how dare you use dispassionate, intelligent reason and logic to provide context and give an accurate assessment of all factors that led to this moment...u are def an evil fascist nazi white-supremacist bigot ;)
One thing I really liked about Trump in retrospect is that he didn't try to apply a kindergarten "good guys versus bad guys" frame on geopolitics. He created endless controversies with it, but my reading was that he just looked at everything in terms of self-interests and negotiating postures. So despite all of his raging about how we were "getting ripped off" on the world stage, it always came with a degree of explicit respect for how "smart" the leaders of those countries ripping us off were.
I would say the same thing about this situation. It doesn't really do anyone any good to look at geopolitical conflicts in terms of "good guys" and "bad guys"; that's just jingoist propaganda meant to lure us into supporting wars. Better to just try to understand that it's more important to understand geopolitics in terms of a variety of players all acting in their own self-interests, which are in conflict, to an extent existentially, and that other than pure military dominance, which is often impossible or at least more costly than anyone wants to bear, negotiation in the only path to maintaining peace.
I think your take about Trump is at least mostly right. Even when you factor in his own admiration of strong men (heavily overblown in a media fatuously obsessed with their own self-flattering notions of good guys and bad guys - which is also a great early Camper Van Beethoven song, btw) and Trump’s own obsession with credit and flattery, he had a pretty consistent frame: every country should put itself first, especially ours, and we’re getting screwed (or our elites are screwing us) because they no longer identify as and with US citizens and their interests have diverged from ours. However much one can find some serious hypocrisy in this - Trump in his own crass huckster way was of course an elitist, too, and hardly one above selling all imaginable Trump branded crap made in China. Nonetheless, policywise, his America First instinct also seemed to give him real if basic insight into the motivations and interests of not only other world leaders, but many of the world leaders we have had the hardest time dealing with and which the balance of our foreign policy elites bungled relations with, often precisely via the reductive, and often cynical idea that they are evil and we are good. In a way Trump’s America First was ironically less blindly solipsistic, for all of the talk about American Exceptionalism, because it granted that for others being Russia First, etc. was just as rational, even reasonable.
The trick re: interests, I guess, is how one defines them. Obviously the US invasion of Iraq not only was a tragic and massively costly, counterproductive decision - one that seemed to marry the idealist delusions of some with the most cynical motives of others. But even taking some of the stated justifications of its architects at face value, it was so poorly thought through, so seemingly blind to predictable unintended consequences (empowering Iran and setting off larger Sunni vs. Shiite conflicts throughout the region), while the realization of their larger goals were so dependent on implausible, highly-probabalistic chains of effects (democratizing the entire Middle East) it really raises the question: what was rational about this? Would any American administration have done the same (simply because we were still in a maximalist if fleeting unipolar moment? simply because 9/11 created a larger popular base of public support for any kind of foreign adventurism loosely related to confronting “terror”?)
This is where I see the limits in realist thought, where for theorists like John Mearsheimer, individual actors, personalities, and motives disappear. Under that rubric, Trump’s ruthless business background or personality shouldn’t matter at all. To the extent we, like most countries, have a much more permanent and powerful deep state, sure, individual leaders might change, but the fundamental deep state and elite conception of a country’s interests should not - except based on the dynamics and constraints of geopolitics. Still, I think it’s clear personalities and individual world views can matter, even as they’re constrained by the permanent bureaucracy.
But back to Iraq and those delusions. Mearsheimer could see clearly what a folly that invasion of choice was - how needlessly destructive to our own power and influence. Mearsheimer et al seemed to be counseling: just because you can doesn’t mean you should. While those in power seemingly decided in part: we can (no one and nothing is really constraining us) so let’s indulge in Wolfowitz’s fantasies of democratization; let’s wildly enrich Halliburton (and ourselves) even further; let’s send a myopic message to the rest of the world about our firepower; even: let’s avenge alleged assassination attempts against my dad - and show everyone I could accomplish something he stopped short of). Lack of constraints feed hubristic thinking and a miscalculation of not only likely outcomes but also a distorted sense of our own actual long-term interests. I remember reading Immanual Wallerstein in the lead up to the invasion and thinking: this is so rational and seems like such a clearer-eyed, more plausible assessment of what a massive invasion and then occupation of choice are likely to do in terms of our power and influence and actual strategic interests. But a lack of constraints meant that much more persuasive analysis remained merely academic.
And thank you for the link to the Niccolo Soldo article. It's one of the best explanations I've seen, in both thought and organization. It was well worth the read.
Oh, thank goodness, some sanity. I've been questioning my subscriptions to a couple of other substacks today. As thoughtful and nuanced as they've been about COVID and other things, they seem to have lost their minds about this. One just called the readership that didn't agree with him "Putin apologists." Another published a wholly emotional story today that admittedly tugs at the heart strings but is sadly one small blip of horror in a larger horrific world after publishing some ridiculousness about how the US needs to find itself so we once again can become "interested" in war. And everyone, in all these conversations, seems to have forgotten three little words that should be at the front of all our minds: "mutually assured destruction." This isn't going to fight poorly armed "brown" people in the desert. Even if Putin is crazy and Hitler, he's crazy and Hitler with his finger on the button of a whole lot of nukes, and our leaders and the rest of us would be wise to remember that. (Conversely, if he's not crazy and Hitler, we can find a way to peacefully end this with as little death and destruction as possible, and we should be looking for that, or demanding our leaders look for that, rather than slinging insults at each other.)
If you ask any historian what led to German agression in WW2 every single one would point to the Versailles treaty as a singificant cause.
Hardly any would say it justified the rise of Nazism or the horrors that spawned from that monstrosity.
It was important to factor this lesson in the post world war 2 conditions so it wouldn't happen again (and to build up former foes to fight former allies).
Yet somehow this similar desire to understand motives of bad actors is verboten currently.
The lack of this understanding is leading to ever more dangerous posturing. To the point I truly believe we are currently the closest we've ever been to nuclear war.
For me personally, I feel utter sadness for the Ukrainians. They like a toy are being torn apart by two children who neither wants the other to have.
Well, he is a monster; poisoning your opponents with radioactive sweetening of their tea etc. (and managing to kill UK citizens on UK soil) is bad. On the other hand, getting away with it is a pretty good lesson, too.
His psychology? Well, two elder infant brothers died during the siege of Leningrad before his birth may create a certain atmosphere in the bosom of one's family that survival at any cost and fuck anyone who gets in your way is a good life motto.
And everyone in Eastern Europe has pretty stark family memories of what happens when you're not strong enough to protect yourself against outsiders. My parents were born here and I am, as the soldier in the fairytale said, no longer young. My grandma was born 120 years ago and fled Ukraine as a young woman during the chaos of war, and my mother's great-uncle, his wife and four adult children were later murdered by the Nazis in Uman in 1942, during another war, and their blood does indeed still cry out to me from the ground, and I hear it, all the way here in the US where I'm as American as they come and speak none of the ancestral languages.
Those oligarchs learned that lesson fer shure. The only way you save yourself and your family is with power, and power comes from resources, the more the better. None of them are fools. They are all shaped by horrors.
I found the argument against citing one’s bona fides as a Dem voter (or left of center activist) interesting. Because I do do this sometimes in giving perspective or credibility to my argument (or in some cases, sadly, as what seems like a necessary preemptive or corrective). My sense is there are at least two reasons implied in the post why one shouldn’t do this. One, because, at least in a normative sense, whether one has ever voted for any Republicans before shouldn’t matter and has nothing to do with the actual rigor of one’s argument or the quality of the facts one is marshaling in support. Second, I can see how implicitly acceding to the notion that only those with pure enough backgrounds as Dems have standing to be heard or taken seriously, might further exacerbate siloed realities on the left and the sense anyone less pure is alien and solely a bad faith antagonist with nothing of substance to contribute.
On the other hand, it’s distressingly common to see people so blinkered, so invested personally, socially, emotionally, in Team Blue, their discomfort with any cognitive dissonance so great, almost the only way past their initial dismissals is to remind them (or establish) what’s simply the truth: I have literally never once voted for s Republican (or, I’ve helped organize dozens of voter reg trips to urban Philly; or, I’ve spent a Summer inside NYCHA buildings listening to residents and helping to organize support for a reasonable reform DA). Even close friends will situationally try to forget this in dismissing out of hand a sound argument. People who have never met me will think it suffices to just label me a right-winger and spray some drive-by epithets.
Sometimes it helps to be specific and give people a clear idea of what your values are and what experiences have informed them.
I’d prefer we could all let the quality of our arguments stand on their own. But we are so far from that ideal already. And, sometimes, in a more general, quotidian sense as well as re: politics, people simply want to be reassured you get where they’re coming from, have also seen what they’ve seen, and are not merely seeking to import and impose antagonistic views, ignorant or naive of their perspective and experience (or, in this context, laden with all of the opposite biases, blindspots, and assumptions of an ideological conservative or partisan Republican).
I’ve had to contend with plenty of friends and others immediately claiming something I’m saying is merely “a Republican talking point”. Shaddi Hamid put it well when he wrote in a recent piece in the Atlantic, about the very real, dangerous, cruel use of race as a major, even dominant factor in rationing limited resources in public health resources: claiming something is just a GOP talking point when that something is true is gaslighting. I also point this out all the time: I don’t care if something is (also) being used somewhere else as a Republican talking point. I only care if it’s true or not (and sometimes add: if you truly think actual right-wing sources are so odious, even dangerous, stop doing and saying things that give them such persuasive talking points!) Civil Rights hero Bayard Rustin put it simply but brilliantly: “If a bigot says to me ‘the sun is shining’, I’ll say ‘yes, the sun is shining’, because I want to tell the truth.” No one has had a good rejoinder to this.
So I guess I try to use a hybrid approach: truth, objectively verifiable facts, and the quality of one’s argument are all that really matter. But I find it much easier to land the arguments in the paragraph above (and substantive info about an issue) when I’ve established or reminded someone I’ve never been right-wing partisan or ideologue. And that I’m not some guy whose angle is “at some point in the past I was a Democrat, so please ignore the fact I’m using that to grift or shill for the Republicans now”.
People (even some of your actual friends!) will dismiss and try to ridicule anything you say about politics, if they can get away with it, solely on the basis of trying to lump you in with the tribal out group. I get the distant echos of “are you now or have you ever been a communist?” We don’t want Neo-McCarthyist litmus tests about one’s standing to speak or participate in society. I just think that, when included honestly, adding some context and perspective re: shared values and how you came to a certain argument can be helpful in finding common ground and making a point. Of course I’m also happy to talk in good faith with anyone who does vote Republican or hold more right of center views, to see where we agree and what we have in common. But many people won’t. I’ve also been honest that, had I been a resident of Virginia last Fall, I would’ve voted for the Republican candidates for statewide office. I’ve also told friends I’m now open to considering reasonable Republicans in upcoming elections if I find a Dem candidate unacceptable. That’s sincere - but it’s also an attempt to shock them into realizing how illiberal and intolerant, even hateful and authoritarian the party we’ve poured so much energy into supporting has become.
I'm intra-cognitively fighting tooth & nail to stay outside the emotionality of this war & you just helped with that. Which is why, I guess, you're writing on Substack and not as a staffer on the Guardian or the NYT.
I hate to be the guy pointing this out but you said “motte” more than once when you meant Bailey. To simplify, consider the strawman argument the Bailey, because straw is grown in the bailey. The strong argument rests in the motte, made of stone and surrounded by a MOAT. It a ridiculously easy mistake to make because no one ever uses motte and bailey in normal language.
I don’t have an easy way to copy/paste the examples here but if you read back through your essay I think you’ll see where you made the switch. There aren’t “mottes“ everywhere, there are baileys everywhere.
Anyway, don’t want you getting misquoted or harangued by bad faith nudniks on Twitter.
Goddammit you might be right. But the way I was thinking about it was that the motte is the easy-to-defend argument that you resort to once you've made the harder argument and your defenses have been breached. And those bad faith, rhetorical arguments are everywhere. Maybe I've got the phrase wrong.
Is there a link to your argument about unvaccinated people having the right to overwhelm hospitals (if that is your argument)? I was okay with people refusing the vaccine but had trouble when it came to deciding access to intensive care. I thought it equitable that if people refused the vaccine, they should be made to wait for treatment if vaccinated people needed urgent treatment and resources were limited. The really grey area is when it comes to unvaccinated children whose parent had made the decision for them.
“By reducing the entire geopolitical crisis to the story of a Hitler-like dictator conquering a hapless innocent nation out of sheer opportunism, you can mobilize public opinion behind intervention in a way that an honest accounting of the situation could not.”
The ones who want to use the Hitler-like dictator story with Putin as dictator seem to have the story backwards. Instead of Putin as a Hitler-like dictator, the real dictator was a deep-state team led by VP Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland as they led a coup against a “hapless innocent nation out of sheer opportunism.” The opportunity in 2014 was adding Ukraine to their long list of their other American colonies around the world. The Hitler-like dictator thing works because the American deep-state, true to form, used actual Nazis to storm the parliament to install Nuland’s hand-picked President. Having a new colony was quite profitable, just ask Hunter Biden as VP Joe was all but running the new regime. They managed to move their Nazis into renegade militias within the Ukraine military plus infiltrate the civilian police force for future muscle. But the larger opportunity here was to bring in NATO, officially or unofficially to place offensive weapons on the Russian border. The NATO weapons would have a travel time to Moscow of 10 minutes or less, the equivalent of the Soviet Union placing their missiles in Cuba.
The Russian speaking people of the Crimea and Donbas knew who the Nazis were as the new Nazi regime banned the Russian language and shut down the Russian speaking media. Crimea people voted to become part of Russia while the Donbas region refused to recognize the American led coup by declaring their independence. The Nazis tried in 2015 to take Donbas by force but failed. The Nazis continued to attack Donbas over the next 8 years killing over 14,000 people. The United States continued pouring weapons and money into Ukraine for years intensifying the fighting. We were and are still arming and training these Nazis. This Nazi story is not from Russia but coming from the West:
Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are on the March in Ukraine
Russia broke the back of Hitler’s Nazi empire but it cost Russia 25 million dead. Now they are forced to fight Nazis again, this time, American funded and trained Nazis, on the Russian border no less. Some red lines have been crossed. Nazis on the Russian border is one of them, NATO weapons pointed at Russia from Ukraine is another.
The United States is a dangerous empire that does not like to be told ‘no’. Russia is the first major power to tell the United States deep-state ‘no’ by using force to de-nazify the CIA’s latest military project along with its US supplied weapons; expect a temper tantrum. So much for the Bailey.
Are you ready to end the world to save the CIA project? Now that’s a real Motte.
I appreciate the explanation of motte and bailey, since this mystified me as well (the rhetorical device; being a keen castle nerd in my teen I am very familiar with the medieval usage).
The rest seems self-evidently obvious to me, or to any other thoughtful person who can stand being honest at least in his private thoughts. I don't like Putin, but given Russia's history he's probably better than we have any reason to expect, and we shouldn't be too surprised when he resorts to armed force to achieve his ends. After all, he's done it before.
As have we, with less excuse and a hell of a lot more tedious moralizing.
That's a very good question for Michael Shellenberger, who has written extensively about Germany's decision to shut down its nuclear plants which created its dependence on Russian oil.
I was doing organizing work for the NYC Climate March in 2014 and a grad student from Germany sheepishly told me that what his government had actually done was not merely myopic if somehow principled. He said they’d also helped fund the construction of nuclear plants not so far over the border in Poland. So, they wanted to both appeal to an environmentally conscious public and either attract or quiesce the Greens - and push off any risks and the byproducts on a poorer neighboring country. Idk - Schellenberger would know far better than I. Of course it reminds me of some of the Biden Admin’s energy and climate politics, too: either being so blinkered by one’s own sense of environmentalist virtue or constrained by the need to pander to the most zealous activists inside and outside their admin, they simultaneously reverse Trump mostly fossil fuel-based energy independence (which did give us and our allies real leverage and options in times like these) and begged both repressive Gulf states and Putin himself to please produce and sell more oil to us! It would almost be comical.
Hard not to find you as cynical as the people you criticize. For example, why does your historical perspective begins with Napoleon? Surely, Europe has had to deal with Peter the Great earlier and was also invaded by the Khan from the East. By that standard, it should be justified to want to control Ukraine no?
The contrarian shtick wears thin at moments like this.
The US is not intervening militarily and will not be intervening for the obvious reason that Russia has 3000 nuclear warheads pointed at us. The “consent” that is being “manufactured” is that of a global coalition applying stiff sanctions that are designed to bring Russia to heel, just as they were used against the Apartheid regime in South Africa. These sanctions are not only necessary, they are morally urgent and obligatory in the face of the relentless shelling of a civilian population.
All of the arguments you are making could easily be made in the case of any imperialist regime in history. After all, wasn’t Apartheid itself in the interests of De Clerk and white South Africans? Isn’it it unfair not to take those interests into account? “Sure, I’m not excusing apartheid itself, but the one-sided narrative presents De Clerk as some kind of monster!” Didn’t the Confederacy have vital interests that were being ignored in the Northern media’s rush to war? Didn’t Serbia have vital interests that we ignore when we discuss the ethic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina?”
At a certain point contrarianism lapses into a kind of nihilism. There seems to be a contingent that is so invested in being smarter than their journalistic peers that they race to be the first one to say “well, actually” in the face of what a five-year old child would recognize as an atrocity. The impulse is born of nothing more than professional ressentiment and loathing. Glenn Greenwald was once a great journalist who has been poisoned by hatred for his peers and it has turned him into a toady for oligarchs. I pity him.
Sometimes, the mainstream “narrative” is simple moral decency. Slavery, genocide, mass rape and sterilization, the bombing of civilian populations — these things are not opportunities to show how much smarter you are than the next asshole on Substack. The greatest writers of the 20th century — Orwell, Camus — did not see that century’s atrocities as opportunities to be more clever or contrarian than their peers.
If anything, the Putin-apologist left resembles nothing *more* than the COVID-policing left in its reflexive repudiation of the obvious.
I'm half tempted to respond to some of the more reasonable points you make here but this is so full of ad hominems and assumed bad faith that I'm inclined not to. I would just note that I went out of my way to NOT "apologize" for Putin. I specifically said he was a monster and that even following his country's rational interests *does not* exonerate him of the moral atrocity of his action. But you took it directly to the conclusion that I'm justifying the invasion and that I'm doing so out of some vain desperation to look smarter than everyone else. It's actually a good example of what I wrote about in the first place: instead of giving me the benefit of the doubt and responding to what I've actually said, you've caricatured my position and in fact me as a person and held that up as your argument against mine.
Frankly, I think it’s a matter of time and place. Your piece would be unobjectionable to me if it weren’t posted as bombs are falling on a civilian population. In a few weeks or months, when the bodies have at least gone cold and are buried, it would be less offensive.
And honestly, I’m upset because I think you’re a smart guy, a very good writer. I wouldn’t have followed you if you weren’t. If I thought you were a hack I wouldn’t bother. If you were reporting from Kyiv right now I feel confident that you’d have a good deal more moral clarity (much as I hate that term) than this.
Thanks, appreciate the kind words. I understand your frustration but it's not as if I were vilifying Ukrainians — I think it's reasonable to have a discussion right now about whether or not this is America's moral responsibility to attend to. Bombs are indeed falling, but at the same time a discourse is being generated right now that, when it's fixed in stone, will be of value to those who push for more intervention. I don't think it's fair to ask people to hold off on any pushback against the dominant narrative until some emotionally appropriate time — especially when there's no such prohibition on the part of those who are pushing in the other direction (toward more aggressive intervention).
I think the concern you’re raising — that this event may give rise to an interventionism that leads us to the next Iraq — is absolutely legitimate, and would be a valuable point to raise in an essay, even right now. I might disagree with you, but it’s not at all out of bounds.
But this is not that essay. I don’t want to mischaracterize your point but it seems you are relying on a strawman of your own — that there’s a full-throated rush to war akin to what we fell into after 9/11. That simply isn’t the case. We are not going to war in Ukraine. If anything what we’re seeing is the anti-Iraq: a truly multi-lateral effort to use sanctions combined with material support to people fighting for their own freedom. This is a model for how international intervention should be done. If we are not prepared to use even non-military sanctions and aid we can be assured of more Ukraines in the future.
And, again, I don’t want to mischaracterize your point, but there have been many on the left who have suggested in so many words that NATO somehow *made* Putin do this — the “look what you made me do” argument of a wife-beater. That somehow NATO made the war happen by failing to offer Ukraine up to Putin on a platter. These arguments are offensive in the face of what’s happening right now. The people making them morally delegitimize the left as much as the apologists for Stalin did in the 1950s. They deserve the full measure of scorn, and then some.
I tried to be careful to avoid pretending there was a full-throated call to war in the way there was for Iraq, but I do believe there are increasing calls for intervention of one sort or another. Adam Kinzinger has called for a no fly zone: https://twitter.com/AdamKinzinger/status/1497354030904975364
Meanwhile we're barraged with fake stories about Ukrainian heroism and Russian barbarism, which are shared eagerly online by people who literally want to be lied to:
That's not to say that Ukrainians have not acted heroically and Russians have not acted barbarically, but this wall of propaganda is alarming to me. If the discourse isn't yet at the place of calling for at least a proxy war with Russia, then are you confident we're so far off?
I think you’re conflating Twitter “discourse” with the real world.
I have also heard the calls for a no-fly zone on Twitter. These people don’t realize what a no-fly zone entails — it would mean US F-35s shooting down Russian planes, I.e. World War III. Unless Biden is insane, and he’s not, there is no way a no-fly zone can even be considered. If Kinzinger is saying this he’s a lightweight or engaging in political theater. The risks of nuclear escalation are simply too vast to even contemplate such a step, and Biden has been very careful to telegraph to RU that he’s not doing this. Ben Wittes is a lawyer and Twitter pundit whose opinions are utterly irrelevant right now. The WH and Pentagon are not taking strategy points from legal pundits and bloggers in the midst of what could be a nuclear crisis.
While I didn't share your moral reaction to this article, I did share the sense that it was an argument against something that didn't *seem* to be happening that I could tell (though I certainly don't review a broad swath of media -- particularly Twitter, where some stuff that seems really weird to me happens regularly): it was speaking as if we were manufacturing consent to military conflict, but without a lot of the strongest arguments one would make if one were arguing against that.
So I was left wondering what specifically it was arguing against...any action at all? Against sanctions?
“the Putin-apologist left” is a grossly-tendentious, catch-all smear. It comes off as not only almost entirely hostile to nuance but a bad faith characterization rendered sans much reasoning or evidence. Meanwhile, in claiming excuses could be made on behalf of the interests of “any imperialist regime in history” you are absolutely inviting anyone (including actual Putin-apologists) to ask if the same sort of sanctions should have been levied on the US government (and inextricably the US public) in the lead up to or immediate aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq. I’m not comparing the US (even under the genuinely awful Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld clique). Actually, you are, via in part a refusal to make meaningful distinctions. As different a country as the US circa 2002-3 was to Putin’s Russia, there was no serious, plausible, honest basis for the US decision to invade and occupy Iraq (and giddily endorse torture; and open CIA black sites; or, prisons like Abu Ghraib; or impose the national security apparatus on millions of Americans in their own country; or justify extrajudicial killings around the globe). Should the world have “brought us to heel”? How is Greenwald “a toady to oligarchs”? Do you mean autocrats? How is he a toady to autocrats? This is a journalist who has been arrested for fearlessly investigating Bolsonaro, putting himself and his family at risk. I haven’t read his latest long piece on Ukraine and will reply once I do if I find evidence of your claim. But language and characterizations like this are just plain unhelpful in making your case or engaging in nuanced good faith debate.
Second, it’s either very naive or an inadequately honest portrayal of the situation we’re in to flatly claim we’re only talking about sanctions after all - just like Apartheid South Africa. I frankly don’t get the attempt to analogize these situations. Other than: two countries in which the governments did bad things. The differences are so many and vast and obvious it’s not worth enumerating them. If you think sanctions are all that’s being discussed by major elected officials of both parties, military planners, and top national security officials…I don’t know what news you’re watching. This is not a binary between simply “no boots on the ground” and sanctions. Put aside the fact Putin (however untrustworthy a narrator as well know him to be) himself said directly that sanctions alone were a major reason he was putting tactical nukes on high alert. Do I have to list all of the risky military proposals we’ve either already undertaken or are being seriously considered or are being heavily pushed in the media which occupy a grey area between sanctions and boots on the ground? I’ve heard a lot about establishing a no-fly zone! And sending in special ops on the down low to train and equip. Delivering more lethal weapons just across the border in NATO countries for Ukrainians to ferry back across, or even deliveries by the US and others of lethal weapons into Ukraine by sea, land, or air. I could go on and on. As horrific as the loss of life on all sides is (Russian conscripts have families, too) I’m glad we and others have helped armed Ukraine so that it has a fighting chance (remember who began supplying them after the Obama Admin refused? Putin-toady Donald Trump). This situation is extremely combustible and dangerous and the potential for miscalculation, error, escalation, and spread are very real. Trump’s recent comments make me sick (in spite of his vastly better job handling Putin personally and in policy). You know what else makes me sick? People like Jake Sullivan and Victoria Nuland anywhere near positions of power with two nuclear armed powers on the knife’s edge.
I think it’s perfectly valid to ask if we shouldn’t have been sanctioned for Iraq. As you say, the two situations were not morally equivalent but there was a pretty good case, particularly post-Abu Ghraib, for us to face sanctions. For better or worse there was no power that could hold us to account, save our own national conscience and the loss of prestige and moral leadership we suffered as a result. For Russia this would not matter, but for us it does.
Greenwald has obsessively derided the Democrats’ attempts to hold Donald Trump to account for his own actions with regard to Russia, as well as the attempt to impeach Trump for blackmailing Zelensky by withholding the very weapons he is now using to fight for his country’s survival. Greenwald’s favorite platform for this activity was Tucker Carlson’s TV show — the host of which has repeatedly praised Putin and openly said he was siding with Russia over Ukraine only a few days ago. While I admire Greenwald’s work on Bolsonaro, his role as useful idiot and sidekick to Putin’s chief American cheerleader puts him beyond the pale.
how dare you use dispassionate, intelligent reason and logic to provide context and give an accurate assessment of all factors that led to this moment...u are def an evil fascist nazi white-supremacist bigot ;)
One thing I really liked about Trump in retrospect is that he didn't try to apply a kindergarten "good guys versus bad guys" frame on geopolitics. He created endless controversies with it, but my reading was that he just looked at everything in terms of self-interests and negotiating postures. So despite all of his raging about how we were "getting ripped off" on the world stage, it always came with a degree of explicit respect for how "smart" the leaders of those countries ripping us off were.
I would say the same thing about this situation. It doesn't really do anyone any good to look at geopolitical conflicts in terms of "good guys" and "bad guys"; that's just jingoist propaganda meant to lure us into supporting wars. Better to just try to understand that it's more important to understand geopolitics in terms of a variety of players all acting in their own self-interests, which are in conflict, to an extent existentially, and that other than pure military dominance, which is often impossible or at least more costly than anyone wants to bear, negotiation in the only path to maintaining peace.
I think your take about Trump is at least mostly right. Even when you factor in his own admiration of strong men (heavily overblown in a media fatuously obsessed with their own self-flattering notions of good guys and bad guys - which is also a great early Camper Van Beethoven song, btw) and Trump’s own obsession with credit and flattery, he had a pretty consistent frame: every country should put itself first, especially ours, and we’re getting screwed (or our elites are screwing us) because they no longer identify as and with US citizens and their interests have diverged from ours. However much one can find some serious hypocrisy in this - Trump in his own crass huckster way was of course an elitist, too, and hardly one above selling all imaginable Trump branded crap made in China. Nonetheless, policywise, his America First instinct also seemed to give him real if basic insight into the motivations and interests of not only other world leaders, but many of the world leaders we have had the hardest time dealing with and which the balance of our foreign policy elites bungled relations with, often precisely via the reductive, and often cynical idea that they are evil and we are good. In a way Trump’s America First was ironically less blindly solipsistic, for all of the talk about American Exceptionalism, because it granted that for others being Russia First, etc. was just as rational, even reasonable.
The trick re: interests, I guess, is how one defines them. Obviously the US invasion of Iraq not only was a tragic and massively costly, counterproductive decision - one that seemed to marry the idealist delusions of some with the most cynical motives of others. But even taking some of the stated justifications of its architects at face value, it was so poorly thought through, so seemingly blind to predictable unintended consequences (empowering Iran and setting off larger Sunni vs. Shiite conflicts throughout the region), while the realization of their larger goals were so dependent on implausible, highly-probabalistic chains of effects (democratizing the entire Middle East) it really raises the question: what was rational about this? Would any American administration have done the same (simply because we were still in a maximalist if fleeting unipolar moment? simply because 9/11 created a larger popular base of public support for any kind of foreign adventurism loosely related to confronting “terror”?)
This is where I see the limits in realist thought, where for theorists like John Mearsheimer, individual actors, personalities, and motives disappear. Under that rubric, Trump’s ruthless business background or personality shouldn’t matter at all. To the extent we, like most countries, have a much more permanent and powerful deep state, sure, individual leaders might change, but the fundamental deep state and elite conception of a country’s interests should not - except based on the dynamics and constraints of geopolitics. Still, I think it’s clear personalities and individual world views can matter, even as they’re constrained by the permanent bureaucracy.
But back to Iraq and those delusions. Mearsheimer could see clearly what a folly that invasion of choice was - how needlessly destructive to our own power and influence. Mearsheimer et al seemed to be counseling: just because you can doesn’t mean you should. While those in power seemingly decided in part: we can (no one and nothing is really constraining us) so let’s indulge in Wolfowitz’s fantasies of democratization; let’s wildly enrich Halliburton (and ourselves) even further; let’s send a myopic message to the rest of the world about our firepower; even: let’s avenge alleged assassination attempts against my dad - and show everyone I could accomplish something he stopped short of). Lack of constraints feed hubristic thinking and a miscalculation of not only likely outcomes but also a distorted sense of our own actual long-term interests. I remember reading Immanual Wallerstein in the lead up to the invasion and thinking: this is so rational and seems like such a clearer-eyed, more plausible assessment of what a massive invasion and then occupation of choice are likely to do in terms of our power and influence and actual strategic interests. But a lack of constraints meant that much more persuasive analysis remained merely academic.
And thank you for the link to the Niccolo Soldo article. It's one of the best explanations I've seen, in both thought and organization. It was well worth the read.
Oh, thank goodness, some sanity. I've been questioning my subscriptions to a couple of other substacks today. As thoughtful and nuanced as they've been about COVID and other things, they seem to have lost their minds about this. One just called the readership that didn't agree with him "Putin apologists." Another published a wholly emotional story today that admittedly tugs at the heart strings but is sadly one small blip of horror in a larger horrific world after publishing some ridiculousness about how the US needs to find itself so we once again can become "interested" in war. And everyone, in all these conversations, seems to have forgotten three little words that should be at the front of all our minds: "mutually assured destruction." This isn't going to fight poorly armed "brown" people in the desert. Even if Putin is crazy and Hitler, he's crazy and Hitler with his finger on the button of a whole lot of nukes, and our leaders and the rest of us would be wise to remember that. (Conversely, if he's not crazy and Hitler, we can find a way to peacefully end this with as little death and destruction as possible, and we should be looking for that, or demanding our leaders look for that, rather than slinging insults at each other.)
If you ask any historian what led to German agression in WW2 every single one would point to the Versailles treaty as a singificant cause.
Hardly any would say it justified the rise of Nazism or the horrors that spawned from that monstrosity.
It was important to factor this lesson in the post world war 2 conditions so it wouldn't happen again (and to build up former foes to fight former allies).
Yet somehow this similar desire to understand motives of bad actors is verboten currently.
The lack of this understanding is leading to ever more dangerous posturing. To the point I truly believe we are currently the closest we've ever been to nuclear war.
For me personally, I feel utter sadness for the Ukrainians. They like a toy are being torn apart by two children who neither wants the other to have.
Well, he is a monster; poisoning your opponents with radioactive sweetening of their tea etc. (and managing to kill UK citizens on UK soil) is bad. On the other hand, getting away with it is a pretty good lesson, too.
His psychology? Well, two elder infant brothers died during the siege of Leningrad before his birth may create a certain atmosphere in the bosom of one's family that survival at any cost and fuck anyone who gets in your way is a good life motto.
And everyone in Eastern Europe has pretty stark family memories of what happens when you're not strong enough to protect yourself against outsiders. My parents were born here and I am, as the soldier in the fairytale said, no longer young. My grandma was born 120 years ago and fled Ukraine as a young woman during the chaos of war, and my mother's great-uncle, his wife and four adult children were later murdered by the Nazis in Uman in 1942, during another war, and their blood does indeed still cry out to me from the ground, and I hear it, all the way here in the US where I'm as American as they come and speak none of the ancestral languages.
Those oligarchs learned that lesson fer shure. The only way you save yourself and your family is with power, and power comes from resources, the more the better. None of them are fools. They are all shaped by horrors.
And perhaps confounding all the analyzing going on: beginning from absolute subzero rationality disintegrating into the blackest of emotional storms.
I found the argument against citing one’s bona fides as a Dem voter (or left of center activist) interesting. Because I do do this sometimes in giving perspective or credibility to my argument (or in some cases, sadly, as what seems like a necessary preemptive or corrective). My sense is there are at least two reasons implied in the post why one shouldn’t do this. One, because, at least in a normative sense, whether one has ever voted for any Republicans before shouldn’t matter and has nothing to do with the actual rigor of one’s argument or the quality of the facts one is marshaling in support. Second, I can see how implicitly acceding to the notion that only those with pure enough backgrounds as Dems have standing to be heard or taken seriously, might further exacerbate siloed realities on the left and the sense anyone less pure is alien and solely a bad faith antagonist with nothing of substance to contribute.
On the other hand, it’s distressingly common to see people so blinkered, so invested personally, socially, emotionally, in Team Blue, their discomfort with any cognitive dissonance so great, almost the only way past their initial dismissals is to remind them (or establish) what’s simply the truth: I have literally never once voted for s Republican (or, I’ve helped organize dozens of voter reg trips to urban Philly; or, I’ve spent a Summer inside NYCHA buildings listening to residents and helping to organize support for a reasonable reform DA). Even close friends will situationally try to forget this in dismissing out of hand a sound argument. People who have never met me will think it suffices to just label me a right-winger and spray some drive-by epithets.
Sometimes it helps to be specific and give people a clear idea of what your values are and what experiences have informed them.
I’d prefer we could all let the quality of our arguments stand on their own. But we are so far from that ideal already. And, sometimes, in a more general, quotidian sense as well as re: politics, people simply want to be reassured you get where they’re coming from, have also seen what they’ve seen, and are not merely seeking to import and impose antagonistic views, ignorant or naive of their perspective and experience (or, in this context, laden with all of the opposite biases, blindspots, and assumptions of an ideological conservative or partisan Republican).
I’ve had to contend with plenty of friends and others immediately claiming something I’m saying is merely “a Republican talking point”. Shaddi Hamid put it well when he wrote in a recent piece in the Atlantic, about the very real, dangerous, cruel use of race as a major, even dominant factor in rationing limited resources in public health resources: claiming something is just a GOP talking point when that something is true is gaslighting. I also point this out all the time: I don’t care if something is (also) being used somewhere else as a Republican talking point. I only care if it’s true or not (and sometimes add: if you truly think actual right-wing sources are so odious, even dangerous, stop doing and saying things that give them such persuasive talking points!) Civil Rights hero Bayard Rustin put it simply but brilliantly: “If a bigot says to me ‘the sun is shining’, I’ll say ‘yes, the sun is shining’, because I want to tell the truth.” No one has had a good rejoinder to this.
So I guess I try to use a hybrid approach: truth, objectively verifiable facts, and the quality of one’s argument are all that really matter. But I find it much easier to land the arguments in the paragraph above (and substantive info about an issue) when I’ve established or reminded someone I’ve never been right-wing partisan or ideologue. And that I’m not some guy whose angle is “at some point in the past I was a Democrat, so please ignore the fact I’m using that to grift or shill for the Republicans now”.
People (even some of your actual friends!) will dismiss and try to ridicule anything you say about politics, if they can get away with it, solely on the basis of trying to lump you in with the tribal out group. I get the distant echos of “are you now or have you ever been a communist?” We don’t want Neo-McCarthyist litmus tests about one’s standing to speak or participate in society. I just think that, when included honestly, adding some context and perspective re: shared values and how you came to a certain argument can be helpful in finding common ground and making a point. Of course I’m also happy to talk in good faith with anyone who does vote Republican or hold more right of center views, to see where we agree and what we have in common. But many people won’t. I’ve also been honest that, had I been a resident of Virginia last Fall, I would’ve voted for the Republican candidates for statewide office. I’ve also told friends I’m now open to considering reasonable Republicans in upcoming elections if I find a Dem candidate unacceptable. That’s sincere - but it’s also an attempt to shock them into realizing how illiberal and intolerant, even hateful and authoritarian the party we’ve poured so much energy into supporting has become.
I'm intra-cognitively fighting tooth & nail to stay outside the emotionality of this war & you just helped with that. Which is why, I guess, you're writing on Substack and not as a staffer on the Guardian or the NYT.
I hate to be the guy pointing this out but you said “motte” more than once when you meant Bailey. To simplify, consider the strawman argument the Bailey, because straw is grown in the bailey. The strong argument rests in the motte, made of stone and surrounded by a MOAT. It a ridiculously easy mistake to make because no one ever uses motte and bailey in normal language.
I don’t have an easy way to copy/paste the examples here but if you read back through your essay I think you’ll see where you made the switch. There aren’t “mottes“ everywhere, there are baileys everywhere.
Anyway, don’t want you getting misquoted or harangued by bad faith nudniks on Twitter.
Goddammit you might be right. But the way I was thinking about it was that the motte is the easy-to-defend argument that you resort to once you've made the harder argument and your defenses have been breached. And those bad faith, rhetorical arguments are everywhere. Maybe I've got the phrase wrong.
I see what you’re saying. Retreating to a motte is a bad faith tactic, but the motte argument is almost by definition uncontroversial.
Thank you for the motte and bailey metaphor!
Appreciate your work.
Is there a link to your argument about unvaccinated people having the right to overwhelm hospitals (if that is your argument)? I was okay with people refusing the vaccine but had trouble when it came to deciding access to intensive care. I thought it equitable that if people refused the vaccine, they should be made to wait for treatment if vaccinated people needed urgent treatment and resources were limited. The really grey area is when it comes to unvaccinated children whose parent had made the decision for them.
“By reducing the entire geopolitical crisis to the story of a Hitler-like dictator conquering a hapless innocent nation out of sheer opportunism, you can mobilize public opinion behind intervention in a way that an honest accounting of the situation could not.”
The ones who want to use the Hitler-like dictator story with Putin as dictator seem to have the story backwards. Instead of Putin as a Hitler-like dictator, the real dictator was a deep-state team led by VP Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland as they led a coup against a “hapless innocent nation out of sheer opportunism.” The opportunity in 2014 was adding Ukraine to their long list of their other American colonies around the world. The Hitler-like dictator thing works because the American deep-state, true to form, used actual Nazis to storm the parliament to install Nuland’s hand-picked President. Having a new colony was quite profitable, just ask Hunter Biden as VP Joe was all but running the new regime. They managed to move their Nazis into renegade militias within the Ukraine military plus infiltrate the civilian police force for future muscle. But the larger opportunity here was to bring in NATO, officially or unofficially to place offensive weapons on the Russian border. The NATO weapons would have a travel time to Moscow of 10 minutes or less, the equivalent of the Soviet Union placing their missiles in Cuba.
The Russian speaking people of the Crimea and Donbas knew who the Nazis were as the new Nazi regime banned the Russian language and shut down the Russian speaking media. Crimea people voted to become part of Russia while the Donbas region refused to recognize the American led coup by declaring their independence. The Nazis tried in 2015 to take Donbas by force but failed. The Nazis continued to attack Donbas over the next 8 years killing over 14,000 people. The United States continued pouring weapons and money into Ukraine for years intensifying the fighting. We were and are still arming and training these Nazis. This Nazi story is not from Russia but coming from the West:
Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are on the March in Ukraine
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/neo-nazis-far-right-ukraine/
Russia broke the back of Hitler’s Nazi empire but it cost Russia 25 million dead. Now they are forced to fight Nazis again, this time, American funded and trained Nazis, on the Russian border no less. Some red lines have been crossed. Nazis on the Russian border is one of them, NATO weapons pointed at Russia from Ukraine is another.
The United States is a dangerous empire that does not like to be told ‘no’. Russia is the first major power to tell the United States deep-state ‘no’ by using force to de-nazify the CIA’s latest military project along with its US supplied weapons; expect a temper tantrum. So much for the Bailey.
Are you ready to end the world to save the CIA project? Now that’s a real Motte.
Alayna
You're really very good at this, Leighton.
I appreciate the explanation of motte and bailey, since this mystified me as well (the rhetorical device; being a keen castle nerd in my teen I am very familiar with the medieval usage).
The rest seems self-evidently obvious to me, or to any other thoughtful person who can stand being honest at least in his private thoughts. I don't like Putin, but given Russia's history he's probably better than we have any reason to expect, and we shouldn't be too surprised when he resorts to armed force to achieve his ends. After all, he's done it before.
As have we, with less excuse and a hell of a lot more tedious moralizing.
Great article! Why didn't Europe see this coming, and work to reduce their dependence on Russian fossil fuels?
That's a very good question for Michael Shellenberger, who has written extensively about Germany's decision to shut down its nuclear plants which created its dependence on Russian oil.
I was doing organizing work for the NYC Climate March in 2014 and a grad student from Germany sheepishly told me that what his government had actually done was not merely myopic if somehow principled. He said they’d also helped fund the construction of nuclear plants not so far over the border in Poland. So, they wanted to both appeal to an environmentally conscious public and either attract or quiesce the Greens - and push off any risks and the byproducts on a poorer neighboring country. Idk - Schellenberger would know far better than I. Of course it reminds me of some of the Biden Admin’s energy and climate politics, too: either being so blinkered by one’s own sense of environmentalist virtue or constrained by the need to pander to the most zealous activists inside and outside their admin, they simultaneously reverse Trump mostly fossil fuel-based energy independence (which did give us and our allies real leverage and options in times like these) and begged both repressive Gulf states and Putin himself to please produce and sell more oil to us! It would almost be comical.
Hard not to find you as cynical as the people you criticize. For example, why does your historical perspective begins with Napoleon? Surely, Europe has had to deal with Peter the Great earlier and was also invaded by the Khan from the East. By that standard, it should be justified to want to control Ukraine no?
Are you responding to me? Where did I mention anything about Napoleon?
Sorry, I was responding to Soldo. Too many chats going!
Ah gotcha
The contrarian shtick wears thin at moments like this.
The US is not intervening militarily and will not be intervening for the obvious reason that Russia has 3000 nuclear warheads pointed at us. The “consent” that is being “manufactured” is that of a global coalition applying stiff sanctions that are designed to bring Russia to heel, just as they were used against the Apartheid regime in South Africa. These sanctions are not only necessary, they are morally urgent and obligatory in the face of the relentless shelling of a civilian population.
All of the arguments you are making could easily be made in the case of any imperialist regime in history. After all, wasn’t Apartheid itself in the interests of De Clerk and white South Africans? Isn’it it unfair not to take those interests into account? “Sure, I’m not excusing apartheid itself, but the one-sided narrative presents De Clerk as some kind of monster!” Didn’t the Confederacy have vital interests that were being ignored in the Northern media’s rush to war? Didn’t Serbia have vital interests that we ignore when we discuss the ethic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina?”
At a certain point contrarianism lapses into a kind of nihilism. There seems to be a contingent that is so invested in being smarter than their journalistic peers that they race to be the first one to say “well, actually” in the face of what a five-year old child would recognize as an atrocity. The impulse is born of nothing more than professional ressentiment and loathing. Glenn Greenwald was once a great journalist who has been poisoned by hatred for his peers and it has turned him into a toady for oligarchs. I pity him.
Sometimes, the mainstream “narrative” is simple moral decency. Slavery, genocide, mass rape and sterilization, the bombing of civilian populations — these things are not opportunities to show how much smarter you are than the next asshole on Substack. The greatest writers of the 20th century — Orwell, Camus — did not see that century’s atrocities as opportunities to be more clever or contrarian than their peers.
If anything, the Putin-apologist left resembles nothing *more* than the COVID-policing left in its reflexive repudiation of the obvious.
I'm half tempted to respond to some of the more reasonable points you make here but this is so full of ad hominems and assumed bad faith that I'm inclined not to. I would just note that I went out of my way to NOT "apologize" for Putin. I specifically said he was a monster and that even following his country's rational interests *does not* exonerate him of the moral atrocity of his action. But you took it directly to the conclusion that I'm justifying the invasion and that I'm doing so out of some vain desperation to look smarter than everyone else. It's actually a good example of what I wrote about in the first place: instead of giving me the benefit of the doubt and responding to what I've actually said, you've caricatured my position and in fact me as a person and held that up as your argument against mine.
Frankly, I think it’s a matter of time and place. Your piece would be unobjectionable to me if it weren’t posted as bombs are falling on a civilian population. In a few weeks or months, when the bodies have at least gone cold and are buried, it would be less offensive.
And honestly, I’m upset because I think you’re a smart guy, a very good writer. I wouldn’t have followed you if you weren’t. If I thought you were a hack I wouldn’t bother. If you were reporting from Kyiv right now I feel confident that you’d have a good deal more moral clarity (much as I hate that term) than this.
Thanks, appreciate the kind words. I understand your frustration but it's not as if I were vilifying Ukrainians — I think it's reasonable to have a discussion right now about whether or not this is America's moral responsibility to attend to. Bombs are indeed falling, but at the same time a discourse is being generated right now that, when it's fixed in stone, will be of value to those who push for more intervention. I don't think it's fair to ask people to hold off on any pushback against the dominant narrative until some emotionally appropriate time — especially when there's no such prohibition on the part of those who are pushing in the other direction (toward more aggressive intervention).
I think the concern you’re raising — that this event may give rise to an interventionism that leads us to the next Iraq — is absolutely legitimate, and would be a valuable point to raise in an essay, even right now. I might disagree with you, but it’s not at all out of bounds.
But this is not that essay. I don’t want to mischaracterize your point but it seems you are relying on a strawman of your own — that there’s a full-throated rush to war akin to what we fell into after 9/11. That simply isn’t the case. We are not going to war in Ukraine. If anything what we’re seeing is the anti-Iraq: a truly multi-lateral effort to use sanctions combined with material support to people fighting for their own freedom. This is a model for how international intervention should be done. If we are not prepared to use even non-military sanctions and aid we can be assured of more Ukraines in the future.
And, again, I don’t want to mischaracterize your point, but there have been many on the left who have suggested in so many words that NATO somehow *made* Putin do this — the “look what you made me do” argument of a wife-beater. That somehow NATO made the war happen by failing to offer Ukraine up to Putin on a platter. These arguments are offensive in the face of what’s happening right now. The people making them morally delegitimize the left as much as the apologists for Stalin did in the 1950s. They deserve the full measure of scorn, and then some.
I tried to be careful to avoid pretending there was a full-throated call to war in the way there was for Iraq, but I do believe there are increasing calls for intervention of one sort or another. Adam Kinzinger has called for a no fly zone: https://twitter.com/AdamKinzinger/status/1497354030904975364
Ben Wittes has called for "regime change": https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/status/1497916216903618562
Meanwhile we're barraged with fake stories about Ukrainian heroism and Russian barbarism, which are shared eagerly online by people who literally want to be lied to:
https://twitter.com/jeff82874662/status/1497603300853645313?s=21
That's not to say that Ukrainians have not acted heroically and Russians have not acted barbarically, but this wall of propaganda is alarming to me. If the discourse isn't yet at the place of calling for at least a proxy war with Russia, then are you confident we're so far off?
I think you’re conflating Twitter “discourse” with the real world.
I have also heard the calls for a no-fly zone on Twitter. These people don’t realize what a no-fly zone entails — it would mean US F-35s shooting down Russian planes, I.e. World War III. Unless Biden is insane, and he’s not, there is no way a no-fly zone can even be considered. If Kinzinger is saying this he’s a lightweight or engaging in political theater. The risks of nuclear escalation are simply too vast to even contemplate such a step, and Biden has been very careful to telegraph to RU that he’s not doing this. Ben Wittes is a lawyer and Twitter pundit whose opinions are utterly irrelevant right now. The WH and Pentagon are not taking strategy points from legal pundits and bloggers in the midst of what could be a nuclear crisis.
While I didn't share your moral reaction to this article, I did share the sense that it was an argument against something that didn't *seem* to be happening that I could tell (though I certainly don't review a broad swath of media -- particularly Twitter, where some stuff that seems really weird to me happens regularly): it was speaking as if we were manufacturing consent to military conflict, but without a lot of the strongest arguments one would make if one were arguing against that.
So I was left wondering what specifically it was arguing against...any action at all? Against sanctions?
“the Putin-apologist left” is a grossly-tendentious, catch-all smear. It comes off as not only almost entirely hostile to nuance but a bad faith characterization rendered sans much reasoning or evidence. Meanwhile, in claiming excuses could be made on behalf of the interests of “any imperialist regime in history” you are absolutely inviting anyone (including actual Putin-apologists) to ask if the same sort of sanctions should have been levied on the US government (and inextricably the US public) in the lead up to or immediate aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq. I’m not comparing the US (even under the genuinely awful Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld clique). Actually, you are, via in part a refusal to make meaningful distinctions. As different a country as the US circa 2002-3 was to Putin’s Russia, there was no serious, plausible, honest basis for the US decision to invade and occupy Iraq (and giddily endorse torture; and open CIA black sites; or, prisons like Abu Ghraib; or impose the national security apparatus on millions of Americans in their own country; or justify extrajudicial killings around the globe). Should the world have “brought us to heel”? How is Greenwald “a toady to oligarchs”? Do you mean autocrats? How is he a toady to autocrats? This is a journalist who has been arrested for fearlessly investigating Bolsonaro, putting himself and his family at risk. I haven’t read his latest long piece on Ukraine and will reply once I do if I find evidence of your claim. But language and characterizations like this are just plain unhelpful in making your case or engaging in nuanced good faith debate.
Second, it’s either very naive or an inadequately honest portrayal of the situation we’re in to flatly claim we’re only talking about sanctions after all - just like Apartheid South Africa. I frankly don’t get the attempt to analogize these situations. Other than: two countries in which the governments did bad things. The differences are so many and vast and obvious it’s not worth enumerating them. If you think sanctions are all that’s being discussed by major elected officials of both parties, military planners, and top national security officials…I don’t know what news you’re watching. This is not a binary between simply “no boots on the ground” and sanctions. Put aside the fact Putin (however untrustworthy a narrator as well know him to be) himself said directly that sanctions alone were a major reason he was putting tactical nukes on high alert. Do I have to list all of the risky military proposals we’ve either already undertaken or are being seriously considered or are being heavily pushed in the media which occupy a grey area between sanctions and boots on the ground? I’ve heard a lot about establishing a no-fly zone! And sending in special ops on the down low to train and equip. Delivering more lethal weapons just across the border in NATO countries for Ukrainians to ferry back across, or even deliveries by the US and others of lethal weapons into Ukraine by sea, land, or air. I could go on and on. As horrific as the loss of life on all sides is (Russian conscripts have families, too) I’m glad we and others have helped armed Ukraine so that it has a fighting chance (remember who began supplying them after the Obama Admin refused? Putin-toady Donald Trump). This situation is extremely combustible and dangerous and the potential for miscalculation, error, escalation, and spread are very real. Trump’s recent comments make me sick (in spite of his vastly better job handling Putin personally and in policy). You know what else makes me sick? People like Jake Sullivan and Victoria Nuland anywhere near positions of power with two nuclear armed powers on the knife’s edge.
I think it’s perfectly valid to ask if we shouldn’t have been sanctioned for Iraq. As you say, the two situations were not morally equivalent but there was a pretty good case, particularly post-Abu Ghraib, for us to face sanctions. For better or worse there was no power that could hold us to account, save our own national conscience and the loss of prestige and moral leadership we suffered as a result. For Russia this would not matter, but for us it does.
Greenwald has obsessively derided the Democrats’ attempts to hold Donald Trump to account for his own actions with regard to Russia, as well as the attempt to impeach Trump for blackmailing Zelensky by withholding the very weapons he is now using to fight for his country’s survival. Greenwald’s favorite platform for this activity was Tucker Carlson’s TV show — the host of which has repeatedly praised Putin and openly said he was siding with Russia over Ukraine only a few days ago. While I admire Greenwald’s work on Bolsonaro, his role as useful idiot and sidekick to Putin’s chief American cheerleader puts him beyond the pale.
Very eloquent.