Hawkish Delusions and the Ukraine Crisis

Hawkish failure to understand why the current crisis is happening makes it impossible for them to find the way out of it.

Bret Stephens looks for the causes of the Ukraine crisis everywhere except the right place:

The current Ukraine crisis is as much the child of Biden’s Afghanistan debacle as the last Ukraine crisis was the child of Obama’s Syria debacle.

Stephens’ sentence is accidentally correct in the sense that all these things are unrelated. Afghanistan withdrawal did not in any way lead to the current Ukraine crisis, and Obama’s decision not to bomb Syria in 2013 did not lead to the crisis in 2014. In fact, these things have absolutely nothing to do with Ukraine. It requires truly delusional thinking to suggest that they are linked.