I can only subscribe to the analysis of our great professor of American politics Louis Balthazar expressed in the text “It’s the fault of the Americans”, published in The duty from 1er March. He writes better everything that I have been thinking for a good week about certain comments made on this Ukrainian crisis, in particular by certain experts themselves.
Let me add a layer. Comparing the decision taken about Iraq and that taken about Ukraine is aberrant, but rather instructive. For, while that of George W. Bush led to the rejection and fatigue of war in the United States, as well as to a strong opposition which resulted in the election first of Barack Obama, then of Donald Trump, Putin’s decision is that of a dictator who makes any opposition to his regime very dangerous. In short, the political model and the legitimacy of the two great powers are absolutely not comparable.
Then, the apostles of diplomacy and negotiation have obviously been fooled by Putin’s maneuvers for three months. Drinking, among other things, the “Kool-Aid” of French President Emmanuel Macron, they believed (probably sincerely) that we could negotiate with Putin. Even after he had used the same violent methods to settle the fate of Georgia in his eyes in 2008 and then that of Crimea in 2014.
Their analyzes go so far as to blame Western, but above all American, diplomacy for the disaster that has befallen Ukraine for a week. In truth, one can wonder if, instead of criticizing the United States for having proposed Ukraine’s membership in NATO, one should not rather criticize them for having waited so long!
Finally, on NATO precisely, some analysts take pleasure in announcing its funeral (much like Macron who spoke of brain death) and, there too, blaming the defense organization for having sinned by provoking the crisis. However, this organization will never have found a mission and a unity as obvious as in the face of this crisis, to the point where it is resuscitating, after an alleged impertinence and an apparent paralysis.
To think that a new European security architecture, with Russia, would constitute a miracle recipe, is to ignore history: this recipe has already been tried and failed in the 1990s, when Putin was not yet in power or become the dictator he is today. I repeat, it is not NATO that frightens the Russian president, but democracy. The United States, like us, will have to find the means to defend it, and not just promote it.