We Fumbled Chances to Prevent the Ukraine War

and haven’t slowed it down, either

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When our country has blundered into war, we tend to be forgiving, as if such literally fatal errors are just too embarrassing to talk about.

We instead wait for the judgment of history.

We are nuts. 

Waiting for the historians to tell us how we stumbled into carnage risks repeating the mistakes before the books get written. Those kinds of mistakes have permanent consequences. We can’t connect dead folks to a charging system in hope the little red lines turn green.

The only time in relatively recent memory when we (sort of) owned up to our diplomatic idiocy was after the second Gulf War. In that 2003 escapade, President George W. Bush insisted that we went after Iraq because it was building weapons of mass destruction, something it wasn’t doing (but that we do all the time).

That war had been preceded, of course, by the first Gulf War, which by all indications, started in 1990 when Saddam Hussein thought he could get away with invading Kuwait.

That’s because we didn’t tell him otherwise.

When the buildup of camouflaged equipment on Iraq’s border with Kuwait indicated something unfriendly was about to happen, April Glaspie, George H. W. Bush’s U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, didn’t exactly terrify Saddam Hussein. Later, one of her fellow U.S. ambassadors said that wasn’t her fault.

Glaspie “took the straight American line, which is we do not take positions on border disputes between friendly countries,” James Akins, who used to be our man in Saudi Arabia, told PBS.

“That's standard. That's what you always say. You would not have said, 'Mr. President, if you really are considering invading Kuwait, by God, we'll bring down the wrath of God on your palaces, and on your country, and you'll all be destroyed.' She wouldn't say that, nor would I. Neither would any diplomat.”

Why not?

When the ridiculously powerful United States of America foresees the possibility of having to get busy with the Army and Navy, threatening the wrath of God seems like a worthy alternative.

The reason we have an $800 billion defense budget is so we can shake that enormous stick at stubborn people, instead of getting cornered into actually using it on them.

Little guys have to fight all the time. Big guys can usually get away with just getting their shoes dirty drawing lines in the sand. 

Remember when Russia grabbed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014? President Barack Obama refused, despite the advice of his vice president, to sell arms to Ukraine to discourage further Russian misbehavior. We just gave the Russkies a hard time with sanctions, and not that hard, at that.

Ukraine “is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,” Obama told The Atlantic in 2016.

So Russia infiltrated eastern Ukraine with disguised soldiers, and in 2018, started piling up uniformed men and materiel on the border.

This would have probably been a good time for us to pitch a fit.

But President Donald Trump did not show any significant discomfort at all. He publicly sympathized with President Vladimir Putin’s dislike of a possibly-expanding NATO in Ukraine and elsewhere in Russia’s neighborhood. He delayed sending arms to Ukraine, as leverage to try to get the country to provide him with political help in the United States. That signaled plainly that Ukraine’s national integrity wasn’t a big deal to us.

The reason Putin dislikes NATO so much is that it’s the classic American “speak softly and carry a big stick,” and it works. NATO has kept Russia out of member nations for decades without ever having to unwrap Article 5. That’s the one that promises to protect member nations under attack.

Joe Biden, after election as American president,  warned Putin away from further adventures in Ukraine, but all the agreeableness of previous U.S. administrations made Putin doubt that we’d actually get moving. He certainly didn’t think that Biden could talk most of Europe, thirsty for Russian fuel, to go along, too.

If Putin had been convinced of what the United States was willing and able to pull off, the invasion wouldn’t have happened. Depending on the numbers you trust, 100,000 or more people who were alive in 2021 aren’t anymore because of a long-standing failure to communicate.

And the war doesn’t seem to be getting less lethal lately.

As of last month, the U.S. has sent $76.8 billion in aid to Ukraine($46.6 in military support), according to the Council on Foreign Relations. That’s a huge commitment, but it hasn’t done the trick. That is, if the trick is getting Russia to send its troops elsewhere.

That’s not surprising. It’s hard to put a number on how many Russian troops would need to die before Putin decides there have been too many. But as long as he remains confident he can keep himself alive and in power, it’s probably a very big number. 

Putin probably suspects all the Western help to Ukraine is intended mainly to get rid of him. That’s not true, but at this point, the only obvious way for this disastrous invasion to end is Russian regime change. 

If the best hope of stopping the war is a new boss in Russia, however, much more bad stuff could probably take place before that eventuality. There’s been a year of Russian military blood-bathing and a lot of unhappiness among Russian big shots, but the keys to the Kremlin haven’t been recut yet. 

More military aid to Ukraine, like F-16 or Mirage-2000 jet fighters and pilot training, might conceivably create a situation that dissuades Putin. But so far, the main result of more firepower has been very bad news for two countries. Death, destruction, economic disaster and lots of all three. And nobody’s backing off.

Putin keeps brandishing the nuclear nevermind and hints at other awful escalations. It doesn’t sound like life in Ukraine is headed down the road toward doves and olive branches.

Putin has already sent convicts to the front lines and is reportedly dusting off T-55 tanks that are older than he is. Next, he’ll conscript the babushkas.

He, and a disinformed population, seems willing to treat this invasion like it’s Stalingrad, 1942. 

Last September, after demurring for months, Ukraine applied for fast-track NATO membership. Last month, a delegation of Eastern European NATO member states came to Washington to support beginning the process of considering that application.

Publicly exploring this initiative would be a risky strategy for Europe and America. 

But it would draw an unmistakable line in the sand.