PATRICK BUCHANAN writes that there is no important U.S. interest in Ukraine that would justify any military action or economic sanctions in response to Russia’s actions:

What is the U.S. vital interest in Crimea? Zero. From Catherine the Great to Khrushchev, the peninsula belonged to Russia. The people of Crimea are 60 percent ethnic Russians.

And should Crimea vote to secede from Ukraine, upon what moral ground would we stand to deny them the right, when we bombed Serbia for 78 days to bring about the secession of Kosovo?

Across Europe, nations have been breaking apart since the end of the Cold War. Out of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia came 24 nations. Scotland is voting on secession this year. Catalonia may be next.

Yet, today, we have the Wall Street Journal describing Russia’s sending of soldiers to occupy airfields in Ukraine as a “blitzkrieg” that “brings the threat of war to the heart of Europe,” though Crimea is east even of what we used to call Eastern Europe.

The Journal wants the aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush sent to the Eastern Mediterranean and warships of the U.S. Sixth Fleet sent into the Black Sea.

But why? We have no alliance that mandates our fighting Russia over Crimea. We have no vital interest there. Why send a flotilla other than to act tough, escalate the crisis and risk a clash?

The Washington Post calls Putin’s move a “naked act of armed aggression in the center of Europe.” The Crimea is in the center of Europe? We are paying a price for our failure to teach geography.

The Post also urges an ultimatum to Putin: Get out of Crimea, or we impose sanctions that could “sink the Russian financial system.”

While we and the EU could cripple Russia’s economy and bring down her banks, is this wise? What if Moscow responds by cutting off credits to Ukraine, calling in Kiev’s debts, refusing to buy her goods and raising the price of oil and gas?

This would leave the EU and us with responsibility for a basket-case nation the size of France and four times as populous as Greece.

— Comments —

John writes:

These are bad times, but one good thing is that for years we have not had to worry about a nuclear holocaust, as we did during the Cold War. I vividly remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the fear I felt as a child as it unfolded. And though the eighties the fear lingered in popular culture, typified by the movie, The Day After.

Well now it seems that the neo-conservatives and the other fools and scoundrels who run our government are doing everything they can to provoke nuclear-armed Russia, so that we can return to those wonderful days of nuclear anxiety. What gall those Russians have, standing for their national sovereignty against the lords of globalism!

If we Americans have any courage left in us, we will stop this insanity. The consequences could be very unpleasant if we don’t.

Buck writes:

Pat writes: “We have no alliance that mandates our fighting Russia over Crimea.” That’s incorrect. Clearly, notwithstanding whether we should have one, we do have one. It’s more than just an alliance. The Budapest Memorandum was signed in 1994 by the U.S., Great Britain, Russia, and the Ukraine as a “general and complete disarmament maintenance” agreement and as an “accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons”, and all under the auspices of the United Nations Security Council. Some refer to it as a treaty, though technically it is not. It appears to be at least and addendum to a treaty. The Ukraine gave up their nukes in exchange for “respect (of) the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine; protection against the threat of use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine; protection against economic coercion. All signers affirmed that they would protect the Ukraine if threatened by nukes.

I’m certainly no expert, but if this isn’t considered an alliance, then I don’t know what one would look like. But, they’re all lawyers, aren’t they.

I love Pat. But, he rides off the rails sometimes. I get what he’s saying – leave Russians to the Russians, but he often ignores the context in which events are taking place. We’re hip deep in this. We made an agreement, stupid or not. Did we sell them a bill of goods? Are we no-warranty used car salesmen?

We need to get it together.

Henry McCulloch writes:

Sovereignty over the Crimea is not worth Americans’ blood and money, and no business of the U.S. government.  Let’s remember that the Crimea is (1) overwhelmingly Russian in population; (2) home port of the Russian Black Sea Fleet (effectively Russia’s Mediterranean Fleet); and (3) only became politically attached to the Ukraine when the Ukrainian General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Stalin’s henchman Nikita Khrushchev, transferred it by fiat from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954.

If the United States had a mature government that acted in the American national interest and the greater interest of what remains of Western civilisation, the U.S. government would be courting post-Soviet Russia as an ally, not heedlessly antagonising her because of the idiotic and outdated preoccupations of neoconservative and liberal apparatchiks in Washington and New York.  Obama is ignorant of foreign affairs, which is probably to the good as his instincts are anti-American in any event.  Deranged warmongers such as John McCain should have their passports revoked so they can’t fly off to places like Kiev, Cairo and Syria to make bad situations worse.  Actually Americans would do well to keep John Kerry safe at home, too – he whom Jim Kunstler has memorably described as “a haircut in search of a brain.”

NATO should have been disbanded in triumph after the Soviet Union imploded and the Warsaw Pact ended: its mission no longer existed.  Instead it has become the armed component of the United Nations’ — and post-Reagan U.S. administrations’ — Cultural Marxist drive to destroy every traditional nation and institution (European and Western ones, anyway) and replace them with … what?  A global multiculturalised Third World for all?  Not the future I want for our sons.  Astonishingly for those of us who were part of its forces while there was a real Cold War on, NATO is now an agent of the cultural revolution that has been sweeping the world since the 1960s, as institutionally Leftist in its way as the old Soviet Union.  Expanding NATO into lands that were part of the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union is a pointless and risky provocation of a nation that should be a strong ally against resurgent Islam and East Asia.  Russian governments react forcefully against Western incursions into Russia’s near-abroad; anyone who knows anything of Russian history should understand why.

Having sent Lawrence Summers, Jeffrey Sachs and other criminalconomists from Harvard to derail a post-Soviet economic recovery and enrich the oligarchs at ordinary Russians’ expense, I should think the United States might want to be diplomatic with Russia, not hostile.  Some Americans, at any rate, have given Russians considerable grounds to resent American meddling in the years after the USSR collapsed.

Subject to the caveat that as an American it really isn’t my business, I would rather have the Crimea and the Black Sea balance of power in the hands of Putin’s Russia than in the hands of the CIA and Soros-funded incompetents who have just been put in power in Kiev.

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