From the editor: Underthinking the situation

Ukraine. We’ve all heard of it, right?

Thanks to a period of political unrest that led their eastward leaning president to scamper … no, that’s not what attracted the interest of most Americans. Rather, it was Russia’s quasi-takeover of the Crimean peninsula and their continuing chest thumping along border. Donetsk is the latest flash point.

The former Soviet republic has been in the news of late, as have the major players: Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama,Viktor Yanukovych—OK, not so much Yanukovych, but those guys in unmarked military uniforms trucked in from Russia, certainly.

Yeah, many on television insist on referring to the region as “The Ukraine.” Some critics compare Russia’s machinations to the good old Cold War. And, as has become habit in present day America, where one falls on the political spectrum determines their opinion of the Obama administration’s response.

But how much do we really know about the place?

Well, professors from Harvard, Dartmouth and Princeton, along with Survey Sampling International, recently buried several pertinent questions about Ukraine in a more general survey of foreign policy opinion.  Surprisingly, only 16 percent of Americans could point out the country on a map, despite its importance in the news of the day.

Actually, that shouldn’t come as too much of a shock. In a survey conducted not long before the U.S. entered World War Two via Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor (after years of wrangling over China), less than half of all American adults polled could identify China on a map. And that was in the era of the vaunted “three R” educational system. Ukraine rarely enters our public consciousness.  After all, when the accident occurred at Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant, Ukraine was still a part of the Soviet Union.

On a side note, one of my uncles was a U.S. Marine stationed in Japanese-occupied Beijing (then called Peking) from 1940 until the unit fell into enemy hands on what was December 7, 1941 on this side of the International Dateline. One of my ex-wives grew up in Lithuania, a Soviet republic at the time of Chernobyl. She was in the path of fallout from Chernobyl and recalled that Soviet authorities were slow to inform them of the danger.

To be honest, she said “Russian,” not “Soviet.” Lithuanians, like many Ukranians, tend to despise Russian control.

Bitter notes of history sometimes play a role in modern squabbles. For example, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. apparently promised then Russian president Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not lasso in former Soviet republics. Of course, Yeltsin’s memory is suspect, but Putin is on record complaining that the end of the Soviet Union was the most tragic bit of the 20th Century—Hitler (and Stalin) notwithstanding.

American public opinion is shaped less by an understanding of social, cultural and historical nuances than on … well, ignorance.

This survey by a trio of Ivy League scholars and SSI also discovered something peculiar in the data. I will not comment on just how to define this attribute. Instead, it is best to let the results speak.

The scholars learned through survey data that those who misidentified Ukraine on the map by the greatest margin—in other words, those who located it somewhere in Africa or along the Mediterranean—were more likely to favor American military involvement in the region.

Yep, the less one knew about geo-political reality, the more they yearned to send in the troops.

This brings to mind images of confused Marines landing on a beach in Portugal, weaving between sunbathers in hopes of finding someone with a Russian or Ukrainian accent. But it also speak volumes about how we respond, as a public with opinions we voice to our political leaders and our pundits, to global crises.

Throwing American power at any old problem doesn’t require much thought.