U.S. Escalation in Ukraine Is Illegitimate and Will Make Matters Worse

Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at Brookings, writes ‘The West, including the United States, needs to get serious about assisting Ukraine if it does not wish to see the situation deteriorate further. That means committing real money now to aid Ukraine’s defense.’
He’s dead wrong. No matter who is in the right or wrong in Ukraine, the U. S. shouldn’t intervene further. It shouldn’t have intervened in the first place.
Escalation by the U. S. and European powers will make matters worse. As a general rule, U. S. interventions make matters worse and fail to achieve even their advertised goals, about which one may also be rightly skeptical. See, for example, this 1994 article arguing a case for the futility of U. S. interventions.
U. S. interventions tend to intensify wars, resulting in more and worse civilian casualties and refugees, more and greater destruction, and more and greater military casualties.
U. S. interventions result in a more powerful state at home. Wars and related interventions on any scale establish precedents for greater powers of the state. The idea of using the state to eradicate or ameliorate evils takes root. This idea leads to government that knows no ideological limits, because evils are everywhere both here and abroad. As time passes, the state then applies its enhanced powers in whatever spheres of American life turn out to be politically favorable. The result after many interventions and decades is a warfare-welfare-regulatory state, a spying-police state, and a state with a massive propaganda apparatus. The departments of the federal government control every significant sector of American life.
Intervention after intervention by government embeds the idea that we the people need the government for the sake of our safety and security. This is a totally false idea.

This post was published at Lew Rockwell on January 31, 2015.