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A Tragedy of Errors
The war in Ukraine in context and perspective
by Mark Helprin
To write about war as it is ongoing is like catching a falling knife, or perhaps polishing it. One cannot know what will happen, or the particulars that will have decisively shaped the outcome. With the war in Ukraine barely a month old, writing in March for readers in May is a stressful proposition kept in bounds only by hewing to the fundamentals that by their very nature are best positioned to survive ambitious and specific predictions.
Like so many others, this war is a tragedy of errors, some circumstantial and acute, and others universal and chronic. History is scored by the crescendos of war, with periods of relative calm only between their crests. We may focus upon the breakers for their drama and destruction, but these are part of a perpetual wave that gathers its power in the smooth, silent dips we ignore.
What follows is divided into three broad categories ascending from the specific to the general: an overview of the course of the war and what it has revealed, with attention to the underlying nuclear dimension; the lost opportunities of neither restructuring the post-Cold War European system nor building up our deterrence; what may follow and what must be done.
The focus is more on us than it is on Russia or Putin...Continue Reading
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