An immediate pre-Ukraine-war perspective

As it happened, I wrote down a set of guidelines on how I was looking at the Ukraine crisis on February 23, the day before Russia launched a full-scale invasion. I'm going to put them here as some kind of benchmark for myself and whoever else might want to look at them.

1. We can draw ethical and moral judgments about events in world politics. Especially in retrospect. Doing so in real time is harder.
2. Internal politics affects foreign policy. But since the 17th century, the international system has been increasingly organized around nation-states whose power positions in a dynamic system also define the range of foreign policy choices.
3. The saying that has long since become a cliche - power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely - is pretty much true. Both in internal politics and in the international system.
4. Thucydides' observation (that is a favorite of the economist and Greek politician Yanis Varoufakis) - "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" - is still very operative in international politics.
5. International law is an attempt to regulate the extremes of disorder, violence, and murder that are still very much part of the world scene. And international law is a necessary and practical tool for that purpose.
6. Another saying that is an important guideline about to war and peace comes from I.F. Stone: "all governments lie."
7. More specific to the Ukraine crisis, the issues involved didn't just re-emerge in the last few weeks. Looking at how the current situation developed is important.
8. The flip side of "all governments lie" is that, expecially in military conflicts, all governments selectively use actual facts in their propaganda. The fact that the side of which you disapprove is saying something doesn't mean that it's false. Facts are important and so is critical thinking.
9. When it comes to foreign affairs, political influence crosses borders. There are a wide range of established practices, rules and laws that define the official legitimacy of individual cases. A simple example: it is legal for an American to work is a "foreign agent" for another country as long as the laws and reporting practices are followed. When Michael Flynn was working as an unregistered foreign agent of Turkey (a US ally) while he was serving as Trump's National Security Advisor, that was not legal.
10. Similarities between the types of government can have some effect on the foreign policies they pursue.
11. US Republicans are in an increasing state of radicalizing and, especially after the COVID pandemic, are in a state where claiming to believe plainly ridiculous things has becmoe a kind of loyalty test in itself.
12. The Democrats are right to mock the Republicans for praising Putin as a manly man over Ukraine or anything else. But the Republicans are not following a coherent line on relations with Russia. Even under Trump, both parties cheerfully boosted the US military budget year after year. In 2022, the Republicans in Congress pushed to impose sanctions on Russia even before Putin's recognition of the breakaway republics Donetsk and Luhansk. Trump's abandoning the Iran nuclear agreement couldn't have been reassuring to the Russians., nor his insistence that NATO countries boost their military budgets. Trump's value to Russia was a a chaos agent to weaken the US system. Not because he was following some detailed foreign policy course dictated by Moscow.

I didn't write this part down on February 23, but the full I.F. Stone quote is, "All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out."