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| The Holodomor |
Why make things more complex than they are? In the farcical diplomatic struggle between American President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Biden will be the loser and Putin the winner. The reason is obvious: Putin has more than 200,000 troops mustered on Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia, while Biden has Antony Blinken, U.S. Secretary of State, whom he is depending upon to offer diplomatic resistance to the 200,000 troops.
We know from history that in any contest between force and
diplomacy force will win out. The United States government, which recently surrendered
Afghanistan to Taliban terrorists, is not prepared to shed a drop of American
blood in long-suffering Ukraine,
historically a pathway to Soviet domination of free Baltic States and Poland.
These stepping stones deposited the Soviet military in the post-war period in East Germany, which
remained under Soviet occupation for decades until then President John Kennedy
declared near the Brandenburg Gate that he too was a Berliner. A serious
resistance to Soviet rule began there and continued until the Berlin Wall came
tumbling down in 1989.
The reunification of East and West Berlin marked the
beginning of the long, slow dissolution of the Soviet Empire.
Nikita Khrushchev had denounced Joseph Stalin in 1953 as having fostered a “cult of personality.” He included in his denunciation a condemnation of Stalin’s brutal crimes, such as the execution, torture and imprisonment of loyal party members on trumped up charges. Sometime later, Khrushchev re-deeded Crimea to Ukraine. The Holodomor, the Stalin induced famine in Ukraine that destroyed what had been known since Roman times as “the breadbasket of Europe” and resulted in the deaths by starvation of 8-10 million people, haunted Khrushchev, who was born in Ukraine and who served as Stalin’s “butcher of Ukraine.”
In the postmodern world, Ukraine is to the Biden
administration what Czechoslovakia was in pre-World War II days to Neville Chamberlain’s
diplomatic reliant administration in Great Britain.
In 1936, after Chancellor Adolf Hitler had conjoined Germany
and Austria by sending German troops into the Rhineland, Czechoslovakia was
next on Hitler’s to-conquer list.
German Nazis in the Sudetenland were encouraged to stir up
trouble. Czechoslovakian leader Evard Benez suspected correctly that should
Hitler be given the Sudetenland as an appeasement trophy, Czech defenses would
be handed over to an aggressor state and Czechoslovakia itself would be
rendered defenseless.
A flurry of diplomatic activity was unleashed. Chamberlain
flew to Berchtesgaden, then to Godesberg a week later, then on to Munich, where
he received from Hitler a signed international agreement that the Chancellor of
Germany would make no further demands for land in Europe beyond annexing the
largely German Sudetenland. Hitler got what he wanted without firing a shot. Six
months later, in March 1939, German troops took over the rest of
Czechoslovakia.
Great Britain drew a red line at Poland. Having failed to
stop aggression in Czechoslovakia, Hitler reasoned that Britain would not go to
war over Poland. Two days after Hitler dispatched his troops to Poland in 1939,
Britain declared war on Germany. World War II had begun.
To be sure, Biden is not Chamberlain and Putin is not
Hitler. But Putin has learned from history, while Biden has not. Putin already
has sheared off a chunk of Ukraine – the Crimea – during the “lead from behind”
administration of President Barack Obama.
That piece of the puzzle provided a salt water port to landlocked Russia at a time when Russia in the post Stalinist era had lost its satellites to the West. Since then, Putin, mindful that President Ronald Reagan had arranged with Saudi Arabia to cripple Russia’s exportation of oil by lowering its price on the world market, had resolved to boost oil production and, so far as possible, make Russian oil indispensable to Europe by means of a pipeline attaching Russia to Germany.
Germany, one of the principal pillars of NATO, is now an
energy pipeline satrap of Putin, who has not forgotten the lessons of the
post-Soviet years. And policies undertaken by the Biden administration – an abject
surrender in Afghanistan, an open door policy to border jumpers, wild increases
in inflationary spending at the tail end of a pandemic, and an over-reliance of
diplomacy in the face of militant obduracy – have signaled to the world that
the United States is now prepared to resume former President Barack Obama's failed “lead from behind” foreign policy misadventures.
Connecticut’s two U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris
Murphy, have taken it upon themselves to stem the ultimate tide of history concerning
the predatory interests of Putin in Ukraine by visiting the country and
condoling with Ukrainians in Connecticut and the world.
In the meantime, White House National Security advisor Jake
Sullivan said on Sunday, according to an Associated Press story in a Hartford
paper, that the invasion "could happen as soon as tomorrow, or it could take some
weeks yet.”
Has “the White House… briefed lawmakers that a full Russian invasion
could lead to the quick capture of Kyiv and potentially result in as many as
50,000 casualties”?
Sullivan, we are told, “did not directly address” such
reports.
Perhaps Connecticut’s media should bestir itself and put
that and other questions to Blumenthal and Murphy, both apparently friendly to
Ukraine.
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