Will Congress push the U.S. further into Ukraine? Predictably, the election results are being used as a basis to forecast that the Congress indeed will push Obama and the U.S. further into Ukraine.
Far more important than this question and the prediction are a set of different questions. Is such a commitment a good idea? What will be the consequences? How will Russia respond? What do Americans gain by a deeper commitment to Ukraine? How will Russia regard a strongly pro-American state on its border? How will such a push affect relations between the U.S. and Russia and between European countries and Russia? How would such a deeper link affect the chances of a large war? Is Ukraine a reliable partner or ally for the U.S.? What are the interests of various Ukrainian parties in all of this and how might they use a deeper U.S. commitment for their own ends?
The U.S. involvement in Afghanistan under Presidents Carter and Reagan provides an example of how irrational, uninformed, blundering and mistaken U.S. foreign policy can be toward another neighbor to Russia. The U.S. misread Russian intentions totally. There was no strategic push by Russia into that region, nor any threat to the Persian Gulf. The U.S. armed the mujahideen and supported warfare from which the country has not yet recovered. The U.S. didn’t understand the divisions among the mujahideen and their interests. Brezezinski didn’t gauge the consequences for Afghanistan in terms of civil war, domestic rivalries and the bad effects on the population of that country. He didn’t foresee the blowback for Americans. Or else he under-estimated all of it and/or didn’t care. The U.S. spurned diplomatic solutions and embraced aggressive means of dealing with the USSR and UN mediation efforts. Eventually, 12 years after peace accords were reached, the U.S. still went to war in a land that has no strategic or national security importance. It still hasn’t left. Now it and NATO are keeping forces there indefinitely.
The same general kinds of issues and questions, in a different form, are occurring again in the case of Ukraine, another country bordering on Russia in which the U.S. has no strategic or national security interest. Getting more deeply involved with Ukraine is another irrational blunder for the U.S. It has no promise of anything good for Americans or the world, but it has great promise for harm or even tragedy of very great scope.
11:16 am on November 6, 2014
