Should the U.S. have supported the coup in Ukraine?

[JackRiddler]

9. Unacceptable.

Once should expect what normally occurs to occur, and not affect to discover it or pretend it is some dark secret being revealed which people ought to be shocked at.

No one is advocating being shocked. The frequency of an action cannot be the criterion by which it is judged as acceptable.

By this standard no one should get worked up about violations of voting rights in Republican controlled states, slave wages in Bangladesh, or the levels of hydrocarbon consumption that are causing global warming. You've probably "affected to discover" such wrongs in the past. Slavery, serfdom, child labor, legal subjugation of women, etc. etc. -- all were once normal in the United States (and widespread in many places today). Confronted with critiques of these wrongs, there were always "realists" who responded in much the same way as you do, not with approval, but by suggesting it's the way of the world so give up.

Democracy, rule of law, a republic -- all mean nothing if policy is conducted in secret and by means of deception, without open discussion and debate. When did the U.S. government announce it was going to machinate to overthrow Yanukovich? Who decided this was good for "Western" interests, or for the American people this government supposedly represents? If it had an impact -- it may well have -- we see the results now: a right-wing ethnocentric government in Ukraine comes to power under siege and necessarily looking for a fight at birth, immediately bans the Russian language, and thus gives Putin the pretext to intervene with the approval of more than 90% of the Crimean population. Now we are close to a new permanent Cold War to justify burning the wealth of our people on more "defense."

The broad outlines of the prior policy are not enough to justify something as big as a U.S. government decision to covertly back the overthrow of the elected government in Ukraine. Again, regardless of the impact it has. And of course, it robs the U.S. government of its standing to complain to the Russians (as prior U.S. policy a lot worse than the Crimea intervention has also done).