Dear Mr. Bolton…
John Bolton, writing in the Washington Examiner earlier this week.
With all due respect, Mr. Bolton, what was incoherent was our policy regarding Ukraine from the beginning of the war until President Trump began his second term. In any armed conflict, the first and most basic question is – what does victory look like? What are we fighting for and how do we plan to achieve it?
No one in the United States Government before Trump’s second inauguration was ever able to answer that question. To all appearances, no one tried.
We never provided Ukraine with the kind of assistance it would need to actually defeat Russia and recover all lost territory. In point of fact, we understood from the outset that Ukraine could never, on its own, drive Russian troops from all occupied areas. To do so would require the introduction into combat of American and European forces – ground troops – boots on the ground in sizeable numbers and, therefore, obviously significant American and European casualties.
No one would support that. No administration could make such a decision and survive politically. No one would take the risk of such a conflict, an American-Russian war, spirally out of control and leading to nuclear conflagration.
So, instead, we opted to provide what support we could below that threshold. In practice, what this meant was at best a stalemate as both Ukraine and Russia were bled white in an endless conflict harkening back to the trench warfare on the Western Front. We had no vision for how this ended other than some vague notion that Putin might tire of the war and simply go home.
There was never any real chance of such a result. Russia began this war with the intent of occupying Kyiv and installing a puppet government in about 72 hours. It failed miserably. It is now reduced to taking 50-year-old tanks out of mothballs, hiring North Korean mercenaries, and relying on Iran for drones. The Russian Army has been exposed as a mere shadow of the once fearsome Red Army.
That is bad enough. For Putin to openly acknowledge defeat and slink back to Moscow would be the final nail in his coffin and end any pretense Russia has of remaining a great power. Putin will fight to the last man before he voluntarily agrees to that.
We have, in other words, for years now, fueled a conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary without any realistic notion of how we were going to bring it to a close.
It bears worth noting as well that while no one condones Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, we all know that the United States and NATO bear some responsibility for the Russia-Ukraine war. We ignored almost endless warnings from Moscow about the danger it perceived from the eastward expansion of NATO and loose talk about the possibility that Ukraine might join that alliance. Any Russian leader would have considered the possibility of American troops being based in Ukraine on the Russian border as unacceptable.
This war is not going to end with Putin admitting defeat and going home. It is not going to end with all occupied Ukrainian territory being returned to Kiev. Most significantly, however, it is also not going to end with a Russian puppet government in Kiev or any movement toward the restoration of the old USSR as Putin fantasized. It is going to end with a negotiated settlement, a recognition of the freedom and territorial integrity of Ukraine, and some concessions by Ukraine of territory on the border with Russia, a great deal of which has been under effective Russian occupation for many years now.
It will not be a perfect resolution. It will not mean the end of Putin. It will not be a total victory. There will be no unconditional surrender.
It will be a rational, coherent end to the war. It will take us several steps further away from the brink of nuclear war. It will allow us to go back to focusing on the real threat, which is not from a near-bankrupt Russia but from Communist China, which even now is solidifying its hold on the South China Sea, growing a Navy that will soon be capable of challenging our fleet in the Pacific and looting our labs and universities of every technological secret we have.
Dear Mr. Bolton, this is what coherence looks like: cold, hard, pragmatic, and calculated to put America First and keep Americans safe in their beds at night.
I am much more concerned about 600,000 potential Chinese spies infiltrating our universities than the Russia-Ukraine war.
A great summary. By returning attention to the China threat, and to the extent that we can distance Russia from China by facilitating the sort of 'compromise' that you're describing, Mr. Faddis, which aligns with what President Trump is trying to do, we are not foreclosing working with Putin later.
We have another threat to face as well, that has the same creeping quality of the steady Chinese purloining of our intellectual property and military secrets... the threat of Islam's penetration of schools, news and government under the constant prodding of Qatar. This sabotages our culture by pushing a sharia-compliant agenda. This is an all-of-America attack by Islamists on the soul of America. The preview of the destruction and takeover by Muslims is now on display in the UK, France, Germany, Netherlands and Italy. The spear has been prodding us for a while and pretending Islam is solely about religion weakens and distracts us mightily.