Richard Hanania says there is neither a moral nor a practical case for USA to help Ukraine:
You already know Ukraine doesn’t matter to the US, it’s also important to know there’s no moral case for supporting Ukraine either. A country that arrests the opposition and bans media in an entire language is no “democracy.”
Original Twitter post here:
I disagree. I think there is both a practical and a moral case for helping Ukraine.
The practical case for helping Ukraine
In talking about why Scotland should join the EU, I laid out the advantages of larger units:
A larger unit has a larger internal market, which helps its economy: it can have larger production runs of goods and can manufacture a wider range of goods itself.
A larger unit typically has more resources: money, people, raw materials.
A larger unit has more presence on the world stage, since other countries have to care about its opinion. For example, if the USA boycotted Chinese goods, China would care very much. But if Andorra boycotted Chinese goods, China would hardly notice.
A larger unit is typically able to get better terms in trade negotiations, partly because it can use the implied threat of not buying the other party's goods.
A larger unit has big advantages in a war: in protracted conflicts between great powers, the one with the most resources usually wins. This is true of cold wars as well as hot wars.
A larger unit has more resources for big capital-intensive projects such as satellite navigation, chip fabs, AI research, etc.
Because of all these advantages a larger unit isn't going to get pushed around so much by other powers.
The West is such a larger unit. The larger it is, the more likely it is to win the 2nd cold war against the Moscow-Beijing Axis which wishes to overturn the America-led world order.
Ukraine wants to be part of the West, it wants to join the EU and NATO. It should be allowed to do so. If that ruffles Putin’s feathers, tough, because there is nothing the West can do that doesn’t ruffle his feathers except capitulating to him, which is clearly not in the West’s interest.
The West is bigger, and therefore more powerful, with Ukraine as part of our alliance. And the bigger an alliance is, the harder it will be for Russia or China to push it around.
(Exactly the same arguments apply to Taiwan, another small country threatened by a big neighbour. Ideally I’d like to see a military/political/trade alliance covering all the EU and NATO countries, Ukraine, Taiwan, and other countries that want to join.)
The moral case for helping Ukraine
It is true that Ukraine doesn’t have a perfect human rights record. But also irrelevant, because no country, either now or in the past, has ever had a perfect human rights record. So Ukraine isn’t a perfect country, because no country is.
However, Ukrainians want to be ruled by themselves, and not be invaded and conquered by Putin. Indeed, countries in general don’t want to be conquered by foreign armies! And they have a moral right not to be invaded, to be allowed to live in peace.
(I do think that Ukraine has a better human rights record than Russia or China, but even if it didn’t, then so long as its people prefer their own government over being ruled by foreigners, they have a perfect right to that preference.)
Summary
We are at the start of the 2nd Cold War against China and Russia.
It is not obvious to me that the West will win this one. China has more people than the EU and USA put together, so it they get their per capita GDP up to the average level of EU+USA, then they will have a bigger economy than us. If this happens, we are in deep shit.
I see no reason why they oughtn’t be able to get their per capita GDP up to the West’s level, because the laws of physics work exactly the same for them as they do for us. Therefore China (with its allies including Russia) might well win.
So the West, if it wants to win, must do everything in its power to increase its strength. In long-term geopolitical conflicts the bigger alliance (in terms of people, land, wealth, resources, etc) usually wins, therefore it makes sense for the West to build up the biggest alliance it can. This should obviously include nations whose people want to be aligned to the West, such as Ukraine and Taiwan.
Excellent article! The creation of the Western bloc/blue empire has, frankly, been one of the US's biggest achievements.