
By Dalibor Rohac. Dec 9, 2021
There is a strange dissonance between America’s “unwavering support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity, its sovereignty, its independence” recently expressed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and President Biden’s admission that the use of force against a prospective Russian invasion of Ukraine is “not in the cards right now.”
From a tactical standpoint, it is rarely a good idea to announce upfront how far one is willing to go in escalating a conflict. That is doubly true in the age of “hybrid warfare” and “gray-zone aggression,” which Russia itself has pioneered.
After all, if the West decided to play as dirty a game as Vladimir Putin, it has a number of options worth keeping on the table, if only to make the Russian strongman feel uneasy about his brazen moves. Short of an official NATO deployment to Ukraine, for example, it is perfectly conceivable that NATO soldiers, in unmarked uniforms and with military equipment, would choose Ukraine as their holiday destination — not unlike how Russia characterized its own military activities in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
Nobody wishes for a shooting war between NATO and Russia, particularly over a country that is not a NATO member, as the president emphasizes. Even without any Western involvement, the US administration is surely thinking, the notion of Russian tanks rolling into Kiev is farfetched.

Ukraine’s military is in better shape relative to 2014, thanks in part to US military aid and purchases of modern equipment, including the latest Turkish drones. Russian aggression also has helped coalesce a sense of Ukrainian nationhood and hardened Ukrainian attitudes toward Russia, which had been traditionally quite warm.
Yet none of that helps ease the blatant contradiction between rhetorical flourishes about the West’s and America’s firm commitment to Ukraine’s future as a free, sovereign nation and our collective unwillingness to lift a finger in its defense. Uncouth and backward as it may sound, unless we are actually willing to put up a fight over its sovereignty, we are not really committed to Ukraine at all. Even if a Russian-led invasion and occupation of Ukraine are not imminent, Putin understands that the United States and its European partners are not going to stop him from pushing the envelope further at the time and in the manner of his choosing.

The recent record, after all, speaks for itself. Almost seven years since the Kremlin’s initial aggression, Crimea remains in Putin’s hands and much of eastern Ukraine under Russian control — notwithstanding successive waves of sanctions and opprobrium that descended on Russia. If Putin continues, the administration is threatening him with more of the same, including the supposedly “nuclear option” of cutting Russia off SWIFT, the global bank settlement scheme.Guess what. Putin and his circle, fueled by demented dreams of restoring Russia’s national greatness, do not care about Biden’s threat of “severe consequences” any more than the mullahs of Iran and Kim Jong-un of North Korea, who were disconnected from SWIFT some years ago without any observable improvement in their behavior.

What is at stake, moreover, extends far beyond Ukraine. If Ukraine’s territorial integrity is not worth defending, is Taiwan’s? How about dozens of other countries with border disputes and past grievances, including those within NATO and the EU?
And would our allies and adversaries be entirely misguided in wondering whether the administration would not look for an off-ramp in case of a conflict involving a NATO member state? What Americans, after all, want their kids to “die for Latvia because it somehow protects the rule of law,” as Tucker Carlson once dismissively put it?

AP / Susan Walsh
Of course, the United States cannot care about the security of Ukraine more than Europeans do. At a time our nation is shifting its strategic focus, for very good reasons, to the threat posed by China, the administration ought to be firm in asking our oftentimes “delinquent” (as one former president put it) allies to do their part.
Yet it is paradoxically because of our new strategic competition with Beijing that the United States has so much more to lose in the current crisis than Europeans.
In the Indo-Pacific as in Europe, the United States needs reliable allies and friends to stand up to China — but will they want to team up with a paper tiger whose vocal commitments and expressions of support carry no practical weight?
Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Twitter: @DaliborRohac
“Short of an official NATO deployment to Ukraine, for example, it is perfectly conceivable that NATO soldiers, in unmarked uniforms and with military equipment, would choose Ukraine as their holiday destination — not unlike how Russia characterized its own military activities in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.”
That’s exactly what should be happening. Poetic Justice.
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https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/12/tucker-carlson-is-americas-most-watched-kremlin-propagandist.html
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“Carlson isn’t a Russian agent, nor is he a useful idiot. He’s a useful cynic: someone whose moral emptiness happens to serve the interests of a foreign power. If you read Russian government Websites, you’ll find that he’s using the same talking points as Putin’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And sometimes, he generates anti-American material for Russian state TV.”
I’d say this motherfucker certainly is. The only question is whether paid or voluntary. His output is identical to the kremkrappers. He even is also a fan of Asshat, Iran and Orban, whom he travelled to meet for a piece of editorial puffery.
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I hear a lot about Ukraine and how they need US/NATO troops, nope they don’t need troops that would take too long to train. How many NATO troops have actually experienced trench warfare? The US policy is use guided missiles, and protect US military lives, Ukraine doesn’t have that option, they don’t need US or NATO military, they just need materials to do the job.
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I’m with you guys on this, biden might as be a barnyard weather vane, he only picks whatever side helps look good, whichever way the political winds are blowing. He’s an embarrassment to me as an American.
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Agreed. It is also embarrassing that the guy who is a career politician can’t even maintain a position. He acts like he will agree to anything just so he doesn’t miss his afternoon pudding and nap.
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Biden is the worst possible person to have in the Oval Office in this day and age. With mafia land and bat virus land as our new old enemies, we need someone who won’t fall asleep while eating his porridge or forgets what year it is or doesn’t know in which state he’s in. The guy is not even fit to be a clerk at a nursing home. He’s only worthy to be a resident of the said nursing home. It’s very, very unfortunate for Ukraine to face a possible assault by mafia land with such a goober in the Yellow House.
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