Ukraine’s history since at least since 2004 is a story of betrayal. It was betrayed by Russia in 2014 and even more so in 2022, as Moscow trampled on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum that had guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity. But Ukraine has also been betrayed by its supposed allies in the West.
The narrative of both the Biden administration and European Union governments held that, faced with the Russian invasion in February 2022, they were simply bystanders with no geopolitical or geoeconomic interests in Ukraine. They were just there to help a country under attack as it fought for its freedom. Military assistance and aid to the tune of at least €267 billion was said to respond to the United Nations Charter’s Article 51, which contains the right to self-defense against a war of aggression.
This notion of heartwarmingly principled and moral behavior — especially altruistic when coming all the way across the Atlantic — however soon faced a contradiction of double standards.
The “rules-based international order” appeared to be guiding Western foreign policy in Ukraine. It seemingly didn’t apply when NATO member Turkey invaded both Syria and Iraq, conducting a bloody war against the Kurdish autonomous regions in those countries. It also didn’t apply when the Saudi Arabian dictatorship bombed hospitals and schools in Yemen with Western military and political support. That was even before Israel’s war in Gaza, led by Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government and backed to the hilt by Western states.
Today Donald Trump’s foreign policy is brazenly imperialist in a late-nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century fashion, reminiscent of Theodore Roosevelt’s “big stick” policy. Yet this is also tearing down the…
Auteur: Ingar Solty
