despots.
That lesson: Criminals who are not held to account will continue to commit crimes, enemies who are not acknowledged as such and defeated will always remain a threat.
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