Ted Snider | The Libertarian Institute

Selecting Syrsky: The Untold Half of the Zaluzhny Story

by Ted Snider | Feb 23, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

There were probably many reasons why Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky fired Ukraine’s popular commander in chief of the armed forces, Valerii Zaluzhny, on February 8, but one of the biggest seems to have been a disagreement over how to go forward in a war that seemed to have overwhelmingly turned against them. Zelensky spoke of a need for “the same vision of the war,” and Zaluzhny said “a decision was made about the need to change approaches and strategy.” When the war began, Zelensky said that Ukraine “will definitely win” but stressed life over land. “Our land is important, yes, but...

Washington, Pro-Democracy? Depends on the Country

by Ted Snider | Feb 19, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Pakistan just held an election; Venezuela is about to. Both incumbent governments have banned the leading opposition figure from competing. The United States sanctioned one and was silent on the other. What was the difference? Not international law or responsible leadership, both of which require a consistent application of laws and a consistent response. The important difference was that the United States supported the incumbent coup government in one case and opposed the incumbent coup survivor in the other. On January 30, the United States reversed the small and rare diplomatic progress...

America’s Answer Is More Violence

by Ted Snider | Feb 8, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

In an administration seemingly bankrupt of diplomacy or imagination, U.S. President Joe Biden and his team, led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, have responded to the most hair trigger situations across the map in just the past few days with nothing but increased violence. As the risk of widening war in the Middle East crested and then seemed, hopefully, to tentatively recede, the United States has responded by agitating the waters. As the U.S. retaliated to the killing of three U.S. servicemembers in a drone strike by “Iran-backed” Shiite...

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...