Russian Barbarism, American Incompetence, and Ukrainian Suffering

Nothing will excuse the senseless and barbaric war Russia is waging in Ukraine. The war, however, did not take place in a vacuum. To pierce the context of the war is to explain it, not to justify it. Yes, there is, indeed, a distinction with a fundamental difference.

I remember being in Washington, D.C. during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Whether one was a conservative or liberal, we all suffered from the lofty hubris of the logical fallacy that the future was the present only more so. This was a classical error in the study of comparative government that Zbigniew Brzezinski roundly criticized regarding American scholars’ typical view of the Soviet Union.