Senator Richard Blumenthal
US Senate
Washington, D.C.
September 1, 2023
Dear Senator Blumenthal,
I was dismayed to read your opinion column in the Connecticut Post on August 28, 2023.
The core of your argument is the following: “Americans … should be satisfied that we’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment. For less than 3 percent of our nation’s military budget, we’ve enabled Ukraine to degrade Russia’s military strength by half. We’ve united NATO and caused the Chinese to rethink their invasion plans for Taiwan. We’ve helped restore faith and confidence in American leadership — moral and military. All without a single American service woman or man injured or lost, and without any diversion or misappropriation of American aid.”
I’m sorry to say that this statement strikes me as both deceptive and immoral.
Ukraine’s failing counteroffensive has shown China and the world that NATO weaponry could not defeat Russia, and that Russia’s military technology, far from degraded, is strong and improving. The failure of the West’s sanctions vis-à-vis Russia has exposed the weakness, not the strength, of the US sanctions regime, and is ushering in a rapid shift to non-dollar payments and settlements. US diplomacy vis-à-vis most non-NATO countries is in disarray. What is striking is not the unity of the NATO countries but the unity of the non-Western world, which now stands united against the U.S.’ putative “rule-based order,” NATO enlargement, the US military build-up in the Asia-Pacific, and unilateral Western sanctions.
Your claim that all of this is happening “without a single American service woman or man injured or lost,” is also false, though the Americans who are killed die as “mercenaries” or with their deaths unreported. What’s worse is the implication that the deaths of countless Ukrainians—simply because they are not Americans—do not need to weigh on our conscience.
Your claim that US aid flows without any diversion or misappropriation is laughable.
The truth is quite different from the narrative you propound, as the accompanying chronology shows.
The war in Ukraine is yet another war of choice caused by American arrogance, in this case the US push to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and Georgia. When President George W. Bush, Jr. and US Ambassador to NATO Victoria Nuland made this push in 2008 at the NATO Bucharest Summit, I chalked it up to extreme right-wing neoconservatism. The US Ambassador to Russia in 2008, Ambassador William Burns, wrote from Moscow to explain the destabilization that would result from the US push to enlarge NATO to Ukraine. It therefore came as a blow to watch the Democratic Party become the party of right-wing neoconservatism, with Victoria Nuland, Vice President Cheney’s principal deputy foreign policy advisor and Bush’s Ambassador to NATO, becoming President Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State and now President Biden’s acting Deputy Secretary of State.
The US has spurned every opportunity to negotiate with Russia, claiming that NATO enlargement is none of Russia’s business. Even when Ukraine and Russia were close to an agreement in March 2022 based on Ukrainian neutrality, the US stepped in to block the agreement. If Ukraine is to be saved, it will be saved by Ukraine’s neutrality, as part of an overall peace and security arrangement between the US and Russia.
My vote for RFK Jr. will my last vote as a registered Democrat, as I plan to leave what has become a party of warmongers and register as an independent. In the meantime, I appeal to your conscience. The US, backed by you and your fellow Senators, should not be sending Ukrainians to their senseless deaths so that the US can stand tall against China. This is a delusion, and a cruel one, not the foreign policy of a responsible nation.
Jeffrey D. Sachs
University Professor at Columbia University
Cc: Editor, Connecticut Post
Senator Elizabeth Warren
