Stephen M. Walt
No one knows exactly how or when Russia’s war in Ukraine will end, but the terms are likely to be disappointing to Kyiv and its Western supporters. If that happens, the next phase will feature a nasty debate over who was responsible. Some of the participants will be motivated by a genuine desire to learn from a tragic episode, but others will be trying to evade responsibility, shift the blame onto others, or score political points. It’s a familiar phenomenon; as John F. Kennedy famously quipped: “Victory has 100 fathers, and defeat is an orphan.”
There’s no need to wait for this war of ideas to erupt because some of the competing positions are already out there and others are easy to anticipate. I’m not going to offer a detailed evaluation of them here; this column is merely a handy check list of the competing explanations for why the war happened and why it didn’t go as most of us hoped.
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