Back to the USSR

I don’t know if it this is the best way to start a new newsletter but I wanted to jump on a controversy between two writers I follow, Noah Smith and Freddie deBoer.

This is about Ukraine. I spent 2 years and half there, from 2012 to 2014 (my wife is originally Ukrainian). I’ve written about the 2014 events (Maidan and the Crimean invasion) and I think the writing holds up pretty well, 8 years later.

You can read Noah’s latest article, the one that triggered Freddie here and you can read Freddie’s response here.

I like Freddie, I think he has interesting takes on many topics and I wish I could write as fluidly and skillfully as he does.

Yet his arguments regarding Ukraine are infuriating. So I’ll take his latest article and reply both in particular and in general.

I want to deal first with the point raised by Noah Smith that seems to drive Freddie to distraction. I hope he’ll be okay with me quoting at length.

“Noam Chomsky did an interview about Ukraine with Current Affairs lately, and the response was swift and enraged (…) Look at Noah Smith for a good example of the basic incoherence I’m talking about. Echoing a common criticism, Smith claims that American leftists in general and Chomsky in particular are demonstrating an American-centric worldview, insisting that

The arrogance of this kind of armchair quarterbacking is breathtaking — an American public intellectual dictating territorial and diplomatic concessions to Ukraine. Chomsky uses the word “we” to describe the parties that he imagines will make these concessions to Russia, but the first person pronoun is totally unwarranted — it is 100% Ukraine’s decision how much of their territory and their people to surrender to an invader who is engaging in mass murder, mass rape, and mass removal to concentration camps in the areas it has conquered. It is 0% Noam Chomsky’s decision.

And yet a few paragraphs later, Smith says of US support that “without which [Ukraine] would probably have fallen.” (…) Calls for the United States to deepen its involvement in this conflict are definitionally the business of each and every American, including Chomsky”

OK. But, here, Freddie is mixing or equating two things that aren’t the same. Chomsky is entitled to discuss the level of American involvement in Ukraine. As Freddie says, that’s definitely every American’s business.

OTOH, making concessions to Russia (even if only theoretically), on behalf of the Ukrainians, is definitely not the business of Americans.

To make it simple, Americans can decide whether they want to provide weapons, or how much weapons, or what kind of weapons. Ukrainians can ask for more, for different weapon systems, whatever but it's America’s sovereign decision. The same is true about territorial concessions. It’s the business of Ukrainians and no one else.

I also think it’s a bit of a red erring. I don’t know why exactly Freddie got so upset with Noah’s phrasing but it doesn’t mean that Chomsky cannot share his thoughts about strategy, end games and what would be ‘best’ under the circumstances.

Indeed, Freddie does exactly that later in his post

“Perhaps the Ukrainians actually will nobly resist and push Russians all the way out of their territory. Perhaps the notorious corruption and fragile federal government in Ukraine will not prove to be a problem, even with vast troves of weapons having been recently imported. Perhaps the Azov battalion and the prevalence of the ultra-nationalist far-right are problems that will just go away. I’d be happy with those outcomes. But I suspect that, instead, in a year or two those who are celebrating the Ukraine-Russia conflict as a good war will not have such rosy feelings anymore. I suspect that the war will grind on, Russia will fail to capture the country but Ukraine will be unable to retake what they’ve lost, and a brutal, ugly stalemate will ensue”.

While I disagree with some of the specifics and the overall sentiment, the phrasing itself here is unimpeachable. Freddie simply states what he fears will be the endgame. That’s something everyone, American, Ukrainian, whatever, is entitled to do. Indeed, I would expect a rational thinker to use his conclusions about the endgame to inform his actions today. But that’s still very different from casually suggesting Ukraine should give up some territory to appease/satisfy Putin…

To broaden the topic, I think Freddie is wrong about other things. He notes:

“On social media, dissenters are regularly called traitors and fifth columnists. “You’re either with us or you’re with the enemy” is the dominant creed, right now. I haven’t seen an insistence on groupthink like this since the post-9/11 world”.

I cannot know what 9/11 and the runup to the Irak invasion was quite like in the USA for a hard left pacifist/anti-imperialist. But I remember being member of a politics and current event phpbb forum back in the day, exchanging with Americans, British and a variety of Anglo-Saxons (I was the lone Frenchman). Opinions and specifics varied depending on which particular was being discussed but the pushback against GWB’s justifications and the more “ra-ra-ra America” of our members was intense.

In short, there is simply no comparison. GWB was wrong to invade Iraq and the US public was wrong for supporting him, blinded as they were by their anger over 9/11. I take this position with ease as I was saying exactly the same thing 20 years ago.

Here, Putin is absolutely in the wrong and the majority of Russians supporting him are absolutely in the wrong.

There is no reason to be stingy in our (moral) support for Ukraine and in our admiration for Ukrainians determination to resist and repulse Russia’s assault.

“You can think that Russia’s motivations are pure mustache-twirling evil with no justifications in national security or realpolitik”

That’s a quick stab at what Freddie thinks are valid concerns from the Russian POV re. NATO and its eastward extension. I’ll probably develop that in a separate post but, while NATO didn’t always act with tact or displayed much forward thinking in the 90s and early 2000s, it is total bullshit to pretend that NATO ‘threatened’ Russia or that its extension somehow justifies invading Ukraine, even from a cold realpolitik POV. Putin invaded Ukraine because he thought it’d be relatively easy and one more step on the path to recreating the mighty Russian Empire (with Putin as its Czar of course) and the rest is mostly fig leaves - ad hoc justifications for what he wanted to do anyhow, no different from GWB pretending Iraq was seeking to acquire yellowcake...

“I thought the fact that bad actors sometimes do bad things, and that our efforts to change this will often simply make things worse, was a shared lesson of recent history”

I used to be a bit of an interventionist in the 90s. I thought that, with the fall of the Soviet Union and especially after the liberation of Kuwait, the West had the possibility and therefore the responsibility to intervene in a country’s internal affairs if interethnic, interreligious etc. violence was getting out of hand. It took several international disasters (Yugoslavia, Somalia, Rwanda…) to change my mind. I am not necessarily against all interventions but I think initial conditions matter a great deal and winning the war is the easy bit.

But here this is an intervention “we” can win. Certainly, as long as the Ukrainians are willing to suffer the mass murders, the mass rapes and the general destruction of their cities and yet keep on fighting, the least we can do is support and arm them.

It’s not just a matter of morality and of being the Goodies vs. the Baddies (though that matters) but it’s also a question of international norms. America’s invasion of Iraq was morally bankrupt, evil, also ill advised from a practical POV but its greatest cost was the West in general and America in particular losing the moral high ground. It matters. At the end of the day, it’s people yielding the weapons. Why and for whom they’re willing to fight matters. “The pen is mightier than the sword”, right? So Russia blatantly breaking the taboo against conquering weaker neighbouring countries is a danger to all of us, if it is allowed to stand. The Ukrainians, by not folding within 48 hours, are giving all of us a chance to nip this disastrous return to Great Powers’ competition in the bud and, for that, I am grateful. I suspect the Taiwanese and Polish ought to be, too…

Whether they’re seen as major challenges to international norms is a matter of publicity.

No. International norms do exist, however blurry and fickle. Conquering and annexing countries is not accepted anymore and it’s different from even the invasion of Iraq, let alone stuff like Libya, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan or Ethiopia.

Chomsky is suggesting that perpetuating the conflict by enabling short-term Ukrainian victories will ultimately only increase the risk of a truly ruinous war between NATO and Russia and result in greater destruction to Ukraine, without much changing the eventual outcome.

Freddie is using Chomsky as a screen for one of his argument as to why Ukrainians should not be supported and we should acquiesce to Russian’s seizing of Ukraine. We must not risk any escalation with a nuclear country.

Fair enough, except - where does it stop? Should we let Russia take Poland too? Maybe even Germany while we’re at it? China should definitely invade Taiwan and Vietnam as soon as possible…

The truth is that the Cold War is a useful guide here in terms of what is “allowed” and “not allowed”. The USSR and China armed the Vietcong. The US tolerated it and did not escalate. The US armed the mujaheddin in Afghanistan and the USSR did not escalate. Recently, the Russians offered bounties to the Talibans for the killing of US soldiers and “accidently on purpose” let the Wagner group attack US troops at Khasham… The US did nothing. So arming the Ukrainians is within the international norms we’ve evolved during the Cold War. It’s not a direct attack on Russian territory or NATO engaging Russian forces directly (that’s why a no fly zone was not something we would agree to and the reason I think we won’t ever agree to it, regardless of Russian atrocities - up to and including the use of chemical weapons). Therefore, no matter how frustrating it is to Russia, they are bound to let it happen… unless they decide they want to launch WWIII.

Perhaps the Ukrainians actually will nobly resist and push Russians all the way out of their territory. Perhaps the notorious corruption and fragile federal government in Ukraine will not prove to be a problem, even with vast troves of weapons having been recently imported. Perhaps the Azov battalion and the prevalence of the ultra-nationalist far-right are problems that will just go away. I’d be happy with those outcomes.

Mouais. I hope Freddie is sincere but some of these criticisms feel fake, mere justification for his underlying preference for Russia. The Azov battalion and the presence of some far right elements is a smoke screen. Zelensky is Jewish. He was elected by a 70+% margin, in a field of 40+ candidates. I think the following sentence from Wikipedia makes the point perfectly: “Unlike most Eastern European countries which saw far-right groups become permanent fixtures in their countries' politics during the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, the national electoral support for far-right parties in Ukraine only rarely exceeded 3% of the popular vote”. And it’s not just Eastern Europe. Russia has a far bigger and far more problematic nationalist far right issue than Ukraine.

I’ve seen the same thing in many hard left thinkers. They’re reflexively anti-American/anti-imperialist and thus any international move made by the US must be opposed. They also deeply miss and achingly yearn for the good ol’ USSR and its anti-imperialist Marxist discourse (regardless of the fact it was mere fig leaf for a Stalinist agenda that did not care one iota for self determination).

This is sad. Things have to be taken on a case by case. The US was wrong to invade Iraq. The US is right to oppose Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.