Last Call For Russian Into Disaster

Roger Cohen, one of the many liberal voices that were 100% wrong about Iraq, is currently employed by the NY Times and is still 100% wrong, this time about Ukraine.

It’s time to get real over Putin. He has not poured tanks and multiple-launch rocket systems over the Ukrainian border because he is about to settle for anything less than a weak Ukraine, sapped by low-level conflict in the Donetsk region, a country with its very own pro-Russian enclave à la Abkhazia or Transnistria, firmly within the Russian sphere of influence: the symbol of his definitive strategic turn away from closer cooperation with the West toward the confrontation that shores him up as oil prices and the currency plunge. He will not let Ukraine go. 

There is a language Moscow understands: antitank missiles, battlefield radars, reconnaissance drones. Bolster the Ukrainian Army with them and other arms. Change Putin’s cost-benefit analysis. There are risks but no policy is risk-free. Recall that Ukraine gave up more than 1,800 nuclear warheads in exchange for that bogus commitment from Russia back in 1994 to respect its sovereignty and borders. Surely it has thereby earned the right to something more than night-vision goggles. The West’s current Ukraine diplomacy is long on illusion and short on realism. Two plus two equals four, in war and peace.

The same idiots who dragged us into a war in Iraq that we're technically still fighting 13 years later want us to start the same playbook again.  When that fails to work again, I'm sure Cohen will be among the first to call for sending in NATO and US troops.

And in 2028, we'll still be in Ukraine.  And Cohen will still be writing columns.