You might be interested in this clip from Caplan on whether campus indoctrination matters. He says that while “The Case Against Education” says no, he has changed his mind since then.
"The loss of real-world friction coupled with the increasing centralization of the financial system has opened up possibilities for new forms of coercion, control, and power—particularly when governments and the private sector decide to cooperate. "
Exactly right Arnold. It is very sad to see principles like freedom of conscience, speech, and self-government lose their popular support. Even simple inclinations like curiosity about the factual world seem to fallen to imposing ideology on the biophysical, historical world.
You don't deter aggression from a powerful nation without harming the common people there. The choice is to do it with sanctions or with bombs, or else not to deter at all.
The "Liberal Order" was, for 80 years, part of the post WW II Pax Americana, with a semi-reluctant but economically dominant America often acting as the World's Policeman. There was an illusion, which could also be called a delusion, that it was a bi-polar world, with the alt-pole of USSR Communism.
Especially China, but also both India and Russia, are claiming to be new alternate poles to America, which has a relatively smaller percent of the world's exports and manufacturing - as had been planned for, expected, and worked for by all liberal globalists for decades.
Liberalism has been seen to be dying since Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" in 1987, and the acceptance by "liberals" for secret discrimination against Republicans as professors in University, and the accepted atheist intolerance of believers, especially those who believe in human rights for each human fetus.
The only important diversity inside organizations, and especially colleges, is having both Republicans and Democrats, who agree to disagree, peacefully and respectfully, with words about ideas. Not slaps, nor cancel firings. OK, arts & visuals & tech, too. This discrimination was, and is, in violation of the "Liberal Order".
The college tested cancel culture actions, which has been working against Rep. professors, is slowly leading to Gab and Bitcoin other alternate, less Dem dominated areas. This war! war! war! to save Ukraine from invading Russia, totally absent in 2014 when Russia stealthily took over Crimea and the Donbas, shows at least one alt-pole thinks the old Lib Ord is too tired to keep on. It will lead many non-American countries to reduce their US Dollar dependencies, just as the US is trying to reduce its own Russian and Chinese dependencies.
The 'Liberal Order' was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the 'ordering' of any other, as a current John Adams might say.
FYI, the U.S. had a hard time controlling the liberal bloc of countries before and after 1990. Before 1990, it was incompetent in containing the expansion of the anti-liberal bloc in Asia, Europe, Africa, and America. The internal contradictions of the anti-liberal bloc led to the collapse of the URSS and Eastern Europe. Since 1990, it has been much worse because first the U.S. was unable to contain the expansion of anti-liberal countries in the Middle East (aggravated during Obama and now Biden by attempts to destroy Israel in exchange for making peace with Iran and other ME barbarians). And then because many U.S. corporations made clear they were willing to make business in China accepting arbitrary, anti-liberal conditions set by the party and the government (fyi, when I worked in Beijing and Hong Kong in the 1990s, many times I had to argue with their managers not to accept privileges that would make impossible for competing companies to enter into China --and btw, those privileges were expensive, although not as much as they become years later as shown by Hunter Biden's fees).
The notion that multipolar liberalism rests on pure persuasion alone is a confused one. If we look back, the last multipolar liberal order was during the 19th century, under the guns of the dreadnoughts and battleships of the British Empire. Since then, we have had hybrid liberal orders which are neither entirely multipolar nor entirely unipolar. The US pushed and modeled a certain view of liberal republicanism which it occasionally enforced through some combination of threats and rewards.
Now, internally, the US has sought to excise its vestigial liberal tendencies, it has little desire to maintain those vestigial tendencies in its protectorates. Every cancellation is the slight bopping on the head of a heretic, which is a performance of a nascent identity that will progress to imprisoning the heretic, exiling the heretic, and finally killing as many heretics as will be necessary.
The problem is less one of how to persuade the rising authoritarians to just knock it off: the problem is how to cultivate a cohesive class who will fight, kill, and die for the fundamental material and spiritual interests that underpin a powerful liberal government which could potentially preside over a multipolar world order. The idea that this can be done through persuasion alone is like thinking you could persuade Ferdinand and Isabella to make post-Reconquista Spain into a liberal republic by just making a really good argument (and some people in fact did try to do that in the Spanish Court at the time). The other issue is that there is no natural guarantee that liberalism has to survive. The world can quite easily be split into competing authoritarianisms. In fact, liberalism might have a better shot of sustaining itself in such an environment -- just probably not in the footprint of the current US.
Liberalism as an idea without an instantiation is just a ghost. Trying to puff more ideological ectoplasm into such a ghost does not help it to find a corporeal host, so to speak.
Not sure if you've referred to this piece already, but I'd like to point that the NY Times had a good editorial on the threat to free speech in its March 20 Sunday Review.
The "media environment" often turns on a dime, to fashion the current-thing narrative. Mainstream media voices are neither soldiers nor scouts. They are flexible conformists who care naught for consistency over time. They conform to the establishment (supply side) and/or the audience (demand side).
At one remove from media voices, the empirical question is: Do establishment personnel and/or the media base think like soldiers, rather than scouts?
Or does the media triangle -- establishment/media voices/audience base -- entangle cognitive psychology and entrepreneurship in ways that don't squarely fit the soldier vs scout model?
The Russian ethnic minority in Ukraine has had security and civil liberty in Ukraine - more than non-Russian ethnic minorities have in Russia (see my comment about high school graduation tests in the other thread for an example). Unless, that is, you mean "security and civil liberty" in the sense that Putin and people who think like him seem to use these words, which is that a Russian ethnic minority is not secure unless it can live in other countries under exactly the same conditions and expectations as the "state-forming people" lives in Russia.
As for neo-nazi military groups, they were never anywhere as influential as Russian propaganda makes them, and most of them look like being destroyed in what is left of Mariupol anyway, because UAF cannot bring enough strength to bear in time to relieve it. UAF as a whole is not neo-nazi at all, unless again you mean "neo-nazi" in the Russian chauvinist sense, i.e. any Ukrainian who does not acquiesce in and acknowledge the supremacy of Russians. This meaning has a long history which many Ukrainians are well aware of. People were shot and jailed for "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism" under USSR. Soviet propaganda went as far as inventing "Jewish Banderites" (https://i.imgur.com/5qrxwGB.png, the Ukrainian nationalist wolf's flag reads "anti-Sovietism" and the Jewish Zionist fox's flag reads "anti-communism") so even calling a country with a democratically elected Jewish Russian-speaking president "neo-nazi" has good precedent.
Reminder: My comment was about what would constitute a *"happy"* outcome.
Re: civil liberty. See the Wikipedia article, "Language Policy in Ukraine":
"The law regulates the Ukrainian language in the media, education, and business aiming to strengthen its role in a country where much of the public still speaks Russian.[95] The law requires print and online publications to be either exclusively in Ukrainian or have a Ukrainian translation, unless they are in Crimean Tatar, in English or in any other official languages of the European Union.[96] Films produced in Ukraine must be in Ukrainian, and foreign films must be dubbed into Ukrainian unless they meet certain standards set out by the Ukrainian authorities.[96] TV and film distribution firms must ensure 90% of their content is in Ukrainian. Publishing houses are required to print, and book stores are required to sell, at least 50% of their books in Ukrainian.[96][97] All cultural, artistic, recreational and entertainment events must be in Ukrainian, unless the use of other languages is justified for artistic reasons or for the purpose of protecting ethnic minority languages.[96][16] All schools and universities are required to teach in Ukrainian, although special exemptions apply to certain ethnic minority languages, to English and to other official languages of the European Union. Contrary to the minority languages which are EU official languages, Russian, Byelorussian and Yiddish are granted no exemption for the purposes of the law.[16] [... .] In December 2019 the Venice Commission said that several provisions of the law failed to strike a fair balance between promoting the Ukrainian language and safeguarding minorities' linguistic rights.[101] [... .] In January 2022 Human Rights Watch expressed concerns about protection for minority languages[104]."
Also: "The 2017 law on education provides that Ukrainian language is the language of education at all levels except for one or more subjects that are allowed to be taught in two or more languages, namely English or one of the other official languages of the European Union (i.e. excluding Russian).[19]"
Civil rights in the American sense do not include language use. Correct me if I'm wrong, but except for some foreign language immersion programs American public and private schools teach in English and there is a huge industry of ELL classes, despite the existence of at least 60M strong Spanish speaking minority. This makes it difficult to take seriously Americans pointing out the unfairness of Ukrainian language law.
> ... HRW ...
Ukrainians retort that the deliberations of the Venice Commission and HRW do not sufficiently take into account the fact that the Russian language has been used as an instrument for the propagation of Russian Federation's interests. The Russian Empire and USSR had specific, often very harsh, policies in place to promote Russian and suppress the development and use of other national languages, on top of the natural draw which the language or dialect of the imperial center always exerts on subject peoples (this phenomenon is seen as far away as pre-Columbian America, see e.g. Quechua). Even assuming Ukraine is able to keep its independence in this war, it will take Ukrainians decades to undo the damage. English-speaking peoples have never been in a comparable position, but some European peoples, notably the French, have policies aimed at preventing the encroachment of English on their national languages while others, like Swedes and Germans, seem to have given up except for seething about it.
Context matters. It won't make a happy outcome, if Ukraine recognizes minority language rights of EU official languages, but not Russian, Byelorussian, and Yiddish. Language rights are part of civil rights in eastern Europe. Russians are by far the largest language minority in Ukraine and constitute a majority in many districts:
It seems unlikely that excluding Ukraine's ethnic Russians from rights that other minorities enjoy will undo the historic damage, which you rightly pointed out, without causing new damage.
Reminder: My comments are about what would constitute 'an outcome we can be happy with' (per Arnold Kling's post). I would file 'Russia chastened + no WW3' as a great *relief*. A *happy* outcome would require more: for example, no neo-nazi militias, civil liberty (including language rights) for Russian minority, and generous int'l reconstruction aid.
Maybe a happy outcome isn't in the cards. To achieve liberal order in mixed populations scarred by histories of strife and oppression and intense nationalism is a wicked problem.
So it is. I like to think of the invention of nationalism in the XIX century as analogous to the invention of nuclear weapons in the XX century: probably unavoidable given technological and other non-cultural developments, potentially extremely dangerous, and impossible to un-invent.
> It seems unlikely that excluding Ukraine's ethnic Russians from rights that other minorities enjoy will undo the historic damage, which you rightly pointed out, without causing new damage.
Yes, but it is hard to say which damage is greater. And it is not like there is no place for Russians who can't stomach Ukrainian to go to: they can go to big strong wealthy (for now) Russia where they are the 'state-forming people' and enjoy all the appurtenances thereof. Ukrainians have nowhere else to go and be Ukrainians - at least not until something superior to nationalism is invented and supersedes it.
> scarred by histories of strife and oppression and intense nationalism
The example of EU in today's Europe, for all its big shortcomings, shows that this is not an impossible task as long as we are talking about *histories*. It is much harder if we are talking not just about histories but about ongoing threatening activity. Compare Israel vs Arab nations for a newer example than any European one. In the East, Russia is preparing a law recognizing Russian-speakers anywhere as 'compatriots', expanding its ability to use them as a pretext for pressure on neighboring countries whether those Russian-speakers want it (as many Russians in Crimea did) or no (as many Russian-speaking Ukrainians did not even before 24/02).
A terrible post. Most is about an international liberal order that has never existed and it will never exist. The idea of a liberal order is relevant only at the level of countries. Since the end of WWII, we have been living in a world "order" defined by a continuous struggle for power between two main blocs, only one representing the pretension of a league of countries with some domestic liberal order. Even ignoring tension within the "liberal order" bloc, we cannot ignore that we have been living in a Cold War setup that may continue forever. Indeed, in the 1990s, that setup changed and some of us expected much larger changes. But in the past 20 years we were proved wrong, very wrong, because the URSS's fall was followed by the emergence of China and the strengthening of anti-liberal countries which control important energy sources.
To make things worse, the intra-conflicts in several countries of the "liberal world" bloc increased sharply thanks to emergent anti-liberal forces. Yes, in some of liberal countries the barbarians are winning, not a majority of votes but enough support to grab power (in particular, I mean the support of ordinary barbarians graduated in the best U.S. colleges and graduate schools and some of their professors who are leading from behind). The revival of the liberal order should start in the U.S., the U.K., and the E.U. but as of today I'm very skeptical that it will happen.
BTW, you are ignoring what is going on in Latin America. Don't count on any LA country to contain the advance of their domestic barbarians.
Centre-Left & Centre-Right. Same thing… potayto, potaahto.
Did I miss the stampede of the Liberal Order to defend our civil liberties and passive Rights under the Common Law this last two years? On what occasions did the judiciary side with claimants of their Rights and not instead affirm Government tyranny over them?
How is USA & West denying its own citizens fuel, fertiliser, food stuffs, and other Russian goods sanctioning Russia? It’s equivalent would be the Royal Navy in the 1940s sinking merchant ships bringing supplies to Britain. It would of course have saved the Kriegsmarine the bother. It’s due to the part of the brain which is missing in politicians (not alone) that understands that a Nation gets wealthy because of imports not exports.
Maybe the basic point is that "the liberal order was strong enough to weather the Russia-Ukraine war" doesn't overcome the fact that "the liberal order is weak enough that an Illiberal state overtly challenged it".
Strength means you don't get challenged in the first place.
This gets to Wright's idea that we should have negotiated harder. I tend to agree, because even the most cynical view, where we think maybe Biden or whomever wanted a war because they get a "boost" by being tough on Russia without actually getting us involved in the fight, is, in the long-run, going to be offset our show of weakness.
Better to have quietly prevented this war, because the fact of it demonstrates the erosion of our power.
I think you are on to something, but I want to push back when it comes to negotiating harder. Negotiating itself depends on the notion of both sides having something the other wants to exchange for voluntarily. Some things, some principles, have to be non-negotiable, or else you encourage negative actions to bring you to negotiate when you don't have anything to gain. Negotiating with someone who is violating e.g. "Don't break into my house and steal my stuff" is itself a sign of weakness, as you have already ceded your right to not have someone in your house uninvited stealing your stuff. Giving up anything in that case simply encourages the Dane to come back for more Danegeld, as it were.
Now, we can debate what those principles that will not be negotiated are or should be, but we must not lose sight of the fact that there are somethings which must not be up for negotiation, and certainly not to avoid bad behaviors which we condemn. Quite possibly quite a few more things than many people realize.
No disagreement with that. Have you watched The Last Kingdom or read the books it's based on. It's not deep reading or anything, but Bernard Cornwell does a pretty good job of talking about the reasons England was created and Daneland wasn't.
Even beyond principle, I took a central lesson to be that paying Danegeld was acknowledged to create the incentive for the Danes to return, but it was worth it because the Saxons needed time to organize and strengthen themselves. It was their ability to do so, in contrast with the much less cohesive Danes, who were more prone to argue and fight amongst themselves, that allowed the Saxons to prevail in the long run.
All of which is to say, the first principle has to be survival. But, yeah, what should be negotiable and what shouldn't? How do we prevent compromise leading to more aggression?
In my mind at least, you the second principle is probably something like "only commit to defending principles you actually can defend". Like, I think it was reasonable to expand NATO to include Poland. The same folks that harp on NATO's offer of expanding to Ukraine also opposed NATO expansion to Poland. It seems like there are substantial differences. Poland was and is much wealthier and better able to protect itself. And further, Poland doesn't have the same sort of entanglements that Ukraine does with minority Russian speakers and business dealings. Basically, the marginal cost of defending Poland doesn't seem it was much higher than the cost of defending most other European countries. The benefit of creating that non-negotiable defense principle was obvious. Poland was probably already out of Russia's grasp, and bringing them into NATO cemented it.
The situation with Ukraine, even back in 2008 when NATO membership for them got serious, was dramatically worse. The costs of and the ability to defend Ukraine were dramatically higher. The ability of Ukraine to defend itself was much lower. It seemed obvious that instead of pulling Ukraine forever out of Russia's reach, there was an immediate batter to pull it back in.
Thus, I'd argue that in this war, we fundamentally don't have any non-negotiable principles we're committed to. Certainly, "we should oppose war", and "help our friends" and "protect our reputation" and those are worthy principles. But we'd probably have furthered them better by negotiating a deal between the two countries instead of having them kill thousands of each other to wind up at basically the same place they started. Maybe the Russian and Ukrainian leadership was both too blinkered to realize this, but we were worse than useless.
Read the books, yes. Watched I think 2 seasons of the show. Cornwell is very formulaic, but it is a good formula :)
I think the key takeaway there is that if you are paying the Danegeld you had better have a really good plan to get rid of the Danes, and right quick. In practice, most of the time when people meet aggression with negotiation they have no such plans. If you don't have an answer for "What happens when I hand over the geld and the Dane decides to attack later in the week anyway?" you have put yourself in a worse position. The first principle is survival, but when someone is willing to kill you and take your stuff they are probably willing to go back on a deal, so paying them off a little now does not guarantee survival. It might even make it less likely.
Likewise with negotiation, we need to be careful when talking about things Ukraine could negotiate vs what the US could negotiate vs what the EU or whomever could (or can; pick a tense.) While the US probably shouldn't have strong opinions about whether Ukraine decides to cede some territory, Ukraine probably should have some. I think they did well to fight back instead of simply hoping that if they gave up some territory now Putin would never ask for more. Fortunately for them it turns out they were better able to defend themselves than many thought.
The US on the other hand probably should have a coherent plan of "Ok, we are willing to let these X countries get eaten, but we will step in at this point Y." The trouble is that "coherent plans" are not really a long term thing for us, so simple principles like "Don't invade NATO countries" is probably the best we can hope for. If we expect Russia to be a negative competitor to the US, however, we might be better off with "Don't invade anywhere west of Russia," with some level of retaliation being trigged for violation. I would argue we should have stuck with that one, but I could see the NATO one as well. The advantage of "Don't invade anywhere west of Russia" is that you keep the moral highish ground of independent states not being violated without committing to too much in the Asian regions where it could be a real slog to project force and with little clear short term benefit.
With regard to your last paragraph, I am not sure that brokering a deal where Ukraine gave up anything would have been better than fighting it out and Ukraine winning (if they lose it is a big problem for them and us I think.) The reason any criminal, whether mugger or Dane, keeps at it is because the actual cost to them to get some value from their victims is very low. It often does not take a lot of cost for their rational decision to be ceasing criminal activity. An embarrassing defeat for Russia will probably do more the people of Ukraine's long term health and well being than negotiations that keep Russia thinking of Ukraine next time they want something, even with the death and destruction of war. Fighting is sometimes the right answer, even the best answer. We in the US seem to have developed bad judgement about when fighting is the right answer and when it isn't, but that doesn't mean it never is.
You assume the US Military Industrial Complex and CIA and others who govern the USA, pulling the strings if Biden & Co, wanted conflict resolution and peace. I think that is a misunderstanding.
You might be interested in this clip from Caplan on whether campus indoctrination matters. He says that while “The Case Against Education” says no, he has changed his mind since then.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1507135469850660865?cxt=HHwWgsC4zbDuteopAAAA
Michael Lind, writing in Tablet:
"The loss of real-world friction coupled with the increasing centralization of the financial system has opened up possibilities for new forms of coercion, control, and power—particularly when governments and the private sector decide to cooperate. "
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/we-will-delete-you
Exactly right Arnold. It is very sad to see principles like freedom of conscience, speech, and self-government lose their popular support. Even simple inclinations like curiosity about the factual world seem to fallen to imposing ideology on the biophysical, historical world.
You don't deter aggression from a powerful nation without harming the common people there. The choice is to do it with sanctions or with bombs, or else not to deter at all.
The "Liberal Order" was, for 80 years, part of the post WW II Pax Americana, with a semi-reluctant but economically dominant America often acting as the World's Policeman. There was an illusion, which could also be called a delusion, that it was a bi-polar world, with the alt-pole of USSR Communism.
Especially China, but also both India and Russia, are claiming to be new alternate poles to America, which has a relatively smaller percent of the world's exports and manufacturing - as had been planned for, expected, and worked for by all liberal globalists for decades.
Liberalism has been seen to be dying since Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" in 1987, and the acceptance by "liberals" for secret discrimination against Republicans as professors in University, and the accepted atheist intolerance of believers, especially those who believe in human rights for each human fetus.
The only important diversity inside organizations, and especially colleges, is having both Republicans and Democrats, who agree to disagree, peacefully and respectfully, with words about ideas. Not slaps, nor cancel firings. OK, arts & visuals & tech, too. This discrimination was, and is, in violation of the "Liberal Order".
The college tested cancel culture actions, which has been working against Rep. professors, is slowly leading to Gab and Bitcoin other alternate, less Dem dominated areas. This war! war! war! to save Ukraine from invading Russia, totally absent in 2014 when Russia stealthily took over Crimea and the Donbas, shows at least one alt-pole thinks the old Lib Ord is too tired to keep on. It will lead many non-American countries to reduce their US Dollar dependencies, just as the US is trying to reduce its own Russian and Chinese dependencies.
The 'Liberal Order' was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the 'ordering' of any other, as a current John Adams might say.
FYI, the U.S. had a hard time controlling the liberal bloc of countries before and after 1990. Before 1990, it was incompetent in containing the expansion of the anti-liberal bloc in Asia, Europe, Africa, and America. The internal contradictions of the anti-liberal bloc led to the collapse of the URSS and Eastern Europe. Since 1990, it has been much worse because first the U.S. was unable to contain the expansion of anti-liberal countries in the Middle East (aggravated during Obama and now Biden by attempts to destroy Israel in exchange for making peace with Iran and other ME barbarians). And then because many U.S. corporations made clear they were willing to make business in China accepting arbitrary, anti-liberal conditions set by the party and the government (fyi, when I worked in Beijing and Hong Kong in the 1990s, many times I had to argue with their managers not to accept privileges that would make impossible for competing companies to enter into China --and btw, those privileges were expensive, although not as much as they become years later as shown by Hunter Biden's fees).
The notion that multipolar liberalism rests on pure persuasion alone is a confused one. If we look back, the last multipolar liberal order was during the 19th century, under the guns of the dreadnoughts and battleships of the British Empire. Since then, we have had hybrid liberal orders which are neither entirely multipolar nor entirely unipolar. The US pushed and modeled a certain view of liberal republicanism which it occasionally enforced through some combination of threats and rewards.
Now, internally, the US has sought to excise its vestigial liberal tendencies, it has little desire to maintain those vestigial tendencies in its protectorates. Every cancellation is the slight bopping on the head of a heretic, which is a performance of a nascent identity that will progress to imprisoning the heretic, exiling the heretic, and finally killing as many heretics as will be necessary.
The problem is less one of how to persuade the rising authoritarians to just knock it off: the problem is how to cultivate a cohesive class who will fight, kill, and die for the fundamental material and spiritual interests that underpin a powerful liberal government which could potentially preside over a multipolar world order. The idea that this can be done through persuasion alone is like thinking you could persuade Ferdinand and Isabella to make post-Reconquista Spain into a liberal republic by just making a really good argument (and some people in fact did try to do that in the Spanish Court at the time). The other issue is that there is no natural guarantee that liberalism has to survive. The world can quite easily be split into competing authoritarianisms. In fact, liberalism might have a better shot of sustaining itself in such an environment -- just probably not in the footprint of the current US.
Liberalism as an idea without an instantiation is just a ghost. Trying to puff more ideological ectoplasm into such a ghost does not help it to find a corporeal host, so to speak.
Not sure if you've referred to this piece already, but I'd like to point that the NY Times had a good editorial on the threat to free speech in its March 20 Sunday Review.
Re: "We are rewarding soldiers, not scouts."
The "media environment" often turns on a dime, to fashion the current-thing narrative. Mainstream media voices are neither soldiers nor scouts. They are flexible conformists who care naught for consistency over time. They conform to the establishment (supply side) and/or the audience (demand side).
At one remove from media voices, the empirical question is: Do establishment personnel and/or the media base think like soldiers, rather than scouts?
Or does the media triangle -- establishment/media voices/audience base -- entangle cognitive psychology and entrepreneurship in ways that don't squarely fit the soldier vs scout model?
Re: "Assuming that Russia is chastened and no nuclear escalation takes place, we are entitled to be happy with the outcome."
Shouldn't happiness be conditional also on 3 Ukraine variables in outcome?:
Denazification. (Neo-nazi military groups in Ukraine might be strengthened by their role in national military resistance.)
Civil liberties and security of substantial Russian ethnic minority in Ukraine. (This depends partly on denazification.)
A reasonable reconstruction plan.
The Russian ethnic minority in Ukraine has had security and civil liberty in Ukraine - more than non-Russian ethnic minorities have in Russia (see my comment about high school graduation tests in the other thread for an example). Unless, that is, you mean "security and civil liberty" in the sense that Putin and people who think like him seem to use these words, which is that a Russian ethnic minority is not secure unless it can live in other countries under exactly the same conditions and expectations as the "state-forming people" lives in Russia.
As for neo-nazi military groups, they were never anywhere as influential as Russian propaganda makes them, and most of them look like being destroyed in what is left of Mariupol anyway, because UAF cannot bring enough strength to bear in time to relieve it. UAF as a whole is not neo-nazi at all, unless again you mean "neo-nazi" in the Russian chauvinist sense, i.e. any Ukrainian who does not acquiesce in and acknowledge the supremacy of Russians. This meaning has a long history which many Ukrainians are well aware of. People were shot and jailed for "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism" under USSR. Soviet propaganda went as far as inventing "Jewish Banderites" (https://i.imgur.com/5qrxwGB.png, the Ukrainian nationalist wolf's flag reads "anti-Sovietism" and the Jewish Zionist fox's flag reads "anti-communism") so even calling a country with a democratically elected Jewish Russian-speaking president "neo-nazi" has good precedent.
Reminder: My comment was about what would constitute a *"happy"* outcome.
Re: civil liberty. See the Wikipedia article, "Language Policy in Ukraine":
"The law regulates the Ukrainian language in the media, education, and business aiming to strengthen its role in a country where much of the public still speaks Russian.[95] The law requires print and online publications to be either exclusively in Ukrainian or have a Ukrainian translation, unless they are in Crimean Tatar, in English or in any other official languages of the European Union.[96] Films produced in Ukraine must be in Ukrainian, and foreign films must be dubbed into Ukrainian unless they meet certain standards set out by the Ukrainian authorities.[96] TV and film distribution firms must ensure 90% of their content is in Ukrainian. Publishing houses are required to print, and book stores are required to sell, at least 50% of their books in Ukrainian.[96][97] All cultural, artistic, recreational and entertainment events must be in Ukrainian, unless the use of other languages is justified for artistic reasons or for the purpose of protecting ethnic minority languages.[96][16] All schools and universities are required to teach in Ukrainian, although special exemptions apply to certain ethnic minority languages, to English and to other official languages of the European Union. Contrary to the minority languages which are EU official languages, Russian, Byelorussian and Yiddish are granted no exemption for the purposes of the law.[16] [... .] In December 2019 the Venice Commission said that several provisions of the law failed to strike a fair balance between promoting the Ukrainian language and safeguarding minorities' linguistic rights.[101] [... .] In January 2022 Human Rights Watch expressed concerns about protection for minority languages[104]."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_Ukraine#2019_Law_on_Supporting_the_Functioning_of_the_Ukrainian_Language_as_the_State_Language
Also: "The 2017 law on education provides that Ukrainian language is the language of education at all levels except for one or more subjects that are allowed to be taught in two or more languages, namely English or one of the other official languages of the European Union (i.e. excluding Russian).[19]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_language_in_Ukraine
To be clear, Russia (and Crimea etc) should honor civil liberty for ethnic Ukrainians.
I hope that your prediction will be correct, that the neo-nazi military groups (Azov battalion, S14, etc.) will no longer operate.
Civil rights in the American sense do not include language use. Correct me if I'm wrong, but except for some foreign language immersion programs American public and private schools teach in English and there is a huge industry of ELL classes, despite the existence of at least 60M strong Spanish speaking minority. This makes it difficult to take seriously Americans pointing out the unfairness of Ukrainian language law.
> ... HRW ...
Ukrainians retort that the deliberations of the Venice Commission and HRW do not sufficiently take into account the fact that the Russian language has been used as an instrument for the propagation of Russian Federation's interests. The Russian Empire and USSR had specific, often very harsh, policies in place to promote Russian and suppress the development and use of other national languages, on top of the natural draw which the language or dialect of the imperial center always exerts on subject peoples (this phenomenon is seen as far away as pre-Columbian America, see e.g. Quechua). Even assuming Ukraine is able to keep its independence in this war, it will take Ukrainians decades to undo the damage. English-speaking peoples have never been in a comparable position, but some European peoples, notably the French, have policies aimed at preventing the encroachment of English on their national languages while others, like Swedes and Germans, seem to have given up except for seething about it.
Context matters. It won't make a happy outcome, if Ukraine recognizes minority language rights of EU official languages, but not Russian, Byelorussian, and Yiddish. Language rights are part of civil rights in eastern Europe. Russians are by far the largest language minority in Ukraine and constitute a majority in many districts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Ukraine#After_World_War_II
It seems unlikely that excluding Ukraine's ethnic Russians from rights that other minorities enjoy will undo the historic damage, which you rightly pointed out, without causing new damage.
Reminder: My comments are about what would constitute 'an outcome we can be happy with' (per Arnold Kling's post). I would file 'Russia chastened + no WW3' as a great *relief*. A *happy* outcome would require more: for example, no neo-nazi militias, civil liberty (including language rights) for Russian minority, and generous int'l reconstruction aid.
Maybe a happy outcome isn't in the cards. To achieve liberal order in mixed populations scarred by histories of strife and oppression and intense nationalism is a wicked problem.
So it is. I like to think of the invention of nationalism in the XIX century as analogous to the invention of nuclear weapons in the XX century: probably unavoidable given technological and other non-cultural developments, potentially extremely dangerous, and impossible to un-invent.
> It seems unlikely that excluding Ukraine's ethnic Russians from rights that other minorities enjoy will undo the historic damage, which you rightly pointed out, without causing new damage.
Yes, but it is hard to say which damage is greater. And it is not like there is no place for Russians who can't stomach Ukrainian to go to: they can go to big strong wealthy (for now) Russia where they are the 'state-forming people' and enjoy all the appurtenances thereof. Ukrainians have nowhere else to go and be Ukrainians - at least not until something superior to nationalism is invented and supersedes it.
> scarred by histories of strife and oppression and intense nationalism
The example of EU in today's Europe, for all its big shortcomings, shows that this is not an impossible task as long as we are talking about *histories*. It is much harder if we are talking not just about histories but about ongoing threatening activity. Compare Israel vs Arab nations for a newer example than any European one. In the East, Russia is preparing a law recognizing Russian-speakers anywhere as 'compatriots', expanding its ability to use them as a pretext for pressure on neighboring countries whether those Russian-speakers want it (as many Russians in Crimea did) or no (as many Russian-speaking Ukrainians did not even before 24/02).
A terrible post. Most is about an international liberal order that has never existed and it will never exist. The idea of a liberal order is relevant only at the level of countries. Since the end of WWII, we have been living in a world "order" defined by a continuous struggle for power between two main blocs, only one representing the pretension of a league of countries with some domestic liberal order. Even ignoring tension within the "liberal order" bloc, we cannot ignore that we have been living in a Cold War setup that may continue forever. Indeed, in the 1990s, that setup changed and some of us expected much larger changes. But in the past 20 years we were proved wrong, very wrong, because the URSS's fall was followed by the emergence of China and the strengthening of anti-liberal countries which control important energy sources.
To make things worse, the intra-conflicts in several countries of the "liberal world" bloc increased sharply thanks to emergent anti-liberal forces. Yes, in some of liberal countries the barbarians are winning, not a majority of votes but enough support to grab power (in particular, I mean the support of ordinary barbarians graduated in the best U.S. colleges and graduate schools and some of their professors who are leading from behind). The revival of the liberal order should start in the U.S., the U.K., and the E.U. but as of today I'm very skeptical that it will happen.
BTW, you are ignoring what is going on in Latin America. Don't count on any LA country to contain the advance of their domestic barbarians.
Centre-Left & Centre-Right. Same thing… potayto, potaahto.
Did I miss the stampede of the Liberal Order to defend our civil liberties and passive Rights under the Common Law this last two years? On what occasions did the judiciary side with claimants of their Rights and not instead affirm Government tyranny over them?
How is USA & West denying its own citizens fuel, fertiliser, food stuffs, and other Russian goods sanctioning Russia? It’s equivalent would be the Royal Navy in the 1940s sinking merchant ships bringing supplies to Britain. It would of course have saved the Kriegsmarine the bother. It’s due to the part of the brain which is missing in politicians (not alone) that understands that a Nation gets wealthy because of imports not exports.
Maybe the basic point is that "the liberal order was strong enough to weather the Russia-Ukraine war" doesn't overcome the fact that "the liberal order is weak enough that an Illiberal state overtly challenged it".
Strength means you don't get challenged in the first place.
This gets to Wright's idea that we should have negotiated harder. I tend to agree, because even the most cynical view, where we think maybe Biden or whomever wanted a war because they get a "boost" by being tough on Russia without actually getting us involved in the fight, is, in the long-run, going to be offset our show of weakness.
Better to have quietly prevented this war, because the fact of it demonstrates the erosion of our power.
I think you are on to something, but I want to push back when it comes to negotiating harder. Negotiating itself depends on the notion of both sides having something the other wants to exchange for voluntarily. Some things, some principles, have to be non-negotiable, or else you encourage negative actions to bring you to negotiate when you don't have anything to gain. Negotiating with someone who is violating e.g. "Don't break into my house and steal my stuff" is itself a sign of weakness, as you have already ceded your right to not have someone in your house uninvited stealing your stuff. Giving up anything in that case simply encourages the Dane to come back for more Danegeld, as it were.
Now, we can debate what those principles that will not be negotiated are or should be, but we must not lose sight of the fact that there are somethings which must not be up for negotiation, and certainly not to avoid bad behaviors which we condemn. Quite possibly quite a few more things than many people realize.
No disagreement with that. Have you watched The Last Kingdom or read the books it's based on. It's not deep reading or anything, but Bernard Cornwell does a pretty good job of talking about the reasons England was created and Daneland wasn't.
Even beyond principle, I took a central lesson to be that paying Danegeld was acknowledged to create the incentive for the Danes to return, but it was worth it because the Saxons needed time to organize and strengthen themselves. It was their ability to do so, in contrast with the much less cohesive Danes, who were more prone to argue and fight amongst themselves, that allowed the Saxons to prevail in the long run.
All of which is to say, the first principle has to be survival. But, yeah, what should be negotiable and what shouldn't? How do we prevent compromise leading to more aggression?
In my mind at least, you the second principle is probably something like "only commit to defending principles you actually can defend". Like, I think it was reasonable to expand NATO to include Poland. The same folks that harp on NATO's offer of expanding to Ukraine also opposed NATO expansion to Poland. It seems like there are substantial differences. Poland was and is much wealthier and better able to protect itself. And further, Poland doesn't have the same sort of entanglements that Ukraine does with minority Russian speakers and business dealings. Basically, the marginal cost of defending Poland doesn't seem it was much higher than the cost of defending most other European countries. The benefit of creating that non-negotiable defense principle was obvious. Poland was probably already out of Russia's grasp, and bringing them into NATO cemented it.
The situation with Ukraine, even back in 2008 when NATO membership for them got serious, was dramatically worse. The costs of and the ability to defend Ukraine were dramatically higher. The ability of Ukraine to defend itself was much lower. It seemed obvious that instead of pulling Ukraine forever out of Russia's reach, there was an immediate batter to pull it back in.
Thus, I'd argue that in this war, we fundamentally don't have any non-negotiable principles we're committed to. Certainly, "we should oppose war", and "help our friends" and "protect our reputation" and those are worthy principles. But we'd probably have furthered them better by negotiating a deal between the two countries instead of having them kill thousands of each other to wind up at basically the same place they started. Maybe the Russian and Ukrainian leadership was both too blinkered to realize this, but we were worse than useless.
Read the books, yes. Watched I think 2 seasons of the show. Cornwell is very formulaic, but it is a good formula :)
I think the key takeaway there is that if you are paying the Danegeld you had better have a really good plan to get rid of the Danes, and right quick. In practice, most of the time when people meet aggression with negotiation they have no such plans. If you don't have an answer for "What happens when I hand over the geld and the Dane decides to attack later in the week anyway?" you have put yourself in a worse position. The first principle is survival, but when someone is willing to kill you and take your stuff they are probably willing to go back on a deal, so paying them off a little now does not guarantee survival. It might even make it less likely.
Likewise with negotiation, we need to be careful when talking about things Ukraine could negotiate vs what the US could negotiate vs what the EU or whomever could (or can; pick a tense.) While the US probably shouldn't have strong opinions about whether Ukraine decides to cede some territory, Ukraine probably should have some. I think they did well to fight back instead of simply hoping that if they gave up some territory now Putin would never ask for more. Fortunately for them it turns out they were better able to defend themselves than many thought.
The US on the other hand probably should have a coherent plan of "Ok, we are willing to let these X countries get eaten, but we will step in at this point Y." The trouble is that "coherent plans" are not really a long term thing for us, so simple principles like "Don't invade NATO countries" is probably the best we can hope for. If we expect Russia to be a negative competitor to the US, however, we might be better off with "Don't invade anywhere west of Russia," with some level of retaliation being trigged for violation. I would argue we should have stuck with that one, but I could see the NATO one as well. The advantage of "Don't invade anywhere west of Russia" is that you keep the moral highish ground of independent states not being violated without committing to too much in the Asian regions where it could be a real slog to project force and with little clear short term benefit.
With regard to your last paragraph, I am not sure that brokering a deal where Ukraine gave up anything would have been better than fighting it out and Ukraine winning (if they lose it is a big problem for them and us I think.) The reason any criminal, whether mugger or Dane, keeps at it is because the actual cost to them to get some value from their victims is very low. It often does not take a lot of cost for their rational decision to be ceasing criminal activity. An embarrassing defeat for Russia will probably do more the people of Ukraine's long term health and well being than negotiations that keep Russia thinking of Ukraine next time they want something, even with the death and destruction of war. Fighting is sometimes the right answer, even the best answer. We in the US seem to have developed bad judgement about when fighting is the right answer and when it isn't, but that doesn't mean it never is.
You assume the US Military Industrial Complex and CIA and others who govern the USA, pulling the strings if Biden & Co, wanted conflict resolution and peace. I think that is a misunderstanding.