Ted Snider | The Libertarian Institute

Richard Sakwa Explains How We Ended Up In A New Cold War

by Ted Snider | Jan 31, 2024 | Book Reviews, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

The war in Ukraine is a complicated tangle of three wars in one. It is a civil war between Ukraine’s European leaning west and its Russian leaning east. It is a war between Ukraine and Russia. And it is a war between Russia and NATO. Ben Abelow’s book, How the West Brought War to Ukraine, is a clear and valuable introduction to the decisions and events that led up to the war between Ukraine and Russia. Nicolai Petro’s The Tragedy of Ukraine is a comprehensive and masterful account of the history of the ethnic tension between the monist and pluralist visions of Ukraine that led to civil war...

U.S.-China Policy Is Not Going According to Plan

by Ted Snider | Jan 25, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

On January 13, the Taiwanese returned the Democratic Progressive Party and its new leader, Lai Ching-te, to power. Lai’s winning campaign had a platform of promoting a separate identity for Taiwan and rejecting China’s territorial claims. However, the election may not reflect the simple mandate the West projects onto Taiwan, of turning away from China and running into the arms of America. In her new book, Russia, China and the West in the Post-Cold War Era, Suzanne Loftus cites 2021 polling that shows that only 38% of Taiwanese want independence from China. 50% support the status quo of no...

Wall Street Journal Sets Standard for Irresponsible Journalism in Ukraine

by Ted Snider | Jan 10, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Recently, The Wall Street Journal joined the flood of American mainstream media outlets, including The New York Times, Politico and several others, in preparing the American public for a Russian victory. After nearly two years, over $113 billion of U.S. taxpayers’ money spent at horrendous cost in life and limb has put Ukraine in a worse bargaining position than they were at the start of the war. As many as 50,000 Ukrainians are now amputees. And though statistics on Ukrainian casualties are a tightly sealed state secret, the most plausible sources suggest casualties and fatalities as...

Bad Advice: Ukraine Then and Now

by Ted Snider | Dec 14, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

David Arakhamiya’s recent interview enhances our understanding of the diplomatic course of the war in Ukraine in two crucial ways. Despite the political West’s insistence that Vladimir Putin had more expansive goals for invading Ukraine, Arakhamiya says that Moscow would have traded peace for a Ukrainian promise not to join NATO. He also twice states that the West intervened and discouraged that trade and a diplomatic settlement to the war. Arakhamiya is the head of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party. He led the Ukrainian negotiating team in both the Belarus and Istanbul talks. He says...

It’s Unanimous: Ukrainian Neutrality Could Have Brought Peace

by Ted Snider | Dec 5, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

A leading Ukrainian politician said in a November 24 interview that as early as April 2022, Russia was “prepared to end the war if we agreed to...neutrality.” On June 13, 2022, when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia and Ukraine had “reached an agreement in Istanbul” and that the agreement had been initialled by both sides, Davyd Arakhamiia was the Ukrainian official Putin identified: “I don’t remember his name and may be mistaken, but I think Mr. Arakhamia headed Ukraine’s negotiating team in Istanbul. He even initialed this document.” That a tentative agreement had been...

NATO Chief Puts Hypocrisy on Full Display

by Ted Snider | Nov 29, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg put NATO’s hypocrisy on display while talking to reporters ahead of the meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels on November 28. Asked by a reporter about American and European struggles to continue providing Ukraine with weapons and ammunition, Stoltenberg replied, “It's our obligation to ensure that we provide Ukraine with the weapons they need. Because it will be a tragedy for Ukrainians if President Putin wins.” The tragedy for Ukrainians has already happened. Their infrastructure and economy are destroyed, their population is dispersed, their...

There Could Have Been Peace: How the U.S. Ensured a Long War in Ukraine

by Ted Snider | Nov 20, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

On February 27, just the third day of their war, Russia and Ukraine announced direct negotiations in Belarus. Having already said that he was prepared to abandon Ukraine’s pursuit of NATO membership, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky went into the negotiations “without preconditions.” That round of talks, having identified priority topics, led to a second round, again in Belarus. But, though Ukraine was willing to discuss neutrality and “the end of this invasion,” the United States was not. On February 25, the same day Zelensky said he was “not afraid to talk to Russia” and that he was...

Volodymyr Zelensky Is in a Sea of Troubles

by Ted Snider | Nov 2, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is facing two troubles on the foreign front that have received a lot of media attention. The first is that his country is actually receiving much less media attention. For the past month, international attention has been drawn away from his war to another. The second is that he is confronting growing resistance in the U.S. House of Representatives. President Joe Biden’s plan to tie aid to Ukraine and aid to Israel together is both a tactical maneuver to ensure continued congressional support for Ukraine and an admission that that support can no longer...