Two Years In

The war in Ukraine has been on my mind a lot lately.  I have been circumspect about my views, opening up to only a few close friends and of course, my sons.  I am too sentimentally attached to the Republic of Georgia to ever be blatantly “pro-Russian.”  But, on the other hand, I am also well-read enough in the history of the region, with the shape-shifting boundaries of the respective countries, to be entirely dismissive of Russia’s claims and concerns.  Finally, I hate war and conflict.  And I am ashamed of my country’s profiteering complicity in the instigation and perpetuation of the same.  My abiding interest is always in how to prevent wars before they start; but once they have erupted, how to bring them to a close and end the killing and destruction.  Everything I write below is in that context.  

Today is the second anniversary of the Russian “Special Military Operation,” as they call it.  I follow developments closely, which means that I pay virtually no attention to American media outlets, and even less to British news sources.  I don’t like being herded; or if so, I prefer it to be administered by more skillful practitioners of the craft.  American propaganda is predictable, fanciful, and about a year behind the on-the-ground reality.  

In a recent History class, I covered President Woodrow Wilson’s shepherding of our country into the Great War–his “War to End All Wars,” or “War to Make the World Safe for Democracy.” Now, of course, everyone knows that it was no such thing.  He was not being disingenuous or duplicitous.  Wilson actually believed that, for he was an ideologue.  He was also a great fool.  And that is what I think when I hear any voice from our Establishment Party–Biden, McConnell, Pelosi, Lindsay Graham, Schumer, Nikki Haley, Clinton, or any of their media mouthpieces, whether MSNBC or Fox.  I did not put DJT in this listing because there is a real difference between being ill-informed (the former) and the uninformed and/or ignorant (the latter).  So, who am I listening to these days?  Primarily, I have been following thinkers such as Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Noam Chomsky, Seymour Hersh, Jack Matlock, Ray McGovern, Lawrence Wilkerson, Richard D. Wolff, Jonathan Cook, Aaron Maté  and Alexander Mercouris.  So, on to it.

The Putin Interview

I’ve never been a Tucker Carlson fan, but maybe I will finally start paying some attention to him.  There is nothing wrong with this interview.  Why haven’t we been interviewing Putin all along?  Dialogue is a good thing.  We prefer instead to demonize opponents, a particularly bad American habit that dates at least as far back as our characterization of George III.  I understand that we used to practice actual diplomacy.  It seems this archaic practice ended with the George H. W. Bush administration.  These days, we dictate, and then drop bombs, in a “show of strength.”  Hillary Clinton dismissed the interview preemptively:  Carlson was Putin’s “useful idiot,” foolishly giving a forum to Putin’s “lies.”   An increasingly shrill harpy, Clinton has become a somewhat ridiculous figure on the periphery of our political culture.  

I did not hear the lies she predicted.  What I did hear was an in-depth presentation of Russian history and Russia’s position in regard to Ukraine.  One does not have to agree with his conclusions.  Confront them with arguments of your own rather than behaving as a child on the playground.  It is to our discredit that his propositions were being heard by most Americans for the first time.  It is not as if the Russians haven’t been trying to tell us for the last twenty-five years.  

I cannot imagine any American leader expounding on our history in the same manner.  What we hear is more akin to a make-believe imaginary history.  You see with the MAGA folks on the Right, and the “Right Side of History” argument on the Left.  Both offer only platitudes to our glory.  

Apart from Russian history, the most interesting part of the interview was his rationale for their invasion of Ukraine.  In the West, Vladimir Putin is a mad dictator (or as our doddering leader so eloquently put it, “one crazy S.O.B.”)--determined to recreate the old Soviet empire, facts be damned.  In this narrative, he is bent on domination, a veritable new Hitler or Stalin.  If we don’t stop him now, Russian troops will be on the English Channel before we know it.  But this also has to be cast as an ideological struggle–Wilson’s old Democracy vs. Autocracy.  And into the breach steps spunky little Vlodomyr Zelensky as Democracy’s defender.

Such stories are beyond simplistic; they are childish.  When I hear it presented as such, I wonder if people have ever read any history–in this case, Ukrainian history–or if they keep up with what’s going on in the world on any level at all.  

Russia’s obsession with their western flank is not really paranoia, since it is based on the real historical record.  In that regard, they have seen NATO as an existential threat.  We have given them little reason to believe otherwise.  No one was more upset with the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia–my “adopted” country, you might say.  But even I viewed it within the context of the foolish actions taken by Mikheil Saakashvili at the encouragement of the even more foolish directions of George W. Bush.  I was there the previous year and witnessed the frenzy in Sighnaghi to transform the mountaintop town into a picture-perfect NATO headquarters in Georgia.  That came to naught, as it turned out, although the town did receive a makeover, complete with cobblestone streets and faux-Georgian balconies disguising Soviet concrete.  

I have just finished Jack Matlock’s Autopsy on an Empire.  He was our Ambassador in Moscow from 1987 into 1991, which gave him a front-row seat on those momentous events.  In a meeting in Malta, George H. W. Bush and James Baker made assurances to Gorbachev that even with the unification of Germany, they would not expand NATO eastward.  In return, Gorbachev made assurances that the 370,000 troops still in eastern Europe would not be used to impede the democratization of eastern Europe.  A few years later, President Clinton threw away this arrangement.  George W. Bush went even further.  And President Obama demonstrated that he had no compulsion to pushing the envelope as far as it would go.  Our fingerprints were all over the 2014 “Maidan Revolution” in Kiev, where the legitimately elected government was replaced with one more to our liking.    

With Ukraine now looking west, Russia quickly re-absorbed Crimea, which had in fact been Russian since the late 1700s, inexplicably assigned to Ukraine by Khrushchev only in 1955.  Nervous Russian speakers in the east sought to exit a newly-unfriendly Ukraine.  We fully supported Kiev’s bombing of the Donbas, which had intensified in late 2021.  

So, is NATO a benign security cooperative to promote peaceful co-existence in Europe?  Or, is it an instrument of American hegemony, directed, as always, against Russia?  That is the question the Russians have had to try and answer, and I am afraid the evidence tends to support the latter conclusion.  According to Putin, Russia felt like it had no choice but to act, as the Americans and Western Europeans could not be trusted.  They did this to prevent the creeping NATO-ization of Ukraine, and to protect the Russian-speakers in the east.  You don’t have to agree with this analysis by Putin, but it is based in the real world, the real situation rather than some cowboy melodrama of Good vs. Evil.  

There have been American voices warning against NATO expansion from the beginning.  George F. Kennan spoke out against the inclusion of West Germany, in 1955!  He suggested that the organization had already served its purpose by that date.  In the late 1990’s he characterized Clinton’s expansion eastward as the greatest American foreign policy blunder of the 2oth-century.  He died at age 101 in 2005, but the mantle was courageously taken up by John Mearshiemer of the University of Chicago.  At the beginning of the conflict, he was an outlier, often dismissed by some American commentators.  Such is not the case now, as he has been largely been proven correct.  He has been joined by Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, another truth teller that is now a persona non grata in the American media.  

The new thing I learned from the interview was the role of Boris Johnson in blowing up the negotiated settlement two months into the war.  It would have been a far better deal for Ukraine then than anything they can expect to get going forward:  no NATO and the loss of Crimea and the Donbas.  They had apparently agreed, but this did not suit the warmongers in the West.  And so, the deal was scuttled.  Putin claims that this is why he stopped his advance of Kiev.  Perhaps.  I also learned of German perfidy in regards to the Minsk Agreement.  If the Russians seem distrustful of the West, it is not hard to see why.

The Death of Navalny

And so another Russian dissident dies in custody.  This does seem to be a recurring phenomenon.  Russian opposition leaders should avoid getting locked up; or riding on airplanes; or approaching upper-storey windows.  But, there is something a bit off and perhaps phony about it.  First, how does this benefit Vladimir Putin?  Navalny was suddenly catapulted to fame–in the West.  His support in Russia was negligible; likened to that of Marianne Williamson’s threat to President Biden.  And the timing seemed too perfect–almost as if designed to deflect attention for the Carlson interview and the loss of Avdiivka, and right before the Munich meeting.  In fact, his wife was already in Munich, ready to pick up the baton at the very moment it was being dropped.  The public virtue signaling seemed a little too orchestrated and packaged.  But at least my conspiratorial skepticism is not as bad as some in the fever swamps of  the far Right.  One commentator deduced that Navalny had a heart attack because he had been vaccinated, and he fell dead from it, just like hundreds of thousands of others, including those piloting planes.  That is all of that gibberish that I heard before my fingers found the “X” on my computer screen.

Who is “Winning”?

I recently saw a headline in The Guardian which read, “Putin Thinks He Can Still Win in Ukraine.”  The word “still” implies that he believes he can prevail in spite of difficulties and setbacks, etc.  That is similar to someone saying, “Terry Cowan Thinks He Can Still Teach History.”  I do, in fact.  But that is because I have been teaching History, I am teaching History, and Lord willing, I will be teaching History.  It is the same with Putin and “winning.”  I follow  the front line movements every day.  My go-to source is the Interactive Map on the Institutue for the Study of War’s website.  Any good source is Alexander Mercouris at the Duran.  

For quite some time now, the movement has been one-way–a slow, methodical Russian advance.  The 2023 Counter-Offensive did not “fall-short;” it was defeated by a determined Russian opposition.  All reliable accounts suggest Ukraine is running out of men and munitions.  The Russians are not.  The passage of the 61 billion dollar package by the House will not change that.  According to Time magazine, the average age of an Ukrainian soldier is now 43, which highlights the severity of their manpower problem.  Given Russia’s advantages across the board, the war is unwinnable for Ukraine, and probably always was.  They were severely and disastrously ill-advised by the West.  

Ultimately there will have to be some sort of negotiated settlement.  The Russinas are not the ones who are refusing to talk about this.  Whenever I hear Zelensky or Blinken or Sullivan or Kirby speak of “1991 borders,” I am reminded of just how delusional the official Western position is.  1991 borders are about as likely to happen as a 2-state solution for Palestine.  

The Soviet system created untold future problems by its ideology.  They moved peoples and borders around at will, as if such distinctions were meaningless in the Communist workers paradise.  The whimsical severing of Crimea in 1955 has already been mentioned.  Years before the final break-up of the Soviet Union, leaders were fully aware of the explosive situation of Nagorno Karabakh, an Armenian enclave that was left within Azerbaijan, instead of being connected to Armenia, only a few miles away.  According to Ambassador Matlock, Gorbachev had a particular dislike for Armenians and simply refused to address the situation, at a time when he had the power to do something about it.  The Azerbaijanis are a Turkic people, so this diffidence showed a gross unconcern with even 2oth-century history.  The most vehement opposition to Russia in Ukraine is in the west of the country around Lvov.  In 1919, Lvov was taken from Austrian Galacia and made part of the new Poland.  Only after the Second World War, when the victorious Soviets shoved Ukraine’s and Poland’s borders west did it become part of Ukraine.  Not only does that illustrate the fluidity of borders in the region, but also that much of the current instability is the result of arbitrary actions taken by Russia during the Soviet years.

The sooner a negotiated settlement is effected, the better it will be for Ukraine; not only in terms of territory lost, but more importantly, in preservation of what is left of their younger generation of men.  Prolonging the conflict only puts more Ukrainians in the grave and more money in the pockets of American arms merchants.  It is a tough neighborhood.  NATO membership will be a non-starter.  A reduced, neutral Ukraine, a buffer between East and West, with economic ties to both, perhaps seems the most viable option for the future.  But I doubt that this option will be taken until it becomes the only one left.

I also have some thoughts about the genocide in Gaza, but those will have to wait.