The "Beware: Poison" Approach to Security by Anna Simons, Foreign Policy Research Institute
The current debate about Ukraine is troubling for at least three reasons. First, Russia is being belittled and President Putin caricaturized in unnecessarily unhelpful ways. Second, the comparisons between President Obama and Neville Chamberlain or Putin and Hitler are deeply flawed. All analogies are problematic. But if an analogy is to be drawn, then why not make a comparison to the prelude to the Korean War, when it was thought that Washington had better counter aggression in East Asia if it hoped to retain allies in Western Europe.
Did allied resolve over Korea really keep Western Europe out of communist clutches? Is that what kept the free world free?
Questions such as these point to the third problem swirling around the Ukraine debate: some very important assumptions remain unquestioned. Like: what commitments does the United States have, and to whom? Presidents and their representatives have made all sorts of promises and pronouncements over the years. Yet, when is the last time the U.S. Senate openly debated the terms of a bilateral defense treaty?
Constitutionally speaking, there are very constrained circumstances under which “we the people” owe other countries anything. So, what obligations are pundits, politicians, and policy makers actually referring to when they claim the U.S. needs to act?
Unfortunately, ‘we the people’ have paid insufficient attention to how diffuse U.S. foreign policy-making has become. Worse, those we rely on to advise us about national security – namely, defense intellectuals – have been equally derelict. Case in point, one question we should not have to ask is how, 12+ years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, any part of Ukraine can be absorbable by Russia…