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Tuesday, April 19, 2022
Speaking of Which: 23 Theses on Ukraine
I started working on this last week, hoping to sum up much of
what we know about the Russia-Ukraine War: the context, including
a look back at history; what the conflict tells us about military
thinking and international institutions; and how I imagine the
crisis can be resolved, and further crises averted. I originally
thought of doing a set of numbered theses, but the paragraphs
are probably too long to be so considered. Still, they feel
rather schematic to me, as I touch on a lot of points.
Three great betrayals contributed to Vladimir Putin's decision
to invade Ukraine on February 24. The bad faith from breaking these
promises snowballed into future recriminations and fears. These were:
- The US promise not to expand NATO beyond Germany when East and
West merged in 1989. Bill Clinton broke this when he accepted NATO
membership for Poland and other former Soviet satellites in 1997.
- Russia's promise to respect Ukraine's borders and security in
1993, when Ukraine transferred its portion of the Soviet nuclear
weapons to Russia. Putin broke this in 2014 when Russia seized and
annexed Crimea, and armed a separatist militia in Donbas.
- The Minsk Protocol was signed in September 2014 to settle the
Donbas dispute, but soon failed, as did the subsequent Minsk II
agreement. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, elected in 2017,
renounced the treaty in 2021.
Perhaps the most important betrayal of all was the informal
agreement no one dared write down. On December 8, the leaders of
Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus met secretly and agreed to dissolve
the Soviet Union, leaving all 15 SSRs as independent states. This
was a second coup attempt, after the reactionary "old guard" coup
by elements in the military and party failed to depose Gorbachev in
August 1991. By that point, the central government was weakened, and
independence movements were rapidly advancing in many SSRs, including
Ukraine. The coup dissolved the Soviet Union, with a "Commonwealth of
Independent States" serving as a clearing house until the military
and other shared resources could be divided. The unwritten part was
the Yeltsin's assumption that once the dust cleared, nothing much
would change: Russia would continue to dominate the periphery, as
it had in the Soviet Union and before that in the old Empire. For a
while, it seemed to work that way, but then Ukraine started to stray.
The definitive break came in 2014, when the Ukrainian parliament
impeached "pro-Russian" president Yanukovych, in an effort to
realign Ukraine with the more prosperous EU. That's when Putin
panicked and went to war. The Russian Empire grew out of the Duchy of Moscow, founded
in 1263 as a vassal state of the Golden Horde. It was initially
ruled by the Rurik Dynasty, who before the Mongols interrupted had
held power in Kyiv, in a state the Russians later called Kievan Rus
(879-1240). Given this history, it's little surprise that Russians
have come to think of Kyiv as theirs. The Duchy of Moscow broke
free of the Mongols and expanded, in 1480 recasting themselves as
the Russian Empire. But Moscow didn't conquer Kyiv until 1667, and
it was not until the late 18th century when Russia extended control
over most of modern Ukraine, and started a campaign to move Russians
into Ukraine (which, to use a term Putin recently reiterated, they
called Novorussiya; those Russians mostly moved to the south, which
had been ruled by Turks -- the Crimean Khanate fell in 1783 -- and
the southeast, a major coal area). Western Ukraine, including Lviv,
was ruled by Austria-Hungary up to 1918, then by Poland until borders
were redrawn after WWII. Ukraine was briefly independent 1917-20,
with revolutions and civil war alongside Russia, before joining the
Soviet Union in 1922. Russian political culture shares a trait with most other
declining empires: an exaggerated sense of their own wisdom and
benevolence, which convinces them they are entitled to intervene
in the affairs of their former subjects. We see this in France's
recent interventions into former colonies like Mali, and in the
UK returning (under US direction) to Afghanistan and Iraq. We
even see this conceit in such long-gone empires as Turkey and
Iran. We see a variant of this in the US, which given the global
dominance the US has sought since WWII can be applied to countries
with only tenuous or imagined relationships. In Russia, this is
especially strong, perhaps because the former empire was compact
and contiguous -- although Russians have also claimed a pan-slavic
identity (such as their bond with Serbia). Their sense of bonds is
further shored up by the Russian diaspora: as the Empire expanded
(and as the Soviet Union recapitulated the Russian Empire), ethnic
Russians colonized their subject territories, sometimes achieving
majority status (as in Crimea and Donbas). They became a special
focus for Russia's post-imperial chauvinism, in a way that has few
parallels elsewhere (although Reagan sending the Marines to Grenada
to "protect American medical students" was a supremely Putinesque
move). Americans tend to date the Russia-Ukraine War from February
24, when Putin commenced his "special operations," sending troops
into Ukraine from both north (some via Belarus) and south (through
Crimea). The invasion had been predicted by US "intelligence" leaks,
accompanied by threats of escalated sanctions should Russia follow
through on their threats. Ukrainians, on the other hand, date the
war from February 2014, when Russia took advantage of widespread
protests against the impeachment of Yanukovych to execute a coup
in Crimea and an uprising in Donbas. Those regions had Russian
majorities, and had reliably voted for "pro-Russian" candidates
since 1991. The Crimean operation was over in an instant, and
ratified in a referendum on March 16. The Soviet Union had its
main naval base in Sevastopol (it retained base rights there until
2017, per an agreement following the independence), and quickly
moved operatives in to orchestrate the transfer. Protests in other
heavily Russian cities, like Odessa, fizzled out, but the Donbas
area broke out into an armed revolt, which Russia backed (and to
some extent led). The Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts declared their
independence from Ukraine, and Ukraine's military moved to suppress
the revolts, clawing back a little more than half of their territory.
A cease fire agreement in 2015 effectively froze the conflict, but
eight years some 14,000 people were killed. Both sides dragged their
feet on implementing the 2015 Minsk Agreement, which called for
Ukraine to repeal laws thought to discriminate against Russians, and
offered Donetsk and Luhansk autonomy within Ukraine. Zelensky, who
was elected in 2019 on a vague promise to resolve the conflict, felt
that Minsk would give Russia greater power to meddle in Ukrainian
affairs, making it harder to join EU and/or NATO. Meanwhile, from
2014 on, the US and its allies imposed increasingly strict sanctions
on Russia's economy, and on individuals believed to have influence
on Putin. The impact of the sanctions is unclear, but they were part
of a more general American-led effort to marginalize Russia, which
included expanding NATO and its armory. After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, a number of
conflicts arose over borders between the newly independent SSRs that
hadn't been problems under strong central rule. Transnistria
broke away from Moldova in 1991. Abkhazia and South Ossetia from
Georgia in 1993. Russia supported those independence movements, so
its support for Donetsk and Luhansk wasn't unprecedented. On the other
hand, when Chechnya tried to break away from the Russian Federation,
the Russian Army was sent in to quash the uprising. The Chechen War
(1994-96) failed, but when Putin rose to power in 1999, he launched
the Second Chechen War, which ended independence, leaving 50-80,000
total dead. There is a theory, popularized by David Satter, that
Putin orchestrated apartment bombings in suburban Moscow, killing
more than 300, as a pretext for reopening the war against Chechnya.
(As crazed conspiracy theories go, this one doesn't seem especially
out of character.) Chechnya provided Putin with his first taste of
war, and it felt good. The war lifted him from unknown to Russian
hero. The bigger problem with the dissolution of the Soviet Union
was the economic catastrophe which followed. In Russia, the economy
contracted by 40% between 1991 and 1998, and life expectancy dropped,
as mortality for men rose by 60%. Similar problems beset the other
former SSRs, although the Baltic states did better, by reorienting
their economies to trade with Europe. Going back to Tsarist times,
the Russian economy was designed to take advantage of the Empire's
periphery. The bigger problem was rampant corruption, which fueled
the rise of a class of oligarchs, and led many to classify the
governments as kleptocracies. But Russians like Putin were easily
alarmed when former SSRs pivoted away from Russia, and especially
in 2014 when Ukraine signed a memorandum to join the EU. That was
when Putin put pressure on Yanukovych to cancel the move, and mass
protests emerged, leading to the impeachment of Yanukovych and the
Russian operations in Crimea and Donbas. This wasn't the first time
Russia perceived the threat of outside (especially American) political
operations within their former sphere: the so-called Colour Revolutions
of 2003-05 had overthrown pro-Russian cronies in Ukraine (Orange),
Georgia (Rose), and Kyrgyzstan (Tulip, or Rose). The most consequential of the Color Revolutions was the one in
Georgia, as it brought Mikheil Saakashvili to power. He was outspoken
in his desire to join NATO and the EU, while also plotting to retake
the Russian-backed breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Putin responded to the threat by sending troops into Georgia, where
they quickly won several battles, before withdrawing to new military
bases in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The war started on August 1,
2008, and was over by the 12th. American super-hawks John McCain (at
the time the Republican candidate for president) and Lindsay Graham
were livid, insisting the US should fight to defend Georgia, but
cooler heads prevailed, and Condoleezza Rice oversaw the cease fire
agreement. This was Putin's second brush with war, and it, too, felt
good. The operations in Ukraine in 2014 would be his third. Russia's operations in Ukraine in 2014 feel improvised, like
Putin was trying various things, with a cautious eye toward figuring
out just what he could get away with. The best solution for Russia
would have been to undo the impeachment and return Yanukovych or some
other pliant crony to power, but even if some in parliament were bribed
to impeach, much popular opinion had swayed to the side of the Maidan
protesters. And then Crimea fell right into his lap, and that was too
rich a prize to let go. Crimea had originally belonged to the RSFSR,
and was only turned over to Ukraine in 1954. The population was about
65% Russian (vs. 15% Ukrainian, and 11% Crimean Tatar). Russia had a
naval base and troops stationed in Crimea. (Annexing Crimea saved
Russia from having to build a new Black Sea naval port by 2017.)
The land connection was very narrow, and easily severed. And in the
east, the Kerch Peninsula came close enough to the Russian mainland
that Russia has since been able to span it with a bridge. (The main
drawback was that Crimea depended on a canal from Ukraine for water.
After annexation, Ukraine dammed the canal. The first thing Russia
did after invading this year was to destroy that dam.) Donbas also
proved to be relatively easy to infiltrate and supply. There were
repercussions for their operations, chiefly in the form of sanctions,
which presumably have been a drag on Russia's economy (and oligarchs),
but it's hard to say how much. NATO was originally founded in 1949, not to fight a war with
the Soviet Union but to deter one, while uniting western Europe under
consistent American command. Deterrence was straightforward, because
Eastern Europe had already been ceded as a Soviet sphere of influence
at Yalta. Both the US and Russia were war weary, and the US had (and
the USSR would soon have) nuclear weapons. NATO saved most European
nations (especially Germany and Italy) from the burden of rebuilding
their militaries. France and the UK still had foreign empires to lose,
so the US cut them some slack. Russia allowed Austria and Finland to
carry on as neutral nations. The US worked to suppress Communist
movements in its sphere (most violently in Greece, clandestinely
in Italy), but didn't lift a finger when the Russians put down
rebellions in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). The Cold
War was an arms race, but the hot spots were in the so-called Third
World. When Russia let go of its Warsaw Pact allies, the only cause
for concern was East Germany, which wanted to unify with the West.
Gorbachev reluctantly agreed that a unified Germany would be safer
in NATO than as neutral. For one thing, Germany had all the tech it
would need to build a nuclear arsenal, but as long as it was covered
by NATO had no reason to do so. This concern to "keep Germany down"
was the main reason for maintaining NATO after the Warsaw Pact
disbanded. But as the 1990s progressed, NATO started finding more
reasons to exist. They contributed to America's 1990-91 Gulf War.
They reluctantly intervened in Yugoslavia, which had splintered into
warring factions in 1991. In 2001 they voted to support America's
war in Afghanistan. France, Germany, and Turkey sat out Bush's Iraq
War, but in the search for "a coalition of the willing," the US
sought allies from Eastern Europe, leading to a second wave of
NATO expansion. (The first, in the late 1990s, was sold as a path
for Eastern European countries to join the EU, but it could just
as well be seen as an arms cartel scam. It's unclear whether fears
of an increasingly nationalist Russia drove or were caused by NATO
membership.) During the 1990s, Russia had objected to NATO expansion
but hadn't seen it as a big threat. However, around 2010, as Obama
was getting out of Iraq and winding down Afghanistan, the US military
was looking for new budget opportunities, and remembering the Cold
War fondly. They were originally talking about a "pivot to Asia,"
but after Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 it got easier to sell
Putin as evil wizard -- and as Putin clamped down on dissent in
Russia, to present him as a treacherous foe of democracy. With that,
conjuring up ancient fears of Russia, especially in Eastern Europe,
which had long felt the stifling force of Russian power, was easy.
Why the US should go out of its way to antagonize Russia is hard to
fathom. Could it be as simple as that expanding NATO created a new
market for politically influential US arms merchants? Conversely,
it took market away from Russian arms -- one of the few manufactures
Russia could sell competitively. This had the effect of limiting
Russian arms sales to countries barred from US arms, like Syria and
Venezuela, effectively reproducing the Cold War division without any
hint of ideological coherence. Russians have long been attracted to the idea that a buffer
zone of friendly or at least neutral nations around them provides
a measure of security against foreign attack. This was tested early
in WWII, and turned out to be worthless. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
of 1939 allowed Germany to expand east without provoking Stalin, and
encouraged Stalin to move west to the new German border, occupying
territory that had been stripped from Russia after WWI. The additional
territory proved to be useless in defense of the Soviet Union after
Hitler broke the Pact and invaded in 1941. The Soviet gains of 1939
were wiped out almost instantly, and the Nazis found collaborators
who were more anti-Russian than pro-German. Moreover, Russia attempted
to recapture Finland in a fruitless war that only detracted from their
defense against Hitler. Nonetheless, Stalin returned to the idea of a
buffer zone when laying out the Warsaw Pact sphere of influence in
Eastern Europe. Russian dominance of Eastern Europe generated enough
resentment the arrangement collapsed as soon as Gorbachev decided to
let it go. Putin seems to have nostalgia for past empire, even when
he allows that reconstituting it is impossible. This is clearest in
his equation of anti-Russian sentiment in Ukraine with Nazis -- hence
his vow to "de-Nazify" Ukraine. The history of anti-semitism and Nazi
collaboration in Ukraine makes it a bit too easy to charge Ukrainian
nationalists with Nazism. Then, in 2016, Putin did a very dumb thing: he deployed his
hackers to try to tilt the US presidential election to Donald Trump.
Hillary Clinton was tied to Obama's turn against Russia, and was
clearly the more hawkish candidate, more committed to America's
domineering role in world affairs. Trump, on the other hand, was the
kind of guy Russian oligarchs were used to doing business with. And
Trump seemed to admire Putin, while they shared many of the same
prejudices and tastes. Unfortunately, Trump won, and Clinton used
Putin's role as a scapegoat, encouraging her fans to become rabid
Russophobes. Trump was as obsequious as expected, but he did Russia
few real favors, mostly because he handed foreign policy over to
neocons who grew up in the Cold War and only became more wedded to
raw power in later years. Trump added to Russia's sanctions burden.
He figured that a big part of his job was to sell arms abroad, and
he tried to cajole NATO into buying more, and deploying closer to
Russia. He tore up several treaties, the intent being to stimulate
a greater arms race. He had little concern for Putin's affronts to
democracy, but that didn't stop others from harping on them. His
term corresponds to four years of frozen conflict in Ukraine, where
he gave neither side reason to hope or to settle. He likes to boast
now that Putin wouldn't have invaded if he were still president. He
is probably right, but not for the reasons he offers. Trump likes
to think of himself as a tough guy no one else would dare to cross.
He isn't, but that doesn't matter. There is a limited number of
things the US can do in a conflict with a nuclear power like Russia:
sanctions are easy, cyber is iffy, arms are business, propaganda is
a given. In such a conflict, both sides calculate carefully what
they can get away with, and what they dare not try. Trump makes such
calculation harder, because he's so unbalanced and unstable, or to
put it more succinctly, stupid and crazy. That may have been enough
to get Putin to err on the side of caution. But beyond that, Zelensky
is also busy calculating what he can and cannot get away with, and
he was able to play Biden for more support than had been possible with
Trump (who famously withheld aid when Ukraine didn't dish up the dirt
Trump wanted on Biden). So do the math: Zelensky is getting stronger,
the US under Biden is more committed in supporting Ukraine, and Putin
is getting nervous that his big play in Ukraine might collapse. That
needn't have pushed Putin over the edge, but it certainly made it more
likely that Putin would panic. While I suspect that Biden's warnings
and threats were meant to deter Putin, they also felt like taunts.
It's not at all clear that the Biden administration (or its more
hawkish allies, like the UK) regards the invasion as the tragedy it
plainly is. Rather, they'd like to take it as vindicating their long
process of painting Putin into a corner. All states implement a regimen of laws and rights to govern
behavior, and enforce it through police and courts. In nations where
the system is widely regarded as just, conflicts are rare and usually
resolved without resort to violence. This creates a measure of safety
and stability which allows commerce and culture to develop and flower.
No such system exists to govern
the behavior of states, although many have been proposed, treaties
have been signed, and some toothless institutions created (like the
League of Nations after WWI, and the UN after WWII). Powerful states
refuse to submit even to normative rules, and no one (even collectively)
can force them. After the UN
was created, the US and USSR tried to use it to protect and advance
their foreign policies, and failing that gradually withdrew, in favor
of pressing their own local power advantages, or practicing subversion
where that seemed the more advantageous path. After the Soviet Union
dissolved, there was much glib talk about a "New World Order" with the
US as the world's sole hyperpower presiding over a world of unfettered
capitalism. But despite having the world's largest economy, with bases
around the globe and enough firepower to destroy all life on earth,
Americans failed to grasp the first principle of anarchy: when no one
has the power, the only viable approach is to seek mutually satisfactory
understanding. Even during the Cold War, the US was much more successful
in offering generosity -- think of the Marshall Plan, or the deficits
the US ran to build up the economies of its allies -- than by bullying.
After all, no one likes to be pushed around, and over time the offenses
add up into deep resentments: Russia is a seething bed of persecution
and paranoia, where each sanction further exacerbates open wounds. US
affronts to Russia go back as far as the Civil War, when the US sent
troops into Siberia to try to overturn the Revolution. After WWII, they
became increasingly regular. The US jihad in Afghanistan was expressly
meant to kill Russian soldiers -- the only way they could have been more
explicit is if they offered bounties for scalps. Even after Gorbachev
and Yeltsin bent over backwards to appease Reagan-Bush-Clinton, the
insults kept coming: the "Star Wars" system, which had it worked (not
that it ever could) would have allowed the US to launch a "first strike"
with no fear of reprisal; the indifference to the Russian collapse in
the 1990s; the advance of NATO, playing up anti-Russian fears, not least
by separating former trading partners from Russia; then came sanctions
as the US felt entitled to judge and punish every Russian infraction. The triumph of capitalism wasn't very satisfactory either. The
elections of Reagan and Thatcher ushered in a meaner and greedier cult,
where exploitation became even more predatory. As Communists, Russians
already have suspected that capitalism was a criminal enterprise, so
when they tried their hand it, it's not so surprising that their new
class of oligarchs rose out of the old class of black marketeers. The
easiest way to get rich was to steal, and the way that worked in Russia
was only slightly more thuggish than in America. (One might be tempted
to blame this on the authoritarian bias the Communists inherited from
the Tsardom, but capitalism in America's Gilded Age was pretty thuggish
too.) Corruption aligned the forces of government with predation, and
in a society embracing "greed is good" corruption is rife. Even America,
with all the high-minded talk of democracy and women's rights, was easily
satisfied with "allies" as autocratic as Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Given
how doggedly the American right fought against the moderating effect of
democracy, they were all the more determined to make sure that no
international agreements and institutions would emerge to regulate
their game. And in that they had a shared interest with the world's
other oligarchs. They even sought to rig trade agreements to prevent
governments from putting "public interest" above private profits. Despite all the provocations, Putin alone bears responsibility for
the invasion, and for all the deaths, disruptions, and destruction his
army has produced, and also for the damage elicited as Ukrainians have
tried to defend themselves. He could have chosen differently. He could
have negotiated a reasonable solution. Or he could have simply kept the
status quo, more or less indefinitely. NATO was never going to attack
Russia. It's unlikely Ukraine would have mounted a serious offensive
against his Donbas position, but defending Donbas would have been much
easier than attacking Kyiv, and even if Donbas surrendered, he'd still
have influence within a democratic Ukraine. And while losing Donbas
might have been a blow to his ego, it's effect on Russia's balance
sheet would have been negligible. He took a big, unnecessary gamble,
and even if he persists and eventually ekes out some concessions,
he'll never regain the good will he's lost. I'm not a big believer in a "right to self-defense," and not
just because it's often claimed to justify counter-offense (often
going beyond any sense of proportionality). But self-defense is an
understandable reaction, and in response to such a calculated and
systematic invasion as Putin has launched, it is hard to see any
other way to repel the invader. I could even go so far as to assert
that military aggressors never learn necessary lessons except in
abject defeat -- as, for instance, Germany and Japan did in WWII (a
second essential requirement is that they recognize and accept their
own nation's responsibility for the war they lost). Given this, I
understand Zelensky's desire for arms to help beat back the invaders,
and as long as he's not the one responsible for prolonging the war,
I wish him success. But I do worry that the US and NATO have their
own selfish reasons for prolonging and escalating the war. One must
recognize that the only way this ends is through an agreement with
Russia. Russia is too big to be bled to death by their losses in
Ukraine, and there's no way Ukraine could effectively take the war
onto Russian soil (after all, Napoleon and Hitler tried that and
failed, even before Russia built a nuclear arsenal). There is much talk in high places about war crimes, and even
the word "genocide" is bandied about. I suspect this is tied to the
rather dubious legal theory that when a party is guilty of genocide,
other nations are obligated to intervene to protect those being killed.
I say this is dubious because any military intervention will result
in more people being killed, compounding the original crime. That's
just how militaries go about doing their business. Zelensky may think
he wants the US to join him, to implement a "no-fly zone" and add to
his offensive capabilities, but everywhere the US military enters,
atrocities are sure to follow. "War crimes" may seem like a simpler
case to make. Indeed, I'd be happy to posit that all acts of war
should be considered crimes, but given the anarchy that prevails
between nations, there is no practical way to prosecute a side that
is not utterly defeated (as Germany and Japan were in WWII, but as
Russia will not be here). As such, loose talk of war crimes only
muddies the issue, which is reaching an agreement both sides can
live with. It's long been clear what a settlement would look like. It
could have been negotiated years ago. The war makes negotiations
more difficult, because wars open wounds that confound reason, but
the relative balance of "wins" and "losses" in the war barely affects
what needs to be done. The disputed territories need to be decided
by a fair vote of the people who live there. Before the war, it
seemed likely that the separatist-held parts of Donetsk and Luhansk,
and even more so Crimea, would have voted to join Russia. How the
war might shift such a vote is anyone's guess (the Mariupol seems
to be meant to expand Russian control of Donetsk, especially along
the Sea of Azov). Exactly how one organizes such a vote will be a
tricky thing to negotiate, but I think Ukraine -- at least those
who want closer integration into Europe -- should be happy to let
go of any regions that would rather rejoin Russia. The second bit
is to remove Russian troops from those parts of Ukraine that don't
want to join Russia, with credible security guarantees that Russia
will not attack or threaten again. Before the war, one might have
taken Putin's word for this, but that is harder now. The third part
is to unwind the sanctions against Russia. This is where the US and
EU need to negotiate, since they're the ones responsible for the
sanctions. It's important here that they offer clear criteria for
removing all sanctions, allowing a better-behaving Russia to rejoin
the community of nations. It's also important that the criteria not
require regime change, reparations, and/or prosecutions (even though
under any reasonable system of justice, that is exactly what would
be required). Moreover, Russia should not be prohibited from anything
the US and EU are not also prohibited from. Finally, there should be
further negotiations on reducing armed threats worldwide, but nothing
specific to Ukraine should depend on such negotiations. One thing that should be obvious is that prevailing security
theories have been proven false, much to our peril. A show of strength
does not guarantee the other side will submit. It is just as likely
that strength will elicit cunning resistance. This is partly because
strength is complex and fallible. This is especially true in the case
of nuclear weapons, where the potential danger is so great that the
power becomes practically impossible to use. Russia's nuclear weapons
effectively took the options of US troops and/or air power off the
table (which the US had resorted to several times when facing non-nuclear
foes), yet Russia was able to operate conventionally without fear of US
nuclear weapons. So-called economic weapons are also problematic. We are
running a massive experiment in the efficacy of sanctions, with no real
understanding of how they work, what the impacts are, how they might be
circumvented, etc. Past experience with sanctions shows that they often
backfire, precipitating the escalation they're meant to deter, or that
they will prove ineffective beyond polarizing the conflict. I expect
that a reasonable analysis of the threats and weapons deployed in this
war will show them to be severely wanting. The way forward is not to
double down on arms -- the lesson those most invested in NATO would
like you to take away -- but to work to rebuild cooperative bonds
between nations: an important step there would be to starve conflicts
of arms by negotiating mutual arms reduction treaties. Focus now should be on a cease fire, to limit further harm
and encourage negotiations. The lack of emphasis on this by the US
and EU, as well as major "neutral" powers like China and India, is
not just disconcerting, it's evidence of bad faith. Critics of US
policy have accused the hawks of being so obsessed with knocking
Russia down, they're willing to fight to "the last dead Ukrainian."
Russia and Ukraine, at least, are paying for their intransigence:
the former thinking they can still win something worthwhile, the
latter unwilling to make concessions that appear inevitable. But
the longer the war goes on, the more sunk costs add up, the nastier
and more brutal it gets. Warring parties may start with different
principles and concerns, but in short course they find themselves
in the same rut of terror and vengeance. It is possible that when
they first invaded, Russians expected to be greeted as liberators --
much as Americans expected in Iraq and Afghanistan. They certainly
didn't plan on committing atrocities against people they hoped to
reorganize as allies, but they did, because that's what armies do.
Americans, having aspired to "make the world safe for democracy,"
entered WWII with a moral critique of indiscriminate slaughter, but
wound up fire-bombing whole cities, and obliterating two with atomic
bombs. Every day without a cease fire continues to propel all sides
down that moral slope. When Yugoslavia started to break up, US Secretary of State
James Baker explained American indifference with the line, "we don't
have a dog in that fight." Baker clearly had no reticence about fights
the US did have dogs in, like Panama, Kuwait, and Somalia (a parting
poison pill Bush left for Clinton to throw up). Such benign neglect
didn't last: taunted by hawks like Madeline Albright ("what's the
point of having this superb military you're always talking about if
we can't use it?"), NATO took on Bosnia as a make-work project, and
secured a treaty ending the war rapidly enough it looked to many like
some kind of good deed. The contrast between their "success:" in
Yugoslavia and the tragedy in Rwanda the US had neglected created
a storm of "humanitarian interventionism" scouring the earth for
wars they could stroke their sense of moral superiority by joining.
They never really had enough clout to get into a war the neocons
didn't already want (Haiti may be the exception here), but they
were always ready to add their high-minded propaganda to other war
projects (Afghanistan and Iraq, obviously, but they were more
prominent in Libya and Syria, which the neocons were happy with
but couldn't really explain; Syria was especially a mess, because
the US had several dogs in that one, and they were mostly fighting
each other). Benign neglect made a comeback under Trump, who
couldn't be bothered with "shithole countries," nor did he care
what US clients like Israel and Saudi Arabia did with American
weapons. Biden has brought ideology back into the mix, but one
thing no American foreign policy wonk has considered for decades
is the notion that war itself is unbearable in the modern world,
and that foreign policy should be dedicated above all else to
preventing war. This is an especially difficult concept for a
nation that prizes the cult of profit-seeking (capitalism) above
all else. It's hard to find anyone in American foreign policy that
isn't pursuing or advancing some kind of greedy algorithm. Yet in
the anarchy of international affairs, the only thing that works is
cooperation, which necessarily starts with a willingness to see
others do better. Robert Wright quotes a very disturbing Biden tweet:
We are engaged anew in a great battle for freedom. A battle between
democracy and autocracy. Between liberty and repression. This battle
will not be won in days or months either. We need to steel ourselves
for the long fight ahead.
Recasting this war as one between competing worldviews allows no
room for compromise. In claiming higher principles, Biden is setting
out on a crusade to destroy not some idea of "autocracy" but Russia
itself -- a nuclear-armed state with extraordinary depth and reach,
and by his own reckoning a callous disregard for human life. If his
goal isn't to get us all killed, he should dampen down the hyperbole.
On the other hand, one can sympathize with Biden's sense of the need
to defend democracy. But his (and our) enemy there isn't Putin, but
the majority of Republican politicians, their financiers and media
flacks. Putin's only role in this is as an example of what can happen
when right-wingers -- and despite all the ex-KGB nonsense, Putin is
pure right-winger on any scale that matters -- get too much power.
Nor should we be surprised that he would use that power to start a
tragic waste of a war. There are many precedents, like GW Bush. Which leads me to a final point (for now): American foreign
policy needs to stop trying to interfere in domestic political affairs
elsewhere, except perhaps to make it clear that we would welcome more
progressive, more pacific, more democratic governments everywhere.
The reasons for this are myriad, well beyond what I can enumerate
here. The world currently faces problems that can only be addressed
through cooperation, and that starts with social justice at home.
Apologies for not even trying to provide links. The Robert Wright
post is
here, and it includes a link to the actual tweet. It's in the free
part of the post -- I haven't read the rest
because it's subscriber-only (my wife pays him but I don't seem to have
the password; there must be a better way than keeping useful reporting
and analysis exclusive to the few people who can manage to pay for it --
especially given how ubiquitous misleading propaganda is).
Many other sources were consulted in writing this (at one
point I had more than 50 Wikipedia tabs open). Recent
Speaking of Which
posts include numerous links on Ukraine. I imagine I'll do another in
the next week or two to follow up on themes here. But there's something
nice about keeping this uncluttered.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
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