Biden Plays American Roulette (resend)
Putin is a bloody dictator. But he has a legit beef
The Biden administration, in the midst of a relentless pandemic, spiraling inflation, unprecedented levels of civic alienation, rising right wing opposition, and just months away from what might be a shattering set of midterms, has now come up with a new political priority: Hurriedly diving neck deep into the brewing military storm around a threatened Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Even indirect engagement in a convoluted European land war that would pit us, even indirectly, against a nuclear-armed Russia is probably not what most everyday Americans yearn for. I don’t see any rush to break open world maps to search for and sort out Kyiv, Donetsk, Odessa or Dnipro. Not even good old national chauvinism is bound to ignite much popular support for this involvement.
The Bi-Partisan National Security Blob, however, is downright ecstatic. Pleased that no Blobbers got their weenies caught in the gears after their total folly was so painfully exposed in Afghanistan six months ago, the usual advocates of militarism and US Exceptionalism are, once again, totally psyched. They’ve been given one more opportunity to strut their stuff, throw their weight around, and conveniently forget their own wretched record in attempting to police and “bring democracy” to the world.
Neocon-turned-Bidenista Max Boot summed up his and others call for a hardline response to Russia saying “The Soviet Union died a deserved death. We cannot stand idly by as Putin attempts to resurrect the ‘evil empire.’”
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Tony Blinken has been making the international rounds, hitching up his pants, stiffening his back and talking tough. "If a single additional Russian force goes into Ukraine in an aggressive way,” he said a few days ago,” that would trigger a swift, a severe and a united response from us and from Europe.”
Not sure what that “severe response” would be as even Biden says no American troops would be sent to Ukraine – though thousands are being deployed to NATO states on the Russian border. More sanctions? Yes. But we have already battered Russia with sanctions and that cost has been baked into Putin’s cake.
The ambiguity, the open-ended peril that this endeavor entails, what a deepening of this conflict might mean for China (Taiwan), has not deterred a massively wide chorus of Democrats, Republicans and just about everybody in between and to their sides from pledging their support. Even if it is not clear what is being supported. But the pro-interventionist consensus is rock solid across the American political class.
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If it were Donald Trump leading this US military posture, liberals would be hysterical in their opposition. With Biden, they are compliant.
As to Biden himself, it’s hard to believe he thinks there is any short-termed political value in this stand. In the long term there certainly isn’t. Yet, given the ear-shattering response to the Russian mobilization, it’s not too much to say that part of Biden’s legacy will be that January 2022 will be marked as the official beginning of The New Cold War. If he thinks he can exploit this conflict to “look strong” he better think twice.
Democrats and liberals who ought to be opposing this rush to military solutions, have been primed to do otherwise by the rhetoric of the last 5 years during which so many actually and foolishly believed Donald Trump was a Russian agent (rather than just a corrupt Greed Head who admired Putin’s illiberal rule).
This has left the anti-war space wide open for…Republicans. The most strident voice against Biden ramping up for war has been, oh boy, Tucker Carlson. On a nightly basis, he clearly places the underlying blame for this situation on NATO and he’s right. Unfortunately, his Ukraine views are mixed in with rants against vaccines, support for American neo-fascists and expressions of loyalty to Donald Trump. He’s about as sincere in wishes for Ukranian peace as he is about defending the constitution.
Many liberals, meanwhile, have taken a page from the Dick Cheney 2003 Playbook and are now busy labeling any and all dissenters from official Russia policy as “Russian agents” or “moles.”
Sober up. Tucker and Fox news are not Russian agents. They are simply raging assholes.
With very few and not so easy to find exceptions, the American media has also been a reliable echo chamber for the Pentagon and the State Department as – frankly—most of its expert talking heads on this issue are veterans of either institution.
I mean among 330 million Americans, can’t the networks find somebody other than the former US Ambassador to Moscow or one of the former NATO Supreme Commanders to analyze what’s going on? Perish the thought they might turn to a real historian to lay out the byzantine complications that underlie this conflict and its origins.
All exposition, any deep context, and worse of all, HISTORY, is the primary evil that television avoids at all cost. What we get instead is heavy breathing and rising emotional registers from Anderson Cooper, Andrea Mitchell, Erin Burnett and Joy Reid as they try to power through segments on Russia about which, fundamentally, they don’t know a frickin’ thing.
To fully understand the conflict, we could go back a couple hundred years as what we know as Ukraine has been booted in and out of the Russian empire, its sphere of influence and the Soviet Union itself more times that we wish to count.
Given the constricted limits of this newsletter as well as my self-confessed limits on my own historical knowledge, we can start this story around 1998-2000 and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It was then that Ukraine, with about 40 million people, declared its independence as did numerous other former Soviet Republics. Simultaneously, the Eastern European nations that had been occupied by the Red Army in the closing days of WWII and that had been turned into “Peoples’ Democratic Republics” and integrated into the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact military alliance, cast off their Communist regimes and the pact evaporated.
The U.S. moved quickly to fill the void and soon assimilated most of these former Soviet allies into the NATO pact, radically re-ordering the lines of geopolitical stability in Eastern Europe.
The Clinton and Dubya administrations initiated a rapid expansion of NATO completely flipping the military position of Russia. Instead of having the buffering effect of Warsaw Pact countries on its frontiers, Russia was now being surrounded, quite literally, by US-backed troops along almost its entire Western border.
Putin runs a regime that I have little desire to applaud or endorse. But his complaint, I’m sorry, has true legitimacy.
NATO was originally conceived as an defensive pact to protest Western Europe against a mostly imagined Soviet invasion. With the collapse of the Soviets, a strong argument could be made that NATO had become obsolete.
Bill Clinton, and the entire US military establishment, strenuously objected and –overnight—NATO was re-energized not only with incorporation of the former Eastern Europe regimes included, but Clinton also gave the alliance the lead role in the war against Serbia.
Some years earlier, in 2008 to be precise, the Bush Administration loudly announced its intention to include the former Soviet republics but now independent countries of Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. Ukraine, with its population of 40 million, and often known as “the breadbasket of Europe” certainly loomed as the brass ring among its smaller neighbors (though it was dwarfed by Russia).
At the time, US. Diplomat and intelligence officer Fiona Hill, who starred as an impeachment witness against Donald Trump, tried (with others) to alert George Bush that continued NATO expansion would unnecessarily provoke the Russians. She wrote recently in The New York Times:
“Mr. Putin was furious: NATO had just announced that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually join the alliance. This was a compromise formula to allay concerns of our European allies — an explicit promise to join the bloc, but no specific timeline for membership.
At the time, I was the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia, part of a team briefing Mr. Bush. We warned him that Mr. Putin would view steps to bring Ukraine and Georgia closer to NATO as a provocative move that would likely provoke pre-emptive Russian military action. But ultimately, our warnings weren’t heeded.’ (emphasis mine).
Four months later, the Russians invaded Georgia, occupied a northern sector and created a dummy republic that persists today. The Georgians immediately cooled their pro-NATO rhetoric not wishing that Russia take it over completely.
By 2014, though, Ukraine was chafing under pro-Russian oligarchic rule and was looking to associate itself with a European Union trade group that would strengthen its ties to the West. When the Kiev government balked, it sparked a mass uprising that led to regime change and a much more pro-Western government (contrary to the opinion of some American leftists, the Ukraine revolution was organic and bubbled up from the streets. Of course, the US gave this movement internal and external support but to claim that the Maidan Revolution was but a CIA coup reveals staggering ignorance and a toxic level of political dogmatism).
Convinced that this change of government was all prelude to Ukraine entering NATO, and no doubt deeply alarmed by the anti-Russian tone of the uprising, the Russians moved in a few months later and ignited and fueled a breakaway proxy war in the Donbas region. That conflict remains hot, and the Russians, via the “Republic of Donbas” continue to occupy about 10% of Ukrainian territory. The Russians also took back the Crimean peninsula that has been readily integrated into the Federation and dissolved into greater Russia.
When the Soviets collapsed, the US slyly took advantage of the ensuing chaos to basically scoop up former Russian allies and convert them into NATO members, ensuring that Russia stay bottled up in Russia (though the Russia of 1991 or so posed a threat to exactly nobody).
Putin is now returning the favor. Knowing the US is also in deep crisis at the moment, with an administration preoccupied on a dozen different fronts, it seemed an ideal moment to punch back and blow a hole in the future of NATO. Hill argues that he wants simply to kick the US and its military out of Europe and she’s probably correct.
There are reasons that Germany and France are decidedly less enthusiastic about ramping about this conflict. Their domestic energy problems make them dependent on Russian fuel and, more importantly, they no doubt have little desire to see the continent go up in flames over the Ukraine.
There are some logical ways out of this crisis, though I seriously doubt they will even be considered. The Russians are demanding they be given guarantees that Ukraine and Georgia never be admitted into NATO (which in this writer’s opinion is an obsolete structure that should be disbanded as it seems more an aggravant to peace than a defender).
U.S. negotiator and former Ambassador Wendy Sherman called this Russian demand a “non-starter.”
So, if the US does not want war, supposedly, and if we do not want to deploy troops in Ukraine, just what does anybody intend to do? The Russians might be very likely to launch another strike on Ukraine while it is equally unlikely it will occupy all of Ukraine. That would be a real stretch for the Russian military.
Solution to this crisis resides in lowering the temperature on the Russian border and understanding that while Putin might be a bully, a dictator and so on, we still must recognize our own responsibilities in this confrontation and not continue to draw a line in the sand around expanding NATO.
It sounds simplistic, but imagine if during the Cold War, the Soviets had set up military bases and alliances in and with Canada, Mexico, and all of the Caribbean states (not just Cuba). And remember, during the Cold War we spent billions fighting wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras under the pretext that we were defending the hemisphere against Russian influence.
The Russians, now on a very limited basis, are doing the same to the US.
The obvious solution, at least short term, to this crisis is for US and NATO to actually state the obvious: Ukraine will not be admitted anytime in the foreseeable future to NATO (if for no other reason it cannot be included because its borders are not clear – thanks to the Russian annexation and occupation).
A more robust settlement would establish Ukraine as a neutral state that could enjoy warm relations with both East and West.
I wouldn’t bet on it. On top of historical issues, we are now faced with the immediate political expediencies of both the US and Russian leadership. Putin has an election coming up (of no deep concern) and there’s little doubt he has the resolve to see this through. After successfully militarily intervening in Belarus and Kazakhstan, Putin has got to feel confident.
As to Biden, I have no idea what he is feeling or thinking. I just know it looks like he has stumbled us into a very dangerous and unpredictable place that bodes nothing good. ++
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