2/24/22 UPDATE: It has begun. Russia has initiated a full-scale assault on Ukraine from the east, south, and north. The following is my synopsis of the contributions of two Fox News celebrities to the broad sense of confusion and myopia in America regarding Russia and the Ukraine.
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If you haven’t noticed, Putin is at it again, and our hapless president is bewildered and stumbling toward appeasement, or maybe just plain impotence. Now, here’s the kicker: some on the right are also ambivalent and would be, quite honestly, content with the results of Biden’s passivity. Fox News’s Neville Carlson (alias Tucker Chamberlain) is exhibit #1. He’s Fox News’s #1 offering and it shows. If you turn at least a casual ear to talk radio you’ll hear the occasional caller spout the latest lines, almost word for word, from Carlson about “neocons”, Ukrainian corruption, our undefended southern border vetoing any efforts to assist our allies, Carlson’s adaptation of Code Pink’s “no blood for oil” chant, and other reformulations of old rhetorical handles.
Sadly, he’s not alone on my side of the political ledger, the right. On Tuesday (2/22/22), he was joined by Laura Ingraham in a tag-team revitalization of Lindbergh’s America First Committee, which by the way in its initial form died over the burning hulks of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. If you’re interested, here’s a good dose of Tucker-thought on Russia-Ukraine. It’s entertaining but incoherent bombast.
Carlson repeatedly asks, “. . . how does intervening in Ukraine help the core interests of the United States?” Honestly, substitute Ukraine for any number of different countries and you’ll probably get any number of answers to his query. And prevalent answers would be different depending on the era. One answer would prevail in a time when long-distance travel was a death-defying journey, and before the harnessing of electricity and artificial power and Adam Smith’s depiction of the glories of free trade. George Washington could understandably advise the young nation “to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.” But two-month delivery times for a letter across the Atlantic is an alien experience for today. Things move quickly – sometimes instantaneously – and their impacts travel at the same speed. Missiles, hijacked airliners turned into missiles, cyber-attacks, blue-water navies, strategic bombers, and international supply chains make the point.
Let’s ask Tucker’s question in 1931 before Japan’s invasion of China; instead of the Donbas, it’s Manchuria. Oh, what about Mussolini’s 1935 “minor incursion” into Ethiopia? Lest I forget, we could level the question at the “little corporal’s” swallowing up of Czechoslovakia, and furthermore Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. That takes up the Axis connection to Tuckers’ question. 405,000 US deaths later (75-80 million worldwide), we had peace that didn’t last long. And then we’re back to mankind’s annoyingly familiar flawed nature.
Moving forward in time, what core interest did we have in Korea? Or, for that matter, West Berlin? Cuba? Nicaragua? Grenada? Kuwait? The profusion of instances answers the question. It’s an interrelated world of multifaceted interests and impacts. A leading statesman has to pick and choose, not ignore and hide.
To remind you of what a statesman sounds like, President Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech of 1983 provides an educational contrast. Tucker no doubt would refer to him as a “neocon”.
Regarding Ukraine, is it in America’s interest to stand pat as the Soviet Union is revived? Ukraine is the vital piece in Putin’s reconstruction project. It was the breadbasket for the empire yet also distinct, so much so that Russification, the policy of transplanting millions of Russians in the country, was active for a couple of centuries or more. For Russia, if they can’t make Ukrainians Russian, they’ll make Ukraine Russian. First-language Russian speakers (14% of the population) are a product of this ethnic imperialism. They’re also the leverage for Putin to use tanks to complete the task that was interrupted by the USSR’s implosion.
The CCP is taking a page out of this dog-eared book by injecting Han Chinese into Xinjiang.
You’ll notice that I didn’t mention Vietnam in the litany of US interventions. It’s a sore spot, or embarrassment, for most Americans since we are said to have lost. But losing was a choice, not inevitable. Many decisions were made to draw out the war, allow North Vietnam to stay in the fight, and prohibit US assistance to Saigon by Congressional order at the moment Hanoi’s tanks headed south. We saw similar choices throughout the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama yanked US forces out of Iraq and we got ISIS. Biden yanked them out Afghanistan and we got Kabul airport and a descent into the 7th century and more terrorist sanctuaries. Choices, horrible choices, and not the only ones available.
Each time that we choose a new defeat, we’ll go through a period of national PTSD. It’s no different post-Iraq War (W’s edition) and Afghanistan. This time, it’s more than a revival of a McGovernite wing in the donkey party. The right has correspondingly rediscovered its inner-Robert Taft/Charles Lindbergh. Tucker and Ingraham speak in the manner of Lindbergh’s isolationism and Taft’s fear of internationalism. Lindbergh combined a retreat to fortress America and an extreme naivete about the character of the Reich Chancellery. Taft bristled at anything that smacked of a loss of US sovereignty, real or imagined. He found NATO troubling.
Still, a catalyst was necessary to provoke a 180-degree turn for the mediagenic stars of Fox News who were past boosters of the War of Terror. To be fair, I’m not aware of Tucker’s stance at the time of Bush’s invasion of Iraq but we have Laura’s confession. She got a whiff of populism, Trump style, and was intoxicated. Trump had no statesmanlike competence to exhibit on the debate stage in 2016 so he resorted to insults and boilerplate attacks on Jeb Bush that drew from the worst of the Bush-lied-people-died period of Democrat demagoguery. Everyone pre-invasion assumed Saddam had WMD, including the dictator himself, or so he said. Trump refashioned the canard in the language of illicit “forever wars” as a campaign slogan and cudgel against Jeb Bush and his new bogeyman of “the establishment” (synonymous with anyone in opposition to Trump). It’s a familiar feature in the Trump Brigades’ talking points.
And the slogans thrived, going so far as to mutilate any original meaning. RHINO morphed from liberal Republican to anyone opposing Trump. Neocon changed from the architects of Reagan’s foreign policy to, again, anyone antagonistic to Trump. “Forever wars” came out of Trump’s mouth as easily as it did any Democrat sealing the doom of South Vietnam. A person’s stance on Trump became the arbiter of meaning in our political lingua franca.
From the time of Trump’s ascension, Trump and the Fox News primetime lineup trundled in unison into a fixation on getting out, and staying out. Trump, with Ingraham and Carlson in tow, tried a pullout in Iraq but he’s got an ISIS problem. The complication of ISIS extended into Syria so he’ll have to eradicate these blood-thirsty savages even as he tries to abandon the Kurds to Erdogan’s new Ottoman Empire. Trump detours and his fits and starts abound. Assad gasses his own people and Trump orders missile attacks. It’s a messy world, but he’s determined to get out of Afghanistan with nothing but cheerleading from Tucker and Laura.
Trump’s Doha Agreement (signed Feb. 29, 2020) was minted in the same manner as the previous negotiated sellouts: the victims were absent from the room. Chamberlain/Daladier cut a deal with Hitler on Czechoslovakia that excluded the Czechs. Nixon/Kissinger reached agreement with the North Vietnamese with only a perfunctory role for the South. The Kabul government was at most a wall flower to Pompeo and the Taliban. The kink in the grand diplomatic design was that Trump wouldn’t be around to see it through. Biden was elected and, true to form, he flubbed the flight out of the country.
Remember that Trump and Biden were united in their enthusiasm for getting out and not in the least worried about its return to terrorist sanctuary and the loss of a strategic asset.
Now it’s Ukraine’s turn. The same “forever wars” vitriol that our Fox News celebrities and Trump retroactively aimed at W and his people would be directed at anyone wanting to stop Putin. Epithets are summoned to smear the object of our sympathies. Ukraine is vilified as corrupt and not a democracy. Well, yes, Ukraine is corrupt, like the rest of the old USSR post-breakup, but is it more corrupt than, say, our politicians who enter office middle class but leave oligarch-rich? Pelosi, can we examine your account books?
Tucker is fond of saying that the country is an affront to democracy because it banned political parties and jails the opposition. He’s only half right. The other half is the existence of the country under the pall of Russian domination. After the fall of the Soviet empire, “Russian interference” was a recurring feature of the Ukrainian political scene; and before it, Stalin’s Holodomor (1932-3) was as much genocide as it was a byproduct of central planning. Ukrainian elections were continually beset by massive Russian intrusions. Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004) was a popular uprising to throw out a Putin puppet in the presidency. It was followed in 2013 by the Euromaidan protests to force a realignment away from Russia and toward the West. All throughout, Putin’s operatives were active with money and guidance to contort elections. Russia’s $40,000 in Facebook ads in 2016 in our country pale in significance. The country has been in a near continuous struggle to be independent of Russia. Life under nonstop foreign pressure isn’t healthy for the fragile elements of democracy.
Anyway, Ukraine isn’t in the same league with Putin’s Russia when it comes to sheer political ghoulishness. Enterprising but critical journalists disappear at an amazing clip. Anna Politkovskaya (2006) and Natalia Estemirova (2009) are two of many of Putin’s victims. The list of the murdered for being so impetuous as to stand athwart Putin is so long that the Russian human rights group Memorial (now illegal) maintains a catalogue called “Last Address”. Political homicides aren’t limited to Russia as the spate of overseas poisonings illustrates. Exile is no refuge from the guy.
Do you think Carlson is cognizant of these realities? It’s hard to say. I certainly don’t hear any pushback on the torrent of claims coming out of the Kremlin. Putin believes that the Ukraine is an illegitimate country. Does Carlson? It has more legitimacy than Russia’s claim on it. Russia’s control over most if it didn’t happen till Peter the Great in the 18th century. Prior to that, the nation shape shifted under the control of the Duchy of Lithuania, Poland, Austria-Hungary, and the Golden Horde (Tartars), Russia arriving on the scene later. If not for Russia, the country might have joined the family of eastern European nations much earlier.
Laura’s stance was obvious when she became euphoric from the fumes of Trump’s populism. Right now, another scent is in the air. It is the whiff of 1938 Czechoslovakia and later Poland. Both were creatures of the Versailles Treaty and thusly held in ill-repute by an ascending German leader in much the same manner as Putin holds Ukraine. The two eastern European countries were just stepping stones on the way to lebensraum. In like manner, the Ukraine is an important cog on the path to reassembling the USSR, or Russian Empire, or whatever label you wish to apply to Putin’s Slavic lebensraum. Laura, is lebensraum an appropriate tool for satisfying territorial appetites?
Seriously, are a country’s borders to be decided by the ambitions of dictators? If so, say goodbye to Taiwan and South Korea. Welcome to the Palestinian Caliphate, a gift of Iran’s mullahs. So, what’s our interest in the Ukraine? It’s to prevent the resuscitation of imperial ambitions in a region critical to our well-being, Europe. If we stood up to this thug, we might have more going for us in confronting Xi than a pell-mell run for the hills in Afghanistan and the Ukraine scalp for Putin.
The next shoe to drop: Taiwan. Partially, America’s fatigue in the Middle East gave us Trump, who gave us Doha. America’s fatigue with Trump gave us Biden which led to the Afghanistan bugout, and much else that plagues us. It didn’t take Putin long (5 months) to initiate the largest land invasion in Europe since World War II. Xi’s been watching, and has a checklist with Hong Kong marked and followed by the Senkaku Islands, the South China Sea, Taiwan, and worldwide hegemony. Debacles unleash tyrants, and so will a retreat into fortress America and a handwringing paralysis every time there’s talk of a venture beyond our shores.
Tucker and Laura didn’t get the email.
RogerG
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