The US and the British governments have been saying they will support Ukraine no matter the cost.
This is admirable, but it also exposes the core of today’s politics, especially Western politics, whose politicians have been trained to make such commitments because:
(1) it feels good (works like a boost of ideological dopamine),
(2) it sounds good (has publicity value),
(3) it is career-sustaining (has a resume-dressing value),
(4) the best part is that the others are footing the bill.
In other words, politicians have been trained to steal.
There are two types of thieves. The first steals property from someone else and makes it his own. The second steals property from someone else and gives it to a third party so that he can be thanked for (and indirectly benefit from social and political constructs). The first thief risks jail; the second thief is praised as a hero, a Robin Hood, or a robinhooder.
Financial robinhooding is popular but at least controversial, but political robinhooding is not only popular but has been elevated to the throne of political correctness, demanding total obedience.
In the West, especially in the US, a generation of politicians have been raised, trained, and cultivated to hate Russia in the name of democracy and freedom.
Coming from the history of the Soviet Union, who can question that motivation?
But the whole thing is not independent thinking on behalf of the people they represent. It is the result of a career-building training and recognition system centered on inherited institutional ideologies.
When a generation of politicians’ most important skills is based on institutional political ideologies considered standard or orthodox, they become trained career people, not truth finders or practical strategists.
And if the ideologies and strategies happen to provide theoretical justification for political robinhooding, the politicians become trained career thieves who steal from the people only to justify and support the thievery as a career.
Such continuity/promotion of careerism in the name and appearance of professionalism happens even in science today (which is the primary reason why some erroneous ideas such as macro-evolutionism continue to dominate despite the mounting scientific evidence refuting them, but that’s a different story – See more in Science and Faith).
It is, therefore, probably a reflection of human nature. But the situation is the worst in politics.
And this has become a civilization-threatening problem.
If American politicians really loved freedom and democracy, they would have taken a much humbler, low-key position in the late 1980s and early 1990s during and after the fall of the Soviet Union to actually support the Russian people and government to pave a relatively stable way for Russia to transit into a market economy and democracy. Rather, they just celebrated a sudden collapse of the system and claimed political credits from it.
Had they done the right thing then, there would be no Putin.
The current situation in Ukraine with Russia is only a continuation of the stupidity and arrogance of American and European politicians. It is a pattern of an error followed by another necessary error in response to the previous error, and so on. Along the way, politicians built their careers due to the above-identified four benefits of making ostensibly consistent commitments to an inherited and trained ideology.
But here is a real crisis: while enjoying a ‘fighting spirit’ and power superiority over a mostly imaginary enemy, they prepared ways for two true threats to freedom to rise:
- the threat of a much larger nationalist power arising from without, and
- the threat of social and political corruption fermenting from within.