Sometimes even thoughtful people mistake cynicism for cleverness.
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 American government never made public any actual intelligence. What they did was speculate in public about what they 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 be not merely chosen but willed.