Kasparov

12.2.2024

On this Thanksgiving weekend, we are all expressing gratitude, for the various people and things in our lives that we hold dear. Meanwhile, the world is ablaze with conflict—in the Middle East, Ukraine, Syria, Georgia, the list goes on. I would like to zoom out a bit, from our personal thanks, to this broader picture. These events did not occur spontaneously; rather, we have specific people and policies to thank for the conflict-ridden world we are confronting. It is their action, or rather, inaction, that has brought about this current state of affairs. On this Thanksgiving, I would like, perhaps somewhat cynically, to take a step back and look at where we should our direct our geopolitical “thank-yous.”

Thank you, first, to President Biden and his national security team, primarily Jake Sullivan and Bill Burns. Their cowardly, inept foreign policy has caused one disaster after another. The advance of totalitarian forces around the globe is largely a result of these policies of appeasement. Cowardly, inept, not to mention dishonest—the purported reason for not arming Ukraine was that Congress wouldn’t go along and provide funding. Now, Congress has long since approved $61 billion in aid, but only a fraction of that money has been utilized. Sullivan has said publicly that Ukraine needs to deploy more manpower; Zelensky’s response was that his army has only received weapons for two and a half brigades. And Biden only just last week announced that Ukraine can use long-range missiles to strike deeper inside Russia. It is of course easy to blame the legislative branch, when the real roadblock is a policy of caution at every time, an unwillingness to take any risks to protect democracy.

Likewise, we ought to be grateful to German chancellor Olaf Scholz for continually “negotiating” and thus empowering Putin. We can take a further step back and be grateful to President Obama and Chancellor Merkel, who sowed the seeds of the policies we are witnessing today. Their deference to Putin’s fledgling dictatorship paved the way for today’s leaders doing more of the same; worse yet, they still refuse to take any responsibility for the full blossoming of his dictatorial regime.

One of the few bright spots in today’s world picture—perhaps aside from the fact that Germany’s upcoming elections will likely force Scholz out of office—is the rebel advance in Syria; this past week, fighters took Aleppo, tearing down the giant posters of Assad lining buildings and putting up the rebel flag. Of course, Assad quickly ran to Moscow for the support he has come to rely on. Unfortunately for him, Putin doesn’t have the time or resources to extend his way days; he is too spread thin on other fronts.

But enough of the cynicism. Now, I’d like to extend a genuine and heartfelt thank-you—to President Zelensky and the millions of Ukrainians who are wearing down the Putin regime, its war machine and economy, with their personal blood and sweat. They are the ones—not our impotent “leaders”—who are making it impossible for him to help his fellow dictators. Thank you also to the Israeli Defense Forces, for scrambling Hezbollah and demonstrating the Iranian regime’s weakness. They, too, have contributed to the shift on the ground in Syria, by weakening crucial links in the global network of tyranny. And in yet another downstream result of this weakening, the people of the Republic of Georgia are taking to the streets to defend their choice of pro-European government against the Russian puppet regime. Chipping away at authoritarianism in one place has an international domino effect.

Let’s hope that the incoming Trump administration will interpret this current state of affairs correctly, see it for what it is—a global rise of authoritarianism, in the wake of the retreat of the free world. We are now getting a repeat of a historical lesson we have learned many times before, that appeasement and negotiation is never a way to deal with dictators. Every day of inaction the price of confrontation goes up. Perhaps there is room for a very tentative optimism that this administration may do something differently, and give us a reason to be truly thankful for our democratic leaders come next Thanksgiving.