One of the flaws of the habitually glib is to mistake cynicism for cleverness. For some reason the New York Times frequently gives a platform to such people so that they may impart the blindingly obvious. A recent case in point is an essay by a young American academic. He writes that Vladimir Putin has so far made a success in calculating the costs and benefits of military conflict in Georgia (2008), Ukraine (2014), and Syria (2015); the writer might have mentioned Chechnya and one or two other places. Nevertheless, he adds, ‘it may be that, in trying to swallow all of Ukraine, Mr Putin has finally overstepped’. He goes on to assert that ‘the U.S. strategy of making public intelligence about Russia’s military buildup around Ukraine was clever’. No. The USA never made public any actual intelligence. What it did was speculate in public about what its leaders said was likely to happen. That it has happened only serves to underscore to the world how impotent the USA and its allies were in preventing it from happening. Yet they persist, now by telling everyone that they spent weeks trying to persuade China’s government to join them in a ‘bluff’ but that their appeals were rejected. What are the rest of us meant to make of this? It does not distract us from the reality in Ukraine, which speaks for itself. Ukraine’s friends do nobody any favours by repeating old warnings. They earn no moral or political points for cynicism. With an alliance like NATO, impotence is a choice. Ukrainians as well as Russians will continue to draw the obvious conclusion: for a tragedy to happen on this scale, it must not merely be chosen but willed. |