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Saturday, April 02, 2022

Waking Up from 1989--or not

 The collapse of Communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe in 1989 convinced most of the West that the world was now headed in the same direction, towards worldwide capitalism and democracy.  Things had looked roughly the same 80 years earlier, in 1909 or so, another optimistic moment in which at least one observer, Norman Angell, argued that great-power war had become obsolete.  Then the First World War broke out, first in Eastern Europe, and then all over the continent because of imperial Germany's great power ambitions.  After the collapse of the Ottoman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and German empires at the end of that war, the victorious allies looked forward once again to a long peace, but the Depression and the rise of Nazi Germany doomed those hopes as well.  The League of Nations failed to prevent small and then large wars in the 1930s.

The US foreign policy establishment, we can now see, looked forward in the early 1990s to the complete hegemony of American values and interests, enforced when necessary by military power.  Paul Wolfowitz put this one paper late in the Bush I administration, and no subsequent administration has really abandoned these dreams.  George H. W. Bush had fought the first Gulf War with the united support of the UN, but Bill Clinton decided to fight Yugoslavia for Kosovo without it.  He also tried and failed to straighten out Somalia, and expanded NATO.  Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives returned to power under George W. Bush and wrote a national security strategy declaring, among other things, that the US would attack any nation that was trying to build weapons the US did not think they should have.  After 9/11 they implemented that policy in Iraq, with disastrous results, and decided to try to establish a new friendly government in Afghanistan.  Meanwhile, initial attempts in the 1990s to use billions of dollars to integrate Russia into the world economy ended very badly, and Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia in 1999.  Bush II continued expanding NATO, and at the end of his term tried to bring Georgia and Ukraine into it as well. 

Future historians, I think, will see that the collapse of Communism encouraged a new phase of American imperialism focused on the Middle East.  That trend continued under Barack Obama, who encouraged the Arab spring, took steps to overthrow Qadaffi in Libya, and committed the US to the overthrow of Assad in Syria.  Sick of its elites adventures, the American people in 2016 barely elected Donald Trump, who wanted to end the imperial era.  He had nearly pulled out of Afghanistan when he left office, and he apparently had thought seriously about leaving NATO.

The US government did recognize a potential Chinese threat all this time, largely, I suspect, because Taiwan remains the principal reason for the maintenance of  the US Navy.  The US has been trying to build a new anti-Chinese alliance in Asia, yet we also hoped--and may still hope--that China's increasingly important place in the global economy will dissuade it from dangerous military adventures.  The US refused, however, seriously to take account of who Vladimir Putin was and what his ascent to power meant.  Shortly after he took power in 1999, bombings of Moscow apartment buildings took several hundred Russian lives. Putin blamed Chechen terrorists--even though there was no ongoing war between Russia and Chechnya at that moment--and made the bombings his pretext to resume the war.  He won it by leveling the Chechen capital, Grozny.  I recently learned from this excellent episode of This American Life that evidence emerged almost at once that Russian intelligence had set off the fatal bombs in Moscow--and a longtime friend of mine, a Russian expert, confirmed that. Putin, in short, immediately revealed himself as a dictator who would murder his own people to create a pretext for territorial expansion--and it was no secret that he regarded the collapse of the USSR as a catastrophe.  He soon began murdering political opponents as well, both inside and outside Russia,. Yet the West, noticing Russia's increasing role as an energy supplier--especially to Western Europe--refused to take him seriously as a long-term threat, and both George W. Bush and Barack Obama treated him as some one we could get along with, at least until the annexation of Crimea and hte beginning of the war against Ukraine in 2014.  Donald Trump regarded him as an ally.

The shock within our media and foreign policy establishment at Putin's invasion of Ukraine is wondrous to behold.  Many simply cannot believe that Putin would dare do something that we did not believe he should do.  Many immediately began grasping at straws suggesting that he could not succeed, such as the hope that oligarchs might overthrow him.  This is a real parallel to the response to Hitler in the late 1930s, when many hoped that "moderates" in the German government would restrain him.  Putin, however, is obviously an outlaw determined to use terror to tighten his rule at home and force to expand it abroad  History tells us, too, that that is not necessarily a self-defeating strategy.  That is how the Russian empire was originally created and expanded, and then restored under the USSR.  Our vision of a world in which such things do not happen is simply not self-actualizing in the real world.

Two years ago, a longtime friend of mine, a political scientist and retired Air Force colonel named Thomas Ehrhard, summarized the impact of post-cold war thinking on our military in this excellent article.  Assuming--like the British government in the 1920s and early 1930s--that a great-power war was too unlikely to worry about, our military stopped preparing for one.  That may be one reason why the Pentagon does not seem to be showing any appetite for intervention in Ukraine, the course of action which I continue to believe we should seriously consider.  The battlefield news from Ukraine is still good, although the devastation of the major cities and the refugee crisis are horrifying.  Unless the war ends with Putin's fall, however--an outcome that does not seem in the least likely--NATO will have to contend with very real threats to seize the Baltic states--which are far less defensible than Ukraine.

Putin has been much more patient and more clever than Hitler was.  He spent years building up his economy and shoring up his domestic position.  He was not, like Hitler, impelled by economic problems to expand rapidly.  He did test the waters in 2014 and emerged relatively unscathed.  (It isn't clear that the sanctions the west imposed at that time did that much harm.)  The Chinese have also been patient.  Yet  Russia, and perhaps Chna as well, now feels entitled to use its military power to secure territorial ambitions.  It's true that the US set the precedent for unrestrained use of its military power in Kosovo, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere.  I opposed two of those interventions but I will not make the popular era of assuming that we have no right to complain about Russia's aggression because of our own behavior.   A Second World War solution to the problems of Russia and China--their conquest--is obviously impossible.  We must figure out what we can do, and what we are willing to do, militarily,  to stop their expansion if sanctions do not bring down Putin.

6 comments:

PJ Cats said...

Dear Prof EM Kaiser,

I think Europe is partly on the way to a measured and realistic response. That would be to make itself independent from Russia's energy supply, if necessary in a shockwise way. I think we can do that (I'm in The Netherlands), not without pain, but I for one would be willing to go that route. Many of the people I speak to say the same. The next step, which is also being taken already, is to further isolate Russia from trade and finances. These two steps (which should have been taken in 2014, after the downing of flight MH17) should present the Russian regime with enough domestic problems to keep it occupied. The Ukranian campaign thus far has not been very convincing about Russia's military capacities. Maybe it's also been pretty costly in terms of its military projection capabilities.
To go to war with Russia over Ukraine I find a bridge too far. We should do that over the Baltic States; I think Ukraine just doesn't present a reasonable casus belli for us. Also I may be chicken, but then, I'm close enough to the port of Rotterdam to be in the fallout zone. So for now, I think we should supply Ukraine with arms and intel and kind of sit back and wait.
I think you are right in supposing that Putin will stay in power and even strengthen his position. You would also be right in assessing that he is a killer and basically a petty thief who got the chance to grow into a mob boss. He is not even good at that, maybe that's why he and Trump look so similar. They are both terrible at doing what they want most. How strange.
It seems that through history, the Russian people always end up with this type of leader. That's bad enough for them; if we can keep the problem isolated and localized, I think we have a winner.

That Liberal Guy said...

Actually it was H.W. Bush who tired to straighten out Somalia and sent the troops. Clinton merely did the best he could with that hand he was dealt. Perhaps he could have immediately pulled them out saying it was a mistake sending them in. But in the world of the real no President could so contradict a past president. (Except of course, Trump).

Energyflow said...

So what I take from this is that we are in a zero sum game. We expand and control more or they do. No peaceful coexistence. Again you have provided a case, chechen war false flag. This is rather likely. I have presumed this for a long time and generally ignored or excused it. I presume he had his reasons. Chechenia is however within Russian borders. We can then list less the several years out of 250 that the USA was not at war and the myriad regime changes, false flags abroad with tens of millions dead or displaced to equal Stalin, Mao, perhaps WWII immensities. This policy continues today in Pakistan and elsewhere as a matter of course. What for Russia was an extreme exception is for America and Britain daily business. So essentially while the entire 2nd and 3rd World feels daily under potential threat by sanctions or regime change mechanisms by America anyone who dares react against such is automatically branded as criminal by examining him to see if he has a completely spotless vest. The 2014 Coup d'état is well documented and the following Ukraine regime controlled by USA in background and spearheading a NATO advance against Russia. Ukraine had planned a strike against Donbass and amassed its troops where they are now encircled. They are NATO trained and armed. In all but name this is an American war against Russia. Nonintervention by Russia would have been suicide. Putin likely saw similar interference in Chechnya and acted accordingly. Daily false flags propaganda by the Ukrainians are being unmasked. Meanwhile real live torture and murder videos of Russian POWs are in wide circulation. Nobody needs empire and autocracy. It all depends on whom one wishes to believe, on who is more credible to a broader audience. The global south refuses sanctions, seeing America/ NATO at fault while the West is browbeaten, whipped into a frenzy by a monolithic press( Tucker excepted) crying for blood as in 2003 by Iraq. Later it was all just a mistake, as with Hunter Biden. Most occurrences of significance in Ammerican history can be thrown into serious doubt after the fact. Usually warmongers got their way, benefit of the doubt. All naysayers were branded traitors, conspiracy theorists. Why is this so? Cui bono? Moneyed interests of course. Democracy is a fig leaf when foreign adventures and plunder beckons. Washington warned against such. Patriotism starts at home.

Bozon said...

Professor

My suggestion here is now to add both racial, religious, and civilizational aspects to your LIEO account.

I would call what is rolling out The White Western Civilizational Civil War III, although beginning, not as WWI did, between Austrian Catholic and Slav Orthodox rebel elements, but rather with a Slav on Slav Civil War in East Ukraine, but then confronting a Catholic minority in the West of a torn country at the civilizational fault line.

All the best

That Liberal Guy said...

"He [Bill Clinton] also tried and failed to straighten out Somalia"

Left a similar message a couple days ago. Maybe it's not a big deal, but choosing to send troops to a foreign country should be considered a big deal. So mistaking which President sent them there should also be a important.

noribori said...

"Russia is essentially saying, What are you going to do if we fire a tactical nuclear weapon at a military airport in Poland? This is something that they see themselves justified in potentially doing because those military airports are being used to supply military equipment to Ukraine."

From this interview with Masha Gessen:
https://the.ink/p/is-this-how-russia-ends?s=r