The Ukraine Debate

The fog of war, being especially foggy when we are not directly involved, makes it very difficult to understand what is happening on the ground in Ukraine. We pointed out, a couple of days ago, that the tone and tenor of news reports are suggesting that the Ukrainians are losing the war, and that, even where they are winning, their country is becoming rubble. The Russian military has gained some 20% of the country and is meeting the challenge of counterattacks.

Considering that we had been told that the Russians could not accomplish anything on the battlefield, that they had suffered appalling losses, and that Vladimir Putin is soon going to die of cancer, this shift in tone feels significant.

For now, given that we do not really know what is happening on the battlefield, we will shift to another arena, the marketplace of public debate on the Ukraine issue.

I would like to emphasize the rather different analyses of three foreign policy commentators. They are Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times and Christopher Caldwell, for the New York Times. While Friedman and Ganesh disagree on their analysis, both hail from the liberal left. Caldwell is a conservative.

Let’s begin with Friedman, a man who camped out in Tahrir Square a decade ago to breathe the air of freedom that was going to lead to the empowerment of the Muslim Brotherhood. We have good reason to shed some doubt on the pontifications of Tom Friedman, who embarrasses himself more often than he offers a cogent analysis.

Now, in a recent column, Friedman suggests that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has awakened Europe from its slumber and has united it in a way that we had not seen for decades.

You see, the Europeans think that Putin is Hitler, a convenient analogy, one that seems to echo the American left in its willingness to turn every Republican of any stature into Hitler. After a while it all becomes tedious. After a while you think that some people are fighting the last war. Anyway, here is Friedman, longing for the days when Hitler provided some moral clarity to those who do not know how to think.

This invasion — with Russian soldiers indiscriminately shelling Ukrainian apartment buildings and hospitals, killing civilians, looting homes, raping women and creating the biggest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II — is increasingly seen as a 21st-century rerun of Hitler’s onslaught against the rest of Europe, which started in September 1939 with the German attack on Poland. Add on top of that Putin’s seeming threat to use nuclear weapons, warning that any country that interfered with his unprovoked war would face “consequences you have never seen,” and it explains everything.

Sports fans, it was not just an awakening to the notion that history was repeating itself. It was an earthquake:

In sum, what I thought was just a Russian invasion of Ukraine has become a European earthquake — “an awakening — boom! — and then everything changed,” as Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister, put it to me. “The status quo ante will not come back. You are seeing a huge change in Europe in response to Russia — not based on American pressure, but because the threat perception of Russia today is completely different: We understand that Putin is not talking about Ukraine alone, but about all of us and our way of freedom.”

Friedman argues that Europe is coming together, just as the United States is coming apart. Quite the vision there, Tom:

To put it bluntly, while the United States of America seems to be coming apart, the United States of Europe — the 27 members of the European Union — have stunned everyone, and most of all themselves, by coming together to make a fist, along with a number of other European nations and NATO, to stymie Putin’s invasion.

He knows this because European nations have taken in a lot of refugees. 

Maybe the most impressive thing is how many Ukrainian refugees E.U. nations have been willing to house without much complaint. There is an awareness that Ukrainian menfolk are fighting to defend them, too, so the E.U. nations can at least house their women, children and elderly.

As it happens, Eastern Ukraine is being destroyed. Friedman retains an optimistic tone, imagining that some new arms are going to do more than prolong the agony:

Some E.U. leaders are already encouraging President Biden to call Putin and explore terms of a cease-fire. Putin’s forces in eastern and southern Ukraine are now out-pummeling the Ukrainian Army at various strategic junctions, volleying round after round of rockets and heavy artillery. They don’t need to be accurate; they just need to overwhelm the Ukrainian forces with their sheer volume.

I hope the Ukrainians can hold their ground long enough for more advanced Western arms to arrive to even the fight and for the E.U. sanctions on Russia to really hurt, so that Ukrainians have real leverage with Putin in any negotiated settlement.

One does not quite see what leverage Ukraine will have at the negotiating table, especially when Putin cannot really afford to look like he has lost.

Anyway, Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh, a liberal like Friedman, but more intelligent and a better writer. At the least, he does not quite have the schoolgirl gushing tone that Friedman has.

To Ganesh, a European, the Ukraine War has not really brought Europe together. It has not given us what he calls the hour of Europe. The reason: both France and Germany are still hedging their bets. They are helpfully imposing sanctions on Russian energy, but not the most Draconian kind, because that would destroy their economies. Besides, as the West cuts back its purchase of Russian oil and gas, the East is hard at work taking up the slack:

Europe can only ever do so much, though, without its power couple. Neither France nor Germany is as explicit as von der Leyen that Ukraine “must win”. The former’s president, Emmanuel Macron, undeterred by things like evidence and results, believes in his calling as the west’s one-man bridge to Moscow. Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, speaks in terms too elliptical for some in his own domestic audience to fathom. “Can violence be fought with violence?” he asked last week, as an undergraduate debater might. Into such waffle, some of Germany’s neighbours read a preference for a quiet life over the commercial expense of a lasting schism with Russia. Both nations can mount a defence, citing refugee intakes (more than 700,000 in Germany alone) and their commitment to such sanctions as the new EU ban on most Russian oil. Both can argue that a Ukrainian victory is easier to desire in the abstract than to define on the ground. Both can insist that it is easier to contemplate an open-ended energy war when geological luck has spoilt you with resources, as it has the US.

How then is the war going? Ganesh considers it an attritional horror. It would be difficult to argue the point:

In an unwelcome symmetry, the war has followed much the same arc as Europe’s response to it. What began as stunning Ukrainian overperformance, at least next to the insulting expectations of outsiders, has become attritional horror. What began as a cohesive Europe, with Germany overcoming its own past to set a much larger defence budget, has become progressively mushier. The spectrum of policies from Estonia to France, to say nothing of Hungary, has widened troublingly.

So, Ganesh sees Europe dividing in its resolution:

Talk of a split within “the west” is not alarmist, but it is imprecise. The split to worry about is within Europe. 

He concludes:

Those who wish the continent well are left to wonder if there might be some perverse good here. If it ever materialised, “strategic autonomy” would necessarily be led by France and Germany, unless some non-EU structure could be wrought to accommodate Britain. That would have meant, right now, a “European” posture on Ukraine that would displease much of Europe, as well as the US. Incoherent policies might be better than a uniformly bad one.

Germany can at least claim to have been sceptical about an autonomous Europe all along. The French predicament is more awkward. Macron once attributed America’s toughness towards Russia to its “historic superego”, whatever that means, and the luxury of having a“sea between the two of them”. Well, there are countries rather closer to Russia than France that seem to prefer the US approach to the Elysée’s. Two and a half years since that vivid metaphor of his, it is strategic autonomy, not Nato, that is fighting brain death.

We also highlight the views of one Christopher Caldwell, one of the conservative voices writing occasional commentary for the New York Times. Caldwell has a radically different take on the war, so it is worth paying some attention.

He highlights the views of one Henri Guaino, formerly an advisor to French president Nicholas Sarkozy:

Naturally, Mr. Guaino understands that Russia is most directly to blame for the present conflict in Ukraine. It was Russia that massed its troops on the frontier last fall and winter and — having demanded from NATO a number of Ukraine-related security guarantees that NATO rejected — began the shelling and killing on Feb. 24.

But, Caldwell wants especially to highlight the way that United States, that would be the Biden administration, has botched the policy challenge. And therefore he considers our inept current administration to bear significant responsibility for the war. 

It is worth emphasizing the point, since Friedman and Ganesh seem to think that the American administration has done a fine job:

But the United States has helped turn this tragic, local and ambiguous conflict into a potential world conflagration. By misunderstanding the war’s logic, Mr. Guaino argues, the West, led by the Biden administration, is giving the conflict a momentum that may be impossible to stop.

He is right.

In 2014 the United States backed an uprising — in its final stages a violent uprising — against the legitimately elected Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovych, which was pro-Russian. (The corruption of Mr. Yanukovych’s government has been much adduced by the rebellion’s defenders, but corruption is a perennial Ukrainian problem, even today.) Russia, in turn, annexed Crimea, a historically Russian-speaking part of Ukraine that since the 18th century had been home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

Perhaps you know the history, beginning with Russian claims to Crimea:

One can argue about Russian claims to Crimea, but Russians take them seriously. Hundreds of thousands of Russian and Soviet fighters died defending the Crimean city of Sevastopol from European forces during two sieges — one during the Crimean War and one during World War II. In recent years, Russian control of Crimea has seemed to provide a stable regional arrangement: Russia’s European neighbors, at least, have let sleeping dogs lie.

But, the Biden administration chose not to let sleeping dogs lie. It got together with Ukraine and signed an accord calling for Ukraine to join NATO:

But the United States never accepted the arrangement. On Nov. 10, 2021, the United States and Ukraine signed a “charter on strategic partnership” that called for Ukraine to join NATO, condemned “ongoing Russian aggression” and affirmed an “unwavering commitment” to the reintegration of Crimea into Ukraine.

It was not a very good idea. Virtue signaling and public posturing do not make for good policy. Perhaps John McCain was right when he denounced Antony Blinken for gross incompetence:

That charter “convinced Russia that it must attack or be attacked,” Mr. Guaino wrote. “It is the ineluctable process of 1914 in all its terrifying purity.”

What is the state of play of the war? Caldwell has a somewhat different analysis. He emphasizes the fact that we Americans are directly involved in the war:

The United States has provided intelligence used to kill Russian generals. It obtained targeting information that helped to sink the Russian Black Sea missile cruiser the Moskva, an incident in which about 40 seamen were killed.

And the United States may be playing an even more direct role. There are thousands of foreign fighters in Ukraine. One volunteer spoke to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation this month of fighting alongside “friends” who “come from the Marines, from the States.” Just as it is easy to cross the line between being a weapons supplier and being a combatant, it is easy to cross the line from waging a proxy war to waging a secret war.

So, our participation is causing the war to continue. And, one reason is the Western insistence that Ukraine can and must win:

Even if we don’t accept Mr. Putin’s claim that America’s arming of Ukraine is the reason the war happened in the first place, it is certainly the reason the war has taken the kinetic, explosive, deadly form it has. Our role in this is not passive or incidental. We have given Ukrainians cause to believe they can prevail in a war of escalation.

Thousands of Ukrainians have died who likely would not have if the United States had stood aside. That naturally may create among American policymakers a sense of moral and political obligation — to stay the course, to escalate the conflict, to match any excess.

The United States has shown itself not just liable to escalate but also inclined to. In March, Mr. Biden invoked God before insisting that Mr. Putin “cannot remain in power.” In April, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin explained that the United States seeks to “see Russia weakened.”

And, being as history makes for strange bedfellows, Caldwell quotes Noam Chomsky, whose views seem strangely consonant with those of President Trump:

Noam Chomsky warned against the paradoxical incentives of such “heroic pronouncements” in an April interview. “It may feel like Winston Churchill impersonations, very exciting,” he said. “But what they translate into is: Destroy Ukraine.”

And then, we have the thoughts of Henry Kissinger, also someone who prefers a negotiated solution to our willingness to fight to the last Ukrainian:

Russia has a land bridge to Crimea and control of some of Ukraine’s most fertile agricultural lands and energy deposits, and in recent days has held the battlefield momentum. Ukraine, after a robust defense of its cities, can expect further NATO support, know-how and weaponry — a powerful incentive not to end the war anytime soon.

But if the war does not end soon, its dangers will increase. “Negotiations need to begin in the next two months,” the former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger warned last week, “before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome.” Calling for a return to the status quo ante bellum, he added, “Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine but a new war against Russia itself.”

Dare we say that the decision making is shrouded in complexity. There is effectively no good way to resolve this conflict right now:

In this, Mr. Kissinger is on the same page as Mr. Guaino. “To make concessions to Russia would be submitting to aggression,” Mr. Guaino warned. “To make none would be submitting to insanity.”

But, the Biden is tough and resolute. Or, at least, it feels the need to show itself to be. 

The United States is making no concessions. That would be to lose face. There’s an election coming. So the administration is closing off avenues of negotiation and working to intensify the war. We’re in it to win it. With time, the huge import of deadly weaponry, including that from the newly authorized $40 billion allocation, could take the war to a different level. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine warned in an address to students this month that the bloodiest days of the war were coming.

We are watching the destruction of a large part of a country. But, we seem to feel the need to look tough, so we will not negotiate. And more people will die, needlessly.