Chomsky on the Russia-Ukraine war

I won't elaborate the idea that the current Russia-Ukraine war changes everything, or that we're living in a new world now, etc. Because, who knows, by this time next year we could be focused on some new metaphorical asteroid approaching. (Hopefully only a metaphorical one!)

But I also want to do a couple of posts about consciously left takes on the Ukraine situation.

Here is an interview with Noam Chomsky from The Real News, in an event sponsored by various leftie groups. Including the "Communist Party USA," which is apparently still around. (At least there's a website by that name.) Noam Chomsky: A Left Response to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine 04/08/2022:

I check in on Chomsky's commentary periodically, mostly because it's consistently irritating but in a thought-provoking way. He often sounds like a gloomy anarchist or a Borg spokesperson: All governments are brutal and oppressive, all political movements are corrupted and inadequate, Resistance Is Futile!

But if he were nothing but Mr. Gloom-and-Doom, nobody but burnt-out cynics would pay any attention to him. The main value I find in his commentary is that he practices "fundamental criticism," which doesn't translate easily into current political slogans or policies. But because he is well-infomred and reflective, he focuses on points worth considering. And what may be excessive cynicism in one way also forces his listeners to look at comparisons they might not otherwise make. (The interviewer here does ask challenging questions of Chomsky.)

For instance, Chomsky mentions the fact that countries that are not part of the West or the Northern Hemisphere aren't nearly so enthusiastic about condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine as NATO members are. That doesn't require any exotic explanation, of course. Just as NATO member states differ in their emphasis on the Ukraine war (Poland and the Baltic states now and in the foreseeable future can be expected to grumble that their NATO partners are insufficiently hardline in their opposition to Russia), so also countries from China and India and Pakistan to all of Latin America are not as likely as American TV audiences to see Russia's intervention in Ukraine as a uniquely shocking event. African nations tend to take a hard line against the idea of changing national boundaries by force.

I'm reminded that after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, most Americans were in such a "USA! USA!" mode that most didn't notice something the mainstream media didn't emphasize anyway, which was while Latin American countries joined most others in expressing their solidarity with the US, their diplomatic responses were notably more muted than even some countries like Iran - whose condemnation of the attacks didn't seem to make much of an impression on Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives.

Geography obviously matters. China is an ally of Russia at the moment and they have been guarded in their official position, though supportive of Russia in the UN Security Council. In this instance, Russia is in the process of invading and trying to conquer and incorporate a country that is a direct neighbor or near-neighbor to various EU and NATO countries. Of course, those countries are going to focus a lot of attention, concern, and action on responding to that invasion.

Chomsky is highly critical of the Russian invasion in this interview. But he makes a very valid point when he asks if Mexico were to try to join a military alliance with China, would the US regard that as a national security threat? I doubt anyone alive actually believes otherwise. The Monroe Doctrine in practice is alive and well, though there is no international law justification for the US deciding to topple governments in Latin America whenever they become inconvenient.

But the scorn which some New Cold War enthusiasts direct against almost any attempt to point to the actual political conflicts in the recent past between NATO and Russia over Ukraine is a bit silly. Of course looking at the key developments that led up to the current moment is important. Another left writer, Loren Balhorn, editor and co-founder of the German version of Jacobin, notes, "In the days before the [2022 Russian] invasion, we [at Jacobin] believed, as did a large part of the international community also (and not least most Ukrainians themselves), that Vladimir Putin was bluffing." (my translation; Jeder Krieg ist eine Niederlage Jacobin.de 15.04.2022)

Obviously, serious foreign policy analysts and scholars as well as intelligence agencies - and hopefully even some journalists! - would want to look back at the chain of developments that led to February 24's invasion and see what they got right and wrong in their judgments and risk assessments. It would be too much to hope that the pundits on the American Sunday-morning news shows would bother with such an effort, though they will have no problem heaping scorn on the past assessments of people who are not currently all-out New Cold Warriors.

Balhorn explains his own editorial reflection (my translation):

We thought [Putin] wanted to unsettle the West, perhaps use the threat of war to drive a wedge between NATO member states and achieve a more favorable outcome for himself – unquestionably a cynical scam, but still rational from his point of view. Irrational, on the other hand, would be a military attack that could only end in disaster for Ukraine, Russia and, last but not least, Putin himself. So, no need to panic.

Obviously, we were wrong. We misjudged the Kremlin's calculations and geopolitical ambitions. We weren't attentive enough to the Great-Russia project that Putin has adopted to ideologically legitimize his crumbling rule – a regime that in recent years has increasingly relied on open repression in the face of economic stagnation and growing discontent. As a result, we did not see the war coming until it exploded on our screens on the morning of February 24.

Explaining is not excusing. And understanding is not sympathizing.

Not that a New Cold War will lack for excusing and sympathizing in all sorts of directions.

Sunday's pro-democracy election outcomes in France and Slovenia

Emmanuel Macron's re-election as French President this past Sunday was a relief to pro-democracy leaders and voters in Europe: A divided nation: Five takeaways from France's election France 24/AFP 04/25/2022.

Sunday's election in Slovenia also came out well, although the newly-elected President Robert Golob is relatively new to his role as a political leader. But he campaigned in favor of democracy on a left-leaning program against the Orbanist former premier Janez Jansa, who had taken a hard right turn the last couple of years. (Annette Gantner, Robert Golob: Sloweniens Shootingstar Oberösterreichische Nachrichten 26.04.2022) The national Interior Minister claims that a far-right Identitarian group, apparntely one called Patriots in Motion, was behind the attack, in which fortunately no one was injured. (Bericht an Staatsanwaltschaft nach rechtsextremer Störaktion übermittelt Standard 25.04.2022)

Macron's victory is important. But Frqance also had an unusually low turnout by French standards on Sunday. Also, "In an alarming signal for Macron, 8.6 percent of those who went to voting stations Sunday also took the trouble not to cast a vote for either candidate, with 6.35 percent of the votes blank and 2.25 percent spoilt."

One of Macron's problematic ideas was to propose during the campaign to raise the retirement age, which sounds like a classic corporate Democratic idea in the US. For any center-left party, the idea that voters have nowhere else to go is a risky play. Obviously a significant number of voters were upset enough that they took the trouble to vote but didn't vote for either candidate.

The conventional press narrative is that Macron's win is a good sign for "Europe," i.e., for EU leadership. A big indication of how serious he is about that is whether he immediately gets out in front on the refugee issue to create a narrative to counter the xenophobic one that's already in motion.

So far, the EU is largely whiffing on the issue in stereotypical EU fashion by each country hoping some other EU governments will do something so they won't have to. This weekend there was an attack on a refugee shelter in Vienna that housing some Ukrainian refugees among others, the first incident like that I've heard against Ukrainian refugees. (Rechtsextreme Aktion gegen Ute-Bock-Haus ORF 24.04.2022)

Boris Johnson, now head of a non-EU country, doesn't want no Ukrainian refugees there because some of them might be Russian spies, a variation on the ever-popular "criminal foreigners!!" theme. Another one getting some traction is, "How come so many Ukrainian refugees have cars?" (Translation: "Welfare loafers!").

Monday's UN count: 4.7 million Ukrainian refugees in the EU and Moldova since Feb. 24. Of the two EU countries most likely to try to ignite a panic over refugees, Poland has 2.9 million and Hungary 0.5. The refugee crisis year of 2015 that sent the Putinist parties and their xenophobic messaging soaring involved 1.1 million refugees for the entire year, most of which went to Germany.

Adapting to the new environment for Russian petroleum exports

The Wall Street Journal is still useful for just-the-facts-ma'am coverage of some business issues that the political news might not emphasize so much. (I hope the ancient "just-the-facts-ma'am" Dragnet reference hasn't become totally unintelligible!) Jonathan Ryan, Russian Oil Flows, But Increasingly Under The Radar. The link here is to the Vigour Times version dated 04/21/2022, which appears in the WSJ print version for 04/22/2022.

My Twitter feed features quite a bit of moralizing about Western countries not slamming an immediate ban on all Russian oil and gas imports. A good portion of the moralizing is directed at Germany, whose well-defined role in Europe and NATO is to be criticized for never doing enough and not showing enough leadership and then to be criticized when they do things and exert leadership for their preferred policies.

We can all be grateful that during the COVID crisis and now the Ukraine emergency, Germany didn't insist on the disastrous austerity policies it pushed during the 2008 recession and the subsequent eurozone crisis. Greece in particular may never entirely recover from the effects of the latter brand of German leadership.

No politician is especially eager to embrace policies that lead to serious economic crisis in their own country. Not even ones like in Hungary or Poland that are not subject to normal democratic pressures during elections. Of course, leaders certainly do wind up producing or aggravating crises often enough under the influence of lobbyists for particular business interests or from just plain bad economic policies. But as a rule, they would prefer not to see that particular result.

But at least on issues like boycotting Russian energy sources over Ukraine, politicians are subject to moral and emotional appeals.

Capital, on the other hand, is not burdened with a soul. So for oil companies, "bitness is bitness."

... an opaque market is forming to obscure the origin of that oil. Unlike before Russia invaded Ukraine, oil buyers are worried about the reputational risk of trading crude that is financing a government that Western leaders accuse of war crimes.

Oil from Russian ports is increasingly being shipped with its destination unknown. In April so far, over 11.1 million barrels were loaded into tankers without a planned route, more than to any country, according to TankerTrackers.com. That is up from almost none before the invasion.

The use of the destination unknown label is a sign that the oil is being taken to larger ships at sea and unloaded, analysts and traders said. Russian crude is then mixed with the ship’s cargo, blurring where it came from. This is an old practice that has enabled exports from sanctioned countries such as Iran and Venezuela.

Practical corporate executives aren't going to let a few wars crimes or leveled cities in Ukraine get in the way of quarterly profits if they can avoid it. And, obviously, they have ways of doing just that. "New grades of refined products dubbed the Latvian blend and the Turkmenistani blend are also being offered in the market, according to traders, with the understanding that they contain substantial amounts of Russian oil, they said."

One would hope that political leaders would be reluctant to get involved in any oil smuggling scheme illegal in their countries. But keeping the lights on and the automobiles driving are still priorities for them:

The U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia have banned imports of Russian oil. The EU is more dependent on Russian energy, importing 27% of its oil from the country. European leaders have debated whether to impose an embargo as well, but have yet to act, as they balance the desire to isolate Russia without inflicting pain on their own economies through higher energy prices.

It's not mentioned in the article, but it's worth noting that Germany, the largest national economy in the EU, gets something like 55% of its natural gas imports from Russia. German politicians can't afford to ignore the likely negative impact on their economy from a sudden cutoff of that flow if no feasible replacement supplies are available. German also imports significant amounts of its coal and oil from Russia.

In the neoliberal globalization gospel, this interdependency among nations is a good thing because it maximizes profits. And allegedly has the pleasant side-effect of discouraging wars. This was a major hope of antiwar and pacifist activists prior to the First World War, as well. But politics doesn't always work according to stock analysts' prescriptions of what would be best for rising profits. Nationalism and political ambitions and human greed are real. Capital may be soulless and lifeless. But the people who actually make the decisions about what to do with it are very human. Maybe in a Star Trek future, androids will someday be able to handle things better.

Meanwhile, we're stuck in a messy world where people make decisions that sometimes turn out to be bad. And when it comes to war, the decisions are way too often really bad. But this is a factor that EU politicians definitely have to take seriously in this situation: “'The European Union fully sanctioning Russian oil would be like saying tomorrow you cut your salary by 40% and you need to continue to live as if nothing has happened,'  said Giovanni Staunovo, a commodity analyst at UBS Group AG 'In the meantime, there are huge discounts for Russian oil in the market. Some will find this environment very attractive.'”

And in a final two paragraphs that don't appear in the WSJ print edition:

EU officials are drafting a plan for a potential embargo, but the timing is still under consideration due to the upcoming French election and pushback from Germany. An embargo would likely only be implemented over time. Some worry that traders are already working out ways to keep the oil flowing.

“Even if we see some kind of oil embargo from the EU, will they remember to sanction the tankers? More ship to ship transfers away from the coast, it’s a reasonable expectation,” Mr. Johnson said.

Ukrainian war and Ukrainian refugees

Julia Ioffe, a Russian-Jewish immigrant to the US who reports on Russian affairs, gave this interview to PBS for a Frontline Special on the Russian war against Ukraine, Putin's Road to War: Julia Ioffe (interview) Frontline PBS 03/10/2022.

Near the end (43:45), she says of Vladimir Putin:

I think he's more dangerous than he's ever been at any point in the last 22 years. I think he did not expect to lose in Ukraine. And therefore he will not lose. He will grind the country down to a fine, fine ash. And it doesn't matter how many Russian soldiers die in the process, how many Ukrainian soldiers and civilians die in the process, he will not be humiliated by people he calls "little Russians".

The honest answer, eight million more on top of the two million or so already there.

But virtually no European politicians wants to say that directly because it's a very touchy political theme, which will quickly become much more controversial. To be realistic, the EU countries will argue and negotiate among themselves over which countries accept how many Ukrainian refugees. So even the most pro-refugee office-holders and leading politicians have to take the negotiating positions of their country into account.

Ioffe gives an idea of the size of the current refugee challenge (46:45):

What that means for Europe, you know, if you just - even if you set that tragedy aside of that, you know, blooming tragedy aside, again: a million people in a week fled - to some of the most xenophobic countries in Europe, who right now are greeting them with open arms because, (a) they're their neighbors, and (b) they're white and Christian and look like them. But how long does that last? How many more refugees can the West absorb? We say with the refugee flows from Syria, they gave us Brexit, they gave us the rise and empowerment of the far right in Germany, and in Hungary, in the Czech Republic and France. Is this going to keep emboldening the far right?

Answer: There's no point in even formulating it as a question.

I'm sure Putin is very, very aware that managing an immigration crisis is a huge weakness for the EU. Because he and everybody else saw what Ioffe refers to there. If there were any lingering doubt, the Polish and EU reactions to the few *thousand* refugees Belarus sent across the border into Poland last year confirmed it about as clearly as it could. I haven't seen any specific reporting on this aspect, but it's obvious now that there's a very good chance this was something that Putin encouraged just to see the EU's reaction.

The nominal reason for it was to retaliate for sanctions the EU had placed on Belarus for a blatant act of air piracy by the Belarusian government. But it seemed like an odd kind of response.

Here is a news report from four months ago, Warnings that Belarus migrant crisis risks military conflict BBC News 11/13/2021:

I'm hopeful about how the EU will respond to the refugees. Hopeful but very skeptical. The far right is already trying out their xenophobic spin on this, portraying this as part of the George Soros COVID Virus "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory. Although several European far-right parties have been tiptoeing around invasion of Ukraine, they are generally Putinist parties. They have a long-standing ethnonationalist vocabulary to morph "white" Ukrainians into "subhuman Slavs." (It's not consistent with their current admiration for Russia, but they don't care.)

The common media image of Ukrainian refugees as mostly white women and children is accurate. But there are already cases where EU countries are (illegally) refusing entry to refugees from Ukraine who are not Ukrainian citizens. When the war started, Ukrainians already could legally travel in the EU for three months visa-free. And under a special law the EU just invoked, Ukrainian refugees can stay for a year without asylum, and that can be extended to three years.

But everyone will soon see that the refugees are not only middle-class women with small children who need short-term support and then will go back home, but also individual men and women of all ages as well as adolescents and children. Assuming that Russia continues as they are at present, we're looking at as many as 10 million refugees, many of whom unlikely to go back to Ukraine any time soon, and many of them never. I saw someone recently saying that a lot of them don't need temporary assistance, they need a new homeland.

And with 10 million refugees, there will also be very sick people, criminals, and many people severely traumatized and people without easily marketable skills among them. That's why the response can only be handled responsibly with solid governmental direction, from the EU and national governments. The rightwing has a big menu of anti-refugee stereotypes ("economic migrants," "freeloaders", "criminal foreigners", "don't speak our language," etc.) that they are already skilled at using. To the extent that Russian information operations are able, they will boost the xenophobic message, like they did in 2015-16. What will make the different is primarily how the center-right and center-left react to the xenophobic demagoguery. I see zero chance that the rightwingers won't use it. In the 2015-16 crisis, most center-right and center-left parties reacted with some version of "we hate the refugees, too, but we're politer about it than the hard right."

In just two weeks of war, the EU already has more refugees that have arrived than for the entire two years of 2015-16. And as many as four times more could be coming in relatively short order. The EU economies are so deeply integrated and everyone can see what a mess Brexit has been that any talk about an "existential crisis" for the EU is overblown at this point. But how bad it gets really does ride on how willing the center-right and center-left politicians are willing to actually push back against the xenophobic politics and *not* play duck-and-cover like they did in 2015-16.

There is another kind of "pushback," though. The term is used to describe the expulsion of asylum seekers without allowing them to apply for asylum. This is flat-out illegal in international law on refugees. But that's exactly what Poland did in the Belarus incident last year. And the EU endorsed that illegal policy on Poland's part. (The United States and Australia also use this illegal, disgraceful practice.)

Poland is currently accepting a huge number of Ukrainian refugees. Most of the two million or more that have arrived in the EU enter through Poland. But Poland is also practicing illegal pushbacks against third-country citizens from African and South Asian countries that are fleeing Poland. (Lorenzo Tondo and Emmanuel Akinwot, People of colour fleeing Ukraine attacked by Polish nationalists Guardian 03/02/2022)

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."

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.
1/

— 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.

Russia launches fulll attack on Ukraine, new war in Europe

The early reports on a war are normally a mixture of news, rumors, disinformation, and confusion. But Slate's Fred Kaplan is a knowledgeable and careful reporter on military affairs, So he's always worth reading. (Putin’s Invasion Has Begun Slate 02/24/2022)

Kaplan cites some relevant precedents. He actually knows something about them. We won't be able to say the same about the avalanche of bad historical analogies that we always get in situations like this. He notes, "Many Russian officers no doubt remember these lessons from their adventure in Afghanistan, which helped bring down the Soviet Union itself - just as Americans learned it in Vietnam, lraq, and belatedly Afghanistan."

It would be nice to think that the US foreign-policy and military establishments learned some relevant lessons from the Muslim terrorist networks they promoted in Afghanistan and from the "unintended consequences" they produced in later decades. (And also from Vietnam and Iraq!) Nice to think, anyway.

I see someone on my Facebook feed just posted a piece on Ukraine by Max Boot, one of the "respectable" neocons who has managed to be wrong about pretty much everything he has ever said about foreign policy. I can hardly wait to hear Little Tommy Friedman's commentary on how it's time to tell Russia to Suck.On.This. And what's Kenneth "Iraq-will-be-a-cakewalk" Adelson up to these days? Maybe we'll even hear from Richard Perle, the guy whose admirers nicknamed the Prince of Darkness.

And of course I look forward to the thousands of references for the rest of the year to Munich 1938 and Poland 1939. Putin himself has come up with a bizarre version of the latter as part of his strange revisionist history of Ukraine from earlier this week, in which among other things he says Ukraine was something the dirty Commies invented with a stroke of Lenin's colored pen, or something.

There was a two-paragraph note in the Vienna paper Standard saying that Putin is determined not to repeat the mistake Stalin made in 1939 when he signed a non-aggression pact with Germany because he didn't realize that the USSR wasn't prepared for war with Germany. (?!?) This was Putin's own garbled attempt at a "Poland 1939" analogy, Ukraine being the "Germany" in that take. (Anna Sawerthal, Putin will Kriegsfehler Stalins nicht wiederhole Der Standard 24.02.2022)

In German today, the term "Putin-Versteher" (someone who understands Putin) is used as an insult meaning, "Putin sympathizer". It seems to me that understanding an adversary would be kind of a necessary thing, but what do I know? I am curious to see what people who actually do understand Putin make of that and his whole "he-dirty-Commies-created-Ukraine" talk.

I know Putin's versions of a grand historical narrative have varied over the decades he's been in power. But trying to take over Ukraine seems like a level of recklessness that he's not shown before. And his justifications here seem kooky compared to those he's used for interventions in Georgia, Moldova, Syria and also Ukraine before now.

Is "retirement" really such a difficult concept for such guys? I mean, Mikhail Gorbachev surely has had a more pleasant time the last 30 years than if he had stayed in power this whole time!

The new situation with Ukraine and Russia on Tuesday

Russia's latest move of formally recognizing the breakaway "republics" of Donetsk and Luhansk, thus abandoning its commitments under the Minsk Agreement, presumably meaning Russia will no longer take part in the "Normandy format" negotiations around the status of the two mini-republics.

Putin himself gave a long, rambling televised speech in which he strongly implied that he sees Ukraine as legitimately part of Russia.

Since the Minsk process was stalled out already and Russia already de facto controlled Donetsk and Luhansk, the formal recognition doesn't in itself change the real situation. But Russia is likely to send additional Russian troops there. And it publicly looks like Putin is rejecting indefinitely any possibility of adjusting the Russia position in the two breakaway republics, much less reversing the annexation of Crimea.

Presumably the NATO countries including the US will now start implementing an expanded set of sanctions against Russia. And there will surely be pressure from Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to reinforce the military position of NATO there. Russia is clearly implementing a policy shift that possibly does include an attempt to seize all of Ukraine. And the NATO countries will have to make an inevitably tricky calculation of how much escalation, diplomatically and militarily, they take in response.

It's safe to say that the latest developments is giving arms manufacturers new visions of dollars signs flying in front of them. And there will be an intensified debate in the US and Europe about which political sides are being "tough" enough or insufficiently so.

And that means more political barbs flying with varying degrees of conforming to reality. Like in the 1950s, mainstream Democrats and Republicans will accuse each other of being insufficiently tough on Russia, even as the Biden-Harris Administration has to come up with specific and immediate tactical responses to the unfolding developments and to propaganda hacks like Tucker Carlson gushing over Putin's manly manliness.

There's always a "blame game" in these situations. And since it's Russia that is committing obvious violations on Ukraine's sovereignty and international law in this situation, and is also positioning troops for possible a major invasion of Ukraine, mainstream commentators in the US end Europe will be grumpy about anyone insisting on critical reflections on Western policy.

But it's still important for people to try to walk and talk at the same time on this. And while reflecting on how we got here doesn't provide definitive solutions to problems of the moment, it's clear that some previous decisions weren't as carefully considered as they should have been. Both the Clinton Administration and Cheney-Bush thought NATO enlargement was essentially a freebie in terms of security risks. And a boon for the US military-industrial complex, although the latter should go without saying. But the corporate press in the US will rarely actually say so at all.

The incorporation of the former Soviet Baltic Republics Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania was especially risky, because in pure realist terms there was no way that Russia wouldn't regard that as particularly problematic. But, again, the US took that as freebie, effectively assuming that Russia would not ever push back on that in any substantive way.

Now with the Ukraine developments, the actual risk in the Baltics is more obvious. Ukraine is not part of the NATO alliance. The three Baltic countries are. And now the NATO countries have to worry about the fact that Russia has the option to create threats on the border there in the same manner as they are currently during in Ukraine. In other words, NATO is actually not prepared for a near-term invasion of one or more of the Baltic countries by Russia. Much less positioned to intervene in Ukraine to push back a Russian invasion there.

But, however much American arms manufacturers might benefit from wild threat inflation over Russia's current pressure on Ukraine, policymakers really do need to try to keep a grip on the realities of Russia's current situation. Russia has an impressive nuclear arsenal. But it's also a petrostate very dependent on oil and gas exports, many of which currently go to Europe. They have been building infrastructure to enable more exports to China, which is currently on very good terms with Russia, and definitely has the need and the renminbi to become a bigger customer. But that's definitely not an overnight substitute.

Russia has a lot of ground troops, not surprisingly for a country with the world's largest territory and longest land borders with other countries. But its currently military budget is roughly the size of those of Germany and France combined, and about a tenth of the US one. Which for media sloppiness on this. Russia's economy is about the size of that of Spain, the EU's fourth largest economy. That means to get its current size of armed forces, it has to be spend a far higher percentage of the GDP on defense that Germany and France have to spend to get a similar combined military budget. So arguments that Russia spends x% while Germany, France, or the US spends only y% of theirs are pretty meaningless comparisons if they don't include the actual comparative sizes of the military budgets.

Russia by almost any measure is taking a huge risk already, and an even bigger one if they really try to militarily take all of Ukraine. It's questionable whether even the 150,000 troops Russia has reportedly positioned near Ukraine now are anywhere near sufficient to carry out a full-blown conquest and permanent occupation of Ukraine. The grandiose, weird rambling of Putin's speech Monday could be partly ideological hot air. But there could also be a big element of arrogance and overconfidence in it, as well.

I recently re-read a 1938 essay by the psychoanalyst Earnest Jones from the period just after the 1938 Munich Agreement had been signed. ("How Can Civilization Be Saved?") He wrote there:

In more dictatorial countries than ours [Britain] the demand for omnipotence in rulers is so strong that the latter have to make constant efforts to meet it. This is the psychological reason why the position of dictators is so notoriously delicate, and why they are so sensitive to any loss in prestige, that the temptation to retrieve it by a violent coup may be overwhelming. lt is extremely difficult for a dictator to act this part for long without being captured by the belief itself and thus becoming megalomaniac. Even Napoleon lost, at the end, his usually close touch with reality. [my emphasis in bold]

Whether we use "dictator" or "authoritarian" to describe Putin's current position of power, my own non-specialized guess is that something like that is actually going on with Putin now. What the NATO countries and especially the US need right now are realistic and practical views and evaluations of what is happening and not testosterone-charged fantasies and arms-manufacturer lobbyists' hype.

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.

The suspense continues over Ukraine - but what does Biden's current position mean?

The suspense is still there in the confrontation in the Ukraine. (Biden says Russia poised to invade Ukraine as the U.S. continues to seek diplomacy PBS Newshour 02/18//2022)

There are reports of clashes in the Donbass area between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists. Biden repeated again that US intelligence believes that Putin has made the decision to invade, although it's not exactly clear what that means. For all of us who can only watch from a distance with limited independent reporting from the area, we could ask if Biden is that confident that invasion is a near-certainty, how is that reflected in the official negotiations? If the US is really convinced the Russians are negotiating in completely bad faith on this, shouldn't the Administration be doing some public form of walking away from the negotiating table?

And given the EU's pitiful response to Belarus sending a few thousand refugees across the Polish border last year, which looked an awful lot like a sad combination of mindless panic and irresponsibility, shouldn't the US and the EU be preparing some kind of all-hands-on -deck preparation for the estimated Ukrainian refugees that will soon be pouring into the US. The number of 1.2 million is being reported as a possible number in case of a Russian invasion of all of Ukraine.

As the apocryphal quote from Ambrose Bierce has it, war is God's way of teaching Americans geography. So here is a Google Maps snapshot of Ukraine and its western neighbors:

From northwest to southwest, Ukraine shares borders with EU and NATO countries Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. Since experience especially since 2015 has shown that EU politicians tend to collectively wet themselves when confronted with a big wave of refugees, and if the US knows that Putin has made a clear decision to invade: refugees, people. It's a problem we're likely to have to deal with within weeks.

It strikes me as non-foreign-policy-blob person who really doesn't want to see another Ukraine war - on top of the low-level one that's been going on since 2014, that the Putin-has-decided-to-invade message is a strange formulation.

Meanwhile, it's also worth remembering that whether a war is justified or not is never totally dependent on who shot first. So the current mutual accusations about the other side's actions in Donbass are not something that those of us who don't have access to top-level intelligence information is not something we can adequately judge immediately. It's worth remembering that even the initiating act was officially justified by Germany as a defensive reaction to a Polish military incursion. The Germans dressed up some Polish prisoners in Polish army uniforms and shot them, then arranged their bodies on the ground as documentation. (A strange footnote: the uniforms were supplied to the German government by a man named Oskar Schindler, whose support for the Nazi cause famously shifted later.)

The (present-day) German channel is reporting that the Russian-dominated separatist mini-republic of Donezk has ordered a general military mobilization. (Ostukraine-Separatisten ordnen Generalmobilmachung an 19.02.2022) The ZDF report also notes (my translation from German):

Since 2014, Western-backed government forces have been fighting Russian-backed separatists in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, not far from Russia's border.

According to UN estimates, more than 14,000 people have already been killed, mostly in separatist territory. A 2015 peace plan under German-French mediation is not being implemented.

On that last point, it's worth noting that from 2017-2021, we had a scammer and demagogue as the US President whose only real interest in foreign affairs was in how he and his immediate family of grifters could make money on it. A more active negotiating position by the US and other NATO powers could have made a real constructive difference.

A pause in the Ukraine crisis?

I hope the current seeming pause in the Russian buildup is real and that it is followed by further active negotiations over the key issues, including the formal discussions known as the "Minsk process."

The US response

Biden gave this speech on Monday (yesterday). In this PBS NewsHour video, he begins speaking just after 3:55. He basically repeated his previous public position, which on the surface seems to have been reasonably restrained. I'm sure we'll learn interesting details the next few weeks and months about how various considerations factored into the US response. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the energy lobby in the US and western Europe are not entirely unhappy that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project might be cancelled.

Some comments on this speech. (Official White House transcript is here.)

Because this is about more than just Russia and Ukraine. It’s about standing for what we believe in, for the future we want for our world, for liberty — for liberty, the right of countless countries to choose their own destiny, and the right of people to determine their own futures, for the principle that a country can’t change its neighbor’s borders by force. That’s our vision. And toward that end, I’m confident that vision, that freedom will prevail.

That is standard liberal internationalist framing (for better or worse). Since foreign policy runs to a significant degree on hypocrisy, critics of Biden's policies domestic (Americans and others) will be able to quote this stock passage about countries choosing their own destinies and determine their own future to criticize American policy. (Haiti's change of government in 2021? US-trained soldiers staging coups in countries like Mali, Chad and Guinea?)

"And when it comes to Nord Stream 2, the pipeline that would bring natural gas from Russia to Germany, if Russia further invades Ukraine, it will not happen."

Assuming, the current crisis eases, it will be interesting to find out how much in agreement the German and US governments actually were on under what conditions Nord Stream 2 would actually be cancelled. The US has never been fond of the project. But concelling it would also have a major effect on German and European energy supplies in the coming years.

He did throw in at least a mild reference to the US alliance with the Soviet Union in the Second World War, referred to in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. "Seventy-seven years ago, our people fought and sacrificed side by side to end the worst war in history."

"And make no mistake: The United States will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full force of American power. An attack against one NATO country is an attack against all of us. And the United States commitment to Article 5 is sacrosanct."

The actual wording of NATO's Article 5 says that in the event of an armed attack on a NATO member, each member country "will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area." It's not an automatic declaration of war, in other words. And it doesn't mean that if, say, Russian and Lithuania troops start shooting at each other across the border that NATO armies will immediately seize Kaliningrad or something.

Interestingly, at this writing, the following portion of Biden's actual speech (at 12:45 in the video) does not appear in the official transcript: "To be clear: If Russia decides to invade, that would also have consequences here at home. But the American people understand that defending democracy and liberty is never without cost."

What could he mean by that? That gas prices would go up if Nord Stream 2 is shut down and other Russian oil and gas exports are curtailed? Presusmably that's a big part of it, because he does say two paragraphs later, "I will not pretend this will be painless. There could be impact on our energy prices, so we are taking active steps to alleviate the pressure on our own energy markets and offset rising prices." And proceeds to elaborate on that a bit.

I think it's very legitimate to wonder whether the US and some of the NATO allies overhyped the actual Russian threat. Particularly since the Ukrainian President himself was publicly joking about the liklihood of an imminent Russian invasion:

As the U.S. and European allies continue to issue increasingly dire warnings about Russia’s intentions, [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky has notably downplayed the threat, even chiding the Biden administration for hyping up the possibility of an invasion. His joking remarks seemed to be making light of all the doomsaying; a spokesperson told NBC News that “the president referred to a date that was spread by the media.” According to the outlet, “observers said Zelensky appeared to have been sarcastic to those who watched his video.” (Benjamin Hart, Ukrainian Leader Makes Confusing Joke About Russian Invasion New York 02/14/2022)

Hart does remind his readers that Zelensky is "a former professional comedian."

Christian Ferdinand Wehrschütz is an Austrian reporter who has been head of the Ukraine bureau of Austria’s public news agency ORF since 2015 and has established a good record in doing so. Did a did a post in German on Facebook 02/06/2022 making the point that the current level of troop numbers Russia was reported to be massing on Ukraine’s border, which is that they would be enough to take control of additional territory in the Donbass region, they didn’t sound remotely sufficient for a planned complete occupation of Ukraine.

My translation of a relevant portion::

First, as is so often the case, the question is not asked [in the article on which he is commenting] how great the expected Ukrainian (military) resistance would be! Because the Russian figures alone say nothing about the possibilities that are associated with it after an attack.

An example: for a peace mission for Donetsk and Lugansk [portions of the Donbass region currently under Russian control] – not a combat mission!!! - military planners have calculated that this would require an international force of 25,000 to 30,000 soldiers. This involves about 4 percent of Ukraine's territory. I have not met any ([Ukrainian] General Staff) officer who considers 100,000 /120,000 soldiers to be sufficient to conquer the left-bank [western portion of] Ukraine including Kiev.

In addition, this would not be a play war, but a real war with an occupying power, not to mention the Western sanctions. If the Ukrainians in Kharkiv and other cities do not capitulate without resistance, this means a war in the urban area with high losses, including for the Russians, and catastrophic images of destruction, death and misery. Apart from the Western reactions, is this so easy to "sell" to the population in Russia? [my emphasis]

Wehrschutz also links this story by Ansgar Haase, Was plant Putin? Geheimdienste geben düstere Prognose dpa/t-online 04.02.2022.

Flashbacks to historical analogies over the Ukraine crisis

Harold Meyerson (On Ukraine: Bernie vs. DSA The American Prospect 02/11/2022) praises Bernie Sanders' excellent speech on Ukraine, Diplomacy in Ukraine 02/11/2022:

Meyerson notes that he has been a decades-long member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the social-democratic group which, as he notes, has seen "explosive growth since 2015 is largely a by-product of Sanders’s presidential campaigns."

But Meyerson criticizes the DSA's position on the Ukraine crisis for being not being harsh enough on Russia:

The word “Russia” appears just three times in its 608-word statement ... That Russia (and Putin, who is not mentioned in the statement at all) instigated the current crisis by its own rather hard-to-miss “ongoing militarization,” or that it even so much as played a role in the bewildering appearance of an army (the Russian one, it would seem) on Ukraine’s border, is somehow omitted from the statement, which attributes the current standoff solely to expansive U.S. militarism. That Putin’s Russia is an autocratic regime that actively seeks to undermine democracy wherever it can is also, apparently, not worthy of comment. [my emphasis]

There's seems to be a heavy dose of nostalgia in Meyerson's comments. What I mean is that during the Cold War, the small number of committed social-democrats like the predecessor to the DSA tended to want to draw a bright line between themselves and the also small number of supporters of the US Communist Party, which was known for consistently reflecting whatever the official Soviet position of the moment on foreign affairs was.

Without trying to rehash the complicated history of social-democrats and communists and their influence on the US labor movement, in the US labor federation AFL-CIO anti-Communism was a strong influence both within labor and in terms of the AFL-CIOs enthusiastic support of Cold War foreign policies. See, for instance: Lovestone’s Thin Red Line The Nation 05/24/1999). Jay Lovestone was a former head of the US Communist Party (1927-1929) who later became the very hawkish head of the AFL-CIO's international affairs operation.

Meyerson ends with a flashback to the old days:

When the Communist Party of yore uncritically praised Stalin’s Soviet Union, not least when it hailed his 1939 pact with Hitler and Russia’s subsequent invasion of Poland, it at least could count on payments of Moscow gold for its efforts. To the best of our knowledge, the current group of DSA apparatchiks—innocents all—provide such encomiums for free.

"Moscow gold" is a real nostalgic touch.

But the Russia-baiting is similar, even though the context is radically different. The parties that were members of the pre-World War II Communist International (Comintern) actually did take the Soviet system as a model goal. I won't say that there are not socialist-minded groups out there who may somehow take Putin's (capitalist) oligarchical form of government as a model. But who knows what quirky variations are out there?

In general, though, to the extent that Putin and his government has cultivated explicit disciples in European and American politics, they have been almost exclusively rightwing parties like Viktor Orbán's Fidesz in Hungary, Marine Le Pen's National Front in France, and the Freedom Party (FPÖ) in Austria. And there may be people on the left who are uncritically enthusiastic about the reporting today on the Russian state channel RT.

But any serious antiwar perspective, from the left or any other point on the political spectrum, has to take a critical perspective on their own country's claims in situations that can lead to war. This week, we're looking at the strange spectacle of the US predicting a possible Russian invasion this week while the Ukrainian President who would be leading the Ukrainian defensive war is publicly mocking the idea that Russia will invade in a day or two. Americans of all political orientations would do well to pay attention to such strange inconsistencies.

The experience of portions of the US labor movement in uncritically backing US Cold War misadventures was not a very inspiring one. (See: Anthony Carew, Conflict Within the ICFTU:Anti-Communism and Anti-Colonialism in the 1950Conflict Within the ICFTU: Anti-Communism and Anti-Colonialism in the 1950 International Review of Social History 41:1996)

But I was also struck by Meyerson's analogy to "1939," in this case what's known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact, formally the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. That agreement was a direct sequel and result of what is surely the most-cited historical analogy, the "Munich" analogy. That would be the Munich Agreement Britain made with Hitler and Mussolini in 1938 that allowed Germany to take part of Czechoslovakia.

Foreign policy by analogy is risky. Jeffrey Record addressed that problem notably well in two books: Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (2002) and The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (2007). A shorter version of the latter is available online, Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s (Aug 2005)

Recent developments in the Ukraine crisis

Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff at the State Department 2002-2005, gives Deutsche Welle his thoughts on the Ukraine situation and how it developed over the last 30 years. He also has some salty comments about the US military-industrial complex. (From the start through 14:50) The remainder is about a case of intrigue involving Turkish arms sales to Ukraine.

US says Russian attack no longer 'imminent' +++ Turkey offers mediation role in Ukraine 02/03/2022:

There's an often-used phrase "the fog of war." But there can also be fogs in diplomacy, as well. In the last several days, the Ukrainian government was complaining that the NATO countries were unnecessarily hyping the Russian threat. And Anatol Lieven analyzes a surprisingly and puzzling difference in the tone the US was taking with that of the NATO secretariat in Leaked drafts of NATO, US responses to Russia are surprisingly revealing Responsible Statecraft 02/02/2022. He notes that "Russia [is] breaking off talks with NATO and negotiating directly with the United States."

Of course, Russia is communicating with the other NATO countries, too. But these formal postures do mean something in diplomacy. Even when its difficult for public to guess what they might mean.