I’m trusting
that all of my readers have already seen plenty of news about the
Russia-Ukraine war. Thus, I’m not going to try to begin this essay with a
summary of the situation – either of the invasion that began this week, or of
the whole tawdry history of Russia-Ukraine relations over the last ten years or
so.
However, I do
think it’s a good idea to say that people trying to understand these events
would benefit from keeping in mind two relevant definitions from The Devil’s
Dictionary, by the great satirist Ambrose Bierce.
Boundary, n. In political
geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary
rights of one from the imaginary rights of the other.
Cannon, n. An
instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.
Ambrose Bierce
was writing at the end of the 19th century. During his childhood,
his country had sent a great number of cannons to its frontier with Mexico, and
emerged from the scuffle with a “rectified” boundary. As a young man, Bierce
fought in the Civil War, and helped make sure that the Confederacy would fail
in its attempt to establish a new international boundary where there hadn’t
been one before.
Meanwhile, as a
mature journalist, he frequently found himself writing about such exercises in
boundary rectification as the Franco-Prussian War, the Saltpeter War, the Spanish-American
War, and the two Boer Wars.
So we can be fairly
confident that Ambrose Bierce knew his stuff.
Now, it just so
happens that, since the end of the Cold War, the United States and its various
coalitions of allies have been the principal cannon-wielders of the world. Yet
curiously enough, almost none of America’s wars have ended with the drawing or
redrawing of boundaries.
For example,
Iraq was “liberated” from Saddam Hussein, yet instead of granting his most
oppressed subjects, the Kurds, what they wanted – an independent Kurdistan –
they were just forced against their will into a new polity erected on the old
Iraqi borders.
How well did
this work out? Well, within a decade of the (partial) withdrawal of US forces,
Iraq had already degenerated into a failed state, been temporarily overrun by
ISIS, and finally gotten transformed into a de facto client state of
Iran.
America has
repeatedly proven ready and willing to insert itself into conflicts all over
the world, instigate coups and install American puppet regimes in countries both
large and small, and heavily bomb its supposed enemies with little concern for
civilian casualties. Yet it is largely uninterested in redrawing national
boundaries – even though, historically speaking, a desire to redraw boundaries
has been the main reason for nations to go to war.
It seems to me
that the most likely explanation for this weird fact is that the neocons and
neoliberals who have set American foreign policy for the last thirty years or
so don’t really believe in boundaries.
Oh, they will certainly
get good and angry angry when a country that they disapprove of, such as
Russia, starts violating the “territorial integrity” of one of its neighbors. Yet
at the same time, they see the idea of a boundary that separates two distinct
peoples with two distinct ways of life as being rather strange and antiquated. After
all, the world to them is a place full of interchangeable people who all want
the same things that they want – that is, to live under a government that
governs in accordance with the value systems of Harvard and the New York
Times.
They refer to
such a system of government as “democracy,” in blithe disregard of the question
of how much power it actually gives to the voters/common people. Have you ever
wondered why, here in the United States, SCOTUS’ ability to legalize same sex
marriage and abortion without any kind of democratic mandate does not get
points knocked off of the US’ standing in democracy indices, while at the same
time, Hungarian premier Victor Orbán’s highly popular decision to refuse entry
to most Middle-Eastern migrants gets him called a “strongman” or even a
“dictator” by the western press? Well, now you know.
But I digress.
The point is that, in the neoliberal imagination, all people are homogenous, or
at the very least they ought to be. If Iraq is suffering under a dictator, it
is good to ask whether the dictator should be gotten rid of, and who should
govern Iraq in his stead. It is bad to ask whether there should even be a
unified “Iraq” in the first place.
Or consider
South Africa. When the Apartheid regime fell in the 1990s, too few people asked
whether the Zulus and Xhosas and Tswanas and Boers and Cape Coloureds and all of
that country’s other ethnic groups, who had been forced into a very unhappy
union in order to satisfy the demands of British imperialism, should now be
free to go there own ways. Instead, they just asked what needed to be done so
that all “South Africans” could live like, and be governed like, US Americans.
I trust that I
do not need to devote time to summarizing the results for South Africa.
The first thing
to take into account when trying to understand Russia is that the Russians,
like most people in the world, do not share the neoliberals’ attitudes toward
boundaries.
Vladimir Putin
is not interested in global hegemony. His concerns are strictly regional.
The proximate
cause of the war with Ukraine was the secession of the Donbas – a.k.a. the
Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics – in the very easternmost part of
Ukraine. The Donbas is full of ethnic Russians who have always favored closer
integration with Russia, and who generally see the breakup of the Soviet Union
as a tragedy because it separated them from their kinsmen.
Until 2014, the
presidency of Ukraine was held by Victor Yanukovych, a member of the
pro-Russian faction. Then Yanukovych was overthrown in a US-backed coup, and
the Donbas, which refused to recognize the new central government which took
his place, has spent the past eight years fighting a bitter war of independence.
Russia waited
until this week to militarily intervene. For people who only heard the western
side of the story, Russia’s recent actions are a senseless and unprovoked
aggression. But for the inhabitants of Donetsk and Luhansk, the eventual
arrival of the (excessively patient) Russians was the well-earned and eagerly celebrated reward for eight long years of struggle and bloodshed and
heroism.
The United States’ leadership class cannot understand or respect this, because to them, a man’s national identity depends – or at least, it ought to depend – only on which side of a more or less arbitrary line he happens to live on.
And that man’s
political desires should not include a desire for unity with, or separation
from, this or that group of people. Rather, he should desire only to be
governed by the best possible government – which in practice means a pliable government, possibly installed in a CIA-backed coup, which can
be relied upon to implement whatever policies Harvard and the New York Times
and George Soros say are the best policies.
Now, if you’ve
read this far, you’ll probably be patient enough to believe me when I say that none
of this is meant as an expression of approval for what Vladimir Putin just did!
My desire is
simply to remind people of the fact that there is more than one side to this
story, and that it isn’t the simplistic tale of good-vs-evil that you would get
by watching CNN or reading the Times. It is important for Americans to
understand the Donbas separatists’ side of the story. Yet it would also be
stupid to deny that in most regions of Ukraine, the population is quite
patriotic and loyal to Kyiv, and that these people deserve not to have their
houses bombed and their cities occupied by the Russian army.
Had the United
States and its NATO allies been more honest with themselves and with Ukraine
about the limits of their reach, this situation might have been settled through
some sort of peaceful compromise. Until a few days ago, mutual respect might
have prevailed – or in other words, the leaders of Ukraine might have realized
that the best way to avoid war was to commit to staying out of NATO, and to negotiate
an honorable peace with the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, who (it
must be remembered) have a legitimate reason for believing that they don’t owe
allegiance to the present-day Ukrainian government.
But instead, we
have leaders who loudly, and up to the final moment, insisted that Ukraine’s
borders, and Ukraine’s right to join NATO, were and always would be inviolable…
in the full knowledge that they were unwilling to do anything to defend them if
war broke out.
If Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky dies in battle defending his homeland – something
which he thinks is increasingly likely – then he will have died a hero, and he
will live on in song and story for hundreds of years.
But Joe Biden?
Antony Blinken? Olaf Shultz? Jens Stoltenberg? These people will be remembered
by history very differently, to the extent that they are remembered at all.
And of course
we must not leave out Victoria Nuland, the woman at Foggy Bottom who was the
prime mover on the American end of the 2014 coup, and who then hand-picked the
new Ukrainian government, and who, after four years out of office during the
Trump administration, was put back into the State Department in a higher post
under Biden, and confirmed by the Senate by unanimous consent.
Now, I also
think it is still a big mistake to compare Vladimir Putin to Hitler. Indeed, it
is a sign of the intellectual poverty of our times.
If Americans
were still decently educated, then instead of always rushing straight to the Führer,
they would have a whole plethora of historical comparisons to draw on whenever
somebody set to work using cannons as instruments of boundary rectification.
They could bring up the memory of James Knox Polk, or Otto von Bismarck, or
William McKinley, or Cecil Rhodes, to name a few.
I think that a
particularly succinct way to describe what is happening between Russia and
Ukraine right now is that Putin is trying to be the Bismarck of the 21st century. Like Chancellor Bismarck, he is leading a beleaguered country on what
he thinks is a path of reform and rejuvenation that will restore it to its
rightful place in the world order. And like Bismarck, he is not above including
a few carefully-planned, well-executed wars in his quest for greatness.
Putin does not make
war in the way that the United States makes war. To begin with, because his
hegemonial ambitions are regional rather than global, his wars are all fought
near his own country. Also, Putin’s wars tend to be quick – for instance, the
invasion of Georgia in 2008 (which was launched in defense of South Ossetia, another
tiny separatist republic recognized only by Russia) was over in just five days.
Finally, the
goals of Putin’s wars are more modest. For instance, while the United States
spent 20 years trying to rebuild Afghanistan as a liberal democracy, Russia’s
involvement in the Syria war had the simpler (and much more achievable) aim of
killing a lot of ISIS members, and shoring up the
authority of Bashar al Assad.
The Ukraine war is clearly Putin’s most
ambitious war to date. And it appears that this time he has gone the full Bismarckian
route – tired of giving indirect aid to the separatists in a eight-year-long
festering conflict with no hope of a clear resolution, Putin has decided to drop
all pretenses, throw everything he can at the enemy, and make a hard drive deep
into enemy territory in the hopes that, when the capital falls, he can quickly
force his preferred peace terms on his prostrate foe, and then leave.
I think it is
very unlikely that Putin is planning a protracted occupation like what the US
did with Iraq and Afghanistan. I expect him to be content with demilitarizing
the Ukraine and securing the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk. As a result,
the human cost of the war is almost certain to be less than that of the United
States’ recent Middle-Eastern misadventures.
Even so, it may
turn out to be a price that’s too high to be borne, even, or perhaps especially,
for Russia. From a military standpoint, Otto von Bismarck’s final war – the war
with France in 1870 – was a brilliant and seamless victory. But it earned his
country seventy years of enmity with France, and with that came the future
losses in two World Wars.
For Russia,
which I expect to face serious challenges later this century in the form of
population decline and Chinese irredentism, the hatred of its western
neighbors may more than it can handle. What will the long-term consequences
be? At this point, no one can say.
Nor can one
neglect the price that a nation pays at home when too many of its citizens come
to believe that their leaders are sending them off to fight and die in needless
wars of choice. America suffered a lot in this way from the Vietnam, Iraq, and
Afghanistan wars; Russia may be at risk of something similar.
Since I started
this piece with a reference to a work of satire, I may as well finish it with
another. A few days ago, The Onion published an article entitled “U.S.
Shocked Russia Would Invade Another Country After Seeing How Badly America’s
Recent Invasions Went.”
Say what you
want about The Onion, you’ll find more truth in it than you will in a
lot of other news sources.
How badly (or
how well) will this invasion go? At the moment, nobody knows.
All we know for
certain is that Vladimir Putin, when forced to make a decision about how to
deal with the situation in Ukraine, chose the quickest, most forceful option that
was available to him. And we also know that the time has now come for the
collective nations of Europe to endure the predictable consequences of
outsourcing their security to the United States, and of becoming abjectly
dependent on an ally that has turned out to be all bark and no bite.
And we know
that Russia isn’t the only country that is positioning itself to take advantage
of the coming international realignment. As American hegemony continues to
weaken, more cannons will be employed, and more boundaries will be rectified. It
would be naïve not to expect the world maps at mid-century to look quite a bit different
than those of today.
An interesting, original, analysis.
ReplyDeleteOne thing your readers may wish to know is that there is a rumor in Moscow -- with what foundation, I do not know -- that Putin has some sort of terminal illness, and is determined to make his mark as the man who restored the Russian Empire before he dies. Even from his own point of view, his invasion seems precipitate, when he well could have gotten what he claims to want -- Ukraine not to become a member of NATO, and autonomy or even secession for the Russian-speaking areas of East Ukraine -- without war.
For my part, I would like to see a revival of an idea championed by two individuals, unlikely partners and now generally deprecated, if not reviled: the Right of Nations to Self-Determination. Both Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, for different reasons, championed this concept-- with, of course, exceptions and modifications. (Lenin's exceptions were non-Russian nations who attempted to secede from the Soviet Union after his seizure of power; Wilson's were the non-white colonies of the European powers.)
This concept is not an easy cure-all. Too often, two or more 'nations' are geographically interpenetrated, so who gets to rule has to be settled -- as Bismarck noted all great questions are -- by blood and iron.
I would like to point out an exception to the observation of the author that the US elite cares nothing for boundaries. They certainly believe that Taiwan, even though they officially recognize that it is part of historic China, should be 'separate'. And they were very happy to help pull apart Yugoslavia, when its non-Serb populations decided to draw new national boundaries. And they have not really objected when Israel takes steps to extend its boundaries by settling the West Bank.
Doug,
DeleteThank you for the interesting reply. I have to say, first of all, that I haven't heard the terminal illness theory before. It could be true... but on the other hand, there are so many historic examples of people doing what Putin is doing as part of the ordinary course of statecraft, that I am not inclined to believe it. But we'll see.
Also, to clarify: when I say that the West doesn't care about boundaries, I don't mean that they aren't willing to defend or even, in very rare cases, expand boundaries when doing so expands their sphere of influence. What I mean is that they don't share the common belief of nearly all historic humanity that it is normal and good for the world to contain many different national cultures, separated by boundaries, and largely uninterested in imposing their own value systems on one another. And because they don't have this worldview, they are unable to simultaneously understand and sympathize with the Ukrainian majority, who want to defend their homeland, and the Donbas separatists, who feel like they have been stranded on the wrong side of a national boundary, and are being oppressed by a US puppet state.
As for "self-determination" as a principle of international relations - well, one of the ironies of conflict is that both sides are loudly claiming to be standing up for it.