Fireside this week! Depending on the order that things get written, we may have a few weeks of ‘break’ from our How to Roman Republic series, but do not fret: we will finish it. The one thing I am looking to ‘slot in’ as it were is a look at the armor of Baldur’s Gate III and the Dungeons & Dragons 5e armor system more generally and that may end up getting done earlier (and it would seem a shame to delay it until after all of the BGIII discourse is long past).
For this week’s musing, I wanted to talk about one response to the NATO policy in the current conflict in Ukraine that seems to have become increasingly common over the past few weeks: the notion that NATO both could and should compel Ukraine and Russia to seek a negotiated solution to the conflict. In a lot of cases this argument tends to be made by folks coming out of business insisting that the parties in question just need to ‘make a deal,’ which I find odd because surely they are well aware that often in business there is no deal that is acceptable to both parties. In business, that sort of situation might result in competition or in lawsuits; in foreign policy, it results in war – war being the nearest analog that sovereign states have to suing each other (both are a resort to force, just different sorts of force).
In the case of the War in Ukraine, it isn’t particularly hard to see why any kind of negotiated solution is going to be elusive. On the Russian side, Putin’s stated aims range from absurdly maximalist (‘demilitarization and denazification,’ which essentially means conquest – countries do not generally let other countries demilitarize them by force without a fight) to merely pie-in-the-sky pollyannish. Recall that Putin has formally annexed four Ukrainian oblasts, none of which were fully under his control when he declared the annexation and in which he has since lost ground. One may argue that the new Russian oblasts do not need the same borders as the old Ukrainian ones, but I struggle to imagine Putin or the average Russian imagines that Kherson Oblast will not include Kherson or that Zaporizhzhia Oblast will not include Zaporizhzhia. At this point the minimum acceptable peace conditions Russia appears ready to contemplate would involve Ukraine voluntarily surrendering two of its largest cities, which Russia at this point has little near-term hope of capturing by force.
Needless to say, that is a non-starter with the Ukrainians.
Some of the less serious and more facile commentary just assumes that this point can be finessed and that Russia can be talked into some sort of intermediate solution. It is not clear to me that this is the case. Putin may be an autocrat, but no one rules alone and Putin seems to be quite concerned about the support he needs from Russia’s nationalist and ultra-nationalist political movements, which would of course be furious if Putin, having gotten tens of thousands of Russians killed, declared, “just kidding” about Russia’s minimal war aims. Putin is backed in by politics the same way as every other leader and his calculus may well be that a frozen conflict can be won later (or at least you can tell the ultra-nationalists that), whereas a conflict settled by a deal is settled. To use a business metaphor: Putin doesn’t have to declare any losses until he sells.
The idea that the United States could use some sort of deal to actually extract concessions1 is equally ludicrous. If the United States was planning to cut off NATO support to Ukraine, why would Putin make any concessions at all? And why would it be in the interests of the United States to trade the security interests of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Germany and Ukraine (combined population, c. 186 million; combined GDP $5.7 trillion nominal) and thus its strong alliance with them for vague promises from Russia (population 147m; GDP $2.215 nominal).
Vague promises that Putin might well not keep! Remember when Putin made a deal with Yevgeny Prigozhin two months ago and then obviously murdered him and all of his close associates – let me check my notes – last Wednesday? Alternately, remember when the Russian Federation agreed, in writing as a condition of Ukraine surrendering its nuclear weapons to guarantee the boarders of Ukraine? How much is a handshake deal with Putin even worth?
Meanwhile there is Ukraine’s calculus. Many of these suggestions focus on the ability of the United States or ‘the West’ to compel Ukraine without considering at all that Russia might not take a negotiated bargain, but they also assume the ability to compel Ukraine. But Ukraine is an independent actor with agency too (no matter how often Russian propagandists insist that it is merely a ‘puppet regime;’ if it was a puppet regime, you wouldn’t have nearly so many unnamed “Pentagon Officials” complaining irresponsibly to the press about Kyiv’s decisions).
And it is not at all clear to me that, if aid were shut off, that Kyiv would immediately sue for peace. Bluntly put, the Ukrainians have learned that the Russians commit horrific atrocities in every village and city they capture and they have no reason to suppose that such atrocities would end with the cessation of active hostilities. Public Ukrainian support for continued resistance is, as a result, extremely high. And, as we’ve discussed, the end of large-scale NATO support would not spell the immediate end of Ukraine’s ability to resist. Moreover, the end of US support wouldn’t necessarily mean the end of European support (albeit at lower absolute levels); I do not think there is anything the United States can do short of joining the war on the Russian side to make Poland stop supporting and aiming Ukraine. Many countries on NATO’s ‘Eastern Flank’ (I hate this term, NATO doesn’t have an ‘Eastern Flank,’ – the East is NATO’s front) evidently understand Ukraine’s survival and victory to be in their vital national security interests.
And fundamentally, I have to ask: what Ukrainian, having witnessed what Putin and his Russians are prepared to do, is going to agree to an armistice that leaves their parents or their children or their friends or their family or their home town on the wrong side of the armistice line, unless they have no other choice? Keep in mind that the Ukrainians may at this point may have a far narrower definition of “no other choice” than you do; they may well be willing to continue to resist on far less favorable terms. And if they were in a position with no other choice, why wouldn’t Putin resume the pursuit of his original maximalist war aims? Folks imagine they could achieve some sort of ‘Goldilocks’ peace here, but war does not work this way and all of the belligerents get a vote.
Of course all of this leaves beside the question of if it is in the United States’ strategic interest to support Ukraine (it is) or if the cost-benefit analysis for supporting Ukraine is favorable (it is) or if it is a morally right and just to support Ukraine against Putin’s unprovoked war of aggression (it is) or selling out Ukraine would damage the United States’ global image and thus strategic position as the security guarantor of democracies, the coin by which we buy our global preeminence (it would be). Which is why there are so few serious voices calling for this kind of a solution; at most you have serious restrainers calling for us to start thinking about war termination scenarios.2 The steady polarization of this issue among staunch partisans is really an indicator of how many people in the United States hate the other party more than they love their country, something I have no problem calling unpatriotic.
That isn’t to say I think that there can’t be some kind of negotiated solution, if conditions change. If Russia wants to begin discussing deescalation scenarios, we can have that discussion, though of course Ukrainian interests are likely to be pretty important. It is very odd to me that it seems many American commentators take it upon themselves to be appalled by the death and damage on Ukraine’s behalf in contravention of Ukraine’s stated interests; if Ukrainians think the war worth the costs to Ukraine, that is their decision to make. But of course all of that is predicated on one major change in conditions: willingness for Russia to accept that its effort to remake Ukraine through military force has failed. Until Russia starts looking for a way out, there is no way out but through; one party cannot end a war. It takes one to start a war, but two to make peace.
But underneath all of this is a deeper mistake that runs through a lot of political discourse within many NATO countries: the assumption that the USA or NATO or ‘the West’ is the chief or primary mover in a given relationship or in a deeper sense that only the United States or NATO or ‘the West’ have real agency in international affairs. Of course it’s never phrased that way, but it is built into assumptions about what ‘the West’ either can do or has done. It’s really striking how much this is a double-edged sword, with certain voices on the right insisting that if only ‘the West’ had sufficient will, they could impose any sort of (beneficial) solution on other countries, while other voices on the left adopt the same pose but with a negative inflection: everything bad is a result of western policy and if only ‘the West’ acted less (or more rightly) then all of these negative outcomes could be avoided.
Both views massively overstate the influence ‘the West’ has in everything. Other countries have agency (or more correctly, actors within those countries do) and generally much more influence over their own affairs. No, ‘the West’ cannot impose whatever terms it wants on countries in the developing world. And in the inverse, I do not think the current foreign policy of the countries of ‘the West’ is, at this point, the most important determining factor when it comes to economic development or social progress in the developing world (though decades – if not centuries – of direct imperial rule did a lot to shape the ‘starting conditions’ for many developing countries). It certainly isn’t the case that the United States can compel a country to develop into being rich and free, as failures to do so in Afghanistan and Iraq – despite tremendous investment of funds and resources – attest.
Accepting that the powers of even the wealthiest countries are limited, that they can only achieve some goals and that they are at best able to nudge the policies of foreign powers, but not fundamentally reshape them is a realization that comes with tremendous clarifying power. It is, however, politically inconvenient for at least some voices in our national dialogues and deeply unsatisfying besides – who doesn’t want to think that their country, alone of all countries, is the protagonist-villain of world history? – and so will probably always be an unwelcome lesson for many. And yet it remains true: other countries get a vote too.
On to Recommendations!
On this topic, over at Foreign Affairs, Mick Ryan has one of the better summaries of the current situation with the Ukrainian counter-offensive, both in how things are going and what steps may be necessary in the future. Though I will say that I think Ryan may undersell the implications of some of his conclusions. He recognizes that US doctrine isn’t suitable for Ukraine (and indeed, notes even more trenchantly that it isn’t suited for many of the United States’ NATO partners; the US military is a sui generis force at the moment and so it shouldn’t surprise that it has a sui generis doctrine), but then resorts back to NATO training Ukrainian units with “evolved NATO doctrine” – evolved in the sense of learning the lessons of the current war. I think we’re far enough in that we might consider flipping that script: NATO partners should be facilitating the training of Ukrainian units in the Ukrainian way of war (which of course means Ukrainian instructors), which looks to be better adapted to the realities of the modern, Eastern European battlefield.
Hopping continents, I wanted to also provide some reading on the crisis in the Sahel region of Africa which has come back into the headlines due to a coup in Niger, so I asked a colleague with some expertise in the region to make recommendations. On the internal factors behind the coup in Niger and its connection to the difficult security situation there, this essay by Alex Thurston on his Sahel Blog is an excellent summary. Meanwhile, the best rundown I’ve seen of the external factors, including western involvement, is this piece in Foreign Affairs by Hannah Rae Armstrong (alas, paywalled).
Turning to the ancient world, I have gotten a lot of requests to talk more about Carthage and I plan to do so, but in the mean time, for those interested in some insight into Carthaginian decision-making, Michael Taylor has an excellent scholarly article out in Libyan Studies on how Carthage’s division of power shaped its strategic outlook. What’s even better is the article is open-access and so is available to the general public!
Finally, in higher education news, you may or may not have heard about the drastic cuts being contemplated by the University of West Virginia which included, at least initially, disbanding the entire foreign languages program (not just the major, the whole program, courses, faculty and all). I find that for folks who don’t work in higher education, there’s a lot of misunderstandings about how these things happen – particularly that this is caused by plunging enrollments and demographic changes (which are coming, but they’re not here yet). So I thought this rundown at WVU Facts, while coming from interested parties, does a lot to clarify where this problem has come from – mostly in the form of catastrophic mismanagement by the very university leaders who are now calling for huge cuts. For a more general look at this problem as it occurs in many universities – that university administrators engage in ambitious ’empire building’ programs which leave universities financially vulnerable and divert money away from the core education mission – the Wall Street Journal had one of the best reports. The key thing to stress is that the problem isn’t (yet) falling enrollments, but universities spending recklessly on buildings, new programs and more administrators, rather than shoring up existing programs and preparing for the lean times ahead.
One again, because these are mostly public universities, you (assuming you are an American taxpayer, which not all of you are, of course) should be furious with how these university administrators, selected by your elected leaders, are squandering the future of institutions your tax money built. In the final analysis, you – John Q. Taxpayer – you are the one being robbed by this sort of recklessness.
Finally, for this week’s book recommendation, I’m going to recommend Peter Lorge’s, Sun Tzu in the West: The Anglo-American Art of War (2023). This isn’t a book about Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (though Lorge prefers the more modern spelling of Sunzi and also is quick to note that Sunzi was not a historical figure but a literary construction), though you will probably get to the end of the book with a more sophisticated understanding of it. Instead, Lorge is focused on the reception of The Art of War and the place it took in English-language discussions. He thus follows the path the book took, through early translations, eventually culminating in the influential Griffith translation and how those translations were understood and recieved.
In particular, Lorge argues that the Anglophone understanding of The Art of War remains contorted to fit Anglo-American strategic concepts, particularly those of Basil Liddell Hart. Subsequent translations of The Art of War were essentially bent to fit Liddell Hart’s concept of “indirect strategy” and to provide a supposed eastern counter-point to western ‘directness’ in war. And indeed, one can see how that bending of The Art of War then ripples out, influencing lots of bad takes on the ‘western way of war,’ imagining an ‘eastern way of war’ as its opposite, even though I would be quick to note that Sunzi, like Thucydides and Clausewitz, operates in what I term the ‘Second System’ of war and are thus more alike than they are different. The Anglophone reception of Sunzi thus effectively manufactured out of his writings a vision of ‘eastern strategy’ which continues to be awkwardly applied to all Chinese (and in some cases all Asian) strategic thought.3
In any case, Lorge’s book is an excellent next-step for anyone who has read a translation of The Art of War and wants to be less wrong about it. It is, it must be said, written in a dry, academic style, but it is not full of jargon and will be easily understood by the non-specialist and there is something compelling about traveling with Sunzi as he makes his way to the English-speaking world (a few times). Well worth a read and a valuable corrective to quite a lot of the simplified and two-dimensional reading of Sunzi as a cipher for decoding strategic thought in East Asia.
- Advanced recently by crank presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
- Which is a reasonable position to take. We should be thinking about acceptable ways to bring hostilities to a close. But that is quite a separate issue from considering what range of scenarios are acceptable.
- Even when Sunzi is not the most influential Asian military theorist today – that prize almost certainly goes to Mao Zedong.
I fear that the lawsuit analogy is precisely why so many business types think they can just hammer out a deal between Ukraine and Russia. Civil litigation is filled with an enormous number of offramps and settlement is far more common than trial, let alone trier of fact verdict followed by judgment. I haven’t kept up with the latest stats, but at least when I was practicing, you were talking 95% or so of lawsuits settled at some point, the majority of those at some point in the discovery process.
Take a businessman with no military experience or even much interest and tell him that a war between states is analogous to a lawsuit between companies, and he’s almost certainly going to underestimate how sticky armed conflict can be and how hard it can be to extricate yourself from one even if all the pecuniary interests suggest that you should.
Perhaps it would be better to tell him that being invaded is like being mugged. How exactly do you negotiate with your mugger?
How do you do it when your mugger is your next door neighbour, and always will be?
I believe the New York City DA would counsel you to recognize and work to ameliorate the social injustices that have caused your mugger to behave as he does.
That’s terrible advice for a mugging, but extremely good advice for someone trying to avoid a war.
No it isn’t. A mugging occurs when A attacks B to get something from them. A war occurs when A attacks B to get something from them. It might be right for them to do so, but it certainly doesn’t have to be.
The major cause of wars is the belief that B is weak and friendless.
It depends on who you’re giving the advice to.
If you are advising a nation that fancies themselves, to use Kipling’s words, “armed and agile,” then advising them to reduce injustices rather than causing new ones is a good way to discourage wars.
If you are advising a nation that some bunch of fascists have decided is soft, weak, decadent, and ripe for invasion, then the exact opposite advise is useful- they need ammo.
I don’t believe that they would (it’s a bit unclear to me which individual you’re referring to).
This strikes me as something of a corruption of the much more common observation that as a matter of public policy, reducing social injustices tends to reduce future levels of crime.
A lot of things reduce future levels of crime, without having the obvious eye-for-an-eye appeal of brutalizing or imprisoning violent offenders in the present moment. Investing money in a public education system (with the correct choice of toppings) helps. Making sure there’s a solid core of local businesses that can actually provide gainful employment for the people who live in the area helps. Getting the tetraethyl lead out of your gasoline helps.
None of this stuff prevents the mugging directly in front of you, but it may prevent your children (or someone else’s children) from being mugged twenty years from now, if that’s the sort of thing you’re concerned with.
However, all of this addresses public policy concerns that are the state’s business to attend to. There are, obviously, a very different set of concerns facing a private individual who is, in this very moment, being robbed at knifepoint.
There are many policies intended to be used by the state to ensure that today’s citizens and their children are not mugged 10, 20, or 30 years from now by those who are as yet children or unborn, who cannot reasonably be held to blame for a crime they might hypothetically commit decades from now if their life goes badly.
And there is no swifter and easier way to mock these policies than to pretend that the real motive is some kind of pathological generosity and submissiveness towards criminals here, now, in the present moment. And so the policies so often get shot down… and so our children end up living in a world with more slums, less human flourishing, and either more muggings, more people working on chain gangs for pennies on the dollar while private prisons collect the balance, or both.
That seems entirely fanciful. What evidence is there of any correlation between the level of social injustice and the level of crime?
The biggest influences on crime (and it’s not close) are the rate at which crimes are solve, and the rate at which criminals are punished. This shows that the hyperventilating about poverty, education, and jobs is simply hyperventilating. Criminals choose to commit crime, and their chief factor is whether they think they will get away with it.
“What evidence is there of any correlation between the level of social injustice and the level of crime?”
Well, here: “In industrialised societies, the prevalence of exploitation, in the form of crime, is related to the distribution of economic resources: more unequal societies tend to have higher crime, as well as lower social trust”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8
And here:
“This study examines whether income inequality and poverty are determinants of crime rates across 34 provinces in Indonesia. Three indicators of income inequality and four poverty measures are tested to examine whether the dimension and degree of unequal welfare distribution are linked to crime occurrences. We use panel data from 2010 to 2019 with the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) approach. The findings indicate that higher income levels and wider income inequality are associated with higher crime rates”
https://www.mdpi.com/2134470
And here:
“It asked 148,000 people in 142 countries about their perceptions of crime and how safe they feel across four measures: whether they trust the local police; whether they feel safe walking home alone; if they have had property or money stolen; and whether they have been assaulted over the past year. Testing the correlation between these questions and the amount of income inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) in any given country shows a strong and positive relationship”
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/06/07/the-stark-relationship-between-income-inequality-and-crime
I can provide more evidence if you would like.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10610-020-09450-7 and citations.
As someone who worked in law enforcement and with criminologists and other specialists in the area, Simon Jester is pretty right (and backed by the history for those who know it). However the urge not to accept this remains strong.
How nicely vague. What “social injustices” are the particular causes?
Mary, my comments are quite long enough without even more giant digressions.
“Social injustices” isn’t vague in context; this topic isn’t obscure and it isn’t rocket science. It only seems vague or obscure if you start from bad assumptions. If you assume that virtually all crimes are committed by ‘malefactors’ who are just born evil and have to be intimidated into obeying the law, then of course this seems confusing and ambiguous. Obviously, a born evildoer can’t be made good by being nice to them!
But in reality, this is not how crime works, and it’s easy to understand why.
People are far more likely to commit crimes, or to enter a lifestyle in which it becomes inevitable that they will commit crimes, if they see no stable or survivable alternative. You may be familiar with the saying, popular among American gun rights advocates, of “better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.” The problem is that this attitude generalizes. A man- or woman, but usually man- who sees no end except a miserable grave if they continue to follow the paths of legality defined for them by others may very well decide to leave those paths.
Suppose that you ensure that society is full of people who are miserable, whose mental health problems are untreated, who are saddled with unwanted children they cannot afford to raise comfortably, who have to work so many hours to survive that supporting even one child means being unable to raise them at all, who cannot interact with the police for fear that a brute squad will beat or shoot them on general principles regardless of whether they’ve done anything wrong. You will predictably create a society where a lot of crime happens.
Conversely, if you promote the general welfare, treat mental health problems, make family planning possible, ensure that parents (and everyone else) makes a living wage for the jobs they work at, and curtail police brutality so that law enforcement can be a matter of guardians within a community rather than occupying armies among a population they hate, and you will see the crime rate fall.
That is some, though not all, of what I meant by “injustices.” Again, it’s not rocket science.
This is an insulting comment.
The vast majority of people in the circumstances you describe DO NOT commit crimes. Therefore the circumstances do not cause them to commit the crimes.
This is an unpleasant realization if your political position is that you can change people by changing their circumstances, but given the horrors that position has caused, the sooner the realization occurs the better.
One also notes that crime, and the abetting of crime, produces the sorts of circumstances that you claim cause crime. Self-absorbed people who refuse to consider the consequences of their own actions will have done many stupid things beside commit crimes.
How much do they not consider the consequences of their actions? So much that a prison doctor discovered he could always tell who would be back in prison at the time of discharge. He’d speak of whether he’d see them again. The small number who said, “No,” well, he wouldn’t. The rest? They said, “It depends,” and they’d be back, because it depended on whether the police caught them, or the courts convicted, or anything anyone else did, but not on whether they would stop committing crimes.
@SimonJester:
I entirely agree that unemployment and economic inequality have a lot to do with crime rates. But, the ability and willingness of the authorities to punish crime and deviance are a big factor as well. It’s a both-and, not an either-or. Even the most economically egalitarian societies you can think of- hunter gatherer societies, communist ones, social democratic ones- still had some degree of interpersonal violence and crime and needed some way to deal with it through coercive authority. Not least because a lot of crimes (rape, domestic violence, men fighting over women) is about sex and gender rather than economics. And also because even in a fairly well run, economically egalitarian society, there are still going to be people who want to get more than their fair share and need to be prevented from doing so.
“What evidence is there of any correlation between the level of social injustice and the level of crime?”
it’s not an accident why Central America and South Africa have the highest murder rates in the world along with the highest levels of inequality.
Correlation does not prove causation. Especially given that both poverty and crime correlate with other factors. Such as absence of fathers from the home, and lack of social trust stemming from diversity.
No but it _was_ ey81’s original question.
@Mary Catelli writes: “The vast majority of people in the circumstances you describe DO NOT commit crimes.”
The poor reasoning here took my breath away. The vast majority of people drive do not get into serious accidents, either, yet it’s well worthwhile to take systemic measures to reduce serious accidents.
It takes only a very small minority of people committing crimes to have pretty bad societal effects. Reducing that rate is well worthwhile.
Notice the dehumanizing assumption that robbery, burglary, murder, and many other carefully planned crimes are committed by accident.
If the idea that (some) human beings’ actions are like skidding on ice takes your breath away, the problem is you.
You entirely misinterpreted my point. I’m not saying crimes are committed by accident; I’m pointing out that the reducing the _rate_ of crimes is important. You completely ignore this, and assume that a thousand crimes or just one crime have essentially the same effect on society.
No, actually, you are assuming that crimes are committed by accident. Your argument makes no sense otherwise.
No, I agree with you that crimes are committed on purpose. I’ve explained twice now where you’ve gone wrong; I don’t think I can make it any more clear.
No, you have asserted twice that it’s true. You do, I notice, assume that I do not hold my position by accident and so you argue with me because you think I could change my mind, but you do not hold that position about criminals. They have to be manipulated.
As one of my professors put it, “Discovery is when you discover you can’t afford this.”
Only way I could even see the US credibly try to force Russia to the table would have to be a legitimate threat of war – an authorization from Congress, troops and materiel being moved in place en masse to intervene in the Russo-Ukrainian War, and so forth. Since that’s not going to happen unless Russia does something that triggers NATO self-defense (like using a nuclear weapon), that means there is no way we could force them to the table.
There is a sense in which the US/NATO can apply force. But it is the sense in which they already are doing so, and it has obviously not been enough to force a settlement.
They can send F-16s and Leopard 2s in significant quantities, not the insulting quantities of materiel that the US, UK, France, Germany, and Poland have sent so far. There should be enough Leopard 2s in Ukraine to equip two divisions, not two battalions.
European countries have been relying on “the peace dividend” for the last 20 years; we don’t have enough 155mm shells to equip our own forces, let alone to equip Ukraine.
I understand a group of European countries have agreed to supply some 60 F16s to Ukraine. Training pilots takes a lot of time; but the great majority of those in need of traning are ground crew, at a rate of about 100:1. I assume those countries are expecting the USA to replace the F16s with newer planes.
But what Ukraine really needs is air *cover*; high-altitude drones that can loiter for 24 hours, equipped with snazzy cameras, HARM missiles, and precision bombs that can be launched from drones. And, of course, anti-aircraft missile systems. Russia is using clouds of cheap drones to distract Ukrainian radar from their precision missiles (ballistic, cruise). Ukraine needs systems that can track 40-50 targets simultaneously.
Russia seems to be in an odd position. They’ve spent a year building a barrier of dense minefields, trenches, tank traps and hard points. These are an obstacle for advancing Russian forces, and a death-trap for retreating Russian forces. If you throw all your effort into building a wall to hide behind, it doesn’t make sense to show your face on the enemy’s side of the wall. So Russia’s slow advancs around Kupiansk, Kreminna and Svatove are probably feints, meant to draw Ukrainian forces away from the South (where Ukraine is taking heavily-defended ground).
Crimea is at the heart of all this. Both Putin and the Russian public seem to see Crimea as intrinsically Russian, in a sense they don’t apply to Donbas and its inhabitants. But Ukraine also sees Crimea as non-negotiable; possibly because Crimea is defensible in a way that Donbas isn’t – Donbas is smack on the Russian border, and there’s no natural boundary. Crimea has no border with Russia. In fact it’s almost an island, given the swampy nature of the northern isthmus.
So I see Crimea as the main obstacle to a negotiated settlement.
Some people might have thought that the main obstacle to a settlement is that the Russians have violated every previous settlement and will without doubt violate any future settlement.
Any meaningful “settlement” will require Ukraine to have NATO membership or nuclear weapons. No other “settlement” has any meaning.
Peace dividend or no peace dividend, NATO members plus Sweden have around 1,700 Leopard 2s. Of those, around 1,200 are new (2A5 or newer). Every single one of these tanks, with the possible exception of a few dozen Canadian tanks, exists to fight a land war in Europe against the Russian Army. Somehow, Ukraine only got 90 2A4s and 31 Stridsvagns and 2A6s.
And then there’s the US Air Force with its 900 F-16s. But the Pentagon thinks Ukraine doesn’t deserve a decisive victory (every big delivery so far has involved Biden or State doing it over DoD objections) and nitpicks it to death – “how dare it launch a counteroffensive without air superiority, which we refuse to deliver.”
@ad9
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but the main reason that trusting to a negotiated settlement is foolish is not the same as the main reason that no settlement can be negotiated in the first place.
Imagine a world where there was some way to create a magical force field at the agreed-upon border that would make further invasion or Russian treachery impossible, even if the Russians used every means at their disposal including nuclear weapons. In such a world, we could imagine a negotiated agreement that the Russians would be forced to honor, whether they liked it or not, assuming they were willing to agree to it in the first place.
But it would be impossible to ever come to an agreement over the matter, if both sides absolutely refuse to come to consensus about who will get to own the Crimea.
@Alon Levy
Many of those tanks are not in serviceable condition, and the factory infrastructure to refurbish them is so weak that it processes, as I understand it, some number more like “one tank per week” than “one tank per day,” at best. If I’m not mistaken, that is the problem created by the long “peace dividend.” The total number of Leopard 2-armed tank units the European Union can support in Ukrainian hands at the point of contact winds up being much, much lower than the total number of modernized Leopard 2s in the EU’s combined orders of battle.
@Simon:
Yeah, that was the excuse for sending zero tanks, and suddenly it changed into the excuse for sending 100 tanks (Ukraine asked for 300) plus a bunch of Leopard 1s (has anyone followed up on why it’s easier to find Leopard 1s in good condition than Leopard 2s?).
Alon Levy, the fact that over time people give more tanks does not invalidate the ‘excuse.’
First, because that’s precisely the result you’d expect: efforts to increase capacity, refurbish tanks that were unready for service, and figure out some way to keep the system running under the increased strain of supplying a (proxy) war should make it possible to send more tanks to Ukraine after 6-12 months of fighting than was possible after 1-2 months of fighting.
Second, because protracted warfare and pressure to do something sometimes makes people ignore costs they previously worried about, or forces them to find a way to pay it that they didn’t find before.
More broadly, I’m no authority on Leopard tanks, but there are two obvious possibilities. One is that no one is actively using the Leopard 1s as much, so giving them up costs effectively nothing. The other is that because the Leopard 1s are often tanks relegated to a storage depot, they may well have been given a final “tune-up” at some point in the reasonably recent past and then just left alone, so that they are now more or less ready to just drive away and take to Ukraine. The Leopard 2s, being in more active service, may actually need more maintenance and preparation…
This is pure speculation on my part.
Jack pointed out that F-16s require ground crew. Main battle tanks also need a fair number of technicians and even more spare parts to keep them running. There was a scandal in Germany not long before the Ukrainian war when an investigative newspaper revealed that a remarkably low percentage of the German aircraft, tanks, etc were not actually operational – seems that one way to reduce the military budget post 1991 was to cut back on spare part production. So while Europe has in theory thousands of Leopard 2s, the actual number “ready to ship” may be much lower.
Main battle tanks also require infantry and artillery and I guess these days drone operators that are all trained to work with the tanks, combined arms. Just throwing tanks alone into battle, as the Russians have demonstrated, accomplishes nothing and you lose the tanks. This training takes time.
There’s also the argument that Western aid needs to be kept at a rate that doesn’t also allow Putin to build up Russian forces to match. Putin said at the beginning that Ukraine was a “special military operation” because the Russian people, and oligarchs, most likely would not agree to mobilisation, conscription, higher taxes, etc to fund a war. And he still hasn’t been able to do so because Ukraine simply isn’t a threat to Russia itself.
So now one goal of aid to Ukraine is not to serve Putin’s self-interest by giving him reasons to pitch this war as “existential” to the Russian people. Announcing that Europe is sending a thousand Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, that’s a big bad threat. Announcing that Sweden is sending a hundred, and Germany fifty this month, and a hundred three months later, and the Netherlands fifty, … not so much. Putin would look weak if he tried to claim that the company of Leopard 2 tanks just announced by some Western country were a terrible threat to Russia demanding an immediate response.
This is also supposedly the reason why Western countries won’t send long range missiles to Ukraine. If they did, the Ukrainians would start hitting targets inside Russia. I can see the political logic behind this, much though it distresses the Ukrainians. But I also think it’s possible that Western countries are simply discovering that they don’t have working long range missiles to send.
Ukraine is not short of infantry right now. It explicitly asked for 300 Leopard 2s, which was already negotiated down from what it had previously wanted; 300 Leopard 2s or even 600 is not too much armor relative to the hundreds of thousands of troops it has right now.
And re “poor readiness,” that was the excuse a lot of people gave last year for why Germany couldn’t send any kitties, and then Scholz changed his mind and suddenly it became possible to send a bit over a hundred of them, plus a bunch more Leopard 1s.
Ditto the excuse of training. If training takes a long time then it’s a reason to send materiel earlier rather than later. What was Biden doing for the year+ he dithered on F-16s?
This is a weird list. Poland supplied around half of it’s airforce and tanks, while France did almost nothing, and the others are in the middle (Germany notably changing it’s mind on it for the better).
You might need to get better grasp on contributions?
Part of the problem with Ukraine is that certain of the mouthiest supporters would have been warning us how dangerous supporting Ukraine is not that long ago. Then there’s the exaggeration of the value of aid; it’s extremely hard to explain to most people that most of the gear we’ve sent would have been scrapped at cost to the taxpayers. (Though I should be able to purchase a used Bradley IFV with full combat loadout.)
Two factors seem to be driving university funds away from basic education. One is new building to make a campus more attractive to potential students and researchers; more students and research grants equals more money. Also, alumni seem more interested in donating really large sums to capital projects.
Administration bloat is the natural tendency for bureaucratic expansion, plus “we’re doing something” to help various groups. Veteran and minority outreach are obvious ones; but Women’s outreach when women are the majority of students is an even better example of the bloating.
My understanding is that the Bradley, being a 25-30 ton tracked vehicle, is heavy enough to potentially cause damage to public roads it drives over, and the explosive ammunition isn’t particularly safe if not handled properly.
Furthermore, it cannot feasibly be operated in combat form by a private individual and there are effectively no legal uses for a combat-loaded Bradley that some other vehicle (including a Bradley without the chaingun rounds) couldn’t fulfill just as well.
The deliberately ambitious claim here boils down to “I should have the right to prepare for war against the state at a time of my choosing,” and it is unsurprising that states take a dim view of the claim. For that matter, I’m not sure I like it as a private citizen. The history of relatively powerful elite individuals (the ones who could plausibly afford a combat-loaded Bradley and keep one in condition) deciding to rebel against central authority using their private arsenals and personal troops is not a history of things going all that well for the average peasant with close to the median income level.
Russian propagandists insist that it is merely a ‘puppet regime;’
The part of this I keep wondering about is, if this is all a CIA plot or whatever, is how you explain Sweden and Finland suddenly doing an about face on NATO after spending 70-odd years of “No thanks, we’ll pass.” Were Sweden and Finland suddenly puppetized very quietly in the past few years, or were they always puppets that were told to only pretend to be neutral as some eight-dimensional chess maneuver?
I mean, Sweden was always a puppet, actually. (More specifically, the Swedish security and defense establishment was secretly cooperating with NATO through much of the Cold War, and you wouldn’t have to squint very hard to view them as a secret NATO member in that period. Diplomatically and politically, they absolutely were independent, and so “puppet” is pretty unfair… but it’s hardly accurate to suggest that they did an about-face either. They moved from a policy of secretly planning a joint defense in the event of Soviet aggression to a policy of openly planning a joint defense.)
Finland’s situation is much more complex. In some ways, they joined NATO because they felt *less* threatened than they had in the past. One calculation they’d always been running, since the war years, was that if they provoked or threatened the Soviets too much, they’d become the Finnish SSR overnight and what then? Either Richard Nixon blows up the world because of it and Finland loses, or he doesn’t and Finland loses. There wasn’t any plausible way the US could force the Soviets out of Finland (what, an amphibious landing across the Baltic?) or any realistic possibility of NATO mounting a successful defense without pre-positioning heavy assets in Finland, and the Soviets were never going to tolerate American troops a hundred miles from Leningrad. So during the Cold War, Finnish independence was dependent on not provoking the Soviets too much.
The Cold War ended, and with it the fear of an overnight takeover. Then Russian aggression re-emerges as a threat, but with dramatically reduced capabilities. Now it is plausible that the FDF could hold the Russian military off for long enough to get NATO into the fight, both because it’s now reasonable to expect that Russia could not deny NATO access to the Baltic, and because Russia no longer has any chance of winning a broader European conflict. So NATO membership has much more upside, and less risk.
Thanks for your good response, but this is working from the premise that the Soviet Union and later Russia are aggressors, rather than poor victims of America aggression*, which goes against the whole premise.
* Which in case it isn’t clear, I don’t agree with.
“In some ways, they joined NATO because they felt *less* threatened than they had in the past.”
You mean that Finland joined NATO after Russia invaded a neighbouring non-NATO state they were pledged to leave alone, because the Finns felt Russia was less murderously aggressive after it had done that than they did before the invasion, when it had not done that?
What line of reasoning leads you to conclude that the Finns felt less threatened after the invasion than they did before it?
The reasoning is spelled out in their last paragraph: “Less of a threat” doesn’t mean “less murderously aggressive”, but “less militarily capable of overrunning Finland”. And it also isn’t comparing Russia before and after the invasion, but Russia now with the Soviet Union.
The post distinguishes three phases:
Soviet Union (more threatening than now): aggressive and capable of overrunning Finland -> joining Nato doesn’t make sense because it wouldn’t be able to defend Finland effectively
Russia 1991-2022 (less threatening than now): less aggressive and incapable of overrunning Finland -> joining Nato is unnecessary because Russia seems to be unwilling to start a large war, only small wars for limited territories with pro-russian separatists in them (no such territory in Finland)
Russia post-2022 (more threatening than in the decades before, but less threatening than during the Soviet era): aggressive again, but still incapable of overrunning Finland -> joining Nato is a realistic way of protecting Finland from Russian aggression (and in fact the best window is while Russia is busy with the invasion of Ukraine; as long as most of the Russian military is in Ukraine it is less capable of threatening other countries with invasion)
The Stalin era is its own case (and I agree that the Soviets then were quite a threat to FInland), but I think that the post-1956 Soviet Union was less of a threat to Finland as well as more generally to world peace than Putin’s Russia today.
Acquiring territory by conquest, after all, breaks a pretty strong taboo that both the United States, the Soviet Union, and most of their allies honored starting from just a few years after WWII. Whatever else one might think of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia or Hungary- or the US invasions of Iraq, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, etc.- they weren’t that.
The former Finnish ambassador to Moscow says he misses the (post-Stalin, again) Soviet era for a different reason- back then the Soviet Union, unlike Russia today, was not a one-man show, and there was an institution with the power to constrain the leader.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/kremlins-grand-delusions
You make a cogent point. However, I would make a more fine-tuned argument:
1944-47: Finland is non-occupied but overseen by Allied Control Commission. We obey Soviet commands, and secure our independence by delivering the war reparations meticulously to the schedule. Soviets don’t want to disturb the flow of goods, some of which have strategic significance. (In 1946, Finnish locomotive deliveries were about 40 % of the Soviet production of railway locomotives.)
1948-1955: Finland signs the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance with the Soviets. Military planning is more or less sincerely about countering the Western threat or about preventing a domestic communist coup. No real capability for mobilisation or even fighting a war. The Finnish sovereignity depends on great-power balancing in the High North.
1955-67: With the Soviets leaving Porkkala base, Finland starts to silently restore a military capability to stop a Soviet attack conventionally. The Americans make a silent promise not to attack Finland with nuclear weapons as long as we fight the Soviets to perevent them from crossing into Norway and Sweden. Finland starts to call itself a “neutral country”.
1967-1992: Finland prepares to fight a land war everywhere on its soil, with the assumption that war starts more or less by surprise. Lapland is militarised by establishing an Arctic brigade and deploying an air force fighter command there. Readiness of regular troops measured in hours, reserve mobilisation in days. Military planning is solely about repelling a Soviet aggression but no idea about alliances is even entertained, as any attempt to join one would be suicidal.
1992-2014: Finland keeps planning for a war against Russian aggression, developing a combatibility for joining NATO if necessery. No popular support for NATO, partly because it is perceived to be too dovish. (Joining NATO was generally seen tantamount to scrapping conscription and local defence, concentrating on a mechanised spearhead force and international operations.) However, readiness of the military is slowly allowed to decrease.
2014-2022: Finland can’t join the NATO, as Russians regularly hold large military drills near our border, with the stated training aim “ensuring the neutrality of a neutral near-abroad country”. The readiness of the military is increased markedly, and the whole training system of the Army revamped to improve immediate readiness. The amount of reserve training is increased by hundreds of percents.
2022-23: The immediate Russian military capability by the Finnish border drops to almost zero, while the majority of the Finnish population, including all major parties, understands the true aims of the Russian leadership. Finland joins the NATO.
It’s not that, after watching Russia invade Ukraine, the Finns felt less concerned that Russia might invade Finland.
It’s that, after watching Russia invade Ukraine and make fools of themselves, the Finns felt less confident that a Russian invasion would succeed quickly. Which in turn made the idea of seeking outside allies to help the Finns hold off a Russian attack entirely more plausible.
Indeed. There was some very serious discussion about joining the NATO in Autumn 2014. It seemed it might become an important topic in the General Election of 2015. At the same time, the Russian military held a number of very large surprise exercises on the other side of the border. President Sauli Niinistö gave the leaders of all parliamentary parties a private briefing urging them to drop the issue, after which the discussion about NATO membership stopped, and also the Russian military activity decreased.
The Russian defeats in Ukraine in Spring 2022 meant that for the time being, the Russians had no possibility of launching an attack with large forces. And Finnish strategic communications had made it very clear for some years that any cross-border excursion of lesser size would be repelled forcefully. (E.g. https://youtu.be/bTmWCbcYwb8?si=GOSNiO-iD-z4vqxA ) This opened a window of opportunity to become a NATO member.
The polling on joining NATO was warming up already on the eve of the war, no? Even if the actual moment it went far enough up that Marin dropped SDP’s opposition to joining NATO only after the war started…
The polling showed some increase in the public support for NATO membership, but it had been rather steady for decade with around 20-25 % for and 40-55 % against. In such atmosphere, most parties were not very adamant about NATO membership. Only the National Alliance was openly for it. It might have been possible to get a majority for the membership if the president and the government had decided to expend their whole political capital on it, but the issue would have been seen as an elite project. (This was seriously seen as something SDP’s Paavo Lipponen might have done, had he won the election in 2003. He didn’t. Mainly because of that perception.) Actually, this was something many professional military persons feared: breaking the popular support for the national defence, with consequent loss of the actual military capacity.
The SDP was somewhat divided on the issue. On the one hand, the most respected social democratic foreign policy expert, Erkki Tuomioja, was strongly against NATO membership, on ideological grounds stemming from anti-imperialism and peace movement of the 1970’s. (Think of a Finnish Joschka Fischer.) On the other hand, there was an even older line of patriotism and positive attitude towards national defence stemming from the wartime and post-war cooperation between SDP and the National Alliance in local politics around the country.
The Ukrainian War changed all this. Even Erkki Tuomioja took, after a lot of grumbling, a stance for NATO, simply to make sure that the nationally vital decision gets the unanimous support it needs. After all, if we are going to break our relations with Russia more or less permanently and take an official position as the vanguard of the West, then we need to do that with complete seriousness, not with internal bickering.
The Ukrainian being a puppet state wouldn’t necessarily imply that Sweden and Finland are… There are enough countries that joined NATO out of their own will that joining NATO isn’t necessarily an indicator that they are being puppetted. Not that I think that Ukrain is a puppet either.
Or to put it more briefly — a state can have both puppets and legitimate allies.
Given that the people making the argument consider all of NATO to be US vassals, (and thus collapsing “only NATO has agency” into “only the US has agency” because the other members don’t) I don’t think they’d see it that way.
They’re wrong, but it’s a mostly self-consistent worldview.
It’s symptomatic that Russia and its boosters are incapable of understanding the concept of “allies” – in their worldview, by necessity one is the master and the other the slave, because that’s the only way they’re capable of thinking.
I don’t think that’s what’s going on.
First, saying nasty things about the Ukrainian government is a purpose in itself.
Second, moving from a conceptual frame in which the average Ukrainian — the man on the
Clapham omnibusKiev trolleybus — is a voting citizen and patriot, who wants Ukraine to win and is willing to make sacrifices for that, into a conceptual frame in which he is a subject with no say, is politically disengaged, and doesn’t care how the war ends, only that it does. Naturally, this requires undermining the legitimacy of the Ukrainian government. (As a side treat, in the new frame the speaker is standing up for the oppressed victims of the regime.)Thirdly, you are not the target audience. The speaker knows they cannot, and need not, convince everyone. But, suppose that lots of people don’t instinctively see war as coercive negotiation, something that is occasionally rational to do, but as a manmade natural disaster. Just as a wildfire turns dry timber into smoke and property damage, a war turns weaponry into indiscriminate destruction and suffering. (Indiscriminate destruction. Just as one doesn’t track particular flames and embers, the sides are epiphenomena and can be ignored — looking at the ground level, there are no winners, there are only survivors and victims.) Thus while saying “for the love of all that is holy, stop shipping weapons into an active warzone, they will only kill more people” sounds like nonsense to you, it makes perfect sense to a lot of people, who may or may not be numerous enough to achieve the goal of the speaker.
To state the obvious, there’s also that theses speakers *do not believe that voting citizen exist at all*. They don’t really exist in Russia ; their system is entirely based on keeping the populace disinterested and impotent. They strongly project that to all other countries, leading to them behaving like if the citizen of other country were also just subjects that obediently follow orders.
A lot of why Russia is so comically inept in this war is that the people that take decision just don’t understand at all other countries, and act as if theses countries were all identical to Russia. That general error is common all over the world, but particularly proeminent here.
After 35 years of following the various wars of my lifetime, the one eternal truth seems to be the one expressed by the clever old bastardo, Niccolò Macchiavelli when he said: “Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.” It keeps on catching me by surprise, and it sure as hell keeps on catching the various war-starters by surprise.
Perhaps all Presidents, Prime Ministers etc should be obliged to have the phrase tattooed on their hands or something as part of taking office
This type of thinking is also extremely prevalent in the Middle East, with eg Israelis blaming Obama for the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 and Lebanese Hezbollah partisans blaming him for the existence of rebels in Syria. In both cases the US provided rhetorical support, and in the latter case material support, but these are local developments with primarily local causes. Let alone the way Israel is treated as a direct puppet of the US, rather than an independent actor doing things that often contradict US desires.
Your excellent tour d’horizon of Ukraine lacked one essential consideration. It is Ukraine’s war aims that are the sticking point. These are declared to be the re-occupation and re-incorporation of all territories lost since 1991. Since there is no way that any feasible Russian administration will accept the loss of Crimea, nor any feasible way that Ukraine can conquer it, the Ukrainians have only two options: (1) accept an unjust peace (2) fight an endless and unwinnable war.
My impression from talking to ukrainians is that it’s largely a maximalist point: They wouldn’t like it, but they’d be willing to trade Crimea for peace (or at least a situation where they continue to claim it but aren’t actually trying too contest it militarily), but that assumes Russia is willing to make the offer to return the other occupied territories, which they haven’t. (and that’s the, at this point, non-negotiable point)
I have yet to hear a Ukrainian prepared to settle for less than the maximalist position but maybe you are right and they will. If they do, when they do, they will find it will be largely a matter of whose boots are on which ground. Neither side can afford to be picky when it will be largely a peace of mutual exhaustion.
There is a chance NATO (even China) could step in with something more sensible but only if they are prepared to be unpopular with both Ukraine and Russia.
I think the Ukrainian government can’t officially (or even unofficially) accept the formal de jure loss of Crimea by conquest. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t agree to a ceasefire or an armistice where there would be an ongoing occupation of Crimea and the rest of Ukrainian territory would be returned to them. But no such offer is on the table or even any hint of that – Russia is not prepared to trade land for peace, so they’d only be negotiating with themselves when reducing how much land they are asking for.
I’m honestly not sure if they could accept a de jure cession of Crimea by a mechanism other than the Russian military conquest but it would need some creative diplomacy to come up with a suitable mechanism, and there’s no point talking about that before Russia is seriously coming to the table saying that they will return Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzia and Kherson Oblasts in their entireties, but they want to retain Crimea. Then Ukraine can respond that they can’t recognise a conquest by force and then Russia or the mediator can say “well, not by force, but how about…”. But until we get to that point, it’s not for Ukraine to start suggesting ways to take away its territory.
Just to suggest the sort of thing a creative diplomat might come up with – note that this is an example, rather than anything I’m specifically advocating:
The UN grants India a temporary mandate over Crimea on a temporary basis without ending any claims as to sovereignty. Ukraine (funded by the USA/NATO, but that’s not in the treaty) defrays India’s reasonable expenses in governing the territory. Crimeans are not subject to taxation during the mandate. Once India has stabilised Crimea, it will then conduct a referendum allowing the residents of Crimea to self-determine the sovereign status of the territory (ie choosing between Ukraine and Russia).
I’m suggesting India because they are a country that is close enough to Russia that they might be acceptable, but also they are a democracy and the Electoral Commission of India is a body that would be widely recognised as being able to conduct a free and fair election, so they’re one of a fairly small set of options that potentially could be acceptable to both Russia and Ukraine.
I largely agree with this general thrust. However, in practice, it is likely to be (since you mention India) something along the lines of the ‘peace’ between India and Pakistan and India and China.
> Once India has stabilised Crimea, it will then conduct a referendum
Firstly, I’m not aware of much instability in Crimea; the only fighting I’ve heard of is cross-border drone attacks, and perhaps some sabotage.
Secondly, a referendum held on occupied territory has no legitimacy. Why would Ukraine concede the result of such a referendum? That type of “peace” is what’s called a “frozen conflict”. If I were Ukraine, I’d assume that the attacks would begin again as soon as Russia had replenished its arms stocks.
Moreover, a referendum in Crimea would be coming a decade or more after Russia occupied the territory by force and started (1) moving in Russians and (2) expelling or brutalizing anyone who identified as Ukrainian. Ukraine has good reason to consider this kind of thing illegitimate.
It’s one thing (arguably bad, whatever) to say that if your ancestors conquered land ten generations ago and killed or expelled most of the inhabitants who disagreed with that action, they get to keep it and the survivors of the original inhabitants have no say in how the land is used or who gets to have it.
It’s quite another (assuredly much worse) to formalize the precedent that you can get to keep land if you remove the hostile original inhabitants really fast and just run out the clock within, oh, five to ten years.
Simon_Jester, but we still have to remember that Crimea was never that Ukrainian, people identifying as Ukrainian has only ever made up a little over a quarter of the population. Russians have far outnumbered them since 1850s.
Khrushchev should never have donated Crimea, it was a horrible mistake and we are only left with bad options. Maybe the most “right” option would be to create an independent Tatar nation, but I don’t see any chance of that happening.
Maybe Crimea could be traded for Ukraine’s NATO membership, but Russia couldn’t be trusted with the minority populations. If Ukraine manages to reacquire Crimea how will they deal with the majority population and huge lingering animosity.
I think that Ukrainian people might be more prepared to say this sort of thing than their government – anything that the Ukrainian government offers, formally or informally, will be banked as a concession by the Russians who will then demand more.
I suspect there is also the simple fact that Ukraine doesn’t want to create a precedent for de jure taking territory by force (de facto is different, of course). The legal rights for separatism come from self-determination, not from force, and there’s no reasonable way to recognise the “referendum” of 2014 as being free and fair.
Now, in a negotiation, if Ukraine says “we can’t accept seceding territory because it was taken by force”, then perhaps a creative diplomat working for whoever is the mediator could say “well, can we come up with a legitimate basis for this?”
What exactly that creative diplomat comes up with, I don’t know – one suggestion I have is to have a third country that would be trusted by both sides to take over Crimea on a UN mandate and then conduct the referendum. The only candidate I have for that third country is India and it’s not an especially good candidate.
Perhaps Turkey?
Japan doesn’t recognize the ownership of islands seized by the Soviet Union/Russia at the end of WWII. Japan signed a joint declaration with the Soviet Union with a providing for the end of the state of war and for the restoration of diplomatic relations between both countries, but the Soviet Union continues to occupy the disputed islands and there is no official peace treaty.
The thing about wars is that the unacceptable can be forced upon you once you’ve been beaten enough.
Bret covered that. Ukraine was invaded by Russia. The Ukrainian war aim is, uh, not to have been invaded. AFAIK Ukraine are not asking for a Treaty of Versailles inflicted on Russia, just not to have any Russian troops in their territory, for Russia to respect the agreement(s) Russia signed backed in the 1990s.
If I steal your car, then try to steal your computer and your furniture, it isn’t “maximalist” of you to demand the car back. Nor would you be unreasonable in not accepting my offer “well yes I stole your car but trust me, that’s all I’m going to steal.”
As for an endless and unwinnable war, that’s a problem for Russia too.
I don’t think “maximalist” is pejorative in this case, it’s just “The maximum goals I want to achieve” (to contrast with minimalism, “The minimum I am willing to settle for”) and of course there’s often some flexibility, and what actually happens in these cases depends on how things turn out in the field.
Everything you say is true but beside the point. If I have stolen your car, your computer and your furniture I have already demonstrated that I am both powerful and untrustworthy. You can spend the rest of your life trying to get it all back if you want but if you get the chance to have the car back, I’d settle for that if I were you. Remember which of us runs a criminal empire.
Except Ukraine has already taken back some of the stuff Russia has stolen, and is backed by some very powerful forces themselves.
If you steal my car, my computer, and my furniture, and my neighbors say “Know what, enough is enough, we’ll give you a hand”, it changes the equation quite dramatically. Criminal empires tend not to do very well when the people they prey upon decide they’re sick of it.
Honestly, if “Recognize the territorial boundaries you already agreed to” is the maximum Ukraine wants, we should be applauding their restraint. Most people would be calling for blood. If this were the USA we’d be trying to obliterate the nation that did this to us. The “maximal” goal Ukraine has expressed isn’t even justice, it’s remarkably merciful towards Russia–basically, if Russia stops trying to destroy Ukraine, Ukraine will stop killing Russians. (Which is very, very wise from a strategic perspective–that limited and perfectly moral stance is getting them the forces and finances necessary to continue this war.)
Further, you seem oddly comfortable with supporting what you yourself describe as “a criminal empire”. You seem very sympathetic towards the clear aggressor here.
I never adopt ‘moral’ positions. If one of the parties to a dispute is a criminal empire, it makes a difference to what works and what doesn’t work.
Yes, well. In this case, the ‘criminal empire’ (Russia) isn’t doing very well at all in the war.
The Russians are firmly on the defensive despite theoretically having much greater resources and population. Their government is inherently unstable, being a dictatorship ruled by a rather isolated octogenarian with no clear successor. Their own efforts to pad out their forces with mercenaries have created considerable problems and chaos within their own ranks- Prigozhin is dead but I can’t imagine Putin had a nice summer in light of Prigozhin’s actions.
It is entirely conceivable that all Ukraine has to do is wait until the Russian economy collapses sufficiently, until the Russian armies get tired of trench warfare and mutiny, until Putin dies of assassination or natural causes and the entire Russian state falls into chaos, or some combination of the above, and then they will be able to sweep in and take territories they could never have recaptured in the face of organized Russian opposition.
If you are powerful and untrustworthy I don’t want anything back. I want a bullet in your head. If you were powerful and trustworthy, I might think differently.
But precisely because you are untrustworthy, there is nothing you can offer me, or anyone else, but your death. That is the price of being untrustworthy.
I agree that a price has to be paid for being untrustworthy but that does not mean a bullet in the head is the correct response when responding to actions of untrustworthy parties. Though it could be!
In this case, the price of untrustworthiness (and an evident inclination to destabilize and invade neighbours) is that Russia will have to be militarily defeated. There’s no point in making a peace agreement with someone who is committed to destroying you.
“Though it could be!”
Indeed. Tell me why putting a bullet in your head would not be the correct response to the action you committed in your hypothetical example.
Personally I’m a big fan of holding out for unconditional surrender. By the aggressor that is. Anything else is just saving up trouble for the future
I’m not so sure about Russia’s ability to defend Crimea indefinitely. Even if the terrain is in their favour, the supply situation could get extremely strained if Ukraine were to achieve control of the rest of its territory. I don’t pretend to be an expert, but everything I’ve read about this war has stressed the importance of supply lines as central to both Russia’s early failures and Ukraine’s strategy in their counteroffensives.
If Ukraine takes everything but Crimea, Crimea’s supply situation becomes fairly untenable. I believe they’d be in HIMARS range of the ports, and definitely in range of the bridge.
History suggests that the Russians will betray any peace deal whatever if they hope they can get away with it. Therefore the only peace that will hold is one in which Ukraine is in NATO or has a functioning nuclear deterrent.
It might be wise to start thinking about which of these you prefer.
The most recent NATO meeting makes it quite clear that NATO is not willing to admit Ukraine while it is at war with Russia. Which means that Russia can keep Ukraine out of NATO by simply continuing the war.
Even in an extreme scenario where Ukraine took back all of its territory to the 1991 borders including Crimea, in theory Putin or whoever was in charge of Russia at that point could just keep firing missiles into Ukraine while rebuilding their army on their own territory until they were ready to attack again, unless you think that Ukraine could either succeed in conquering Russia where Napoleon and Hitler failed, or succeed in stopping missile fire from a territory without invading it when countries in vastly better military positions (Israel and Gaza, the US and Iraq during the First Gulf War) have failed.
A functioning nuclear deterrent, absent an end to the fighting even temporarily, has similar problems that become apparent with a moment of thought.
The objection that Russia could break a ceasefire and attack again applies to any scenario that doesn’t involve some sort of foreign troops marching on Moscow. Even going back to 1991 borders wouldn’t change that.
> quite clear that NATO is not willing to admit Ukraine while it is at war with Russia
I believe the customary NATO rule is that a country that doesn’t control its own borders cannot join (because NATO is a mutual defence alliance, so all NATO countries would immediately find themselves at war with Russia).
I’m not personally convinced by the “mutual defence” schtick, and NATO is plainly more than an alliance – it’s a political organisation.
> conquering Russia where Napoleon and Hitler failed
Napoleon and Hitler both tried to take Moscow. Both had weak lines of supply, and both underestimated the challenges of a Russian winter for troops that were largely on foot.
Ukraine has no ambition to seize Moscow. Ukraine is operating on interior lines; Russia is operating on exterior lines. Neither Hitler nor Napoleon had that advantage.
Of course, Ukraine is dependent on external supplies; it has no tank factories or aircraft factories. But Ukraine’s (stated) goals are restricted to liberating its own territory.
If NATO won’t let Ukraine in while it is at war with Russia, and Ukraine has no intention to seize Moscow, then Ukraine cannot enter NATO without Russia’s consent. Unless, again, you think that Ukraine can stop missile fire from a territory without invading it when IE Israel has failed to do this with Gaza despite overwhelming conventional military superiority and (with the help of Egypt) effectively surrounding it on all sides.
The rocket fire from Gaza isn’t why Israel isn’t in NATO, though. It’s treated as low-intensity warfare, or terrorism, just by different means from the more traditional shootings and bombings of the Intifada (or, more relevantly to NATO, far left terrorism in 1970s-80s Europe).
“The most recent NATO meeting makes it quite clear that NATO is not willing to admit Ukraine while it is at war with Russia.”
Well, then the war will continue indefinitely, won’t it?
Or until Ukraine has its own nukes. Or until NATO changes its mind.
History suggests that all peace deals are betrayed if one or other parties to it hope they can get away with it. Membership of NATO and functioning nuclear deterrents are, I agree, devices that would tend to lessen the chances of a betrayal by one of the parties in this case. However it raises the stakes if they do so they are not necessarily the way ahead.
There will be no meaningful peace without one or the other. Only a pause before Russias next stroke of treachery.
Or Ukraine’s. They have not been simon pure in all this. Admittedly about a 2 on a scale of nought to Russia.
I can just see you blaming the Poles for the Second World War. After all “they have not been Simon pure in all this”.
Yes, I would apportion some blame to Poland. Partly because of their attitude to Teschen in the formation of the Little Entente, partly because of their alliance with Hitler in 1934 and partly because they joined Germany in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938-9.
Poland did not ally Hitler’s Germany in 1934 nor cooperated with him against Czechs in 1938.
These claims are really tiresome tropes.
“It is Ukraine’s war aims that are the sticking point”
This sentence implies that it is ONLY Ukraine’s war aims that are the sticking point. The whole point of Bret’s post is that *all belligerents get a vote*. Russia’s war aim to keep Crimea (and also Kherson, Zaporizhnia, Donetsk, and Luhansk) are also sticking points.
It’s also a bit odd to me that anyone would suggest that a country’s goal to preserve its internationally recognized borders is somehow an unreasonable war aim. If Mexico invaded the United States on the grounds that Texas used to be a part of Mexico, I don’t think anyone would be saying ‘let them have it to make peace’, except maybe the Mexicans. (obviously the military forces at play here are different than between Russia and Ukraine, but regardless I hope it’s obvious how absurd the idea is that the US insisting on the return of its internationally recognized territory is somehow an excessive demand).
I am not saying Ukraine’s war aims are either unreasonable or excessive. I’m saying they are unattainable. It’s a technical question, not a moral one.
That’s clearly wrong tho ; the question is not if Ukraine is able to take Crimea, it’s if they will want to (because of the numerous other costs, first among them in term of casualties, but also in term of war length).
Which circle back to how it’s the Ukrainian decision, not ours.
I agree it’s entirely their decision. Though of course also Russia’s. I am merely stating my opinion as to the wisdom of Ukraine doing so. Even if they manage it, do they really want more people who don’t want to live in Ukraine? But, as you say, that’s their decision too.
I don’t know. A year and a half ago, back in February 2022, lots of people were saying that Ukraine’s extremely minimal war aim of “continue to exist as an unoccupied independent state for more than a couple of weeks” was unattainable.
It turned out that the Ukrainians can attain rather more than some thought possible. And that the Russians seem less able to attain than many of their devotees had believed.
And lots of other people were saying that Western sanctions were going to destroy the Russian economy so utterly that the Russian people would rise up against their oppressor, Putin, overthrow him, and force an end to the war. But that didn’t happen, either.
I was as surprised as everyone else.(including I would think, the Ukrainians). Those heady days are over and we are in a ‘Ukraine grinds it out better than the Russians’ situation. But Russia can grind it out for longer.
Mick, I’d really appreciate some details on *why* you think Russia can “grind it out” for longer. You seem very confident that it is not only unlikely but impossible for Ukraine to reconquer all its territory, much more confident than a lot of people here, and it would be very interesting to know the evidence you’re drawing on and how it’s leading you to this conclusion.
The short answer is that everyone here favours Ukraine and what people favour they tend to predict will happen. I favour Ukraine too but I prefer to make predictions on the basis of past behaviour. Great Powers grind it out more than non-Great Powers.
Mick, I’d really appreciate some details on *why* you think Russia can “grind it out” for longer. You seem very confident that it is not only unlikely but impossible for Ukraine to reconquer all its territory, much more confident than a lot of people here, and it would be very interesting to know the evidence you’re drawing on and how it’s leading you to this conclusion.
I can’t speak for Mick, but Russia’s got a population of 147 million, as opposed to Ukraine’s 37 million. Of course, having a larger population isn’t everything, but it does help quite a bit.
“I prefer to make predictions on the basis of past behaviour. Great Powers grind it out more than non-Great Powers.”
Thank you – that’s a good answer, but I’m not sure the evidence supports it.
Looking at recent history, a Great Power, engaged in a protracted war of occupation on the territory of a non-Great Power, has more often lost than won – even in cases where the population imbalance is far bigger than with Russia and Ukraine, and even in cases when the occupied country hasn’t had much in the way of support from overseas. France didn’t grind it out in Indochina or Algeria, Britain didn’t grind it out in Kenya, the US didn’t grind it out in Afghanistan or Vietnam, the USSR didn’t grind it out in Afghanistan. And in all those cases the occupier started off at least in nominal control of the entire country, including all its population centres, and the occupied population had considerably fewer military resources.
(And that’s leaving aside the question, raised elsewhere on this blog, about what a Great Power is, whether it’s a meaningful term, and whether Russia is one any more.)
I make no predictions about who will grind it out longer in this case, much less who will be judged in the end to have won or lost. Only that Ukraine (and NATO for that matter) should bank on a long war if it is determined to keep fighting until the last piece of pre-1991 Ukrainian territory is re-occupied. And even then they will have a neurotically vengeful Great Power indefinitely on their doorstep. I’d quite like to explore alternatives.
They will have a neurotically vengeful Great Power indefinitely on their doorstep regardless of what they do. They should leave any delusion that Russia will stop being neurotically vengeful regardless. Russia wants revenge on the entire world for not being subjugated to Russia.
“I make no predictions about who will grind it out longer in this case”
Sorry, but yes, you do, Mick. You predicted that “Russia can grind it out longer” – that’s a direct quote from your comment above – and that Ukraine’s war aims are “unattainable”.
I assume Russia can grind it out longer but I cannot say for sure they will on this occasion. I stand by my prediction that Ukraine’s war aims are unattainable but I cannot say for sure they will be on this occasion. Best I can do, I’m afraid.
“Great Powers grind it out more than non-Great Powers.”
that worked out great for America (and France, and China) in Vietnam, didn’t it?
Always be chary of grand statements with a single example.
They will have a neurotically vengeful Great Power indefinitely on their doorstep regardless of what they do. They should leave any delusion that Russia will stop being neurotically vengeful regardless. Russia wants revenge on the entire world for not being subjugated to Russia.
Russia has been complaining about NATO expansion since the ’90s, and has been especially twitchy about the possibility of Ukraine joining. When it seemed that there was a serious possibility of Ukraine joining, Russia launched a war, with one of its main stated aims being to prevent this from happening. Ockham’s razor therefore suggests that Russia is fighting to stop Ukraine joining NATO, not out of some kind of neurotic desire to exact revenge on the entire world.
Russia has got used to being cheek-by-jowl with NATO since 1949. They know perfectly well they have nothing to fear from it. NATO-baiting is a useful red herring.
False dilemma. It’s obvious that its motive in thus objecting is neurotic.
Russia has been complaining about NATO expansion since the ’90s, and has been especially twitchy about the possibility of Ukraine joining. When it seemed that there was a serious possibility of Ukraine joining, Russia launched a war, with one of its main stated aims being to prevent this from happening. Ockham’s razor therefore suggests that Russia is fighting to stop Ukraine joining NATO, not out of some kind of neurotic desire to exact revenge on the entire world.
Not that nonsense again!
Putin has been quite clear about his belief of Ukraine being ‘a fake nation created by Lenin’; that NATO-blaming is mostly propaganda aimed at foreigners. Besides in the 90’s the Russians complained more about NATO intervening in the Yugoslav Wars rather than NATO expansion eastwards.
Also, if Putin had been so scared of NATO, he would not have dared to start this war in the first place.
Finally, if he had been so worried about Ukraine joining NATO he would have simply continued his previous strategy of supporting ‘separatists’ in Ukraine as part of a ‘frozen conflict’. He had done that in Georgia and it worked perfectly; why would the likes of Germany allow a country in the middle of a territorial conflict inside NATO?
Putin has been quite clear about his belief of Ukraine being ‘a fake nation created by Lenin’; that NATO-blaming is mostly propaganda aimed at foreigners. Besides in the 90’s the Russians complained more about NATO intervening in the Yugoslav Wars rather than NATO expansion eastwards.
Russian diplomats have been complaining about NATO expansion since the first round, and various Western pundits have been predicting trouble as a result for the same amount of time. And notwistanding the borderline-racist rhetoric being thrown around nowadays, Russia historically has not been notably more imperialist than was the norm for great powers. Maybe Putin has some additinal personal animus against the idea of Ukrainian nationhood, but even if that’s true, it still falls well short of “Russia wants revenge on the entire world for not being subjugated to Russia”.
Also, if Putin had been so scared of NATO, he would not have dared to start this war in the first place.
Unless he were scared of NATO getting more powerful/close/threatening in the future, in which case it would make sense to start the war before that happened.
Finally, if he had been so worried about Ukraine joining NATO he would have simply continued his previous strategy of supporting ‘separatists’ in Ukraine as part of a ‘frozen conflict’. He had done that in Georgia and it worked perfectly; why would the likes of Germany allow a country in the middle of a territorial conflict inside NATO?
Maybe he was worried that the separatists wouldn’t be able to hold out without overt Russian support.
If everyone acted as much on their fears as you claim Russia has a right to, the world would be endlessly at war.
Unless he were scared of NATO getting more powerful/close/threatening in the future, in which case it would make sense to start the war before that happened.
Then why did Putin seize Crimea?
Before he did that most Ukrainians wanted nothing to do with NATO. Then in 2014 Putin removed the most pro-Russian parts of Ukraine from the country and alienated the other pro-Russian parts of the country by stealing their land and supporting separatists (who quickly became ‘separatists’)…
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations#Popular_opinion_in_Ukraine
That should suffice to disprove the claim that Putin’s policy towards Ukraine was based on fears of NATO expansion instead of, say, domestic politics concerns.
That is unless you will know claim that Putin was a complete idiot who did not have the faintest idea what he was doing…
This complete idiot thing might bear investigation. A very clever complete idiot, but still a complete idiot.
> nor any feasible way that Ukraine can conquer it
Actually, it seems to me that Russia has only one feasible way to hold Crimea: it must hold the landbridge. The Kerch Strait Bridge is highly vulnerable to a couple of well-aimed missiles, and Russia can’t supply both the population and the invasion force by sea through Sevastopol.
Ukraine is 50 miles from Melitopol and the coast; but they’re only 10 miles shy of being able to shell the coast road.
I think Donbas looks much harder to (a) reconquer, and (b) hold long-term.
We tend to forget that Russia has vast untapped military resources (Ukraine does not). Crimea is important to Russia, the Donets isn’t. In my opinion Russia can hold Crimea till the cows come home if she really wants to, and it appears she really wants to.
Let’s not forget the examples of the Crimea War (once) and the Second World War (twice) about the difficulties of conquering it from outside.
We tend to forget that *because it’s false*.
Russia do not have vast untapped military resources. If they had, they would not sacrifice elite VDV units to hold doomed lines or try to buy ammunition in North Korea.
The illusion that Russia is a superpower and Ukraine cannot win against it is an illusion, mostly propped by propaganda. Factually, Russia cannot resist Ukraine in Crimea if Ukraine decide they want to get it back.
Russia has been demonstrating for several hundred years that it is an incompetent military power but one that can throw everything in — especially people and their living standards — if it has to. I do not know what it is prepared to do to keep Crimea but it is certainly more than Ukraine can.
Just because we in the west are rooting against them should not lead us into illusory assumptions about what Russia can do. So far it has managed reasonably well without breaking much of a sweat. Losing? Russia is inured to losing, The trick is to make peace while it still is.
Russia has demonstrated what they are capable and willing to do in an existential war, but the indications of what they are willing to endure for a war that is merely a nuisance for most Russian citizens aren’t nearly as promising. For example the tank production numbers at Uralvagonzavod seem pretty pathetic currently. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ukraine surpasses them in the future.
Russia has been demonstrating for a couple hundred years that it can resist outside invasion when it has great power allies like the United Kingdom or (in WW2) the United States. Right now it has, what exactly – India buying its oil and gas at a steep discount? China offering thoughts and prayers?
Ukraine has not yet been able to push the russians out of the annexed oblasts even. Launching offensives into prepared enemy positions is hard, after all.
“Russia has been demonstrating for a couple hundred years that it can resist outside invasion when it has great power allies like the United Kingdom or (in WW2) the United States. ”
Well, it can sometimes. But Russia had great power allies in 1918 and that didn’t stop the German army moving into the whole of their western empire at practically jogging speed (no army in history had ever advanced as fast into hostile territory as Germany in 1918, no army ever would again until Desert Storm), and dragging them to the table to sign it all away at Brest-Litovsk. The collapse and utter defeat of the Russian Empire in 1918 tends to get forgotten about, because of course it didn’t stick; Russia, or the USSR as it shortly became, was saved by German defeat in the West later the same year. But it did happen. Even before the West saved Soviet Communism directly in 1921-22, with colossal amounts of food aid, it had saved it indirectly (and unintentionally) in 1918.
“Kick in the door and the whole rotten edifice will come crashing down” wasn’t just Nazi self-delusion, you see. It was based on very recent experience of how a German army would do against a Communist Russian army, i.e. very well indeed.
The Crimean War was ill-conceived, with vague objectives. The WWII attacks on Crimea were *by sea*, and not properly supported by the Navy. They were also intended as diversions, and were resourced accordingly.
In the Ukraine case, any attack would be from the land, and presumably preceded by encirclement to prevent reinforcement.
We should try to learn from history, but not by that sort of crude comparison.
I do apologise, Jack, just trying to be helpful. I don’t recall any ‘sea’ attacks in WW2 with or without navies — which neither side had much of, much like today really. Though there were assaults over various bodies of water, much like today really. The participants in the siege of Sevastopol will be disappointed to hear they were a diversion.
But I look forward to these encirclement battles of yours. They are hard to envisage in Crimean circumstances and considering the size of the two armies, but I’ll take your word for them.
“We tend to forget that Russia has vast untapped military resources”
They are a lot less vast than they were eighteen months ago. In the meantime, I imagine the strength of the Ukrainian Air Force is going to double or triple over the course of the next year or so, quite apart from whatever other weaponry arrives from points west.
“We tend to forget that Russia has vast untapped military resources (Ukraine does not).”
Citation needed. What form do they take, these vast untapped military resources? Are they, to quote a meme, in the room with us now?
Are they huge fleets of modern AFVs, with trained crews, in running order, so far uncommitted? Where are they, and how do you know? Can you name bases? Show me satellite pictures of their tank parks?
Are there major Russian formations (Combined Arms Armies) that have so far not taken part in the war? What are their designations?
“there is no way that any feasible Russian administration will accept the loss of Crimea”
But this is just provably false. You’re effectively claiming that Boris Yeltsin is not a feasible Russian president. But he was; I remember him. I was there.
Russian administrations from 1991 to 2014 accepted Crimea as Ukrainian. They signed several international treaties acknowledging it. Countries, even very nasty dictatorships, often accept the loss of territory that they no longer control and have no realistic hope of recovering.
Russia was in no position to do anything else at that time. It was not so much a fait accompli as a ‘never thought about’. This is not the situation now. The legalism of it all is, as I am sure you are aware, equally irrelevant.
“Russia was in no position to do anything else at that time.”
That is exactly what I said! Countries, even very nasty dictatorships, often accept the loss of territory that they no longer control and have no realistic hope of recovering.
“This is not the situation now.”
No, but in the near future it may well be, and we’re talking about the future here.
“Poland&other NATO-East”
Crucial thing is that these countries have plenty of different options for inclicting pain on Russia, that could use, but not using in order to stay in line with more general “WEST” consensus.
For example, there is still significant trade going out/in Russia using Petersburg Baltic port. Blocking it would be trivial for NATO Baltic countries.
The carthaginian political terminology being (for obvious reasons) so close to jewish terminology is something I always intellectually know but still always surprises me.
As a point of reception: in Israel, schoolchildren are taught that the Carthaginians were Phoenicians and their language was similar to Hebrew, but that’s it – the ancient Mediterranean after Alexander is taught from a Roman point of view, and there’s little attempt to build up Carthage as a recognizable culture to the Israeli reader.
it obviously makes sense (early jewish identity is to a pretty great extent built in contrast to their other caananite and phoenician neighbours) but it’s also clearly a case of a division of institutions that were at one point fairly similar.
There is also the point that the Jewish history had one of its turning points in the nation having a king (melek) over them. A passage in the Book of Samuel casts this as a sign of weak faith: instead of relying on a God-chosen judge, a shofet, and the leadership of God, the Israelites want a king like the peoples around them.
So, noting that the Phoenicians retained the rule by judges is sort of an embarrasment.
The thing is, there’s no way for the Russian to hold on Crimea without Ukraine’s approval either. Crimea depend on water from the Ukrainian mainland, and the bridge is too exposed for non-water need.
So, if Ukraine win back the Donbass and the war continue, Crimea will fall. Perhaps in an absolutely horrific siege with people dying of thirst and hunger, but it will fall. The Ukrainian probably cannot assault it (albeit assaulting and taking Crimea have been done at least twice for significantly less casualty than its natural fortress position would make one think), but they can take it once everyone have evacuated cause they cannot keep staying here anymore.
More likely, and probably the Ukrainian plan, if they win back the Donbass and all, they suddenly have an actual negociation tool with Russia for concessions and stuff. Keep the Crimea and get some water with it, but give us that and that.
Actually it’s not so much the Crimea bridge as the Crimea canal. Without that Crimea is hard to do anything with. It was the first thing Russia captured and the first thing Ukraine recaptured. That’s how important it is.
It is what gives me hope of a lasting peace. Since it will be in Ukrainian hands when the ceasefire comes, Russia will have to behave at least tolerably well or the water will get cut off again, as it was in 2012. In some ways it is safer for Ukraine if Crimea stays in Russian hands!
It was in Ukrainian hands when this war started. Did that cause Russia to behave “tolerably well”?
I believe you mean “Russian hands”.
The water supply to the Crimea canal was in Ukrainian hands when the war started.
In my view the Canal being in Ukrainian hands is what started this war. Crimea was untenable without it and Russia could see no way to get the taps turned back on short of conquering it. However, events that transpired when they did, will — I am confident — cause the Russians to behave tolerably well it there is a return to the status quo ante.
Having gone to this much effort to seize Crimea, it’s unlikely they will give it up, which means they will be back in an untenable position
Unless Russia does a deal with Ukraine to keep the water flowing. They have just discovered the price if they don’t. Russia cab be terribly pragmatic when it pays her to be so.
It’s not terribly pragmatic to try to make a deal with someone whom you’ve just broken a deal with. At terrible cost to that person.
On the contrary, that is the definition of pragmatism. If you’ve been hurt by someone but that someone has also suffered in the process then they are less likely to do so in the future.
Nah, that’s a person who will break the deal again as soon as he thinks he can get away with it and who has delusions about costs.
But the canal was in Ukrainian hands for decades, and is inside the Ukrainian borders Russia agreed upon in 1991. This could not “cause” a war until and unless Russia decided to conquer Crimea, and only then realized that its conquest was of little value without a canal it had neglected to conquer along with Crimea, so that Russia decided it had better conquer the canal (and the rest of the Ukrainian state) too.
In which case the only way it makes sense to say “the canal being in Ukrainian hands started the war” is if the underlying assumption is that the Ukrainians having anything whatsoever is grounds for war, because it’s all rightful Russian property that the Ukrainians are illegally squatting on, and how dare they not hand it all over to Russia without a fight.
I agree entirely with your first paragraph. The second one contains too much moral posturing for me to comment on.
Mick, you have a strange tendency I’m noticing. Whenever someone points out that basic notions such as ’cause and effect’ do not support your framing of events, you dismiss it as ‘moral posturing.’ You yourself use phrases like ‘behave tolerably well’ and imply phrases like ‘Russia had no choice but to…’ and do not call them moral posturing. I sense a double standard here.
If the underlying problem is that the Russians want everything and cannot have it without taking the canal, it is simply misleading to say “the problem started with the fact that the canal is in Ukrainian hands.” Unless, of course, we simply accept as an axiom that Russia has a right to everything and Ukraine has no right to anything. You claim you don’t engage in moral posturing, but to accept such an axiom is to try and take a moral posture… on behalf of the Russians.
It’s bad posture, but it’s still posture.
You seem very ‘realpolitik’ right up until being ‘realpolitik’ means admitting that the Russians have aggressive and nearly unlimited war aims here that cannot feasibly be satisfied by appeasement.
Simon: Phrases like ‘behave tolerably well’ and ‘Russia had no choice but to…’ are ordinary descriptive phrases and do not involve moral posturing, either by me or the parties involved. You can agree with them or not, as you wish. I criticise others for moral posturing, which again you can agree with or not.
I have at no time said anyone has a right to anything. It is not something I do because it involves a degree of moral posturing. I merely postulated that the war started because Russia found Crimea untenable without the Crimea Canal and could see no way of re-opening it without capturing it. The rest follows. However, this is strictly my interpretation of the way foreign policy goals can escalate in aggressive but aggrieved Great Powers. That is not a moral judgement on Russia but my technical analysis of Russia.
I like to think I use ‘realpolitik’ at all times. I know of no Great Power with ‘nearly unlimited war aims’. All Great Powers are sometimes satisfied by appeasement, sometimes not. In my view Russia will be appeased, minimally, by retaining Crimea. Anything else will have to await developments on both the battlefield and the wider diplomatic front. Glad to have cleared that up!
“ordinary descriptive phrases” and “moral posturing” are not antitheses. You can not defend yourself against a charge of the latter by the former.
the water is important for agriculture, but remember agriculture is economically marginal under modern economic conditions.
the thing about Crimea is that it’s a position from which Russia can dominate the Black Sea sea lanes, and from that position the Ukrainians find their future economic position to be insecure
You omit the possibility that loss of Crimea is something that Russia would actually cross the nuclear threshold to avert.
Its possible. But from the point of view of Vladimir Putin, it makes a lot more sense to risk a nuclear war over Moscow than Crimea.
Or the possibility that acceptance of Russian conquest might make Russia figure that NATO isn’t really prepared to defend non-nuclear allies and therefore it can first-strike countries with impunity. (If you think that’s ridiculous, be aware that the Soviet invasion plan in the 1970s, Seven Days to the River Rhine, included a first strategic strike on Denmark on this theory.)
That was the most cartoonish propaganda rant about Ukraine that I’ve seen in a while. Things must not be going so well on the ground for Bret to be this wild.
Russia’s goals must be “maximalist”. Why? Because Bret “struggles to imagine” Russia not demanding Kherson or Zaporizhzhia. Such fine reasoning!
Or it might happen like this: Russia… doesn’t demand Kherson or Zaporizhzhia. Just as Russia didn’t in April 2022. Before Boris Johnson directly intervened to sabotage peace talks between Zelensky and Putin. According to Naftali Bennett.
Anyway, I guess we see now why it was such a terrible idea for the US to support the coup which overthrew the democratically-elected government of Ukraine in 2014. Lesson learned? Sadly, we all know US foreign policy too well to believe that.
I suspect I am just “feeding the trolls’ by responding to this because you seem to have your mind made up (or are paid by the Kremlin to write this) but I think our host did explain it pretty well.
To restate though, the reasoning was this:
-Russia explicitly went through the show of legally adding the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts to Russia. It did not have to do this. It could have just held onto the territory it captured in these Oblasts (or incorporated it into another Oblast, or anything else) Adding these Oblasts was a deliberate move
-Russia does not hold the largest cities in these oblasts, which they are named after. As a result, it would be very hard, even in propaganda-filled Russia, to plausibly pretend that Russia controls these Oblasts
-The take home from the two above points is that Russia has deliberately closed the door to a face-saving concession. It cannot make peace with the territory it has now while plausibly claiming it controls the oblasts it has incorporated into its state. As a result, it would be very tricky for it to make peace and still claim, internally, to have succeeded in the war
Is it possible for Russia to make peace with what it has and tell its people that it controls Kherson Oblast, or twist it in some other way to act like everything succeeded? Sure, there might be a way. But I think our host’s reasoning makes sense.
There’s an argument that the purpose of annexing those oblasts to Russia proper was to be able to say that technically the war was on Russian soil, therefore any kind of soldier can be deployed there indefinitely. Any constraints they pose on negotiation may be incidental — they could always be reorganized into, say, three oblasts, requiring new names and new boundaries to be drawn, and oh would you look at that, they coincidentally match the border agreed in the peace talks. (As I understand it, oblasts are not like US states but more like postcodes. They were created for administrative convenience, and thus can equally be changed or abolished if that is what administrative convenience now calls for.)
The Russian state can choose to do this, but doing so would involve admitting a loss of claimed territory.
Putin’s not going to accept such a loss to his prestige without a very good reason, and until he either accepts that the war is truly unwinnable, or dies, it’s unlikely that he’ll find a good enough reason. If he were capable of making such concessions about land that doesn’t belong to him, he’d never have started this war in the first place.
What makes Naftali Bennett a credible source on this? He’s not an especially honest politician. His policy as prime minister was to avoid giving any aid to Ukraine even when Ukraine specifically requested Israeli tech; among the United States’ first-world allies, Israel has been the worst re giving aid to Ukraine, except maybe Hungary if you count it as an ally (which I don’t).
Netanyahu’s policy on Ukraine aid isn’t that much different, he has avoided directly giving lethal aid or advanced tech (though he has apparently volunteered to do some middleman things IE selling old Merkava tanks to countries to replace their own tanks that will be given to the US and presumably sent to Ukraine).
Both Israeli Prime Ministers have this policy because they have made deals with Russia where, among other things, Russian military forces in Syria will regularly turn off their air defenses and allow the Israeli Air Force to bomb Syrian territory, which is something that successive Israeli governments really want to do for some reason. And they don’t want to risk these arrangements by upsetting Moscow too much.
This balancing act is a large part of the reason why Naftali Bennet became a mediator between Russia and Ukraine in the first place. It isn’t evidence for or against his honesty.
I don’t think anyone should just blindly trust a man like Naftali Bennett. But in this case I see no reason why he would lie. As prime minister, he would likely be privy to high-level meetings between the main players, and Israel’s policy of not antagonizing either side puts it in a natural position to mediate between the two sides.
Usually when politicians deceive it is to benefit either themselves or their government. What would Bennett or his government stand to gain from making up a story about NATO sabotaging peace talks? That would ruin any credibility Israel has a mediator here, completely wreck its foreign policy goal of balancing the two sides, and greatly anger the US, Israel’s single most critical diplomatic relation.
1. Bennett is hardly the only prime minister to piss off the United States. Netanyahu almost singlehandedly turned Israel from a consensus issue in American politics to a partisan one, through his constant poking of Obama in the eye. Both Bennett and Netanyahu have clearly angered NATO by refusing to send weapons to Ukraine (and, years ago, abstaining in US-backed UN votes condemning Russian aggression) and don’t seem to mind. Neither runs as the pro-American guy in politics; the person who does, Yair Lapid, is the most pro-Ukraine papabile in Israel right now.
2. Within Israel, casual lying in foreign affairs is normalized. Yitzhak Shamir: “in the name of the Land of Israel, it’s fine to lie” – and Shamir had a reputation for honesty by Israeli standards.
3. Israel conceives of peace talks differently from NATO, because in Israel’s case, peace talks are extremely asymmetric, between occupier and occupied, and the superpower in the room sides with the occupier. This means that what Bennett thinks of as peace talks and what actual peace talks are are two different things, to the point that he might even have made an honest mistake instead of casually lying.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your statements. And they don’t contradict what I am saying.
Netanyahu, Bennett, and other Israeli prime ministers have done things to anger the US before, but when they did this it is for some gain: expansion of settlements, trying to sabotage the Iran deal, or something else.
And when Shamir says “in the name of the Land of Israel,” I assume he is implicitly saying that it is okay to lie when the lying serves the interests of Israel. I don’t think he is saying that it’s okay to just go around lying randomly to cause confusion or for no greater purpose (correct me if the Hebrew means something different).
Yes, it is possible that Bennett’s recounting of the negotiations is biased. Given his role as mediator, he could be exaggerating his success in arranging talks, or how close they are to reaching an agreement. But a few things are unequivocal from his story, unless he’s literally concocting the whole thing out of thin air.
1) There were talks going on. Bennett was traveling to and from Moscow to speak with Putin. He made calls to Zelensky around the same time. The fact that Putin and Zelensky were talking indicates that both were willing to engage in negotiations.
2) Bennett states specific concessions each side was willing to give (Russia will not demand a change of government in Ukraine nor disarmament, Ukraine agrees not to pursue joining NATO).
3) Bennett states that NATO blocked the talks.
However distorted Israeli views on peace talks may be, I don’t think any of these concrete claims can emerge from only exaggeration or faulty memory. “Zelensky and Putin couldn’t reach an agreement after many rounds” doesn’t just transform gradually into “NATO blocked the talks”. It would take outright deliberate lying to come up with these statements if they were not true, and doing that brings no benefit to Bennett or Israeli interests as he perceives them.
Bennett wasn’t prime minister long enough for us to see a pattern, but Netanyahu pokes the US in the eyes just for the sake of it. He has the same relationship to the US that Shas has to Israel: create problems hoping you can get something in exchange for stopping them.
What you are saying supports what I am saying: Netanyahu provokes the US because he hopes to score some gain.
Yeah, but the gain is pretty random, it’s not something you can predict from some kind of realist theory of interests. That’s why I talk not just about lying but about casual lying.
Making new facts on the ground to create future leverage is a common tactic and not that random. But in any case, this is not applicable to the situation with Bennett. Making up a false story comes at great cost and offers no benefit at all.
Pray tell, how exactly did Johnson sabotage the peace talks between Zelenskyy and Putin?
Tell me, DanGer:
Would it make you happy or sad if Russia ended this war without control of the Kherson Oblast and the Zaporizhzhia Oblast? Are you comfortable with Russia conceding that it does not own those territories and never had any right to them?
Because the Russian government appears not to be comfortable with making such a concession, and has artificially increased the amount of internal prestige it will lose if it makes the concession.
Do you believe that Vladimir Putin is fundamentally a gentle soul, who finds it easy to give up things he has said belong to him? Do you think that the dominant political figures in Russia below Putin’s level are comfortable with doing such a thing, and would respect Putin if he did so?
Anyway, I guess we see now why it was such a terrible idea for the US to support the coup which overthrew the democratically-elected government of Ukraine in 2014. Lesson learned? Sadly, we all know US foreign policy too well to believe that.
Not that nonsense again!
There is no evidence at all that the CIA had supported Euromaiden.
That should settle it.
Or do you believe that the same organisation which constantly failed to assassinate Castro and sponsored failed coup after failed coup against Saddam Hussein is so hyper-competent they do not leave any evidence?
There may come a point when the West has to push and prod Ukraine to negotiations, but that point _clearly_ isn’t now. The situation will only arise once Ukraine has more or less won already (because Russia will never negotiate in good faith until they’re facing obvious defeat) and it’s just the end-state that’s up for discussion.
For instance, the West has little interest in Ukraine securing the post-2014 areas of Crimea and Donbas, and could very well try to use a mix of carrot and stick (threat of withheld arms deliveries) to trade away Crimea and 2014-Donbas for a NATO membership and an accelerated path into the EU. Honestly, regaining areas that don’t even want to be part of Ukraine might be a poison pill for Ukraine – there would be endless separatism and pro-Russian movements in the Donbas.
This situation clearly hasn’t arisen yet and probably won’t even in 2024 at the current pace, but any serious observer will note that Ukraine and the West have somewhat different objectives once the endgame is reached. Keep your eyes open for when arms deliveries start to become lessened in order to limit Ukrainian ambitions for the peace (again, this absolutely shouldn’t happen _yet_ while our objectives are strongly aligned).
> Honestly, regaining areas that don’t even want to be part of Ukraine might be a poison pill for Ukraine
Which parts of Ukraine don’t want to be part of Ukraine? I seriously doubt that the inhabitants of Donbas want to be ruled by people that have flattened their cities and kidnapped their children. Referendums held under occupation conditions don’t convince me otherwise.
A lot of rich Russians have holiday homes on the Black Sea coast of Crimea; Putin apparently has a palace there. But they hardly constitute a democratic majority.j
Gallup survey found that “83% of Crimeans felt that the results of the March 16 [2014] referendum on Crimea’s status likely reflected the views of most people there” https://www.usagm.gov/2014/06/03/ukraine-political-attitudes-split-crimeans-turning-to-russian-sources-for-news/
Do you have any data proving that they want to be part of Ukraine? Ideally more recent than the 1991 referendum
There is the data that all surveys in Crimea since 2014 have been carried out in Russian controlled territory. There is no source of information that I would value less.
This was done by Gallup, I think they called them on the phone, so that’s as good as it can be given the circumstances.
Anyway, do you have any data proving that they want to be part of Ukraine?
“This was done by Gallup, I think they called them on the phone, so that’s as good as it can be given the circumstances.”
*ring*
*ring*
*ring*
“Hello?”
“Hello, peasant! I am an unknown voice on the telephone! God knows who I am, or indeed who else might be silently listening to this call, notebook in hand! But you can be sure that I know your name and phone number, and presumably your address as well. Now, tell me, how do you feel about the current military occupiers of your town and their various secret police forces? Generally positive, right?”
“er… yes?”
“Good lad.”
Crimea’s 2023 population is not the same as its 2014 population – it’s received hundreds of thousands of Russian settlers while ethnically cleansing Ukrainians and Tatars.
The telltale sign about what 2014 Crimeans wanted is that, before Russia interfered, there was no significant domestic secessionist movement there. There was a strong Russian identity and political support for pro-Russia politicians, but no real secessionism. Europe is full of secessionist parties that do well in regional and even national elections: SNP, Sinn Féin (in Northern Ireland), N-VA, Vlaams Belang, Junts, ERC, EH Bildu, EAJ, Lega. Crimea and the Donbas didn’t have such movements; their vision of Ukraine was of a united Ukrainian state in Belarus-style alliance with Russia.
@Alon Levy
There was no insurgency in Tibet in the last 50 years, does it mean that they want to be a part of China? Do you have any sources for the “hundreds of thousands of Russian settlers”?
@ajay
That’s fair enough, but do you have any proof that they wanted to be part of Ukraine, before or after 2014?
There was no insurgency in Tibet in the last 50 years, does it mean that they want to be a part of China? Do you have any sources for the “hundreds of thousands of Russian settlers”?
?
I do not have a high opinion of the CCP (the opposite of high to be precise), but I was under the impression that the Tibetans only want more autonomy instead of independence; you see, Tibet is economically dependent on fiscal transfers from China.
I had read that, for example, here: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4111
Though I admit that as I have no first hand experience of the place that impression might be wrong.
“but I was under the impression that the Tibetans only want more autonomy instead of independence; you see, Tibet is economically dependent on fiscal transfers from China.”
I don’t think being dependent on fiscal transfers necessarily means you don’t want independence. People often want independence for non-economic reasons, even if they know it comes at an economic cost.
Tiber was conquered by military force and its spiritual leader has been in exile since. It’s not at all the same as Crimea voting for independence in 1991 by a margin that in mature democracies is called a landslide and then having equal say in the governance of Ukraine as any other oblast. Come on.
(Cf. the breakaway republics in Georgia, both of which voted against independence in the referendum held in the Georgian SSR.)
Crimea and the Donbas didn’t have such movements; their vision of Ukraine was of a united Ukrainian state in Belarus-style alliance with Russia.
I think this is more or less right, yes.
I see a lot of sloppy conflation in popular discourse between “speaks Russian as a first language”, “identifies as ethnic Russian”, and “wants to be part of Russia and/or annexed by Russia”. These are three totally separate things and someone can fit into any of the three boxes without fitting into the other two. Ukraine had a lot of Russian speakers before 2022 (and 2014), but most of them weren’t considered ethnically Russian and I don’t think most of them actually wanted to be part of the Russian state. For one thing, the pro-Russian parties tended to be on the (economic) left, the modern Russian regime under Putin is very much on the right.
The UN did some polls in Crimea between 2009 and 2011 that all found that 2/3 or more of Crimeans said that they were in favor of seceding from Ukraine and joining Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Crimean_status_referendum#Polling
Quoting the above article, “A poll by the International Republican Institute in May 2013 found that 53% wanted ‘Autonomy in Ukraine (as today)’, 12% were for ‘Crimean Tatar autonomy within Ukraine’, 2% for ‘Common oblast of Ukraine’ and 23% voted for ‘Crimea should be separated and given to Russia'”. However, polling in 2008 which asked about the issues separately found that 63.8% of Crimeans were in favor of secession and 53.8% of Crimeans would like to preserve its current status but with expanded powers and rights, with the two mutually exclusive positions having a large overlap in support.
Regardless of specific poll results, the fact that a large majority of Crimeans wanted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia seems to have been fairly uncontroversial before March 2014. Quoting a Radio Free Europe article that was published on February 24, 2014:
Even in the 1991 independence referendum, where 54% of Crimeans who voted voted for Ukrainian independence, a little reported fact is that 42% of Crimeans didn’t vote in that referendum, a rate much higher than the rest of the country where not even one other Oblast had more than 13% of the electorate not vote. Not voting rates were much higher in Eastern Ukraine than in Western Ukraine (IE 12% in Donetsk Oblast, 13% in Luhansk Oblast, only 2% or less in the furthest Western Oblasts), strongly suggesting that non-voters were generally people who opposed independence and boycotted the referendum. Factor that in, and even in 1991 when the Soviet Union’s economy was collapsing, only 37% of Crimea’s electorate voted for Ukrainian independence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Ukrainian_independence_referendum#By_region
“In Crimea, of course, the sentiment of the vast majority of the population is that this is Russian territory, we want out, and we should never have been part of Ukraine.” https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-split-partition-/25270988.html
Furthermore, it has been reported in mainstream Ukrainian news outlets that in transcripts released of Ukrainian government meetings during the Crimean crisis, it was recorded that, to quote a Google translate of the relevant article:
“‘The fourth element of the situation in Crimea is the mass support of the population for the actions of the Russian Federation,’ Nalyvaichenko said then.
Interior Minister Arsen Avakov supported Nalyvaichenko’s statement.
‘I would like to say separately that the majority of the population of Crimea takes a pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian position. This is a risk that we need to take into account,’ he said then.” https://korrespondent.net/ukraine/3633123-kyev-pryznal-chto-krym-massovo-podderzhal-rossyui
The lack of secessionist political movements in Crimea prior to 2014 seems more than explicable IMO by the fact that it takes two to tango, and the government in Moscow generally speaking did not officially support Crimean secession between 1991 and 2014. Given that context, it makes perfect sense for the overwhelmingly pro-Russian population of Crimea to form a coalition with pro-Russian Ukrainians on the mainland. Supporting a seperate secessionist party would divide resources for no benefit whatsoever.
Donbas is a more complicated story (the political movements in Donetsk and Luhansk that are commonly referred to in Western media as “separatist” actually had as their officially stated goal reintegration into Ukraine with local autonomy for the vast majority of the April 2014-February 2022 timespan), but in Crimea there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that a large majority of the local population wanted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia in 2014, and for a long time before then.
Surveys prior to 2014 takeover, as recent as february 2014 shower support for remaining in Ukraine for Crimea.
They are easily googlable. And for Donbass, it was landslide.
Crimea’s willingness to be part of Ukraine has long been suspect.
So has Crimea’s willingness to be part of Russia. Lots of suspicion to go around in a conflict like this.
Ultimately, given Russia’s willingness to shoot or disappear people for having the ‘wrong’ political opinions or for trying to express organized political dissent, and Russia’s willingness to engage in ethnic cleansing, any concession that the Crimean Peninsula belongs to Russia amounts to setting a very bad precedent.
Namely, “if you can conquer a territory by surprise attack, butcher or chase away enough of the inhabitants willing to admit they want you gone, and sit on it for five or ten years, it’s yours.”
Vladimir Putin would love it if the international community legitimized his paltry, tiny attempts at conquest by saying that, I’m sure. I don’t think there’s any reason to do that favor for him.
“It is very odd to me that it seems many American commentators take it upon themselves to be appalled by the death and damage on Ukraine’s behalf in contravention of Ukraine’s stated interests; if Ukrainians think the war worth the costs to Ukraine, that is their decision to make.”
This kind of argument should be seen as wrong, but it shouldn’t be odd to long-term readers of this blog, and especially not to its author. Put aside the big-named aristocrats writing history to each other, these people speak on behalf of the peasants whose villages are getting foraged by the armies. The peasants didn’t have a say in the war taking place, and more generally, they aren’t invested in what happens at the level of the nobles and don’t care which polity they end up being ruled by. They care about not having their houses burned, their animals driven away, their men compelled to work (and sometimes tortured because the soldiers were bored, and/or sold into slavery), their women gang-raped (and/or sold into slavery), and any survivors starving to death because the armies took all the food.
Given this, it makes perfect sense to conceive of the war as something akin to:
– a natural disaster;
– an industrial accident;
– a supernatural disaster (“Ares showed up and wrecked the neighborhood”);
and speak in a manner implying that, because its area of impact happens to include Ukraine and Russia, their respective populations stand together in solidarity in wishing for this disaster to abate. To completely elide the existence of opposed sides, to say that there is only a singular phenomenon of primordial chaos afflicting the countries in question, converting weaponry into death and suffering, just as hurricanes convert warm moist air into floods and high winds; so please, for the sake of everyone in the area, would you stop sending more weaponry. Moreover, war is somewhat contagious, thus sending weaponry risks “escalation” and “being dragged into” the war — basically, “shh, or you might attract the attention of Ares!”.
Of course, this kind of argument had never had any weight in the (international realist) decisionmaking of states, it would have always been futile to bring it up — and more importantly, in an era of nation-states and popular sovereignty, people are invested in the things happening with their political leaders, and they do care rather an awful lot about what polity they end up being ruled by. Though I do suppose it fits mortis-in-tenon with the various claims that the Ukrainian government is a Western puppet, illegitimate, and disliked by the populace, and/or that the Ukrainian state (as the collection of its institutions) is corrupt, cruel to minorities, and disliked by the populace. Perhaps we can be extremely charitable and assume that the corresponding assertions about the Russian government and state are omitted because the speaker assumes their truth is already widely accepted?
“Corrupt, cruel to minorities, and disliked by the populace” comes as an extraordinarily fair description of modern eastern European ruling regimes* writ large, regardless of whether they’re backed by the West or by the USSR/Russia. Obviously a foreign military attack is exactly the sort of thing that can lead people to rally behind even a regime they otherwise dislike (recall George W. Bush’s >90% approval ratings circa late 2001) but this shouldn’t blind us to the Ukrainian regime’s position at the relatively far end of a corruption/cruelty spectrum on which Western-backed regimes like Romania or Bulgaria (or Ukraine under Yushchenko/Poroshenko) can often be difficult to distinguish from more hostile regimes like Serbia or Belarus (or Ukraine under Yanukovich).
* (Using “regime” here in the strictly non-pejorative sense as a broad umbrella term for a society’s entire ruling order, as opposed to more specific terms like “government” or “leadership” that can downplay the blurring of lines between powerful institutions like government, big business, the military, and organized crime.)
I’d disagree that Eastern European governments as a whole are generally “cruel to minorities, corrupt, and disliked by the populace”. It sounds like typical western self congratulatory thinking to me.
Cruel and corrupt are obviously subjective terms: Eastern European countries tend to be tough on minorities, but whether “tough” is the same as “cruel” is going to come down to your personal values. As for corrupt, I’d say that different countries have their own forms of corruption, sometimes more and sometimes less concealed (the United States included). “Disliked by the populace” is less subjective though, and this Pew survey from a couple years ago indicates that Eastern European countries like Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic compare favourably to western countries in terms of how much faith they have in the government (it depends on how exactly you ask the question).
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/10/14/democratic-satisfaction/
(Ukraine actually does score low on that Pew survey, but so does Russia).
Agreed as to corruption. I doubt that many in eastern Europe or anywhere else think that the Clintons, Trumps, and Bidens are exemplars of clean government.
In Europe, the prevailing view of American politics is that of an average Democrat, more informed than most on foreign policy and less informed than most on domestic policy. Everywhere except Hungary, opinions of the US and of the president went up after the Trump-Biden transition. More left-wing people are more in line with more left-wing Democrats, centrists are in line with moderate Democrats, and more right-wing people are more in line with moderate Republicans (rarely, conservative ones).
Pew has a survey from two months ago at https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/international-views-of-biden-and-u-s-largely-positive/ but it didn’t ask about corruption perceptions, only about related things. Western Europeans and Canadians generally rate their (our) institutions as superior to the US’s; everywhere in the world, people don’t.
The Clintons’ and Bidens’ reputation for corruption looks a lot sparser outside the dedicated set of propaganda organs that exist in part for the purpose of repeating that it exists.
That is not to say that there is no such corruption, but the extent has been overwhelmingly exaggerated. If you live in the sub-created reality bubble, the Clintons are responsible for numerous murders; outside the bubble, they’re responsible for some quite questionable consulting deals and so forth, like pretty much everyone else with any real power in America these days.
A great deal has been alleged and never proven, thrown as a political weapon and then conveniently forgotten when it turned out to be wrong or impossible to substantiate.
If I remembered that the person telling me “Bob is a corrupt criminal” lied to me ten times in a row, or at a bare minimum made ten unsubstantiated allegations in a row, it might force me to question whether this same person is being fully honest with me in confirming and validating my beliefs about other things.
“Tough” seems to me a euphemism when you consider that LGBT people and Romani are still denied basic human rights in several eastern European countries.
Well, somewhat. I think there’s another conceptual switch in the background. Namely: what is a nation, what is a state?
To some extent, Western Europe has copied the American answer to this question: the fundamental concept is the state, a government, with a territorial extent, and the derived concept is the nation — the nation is defined as the citizen population governed by the state. The nation is defined by the state, and overwhelmingly it lives within the borders of the state.
Meanwhile, to a large extent, Eastern Europe answers the question in the opposite direction: the fundamental concept is the nation, an ethnicity, culture, language, and the derived concept is the state — constituted by and of the nation to govern it. The members of the nation can live more or less wherever, they remain citizens of their state, in a certain sense the state is wherever its citizens (or at least, communities of its citizens) are. To put this vision in the terms of the other: the state does not have a territorial jurisdiction, but a subject-based extraterritorial jurisdiction.
In practice, these two views collide awkwardly. The states of Eastern Europe are territorial, because that’s how the world works, thus they end up both with minorities within their borders they mostly want nothing to do with, and basically wish just left or disappeared, and simultaneously with diasporas outside their borders in neighboring states, who they want to protect and want to have jurisdiction over (some even grant permanent, generational non-resident diasporal citizens full voting rights!) and partially as a consequence of the latter, territorial irredentism.
Obviously, the prevalence of these views is not nearly so geographically segregated. It is the “Eastern European” view, or specifically its failure mode, that makes an American say “go back to Mexico”, a Brit say “go back to Pakistan”, a French say “take off that hijab”. Likewise, the “American/Western European” view is not that uncommon in Eastern Europe.
As a side question, it’s interesting to think what would be the easiest way to correctly implement the “Eastern European” vision, without these problems. Probably the most straightforward approach is to say — eff all these independent states, from now on this entire region is going to be a single unitary state (let’s just call it Europe). All the various nations can go and issue voluntary church membership cards, collect tithe, hold church elections, arbitrate disputes between church members (under threat of revoking membership for noncompliance), provide church-paid lawyers to represent people in central court, provide welfare and cultural events in whatever forms the congregation votes for. All of these things no longer need to be done (or only in much reduced quantity) by the central state, thus it can be deliberately minimalist and light-touch in these regards. (As a side effect, you’ll also quickly get a Socialist Nation, providing social housing for high tithes.) Unfortunately, the above says nothing whatsoever about infrastructure/utilities (roads, trains, sewers). Fundamentally, people don’t live in a featureless nothing — natural and manmade geographical features exist, thus this view can never quite be pure and seamless.
I disagree. Nations are created by states. The idea that nations are a thing, and that a nation should be united by a single government, is an invention of states. Russia is a bigger nation than Ukraine because the rulers of Moscow happened to conquer more people than the rulers of Kyiv. Many European nations have outlived the states that created them, because their successor states found the idea of the nation useful.
Enh, that seems too simple. I’m pretty sure Azar Gat would disagree, though I forget all the details.
Greek city-states could fight viciously among each other, but they still shared some identity as Hellenes, speakers of one language (or a few related dialects), participants in the Olympic Games.
Certainly there can be _ethnicity_ prior to a state creating it. Arguing about whether there was a German nation as opposed to ethnicity, before Prussia swallowed everyone up, doesn’t seem obviously useful.
States sometimes try to assimilate everyone to their preferred nationality (and sometimes “pick” from a continuous gradation of accents The One Correct Way to speak the language) and have a fair amount of success with it. That is so. But just in Eastern Europe:
– we have the gypsies, never a nation-state, or even a majority in any area larger than a few villages;
– we
haveused to have the Ashkenazim, whose nationhood obviously precedes their eventual conquest of a nation-state for themselves outside Europe;– we have a Polish nation, despite there not having been a Poland at the time nationalism was invented (because the earlier Poland was divided between Russia, Prussia and the Habsburg empire) and the obvious continuity of origination with other Slavic languages (of which none except Russian had a state of its own);
– we have Hungarians, speaking a non-Indoeuropean language, with the closest related language being spoken by random forest people in Siberia, which survived without state cultivation from
circa 900 to the start of nationalism;
– further afield, there are the Basques, speaking a language with no(?) known relatives, which survived being surrounded by Indoeuropean speakers without state cultivation (but with occasional persecution) since the freaking Bronze Age.
Your view holds true when looking at France or Russia – there, one state conquered many different peoples and then forged them into one nation by propaganda (and cultural genocide). But looking at Germany and Italy, the idea of the nation existed before unification, and was one of the drivers of unification. While there was in both cases one state benefitting hugely from the idea of the nation (Prussia resp. Piedmont), that state could not have created that idea all by itself.
In general, ideologies can be harnessed and to some degree formed by the state – but the state by no means has complete control over ideologies (not that states haven’t tried); intellectual movements and popular beliefs do exist outside of state control and turn out to be very hard to completely suppress.
“Your view holds true when looking at France or Russia – there, one state conquered many different peoples and then forged them into one nation by propaganda (and cultural genocide).”
I think Russia / Soviet Union / Romanov Empire has at some points in history at least, seen themselves as a multiethnic / multinational country, the various subject peoples (Mari, Mordvins, Tuvans, Bashkirs, Tatars, Kalmyks, etc.) are supposed to be loyal to the Czar or the Communist Party but are still considered ethnically and linguistically distinct.
Of course, even among self-identified ethnic Russians, a lot of them are going to be descended wholly or in part from conquered and assimilated Finnic, Turkic, or other groups, so there’s a lot of what you indicate (forging into one nation) as well.
” we have Hungarians, speaking a non-Indoeuropean language, with the closest related language being spoken by random forest people in Siberia, which survived without state cultivation from
circa 900 to the start of nationalism;”
I agree entirely with your general point (and disagree entirely with the “nations are something artificial created by states” thing), but it’s worth remembering that the Hungarians *had* a state, until the mid 16th c when their king died in battle against the Turks (and they had a rump state under Turkish suzerainty for a while after that).
The Hungarian nation in particular does have a certain component of elite creation- Hungarians today are ethnically/genetically quite similar to their Eastern European neighbors, the reason they speak a different language is because that was the language of the ruling elite, that eventually became the language of the masses.
I don’t know whether it would count as “implementing the ‘Eastern European’ vision”, but surely the most straightforward approach (albeit one with moral difficulties) would be forcible population transfers to make the ethnic boundaries match the political ones, in the same way as, e.g., the victorious Allies forced the Germans living in what was now Polish territory to move west to Germany.
Though after what the Germans had just done to the Poles over the previous six years, I can’t imagine that any Germans staying behind would have had a happy time of things.
I think this is a pretty good summary of the differences, yea. With the caveat that, as you say, there are lots of people in Western Europe who take a more “Eastern” view of the relationship between nation, state, and ethnicity and the relative importance of them. I have my doubts about the extent to which Western cosmopolitan values are going to last, in Western Europe, in the long term.
It is far from obvious that they are less pro-survival and pro-strength than the idea that the ethnicity gives rise to the nation which gives rise to the state.
The example our host gives of how Rome was able to flourish and build a vast empire is instructive. A visitor from outer space examining the Mediterranean in 450 BC would have had no easy way to predict at a glance that Rome would some day rule over what were then far more powerful cities like Athens, Sparta, and Carthage, let alone over what were then powerful states such as Egypt or large swathes of what was then the Persian Empire.
One of the keys to Rome’s success was that the Romans did not believe that “Roman-ness” was fundamentally the property of a ‘pure’ Roman ‘bloodline’ or ethnicity. You could become a Roman by doing good things for the Roman state, and Rome would even gradually encourage this process. This allowed Rome to integrate much larger populations and adapt in ways that, say, a superficially similar Greek polis with superficially similar political institutions could not have done.
Eventually, Rome became enormously more powerful than any single city-state, and eventually more powerful than any single kingdom in its ecumene, with the sole exception of the Parthians.
To stand around in 2023 AD saying “I don’t know if the state-over-ethnicity model of politics and culture will last as long as the ethno-supremacist model” is a bit like saying in 450 BC “but won’t the Romans corrupt and lose the uniqueness of their polis by allowing foreigners to become citizens in such large numbers and accepting large groups of respected allies to fight alongside them?”
Turns out, it didn’t work out that way.
“Eventually, Rome became enormously more powerful than any single city-state, and eventually more powerful than any single kingdom in its ecumene, with the sole exception of the Parthians.”
I’m opposed to empires (all empires- British, Russian, Mughal, Roman, Chinese or whatever), and I don’t subscribe to the theory that “bigger is better”, or that power and size are the highest goods in life. So the claim that “diversity made Rome great and strong”, while it might be true, is going to leave me entirely unmoved.
This allowed Rome to integrate much larger populations and adapt in ways that, say, a superficially similar Greek polis with superficially similar political institutions could not have done.
Most Western countries are currently failing to integrate their minority groups. Either what Rome did was different in important ways from what the modern West is doing, or the situation is different enough that what worked for Rome doesn’t work today. Either way, there’s no reason to expect things to work out for us like they did for the Romans.
“Most European states are failing to integrate their minorities’. I don’t know that this is true. Australia and NZ get along fine, Germany is absorbing the influxes of the 1950s, and Britain the Indian/Pakistani/West Indian influx of the 50s. I can’t speak for France or the Netherlands. If two or three generations is the norm then the issue is simply time.
I don’t know that this is true. Australia and NZ get along fine, Germany is absorbing the influxes of the 1950s, and Britain the Indian/Pakistani/West Indian influx of the 50s. I can’t speak for France or the Netherlands. If two or three generations is the norm then the issue is simply time.
All those countries have highly distinct ethnic minority groups, so I don’t know what definition of “integration” you’re using.
GJ – Well, Britain has always had highly distinct ethnic minority groups – Welsh, Scots of two sorts, Irish. A cabinet led by Rishi Sunak, with Suella Braverman and Kwasi Kwarteng on the benches, Boris Johnson (US born, Turkish ancestry) lurking…Germany with its Sorbs (and pre 45 Poles and French), German-Turkish leader of a party, France with Bretons and Occitans and Basques and Alsatians. I could go on, but you get the point.
People can and do have more than one identity, more or less salient in context. Hyphenated Americans are still Americans. And the contours of the unmarked identity – the ur-nation – can change rapidly: Protestantism was a key marker of English identity a century ago. In my lifetime Australia has gone from colonial British to ‘Anglo’ plus, to ‘whatever, just enjoy the cricket’, and is currently arguing about where the First Nations sit (we have gone from quietly burying them to celebrating their cultures while ignoring their needs).
I see no reason for gloom.
GJ – Well, Britain has always had highly distinct ethnic minority groups – Welsh, Scots of two sorts, Irish… France with Bretons and Occitans and Basques and Alsatians. I could go on, but you get the point.
The Welsh, Bretons, Basques, etc., haven’t been fully integrated, it’s true. Scots are a bit more complicated, because the UK was founded as a union between Scotland and England, rather than through absorbing the one country into the other. But also, fallacy of the excluded middle. Wales might not be exactly the same as England, and Brittany might not be exactly the same as France, but they’ve got far more in common than Pakistan or Mali and England or France.
A cabinet led by Rishi Sunak, with Suella Braverman and Kwasi Kwarteng on the benches, Boris Johnson (US born, Turkish ancestry) lurking…Germany with its Sorbs (and pre 45 Poles and French), German-Turkish leader of a party,
Integration isn’t about holding high office, but about how culturally distinct a population is. Plenty of countries, both past and present, have had highly distinct minority groups which were well-represented in the upper echelons of society.
In my lifetime Australia has gone from colonial British to ‘Anglo’ plus, to ‘whatever, just enjoy the cricket’, and is currently arguing about where the First Nations sit (we have gone from quietly burying them to celebrating their cultures while ignoring their needs).
“Whatever, just enjoy the cricket” is not a strong enough basis to maintain a functional country in the long run.
@GJ: I think “whatever, just enjoy the cricket” is a way of saying “adopt the customs and culture of our country and we don’t care where you’re from”–in other words, the type of assimilation and integration you’re talking about.
That having been said, I do agree that Western societies aren’t pushing this as hard as they should be, and are assuming that the process will just happen naturally. Which it will, but it’s going to be a lot slower and there’s going to be a lot more friction between the native-born and newcomers than there would be otherwise.
@GJ: I think “whatever, just enjoy the cricket” is a way of saying “adopt the customs and culture of our country and we don’t care where you’re from”–in other words, the type of assimilation and integration you’re talking about.
Not only do most western countries not encourage this, they often actively discourage it. E.g., DEI policies generally advantage minority candidates over majority candidates, so people are incentivised to identify as part of a minority group rather than as part of the Australian (American, British, Canadian…) majority.
That having been said, I do agree that Western societies aren’t pushing this as hard as they should be, and are assuming that the process will just happen naturally. Which it will, but it’s going to be a lot slower and there’s going to be a lot more friction between the native-born and newcomers than there would be otherwise.
Why do you assume it will? There are plenty of examples of ethnic minority groups lasting for centuries without losing their distinctive character.
@GJ: There are plenty of examples of ethnic minority groups lasting for centuries without losing their distinctive character.
Usually, however, those are groups that have been actively prevented from assimilating and integrating rather than being encouraged to assimilate and integrate, or just simply being left to decide to do as they will.
@Hector_St_Clare:
You’re moving the goalposts. Your original claim was that Western cosmopolitan values may not last, with the implication that they may weaken or cause the downfall of their respective states. The ability of a state (or a people, a nation, however we conceptualize it) to generate material strength seems fairly important to its survival, and thus relevant to the discussion.
If you wish to pivot the terms of the argument to “insular states are more likely to leave others alone, which is more moral than empire-building,” then we can have that conversation, but you have in effect conceded the previous argument.
@GJ
First, Rome is not the only example in history of a state becoming very successful in large part because of its willingness to accept foreigners as equals and integrate them into its system.
Second, the perception that Western societies are not integrating their minorities hinges very heavily on specific details and opinions, which not all of your contemporaries share.
Third, the perception that Western societies are failing to integrate minorities, and that therefore diversity is a bad strategy for ensuring those societies’ survival, seems perverse. Naively, one would think that the conclusion would be “Minority groups are not integrating, therefore Western societies are not pursuing the strategy of diversity and integration in the first place, and therefore it is irrelevant whether the strategy would work.”
Perhaps “accepting people with strange customs and languages and dare I say different skin colors as valid members of one’s society” is not a thing that has been tried and found impractical, but rather a thing that has been found scary and not tried.
Much of the discussion assumes some eternal unchanging ‘culture’ to which ‘minorities’ should assimilate. Leaving aside that the Welsh (or the Basques or Sorbs) have been around longer than the English, Parisians or German-speakers, of what does this culture consist? Dress? Language? Food? Sports? Political attitudes? Religious affiliation? All of these vary across the mainstream culture, are changing too, and anyway why not have a Vietnamese pork roll for lunch, or learn to cook pasta properly (both changes for the good in my experience)? Britain has absorbed Huguenots, East European Jews and West Indians without ill effect.
If the fear is of displacement, then the minorities have more to worry about than the majority. If the core values are ones of tolerance and a commitment to peaceful resolution of our differences of the moment, then these are not held by all of the majority culture.
@ Simon_Jester:
First, Rome is not the only example in history of a state becoming very successful in large part because of its willingness to accept foreigners as equals and integrate them into its system.
So? That doesn’t make the West’s current approach to things any more or less successful.
Second, the perception that Western societies are not integrating their minorities hinges very heavily on specific details and opinions, which not all of your contemporaries share.
It’s a perception easily verified by walking through virtually any Western city. I think I’ll trust my lying eyes over some unspecified “contemporaries” on this one.
Third, the perception that Western societies are failing to integrate minorities, and that therefore diversity is a bad strategy for ensuring those societies’ survival, seems perverse. Naively, one would think that the conclusion would be “Minority groups are not integrating, therefore Western societies are not pursuing the strategy of diversity and integration in the first place, and therefore it is irrelevant whether the strategy would work.”
You keep equating “diversity” and “integration”, when in many ways they’re opposites. A society in which newcomers are expected to integrate into mainstream society is aiming and homogeneity, not diversity.
As for whether diversity benefits society:
“Does ethnic diversity erode social trust? Continued immigration and corresponding growing ethnic diversity have prompted this essential question for modern societies, but few clear answers have been reached in the sprawling literature. This article reviews the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust through a narrative review and a meta-analysis of 1,001 estimates from 87 studies. The review clarifies the core concepts, highlights pertinent debates, and tests core claims from the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust. Several results stand out from the meta-analysis. We find a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust across all studies. The relationship is stronger for trust in neighbors and when ethnic diversity is measured more locally. Covariate conditioning generally changes the relationship only slightly. The review concludes by discussing avenues for future research.” https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-polisci-052918-020708
“Trust fuels economic development and a lack of trust slows it. As American economist, mathematician, political theorist, and Nobel laureate Kenneth J. Arrow once wrote, “Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust [and]…much of the economic backwardness in the world can be explained by the lack of mutual confidence.”
Trust is a foundation for more than economic well-being. High trust is also connected to less violence, more political stability, and better health outcomes.” https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/12/trust-is-the-glue-of-a-healthy-society-heres-how-to-bring-it-back/
My previous post doesn’t seem to be appearing, but maybe if I include just one link it will work:
“Does ethnic diversity erode social trust? Continued immigration and corresponding growing ethnic diversity have prompted this essential question for modern societies, but few clear answers have been reached in the sprawling literature. This article reviews the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust through a narrative review and a meta-analysis of 1,001 estimates from 87 studies. The review clarifies the core concepts, highlights pertinent debates, and tests core claims from the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust. Several results stand out from the meta-analysis. We find a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust across all studies. The relationship is stronger for trust in neighbors and when ethnic diversity is measured more locally. Covariate conditioning generally changes the relationship only slightly. The review concludes by discussing avenues for future research.” https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-polisci-052918-020708
Social trust, of course, is correlated with all sorts of good things, including economic growth, low crime rates, and self-reported happiness.
@SimonJester:
Fair enough, my response was kind of knee-jerk and I conflated normative preferences with positive statements.
Better terms than Western or Eastern European would be “ethnonationalist” and “multicultural” states.
Ethnostates are the norm in large parts of the world, and not just Eastern Europe.
I agree, but I’d say we are talking about something different and narrower than “multicultural” here. The western cosmopolitan, high-openness model is only one way of being multicultural.
India is a multicultural state, but isn’t cosmopolitan in the liberal western sense (see, e.g., https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/religion-in-india-tolerance-and-segregation/), nor were some premodern states like the Ottoman Empire. There are various ways to manage internal diversity, the liberal model is just one.
Why should Russian aggression be rewarded in any way? Why should parts of the Ukraine be sacrificed for ‘peace’? Didn’t we learn from czechoslovakia in 1939?
I don’t think the war is over yet, and as mentioned, it’s Ukraine’s decision to make in any case, but the answer is “Because they can’t win.” If you can’t win it makes more sense to settle for a loss early. (the difficult point is of course determining when victory becomes impossible, and not merely very difficult)
Not necessarily: If the inevitable defeat will be worse than the war, it’s best to delay the defeat as long as possible.
The point is that it’s usually better to settle for a small loss now than a big loss in the future. (now, i reiterate: I don’t think the situation is settled yet, so it might so the ukrainians still have a chance to settle things in their favour)
A peace where Russia keeps the annexed oblasts is bad, but not as bad as one where the russians overrun all of ukraine and annexes the entire country. (note: I don’t think that’s realistic, but again, battlefield conditions can change)
This “settle for a small loss now” is exactly what Ukraine did in 2014 when Russia invaded and occupied Crimea.
It didn’t work! Russia just tried to overrun all of Ukraine and annex the entire country.
“A peace where Russia keeps the annexed oblasts is bad, but not as bad as one where the russians overrun all of ukraine and annexes the entire country.”
Perhaps you would like to give some reason to believe that ceding the annexed oblasts makes it less likely that the Russians will overrun the entire country. It can’t be because you think that gaining those oblasts will weaken Russia, or that they will keep any agreement with Ukraine, so I really can’t see what that reason might be.
Perhaps you would like to give some reason to believe that ceding the annexed oblasts makes it less likely that the Russians will overrun the entire country.
As I understand it, those oblasts have most of the Russian-speaking population, so ceding them to Russia removes an irridentist flashpoint. And the Ukrainians have already shown that they’re not going to fall quickly to an invasion, like Putin seems to have expected, which will potentially make Putin/any future Russian leader more cautious about starting another war (cf. the Winter War between Russia and Finland).
“Perhaps you would like to give some reason to believe that ceding the annexed oblasts makes it less likely that the Russians will overrun the entire country. It can’t be because you think that gaining those oblasts will weaken Russia, or that they will keep any agreement with Ukraine, so I really can’t see what that reason might be.”
Because if Russia is in a position to want peace they presumably wants out fo the war too. And it might give the ukrainians time to re-arm, seek new allies, hope for a shift in the russian political situation, or whatever.
Again, this only makes sense if the military situation becomes a lot more dire than it is (but not so dire that russia can just overrun the place)
scifihughf: Arguably it *did* work in that the ukrainian army was in no position to contest in 2014 but was built up significantly since.
After another year or three, the war could evolve to the point where the fronts are fortified to the point where neither side can make significant amount progress without great loses. In which case a cessation of hostilities leaving Russia in control of some territory it acquired in the Feb 2022 invasion could be in Ukraine’s best interest.
Given the cost to Russia, including the leader of some of the best troops starting a revolt, the territory taken would probably not be seen as an inducement to try another invasion for quite some time.
“Given the cost to Russia, including the leader of some of the best troops starting a revolt, the territory taken would probably not be seen as an inducement to try another invasion for quite some time.”
I think the appropriate response is:
Once all the Germans were warlike and mean
But that couldn’t happen again
We taught them a lesson in 1918
And they’ve hardly bothered us since then!
I think the appropriate response is:
Once all the Germans were warlike and mean
But that couldn’t happen again
We taught them a lesson in 1918
And they’ve hardly bothered us since then!
That explains why Russia has been continually invading Finland since the Winter War.
Wait, no…
>one party cannot end a war. It takes one to start a war, but two to make peace.
Did we remember to send the memo to Trotsky? I feel like he didn’t get the memo.
It’s ironic that the one time in modern history this was tried it Russia was the country that wanted out. And it went exactly as well as you would expect, with the Germans immediately overrunning near-empty trenches and forcing the Russians to sign away a third of their population and half of their industry in an actual peace treaty 3 weeks later.
That was, essentially, recognition of the obvious: that the Russian army could not possibly repel a serious German invasion while fighting a civil war. And that civil war had already begun and would have been largely inevitable (if it hadn’t been the Bolsheviks in October, it would have been Kornilov purging everyone he considered too far to the left a few months later).
Russia had essentially lost the war by late 1916 or early 1917, and was only able to keep up the pretense of holding front lines because the Germans were too thinly stretched to take much advantage. “No war, no peace” didn’t work, but the Russians- any Russians- didn’t really have any alternative except to sign away a lot of territory anyway, regardless of which government was in power, unless the Germans decided to do them a favor and choose not to take that territory.
You need to read the Giles 1910(?) translation of the Art of War.
He puts in the commentaries and brings it into dialogue with the commentators like Cao Cao.
He also contextualizes it better.
I like it much more than later translations that always seem to be “The Art of War…. for Business! for your family!”
I think you’re underselling another way in which Putin’s need to maintain internal credibility with Russian nationalist hardliners presents an obstacle to a negotiated settlement. For such hardliners, a major black mark on Putin’s credibility was his decision from 2014 through 2022 to pursue negotiations with Ukraine and the West under the Minsk frameworks instead of openly (as opposed to wink-wink-nudge-nudge pseudo-covertly) backing the Russophile separatist proxies in the Donbas, especially since a number of key figures on the Western/Ukrainian side (Merkel, Hollande, and Poroshenko) have openly stated within the past year that they never saw the Minsk negotiations as realistic and were merely using them to buy time to build up Ukraine’s armed forces for an inevitable future war. Essentially, Russian elites these days are all but unanimous in describing the West as “недоговороспособны,” which translates literally as “non-agreement-capable” or “incapable of negotiating” but more loosely as “untrustworthy” or “perfidious” — which of course leads them into exactly the sort of behavior that their Western and Ukrainian counterparts will likewise interpret as evidence of untrustworthiness and perfidy, a kind of mutually-escalatory geopolitical doom spiral that our host has described well in reference to early-modern European interstate relations but seems far more hesitant to apply to the geopolitical conflicts of the present day.
As far as realistic outcomes, the question “If the United States was planning to cut off NATO support to Ukraine, why would Putin make any concessions at all?” seems to me to be exactly backwards: if there’s any possibility at this point of an offramp from the highway that may or may not be leading to World War III, the relevant question is what reason Putin would have to make any concessions if the West wasn’t willing to budge on the issue of Ukrainian neutrality between Russia and NATO. To flip the script a bit, the US during the Cuban Missile Crisis was perfectly willing to make major concessions (such as removing its Jupiter missiles from Turkey, albeit without admitting so publicly until years later) only once the Soviets also agreed to remove their own nuclear missiles from Cuba, so what sense would it have made for Soviet policymakers to argue that the only path toward extracting concessions from the US would’ve been to stand firm and refuse to back down?
> if the West wasn’t willing to budge on the issue of Ukrainian neutrality between Russia and NATO
But that issue is not for “the West” to decide; if someone outside Ukraine decides Ukraine’s foreign policy, that’s no better than invading them.
Putin’s been very clear that he regards NATO as an unreliable negotiating partner; in fact he claims that NATO effectively started the war, by not preemptively rejecting the notion of Ukraine’s membership. That’s obviously nonsense. But it’s plain that there’s no point in anyone pressuring Ukraine to negotiate, if there’s nobody to negotiate with.
Putin is the aggressor. His lies and excuses have no credibility.
I think the problem, and the reason the US is perceived in much of the world as perfidious (recall Britian had the same problem) is that liberal democracies fundamentally don’t recognize other types of regime as legitimate, so they don’t really feel bound by promises. (Charles I had the same problem, only sort of in reverse.)
Another problem is that modern democracies tend to change leaders fairly frequently, making it difficult to stick to a single long-term policy. In a monarchy (an actual monarchy, where the monarch has real power), the government can credibly commit to keeping an agreement, because the guy who signed it off is going to remain in power for the next few decades (and even if he’s not, it’s normally clear who’s going to succeed him, and you can often get at least an idea as to what sort of ruler he’s likely to be). In America, OTOH, the President will be around for *at most* the next eight years, and might get replaced by someone with an entirely different approach to foreign policy. Especially when you remember that people vote for politicians for all sorts of reasons — even if the US public are satisfied with a hypothetical deal Biden works out re: Ukraine, they might end up voting for a complete Russophobe because they like his policy on healthcare or crime.
Re: Perfidious Albion, I think it was much the same phenomenon at work. Britain, AIUI, got its reputation for faithlessness through exiting the War of the Spanish Succession and the Seven Years’ War and leaving its allies in the lurch, and in both occasions this happened after one ministry fell and was replaced by another.
Perfidious Albion was apparently popularized by the revolutionary French.
I think no further comment is necessary.
I have a much longer note on the same point elsewhere, but while there are commitments that monarchies can offer and democracies cannot, there are also ceilings on the commitments monarchies can offer that democracies can surpass.
In an absolute monarchy, the king is incapable of issuing an edict that he may not later simply abrogate; and the succession process non-negotiably places a sometimes-surprising relative of often-indeterminate politics on the throne, who is then of course generally empowered to abrogate any of the prior king’s acts without restriction.
To the extent that this unreliability is restrained—by the presumption of royal honor, by the expectation of filial conduct, by the leverage available to ministers and dukes—it is precisely by factors that act against “an actual monarchy”.
If the US and UK are the two examples here, “liberal democracies” seems less relevant as a shared trait than “preeminent global geopolitical hegemons of their era” — both the US and UK have shown themselves perfectly capable of negotiating in good faith with all kinds of illiberal or non/anti-democratic regimes, even to the point of directly installing such regimes as their preferred alternatives to more liberal or democratic regimes that happen to oppose their geopolitical interests.
Indeed, it’s not much of a stretch to interpret the US’s current rhetorical leitmotif of “democracy versus autocracy” as itself fundamentally hypocritical and perfidious; the current wave of authoritarian repression in Pakistan by a regime that ousted its popular democratically-elected president at the urging of the US (due to his overly-neutral stance on the Ukraine war, to boot!) is only the most recent example to come to mind off of a very long list.
The “Perfidious Albion” tag was coined in the eighteenth century, before Britain became the global hegemon.
Yes, the US is capable of installing dictators, although it’s usually in preference to rulers of the “people’s democracy” stripe, not genuine democracies. But the US is also perfectly capable of pulling the rug out from such autocrats, like Diem or Marcos. In contrast, no one thinks that the US is going to abandon NATO (though it would be nice if the other members of the alliance didn’t perpetually welsh on their commitment to spend 2% of GDP on defense). Hence the motto among Mideast rulers (none of them democrats) that the US is dangerous as an enemy, fatal as a friend.
I have a pretty dim view of most US foreign policy going back to, say, 1900 (with some exceptions) but to be fair to my opponents, it’s worth pointing out that the US often does keep promises even when I would expect them not to. In the specific case mentioned above (the Cuban Missile Crisis), the US actually did honor their promise never again to support an invasion of Cuba, even after the Soviets folded and Cuba was weak and relatively defenceless (minus the one weapon a weak party always has, insurgency). It would have been easy for the US to break their promise at any point after 1991, but they didn’t.
I’m a bit surprised that you periodize this. Not an expert, but it seems to me that the US’s twin foreign policy stars of racist imperialist perfidy and liberal democratic neighborliness were pretty well defined by the time Jackson ran against Quincy Adams, and perhaps even earlier. Any particular reason the last century stands out against its antecedents?
You’re right to call me out for sloppy thinking / writing. I tend to think of (roughly) 1900 as the start of the US trying to be a hegemonic power (with the Spanish-American War and the acquisition of overseas territories, etc..). But of course that’s not really true- the US did plenty of imperial expansion during the 19th century, it was just overland rather than overseas. And of course as much as I dislike a lot of 20th century US foriegn policy, the US treatment of Native American nations in the 19th century was much, much worse. (And I think that has to fairly be counted as foreign policy rather than domestic, even if the US at the time didn’t see it that way).
+1000 to this.
Though I’ve always kind of admired Charles I, for his personal courage if nothing else.
TBH I think Parliament was more at fault. Charles was just wanted the same powers as his father and all other English monarchs in recent history; it was Parliament that kept trying to constrain him.
That only puts Parliament in the wrong if it was wrong for Parliament to try to constrain the king, in and of itself.
If Parliament is imagined to be some kind of unwelcome and unfair imposition on the rightfully unified power of a divinely appointed monarch, then of course, it is wrong for a bunch of up-jumped peasants with delusions of being a legislature to try and dictate terms to a king.
Personally, I see Parliament as a power bloc within a country, one that has a legitimate role in government, one that has just as much right to jockey for position as a king or a bloc of hereditary nobles, or more so. So to me, it is in no way wrongful for Parliament to try and increase its power at the king’s expense. It’s even laudable, I’d argue, because constitutional monarchies tend to be better places than absolute monarchies.
When Henry VII demanded of a noble supporter of Richard III why he fought for the ‘usurper’, the reply was “Parliament hath made him my king; if Parliament makes a stook king, I will fight for the stook”. Henry had himself declared rightful king by Parliament – as had the kings before him (and as would Mary, Elizabeth and James after him). That Parliament was at least the equal to the king was well-established by Charles’ time.
That only puts Parliament in the wrong if it was wrong for Parliament to try to constrain the king, in and of itself.
Or if it’s wrong for people or organisations to destabilise the country for the purpose of arrogating more power to themselves, which is what I think.
If Parliament is imagined to be some kind of unwelcome and unfair imposition on the rightfully unified power of a divinely appointed monarch, then of course, it is wrong for a bunch of up-jumped peasants with delusions of being a legislature to try and dictate terms to a king.
You really do have a compulsive tendency to straw-man people, and in a particularly passive-aggressive way, don’t you?
It doesn’t feel like much of a strawman from where I stand. On the one hand, when the king tries to exercise greater power against Parliament’s will, he is just taking what is rightfully his. On the other hand, when Parliament tries to establish its own power and primacy (something with precedents in England’s past before the civil war), it is “destabilizing the country” and “arrogating power.”
This is the kind of language people adopt when, on some level, they believe that one side of a constitutional power struggle is fundamentally in the right and deserves to have most or all of the power, while the other side is in the wrong and deserves little or nothing.
On the one hand, when the king tries to exercise greater power against Parliament’s will, he is just taking what is rightfully his. On the other hand, when Parliament tries to establish its own power and primacy (something with precedents in England’s past before the civil war), it is “destabilizing the country” and “arrogating power.”
The King wasn’t “trying to exercise greater power”, he was trying to exercise the same power his immediate predecessors had. It was Parliament that was trying to increase its control over how the King spent money.
I think this is not an ideological problem but a structural problem. Liberal democracies, party states, and autocracies are different sorts of information systems, which means that they communicate, negotiate, and commit in very different ways from each other. (So to do feudal states, classical democracies, clan alliances, etc.; but they are less present on the modern world stage.)
An autocracy’s information system is fundamentally, like, a guy. An autocracy can be trustworthy and untrustworthy in the customary way that a human is trustworthy or untrustworthy. You can do a handshake deal with an autocracy. You can get the (national!) decision-making body of an autocracy in a room, with a single carafe of coffee. Of course, an autocracy can betray you for all of the reasons that a person can betray you—advantage, resentment, personal business. And when that guy leaves power or dies—and every person leaves power or dies—too bad, time for a New Guy. Hope they like you too!
On the other hand, a liberal democracy’s information system is systematic and popular. There’s nobody to do a handshake deal with—you can shake the US president’s hand, but that and $2.90 will get you a ride on the NYC subway. You can cultivate dozens of elites in the right places for decades, and one mass scandal can blow your entire operation. From the perspective of an autocracy, it’s pathetically unreliable; it’s like negotiating with the wind.
(Plus, especially for autocrats like Putin who arose within hybrid regimes, the leaders of democracies are literally pathetic: men and women who’ve attained the highest office and then completely failed to consolidate their rule.)
But on the other hand, the kind of commitments liberal democracies can make can be remarkably sturdy. How can an autocrat commit to abide by their word? Pinky promise? While a treaty signed by the President and ratified by the Senate has the force of US law and can be enforced (to some extent) against the wishes of the President, the legislature, and the people. A cause popular with the American public at large can carry the government, no matter how many Senators and Representatives you bribe. And so on.
From the perspective of a liberal democracy, an autocracy has the problem of the omnipotence paradox—an autocrat can’t sign a treaty so powerful that they cannot simply decide to abrogate. From the perspective of a liberal democracy, it’s the autocrats who are unreliable. So it’s not surprising that there’s often friction between these actors, and that they often accuse the other of betrayal. In a very real sense, they are different organisms; they cannot even make the same kind of promises
Party states, like the high party eras of the USSR and the PRC, are another form, combining the institutional intricacy and stability of the liberal democracies with the popular indifference and deliberative secrecy of the autocracies.
And of course all of this is a first-order approximation; in actual fact plenty of important decisions in liberal democracies get made by unaccountable actors for personal reasons, while autocrats labor under all sorts of institutional constraints. But I think it does point to some real substantive differences; and some real, observable problems that emerge at the point of contact.
Actually, I found this line of thinking very useful for understanding Donald Trump’s preference for authoritarian counterparties in his international negotiations. Trump comes from the world of family-owned businesses—the private autocracies—and I think he expects the world at large to operate the way his world does. When he looks to other nations he wants to find someone to do a handshake deal with; he wants to find societies organized to create such a person. Whereas leaders of liberal democracies with a background in liberal democratic government—governors, senators, etc.—or even, perhaps, in shareholder joint-stock businesses—have a very different perspective on the structures of international relations.
Anyway, I hope this comparison articulates the distinctions fairly. But of course, I have my preferences.
I think this is a really excellent comment. I particularly like that you separate out party states (and other nonliberal political orders like clan alliances, etc.) from “autocracies”, I feel like American popular discource often conflates all of the alternatives to liberal democracy together, whereas in fact, as you point out, they’re all quite different in their internal dynamics and in how they functioning. I think the appeal of party states, to their supporters, is largely that when they’re functioning ideally they can avoid some of the problems of liberal democracies on the one hand and of autocracies on the other.
I would just make two minor nitpicks. First, clan alliances aren’t absolutely absent from the modern world- they continue to be important in places like Afghanistan. I’ve heard people make the case that one reason the US lost in Afghanistan was because Ashraf Ghani was very bad at playing the game of clan politics, he was notoriously rude and high handed with the tribal elders and turned out not to be able to get them to fight for him. And secondly (as you note), these are ideal types, the reality can be more complicated. In the US, for example, various types of elites (economic, financial, cultural, intellectual, political) have considerable power to shape public opinion rather than just responding to it. Especially as regards foreign policy where a lot of the general public has less fixed views and simply cares less.
As an aside, the asinine concept of NATO’s “Eastern flank” is also a not-so-subtle rhetorical nudge toward alarmism and escalation — having enemy forces threatening your “flank” is far more worrisome than if you were to acknowledge that this “flank” is actually your primary front line! (Maybe Lee should’ve described Pickett’s Charge as an attack on the Army of the Potomac’s “Western flank”?)
Having read Sunzi’s Art of War, all the “Art of War” pieces of writing in English that try transferring the “philosophy” to business or social conflict or anything that’s not war fetishize the Orient in my opinion. I particularly noticed a lot of them coming out when commercial leaders in the United States felt threatened by Japanese competitors. Are there principles in the administration of warfare that are useful to people in business? Yes, I am a vice president of sales and marketing, and I use the Strategy, Operations, Tactics structure all the time to figure out the highest priority goals to put what percentage of my limited budget towards and what actions to take to achieve those goals. However, I do not believe that I am going to get an “enemy” to “dangerous ground” or “desperate ground”. I don’t have enemies, I have competitors. I can’t put them in a situation with “no way out”, because I’m working with clients who have agency, not mountain ranges or rivers. And the stories of Zhuge Liang, which Mao Zedong quoted quite a lot, are far more entertaining.
The war will not end unless Russian internal politics permits it to end. Ukraine isn’t marching to Moscow no matter what, so there is no possibility of an external regime change. I doubt that the siloviki regime will be able to back down even if the Ukrainians restore the 1991 borders by force. Russia’s internal political dialogue is between the ultranationalist Putinists and the hyper-mega-supernational-imperalist Girkinites. And I see no path to an internal regime change, although others may be more optimistic.
Of course, battlefield outcomes has can have pretty wide repurcussions on internal politics, though often in very unexpected ways.
I wouldn’t call Putinism a nationalist ideology. It was a boring run-of-the-mill kleptocracy, now sprinkled with some White Guard protofascism, while the Z-supporters are an unholy union of imperialists and nationalists who just happen to be united because both view Ukraine as rightful Russian possession, the first because it’s a former imperial province, the second because they view Ukrainians as temporarily confused Russians.
You’re right; I’m wrong.
Nationalists who correctly poke holes in the silly ahistorical fabrications of other countries’ nationalist ideologies always make me think of the old line about how we’re both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do; when you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
On the contrary, in the case of nationalism the situation is symmetrical. Internationalism is as opposed to every individual nationalism as they are to each other, and is even more reliant on silly ahistorical ideological fabrications.
In other words, internationalism becomes much easier to understand once it’s understood as fanatical loyalty to a country that exists only in elites’ heads, and sees every actually-existing country as a threat to its own glorious destiny.
I suppose, but such a definition of “internationalism” also confines it in large part to the realm of myth. It becomes extremely hard to identify real “internationalists,” as opposed to:
1) People who are not elites and are unlikely to become elites in the normal sense of “actually has a lot of power.”
2) People who are elites and who are fairly straightforwardly upholding some broadly plausible interpretation of their national interests, when those interests are correctly understood. Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden are not internationalists, for instance.
3) People who are elites, and who are not particularly loyal to any country, and who simply pursue their own personal interests, which may or may not align with that of the country they claim citizenship in, depending on happenstance. Plenty of billionaires fall into this category, for instance; they’re not patriots but they’re not “fanatically loyal” to some specific concept of a political order that unites the Earth.
One does not cease to be an internationalist merely because one deludes one’s self that internationalism is good for the country, whatever the riffraff think.
This leads to the perverse conclusion that a real
Scotsmannationalist would prefer to damage their own country, or allow their country to come to harm, rather see their country benefit from participation in international norms and institutions.Or that they are so firmly convinced that no good can come of cooperation that they reflexively oppose cooperation at all times, because to do otherwise would be “internationalist.”
Personally, I don’t think this holds up very well. Especially not in a superpower such as the United States. The US is already the beneficiary of many international institutions and would have considerably less influence and power without them. OF COURSE there are plenty of Americans who quite simply believe that it is in the US’s genuine national interest to pursue international alliances, cooperation, and trade.
…
Though really, the problem is that we’re discussing “internationalism” without a clear definition for it, and different people mean very different things by it. It can mean “thinks it’s a good idea to be part of NATO,” it can mean a code word for “I don’t want to out myself as anti-Semitic but I actually mean Jews,” or it can mean anything in between, depending on who’s talking.
What does internationalism mean, and how do you know an internationalist when you find one?
Actually, adherents of the two largest world religions, constituting a majority of humanity, do not dismiss each other’s god, though they disagree on some aspects of His nature.
I’ve never been that impressed by that statement as applied to religion (I’ve been at various times an atheist, an agnostic, a monotheist, a ditheist and a polytheist, and never found it convincing). I don’t think it really works when it comes to nationalist narratives either.
Even in theory, it only is going to “work” when the atheist is arguing with a monotheist or a ditheist. A polytheist follower of the Hindu or Shinto gods, or other pantheons, is going to have no intrinsic difficulty accounting for the fact that the old Norse worshipped Thor, the Greeks worshipped Athena, each Native American nation had its own gods, etc.. The difficulty accounting for other religions only poses a serious problem for followers of religions that teach that there’s only one god worth worshipping.
Even then, though, a Christian or Muslim doesn’t necessarily have to believe that the Norse were necessarily praying to *nothing*, or that the entity they called Thor doesn’t exist. Christians believe in lots of other supernatural entities in the world after all- in archangels like Raphael and Michael which someone might reasonably pray to, as well as in….less benign supernatural beings. And Muslims believe additionally in the *jinn* and other classes of supernatural creatures. Neither Christians nor Muslims believe that you ought to be worshipping these other categories of being, but that’s different than the atheist argument that these beings don’t actually exist. A Christian doesn’t necessarily have to explain away a miracle attributed to a pagan deity, or a supernatural personal experience that someone has involving such a presence, they can just say that the miracle was real but you still shouldn’t be worshipping them. An atheist actually does have to explain away the event.
As far as nationalism goes, I can be a nationalist on behalf of my own ethno-national group as well as sympathetic to some other people’s nationalist aspirations and narratives, certainly where they don’t conflict with my own. There’s no conflict between nationalist aspirations for my group and the nationalist aspirations of, say, the Poles, the Czechs, the Igbo, or the Aymara- we’re in entirely different parts of the world, after all, and I can totally consistently wish them good luck in their endeavors. There are other nationalist narratives which I do think are much less well grounded, both on normative and positive grounds, and in some cases can be disproven by history, but it all comes down to the specific claims in question.
Indeed. The father of Finnish nationalism, Johann Vilhelm Snellman, was a left-wing Hegelian. In his concept of world history, every nation has a role to play, and a contribution which it is capable of making to the development of the humanity. This contribution can only be perfected when the nation is allowed to develop its language, culture and science in peace, without undue interference. This is a very suitable type of nationalism for small nations, not requiring subjugation of anyone else.
Yes, Augustine would have said that pagans were worshipping demons. Some modern Christians, e.g. C.S. Lewis, I think would say that polytheists generally have a dim but mistaken apperception of the true nature of the divine (just like Jews and Muslims, but worse). It’s like the way Newton had a partial perception of the nature of light and motion, better than that of Aristotle, but not as good as that of modern physicists. It doesn’t follow that light doesn’t exist, or that motion is entirely random and lawless. It’s really atheists who are the extreme case, more divorced from all believers than the various believers are from each other.
And, of course, a Christian does not have to believe that all pagans worshipped even the same sort of thing.
Indeed. The father of Finnish nationalism, Johann Vilhelm Snellman, was a left-wing Hegelian. In his concept of world history, every nation has a role to play, and a contribution which it is capable of making to the development of the humanity. This contribution can only be perfected when the nation is allowed to develop its language, culture and science in peace, without undue interference. This is a very suitable type of nationalism for small nations, not requiring subjugation of anyone else.
Exactly. I find a lot to agree with in that. And thank you for tipping me off to Snellman, he sounds interesting.
> because they view Ukrainians as temporarily confused Russians
Not sure who “they” is.
My impression is that many Russians regard Ukrainians the way they regard a lot of imperial subjects: as stupid peasants who can’t speak their own language properly.
It’s worth noting that most of the “Russians” who have been dying in this war are not from Russia; they’re people from homelands far from Europe, that Russia cares no more for than they care for Ukrainians.
This is simply not true. Some of the non-Russian peoples are indeed overrepresented but the majority of the soldiers are definitely Russian, you can see the distribution of the confirmed losses by region here https://en.zona.media/article/2022/05/20/casualties_eng (by BBC and Mediazona)
I think this is more or less right, although I think the “white guard” stuff is more than a sprinkling, for Putin personally: he really does seem sincere and convinced in his nostalgia for the bad old days of the Czarist Empire. He’s reputed to have said that the two greatest villains in Russian history were Nicholas II and Gorbachev, both because they held imperial power and gave it away.
You’re right to draw a distinction between nationalists and imperialists, though.
Lightning hits on very particular locations in Russia for occupants.
Yeah, short of something like that, regime change looks unlikely
Looking forward to reading the Art of War analysis. I’ll defer too much talk about it until I’m informed about what the author has to say…
But it does remind me of the early-1990s “East Asian strategy!” panic/fetish in the business press, when we were all being encouraged to apply military lessons to normal human interactions. As an impressionable youth I came across someone who’d decided to capitalize on this by writing Napoleon’s Art of War. I was really looking forward to finding out how his lessons might be applied to my life—imagine my disappointment when it was all just about artillery positioning…
The thing that struck me reading “The Art of War” is that it’s not about how to wage war. It’s about how to evaluate generals. This is pretty clear in the discussions of battles and sieges. These are big, impressive, showy things that people get excited about. But they’re also fundamentally failures. The ideal is to use the THREAT of such things to achieve the goals–violence perceived is violence achieved. That leaves you with all your resources, and thus in a better position to fight in the future. Pretty obvious once someone points it out, but a king or emperor sitting on a throne far from the action isn’t going to necessarily see that.
Thus any application to business or non-war activities really boils down to “Think about what’s actually necessary to do the job, and realize that the people doing the job properly may not be the ones that are in the public eye.” Useful, no doubt, but you find the same advice in Epictetus, “The Meditations”, and pretty much any business manual.
I’m not sure that the Western allies could stop Ukraine carrying on an insurgency for an indefinite duration if Ukraine were committed to doing so.
I’m not even sure that the Ukrainian government could stop their own people in occupied Ukraine carrying on an insurgency if those people were determined to and retained a measure of popular support in Ukraine and / or the West.
“GDP $2.215 nominal”
I’m sure you meant “trillion”, but this on it’s face made me laugh.
Since Protracted War came up again, I wonder if we should give any credit for the ideas (formalized by Mao) to George Washington.
“By this time Washington had no illusions about the militia; most of them had gone home. While many American leaders despaired, Washington kept his head and took charge of the war. He told Congress the American army would no longer seek to end the struggle in one titanic battle. ‘We will never seek a general action,’ he informed the president of Congress, John Hancock. Instead, ‘We will protract the war.’ This seemingly simple change in strategy formed the conflict into a war of attrition—precisely the kind of war the British were least prepared to fight.”
– What If?: The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, 2000.
I note the book I quoted above should be taken with a grain of salt, as it is very Fukuyama-ist in bent, and some of it’s takes on Russia in the early 1900’s have, IIRC, been more or less debunked by Dr. Devereaux (not directly, just along the way to making other points).
But it does directly quote Washington saying “We will Protract the War”
The Dutch war of Independence, which started in the 16th century, is sometimes known as the Eighty Years War. Seems pretty protracted to me. The Peloponnesian War lasted a while, too.
I don’t think “protracted wars” were very new in the 1770s.
There’s a bit of terminology difference here: While both sides have element of fabian tactics and guerilla warfare, both the 80-years war and the american war of independence were *primarily* conventional wars fought by states using conventional armies. (though at times supplemented by other types of forces)
Washington was trying to keep a consolidated Continental Army together to a much greater extent than Mao’s “People’s War” would rely on. He was a lot more willing to bring that army into the same general areas that the occupying British occupied, even if he avoided direct battles sometimes. Unlike Mao, Washington did not rely heavily on guerilla action by partisans to distract and slowly soften up his stronger opponent; he seemed to be relying more heavily on foreign aid (something a communist insurgency often does not have much of) and the extreme distance and inconvenience the British faced in shipping more troops to North America (something Mao in particular could not count on much of).
Also, Washington did seek general actions with the British on several occasions, arguably well before he was ready.
I would argue that Washington’s strategy was probably inspired by ‘Fabian tactics,’ and can reasonably be seen as prototypical to Mao’s strategic thought, but there are other examples (such as the Rif wars) much closer to Mao in time and much more direct as inspirations to his thinking.
Ollie and Percy are just the cutest things ever!
Count me among those who think this war in Ukraine needs to be ended, ceasefire and negotiations. Every war shouldn’t become an existential crisis. This seems to be a departure from the norm in a way, nations used to be able to claim victory or admit defeat and move on, more or less. Otherwise every war would become a death struggle to the end, and that’s not what usually happens (or has happened in the past), and it makes wars even worse than they are, for everyone involved. I don’t think it’s too cold and clinical to point to the 18th century in Europe, when our notions of “civilized” war began, with “rules.” Those did serve to end some of the bloodshed so shouldn’t we regard this as a positive development?
Look at Korea — isn’t it better that war ended in a stalemate rather than go on and on until both nations were even more devastated? The status quo has been better for all involved, I would argue. Or the Arab-Israeli wars — the major powers and UN stepped in then to put an end to fighting before it grew out of control and threatened to draw in nuclear powers. Isn’t it a good thing those were stopped before they became genocidal?
We used to be more careful and pragmatic about these things. I’ve got a old book or two on the subject of how too often, modern democracies tend to turn every war into a moral crusade * that winds up making the conflicts worse, bloodier, and harder to resolve. Not every war is WWII.
* or invokes the need to carry on no matter what, or those who died will have “died in vain,”, which sounds a lot like trying to get out of a hole by digging deeper.
I agree, but the conditions for peace talks are not here yet. I do think we should significantly ramp weapons delivery to Ukraine to make them happen. That’s the pragmatic view ; as long as Russia do not want peace, there won’t be peace. And Russia do not want peace yet. Realistically, the best way to shorten that is to definitely show to Poutine his struggle is futile, after all.
Older wars were not exactly less of a death struggle. Just ask Carthage how civilized ancient war was. (and Carthage is not an exceptional case by any mean.
As to Korea, you should know that korean do not all agree with your opinion. Even if you are korean (or Ukrainian), you’re just one voice among millions, and should check what other people want.
“Patriotism has, then, many faces. Those who would reject it entirely do not seem to have considered what will certainly step—has already begun to step—into its place. For a long time yet, or perhaps forever, nations will live in danger. Rulers must somehow nerve their subjects to defend them or at least to prepare for their defence. Where the sentiment of patriotism has been destroyed this can be done only by presenting every international conflict in a purely ethical light. If people will spend neither sweat nor blood for ‘their country’ they must be made to feel that they are spending them for justice, or civilisation, or humanity. This is a step down, not up. Patriotic sentiment did not of course need to disregard ethics. Good men needed to be convinced that their country’s cause was just; but it was still their country’s cause, not the cause of justice as such. The difference seems to me important. I may without self-righteousness or hypocrisy think it just to defend my house by force against a burglar; but if I start pretending that I blacked his eye purely on moral grounds—wholly indifferent to the fact that the house in question was mine—I become insufferable. The pretence that when England’s cause is just we are on England’s side—as some neutral Don Quixote might be—for that reason alone, is equally spurious. And nonsense draws evil after it. If our country’s cause is the cause of God, wars must be wars of annihilation. A false transcendence is given to things which are very much of this world.” — CS Lewis, “The Four Loves”
I think the sixty years since then have put a question mark on this. If nations deciding to only fight wars in the name of morality makes them less threatening, and a significant part of them take this stance and actually mean it, then nations are less threatened and war becomes less likely. And so far it seems like modern democracies rarely fight wars against each other and military mortality has declined rapidly since WWII.
Perhaps this will not last and in the future we will have big bloody ideological wars that will make us long for when wars were merely fought out of patriotic self interest. Or perhaps the time when nations will no longer live in danger is in the process of being realized.
this is a really good riposte to C. S. Lewis, who was a great writer and novelist but, as you correctly note, didn’t have the benefit of seeing how the post WWII era would turn out.
I think C.S. Lewis isn’t necessarily condemning the idea of just wars – if anything as a devout Christian and medievalist he probably would’ve been familiar with, and endorsed, the concept – but the idea of ideologically motivated just wars. The French Revolutionary Wars (maybe even the Crusades, I’m not familiar with his thoughts on those) were probably on his mind when he wrote this.
Oh, i’m not criticizing Lewis’ moral philosophy here, I’m criticizing his inability to foresee the future (which isn’t really a fair criticism at all). The argument he makes is entirely sound, as a philosophical argument. It just turned out to be disproven by subsequent history. If I was living in, say, 1948 I would probably have predicted a century of titanic ideological world wars as well.
Perhaps this will not last and in the future we will have big bloody ideological wars that will make us long for when wars were merely fought out of patriotic self interest. Or perhaps the time when nations will no longer live in danger is in the process of being realized.
It seems to me that you can make a strong case that, say, Iraq and Afghanistan would have turned out better had the US just replaced their governments with pro-American strongmen and called it a day, instead of trying to turn them into American-style liberal democracies. Not to mention the Arab Spring and overthrow of Gadaffi, both of which were supported by the West for basically ideological reasons, and both of which had massively destabilising effects that are still ongoing. And now in the Ukraine, you have a large number of people demanding war a outrance because Putin is evil and compromise with him is therefore compromise with evil. It’s true that Western Europe and North America have been historically peaceful since the end of WW2 (although I’d ascribe that more to a combination of US/Soviet hegemony + nuclear weapons), but in the rest of the world, I think one might quite reasonably wish that Western nations would show more patriotic self-interest and less ideologically-driven crusading.
Western nations acted out of perceived patriotic self-interest during the height of European imperialism in the late 19th century and that was a lot more destructive to the invaded countries than the interventions of the past decades (including, among other atrocities, genocides as a response to rebellion). Especially in far-away wars of choice the ideals of liberalism and human rights seem to restrain violence to some degree.
Perhaps if it wasn’t replaced by ideology self-interested patriotism would have wisened up and come to the realization that imperialism isn’t beneficial to a country and doesn’t make it safer from its competitors. Maybe in a world that doesn’t turn to ideology after WWI we could have skipped WWII and started the long peace two decades earlier. Or maybe every country in WWII would have been some variety of fascist (which I would categorize as a highly irrational emotive offshot of self-interested patriotism).
Western nations acted out of perceived patriotic self-interest during the height of European imperialism in the late 19th century and that was a lot more destructive to the invaded countries than the interventions of the past decades
But those wars were still generally less destructive than the ones that preceded them. The trend doubtless has a variety of causes, but it predates the push to pretend that every war is fought for entirely disinterested ethical motives.
The problem with saying “the US should just have set up strongmen in Afghanistan and Iraq” is the considerable challenge of finding strongmen who are, in point of fact, strong.
Think of Diem in South Vietnam. He represents a fairly common failure state of attempts to prop up an autocratic puppet regime. Namely, that literally no one in the country except the elites your strongman personally funnels money to has any real interest in keeping him in power, and not even they really care about him if his successor can keep the gravy train running.
Given the circumstances of how the US won in Afghanistan and what the political situation on the ground was, it is very hard to see how the US could have “just set up a strongman” and not wound up with a Diem.
Iraq is a rather different situation. As I understand it, the Iraqi government was not actually overthrown by the guerilla movements that sprung up against it. It’s still there, which is not to say it hasn’t undergone its own internal shifts in power and politics. There was never anything like the way that the Taliban swept Afghanistan soon after the US pullout.
I don’t know that the US tried to turn Iraq and Afghanistan “into American-style liberal democracies.” In Afghanistan they first supported reactionary tribalist factions against a government that was (brutally, in the Afghan tradition) imposing modernism – education for girls and women, an end to forced marriage and blood feud. Then they supported a bunch of front-men who talked the western game while relying on bribery and foreign forces (no slur here – again a common ploy). In Iraq their first pick – Chalabi – was another of the same. In neither case did they look for people who had any wide base of support – probably because they sensed (correctly) that such people would be hostile to their agenda.
As for military mortality, a lot of that is simply that there have been very few peer-to-peer conflicts involving Western nations since WW2 (depending on how strictly you define “peer”, arguably none). Western colonial forces in 19th-century Africa often lost very few men to direct enemy action for similar reasons.
I think that C. S. Lewis’ argument here hinges too heavily on his own personal revulsion, on what he finds “insufferable,” “nonsense,” and “evil.”
The evidence does not support the idea that wars fought without nationalism are inherently more likely to turn into wars of annihilation than wars fought with them. If nothing else, a non-nationalist ideology can decisively win a war by changing the social order in the losing country’s territory. A nationalist ideology cannot permanently win a war save by destroying the losing nation.
I don’t think C.S. Lewis is arguing that wars fought for nationalist reasons are good; if anything, I think nationalist casus belli along the lines of “sure this land belongs to a legitimate government that we have peaceful relations with, but some of the people on that land speak our language, so it belongs to us regardless of whether or not our own government has any pretense of a historical or legal claim to said land” would be included in his argument. Its important to remember that historically, nationalism came in a parcel with liberalism, and it wasn’t until the late 19th century that conservative statesmen like Otto von Bismarck figured out a way to shore up a conservative order by appealing to the national feelings of the populace.
If you’re right, it makes Lewis’ complaint rather incoherent, because he’s complaining about a 20th century phenomenon and contrasting it to beliefs common in the 19th century, but is apparently unhappy with the 19th century beliefs too. What, exactly, is he opposed to here, and what, exactly, is he supporting?
@Simon_Jester
Lewis seems to be supporting Realism. Countries should act in their own security interests and people should support their country acting in its security interests.
“Countries should act in their own security interests and people should support their country acting in its security interests.”
The problem with that is “security interests” can be even more vague, subjective and expansive than communist, capitalist, ethnonationalist, or liberal ideological interests (and let’s not get started on religious ideological interests). Lots of people historically have felt that their security interests require expanding across whole continents, sometimes more than one of them. Lots of British and Russian expansion historically was justified on the grounds of “security”.
That applies to people as well as nations, but people who act for their own safety are generally vastly more safe for others than those who act on ideological grounds.
Depends on the specific war in question, but a lot of nationalist ideologies have fought wars that were either quite limited or self limiting in their objective, so no, it’s not true that “a nationalist ideology cannot permanently win a war without destroying the losing nation”. In Nigeria in 1967 the Igbo were not fighting to destroy or subjugate the Hausa nation, they were fighting to secede from Nigeria and have a nation-state of their own. Same for lots of other wars of national liberation.
Wars over disputed border territories are a different story, and less defensible, but they’re still very much limited in their objective. I’m not particularly a fan of either side in the on-and-off Armenian-Azeri war, for example, but neither side is actually trying to obliterate the other side as a nation.
Re Armenia- Azerbaijan, I’m not sure genocide is not on the Azeri agenda. They and Turkey recall 1915 with fondness.
The evidence does not support the idea that wars fought without nationalism are inherently more likely to turn into wars of annihilation than wars fought with them.
CS Lewis is talking about wars fought for the national interest vs. wars fought for abstract concepts, not wars fought with or without nationalism, which is itself an abstract concept.
If nothing else, a non-nationalist ideology can decisively win a war by changing the social order in the losing country’s territory.
This is precisely the sort of all-encompassing war aim CS Lewis is talking about.
It is very easy to conceptualize the national interest as being somehow served by the total annihilation of the enemy nation. During Lewis’ own lifetime, the Nazis did exactly that.
There is no coherent way to separate “wars fought for the national interest” and “wars fought for abstractions” as distinct categories.
Nonsense. The Nazis fought in support of an ideological racial position, not a national position. Witness they annexed not on the argument that the land belonged to the nation somehow, but that it held people of the race, or that the race deserved it better than those of a different race now there.
You might be interested in how the genocide scholar Dirk Moses employs the concept of “permanent security” to bridge the gulf between the two positions you’re describing:
It is very easy to conceptualize the national interest as being somehow served by the total annihilation of the enemy nation.
Except that the vast majority of wars fought in the national interest didn’t have total annihilation as a war aim. None of the 18th-century cabinet wars were fought with genocidal intent; the victorious Coalition didn’t genocide France after the Napoleonic Wars; the British and French didn’t try to destroy Russia after the Crimean War; the Italians in their Wars of Independence kicked the Austrians out of Italy, but didn’t try to invade or destroy Austria itself; the Prussians used the Franco-Prussian War to unite Germany under their own leadership, not to wipe out the French nation.
During Lewis’ own lifetime, the Nazis did exactly that.
On the basis of a universalising ideology which was purportedly true for all nations at all times (i.e., that the world is a never-ending struggle in which more militarily fit countries will rightly and inevitably crush the weak).
There is no coherent way to separate “wars fought for the national interest” and “wars fought for abstractions” as distinct categories.
They’re overlapping categories, sure, but they’re still different categories.
Nonsense. The Nazis fought in support of an ideological racial position, not a national position.
So, the Nazis were not nationalist? That’s a new one…
Usually, when people living to the West of the Atlantic posit a ‘controversial’ opinion on the Nazis, it is that the Nazis (who beat up trade unionists for rich industrialists, enacted mass privatisation to gain the confidence of Germany’s business class, and under whose rule the top income share increased) actually were socialists.
However, now I read that they actually were not nationalists but ideological racists. (Did the Nazis even distinguish between the ‘German nation’ and the ‘German race’?) That is certainly original.
If you’ve only read now that they were ideological, you should read up more on them before talking about them.
I meant that they were obviously both nationalist AND ideologically racist. Maybe I had phrased that insufficiently clearly.
Their actions were informed by what their crazy racialist, social-darwinist ideology made them believe was in the best interest of the German Volk (nation/people).
you should read up more on them before talking about them.
I have the vague suspicion that after subtracting things written by crazy ideologues and grifters*, I have read more on the Nazis than you.
Though I wonder why I am bothering to reply to you. You are (presumably knowingly) arguing for a position which would be rejected by like 99 percent of all genuine historians of the Third Reich; I do not think I could hope to persuade such a person. Some discussions on the internet end up informing bystanders; however, I do not think this is one of them.
That reminds me of a certain other poster; I think I should from now on resist my urges to reply to him also.
*As far as I am aware the closest thing to a ‘historian’ who had claimed that the Nazis were not-nationalist is Candace Owens (https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/j3dbby/candace_owens_thinks_hitler_was_a_globalist/); which tells enough.
Nah, they had no interest in Germany as a nation, only as a racial group.
Nonsense.
He was not talking about “national ideology” but nations and patriotism. You permanently win those wars by forcing a treaty.
As for your distinction between “changing the social order” and “destroying the losing nation,” your pose of superiority is immoral. If there’s one thing that the 20th century taught us is that if anything, the first is more evil.
Do you genuinely believe that the Allies in WW2 should’ve aimed to utterly destroy Germany and Japan, rather than changing their social orders?
False dilemma.
Well, Mary, if you reject the false dilemma between “the Allies should have destroyed Germany and Japan as nations” and “the Allies should have reshaped the social order of Germany and Japan,” then we are left with the third option of “the Allies should not have won the war.”
You aren’t an Axis sympathizer, so clearly you have to have some theory of what Allied victory should have looked like after World War Two. What should have happened?
…
A social order can be riddled with evil and changing it can be a positive good. It isn’t always, on either count, but it can be. To kill an entire race or nation of people can never be a positive good.
The idea that it is better to exterminate entire peoples than to change the rules by which a people might live is itself a belief system that privileges ideas over people. One cannot hold such a mentality, and then seriously share Lewis’ criticism that wars fought over ideology are worse than wars fought over national interest.
False trilemma. You are arguing from the position that ideological wars are good, so you’re probably not going to see the problem.
@Simon_Jester
To be fair, there are other options, from “beat them back into their borders, then offer peace” to “occupy the country militarily but allow the government to stay in power and manage civilian affairs (no de-nazification and the like)”.
In the current war Ukraine and its allies aren’t trying to destroy or socially reshape Russia either, but they are still aiming to win the war.
The people living in South Korea are better off. North Korea…not so much.
The other problem is that “existential war” is a lot like a rape attempt–in order for it to happen, only one of the parties involved has to want it to be so.
The Professor’s comments on university spending priorities are spot-on. Having worked at a leading public university for years, I saw firsthand how elected officials and academic chiefs suffer the same rampant egomania for “doing something big” rather than tending to mundane tasks that create a more efficient organization or society. The idea is that no one cares or remembers if you make trains run on time, fix the roads, shore up programs, take care of business in general. But you can impress donors by building new stuff (that can be named after them!) or planting your personal flag on some new scheme that may not be be necessary at all. Bragging rights, essentially. So core infrastructures are ignored or decay while grandiose boondoggles take over.
Comment to subscribe.
I mean, I agree that the United States can’t compel countries to develop prosperity and freedom, but I disagree with the implied premise that that’s what the United States was trying to do. That’s what US government officials said they were there to do, and I find that claim only slightly more plausible than their claims that Hussein really had nukes.
This explanation is incoherent unless it is coupled with an explanation of why US leaders were telling the truth with respect to Germany and Japan, but ceased to do so later Did the nature of our government change permanently when the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, or something?
Japan was MacArthur insisting that the country was ready for democracy; there were a lot of people behind the scenes in the US who thought otherwise.
Germany was because it’s in Europe. Cold War America treated the European theater and other theaters profoundly differently. In Europe, the US generally backed democracies; the big exception was Greece, and even there, the regime before the 1967 was a democracy run by a right-wing government, just with a deep state that considered the center-left opposition illegitimate. Elsewhere, the US cut loose all kinds of allies out of racist belief that their countries weren’t ready to develop, like Chiang Kai-Shek in China, and had no trouble backing really brutal dictators like Syngman Rhee. (The worst NATO dictator in Europe was Salazar and the really bad stuff he did was not in Portugal but in the colonies.)
Re Iraq, you may recall that the most common counterargument in the US to Bush’s “let’s make Iraq an American-style democracy” was not “you’re insane, it’s going to kill hundreds of thousands of people,” but “the Iraqis are not ready for democracy.” (This is ad the regime change question; the most common argument in opposition to the Iraq War was that Saddam had no WMD, but that’s not what we’re talking about.) This was usually pitched in explicitly racist terms – not for nothing, the racists hated Bush and the alt-right was defined as an alternative to Bush-style neoconservatism – but lots of left-wing people dabbled in it as well using essentialist rhetoric about how Amerikkka wasn’t democratic either and Iraq couldn’t just democratize and what not.
You’ve lost me. I thought the argument was the US had benevolent intentions in Germany and Japan (despite some disagreement within the halls of government), but malevolent intentions pretty much everywhere else. (Although South Korea is a democracy now, which is confusing.) Now you seem to be flirting with the idea that some countries are ready for democracy, and some not, and that US intentions don’t really have decisive effect.
No, I’m asserting that the American national security establishment thought that some countries were ready for democracy (European ones) and others weren’t (non-European ones). MacArthur presided over a democratic constitution for Japan over a lot of objections within the security establishment.
South Korea is democratic now, yes. This isn’t really about the US one way or the other – the evolution of the South Korean regime has been domestic since the 1960s. (In general, the international left overrates the role of the US and underrates that of domestic reactionaries in various right-wing military coups in Latin America and Southeast Asia.) I’m making assertions about things the US was doing in the first 10-15 years after the end of WW2.
The relevance to Iraq is that the neocons thought they were trying to resurrect the spirit of WW2 and MacArthur’s role in democratizing Japan. What they actually were doing was profoundly different; our host here has talked before about the difference between peer conflict and counterinsurgency.
“South Korea is democratic now, yes. This isn’t really about the US one way or the other”
If so, it’s a remarkable coincidence that West Germany, South Korea and Taiwan seemed to be, and seem to be, so much more democratic than East Germany, North Korea and the PRC.
All the “incidents” had the US government convinced that Japan would be easier to manage than Germany. If you keep having to do false flag after false flag to get your way, it seems fairly obvious that if you are removed with your false flags, the population will stop doing things your way.
The most common explanation I’ve heard (and didn’t think of as particularly controversial) is that unlike 2000s-era Afghanistan or Iraq, 1940s-era Germany and Japan were the core partners of a nascent Great Power bloc that had just demonstrated its ability to compete with the Anglo-American bloc, and especially with the recent precedent of Germany’s reaction to its deliberately humiliating beatdown at Versailles, the US was anxious to integrate these defeated competitors into its own power bloc as junior partners rather than risk the sort of lasting turmoil and discontent that might have easily driven them into the arms of the Soviets. (Which also goes a long way toward explaining a number of otherwise baffling decisions, like the willingness to risk the loss of the Korean peninsula by handing over much of the administration of South Korea to recent former collaborators in the decades-long, borderline-genocidally-brutal Japanese imperial occupation.)
Regardless of whether that was the overall objective, the US certainly put a lot of effort into installing elected governments and economic development and made a serious though failed attempt to build up local militaries. The US could have simply installed a military governor and absorbed them as territories, and just neglected infastructure.
Beyond the tendency to think that your own country is the villain-protagonist of world history, I think an important element in a lot of these calls for an immediate negotiated settlement is that a lot of people, thanks to Fox News et al., really believe that Ukraine is a puppet of the West, that Euromaidan and other color revolutions were CIA ops (after all, they think they killed JFK), that the Biden family is only supporting Ukraine because they are swimming up to their ears in Ukrainian money from corruption, that Volodymyr Zelensky is a strongman who is dismantling democracy in his country, and that Russia is actually doing quite well militarily in the War.
These are all talking points I have myself heard from family members, and so without suggesting that the most important front of the Russo-Ukrainian War is American public opinion, I do worry all of these points, no matter how lucidly laid out, won’t affect this kind of talk because the people making them exist in a media bubble, and these arguments are based on a completely different set of priors from their own.
> The steady polarization of this issue among staunch partisans is really an indicator of how many people in the United States hate the other party more than they love their country, something I have no problem calling unpatriotic.
You’re crossing a line there, prof.
“You’re unpatriotic for not supporting the war” is a standard, and discreditable, ruling-party line from the Iraq and Vietnam eras, but “you’re unpatriotic for not supporting the *proxy* war” is a truly shameless twist on it. “Show some respect for our brave tax dollars dying overseas!”
Or do you only mean that your understanding of geopolitics is so self-evidently right than anyone disagreeing with you must be doing so because they don’t love the USA enough? That’s more intellectually honest at least but as a political claim it’s just as disgraceful.
I think Ukraine’s cause is well worth the support the US is giving and then some, but I won’t stand for equating disagreement with disloyalty. When you do that, you’re the one giving in to partisanship.
I’m pretty sure our good host is attributing some (most?) of the American anti-Ukraine sentiment on the fact that the other side supports Ukraine, ergo supporting Ukraine is wrong. And then claiming that it is the reasoning that is unpatriotic, not the ultimate policy stance.
Are people who support Ukraine because the other side don’t also being unpatriotic? And how do we go about determining how numerous they are compared to the unpatriotic anti-Ukrainians?
“Are people who support Ukraine because the other side don’t”
Straw man. I know of no such people.
Whereas a lot of Republican politicians, from Trump down, seem very inclined to serve Putin’s interests.
Straw man. I know of no such people.
“How can Nixon be President? *I* don’t know anyone who voted for him!”
Less facetiously, I know plenty of people who hate Putin because they view him as being aligned with the opposing side on of the culture wars.
“aligned with the opposing side on of the culture wars”
…so what? It’s not like we dislike him because he’s part of a different sports team. We dislike him because his morality and actions are reprehensible, even evil.
That’s not a quote anyone said, either. The correct version is that Pauline Kael said she only knew one person who voted for him and acknowledged that she lived in a “special world.” At no point did she express surprise at the victory. I guess when you are opposed to the democratic regime, it’s okay to make shit up?
That’s not a quote anyone said, either. The correct version is that Pauline Kael said she only knew one person who voted for him and acknowledged that she lived in a “special world.” At no point did she express surprise at the victory. I guess when you are opposed to the democratic regime, it’s okay to make shit up?
Yes, it’s true, I quoted the common version of the saying from memory, rather than looking up the exact wording. So what? It doesn’t change my point.
Were you on the Internet in the early teens?
Despite the invasion of Georgia and the assassinations and the whatnot, Putin was regarded on the Internet with some affection until Russia passed its anti-gay legislation, at which point the Internet turned on him with a vengeance.
So what? Nobody has said that and yet you confidently quoted this. So when you tell us that you know people who only support Ukraine out of culture war reasons, we call bullshit, because your grasp of basic facts is just bad.
…so what? It’s not like we dislike him because he’s part of a different sports team. We dislike him because his morality and actions are reprehensible, even evil.
Bear in mind you’re talking about a country which has somehow managed to turn “Kidnapping and raping children is bad, actually” into a partisan statement: https://www.vox.com/culture/23794355/sound-of-freedom-controversy-true-story-qanon
‘turn “Kidnapping and raping children is bad, actually” into a partisan statement’
No, that’s not what has happened.
What’s happened is that many conservatives have become deluded or dishonest about how much child trafficking is happening and who is doing it.
The QAnon idea that there’s some vast Democratic conspiracy of child trafficking is an evil lie, no more grounded in reality than the Satanic panic of the 1980s.
Not one of Epstein’s clients has been arrested for that. Burden of proof is on those who claim it’s overstated.
“Bear in mind you’re talking about a country which has somehow managed to turn “Kidnapping and raping children is bad, actually” into a partisan statement:”
The criticism here isn’t that “sex trafficking of minors is good actually”, it’s that US conservative Christian wildly overstate how common the problem is, for ideological reasons.
And what do you consider an acceptable level of trafficking children for sex slavery?
And what evidence have you that they overstate the problem? Bear in mind, in your answer, that not one of Epstein’s clients have been arrested.
https://xkcd.com/1731/
@ Alon Levy:
So what? Nobody has said that and yet you confidently quoted this.
Pauline Kael didn’t say it. Lots of other people, though — it’s a common enough saying, after all. And many aphorisms are the same. If someone says “I may disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it,” or “For evil to triumph, all that’s required is for good men to do nothing,” or “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” I don’t go into hysterics about how they’re obviously a lying liar who lies just because they didn’t quote the original Voltaire, Burke, or Virgil.
@ Mindstalko, Hector:
Have you even watched the movie, or even read the article I linked to? “The Sound of Freedom” never mentions anything about a “vast Democratic conspiracy” or the overall level of child trafficking, but it’s still getting smeared as “Q-Anon adjacent” because even making a movie about child trafficking is apparently too close to one of the other side’s talking-points. Yet you want me to believe that these same people form their views on geopolitics in an entirely disinterested and non-partisan manner? Sorry, not buying it.
Yet you want me to believe that these same people form their views on geopolitics in an entirely disinterested and non-partisan manner? Sorry, not buying it.
I absolutely don’t think that either side in American politics forms their views on geopolitics in a disinterested or non-partisan manner. And I generally disagree strongly with both US progressives and US conservatives about foreign policy, which is one reason I find the whole US political spectrum so alienating. Nevertheless, as much as I’m not a liberal, I think that liberals are closer to correct on the narrow question of “is Ukraine or Russia on the right side here, and does Ukraine deserve support”. Even if it’s only by accident.
I’m saddened by the fact that many/most of the people that I incline to agree with on other issues disagree with me about Ukraine, but I believe in deciding my position on issues on a case by case basis, not on the basis of “whose team do I want to be on”, necessarily.
Burden of proof is on those who claim it’s overstated.
Here’s an example of how it’s overstated- a popular talking point among some of these activists is that “the median sex worker enters the business at 13”, or something like that.
This is pretty clearly not true, as we can see from a study in Switzerland (from authors whose tone is generally critical of sex work):
https://sci-hub.se/https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1600-0447.2009.01533.x
and from a survey more recently in England:
https://www.beyond-the-gaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/BtGbriefingsummaryoverview.pdf
On the flip side, the vast majority of criminal sexual conduct involving minors happens in the home, with “mother’s boyfriend” or male relatives, or sometimes in the context of other trusted adults like coaches or teachers, not in the contexts of international sex trafficking rings.
The first rule in a hole is to stop digging. The quote about Nixon is always sourced to Kael, or (as in your case) listed without a source but coming, ultimately, from someone putting words in Kael’s mouth; at no point has anyone been able to produce a high-profile person identified with liberalism who said that. Because, like your disgusting homophobia, this is an ideology based on lies.
The first rule in a hole is to stop digging. The quote about Nixon is always sourced to Kael, or (as in your case) listed without a source but coming, ultimately, from someone putting words in Kael’s mouth; at no point has anyone been able to produce a high-profile person identified with liberalism who said that.
No-one’s been able to produce a high-profile person who said “I may disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it,” but it’s still a good way of summing up a particular approach. Similarly, “But nobody I know voted for Nixon” is a good way of summing up the dangers of overgeneralising from personal experience.
Because, like your disgusting homophobia, this is an ideology based on lies.
“Disgusting homophobia”? I don’t think I’ve expressed an opinion on the matter one way or the other.
Actually, there are a lot of people who make geopolitical decisions based solely on partisan considerations. Certainly many of the same people who laughed along with Obama when he mocked Romney for suggesting that the Russians were our adversaries now believe that Putin is the devil, only because the Democratic party tells them so. They are fools, but it would be wrong to question their patriotism.
The main take I see from partisan Democrats now (I’m thinking of Matt Yglesias) is that the top geopolitical threat to the US is still China. The Blob says the same thing – Russia is an acute threat but in the long run the pivot to Asia is still right.
The anti-China consensus is arguably much stronger among Republicans, both now and historically. Peter Beinart in the New York Times uses the already-longstanding term “Asia First” to describe the underlying foreign policy consensus among Republicans, up to and including figures in the Ron Paul or Tucker Carlson mold often falsely described as “isolationist” or “anti-imperialist,” for whom the greatest long-term crisis in world affairs is China’s ability as a nonwhite and non-Christian power to enforce its independence from Western political, economic, and cultural domination. In this worldview, “stop antagonizing or trying to subjugate Russia, and start courting them as allies against China” makes perfect strategic and patriotic sense, while also providing a clear fix for the extremely artificial separation (an artificiality that liberal or Dem-aligned foreign policy hawks seem pathologically unable to comprehend) between American/Western exceptionalism as a practical approach to foreign policy, and the ideology of explicit white Christian world supremacy as its racial/cultural cornerstone.
Reminds me of one of my favorite bits of political inanity: Jeb Bush’s apparent failure to understand (or at least to accurately describe) his father’s self-deprecating joke of describing his unimpressive tennis serve as “unleashing Chiang,” a way of ridiculing far-right Bircher-style Cold Warriors for their devotion to Chiang Kai-shek.
@skinner was right: Or, or, it could just be that China is actually a potential rival whereas Russia can, at best, be a dog in the manger.
“Republicans only don’t like China because they’re racist religious zealots” is…certainly an opinion that you can have.
I’d be far more hesitant to write off Russia’s capacity as a rival to the West, when the state of the current conflict seems like a pretty clear demonstration of its ability to stretch if not fully exhaust the West’s military-industrial production capacity toe-to-toe in a high-intensity ground war, even without direct support from China. Not to mention that we still don’t have a clear picture of how fully pulling the plug on cheap Russian energy would affect the stability and economic viability of Europe, since Europe is still currently buying plenty of Russian energy via intermediary countries like Turkey or India, and Russia will probably have far more long-term flexibility to diversify its end purchasers than Europe will have to diversify its suppliers.
The point about China and white world supremacy doesn’t really boil down to Republicans being racist, in a sense it boils down to the entire global order of Western hegemony being a racist legacy of European colonialism, including the so-called “rules-based international order” so beloved of liberal hawks like Biden, whose foreign policy approach to China is after all largely indistinguishable from that of hawkish Republican interventionists like Nikki Haley or Marco Rubio. In so many words, if the knock on conservative “isolationists” is that their professed anti-militarism is a sham that doesn’t actually preclude a racist disregard for the autonomy of nonwhite or non-Christian peoples, the knock on liberal “internationalists” is that they tend to rely far more than conservatives on an arbitrary and hypocritical distinction where domestic policies underpinned by racism are beyond the pale while foreign policies ultimately underpinned by similar racism are fine and dandy. (This tension after all was a major part of what ultimately undid the Great Society coalition in the 1960s: those pesky civil rights activist types like MLK refused to get with LBJ’s program of opposing racist brutality in the South to build up a nonwhite constituency, while abetting far worse racist brutality in Vietnam to appeal to an existing constituency of white anticommunists.)
@Skinner_Was_Right
for whom the greatest long-term crisis in world affairs is China’s ability as a nonwhite and non-Christian power to enforce its independence from Western political, economic, and cultural domination. In this worldview, “stop antagonizing or trying to subjugate Russia, and start courting them as allies against China” makes perfect strategic and patriotic sense,
So, you claim that the Republicans base their foreign policy on racism and religious bigotry?
I wonder how Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney declaring ‘Russia is our number one geopolitical foe’ in 2012* fits into that.
Or the US’ policy towards the PRC in the years around 2000 including ‘helping China grow rich by doing such things as helping them to join the World Trade Organisation; so they will magically democratize through free trade and capitalism’…
*Source: https://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/26/romney-russia-is-our-number-one-geopolitical-foe/
I’d be far more hesitant to write off Russia’s capacity as a rival to the West, when the state of the current conflict seems like a pretty clear demonstration of its ability to stretch if not fully exhaust the West’s military-industrial production capacity toe-to-toe in a high-intensity ground war, even without direct support from China.
Clear nonsense.
If it weren’t for the idiot politicians here in Europe going full headless chicken/professional ostrich mode (with side servings of ‘not my problem idiots’ and ‘idiot pacifist’) instead of immediately giving Ukraine as much support as practically possible, whilst the US DoD was so stingy they gave Ukraine EVEN LESS support, Ukraine would already have completely destroyed the Russian military and kicked them out of their country instead of only destroying most of Russian military power.
Not to mention that we still don’t have a clear picture of how fully pulling the plug on cheap Russian energy would affect the stability and economic viability of Europe, since Europe is still currently buying plenty of Russian energy via intermediary countries like Turkey or India, and Russia will probably have far more long-term flexibility to diversify its end purchasers than Europe will have to diversify its suppliers.
Is that a joke? Even if Russia somehow succeeds in finding costumers who will not act as intermediaries, then those countries will in return need to buy less on the world market with the result there is more gas available on the world market for the EU.
The point about China and white world supremacy doesn’t really boil down to Republicans being racist, in a sense it boils down to the entire global order of Western hegemony being a racist legacy of European colonialism, including the so-called “rules-based international order” so beloved of liberal hawks like Biden,
If you ask me it would be far more accurate to describe the current world order as a legacy of WWII.
In 1990 the permanent members of the UN security council included the Soviet Union and the PRC; yet excluded such former colonial powers like Germany, Japan, and Spain.
As you see being an important member of the winning side of World War II was more important on becoming part of UNSC than being a colonial power.
The only counter argument against that that I can find is that one can claim that the USSR and China actually were colonial powers because of the czarist colonisation of Central Asia and Qing expansionism. However, you do not strike me as the type to claim that.
@Skinner was right: the entire global order of Western hegemony being a racist legacy of European colonialism, including the so-called “rules-based international order”
Which is why the UN Security Council included China from the beginning as a permanent member with veto power.
A Security Council seat that, if you’ll recall, was occupied for decades at US insistence not by the actual government of China in Beijing, but by the US-backed “Republic of China” government-in-exile in Taipei under Chiang Kai-shek, a regime whose abortive victory in the Chinese Civil War was anticipated by Western colonial chauvinists (as the academic history cited by Beinart makes clear) to continue the prior century’s precedent of Chinese helplessness before Western interests.
In any case, the UN with its vague gestures in the direction of international democracy is just the most surface-level institution of the broader post-WWII international order, which also includes such flagrantly antidemocratic Western-dominated structures as the WTO, IMF, and World Bank — and much of the global instability we’re currently seeing around situations like the Ukraine conflict or a potential future Taiwan conflict is directly attributable to the US decision in the wake of the first Cold War to deliberately forego a meaningfully internationalist world order under global institutions like the UN or ICC, a trajectory on which the most notable milestones were arguably the 1999 Serbia/Kosovo intervention, when we appropriated on behalf of NATO the right to unilaterally determine the legality of international military action and redraw the borders of another country by force (often directly cited by Russia as direct precedent for the invasion and carveup of Ukraine), and the 2003 Iraq invasion, when we dispensed with even the thin pretense of NATO-led pseudo-internationalism as soon as the Europeans refused to go along.
That said, the collective West is doing a bang-up job right now of undermining whatever remotely plausible claim it has left to global leadership, by instituting a de facto mandate that every “neutral” internati