Misinformed public - No, Trump would not have stopped Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
"UPDATES: Latest Russia-Ukraine updates: US warns over sanctions busting "Ukraine clings to Bakhmut, top US official tells Russian counterpart Washington backs Kyiv all the way" "
by Jeffrey Treistman, Ph.D., opinion contributor - 03/03/22 8:30 AM ET
The Hill recently reported .. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/595919-62-percent-of-voters-say-putin-wouldnt-have-invaded-ukraine-if-trump .. a sobering statistic — the majority of American voters believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if Donald Trump .. https://thehill.com/people/donald-trump/ .. had still been in office. Although a more detailed breakdown of the survey results reveal the typical partisan divide (i.e. Republicans more strongly believe former President Trump would have prevented a Russian invasion), the survey nevertheless suggests a fairly uniform opinion that Putin invaded Ukraine simply because he viewed President Biden .. https://thehill.com/people/joe-biden/ .. as weak. Unfortunately, the majority of Americans are incorrect, and the survey exposes a severely flawed understanding of the causes of the Ukrainian conflict.
The survey also suggests that the average American citizen has little understanding of the causes of war. To a certain extent, this is understandable since such topics are only discussed at the university level and only in very specific courses on international relations. Consequently, most Americans are unaware of one of the fundamental causes of war known as the “security dilemma .. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/106591295000300202 ” — a circumstance in which the defensive policies of one country inherently threaten another country. According to the security dilemma, efforts by Western allies to bolster their defenses and expand NATO will inherently threaten Russia. Every effort by NATO to shore up its defenses is interpreted as a direct existential threat by Russia. As Putin declared .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/19/ukrainians-our-survey-werent-enthusiastic-about-nato-exercises-close-russia/ .. last December, “It is the United States that has come to our home with its missiles and is already standing at our doorstep. Is it going too far to demand that no strike systems be placed near our home?”
The logic of the security dilemma therefore argues that individual decision-makers including Trump, Biden and Putin are all tangential to the greater military struggle playing out on the European chessboard. It is balances of military power — not individual leaders — that determine the likelihood of war.
Nevertheless, the American public appears to have forgotten that Trump’s “America First” foreign policy was largely isolationist and compromised longstanding alliances. Retired Marine Corps generals even argued .. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/10/26/trump-international-relations-danger-isolation-policies-column/3726323001/ .. that Trump’s foreign policies weakened America’s global standing and strengthen its adversaries. They argued that “such moves will only embolden rogue nations, global terrorists and nonstate actors who threaten to dismantle our democracy and way of life and the world order.”
No, Trump would not have stopped Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, the counterfactual is more plausible — Trump’s foreign policies actually served to embolden Putin and weaken the trans-Atlantic alliance. Trump’s hostility toward Europe has ultimately been destructive .. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/14/trump-biden-foreign-policy-alliances/ , undermining the security of both the United States and its western allies — including Ukraine.
Jeffrey Treistman .. https://thehill.com/person/jeffrey-treistman , Ph.D., is an assistant professor of national security at the University of New Haven. Treistman previously worked for the U.S. Department of State as a policy advisor in Baghdad, Iraq, and was a Research Assistant at the Institute of National Security and Counterterrorism.
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