Primary responsibility for the war in Ukraine belongs, of course, to Russia and Vladimir Putin, who invaded a neighbor without a shred of justification — a neighbor that posed no real-world threat to Russia’s borders or its people. That said, it is entirely fair to look at the mistakes by other actors that led to this pass. On this much, there should be common agreement: Strategic ambiguity failed to deter Russian aggression. That should compel some hard thinking about our Taiwan policy.
There are two ways to try to deter hostile regimes from attacking their neighbors. One is to draw clear red lines: Go past this point, and you will face particular consequences. Of course, as we saw with Barack Obama’s laughable Syria policy, drawing clear red lines is ineffective if you don’t enforce them. Indeed, this was a major backdrop to the Iraq War: Saddam Hussein was regularly violating the terms of the cease-fire that ended the Gulf War, and the George W. Bush administration had to decide whether to enforce those terms or admit that we were abandoning them.
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