6 May 2022

Rajan Menon, War Is Hell (Even for Those Far from the Battlefield)


I can’t help wondering: Did Joe Biden send his secretaries of defense and state to Kyiv recently to show just how totally “into” the war in Ukraine his administration is? So into it, in fact, that it’s hard to express (not in weaponry, perhaps, but in words). Still, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin did make it clear enough that Washington’s objective in sending ever more weapons Kyiv’s way isn’t just to help defend the Ukrainians from a nightmarish aggression — not anymore. There’s a deeper purpose now at work — that being, as Austin put it, to ensure that Russia is eternally “weakened” by this war. In other words, the world is increasingly to be involved in a bad take two of the Cold War of the last century. And by the way, when it comes to actual diplomacy or negotiations, not a word was said in Kyiv, even with the secretary of state there.

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