1847 “Poshlost” is a wonderful Russian word, untranslatable because of its capacity to signify so many things at once: banality, crassness, cheesiness, crudeness, the whole spectrum of the trivially absurd and the absurdly trivial.
This tragedy has now morphed into a US led and financed coalition of the US vs Russia. And, borrowing from Chomsky, we are fighting it to the last Ukranian. Let's hope that it does not spin further out of control, and that The Law of Unintended Consequences does not prevail.
One writer I follow made the following analogy: telling your gun enthusiast neighbor with a violent temper and an alcohol problem that you saw his wife fooling around in public with another man.
The neighbor shoots the wife. He broke the law and suffers the appropriate consequences, but you acted irresponsibly and contributed to his violence.
Yes, American / Western hubris at the end of the Cold War was reminiscent of the winner-take-all Treaty of Versailles, when what was needed was a Marshall Plan that would have allowed Russia both dignity and the means to rebuild their economy within a democratic framework. Instead Ukraine is reduced to rubble, a lose-lose-lose for Ukraine, for Russia and the Western alliance.
Apropos to Kennan's 1997 NYT article is Mearsheimer's recent article in The New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine
This tragedy has now morphed into a US led and financed coalition of the US vs Russia. And, borrowing from Chomsky, we are fighting it to the last Ukranian. Let's hope that it does not spin further out of control, and that The Law of Unintended Consequences does not prevail.
One writer I follow made the following analogy: telling your gun enthusiast neighbor with a violent temper and an alcohol problem that you saw his wife fooling around in public with another man.
The neighbor shoots the wife. He broke the law and suffers the appropriate consequences, but you acted irresponsibly and contributed to his violence.
Yes, American / Western hubris at the end of the Cold War was reminiscent of the winner-take-all Treaty of Versailles, when what was needed was a Marshall Plan that would have allowed Russia both dignity and the means to rebuild their economy within a democratic framework. Instead Ukraine is reduced to rubble, a lose-lose-lose for Ukraine, for Russia and the Western alliance.
Yes, it really was a squandered opportunity. And now so much suffering with no end in sight. I agree, it is a "minus-sum" situation.