An excellent article on U.S. involvement in Ukraine — one that provides more background and analysis than a hundred mainstream pieces — is offered by Christopher Caldwell at the Claremont Review website. A link to “Why Are We in Ukraine?” (Summer 2022) can be found below. To sample Caldwell’s valuable and rare essay, check out the following quotes:

• “Never has an official non-belligerent [the U.S.] been more implicated in a war. Russia and its sympathizers assert that the U.S. attempt to turn Ukraine into an armed anti-Russian camp is what the war is about in the first place.”
• “[E]conomic sanctions, far from bringing about the collapse [U.S. Secretary of State] Blinken gloated over, have driven up the price of the energy Russia sells, strengthened the ruble, and threatened America’s western European allies with frostbite, shortages, and recession.”
• Note well: “India, China, and other rising countries have conspicuously declined to cut economic ties with the Russians.”
• U.S. policy in Ukraine has led to “a shotgun wedding of Russia and China, forcing the most natural-resource-rich country on the planet into the arms of the West’s most dangerous adversary.”
• “Rather than beg its way back into the U.S.-led global financial order, the Russians are trying to build a new one with new partners. They have a chance of pulling it off.”
• In the 1990s, when America enjoyed “sole superpower” status, “the G7 made up 70% of the world economy. Today it makes up 43%. India and China are both giant export markets for Russian oil and gas.”
• “The attempt to isolate Russia from the American world system has had a striking unintended consequence—the possible founding of an alternative world system that would draw power away from the existing one.” Who doubts China will enjoy the fruits of this?
• “[M]ost Western accounts of what led to the invasion of Ukraine last February… are presented as psychopathological, not geostrategic.” Such superficial depictions of Putin as a sort of Darth Vader do nothing to help Westerners understand this war and its consequences.
• Use of our high-tech and practically autonomous weaponry has created a situation where, practically speaking, the United States and not Ukraine “has become the battlefield adversary of Russia.”

Despite its many military and moral failures of the last 20 years, the U.S. foreign policy establishment seems incapable of learning that our sole- superpower status is dwindling and that unintended consequences lurk behind every pompous decision it makes. Rather than bleeding Russia, which is the American aim that’s acknowledged by the man on the street but not the men in front of the cameras, what if this war is hastening the end of U.S. dominance, including as ruler of the global economy?

Read all of Caldwell here: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/why-are-we-in-ukraine/