Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Friday that NATO should reconsider its relationship with Russia in light of its incursion into Ukraine, which should bury the idea that the end of the Cold War brought permanent peace to Europe.
"Russia's actions in Ukraine shatter that myth and usher in bracing new realities," Hagel said in a speech that captured the Obama administration's deepening concern that decades of effort to draw Russia closer to the West may be failing.
Yes, more than 22 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union (and 69 years after World War II, which brought our military to Europe), we find that we must still defend our gains of those Cold and hot wars. World War II at least gave us the wisdom to understand that we were foolish to think of World War I as the "war to end all wars." I guess Ukraine has provided a lesson that the Cold War was not the cold war to end all wars.
Pity the Obama administration didn't have the same sense of duty to protect our war gains in Iraq by keeping a stabilizing military presence in Iraq after 2011. But President Obama opposed this war despite a lawful declaration of war in 2002 and battlefield victories over Saddam in 2002 and against the various insurgents and terrorists by 2008. So here we are.
We kept troops in Japan, Germany, and Italy, and other places in Europe after World War II; kept troops in South Korea after the Korean War; and even kept troops in Kuwait after the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Iraq was the exception to the rule of no
Iraq may yet turn out okay, but without us in place, the odds are clearly lower.
Heck, I'm worried the administration doesn't even think it has a duty to protect the gains of the "good" war in Afghanistan after this year.
