"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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.