The ear­ly 2nd cen­tu­ry poet Juve­nal coined the phrase “bread and cir­cus­es” to describe how Roman emper­ors dis­tract­ed their pub­lic from gov­ern­men­tal short­com­ings. The rash and ulti­mate­ly short-sight­ed ploy echoes today in the form of crises. The dan­ger is that crises can be lethal if mis­han­dled, a dis­tinct pos­si­bil­i­ty when they are sea­soned with cynicism.

Ukraine is the cur­rent front-run­ner. Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vlad­mir Putin sure­ly knows war will have an enor­mous cost to his own coun­try. His appar­ent will­ing­ness to risk and even embrace the prospect is cen­tral to his dream of a restored Russ­ian empire. In the short term, a war pos­ture serves to dis­tract his increas­ing­ly restive pop­u­la­tion from their hopes for democ­ra­cy as opposed to oli­garch-owned klep­toc­ra­cy, while enhanc­ing — if only in his own mind — his bare-chest­ed macho image.
If Juvenal’s Romans are any exam­ple, the West just needs to hold out long enough and Putin may end up as an emper­or with no clothes.

                              HOPE IN NEED OF A REALITY CHECK

In the mean­time, to help keep the Ukraini­ans from being Putin’s present punch­ing bag of choice, they are being lav­ished with what Wash­ing­ton calls “lethal aid” — a con­tra­dic­tion in seman­tic if not moral terms.
Accord­ing to his Twit­ter feed, Ukraine For­eign Min­is­ter Dmytro Kule­ba is also con­vinced NATO will help his coun­try hold its “red line” of “no con­ces­sions on sov­er­eign­ty, ter­ri­to­r­i­al integri­ty with­in inter­na­tion­al­ly rec­og­nized borders.”
Before he takes that to the bank, Min­is­ter Kule­ba might want to ask the Pales­tini­ans about UN Res­o­lu­tion 242.

Passed in Novem­ber 1967, it “calls for the with­draw­al of Israeli troops from the occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries, acknowl­edges the claim of sov­er­eign­ty, ter­ri­to­r­i­al integri­ty and polit­i­cal inde­pen­dence of every state in the region and calls on the UN Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al to appoint an Envoy to facil­i­tate an accept­able solu­tion to the con­flict.” Instead, Israel’s con­trol over the West Bank could serve as a mod­el for Putin in Ukraine.

             ‘RHETT BUTLER MODE’

Nations and gov­ern­ments who need or ask for help only get what they want if the con­se­quences of not get­ting it might adverse­ly affect the self-inter­est of poten­tial donors. Oth­er­wise the response is summed up by the famous line in “Gone With the Wind”: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
Even when they do give one, the pow­er­ful have a long and inglo­ri­ous his­to­ry of choos­ing the wrong lead­ers for dubi­ous rea­sons as their dar­lings, or proxies.
The coali­tion that bombs chil­dren in Yemen gets away with it because it’s fight­ing rebels backed by Iran and is led by Sau­di Ara­bia, a major oil pro­duc­er. That also accounts in part for why lit­tle more than lip ser­vice is paid to the Saudi’s bru­tal and repres­sive prac­tices, includ­ing the treat­ment of women.
Coin­ci­den­tal­ly, pro­tect­ing women’s rights was one of the rea­sons the U.S. said it was fight­ing the Tal­iban in Afghanistan. Until it wasn’t.
Afghan chil­dren are now in a gen­uine life-threat­en­ing cri­sis, on the verge of star­va­tion because the West objects to giv­ing aid to the Tal­iban. The mul­lahs, in turn, cleave to poli­cies based on a strict (and some con­sid­er incor­rect) inter­pre­ta­tion of Islam, rather than eas­ing off enough to enter the mod­ern world.
Does any­one remem­ber that Wash­ing­ton gave the Afghan muja­hadin, from which the Tal­iban grew, Stinger mis­siles sim­ply because they were fight­ing the Russians?

                     BAD FRIENDS AS BEST FRIENDS

In the spir­it of nev­er let­ting a short-sight­ed oppor­tu­ni­ty go to waste, the U.S. hap­pi­ly offered Sad­dam Hus­sein mil­i­tary intel­li­gence when he invad­ed Iran, based on a 4th cen­tu­ry BC Indi­an San­skrit proverb: “The ene­my of my ene­my is my friend”.
After ten years, more than a mil­lion killed and wound­ed on both sides and wide­spread eco­nom­ic destruc­tion, no sig­nif­i­cant chunk of ter­ri­to­ry changed hands.
Sad­dam turned out to be the evil man Wash­ing­ton knew he always was and the Islam­ic State jihadist move­ment emerged from the U.S. inva­sion that over­threw him.
Iraq is close to being a fail­ing state.
Iran, on the oth­er hand, is now a promi­nent region­al pow­er with out­sized influ­ence in Lebanon, Syr­ia, Yemen…and Iraq. It is also a cri­sis. The seem­ing­ly Sisyphean task of con­vinc­ing Tehran to for­sake dreams of nuclear capa­bil­i­ty has its roots in the days when Wash­ing­ton embraced the Shah and ignored his repres­sive domes­tic poli­cies. The Islam­ic Rev­o­lu­tion that over­threw him has sur­vived despite gross eco­nom­ic incom­pe­tence and unpop­u­lar reli­gious stric­tures, in part by using resent­ment of the U.S. as a sym­bol­ic cir­cus. Flout­ing a poten­tial nuclear capa­bil­i­ty is the crowd-thrilling high wire act.

                   THE ONES EVERYONE LOVES TO HATE

Sim­i­lar­ly, North Korea punch­es, or at least jabs, above its weight, build­ing and test­ing ever more pow­er­ful mis­siles it knows full well if it fires in anger will result in nation­al destruc­tion. The U.S.  Indo-Pacif­ic Com­mand described a recent launch as pos­ing no imme­di­ate threat to the Unit­ed States or its allies and called on North Korea to “refrain from fur­ther desta­bi­liz­ing acts.”
A rigid­ly-con­trolled state media ensures that Kim Jun-Un’s the­o­ret­i­cal­ly ador­ing peo­ple won’t ever hear such heresy. If they did, one of Don­ald Trump’s favourite dic­ta­tors wouldn’t be able to strut, pose and rev­el in the world’s atten­tion, the cir­cus he offers his peo­ple instead of bread.
Whether he meant it cyn­i­cal­ly or oth­er­wise, all that was neat­ly summed up by the late Pres­i­dent John F. Kennedy: “When writ­ten in Chi­nese, the word cri­sis is com­posed of two char­ac­ters — one rep­re­sents dan­ger, and the oth­er rep­re­sents opportunity.”

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