11/11/22
‘This Story Lacks Context’
‘Russia is waging an unprovoked and unjustified war against Ukraine.’ That’s what we’ve been told here in the United States by our venerable mainstream media. If history started in January 2022 that narrative might make sense. But history didn’t start in January 2022, and the fact checkers over at Facebook and Snopes must be sleeping on the job. In the years leading up to the invasion, Ukraine was being courted by NATO. Prominent Ukrainian leaders openly expressed their desire to join NATO because, who wouldn’t want to join a military alliance that guarantees protection to its members via the awesome power of the United States? After all, NATO and the West are the ‘good guys.’ Russia and Vladamir Putin are the ‘bad guys.’ Just ask Eliot Cohen, a professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, who wrote an article for The Atlantic recently claiming just that. Said Cohen,
“The United States and its allies have had a remarkably, perhaps perilously easy time in persuading their people to go along with extensive aid to Ukraine, despite high inflation and energy shortages. To some extent, this is the result of the West’s muscle memory from the Cold War, when Soviet ideology was relentlessly hostile and Soviet internal practice stunningly brutal. Soviet external behavior, from the subjugation of the Baltic states and Eastern Europe to the invasion of Afghanistan, was menacing as well as repellent. And even though the Cold War is more than a generation behind us, when the Russians behave like brutes—“orcs,” as the Ukrainians refer to them—that muscle memory is triggered. Americans are used to seeing the Russians as the bad guys, and thus our institutions, including the armed forces and the CIA and its foreign counterparts, have a deep repertoire of actions ready in response.” [bold added]
Cohen then repeats the party line, stating that Russia’s invasion was “unprovoked” and deploring the “semi-genocidal nature of Russia’s attack on Ukraine.”
While it’s perfectly good and reasonable to deplore genocide and other such atrocities committed by invading armies, this kind of “good vs. evil” narrative is misleading. The inconvenient truth about geo-political conflict is that in most cases, each belligerent shares responsibility for precipitating the violence. That is certainly true of the current conflict. To most Westerners, it would come as a surprise to hear that Ukraine has long been embroiled in a civil war. For years, the Kiev government has been actively suppressing the heavily Russian populations in the eastern territories of Ukraine. While some of this activity is legitimate government action to maintain order and stability in the region, there is a darker side. Kiev has enlisted groups like the Azov Battalion and other far right and neo-Nazi militant groups to conduct “peace keeping operations” in southeastern Ukraine. These operations have at times devolved into random killings of civilians and indiscriminate shooting of rockets into civilian areas. Crimea was annexed by Russia back in 2014. That was the spark. Since then, Ukraine has been fighting this desperately righteous civil war in its eastern territories against the pro-Russian separatists in which, according to the UN, at least 14,000 people have been killed.
Before 2014 and the start of the civil war, Ukraine had multiple contested elections in which allegations of cheating and voter fraud were hurled by both pro-Russia and pro-Western leaders. There were protests, riots, and violent police repressive actions.
The fighting has resulted in high civilian casualties, hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, and a massive displacement of people from the Donbas into Russia as refugees. All of this happened before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. To be clear, the pro-Russian insurgent forces have also been guilty of many atrocities. This isn’t a defense of one side or the other – rather an indictment of all belligerent parties involved. This is not a defense of Putin, or of Russia. They have acted irresponsibly on the world stage, and many innocent people are suffering because of their actions. However, if peace is the goal, we must seek to understand both sides.
This approach disturbs our preferred method of domestic propaganda during war time: dehumanizing the enemy. That’s why the Ukrainians call Russian soldiers “orcs.” That’s also why Russian leaders, including Putin himself, have accused the Ukrainians of being (or at least harboring) Nazis. Because if you’re dealing with Nazis, or orcs, you are dealing with evil. Since Nazis and orcs have no redeeming qualities, you can be free from the burden of guilt that normally comes from doing violence to another human being. This is all well and good when you’re enjoying a great novel or watching a Marvel movie. But when international powers base their foreign policy on such a philosophy, unnecessary war and death are sure to be the result.
There is another approach to making foreign policy decisions that has been discarded by the current political leadership class. It has been out of fashion so long that it’s become a relic of ancient history. It was practiced and preached by none other than George Washington. In his final address to the people as President of the United States, he warned against entangling alliances and foreign attachments:
“…permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded, and that in place of them just and amicable feelings toward all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur. ….. The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop.”
Washington’s farewell address is really fantastic. If you’ve never read it in full before, I highly recommend you do so. His counsel is clear. The United States should be avoiding both permanent alliances and permanent hostility toward any foreign nation. We should be fostering peace and keeping ourselves independent and neutral wherever possible. Harboring “an habitual hatred” will lead us to be easily blinded by the passions of the moment. We have not followed this wise counsel. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 90’s, the U.S. should’ve taken a leading role in rebuilding Russia’s economy and integrating them into the EU and NATO and the UN etc. That’s a story for another day. Instead, the U.S. has continued to lead an explicitly anti-Russian military alliance (NATO) that is always expanding eastward, closer and closer to Russia’s borders. Meanwhile we are funding Ukraine’s military to the tune of billions of dollars in their fight against Russia, even though we have no formal military alliance with them. It is strange to see Ukrainian flags flying from American front porches when just a few months ago Ukraine was considered by many in the United States as a corrupt pseudo democracy. Now congress and the White House are approving spending bill after spending bill to support Ukraine when the United States has few national defense or economic interests there. This is not an argument that Russia was justified in their invasion – they aren’t. Nobody is rooting for Ukraine to lose the war. American involvement is the concern. American involvement in a war that is not ours, in which we stand to gain nothing but risk losing a great deal.
A Geopolitical Game of ‘Chicken’
Who will flinch first? Whenever two nations have conflicting interests, it is worthwhile to consider which of the two has the greater interest. In Ukraine, the United States and Russia have conflicting interests. The U.S. wants to demonstrate that it is still the sole superpower, and that it can decide the fate of nations and peoples despite what an outcast “pariah” state like Russia may have to say about it. If the U.S. fails to demonstrate this power, other nations may feel the need to triangulate their alliances between the U.S. and other potential superpowers like Russia or China. Obviously, American foreign policy makers don’t want that. The U.S. would like to remain the unchallenged and unquestioned world hegemon, providing relative security and stability for everyone in their sphere.
Russia, on the other hand, has interest in Ukraine for more proximate reasons. Ukraine shares hundreds of miles of border with Russia. Ukraine has a significant Russian population. Ukraine has a long and complicated history with Russia. Ukraine’s southeastern Donbas region is rich in natural resources like oil that Russia would like to have access to. Ukraine stands between Russia and Crimea, Russia’s access to the Black Sea and their largest naval fleet. A hostile Ukraine would pose direct and significant risks to Russian national security, especially if Ukraine were aligned with nuclear armed NATO and the West. Given all this, it’s easy to see why Vladimir Putin and his fellow Russian oligarchs have set their sights on Kiev and the Donbas. Russia clearly has a greater interest in Ukraine than the U.S.
Let’s put it another way. Imagine that Texas had seceded from the United States 30 years ago and was now making nice with a nuclear armed Central-South American military alliance that was explicitly anti-American. Imagine that the new government in Texas started restricting the use of the English language, and that South American intelligence agencies had been meddling in Texas’ elections to prevent a pro-American leader from taking power. Imagine that Texas was doing military training exercises with these hostile neighbors and strengthening economic ties with them. Imagine Texas started asking to join that hostile alliance. To what lengths do you think any American President would go to prevent that from happening? Embargos and sanctions? Military action? All out invasion? Threatening the use of nukes? These would all be on the table.
This is an imperfect analogy, but it illustrates the point. Russia cannot tolerate a NATO aligned Ukraine on their border. And given the history of NATO expansion, they have every reason to assume that it’s just a matter of time before that fear becomes a reality. Preemptive action appears to them to be the only reasonable course, and so in February of 2022 Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine.
The key point here is that Russia has more to lose than the U.S. or NATO. As much as we’d hate to lose a potentially friendly Ukraine to an aggressive Russia, and as much as we’d hate to be perceived as weak or weakening on the world stage, the stakes for Russia are higher. From the Russian perspective this is about national survival. That’s why Vladimir Putin was willing to use nuclear threats, and that is also why we should take those threats seriously. They’ve been mobilizing more of their population for war. Russia is ready to take this thing to the mat…is the West? We would do well to recognize that with each escalation in Ukraine, the world inches closer to nuclear war. What happens when Putin uses a couple tactical nukes on Ukrainian cities? Will the West just sit by and watch? Unlikely. NATO will have almost no choice but to get involved at that point. And once NATO is engaged in direct military conflict with Russia, you can be certain that Putin’s nuclear trigger finger will start getting very itchy. Is the West willing to trade cities with Putin in order to win back some ground in Ukraine? Will it be worth the millions of lives lost at that point? It’s not even clear that the Europeans will be able to last the winter without oil from Russia - let alone be willing to face the possibility of nuclear escalation. This is one big game of ‘chicken’ that Russia will win. So, rather than playing the stupid game, let’s skip ahead to the peace talks and compromise that will eventually come.
Path to Peace
De-escalation is the only legitimate path forward. Nuclear war must be avoided. The U.S. and Russia are the real belligerents here. POTUS needs to sit down with Putin and hammer out a deal that will ease Russia’s security concerns without sacrificing Ukraine’s autonomy or sovereignty. I don’t know exactly what that deal would be, but it could turn into something like the following:
- Immediate ceasefire
- Putin withdraws all troops from northern Ukraine
- Areas in the Donbas currently held by Russia might undergo a UN supervised election to determine if they’ll remain in Russian control. The results must be honored.
- The rest of Ukraine remains independent of Russia and the West.
- NATO explicitly promises not to expand further to the east or accept an application from Ukraine to join.
- A clear pathway to a new economic treaty between Russia and the E.U. should be included.
Ukraine is unlikely to accept any agreement short of complete Russian withdrawal. When that doesn’t happen, the U.S. needs to step in and force Ukraine to compromise. Once a deal is reached, if Ukraine wishes to reject it and fight on, they will have to do so without American support. Since this is impossible, they will be forced to accept the deal. This might sound unsympathetic to some, but it’s the quickest way to peace. Ukrainian civilians are taking the brunt of this war, and continued U.S. support without an avenue to peace is only prolonging their suffering. Washington and the West are “Fighting the Russians to the Last Ukrainian,” in the words of Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute.
Many in the West are holding out hope that the Ukrainians will somehow be able to push the Russians all the way back across the border, or that a popular revolution in Russia will dethrone Putin and end the war. Both possibilities are probably a pipe dream.
- First, Ukraine’s recent surge has resulted in the retaking of only a small portion of the ground they lost earlier this year. As successful as the counteroffensive has been, it’s hardly enough to scare off the Russian bear, and it’s hard to imagine Ukraine finding more success than this in any future offensive.
- Second, winter is coming. Historically, Russia has done very well during winter wars, and given the fact they have Europe over a barrel because of energy demand, Russia certainly has the advantage. Due to Russia’s recent attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, the civilian population in Ukraine will also suffer severely this winter. Home heating and hot water are becoming scarce in many areas across their country.
- Third, Putin will almost certainly hold on to power in Moscow. If he is deposed, he won’t be replaced by some good liberal that likes the West. More likely his successor would be a hard-liner and would look to escalate the war again. Putin’s most powerful enemies in Russia are probably not the dovish liberals upset that he invaded Ukraine. Rather they are hawkish generals who might blame him for Russia’s inability to achieve speedy and complete victory. Russia is hardly on the brink of collapsing or quitting this war.
It’s hard to know what’s actually happening on the ground in Ukraine, or in Russia. Unfortunately, we are left almost exclusively with reporting that is heavily biased by the engaged parties. Much of this information is unreliable, and the ‘fog of war’ makes rational decision making very difficult. There are just a few things we do know. First, that Ukrainian civilians are suffering. Second, Putin is not going to stop this war without some sort of success to show. Third, the United States is the only country in the position to strike a deal with Russia that might end this war soon. Rather than being intractable, the U.S. Government should be actively and anxiously engaged in finding a path to peace. Eventually, if this war doesn’t spiral out of control and drag us all to hell, there will be peace talks. There will be compromise. Nobody is going to get everything they wanted. The only question is, how long will the people of Ukraine have to suffer until the two great nations work out an agreement?
The Washington quote is an eloquent way of expressing the sentiment that our government must be wholly, and singly, involved and interested in our citizens' best interest. Sadly, most government officials are personally self interested and dim, and have been for 200 years in this country. Likewise, the citizenry is equally dim and deserving of the government it gets (see PA's and AZ's recent elections).
I think that if Biden sat down to negotiate with Putin he might just surrender the White House to him. When compared to Putin he is completely incompetent and would likely forget that it is Ukraine that is being fought over not the US. Actually compared to a freshman poly-sci major he appears incompetent at both politics and negotiations. You'll understand how sad this is if you've watched any of James Klugg's videos interviewing college kids and asking them basic questions.