'Ukraine 2022 is not Czechoslovakia 1938'
A conversation with military historian Eliot A. Cohen on Putin's murderous miscalculation in Ukraine and what the U.S. can do to hasten his defeat.
By Michael Judge
I’ve known Eliot Cohen since the early 2000s when I first began editing his op-eds for The Wall Street Journal. A respected military historian, author, and senior official in the George W. Bush administration, Cohen has taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies for decades and is the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. He’s also a contributing writer at The Atlantic, where he wrote, unsparingly this week, “To break the will of Russia and free Ukraine from conquest and subjugation, many Russian soldiers have to flee, surrender, or die, and the more and faster the better.”
To that end, Cohen has praised the Biden administration for unifying our NATO allies and speeding the delivery of Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger surface-to-air missiles to Ukraine. But he’s also been highly critical of Biden’s refusal to assist with the transfer of 28 Polish MiG fighters to Ukraine. “[H]aving already hinted that the United States would supply more sophisticated surface-to-air weapons to Ukraine,” he wrote this week, “the notion that transferring fighter planes would escalate the conflict is simply preposterous.” In our proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, he continued, “We are dealing with an enemy that is vicious but weak, menacing but deeply fearful, and that is likely to crack long before our side does—if only we have the stomach for doing what needs to be done.”
This is all “bloody and brutal stuff,” says Cohen. But the U.S. can and should be doing more, he argues, without having to publicly declare a no-fly zone above Ukraine. I reached Cohen by telephone from his home near Washington, D.C., earlier this week, just two days before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed Congress and asked, once again, for a no-fly zone enforced by NATO, saying bluntly, “Russia has turned the Ukrainian sky into a source of death for thousands of people.”
MJ: Eliot. It’s Michael Judge.
E.C: How are you?
Hanging in there.
Yes, indeed.
Why don’t we jump right in. I want to ask you a few questions about your most recent piece for The Atlantic, but first of all I want to ask about the recent Russian missile attack very near the Polish border. Strategically, what does that signal? Is Putin sending a signal that he’s not afraid to take on NATO?
My guess is it’s a target that you would imagine the Russians would hit. I think the thing that would be a major signal would be if they were to hit anything on NATO territory. That’s the real big gamechanger. This is the kind of thing you would expect them to do because it’s on Ukrainian territory. I think there's a bit of showing off of their high tech. But I don't actually read a whole lot of significance into it other than, in general, they want to try to show that they’re formidable given that basically they really are, I think, increasingly in a world of hurt.
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