New World Order

Pat Buchanan: 

To repeat: If Russia attacks its neighbors Finland, Sweden, Ukraine, Moldova or Georgia, we stay out of the war. But if Russia attacks Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, Romania or Bulgaria, we go in, even at the risk of nuclear war.

Does this seem logical? Does this make sense? Why are we committed to do for Bulgaria--risk war with Russia--what most all agree would be insane in the case of Ukraine?...

If the Finns show an interest in joining NATO, would NATO defend Finland against Russian military action while its application for membership in NATO was being considered? Would all 30 members of NATO welcome a new member, with 5.5 million people and a long border with Russia, for whom all of NATO would be obliged to go to war with Russia, under the Article 5 war guarantee?

Both the next two writers doubt the widespread idea, which I certainly have, that Putin has made a terrible mistake.

Professor Sir Huw Strachan in today's Daily Telegraph.

"The Russian president regards Ukraine not as an independent sovereign state but as an integral part of the Russian empire. Ukraine’s entirely justified rejection of that assumption makes this an existential struggle for both sides. Putin is now fighting for his political survival, just as much as Zelensky and the Ukrainians are fighting for their lives.

 

"As the war lengthens it will pose fresh challenges. A long war will give sanctions more time to take effect, but don’t expect them to divide the Russian president from his people any time soon. Economic warfare rarely prevails in isolation. It failed to divide the German people from their leaders until the very end of the First World War, and it failed entirely to do so in the Second World War. Rather, common adversity can rally a nation, while deaths in combat – at least for the immediate future – are more likely to represent sunk costs than a reason to stop.
"The effects of economic warfare are also visited on those who employ it. War shattered the globalised economic system in 1914 and it was only finally put back together again after 1990. We are dismantling it once more. The longer the war in Ukraine, the more the unity of Nato and the EU will be strained. Other domestic effects will follow as refugees once again stoke migration across Europe.

I hope this, written by John Keiger in the Spectator, is not true.

"As early as 1920, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, who believed that Versailles carried insufficient safeguards against a resurgent Germany, declared: ‘This is not peace, it is a 20 year truce.’ This is the route Putin is taking in refusing to accept the post Cold War system. Whether the West engaged in misplaced triumphalism, or should have indulged Russia more effectively, is moot. What is important is that the post Cold War international system was built on neither Russian moral capitulation nor consensus among the parties to the Cold War. The result has been a ‘thirty year truce’, worsened by the West’s determination to take a peace dividend, like in the 1920s and 1930s."