Former Reagan Special Assistant: U.S. Should Not Go to War With Russia Over Ukraine

Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, wrote in an op-ed published Wednesday that the longer the Ukraine War is allowed to drag on, the closer the world inches to WWIII.

Bandow wrote in AntiWar.org that the U.S. and Kyiv do not share the “same interests.”

“All other things being equal, it would be great to insulate Ukraine from its position next to its large, authoritarian, and threatening neighbor. But that objective is not worth going to war with a nuclear-armed power, which is why members of the transatlantic alliance spent 14 years ostentatiously misleading successive Ukrainian governments, seeming to promise membership while refusing to consider membership. No NATO member was prepared to fight for Ukraine.”

Bandow pointed to how the U.S. is experiencing “official and informal censorship of news and social media threatens to cancel anyone pro-Russian, even if not a propagandist, biasing reporting. This limits access to accurate information, even for policymakers who strongly support Ukraine.”

Read Bandow’s op-ed in AntiWar.org

The New York Times reported last week that U.S. intelligence knows more about the Russian military than it does the Ukrainian fighters. The report said American intelligence agencies have “less information than they would like about Ukraine’s operations and possess a far better picture of Russia’s military.”

Beth Sanner, a former senior intelligence official, told the paper: “How much do we really know about how Ukraine is doing?”