"Reagan Didn’t Win the Cold War - How a Myth About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Leads Republicans Astray on China" - Max Boot (Foreign Affairs)

 "Reagan Didn’t Win the Cold War - How a Myth About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Leads Republicans Astray on China"

Max Boot

Foreign Affairs, september 2924

 

...To be sure, there is a superficial allure to the thesis that Reagan brought down the Soviet Union and won the Cold War, because Reagan sometimes spoke of doing just that.

... As the journalist Fareed Zakaria has noted, the Soviet economy accounted for roughly 7.5 percent of global GDP at its peak; China today makes up about 20 percent of global GDP. There are no policies that the United States can plausibly implement that will “defeat” China—it is hard to know what “defeating China” even means. It is easy, however, to imagine that unrelentingly hard-line policies from both the United States and China could raise the risk of a nuclear war.

 

 

Reagan Didn’t Win the Cold War

How a Myth About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Leads Republicans Astray on China

By Max Boot

September 6, 2024

 

U.S. President Ronald Reagan addressing a news conference in Washington, D.C., October, 1983

Mal Langsdon / Reuters

 

 

When Republicans strategize about how to deal with China today, many of them point to President Ronald Reagan’s confrontational approach toward the Soviet Union as a model to emulate. H. R. McMaster, who served as national security adviser under President Donald Trump, argued: “Reagan had a clear strategy for victory in the global contest with the Soviet Union. Reagan’s approach—applying intensive economic and military pressure to a superpower adversary—became foundational to American strategic thinking. It hastened the end of Soviet power and promoted a peaceful conclusion to the multi-decade Cold War.” A trio of conservative foreign policy experts—Randy Schriver, Dan Blumenthal, and Josh Young—made the case that the next president “should draw upon the example of former President Ronald Reagan in taking hold of China policy,” citing “the intent to win the Cold War against the Soviet Union” that “permeated” Reagan-era national security documents. And in Foreign Affairs, Trump’s former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger and the former Republican representative Mike Gallagher cited Reagan to argue that “the United States shouldn’t manage the competition with China; it should win it.”

I would have been more sympathetic to these prescriptions before I spent a decade researching Reagan’s life and legacy—uncovering a historical record that is sharply at odds with the legends that have come to surround the 40th president. One of the biggest such myths is that Reagan had a plan to bring down the “evil empire” and that it was his pressure that led to U.S. victory in the Cold War. In reality, the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union were primarily the work of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—two consequences of his radically reformist policies (the former intended, the latter unintended). Reagan deserves tremendous credit for understanding that Gorbachev was a different kind of communist leader, someone he could do business with and thereby negotiate a peaceful end to a 40-year conflict. But Reagan did not bring about Gorbachev’s reforms, much less force the collapse of the Soviet Union. To imagine otherwise is to create dangerous and unrealistic expectations for what U.S. policy toward China can achieve today.

WHAT REAGAN REALLY DID

To be sure, there is a superficial allure to the thesis that Reagan brought down the Soviet Union and won the Cold War, because Reagan sometimes spoke of doing just that. Richard Allen, Reagan’s first national security adviser, recounted to me a conversation that he had with the former governor in 1977 as he was preparing for his 1980 presidential campaign. “Do you mind if I tell you my theory of the Cold War?” Reagan said. “My theory is that we win, they lose. What do you think about that?”

Once in office, Reagan raised defense spending—he undertook the largest peacetime military buildup in U.S. history—and launched the Strategic Defense Initiative to create a “space shield” against nuclear missiles. He also provided arms to anticommunist insurgents in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua, along with secret, nonlethal assistance to the Solidarity movement in Poland. Reagan often talked tough about the Soviet Union and forthrightly called out its egregious human rights abuses. In 1982, he prophesied that “the march of freedom and democracy” would “leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history.” In a 1983 speech, he labeled the Soviet Union “the focus of evil in the modern world.”

The most compelling evidence to suggest that Reagan had a strategy to defeat the Soviet Union—cited by advocates of a get-tough approach to China today—is a pair of now declassified national security decision directives issued in 1982 and 1983 by Reagan’s national security adviser, William Clark. NSDD 32 called on the United States to “discourage Soviet adventurism” by “forcing the USSR to bear the brunt of its economic shortcomings, and to encourage long-term liberalizing and nationalist tendencies within the Soviet Union and allied countries.” NSDD 75 further elaborated on the need “to promote, within the narrow limits available to us, the process of change in the Soviet Union toward a more pluralistic political and economic system in which the power of the privileged ruling elite is gradually reduced.”

It is easy to draw a direct connection between the policies enunciated in NSDDs 32 and 75 and the epochal events that followed just a few years later and culminated in the end of the Cold War. Indeed, Clark’s admiring biographers, Paul Kengor and Patricia Clark Doerner, called the policies “the directives that won the Cold War.”

THE CONFLICT WITHIN

Reality, however, is a lot messier than this simplistic story line. “It’s tempting to go back and say, ‘You know, we had this great strategy and we had all these things figured out,’ but I don’t think that’s accurate,” Reagan’s secretary of state George Shultz told me. “What is accurate was that there was a general ‘peace through strength’ attitude.”

Indeed, accounts that focus only on Reagan’s get-tough approach to the Soviet Union during his first term miss a big part of the picture. Reagan’s approach toward the Soviet Union was neither consistently tough nor consistently conciliatory. Instead, his foreign policy was an often baffling combination of hawkish and dovish approaches based on his own conflicting instincts and the clashing advice he received from hard-line aides such as Clark, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and CIA Director William Casey and more pragmatic advisers such as Shultz and national security advisers Robert McFarlane, Frank Carlucci, and Colin Powell.

In dealing with the Soviets, Reagan was constantly torn between two opposing images. On the one hand, there was the human suffering behind the Iron Curtain: after an emotional Oval Office meeting on May 28, 1981, with Yosef Mendelevich, a recently released political prisoner, and Avital Sharansky, the wife of the imprisoned Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, Reagan wrote in his diary: “D—n those inhuman monsters. [Sharansky] is said to be down to 100 lbs. & very ill. I promised I’d do everything I could to obtain his release & I will.” On the other hand, there was the specter of nuclear destruction if the U.S.-Soviet confrontation spun out of control. This danger was brought home to Reagan by a nuclear war game, code-named Ivy League, on March 1, 1982. While Reagan watched from the White House Situation Room, the entire map of the United States turned red to simulate the impact of Soviet nuclear strikes. “He looked on in stunned disbelief,” the National Security Council staffer Tom Reed noted. “In less than an hour President Reagan had seen the United States of America disappear. . . . It was a sobering experience.” Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union was thus far less consistent than most of his admirers would admit. Although his meetings with Soviet dissidents pushed him toward confrontation, his knowledge of what a nuclear war would entail tempered him toward cooperation.

Reagan did not bring about Gorbachev’s reforms, much less force the collapse of the Soviet Union.

While many Reagan fans have suggested that NSDD 32 and 75 amounted to a declaration of economic warfare against the Soviet Union, Reagan repeatedly acted to reduce economic pressure on Moscow. In early 1981, he lifted the grain embargo that President Jimmy Carter had imposed the previous year in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. When a Soviet-backed regime declared martial law in Poland in December 1981, Reagan imposed tough sanctions on the construction of a Siberian gas pipeline to Western Europe before lifting them the following November in response to opposition from European allies. Hawks were frustrated by the president’s willingness to renounce one of the United States’ most powerful economic instruments without getting any concessions in return. Writing in The New York Times in May 1982, the editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, aired these frustrations under the headline “The Neo-Conservative Anguish Over Reagan’s Foreign Policy.” Podhoretz complained that Reagan’s reaction to the imposition of martial law in Poland was even weaker than Carter’s reaction to the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan: “One remembers easily enough that Carter instituted a grain embargo and a boycott of the Moscow Olympics, but one is hard-pressed even to remember what the Reagan sanctions were.”

Conservatives would have been even more horrified if they had known that Reagan was secretly reaching out to the Kremlin at the time. In April 1981, Reagan sent a sentimental handwritten note to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev professing his desire for “meaningful and constructive dialogue which will assist us in fulfilling our joint obligation to find lasting peace,” and in March 1983, two days after calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” the president privately told Shultz to maintain lines of dialogue with the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. Indeed, Reagan hoped to meet with a Soviet leader from the start of his presidency and lamented during his first term that Soviet leaders “keep dying on me.”

Many admirers now give Reagan credit for a calculated strategy that combined pressure and conciliation, but this approach bore little fruit in his first term, instead baffling Soviet leaders: “In his mind such incompatibilities could coexist in perfect harmony, but Moscow regarded such behavior at that time as a sign of deliberate duplicity and hostility,” Dobrynin wrote in his 1995 memoir.

In 1983, a series of escalating crises—including the Soviet shootdown of a Korean civilian airliner, a false Soviet alert of a U.S. missile launch, and a NATO war game (code-named Able Archer) that some Soviet officials saw as a cover for a preemptive U.S. attack—raised the fears of nuclear war to their highest levels since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Realizing that the risk of Armageddon was very real, Reagan consciously dialed back his hawkishness. In January 1984, he delivered a conciliatory speech in which he spoke of how much the typical Soviet citizens “Ivan and Anya” had in common with the typical Americans “Jim and Sally” and promised to work with the Kremlin to “strengthen peace” and “reduce the level of arms.”

The problem was that Reagan had no partner for peace at the time: during his first term, the Soviet Union was successively led by the elderly hard-liners Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko. Only when Chernenko died in March 1985 did Reagan finally find a Soviet leader he could work with in Gorbachev, a true “black swan” who rose to the top of a totalitarian system only to dismantle it.

THE UNEXPECTED COLLAPSE

Those who argue that Reagan brought down the “evil empire” usually focus on Gorbachev’s ascension as the turning point, crediting the U.S. president and his defense buildup with the selection of a reformer as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. The problem with this theory is that no one in early 1985—not even Gorbachev himself—knew how radical a reformer he would turn out to be. If his colleagues on the Politburo had known, they likely would not have selected him. They had no desire for the Soviet empire, or their own power and privileges, to end.

Gorbachev did not want to reform the Soviet system in order to compete more effectively with the Reagan defense buildup. In fact, it was the opposite. He genuinely worried about the dangers of nuclear war, and he was appalled by how much money the Soviet Union was spending on its military-industrial complex: an estimated 20 percent of GDP and 40 percent of the state budget.

This was not a reflection of a Reagan-induced crisis that threatened the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union but rather a product of Gorbachev’s own humane instincts. As the historian Chris Miller has argued, “When Gorbachev became general secretary in 1985, the Soviet economy was wasteful and poorly managed, but it was not in crisis.” The Soviet regime, having survived Stalinist terror, famine, and industrialization, as well as World War II and de-Stalinization, could have survived the stagnation of the mid-1980s as other, poorer communist regimes such as China, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam did.

There was nothing inevitable about the Soviet collapse, and it was not the product of Reagan’s efforts to spend more on the military and to curb Soviet expansionism abroad. It was the unanticipated and unintended consequence of the increasingly radical reforms implemented by Gorbachev, namely glasnost and perestroika, over the objections of more conservative comrades who finally tried to overthrow him in 1991. The Soviet Union broke up not because it was economically bankrupt but because Gorbachev recognized that it was morally bankrupt and he refused to hold it together by force. If any other member of the Politburo had taken power in 1985, the Soviet Union might still exist and the Berlin Wall might still stand, just as the demilitarized zone still divides North Korea from South Korea. Although he did not induce Gorbachev’s reforms, Reagan deserves credit for working with the Soviet leader at a time when most conservatives warned that the president was being hoodwinked by a wily communist.

Reagan and Gorbachev hardly saw eye to eye on everything. They clashed over human rights in the Soviet Union and Reagan’s beloved Strategic Defense Initiative. But despite temporary setbacks, the two leaders signed the first arms control accord to abolish an entire class of nuclear weapons, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, in Washington in 1987, and in 1988 the Reagans traveled to Moscow. During the visit, as the two leaders strolled through Red Square, Sam Donaldson of ABC News asked Reagan, “Do you still think you’re in an evil empire, Mr. President?” “No,” Reagan replied. “I was talking about another time and another era.”

PRESSURE DOESN’T MAKE PEACE

There is little evidence that pressure on the Soviet Union in Reagan’s first term made the Soviets more willing to negotiate, but there is a good deal of evidence that his pivot toward cooperation with Gorbachev in his second term allowed the new Soviet leader to transform his country and end the Cold War. Yet many conservatives conflate Reagan’s second-term success with his first-term failures, applying the wrong policy lessons to relations with communist China today.

Ramping up confrontation with Beijing regardless of the consequences risks a repeat of the war scares that brought the world to the brink of catastrophe in 1983, and such a strategy has even less of a chance of success today. Even if it was not on the verge of bankruptcy, the Soviet Union’s economy was weak in the 1980s, thanks to communist central planning and a fall in world oil prices. China, on the other hand, has successfully combined free-market economics and political repression to become the world’s second largest economy. As the journalist Fareed Zakaria has noted, the Soviet economy accounted for roughly 7.5 percent of global GDP at its peak; China today makes up about 20 percent of global GDP. There are no policies that the United States can plausibly implement that will “defeat” China—it is hard to know what “defeating China” even means. It is easy, however, to imagine that unrelentingly hard-line policies from both the United States and China could raise the risk of a nuclear war.

The United States should continue to contain and deter Chinese aggression, limit the export of sensitive technology, and support human rights in China while still engaging in dialogue with Chinese leaders to lessen the risk of war. This was the prudent approach to the Soviet Union that U.S. presidents of both parties adopted during the Cold War. But Washingtonshould not imagine that it can transform China. Only the Chinese people can do that. Today’s confrontation with China can only end if Chinese leader Xi Jinping is succeeded by a true reformer in the Gorbachev mold. Unless that long-shot scenario comes to pass, pursuing a one-sided caricature of Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union is likely to make the world a more dangerous place.

 

• MAX BOOT is Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Reagan: His Life and Legend.

I traveled across Ukraine with a U.N. refugee agency - Max Boot (Washington Post)

Opinion 

 

I traveled across Ukraine with a U.N. refugee agency. Here’s what I saw.

By Max Boot

Columnist|

The Washington Post, February 27, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/27/united-nations-ukraine-refugees/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_popns&utm_campaign=wp_opinions_pm

Public opinion surveys suggest that, while nearly 60 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the United Nations, they are less supportive than the citizens of many other countries. Forty percent of Americans have an unfavorable impression of the global body compared with 25 percent of Britons and Germans.

Some criticism is definitely warranted. For example, the Biden administration has suspended funding for the United Nations’ Palestinian-aid group, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), after some of its employees were alleged to have participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. The U.N. Human Rights Council is a sick joke: Its members include notorious human-rights abusers such as Russia, Venezuela and China. And U.N. peacekeeping troops have become notorious for abusing the very people they were supposed to protect.

But the United Nations also does a lot of important work for which it receives scant credit in the United States. I recently spent a week traveling across Moldova and Ukraine with a delegation of American experts assembled by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, as the U.N. refugee agency is known, and I came away greatly impressed by UNHCR’s efforts to alleviate the refugee crisis created by the Russian invasion. Its work — which is helping Ukraine and its neighbors to weather the onslaught — deserves continuing U.S. support.

The scale of the refugee crisis is mind-boggling: Two years after the Russian invasion, nearly 6.5 million people have fled Ukraine and another 3.7 million are internally displaced. That’s roughly a quarter of Ukraine’s prewar population. And, in front-line communities, even many of those who remain in their homes are struggling to survive. In all, some 14.6 million Ukrainians require humanitarian assistance. Those needs are far beyond the capabilities of the Ukrainian government or those of its neighbors to cope with on their own; Kyiv can only fund half its own state budget and requires foreign aid for the rest.

Filling the vacuum have been myriad governmental and private relief agencies, including organizations funded by the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development. The United Nations is often in the lead. In 2023, UNHCR provided 2.63 million people in Ukraine with assistance of various kinds. That includes repairing damaged houses, sending winter blankets and generators to front-line communities, helping displaced Ukrainians restore legal documents lost in the war, and offering psychological and social services to people traumatized by Vladimir Putin’s incessant bombing.

UNHCR sometimes delivers relief supplies; we saw a warehouse full of food, winter clothes, hygiene kits and kitchen sets in Odessa. But the agency prefers, wherever possible, to provide cash assistance via an ATM card utilizing Ukraine’s existing banks. Those grants went to nearly 900,000 Ukrainians last year. Though the average stipend is only about $120 a month, that pittance helps displaced Ukrainians get whatever they need the most, whether it’s housing, health care, transportation, food or clothing. It also boosts the local economy rather than creating a parallel “aid economy.”

Our group visited a Kyiv apartment building two days after it was hit by a Russian missile to see how quickly and effectively UNHCR and its local and international partners can swing into action. Four people had been killed, 39 injured and hundreds forced out of their homes. By the time we arrived, laborers were already repairing the damage while, in a nearby school gymnasium, UNHCR and other aid agencies had set up shop to help the affected families. The gym was emptying out because most of the people had already received what they needed, whether food or medicine or a place to sleep. Such rapid response operations occur all the time across Ukraine, and they are helping that country to survive the Russian onslaught.

UNHCR also has been an indispensable lifeline in European countries struggling to cope with a massive refugee influx. We visited Ukraine’s neighbor Moldova (population 2.5 million), which has been inundated by more than 1 million Ukrainians since the start of the war in 2022. Yet there are no tent cities for Ukrainian refugees in Moldova or anywhere else in Europe; all the newcomers either move on or get absorbed by the local population. That’s one of the hidden success stories of the past two years. In part, that speaks to the generosity of European nations in dealing with the continent’s biggest refugee crisis since 1945. But it is also a reflection of the international aid effort spearheaded by UNHCR.

UNHCR is far from perfect; it is subject to some of the same problems as other U.N. agencies. Its Uganda operation was rocked by a corruption scandal in 2018, and in Ukraine it was initially criticized by government officials for being slow to respond to the Russian invasion.

But I was impressed by the UNHCR employees I met in Ukraine, a combination of local and foreign hires who appear intensely committed to the mission and work long hours under grueling and often dangerous conditions. The UNHCR country director, Karolina Lindholm Billing, is a no-nonsense Swede who has been in Ukraine since 2021. She manages 370 staff in 10 different locations, employing a combination of firmness and compassion.

Lindholm Billing had to evacuate her husband and three teenage children from Kyiv when the Russians invaded and sees them only on occasional home visits to Stockholm. “If I didn’t believe that the work my colleagues and I do, often seven days a week and in risky situations, was meaningful to the people we serve, then I would never sacrifice these years with my teenagers,” she told me. “Because we are on the ground where the brutal war hits people every day, we see the positive impact that humanitarian support has on people’s lives.”

I saw it, too, as we visited the refugee-assistance sites that UNHCR operates for grateful Ukrainians who are eager not only for material aid but a sign that the world cares about their plight.

UNHCR spent nearly $1 billion in 2023 responding to the Ukrainian refugee and displacement crisis. The U.S. government was the single biggest donor, giving $200 million, but European nations gave more in aggregate, while also incurring substantial costs in handling millions of refugees in their own countries. This year, UNHCR is asking for a similar contribution from the United States to continue its lifesaving work.

But that money may not be forthcoming. It is part of the $95 billion foreign aid bill — which includes $60 billion for Ukraine — that passed the Senate but is stalled in the House by Republican isolationists. Even some House members who support military aid for Ukraine are talking about removing humanitarian aid and budgetary support for Ukraine.

That would be foolish and heartless. Humanitarian and budgetary aid allows Ukraine to keep functioning in the face of continuing Russian aggression, and makes it possible for refugees to return to their own country — as roughly 2 million Ukrainians have already done. Without that international support, Ukraine could become a failed state no longer able to defend itself and millions more refugees could flee the country, destabilizing its neighbors.

Congress needs to provide both military and budgetary aid to Ukraine as that country battles not only for its own survival but also the security of the entire West. And it needs to keep supporting UNHCR as part of the U.S. response to refugee crises not only in Ukraine but also as far afield as Lebanon, Sudan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. The United Nations makes its share of mistakes, but UNHCR is an unheralded success story.

Opinion by Max Boot

Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, he is the author of the forthcoming “Reagan: His Life and Legend.  

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The 4 factors that explain Ukraine’s extraordinary military success - Max Boot (WP)

Nos primeiros dias da invasão putinesca da Ucrânia, os amigos do tirano de Moscou no Brasil (em outros lugares também) estavam certos de uma derrota rápida das forças ucranianas. Até o próximo (provável) presidente culpava o Zelensky e a OTAN pela guerra de agressão da Rússia contra o vizinho menor, no que foi uma postura das mais sórdidas que ele poderia ter em termos de diplomacia brasileira. Agora, fica apelando para que o Brasil e a UE liderem uma iniciativa de pacificação, querendo ganhar o Prêmio Nobel da Paz que não obteve com o seu malogrado projeto de "solução" do problema do programa nuclear iraniano. 

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Opinion

The 4 factors that explain Ukraine’s extraordinary military success

By Max Boot

Columnist

The Washington Post, September 12, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Last week, I wrote that Ukrainian forces had the initiative and Vladimir Putin was losing his “war of choice.” Little did I know how true that was. When I wrote that column, attention was focused on Ukraine’s offensive in the south toward Kherson. That attack is making only incremental gains, but in the past week, Ukraine has launched a surprise offensive in Kharkiv province that has achieved lightning progress in the northeast.

The internet is full of images of jubilant Ukrainian civilians being freed from the yoke of Russian occupation. In all, Ukrainian forces claim to have liberated more than 1,000 square miles of territory (more than the land area of Los Angeles and New York combined), and the offensive is not over yet. Especially significant has been the liberation of key railway and logistics nodes such as the Ukrainian city of Izyum that were used to support Russian operations in the eastern Donbas region.

This is the biggest Ukrainian victory since the successful defense of Kyiv in the conflict’s early days. Putin’s plans for a three-day war have turned into a nearly seven-month slog. How is it that Ukraine been so successful at besting its larger neighbor? I see four factors at work.

First, Western aid has been vital. President Biden’s decision in June to supply Ukraine with High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) was a turning point. The long-range rockets allowed the Ukrainians to target Russian ammunition depots and command posts. The more recent U.S. decision to send High-speed Anti-Radiation Missiles(HARM) allowed the Ukrainians to hit Russian air defense radars, giving Ukrainian drones and manned aircraft greater freedom to support a ground offensive. Meanwhile, antiaircraft guns such as Germany’s Gepard allowed Ukrainian forces to keep Russia aircraft at bay. Washington has also shared critical intelligence with the Ukrainians.

But remember: Afghan forces also received tons of Western military equipment, and it did not avert their collapse last summer. That’s in large part because they were fighting for an unpopular and corrupt regime.

A key difference in Ukraine — and the second factor explaining its extraordinary success — is the unity of the Ukrainian people behind Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. His decision to stay in Kyiv in the war’s early days, at considerable risk to his life, secured his place in the pantheon of great wartime leaders. But it’s more than Zelensky: Ukrainians are fighting to defend their democracy and their right to self-determination.

Putin, the Butcher of Bucha, has tried to break Ukraine’s will to fight with barbaric attacks on civilians, but, just as with Hitler’s bombing of London, his tactics have backfired by uniting his victims against him. If Ukrainians need any motive to keep fighting, it is supplied by the grisly atrocities that Russian forces commit wherever they go.

The third factor that explains Ukraine’s success is the ingenuity, skill and fighting spirit of its armed forces. They have been retooled since 2014 into a force that, like their Western counterparts, empowers lower-level commanders to make independent decisions in contrast to the centralization of authority in the Russian ranks. What the Ukrainians have done — transforming their military to incorporate vast quantities of unfamiliar foreign weapons while engaged in heavy combat operations — is akin to rebuilding an airplane while in flight. Their tactical skill has been on repeated display this past week. By advertising their Kherson offensive, they induced the Russians to move troops from the east to the south, thereby opening up the east for a surprise attack.

The fourth and final factor that explains the war’s unexpected course is the corruption and stupidity of the Putin regime. Russian commanders have squandered their material advantages through incompetent leadership aggravated by terrible intelligence. In their original attack on Kyiv, the Russians displayed an inability to conduct fast-moving offensive operations. The Ukrainians are now showing them how it’s done.

The only thing the Russians have been good at is massing artillery to pulverize everything in their path, but the HIMARS neutralized the Russian artillery advantage by interrupting the supply of shells. That brutally exposed all of the invaders’ deficiencies. Once again, last week the Russians were caught with their pants down: They did not anticipate the Kharkiv offensive. The Russians will be hard put to recover because their forces have been too small and too overstretched from the start, and they have suffered heavy losses over the past six-plus months.

Of course, we should not swing from one extreme to another. It was once widely assumed that the war would result in a rapid Russian victory and, when that didn’t happen, that it would devolve into a stalemate. But as I wrote on June 29, “while the war in the east appears deadlocked, a military stalemate can break with shocking rapidity.” That has now happened, and it is a joy to watch the Ukrainians advancing.

But we should not assume that Ukraine will now simply roll unopposed to victory. Russian forces could collapse, but Ukrainian forces could also become overstretched or Putin could finally order a total mobilization — or even use tactical nuclear weapons. War, for good and ill, is an inherently unpredictable business.

Opinion by Max Boot

Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.” 

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A degradação da Política Externa dos EUA por Trump - Max Boot (WP)

Trump’s corrupted foreign policy: Coddle the dictator, abuse the ally

Max Boot

The Washington Post, November 14, 2019

The Trump administration’s corruption and degradation of U.S. foreign policy were on shameful display on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue on Wednesday.

In the White House, President Trump was fawning over Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a vicious anti-American dictator who has ethnically cleansed the Kurds in northern Syria, locked up his domestic critics and established close ties with Russia. “You’re doing a fantastic job for the people of Turkey,” Trump gushed. Of course he did: By Trump’s lights, this is how a leader should behave.

Trump even praised Erdogan for having “a great relationship with the Kurds,” which will come as news to them. The United States reportedly has drone imagery showing atrocities committed against Kurds by pro-Turkish militias in Syria; I’d hate to see how Erdogan treats someone he has a lousy relationship with. Once again Trump put his extraordinary gift for Orwellian doublespeak to use on behalf of an odious autocrat.

In the Longworth House Office Building, meanwhile, the House Intelligence Committee was hearing damning evidence of how Trump had mistreated a democratic ally threatened by another one of his favorite dictators—Vladimir Putin. The facts are incontrovertible: This summer Trump blocked military aid that Ukraine desperately needs to force its government to announce a sham investigation of Joe Biden. Ukraine eventually got its military aid, as Republicans repeatedly pointed out, but this only occurred after the whistleblower came forward. And while Trump did meet Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September, the democratically elected president of Ukraine still has not gotten the kind of White House welcome that the Turkish dictator has twice received.

In recounting this sordid story for a television audience, diplomats George Kent and William B. Taylor Jr. were utterly credible and totally devastating witnesses. They pointed out what an important ally Ukraine is and what a heavy price it paid in the lives of its soldiers when the military aid was withheld.

Republicans were left sputtering about crackpot conspiracy theories that blame Ukraine, not Russia, for 2016 election interference. Even if that’s true (and it’s not, as Kent and Taylor noted), how would that justify Trump soliciting a bribe? The Republicans talked so much nonsense because they could not challenge the damning evidence about Trump’s corruption of U.S. foreign policy.

At one point, committee counsel Daniel Goldman asked Taylor: “Have you ever seen another example of foreign aid conditioned on the personal or political interests of the president of the United States?” “No, Mr. Goldman,” the veteran diplomat testified. “I’ve not.”

But while Trump’s disreputable and dishonorable actions in Ukraine were unprecedented when compared with other presidents, they are utterly routine for this one. Trump recognizes no separation between public and private: He thinks “his” officials are there to serve him, not the U.S. government. He demands personal loyalty even at the cost of violating the law, and when he does not get it, he fires appointees such as James B. Comey as FBI director and Jeff Sessions as attorney general.

Knowing what we now know about how Trump operates, I cannot help but be suspicious of his motives in kissing up to Erdogan. According to NBC News, former national security adviser John Bolton recently said that “he believes there is a personal or business relationship dictating Trump’s position on Turkey because none of his advisers are aligned with him on the issue.”

Trump himself admitted that he has a “little conflict of interest” with Turkey because of the Trump Towers in Istanbul. A New York Times article spells out those conflicts by exposing the cozy links between Trump’s son-in-law and shadow secretary of state, Jared Kushner; Erdogan’s son-in-law and finance minister, Berat Albayrak; and Mehmet Ali Yalcindag, the son-in-law of Trump’s Turkish business partner, Aydin Dogan, who built the Trump Towers Istanbul and still pays Trump for the use of his name.

As a result of their “backdoor diplomacy,” the Times notes, “the Trump administration has balked at aggressively punishing a state-owned Turkish bank for evading American sanctions against Iran” and “also deferred legally mandated sanctions against Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for installing Russian missile defense systems.”

Eric Edelman, a former ambassador to Turkey and undersecretary of defense under President George W. Bush, told the Times that “Trump is replacing formal relations among nations in several cases with family-to-family relationship, or crony-to-crony relationships.”

Whether in Ukraine or Turkey or elsewhere, Trump invariably seeks to cut deals with the most corrupt cronies he can find. Zelensky’s misfortune is that he is trying to fight corruption while Trump is promoting it. Hence Trump’s outrageous attempt at blackmail. Unless Trump is removed from office by either impeachment or election, he will continue to corrupt U.S. foreign policy on a hitherto unimaginable scale.

Asli Aydintasbas: Erdogan’s close ties with Trump might be good for him — but they hurt Turkey

The Post’s View: Trump’s Syria decision reflects his stunning ignorance of the situation

David Ignatius: As Trump abandons Syrian Kurds, a top commander pleads for U.S. support

Jennifer Rubin: The corruption of U.S. foreign policy