2/22/2023

My Dear Friend & POTUS, JRB,

            Whoever thought that a quick trip to Kyiv would cause such a stir? Yesterday’s news was full of dramatic accounts of how your snuck into a war zone on a purple train. The NYT noted, “Since Abraham Lincoln rode to the front lines outside Washington to watch battles in Northern Virginia during the Civil War, no sitting president has gotten that close to combat.”

            In reflecting on your trip David Ignatius expressed his surprise in the WP today writing, “who would have bet that an 80-year-old U.S. president, a man who was garrulous, sentimental & sometimes appeared senescent, would turn out to the most undervalued American leader in modern times.” Don’t let that go to your head.

            I hope you are & your people are hard at work figuring out how to make peace. When the violent conflict ends, the defeated remain. No war has completely obliterated a fighting force. We are always left with the vanquished & need to consider how they will be assimilated back into coexistence with their foes.

            We must figure out what to do with VVP & Min Aung Hlaing. I doubt they will perish any time soon. They need to imagine their way out. Gautam Mukhopadhaya, former Indian ambassador to Myanmar, has done some good thinking about this & notes “It is imperative that the opposition work within to carry at least a potentially reformist section within the Armed Forces (of Burma) so that the institutions of governance, especially administration and police, can be ‘civilianised’.”

            I am reminded of the simple fact that war grows from hate. That emotion is not extinguished just because a soldier puts down his weapon. According to Nancy Gibbs writing in TIME after the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting in 2018, “the antidote to hate is engagement.” So, please consider how we will engage the losers once the bombs stop falling.

            WINTA,