The US is sending small arms and artillery but not fixed wing aircraft, MBT's, attack helicopters, etc. That's a pretty nuanced approach, but it should be clear that it's an approach designed to bleed Russia while it simultaneously allows for the conquest of Ukrainian soil.
So I flip the question around: is that amount of aid--designed to allow the Ukraine to lose slowly--acceptable to you?
The US is doing something. It's just not doing enough to help Ukraine to a victory as compared to a drawn out loss.
You asked "what actual policy should we adopt"? For the concrete example of the actual policy that the US is actually pursuing, is that acceptable to you or not?
Given the complete and utter incompetence of the military, intelligence agencies, and government of the US since at least before the Cuban revolution, I'd say our best choice is not to exercise our power.
I agree that we should be competent, as I'm actually inclined towards liberal interventionism. But please explain the reforms, prosecutions, and actions we've undertaken to increase competence since the latest demonstrable acts of military/intelligence incompetence in just the 21st century (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen to name but a few).
“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Lol i guarantee you that countless more iterations of capitalism have collapsed than Marxism. It's just that no one even bothers to call them "not real capitalism." Only with Marxism do people actually blame regime collapse on ideology
The point though is that this is an American war. It's American in the sense that without military and foreign aid from the US and its allies the Ukrainian armed forces would dry up and blow away.
It's also American in the sense that the long term consequences are going to diminish US influence in the world. That's the obvious consequence of forcing the Russians into an unholy alliance with the Chinese in an attempt to bypass Western dominated systems like SWIFT.
Hey dumbass if we’re funding and training an army into a NATO force then yeah Russia will see itself as fighting NATO and not Ukraine. Yes dumbass the US was allied with the Soviets in WW2 lol. It was a joint project that gave them $180 billion in todays dollars. Ukraine would fold without us, so we’re tied in.
It’s considered a victory for the Russians In The eastern front bc so many of them died. We were directly tied to them. I don’t get how your idiotic points debunks what he said.
If we weren’t giving them infinite funding, NATO training and intelligence then they would’ve folded. Do you think is funding the Mujahadeen and the blowback wasn’t a US project either? You’re too stupid to be smug.
Fucking moron if we’re giving Ukraine infinite weapons and training then Russia will perceive this as a war against NATO bc it is. Nobody in Russia is afraid of being wiped out by Ukraine.
If NATO and the US are keeping this war alive and they’re the ones who started a coup that lead to massacres of thousands of ethnic Russians that lead to this war then yeah the US has a lot of fault and involvement. Fucking moron.
Yes, this is a great point and I'm surprised that not all comments are something like this! If Americans are just coping about Afghanistan, then what is all of EU coping about? The simplest explanation is of course that no, it's not driven by cope for either of them!
You assholes killed 10,000 ethnic Russian civilians before the invasion even happened. You were escalating shelling even more the weeks before it happened. Yes it is more complicated than that.
You’re dangerously stupid if you think Russia is just as likely to invade Sweden or Finland. You freaks sent 2.5 million refugees from Ukraines east to Russia’s border. You don’t get to call yourself an adult and claim this war wasn’t provoked. Then again I’m probably talking to a bot or a cop/glowie.
Well given the economic crisis in Europe and elsewhere that we all know is coming this winter, it will play a role in all our life, one way or the other.
Which makes the total lack of discussion on the subject all the more puzzling. And I do not see any explanation, except indeed that it fullfills some weird need in Western psyche, particularly american but not only. A dying civilization wishing for meaning in its decadence is what it more and more looks like.
The economic "crisis" is very much because they lack energy independence. They did this to themselves on purpose. But, this does not mean Ukraine plays a role in my life. I don't live in Europe.
And, I understood Freddie's question to be directed to whether I have a "weird need" - as you put it life, to be at war, a weird need for victory to erase the negative stains of past US failures, or something like that. Not about whether the US/European sanctions on Russia have made US/Europeans lives more difficult. In Europe's case, they made a conscious decision to try and punish Russia for invading Ukraine, and Russia said "back at you."
I do buy food and energy. I don't buy the propaganda that the inflation in food and energy costs are because of the war in Ukraine. A factor, sure. But a factor that pales in comparison to all the excess liquidity created by Congress and the Feds at a time when production has purposefully squashed by various governments.
Taiwan is very well fortified and at this point China’s invasion could very easily fail. Xi is also aware of the dictator information problem and he can’t trust what his generals and admirals tell him.
I get it, I understand the complicated background and how the US and NATO to a large extent backed Putin into a corner and perhaps even forced his hand to invade Ukraine. But I also admire the courage and leadership shown by Zelenskyy. Who knows what the guy is really like, but who could have blamed him for fleeing at the outset of a war where his country was so clearly outmatched? He stayed, he inspired his fellow citizens, and he earned a lot of well deserved goodwill. One can only hope he doesn’t now squander it.
Don't play stupid. The United States threatened WWIII over basing Soviet missiles in Cuba, in large part because this gave very little time to react to a first strike.
Right but Poland is already part of NATO. So what difference does Ukraine make? It would be like threatening WWIII over Cuba when Canada was a member of the Warsaw Pact.
Part of the deal in the Cuban missile crisis was that the United States would not attack Cuba, although Cuba did participate in the wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador,, to name two.
I mean, since the initial invasion, the only thought I give to it is news headlines that hit my inbox. I follow F1, and I chuckled when Haas immediately cut ties with its Russian oligarch backer…because it was a great excuse to get rid of his son, who was a sucky driver but who had bought his place on the struggling team. I noticed in the US Open tennis tournament that the Russian players simply didn’t have their national origin listed. Whatever. Medvedev is still one of my favorites.
There’s certainly a certain subset of politically engaged (or obsessed) people using it as a proxy and purity test, but in my everyday life it’s just not a thing the way the Gulf War or the “War on Terror” were.
I agree the ghosts of Vietnam and Afghanistan have a large role to play with this, but I certainly don't think that's the only thing at work here. The entrenched military industrial complex, perceived Western (American) hegemony, favorable trade deals, even religion plays a part.
We used to be able to rely on our superior standard of living and unstained liberty as a shining beacon to the world, but those have both taken drastic hits in the last few decades. The way America is currently built and managed, it kinda needs to go warring every now and then in order to retain that 'alpha-male' status around the globe.
"I agree the ghosts of Vietnam and Afghanistan have a large role to play with this, but I certainly don't think that's the only thing at work here. The entrenched military industrial complex, perceived Western (American) hegemony, favorable trade deals, even religion plays a part."
I was going to post something similar: that Freddie's take was a part of what's going on, but not by far the whole story. His reading seems reductive in the same way "goodies vs. baddies" is. It's basically reducing the war to baddies vs. baddies. While I think that's probably directionally correct, it's much more complicated. And we should certainly be able to talk about it.
I think it's pretty clear that a) Ukraine is lying and that b) it's completely understandable that they would lie. Of course they would exaggerate the enemy's losses while downplaying their own.
The real question is why the mainstream media in the United States would close ranks around a narrative that uncritically parrots Ukrainian propaganda. Does that really serve the US public in terms of setting the stage for partition, which almost everyone understands is the only realistic course to a ceasefire?
My best guess is that Russia has suffered about 15k deaths in the invasion so far. Ukraine? Probably 70k-90k deaths, and possibly over 100k.
Who's lying more? Ukraine is desperate the portray the fight as winnable and it is not. In terms of how much aid the US is willing to give how is that not relevant?
America is a hegemonic power dedicated to war as an industry. Americans are the most heavily propagandized people imaginable (North Korea?). You are a menace, your story is a fraud and you perpetrate great evil in the name of good. Woke ideology is a carbuncle backed up by political coercion and military might. America is now a reign of terror and the American people are fully culpable.
Gotta say I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't see a pro-ukraine consensus. I see lots of folks on both left and right taking Putin's side for all sorts of reasons, with a bewildered middle going "obviously there's a good side and a bad side here, right?
I gotta call a spade a spade here though and say this is actually a war of Goodies vs Baddies. Yes obviously that's reductive. But it's a war of a country aspiring to enter the ranks of prosperous, liberal democracies, that has spent the last several centuries being oppressed and literally starved, fighting for survival against a vastly mightier imperial power. It would be challenging to come up with a less morally complicated war if I tried to.
What I see is cope on the other side - "oh, it's really about NATO expansion" or "ah actually the US are the imperialists" or "this one random militia group is really racist actually." No, it's not about those things. Or, those things are secondary to the raw attempt by Russia to establish dominion over a fiercely independent neighbor.
I guess to you this comment will feel like part of the cathedral or whatever coming to make sure the pro-ukraine consensus is enforced in all spaces. I don't really have a counter to that other than I'm just a guy who feels strongly about it and is subscribed to your blog. I promise I'm not here to thought-crime you or whatever. I just wanted to come here and make the basic, obvious case as I see it. Sometimes everyone agrees on something because it happens to be right.
This point of view has its value, but it is ultimately incorrect. Morality *does* matter. Otherwise, there wouldn't be so much effort to manufacture the narratives around it.
1) That means morality does matter, and that it is worth arguing over.
2) I do not believe that the "regimes" are anywhere near as sociopathic as you pretend. They are made up of people, and I believe, in most cases, those people tell themselves a *moral* story about what it is they are doing.
1) What matters in international relations is power and national interest. It's why the US never intervened in Rwanda and why is tacitly encouraged purges in Indonesia and the Phillipines.
2) The United States has been willing to overthrow foreign regimes and so chaos in foreign countries for decades. Is that idea that it is acceptable to spend foreign lives to save American ones a "moral" one?
At a certain point, you're either a complete cynic, in which case, everything is just power relations and will to power, and the perception of morality is all that matters, or you think that there's meaning beyond power.
I think there is meaning beyond power, even in international relations, despite their oft-cynical mechanisms. I'm very suspicious of specific moralities, but the idea of morality being a significant force in most people's lives seems obvious. Almost all people -- even those in power -- go to sleep at night telling themselves they are acting for the greater good in some regard. They cling to the morality of what they do, of its necessity for greater ends, even (and especially) if they feel the means are distasteful, cruel, or wrong.
That combined with its ability to sway "useful idiots" is what makes morality an effective persuasive tool, and why I argue that it matters.
For me, within a nation morality matters and has a chance to help. Especially nations that are largely self-ruled. But relations between nations have no higher authority, like within a nation, that can be called upon. It's a jungle, which is how I understand the realpolitik stance (I am no foreign relations expert, so just an outsiders perspective).
Conquest isn't necessarily in the interests of a state, so avoiding them can still be considered pure self interest.
Tanks will roll again if deemed necessary, you can count on that. As Freddie says, the universe doesn't care. We create our moral narratives to protect ourselves from the void, but we only enforce them effectively within the state, outside the state the narratives break down, are unenforceable. I guess the UN and other international bodies try to fill that vacuum, but so far they have been unsuccessful. I suppose to be effective they need to be considered legitimate and representative of everyone affected by their decisions, which is hardly the case now.
"Conquest isn't necessarily in the interests of a state, so avoiding them can still be considered pure self interest."
One needs very careful analysis to separate arguments about how a certain action or avoidance of action is "self interest" from post hoc just-so stories.
I would only remark on the use of the word 'neighbor' at the end of your third paragraph. I'd say that's somewhat true, but there's a lot of Russia tied up in Ukraine, especially culturally speaking. Unlike close neighbors like Poland and Turkey, Ukraine is unique among eastern European nations (aside from maybe Belarus) in that a good chunk of Russian history and 'identity' is linked with Ukraine - especially Kiev and the eastern provinces.
I mean, the Kievan Rus could easily be considered the cultural and historical cradle of the Russian people, so there's a lot of the intractable 'homeland' mindset going on here as well. I'm not arguing for or against Putin with that, I'm just saying that it might not be as simple as one neighbor picking on another. Perhaps a good part of the Russian line of thinking is here is simply trying to right the perceived wrong of eastern Ukraine and Kiev not being included in Russia back in '91 when the USSR fell apart.
Oh I agree! The Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth alone encompassed nearly all of modern-day Ukraine aside from the very easternmost provinces, and that was around for a long time indeed. I didn't mean to imply it was a stark cutoff before '91, just that it has been a messy area in terms of cultural and ethnic boundaries. And that Russian history, at least the old history, has a definite stake in that area.
How about we just stick to you twats initiating a coup in 2014 that lead to a one sided massacre in eastern Ukraine that went on for 8 years before the invasion. The reason why most of the east is siding with Russia. Gee I wonder what half the Ukrainian army was doing in the middle of the country.
Hint if you do a coup or take away economic autonomy via IMF restructuring you don’t give a fuck about sovereignty.
And the Ukrainian government outlawed the opposition parties and is deface a dictatorship. These are not ppl trying to join the liberal order.
Also what you said doesn’t apply to the eastern parts of Ukraine NATO has empowered to shell the shit out of.
I agree with all of this except for one thing: It IS about NATO expansion, too. That's still secondary to Russia's aggression, absolutely, but it's a close runner-up and Americans need to wrestle with it.
NATO should have been dismantled or overhauled after the end of the Cold War. If we'd been serious about building a rules-based international order (rather than an American empire), we would have entirely reimagined our European alliances and not treated a humiliated and weakened Russia as a conquered enemy to be contained. There were warnings about this at the time, including from such anti-imperialist firebrands as Thomas Friedman and George Kennan.
I encourage you to read the Friedman column above.
We're not talking here about US policy towards Putin's Russia in the past decade, which is a very difficult problem with no clear answer. I am not saying (and Thomas Friedman is certainly not saying) that rolling back NATO in the past decade would have solved anything.
We're talking about choices made by the US in the '90s, in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse, when Russia was weak and demoralized and the US was at the apex of its global power and reach. During that brief window, the US really *was* the only international actor whose decisions mattered (thankfully, that's no longer the case!) The decision to expand NATO was made in 1998, when Yeltsin was president and Russia was no threat to the West at all. Before Putin, before Grozny, before Georgia, before Syria, before Crimea. Before 9/11, for that matter.
Dismantling NATO wouldn't have meant an end to alliances or security guarantees. NATO was an entity created for a specific purpose (Soviet containment) at a particular time in history. The unipolar world of the 90s called for creating new institutions, or perhaps shoring up the truly internationalist ones, such as the UN. Instead, we approached the 90s with the same mindset as the Cold War, and arguably we helped sow the seeds of a new Russian nationalism in the process.
Does any of that excuse the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Of course not. It doesn't excuse the Nazis to acknowledge that their rise was made possible in part by the terms of peace imposed on Germany after WWI. It doesn't excuse the Vietnam War to acknowledge that the spread of Soviet-inspired Communism at the time was real and there were very good reasons for the US to fear it.
I am not a fan of Friedman generally. The point is that critiquing NATO expansion isn't just some shallow campus lefty take about US imperialism being Bad (as you implied), it's something that realists and liberal internationalists alike were concerned about in the 90s.
To the Russians, NATO in fact IS the sphere of influence of the US, and expanding the alliance up to Russia's borders entailed a shrinking of the Russian sphere. Maybe you think that's all good and well and that the American sphere of influence should be as big and broad as possible. (Though if so, where does it stop, exactly?)
But in my opinion, what's desirable is a world in which the spheres of influence of great powers are themselves simply less relevant, a goal which requires ceding some power to multilateral institutions.
I can imagine an alternate history in which NATO was slowly wound down (not abruptly dissolved) ... and in which some sort of framework of security cooperation on the European continent was gradually built up between the US and Russia. Maybe via the EU and other European institutions (which fulfilled the second goal of NATO you mentioned). Maybe via the UN. I don't know. Sure, it seems fantastical from where we sit now, but what's the alternative to building international institutions? There are only two: either total hegemony by some great power (which never lasts long, as the US has discovered), or the world we have developing now -- a return to great power competition and increasing brinkmanship, with the nuclear axe hanging over all of our heads. I wish we'd tried harder for the utopian option when the window was open.
There are some people from the former state of Yugoslavia who have the answer to that question. It is easy to see that tinpot dictators like Milosevic and Karadzic ought to be stopped. The moral case is the same for Putin, but the mechanics aren't so simple given the size of Russia.
Assuming that support for a government that harbors intense fascist sympathies is good, regardless of its place in their people’s defense against an equally troubling show of imperialist force, reduces the conversation to a point of moral triviality in an international scene where our government has themselves displayed the same level of imperial force upon others.
So to say, the position of “goodies vs baddies” is inherently contradictory and flawed to maintain, from a perspective of US interventionism.
Where is this supposedly equally large and important "pro-Putin" position to be found in the western discourse other than in ephemeral twitter bullshit or in the minds of NAFO war cheerleader freaks?
I don't claim it is equally large, merely that there is no rigidly enforced consensus. But FWIW Tucker Carlson has been generally pro-Putin and hosts one of the most watched news shows in the country.
I was going to add this - - and Orban's pro-Putin stance has not diminished his standing with social conservatives.
I would also point out that prior to Putin's surprise commencement of war, there were a lot of real pundits saying the US should not send soldier one into this conflict. That's not exactly rah rah hubris.
I make a point of ignoring Carlson so I'm not sure exactly what he's said about the war but I think he's a sort of the exception that proves the rule. He's someone whose opinions are so odious, especially to professional Opinion-Havers, that it discredits others who might express superficially similar criticisms of the US' role in the war. Perhaps a sort of controlled opposition, if I were more conspiratorially-minded. It's telling here that even the Republican party Carlson operates as part of largely doesn't share his opinions (for example, in Texas Greg Abbott has been trying to smear Beto O'Rourke for voting against some Ukraine aid when he was in congress).
How has Tucker been pro-Putin? A search for "Tucker Carlson Putin" only shows a lack of interventionism. Here is Tucker Carlson responding to a Psaki speech about "Putin's price hike":
“So like, if you think it’s ‘Putin’s price hike’ — I guess they expect we do think that — the bottom line is, Russia invades Ukraine, it’s appalling, everyone agrees,” he said during his show on Monday. “But our response to it, does it hurt Putin? No. It hurts the United States. We’re the real victim here.”
Here he is at a conference in Iowa in July:
"I'm not a Putin defender, despite what you might have heard," Carlson told the crowd in Des Moines, Iowa. "I don't really care one way or the other because he's not my president, he doesn't preside over my country."
"What he does in Ukraine — while I think historically significant, certainly significant to Ukrainians — is not more significant to me than what gas costs. In fact, it's not even in the same universe."
Do you consider these stances pro-Putin? Isolationism can be called pro-Putin if you consider avoiding intervention helps bad actors, but that view is not universally applied and reminiscent of "you are either with us or you are with the terrorists".
If this is the case it again speaks to Freddie's point in the article: Any deviation from the NATO line, regardless of its form or motivation, is treated as rank Putin apologia.
Even if that's the case (the majority of these seem to be pointing to NATO's role in the escalation of tensions before the war, which is true) those are just people on the internet. What power do they have? What positions do they occupy where they might even theoretically influence US Ukraine policy? There is no equivalency between their significance or impact of this dissent and the Acela Corridor Ukraine consensus.
No that is not the prevalant viewpoint on Fox News. The prevalent viewpoint is that the US should not be involved. That is a view shared by at least half the nation.
I can't speak to what they say on Fox News but the idea that someone who hasn't staked a position (and who has a history of empty "antimilitarist" rhetoric) might run for president, might win, and might reverse the arms sales or something does not have the same discursive weight as the fanatically pro-Ukraine political and cultural consensus in the US.
I agree. I see no one in the U.S. taking Russia's side. Just a bunch of people questioning the value to America of American involvement (we can call this Pat Buchanan mode, which is always right at a certain point on the curve) and a different group of people that somehow imagine America is the cause of this conflict in the first place (we can call this University Professor or Timeless Leftie mode).
Hawley voted against the $40B aid package to Ukraine but has also argued that Biden should do more to help Ukraine outside US spending, like facilitating Polish plane transfers or increasing sanctions. He's being accused of flip-flopping to try to chase public opinion, but would probably argue he thought the aid package had problems. I'll leave questions about his actual position and integrity as an exercise for the reader.
Well, we have JD Vance, who has a better than even chance of being Ohio's next senator, saying he didn't care what happens in Ukraine. We have a bunch of MAGA congressfolk saying they don't want to pay for more aid to Ukraine. And on the left we have (cough) Freddie et al. with their claim that the West provoked Putin (despite four centuries of Russian rhetoric dating back to Peter the Great to the effect that Ukraine is part of Russia and that the West is out to choke and suppress the great Russian state).
You could say these aren't "taking Putin's side" because none of these people say Putin is right and good. But the logical consequence of believing "I don't care" or "Ukraine must not win" is to withhold aid without which Ukraine will lose. So I think it's fair count these people as taking Russia's side.
And btw I don't agree that a Russian loss is bound to be bad for the world. Dictatorships that lose wars sometimes fall to democratic revolutions -- cf Weimar or post-Falklands Argentina. We shouldn't thoughtlessly root for Putin's end -- let's have open debate as Freddie advocates-- but the chance of a better outcome isn't zero.
"I guess to you this comment will feel like part of the cathedral or whatever coming to make sure the pro-ukraine consensus is enforced in all spaces. I don't really have a counter to that other than I'm just a guy who feels strongly about it and is subscribed to your blog. I promise I'm not here to thought-crime you or whatever. I just wanted to come here and make the basic, obvious case as I see it. Sometimes everyone agrees on something because it happens to be right."
The US is sending small arms and artillery but not fixed wing aircraft, MBT's, attack helicopters, etc. That's a pretty nuanced approach, but it should be clear that it's an approach designed to bleed Russia while it simultaneously allows for the conquest of Ukrainian soil.
So I flip the question around: is that amount of aid--designed to allow the Ukraine to lose slowly--acceptable to you?
The US is doing something. It's just not doing enough to help Ukraine to a victory as compared to a drawn out loss.
You asked "what actual policy should we adopt"? For the concrete example of the actual policy that the US is actually pursuing, is that acceptable to you or not?
Given the complete and utter incompetence of the military, intelligence agencies, and government of the US since at least before the Cuban revolution, I'd say our best choice is not to exercise our power.
I agree that we should be competent, as I'm actually inclined towards liberal interventionism. But please explain the reforms, prosecutions, and actions we've undertaken to increase competence since the latest demonstrable acts of military/intelligence incompetence in just the 21st century (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen to name but a few).
“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Lol i guarantee you that countless more iterations of capitalism have collapsed than Marxism. It's just that no one even bothers to call them "not real capitalism." Only with Marxism do people actually blame regime collapse on ideology
The point though is that this is an American war. It's American in the sense that without military and foreign aid from the US and its allies the Ukrainian armed forces would dry up and blow away.
It's also American in the sense that the long term consequences are going to diminish US influence in the world. That's the obvious consequence of forcing the Russians into an unholy alliance with the Chinese in an attempt to bypass Western dominated systems like SWIFT.
So there's no problem if the US decides to wrap up its program of military aid in a couple of months?
So what happens to SWIFT, a possible retreat from the dollar as the world's global reserve currency--that's not really an American concern either?
Hey dumbass if we’re funding and training an army into a NATO force then yeah Russia will see itself as fighting NATO and not Ukraine. Yes dumbass the US was allied with the Soviets in WW2 lol. It was a joint project that gave them $180 billion in todays dollars. Ukraine would fold without us, so we’re tied in.
It’s considered a victory for the Russians In The eastern front bc so many of them died. We were directly tied to them. I don’t get how your idiotic points debunks what he said.
If we weren’t giving them infinite funding, NATO training and intelligence then they would’ve folded. Do you think is funding the Mujahadeen and the blowback wasn’t a US project either? You’re too stupid to be smug.
Fucking moron if we’re giving Ukraine infinite weapons and training then Russia will perceive this as a war against NATO bc it is. Nobody in Russia is afraid of being wiped out by Ukraine.
If NATO and the US are keeping this war alive and they’re the ones who started a coup that lead to massacres of thousands of ethnic Russians that lead to this war then yeah the US has a lot of fault and involvement. Fucking moron.
Yes, this is a great point and I'm surprised that not all comments are something like this! If Americans are just coping about Afghanistan, then what is all of EU coping about? The simplest explanation is of course that no, it's not driven by cope for either of them!
You should sign up for the Ukrainian Foreign Legion they could use medics
You assholes killed 10,000 ethnic Russian civilians before the invasion even happened. You were escalating shelling even more the weeks before it happened. Yes it is more complicated than that.
You’re dangerously stupid if you think Russia is just as likely to invade Sweden or Finland. You freaks sent 2.5 million refugees from Ukraines east to Russia’s border. You don’t get to call yourself an adult and claim this war wasn’t provoked. Then again I’m probably talking to a bot or a cop/glowie.
"what role does Ukraine play in your life?"
None whatsoever.
Well given the economic crisis in Europe and elsewhere that we all know is coming this winter, it will play a role in all our life, one way or the other.
Which makes the total lack of discussion on the subject all the more puzzling. And I do not see any explanation, except indeed that it fullfills some weird need in Western psyche, particularly american but not only. A dying civilization wishing for meaning in its decadence is what it more and more looks like.
The economic "crisis" is very much because they lack energy independence. They did this to themselves on purpose. But, this does not mean Ukraine plays a role in my life. I don't live in Europe.
And, I understood Freddie's question to be directed to whether I have a "weird need" - as you put it life, to be at war, a weird need for victory to erase the negative stains of past US failures, or something like that. Not about whether the US/European sanctions on Russia have made US/Europeans lives more difficult. In Europe's case, they made a conscious decision to try and punish Russia for invading Ukraine, and Russia said "back at you."
You don’t buy food or energy? Wow - how do you manage that?
They're German or English and have moved to bathing with damp rags instead of taking a bath or shower.
The French have been doing this for decades. Germans and English finally catching up.
I do buy food and energy. I don't buy the propaganda that the inflation in food and energy costs are because of the war in Ukraine. A factor, sure. But a factor that pales in comparison to all the excess liquidity created by Congress and the Feds at a time when production has purposefully squashed by various governments.
I would say every war is its own thing and may or may not have anything to do with one’s pet issues.
One example might be that the epic failure that was Russia’s attempted invasion of Ukraine has throughly chastened the Chinese re: Taiwan.
Amount of Ukraine seized by Russia: 20%
Amount of Russia seized by Ukraine: 0%
And everyone (including you) was convinced it would be 100% in 3 days.
I predicted that the Russians would turn to siege warfare ala Grozny and Aleppo to win. That is not a quick process.
The smart money now is for a conflict lasting for years if not decades and conducted almost entirely on Ukrainian soil.
How do you know that? I'd expect the Chinese (especially Xi) to think their superiority over Russia means that they don't need to learn any lessons.
Taiwan is very well fortified and at this point China’s invasion could very easily fail. Xi is also aware of the dictator information problem and he can’t trust what his generals and admirals tell him.
I get it, I understand the complicated background and how the US and NATO to a large extent backed Putin into a corner and perhaps even forced his hand to invade Ukraine. But I also admire the courage and leadership shown by Zelenskyy. Who knows what the guy is really like, but who could have blamed him for fleeing at the outset of a war where his country was so clearly outmatched? He stayed, he inspired his fellow citizens, and he earned a lot of well deserved goodwill. One can only hope he doesn’t now squander it.
Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons, under what scenario is it at risk for invasion?
Invasion by whom? Ukraine? To the extent that they could seize Russian nukes?
Zero chance.
For the same reason missiles in Cuba was a threat to the United States.
Please explain. The US was at risk for invasion?
Keeping in mind that Poland is part of NATO.
Don't play stupid. The United States threatened WWIII over basing Soviet missiles in Cuba, in large part because this gave very little time to react to a first strike.
Right but Poland is already part of NATO. So what difference does Ukraine make? It would be like threatening WWIII over Cuba when Canada was a member of the Warsaw Pact.
Compare the distance from central Russia from the Ukrainian border to that from Poland.
Was that the reason, though? Or was it about not liking the idea that it gave Cuba the ability to export revolution without fear of reprisal?
Part of the deal in the Cuban missile crisis was that the United States would not attack Cuba, although Cuba did participate in the wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador,, to name two.
Freddie, you put down in words what was on my mind. Spot on.
I mean, since the initial invasion, the only thought I give to it is news headlines that hit my inbox. I follow F1, and I chuckled when Haas immediately cut ties with its Russian oligarch backer…because it was a great excuse to get rid of his son, who was a sucky driver but who had bought his place on the struggling team. I noticed in the US Open tennis tournament that the Russian players simply didn’t have their national origin listed. Whatever. Medvedev is still one of my favorites.
There’s certainly a certain subset of politically engaged (or obsessed) people using it as a proxy and purity test, but in my everyday life it’s just not a thing the way the Gulf War or the “War on Terror” were.
I agree the ghosts of Vietnam and Afghanistan have a large role to play with this, but I certainly don't think that's the only thing at work here. The entrenched military industrial complex, perceived Western (American) hegemony, favorable trade deals, even religion plays a part.
We used to be able to rely on our superior standard of living and unstained liberty as a shining beacon to the world, but those have both taken drastic hits in the last few decades. The way America is currently built and managed, it kinda needs to go warring every now and then in order to retain that 'alpha-male' status around the globe.
"I agree the ghosts of Vietnam and Afghanistan have a large role to play with this, but I certainly don't think that's the only thing at work here. The entrenched military industrial complex, perceived Western (American) hegemony, favorable trade deals, even religion plays a part."
I was going to post something similar: that Freddie's take was a part of what's going on, but not by far the whole story. His reading seems reductive in the same way "goodies vs. baddies" is. It's basically reducing the war to baddies vs. baddies. While I think that's probably directionally correct, it's much more complicated. And we should certainly be able to talk about it.
Ukraine is of no interest or use to the United States except as a threat to Russia.
Take away Russia, and Ukraine would be a pariah state.
I think it's pretty clear that a) Ukraine is lying and that b) it's completely understandable that they would lie. Of course they would exaggerate the enemy's losses while downplaying their own.
The real question is why the mainstream media in the United States would close ranks around a narrative that uncritically parrots Ukrainian propaganda. Does that really serve the US public in terms of setting the stage for partition, which almost everyone understands is the only realistic course to a ceasefire?
And Russia is telling the truth? Just the other day the official line was they were conducting a pre-planned retreat. Do you believe that?
I think the obvious position of the media should be that they're both lying because that comes closest to the truth.
Well accept for the fact that Russia has been lying a lot more.
My best guess is that Russia has suffered about 15k deaths in the invasion so far. Ukraine? Probably 70k-90k deaths, and possibly over 100k.
Who's lying more? Ukraine is desperate the portray the fight as winnable and it is not. In terms of how much aid the US is willing to give how is that not relevant?
On what are you basing your estimates?
Milbloggers, telegram, etc. The media has basically abdicated its investigative role leaving third parties to step in to pick up the slack.
It’s not winnable? The satellite imagines show the Russians in retreat, we can see the dead bodies and the blown up tanks, APC, etc.
Losing some battles is pretty normal for any war. The Russians have plenty of room to escalate though while the Ukrainians do not.
America is a hegemonic power dedicated to war as an industry. Americans are the most heavily propagandized people imaginable (North Korea?). You are a menace, your story is a fraud and you perpetrate great evil in the name of good. Woke ideology is a carbuncle backed up by political coercion and military might. America is now a reign of terror and the American people are fully culpable.
Gotta say I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't see a pro-ukraine consensus. I see lots of folks on both left and right taking Putin's side for all sorts of reasons, with a bewildered middle going "obviously there's a good side and a bad side here, right?
I gotta call a spade a spade here though and say this is actually a war of Goodies vs Baddies. Yes obviously that's reductive. But it's a war of a country aspiring to enter the ranks of prosperous, liberal democracies, that has spent the last several centuries being oppressed and literally starved, fighting for survival against a vastly mightier imperial power. It would be challenging to come up with a less morally complicated war if I tried to.
What I see is cope on the other side - "oh, it's really about NATO expansion" or "ah actually the US are the imperialists" or "this one random militia group is really racist actually." No, it's not about those things. Or, those things are secondary to the raw attempt by Russia to establish dominion over a fiercely independent neighbor.
I guess to you this comment will feel like part of the cathedral or whatever coming to make sure the pro-ukraine consensus is enforced in all spaces. I don't really have a counter to that other than I'm just a guy who feels strongly about it and is subscribed to your blog. I promise I'm not here to thought-crime you or whatever. I just wanted to come here and make the basic, obvious case as I see it. Sometimes everyone agrees on something because it happens to be right.
Nation states are by nature amoral and sociopathic. Projecting human morality onto international relations is a recipe for disaster.
This point of view has its value, but it is ultimately incorrect. Morality *does* matter. Otherwise, there wouldn't be so much effort to manufacture the narratives around it.
It matters in terms of producing useful idiots to carry the water for regimes whose sole concern is realpolitik.
1) That means morality does matter, and that it is worth arguing over.
2) I do not believe that the "regimes" are anywhere near as sociopathic as you pretend. They are made up of people, and I believe, in most cases, those people tell themselves a *moral* story about what it is they are doing.
1) What matters in international relations is power and national interest. It's why the US never intervened in Rwanda and why is tacitly encouraged purges in Indonesia and the Phillipines.
2) The United States has been willing to overthrow foreign regimes and so chaos in foreign countries for decades. Is that idea that it is acceptable to spend foreign lives to save American ones a "moral" one?
At a certain point, you're either a complete cynic, in which case, everything is just power relations and will to power, and the perception of morality is all that matters, or you think that there's meaning beyond power.
I think there is meaning beyond power, even in international relations, despite their oft-cynical mechanisms. I'm very suspicious of specific moralities, but the idea of morality being a significant force in most people's lives seems obvious. Almost all people -- even those in power -- go to sleep at night telling themselves they are acting for the greater good in some regard. They cling to the morality of what they do, of its necessity for greater ends, even (and especially) if they feel the means are distasteful, cruel, or wrong.
That combined with its ability to sway "useful idiots" is what makes morality an effective persuasive tool, and why I argue that it matters.
For me, within a nation morality matters and has a chance to help. Especially nations that are largely self-ruled. But relations between nations have no higher authority, like within a nation, that can be called upon. It's a jungle, which is how I understand the realpolitik stance (I am no foreign relations expert, so just an outsiders perspective).
Conquest isn't necessarily in the interests of a state, so avoiding them can still be considered pure self interest.
Tanks will roll again if deemed necessary, you can count on that. As Freddie says, the universe doesn't care. We create our moral narratives to protect ourselves from the void, but we only enforce them effectively within the state, outside the state the narratives break down, are unenforceable. I guess the UN and other international bodies try to fill that vacuum, but so far they have been unsuccessful. I suppose to be effective they need to be considered legitimate and representative of everyone affected by their decisions, which is hardly the case now.
"Conquest isn't necessarily in the interests of a state, so avoiding them can still be considered pure self interest."
One needs very careful analysis to separate arguments about how a certain action or avoidance of action is "self interest" from post hoc just-so stories.
I would only remark on the use of the word 'neighbor' at the end of your third paragraph. I'd say that's somewhat true, but there's a lot of Russia tied up in Ukraine, especially culturally speaking. Unlike close neighbors like Poland and Turkey, Ukraine is unique among eastern European nations (aside from maybe Belarus) in that a good chunk of Russian history and 'identity' is linked with Ukraine - especially Kiev and the eastern provinces.
I mean, the Kievan Rus could easily be considered the cultural and historical cradle of the Russian people, so there's a lot of the intractable 'homeland' mindset going on here as well. I'm not arguing for or against Putin with that, I'm just saying that it might not be as simple as one neighbor picking on another. Perhaps a good part of the Russian line of thinking is here is simply trying to right the perceived wrong of eastern Ukraine and Kiev not being included in Russia back in '91 when the USSR fell apart.
Oh I agree! The Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth alone encompassed nearly all of modern-day Ukraine aside from the very easternmost provinces, and that was around for a long time indeed. I didn't mean to imply it was a stark cutoff before '91, just that it has been a messy area in terms of cultural and ethnic boundaries. And that Russian history, at least the old history, has a definite stake in that area.
How about we just stick to you twats initiating a coup in 2014 that lead to a one sided massacre in eastern Ukraine that went on for 8 years before the invasion. The reason why most of the east is siding with Russia. Gee I wonder what half the Ukrainian army was doing in the middle of the country.
Hint if you do a coup or take away economic autonomy via IMF restructuring you don’t give a fuck about sovereignty.
And the Ukrainian government outlawed the opposition parties and is deface a dictatorship. These are not ppl trying to join the liberal order.
Also what you said doesn’t apply to the eastern parts of Ukraine NATO has empowered to shell the shit out of.
"moose/polar bear cavalry"
Now that I'd like to see.
Ha! That would be pretty badass though.
I agree with all of this except for one thing: It IS about NATO expansion, too. That's still secondary to Russia's aggression, absolutely, but it's a close runner-up and Americans need to wrestle with it.
NATO should have been dismantled or overhauled after the end of the Cold War. If we'd been serious about building a rules-based international order (rather than an American empire), we would have entirely reimagined our European alliances and not treated a humiliated and weakened Russia as a conquered enemy to be contained. There were warnings about this at the time, including from such anti-imperialist firebrands as Thomas Friedman and George Kennan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/opinion/putin-ukraine-nato.html
I encourage you to read the Friedman column above.
We're not talking here about US policy towards Putin's Russia in the past decade, which is a very difficult problem with no clear answer. I am not saying (and Thomas Friedman is certainly not saying) that rolling back NATO in the past decade would have solved anything.
We're talking about choices made by the US in the '90s, in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse, when Russia was weak and demoralized and the US was at the apex of its global power and reach. During that brief window, the US really *was* the only international actor whose decisions mattered (thankfully, that's no longer the case!) The decision to expand NATO was made in 1998, when Yeltsin was president and Russia was no threat to the West at all. Before Putin, before Grozny, before Georgia, before Syria, before Crimea. Before 9/11, for that matter.
Dismantling NATO wouldn't have meant an end to alliances or security guarantees. NATO was an entity created for a specific purpose (Soviet containment) at a particular time in history. The unipolar world of the 90s called for creating new institutions, or perhaps shoring up the truly internationalist ones, such as the UN. Instead, we approached the 90s with the same mindset as the Cold War, and arguably we helped sow the seeds of a new Russian nationalism in the process.
Does any of that excuse the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Of course not. It doesn't excuse the Nazis to acknowledge that their rise was made possible in part by the terms of peace imposed on Germany after WWI. It doesn't excuse the Vietnam War to acknowledge that the spread of Soviet-inspired Communism at the time was real and there were very good reasons for the US to fear it.
I am not a fan of Friedman generally. The point is that critiquing NATO expansion isn't just some shallow campus lefty take about US imperialism being Bad (as you implied), it's something that realists and liberal internationalists alike were concerned about in the 90s.
To the Russians, NATO in fact IS the sphere of influence of the US, and expanding the alliance up to Russia's borders entailed a shrinking of the Russian sphere. Maybe you think that's all good and well and that the American sphere of influence should be as big and broad as possible. (Though if so, where does it stop, exactly?)
But in my opinion, what's desirable is a world in which the spheres of influence of great powers are themselves simply less relevant, a goal which requires ceding some power to multilateral institutions.
I can imagine an alternate history in which NATO was slowly wound down (not abruptly dissolved) ... and in which some sort of framework of security cooperation on the European continent was gradually built up between the US and Russia. Maybe via the EU and other European institutions (which fulfilled the second goal of NATO you mentioned). Maybe via the UN. I don't know. Sure, it seems fantastical from where we sit now, but what's the alternative to building international institutions? There are only two: either total hegemony by some great power (which never lasts long, as the US has discovered), or the world we have developing now -- a return to great power competition and increasing brinkmanship, with the nuclear axe hanging over all of our heads. I wish we'd tried harder for the utopian option when the window was open.
What purpose did NATO serve after 1991?
There are some people from the former state of Yugoslavia who have the answer to that question. It is easy to see that tinpot dictators like Milosevic and Karadzic ought to be stopped. The moral case is the same for Putin, but the mechanics aren't so simple given the size of Russia.
Assuming that support for a government that harbors intense fascist sympathies is good, regardless of its place in their people’s defense against an equally troubling show of imperialist force, reduces the conversation to a point of moral triviality in an international scene where our government has themselves displayed the same level of imperial force upon others.
So to say, the position of “goodies vs baddies” is inherently contradictory and flawed to maintain, from a perspective of US interventionism.
Where is this supposedly equally large and important "pro-Putin" position to be found in the western discourse other than in ephemeral twitter bullshit or in the minds of NAFO war cheerleader freaks?
I don't claim it is equally large, merely that there is no rigidly enforced consensus. But FWIW Tucker Carlson has been generally pro-Putin and hosts one of the most watched news shows in the country.
I was going to add this - - and Orban's pro-Putin stance has not diminished his standing with social conservatives.
I would also point out that prior to Putin's surprise commencement of war, there were a lot of real pundits saying the US should not send soldier one into this conflict. That's not exactly rah rah hubris.
I make a point of ignoring Carlson so I'm not sure exactly what he's said about the war but I think he's a sort of the exception that proves the rule. He's someone whose opinions are so odious, especially to professional Opinion-Havers, that it discredits others who might express superficially similar criticisms of the US' role in the war. Perhaps a sort of controlled opposition, if I were more conspiratorially-minded. It's telling here that even the Republican party Carlson operates as part of largely doesn't share his opinions (for example, in Texas Greg Abbott has been trying to smear Beto O'Rourke for voting against some Ukraine aid when he was in congress).
How has Tucker been pro-Putin? A search for "Tucker Carlson Putin" only shows a lack of interventionism. Here is Tucker Carlson responding to a Psaki speech about "Putin's price hike":
“So like, if you think it’s ‘Putin’s price hike’ — I guess they expect we do think that — the bottom line is, Russia invades Ukraine, it’s appalling, everyone agrees,” he said during his show on Monday. “But our response to it, does it hurt Putin? No. It hurts the United States. We’re the real victim here.”
Here he is at a conference in Iowa in July:
"I'm not a Putin defender, despite what you might have heard," Carlson told the crowd in Des Moines, Iowa. "I don't really care one way or the other because he's not my president, he doesn't preside over my country."
"What he does in Ukraine — while I think historically significant, certainly significant to Ukrainians — is not more significant to me than what gas costs. In fact, it's not even in the same universe."
Do you consider these stances pro-Putin? Isolationism can be called pro-Putin if you consider avoiding intervention helps bad actors, but that view is not universally applied and reminiscent of "you are either with us or you are with the terrorists".
If this is the case it again speaks to Freddie's point in the article: Any deviation from the NATO line, regardless of its form or motivation, is treated as rank Putin apologia.
“I see lots of folks on left and right taking Putin’s side”. Really? Like who? Like an actual public figure, not a Twitter rando
Even if that's the case (the majority of these seem to be pointing to NATO's role in the escalation of tensions before the war, which is true) those are just people on the internet. What power do they have? What positions do they occupy where they might even theoretically influence US Ukraine policy? There is no equivalency between their significance or impact of this dissent and the Acela Corridor Ukraine consensus.
No that is not the prevalant viewpoint on Fox News. The prevalent viewpoint is that the US should not be involved. That is a view shared by at least half the nation.
I can't speak to what they say on Fox News but the idea that someone who hasn't staked a position (and who has a history of empty "antimilitarist" rhetoric) might run for president, might win, and might reverse the arms sales or something does not have the same discursive weight as the fanatically pro-Ukraine political and cultural consensus in the US.
Ah yes, the comments section of Freddie DeBoer’s Substack is all made up entirely by high level Nat Sec officials and media bigwigs. Fantastic point
Again with this “plenty of dissenters”. Why is it so hard for you to back this up with some actual examples if they are so plentiful?
I agree. I see no one in the U.S. taking Russia's side. Just a bunch of people questioning the value to America of American involvement (we can call this Pat Buchanan mode, which is always right at a certain point on the curve) and a different group of people that somehow imagine America is the cause of this conflict in the first place (we can call this University Professor or Timeless Leftie mode).
Josh Hawley. Matt Taibbi.
Hawley voted against the $40B aid package to Ukraine but has also argued that Biden should do more to help Ukraine outside US spending, like facilitating Polish plane transfers or increasing sanctions. He's being accused of flip-flopping to try to chase public opinion, but would probably argue he thought the aid package had problems. I'll leave questions about his actual position and integrity as an exercise for the reader.
https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-blasts-40-billion-ukraine-aid-not-americas-interests
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/hawley-demands-biden-provide-zelenskyy-migs-weaponry
Well, we have JD Vance, who has a better than even chance of being Ohio's next senator, saying he didn't care what happens in Ukraine. We have a bunch of MAGA congressfolk saying they don't want to pay for more aid to Ukraine. And on the left we have (cough) Freddie et al. with their claim that the West provoked Putin (despite four centuries of Russian rhetoric dating back to Peter the Great to the effect that Ukraine is part of Russia and that the West is out to choke and suppress the great Russian state).
You could say these aren't "taking Putin's side" because none of these people say Putin is right and good. But the logical consequence of believing "I don't care" or "Ukraine must not win" is to withhold aid without which Ukraine will lose. So I think it's fair count these people as taking Russia's side.
And btw I don't agree that a Russian loss is bound to be bad for the world. Dictatorships that lose wars sometimes fall to democratic revolutions -- cf Weimar or post-Falklands Argentina. We shouldn't thoughtlessly root for Putin's end -- let's have open debate as Freddie advocates-- but the chance of a better outcome isn't zero.
"I guess to you this comment will feel like part of the cathedral or whatever coming to make sure the pro-ukraine consensus is enforced in all spaces. I don't really have a counter to that other than I'm just a guy who feels strongly about it and is subscribed to your blog. I promise I'm not here to thought-crime you or whatever. I just wanted to come here and make the basic, obvious case as I see it. Sometimes everyone agrees on something because it happens to be right."
The throat-clearing is strong with this one.
You’re wrong.
Putin is a stand-in for Trump. The Afghanistan withdraw was an unmitigated disaster.
And the first explains the left hand while the second explains the right hand.
Oh, and it plays no part in my life. After the "weapons of mass destruction" BS, any cheerleading by the media is treated with profound distrust.