Poland Hot Take

.What happened in Poland was completely on purpose and as directed to Biden as the rest of this whole Ukraine craziness is - a way of saying 'I'm not intimidated by your new level of power.' This is what Cold War is, war by proxy and brinksmanship that dares the other side to escalate. If you don't show up to a war you're being challenged to, you don't eliminate the threat of it, you make the resulting war bloodier. This is obviously in large part Obama's fault for not standing up to Putin in half a dozen different arenas, and the longer Democrats take to stop excusing Obama for it and (un)reform their way of thinking about defense, the bloodier the resulting wars will be in their wake. Dictators are even less 'just misunderstood' than Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell (though not by a distance anywhere near what moderates allege...). Like Trump and McConnell, their entire aim in life is to increase their power over other people, and any of their people's legitimate grievances they bring to the negotiating table are brought to be abused.

But you should trust Democrats to take proper account of their role in this far before you trust Republicans. If Democrats were naively pursuing a dovish course - believing you can neutralize authoritarian threats by taking their concerns into account, Republicans under Bush believed that by using the sword and flag enough, you can defeat enemies and remake them in your image. And by pursuing this course in the Middle East, they went out of their way to strengthen their most obvious authoritarian threats - China and Russia. There are no words in the English language for that level of incompetence, stupidity, arrogance, and fanaticism. It's the ultimate evidence that the Republican party was willfully rebuilding itself in the image of the world's most destructive dictators because they secretly (unsecretly) admired their level of power.

Nobody wins in war, you just show up to fight it, inch by inch, like a pro forma ritual, in which you just resign yourself to gaining or losing an inch year by year, because that's how you prevent larger wars; and as Vladimir Putin now relearns, there are no words for the dangers of believing you can destroy whole societies and rebuild them from the bottom up. This whole mess means we are back to living every day with the low grade threat of World War III breaking out, and it's more George W. Bush's (Cheney and Rumsfeld's) fault than anybody in the world, who willfully strengthened the influence of Russia and China because W thought he could reform the precise countries that hated us most. It's a cluster bomb of diarrhea in the face of his father's legacy, who did more than anyone on earth except Gorbachev to save us from that perpetual threat. I'm not sure whether to call it a willfully stupid act of evil or a willfully evil act of stupidity, but some mix of willfully acting stupid and evil is the entirety of the modern Republican party, and their delusions have only increased in the years since. Their hubris would be funny if it weren't so willfully lethal, and has set the stage for everything that's happened thereafter.

Note: This is not advocating war with Russia, not that anybody would care what I think, but we do need a proportional response. I guarantee Biden and Blinken had a team working on what the appropriate response is for every contingent scenario since this first happened. Biden, Hilary Clinton, and Al Gore are, literally, the only Presidents I would trust in a scenario like this.