We have noted ‘neo-conservative’ Washington Post columnist Max Boot several times previously, not particularly charitably. The neo-conservatives were rather useful to Republicans from the Reagan Administration through that of the younger George Bush, in that they supported a stronger American military. The trouble is that while conservatives wanted the US to have the world’s strongest military to defend the United States, and were proceeding from something of a Cold War mindset, the neo-cons wanted to use that military to project American power forward. President Reagan used that power judiciously, in quick, easy actions in Panama and Grenada, and the elder President Bush used it in response to the actual threat of Iraq under Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait, and the threat posed to world oil supplies. The younger President Bush used it in response to an actual threat in Afghanistan, and a perceived threat from Iraq. The actions of President Reagan and the elder President Bush went well: they had defined missions which could be, and were, accomplished quickly, and we got right back out. Under the younger President Bush? Not so much: the wholly necessary mission of destroying al Qaeda was accomplished fairly quickly, while the very much unnecessary mission of trying to build Iraq and Afghanistan into functioning, Western-style democracies took years and years and years, and, in the end were never accomplished.
But the neo-cons have learned nothing.
by Max Boot | Monday, October 24, 2022 | 1:11 PM EDT
Polls suggest that the economy and crime are among the most important issues for voters in the midterms — and that, as a result, Republicans are surging in the home stretch. I think a lot of voters are missing the point. These elections are actually a referendum on whether you favor the continuation of democracy in America — and Ukraine.
Can we please stop pretending that Ukraine was a democracy? In 2010, Viktor Yanukovych was elected President in what observers stated was a free and fair election. As President, Mt Yanukovych was more pro-Russian than oriented toward western Europe, and declined to sign a closer arrangement between the European Union and Ukraine, or accept NATO membership. He was not defeated for re-election, but overthrown by the “Euromaidan Revolution“. Some democratic forms were reinstated, but deposing President Yanukovych was most certainly not democratic at all.
Those issues are more closely linked than most people realize, because most of the same MAGA candidates who support Donald Trump’s strongman rule at home are either indifferent or hostile to the fate of democracy abroad. J.D. Vance, the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate in Ohio, exemplifies the trend: He has said the 2020 election was “stolen” and “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”
That makes it all the more disturbing that Vance and other MAGA candidates are in the lead two weeks before Election Day. Vladimir Putin must have a smug smile on his face as he reads reports of recent political developments in the “Main Enemy,” as KGB agents of his generation referred to the United States.
A Post analysis found that “a majority of Republican nominees on the ballot this November for the House, Senate and key statewide offices — 291 in all — have denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election.” Put another way, this means a majority of the most important GOP candidates reject the fundamental premise of democracy, which is to accept the outcome of an election even if your side loses. Yet in a recent New York Times-Siena College poll, 39 percent of voters (and 71 percent of Republicans) said they are open to supporting candidates who reject the results of the 2020 election. If these candidates prevail, it will mean that aspiring authoritarians could have a stranglehold on our democracy.
I must say that I find this amusing: the distinguished Mr Boot, who tells us how very much he supports democracy, also tells us that it is a horrible, horrible thing that the voters might have issues other than Donald Trump and the war in Ukraine on their minds, and that if Republican candidates win a majority in the House of Representatives, and possibly the Senate, in a free and fair election, our democracy is doomed.
The fallout could reach all the way to Ukraine, where an embattled democracy needs U.S. aid to beat back the Russian invasion. Last week, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the likely next House speaker, said: “I think people are going to be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine. They just won’t do it.”
Mr Boot, it seems, is very concerned that if Republican candidates win majorities in Congress as the result of free elections, they might just follow what they see as the will of the voters, and stop sending unlimited and unaccountable aid to Ukraine. Don’t the public have the right to believe that we shouldn’t do that?
Mr Boot, who never served in the military himself, is very much a fan of war, and he wants to see American and European aid to Ukraine to continue, to fight Russia, a nation with a strategic and tactical nuclear arsenal.
As we have previously noted, Mr Boot, who was brought to the United States as a child when his parents fled the Soviet Union, and other neoconservatives have not been real fans of individual liberty. Patterico’s tweet, “We may get to a point where the big debate becomes: why on earth didn’t we institute more coercive measures on the unvaccinated in July 2021, when we could have stopped COVID before it mutated beyond the vaccines’ capacity to immunize people against it?” wound up not aging well, as there were already breakthrough COVID infections among people who were immunized, and while the SARS-CoV-2 virus does seem to have mutated to be able to get beyond vaccinations to prevent contraction and transmission of the virus even more easily — it’s clear that, even originally, the vaccines didn’t completely prevent infection — it has also mutated to be a much less serious disease.
Mr Boot called President Trump a fascist, knowing that the definition of fascism includes ” individual interests (being) subordinated to the good of the nation,” as he called for individual interests being subordinated to the good of the nation!
Then again, why would we expect any sense, or trust the judgement, of a man who stated, “I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump.” One would think that a man who holds a baccalaureate degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Master of Arts degree in diplomatic history from Yale would know and understand that the Soviet concentration camp system flourished under Comrade Stalin; did Mr Boot believe that Donald Trump would somehow establish his own ГУЛаг, Гла́вное управле́ние лагере́й, in the United States? If he did, it certainly never happened, and the repression of speech in the United States has happened only by liberal institutions in banning conservatives, not the government under President Trump.
Sadly, it isn’t just Mr Boot; the Editorial Board of The Washington Post also weighed in, telling readers, “This is no time to go wobbly on resisting Russian aggression.” Worried sick that the voters might, gasp! vote in a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, the Editorial Board tell us:
It’s no surprise that the Kremlin would try to divert attention from its failures in Ukraine toward a new story about Kyiv’s purported plans to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb.” Transparent disinformation, Moscow’s tale might be intended to serve as a pretext for its own first strike with unconventional weaponry. More likely, it is another attempt to play on the West’s fears of nuclear war, the goal of which, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank that tracks the conflict, is “to slow or suspend Western military aid to Ukraine and possibly weaken the NATO alliance.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin guessed right that Western solidarity with Ukraine would be crucial; he has consistently guessed wrong about the willingness of Kyiv’s friends to stay the course, despite the costs of doing so. As Mr. Putin has no doubt noticed, however, there are incipient fissures in that united front, including — ominously — signs of a split within the Republican Party over U.S. aid to Ukraine, which has totaled $54 billion since the war began in February. Rank-and-file GOP voters, possibly influenced by messaging from former president Donald Trump and Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, are warming to the idea that U.S. aid is a waste of money better spent on domestic problems. A September Pew Research poll found that a significant minority of Republicans — 32 percent — say the United States is providing “too much” aid, up from 9 percent in March. Small wonder 57 GOP members of the House and 11 GOP senators voted no on a $40 billion package in May. Trump-endorsed Republican candidates for Senate in Arizona, Nevada, New Hampshire and Ohio have disparaged aid for Ukraine, as have several House candidates. Republican Joe Kent, running for Congress in a historically red district in Washington state, has tweeted: “No aid to Ukraine unless they are at the [negotiating] table.”
If indeed the Republicans take one or both chambers of Congress in the midterm elections, it will be up to their leadership to contain isolationist sentiment and work with President Biden and other Democrats on aid for Ukraine. Unfortunately, potential speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said last week that next year “people are going to be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine.” Mr. McCarthy — who voted for the May bill — modified that remark slightly later, noting that he supports “making sure that we move forward to defeat Russia.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell countered Mr. McCarthy by calling for “expedited” aid. To his credit, Mr. McConnell has been a strong supporter of a robust U.S. response to Russian aggression in Europe, based on the succinct, and apt, rationale that it is an investment in vital U.S. interests: “The future of America’s security and core strategic interests will be shaped by the outcome of this fight. Anyone concerned about the cost of supporting a Ukrainian victory should consider the much larger cost should Ukraine lose.”
Good heavens, it looks like the Editorial Board have gone full neo-con! The concept that intervention is required to support “vital US interests” could have been lifted from the writings of Bill Kristol.
To be sure, real democracies abroad are in American interests, because real democracies are (mostly) unlikely to start wars of aggression. But there is a real, qualitative difference between wars of aggression when Iraq invaded Kuwait, or the Muslim guerrilla wars in Africa, and the invasion of Ukraine by a nation with a nuclear arsenal capable of killing the majority of people on earth. I do not want Russia to succeed in its war of conquest against Ukraine, but I want the defense of Ukraine to turn into a nuclear war even less.
That’s the part these clowns just don’t get: the harder we press Russia, the harder Russia as resisted. The action by OPEC+ to cut back oil production, to push increased prices, was led in part by Russia, anxious to hurt the United States and NATO Europe for giving aid to Ukraine. The cutbacks of natural gas shipments to Europe, as winter is approaching — and remember: most of Germany and Poland, and a good part of France, are north of our longest border with Canada — are methods Russia is taking against the West that is supporting Ukraine. If, after all of that, Ukraine begins to push back Russian troops, it is hardly out of the possibility that Russia would use smaller, “tactical” nuclear weapons against Ukrainian troop concentrations. Vladimir Putin does not seem to be the most stable national leader around, and he certainly doesn’t think like a Westerner; he could easily see this as a logical step to cow the West into ceasing its aid to Ukraine, and a way to stave off defeat.
Once that nuclear threshold has been crossed, we have no idea whatsoever how far and how often it will be crossed. I do care what happens in Ukraine . . . but I care more about what happens in New York and Philadelphia and Lexington, and one thing about which I care is not increasing the chances that one of them could be incinerated in nuclear fire.
The GOP’s mixed signals are music to Mr. Putin’s ears. Also unhelpful, in its own way, was Monday’s letter from a group of 30 progressive House Democrats to Mr. Biden, urging the president to open direct cease-fire negotiations with Moscow. The Democrats, unlike Mr. Biden’s critics in the GOP, said they want to “pair” this new diplomatic push with continued aid; there is no moral equivalence between the two parties in that regard. Still, Russia is all too likely to advertise the progressives’ letter, which includes the suggestion that ending the war would help ease high gas prices, as evidence of flagging U.S. resolve. The White House politely but firmly rebuffed the idea, as it should have. This is no time to go wobbly — and that goes for lawmakers in both parties.
And now we have The Washington Post’s Editorial Board telling us that not only should the United States continue sending military aid to Ukraine, but that we shouldn’t even attempt to negotiate an end to the war.
If there is no negotiated end to the war — something which would decrease the chances of a nuclear escalation and the spread of a nuclear conflict — then the war must be fought to a conclusion, with one side winning and the other side losing. If Ukraine loses, it’s independence is gone and the Ukrainian people will suffer a lot more death and devastation; if Russia loses, the probabilities of nuclear war significantly increase. I, for one, don’t see what Major Kong called “nuclear combat, toe to toe with the Russkies,” as a wise idea.
There is, of course, the unstated part of both Mr Boot’s and the Editorial Board’s messages: with the domestic issues of inflation and the American people getting poorer, in real terms, those evil reich-wing Republicans might just gain more power, including taking control of the House of Representatives, and even the Senate, which would completely mess with the left’s domestic goals of nationalizing an abortion license, expanding homosexual and transgender ‘rights,’ putting Donald Trump in jail, and generally pushing the ‘progressive’ agenda. In the end, those things are far more important to them than Ukraine, but those have not been the electoral winners they think they should be.
But this isn’t 1939, and the Russian army hasn’t rolled over Ukraine in three weeks, the way the Nazis did in their half of Poland.[2]The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact ‘gave’ the USSR the eastern half of Poland, which the Red Army took. It’s been over a year and a half since the Russians invaded, and the war has been a costly stalemate for Russia, which holds part of Ukraine, but if the Russians are not advancing and conquering the whole country, the Ukrainians have been unable to kick the Russians out. Ukraine is being devastated, industries damaged or destroyed, and people are being killed, but the war is simply not moving much.
