Rod Dreher: NATO ‘No-Fly Zone’ Nuttery

[Kamaji]

NATO ‘No-Fly Zone’ Nuttery

By Rod Dreher
February 25, 2022

You want to know why I keep banging on about approaching the Ukraine crisis from a foreign-policy realist perspective? Because of things like this:

https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1496999211656749060



In case you don’t know, Josh Marshall is a prominent liberal writer and editor. He’s talking plain common sense here, but a number of his Twitter followers call it appeasement, and say we better do something like this, or Putin is going to take over the world. More important than Twitter, though, is for a retired senior general — former NATO supreme Allied commander! — going on TV talking such dangerous idiocy. People are losing their minds. Here is a retired general who used to command all the NATO forces in Europe, actually suggesting that NATO should insert itself into a war on behalf of a non-NATO member, and tell a nuclear-armed great power that NATO will shoot down its planes and helicopters. What do these lunatics think would happen then?!

I heard one prominent analyst say the other day that NATO should establish a “trip wire” in Ukraine to deter Putin. Well, what if Putin kicks over the trip wire? Are we prepared for war with Russia over it? On what planet would that be anything but a suicidal idea?

Eli Lake, who is a Russia hawk, tweets:

https://twitter.com/EliLake/status/1497196896305225733

To which one of his followers responds:



That line made it click with me why I am so outdone with idealists in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. If the world were rightly ordered, all women would be able to walk anywhere they want at night, wearing anything they wanted to wear, and nobody would harm them. But all women with a lick of common sense know that if avoiding rape is important to them, that they will not be able to fully exercise their rights as free women. It should not be that way, but that’s the way of the world. You have to be realistic.

In a perfect world, Ukraine, like every sovereign nation, would have the right and the ability to set its own course. But that is not the way the world works. Russia has a say. You might hate that, but that’s a fact of life. “It’s not faaaaaaaair!” is not a policy, or a serious response.

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Source:  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/kiev-no-fly-zone-nato-joulwan/