Because after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 14, it suddenly became a matter of near-theological purity as to how people talk about the role the West and NATO played in the developments that lead up to that point.
I'm definitely not in the camp of those who are relieved that we have a new Cold War situation with the familiar enemy of "Moscow" once again. I would have preferred that the so-called "unipolar moment" for the US had produced a world with fewer nuclear weapons, more progress on reducing global warming, and with fewer wars and misbegotten regime-change operations. The torture laboratory at Guantanamo Bay is certainly something the US and the world would have been better off if it never had existed.
But we now live in a world where the US is a power whose relative position in the world has declined in relation to China. And Russia has come a long way from the days of "shock therapy" in the mid-1990s. Those three powers have a lot of influence in the world. They have "agency" in what happens. (I'll just mention Iraq and Libya as two obvious examples.)
So I was surprised to see this argument by Ost:
Even Noam Chomsky, while more viscerally critical of the invasion — he called it “a major war crime, ranking alongside the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Hitler - Stalin invasion of Poland in September 1939”—then proceeded to speak all about NATO, endorsing someone else’s claim that “there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion” of NATO. Once again, Putin appears here as almost helpless, apparently left no other choice but to invade Ukraine in trying to defend Russia.This mainly provoked the question for me, "Who and what is the Party for Socialism and Liberation?" Well, according to the current Wikipedia entry under that name, it's "a communist political party in the United States, established in 2004" with headquarters in San Francisco: I really don't recall ever having heard about it at all before. And I lived most of my life in the SF Bay Area until 2018. Maybe there is some reason I should be paying attention to what that particular group is saying about foreign policy. But I'm guessing that I'm not the only one who never heard of them before.
The statement of the “Party for Socialism and Liberation” was blunter but not really different from the approach of too many others: “While we do not support the Russian invasion, we reserve our strongest condemnation [emphasis added] for the U.S. government, which rejected Russia’s legitimate security concerns in the region.”
[Spoiler: if you read all the way down to the last paragraph, Ost says explicitly, "Almost no one on the left has supported the war {i.e. Putin's invasion of Ukraine}." But he seems to think it's his duty to denounce those almost-no-ones who seem insufficiently zealous against Russia in their comments on the war. ]
Inadequately informed though I may be on the debate among communist grouplets in the US over Ukraine, David Ost's commentary left me feeling in need of doing a reality-check, even though it may sound like buzzkill for anyone still gasping in relief that we finally have the Free World Vs. The Rooskies scenario back in operation.
Ukrainian politics since its independence in 1991 has involved a lot of discussion and argument about how closely Ukraine should be aligned with NATO countries or with Russia or what kind of balance should be struck between the two. Here are a list of the Ukrainian Presidents:
- Leonid Kravchuk (1991-1994)
- Leonid Kuchma (1994-2005)
- Viktor Yushchenko (2005~2010)
- Viktor Yanukovych (2010-2014)
- Oleksandr Turchynov Acting (2014)
- Petro Poroshenko (2014-2019)
- Volodymyr Zelenskyy (2019-present)
Pro-Russian Yanukovych came very close to making a deal with the EU to put them on track for EU membership. (Pundits don't often mention it, but the EU Treaty has an explicit mutual defense clause. It's not "only" an economic or vaguely political grouping.) But Russia offered him what he judged to be a better deal to move instead to closer association with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union. This became a central issue in the "Euromaidan" democratic uprising in Ukraine 2013-14 that brought first Poroshenko to the President and then Zelensky.
But this was not an eastern Ukraine vs. western Ukraine split. It was generally understood, both inside Ukraine and those outside who were paying attention, that the EU and Russia were hoping to persuade Ukraine to align more closely with them. Recognizing that didn't become heresy in foreign policy discussions until February 24 of this year.
It's also the case that Putin and Russia had made it very clear as early in the later 2000s that Russia was particularly concerned about possible NATO membership (and implicitly about EU membership) for Ukraine and Georgia. The fact that Russia was expressing that position does not mean that it was virtuous for them to do so, or even that their concerns were legitimate. But it was a real issue at the time. Ukraine and the NATO countries knew it, the "realist" international-relations experts who warned about possible Russian reactions knew it, and so did everyone else who was paying attention.
The notion that the Russians pulled this justification out of the air as an excuse in the fall of 2021 when they decided to launch the current Ukraine operation is silly. But that's the impression you would get from some of the more enthusiastic Putin-bashers. It's true, as Ost also argues, that blocking Ukrainian membership in NATO was not the aim of the current operation. Annexing Crimea and establishing effective control of the two breakaway "republics" of Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014 had already effectively achieved that goal.
Honestly, this point of Ost's argument sounds like the kind of rote criticism of the left that he's apparently been making for decades, as he describes in the article. In the real world, it's possible to both look critically at the way the US has exercised its own agency in the past as the world's "hyperpower" in relation to Ukraine and also condemn Russia's current invasion. This is about high-stakes foreign policy that have put us back in Cuban Missile Crisis territory in terms of nuclear war risks. It's not a football game where you're supposed to just cheer for your own side.
I'll have to admit that, at least for German history geeks, this is a clever polemical line, "Blaming America for Russia invading Ukraine is like blaming the German Communist Party for the murder of Rosa Luxemburg."
Then after the "left"-bashing, Ost gets to, well, what I was saying above:
NATO has of course long been a major point of contention for Russia. The West has understood the prospect of Ukrainian membership as so unacceptable to Russia that NATO has repeatedly stated that there were no plans to do begin accession, though without formally withdrawing its 2008 statement that this was the long-term aim.Yes, it turns out that the US and NATO were playing a significant role in European security issues before February of 2022. Go figure.
Actually, there and in the next four paragraphs, most of his analysis reads pretty much like the kind of things "realists" who were warning about the risks of NATO enlargement since the 1990s have been saying. Then he goes back to grumping in what to me sounds like stale sectarian quibbling about whether the leftists he's criticizing. Though Noam Chomsky and the mighty San Francisco-based Party for Socialism and Liberation being the only ones he identifies specifically, and he's half-agreeing with Chomsky.
For some of the longer background, see Also: Keith Gessen, Was it inevitable? A short history of Russia’s war on Ukraine Guardian 03/11/2022
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