We (as the US) had a golden opportunity to reinvest our peace dividend after 1991 but we squandered it in a useless war for nearly 20 years after 9/11. But we have no choice but to reinvest in defense now.
In both cases, the democracies created are flawed, but certainly more democratic than what came before.
When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the Ukraine was left with the world’s 3rd largest nuclear weapons arsenal. They gave up every single one of them in exchange for a promise from the western world to help them defend themselves from aggression.
If we don’t live up to that promise, how can we ever hope to limit nuclear weapons proliferation anywhere else?
Moreso, most people did not consider Ukraine a true democracy in the 90s thru to Euromaidan
Nonetheless I do think the non-proliferation argument is a good one for distinguishing the two cases, thanks.
Obtaining such fissile materials is about 90% of the effort of building nuclear weapons, and preventing the acquisition of them is about 90% of anti-proliferation efforts. I think that Ukraine could have easily deployed a nuclear deterrent in the 2010s if they had warehoused all those Soviet warheads in the 1990s.
And we don’t have a legal obligation to their security, only a promise. But that makes what we are doing even more powerful, IMO
This analysis seems a little thin.
The codes to operate those weapons only really control the detonation sequence. At the end of the day, making new detonators from existing bombs is much less hard than collecting the fissile materials needed and assembling bombs from scratch.
Perhaps Iraq wouldn't be a democracy, but our support of Ukraine would be more full-throated, and maybe our political circumstance would be better off.