This will be on History tests, eventually -- presuming there's anyone around and current events don't eventually poke a hole in history big enough to throw a Dark Ages through.A reporter at the BBC*, sounding a little thick, wondered why... if this was such a humanitarian crisis and an affront to the international order ...Uncle Sam wasn't sending troops.
The reporter first brought up the fact that Ukraine wasn't a NATO member and therefore we were not treaty-bound to defend them militarily, but they then discarded that angle, noting
...that lack of national interest hasn't stopped former presidents from expending blood and treasure on behalf of others in the past. In 1995 Bill Clinton intervened militarily in the war that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia. And in 2011 Barack Obama did the same in the Libyan civil war, both largely on humanitarian and human rights grounds.The real reason we happily intervened in those instances wasn't oil (Serbia didn't have any and we weren't getting any to speak of from Libya) but because neither Benghazi, Belgrade, nor Baghdad had the Strategic Rocket Forces in their hip pocket.
In 1990 George H W Bush justified his international coalition to expel Iraq from Kuwait as defending the rule of law against the rule of the jungle.
We might risk a nuclear knuckle-joust over an Article 5 attack on a NATO treaty partner, but sorry Volodomyr, you're mostly on your own for this one. We'll send thoughts and prayers and maybe a few crates of ATGMs, but we're pretty warred out at the moment.
*And why was the reporter at the Beeb cocking a snook about Biden not sending troops, anyway? Aren't there people closer to home to whom she could have put these questions? BoJo's not been shy about denouncing the depredations of Hitler 2: Electric Boogaloo, either, but I don't see her demanding that he ship the West Shropshire Fusiliers or whoever off to Kharkiv.
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| (Not actually current equipment for the West Shropshire Fusiliers... which is a unit I made up.) |
