(Dobbs) The Best Way To Help Ukraine
The nation's backbone itself shows that it's worthy to join Western nations.
If you still hold out some hope that Vladimir Putin will dig deep down and come to his senses and see what damage he’s doing and moderate his rhetoric and pacify the planet and stop the lies, you could not be encouraged by his speech yesterday in Moscow.
Becoming the poster boy for the worst types of hypocrisy and the worst traits of authoritarianism, Putin abandoned his last vestige of credibility… as if he had much to work with in the first place.
In the Kremlin ceremony recognizing Russia’s fraudulent elections in four Ukrainian provinces— some Ukrainians had to vote at gunpoint— and formalizing its illegal absorption of those provinces into the Russian motherland, Putin and four lackeys appointed to lead them chanted “Russia, Russia, Russia,” as if they were at a football match.
Before that, in menacing remarks about “the ruling circles of the so-called West,” which he unambiguously called “the enemy,” Putin took duplicity over the top: “Not only do Western elites deny national sovereignty and international law,” he said, but he accused Western leaders of "totalitarianism, despotism, and apartheid.”
The cliché here is, talk about the pot calling the kettle black! You want to say “the gall,” but we’re well past that point. Putin isn’t just impudent. He is putting a superpower conflict on the table.
He’s not only claiming that he and his powerful nation are the victims here, but that if he has to use nuclear weapons to have his way— Russia has the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal, even bigger than ours— he will. But again, although he’s the one who several times now has raised the prospect of a nuclear war, last week calling it “no bluff,” yesterday he framed the danger as a nuclear threat from the West: “Those who try to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the prevailing winds can turn in their direction.” He wasn’t just delivering a weather report.
And with today’s development, seeing Ukrainian troops outflanking Russian soldiers as they retook a key city in one of the regions Russia only yesterday declared its own, and seeing those Russian soldiers fleeing for the lives, those prevailing winds might get stronger, because increasingly, Putin will feel cornered. A former commander of NATO’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Forces, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, told CNN, “As Putin's conventional warfare is struggling in Ukraine, I expect the Russians to increasingly turn to unconventional warfare."
There is a lot of speculation about Putin and what drives him. The East-West divide, the prospect of antagonists all around him, the quest for power, the glory of the motherland. Some even speculate that mentally, Putin has simply gone off the deep end. My own theory of Putin’s motives is based on what I once heard him declare at a rally in Moscow: “We were a superpower once, we will be a superpower again.” It’s what every Russian nationalist would want. But whatever drives him, Vladimir Putin is turning a nation with a rich history of power, culture, and innovation, his nation, into an impoverished pariah. In a column yesterday titled “Outcrazy Your Opponent,” Tom Friedman wrote, “I have known a Russia that was strong, menacing, but stable— called the Soviet Union.”
Who’d have thought we’d ever yearn for that kind of adversary?
That’s why, despite the worries of Western leaders that fast-tracking Ukraine’s application this week to join NATO might provoke Putin, they should do it. First, because Putin already has proved that he needs no provocation to raise the stakes. Second, because although the conditions for joining NATO mean showing that your nation respects democracy and the rule of law, and in the past Ukraine has come up short, it’s not as if NATO’s veteran members all show allegiance to those high standards themselves. Hungary and Turkey, both increasingly autocratic, are a case in point. Third, because Sweden and Finland both were fast-tracked this summer because of the Russian threat at their borders and in Ukraine, those borders already have been breached. And fourth, because Ukraine has earned it.
Putin has said that an attack on the regions he has just annexed now is an attack on Russia itself. But turnabout is fair play. If NATO were to fast-track Ukrainian membership, then consistent with its charter, an attack on Ukraine would be an attack on NATO itself. I’m not naive about the limits of power— just look at the outcomes of American force in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan— but it’s probably fair to say that if this war were to become a battle between Russia and NATO instead of a battle between Russia and Ukraine, it would be no contest.
Whether he’s crazy or just power-hungry, Vladimir Putin knows that.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky knows it too. In his nightly address to the nation Wednesday evening, with his military forces chasing Putin’s soldiers who have invaded his country, he switched to the Russian language and warned them, “If you want to live, run.”
That is the kind of backbone NATO needs. It is the kind of backbone the world needs.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Spot on! Thank you Greg.
So well said. Thanks Greg