Feigning to Help the Ukraine

Although attacks outside Kyiv today have raised suspicions that Moscow will not scale back its military might, as it promised Tuesday, there are reasons for cautious cheer: satellite evidence, for instance, that proves Russian advances have stalled.

In the last two weeks, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has deftly and calmly worked as a kind of global psychiatrist to help half a dozen nations understand his conflict through their own parochial eyes.

Last week, for instance, he flattered the U.S. Congress by quoting Martin Luther King then lauding America as “the leader of peace”; won standing ovations in Britain by saying that he like Winston Churchill would fight to the end; captivated the Bundestag by explaining in German why the Russia/Ukraine conflict could sever Europe much as the Berlin War fractured Germany.

It’s time, however, for those of us living in safer quarters to understand the war through larger, less parochial and unfortunately less flattering lenses.

For without a doubt, the U.S. did almost everything it could in the ‘90s and early nulls to stoke Vladimir Putin‘s fury. Our country’s top diplomats have readily admitted as much. Bill Perry, for instance, President Clinton’s secretary of defense, said the U.S. deserves much of the blame for inciting conflict in the region because while spurning Putin’s request to join NATO in 2000, we went on to woo several nations surrounding Russia into a “North American” treaty alliance. George Kennan, America’s top expert on post World War II Russia, said in 1998 that the decisions would almost surely spark “a new cold war.

In 1992, reflecting the Beltway’s bombastic consensus, Francis Fukuyama published a book called “The End of History” which unabashedly declared that since the United States had become the sine qua non of civilizations, history itself had come to an end. Other nations could do little more than emulate us, Fukuyama implied, although until they reached our astonishing height, America would stand by to defend them if some Goliath attacked.

Except that we didn’t do that at all.

In 1994, just two years after the United States promised to both inspire and protect less civilized others, President Clinton did nothing to stop 100 days of bloodshed in Rwanda. After 800,000 deaths, Clinton diplomats were still vehemently insisting that “acts of genocide” do not amount to “genocide.”

Two years later, on April 21, 1996, spies reporting to then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin used booby trap bombs to kill Dzhokhar Dudayev, the first democratically elected president of Chechnya. A few days later President Clinton met Yeltsin not to upbraid him but to announce a U.S.-Russian alliance for peace in Chechnya that asked Chechens to sever their fealty to Dudayev’s heirs.

Fortunately for our global sanity, there is an alternative school of thought to Fukuyama’s “End of History” nonsense. Although its name—”Multiple Modernities” theory—is known only to academics in the United States, its central idea—that every society follows its own unique ark of progress and decline (two steps forward, one backward, two steps…)—is widely embraced by leaders not only in Russia but in China and India. History will never “end,” says this theory, because nations will always differ about which traditions should be preserved, just as their citizens will always—and necessarily—struggle to find their place in society.

Modernities Theory may seem muddled when compared with Fukuyama’s straight arrow of progress over America’s 246 years. But China and India have been around for a while too—the former since 1250 BCE and the latter since 2600 BCE. And platitudes aside, world peace will remain elusive until the West begins seriously listening to the 2.8 billion voices in China and India, and billions of others who believe that their histories don’t end just because the U.S. says so.