ROME—Pope Francis said that the “barking of NATO at the door of Russia” might have led to the invasion of Ukraine…
I acknowledge that I have written the same, many times, that Thomas L. Friedman wrote similarly. William Perry, George Kennan. We were right, they (the NATO expansionists) were right. We all agree that bark does not equal bite. We who were anti-NATO expansion acknowledge that retrospective wisdom is still retrospective; that one cannot time-travel and undo what has been done, which is what Putin wants to do throughout Europe; that action and reaction, actor and reactor, must be seen if we are rational, to obey the laws of time, that action must precede (and thus causes) reaction; that thirty years of bark but no bite fed paranoia, a mental disturbance that admits of no facts and was a pre-existing condition in the Russian mind. We all agree that factless paranoia is not reason for war, indeed the nature of paranoia is to be unreasoning, that this is in Friedman's words "Putin's War", and this threat to all of Eastern and Central Europe, in fact to the United States of America, is Putin's Project. The unreasoning foundation of paranoia will eventually out when the disturbance of the mind makes the leap to action. Then paranoia boomerangs on the paranoid, bringing down on him his fears realized. This is all psych 101. Thus, NATO is transformed into rock-solid fortress and will enlarge, precisely the opposite of what the disturbed man wished, with the additions of Finland and Sweden; thus Germany has rearmed dramatically; thus the West, which mistakenly treated the Russian as rational, now acknowledges that mistake and isolates the deranged patient in a straitjacket in a sterile institution and contemplates his total, physical destruction.
Pope Francis made his remarks in an interview with Italian daily Corriere Della Sera. He described Russia’s attitude to Ukraine as “an anger that I don’t know whether it was provoked but was perhaps facilitated” by the presence in nearby countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
“In Ukraine, it was other states that created the conflict,” Pope Francis said in the interview, without identifying which states. He likened the war to other conflicts that he said were fomented by international interests: “Syria, Yemen, Iraq, one war after another in Africa.”
“I don’t know how to answer—I am too far away—whether it is right to supply the Ukrainians” with weapons, the pope said.
The Pope is also correct there to question without knowing the answer whether the West should have armed Ukraine. It made each arming nation a party to the war, thus erasing the legal line between a localized conflict and general war. The case can be made, the undersigned made it, that it would have been wiser, with less bloodshed to Ukraine itself, had the West acted as toll collector on a turnpike. We will not forcibly prevent you from entering Ukraine, Russia, you must just pay the fee. Here too though, events overtook the question. Ukraine would not appease the Russian passage and to the great surprise of the West the Russian motorized vehicles ran out of fuel on those superhighways and the Ukrainians turned them into crematoria on asphalt. The West cannot ignore that recent history; the once-vaunted Russian conventional military has been exposed as paper tiger. Once again, it is the actor, Putin, who has caused the reaction
