Core takeaway
Since the end of the Cold War, Washington has persuaded itself that expanding US power in Eurasia is akin to an act of altruism.
It has clung to this belief even as it violated the democratic principles and values it was professing to promote by engineering Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership despite the Ukrainian public’s opposition;
by pretending Georgia had not initiated war in 2008; and by abetting the mass upheaval that led to violence and culminated in the overthrow of Ukraine’s appallingly corrupt but democratically elected government in 2014.
Convincing themselves that any who objected were anti-democratic and therefore illegitimate and driven solely by base motives, Washington policymakers and their pursued policies and used a language of will and power that cast the world as an arena of competition—some countries as prizes to be won, others as pivots to control, and still others as regimes to be countered.
This strategic and moral confusion in foreign policy bred a combination of overconfidence and breathtaking ineptness that has secured not primacy but disaster for America and its allies and partners.
Washington’s Eurasian morass has been decades in the making. Extricating America will be a long-term and perilous challenge.
Almost alone among major Western leaders, Donald Trump has had the fortitude to characterize the Ukraine war as the calamity it is.
May the Alaska summit mark the beginning of a return to an American foreign policy anchored in its earlier tradition of clear-eyed assessments of national interest and the prudent use of power
1.https://www.compactmag.com/article/how-decades-of-folly-led-to-war-in-ukraine/
2. Michael A. Reynolds is associate professor of Near Eastern studies and co-director of the Program in History and the Practice of Diplomacy at Princeton University.
