Time to Negotiate with Putin

As much as you may hate Putin, we must be pragmatists to end the suffering of Ukrainian civilians.

Ukraine played a game of chicken with Russia and essentially lost. They thought that Russia would never be so crazy as to invade, but then they did. It is like the guys driving full speed against each other assuming the other guy will turn away just in time. In this case, Russia and Ukraine drove straight into each other thinking the other guy would turn.

A lot of suggestions to deal with Putin make the same mistake. One assumes that if one squeezes or threatens the other side hard enough, they will eventually yield. We saw this play out in WWII. Axis and Allies forces would carpet bomb each other’s cities thinking it would break their morale. People have such a strong belief in the idea that you can threaten people to comply. This belief has made torture popular throughout the ages despite how ineffectual it has proven as an interrogation method. We saw how neocons such as George W. Bush and Cheney embraced this thinking with their “enhanced interrogation” techniques. The whole war on drugs was based on the same idea. The ballooning American prison population and broken-window philosophy was based on much the same idea: if you just beat and threaten people enough, then they will yield.

People adopt this thinking in war, but all you end up with is an escalation of endless rounds of retalliation. People call for a No-Fly zone in Ukraine in the belief…