Exactly sixty years later, the world is again at risk of nuclear “Armageddon,” according to US president Joe Biden, as the same two states again find themselves locked in conflict over a neighboring state. Over the past eight months, a pervasive narrative has emerged in public discourse about the war in Ukraine: Russian president Vladimir Putin is a Hitler-like madman bent on European, if not world, domination, so dialogue and negotiation are pointless. Putin won’t talk, Russian officials’ statements to the contrary are merely a ruse, and even if they weren’t, talks would be immoral — a “reward” to an aggressor state — and would actually make things more dangerous, just as appeasing Nazi Germany made war more likely. The only way to end the war is through “overwhelming power” on the military side, and to “humiliate” its leader, or even remove him from power.Most of Marcetic's article is a retrospective on the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 with emphasis on the political climate. While there was no shortage of hawkish blowhards weighing in to demand more risky and reckless action - is there ever such a shortage? - the discussion of the urgent need for diplomacy was also very much part of the public discussion. While now in the current confrontation with Russia, "today’s liberals and progressives [are] sounding almost indistinguishable from that era’s hawks and reactionaries."
To that end, diplomacy for the purpose of de-escalation and finding a way out of the conflict before it triggers nuclear disaster, has become a “quasi-thought crime” in Washington. When thirty House progressives recently signed a letter meekly urging the president to add “a proactive diplomatic push” to his war strategy, they quickly retracted it and called for military victory instead under a blizzard of attacks. The Biden administration said it was “reassured” by the withdrawal of the letter, and has spent the war avoiding talks with Russian officials, with the president most recently ruling out a meeting with Putin to discuss the war. [my emphasis in bold]
Marcetic doesn't try to force the Cuban Missile Crisis into being a directly-applicable analogy to the Russia-Ukraine War today. And that makes sense. What is famously remember as a crisis of "thirteen days" (Octobwr 16-29, 1962) took place in a far more compressed time frame that from February 24 of this year until now.
But it also took place in the longer context of the Cold War, where stereotyped thinking was the order of the day.
Part of what we are seeing now is that US-vs.-Russia harks back to the days of the Cold War. Which is understandable, though not terribly helpful. Also not very helpful was the often very superficial Cold War triumphalism that so much of the political and foreign policy establishment in the US embraced.
Nostalgia for a Heroic Age
Felix Heidenreich, the author of a new German book (Demokratie als Zumutung [Democracy as Imposition], 2022) seems to be breathing a sigh of relief that the Russia-Ukraine War has restored a more bipolar view of the West-vs.-Russia situation. Reading his book reminds me of following a newspaper columnist who brings up interesting perspectives, but after a while you start to realize he never gets much beyond the banal.
It's been a favorite truism in the EU for a while that we live in a post-heroic era. This normally means that whatever "we" is intended don't celebrate militarism, war, or international power politics. But it's hard to be a New Cold War fan and still profess "post-heroic" viewpoints. So Heidenreich splits the difference. Tn comparison to Ukrainian citizens going off (willingly and through conscription) to fight in the army against the Russians, he writes, "The post-heroic 'West' suddenly seemed almost ridiculous." (My translations here)
He follows it by trying to hedge a bit in good cover-all-bases style: "But a mere return to the figures, images and rhetorical strategies of heroic times seems neither possible nor desirable."
Yet the particular Ukraine-changes-everything perspective he provides is a good example of how rushing to get comfortable with a changed situation can also be self-limiting. And is much easier to express in "heroic" mode. For instance, he writes in seeming relief:
Disasters are not made less shocking by the fact that they were predictable. Although after months of troop deployments, hate speech, propaganda lies on Russian state television, no one can be surprised, one is horrified: Putin really does it! He just starts a war! If any evidence of the acute threat to democracy posed by nationalism and authoritarianism was needed, Putin's war of aggression against Ukraine has provided it. The fog is finally gone, everyone, not only the Finns and Balts, the Americans, the people in Hong Kong or Taiwan can now see that the democracies are in a defensive struggle. [my emphasis]Of course, until the Russian invasion was actually launched on February 24, there was nothing inevitable about the war. According to the news reports this year, most if not all European governments were surprised that Putin actually decided to go through with it. American intelligence was reportedly more confident in predicting it.
If we look backwards from what we know today, it's as easy as it is silly to say, "Oh, look, any old fool could have seen this coming! Why, I knew all along."
But Heidenreich is not making a retrospective analysis on why many people got it wrong. In fact, the Americans also reportedly expected that Russia would be able to rapidly take control of Ukraine. Because looking at alternative possibilities, evaluating capabilities and intentions, are what government have to do. One reason others were doubtful that Russian would actually launch an attack after the February buildup was that they didn't seem to have mustered enough troops to be confident of achieving their presumed goals.
And, now, after the fact, there is a general consensus that the Russian government did underestimate the number of troops it would take to accomplish their initial aims. That Russian leadership made a reckless decision in that context to proceed with the invasion failed to appreciate the downside risks doesn't mean that any idiot could have predicted they would do exactly that.
But Heidenreich goes on to hold up the Ukrainians rallying against the Russian invaders as a model for how he thinks people should approach their responsibilities as citizens. He has some usefully thought-provoking points, like how politics is affected by a kind of commercialization, in which citizens think of themselves as consumers who expect governments to "deliver" things to them. He contrasts this to the democratic sense of citizens taking active responsibility for their government, which should act for the collective good of the society. The latter he takes as a necessary civic involvement or "imposition."
So, the current Ukrainian war against the Russian invasion looks to him like a model for responsible citizen participation and both the governed and the government taking mature responsibility for public policy. He holds up the Russian invasion as finally justify an end to what he seems as the immature expectation of voters that the leaders they elect actually do things that benefit the people who elect them. "After Putin's attack on Ukraine in February 2002, this time of childish innocence is finally over," he writes.
Heidenreich gushes over Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's speech immediately after the Russian invasion, in which he declared "If you attack us, you will see our faces, not our backs, but our faces." And he proceeds to compare that to Churchill "blood, toil, tears and sweat" speech of 1940 rallying Britain against the Axis. And goes on to gush about Churchill, a favorite icon of neocon hardliners.
But here in the present, he writes, "In the following days, Zelenskyi became a kind of icon of the free world. No one doubts that Putin wants him killed. But again and again he succeeds in saving the fighting morale of the Ukrainians through his presentations."
No one doubts that Zelenskyy has shown himself to be a capable war leader so far. And war does provide examples of some remarkable human achievements, along with bringing out some of the worst of human evil. William James did a famous lecture, "The Moral Equivalent of War," in which he hoped that humanity would learn to bring the remarkable collective efforts and achievements that war brings forth from people to other aspects of life.
But Heidenreich is focused on the utility of the unity that war itself brings as a solution to which he views as democratic citizens' childish view of political responsibility. Instead of demanding that politicians "deliver" on their promises and "deliver" policies that actually benefit them. Instead, he invokes the New Cold War dichotomy that Biden unfortunately also uses of Democracy vs. Autocracy as a guide for foreign policy.
It's notable that he uses the figure of Uncle Sam on army recruiting posters in the US during the First and Second World War as a symbol of the kind of "democracy as imposition" he favors. Democracy as following orders? Given his use of the Democracy vs. Authoritarian framework, does he think only democracies have military recruiting or military conscription?
But taking war as a general model and mindset for democratic politics has some definite limits. The initial unity of a population in the early phase of a war is a powerful kind of solidarity. But in itself, it's a solidarity of fear and hatred toward an enemy. And it brings an enormous pressure for conformity to the national cause.
And to the extent the New Cold War attitude that Branko Marcetic rightly finds so problematic becomes a general consensus in a country or group of countries, it can produce a Groupthink mentality that blinds people, including those making key decisions on war and peace, to important concerns they really need to consider. Something like that very probably happened on Russia's decision to go to war with Ukraine this year.
And, to bring the theme back to the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was not only a more vigorous public debate including people calling for sensible diplomacy in those famous Thirteen Days than we are currently seeing in the US and Europe on the Russia-Ukraine War. But it's also very worth remembering that not only the public discussion was more focused on the need for diplomacy than today's seems to be. But the Kennedy Administration's internal decision-making process in the Cuban Missile Crisis is regarded in professional management theory as a model of how to avoid "groupthink" and instead ensure that risks and alternative are adequately considered. (Morten Hansen, How John F. Kennedy Changed Decision Making for Us All Harvard Business Review 11/22/2013)
