The Blindness Of BlinkenThe same diplomats who got us into previous failed wars are calling the shots on Ukraine.
By George Liebmann
March 1, 2022
Many of the usual suspects who upheld America’s unwise wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—and its ill-considered interventions in Yugoslavia, Syria, and Libya, with their destabilizing refugee flows—are predictably upholding Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s pre-Russian invasion intransigence with regard to possible NATO membership for Ukraine. Blinken, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, are devoted Clintonistas who fully bought into the Clinton-Albright NATO expansion project opposed by George Kennan, William Perry, and others.
Acquiescence in Putin’s objections to Ukraine’s inclusion in NATO, it is said, would have been “appeasement” leading to further demands. Russian claims should not have been examined on their merits.
But as Learned Hand once said, “People do not take sides so much because of their economic interests as because of some wounding of their self-esteem.” The nation that did most to win World War II was described by a feckless recent president as a mere “regional power.” Given his country’s economic interests, Putin’s nationalist demagoguery appears to us not that of a rational actor, but we should have recognized that many of his countrymen are susceptible to it. Hitler’s stock in trade was constant harping on the “war guilt” clause of the Treaty of Versailles and its reparations and disarmament provisions. Germany suffered little from either; Western loans more than offset reparations and the disarmament provisions were almost immediately successfully flouted, but the Allies withheld from Muller and Bruning concessions that they made to Von Papen when it was too late.
The postwar settlement originating at Tehran and Yalta contemplated a Holy Alliance of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, not a world government founded on the equality of states, like the League of Nations. Such an arrangement, followed by the Concert of Europe and the Conference System, produced a hundred years free of major wars. The U.N. was a focus of Roosevelt’s at both Tehran and Yalta, as shown in Robert Divine’s Roosevelt and World War II (1970) and Frank Costigliola’s Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances (2013). The last work depicts an inarticulate Roosevelt, who did not fully communicate his vision to the public, as alone in the White House after the death of Missy Le Hand and the illness of Harry Hopkins, his principal aides—Admiral William Leahy and Judge Samuel Rosenman being well to his right and left respectively.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-blindness-of-blinken/
