I think what really irks many progressives, especially those outside the US, is that America faced no real 'consequences' as a result of the Iraq war. Just a bunch of perfunctory disclaimers and Op-eds admitting how 'wrong' it was post-fact. But no real, negative, ramifications for either the country, the hostile media, the foreign-policy elite or even the government. No sanctions, no international isolation, not even a thousand extra body-bags courtesy of a foreign power supplying Saddam with weaponry to aid against a hostile, illegal invasion. Just a "yep, got it, shouldnt have done that, soz guys, probably wont do it again for a good while, btw see how humble we are? The Chinese/Russians would never!". But none of the tangible 'consequences' that the US regularly threatens to mete out to others.
Of course, this is because in the real-world, there are only 2 countries (excluding EU) that have the power to sanction anybody and nobody is/was going to sanction the US for crimes past or present. But then you are left face-to-face with the reality that the balance between raw, coercive power and geopolitical ethics/laws is not as even, or 'favorable' towards the latter, as you might like. Progressives hate the idea of compromising with this aforementioned reality.
I actually sympathize with the first bit Re 'consequences'. Americans can't be permitted to go prancing about the world stage selectively applying some international laws/norms whilst violating others, invading countries, drone-bombing weddings, etc. All the while proclaiming that there is some perfectly unique, feedback-loop within their system that then 'rights the wrongs' and so invalidates the need for the sort of severe outside censure/penalties which they are happy to dish out themselves. Luckily (for non-Americans), power dynamics are shifting and the raw US power that underpins a lot of their, use-of and immunity-to, unilateral, punitive, actions, is now in a gradual but irreversible relative decline. Massive countries like China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, etc, countries with no obviously deep links to the US (maybe outside of a momentary convergence of interests) will shift the balance of power and by mid-century should cement a truly multi-polar world.
Progressives, however, are then going to have to come to terms with the fact that the US will no longer be the hegemonic rule-breaker par-excellence. China already boasts very similar levels of geopolitical power and by mid-century will likely have overtaken the US in a lot of key metrics. China, already, is nigh-on impervious to western censure and is growing increasingly impatient with any criticism. How will the progressives then react to a nation that doesnt even present them with the illusion that their disapprobation matters?
Tksr, I think global power dynamics are shifting but more in a way to isolate the US than to explicitly counter it. Aside from the possible exception of Brazil, there is no major power in the Western Hemisphere aside from America. Most of the world’s powers are clustered in Eurasia.
Simple geography dictates that for countries like China and India or even China and Russia, they will be mutually a greater threat to each other than the USA will be to any of them. America has always been the “odd man out” in great power conflicts. It generally gets drawn into or inserts itself into other peoples’ fights. That is why we see the great powers of Eurasia hedging against each other.
For example, China’s navy is structured towards winning local conflicts. It is structured with a very large fleet of vessels with small tonnage. This instills insecurity in China’s neighbors who bolster their own capabilities (e.g. Indonesian military modernizations). This in turn feeds Chinese insecurity and creates a vicious spiral. The same can be said for India and it’s neighbors as well as Russia and its neighbors.
Nobody is arguing that the US will not be able to play the role of off-shore balancer or that it will ever be sidelined totally in the realm of global geopolitics. This is not the point I am trying to make, but I would quickly add that the tyranny of distance works both ways.
My point is/was that as other poles rise, the US' ability to dictate rules of the road and/or build systems/institutions which solely serve its interests will naturally decrease. For example, we can already see that it now needs to partner with a whole host of European and Asian countries to try and set technology standards to cope with the rise of China. This isn't something it had to do back in the 1990s. Its sanctions regime too is going to have to be used a hell of a lot more selectively in a future where a) its interests are not 100% aligned with those of the EU (the only power with whom it shares enduring cultural/linguistic links), b) new technologies make them less potent and c) new powers (india, indonesia, nigeria, etc) and power structures develop to hugely increase the complexity of even trying to implement a sanctions programme.
Ultimately the US will always have a seat in the room. It isnt going anywhere. However, going forward, it will be (at best) a case of Primus inter pares and that obviously comes with far more constraints than the role of unchallengeable Hegemon.
A balance of powers where no one can overwhelm the rest also tends to be very violent full of wars for a long time as European history shows, while a Pax Americana/Romana/Sinica where a hegemon dominates tends to lead to less suffering for the common folks in a large area (even if the hegemon was quite expansionary as Rome was).
"In 2003 it was the U.S. threatening to invade a country that had not threatened it in any way; now it’s Russia threatening to invade a country that has not threatened it in any way." He literally says they're the same, you just have US/Noah Smith derangement syndrome so bad you can't see it.
It's convenient to say that past errors or your side are the same as current actions of another side.
That way you get to keep your past actions (what's done is done), you get to play hollier than thou (hey, I'm against that stuff now), plus you get to criticize the other side real-time actions while appearing impartial, and support your real-time actions against it (sanctions, troops, etc).
That's "hypocritical impartiality 101" in the playbook.
Dude, what do you want Noah to do about the fact that the Iraq invasion has already happened?? How has he been partial or hypocritical, he literally stated that both are bad??
It’s super obvious you just want every single piece of rhetoric to be anti-US, because you can’t even handle a simultaneous criticism of both the US and Russia.
You're making an error by thinking in terms of "sides", as though the US (or any country) is a hive mind. Lots of people on this "side" thought invading Iraq was a bad idea in 2003; are those people hypocrites for opposing another invasion now?
> "killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people" in Iraq = Error
Grim number utilitarianism actually has strange results here, because Bush definitely saved more lives with PEPFAR than were lost in Iraq. And a generic replacement president probably wouldn't have done the good one.
In my view, this makes the case against the Iraq War even more damning. The best thing American taxpayers can do for non-Americans isn't violently rewriting global governance norms, but raising our spending on global health initiatives from a relative pittance to something at least a bit more than that.
John from VA, you make a good observation. I think though we must remember back to the zeitgeist of the 9-11 era. Between 2001 and perhaps 2004 America felt a profound insecurity and fear of an even more devastating 9-11 style terrorist attack (possibly with nukes).
We must pair this sense of insecurity with the intense desire for retribution and the nationalistic fervor it fed into our people. Americans felt entitled to wage the War on Terror. They felt they were in a way “owed” a revenge.
When we look back we cannot forget our sense of the “Spirit of the age” that operated then. I don’t think Americans would have been too partial to a PEPFAR type of engagement with the Middle East—even though in the long run it would have served our national interests, and frankly, humanity much better.
I don't think PEPFAR registered with most voters and if anything, it was mostly Bush himself who pushed hard for it. I also don't think we would've had a large public push to invade Iraq without the Bush administration misrepresenting evidence of Iraqi threats to the US. The zeitgeist might be important for explaining what policy happened, but the players behind the scenes played a very powerful role in shaping events, as well.
Americans were afraid so they needed to slaughter millions of people who had nothing to do with 9/11 to make themselves feel better. Totally makes sense.
"When Russia invaded in 2014, Ukraine was thinking about joining the EU, but not NATO"
Yeah, as if the pressure ever stopped. Conveniently forgot that at the same exact year foreign powers supported, funded, and celebrated the orange-colored Maidan "revolution", resulting in the toppling of the democratically elected government of Ukraine by friendly to them goons, which included bona-fide neo-nazis in their coalition.
And areas of Ukraine were historically part of Russia for centuries, and some, like Crimea, had a majority ethnic Russian population, and the country is being cuddled by foreign powers to be used as a pressure point against Russia. Not that this gives Russia the right, but it's an understandable concern and right next to its borders.
Meanwhile, the US has invaded 4 countries in the last 20 years, halfway around the world from itself, that it had absolutely no reason to be or BS, and helped destabilize several others and arbitrarily punish ("sanction") whichever it doesn't like with huge cost to their populations. Cry me a river about their concern for "aggresion" in this case.
Reacting against having a bordering country's government toppled and used against you, which country has large pockets of ethnic population of your ethnicity (that you're justified to be concerned about), and which country had historically been part of your country for centuries, is not exactly imperialism. At worst it might be irredentism.
And certainly it's not the "let's invade and occupy some country half around the world from us for their oil resources, to get a foothold to the area to use it to futher promote our interests, or to feed our military contractors" kind of imperialism.
So it’s not imperialism even if you invade a people who doesn’t want you there just because there is a border? So do you support the US invading Mexico, then? Because Ukraine poses as much of a threat to Russia as Mexico does to the US.
In general, it's not imperialism if you're not building an empire, and if you're not invading half the world away from you. It might be recidivism, it might be settling historical griavences (as neighbors have) and so on.
As for the "US invading Mexico", whether I do support it or not, they already did. I'll take their concerns seriously when they give back California, Texas, Florida, and so on.
"Because Ukraine poses as much of a threat to Russia as Mexico does to the US".
Mexico is not funded, and manipulated by the largest enemy to the US, which has also previously approached all neighbor countries to get into its anti-US cold-war army coalition.
When a much smaller country than Mexico got into a similar situation, with some missiles put by USSR in Cuba, the US not only threatened invasion but immediate world war III.
The only reason Russia thinks of the US as an enemy is because Putin finds democracy to be an enemy. If Russia had a fully functioning democracy, do you think any of this would happen?
"The only reason Russia thinks of the US as an enemy is because Putin finds democracy to be an enemy."
That's a mental model of the situation for an American informed by their domestic news, all synchronized to the bipartisan consensus and the facts as written by the State Dept. Not so much for Europeans who actually know history.
As if the US being pro-democracy, is why Putin considers it an enemy.
If Putin was a malleable puppet, they'd had absolutely no problem with him being 10 times worse - like they didn't have a problem toppling democracies when it suited them, from Mosaddegh to Allende, and like they had no problems with dictators and authoritarian states, from Pinochet and Suharto to their modern day pals like the Saudis, or people Bolsonaro.
> If Russia had a fully functioning democracy, do you think any of this would happen?
If the "fully functioning democracy" wasn't a pushover like Yeltsin, handing over national resources to the lowest western bidder, and playing by the US national interests playbook? Absolutely.
Or is the question based on the assumption that only "non functioning democracies" ever have wars with their neighbors? Especially if hollier than thou "fully functioning democracies" try to use them as satellite states to do their bidding, and to bring them in explicitly against them cold war coalition?
It's amazing that large pockets of ethnic population matter more to you than sovereignty of a country. This is what happens when you consume so much anti-US content that you end up implicitly defending Nazi Germany's imperialism of Sudetenland.
"It's amazing that large pockets of ethnic population matter more to you than sovereignty of a country."
Not that amazing. A "country" in the abstract is just a diplomatically regognized area where some government exerts its power. Countries can be created arbitrarily, badly, with force, often separating people or combining peoples with differerent interests and ways of life, like the straight line African country borders drawn by colonialists (from arrogance of on purpose to divide-and-conquer) that ended in so much bloodshed and internal conflict.
Whereas, ethnicity has behind it an actual nation of people, with common culture, shared history, and so on, and ethnicities creating their own sovereign national states has been the historical force breaking down empires and joining feudal kingships and creating modern Europe.
Not to mention how hypocritical the US concerns about the "sovereignity" of some particular country is, from countries that have toppled governments, invaded, bombed, and sanctioned tons of others for daring to be sovereign, and keep many more still as satellites/puppets.
If it is permissible, or at least understandable, for a country to go to war with a neighboring state to protect its ethnic kinsmen would it also be permissible or understandable for that country to also eject or cleanse itself of different ethnicities?
If you are for the first line of reasoning it is very difficult to counter the second. The logic of the first easily translates to the latter and could lead to problems.
Still defending imperialism of Sudetenland!! Countries can be drawn badly, doesn’t mean that suddenly imperialism is okay, but keep covering for Russia dude.
And look at that last paragraph saying “omg US hypocritical” as if that has ANYTHING to do with my point, lmao.
Plus, if you ask the Russian speakers in the Ukraine which country they’d prefer to belong to these days, they most certain wouldn’t choose the country run by Putin.
Ehh that one's actually debatable. There WERE referenda in the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine. The main problem was that those referenda were beset by all the usual meddling and election-rigging.
I find myself to be in complete agreement with the second part of your post but not so much with the first.
The fact is that Germany, France even Ukraine are concerned about the language coming out of Washington.
If Putin attacks Ukraine he will clearly be the most responsible party, by far but there are concerns, and not just from the Putin friendly alt-right or the far-left.
I recommend you check out the Bloggingheads conversation between Robert Wright and Thomas Friedman. Thomas Friedman, yes let's invade Iraq yesterday Thomas Friedman, was arguing NATO expansion was a mistake and that the best resolution to this crisis would be an officially neutral Ukraine.
"Meanwhile, some in the press (though few to no people in positions of power) are still flirting with fringe ideologies like MMT, which urge higher deficits and lower taxes in every situation."
Neither "fringe" nor "ideology" applies to MMT and the phrase "...which urge higher deficits and lower taxes in every situation" reveals that you don't know much about it. That contention compares badly with the large majority of your writing which is informed and free of hyperbole. I feel MMT has much to recommend itself, especially as an alternative to Neoliberal economics which is still dominant in the US in spite of its many defects and the sorry record it has had in our country for the last fifty years. Maybe consider investigating MMT and posting your thoughts?
"My position on this conflict has been the same since 2014: Russia is the aggressor and what it's doing to Ukraine is terribly unfair, and also there's very little the US can do about it and a lot the US has done in the past to help get us here."
Although I think you're broadly correct, I think you are missing something on the concept of provocation in understanding how Russia sees it – and of course one of the tragedies of war is that both sides often think the other provoked it. If you look at it in terms of morally-neutral regional power politics with Russia and the Western countries as adversaries, it certainly looks like the Western countries are continuing their push to expand their alliance to Russia's borders – or from a revanchist perspective, inside Russia's historical borders. Whether it's via membership in the EU or NATO is a distinction without a difference – in fact I'd say the former is more of a sign of alliance with the Western nations than the latter – so a step like, say, granting visa-free travel, or joining the DCFTA, or announcing that you're seeking EU membership, is seen as part of a realignment being pushed against Russia's interest, not without reason.
The big caveat, of course, being in the EU is way better than being in Russia's 'sphere of influence' and literally every country knows this, so Russia basically has no hope of maintaining a sphere of influence by normal means. The EU is widely seen as weak but is very, very good at leveraging all kinds of economic strength (as long as its citizens pay no price whatsoever), so the sheer gravity of the market will pull countries like Ukraine in. This is a direct threat to Russia's influence in the region, which powers always see as key to their self-interest – no one wants an enemy right on their border.
I still agree with you that tools such as sanctions and (maybe) weapons shipments are fine; the issue of the sanctity of international borders is also important and allowing Russia to annex Crimea essentially unpunished was a big mistake that I think exacerbated the current crisis. And I think it's plausible that Putin thought the EU would back down and the US wouldn't care and now is caught in a kind of bluff he didn't expect to deliver on. I also always suspect these things are driven by internal politics we don't hear about, like some threat to his power from a close ally. Who knows? But I don't think Russia is wrong to see Ukraine falling out of its sphere of influence as a precursor to important countries like Kazakhstan doing so as well, and because the only source of power it has our arms and natural resource supply, they are the only ones they can use.
So yes, it's a war of aggression in which Putin would be in the wrong. But strictly in terms of power balance, the West has definitely taken steps to shift the balance away from Russia. In theory, it could promise to take those steps, like disavowing EU or NATO membership – although at this stage that might look like capitulation and invite further Russian overreach. Statecraft is complicated, but I think you really are overlooking the history of power balance in Eastern Europe in the last few decades; Ukraine is much more salient to Russia than Iraq was to the United States.
Well, the key assumption you’re making is that Putin sees the West as an enemy, because Western values certainly are to an autocrat like him, but there is as much reason for _Russia_ to see the West as the enemy as there is for France to see Germany (or Britain) as an enemy.
Maybe 'adversary' is a better word, but it's essentially a holdover from the Cold War – enemies become friends only in exceptional circumstances, such as European powers after WW2. I think countries of similar size will essentially always compete unless forced to ally by a larger adversary, historically they don't really seem to need a reason, the reasons are invented to justify the competition.
Eh. I suppose it depends on what you mean by similar size, but the UK and US didn’t start a war during the time frame when the US was ascending and UK declining. Plus, by any definition, Russia is a much smaller power than the US.
And more importantly, tons of vaguely aggressive rhetoric from hawks in WaPo or the Atlantic, who've spent the past 20 years never seeing a war they didn't want to start or double down on, calling for "resolve" and making horrible WWII analogies that decry "appeasement," and saying Putin won't stop with Ukraine, and the future of the whole free world is on the line, in the service of escalatory maximalist approaches that prevent any diplomatic concessions that might actually avoid a war. "No war in Ukraine" isn't just a call for the United States to avoid personally fighting it, but for the United States to swallow its pride and do what's necessary to actually avoid it.
The graver straw man is implying that those calling for realism and restraint somehow do not "support Ukraine" and its democratic leanings. Every decent, informed American with a conscience supports Ukraine, and hopes Vladimir Putin drops dead of a heart attack tomorrow. That just doesn't tell us what the hell to actually do about it, to minimize the harm and injustice that results from anarchic great power politics.
I get that there's recency bias and agree can't confuse Ukraine with Iraq. But it's equally irrational to see the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles as isolated errors, detached from national pathologies, biases and blind spots that remain very much alive in our foreign policy establishment today. And yes: NATO expansion is related to those pathologies. Realists warned against it for precisely the fear that it would stoke Russian insecurity whenever they recovered enough to push back against it, and lofty idealists laughed them out of the room.
You write, "A Russian invasion would a clear and unambiguous act of aggression. And yet some progressives insist on seeing Russia’s buildup as a reaction to Western aggression."
^A Russian invasion can be two things at one time. Yes, it's evil and indefensible by any Western standard - and also something that may not in fact have happened had NATO not surged thousands of miles up to Russia's borders in its decade of weakness. And it might yet not happen, if we weren't too proud to admit what everyone already knows, and offer say a 20-year moratorium on NATO expansion. The maximalist voices who think we still live in 1998 and the United States can get everything it wants all the time are part of the reason we're at an impasse.
I for one much prefer a discourse that finally errs on the side of vigilance against this "blob," who romanticize America's military as a "global force for good," and inevitably trend towards a more aggressive and warmongering foreign policy than the American people actually want. The chances of direct war with Russia are low, but the stakes of such a conflict are high enough - and the experience of complacent media drumbeat recent enough - to warrant forceful and preemptive opposition to the idea.
>>The maximalist voices who think we still live in 1998 and the United States can get everything it wants all the time are part of the reason we're at an impasse.
Who exactly do you think these maximalist voices are? You seem to be hammering away at the exact same strawman Noah called out. The Baltics were admitted in 2004. The only states NATO has admitted since then were on the other side of the Balkans from Russia.
From where I'm sitting, The Blob seems mostly paralyzed on "how to de-escalate without looking like they're capitulating". While I *totally agree* with the general need for "vigilance" against The Blob, it's really confusing to me that you and everyone else are calling for it *right now*, because The Blob doesn't even seem to know what the hell it wants!
The Blob got us in trouble in Iraq and Afghanistan because there was no nuclear power on the other side of the table. The Blob had clear neoliberal/imperialist objectives to complete, and no one was there to stop them, so they built up their steam to a critical mass and shit the bed each time.
But right now, The Blob isn't clearly identifiable as "maximalist". They're using a lot of the same talking points a maximalist *would*, but that's because Putin is, as even you agree, a genuinely bad guy. And again, besides the basic outline of the situation, it doesn't seem like The Blob agrees on much else about the situation! Look, just because every move Putin has made has driven his would-be targets closer to the West, and The Blob was tickled pink about that, doesn't mean The Blob WAS trying to encircle and entrap him, or actively IS now. The red carpet was rolled out for a good 15 years, and then got rolled back up again. Putin's reacting to something that *ended* 15 years ago, not something that's going on right now.
I get the vigilance, but you're still fighting your own previous war against The Blob. You should be more worried that they don't know what the hell they want; but you should also be encouraged. This is an opportunity to build a consensus in a positive direction. But you aren't going to be able to identify that direction accurately if you spend all your time accusing The Blob of a maximalist consensus that doesn't exist.
I think the blob is marked more by a mindset about America's role in the world more than any concrete policy proposal in this or that context. The blob are liberal interventionists, born of Cold War era and emboldened by America's victory and short-lived hegemony. They think the United States is an enlightened and exceptional nation entitled to global "leadership", with a sacred moral duty to impose its preferred "rules based" order on everyone else. They think it should do this by force if necessary, because its military is a "global force for good" that's innately more trustworthy than militaries from nations that don't share America's superior values. They're obsessed with "credibility" and tired WWII analogies, allegedly proving our need to be aggressive and confrontational everywhere at once.
That the blob lacks consensus now is a symptom of its inability to adapt to a multipolar world where that strategy is increasingly unsustainable and unpopular. They are "paralyzed on how to de-escalate without looking like they're capitulating" because they're distinctively terrified of looking like they're capitulating. Ordinary Americans don't care if Ukraine joins NATO. They don't mind admitting that it won't, because they were never that invested in this outsized and outdated view of American capabilities abroad. Realists and humanitarians would gladly trade that admission in order to prevent a savage war, even if it means tacitly conceding that US power has receded from its high-water mark. The blob's pride turns that into a third-rail: all diplomatic concessions are "appeasement." We need to engage with those arguments in order to build a healthier consensus, which would involve more humility about the limits of what we can achieve, and trading concessions (like a moratorium on NATO expansion, and Russia keeping Crimea) that offend our liberal sensibilities, but nonetheless beat the alternatives.
But I think you go off the rails (no pun intended) here:
>>Ordinary Americans don't care if Ukraine joins NATO. They don't mind admitting that it won't, because they were never that invested in this outsized and outdated view of American capabilities abroad. Realists and humanitarians would gladly trade that admission in order to prevent a savage war, even if it means tacitly conceding that US power has receded from its high-water mark. The blob's pride turns that into a third-rail: all diplomatic concessions are "appeasement."
Just because The Blob is wrong when they characterize everything as appeasement, doesn't mean Putin is engaging us "on the level" here and that his demands are innocent. He's cynical. Most available psychoevidence points to a messianic complex of restoring the tsarist Russian Empire, as I mentioned elsewhere. There are very valid frames of argument that outline the very real dangers of Western capitulation in this crisis while still rejecting the Blobbist philosophies of hegemony, credibility, and vigilance against appeasement.
In other words, just because The Blob is almost always wrong, doesn't mean that the realists and humanitarians are right. It is possible, indeed likely, that most actors are misinterpreting the situation based on idiosyncratic biases, and therefore that their policy preferences are wrong. Certainly, thus far all major schools have their clear flaws at the moment.
It's also possible that there is NO one policy path that could reliably both (1) avert an immediate war AND (2) avert the expansion of a neo-tsarist Putinist Russia, let alone satisfy EITHER of them, let alone satisfy any of dozens of other proposed objectives.
The people that want war should join the army get on the plane and sit in a fox hole in the freezing cold waiting for command to charge. From the pictures of the 82nd Airborne troops loading onto planes I had the impression there were too few to make a difference and once again we, American are sacrificing young men and women for poorly developed goals.
Erm, Did you read this piece? Noah’s point is that he can’t actually find (outside of randoms on the Twitterverse) important Americans advocating for the US to fight a war in the Ukraine.
The “people who want war” seem to be Russian, so please direct your remarks at them. After all, the West hasn’t amassed 100,000+ troops on the borders of Ukraine ready to invade.
I suspect that part of the reason why The Blob exists is that Americans tend to be so poorly informed. We all know that domestic politics is tribal at this point, but foreign policy often seems to me to be all the more meme-based, like this bad take of David's here.
I've literally seen this same meme dozens of times in my life, and it's no better than any of those other dumb political memes - like, just to name a few classics: "Congress shouldn't get a paycheck until they pass the budget!" "Just lock them in a room and make them work it out!".
I think there's a missed opportunity to discuss the impact of COVID on people. There's a lot of people who have been traumatized by the past two years and have moved forward very different than before and I do wonder how that'll affect their perspective going forward beyond COVID.
There is certainly a lot of BS rhetoric on both the "hawk" and "dove" sides about the Russia/Ukraine thing. It seems like the real issue of substance that the two sides do disagree about is whether there are concessions the US could make that should be acceptable to us, and which would prevent an invasion.
The real controversy, from what I can tell, is whether the US could solve the whole problem by putting it in writing that Ukraine will never be a NATO member. Perhaps as part of a deal that establishes Ukraine as a neutral state that will not enter military alliances with either NATO nor Russia.
That’s a big one. Also, if the US should take that step. Then it would be essentially giving in to Putin’s bluff/threat. That’s textbook appeasement. And what would constrain Putin from taking Ukraine eventually anyway? Giving Hitler the Sudetenland didn’t stop him from imperialistic aggression.
This is what I mean about ham-fisted pathologies cramming literally everything into WWII analogies. It is not 1935. Putin is not Hitler, and he doesn't want to take over the world. He doesn't even want anything to do with triggering Article V. If ever there were a "Last War Brain" dominating our foreign policy discourse, it's that one.
When you define "appeasement" as "anything less than the United States getting everything it wants all the time," you foreclose any opportunity for actual negotiations. You cannot have a "diplomacy first" foreign policy without a willingness to make concessions, in light of a clear-eyed view of the balance of power. Putin threatened when he did because he accurately sensed that the United States is no longer a global hegemon. However it makes us feel, the balance of power is in his favor. Ukraine is not joining NATO any time soon. So why not say so, if it might avoid a tragedy?
Because, even if you're skeptical of hazy theories like "it shows weakness" as I am, it's still rewarding him for manufacturing a crisis.
He didn't *have* to mobilize forces along the border. Ukraine was not threatening him. NATO wasn't threatening him. He did that all by himself. It was a strategic move, for sure, but it was specifically calculated to create the current crisis. The status quo was that he had effective control of the regions he wanted, and Ukraine's pleas to NATO were falling on deaf ears.
Also, NATO can't declare Ukraine's neutrality for it. That's just as clearly a violation of Ukraine's sovereignty as a Russian invasion would be.
Pretty much any way you slice it, even the most charitable framing of Putin's demands basically subordinates to him Ukraine's sovereign right to determine its own foreign policy. That's by design.
Just because he's "not Hitler" doesn't dictate that our ONLY OPTION is The Full Chamberlain.
Much of that is true, I just don't think it changes the solution that works best for everyone. Putin didn't have to manufacture a crisis, but he deemed it in his interests to do so anyway. I would rather admit that he assessed the cold reality of the situation correctly than watch him kill 50,000 people and rob Ukraine of its entire democracy, for sake of not appearing to "reward" him.
The one part of your comment that isn't true is the idea that excluding Ukraine from NATO somehow robs it of sovereignty. Nonsense. NATO membership obliges AMERICAN forces to go fight on Ukraine's behalf in a potential conflict. That's not a question of self-determination, but of international obligation. It affects us directly.
The only people who deserve a vote on where and whether Americans go fight are Americans. Americans foreclosing a military alliance with Ukraine would be an exercise of our own sovereignty, not a denial of theirs.
I was splitting hairs: I didn't say exclude, I said we couldn't "declare [their] neutrality for [them]". That's different.
Switzerland and Austria, for example, are declared neutral. Great for them! They passed laws that declared it, they fortified the shit out of their mountain provinces, and no one will ever force them out of it. Ukraine's still a democracy, and they could literally do the exact same thing! I'd even prefer that outcome.
NATO also has plenty of its own agency, and the power to declare a moratorium on new members along Russia's borders. I think any such moratorium would have to come with an implied threat: "if you invade or annex anyone before the 20 years is up, all bets are off". Given Putin's age, it would help us run out the clock on him! And if I'm totally wrong with my psychoanalysis, and he's just trying to brush us off his doorstep by scaring us silly (I wouldn't put it past him!), it still works.
But a straight moratorium with no qualifications is still a capitulation. Again, just because he's "not Hitler" and just because "credibility" and "weakness" are bullshit, doesn't mean that he wouldn't find SOME way to take advantage of a straight moratorium. If anything, he's Saner Than Hitler And Wily Like A Fox, which means he's even MORE liable to take advantage.
I don't care about driving Putin to the Pacific. Or even past the Urals. Russia is a vital power that keeps Northern Asia from being a thorn in everyone's side and the fucking ethnic basket case it rightly SHOULD be. I just want to see stability in Eastern Europe, and we can't have that if he's rebuilding a damned tsarist empire.
Thank you! I too tire of the threadbare comparisons to WW2. Enough already!
That said, I think there has to be an element of fairness accorded the “Blob.”
Another way of looking at it is that the “Blob” and its associates worldwide have been trying to cultivate an international relations system with rules that have true enforcement mechanisms. The enforcers being the US alliance network.
I think it is one thing for you to point to instances where the “Blob” has gravely erred but it is a different thing entirely to critique the entire “rules based order” project (which needs a much more robust critique than what I have seen in the comments here so far).
Of course we still tire of them. Putin would need to invade about 6 more countries, then incite allies in Asia to start conquering too in a sincere effort to take over the world, and then commit a Holocaust for it to be an appropriate analogy.
Leave aside the lessons learned from the Iraq war, it's worth putting the Russia-Ukraine conflict through some basic marginal cost-benefit analysis.
Is there anything we can do, that we are willing to do, that could possibly improve the situation any? And if yes, would the improvement justify the cost?
I mean, we've been trying sanctions for years, and killing the pipeline appears to be a non-starter. A weapons buildup is brinkmanship by definition, and exactly what Russia is doing. Brinkmanship is a dangerous game, and it frequently leads to a bad place.
But back to the last-war problem: have any of the vested interests that dragged us to hell in Iraq changed? So why should we trust anyone in the establishment?
The military-industrial complex goes far beyond one or two people. The military -- defense contractor revolving door is as active as it ever was. Who, exactly, has been held accountable for any part of the decades-long debacle? A couple of the grunts at Abu Ghraib and a handful of other war criminals, the guy who complained that the Afghanistan withdrawal was badly executed, and...who else?
The United States, American media and American politicians are doing nothing but talking about war: defending the Ukraine when there is ZERO Russian interest in invading Ukraine - much less occupying it.
Huh. I guess countries just amass virtually their entire military along the borders of a neighboring country for no reason.
So pray tell, can you name another country that does that for no reason?
Though I will give you this: You may be right that Putin is simply bluffing and trying to get anything he can out of his bluff. Though I don’t think he’s thought through the consequences for Russia.
Seriously - you couldn't take the trouble to at least do a Wiki search before you wrote the above? Russia's armed forces have over 1 million active personnel.
130K is by no means "virtually their entire military".
Secondly, where do you expect armed forces to reside? Since Russia doesn't have 180 or whatever foreign military bases like the US (they have exactly 1 outside of ex-USSR bordering nations: Syria), they're going to be in Russia.
And where in Russia are they going to be? A lot of them are going to be on Russia's borders.
A significant number of the so-called smoking gun photo proofs are cropped pictures of Russian military bases: showing trucks or whatever but not showing the concrete barracks.
Lastly, there are regular military exercises along the Russian border - these always prompt a force shift response in case the exercise is a ruse.
Scott Ritter said it best: If you're going to get sanctioned for putting peacekeepers in Donetsk anyway - why not just defang Ukraine once and for all? Russia won't stay there - they'll leave pretty quick unlike the US in Iraq or Afghanistan.
And you still are not admitting your failure to spend 5 seconds to see just how large the Russian military is.
This is a great post, but I think the risk of a hyper inflationary outcome if the Fed doesn’t hike rates is overstated. Hyper inflations are extremely rare and the key conditions just aren’t there (chiefly, runaway monetary financing of government deficits). I just don’t see the mechanism for how higher inflationary expectations results in currency collapse. Feels a bit blackbox, hand wavy.
Everyone informed on the subject has excellent reason to believe he'll stop there, at least in terms of overt territorial conquest. It is not 1935. Putin is not Hitler, and he doesn't want to take over the world, nor even trigger Article V.
As far as I can see it, Putin isn't trying to rebuild the Soviet Empire, he's trying to rebuild the *Russian [Tsarist] Empire*. And I mean that very literally - he's been playing the "orthodoxy, autocracy, nationalism" playbook word for word for 20 years now.
The Russian Empire was an inherently colonial project that took a very long view: In order to pacify the East, it needed to Russianize those peoples, and that process was going to take generations.
Everyone keeps saying Putin isn't Hitler, and you're absolutely right that he's not "hell bent on genocidal conquest". But there's plenty of evidence that he's determined to shape his state such that he is the first in a long line of Russian leaders who accomplish [ed: on their Western frontier] through cultural hegemony what the Soviets never could with ideology and totalitarianism.
So, sure, he's not going to just directly invade the Baltics after taking Ukraine. But he'll definitely kickstart Belarus' transition into some sort of Russian "conservatorship", and maybe even astroturf a movement there for it to officially join the Russian Federation. He'll use that as a platform to put pressure on the Baltics - each of which have ~25% Russian populations - and maybe even Finland. The tactics will change - he'll trade oil extortion or something else for Article V-inducing border crises - but the goal will be the same - "roll back NATO expansion" - and the rhetoric will be the same - "there are Ethnic Russians inside your borders who need to be protected!".
I eagerly await your counterpoint. Because thus far, I haven't seen anyone on the dove side put forth an actual alternative theory of Putin's overarching goals. It's mostly just been protestations that "he's not Hitler", which, congratulations on being smart enough to figure that out, but doesn't fully answer the question.
Arming Ukraine is a must. No need for American troops to die in Ukraine, but if Putin’s going to mass pretty much his entire military on the borders of Ukraine, I’m not sure why he expects everyone else to not react.
"Meanwhile, recent U.S. troop deployments to NATO countries in East Europe such as Poland and Romania total fewer than 6,000 — a pittance compared to the 130,000 soldiers Russia has amassed on the Ukraine border, and certainly nowhere near enough to be the basis of military action."
On the contrary, 6000 NATO troops can do quite a lot. "Bluntly, they can die. They can die heroically, tragically, and in a manner that guarantees that the action cannot stop there." (Schelling, Arms and Influence). NATO troops dying in eastern Europe would mobilize domestic support for a conventional war. That was the logic of the East Berlin garrison, that is still the logic of placing an airborne battalion of 500 soldiers in Latvia.
Second, while few or no politicians are openly dumb enough to say the magic phrase "war with Russia," they are advocating measures equivalent to war. A no fly zone, as Rep. Kinzinger brilliantly proposed, would guarantee act of war. Shooting down a Russian fighter jet is an act of war, shooting down a Russian fighter jet with a NATO jet flying out of Poland or Romania justifies a Russian attack on that country. Imagine the response if a Russian jet out of Syria shot down an American fighter jet during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Disconnecting Russia from global finance is tantamount to an act of war under international law. One of the anti-US/anti-Roosevelt lines is he provoked the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor by embargoing the Japanese economy and denying them oil.
There is a moral difference between Iraq and Ukraine. It's weird and difficult to articulate, but no amount of tu quoque'ing can make it immoral for America to condemn the invasion of Ukraine.
To turn around and do exactly that, many of the same people cheerleading for sending anti-tank weapons to Ukraine were rending garments and denouncing Putin when Russia was (falsely, in turned out) accused of paying the Taliban bounties for American servicemembers, or when Iran armed Iraqi insurgents. Many of the politicians demanding NATO deployments to Eastern Europe and aggressive confrontation with Russia, even if that sparks a war (if Putin is unhinged enough to attack Ukraine, as we are now told to assume he's insane, why would he be any more reluctant to invade Estonia, or bombard Germany?)
What if Russia refuses to export gas to Eastern Europe, and the lights turn off and the heat goes out? Should we invade to end the humanitarian crisis and (forcibly) restore LNG shipments?
In short, even if no one says "invade Russia," demanding actions that predictably lead to a shooting conflict between NATO and Russia is not a smart move, nor is it a morally superior path to those who say to stay out of the war.
For clarity - I favor arms shipments to Ukraine, I favor closing the Bosphorus to Russian ships, I do not favor shutting down Russian banks. That hurts ordinary Russians far more than the kleptocrats, and unlike western democracies, popular discontent in Moscow leads to police rounding up the demonstrators, not to government policy changes.
I think what really irks many progressives, especially those outside the US, is that America faced no real 'consequences' as a result of the Iraq war. Just a bunch of perfunctory disclaimers and Op-eds admitting how 'wrong' it was post-fact. But no real, negative, ramifications for either the country, the hostile media, the foreign-policy elite or even the government. No sanctions, no international isolation, not even a thousand extra body-bags courtesy of a foreign power supplying Saddam with weaponry to aid against a hostile, illegal invasion. Just a "yep, got it, shouldnt have done that, soz guys, probably wont do it again for a good while, btw see how humble we are? The Chinese/Russians would never!". But none of the tangible 'consequences' that the US regularly threatens to mete out to others.
Of course, this is because in the real-world, there are only 2 countries (excluding EU) that have the power to sanction anybody and nobody is/was going to sanction the US for crimes past or present. But then you are left face-to-face with the reality that the balance between raw, coercive power and geopolitical ethics/laws is not as even, or 'favorable' towards the latter, as you might like. Progressives hate the idea of compromising with this aforementioned reality.
I actually sympathize with the first bit Re 'consequences'. Americans can't be permitted to go prancing about the world stage selectively applying some international laws/norms whilst violating others, invading countries, drone-bombing weddings, etc. All the while proclaiming that there is some perfectly unique, feedback-loop within their system that then 'rights the wrongs' and so invalidates the need for the sort of severe outside censure/penalties which they are happy to dish out themselves. Luckily (for non-Americans), power dynamics are shifting and the raw US power that underpins a lot of their, use-of and immunity-to, unilateral, punitive, actions, is now in a gradual but irreversible relative decline. Massive countries like China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, etc, countries with no obviously deep links to the US (maybe outside of a momentary convergence of interests) will shift the balance of power and by mid-century should cement a truly multi-polar world.
Progressives, however, are then going to have to come to terms with the fact that the US will no longer be the hegemonic rule-breaker par-excellence. China already boasts very similar levels of geopolitical power and by mid-century will likely have overtaken the US in a lot of key metrics. China, already, is nigh-on impervious to western censure and is growing increasingly impatient with any criticism. How will the progressives then react to a nation that doesnt even present them with the illusion that their disapprobation matters?
Tksr, I think global power dynamics are shifting but more in a way to isolate the US than to explicitly counter it. Aside from the possible exception of Brazil, there is no major power in the Western Hemisphere aside from America. Most of the world’s powers are clustered in Eurasia.
Simple geography dictates that for countries like China and India or even China and Russia, they will be mutually a greater threat to each other than the USA will be to any of them. America has always been the “odd man out” in great power conflicts. It generally gets drawn into or inserts itself into other peoples’ fights. That is why we see the great powers of Eurasia hedging against each other.
For example, China’s navy is structured towards winning local conflicts. It is structured with a very large fleet of vessels with small tonnage. This instills insecurity in China’s neighbors who bolster their own capabilities (e.g. Indonesian military modernizations). This in turn feeds Chinese insecurity and creates a vicious spiral. The same can be said for India and it’s neighbors as well as Russia and its neighbors.
Nobody is arguing that the US will not be able to play the role of off-shore balancer or that it will ever be sidelined totally in the realm of global geopolitics. This is not the point I am trying to make, but I would quickly add that the tyranny of distance works both ways.
My point is/was that as other poles rise, the US' ability to dictate rules of the road and/or build systems/institutions which solely serve its interests will naturally decrease. For example, we can already see that it now needs to partner with a whole host of European and Asian countries to try and set technology standards to cope with the rise of China. This isn't something it had to do back in the 1990s. Its sanctions regime too is going to have to be used a hell of a lot more selectively in a future where a) its interests are not 100% aligned with those of the EU (the only power with whom it shares enduring cultural/linguistic links), b) new technologies make them less potent and c) new powers (india, indonesia, nigeria, etc) and power structures develop to hugely increase the complexity of even trying to implement a sanctions programme.
Ultimately the US will always have a seat in the room. It isnt going anywhere. However, going forward, it will be (at best) a case of Primus inter pares and that obviously comes with far more constraints than the role of unchallengeable Hegemon.
A balance of powers where no one can overwhelm the rest also tends to be very violent full of wars for a long time as European history shows, while a Pax Americana/Romana/Sinica where a hegemon dominates tends to lead to less suffering for the common folks in a large area (even if the hegemon was quite expansionary as Rome was).
"killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people" in Iraq = Error
Russia invading Ukraine = Crime against humanity
"In 2003 it was the U.S. threatening to invade a country that had not threatened it in any way; now it’s Russia threatening to invade a country that has not threatened it in any way." He literally says they're the same, you just have US/Noah Smith derangement syndrome so bad you can't see it.
"He literally says they're the same"
It's convenient to say that past errors or your side are the same as current actions of another side.
That way you get to keep your past actions (what's done is done), you get to play hollier than thou (hey, I'm against that stuff now), plus you get to criticize the other side real-time actions while appearing impartial, and support your real-time actions against it (sanctions, troops, etc).
That's "hypocritical impartiality 101" in the playbook.
Dude, what do you want Noah to do about the fact that the Iraq invasion has already happened?? How has he been partial or hypocritical, he literally stated that both are bad??
It’s super obvious you just want every single piece of rhetoric to be anti-US, because you can’t even handle a simultaneous criticism of both the US and Russia.
You're making an error by thinking in terms of "sides", as though the US (or any country) is a hive mind. Lots of people on this "side" thought invading Iraq was a bad idea in 2003; are those people hypocrites for opposing another invasion now?
Literally one person in Congress voted against the Iraq War.
How about now?
> "killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people" in Iraq = Error
Grim number utilitarianism actually has strange results here, because Bush definitely saved more lives with PEPFAR than were lost in Iraq. And a generic replacement president probably wouldn't have done the good one.
In my view, this makes the case against the Iraq War even more damning. The best thing American taxpayers can do for non-Americans isn't violently rewriting global governance norms, but raising our spending on global health initiatives from a relative pittance to something at least a bit more than that.
John from VA, you make a good observation. I think though we must remember back to the zeitgeist of the 9-11 era. Between 2001 and perhaps 2004 America felt a profound insecurity and fear of an even more devastating 9-11 style terrorist attack (possibly with nukes).
We must pair this sense of insecurity with the intense desire for retribution and the nationalistic fervor it fed into our people. Americans felt entitled to wage the War on Terror. They felt they were in a way “owed” a revenge.
When we look back we cannot forget our sense of the “Spirit of the age” that operated then. I don’t think Americans would have been too partial to a PEPFAR type of engagement with the Middle East—even though in the long run it would have served our national interests, and frankly, humanity much better.
I don't think PEPFAR registered with most voters and if anything, it was mostly Bush himself who pushed hard for it. I also don't think we would've had a large public push to invade Iraq without the Bush administration misrepresenting evidence of Iraqi threats to the US. The zeitgeist might be important for explaining what policy happened, but the players behind the scenes played a very powerful role in shaping events, as well.
Americans were afraid so they needed to slaughter millions of people who had nothing to do with 9/11 to make themselves feel better. Totally makes sense.
Errors are worst than crimes.
"When Russia invaded in 2014, Ukraine was thinking about joining the EU, but not NATO"
Yeah, as if the pressure ever stopped. Conveniently forgot that at the same exact year foreign powers supported, funded, and celebrated the orange-colored Maidan "revolution", resulting in the toppling of the democratically elected government of Ukraine by friendly to them goons, which included bona-fide neo-nazis in their coalition.
And areas of Ukraine were historically part of Russia for centuries, and some, like Crimea, had a majority ethnic Russian population, and the country is being cuddled by foreign powers to be used as a pressure point against Russia. Not that this gives Russia the right, but it's an understandable concern and right next to its borders.
Meanwhile, the US has invaded 4 countries in the last 20 years, halfway around the world from itself, that it had absolutely no reason to be or BS, and helped destabilize several others and arbitrarily punish ("sanction") whichever it doesn't like with huge cost to their populations. Cry me a river about their concern for "aggresion" in this case.
So are you for imperialism or against it?
Noah is consistent, at least, in being against imperialism (even if the US, under completely different administrations, is inconsistent).
Reacting against having a bordering country's government toppled and used against you, which country has large pockets of ethnic population of your ethnicity (that you're justified to be concerned about), and which country had historically been part of your country for centuries, is not exactly imperialism. At worst it might be irredentism.
And certainly it's not the "let's invade and occupy some country half around the world from us for their oil resources, to get a foothold to the area to use it to futher promote our interests, or to feed our military contractors" kind of imperialism.
So it’s not imperialism even if you invade a people who doesn’t want you there just because there is a border? So do you support the US invading Mexico, then? Because Ukraine poses as much of a threat to Russia as Mexico does to the US.
In general, it's not imperialism if you're not building an empire, and if you're not invading half the world away from you. It might be recidivism, it might be settling historical griavences (as neighbors have) and so on.
As for the "US invading Mexico", whether I do support it or not, they already did. I'll take their concerns seriously when they give back California, Texas, Florida, and so on.
"Because Ukraine poses as much of a threat to Russia as Mexico does to the US".
Mexico is not funded, and manipulated by the largest enemy to the US, which has also previously approached all neighbor countries to get into its anti-US cold-war army coalition.
When a much smaller country than Mexico got into a similar situation, with some missiles put by USSR in Cuba, the US not only threatened invasion but immediate world war III.
The only reason Russia thinks of the US as an enemy is because Putin finds democracy to be an enemy. If Russia had a fully functioning democracy, do you think any of this would happen?
"The only reason Russia thinks of the US as an enemy is because Putin finds democracy to be an enemy."
That's a mental model of the situation for an American informed by their domestic news, all synchronized to the bipartisan consensus and the facts as written by the State Dept. Not so much for Europeans who actually know history.
As if the US being pro-democracy, is why Putin considers it an enemy.
If Putin was a malleable puppet, they'd had absolutely no problem with him being 10 times worse - like they didn't have a problem toppling democracies when it suited them, from Mosaddegh to Allende, and like they had no problems with dictators and authoritarian states, from Pinochet and Suharto to their modern day pals like the Saudis, or people Bolsonaro.
> If Russia had a fully functioning democracy, do you think any of this would happen?
If the "fully functioning democracy" wasn't a pushover like Yeltsin, handing over national resources to the lowest western bidder, and playing by the US national interests playbook? Absolutely.
Or is the question based on the assumption that only "non functioning democracies" ever have wars with their neighbors? Especially if hollier than thou "fully functioning democracies" try to use them as satellite states to do their bidding, and to bring them in explicitly against them cold war coalition?
It's amazing that large pockets of ethnic population matter more to you than sovereignty of a country. This is what happens when you consume so much anti-US content that you end up implicitly defending Nazi Germany's imperialism of Sudetenland.
"It's amazing that large pockets of ethnic population matter more to you than sovereignty of a country."
Not that amazing. A "country" in the abstract is just a diplomatically regognized area where some government exerts its power. Countries can be created arbitrarily, badly, with force, often separating people or combining peoples with differerent interests and ways of life, like the straight line African country borders drawn by colonialists (from arrogance of on purpose to divide-and-conquer) that ended in so much bloodshed and internal conflict.
Whereas, ethnicity has behind it an actual nation of people, with common culture, shared history, and so on, and ethnicities creating their own sovereign national states has been the historical force breaking down empires and joining feudal kingships and creating modern Europe.
Not to mention how hypocritical the US concerns about the "sovereignity" of some particular country is, from countries that have toppled governments, invaded, bombed, and sanctioned tons of others for daring to be sovereign, and keep many more still as satellites/puppets.
If it is permissible, or at least understandable, for a country to go to war with a neighboring state to protect its ethnic kinsmen would it also be permissible or understandable for that country to also eject or cleanse itself of different ethnicities?
If you are for the first line of reasoning it is very difficult to counter the second. The logic of the first easily translates to the latter and could lead to problems.
"If you are for the first line of reasoning it is very difficult to counter the second."
Only if one follows the slippery-slope fallacy.
Still defending imperialism of Sudetenland!! Countries can be drawn badly, doesn’t mean that suddenly imperialism is okay, but keep covering for Russia dude.
And look at that last paragraph saying “omg US hypocritical” as if that has ANYTHING to do with my point, lmao.
Plus, if you ask the Russian speakers in the Ukraine which country they’d prefer to belong to these days, they most certain wouldn’t choose the country run by Putin.
Ehh that one's actually debatable. There WERE referenda in the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine. The main problem was that those referenda were beset by all the usual meddling and election-rigging.
Recently? We’re talking about now, not decades ago.
Really, have you?
You go ask them. All sources I’ve read state that the Russian speakers in Ukraine are firmly anti-Putin now.
I find myself to be in complete agreement with the second part of your post but not so much with the first.
The fact is that Germany, France even Ukraine are concerned about the language coming out of Washington.
If Putin attacks Ukraine he will clearly be the most responsible party, by far but there are concerns, and not just from the Putin friendly alt-right or the far-left.
I recommend you check out the Bloggingheads conversation between Robert Wright and Thomas Friedman. Thomas Friedman, yes let's invade Iraq yesterday Thomas Friedman, was arguing NATO expansion was a mistake and that the best resolution to this crisis would be an officially neutral Ukraine.
Check out the video:
https://youtu.be/mBOczZjQO1Q
Interesting to hear that from Friedman, but unfortunately Noah Smith is the new Thomas Friedman and people listen to him now.
"Meanwhile, some in the press (though few to no people in positions of power) are still flirting with fringe ideologies like MMT, which urge higher deficits and lower taxes in every situation."
Neither "fringe" nor "ideology" applies to MMT and the phrase "...which urge higher deficits and lower taxes in every situation" reveals that you don't know much about it. That contention compares badly with the large majority of your writing which is informed and free of hyperbole. I feel MMT has much to recommend itself, especially as an alternative to Neoliberal economics which is still dominant in the US in spite of its many defects and the sorry record it has had in our country for the last fifty years. Maybe consider investigating MMT and posting your thoughts?
Tweet by David Klion, shared by Matt Yglesias so I assume he also agrees.
Good summary of the Russia/Ukraine crisis in my opinion:
https://twitter.com/DavidKlion/status/1492558754558189569?
t=9Ku9HgbCKm2SeUs2Myrbbg&s=19
"My position on this conflict has been the same since 2014: Russia is the aggressor and what it's doing to Ukraine is terribly unfair, and also there's very little the US can do about it and a lot the US has done in the past to help get us here."
Although I think you're broadly correct, I think you are missing something on the concept of provocation in understanding how Russia sees it – and of course one of the tragedies of war is that both sides often think the other provoked it. If you look at it in terms of morally-neutral regional power politics with Russia and the Western countries as adversaries, it certainly looks like the Western countries are continuing their push to expand their alliance to Russia's borders – or from a revanchist perspective, inside Russia's historical borders. Whether it's via membership in the EU or NATO is a distinction without a difference – in fact I'd say the former is more of a sign of alliance with the Western nations than the latter – so a step like, say, granting visa-free travel, or joining the DCFTA, or announcing that you're seeking EU membership, is seen as part of a realignment being pushed against Russia's interest, not without reason.
The big caveat, of course, being in the EU is way better than being in Russia's 'sphere of influence' and literally every country knows this, so Russia basically has no hope of maintaining a sphere of influence by normal means. The EU is widely seen as weak but is very, very good at leveraging all kinds of economic strength (as long as its citizens pay no price whatsoever), so the sheer gravity of the market will pull countries like Ukraine in. This is a direct threat to Russia's influence in the region, which powers always see as key to their self-interest – no one wants an enemy right on their border.
I still agree with you that tools such as sanctions and (maybe) weapons shipments are fine; the issue of the sanctity of international borders is also important and allowing Russia to annex Crimea essentially unpunished was a big mistake that I think exacerbated the current crisis. And I think it's plausible that Putin thought the EU would back down and the US wouldn't care and now is caught in a kind of bluff he didn't expect to deliver on. I also always suspect these things are driven by internal politics we don't hear about, like some threat to his power from a close ally. Who knows? But I don't think Russia is wrong to see Ukraine falling out of its sphere of influence as a precursor to important countries like Kazakhstan doing so as well, and because the only source of power it has our arms and natural resource supply, they are the only ones they can use.
So yes, it's a war of aggression in which Putin would be in the wrong. But strictly in terms of power balance, the West has definitely taken steps to shift the balance away from Russia. In theory, it could promise to take those steps, like disavowing EU or NATO membership – although at this stage that might look like capitulation and invite further Russian overreach. Statecraft is complicated, but I think you really are overlooking the history of power balance in Eastern Europe in the last few decades; Ukraine is much more salient to Russia than Iraq was to the United States.
Well, the key assumption you’re making is that Putin sees the West as an enemy, because Western values certainly are to an autocrat like him, but there is as much reason for _Russia_ to see the West as the enemy as there is for France to see Germany (or Britain) as an enemy.
Maybe 'adversary' is a better word, but it's essentially a holdover from the Cold War – enemies become friends only in exceptional circumstances, such as European powers after WW2. I think countries of similar size will essentially always compete unless forced to ally by a larger adversary, historically they don't really seem to need a reason, the reasons are invented to justify the competition.
Eh. I suppose it depends on what you mean by similar size, but the UK and US didn’t start a war during the time frame when the US was ascending and UK declining. Plus, by any definition, Russia is a much smaller power than the US.
There have been voices calling for the US/NATO to defend Ukraine militarily. MP Tobias Elwood from the UK is one. Here's another. https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2022/01/us-must-prepare-war-against-russia-over-ukraine/360639/.
And more importantly, tons of vaguely aggressive rhetoric from hawks in WaPo or the Atlantic, who've spent the past 20 years never seeing a war they didn't want to start or double down on, calling for "resolve" and making horrible WWII analogies that decry "appeasement," and saying Putin won't stop with Ukraine, and the future of the whole free world is on the line, in the service of escalatory maximalist approaches that prevent any diplomatic concessions that might actually avoid a war. "No war in Ukraine" isn't just a call for the United States to avoid personally fighting it, but for the United States to swallow its pride and do what's necessary to actually avoid it.
The graver straw man is implying that those calling for realism and restraint somehow do not "support Ukraine" and its democratic leanings. Every decent, informed American with a conscience supports Ukraine, and hopes Vladimir Putin drops dead of a heart attack tomorrow. That just doesn't tell us what the hell to actually do about it, to minimize the harm and injustice that results from anarchic great power politics.
I get that there's recency bias and agree can't confuse Ukraine with Iraq. But it's equally irrational to see the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles as isolated errors, detached from national pathologies, biases and blind spots that remain very much alive in our foreign policy establishment today. And yes: NATO expansion is related to those pathologies. Realists warned against it for precisely the fear that it would stoke Russian insecurity whenever they recovered enough to push back against it, and lofty idealists laughed them out of the room.
You write, "A Russian invasion would a clear and unambiguous act of aggression. And yet some progressives insist on seeing Russia’s buildup as a reaction to Western aggression."
^A Russian invasion can be two things at one time. Yes, it's evil and indefensible by any Western standard - and also something that may not in fact have happened had NATO not surged thousands of miles up to Russia's borders in its decade of weakness. And it might yet not happen, if we weren't too proud to admit what everyone already knows, and offer say a 20-year moratorium on NATO expansion. The maximalist voices who think we still live in 1998 and the United States can get everything it wants all the time are part of the reason we're at an impasse.
I for one much prefer a discourse that finally errs on the side of vigilance against this "blob," who romanticize America's military as a "global force for good," and inevitably trend towards a more aggressive and warmongering foreign policy than the American people actually want. The chances of direct war with Russia are low, but the stakes of such a conflict are high enough - and the experience of complacent media drumbeat recent enough - to warrant forceful and preemptive opposition to the idea.
>>The maximalist voices who think we still live in 1998 and the United States can get everything it wants all the time are part of the reason we're at an impasse.
Who exactly do you think these maximalist voices are? You seem to be hammering away at the exact same strawman Noah called out. The Baltics were admitted in 2004. The only states NATO has admitted since then were on the other side of the Balkans from Russia.
From where I'm sitting, The Blob seems mostly paralyzed on "how to de-escalate without looking like they're capitulating". While I *totally agree* with the general need for "vigilance" against The Blob, it's really confusing to me that you and everyone else are calling for it *right now*, because The Blob doesn't even seem to know what the hell it wants!
The Blob got us in trouble in Iraq and Afghanistan because there was no nuclear power on the other side of the table. The Blob had clear neoliberal/imperialist objectives to complete, and no one was there to stop them, so they built up their steam to a critical mass and shit the bed each time.
But right now, The Blob isn't clearly identifiable as "maximalist". They're using a lot of the same talking points a maximalist *would*, but that's because Putin is, as even you agree, a genuinely bad guy. And again, besides the basic outline of the situation, it doesn't seem like The Blob agrees on much else about the situation! Look, just because every move Putin has made has driven his would-be targets closer to the West, and The Blob was tickled pink about that, doesn't mean The Blob WAS trying to encircle and entrap him, or actively IS now. The red carpet was rolled out for a good 15 years, and then got rolled back up again. Putin's reacting to something that *ended* 15 years ago, not something that's going on right now.
I get the vigilance, but you're still fighting your own previous war against The Blob. You should be more worried that they don't know what the hell they want; but you should also be encouraged. This is an opportunity to build a consensus in a positive direction. But you aren't going to be able to identify that direction accurately if you spend all your time accusing The Blob of a maximalist consensus that doesn't exist.
I think the blob is marked more by a mindset about America's role in the world more than any concrete policy proposal in this or that context. The blob are liberal interventionists, born of Cold War era and emboldened by America's victory and short-lived hegemony. They think the United States is an enlightened and exceptional nation entitled to global "leadership", with a sacred moral duty to impose its preferred "rules based" order on everyone else. They think it should do this by force if necessary, because its military is a "global force for good" that's innately more trustworthy than militaries from nations that don't share America's superior values. They're obsessed with "credibility" and tired WWII analogies, allegedly proving our need to be aggressive and confrontational everywhere at once.
That the blob lacks consensus now is a symptom of its inability to adapt to a multipolar world where that strategy is increasingly unsustainable and unpopular. They are "paralyzed on how to de-escalate without looking like they're capitulating" because they're distinctively terrified of looking like they're capitulating. Ordinary Americans don't care if Ukraine joins NATO. They don't mind admitting that it won't, because they were never that invested in this outsized and outdated view of American capabilities abroad. Realists and humanitarians would gladly trade that admission in order to prevent a savage war, even if it means tacitly conceding that US power has receded from its high-water mark. The blob's pride turns that into a third-rail: all diplomatic concessions are "appeasement." We need to engage with those arguments in order to build a healthier consensus, which would involve more humility about the limits of what we can achieve, and trading concessions (like a moratorium on NATO expansion, and Russia keeping Crimea) that offend our liberal sensibilities, but nonetheless beat the alternatives.
That's a very valid and well-written response.
But I think you go off the rails (no pun intended) here:
>>Ordinary Americans don't care if Ukraine joins NATO. They don't mind admitting that it won't, because they were never that invested in this outsized and outdated view of American capabilities abroad. Realists and humanitarians would gladly trade that admission in order to prevent a savage war, even if it means tacitly conceding that US power has receded from its high-water mark. The blob's pride turns that into a third-rail: all diplomatic concessions are "appeasement."
Just because The Blob is wrong when they characterize everything as appeasement, doesn't mean Putin is engaging us "on the level" here and that his demands are innocent. He's cynical. Most available psychoevidence points to a messianic complex of restoring the tsarist Russian Empire, as I mentioned elsewhere. There are very valid frames of argument that outline the very real dangers of Western capitulation in this crisis while still rejecting the Blobbist philosophies of hegemony, credibility, and vigilance against appeasement.
In other words, just because The Blob is almost always wrong, doesn't mean that the realists and humanitarians are right. It is possible, indeed likely, that most actors are misinterpreting the situation based on idiosyncratic biases, and therefore that their policy preferences are wrong. Certainly, thus far all major schools have their clear flaws at the moment.
It's also possible that there is NO one policy path that could reliably both (1) avert an immediate war AND (2) avert the expansion of a neo-tsarist Putinist Russia, let alone satisfy EITHER of them, let alone satisfy any of dozens of other proposed objectives.
The people that want war should join the army get on the plane and sit in a fox hole in the freezing cold waiting for command to charge. From the pictures of the 82nd Airborne troops loading onto planes I had the impression there were too few to make a difference and once again we, American are sacrificing young men and women for poorly developed goals.
Erm, Did you read this piece? Noah’s point is that he can’t actually find (outside of randoms on the Twitterverse) important Americans advocating for the US to fight a war in the Ukraine.
The “people who want war” seem to be Russian, so please direct your remarks at them. After all, the West hasn’t amassed 100,000+ troops on the borders of Ukraine ready to invade.
I suspect that part of the reason why The Blob exists is that Americans tend to be so poorly informed. We all know that domestic politics is tribal at this point, but foreign policy often seems to me to be all the more meme-based, like this bad take of David's here.
I've literally seen this same meme dozens of times in my life, and it's no better than any of those other dumb political memes - like, just to name a few classics: "Congress shouldn't get a paycheck until they pass the budget!" "Just lock them in a room and make them work it out!".
I think there's a missed opportunity to discuss the impact of COVID on people. There's a lot of people who have been traumatized by the past two years and have moved forward very different than before and I do wonder how that'll affect their perspective going forward beyond COVID.
There is certainly a lot of BS rhetoric on both the "hawk" and "dove" sides about the Russia/Ukraine thing. It seems like the real issue of substance that the two sides do disagree about is whether there are concessions the US could make that should be acceptable to us, and which would prevent an invasion.
The real controversy, from what I can tell, is whether the US could solve the whole problem by putting it in writing that Ukraine will never be a NATO member. Perhaps as part of a deal that establishes Ukraine as a neutral state that will not enter military alliances with either NATO nor Russia.
That’s a big one. Also, if the US should take that step. Then it would be essentially giving in to Putin’s bluff/threat. That’s textbook appeasement. And what would constrain Putin from taking Ukraine eventually anyway? Giving Hitler the Sudetenland didn’t stop him from imperialistic aggression.
This is what I mean about ham-fisted pathologies cramming literally everything into WWII analogies. It is not 1935. Putin is not Hitler, and he doesn't want to take over the world. He doesn't even want anything to do with triggering Article V. If ever there were a "Last War Brain" dominating our foreign policy discourse, it's that one.
When you define "appeasement" as "anything less than the United States getting everything it wants all the time," you foreclose any opportunity for actual negotiations. You cannot have a "diplomacy first" foreign policy without a willingness to make concessions, in light of a clear-eyed view of the balance of power. Putin threatened when he did because he accurately sensed that the United States is no longer a global hegemon. However it makes us feel, the balance of power is in his favor. Ukraine is not joining NATO any time soon. So why not say so, if it might avoid a tragedy?
Because, even if you're skeptical of hazy theories like "it shows weakness" as I am, it's still rewarding him for manufacturing a crisis.
He didn't *have* to mobilize forces along the border. Ukraine was not threatening him. NATO wasn't threatening him. He did that all by himself. It was a strategic move, for sure, but it was specifically calculated to create the current crisis. The status quo was that he had effective control of the regions he wanted, and Ukraine's pleas to NATO were falling on deaf ears.
Also, NATO can't declare Ukraine's neutrality for it. That's just as clearly a violation of Ukraine's sovereignty as a Russian invasion would be.
Pretty much any way you slice it, even the most charitable framing of Putin's demands basically subordinates to him Ukraine's sovereign right to determine its own foreign policy. That's by design.
Just because he's "not Hitler" doesn't dictate that our ONLY OPTION is The Full Chamberlain.
Much of that is true, I just don't think it changes the solution that works best for everyone. Putin didn't have to manufacture a crisis, but he deemed it in his interests to do so anyway. I would rather admit that he assessed the cold reality of the situation correctly than watch him kill 50,000 people and rob Ukraine of its entire democracy, for sake of not appearing to "reward" him.
The one part of your comment that isn't true is the idea that excluding Ukraine from NATO somehow robs it of sovereignty. Nonsense. NATO membership obliges AMERICAN forces to go fight on Ukraine's behalf in a potential conflict. That's not a question of self-determination, but of international obligation. It affects us directly.
The only people who deserve a vote on where and whether Americans go fight are Americans. Americans foreclosing a military alliance with Ukraine would be an exercise of our own sovereignty, not a denial of theirs.
I was splitting hairs: I didn't say exclude, I said we couldn't "declare [their] neutrality for [them]". That's different.
Switzerland and Austria, for example, are declared neutral. Great for them! They passed laws that declared it, they fortified the shit out of their mountain provinces, and no one will ever force them out of it. Ukraine's still a democracy, and they could literally do the exact same thing! I'd even prefer that outcome.
NATO also has plenty of its own agency, and the power to declare a moratorium on new members along Russia's borders. I think any such moratorium would have to come with an implied threat: "if you invade or annex anyone before the 20 years is up, all bets are off". Given Putin's age, it would help us run out the clock on him! And if I'm totally wrong with my psychoanalysis, and he's just trying to brush us off his doorstep by scaring us silly (I wouldn't put it past him!), it still works.
But a straight moratorium with no qualifications is still a capitulation. Again, just because he's "not Hitler" and just because "credibility" and "weakness" are bullshit, doesn't mean that he wouldn't find SOME way to take advantage of a straight moratorium. If anything, he's Saner Than Hitler And Wily Like A Fox, which means he's even MORE liable to take advantage.
I don't care about driving Putin to the Pacific. Or even past the Urals. Russia is a vital power that keeps Northern Asia from being a thorn in everyone's side and the fucking ethnic basket case it rightly SHOULD be. I just want to see stability in Eastern Europe, and we can't have that if he's rebuilding a damned tsarist empire.
David responded for me.
Thank you! I too tire of the threadbare comparisons to WW2. Enough already!
That said, I think there has to be an element of fairness accorded the “Blob.”
Another way of looking at it is that the “Blob” and its associates worldwide have been trying to cultivate an international relations system with rules that have true enforcement mechanisms. The enforcers being the US alliance network.
I think it is one thing for you to point to instances where the “Blob” has gravely erred but it is a different thing entirely to critique the entire “rules based order” project (which needs a much more robust critique than what I have seen in the comments here so far).
Still tire of the comparisons to WWII?
When was the last time Kyiv was bombed?
Of course we still tire of them. Putin would need to invade about 6 more countries, then incite allies in Asia to start conquering too in a sincere effort to take over the world, and then commit a Holocaust for it to be an appropriate analogy.
Leave aside the lessons learned from the Iraq war, it's worth putting the Russia-Ukraine conflict through some basic marginal cost-benefit analysis.
Is there anything we can do, that we are willing to do, that could possibly improve the situation any? And if yes, would the improvement justify the cost?
I mean, we've been trying sanctions for years, and killing the pipeline appears to be a non-starter. A weapons buildup is brinkmanship by definition, and exactly what Russia is doing. Brinkmanship is a dangerous game, and it frequently leads to a bad place.
But back to the last-war problem: have any of the vested interests that dragged us to hell in Iraq changed? So why should we trust anyone in the establishment?
Um, yes. Does the current administration look similar to the Bush administration to you? Is Rumsfeld even still alive?
The military-industrial complex goes far beyond one or two people. The military -- defense contractor revolving door is as active as it ever was. Who, exactly, has been held accountable for any part of the decades-long debacle? A couple of the grunts at Abu Ghraib and a handful of other war criminals, the guy who complained that the Afghanistan withdrawal was badly executed, and...who else?
OMG what a terrible article.
The United States, American media and American politicians are doing nothing but talking about war: defending the Ukraine when there is ZERO Russian interest in invading Ukraine - much less occupying it.
Huh. I guess countries just amass virtually their entire military along the borders of a neighboring country for no reason.
So pray tell, can you name another country that does that for no reason?
Though I will give you this: You may be right that Putin is simply bluffing and trying to get anything he can out of his bluff. Though I don’t think he’s thought through the consequences for Russia.
Seriously - you couldn't take the trouble to at least do a Wiki search before you wrote the above? Russia's armed forces have over 1 million active personnel.
130K is by no means "virtually their entire military".
Secondly, where do you expect armed forces to reside? Since Russia doesn't have 180 or whatever foreign military bases like the US (they have exactly 1 outside of ex-USSR bordering nations: Syria), they're going to be in Russia.
And where in Russia are they going to be? A lot of them are going to be on Russia's borders.
A significant number of the so-called smoking gun photo proofs are cropped pictures of Russian military bases: showing trucks or whatever but not showing the concrete barracks.
Lastly, there are regular military exercises along the Russian border - these always prompt a force shift response in case the exercise is a ruse.
For example: US and Polish troops staged an exercise on the Polish side of the Russia/EU border in November 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mkKuJhMFrw
Here is another article: Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and the US hold a military exercise in July 2021: https://foreignbrief.com/daily-news/ukraine-lithuania-poland-and-us-to-hold-military-exercises-through-july-30/
I can't say that you have demonstrated much credibility or knowledge of the situation.
More credibility than you. LOL. What were you saying about there being zero Russian interest in invading Ukraine?
Scott Ritter said it best: If you're going to get sanctioned for putting peacekeepers in Donetsk anyway - why not just defang Ukraine once and for all? Russia won't stay there - they'll leave pretty quick unlike the US in Iraq or Afghanistan.
And you still are not admitting your failure to spend 5 seconds to see just how large the Russian military is.
This is a great post, but I think the risk of a hyper inflationary outcome if the Fed doesn’t hike rates is overstated. Hyper inflations are extremely rare and the key conditions just aren’t there (chiefly, runaway monetary financing of government deficits). I just don’t see the mechanism for how higher inflationary expectations results in currency collapse. Feels a bit blackbox, hand wavy.
The question is what Putin will do after Ukraine. Anyone actually think he will stop there? I’m getting more and more convinced brute force is a must.
Everyone informed on the subject has excellent reason to believe he'll stop there, at least in terms of overt territorial conquest. It is not 1935. Putin is not Hitler, and he doesn't want to take over the world, nor even trigger Article V.
Pray tell, what are your specific reasons?
As far as I can see it, Putin isn't trying to rebuild the Soviet Empire, he's trying to rebuild the *Russian [Tsarist] Empire*. And I mean that very literally - he's been playing the "orthodoxy, autocracy, nationalism" playbook word for word for 20 years now.
The Russian Empire was an inherently colonial project that took a very long view: In order to pacify the East, it needed to Russianize those peoples, and that process was going to take generations.
Everyone keeps saying Putin isn't Hitler, and you're absolutely right that he's not "hell bent on genocidal conquest". But there's plenty of evidence that he's determined to shape his state such that he is the first in a long line of Russian leaders who accomplish [ed: on their Western frontier] through cultural hegemony what the Soviets never could with ideology and totalitarianism.
So, sure, he's not going to just directly invade the Baltics after taking Ukraine. But he'll definitely kickstart Belarus' transition into some sort of Russian "conservatorship", and maybe even astroturf a movement there for it to officially join the Russian Federation. He'll use that as a platform to put pressure on the Baltics - each of which have ~25% Russian populations - and maybe even Finland. The tactics will change - he'll trade oil extortion or something else for Article V-inducing border crises - but the goal will be the same - "roll back NATO expansion" - and the rhetoric will be the same - "there are Ethnic Russians inside your borders who need to be protected!".
I eagerly await your counterpoint. Because thus far, I haven't seen anyone on the dove side put forth an actual alternative theory of Putin's overarching goals. It's mostly just been protestations that "he's not Hitler", which, congratulations on being smart enough to figure that out, but doesn't fully answer the question.
Arming Ukraine is a must. No need for American troops to die in Ukraine, but if Putin’s going to mass pretty much his entire military on the borders of Ukraine, I’m not sure why he expects everyone else to not react.
"Meanwhile, recent U.S. troop deployments to NATO countries in East Europe such as Poland and Romania total fewer than 6,000 — a pittance compared to the 130,000 soldiers Russia has amassed on the Ukraine border, and certainly nowhere near enough to be the basis of military action."
On the contrary, 6000 NATO troops can do quite a lot. "Bluntly, they can die. They can die heroically, tragically, and in a manner that guarantees that the action cannot stop there." (Schelling, Arms and Influence). NATO troops dying in eastern Europe would mobilize domestic support for a conventional war. That was the logic of the East Berlin garrison, that is still the logic of placing an airborne battalion of 500 soldiers in Latvia.
Second, while few or no politicians are openly dumb enough to say the magic phrase "war with Russia," they are advocating measures equivalent to war. A no fly zone, as Rep. Kinzinger brilliantly proposed, would guarantee act of war. Shooting down a Russian fighter jet is an act of war, shooting down a Russian fighter jet with a NATO jet flying out of Poland or Romania justifies a Russian attack on that country. Imagine the response if a Russian jet out of Syria shot down an American fighter jet during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Disconnecting Russia from global finance is tantamount to an act of war under international law. One of the anti-US/anti-Roosevelt lines is he provoked the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor by embargoing the Japanese economy and denying them oil.
There is a moral difference between Iraq and Ukraine. It's weird and difficult to articulate, but no amount of tu quoque'ing can make it immoral for America to condemn the invasion of Ukraine.
To turn around and do exactly that, many of the same people cheerleading for sending anti-tank weapons to Ukraine were rending garments and denouncing Putin when Russia was (falsely, in turned out) accused of paying the Taliban bounties for American servicemembers, or when Iran armed Iraqi insurgents. Many of the politicians demanding NATO deployments to Eastern Europe and aggressive confrontation with Russia, even if that sparks a war (if Putin is unhinged enough to attack Ukraine, as we are now told to assume he's insane, why would he be any more reluctant to invade Estonia, or bombard Germany?)
What if Russia refuses to export gas to Eastern Europe, and the lights turn off and the heat goes out? Should we invade to end the humanitarian crisis and (forcibly) restore LNG shipments?
In short, even if no one says "invade Russia," demanding actions that predictably lead to a shooting conflict between NATO and Russia is not a smart move, nor is it a morally superior path to those who say to stay out of the war.
For clarity - I favor arms shipments to Ukraine, I favor closing the Bosphorus to Russian ships, I do not favor shutting down Russian banks. That hurts ordinary Russians far more than the kleptocrats, and unlike western democracies, popular discontent in Moscow leads to police rounding up the demonstrators, not to government policy changes.