'We win, they lose': America must end the danger Putin poses
Ronald Reagan in 1977 summed up his Cold War strategy as: "We win, they lose." Observing Ukrainian war refugees while in Poland last week - mostly mothers with babies, and the elderly - the thought occurred to me that we need Reagan-esque clarity and confidence in American policy now. The stakes cannot be higher for Ukraine, the West, democracy, the rules-based international order and the free world.
The Soviets intervened to preserve communist rule in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968; Yugoslavia descended into civil war in 1992. Yet Vladimir Putin's Russia is doing something unseen in Europe since Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin attacked neighbors in 1939-41: invade a country, destroy its government, and subjugate its civilians through war crimes. If Putin succeeds, the world will return to the law of the jungle, which made the first half of the 20th century a time of unprecedented bloodshed.
Putin irresponsibly discusses misusing nuclear weapons in this crisis, and his forces' attacks on Ukrainian industrial and nuclear plants attempt to create field-expedient weapons of mass destruction. None of his Kremlin predecessors was as reckless on such serious matters, except perhaps Nikita Khrushchev during the Berlin and Cuban missile crises in 1961-62, before John Kennedy stared him down.
These unsound statements and actions take place within a wider context of worsening behavior. Putin's premiership began with his security service blowing up apartment buildings full of sleeping Russian civilians, blaming the atrocities on terrorists to justify renewing the Chechen conflict. Putin invaded Georgia in 2008. He takes personal interest in murdering defectors in creatively painful ways. If the tactics of his allies and proxies in Syria and eastern Ukraine are any indication, chemical weapons use and attacks on commercial aviation are possible.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/we-win-they-lose-america-must-end-the-danger-putin-poses/ar-AAVf6lb