Ukraine: let's not do this again ...

Finally somebody has said something I find sensible about the multi-faceted crisis that goes by label "Ukraine." I could have said "Russian imperialism," or "post-Soviet nationalism," or "European Union growing pains," or "Autocracy v. Liberal Democracy," or "U.S. imperial decline," but for now I'll stick with simply with one word: Ukraine. There's a lot to understand and unpack there, and it's far beyond my knowledge.

But I resonate with much of what Michael Tomasky offered in in The New Republic [my emphasis]:

... while there’s a lot we don’t yet know, a clear bottom line for the Biden administration has been etched: Don’t go to war. Period. 

If today’s news turns out to be a temporary respite—or a trick—and Russia does invade, cable news will be a nonstop source of images of the invasion for a few days at least. Russian atrocities and deaths of Ukrainian civilians will be emphasized. American neocons and certain Senate front men thereof, notably Democrat Robert Menendez and Republican Marco Rubio—who’s pushing aggression when he’s not apologizing for Donald Trump’s crimes—will get a lot of air time. This last point, incidentally, is one of the key ways in which the mainstream media are failing democracy: If a person can give good blather on foreign policy, TV will anoint that person as an expert, even if he’s gotten everything wrong for a decade or two. ... 

... history records no [U.S. military interventions that were] smashing successes that I can remember. There were, instead, the disastrous quagmires in Vietnam and Iraq. And even most of the interventions that were “successes” from a military or intelligence point of view turned out to be disastrous in a broader sense. We engineered a quick coup in Iran in 1954; what happened next? We installed a ruthless pro-American regime that the people finally expelled in 1979, which was replaced in turn with a ruthless anti-American regime that neocon belligerence has helped to transform into a regional, if not global, power—perhaps soon with nuclear weapons capability. ... 

... Getting militarily involved in Ukraine means getting into a war with Russia, crossing the uncrossable Cold War lines that threatened nuclear annihilation. Maybe Putin will back down. But even if he doesn’t, the fight here is solely economic. If Biden once aspired to bring Ukraine into NATO, he gets the situation now. If Putin does go in, and the war caucus starts trying to whip the country into a frenzy, [Biden] had better stick to his nonguns.

Biden has been around enough ugly blocks to know that he can't expect any lasting popular support at home for getting into a direct military confrontation in Eastern Europe. 

It's not hard to be sympathetic toward those Ukrainians who urgently want to become more European. And the U.S. probably owes them at least some reparations for afflicting them with that sleazy, used political consultant, Paul Manafort, whose wiles helped to impose a Russian puppet back in 2010. And there was much to admire (and some things to fear) in the Maidan uprising that tossed that strongman back to Moscow in 2014, leading to the current government structure. But hey, Ukrainians and Europeans are going to have to untangle this as best they can. 

It's unlikely that deep U.S. involvement here can do good. Our track record stinks.