Big Governments Play Bad Hands Badly

 

Big Governments Play Bad Hands Badly

(I read about this recently in a British article and thought it frightening. Then I heard Clinton opine she thought the Ukraine mess was purposeful, an attempt to pull in and drown the Russians in a Ukraine swamp of nationalism and ferocity. She called it the Afghanistan "Model." So the government wasn't stupid, it was evil. Politicians talk but that made me take this a bit more seriously.)

A historian, Robert John Service, implies an incredible American misreading of Russia, Putin, and Europe led to the Ukrainian disaster. If true, this would make a nice bookend with the Afghanistan withdrawal. With their energy policies, these people would be wrong more often than dictated by chance.

According to him, the Russian invasion of Ukraine resulted from two immense strategic blunders. Robert Service says the first came on Nov. 10, when the U.S. and Ukraine signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership, which asserted America’s support for Kyiv’s right to pursue membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The pact made it likelier than ever that Ukraine would eventually join NATO—an intolerable prospect for Vladimir Putin. “It was the last straw,” Mr. Service says. Preparations immediately began for Russia’s so-called special military operation in Ukraine.

The second was Putin's underestimating the West's resolve.

Mr. Service, 74, is a veteran historian of Russia, a professor emeritus at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. This is an awful idea, a terrible error. But, if purposeful as Clinton suggested,  it does get the government off the hook for being total morons all the time. It would just make them soulless.