Twitter in the morning - Ukraine crisis edition

Twitter can be a good news accumulator if you pay some attention to how to use it that way.

But sometimes the algorithms kick up some groaners first thing in the morning.

I can't blame the algorithms for showing me Michael McFaul's tweets on the Ukraine crisis. I've been following and retweeting them and making snarky comments on some of them. And the first one Twitter showed me today also deserves a bit of snark.

Maybe he's just recycling talking points he's getting students to react to in a class or something. Or recycling talking points he's hearing from them.

In this case, it seems almost cliché to do a mirror-image comparison to the US. Because war is sometimes more justified that others.

Chechnya 1999: War against Muslim separatists. Both of Russia's Chechnian wars were understandably criticized for their needless brutality. And I realize that 1999 was before the 9/11 attacks of 2001 Changed Everything. But, still: Is McFaul really saying that Russia shouldn't have fought Muslim secessionists in Chechnya?

One of the talking heads in a panel discussion on Ukraine I heard yesterday kept repeating that only Russia had changed borders by force in Europe since World War II. Gosh, maybe it was some kind of dream or something, but I remember that that was once a country called Yugoslavia that disintegrated in a sprawling civil war that left behind countries called Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Slovenia. But I guess that since those were considered constituent republics of Yugoslavia, we could say the borders didn't change. (?!)

Kosovo, though, is still officially part of Serbia. At least as far as Serbia is concerned. Except that it has a de facto independence recognized by a number of countries. From the website of the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development: Kosovo on the road to normality (n/d):

Kosovo is Europe’s youngest state. On 17 February 2008 the Assembly of the Republic of Kosovo in Pristina declared the country's independence from the Republic of Serbia. Since then, 114 countries, including Germany and the majority of the EU Member States, have recognised Kosovo as an independent state. Prior to the declaration of independence, Kosovo had been administered by the United Nations since 1999 as an autonomous territory on the basis of UN Resolution 1244.

In a report published in 2010, the International Court of Justice in The Hague came to the conclusion that Kosovo’s declaration of independence did not violate international law. Serbia does not recognise Kosovo as an independent state.

And maybe I imagined it, too, but wasn't there a war over Kosovo in 1999, in which NATO (primarily the US) fought for secessionists against the sovereign state of Serbia for the independence of Kosovo?

At the time, I certainly thought there were substantial reasons that argued for the NATO intervention. But not only was the justification in international law shaky at best - it was not sanctioned by the UN. But as the book pictured above documents, the official goal of the intervention, to protect Kosovars from being "ethnically cleansed," wasn't even accomplished. To do that would have required troops on the ground in Kosovo directly fighting the Serbian forces doing the "cleansing." Instead, the Clinton Administration opted for an air war concentrated against Serbia itself. One results - officially unintended - was that the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was struck by US bombs. (Kevin Ponniah and Lazara Marinkovic, The night the US bombed a Chinese embassy BBC News 05/07/2019)

Of course those were the days when the US was the "single hegemon," the "indispensable nation," and so on. Ah, those were the days...

Now, there's no direct parallel with Biden's wars and Putin's. Biden has been President just over a year, and Putin has been around a while. Actually, Putin was the Russian President 2000-2008 and again from 2012 until now. In 1999-2000 and again 2008-2012, he was Prime Minister. But he was generally understood to be the functional head of the government even when he was "only" Prime Minister.

But if we count US drone and Special Forces strikes on "terrorist" targets, the US list since 1999 would be pretty darn long. Off the top of my head, I recall a 20-year war in Afghanistan, and an invasion of Iraq that changed the government. And created a kinda-sorta de facto Kurdish state, but it doesn't enjoy the same international recognition as Kosovo, so I guess that doesn't count as changing borders.

And, gosh, didn't we also intervene in the Syrian civil war, too? And wasn't there some kind of regime change or something in which the US, France, and Britain took part in Libya in 2011?

And how many times have we killed the main leader or second-in-command of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State? Pakistan had to pretend that the US military strike that took out Bin Laden - an operation that not only cynics might consider an assassination - on their territory was a big surprise to them. It seems like it was just the other day that the Biden-Harris Administration "took out" another head of the Islamic State. But that was actually way back almost three weeks ago. (President Biden confirms Islamic State leader killed in Syria BBC News 02/03/2022)

And regime changes in which the US took part, even ones outside our not-a-sphere-of-influence-really-not-despite-the-Monroe-Doctrine Latin America, have not been totally lacking since 1999. Although the clown coup attempt in Venezuela, which technically still continues, combined with serious sanctions that produces real harm to people in Venezuela, deserves special mention. There's even been a trend of US-trained soldiers staging coups in the African nations of Mali, Chad and Guinea. Probably coincidence. Stuff happens, you know.

My point in all this is that it might, maybe, perhaps be better if political leaders and foreign policy experts tried to think clearly about what the real power dynamics are and not try to run foreign and military policy on bluster, political consultants' PR advice, momentary hormonal surges. or dumb snark on Twitter.

Russia's policy in Ukraine sucks. It's in violation of international law. But it's also a practical problem that the rest of the world has to deal with in light of other real-world factors including the need to work with Russia on nuclear disarmament and climate change, and the fact that something like 40% of Europe's oil and gas supplies come from Russia.

It might also be good if the press and the NATO governments gave us a little more information about where China stands in all of this. I just hear a report on the German Welt news that China is calling for some sort of neutrality arrangement for Ukraine. China's President Xi Jinping certainly made a big show in Beijing earlier this month of showing off china's current friendly relations with Russia, (Shannon Tiezzi, What Putin and Xi Said (and Didn’t Say) About Ukraine The Diplomat 02/04/2022)

The China factor could be kind of important here.