"Hanania points out that if we judge our recent interventions, particularly in the Middle East, by their adverse humanitarian consequences, rather than by their intentions, then we should be less outraged by Putin and more ashamed of ourselves."
Yeah, I don't think our intentions have always been so good either. Iraq was clearly motivated by the fact that we were angry about 9/11 and wanted to punish people who shared the same ethnic background as those responsible for the attacks. It was ugly.
Only ~20% correct: Iraq was motivated by 16 UNSC resolutions against murderous dictator Saddam which were toothless, plus the 30,000 murdered Kurds, plus the US anger (about 20%). The US led UN force after Saddam invaded Kuwait in '91 was to oppose the idea of taking territory by force.
Iraq was ugly before and after ...
That Desert Storm war shouldn't have ended without Saddam being deposed - but US Democrats wanted the war to end as soon as possible.
Saddam's successful killing of '91 rebels was also ugly.
WWII ended "fairly well" due to a) the requirement of the losers for Unconditional Surrender, and b) the US leading to more reconstruction rather than retribution.
Iraq in '92 or in 2003 was not the kind of market economy ready for corruption-prone tribal democracy. The successful S. Korean & Japanese models of post-war development is to emphasize stability and development more than democracy - with lots of human rights but also some human rights abuses.
Most of the ex-USSR & ex-Warsaw Pact countries have been stuck with corrupt democracies, more or less. Total lack of prosecution for Hunter Biden's corruption, not to mention HR Clinton's bribery foundation, shows the US pretty willing to accept Democrat Party corruption.
Our shame on ourselves should be mainly on failing to understand the weaknesses of democracy, and internal acceptance of corruption for partisan reasons.
Every single intellectual who was in favor of Biden in 2020 is partly to blame - far more so than any Trump supporters.
But the biggest blame is on Putin, demonstrating a willingness to do evil deeds. There are, now, no good options in response.
ok, judge the Iraq interventions by their humanitarian consequences. Mark Steyn wrote in 2013 reflecting on his pre-intervention prediction:
> Iraq, I suggested, would wind up “at a bare minimum, the least badly governed state in the Arab world, and, at best, pleasant, civilized and thriving.” I’ll stand by my worst-case scenario there.
That sounds like good humanitarian consequences. Sure, people were killed in the Iraq war, but people were being killed before US intervention and would have continued to be killed without a US intervention. Steyn makes the convincing case that intervention had better humanitarian outcomes than simply leaving Hussein in power and not intervening.
If the issue is the morality of American foreign policy, that Iraq was in such terrible shape before the invasion was itself due to American sanctions. The alternative to the status quo shouldn’t have been a destructive war, but removing the sanctions regime and allowing the country to trade with the rest of the world.
I am no expert but at the time, as I recall it, the primary justification was the concern over Hussein's alleged WMD program and perhaps, secondarily, the desire to rid the world of an evil and aggressive tyrant to permit the establishment of a more liberal government. With 20-20 hindsight none of that panned out, but I question whether it is fair to say that the war was clearly driven by an ethnically-based desire for revenge.
Most Americans believed Saddam was personally involved in 9/11. The idea that the war was somehow revenge for 9/11 or to prevent others doing the same because they shared the same race and religion as the perpetrators was deep in the culture.
Ukraine gave up some 1,400 nuclear weapons after the disintegration of the USSR. They gave up those weapons in return for worthless guarantees from the EU, Russia and the US. Right now, smaller countries around the world are realizing that the Long Peace is over and they need to protect themselves. And the only way a small country can protect itself is nuclear weapons.
Ukraine had a bunch of physical missiles, but didn't have the security keys to unlock them. This point is brought up a lot but they couldn't actually use those missiles without Moscow.
Your more general point that events like this incentivize people to develop nukes is correct though.
The most difficult step in acquiring nuclear weapons is obtaining highly enriched uranium. With 1,400 nuclear weapons Ukraine had plenty. They could, for example, have worked out a deal with Pakistan, trading some of that HEU for unlocked weapons. Or built their own bombs. Or built simpler dirty radioactive but non-explosive bombs. Or bluffed. The real value in nuclear weapons is deterrence not actual use.
With Ukraine, I've yet to cohesively put everything together but there are a couple of crucial points that I think both the "appeasement" and "hawkish" domestic perspectives (Wright/Hanania and Smith here) miss.
1. Wright's argument about cognitive empathy resonates, but I (perhaps cynically) believe that the lack of "cognitive empathy" shown toward Russia is a pretend coping mechanism rather than a true inability to understand. It's what our elites do whenever they're confronted by a request from an out-group. Outgroups cannot be treated as equals.
Truckers/Russia are crazy/evil/deplorable and therefore they can't be dealt with. Sure, we could easily make their protests go away by throwing them a bone on the largely irrelevant issue they're protesting, but they are not equals to be negotiated with. Thus, we will ignore them, rub it in their face, and if they don't like it, we'll simply suspend their basic rights and take their money.
Hanania is coming from the far right, so while he doesn't explicitly make this connection, the dots are there to connect.
2. The Smith style argument is coming from inside the elite, and is thus deaf to understanding a conflict with an out-group that's not framed within a limited perspective. That is, I think Smith is correct that the left didn't understand because the left is so used to looking at military issues in a certain way. Again, though, I'm cynical and think there's a lot that the left/elite doesn't WANT to look at. The military-industrial complex is not the only, and perhaps not even the most dominant driver of power politics in international affairs.
Trade is. Specifically, not really free trade, but the biggest trade blocs in the world competing over the managed direction of a big trade flow. What's not discussed with Ukraine is not just the 2008 invitation to NATO, but the origin of the 2014 Euromaidan movement. This wasn't quite gunboat diplomacy, but something reminiscent of how the great powers were carving up China. Ukraine had been growing closer and closer to the west. Lots of money was flowing (we definitely don't want to look too closely at the Biden family's dealings in Ukraine or Ast. Secretary of Defense Nulan). Ukraine was poised to commit to a path to joining the EU. Then Russia swooped in with a too good to be true counteroffer and (likely in Russian pay) the elected leadership of Ukraine went took that offer instead. The Western part of Ukraine basically revolted and kicked out this elected but corrupt government (with Western approval) and replaced it with a newly elected corrupt government. (edit: added for emphasis). It was only at this point, after the trade discussion fell apart, than the political violence began. The corrupt moderate to pro-Russia government was violently replaced by a corrupt pro-Western government. And the East revolted (with Russia obviously) and installed it's own corrupt pro-Russia governments there. Perceived zero sum trade negotiations amongst corrupt elites > Political violence > war.
What I'm getting at here, is especially on the left and especially now, there's a deep unwillingness on the part of the left to acknowledge how this sausage gets made.
What we preach is free trade.
What happens is managed trade agreements that give preference to some and lock out others.
So what happened in Ukraine was pretty intense bidding war and corruption on both sides to woo a sizable (40+ million population market).
3. In a sane world, the West and Russia would have cooperated and split the difference, and Ukraine would have been more internally conciliatory to this outcome. A Ukraine that was militarily neutral, friendly to its entire population, and open to trade from both directions would have been a win-win scenario. Instead, all sides were corrupt, dismissive and grasping for the best possible deal at the expense of the other. Which is what always happens when you look at something to be divided up instead of something to invest in.
The failure of 'empathy' here is that it has been so long since any Western official has been capable of taking anything seriously that they literally could not imagine that Putin would be this absolutely serious about his goals and commitment to doing whatever was required to accomplish them, as opposed to just blowing smoke and manipulating symbols and ideas like they do. This makes him so foreign and incomprehensible such as to make him practically an inscrutable extraterrestrial. You might as well ask them to imagine a man flipping over tanks with his bare hands, "What is this, another comic book movie? None of us do that; no man would ever do that."
I’d be laughing about this if so many of those Very Serious People weren’t on TV trial ballooning various overt acts of war against a nuclear power. It’s reaching true “Don’t Look Up” levels of craziness.
As much as I’m not a fan of Joe Biden, I hope he’s got enough in the tank to not fall for any of these charlatans laying out plans for how we can shoot down Russian planes or wage a cyber war on the Russian infrastructure without any repercussions.
When I look at an electoral or linguistic map of Ukraine, I see at least two geographically separate countries that probably shouldn't be together. Perhaps that is the fundamental problem here.
That can probably be said of most countries. If that's the bar for whether invasion is justified, then we may as well return to the good old days of ceaseless warfare.
Also, who cares? The idea that you have a right to annex any place that speaks the same language or has the same ethnicity as you is best left in our species' savage past. "There are no Austrians, only more Germans," isn't anywhere near a compelling case for starting a war (and no I don't care about Godwin's law here).
Everyone should care because pretending these issues don't exist and saying it's "best left in our past" leads to... exactly what we have going on here. Our savage present.
It's neither justified nor righteous, but it is. The better approach would be to recognize when these issues exist and the extent to which they exist and deal with them peacefully instead of paper.
I think that's about right in the grand scheme of things.
Another model that I think is pretty obvious for thinking about this that of a mob war. Basically, if you take seriously the view of the Russian polity as a gang of oligarchs, follow that to its conclusion. The 2014 events and everything that's followed comes from their perception that the West is trying to take over a key piece of their turf.
Losing out of Ukraine is not that big a deal to the West, but it's a huge deal to them. It doesn't matter (to them) that they interfered in Ukraine in a corrupt, heavy-handed manner themselves. Whether the Western support of Maidan was based on a corrupt power economic power play or not (and merely heartfelt support for a 'democratic process') is less important that the reality that it was perceived as such by Russia.
I'm a big believer in Zeihan's thesis about the arc of Cold War to post-Cold War geopolitics over the last half century. His concepts work regardless of whether you assume the US is making a conscious decision to disengage, or whether the perceived lack of a near-peer opponent like the old USSR leads to a degradation in US and Western capabilities.
There's a lot of dishonest framing of conservative commentary on our response to the Ukraine invasion. It is not 'isolationist' to note that NATO simply doesn't have the capability to intervene militarily, or to put in place sanctions that would really bite Putin in the hindquarters, because of decisions made over the last decade. It is not 'pro-Russian' to note that Putin is playing the dominant currents in Western public opinion like a fiddle with claims he's a "peacekeeper" and "anti-Nazi" (all he needs to add is that he'll make the Ukraine safe for LGBTQ and he'll have hit the trifecta). The unrealistic pursuit of Green Nude Eel BS and willful blindness to the reality that most of NATO depends heavily on Russian hydrocarbons, the RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA demonization that prevented even as much engagement as we had at the height of the Cold War, and turning our militaries into a giant social experiment has left us with few good options.
I will confess that I never expected Putin to actually invade but I never thought Biden and Co were manufacturing a crisis, even though they made it easy to assume they were shaping the coverage of it for maximum benefit.
Were the nations' situations exactly reversed, what do you think the US would do? What should they do? That is to say, had the US lost the Cold War and broken up, like the USSR, and had the Russians formed a NATO like pact. What if the US then been promised that the NATO equivalent would stop expansion several countries away from our borders only to have that promise broken over and over again to the point where Russia was arming and manipulating the internal affairs of our neighboring country which was once part of our country.
What would and should the US do at that point? I don't think the answer is straight forward, and I don't think it necessarily excludes military intervention. That is what Robert Wright means by cognitive empathy I think, and it's not easy to practice.
Richard Hanania (26 January 2022) made a case that Ukrainians would not engage in sustained resistance to Russian occupation of eastern and central Ukraine because (a) the terrain there is open steppe and (b) Ukraine has a very low fertility rate (1.2):
Hanania's empirical generalization -- that countries with low fertility rates don't fight guerrilla wars because life is precious -- is based on a very small N (sample size). But perhaps he identifies a plausible underlying psychology. Time will tell whether Hanania has placed too much weight on a small number of cases; or, alternatively, has offered a deep insight.
Excerpts:
"Once we step aside from culture war resentments and focus on the hard realities of geopolitics, it is clear that Russia will eventually get its way because it cares more about Ukraine than the US does, and has the ability to threaten or use military force to get what it wants. When resolve and capabilities line up on the same side, that side is going to win. [...]
The only questions now are how far Putin will go, and how tough American sanctions will be. Washington is now deluding itself into believing that it can help facilitate an insurgency in Ukraine. This will not happen. One of the best predictors of insurgency is having the kinds of terrain that governments cannot reach, like swamps, forests and mountains. Ukraine is the heart of the great Eurasian steppe. It has some forests in the northwest and the Eastern Carpathians in the southwest, but Russia is likely to at most occupy the East and center of the country, where there are more Russian speakers, and give itself final say over whatever new government forms in Kiev. [...]
Even setting aside the geography of the country, there is no instance I’m aware of in which a country or region with a total fertility rate below replacement has fought a serious insurgency. Once you’re the kind of people who can’t inconvenience yourselves enough to have kids, you are not going to risk your lives for a political ideal. When the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, their total fertility rates were 7.4 and 4.7, respectively. Chechnya, where Russia has faced insurgencies in recent decades, experienced a population boom after the collapse of the Soviet Union and was still well above replacement with a TFR of 2.6 in 2020, down from 3.4 in 2009, when the last Chechen war ended. Ukraine is at 1.2. We see numbers like this and don’t stop to appreciate the wide chasm that separates the spiritual lives of nations where the average person has 1 kid from those with 3 or more, much less 6 or 7, each.
On fertility, Russia isn’t that much better than Ukraine, but it’s got the tanks and a powerful air force, and the side that wants to fight a guerrilla war has to be the one that is willing to take a much larger number of casualties. There’s a consistent pattern of history where there’s a connection between making life and being willing to sacrifice it. This, by the way, is also why Hong Kong was easily pacified when China started clamping down, and why Taiwan will fold and not fight an insurgency if it ever comes down to it."
Richard Hanania takes stock of his predictions about Russia's invasion/Ukraine's resistance, and updates a wide ranged of predictions, at the link below:
I'm suspicious that Hanania's hypothesis is piggy-backing on the geographic and cultural realities.
If the straightforward version were true (low fertility populations won't fight back) then Russia could take over the entire country and not fight back, right?
But instead my predictions are:
1. Russia will not even try to occupy Western Ukraine indefinitely. They'll retreat to borders they consider defensible. At this point, Hanania's idea maybe be weakly true, but in the context of the population being much more favorable to Russia (majority Russian already and perhaps much of Ukrainian minority expelled, killed, or otherwise mooted).
2. If not 1, and Russia really does try for a lasting occupation of Western Ukraine, it will face an ongoing guerrilla war.
Those outcomes would be based on the simpler concept that ethnolinguistic tribal and political affiliation still matters a lot.
I'm a bit surprised at the apparent success of Russian air strikes in Ukraine. I would have thought very good air defense would have been among the things that Western aid would have provided to Ukraine.
Part of what explains the timing of the invasion was precisely the prospect of Ukraine getting hold of such capabilities. Many strategic conclusions are counterintuitive because of the role of option value. You don't invade the weak countries which are easiest to invade, because who cares, you can take them any time you want if you feel you need to. You invade them when they walk up to the edge of being strong enough to resist and you can't seem to talk them out of walking back.
Because for many years there was still a critical mass of people in the West with influence over such decisions who knew that Russia would not tolerate it and would respond by invasion.
By all means, don't even think of economic sanctions against Russia. The United States imported more gasoline and other refined petroleum products from Russia than any other country in 2021. How could we continue Biden's war on domestic industry without Russian aid and suppor? How can we keep the blue collar plebes down if they are able to find decent jobs? Please China, take Taiwan. We will apologize profusely if anyone says an unkind word. But we need to import from you to keep our domestic industries from producing any decent middle class jobs. Middle class blue collar workers might vote Republican. And we won't even bother to recall our Ambassadors or expel yours. Win win. Can't let trade get in the way of expansionist empires. Autarky is worse than even a world dictatorship. Workers might have intrinsic value and not just be disposable cogs in the uber-specialized global patterns of trade. The sole purpose of the state is to subsidize just-in-time supply chains.
Brazen Biden sycophancy. Oh well. I think I will go read some more stories about the cultural revolution to cheer me up. When the Chinese over run us at least there is a possibility of the silver lining that they will remember how they once handled feckless elites.
It should be possible to inflict pain on Russian oligarchs (mostly sparing the avg Russian) while doing minimal damage to ourselves. Economic sanctions that target status goods and expat financials are more targeted and more likely to inflict the right type of pain and those that are in a position to influence Russian decisions.
Even if just 'targeted' against elites and 'oligarchs' (like with taxes, not where the 'incidence' tends to land, in practice) sanctions hurt us too, and politicians should not find it easy to get away with pretending otherwise. Nevertheless, just as politics and war are on the same spectrum, economics sanctions and armed hostilities are on the same spectrum, and armed conflict is obviously also lose-lose / negative-sum, at least, in the short term. Economic sanctions as an alternative to mass violence and if used wisely is a way to keep the magnitude down, and to keep things from escalating and spinning out of control, but they aren't costless either.
Then again, that's in theory, and in practice and actual experience, we don't seem to ever use them very wisely.
That being said, I was struck when during his otherwise well done speech in which he spoke about the greatest stakes in lived and blood and the highest ideals of freedom, self-determination of nations, and independence, Biden felt it necessary to assure Americans about the petty and venal issue of gasoline prices and that he would try hard to keep them down, because a few dimes extra per gallon would be just as important.
It's not just that the sanctions hurt us too. I think the core issue is that from a game theory perspective, it's still an escalation, and thus invites a tit-for-tat response from the other side.
It doesn't necessarily stop things from spinning out of control. Even within the sphere of economic warfare, Russia may not have power to inflict as much harm on us and we have on them, but it can still take actions to inflict a lot of harm. Maybe more than "we" the west, are willing to live with.
I don't think that's the right model and don't think that it is correct to see it as an escalation. Russia invaded another country - no action at all is an admission that we aren't going to retaliate at all and he is free to act however he wants.
What is the right level between 'we aren't willing to risk anything to prevent Russian aggression' and 'this escalates to nuclear strikes'? *shrug*
I didn't say we shouldn't respond or that Russia was guaranteed to respond with a stronger escalation. I'm simply describing the nature of the "game".
I'm not saying I'm opposed to any sanctions. We should not pretend, however, that sanctions aren't an escalation We're escalating our response. Russia can choose "back down", "ignore" or "escalate" in response.
The right level, if there is one, is the level of "escalation" that makes Russia back down. If that doesn't exist, the right level of "escalation" is the highest level we can go to that doesn't push Russia from "ignore" to "escalate".
Actually, as someone who started out as a political science person and moved on to economics, I think there's a comparative advantage to economists to think about international relations. Economics (and specifically public choice) has the most fleshed out concepts for thinking about about anarchistic arrangements of conflict and cooperation. That's basically what international relations is. Think of countries as people (or tribes of people) interacting without government, and you've got the world.
I am very skeptical of arguing about morally proper responses to the Ukraine invasion based on "Maybe Putin thinks X" rather than "a reasonable person might think X". The former is an appropriate basis for realpolitik analysis, and the latter is an appropriate basis for arguing what is versus what ought to be.
In the case of Ukraine versus Texas, Texas has been part of the US for almost 180 years -- perhaps slightly less considering the Civil War -- and Ukraine has been an independent country for more than 30 years. Even before that, Ukraine was a separate republic for more than 70 years. I think that all makes for a poor analogy.
I am similarly skeptical of arguments based solely on the US track record of interventions, without weighing those against the track record of Russian invasions.
I would also note that sanctions matter in terms of relative damage. The US could easily lose more absolute-dollar revenue from imposing sanctions on Russia than Russia loses, but as a fraction of our economy -- and thus what we could tolerate over a long period of time -- our losses would be much smaller. So we might impose sanctions, and suffer losses as a result, with an expectation that the relative pain would be greater for Russia and that changes to their long-term behavior outweighs our short-term losses. Whether those expectations hold is another question, of course.
Oct 4, 1957: Literally Sputnik. American rocket program immediately put into overdrive - space race launched.
Oct 17, 1973: OPEC agrees to deploy 'oil weapon', commences embargo actions. France launches Messmer Plan of intensive nuclearization of the base energy supply and emphasizing electric alternatives when feasible, making them considerably more energy independent (ie, not extortable) even half a century later.
Not-very-Sputnik moments:
Dec 2019 - covid - let me tell you, USG has learned nothing, remembers nothing, and the increased degree of readiness to face pandemics compared to Nov 2019 is nothing.
Feb 2015-June 2017 Avangard/Zircon/Kinzhal - Russia has the hypersonic missiles, and we don't. Oct 1, 2019-Aug 2021, DF-ZF/DF-17/Long March - China has the hypersonic missiles, and we don't. US tests fail more often than not, and despite knowing we don't have hardly any, we *still* haven't even started approving the building of the new wind tunnels necessary to catch up.
So, 2/22/22 - Ukraine. Sputnik moment? Not-so-sputnik? My money's on the latter, mostly becaues Putin has as strong an incentive as anybody to accurately take our measure and he found it wanting.
"Hanania points out that if we judge our recent interventions, particularly in the Middle East, by their adverse humanitarian consequences, rather than by their intentions, then we should be less outraged by Putin and more ashamed of ourselves."
Yeah, I don't think our intentions have always been so good either. Iraq was clearly motivated by the fact that we were angry about 9/11 and wanted to punish people who shared the same ethnic background as those responsible for the attacks. It was ugly.
Richard, honored that you read and commented!
Only ~20% correct: Iraq was motivated by 16 UNSC resolutions against murderous dictator Saddam which were toothless, plus the 30,000 murdered Kurds, plus the US anger (about 20%). The US led UN force after Saddam invaded Kuwait in '91 was to oppose the idea of taking territory by force.
Iraq was ugly before and after ...
That Desert Storm war shouldn't have ended without Saddam being deposed - but US Democrats wanted the war to end as soon as possible.
Saddam's successful killing of '91 rebels was also ugly.
WWII ended "fairly well" due to a) the requirement of the losers for Unconditional Surrender, and b) the US leading to more reconstruction rather than retribution.
Iraq in '92 or in 2003 was not the kind of market economy ready for corruption-prone tribal democracy. The successful S. Korean & Japanese models of post-war development is to emphasize stability and development more than democracy - with lots of human rights but also some human rights abuses.
Most of the ex-USSR & ex-Warsaw Pact countries have been stuck with corrupt democracies, more or less. Total lack of prosecution for Hunter Biden's corruption, not to mention HR Clinton's bribery foundation, shows the US pretty willing to accept Democrat Party corruption.
Our shame on ourselves should be mainly on failing to understand the weaknesses of democracy, and internal acceptance of corruption for partisan reasons.
Every single intellectual who was in favor of Biden in 2020 is partly to blame - far more so than any Trump supporters.
But the biggest blame is on Putin, demonstrating a willingness to do evil deeds. There are, now, no good options in response.
ok, judge the Iraq interventions by their humanitarian consequences. Mark Steyn wrote in 2013 reflecting on his pre-intervention prediction:
> Iraq, I suggested, would wind up “at a bare minimum, the least badly governed state in the Arab world, and, at best, pleasant, civilized and thriving.” I’ll stand by my worst-case scenario there.
That sounds like good humanitarian consequences. Sure, people were killed in the Iraq war, but people were being killed before US intervention and would have continued to be killed without a US intervention. Steyn makes the convincing case that intervention had better humanitarian outcomes than simply leaving Hussein in power and not intervening.
https://www.ocregister.com/2013/03/22/mark-steyn-iraq-less-unwon-than-other-wars/
If the issue is the morality of American foreign policy, that Iraq was in such terrible shape before the invasion was itself due to American sanctions. The alternative to the status quo shouldn’t have been a destructive war, but removing the sanctions regime and allowing the country to trade with the rest of the world.
I am no expert but at the time, as I recall it, the primary justification was the concern over Hussein's alleged WMD program and perhaps, secondarily, the desire to rid the world of an evil and aggressive tyrant to permit the establishment of a more liberal government. With 20-20 hindsight none of that panned out, but I question whether it is fair to say that the war was clearly driven by an ethnically-based desire for revenge.
Most Americans believed Saddam was personally involved in 9/11. The idea that the war was somehow revenge for 9/11 or to prevent others doing the same because they shared the same race and religion as the perpetrators was deep in the culture.
Ukraine gave up some 1,400 nuclear weapons after the disintegration of the USSR. They gave up those weapons in return for worthless guarantees from the EU, Russia and the US. Right now, smaller countries around the world are realizing that the Long Peace is over and they need to protect themselves. And the only way a small country can protect itself is nuclear weapons.
Ukraine had a bunch of physical missiles, but didn't have the security keys to unlock them. This point is brought up a lot but they couldn't actually use those missiles without Moscow.
Your more general point that events like this incentivize people to develop nukes is correct though.
"Security codes" = "Use weapons right now".
"Typical machine shop" = "use weapons in two weeks."
Or two days, if you know what you're doing. Or two hundred billion dollars, if you are just going to sell some off to the highest bidders.
The most difficult step in acquiring nuclear weapons is obtaining highly enriched uranium. With 1,400 nuclear weapons Ukraine had plenty. They could, for example, have worked out a deal with Pakistan, trading some of that HEU for unlocked weapons. Or built their own bombs. Or built simpler dirty radioactive but non-explosive bombs. Or bluffed. The real value in nuclear weapons is deterrence not actual use.
With Ukraine, I've yet to cohesively put everything together but there are a couple of crucial points that I think both the "appeasement" and "hawkish" domestic perspectives (Wright/Hanania and Smith here) miss.
1. Wright's argument about cognitive empathy resonates, but I (perhaps cynically) believe that the lack of "cognitive empathy" shown toward Russia is a pretend coping mechanism rather than a true inability to understand. It's what our elites do whenever they're confronted by a request from an out-group. Outgroups cannot be treated as equals.
Truckers/Russia are crazy/evil/deplorable and therefore they can't be dealt with. Sure, we could easily make their protests go away by throwing them a bone on the largely irrelevant issue they're protesting, but they are not equals to be negotiated with. Thus, we will ignore them, rub it in their face, and if they don't like it, we'll simply suspend their basic rights and take their money.
Hanania is coming from the far right, so while he doesn't explicitly make this connection, the dots are there to connect.
2. The Smith style argument is coming from inside the elite, and is thus deaf to understanding a conflict with an out-group that's not framed within a limited perspective. That is, I think Smith is correct that the left didn't understand because the left is so used to looking at military issues in a certain way. Again, though, I'm cynical and think there's a lot that the left/elite doesn't WANT to look at. The military-industrial complex is not the only, and perhaps not even the most dominant driver of power politics in international affairs.
Trade is. Specifically, not really free trade, but the biggest trade blocs in the world competing over the managed direction of a big trade flow. What's not discussed with Ukraine is not just the 2008 invitation to NATO, but the origin of the 2014 Euromaidan movement. This wasn't quite gunboat diplomacy, but something reminiscent of how the great powers were carving up China. Ukraine had been growing closer and closer to the west. Lots of money was flowing (we definitely don't want to look too closely at the Biden family's dealings in Ukraine or Ast. Secretary of Defense Nulan). Ukraine was poised to commit to a path to joining the EU. Then Russia swooped in with a too good to be true counteroffer and (likely in Russian pay) the elected leadership of Ukraine went took that offer instead. The Western part of Ukraine basically revolted and kicked out this elected but corrupt government (with Western approval) and replaced it with a newly elected corrupt government. (edit: added for emphasis). It was only at this point, after the trade discussion fell apart, than the political violence began. The corrupt moderate to pro-Russia government was violently replaced by a corrupt pro-Western government. And the East revolted (with Russia obviously) and installed it's own corrupt pro-Russia governments there. Perceived zero sum trade negotiations amongst corrupt elites > Political violence > war.
What I'm getting at here, is especially on the left and especially now, there's a deep unwillingness on the part of the left to acknowledge how this sausage gets made.
What we preach is free trade.
What happens is managed trade agreements that give preference to some and lock out others.
So what happened in Ukraine was pretty intense bidding war and corruption on both sides to woo a sizable (40+ million population market).
3. In a sane world, the West and Russia would have cooperated and split the difference, and Ukraine would have been more internally conciliatory to this outcome. A Ukraine that was militarily neutral, friendly to its entire population, and open to trade from both directions would have been a win-win scenario. Instead, all sides were corrupt, dismissive and grasping for the best possible deal at the expense of the other. Which is what always happens when you look at something to be divided up instead of something to invest in.
The failure of 'empathy' here is that it has been so long since any Western official has been capable of taking anything seriously that they literally could not imagine that Putin would be this absolutely serious about his goals and commitment to doing whatever was required to accomplish them, as opposed to just blowing smoke and manipulating symbols and ideas like they do. This makes him so foreign and incomprehensible such as to make him practically an inscrutable extraterrestrial. You might as well ask them to imagine a man flipping over tanks with his bare hands, "What is this, another comic book movie? None of us do that; no man would ever do that."
I’d be laughing about this if so many of those Very Serious People weren’t on TV trial ballooning various overt acts of war against a nuclear power. It’s reaching true “Don’t Look Up” levels of craziness.
As much as I’m not a fan of Joe Biden, I hope he’s got enough in the tank to not fall for any of these charlatans laying out plans for how we can shoot down Russian planes or wage a cyber war on the Russian infrastructure without any repercussions.
When I look at an electoral or linguistic map of Ukraine, I see at least two geographically separate countries that probably shouldn't be together. Perhaps that is the fundamental problem here.
That can probably be said of most countries. If that's the bar for whether invasion is justified, then we may as well return to the good old days of ceaseless warfare.
Also, who cares? The idea that you have a right to annex any place that speaks the same language or has the same ethnicity as you is best left in our species' savage past. "There are no Austrians, only more Germans," isn't anywhere near a compelling case for starting a war (and no I don't care about Godwin's law here).
Everyone should care because pretending these issues don't exist and saying it's "best left in our past" leads to... exactly what we have going on here. Our savage present.
It's neither justified nor righteous, but it is. The better approach would be to recognize when these issues exist and the extent to which they exist and deal with them peacefully instead of paper.
I think that's about right in the grand scheme of things.
Another model that I think is pretty obvious for thinking about this that of a mob war. Basically, if you take seriously the view of the Russian polity as a gang of oligarchs, follow that to its conclusion. The 2014 events and everything that's followed comes from their perception that the West is trying to take over a key piece of their turf.
Losing out of Ukraine is not that big a deal to the West, but it's a huge deal to them. It doesn't matter (to them) that they interfered in Ukraine in a corrupt, heavy-handed manner themselves. Whether the Western support of Maidan was based on a corrupt power economic power play or not (and merely heartfelt support for a 'democratic process') is less important that the reality that it was perceived as such by Russia.
I'm a big believer in Zeihan's thesis about the arc of Cold War to post-Cold War geopolitics over the last half century. His concepts work regardless of whether you assume the US is making a conscious decision to disengage, or whether the perceived lack of a near-peer opponent like the old USSR leads to a degradation in US and Western capabilities.
There's a lot of dishonest framing of conservative commentary on our response to the Ukraine invasion. It is not 'isolationist' to note that NATO simply doesn't have the capability to intervene militarily, or to put in place sanctions that would really bite Putin in the hindquarters, because of decisions made over the last decade. It is not 'pro-Russian' to note that Putin is playing the dominant currents in Western public opinion like a fiddle with claims he's a "peacekeeper" and "anti-Nazi" (all he needs to add is that he'll make the Ukraine safe for LGBTQ and he'll have hit the trifecta). The unrealistic pursuit of Green Nude Eel BS and willful blindness to the reality that most of NATO depends heavily on Russian hydrocarbons, the RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA demonization that prevented even as much engagement as we had at the height of the Cold War, and turning our militaries into a giant social experiment has left us with few good options.
I will confess that I never expected Putin to actually invade but I never thought Biden and Co were manufacturing a crisis, even though they made it easy to assume they were shaping the coverage of it for maximum benefit.
Were the nations' situations exactly reversed, what do you think the US would do? What should they do? That is to say, had the US lost the Cold War and broken up, like the USSR, and had the Russians formed a NATO like pact. What if the US then been promised that the NATO equivalent would stop expansion several countries away from our borders only to have that promise broken over and over again to the point where Russia was arming and manipulating the internal affairs of our neighboring country which was once part of our country.
What would and should the US do at that point? I don't think the answer is straight forward, and I don't think it necessarily excludes military intervention. That is what Robert Wright means by cognitive empathy I think, and it's not easy to practice.
Richard Hanania (26 January 2022) made a case that Ukrainians would not engage in sustained resistance to Russian occupation of eastern and central Ukraine because (a) the terrain there is open steppe and (b) Ukraine has a very low fertility rate (1.2):
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/russia-as-the-great-satan-in-the?utm_source=url
Hanania's empirical generalization -- that countries with low fertility rates don't fight guerrilla wars because life is precious -- is based on a very small N (sample size). But perhaps he identifies a plausible underlying psychology. Time will tell whether Hanania has placed too much weight on a small number of cases; or, alternatively, has offered a deep insight.
Excerpts:
"Once we step aside from culture war resentments and focus on the hard realities of geopolitics, it is clear that Russia will eventually get its way because it cares more about Ukraine than the US does, and has the ability to threaten or use military force to get what it wants. When resolve and capabilities line up on the same side, that side is going to win. [...]
The only questions now are how far Putin will go, and how tough American sanctions will be. Washington is now deluding itself into believing that it can help facilitate an insurgency in Ukraine. This will not happen. One of the best predictors of insurgency is having the kinds of terrain that governments cannot reach, like swamps, forests and mountains. Ukraine is the heart of the great Eurasian steppe. It has some forests in the northwest and the Eastern Carpathians in the southwest, but Russia is likely to at most occupy the East and center of the country, where there are more Russian speakers, and give itself final say over whatever new government forms in Kiev. [...]
Even setting aside the geography of the country, there is no instance I’m aware of in which a country or region with a total fertility rate below replacement has fought a serious insurgency. Once you’re the kind of people who can’t inconvenience yourselves enough to have kids, you are not going to risk your lives for a political ideal. When the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, their total fertility rates were 7.4 and 4.7, respectively. Chechnya, where Russia has faced insurgencies in recent decades, experienced a population boom after the collapse of the Soviet Union and was still well above replacement with a TFR of 2.6 in 2020, down from 3.4 in 2009, when the last Chechen war ended. Ukraine is at 1.2. We see numbers like this and don’t stop to appreciate the wide chasm that separates the spiritual lives of nations where the average person has 1 kid from those with 3 or more, much less 6 or 7, each.
On fertility, Russia isn’t that much better than Ukraine, but it’s got the tanks and a powerful air force, and the side that wants to fight a guerrilla war has to be the one that is willing to take a much larger number of casualties. There’s a consistent pattern of history where there’s a connection between making life and being willing to sacrifice it. This, by the way, is also why Hong Kong was easily pacified when China started clamping down, and why Taiwan will fold and not fight an insurgency if it ever comes down to it."
Richard Hanania takes stock of his predictions about Russia's invasion/Ukraine's resistance, and updates a wide ranged of predictions, at the link below:
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/lessons-from-forecasting-the-ukraine?utm_source=url
I'm suspicious that Hanania's hypothesis is piggy-backing on the geographic and cultural realities.
If the straightforward version were true (low fertility populations won't fight back) then Russia could take over the entire country and not fight back, right?
But instead my predictions are:
1. Russia will not even try to occupy Western Ukraine indefinitely. They'll retreat to borders they consider defensible. At this point, Hanania's idea maybe be weakly true, but in the context of the population being much more favorable to Russia (majority Russian already and perhaps much of Ukrainian minority expelled, killed, or otherwise mooted).
2. If not 1, and Russia really does try for a lasting occupation of Western Ukraine, it will face an ongoing guerrilla war.
Those outcomes would be based on the simpler concept that ethnolinguistic tribal and political affiliation still matters a lot.
Might the news report, below, bear on Hanania's hypothesis?:
"The Ukraine State Border Guard Service announced Thursday that men aged 18 to 60 were prohibited from leaving the country."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2022/02/25/russia-invasion-ukraine-bans-male-citizens-leaving/6936471001/
I'm a bit surprised at the apparent success of Russian air strikes in Ukraine. I would have thought very good air defense would have been among the things that Western aid would have provided to Ukraine.
Part of what explains the timing of the invasion was precisely the prospect of Ukraine getting hold of such capabilities. Many strategic conclusions are counterintuitive because of the role of option value. You don't invade the weak countries which are easiest to invade, because who cares, you can take them any time you want if you feel you need to. You invade them when they walk up to the edge of being strong enough to resist and you can't seem to talk them out of walking back.
I guess the question is why hadn't the West provided that capacity a long time ago?
Because for many years there was still a critical mass of people in the West with influence over such decisions who knew that Russia would not tolerate it and would respond by invasion.
By all means, don't even think of economic sanctions against Russia. The United States imported more gasoline and other refined petroleum products from Russia than any other country in 2021. How could we continue Biden's war on domestic industry without Russian aid and suppor? How can we keep the blue collar plebes down if they are able to find decent jobs? Please China, take Taiwan. We will apologize profusely if anyone says an unkind word. But we need to import from you to keep our domestic industries from producing any decent middle class jobs. Middle class blue collar workers might vote Republican. And we won't even bother to recall our Ambassadors or expel yours. Win win. Can't let trade get in the way of expansionist empires. Autarky is worse than even a world dictatorship. Workers might have intrinsic value and not just be disposable cogs in the uber-specialized global patterns of trade. The sole purpose of the state is to subsidize just-in-time supply chains.
Brazen Biden sycophancy. Oh well. I think I will go read some more stories about the cultural revolution to cheer me up. When the Chinese over run us at least there is a possibility of the silver lining that they will remember how they once handled feckless elites.
It should be possible to inflict pain on Russian oligarchs (mostly sparing the avg Russian) while doing minimal damage to ourselves. Economic sanctions that target status goods and expat financials are more targeted and more likely to inflict the right type of pain and those that are in a position to influence Russian decisions.
Even if just 'targeted' against elites and 'oligarchs' (like with taxes, not where the 'incidence' tends to land, in practice) sanctions hurt us too, and politicians should not find it easy to get away with pretending otherwise. Nevertheless, just as politics and war are on the same spectrum, economics sanctions and armed hostilities are on the same spectrum, and armed conflict is obviously also lose-lose / negative-sum, at least, in the short term. Economic sanctions as an alternative to mass violence and if used wisely is a way to keep the magnitude down, and to keep things from escalating and spinning out of control, but they aren't costless either.
Then again, that's in theory, and in practice and actual experience, we don't seem to ever use them very wisely.
That being said, I was struck when during his otherwise well done speech in which he spoke about the greatest stakes in lived and blood and the highest ideals of freedom, self-determination of nations, and independence, Biden felt it necessary to assure Americans about the petty and venal issue of gasoline prices and that he would try hard to keep them down, because a few dimes extra per gallon would be just as important.
It's not just that the sanctions hurt us too. I think the core issue is that from a game theory perspective, it's still an escalation, and thus invites a tit-for-tat response from the other side.
It doesn't necessarily stop things from spinning out of control. Even within the sphere of economic warfare, Russia may not have power to inflict as much harm on us and we have on them, but it can still take actions to inflict a lot of harm. Maybe more than "we" the west, are willing to live with.
I don't think that's the right model and don't think that it is correct to see it as an escalation. Russia invaded another country - no action at all is an admission that we aren't going to retaliate at all and he is free to act however he wants.
What is the right level between 'we aren't willing to risk anything to prevent Russian aggression' and 'this escalates to nuclear strikes'? *shrug*
I didn't say we shouldn't respond or that Russia was guaranteed to respond with a stronger escalation. I'm simply describing the nature of the "game".
I'm not saying I'm opposed to any sanctions. We should not pretend, however, that sanctions aren't an escalation We're escalating our response. Russia can choose "back down", "ignore" or "escalate" in response.
The right level, if there is one, is the level of "escalation" that makes Russia back down. If that doesn't exist, the right level of "escalation" is the highest level we can go to that doesn't push Russia from "ignore" to "escalate".
I never implied it was costless. But it shifts the burdens more directly onto those that are capable of making change.
Actually, as someone who started out as a political science person and moved on to economics, I think there's a comparative advantage to economists to think about international relations. Economics (and specifically public choice) has the most fleshed out concepts for thinking about about anarchistic arrangements of conflict and cooperation. That's basically what international relations is. Think of countries as people (or tribes of people) interacting without government, and you've got the world.
I am very skeptical of arguing about morally proper responses to the Ukraine invasion based on "Maybe Putin thinks X" rather than "a reasonable person might think X". The former is an appropriate basis for realpolitik analysis, and the latter is an appropriate basis for arguing what is versus what ought to be.
In the case of Ukraine versus Texas, Texas has been part of the US for almost 180 years -- perhaps slightly less considering the Civil War -- and Ukraine has been an independent country for more than 30 years. Even before that, Ukraine was a separate republic for more than 70 years. I think that all makes for a poor analogy.
I am similarly skeptical of arguments based solely on the US track record of interventions, without weighing those against the track record of Russian invasions.
I would also note that sanctions matter in terms of relative damage. The US could easily lose more absolute-dollar revenue from imposing sanctions on Russia than Russia loses, but as a fraction of our economy -- and thus what we could tolerate over a long period of time -- our losses would be much smaller. So we might impose sanctions, and suffer losses as a result, with an expectation that the relative pain would be greater for Russia and that changes to their long-term behavior outweighs our short-term losses. Whether those expectations hold is another question, of course.
Sputnik Moments:
Oct 4, 1957: Literally Sputnik. American rocket program immediately put into overdrive - space race launched.
Oct 17, 1973: OPEC agrees to deploy 'oil weapon', commences embargo actions. France launches Messmer Plan of intensive nuclearization of the base energy supply and emphasizing electric alternatives when feasible, making them considerably more energy independent (ie, not extortable) even half a century later.
Not-very-Sputnik moments:
Dec 2019 - covid - let me tell you, USG has learned nothing, remembers nothing, and the increased degree of readiness to face pandemics compared to Nov 2019 is nothing.
Feb 2015-June 2017 Avangard/Zircon/Kinzhal - Russia has the hypersonic missiles, and we don't. Oct 1, 2019-Aug 2021, DF-ZF/DF-17/Long March - China has the hypersonic missiles, and we don't. US tests fail more often than not, and despite knowing we don't have hardly any, we *still* haven't even started approving the building of the new wind tunnels necessary to catch up.
So, 2/22/22 - Ukraine. Sputnik moment? Not-so-sputnik? My money's on the latter, mostly becaues Putin has as strong an incentive as anybody to accurately take our measure and he found it wanting.