What is with people who want to justify any outrage by saying something we did provoked the outrage? Sure, these people won't defend the outrage, but the outrage is really understandable and our fault, really.
The force of moral equivalence is strong in this one:
In December 1999, Putin became acting president, and the following March, he was elected to the office. Over the course of the following 14 years, he nurtured in the Russian public a sense of nostalgia for the Soviet Union and especially for the fear it inspired in the rest of the world. In 2008, Russia invaded the former Soviet republic of Georgia and effectively annexed part of its territory. And now it has done the same with Ukraine. This time Putin mentioned Kosovo. Indeed, in his speech to parliament on Tuesday, he made it very clear that by annexing Crimea he had avenged Russia for what had happened with Kosovo.
We had bombed Serbia in the spring of 1999 into submitting to a US-led occupation of Kosovo to end Serbia's war on the Kosovars there. So naturally, Russia invaded Georgia and then Crimea to incorporate territory into Russia?
To equate Kosovo (let alone Georgia) with Crimea is to ignore that we did not annex Kosovo. We have to ignore that Serbia was abusing and hunting Kosovo's people when we intervened. And we have to forget that Serbia's strongman already had built quite the body count in the war in Bosnia earlier in that decade which indicated more death and destruction would follow in Kosovo if we did nothing. And we led an alliance of many nations to stop Serbia, indicating that we'd made a case that Serbia's Milosevic had to be stopped.
Yet Russia's unilateral invasion and annexation of Crimea took place without any actual abuse of ethnic Russians in Crimea.
And scarily enough for the future, Russia's anger over Serbia was based on pan-Slavic solidarity that said Russia was the protector of all Slavs--beyond even their current claims to be the protectors of all ethnic Russians. Russia was willing to go to bat over a bloody thug ruler in the 1990s just because he was a fellow Slav.
But let's accept the premise of the article for just one moment. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that our war against Serbia under Milosevic in 1999 quite naturally led Putin to invade and annex Crimea in 2014.
That's a pretty damning statement about our ability to work with Putin and trust anything he says.
Consider that he burned with fury for close to fifteen years over that insult to Russia's self-proclaimed role as the protector of all Slavs.
Consider that he apparently bided his time to strike a blow in revenge despite a President George W. Bush attempt to improve relations with Russia by seeing into Putin's soul and seeing a man we could work with.
Putin bided his time despite a high-profile "reset" in the first term of the Obama administration that sought to restore our cooperation with Putin's Russia.
Putin bided his time despite assurances from President Obama that he'd have more flexibility to make agreements to Russia's benefit in his second term?
What, pray tell, could have stopped Putin given our efforts of outreach?
And what does it say about future attempts to work with Putin? Are we really to believe Putin has no more territorial ambitions?
Remember, most Ukrainians may not be ethnic Russians, but they are all Slavs. And there are other Slavs, too.
We don't need to make Putin the focus of our foreign policy. China and al Qaeda are our biggest and immediate problems, respectively. Don't dignify weak Russia with a new Cold War.
But do work to organize the power we have in NATO to defend Europe (and abandon efforts to have an independent power projection capablity) without delusions that if only we act a certain way, we can get Russia under Putin to behave.
UPDATE: Even from the right, the Kosovo War can be blamed. Kosovo was not the reason. Kosovo was an excuse. And if Kosovo wasn't cited as the excuse, something else would have been. Or Putin would have made something up completely.
