Putin Wants His Own Monroe Doctrine

Townhall.com ^ | February 8, 2022 | Pat Buchanan

[Kaslin]

When the Union was fighting to preserve itself in the Civil War, the France of Napoleon III moved troops into Mexico, overthrew the regime of Benito Juarez, set up a monarchy and put Austrian Archduke Maximilian von Habsburg on the throne as Emperor of Mexico -- one month before Gettysburg.

Preoccupied, the Union did nothing.

At war's end, in 1865, however, at the urging of Gens. Ulysses S. Grant and William Sherman, the Union sent 40,000 troops to the Mexican border.

Secretary of State William Seward dispatched Gen. John Schofield to Paris with the following instructions: "I want you to get your legs under Napoleon's mahogany and tell him he must get out of Mexico."

The U.S. troops on Mexico's border convinced Napoleon to comply, though Maximilian bravely refused to leave and was captured and put before a firing squad.

The point of the episode for today's crisis in Ukraine?

A powerful army on a nation's border can send a message and dictate terms without going in and without going to war.

Whether Russian President Vladimir Putin intends to send his 100,000 troops now on the Crimean, Donbass and Belarusian borders of Ukraine into the country to occupy more territory we do not know.

But the message being sent by the Russian army is clear: Putin wants his own Monroe Doctrine. Putin wants Ukraine outside of NATO, and permanently.

If his demands are unacceptable, Putin is saying with his troops on the border, we reserve the right to send our army into Ukraine to protect our vital national interests in not having a hostile military alliance on our doorstep.

U.S. officials have been describing a Russian invasion as "imminent," an attack that could come "any day now."

Given the Russian preparations and size of its forces, some U.S. officials said last week Kyiv could fall within hours of an attack and there could be 50,000 civilian casualties and 5 million Ukrainian refugees.

Ukrainian leaders are less alarmist, arguing that an invasion is not imminent and there is still room for a negotiated settlement.

Russian officials are contemptuous of U.S. claims that they are about to invade. Last weekend, Russia's deputy ambassador to the UN tweeted, "Madness and scaremongering continues. ... What if we would say that US could seize London in a week and cause 300k civilian deaths?"

Should Russia invade, and go beyond what President Joe Biden earlier called a "minor incursion," the event could be history-changing.

A major invasion would trigger automatic and severe sanctions on Russia, crippling European economies on both sides of the conflict and forcing Putin to take his country more fully into a Eurasian alliance with China. Yet, ultimately, it is China, not the U.S., and not NATO, that is the long-term threat to Russia.

Neither we nor Europe have any claims on Russian territory.

But China, with an economy 10 times the size of Russia's, and a population 10 times as large, has historic claims on what are now Russian lands north of the Amur and Ussuri rivers. Russians living in Siberia and the Far East are far outnumbered by scores of millions of Chinese just south of the border. These Russian lands are rich in the resources China covets. The two nations came close to war over these borderlands in the late 1960s.

To return to the analogy of the U.S. waiting for the right moment to force France out of Mexico, China and Russia both now appear stronger, more united, more assertive and more anti-U.S. than either was at the turn of the century.

Russia is now demanding to have its borderlands -- ex-Warsaw Pact nations and ex-Soviet republics -- free of NATO installations and troops.

Half a dozen ex-Warsaw Pact countries and three USSR republics -- Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia -- are members of NATO.

China, with an economy and military far larger than at the turn of the century, is also becoming more assertive about its land claims. These include claims against India in the Himalayas, against half a dozen nations on the South China Sea, including our Philippines ally, against Taiwan, and claims to the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands.

The combined strength and reach of Russia and China are growing, while the U.S., post-Afghanistan, is facing challenges to its resources that it seems increasingly strained to meet.

Russia has marshaled an army estimated at between 127,000 and 175,000 troops in a few months, just across the border from Ukraine, while the U.S. this weekend sent 3,000 troops to Rumania, Germany and Poland.

Where is the deterrent here?

Again, Putin's demands that ex-Warsaw Pact countries and Soviet republics be kept free of NATO installations, and that the enlargement of NATO end, if agreed to, would leave Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and Belarus permanently outside.

But if Moscow is going to push to remove NATO forces from its borderlands, this means an endless series of diplomatic-military clashes or a U.S. recognition of a Russian sphere of influence where NATO does not go.

In short, a Putin Monroe Doctrine.

[Travis McGee]

[Empire_of_Liberty]

I don’t exactly blame him. I would like one, too.

We have, instead, opened up South America to China. This, while they attack the world with plague.

[AndyJackson]

U.S. recognition of a Russian sphere of influence

Condi Rice taught us that there are no spheres of influence which is first belied by the fact that our warmongering neocons have declared the earth as there sphere of influence. Second, it defies laws of physics. When somewhere is located within the striking range of a huge army, navy and airforce all while home based, and you have to bear the costs of supporting a small expeditionary force half way across the globe, with extended and vulnerable and perhaps actually non-existent supply lines, you have to concede that it is the other guy's sphere of influence. Short of nuclear Armageddon, you cannot do much.

[pierrem15]

As Buchanan points out unwittingly, he simply accepts the left's narrative about the Monroe Doctrine. The US almost always acted to prevent aggressive outside powers from seizing parts of Latin America. Being distracted by the "festivities" of the Civil War, the US was unable to prevent France from intervening in Mexico.

To accept that Putin wants a Monroe Doctrine is to characterize NATO as a military alliance designed for aggression, which is laughable, both in terms of its military capability and its structure, which requires unanimity to act.

Not one of the current NATO members was coerced into joining, but voluntarily joined. France was free to leave the integrated military command and rejoin it.

[Travis McGee]

Exactly.

Gallipoli should have been a lesson.

[TheDandyMan]

Just as tiresome as the neocons is the “Russia is reasonable, US is the bad guy” drumbeat from libertarians, who seem to conveniently ignore that Russia has just as much, if not more of a history than the US of meddling, foreign adventures, and selling weapons to sketchy players. Russia has decades of brutal communist occupation of Eastern Europe under its belt too. There’s nothing even close to that that the libertarians can pin on the US.

We aren’t going to have a war with Russia over Ukraine, if it came to that; they know it, we know it, Ukraine knows it. But Buchanan says the US has no claims over Russian territory, while basically also saying Russia has the right to dictate to its neighbors, in essence, has a claim on their territory? Can’t have it both ways. Poland and the Baltic States, have every reason, resulting from decades of brutal communist occupation, to oppose Russia. If we want to sell them weapons. I’m all for it. If they want to join NATO, and NATO is agreeable, Russo can pound sand. Russia doesn’t get to decide what Estonia does in her spare time.

Here’s to a Stinger missile in your eye, Putin.

[AndyJackson]

Or the ancient Athenian Syracuse expedition. The Athenians decided that their prestige required capturing Syracuse in Sicily, which was an utter strategic distraction because their power base was their empire in the Aegean. They lost their fleet and with it their empire and consequently their city to the Spartans who because of that one act of stupidity won the Peloponnesian War.

[AndyJackson]

Uh, man, look over here. Our border, our debt, our woke incompetence, and oh uh CHAYNAH!

[glorgau]

Nice graphic, it shows NATO is roughly the same as German occupied territory in 1942-43.

[dfwgator]

is to characterize NATO as a military alliance designed for aggression,

What do you think Kosovo and bombing Serbia was?

[Travis McGee]

Perfect historical example.

A more modern Greek example happened after WW1 when the Greeks thought it was their moment to push out from Levantine Turkey to conquer all of Turkey.

The Greeks became vastly overextended, and were then defeated in detail and pushed all the way back into Greece, losing their territory in modern Turkey.

A comparison can be made to NATO’s overreach, pushing into Eastern Europe, and finally into Ukraine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Turkish_War_(1919%E2%80%931922)

The Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922)

The Greek campaign was launched primarily because the western Allies, particularly British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, had promised Greece territorial gains at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, recently defeated in World War I, as Anatolia had been part of Ancient Greece and the Byzantine Empire before the Ottomans captured the area. The armed conflict started when the Greek forces landed in Smyrna (now İzmir), on 15 May 1919. They advanced inland and took control of the western and northwestern part of Anatolia, including the cities of Manisa, Balıkesir, Aydın, Kütahya, Bursa and Eskişehir. Their advance was checked by Turkish forces at the Battle of Sakarya in 1921. The Greek front collapsed with the Turkish counter-attack in August 1922, and the war effectively ended with the recapture of Smyrna by Turkish forces and the great fire of Smyrna.

As a result, the Greek government accepted the demands of the Turkish National Movement and returned to its pre-war borders, thus leaving East Thrace and Western Anatolia to Turkey.

[Renfrew]

Putin wants a sphere of influence, but the problem is a the huge gap between Russia’s self image and the reality.

It thinks of itself as a great power. In reality its economy is now about the size of Italy or South Korea. If either of those nations claimed global importance the rest of the world would laugh, as we should at Putin.

[TheDandyMan]

There’s plenty to focus on at home and like I said, we aren’t going to actually have a war with Russia over Ukraine. But my objection to the common libertarian painting of the situation is, rather than say, we’re too busy, too stretched, too indebted to put much focus on Eastern Europe in light of our problems at home, they feel the need to justify their position by trying to prove that Russia is good and reasonable, and the US by extension is not.

There was an article posted yesterday which was linked in the comments tk an article about the US “allowing” Estonia to sell Stinger missiles to Ukraine, the implication being that this is a bad thing. It’s only a bad thing is someone has painted themselves into the corner pretending Russia is the reasonable, aggrieved party and the US/NATO is pointlessly provoking them.

[Chickensoup]

cannot blame him one bit

[Flavious_Maximus]

The land north of Amur and Ussuri rivers is part of Manchuria that Joeseph Stalin stole in 1945 from Republic of China led by Chiang Kai-shek. The land belongs to nationalist China, in other words it belongs to Taiwan.

[Empire_of_Liberty]

I would rather have a Monroe Doctrine working in South America, than the Ukraine in NATO.

[Travis McGee]

“Nice graphic, it shows NATO is roughly the same as German occupied territory in 1942-43.”

That point is not lost on the Russians.

Interesting linguistic factoid.

“Nemetz” in Russian means both Enemy and German.

[AndyJackson]

Thank you for another great example.

[dfwgator]

It also goes back to Woodrow Wilson sending US troops to Vladivostok, just after the Russian Revolution.