The thinking in Washington goes like this: for the “low cost” of Ukrainian lives and some American dollars, the West can end Putin’s strategic threat to the United States. No Americans are dying. It’s not like Iraq or Afghanistan ’01–’21. This is postmodern, something new, a clean great power war, Jackson Pollock for international relations—getting a lot of foreign policy mojo at little cost. It's almost as if we should have thought of this sooner.
Well, we did. It didn’t work out past the short run, and there’s the message. Welcome to the new 1980s-style Afghanistan, with the U.S. playing both the American and the Soviet roles at times.
At first glance it all seems so familiar. Russia invades a neighboring country who was more or less just minding its own business. Russia's goals are the same: to push out its borders in the face of what it perceives as Western encroachment on the one hand, and to attain world domination on the other. The early Russian battlefield successes break down, and the U.S. sees an opportunity to bleed the Russians at someone else's bodily expense. "We'll fight to the last Afghani" is the slogan of the day.
