The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

Steven
Cohen on CNN
this weekend made a point that has not
been covered clearly about Ukraine’s proposed deal with the EU: (brackets
and parentheses by the Wrongologist)

Cohen
is professor emeritus at New York University and Princeton University. His
books include “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to
the New Cold War.”

So,
the West’s plan was to bring NATO through Ukraine right onto the Russian border.
Unsurprisingly, the Russians are not prepared to accept that. Specifically, they’re
not prepared to accept NATO forces in Ukraine, or the possibility that subsequently,
NATO could gain a base near that of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet based in Crimea.

The
grandstanding politicians (Sen. Lindsey Graham) and the pundits who say we need
to be more muscular in our response to Russia in Ukraine are morons.

Sen.
McCain (R-AZ) said this weekend that all Putin sees around the world is America’s
weakness and withdrawal from conflict and that emboldened him to move against
Ukraine. It was actually our “muscular” approach to snag Ukraine for NATO that emboldened
Mr. Putin (after Russia’s competing deal to the EU deal) with Putin’s puppet, Yanukovych, died when Yanukovych
fled Ukraine.

Putin’s move is no
threat to us, and we have no responsibility to come up with a counter-move in
Ukraine. Putin
wins this round, he out-thought the US and gets Crimea for his efforts.

Let’s
remember that Russia is no longer the USSR. It is not a threat to Europe, and
it is certainly not a threat to the US.  It is a corrupt, resource-rich
state with a big army and nukes. It controls a lot of
territory, but the idea that it would win a full-on war with America is moronic.

We
also should remember that Ukraine is poor, and mostly corrupt, run by wealthy
oligarchs who have skimmed off the top for years. Subsidized diesel fuel is a
huge part of Ukraine’s economic problems. Ukrainians pay about half the price for
diesel that people do in Europe. In fact, a liter of diesel in Ukraine is the
cheapest in the world. At the same time, Ukraine uses a lot of it, behind only
to Germany and Russia. One of the IMF’s and the EU’s early requirements for
loans was that diesel prices be raised. Next winter might have been very harsh
for the average person in the Ukraine if their government had agreed to that
IMF requirement.

Finally,
Ukraine has an industrial base, but their factories are Soviet era, and supply
nothing we want. They have agriculture, but they produce primarily for the
Russians. Our subsidized agricultural production would make buying from Ukraine
uncompetitive, so we are not an economic alternative for them.

Ignoring
any humanitarian issues, there is little reason for the US to get involved just
because Russia is involved. This kind of cold warrior, knee-jerk reaction has
caused us more financial problems since the 1950’s than any other US foreign
policy response, except for our Al-Qaeda global response for the past 12 years.

We
were out-strategized by Mr. Putin. Is Mr. Obama completely bereft of advisers who know
something about Russia? It should have
been a Rumsfeldian “known-known” that Mr. Putin would react to any
move that would possibly put NATO in his shorts.

Today, the “known unknown” question is how Ukraine will be
partitioned. The Western part of the country will reach towards Western Europe.
Crimea will default to Russia. The Eastern parts of Ukraine, where its industry
is located, could go either way.

In the all of our bouts of bluster with Russia over the past 50 years, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the scariest. Everything since then has been either theater
or a prelude to a proxy war the US wants, and gets.

Ukraine isn’t one of them.