The rather fragile and often broken peace of the postwar era rests on the notion that the large and powerful countries will act together to guarantee the borders of the smaller and weaker countries. When Mussolini decided that wasn’t his concern in 1935, the League of Nations basically ceased to exist as a useful entity. This is a fairly similar situation. There is really no justification for the presence of Russian military forces in Ukraine, but to be realistic, the western allies of Ukraine should probably have made it clear that Crimea could stay under Russian control, that part of the border demarcation was accidentally made into a post-USSR crisis when it began to matter where the border was (in Soviet times it hardly mattered as the republics had only limited sovereignty especially in military matters).
As to claims on various other sections of Ukraine, these appear to be overstated and Russia is clearly forcing people to submit to their rule whatever they think of the situation.
This crisis can only end if Putin is replaced by somebody willing to terminate the operation, or if he changes his mind and does so. I doubt that it will end with a total collapse of Ukraine or its government given how many powerful countries support Ukraine. What we think about it of course has no bearing on the outcome at all.
The relevance of the United Nations has always been rather limited and this is making it even more so. We are basically in a similar situation to the 1935 collapse of the world order that encouraged Hitler to start annexing territory, while Mussolini went on to further misadventures. Also Japan had violated the League charter as early as 1932 in northern China. We all know how that buildup to world war ended, but it seems like we may be on that same path, especially if China decides that the rules don’t apply to them either.
The rules only work if there is adequate restraining force or a culture of compliance. There was neither in the 1930s and there is not really much restraining force now, beyond what China (or other bad actors) may fear from the U.S. and its allies. Russia clearly does not fear NATO enough to be restrained although they say they fear its influence (even though at one point in time they wanted to join NATO).
This is of course largely our own fault, first of all for trusting this world order to work (why would it?) and then putting idiots in charge when there were sensible people available. When I say “our fault” I mean of course the majority of people in our foolish western countries, not in most cases those who frequent FR.
The situation is getting so extremely dysfunctional that I have to wonder if some kind of benign military dictatorship under appropriate supervision might not be the only way we are going to maintain any semblance of freedom or prosperity, there isn’t much point in having free elections if there is a guaranteed result of having morons running our countries with predictable chaos the result of it.
Thank you for that detailed perspective.
I wonder if NATO isn’t less benign than you briefly describe, however. It seems very much, to me, to be a bad actor in this matter.
I do not really understand NATO’s current function. It now includes what used to be East Germany, that it defended other NATO countries against, in a former life. Now, Germany supposedly defends other NATO countries using old GDR hardware that probably needs Soviet hardware to operate. NATO defense has smoothly transitioned to Russia, and apparently not China, even though Trump had easily demonstrated Europe and Russia’s interdependence as well as the international belligerence of China.
My thinking is that Mrs. Clinton used her stay in Foggy Bottom to bring NATO into the Clinton Crime Syndicate, or at least subvert it to criminal ends. The UN seems to take a back seat to the US and NATO in these matters.