The State Department Failed to Prevent the War. Will It Now Prevent the Peace?

A great article based on a speech by entrepreneur David Sacks, on Ukraine, and how we got here. It's largely a pretty good summary of my own views as well.

The State Department Failed to Prevent the War. Will It Now Prevent the Peace?

 

Not really. Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.” What this means is that war is simply a continuation of diplomatic policies by another means. We have had this lesson taught to us through history from Chamberlain's "peace in our time" after giving in to Adolf Hitler, and the nonaggression pacts signed by Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway in which Hitler promised. The division of Poland and a nonaggression pact with the USSR. Our foreign policy detente with the USSR during the Cold War of the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and early 90s. And yet, in each of these examples, we still had war despite diplomacy giving "peace a chance." The problem is with peace, you need two willing partners. You don't have that with Russia/USSR. Even with the Great Peace Dividend after the Berlin Wall fell down on November 9, 1992, and after the peace accords between Egypt, PLO, and Israel, there is still war in those regions.

Putin wants the old USSR back,. That means all the Baltic states, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, Poland, Chech Republic and Slovenia, the Former Yugoslavia states of Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Macedonia, and the list goes on. Putin is recreating his influence in places like Syria and new Inroads with both Iran and Saudi Arabia. In short, Putin and Russia is not honest negotiator at the peace table.

finally, this all started with Putin when the people of Ukraine threw out the Pro-Putin government of Viktor Yanukovych. After the Russian Spring, Putin invaded Crimea. Since then, he has taken piece by piece by piece parts of Ukraine in an effort to punish the people of Ukraine for choosing freedom instead of servitude to Moscow. And the Ukrainians only went towards NATO because Russia was taking their territory piece by piece by piece after the 2014 Russian Spring. Originally, they wanted to join the EU, an economic and political organization that would have opened Ukrainian markets to most of central and Western Europe. And even Putin did not want that.

So, all the excuses this article provides show two things: the author is willing to sell Ukrainian democracy in order to keep in the good graces of Russia and the GOP and conservatives are moving away from Democratic freedom-loving principles to a more authoritarian love affair with Trump leading the way.

 

You drew some funny conclusions from your reading of that article, so I doubt you actually read it. Or worse, you did read it and that was your take away.