An article in Thursday’s New York Times by Peter Baker comes close to encapsulating everything that is wrong with American foreign-policy discourse today. In the words of his title, Baker’s piece summarizes the “Debate Over Who, in U.S., Is to Blame for Ukraine” following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea. According to Baker, many prominent politicians on the right contend that “Moscow’s land grab is President Obama’s fault for pursuing a foreign policy of weakness,” with Senator John McCain calling it “the ultimate result of a feckless foreign policy.” Meanwhile, on the left, Rachel Maddow argued that the fact that the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 “on a trumped-up false pretext” made it more difficult for Washington to respond to Putin doing the same in Ukraine, a sentiment echoed by her fellow MSNBC host Chris Matthews.
Underlying all of this is one of the most common errors in U.S. commentary on international relations: the casual assumption that everything that happens anywhere in the world is ultimately about America, and that when anything bad happens anywhere, someone in Washington must ultimately be to blame. The story that Baker describes on the right—in which America’s failure to use military force in Syria and elsewhere spurred Putin to invade Crimea—has the benefit of being an easy-to-understand and politically convenient one for those who are opposed to the president. But there is simply no reason to think that it is true.
Source: nationalinterest.org
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