Bomb shelter in Mariupol from AP News, March 6, 2022. AP Photo by Evgeniy Maloletka
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
The situation in Ukraine has been in a rapid state of flux since my last posting on March 23rd. Of course, President Biden did not visit the Ukraine, as I urged him to do. My check in the press on April 6th, seemed to hold open the possibility of a Pope Francis visit, though.
Citizens around the world, but especially in the US and Europe, are being whipsawed between graphic images of civilian bodies found in the recently liberated suburbs of Kyiv and the continuing accounts of the desperation growing in Mariupol, the large city on the southern coast. Whipsawed, that is, between the growing horrors being uncovered and the courage and skill of the Ukrainian military, pushing the Russians out from around Kyiv, and preparing for further battle in the South and East of the country. It’s quite a clash of messages: military success beyond anyone’s expectations, yet unable to protect the people of the country from pillage, beatings, rape, executions and now involuntary deportations to Russia – all war crimes in themselves. (Editor’s note of caution: we don’t have the details or ironclad confirmation yet of the deportations, but I’ve read enough to raise the issue. The same for allegations of mobile crematoriums being used by Russian forces to eliminate the corpses of the dead civilians in Mariupol, which emerged shortly after the international exposure given to the war crimes in the liberated suburbs outside of Kyiv.)
Even the usually even tempered CNN host Don Lemon, back from an on-the-ground stint in the country, seemed to grow impatient with official American analysis last night, asking when we would do more militarily to prevent the destruction and bloodbaths. He got no answer. And then there’s the write-off of Mariupol, being called a sacrificial “Alamo” when even the scales of the “sacrifice” don’t work: hundreds in 1836 at the Alamo in today’s San Antonio versus potentially hundreds of thousands in 2022 in Mariupol. Resignation on such a scale is a damning condemnation, in my way of viewing this whole conflict, of our terrible American strategy to not deter the invasion before it took place, given our accurate predictions and the months long build up of Russian forces threatening on the immediate border areas.
It seems like a long time ago that I wrote calling for a humanitarian air “drop” to get food, water and medical supplies into Mariupol, but its’ only been since March 12th. I also suggested that such a tactic would be a good way to invoke a humanitarian “No Fly Zone” (NFZ) to get planes/helicopters into the city, or at least protected “drops” – fully recognizing that the NFZ has become a trip wire fear that neither Biden nor NATO will cross, not even for the best of Western humanitarian values, recalling in my memory at least, the Berlin Airlift in 1948-1948. And not even after President Biden has publicly called Mr. Putin a war criminal, a thug, a murderer…did I miss any of the new and accurate titles, which nonetheless true as they are, only push the possibility of a “settlement” out of reach. As did the President’s unscripted (supposedly) comment made in Warsaw, Poland on March 26the, his closing sentence of an important speech – “‘For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.'” Officials in his administration immediately “walked it back” (they certainly get a lot of exercise with Joe Biden doing that) but surely it registered with Mr. Putin, who doesn’t need any more excuses, much less personal reasons, to dial up his cruelty. So much that is unfolding then is working to push both sides away from compromise outcomes. Wait until Ukraine is able to comb Mariupol’s rubble: then there will be no compromise possible; even now, before the full scope of horrors is known, Ukrainian officials of various ranks – local, parliamentary, and Presidential – are voicing their growing frustration with the West’s failure to do more. NATO is even hesitating to send tanks for the more conventional warfare likely to begin in the stalemated eastern battle areas. (Now being shipped by rail from the Czech and Slovak Republics…) The West – President Biden and NATO, are slow to escape from the mental traps the cunning Putin has thrown up from the very beginning.
Has that been the West’s strategy all along: to give the Ukrainians only enough weapons to fight Russia to a stalemate, but not drive them out of the country in all their newly entered corridors, much less to push them out of the territory the Russians seized in 2013-2014? At times it seems that way, and I think that the Ukrainians sense this, the accusation being just beneath the surface, if that, in President Zelensky’s barnstorming speaking tours, the most energetic chief executive the West has seen since Teddy Roosevelt, FDR – or Winston Churchill.
But war unleashes many unforeseen vectors, physical and moral, and the dynamics set in motion here are forcing all parties to change their initial calculations. Putin couldn’t take Kyiv or install a puppet government. The Ukrainian military has proven not just courageous but very adaptable, and technologically savvy. It wasn’t afraid to hit Russian facilities on Russian territory, which is legally permissible under International Law to protect itself. Perhaps this quote from Serhii Plokhy’s book, “The Gates of Europe,” helps explain why:
“Ukraine, which possesses 33 percent of the world’s rich black soil, is also the world’s second-largest exporter of grain. But even more impressive is its intellectual potential. Ukraine’s literacy rate now stands at a staggering 99.7%. It is arguably the fourth best-educated nation in the world. Every year, its universities and colleges produce 640,00 graduates. Of these, 130,000 major in engineering, 16,000 in IT, and 5,000 in aerospace, making Ukraine the software engineering capital of eastern and central Europe.” (Page 345 in the Chapter entitled “The Price of Freedom.”)
Indeed, I’ve heard accounts of model-airplane enthusiasts teaming up with drone flying hobbyists and some of this aerospace talent to brainstorm new methods of delivering lethal payloads with the technologies they are altering/inventing. (Even as US aerospace scrambles to catch up the the Russian advances in hypersonic missiles, capable of speeds 4 or 5 times the speed of sound, making them, after launched, untouchable.)
Given all this admirable bravery, heroism of the military and civilians too, there is still a bittersweet cloud hanging over the nation and the ongoing war – and its outcome. Let me be clear, in online comments published in the NY Times, I have said that now “Victory” is the only course open to the US and NATO, and by that I mean the total eviction of Russian forces from all the currently occupied Ukrainian land and a return to that nation’s borders in 2012, before the seizures in Crimea and the Donbas eastern regions. The major Tsarist-Soviet-Russian concern with a warm water port in the South would seem to have some room for compromise but maybe not if Putin or his successor insists on military rights of passage/usage. Putin has made major miscalculations in going for the Capital kill in Kyiv and a Vichy regime; but he won the opening psychological maneuvering with the West as President Biden has signaled, in the order I heard them, that it was OK if Putin took a little further bite of Ukraine than the 2013-2014 portions, quickly corrected by aides; then openly signaling that we would not put boots on the ground or wings in the air, the reason being fear of an escalation between the two nuclear powered giants (or former giants: Uncle Sam and the Russian Bear). That has stood as a line the US/NATO will not cross, although I do believe events are going to force a Rubicon upon us: either cross it with boots on the ground and all that is implied in a No Fly Zone – or watch the Ukraine destroyed, its civilians and physical infrastructure, if not by Russian troops close by then by means well over the horizon and even back in Russia itself.
I think that was all Putin needed to tip the scale towards invasion, hearing the lines Biden set up himself, the limits, and it didn’t matter how many weapons we poured into the Ukraine after that. Had the US/NATO sent troops, even token brigade sized forces to the Ukraine itself, not its borders with Russia, and/or declared a No Fly Zone in December or January, all this might have been avoided, but those possibilities seemed to have already been pushed off the table.
Biden has, it seems to me, a habit of constructing boxes of possibility, or rather, impossibility, for flexible adaption, as he did in negotiations with Senator Joe Manchin, from July, 2021 until December…where he assigned equal Presidential veto powers to each senator in the evenly split US Senate, and that became the conventional wisdom among all Centrist Democrats, and the Democratic Party cheerleaders at the Daily Kos, where I have been banned after my posting in October that “President Biden was single- handedly destroying the Democratic Party,” an intentionally polemical assertion with some degree of exaggeration – but later born out by the tremendous drop in his polling numbers.
I can’t speak to what went on in President Biden’s and NATO’s high level security meetings between the fall of 2021 and early 2022, but it seems whatever messages Putin was sending the one that registered most was his nuclear blustering, which did go very public. On this, the fear of nuclear war burst into public view in repeated comments by Joe Biden and was the deciding factor in not sending troops or enforcing a NO FLY ZONE, not even a humanitarian one for Mariupol. Thus, that city of 500,000 suffers the fate of Warsaw in WWII, in the summer and fall of 1944, where Stalin and the West failed to support the second great uprising in that city, as so poignantly and indignantly described in historian Norman Davies “‘Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw.” (The Russians stopped about 30 miles east of Warsaw, and sat and watched, refusing even air cover as the British Air Force gamely tried to get food and weapons to the Polish fighters. As a result, the Germans crushed the revolt and happily destroyed the city.)
As with the negotiations with West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin over his key domestic policies, it was some type of fear that seemed to corner President Biden’s imagination and prevent alternative tactics. Was it the loss of friendship with Manchin, to the point that a great nation’s domestic vision and future in the 21st century was outweighed by keeping “faith” with his Catholic friend? Or was Biden really closer to Manchin’s domestic vision than the public ever knew, with the President never really challenging Manchin’s objections, voiced in September of 2021 that “I cannot accept our economy or basically our society, moving towards an entitlement mentality.” That was an opening, if Biden had the vision and temerity to take Manchin on publicly, to give a national address to counter that statement, in spades, and lay out his own philosophy (sic) for something less than FDR’s Second Bill of Rights or Green New Deal, but still pretty expansive even in the scaled down fall versions.
Do serious foreign policy types think that “student” Putin, former KGB head, whom no one has accused of being stupid, was not watching the Biden persona and deportment on domestic matters in this past fall’s charade of negotiations, looking perhaps for signs of backbone, tenacity and vision? It’s hard for me to be reading Professor Plokhy’s 2021 book, “Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis,” now 150 or so pages in, and not be focused on how much “sizing up” Russian leaders like Nikita Khrushchev did of their opponents – Eisenhower, Nixon, Kennedy – looking for fear and weaknesses, and Kennedy was read, initially, as being afraid, very afraid, of setting off a nuclear confrontation, then war. The sense I have so far – up to mid-October, 1962, is that both leaders feared nuclear war, but Khrushchev was far more willing to take risks, bluster even about weapons he didn’t have yet, ICBM’s (he couldn’t yet reach the US key targets), was far more a brinkman than Kennedy in that fall of 1962, but nonetheless was not willing to go all the way, even for Cuba’s defense in an another US invasion attempt. The Soviet Premier was hoping to protect Castro, bridge his missile gap and achieve a stand-off with US missiles in Turkey and Greece – without a full confrontation, much less nuclear war. And his memoirs tell us how much attention he paid to the persona and psychology of the young US President. And his willingness to bluster the nuclear weapons he had, short and medium range ones. Does that remind readers of recent threats and blusters?
I would be short changing my readers if I didn’t share a deeper perspective on my own outlook, visible I hope, at least a bit, in my previous postings on the war in Ukraine, Russia’s invasion. I have indicated that I think the clear responsibility for the invasion rests with Mr. Putin and his desire to make Russia great again by winning back, by any means necessary, key portions of the geography of former eras of greatness, Tsarist and Soviet. In that sense there is a linkage, not absolute, but clear enough, between the rise of Donald Trump, who wants a US restoration of greatness, pouring it on in his Inaugural Address about the American “carnage” he sees across the land, that he will repair, based chiefly on de-industrial horror stories, the rise of China via naive western “globalization” and its terrible trade deals, and the arrogance and perhaps decadence of the coastal elites. It’s full of exaggerations, distortions, and often, vast oversimplifications if not lies, yet it captured a mood in a good part of the country, fanning the resentments built upon the disparities in regional economic success, but also this sense that the American college and graduate school educated elites look down their noses at the heartland, and rural Americans in general.
In Russia, Trump’s soulmate Putin, in power for an incredible 2001-2022 stretch, has developed his own deep resentments about the way Western free-market geniuses tried to administer “shock therapy” Neoliberal economic assumptions on a centralized economy, an economy which was far better suited to a gradual dose of social democracy, a mixed economy transition slowly engaged, which was the perspective of Russian historian “Stephen F. Cohen” in his 2001 book “Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia.” Putin has built his rise upon the anger generated by this failed crusade, with the Russian people and economy, hitting their nadir in 1998-1999, in the greatest plunge in a nation’s GDP ever recorded. It was the closest historical experience I am aware of to Germany’s experience of its loss in World War I, the humiliating terms of the Versailles Treaty, the Great Inflation of 1922-1923, and then the catastrophic implications of the Great Depression from 1929-1932.
Putin feels his attempts to compromise with the West in terms of nuclear agreements – abrogated unilaterally by the Americans twice – and betrayed by broken promises to keep NATO away from Russian doorsteps – his not being allowed a version of Russia’s “Monroe Doctrine” has justified him in fanning intense nationalistic feelings buttressed by his embrace of Russian religious orthodoxy to wield as a weapon against Western cultural decadence. I think that these dynamics have built to the point where it is the angry Putin which has appeared in full fury in public, eclipsing the controlled, cunning, calculating Putin of Western diplomatic lore.
In future writings I’ll explore the shared terrain of three former great powers – the US, Russia and Weimar Germany, the dangers which arise as they try to regain the memory of times past, and the tools which all three – Trump, Putin and the Austrian Corporal have wielded to break the fall and restore former glory. Each nation had their version of America’s exceptionalism, Germany the custodian of great music, literature and nature feeling, Russian the custodian of the Slavic soul, all spiritual, spurning the material…and all three nations, it seems to me, have had their struggles with the contradictions of modernity’s science, secularism and materialism.
But for now, please set some time aside to understand the case presented by Professor John Mearsheimer who has taught for decades at an obscure little junior college in the Mid-West, the University of Chicago, but who has been spurned by the American Foreign Policy elites, perhaps even more than the late Stephen F. Cohen of Princeton and NYU. Mearsheimer represents, by his own proclamations, an old school of balance of power politics on the world stage, and spheres of influence thinking, which one can grasp quite readily if one thinks of the American Monroe Doctrine, which we declared early on in the 19th century for “our” hemisphere, but which we have had a lot of difficulty in accepting when asserted by other nations – especially Russia. That being said, and no matter how much it illuminates Putin’s mindset from the fall of the Soviet Union, 1989-2001, Putin’s conduct as the head of Russia – internally, against domestic dissent, in crushing the breakaway Chechen region, and its conduct in Syria, all have worked against most all of the former Soviet “satellite” nations in Central and Eastern Europe from wanting any close relationship to a revived Russian bear. Even with Mearsheimer’s powerful insights, he still got the call wrong on Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine. And as he himself admits, “sphere’s of influence” asserted by large nations can be entirely at odds with other nation’s sense of nationalism, independence and democracy itself – if its citizen’s chose to shelter in another large “planet’s” orbit.
Here is one of the clearest foreign policy talks you will ever hear as Mearsheimer lays out what Russia/Putin view as “existential threats” to their interests, how ignoring their view would lead to wrecking the Ukraine, and drive Russia to an alliance with China. His lack of influence upon America’s foreign policy trajectory vis-a-vis Russia since 1989-1991 ought to trouble any citizen worried about a healthy democracy’s avoidance of serious alternative views. His laying out of the dynamics of US-Ukraine-Russia entanglement led me to an interventionist stance on behalf of Ukraine, based on the US’s moral responsibility in leading that nation to a NATO vision that was bound to provoke the Russian Bear. Once those hundred thousand plus Russian troops were deployed where they were in the late fall, early winter of 2021-2022, the legalistic distinction to being covered, or not, by the NATO paragraph five pledge became morally irrelevant: the moral duty was to block the invasion in the first place with US troops on the ground, and/or a declaration of a NO FLY ZONE – before the invasion.
And thus, dispute sharing much of the perspective of Mearsheimer’s historical narrative between the U.S., NATO and Russia from 1991 on, our clear leanings and active interventions in Ukrainian politics created a deep moral obligation not to let the Ukrainian nation (and if it was not fully a nation cohered in 2004, it is becoming so now in a dramatic and startling way, in the pressure cooker of war and its all out mobilization recalling the efforts of England standing alone in 1940) fight Russia by itself.
Editor’s Note added on Sunday, April 10th: I’ve just finished watching a panel hosted by the Nation magazine’s editor and wife of the late Stephen F. Cohen, dated April 7th, so pretty much up to date. I’ve very disappointed in what I heard from Professor Mearsheimer, not on the history of the runup to this conflict and NATO’s obliviousness to historical Russian sensitivities, but to his handling, failing to address adequately Russian atrocities not just in Ukraine, but their predictors from internal conduct of Putin towards adversaries (including poisonings abroad), and especially military conduct in Syria and Chechnya. Here’ the link
“Well, I’m pretty shocked by this whole proceeding. I’ve been touting Professor Mearsheimer, whose work over the past 20 years ought to have been given wider circulation among the public but most of all, with American foreign policy elites. But he did get prediction of the actual invasion wrong, and it’s hard to believe his handling of the Russian targeting of civilians, unless all I see in the missile and air attacks is bogus or distorted info, as justified by the fact the US has supported arming of civilians inside Ukraine to fight; really? That looks spontaneous to me, the Molotov Cocktail factories – are they using Southern Comfort in the fuel? You’re losing me here John, and I’ve plugged your work as necessary to understand what there is fair about the Russian perceptions of the advance of NATO. But the last two weeks of missile and air strikes hitting purely civilian targets: hospitals, schools., nurseries and shelters you seemingly can’t handle, nor did anyone else on this panel, unless I missed Professor Laruelle’s comments, no one mentioning, giving us a sense that Putin’s military tactics here in Ukraine are consistent with Russian methods in Syria and the Chechen wars. No mention of suppression of dissent in Putin’s Russia, poisoning of dissidents, killing or jailing of journalists…I mean, whatever case Putin might have made by pausing the massive threatened invasion before actually plunging in on the 24th of Feb and demanding forums to resolve the issues is now thrown away…and what former Soviet satellite nation looking at Russian/Putin conduct over the years he has been in power (2001…?) would want to remain in the Russian orbit? I think the American left has suddenly become shockingly amoral in many of their very fragmented positions, including the totally unsubstantiated premise that Biden wants this war as the explanation of his terrible public signals greenlighting Putin first to take a little bite, ok, then pledging no boots on the ground and no wings in the air – shocking. Rather, it just looks like the incompetence he displayed all summer and fall in 2021 in having Senator Joe Manchin “run the table on him.” If Putin needed the signals of weakness and over-caution before deciding to launch on Feb 24th, then Biden’s conduct in office has sent nothing but I’ll cave every time I might lose a friend…and everybody is my friend. If the left critics are right, that this is a Biden and American hawk ploy to bleed Russia as in Afghanistan, then they are equally cruel in making the civilian population of Ukraine pay their butcher’s bill for them. They’re forging a new nation and they’ll be damned – the current Ukrainian mood – to come to any table now that doesn’t result in evicting Russian forces from all parts of the Ukraine as it stood in the plebiscite for Independence in Dec. of 1991 when all parts of the Ukraine, including Crimea and the Donbas currently under Russian rule (really Independent John?) voted with the rest of the nation, although not with the same overwhelming percentages (still over 50%). So I’ve been with the late Stephen F. Cohen in his writing and Professor Mearsheimer up to a point, but I fail to see how Putin’s conduct, despite NATO gross mistakes and arrogance even, can win any hearing for his complaints. Unless most of what I see on CNN is a Ukrainian fabrication – as Putin says – and I’m a constant critic of CNN’s ideological biases against Sanders, against MMT in economics and keeping Professor Mearsheimer offscreen…then the left is shockingly underestimating the moral dimensions of the horrors Putin’s army has unleashed. And based on the history I know from “Bloodlands” and Vasily Grossman’s two volumes “Stalingrad” and “Life and Fate I wouldn’t expect a vigorous “left” to emerge in Ukraine, the Right has had the most bitter experience of all things Russian under Stalin…and now it doesn’t look much different under Putin, it’s just that Putin doesn’t possess the awful machinery of deporting millions, burying tens of thousands and putting bullets in the heads of frightened Russian troops… My positions in detail are public and online here: https://wordpress.com/posts/gracchibros.wordpress.com“
I’ll close with a brief posting from one of my comments online in the NY Times, a recent one, just to keep my perspective clear, and to offer readers one public sample of the type of attacks I’ve gotten by Email since I’ve taken my “interventionist” stance on behalf of Ukraine. This one accusing me of being a Trump supporter, but the private one questioning my right to offer opinions about whom Joe Biden should visit since I’m not a foreign policy expert. I’ll spare readers for now the full biography of reasons, especially over the past year or so, after the defeat of Sanders and the Green New Deal, why I feel comfortable writing the way I do, and challenging some of the cherished “gospel” from the Democratic Centrists. They don’t seem to realize the threat to democratic discourse posed by their insistence that only specialists and professionals can have “sound” views.
I was responding to the New York Times article “Up-Close: Ukraine Atrocity Photographs touch a Global Nerve” by Rick Gladstone which appeared on Tuesday, April 5th. Here’s the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/05/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-atrocities.html
And here is the photo which led the piece:
William Neil
MarylandApril 5
Timothy Snyder’s “Bloodlands,” makes this is all too familiar to the region, brought forth by the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin, from the 1930’s and 1940’s, and now an authoritarian oligarchy under Putin. It’s hard for me to fathom the paralysis of President Biden (primarily) and NATO (dependently) in this whole tragedy since early December of 2021 when, whether Putin actually invaded or not, 120,000 troops on Ukraine’s border called for action: sending NATO troops into a region of Ukraine that would be protective and give a clear signal – but not be as provocative as putting them right on the Russian/Ukraine border. Or, as a former NATO commander said last night on CNN, putting up a No Fly Zone in December, before any invasion. But no, the unimaginative, plodding Joe Biden instead signaled no troops and no wings in the air. Now to Mariupol, where the West should brace itself for even worse revelations of abuse of civilians, the whole gamut of horrors that the Eastern Front previewed from 1941-1945. Clearly, Biden and the West had the chance to take the initiative away from Mr. Putin, on the high moral ground of protecting civilians; at least feeding them and getting some of them out of the already demolished city which looks like Stalingrad in 1943. But again, no risk taking for a humanitarian No Fly Zone to deliver supplies or stop the bombardment, or US Special Forces to guide a convoy in. For me, all telegraphed by the failures with Joe Manchin.Reply10 RecommendShareFlag
3 REPLIES
T
Treetop
UsApril 5
@William Neil Yes I agree the West’s response in general has been so reactionary, just waiting to see what Putin will do, while we have the greater military might. My older relatives lived through the horrors of Russian invasion and occupation in the Baltics and always spoke of the cruelty of the Russians – would do anything to get away from them – and now it’s clear why.Reply10 RecommendedShareFlag
jack sherman commented April 5
J
jack sherman
MaineApril 5
@William Neil Your post is absurd—and would trigger WW3. Ukraine IS winning–and Biden has done a lot to help. you trump voters love to invent “the truth.” as if Biden is NOT doing all he can! Billions in aid (which many republicans voted against BTW)–his trip to Poland and strengthening NATO–which trump greatly weakened. but you seem to forget that Trump called Putin “a genius” on the day he invaded! Trump called Putin a “great leader–better than Obama” in the debates! so picture THAT nightmare–if trump was president now? he would be doing less than nothing. get your facts right. You “trump” republicans make me ill. like Tucker Carlson–who was so confused about why we are supporting Ukraine and NOT Russia—you have suddenly changed your tune–when you see a few pictures of murdered civilians. I’m surprised you are not calling this “fake news.”Reply2 RecommendShareFlag
William Neil commented April 5
W
William Neil
MarylandApril 5
@jack sherman Dearest Jack: I invite you to scour my postings over ten years at the Daily Kos for a good word about Trump, or any Republicans https://www.dailykos.com/history/user/billofrights and then in your next scouring exercise, check my voter registrations in NJ, RI MA and MD since 1972 …for signs of what you have hugely and wrongly assumed. Sorry to disappoint you. Daily Kos banned me in late October 2021 and I’ve never been reinstated because I headlined a polemic with the title “Joe Biden is single handedly destroying the Democratic Party” – that was two months before the Russian build up began to assume startling proportions and based on his incompetent handling of the Manchin matters. I hope in a forthcoming essay – I now post here and feel free to “scour” there as well https://wordpress.com/posts/gracchibros.wordpress.com to work on the theme of “Trump, Putin and the Lessons of Weimar Germany.” What else can I say but that my entire American civics education taught me to reject the whole persona of Trump, tactics, lies, and yes, being a man of the democratic left, his policies as well. Good luck in your search!Reply1 RecommendShare
gracchibros 