The US and Europe Risk Flunking Geopolitics 101
A failure to stand by their commitments to Ukraine will cost them dearly in decades to come.
Was it just a brief, shining moment?
Photographer: Win McNamee/Getty Images North AmericaTwenty years ago, I published Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire. I had wanted to call it Blind Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. In the still jingoistic atmosphere that had followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks, my publisher dissuaded me. By the time the paperback came out, I could at least insist on my preferred subtitle.
Despite the passage of two decades, the book’s core arguments still stand up. Indeed, the tragic spectacle unfolding in Ukraine reminds me why I wrote the book in the first place. Americans — and Europeans, whose wealthy yet geopolitically inconsequential Union I also criticized — truly have the blindfolds on if they think they can raise their glasses to a happy new year while missiles rain down on Kyiv.