Victor Davis Hanson
1. Reassuring an
enemy what one will not do ensures that the enemy will do just that and more.
Unpredictability and occasional enigmatic silence bolster deterrence. But
President Joe Biden’s
predictable reassurance to Russian President Vladimir Putin that
he will show restraint means Putin likely will not.
2. No-fly zones
don’t work in a big-power, symmetrical standoff. In a cost-benefit analysis,
they are not worth the risk of shooting down the planes of a nuclear power.
They usually do little to stop planes outside of such zones from shooting
missiles into them. Sending long-range, high-altitude anti-aircraft batteries
to Ukraine to deny
Russian air superiority is a far better way of regaining air parity.
3. Europe, NATO members, and Germany, in particular, have
de facto admitted that their past decades of shutting down nuclear plants, coal
mines, and oil and gas fields has left Europe at the mercy of Russia. They are promising to rearm and meet
their promised military contributions. By their actions, they’re admitting that
their critics, the United States in particular, were right, and they were
dangerously wrong in empowering Putin.
4. China is now
pro-Russia. Beijing wants Russian natural resources at a discount. Russia will
pay for overpriced access to Chinese finance, commerce, and markets. Yet if
Russia loses the Ukraine war, goes broke, and as an international pariah is
ostracized, then China will likely cut the smelly Russian albatross from its
neck—in fear of new Western financial, cultural, and commercial clout.
5. Americans are
finally digesting just how destructive the humiliating flight from Afghanistan
was. The catastrophe signaled to Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran that
Western deterrence had died.
No surprise that Russia sent missiles into a
Ukrainian base near the Polish-NATO border. North Korea in January launched
more missiles than in any month in its history. Iran sent missiles into Kurdistan.
China announces daily that it’s just a matter of time before it absorbs Taiwan.
The tens of billions of dollars of sophisticated weaponry sent to Ukraine by
the West are still far less than what the U.S. military handed over to the
terrorist Taliban.
6. The Ukraine
war did not cause inflation and record gas prices. Both were already spiking by
early February.
The cause was the Biden administration’s
year-long radical expansion of the money supply at a time of post-COVID pent-up
consumer demand. It foolishly continued de facto zero interest rates. Its
generous COVID subsidies for the unemployed discouraged a return to work, and
it slashed U.S. oil and gas production and pipelines.
Prior to Putin’s invasion, Biden was quite
publicly blaming greedy corporations, oil companies, COVID, and former
President Donald Trump for the inflation he had birthed in 2021. And he was
claiming that undeniable high prices were only temporary or mostly an obsession
of the elite.
7. Putin did not
invade during the Trump tenure, although he had been more aggressive under
previous American leadership with his prior attacks on Georgia, Ukraine, and
Crimea. Russia stayed still when oil prices were low, fuel supplies in the West
were plentiful, and the United States was confident. When the United States was
neither bogged down in optional military interventions nor led by a president
predictably accommodating to Russian aggressions, Russia stayed quiet.
Putin took note of increased NATO and U.S.
defense spending. He feared low global oil prices and record American oil and
gas production. He was wary after unpredictable American strikes against
enemies such as ISIS, Abu al-Baghdadi, and the Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani.
8. It is not
“escalation” to send arms to Ukraine. The Russians far more aggressively
supplied the North Koreans and North Vietnamese in their wars against the
United States without spreading the war globally. Pakistan, Syria, and Iran
sent deadly weapons—many in turn supplied to them by Russia, North Korea, and
China—to kill thousands of Americans during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
9. Putin may
never fully absorb Ukraine as long as it can easily be supplied across its
borders by four NATO countries. The United States deadlocked in the Korean War,
lost the Vietnam War, was stalled in Iraq, and fled Afghanistan in part because
its enemies were easily supplied by nearby border friends on the assumption
that the United States couldn’t strike such abettors.
10. It’s not
“un-American” to point out that prior American appeasement under the Obama and
Biden administrations explains not why Putin wished to go into Ukraine, but why
he felt he could. It’s not “treasonous” to say Ukraine and the United States
previously should have stayed out of each other’s domestic affairs and
politics—but that still doesn’t excuse Putin’s savage aggression. It’s not
traitorous to admit that Russia for centuries relied on buffer states between
it and Europe—lost when its Warsaw Pact satellite members joined NATO after its
defeat in the Cold War. But that reality also doesn’t justify Putin’s savage
attack.
We shouldn’t rehash the past but learn from
it—and thereby ensure Putin is defeated now and deterred in the future.
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