The first week of the Ukraine war

We're not even a week into the Russian invasion of Ukraine that doesn't seem to have a standard name yet. The Ukraine War? The Russo-Ukraine War?

Because conventional wisdom in the NATO countries were assuming since the Russian buildup of troops against Ukraine started late last year that the Russians' most likely goal was some new agreements over Ukraine and NATO expansion, we didn't have the months of blowhard rhetoric and elaborate political posturing that we saw, for instance, in the runups to the Gulf War of 1991, the Iraq War, or even the Libyan intervention of 2011. So individuals and parties are still scrambling to orient themselves in what is still a fast-changing situation.

I watched the debate that took place on Sunday in the German Bundestag on the Ukraine situation. Five of the six main parliamentary party caucuses (Fraktions in German) - two other tiny parties have one seat each - are condemning the Russian invasion pretty straightforwardly: the three government parties (Social Democrats, Greens, Free Democrats), the Christian Democrats, and the Left Party. The far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) nominally criticized the invasion but actually defended it, mainly by blaming NATO for it.

For politicians, foreign policy analysts, and talking heads in corporate media channels, the politically safest posture right now is to demand Toughness from the NATO governments and also to blame the US and NATO for having been Too Weak previously. It's sobering to think about how much of US foreign policy discussion consists of bluster.

Understanding how something came about is not the same as justifying the actions of the parties involved, and explaining how something happened is not the same as making excuses for it. Since NATO enlargement is a major point of contention in relation to the Ukraine war now, it's worth noting that especially adherents of the "realist" foreign policy school have been critiquing the assumptions behind that for years. Andrew Bacevich discusses it in this very recent editorial: US can’t absolve itself of responsibility for Putin’s Ukraine invasion Boston Globe 02/25/2022.

However, the talking point that the US somehow promised or made some binding agreement with the Soviet Union to never expand NATO in eastern Europe doesn't hold up to scrutiny. But the NATO countries did effectively assume that NATO expansion was more-or-less risk-free and that Russia was powerless to effectively react against it. Bacevich makes this "realist" judgment of that process:

The argument made by several recent US administrations that NATO expansion does not pose a threat to Russian security doesn’t pass the sniff test. It assumes that US attitudes toward Russia are benign. They are not and haven’t been for decades. It assumes further that Moscow has no interests except as permitted by the United States. No responsible government will allow an adversary to determine its hierarchy of interests.

But it should also be obvious that recognizing the riskiness of those decisions in retrospect does not mean that NATO can just decide tomorrow to go back to NATO structure and membership of 1996.

Josh Marshall notes an instance of instant hawkish bluster in the current moment:

Honestly the twitter fever for "no fly zones" is a sobering reminder that Americans have close to no living memory of a military engagement with a peer military or even one that can put up a fight. One person was skeptical that a no fly zone is an act of war.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 28, 2022

Other perennially popular talking points that are starting to emerge:

The information war: The actual methods, arguments, and channels of communication are always important to note. But I have to scratch my head at commenters who sound like this is the first time a propaganda exchange figured into a war:

Ok. Deep breath.

I think we may look back on this as the first Great Information War. Except we're already 8 years in.

The first Great Information War began in 2014. The invasion of Ukraine is the latest front. And the idea it doesn't already involve us is fiction, a lie.
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— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) February 27, 2022

To be fair, propaganda around wars has only been going on for a few millennia. Although if the first homo sapiens 315,000 years or so ago had conflicts that we could calls war in today's sense, there's a good chance they worked some war propaganda into their cave paintings or war dances or whatever they used.

The "Munich" analogy: Ah, yi, yi. No, the testosterone contest between Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler was not the only thing happening then.

The "How could this happen?" question: If you don't actually know anything about it, you can still express this safe form of vague outrage. Ernest Jones ("How Can Civilization be Saved? 1938) once observed:

Even in our own so-called democratic country [Britain] we are familiar with the constant cry, 'Why doesn't the government do something about it?', and a great deal of social discontent and resentment is the result of disappointment at finding this infantile belief unfulfilled. At times people cling to the belief in the face of all evidence to the contrary by means of imputing evil designs to their rulers-the train of thought being: 'We know they are omnipotent and so if they do not do this desired thing it can only be because they are wicked'. lt was a similar train of thought that led to the invention of the devil and, incidentally, it could have been predicted that once the belief in the devil waned, that in God must also in time weaken because of the difficulty of making him carry the weight of both good and evil.