History? What History?

As some of us who play political ping-pong continue to struggle with what the West should do about Ukraine (setting aside what is actually happening and being done), I continue to look back at how things got to where they are.

My proximate blame for Putin's invasion of Ukraine continues to be set at the feet of the German politicians who decided it was not such a bad idea to shut down domestic carbon and nuclear energy production, despite wind and solar being nowhere near capable of replacing the lost output in a reliable fashion. "Reliable" includes the great unanswered problem with these “renewables,” i.e. storage. I.e. where you get your power when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.

Right now, and for the foreseeable future barring a breakthrough invention, that means natural gas power plants. Unlike coal plants, natural gas turbines can be spooled up and down relatively quickly, making them the logical backup source.

The problem was and remains - the natural gas that Germany needs to keep the lights on sources from Russia. By committing domestic energy suicide, Germany, Europe's largest economy, made herself dependent on Putin's exports.

Does it surprise you that Putin figured Europe might be hesitant to push back if he invaded Ukraine?

Another bit of history that comes to mind in pondering this matter rolls back a third of a century, to 1990, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and the Gulf War. Ostensibly a 42 nation alliance, the reality is that the US did the heavy lifting in Desert Shield. 70% of personnel and I'd guess an even higher percentage of materiel were American. The Gulf War was a quick and decisive victory that unmasked Iraq's military as a paper tiger.

Unfortunately, that victory was the start of a series of events that I believe have produced disastrous effect, and leave me concluding that we shouldn't have intervened. After all, Kuwait, an Islamic monarchy, wasn't and isn't exactly a paragon of Enlightenment values or Western ideals. The tension between Iraq and Iran in the aftermath of their war (1980-1988, that killed hundreds of thousands), a tension that kept them focused more on each other than on the West, was tipped by our intervention. Of course, our covert assistance to Iraq during that war was repaid by Saddam moving on Kuwait, which raises the question, "what did we get for that assistance?"

Roughly a dozen years later, the nation-builders decided Saddam had to go, and the Iraq war was launched based on, to put it kindly, really flimsy evidence. Not only did more hundreds of thousands die, but the disruption spilled westward, and precipitated the humanitarian crisis that flooded Europe with unassimilated and dismissive-of-Western-culture migrants.

As Konstantin Kisin observes in this speech, multi-ethnic societies can work. America is proof positive of that. Wave upon wave of immigrants have assimilated and embraced American values, and in the process built a great and wealthy nation.

Multicultural societies, on the other hand, cannot. Absent common values, which in the West are rooted in individual liberty and secular government, nations will shred themselves from within. Indeed, that is what's happening in Europe right now, and it traces back to the flood of migrants precipitated by collapsed nations and civil wars in the Middle East. Migrants that, unlike Bonasera the mortician who opened The Godfather with “I believe in America,” aren’t interested in the values of their new homelands.

The blog-spiration for this bit was my happening upon a clip of John Wayne playing Genghis Khan in the 1956 film, The Conqueror. It was an egregious bit of mis-casting, even more so in the context of today's progressive sensibilities that decry any casting decision that crosses identity markers. The irony, or perhaps hypocrisy, of the scolds who get twitchy if a straight actor plays a gay character, or worse, a transgendered character played by anyone not themselves transgender, lies in the blithe dismissal of actual history in favor of counterfactual rewrites such as Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States or Nikole Hannah-Jones' 1619 Project.

History didn't matter, then it did matter, then it didn't matter.

That dissonance morphed into my delving into the continued "we must be the world's policeman" mindset that persists despite all the failures, all the wasted wealth, all the death, and all the lasting harm we see with an honest look at the last few decades' history.

People are prone to conclusion shopping, and when they don't find conclusions they like are apt to resort to vague but sinister 'what ifs.' I've seen the response "you won't like a world where America is not globo-cop" more than once, but given how poor our track record is, it's not even slightly compelling. Worse, it reeks of nirvana fallacy, the neo-con's version of "if only we get the right people and enough political will, we can shape the world into a better place."

Another hand-waving response I often see is "If not us, then who?" This ignores the countless crises, some of them horrific, that we stayed out of. Rwanda, Myanmar, Haiti, and Sudan come to mind, but there are countless others. We have been selective in our interventions across our entire history, so being a bit more selective isn't some great moral failure. The nirvana answer, an international body that responds to such incidents, is how we got that baby blue blob of uselessness known as the United Nations.

As for Ukraine? We engaged, which drops some continued obligation in our laps, but only an insane person continues doing the same thing expecting different results. I don't have a good answer there, and I don't know if there is one, but I do know that simply continuing to burn hundreds of billions of American taxpayer dollars and depleting our own military reserves isn't it. I believed from the outset, and continue to believe, that Ukraine is properly Europe's mess to tidy, as I so recently blogged.

What will actually happen in Ukraine? Probably nothing that will make any of the involved parties happy. What will be the long-term aftermath? Probably nothing amicable, even after Putin shuffles off this mortal coil.

Will the West learn any new lessons? Such as the value of energy independence and the madness of forcing "green" before the tech to support it exists? Or about nation building? Or about the false dualism of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend?"

One can dream...