As the lonely, but noisy, skeptic of our adventure in Ukraine, I have to pass along this excellent feature from Christopher Caldwell in the Claremont Review of Books. Each section of his review has a gut punch, but the one that hurts the most discusses why so few nations have rallied to the U.S.’s side in this conflict. “A guarantor of economic order, the United States has come to mistake itself for a promulgator of international law, able to consign any country, at any time, to the status of an international pariah,” Caldwell writes, recounting how U.S. trade secretary Gina Raimondo has invited other Asian nations into relationships that would allow them to unite with the U.S. the way that the U.S. and Europe did to rapidly weaponize the SWIFT banking system. He goes on to say:
Yes, the West “swiftly moved” against Russia, but six months in, these moves seemed surprisingly ineffective. The reason is that, no matter where you place the fulcrum and the lever, Russia, China, and India collectively are now too much for the United States to lift. Inducements can be offered to get one country to break solidarity with the other two. But cooperating would be foolish, on any terms. At the end of the day, a country that permits itself to be isolated by the United States this way is increasing the risk that it will itself be subjected to a media-and-boycott campaign of destruction like the one we are now witnessing with Russia. A few words about the condition of the Uyghurs, a few talking points on Hindu nationalism, and the U.S. can crank this whole machinery of economic destruction into operation against China or India. They know it, too. The Italian writer Marco D’Eramo reported that, after a March 18 phone call between Biden and Xi Jinping, one Chinese anchorman joked that Biden’s message had been: “Can you help me fight your friend so that I can concentrate on fighting you later?”