Hawks Set Ukraine Up to Fail

Somehow it is never the right time to negotiate.

Robert Kagan asks what he must think is a very clever question:

Today, it is the Ukrainians who are being urged to abandon the romantic path of hopeless resistance and pursue the heroic path of realism. But if they do, what is to stop Russia from taking the rest of Ukraine whenever it is ready?

Kagan’s comparison with Czechoslovakia and Munich is misleading and worthless as it always is. If an analyst falls back on a Munich comparison when talking about a contemporary issue, it is a safe bet that he has little of value to add to the debate. It is even more likely that he has an ideological hostility to negotiating with adversaries. Invoking Munich is typically a way of trying to divert the audience’s attention away from the weakness of the hawkish argument. Kagan’s advice on diplomacy is almost always the same: he is against it and doesn’t think it is worth doing. He is wrong about this, just as he has been about practically every important foreign policy question of the last twenty-five years.