The Kissinger Doctrine

You can stop an expansionist tyrant by thwarting all his aims and pushing him back into his hole. Or you can empower and embolden him with completely gratuitous concessions and appeasement — usually at the expense of some convenient victims which you arbitrarily assume the moral authority to use as pawns in your appeasement game — so that the tyrant becomes more dangerous and unrestrained in the future. Every Putin appeaser and apologist (yes, that’s what they are), from Tucker Carlson to Noam Chomsky to Henry Kissinger, is choosing the evil side, the side of tyranny, violent aggression, and the preventable death or enslavement of millions. They are choosing it for the obvious and only possible reasons: the most extreme cowardice, the pettiest material self-interest, and the most profound cynicism.

Ukraine can defeat Putin’s military outright, and is already well on the way to crippling that military as a viable fighting force far into the foreseeable future. In the process, they have humiliated one of the world’s most powerful tyrants, cornering him within his own illusions, and among his own internal enemies. In so doing, they have also sent a shiver of revelation to all the world’s tyrants: You will lose everything if ever the world finally decides to resist you without compromise.

To recommend precisely non-resistance and compromise at this historically clarifying moment is to reveal oneself as an enemy of freedom, a lover of the “balance of powers” status quo, which is to say a believer in the artificial maintenance — the completely voluntary propping up — of totalitarian expansionist regimes. Who would so identify himself at such a moment? Obviously, someone who sees his personal advantage in the unnecessary continuance of terror and bloodshed — the terror and bloodshed of others, of course, so long as it provides some material benefit for himself.


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