Russian President Vladimir Putin is in trouble. Despite his limited gains on the ground in Ukraine, he is facing strategic defeat in a war that no one (including me) would have expected him to lose. . . . Only one military force in the world can save Putin from utter humiliation now: NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO intervention in Russia’s war on Ukraine could halt that country’s barbarous attacks. But it would mean war between Putin’s regime and the West, and this war would be such a gift to Putin that we should expect that he will soon do everything he can to provoke it.
The U.S. and Europe should resist such provocations. First and foremost, NATO intervention would help Putin by allowing him to rally his nation and impose even harsher measures to suffocate dissent.
Although some observers may believe that Putin would fold before he approaches the nuclear threshold, and others worry that even the smallest NATO action will inevitably spark World War III, such arguments at both extremes ignore the role of chance and risk.
The danger is not that the Russian war on Ukraine becomes a replay of 1939, in which a coalition must stop a mad dictator at all costs, but that a Russia-NATO war becomes a nuclear version of 1914, in which all the combatants would find themselves moving from a crisis none of them expected into a cataclysm none of them wanted.
Despite this dangerous reality, a column in the Washington Post by a former Republican stratgist predicts that Republicans seeking partisan advantage will push for more dangerous actions that could lead to a nightmare senario. Here are excerpts:
The American politics of Russia’s war on Ukraine look calm on the surface but are about to get ugly. Republicans slapped blue-and-yellow flag pins on their Jos. A. Bank suits and took a short break from anti-vaccine bleating and blaming President Biden for global inflation. This moment of unity looked promising; who could miss all those congressional Republicans cheering as loudly as Democrats during Volodymyr Zelensky’s address to Congress?
If that sounds cynical, I would ask: Have you met my former party?
It wants to play the most beloved game in the GOP playbook: that the Democrats are weak on defense. In my decades as a GOP ad maker and strategist, I made some pretty notorious ads about it. And I can tell you they work.Republicans specialize at turning Democratic successes overseas into disasters. It’s a slow-burn strategy designed to trigger an outrage culture that doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. GOP leaders don’t care about reality; their audience doesn’t care about the truth, and their political media apparatus always stays on message.
Donald Trump bungled the 2020 negotiations ending the war in Afghanistan, freeing the Taliban at scale and setting a date certain for U.S. withdrawal. When Biden stuck with that commitment to exit, Republicans leveraged the inevitable chaos in Kabul into a cataclysmic political fable; if only the weak Democrats had held on for another year, victory was ensured.
Similarly, the terrorist attack on the Benghazi facilities in 2012 was another faux scandal-in-a-box . . . I distinctly recall being in a focus group that year and watching the pollster tease from participants how Benghazi could be used to offset the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden under Barack Obama and transformed into a political millstone for Hillary Clinton.
The go-to notion that “Democrats have endangered your family” in every international moment from Vietnam to 9/11 is not about altering Democratic foreign policy or improving our national security; it is about peeling off White, working-class (and lately, Hispanic working-class) voters and turning them into reliable Republicans. The idea that Democrats are overcommitted to diplomacy and international institutions became standard GOP messaging long ago.
[T]he GOP will soon try to flank Biden on Ukraine. Some, like Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), will try to box him in on a no-fly zone — ignoring the negative externality of a nuclear exchange — while others will push him further than he wants on lethal aid to Ukraine. Win or lose, the GOP will declare that Biden blew his main chance.
But let’s also be honest about the landscape: A not-so-secret faction of the GOP is rooting for the bad guys in this one. We’ve already heard that from the Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) wing of the party. Many Republican base voters are dictator-curious and believe Russian President Vladimir Putin is the savior of White, straight, law-and-order Christianity; the virus of Trumpian hyper-nationalism . . . . has deeply infected the GOP.
Not long ago, the two parties worked together to face down, contain and repudiate Russian aggression and Moscow’s oppression of free peoples. From Truman to Eisenhower, from JFK to Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the Soviets respected American resolve. A few Republicans might yet hear the call to that unity in the face of Putin’s war, aware that Biden is leading the fight about the shape of the world in the coming century.
But if you think the majority of today’s GOP will leave politics at the water’s edge much longer, think again.
No comments:
Post a Comment