Ukraine and Talking Out Your Ass on (Foreign) Policy

I was completely wrong about whether Russia would invade. Ukraine. I though it just wasn't going to happen. I was also wrong to even have an opinion on it. What did I know? About that, that is?

   Answer: nothing.

   Most people know very little about the situation in Ukraine--so far as I can tell, anyway.

   My own understanding of it is laughably thin. Mersheimer makes an interestimg case that we basically provoked the invasion by flirting with Ukraine's entry into NATO. And that Russia's actions were prudentially rational. Could be.

   I supported arming Ukraine initially. I didn't see how we couldn't. Some Biden supporters have argued that this is an adept foreign policy for which Biden deserves credit. Could be. I didn't and don't think so because I didn't see any plausible alternative. But new hyper-isolationist Trump might disagree. The point, I thought, wasn't so much to win as to raise the cost of invasion so that Russia is less likely to try it again. But it also seemed possible that Ukraine might win.

   Eventually--but it took awhile, and a slap upside the head by Glenn Greenwald--I came to think that the situation was being misrepresented, and that Ukraine had taken back pathetically little territory. And that was when they were strongest. 

   Now I think that I should have kept my mouth shut about all of that, and, instead, tried to learn something about WTF was going on.

   So that's what I'm trying to do now.

   Forced to advocate policy/action, I suppose I'd taper off support, encouraging Ukraine to construct its own system of trenches and tank traps. At least one smart friend thinks "we should be willing to fight to the last Ukrainian," brutal though that policy would be. I swerved in that direction for awhile.

   Now it seems to me that the situation is again being misrepresented, in that we're mainly getting the Brave Ukrainian Freedom Fighters story. But I've read that actually Ukraine is basically impressing soldiers, even pulling people off the street. Throwing old men and even women into the meat grinder against their will. 

   If this alternate account of the war is reasonably accurate, I don't think we can continue to support it. Just War Theory holds that fighting must have a reasonable chance of success. But as the Ukraine situation looks more and more like a futile slaughter (on both sides), I'd think we'd need to end support.

   But that's all conditional on a certain representation of the facts on the ground...and none of it is particularly well-thought-out. It's all kind of just bullshitting about the situation.