What is Ukraine fighting for?
Its survival as a sovereign state. Sure, there is a laundry list of other things important to the Ukrainians. They’d very much like all their land back. They’d like to join the EU, an economic window to the West. They’d like to join NATO, which would greatly increase their defensive security. But none of those things is essential, and as the record of the early peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia in spring 2022 appears to illustrate, all of them were negotiable to Ukraine at the outset of the war. One thing was a deal-breaker, and should be a deal-breaker: any settlement must preserve not just Ukraine’s survival at the end of this war but also its capacity to deter or repel future Russian invasions aimed at extinguishing it.
What is Russia fighting for?
No just cause. Of course, Vladimir Putin wants to reclaim as much of the old Soviet lands in Ukraine as he can, with particular attention to ethnically Russian enclaves and a secure route to Crimea and the Black Sea. It’s true that Ukraine’s borders and the distribution of its ethnic population are artificial products of the Soviet empire rather than organic historical developments, but it’s not as if Russia can complain that it had nothing to do with the many crimes committed against Ukraine by the Soviet Union. ...
As for the idea that Putin is justified in going to war because he fears having a NATO member on his doorstep, he already has Estonia and Latvia on his border (and Poland and Turkey not far away), and this war has pushed Finland into NATO. ... The notion that NATO presents an aggressive threat to Russian security of the sort posed by an expansionist tyrant is fanciful.
Why do Americans care?
.... we care because an international order in which states do not invade one another for territory or conquest — and, if they try, pay a price imposed by a large segment of the world’s economic and military powers — is in America’s interests to preserve. So is an international order in which democratic states (even those with systems far less liberal and democratic than our own) know that the United States and its allies have their back if these states find themselves on the receiving end of aggression by tyrants and terrorists. Our capacity to rally allies for any number of causes is enhanced when we uphold this principle, not because it is a moral principle but because it is a rule of common interests in the same way that every member of a community benefits from the punishment of crimes and the maintenance of public order. This is the kind of neighborhood in which we prosper.
How should this end?
.... We should want lasting peace, not a prelude to more war. (read the much longer article)
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