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Freddie deBoer's avatar

Cancel your own subscriptions, please, those of you who are emailing me. It's easier for you than me in practical terms and if the point is to discipline me it will have the opposite effect. I could have written about anything today. But I'm staking my claim and I am not going to self-censor.

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Xavier Moss's avatar

I genuinely, to some extent, don't understand where you're coming from. Let's compare the invasion of Ukraine to the assassination of Mossadegh. Russia announces it will never permit a NATO-aligned Ukraine; the US says it will never permit a USSR-aligned Iran. They attack to dismantle both regimes. Both are completely and obviously unacceptable. The Iraq war, by this line, was equally unacceptable. You could argue about Afghanistan, whether it attacked and the moral status of punitive war. All the others were wars of expanding spheres of influence for their own sake, and that is not morally unacceptable. These cases are clear. The Iranian did not 'cause' Mossadegh's assassination, and America did not 'cause' the invasion of Ukraine – you claim the latter, and that's the problem. It is the invader that transgressed morality, not the geopolitical actors who wanted to align away from them.

I also think you have a very America-centric view of this. Russia goes on about NATO, but the bigger danger is Ukraine joining the EU. Central and Eastern European countries have two competing vision – integration with the well-managed and affluent Western economies under relatively favorable terms, or domination by Russia. Anyone given the choice would easily choose the former, and most post-Communist regimes have. That's the dream of the West – the EU, not NATO – and America has very little to do with it. Ukraine wants to be Poland because, why wouldn't you? I say this writing from Poland – it's obvious you wouldn't want to be dominated by Russia.

Alignment with the EU or NATO is alignment with the West in general regardless of how you formulate it. Maybe a Finland solution could have worked, but may be not – you also seem to discount the possibility that Putin is anything but a rational pragmatist, and that revanchism in regaining Ukraine and national pride in general could motivate him. But overall, Ukraine chose pursuing EU/NATO membership at all costs as a defence against Russia and there's no reason to think giving up that defence would have resulted in anything other than domination. Of course you want to escape that – Ukraine tried and was succeeding, and Russia decided to fight a war to stop it. Your argument boils down to 'if they didn't want a war they should have just surrendered' – but isn't that their choice to make?

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