One has to stand up to Vladimir Putin

The MBD probably makes me stop and rethink what I think more than any other writer here and today I think assumes he is not as hawkish with Russia and Ukraine as he could be.

It is probably correct to say that the American attitude towards Ukraine is divided into two categories. (Three, if you count, “What is the U crane?”) There are Americans who do not care if Russia invades Ukraine. And there are Americans who do not want Russia to invade Ukraine, but are not willing to fight against Russia to defend Ukraine. The Americans who I am doing want to fight against Russia to defend Ukraine can probably meet in a Toyota Corolla.

Michael is not in favor of Putin and does not claim that Ukraine is coming. He emphasizes that simply because of geography, language, culture and geopolitics, Ukraine will always be more important to Russia than to the United States. Ukraine’s accession to NATO has always been probably an unrealistic scenario.

But I am still not convinced that the US should not take a relatively aggressive stance on this potential conflict.

Authoritarian forces tend to see territorial conquests as most of us see potato chips: it is very difficult to eat just one. Satisfaction of the first increases the longing for the second, Satisfaction of the second increases the longing for the third and so on.

Under Vladimir Putin, the Russian army helped create pro-Russian separatist states on its borders Agriculture, annexed Crimea, and occupied the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. And this is separate from Russia’s cyber warfare, hacking, involvement in US elections, assassinations of dissidents on British soil, radiation from British passenger aircraft during these killings, equipping stupid separatists to shoot down passenger planes;

When you are Vladimir Putin, life is very sweet. You get grounded, you equip separatist groups that agree to create client states, and Western leaders usually respond with an angry letter and some financial sanctions that do not really hurt you personally. And so it is for four presidents! You have got a former German chancellor serving on the board of a Russian gas company, the same man who called you a “perfect Democrat.” Germany wants to complete a pipeline that will make it more dependent on your energy reserves. Should I stand in front of you? Most Western leaders either bribe easily into arrangements that make their countries more dependent on you, or they desperately want to avoid a conflict with you.

Everyone seems to be willing to lean back to keep Vladimir Putin happy – and I do not mean just the athlete.

But you may have noticed that for an authoritarian with a strict class connection and ruling with an iron fist, Vladimir Putin is spreading a lot of chaos. Additions, murders with nerve gas, hacking, misinformation and propaganda, arming separatist groups, using energy reserves as a weapon; Putin’s preferred way of getting what he wants is to make life dangerous and miserable for everyone else, and to force people to bend to his will. He is a former KGB, so the words “we can not do it because it is wrong” simply do not exist in his vocabulary.

Xi Jinping may be the most powerful person on earth, but Vladimir Putin is probably in the top five. Given his history in the Russian administration since 1999, we do not want Putin to become more powerful than he is. The stronger Putin becomes, the more problems he creates.

It would be nice if the problems in distant lands remained there and we could be sure that the divisions, aggression, brutality and cruelty of distant leaders and dictators in a tin would never affect the daily lives of Americans. And sometimes they do not. Most Americans have not heard, noticed or could not tell you much about the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda or Srebrenica or Sudan or the Yazidi or Rohingya massacres in Myanmar. The West did not exactly run on the ramparts when Putin completely crushed Chechnya and slaughtered civilians.

But sometimes these distant problems end up on America’s doorstep and one morning we wake up and Pearl Harbor burns, or passenger planes crash into Manhattan skyscrapers, or angry mobs flood our embassies and kill American diplomats.

Vladimir Putin talks about a good game for stability and diplomacy, but his actions show that he enjoys the opportunity to make the lives of Americans miserable. If he wanted to shut down the hackers involved with our pipelines, he could. If it wanted to shut down troll farms and disinformation efforts, it could. Putin wants us divided, weak, paralyzed, helpless and humiliated. In taking office, President Biden made clear his almost desperate desire for “a stable, predictable relationship” and rejected US opposition to the NordStream 2 pipeline, trying to reduce tensions. In response, Putin more or less turned the bird over to Biden, gave him a wedge, and took his lunch money.

Why do not the Americans want to see Russia conquer larger parts of Ukraine? Because Vladimir Putin is just a simple old bad LYGE and bully, and the more a bully succeeds, the worse he gets. This does not mean that we should go to war with him. But it means we must make every effort to ensure that a Russian invasion would be a long, painful, bloody and unpopular fiasco for Moscow. (In a way, this is what has kept China and Taiwan at peace for generations. China has the military power to conquer Taiwan whenever it wants, but the process of conquering Taiwan has a cost in blood and treasure that Beijing is unwilling to do. to pay, at least for now.) If Putin wants to occupy Ukraine, we must ensure that the action is as painful as possible militarily, economically, geopolitically, economically and socially – and that, like in Afghanistan, the locals do not will never welcome the conquerors, and will shoot the occupying forces for years to come.

If we are lucky, announcing the extremely high cost of occupying Ukraine will be a deterrent. And if he does not, he sends at least one warning to the next authoritarian with dreams of territorial expansion through military conquest.