US’s meddling in foreign wars has bad track record
Political unrest abounds in an Eastern Bloc nation as hundreds of thousands of protesters line the streets. The nation’s government is doing all it can to calm the protests, occasionally resorting to deadly force. Russia fully backs the standing government and its actions, while the U.S. and the rest of the West condemn their use of force against the protesters. As tensions mount, Russian funds are finding their way into the pockets of the local government, and American dollars are being sent to the rioters.
On Tuesday night in Kiev, Ukraine, 26 people were killed in exchanges between police and protesters, and that appears to be just the tip of the iceberg.
This is not the height of the Cold War, but 2014. The Soviet Union has been dead longer than most of the readers of this paper have been alive.
Why, then, are we still trying to apply the domino theory to an “enemy” that is, at best, a mere shadow of its former self? Haven’t we learned anything from our last 60 years of foreign policy?
The more we back a given faction, the more the Russians will back their opposition. It’s a lesson we first saw in Korea: The more money and troops we sent to the South, the more money and troops the Russians sent to the North. We saw it again in Vietnam, with Russian involvement in the war directly and positively correlated to that of the U.S.
Examples aren’t exclusive to Soviet era; we can’t forget Syria, where we are currently and actively supporting the rebels and the Russians are supporting the government.
Korea ended in a stalemate. Vietnam was a dragged-out war that lasted a decade and cost thousands of American lives, and while we technically “withdrew” before the end of the war, our south Vietnamese allies certainly count that as a loss. Syria isn’t over yet, but things show no sign of improving for the rebels we’re supporting in the foreseeable future.
If we learned nothing else from the last half-century, we should have learned that interfering in the revolutions of other countries is both expensive and ineffective. And while we pay the price in tax dollars that could instead be used to improve the lives of Americans, the citizens of Ukraine pay for our international political games in blood.
No, it’s not desirable for any government to use deadly force against its own citizens. However, when those citizens are gathering in less-than-peaceful protests (police officers and government officials are among the dead), one could make the argument that those actions are justified. Even if the protests were completely peaceful, the United States would still not be justified in stomping on the national sovereignty of another nation when no U.S. citizens are involved.
The longer the United States waits to withdraw its support (financial, political and, heaven forbid, military), the more difficult it will be for us to do so. If we disengage from the turmoil in Ukraine now, history will remember us not as backing down, but as never getting involved in the first place.
It’s still early, but right now is the best time to keep ourselves from getting involved from what could potentially be another Vietnam, this time on Russia’s doorstep.