George Rebane
Allowing Russia to exercise asymmetric control of Ukraine’s airspace during its unwarranted, illegal, and rapacious invasion of the country is a big mistake. At every turn in this war and the lead-up to it, the west, led from behind by Biden, has been visibly and overly concerned about how Putin may respond to this or that initiative designed to dissuade or delay the conquest of Ukraine. Even politicians ignorant of history have now seen how such behavior does nothing to stay the hand of the tyrant. Does no one on our side counsel that we too should demonstrate our strength against tyranny by actions that would concern Putin as to how we may react to his next atrocities? At what point do we say ‘Enough!’? No dictator with territorial ambitions has ever stopped on his own; they have all had to be stopped by nations allied with a common purpose to restore a humanitarian and peaceful world order.
My own strong opinion is that were we to populate Ukrainian skies with F-22s and F-35s (inviting other NATO nations to join), thousands of lives would be saved and the war would soon be over. As Joe Lieberman also argues (here), in doing so we would be implementing “responsibility to protect”, the international norm that was unanimously adopted by the United Nations World Summit in 2005. As I argued in the 12mar22 Scattershots (here), there is no natural stopping point for Putin before he controls the Eurasian continent. And the more of his successes we continue to tolerate, the bigger will be the resulting war required to put an end to such conquests both in Europe and Asia. If we don’t start Putin worrying about his own survival now, then when will there come a better time to re-establish the Westphalian world order?
[Addendum] A longtime reader (@502pm below) contested the wisdom of NATO allies imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine with the now widely accepted prognostication that such a tactic would immediately cause Putin to escalate his invasion into a cross-borders nuclear war – in short, WW3. It was offered as the most probable response and ensuing scenario. In my 547pm I rejected that as the only possible contingency, and offered the much more likely alternative contingency were we to continue Biden’s strategy of a limited defense that in effect is no defense. This is corroborated hourly by Putin’s rapid expansion of the scope of his invasion, now expanding it into western Ukraine with attacks on multiple targets with scores of cruise missiles.
The west’s current response that lets Russia maintain air superiority to support his overwhelming numbers of mechanized infantry, armor, massed artillery, and amphibious assault will result in the inevitable ‘rubbling’ of Ukraine, no matter how ineptly the Russians execute their land attack. To date, the west led by Biden, has made it clear that saving Ukraine is not our top priority; minimally irritating Putin is. Given our feckless support and promise not to do more, President Zelensky will soon come to the decision to either surrender sooner and save Ukrainian lives or surrender later, leave Ukraine in a pile of rubble, and sacrifice tens of thousands of lives to no avail. As he continues to shame NATO, Zelensky will do the right thing and save lives if the west is not willing to up the game and also start giving Putin worries as to what we will do.
And the latest surrender of Ukraine will cement Putin’s list of conquests – Georgia, Chechnya, Donbas, Crimea – as the proper strategy to continue expanding Russia. We will inevitably then fight in Poland and the Baltics. It will also affirm Xi Jinping’s assessment (repeating that of Hitler, Stalin, and Tojo) that America is now a weakened and fearful paper tiger, willing to surrender all in order to assure peace in our times. Appeasement will most certainly bring about a drastic change to an Orwellian-structured world order. My counter contingency of today’s ongoing appeasement has a long history of being practiced along with the mass suffering by all concerned. And this contingency has a demonstrated high probability of coming to pass. Putin pulling the nuclear trigger and thereby assuring his place in history as humanity’s ultimate pariah, eclipsing Mao, Stalin, and Hitler, is to me a reach and a low probability event.
So that’s the debate. It’s all a matter of probabilities that the opposing sides assign to their contingencies going forward. I’ll take my stand with history and Putin’s desire to live to fight another day.
[16mar22 update] Brookings Institute leftwing maven William Galston is a nationally known regular contributor of progressive perspectives in the WSJ. In the paper’s 16mar22 edition (here) he concludes “We shouldn’t risk nuclear war, but there’s still a lot more we could do” while arguing that we have a “moral obligation to help Ukraine against Russia”. In supporting his argument he uses profoundly misguided and inappropriate examples of America’s reticence to intervene in the Rwandan slaughter of Tutsis and the 1964 stabbing of Kitty Genovese while bystanders watched and did nothing.
In these citations Galston misses two major points that characterize the Ukrainian war. First, the assailants in both cases were weak, and not able to overwhelm the proximal agents able to aid the victims. And second, neither attacker was prepared or capable of continuing his murderous rampage beyond committing their initial atrocities. This is not the case with Russia invading Ukraine. To the world Putin has made it clear that his intentions have been and will continue to be more than simply the return of a compliant Ukraine into the resurging Russian empire.
And echoing Biden’s peremptorily cowering announcement (joined by many Republicans), that the US will do nothing to risk nuclear war with Russia, seals an extremely dangerous future for all, while not reducing the eventual risk of nuclear war one whit. For the decades during the cold war it was the prospect of MAD (mutually assured destruction) that reined in the USSR and kept us from a nuclear holocaust. Had the Left’s ‘better Red than dead’ become the geo-strategic policy of the west and NATO to contain communism, we would all be fluent in Russian by now. MAD worked only because Moscow knew we were willing to risk a nuclear war as we implemented policies (the ‘minor wars’ presaged by George Kennan) to stifle the spread of communism. Without communicating such risk to the Politburo, MAD would have been toothless.
So, the bottom line for us today should be to counter Putin’s nuclear saber rattling with that of our own – ‘if you pull the nuclear trigger Vlad, we will incinerate you.’ – and bring back MAD. The time to stand up to a thug is early in the game before he and his star chamber become invested in the success of his previous threats – that should be our Plan A. The later we trade in our wish bone for a back bone, the more likely the thug will be willing to initiate a nuclear exchange. Remember that Stalin blinked in 1948, Khrushchev in 1962, Brezhnev in 1981, Gorbachev in 1989. Today again there is no endpoint in sight for retreating from such threats and conquests that does not involve eventual wholesale worldwide misery.
Anybody have a workable wishbone Plan B?
A Nation to Transcend Stupid?
George Rebane
The Atlantic usually contains ideas that are antithetical to the perspectives with which I interpret what happens in the world. A longtime and dear friend, who leans a bit to my left, forwarded to me an essay with which he concurs “with 90% of the points made in this article (regardless of the source!)” After reading it, I must admit to a similar concordance. The piece – ‘WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID’ – by Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and NYU Professor of Ethical Leadership (here).
Dr Haidt is described variously as someone who “has attracted both support and criticism for his critique of the current state of universities and his interpretation of progressive values. He has been named one of the ‘top global thinkers’ by Foreign Policy magazine, and one of the ‘top world thinkers’ by Prospect magazine. He is among the most cited researchers in political and moral psychology, and is considered among the top 25 most influential living psychologists.”
In the cited essay, Haidt uses the Tower of Babel metaphor to interpret what has happened to America in the last two decades as “the fractured country we now inhabit.” Like many of us, he sees that “something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.” Regular RR readers will recognize these longstanding themes in these pages.
The author goes on to outline “the rise of the modern Tower” in concert with the rise of the smartphone, the internet and its extremely influential social networks which now unite the various thoughts and ideas of several billion people. For Haidt “the high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the Occupy movement. … For techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what humanity could do.” Then things started going downhill as “humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel.”
The problem, as dissected by Haidt, began as social media weakened “at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories.” He then goes on to detail how the Left has dominated the various institutions, specifically the media and academe. He abets this argument by citing James Madison in Federalist #10 on “the innate human proclivity toward ‘faction’, by which he meant our tendency to divide ourselves into teams or parties that are so inflamed with ‘mutual animosity’ that they are ‘much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.’”
But since then, thanks much to social media, the Tower has fallen and the factions no longer communicate. The hows and whys of the fall are of some considerable interest to those of us who claim to pay attention. He even details how closed groups of “jerks” dominate discussions and debates on the various blogs. I won’t go on giving you clips of Haidt’s expansion of that very recent and ongoing history. Suffice it to say that Haidt also agrees that we are at least two distinct countries – with appropriately differentiated cultures, languages, histories, values, … - sharing a common border.
What struck me as a significant shortcoming in Dr Haidt’s contemporary ontology is his apparent ignorance (neglect?) of some significant findings by sociologists that dovetail with teachings from the systems sciences. He argues that ‘Democracy after Babel’ will require a ‘redesign of democracy’ that includes reforms in three categorical areas – “three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in the post-Babel era. We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.”
When expanding on these areas, it is not clear at all that Haidt’s recommendations do not require the enlargement of our already encompassing government(s). How else would democratic institutions be “hardened”, social media “reformed”, and the “next generation prepared” for a more compliant and compatible “democratic citizenship”? What Haidt misses is the underlying truth that for large complex systems to remain viable, they need to be decentralized – they need to be based on a structure of distributed control and knowledge. In this universe, nature does not support large systems that are centrally comprehended and controlled. On Earth, the evidence for this abounds when we open our eyes and understand what we see in the natural world.
The alternative approach to successful societies in the post-Babel era, missed by Haidt, is to abandon globalism and work to enlarge the community of sovereign nation-states to have members with much smaller and more culturally cohesive populations. I have lost track, but somewhere in the archives of such sociological studies are solutions that identify ideal national populations to be in the five to ten million range, and comprise of jurisdictional units that are not larger than 50,000. This kind of global structure of independent states and free peoples would promote specialization, trade, and the ready transfer of ‘best practices’, as one people sees how another people have a better solution for a common problem.
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