Ukraine

When it is 1938 in Washington, it is already past midnight in Moscow. The clock is ticking and the map of Europe is being redrawn, but this is not a Munich moment. We are now past that, and past the time when the leader of a Western democracy might have the honesty to admit to his public, as Neville Chamberlain did in 1938, that he doesn’t want to fight a war over “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of which we know little.” The shadow of Munich shames and intimidates the leaders of the Western democracies, and not without reason. But if there is a Munich moment in the latest Ukraine crisis, then it happened nearly seven years ago — in 2015, when the Obama administration backed the Minsk II accords and the dismemberment of Ukraine.

In the coming days, if intelligence assessments are accurate, the world will watch the unfolding of a bloody war between Russia and Ukraine. It will make history for all the wrong reasons, as the largest armed conflict since World War Two. And while Moscow would almost certainly defeat Kyiv on the battlefield, the real story will be the horror unleashed by the first modern war fought between nations of real consequence in decades. Such a war would showcase military modernizations that, while well-known, will still shock most Americans and change our perception that war in the twenty-first century is anything but cost-free. Worst of all, there's chance that a Russia-Ukraine war might not be contained to just those two countries, sucking in America in the process.

While American and Russian officials are yelling at one another in the UN Security Council chamber, another international actor has found itself at the little kids’ table: Europe. It's possible the phrase “little kids’ table” is too harsh. To be fair, French president Emmanuel Macron is at least in direct communication with Russian president Vladimir Putin and urging his European colleagues to formulate a joint European negotiating position on the Ukraine question. France is also a chief mediator of the Normandy Format, which seeks to resolve the eight-year conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas region. But Macron is largely an outlier on his own continent.

As the Ukraine crisis continues to develop, it has become impossible to avoid mentioning Georgia and its relations with the West. This is not only due to the similarities in the two countries' geopolitical circumstances, but also because Georgia is explicitly mentioned with Ukraine in President Putin's demands to the West to forego any future NATO expansion. Like Ukraine, for years, Georgia has sat in the uncomfortable position of being pro-Western without enjoying the protections afforded by membership in both NATO and the European Union. Yet a country that was once a staunch Western ally has become mired in accusations of authoritarianism, behind-the-scenes governance, and covert pro-Russian sentiment. Georgia and Ukraine have occupied a unique position in the post-Soviet space.