Right should count for something! | The Manila Times

NOW it seems that Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy will be abandoned by Donald Trump to slug it out with the bully Vladimir Putin. While the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has thus far stood firmly behind Ukraine and contributed immensely to its heroic efforts to ward off an invader, it has been dependent on the United States' participation. Trump has been fretting about NATO; for him, it really is all about money. He has demanded that member-states allocate 5 percent of their budget to NATO. The US, he complains, has had to shoulder a huge part of the burden. He conveniently forgets that many of the tensions that grip the world were triggered by American schemes and strategies. And now he threatens to disengage.

Right has to count for something. Putin invaded Russia on the pretext that the West, particularly NATO, was an "existential threat" to his fiefdom. I am glad for Mary Sarotte's "Not One Inch," a thoroughly researched, scholarly work that belies Putin's claim that Western powers had pledged, at the time of the Soviet Union's collapse and the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe, that the West would not move an inch closer to Russian interests. The pretext is a falsehood; at worst, it is a lie, and it is on this obfuscation that Putin has claimed the "moral" right to trample on Ukrainian territory. You cannot construct a moral argument on the premise of a falsehood!