The result is reminiscent of what happened to the Iraqi Kurds in 1991. After Saddam Hussein’s forces were routed easily in the Gulf War, then-President George H.W. Bush tried to topple him on the cheap by encouraging a military coup in several radio broadcasts. Kurdish forces (along with many other factions) took this as a promise of American aid and launched a rebellion that nearly took out Hussein’s government. But Bush didn’t want to risk getting bogged down in an occupation and so stood aside while government forces regrouped and massacred the rebels, causing hundreds of thousands of people to flee the country.
The problem wasn’t that Bush was wary of occupying Iraq — after all, the world saw what happened when his imbecile son tried it a little over a decade later. The problem was his lying to vulnerable people (and cynically invoking a lot of pro-democracy rhetoric) as part of a foreign policy gambit. It wasn’t Americans who were shot by the tens of thousands when the strategy blew up.
The same is true today. It is plainly evident that the U.S. and Western Europe aren’t willing to put their own soldiers on the line to defend Ukraine. For these countries, the conflict there is a minor issue compared to the rise of China, the ongoing pandemic, climate change, and much else. Yet instead of facing that fact squarely and honestly, Western powers — and especially the U.S. — continually refuse to cut their losses, stop needling Putin, and seek some kind of detente. Ukraine will suffer the consequences.
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