Overall, one Burkinabè in five now lives abroad. In the last 50 years, more traditional migration patterns have been reestablished, though these have retained important colonial characteristics. The arrival of European colonial powers in the 19th century completely reshaped migration patterns. These victories were not the result of asking, “Who are we?” They came about by asking, “Who but us?” In the crisis of Ukraine, which is really a crisis of the West, we might start asking the second question a little more often than the first.For the Western African nation of Burkina Faso, as with its neighbors in the region, migration has been a way of life for over 1,000 years as people followed livestock and crops on a seasonal basis. But it also led us to our great triumphs: Yorktown and Appomattox the 13th and 19th Amendments the Berlin Airlift and the fall of the Berlin Wall the Marshall Plan and PEPFAR. It led us to make all sorts of errors, the acute awareness of which has become the dominant strain of our intellectual life. It goes without saying that this self-belief - like all belief - was a mixture of truth and conceit, idealism and hubris, vision and blindness. Our sins were real and numerous, but they were correctable flaws, not systemic features. Even our worst blunders, as in Vietnam, stemmed from defensible principles. When we fought wars, it was for grand moral purposes, not avaricious aims. Our literature spoke to the universal human experience our music to the universal soul. Our political ideals - about the rule of law, human rights, individual liberties, democratic governance - were ideals for all people, including those beyond our borders. Our civilization, multiple generations of Americans believed, represented human progress. The United States used to have self-belief. Fortune also tends to favor fervent believers. Most of us understand that history has a way of turning into myth, but the reverse can also be true: Myths have a way of making history. What, really, does the West believe about Ukraine, other than that it would be a shame, and scary, if Putin were to swallow large chunks of it? Certainly nothing worth fighting for. But he believes it, or at least he makes a convincing show of it. Serious historians may scoff at his elaborate historical theories about Ukraine’s nonexistence as a true state. If he were a Disney character, he’d be Rapunzel’s mother.īut Putin has advantages his opponents don’t, which go beyond the correlation of military forces in the Donbas.īut Putin’s greatest advantage is self-belief. Outside of energy, minerals and second-rate military equipment, it produces almost nothing that outsiders want: no Russian iPhone, Lexus or “Fauda.” Putin’s problem with Ukraine, starting with the Maidan uprising of 2014, is that Ukrainians want nothing to do with him.
Why has Putin chosen this moment to make his move on Ukraine? As many have pointed out, Russia is an objectively weak state - “Upper Volta with nuclear weapons,” as someone once quipped - with a nominal G.D.P.
These are some of the deeper risks we now face in the contest with the Kremlin. What, you think our country’s so innocent?”īut neither people nor countries are well served by the defects of those virtues: self-awareness that becomes a recipe for personal or policy paralysis, intellectual humility that leads to moral confusion, a fear of unknown risks that becomes an asset to an enemy. When Bill O’Reilly asked Donald Trump in 2017 how he could “respect” Putin when the Russian president is “a killer,” the president replied: “We’ve got a lot of killers. Such questions are often put by people on the left, but there’s a powerful strain of the same thinking on the right. Who are we, with our long history of invasions and interventions, to lecture Vladimir Putin about respecting national sovereignty and international law? Who are we, with our domestic record of slavery and discrimination, our foreign record of supporting friendly dictators, and the ongoing injustices of American life, to hold ourselves up as paragons of freedom and human rights? Who are we, after 198 years of the Monroe Doctrine, to try to stop Russia from delineating its own sphere of influence? Who are we, with our habitual ignorance, to meddle in faraway disputes about which we know so little? Central to much of the skepticism regarding America’s involvement in the crisis in Ukraine is the question, “Who are we?”
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