Have we lost Ukraine already?

Up until the last part of his essay, 'Have we lost already?', Vancraen is sadly accurate in his assessment of Putin's plans for Ukraine, and the West's feeble reaction.

The remainder of his essay, however, containing Vancraen's prescriptions for united US-EU-NATO action, are all strong and good but do not have a chance of being implemented, thanks to Western disunity and fecklessness, amounting to capitulation to Putin. 

Until now Putin has expertly gamed the West. At each peak of the conflict he has employed peace talks and soothing words as a stalling tactic with the EU; meanwhile, he continued pursuing what he has wanted: a "frozen" No Man's Land in eastern Ukraine (Donbas), a la Transnistria in Moldova and Abkhazia in Georgia; and a literally frozen Ukraine this coming winter, after a cutoff of Russian gas, making Ukraine too weak and depleted to oppose Russia further.

Soon Russia will have its revenge for the breakup and ethnic cleansing of Yugoslavia by doing the same to Ukraine, the largest country in Europe.

To my Ukrainian friends I must say, I'm sorry we let you down.  Now you'll have to make the best of it.

Just as you succeeded, miraculously, in a matter of weeks in resuscitating the Ukrainian army from the brink of death, directly with your pocketbooks and blood, so too you must bring the Ukrainian nation back to life. 

In the space that remains to you, liberate yourselves from corrupt thieves and oligarchs! In what remains of Ukraine, make it a real nation of free, united citizens that is hell-bent on joining the EU and exhibiting the European values of democracy, free expression and free assembly, equality before the law, government accountability, tolerance, entrepreneurship and social solidarity.  

If the words of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. are true -- "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice" -- then perhaps one day Ukraine will become a shining example to Donbas and Russia itself of what great feats free people can accomplish, and make Ukraine the envy of Europe. Слава Україні -- Героям слава!

Winter, war and refugees are coming

By Luc Vancraen

September 7, 2014 | Kyiv Post

URL: http://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/op-ed/luc-vancraen-winter-war-and-refugees-are-coming-363655.html

Milbank: Boomers are terrible political leaders

Everything wrong with U.S. politics is the Baby Boomers' fault [emphasis mine]:

Boomers inherited a system based on compromise and sacrifice — and they gave us the current standoff. They received a United States victorious in the Cold War and atop the world economy — and they gave us the Iraq war and the Great Recession. They are the parents of the first generation in U.S. history — the millennials — to have a lower standard of living than previous generations. And, in retirement, they will probably break Social Security and Medicare.

“Boomers are the scorched-earth, values-driven generation,” said Neil Howe, who with William Strauss chronicled the recurring patterns of generations in the United States. “They invented the culture wars and they’re taking it with them as they grow older, which is this complete polarization and gridlock. It’s very hard to compromise over values.” 

As leaders, boomers are a bust

By Dana Milbank

June 27, 2014 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/VtTfJg

Prager: Sad conservative parents REDUX

In a previous post, I took more time than necessary to destroy Dennis Prager's flawed conceit that somehow college -- not reason or life experience -- is what turns kids into liberals instead of conservatives (or more importantly, voting Democratic instead of Republican).

Note that words here matter. Are conservative parents sad because their young-adult kids decide to vote Democrat, or because they espouse certain beliefs like support for gays?  

In his follow-on column, Prager provides a lot of, er, helpful advice for conservative parents who want to successfully indoctrinate their kids.

The trouble is, a lot of this "character-building" stuff that Prager preaches is indeed apolitical. I mean, I'm a far-left liberal and I agree with a lot of it. It's stuff that I was taught. And I'll teach the same to my kids with no fear that it'll transform them into Tea Party Republican zombies.  

As I said before, one's values are not the same as voting habits.  Most Americans hold very similar values; but we express them differently in our politics.  

Finally, I could pick apart at least half of Prager's "traditional American values," for instance: "...that American military strength is the greatest contributor to world peace and stability, or ... American exceptionalism."

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson certainly never dreamed that America's military strength was going to ensure world peace and stability. Washington didn't even favor a standing army.  America's superpower status was born after WWII.  So we're talking about a "traditional" state of affairs that is only about 70 years old -- not even one-third of our nation's history.

And the term "American exceptionalism" was coined by... Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1929. And he didn't mean it as a compliment. 'Nuff said about that "traditional" value.

If You Want a Conservative Child

By Dennis Prager

November 12, 2013 | The Dennis Prager Show

URL: http://www.dennisprager.com/want-conservative-child/

U.S. foreign policy must be moral as well as prudent

This entire op-ed by Harvard professor Joseph Nye is worth reading. I especially liked his comparison of Bush 41 vs. Bush 43 [emphasis mine]:

When we cannot be sure how to improve the world, prudence becomes an important virtue, and grandiose visions can pose a grave danger. This is sometimes forgotten by those who want Obama to place bigger bets in the revolutions of today’s Middle East. It is one thing to try to nudge events at the margins and assert our values in the long term; it is another to think we can shape revolutions we do not fully understand. There is a difference between a limited punishment of Syria for breaking an international taboo on the use of chemical weapons and becoming involved in a civil war. In foreign policy, as in medicine, it is important to first do no harm. Bush 41, who lacked the ability to articulate a vision but was able to steer through crises, turned out to be a better leader than his son, who had a powerful vision but little contextual intelligence about the region he tried to reshape.

Definitely I agree with Nye that prudence is the word of the day -- of the decade -- in U.S. foreign policy.  We'll be paying for Dubya's imprudence in Afghanistan and Iraq for decades to come. What I disagree with is Nye's America-first view on foreign policy that naturally gives U.S. presidents the right or the option to intervene militarily wherever they wish, as long as their "big bets" show promising odds of success over there -- success as defined by us, over here. 

What Nye and others don't realize is that we are in a new era, a new wave of democratization, now continuing in the Arab-Muslim world. The arc of history bends toward democracy. The U.S. has played no small role in that. (Pat self on back). So anybody straining against that arc will feel the pain, eventually. That goes for the U.S. at home or interfering abroad.

Egypt offers preliminary evidence that Arab-Muslims refuse to go back to dictatorship.  They've had a taste of revolution and they liked it.  Certainly I disagree with the way the Egyptian military with the support of some Egyptians ousted the democratically elected President Morsi, even while I sympathize with their grievances against him.  The street protests of an active urban minority proved very effective, but it was hardly democratic or representative of the wishes of 84 million Egyptians.  Nevertheless, what did we immediately see thereafter? The Egyptian military promised fresh elections.  We'll see if the generals follow through on their promise -- and the U.S. should pressure them hard to do so -- or if the interim government will ban the Muslim Brotherhood as a political party. Nevertheless, the point is that a "new normal" has been established: elections, democracy.  Baby steps.  

Hence, Nye rightly reminds America to think of revolutions in terms of decades, not weeks or years, and to "first do no harm."  But Nye is old-fashioned in his chauvinistic belief that the U.S. can intervene boldly in other nation's affairs and still be lucky enough to avoid blowback.  No.  The world has changed. Everything happening everywhere is known to everybody; and small voices can have huge ripple effects in unexpected places.  Like our back yard.

More importantly, we must graciously accept that the international institutions of peace, national sovereignty and democracy that America helped to build in the 20th century increasingly constrain U.S. foreign policy options as they gather power and widespread recognition. That is a good thing for everybody, the U.S. included. We shouldn't struggle against those reassuring bonds; we shouldn't strain to unbend that just arc.

What I'm getting at, finally, is a plea for a moral foreign policy based on U.S values.  Yes, really and truly.  Not just words to that effect, but deeds. That is the way.  

Many will say I'm naive.  But I say: isn't it in fact naive to think anymore, post-911, that we can make agreements with dictators and hope to maintain control, through them, over millions of angry and oppressed people?  People with access to the Internet, and weapons, and relatives, friends and sympathizers all over the world?  OK, maybe for a while.  But then what?  All that anger will burst forth eventually... and do we really want to bear the brunt of it?  

No.  We must be respected by the people of the world, and not just their leaders.  And we can do that only by leading with our values that we believe are universal (and in fact God-given) and that lead to the greater happiness of all mankind.  If we really believe that, and we're right, then America should prevail.  If we only pay lip service to our values outside U.S. borders, or think they are only for white Christians surrounded by two oceans, then... By all means, let's rely on old-fashioned realpolitik and brute force to get what we want.  But then we shouldn't be shocked or outraged when others resent us or even try to kill us in response; and no more asking ourselves, then, in a pitiful mockery of self-reflection, Why do they hate us?

The foreign policy risk behind the Arab revolutions

By Joseph S. Nye Jr.

August 31, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/17sysWe

Wisdom, not weakness

I hate to direct anybody to V.D. Hanson's stupid commentary on U.S. foreign policy, yet he represents the highest grade of right-wing garbage out there, so I might as well take him down.

It's hard to understand what he is criticizing Obama for, exactly.  For being too soft, certainly.  But on whom?  On Qaddafi?  Oops.  On Syria's Bashar Assad?  Well, they won't come out and say we should start a war with Syria, so what then?  Arm Assad's opponents?  Oops: blowback from angry students is one thing; blowback from armed militants is another.  So that leave us only with more finger-wagging in Assad's general direction.

Or is Obama being too soft on mobs of Arab street protesters?  If so, how could he "get tough" on them?  By bombing them?  By infiltrating them with our spies?  By arming police with tear gas and riot gear?  I'm sure that would calm them down; no blowback potential there, oops.  Then what should Obama do?  More finger-wagging again?

Or, take the recent brutal murder of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens in Libya.  Obama said he would track down the killers and bring them to justice, which sounds pretty tough to me.  (And this President actually tracks down killers.)  Hanson and others criticize Obama for an "absence of adequate military security" in Benghazi.  Fair enough.  But isn't that a technical, not a policy, issue?  The U.S. had no diplomatic presence in Libya for years, and so our embassy outposts there have not yet been well-developed.  Moreover, being a diplomat in a war-torn country is a dangerous job; that's what they signed up for. Just like serving in Afghanistan and Iraq is a dangerous job, to which 6,611 U.S. military fatalities there to-date somberly attest.  (V.D. Hanson can claim his share of intellectual credit for putting them there.)

Here's how Obama explained, before the UN on September 25, why he did what he did:

We intervened in Libya alongside a broad coalition and with the mandate of the United Nations Security Council, because we had the ability to stop the slaughter of innocents and because we believed that the aspirations of the people were more powerful than a tyrant. 

And as we meet here, we again declare that the regime of Bashar al-Assad must come to an end so that the suffering of the Syrian people can stop and a new dawn can begin. 

We have taken these positions because we believe that freedom and self-determination are not unique to one culture. 

These are not simply American values or Western values; they are universal values. 

American values?  That kind of talk drives blood-and-guts neocons like Hanson to tears.  Values never gave anybody a hard-on.  

This is all child's play relative to deadly-serious nuclear tensions between the U.S. and Iran, yet Hanson and the Right's criticism of Obama is pretty much the same: Obama is too soft.  OK, what should Obama do then?  Start a third preemptive war in 10 years that would suck in the entire Middle East and send the price of gas sky-high?  Don't like that, you say?  OK, what then?  Yet more finger-wagging?  Oops, it sounds like Obama just did that at the UN:  

Make no mistake:  A nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained.  It would threaten the elimination of Israel, the security of Gulf nations, and the stability of the global economy.  It risks triggering a nuclear arms race in the region, and the unraveling of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. 

The simple truth is that Hanson and his fellow disgraced neocons have no new ideas, they blew their load in Iraq, and now they long for the good ole' days when our President was a gullible gorilla who liked to grunt and beat his chest, and who would ape whatever they whispered in his ear.  The days when a few craven and dependent dictators like Qaddafi and Mubarak might pay attention.

You see, America's super-muscular military might is only effective against regimes, not against oppressed people who have nothing to lose, and already live in privation and terror. U.S. military power cannot secure their health, their dignity, or a job.  Therefore, neocons like Hanson want America to maintain friendly but autocratic foreign regimes.  Without regimes to threaten or pay off, Hanson and Co. have nothing to offer. 

The more difficult truth is that there is nothing "weak" about America's reading the writing on the wall and adjusting.  Sooner or later, Qaddafi and Mubarak were going down.  Sooner or later, Assad will too.  Yes, these Devils We Knew provided some comfort and stability to us in a region we don't understand and don't really care to.  But as these devils come under attack by their own oppressed people, it would be stupid and pointless -- and contrary to our stated values -- for us to stand alone against a tide of self-determination.  Obama should be applauded for not standing behind dictators who were about to fall, vainly propping them up a bit longer.  That was not weakness on his part, it was wisdom.

Finally, the most difficult truth for some Americans is that we cannot direct world events like pieces on a chess board, especially and increasingly not by military means.  We can't (and don't want to, I hope) stop some moron for posting an amateurish film on YouTube; just like we can't stop street protests in more than 20 countries as a result of it.  We shouldn't try.  And we shouldn't wring our hands over our "powerlessness."  Only when all people enjoy liberty will the real work of U.S. diplomacy begin: then they, not their oppressors, will decide whether they stand with the United States.  Meanwhile, we must have faith that our cherished values will prevail, and speak with confidence and consistency about them to the ignorant and the skeptical.  The alternative has been tried... and failed.

President Ethelred 

By Victor Davis Hanson

September 25, 2012 | National Review

URL: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/328332/president-ethelred-victor-davis-hanson

On Romney's big foreign aid speech

Romney: "If you teach a man to catch a fish this big..."

Mitt Romney's "big foreign aid speech" in New York yesterday took a lot of U.S. rightwing ideological claptrap and imposed it on nations, and a group of aid professionals, that he obviously doesn't understand.

Take, for example, Romney's work requirement to receive U.S. foreign aid, as if developing countries were filled with lazy welfare recipients sitting on their couches, (or their dirt floors as they case may be), waiting for the U.S. to feed them:

Work. That must be at the heart of our effort to help people build economies that can create jobs for people, young and old alike. Work builds self-esteem. It transforms minds from fantasy and fanaticism to reality and grounding. Work will not long tolerate corruption nor quietly endure the brazen theft by government of the product of hard-working men and women.

How insulting and stupid!  We're talking about nations where "Work or Starve" isn't the Tea Party's campaign slogan, it's their everyday reality. These people need Romney's lectures on the importance of hard work like they need to learn the importance of food.  Neither do they need his hollow injunctions to overthrow their corrupt leaders: easy for you to say from New York, Mitt!  

(UPDATE: A friend of mine said I was taking Romney's words out of context; he was just emphasizing job creation. Maybe so. But the context of his speech in the campaign was what mattered. Development professionals know that the U.S. Government's economic growth programs have emphasized job creation -- often with hard-number job targets -- for decades now.  But average U.S. voters may not.  Hence, Romney's speech gave the false impression that foreign assistance is broken and needs a "new Sheriff in town" to fix it. Thus my criticism of his stating the obvious as if it was something novel is entirely valid.)

In fact, Romney openly regrets the Arab Spring, when people in the Middle East and North Africa proved they would no longer "tolerate corruption nor quietly endure the brazen theft by government."  So, oppressed people of the world, you should realize that Romney's injunction to throw off your yoke of tyranny comes with an asterisk, if you're Muslim.

Next, Romney repeated the commonly-held but wrong view that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the answer to every nation's economic prayers:

We will focus our efforts on small and medium-size businesses. Microfinance has been an effective tool at promoting enterprise and prosperity, but we must expand support to small and medium-size businesses that are too large for microfinance, but too small for traditional banks.

Indeed, in the U.S. and abroad, more and better jobs are created by larger companies, not small (and especially informal) businesses.  And microfinance has a mixed record of success at best, placing many in the developing world in a cycle of dependency on usurious short-term loans to survive and operate their micro-enterprises.  Yet it is a matter of faith on the Left and Right that small business creates all the jobs and wealth.  What the developing world could really use is Big Corporations, er, Big People, investing their big money and offering locals high-paying jobs and innovative technologies. It's too bad that Romney didn't offer any bright ideas from his big business experience on how to accomplish that. (His plans would probably involve massive U.S. layoffs and offshore banks.)

Next, Romney offered us this epiphany: free enterprise is good.  And he said it in such a way to imply that U.S. foreign aid to-date has been about throwing free food and stacks cash off the back of trucks:

A temporary aid package can jolt an economy.  It can fund some projects.  It can pay some bills.  It can employ some people some of the time.  But it can’t sustain an economy—not for long.  It can’t pull the whole cart—because at some point, the money runs out.  But an assistance program that helps unleash free enterprise creates enduring prosperity. 

Gee, really?  This is a variation on the "teach a man to fish" bromide.  First, most aid projects aren't nearly big enough to "jolt" an economy, much less "sustain" it, not for any period of time!  Second, we got Mitt's memo about 40 years ago. Seriously. The foreign aid straw man he is knocking down doesn't exist. Absolutely nobody in the foreign aid world thinks the opposite of what Romney said. Third, this is so silly and condescending to people who have been working on institutional, legislative and regulatory reform in developing nations to "unleash free enterprise" and "enduring prosperity."  Romney should shut up and listen to them!

Finally, we should admit that a lot of foreign aid is just a roundabout payout to U.S. industries.  For instance, U.S. military aid to Egypt (which is 5x greater than all other forms of aid) goes into the pockets of U.S. defense contractors, while it's arguable whether Egypt needs such a well-equipped army.  And food aid is purchased from U.S. farmers, whether or not it's the best way to fight hunger. Meanwhile, as a result of U.S. lobbying, since 1986 the Bumpers Amendment has forbidden U.S. foreign assistance from helping developing nations to increase agricultural commodities that might compete with U.S. crop exports, free enterprise be damned. This is not to mention long-standing "Buy America" clauses in U.S. foreign assistance contracts that make U.S. aid much more expensive to deliver. As a result of this and more, a certain degree of ineffectiveness is built into our foreign aid architecture by Congress.

Overall, Romney's tone was just wrong, and his content was either obvious or needlessly inflammatory. It is now apparent that, similar to Dubya, Romney sees a world of friendly vs. unfriendly nations; free vs. unfree markets; and corrupt vs. non-corrupt.  And based on those categorizations, Romney wants to decide who gets foreign aid assistance.  (N.B.: Dubya already tried this.)

Yes, there is a strong connection between those things and poverty.  That's why the U.S. has supported democracy, human rights and good governance for years now. The trouble is, in unfriendly, unfree and corrupt nations, everyday people aren't allowed to write the laws and make the rules.  Thus, by withholding our development assistance, including technical assistance (i.e. teaching them to fish), which is mostly what we provide nowadays, we would punish average citizens for their leaders' avarice and myopia.  That would not only be unfair to them, it'd be counter-productive to Romney's stated aims. 

Moreover, foreign assistance is often the only direct contact the U.S. Government has with people living in corrupt, unfree, and/or oppressive countries. If we revoke it then we have only finger-wagging and threats to communicate with them, which average people overseas probably won't even hear. Foreign assistance is not just about "effectiveness" in alleviating poverty; it is soft-power diplomacy to demonstrate our commitment to our cherished values.  

To his credit, Romney did note that the U.S. contributes about 25 percent of global foreign aid, and spends twice as much on foreign assistance as any other country. But he didn't mention that America also accounts for 41 percent of the world's military spending, or about 5 times as much as our nearest rival, China.  In budget terms, 1 percent goes to foreign aid vs. 20 percent to the U.S. military.  Is a 20:1 ratio of "guns to butter" in achieving U.S. foreign policy aims indeed out of whack, and in which direction?  Romney has gone on record to increase U.S. military spending; and it looks like foreign aid is under threat.  So clearly, Romney thinks that ratio should be even more disbalanced.    

Romney has made the choice pretty stark.  Now it's up to informed Americans to decide.

Rush and GOP: Living in the 19th century

This is a perfect illustration why conservatives cannot be trusted to run U.S. foreign policy, because they have no comprehension of or tolerance for ambiguity.  If anything is slightly ambiguous, they must push it to absurd polar extremes:

RUSH: Wednesday night on Telemundo, Noticiero  Telemundo. The host is Jose Diaz-Balart. He's interviewing Obama, and Jose says, "Would you consider the current Egyptian regime an ally of the United States?"

OBAMA:  I don't think that we would consider them an ally, but we don't consider them an enemy. They are a new government that is trying to find its way. They were democratically elected. I think that, uh, we are gonna have to see how they respond to this incident. Uh, how they respond to, for example, maintaining the peace treaty with Israel. So far, at least, what we've seen is in some cases they've said the right things and taken the right steps. In others, how they've responded to various events may not be aligned with our interests.

RUSH:  All right.  That's psychobabble, and everybody says so. 

See, U.S. foreign aid should only go to allies like Israel who don't need it in the first place and will do what we want anyway.  Never mind that we gave $ billions in military aid to Egypt's dicator Mubarak for 30 years because he kept the peace with Israel while he brutalized Egyptians, and they all knew it.  Now that Egyptian popular opinion matters, we should cut off all foreign aid to "punish" them, cutting off a major source of U.S. influence, according to Rush.  Now we should resort to remote threats and tantrums. Makes perfect backwards sense, doesn't it?

Whereas President Obama realizes that Egypt -- more precisely, its people -- are on the fence with regard to U.S. power, and he doesn't want to cut them off.  But Rush and conservatives do.  And that would accomplish... what?  ... in the most populous Arab country on Earth?  What in the world would official disengagement and diplomatic tantrums from Washington do to influence the people of Egypt, who rightly recognize that the U.S. enabled their oppressor for 30 years, and now must decide if the U.S. has really turned over a new leaf?  F--k 'em, that's Rush's advice.  That's all well and good... if you think we live in a bubble.  But 9/11 showed that we don't.  

The United States will live or die on its adherence to its cherished values and thus its moral authority to lead the Free World.  If we renounce those, if we renounce the idea of America in the pursuit of American interests, then we must rely on naked power to achieve our selfish aims.  Yet we don't have the stomach to follow through on all that that entails -- we are not 19th century Britain (thank God).  And the world is too transparent and interconnected to submit to neo-colonial tyranny by the U.S. or anybody.  We need a new game plan.  Rush and conservatives are living in the last century.  They are clinging to a dead past and bereft of ideas.

New York Times Scrambles to Spin the President's Idiotic Statement on Egypt

September 14, 2012 | The Rush Limbaugh Show

URL: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/09/14/new_york_times_scrambles_to_spin_the_president_s_idiotic_statement_on_egypt