The matter of Ukraine escalated in a lot of people’s minds this past week. Putin amplified the threat of nuclear war after he had a nice bridge severely damaged. He has subsequently tried bombing civilians into oblivion because he can not hardly engage the Ukrainian military anymore. The response from some on the right and increasingly, on the far left, is: we’re all going to die so – to cut to the chase – let Putin have Ukraine. Gosh, if it’s that easy to cow the West, Putin should have threatened a lot more nuclear a lot sooner. Nevertheless, the way some of the arguments are breaking down vexes me. I understand international matters are complex but all I can see is a lot of intellectual cowardice and I don’t like cowards, so I think this needs a breakdown and a fair proposal.
A group of kids are on the playground, and they have a dozen toys in the sandbox. The bully of the bunch thinks he is entitled, not just to the toy he has, but also to the toys used by four of the other boys. A fight breaks out and bully boy grabs several toys. The others don’t accept that outcome, so the fight escalates. The bully, now bloodied by conflict threatens to hurt all the boys, not just the ones who’s toys he seized. This causes an argument among them all. Some now say to let him have all the toys, some say no. This is where we are now.
It’s easy to sue for peace when it will cost the victim everything and you nothing. It’s easy to sit in America or Europe and urge Ukraine to give over a significant chuck of their country in order to save your ass from any risk of conflict. When the bully boy is also a sociopath and that’s used as a pressure point to get you to cave to him, reasonable people find that revolting, and yet the ‘far’ right and the far left seem to be uniting on that point as evidenced by the reception AOC got this week from her even leftier friends.
I have an elegant solution to that problem. If, under threat of nuclear war, we – meaning the parties that are convinced that Ukraine should get on their knees and become slaves of new Imperial Russia – if ‘we’ really believed that Ukraine should give it up, then it should cost the West something to buy that peace. Europe and the United States should carve out territories equal in size to the land that would be ceded to Russia and gift it to Ukraine. Europe could gift them a chunk of France and Germany and we could throw in a couple of our own states, preferably Democrat governed btw. Does that sound outrageous? Yes? Why? You don’t like the precedent that would create for dozens of other delusional expansionist tyrants?
The alternative is to beat down the aggressor. Putin’s Russia, a hollowed-out regime with genocide crimes to now be reckoned with, believes it should still get some conciliatory toys for all the trouble they brought on themselves by invading Ukraine. Just one or two extra toys, right? Here is the reward they should get from retreating and ending the war with Ukraine: Leave Ukraine now before Russia is overrun by all of its neighbors and former satellites, before they come to take away the memory of any Russia for hundreds of years. Leave before there is a Russia no more. Leave before your navy is sunk, and your own major cities leveled. If a Ukrainian army can devastate the Russian army, why would you compel a few other Western countries off the sideline? Why would you ultimately force mutually assured destruction? It seems like Putin had little regard for sending his boys to be slaughtered in Ukraine, but would he feel the same way about his women and children being incinerated on their own soil? The point here is that retreat and defeat in Ukraine is Putin’s only and best option; certainly, if we regard Ukraine’s right to defend itself as equal to Russia’s presumed right to invade. I hear some say they regard him as saner and more intelligent than Western leaders. We really have no choice but to put that to the test.