Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The End of Fantasy Europe
First off I would like to say that I have not read James Kirchick’s The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. Frankly I have better things to do with my time, like reading about the previous dark ages that supposedly befell Europe. However, I have read @Claire Berlinski’s article and will be moving forward to address the issues mentioned there.
I am going to first address my biggest problem with this book and its title. It’s not the end of Europe which is being addressed. It’s the end of the European Union. Whenever Europe is mentioned I will likely be referring to the EU or as I like to call it Fantasy Continent.
Unlike Kirchick or Claire, I am writing to the people of Ricochet. People who elected Trump, people who didn’t vote for Trump. But people for the most part I don’t think have their heads in the clouds. People who live in what I like to call the real world. The one we live in and not the ones that fantasize about the way they wish the world works. Just people.
I am not going to get to much into Donald Trump. Other than to say that I don’t think he is some giant ogre of Napoleonic ambitions. Not even of Mussolini proportions. Frankly I find Donald Trump all too conventional, and if Twitter had existed in the 1960s, President LBJ would probably be tweeting away about how all these “damn hippies” didn’t understand all the good things the Great Society was doing for them.
Instead of talking about the United States, let’s talk about Europe. Or the EU. The US like all real countries is based on some sort of legitimacy. The US is a Republic gaining its legitimacy through its constitution and the people who elect their representatives. It’s not always good. My Country is a confederation of provinces who hold parliaments of representatives backed by the Queen and tracing back its legal rights to Magna Carta and even earlier traditions. China derives its legitimacy through its one-party state of Communism and suffers for it.
The EU is not a country. But it pretends to be one. The EU is giant lie. It gains no legitimacy from its parliament, which cannot vote on legislation. It has unaccountable bureaucracies that give the production of milk 130,00 regulations. It has a council of Ministers that are made up of the heads of states for its numerous member countries. It has a couple Presidents that hold like six-month terms. It derives its authority from treaties with its various member states, but when those states reject it as the Netherlands and France have done in the past, it ignores those elections derived from the people and waits and tries again.
The EU was created in the belief of binding all the member states together economically but not politically. But it then dumped on a parliament system that has no power. It stumbles blindly from one crisis to another. It tells its members that it’s an economic treaty like NAFTA. Then makes unaccountable decisions that no local representative can fix. Without representation and the ability to make redress, your state will have to run on something else. The EU is flying apart at the seams. It either has to make the choice to become one state. With a Parliament or government structure that has real legitimate authority.
But it won’t do that because none of the member states want to give up their sovereignty. So, it muddles along like a 21st-century Polish Diet. Not willing to give up an inch politically and letting its bureaucracies grow.
There is no reason and no possible way for Russia to fight against a United States of Europe. But it is not fighting a USE. It’s merely fighting the EU. A EU that was trying to bind the different member nations together politically and creating an effective central government would easily crush Russia. Economically and militarily.
From a selection of the book chosen:
I came to understand that history had not ended, that Europe was not in a “post-ideological” age, and that optimistic assumptions about the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy, regulated market capitalism, peaceful coexistence, and political pluralism were premature even on the very continent that so prided itself in having founded and exported these values to the world.
Nonsense. Neither the EU or Europe has ever brought any of those things or founded those values and exported them to the world. Great Britain did. France did, some might say. France ran Vietnam as an economic colony pure and simple. It did nothing during its colonial time to bring French Civilization, administration, or culture to most of its Empire. Algeria being really the only exception and even then… The same with the rest of the colonial empires. Great Britain and its Empire were the exception to this. The rest of Europe was much too busy with its own usual self-centered ways, to be bothered exporting its culture to “barbarians.”
Most of us knew history had not ended. Most of us scoffed at the notion. We deemed those who sought a new order as arrogant, vainglorious fools. We also were much too busy making money in the post-cold war era.
A passage from @Claire’s article:
Kirchick recounts the now-familiar story of Europe’s economic torpor, its alienated immigrants, and its demographically unsustainable welfare states. Europe is reeling, too, from the effects of the greatest wave of human migration since the Second World War, a series of deadly attacks by ISIS, Britain’s abandonment of the European Union, and eight years of neglect by the Obama Administration.
His description of this is in places excellent. His chapter about Brexit is well-written, fair-minded, and painful with the same unintended irony that pervades the rest of the book. He is scathing about UK Independence Party head Nigel Farage and the type of American conservative to whom he for some reason appeals. He recounts with dismay watching Farage address “a half-empty lecture hall at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC” in 2015
First off let me break in here for a moment. The thing about Heritage is they have videos of their speeches available. Including the one of their keynote address made by Nigel Farage.
Why I could even post the link.
https://youtu.be/ePsDo7BIn0w
Looks a bit more packed to me by the video. I wasn’t there of course, but I do have a video.
Back:
At the end of his speech, I rose to ask the uncrowned king of British Euroscepticism what he made of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. Although I was prepared for something unconventional, I did not expect what came out of Farage’s mouth.
War in Ukraine, he said, was the result of a “democratically elected leader brought down by a street-staged coup d’état by people waving EU flags.” Russian president Vladimir Putin could hardly be blamed for thinking that the “message” behind the Maidan protests was “we want Ukraine to join NATO.” Invading and annexing Crimea were perfectly understandable reactions to European imperialism. Ukraine’s dismemberment, the thousands of deaths in its eastern provinces, more than a million-displaced people, and heightened tensions between Russia and the West—all of it, Farage told me, was “something we have provoked.” A Kremlin spokesperson could not have scripted the response better himself.”
Let’s try that again.
Heck a democratically elected leader, or even a complete and total stooge is brought down by some armed revolutionaries living in the hills along with protests in the streets. The Stooge has run a terror campaign against his own populace, so public sympathy is high. The new regime is backed openly by a rival power. The neighboring superpower takes umbrage of this happening it its back yard. It starts with economic sanctions and supporting guerilla movements in that country. Those guerillas launch terror attacks on the new regime. The old superpower refuses to reoccupy territory in the land, and increases its military presence. That superpower goes further and plots the assassination of the new regime’s leadership and even supplies weapons and trainers to a group of exiles who will be invading the country to overthrow the new regime.
Hmm. Anyone else guess that I am talking about Cuba and the United States of America.
Yes, the European Union provoked Russia response. But the European Union is just as guilty as George H.W. Bush who called for the marsh people to rise up against Saddam Hussein and then stood by as Saddam Hussein and the Iraq army crushed and killed thousands of people.
We may not like the fact that we live in a world of spheres of influence and terrible regimes who consider some countries theirs.
Nigel Farage spoke the truth to Kirchick. He may have done it a bit crudely. But to believe that Russia would not respond in the way it did after overthrowing their puppet in Kiev is to be naïve on a staggering level.
Farage and those like him, Kirchick carefully argues, live in a morally inverted world where the bumbling and bureaucratic (but benign) EU is likened to the Soviet Union and Vladimir Putin is respected as the Moral Custodian of the West, even as Russia – relying on largely unreconstructed Soviet organs of statecraft – literally invades Europe.
I would counter that Farage and those like him, live in the real world. Where decisions have consequences. Where you don’t play power politics with the lives of millions, provoking dictators and then sitting on your hands and having a good cry cause the local bully came over and punched you in the face.
More:
“If Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea was the first external assault on the post–Cold War European political order,” Kirchick writes, “Britain’s rash decision to depart the EU was the first self-inflicted wound.” He marvels at this spectacle of self-destruction. “It is incredible to behold Great Britain, which once occupied more than 20 percent of the earth’s landmass, moving ever closer to the brink of its own disintegration.” The sentiment is right but its expression is a bit garbled; it was not Great Britain but the British Empire that spanned the globe; at its height, it occupied a full quarter of the world’s land mass. Here one wonders if Kirchick is holding at bay, perhaps at the cost of some mental energy, a premonition of the truly incredible spectacle of imperial self-destruction ahead.
And of course, my reply to Kirchick is this. Russia’s invasion of Crimea was not the first external assault on post-cold war Europe. That honor belongs to Georgia. As to Great Britain, its decision to leave was not rash. It was the best and smartest course of action. The people of Great Britain regained their sovereignty and their foreign and trade policies. Why should a free people decide to give up their sovereignty to unaccountable bureaucrats. No one has yet to explain to me why the EU is a good thing, though I know it’s coming.
Kirchick is contemptuous of American conservatives who through naiveté or malice cheer Europe’s disintegration. He is absolutely right to say there is nothing in Europe’s past to support the idea that the EU, if destroyed, would be replaced by a democratic and cooperative collection of sovereign nation-states. The view is historically illiterate. The long postwar peace is unique and fragile. “Those who claim that the EU has failed,” Kirchick writes, “must answer the following question: In comparison to what? The Europe of the Thirty Years War? The Napoleonic Empire? Hitlerite Europe?”
Ok, fine. I will answer that question easily and in two parts.
First off, the EU has nothing to do with the post-WW2 peace. The EU was not effectively formed until the 1990s, but even then, that’s not the reason Europe had such a long period of peace. It had a long peace, because the Second World War broke it. It also had the Soviet Union who had millions of men and tens of thousands of tanks and APCs and bombers, thousands of nuclear bombs pointing at it. You find plenty of reasons to cooperate when someone is constantly plotting to kill you. So, NATO might be a good supporting argument for European peace. Certainly, the presence of all those Americans and their money helped it along.
Long story short, Europe’s peace is not because of the presence of the EU. If the EU had never been formed in the 1990s, Europe would look a lot like it does today. Except probably be richer with a common market and a universal passport for citizens.
That being said. The best period in European history is not the post-WW2 era. It’s not even the post-cold war era. The best historical period for Europe bar none is after Napoleon and before WW1. And let me tell you something: There are lots of European wars during this period. But also, Europe integrated culturally, economically, militarily, and through communications during this period in a way that it has not done so since. This was the Europe that made Europe. That strode the world like a colossus. That ruled (and ruled well) most of the planet. Who thought it was their destiny to civilize the world. It’s the true golden age of Europe. The EU and its pretensions are nothing more than a faded imitation of the rich successful confident Europe of that era.
Now I am going to skip over the immigration stuff. Frankly I don’t know enough to comment. Kirchick again:
Had Europe (as well as the United States) decided to act as something other than a passive bystander in Syria—by assisting the moderate opposition, creating safe zones, and destroying President Bashar al- Assad’s air force in the early months of the rebellion, years before Iranian and Russian troops hit the ground—there was a chance that the conflict might not have dragged on for so long. Reflexively citing the Iraq experience as a counter argument to any and all methods of military intervention is not sufficient, because in both Libya and Syria—unlike Iraq—war against civilian populations was ongoing and the prospect of impending genocide was apparent.
What makes Kirchick believe the EU an economic union with pretensions of greatness believe that it could stop any of that? The EU that Kirchick wishes existed died when Eisenhower blocked the French and British from seizing the Suez Canal. Europe would no longer have the ability to be a real power. The United States made them into vassal states at that point. Sure, they still have militaries and limited resources. But the Great Britain that can’t afford to put cruise missiles on its ships is somehow going to stem the refugee crisis? One has to ask does Kirchick not know where he lives?
Again:
Europe finds itself in hock to autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Turkish president Recap Taya Erdogan — the former offering himself as a “partner” against ISIS while bombing Western-backed opponents of Russia’s client Assad (whom the vast majority of refugees are fleeing), and the latter demanding political concessions in exchange for reducing the outflow of migrants languishing in Turkish refugee camps. By entertaining Putin’s cynical proposal of an “anti-ISIS coalition,” Western leaders willfully ignore how Moscow’s Syrian intervention is fueling the very migrant wave they supplicate him to help plug. Russia’s interest is very clear: In exchange for its supposed help in fighting ISIS, the West would lift sanctions on Moscow and effectively give a green light to its ongoing subversion of Ukraine. Astonishingly, many in the West apparently support this idea. A late 2015 survey of seventy-six diplomats, elected leaders, and advisors from across Europe and the United States found 53 percent supporting cooperation with Russia in Syria, while listing migration, Islamist terrorism, and the rise of populist parties as the most critical threats to Europe—three problems Moscow is actively aggravating by its intervention in Syria. Maintaining Bashar al-Assad in power will only prolong Syria’s misery by driving the Sunni majority that detests him even more into the arms of ISIS, therefore prolonging the conflict as well as the stream of refugees whose presence in Europe is driving up support for the far-right politicians Russia abets in numerous other ways. While the Russians have repeatedly demonstrated their overreliance on hard power to achieve their aims, Europe’s overconfidence on soft power, far from keeping the world’s problems at bay, has imported them into Elysium.
Well yeah? So, what? I don’t understand what Kirchick is doing here. He seems to think the EU is a real force for good in the world. And that somehow, I don’t even know what he is trying here.
Sorry, its getting late. I intended to write to conclusion and start this essay earlier in the evening. But I remembered I had an appointment with a candidate and we went late discussing viral political marketing.
In summary, I shall say it seems that the Kirchick wants an EU or even Europe that has never existed to fight for values it doesn’t believe in and grants it a legitimacy it doesn’t deserve. If Europe is ever to gain back what its once vibrant strong culture that it once had, it’s going to have to move away from the elderly, mendacity that it currently holds.
As I once said to a friend of mine in the German Air Force, “A lot of people are going to die before we fix this mess.”
His answer: “Yep.”
Published in Foreign Policy
Excellent essay. And very much in the real world unlike Claire.
This is morally offensive. The difference between Castro’s Cuba and Ukraine are legion.
–I fail to see what morality has to do with the way the world works. The fact is the Russians have done nothing different to Ukraine, than what the United States did to Cuba. I do not take on the notion that a sphere of influence must exist. I take it as a fact that the sphere does exist. I didn’t say Russia’s behavior is normal. I did say it was exactly what the United States did to Cuba in response to the Communist Revolution of the country.
–Have you ever read Russian history? Their entire culture is about thousands of years of people attacking and conquering and enslaving them. Just because no one is planning on attacking them now, doesn’t mean that someone wont in the future. This is the Russian mindset. There actions were entirely predictable.
–The thing about other cultures, is that they really are different from us. You might find that cultures are based on histories of peoples and that cultures make entirely rational decisions based on their past experiences that do not correspond with the end of history liberalism world view.
–Here is exactly what we should have done after the annexation of the Crimea.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/zbigniew-brzezinski-after-putins-aggression-in-ukraine-the-west-must-be-ready-to-respond/2014/03/03/25b3f928-a2f5-11e3-84d4-e59b1709222c_story.html?utm_term=.e91b9f2f6539
David March
Mnohaya lita!
t hurts me greatly that the politicians and commentators on the Right look for ways to in excuse the instability Russia creates and even seek to justify it.
–No one here, is justifying it. I am explaining it and given context from a historical perspective.
–I suggest you want to expound on this, write your own post. Provide your analysis, and you to can be promoted to the main feed. You seem to be passionate on this subject. You should be heard.
Instead we should be looking for ways to incentive the Russians to work for stability in the region, seeking them to recognize the sovereign territory of their neighbors and encouraging them to share value with their neighbors instead of trying to impose crippling political domination on them.
–As long as Putin is in charge the country will be a bad actor. Medeyev as President again would be able to go this way. But Russia is ruled by an evil dictatorship.
I’m not personally hurt by it, but I’m baffled by it. First, this is a country with thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at our cities; we have no choice but to take its hostility toward us very seriously. The recent (extraordinary) improvement in Google Translate means that for the first time, any American can read the Russian press almost as if it were English. It’s an astonishing technological achievement, but it’s one that means no one can really doubt how hostile that country is toward us. They’re in violation of critical arms control treaties — they just deployed the SSC-8 cruise even though it clearly violates the 1987 INF treaty; I won’t list all the other treaty violations, but the most frightening development, in my view, is the upgrade and massive expansion of the underground bunkers in Moscow: They seem to be envisioning surviving a nuclear war, which is more insane than the Soviets ever were.
The threat to Europe is obvious — I mean, they have threatened to nuke NATO allies! — and anyone who thinks we could stay out of a European war of that scale is ignoring all the evidence of history; a war that threatens the stability of Europe would surely, eventually, drag us in: cf. World War I, World War II, the Yugoslavian civil wars — all of which were preceded by strong calls to isolationism; it does not work; our fate is too closely bound to Europe, culturally and economically. We can debate whether Crimea properly belongs to Russia all we like (it does not), but surely no one defends Russian incursions into the Donbas? Do you think Russia’s building up its military on its western borders and the Black Sea for fun? They’ve provoked scores of dangerous encounters with NATO and non-NATO but Western ships and aircraft; of course they’ve aggravated the refugee crisis by carpet-bombing Syria; they can now target NATO flights in Turkey and on the Mediterranean coast; and they’re waging a non-stop information war against the West. The risk of war in Europe (through miscalculation if nothing else) is terrifyingly real.
Putin has presided over the re-Sovietization of Russian life, and it is absolutely clear he seeks to re-impose Russian hegemony over the former Soviet Union. The idea that NATO enlargement is to blame for this is just ahistorical: Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia withdraw from the Warsaw Pact, and Gorbachev recognized their right to choose their own security arrangements in the 1990 Charter of Paris. They begged to join NATO, but we waited years before even considering it for fear of unnerving the Soviet Union, and it was years after its dissolution that we even considered NATO expansion. Both sides signed the NATO-Russia Founding Act in 1997. We pursued NATO expansion and EU enlargement in an effort to encourage those countries to democratize and liberalize, as a reward for taking a path that Moscow could have taken, too, but did not. That was their choice, not ours. The Kremlin never established democratic control over its military or intelligence services; it never liberalized; Yeltsin grew more authoritarian and centralized his power, a trend that Putin put on warp-speed. And despite this, we did everything short of bringing Russia into NATO (which would have been utterly strategically idiotic, given that this country in no way shared our values) and created a prominent place for Russia in the new security architecture of Europe. We created the Partnership for Peace, which was a substantial and meaningful — and unprecedented — military alliance precisely so that Russia would understand that NATO expansion wasn’t a secret tool to invade Russia.
If Russia believes its security requires them to subjugate its neighbors in perpetuity and condemn them forever to phony elections and corrupt economies, surely this is because Russia is mad, not because we’re a threat to them. This attempt to suggest that there’s a moral equivalence between our Monroe-Doctrine derived sphere of influence and Russia’s is ludicrous: We want to see governments in our neighborhood that are more like ours, and they want to see governments that are more like theirs: Does anyone (but our President) truly believe there’s no moral difference? No moral difference between open economies, freedom of the press, respect for fundamental human rights, and murderous kleptocracies? Seriously?
It’s pretty simple: Russians are furious about the loss of their empire, which they kept under the yoke of slavery, and they want it back. They’re willing to risk nuclear war to get it. They do not believe any territory that was formerly part of the Soviet Union — or the Soviet sphere of influence — should have the freedom to choose its own government or to ally with the United States. The reason these countries want to choose their own governments and ally with us is because they want to live the way we do, with our freedoms and our prosperity, and don’t want to be stomped upon, murdered, and enslaved by Russians again. This is entirely understandable, surely?
It is true that Russia has historically been traumatized by invasion and bore by far the greatest cost in blood of the Second World War. I understand the roots of Russian paranoia and I respect what they unquestionably suffered. But they are now the world’s largest nuclear power. No one is ever going to invade Russia again, not in the winter nor in the summer; and no one in their right mind would, as they seem to believe, try to destabilize it, either. All we’d get out of that is loose nukes. They are nuts. And they hate us. And should they succeed in breaking off any part of NATO, that is it, game over: No one will ever trust the United States as an ally again. We will be pushed out of the world and into our own borders, consigned to global irrelevance, and the world will belong to China and Russia. Goodbye, democracy in the Baltics! Goodbye, Taiwan! Goodbye, Israel! The rest of humanity will be enslaved; our ideals will perish; our wars will have been fought in vain; and our grandparents who died in Europe and Asia will have been forgotten and dishonored. That’s just the way it is. We didn’t choose this fight. Putin did. But it definitely won’t be going away because we pretend it isn’t happening.
The problem is that morality doesn’t apply to geopolitics.
NATO should never have been expanded, that is the root of the present calamity. Russia is Russia and will do what Russia does in the places Russia does it. Its not like it hasn’t been 300 years or anything. NATO wrote checks it could never cash.
Something approaching half the country doesn’t have ties to Europe. There is no American ‘we,’ that pretense was murdered and tossed into a ditch.
They seem to be envisioning surviving a nuclear war, which is more insane than the Soviets ever were.
–I grew up reading Pournelles writings from the 80s. The Soviet leadership was very confident for a time about surviving a nuclear war.
We created the Partnership for Peace, which was a substantial and meaningful — and unprecedented — military alliance precisely so that Russia would understand that NATO expansion wasn’t a secret tool to invade Russia.
–Claire. You really need to read your Russian history more if you want to understand them very well. All we did was just either play into their hands, or envision us as suckers.
–Putin believes that the US deliberate sells less quality meat to Russia. Stalin believed that FDR controlled America and that the Republican party existed cause he wanted a scapegoat like the kulaks. If FDR lost an election, it clearly meant that he lost in a coup. Elections are illusions.
surely this is because Russia is mad, not because we’re a threat to them.
–YES! Now your getting it!
They’re willing to risk nuclear war to get it.
–Now here I think they don’t really mean it. I think they want us to believe they mean it, so we will cave into them more.
No one will ever trust the United States as an ally again.
–Don’t be so sure about that. I mean the Iraquis were dumb enough to believe you after you pulled out on the Vietnamese right?
NATO should never have been expanded, that is the root of the present calamity. Russia is Russia and will do what Russia does in the places Russia does it. Its not like it hasn’t been 300 years or anything. NATO wrote checks it could never cash.
–I think the initial expansion to Poland was acceptable. I think Russia was begrudgingly acceptable of that. But as soon as expansion went into the Baltics or Romania those were checks it could never cash. Certainly Georgia was just stupid.
Good rule: don’t read any books that have “The End of…” in the title.
But you can totally listen to a song called the End
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSUIQgEVDM4
I was unaware of that; perhaps you could write more about that at some time. My understanding was that Kahn’s book (the one about Thermonuclear War) was widely read on both sides of conflict and shocked sense into policymakers on both sides. When was that published, in the mid-50s? (I just checked, Google says it came out in 1960.) I remember reading it when I was maybe 16 or 17 and being just profoundly shocked by it; I thought it obscene. (For anyone who isn’t familiar with Kahn, I just found an interesting New Yorker profile of him and his work.)
I now think it was not an obscenity at all but a key component of our deterrence, one that made less likely a nuclear exchange. That we no longer publicly contemplate such things, that our analysts and politicians make clear that they believe nothing would be worth that cost, all reduce our credibility and encourage adventurism. (And when prominent politicians blithely opine that of course we wouldn’t take that risk for a “suburb of St. Petersburg,” we might as well just join the CND and be done with it, really.) But that was a different time, and that culture isn’t one we can readily replicate. Everyone in America can now publish his views about politics, Russia, and war on social media, so the impact of a book like Kahn’s (which no one would now anyway write, nor would any major publisher publish it) would be obviated by the clear impression we collectively give that we wouldn’t even conceive, as the New Yorker put it, of accepting “the high risk of an additional one percent of our children being born deformed if that meant not giving up Europe to … Russia.”
We almost certainly wouldn’t have then, either, but it was possible to convey the impression we would — by giving prominence to figures like Kahn, for example — in a way we simply can’t, now, when the views of all our citizens are an open book, so to speak.
It does make me wonder if they’re building those bunkers as a sort of 2017 version of publishing On Thermonuclear War. I don’t think Kahn wrote that as a planned and deliberate act of psychological warfare; or I’ve never heard or read anything to suggest that, but it would have been a clever thing to do if he had, and it seems plausible to me that some bright spark in the GRU came up with this idea as a way of freaking us out. (A bright spark who didn’t quite grasp that the American news media would barely report this, not because our press is controlled and under orders to keep our spirits up, but because — well, honestly I don’t know why, but for all our media is freaked out about Russian subversion, and rightly so, it almost never tells us what’s happening in Russia. I’m sure this prompts in the ranks of the GRU endless perplexed reflections about the way America’s a mystery wrapped in a riddle wrapped in an enigma. Which really, we kind of are.)
Anyway, if it were up to me, we’d be the ones building underground bunkers in Washington, just to freak them out. But no one asks me …
My point was that no, we aren’t to blame for having threatened them through NATO enlargement, and that Americans who parrot Kremlin talking points and insist that we should have known better than to frighten them so have, indeed, been played for suckers. Might we perhaps agree?
I think we do agree.
Quite possible — perhaps even probable — but we can’t be sure. Perhaps our intelligence community has more insight, based on more solid sources, than we do, but people like you and me have to assume there’s at least some chance they mean it, or that Putin may have unleashed forces he can’t control; there may well be some people in the regime who mean it. If there’s even a five percent chance they mean it, that has to be taken as a deadly serious risk. If you knew the flight you were on had a five percent chance of crashing, you surely wouldn’t be able to sit back, relax, and enjoy the inflight movie.
I’ve often thought that while we did pull out in the end, it’s true, our credibility wasn’t quite so damaged as we feared. We did unleash the equivalent of 640 Hiroshimas on the place, after all; and we established that we were still a country quite capable of laying waste to all of Indochina without overmuch self-reproach (an impression enhanced by our tacit support of genocide in Indonesia). Both did terrible damage to our reputation for benevolence, yes, but both also established beyond much doubt that we were nuts, and that trucking with Russia or China was suicidal. Sadly, deterrence does rest in part upon the adversary’s belief in one’s savagery. We did, in the end, abandon our allies, but I think the region’s horror at our willingness to burn Indochina to the ground before we gave up did play a role in discouraging communist movements in Malaya, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines, perhaps more broadly as well; all of them had large, popular communist movements and insurgencies before our involvement in Vietnam and the establishment of ASEAN. Taiwan, and possibly even Japan, were also at risk.
Lee Kuan Yew certainly seemed to think our involvement in Vietnam was a success in the sense that it bought the members of ASEAN time to consolidate and grow economically. He believed there would have been a domino effect, and believed we prevented it. So in that sense, yes, we showed ourselves to be reliable allies.
Have you ever seen this?
It wasn’t a clean business (to say the least; let us be frank: it was a horror), but our behavior did, in fact, suggest that it was probably rational for countries around the world to throw in their lot with us. The Iraqis’ mistake wasn’t trusting us, but not trusting us: They wanted us to leave, and they gave Obama an excuse to do it. The Syrian opposition, however, was mad to trust us, and in the wake of that example — and of our election of an even more extreme (vastly more extreme) isolationist than Obama — it’s not a surprise that Europe and Asia are now under deadly threat.
We almost certainly wouldn’t have then, either, but it was possible to convey the impression we would — by giving prominence to figures like Kahn, for example — in a way we simply can’t, now, when the views of all our citizens are an open book, so to speak.
–Scared people in a crisis situation will contemplate all sorts of crazy things when push comes to shove. Its safe and easy to say ‘we never would do that’, till a million men and thousand T-72 tanks are entering Alsace. Then all sorts of things become contemplating.
–I mean the nukes nearly flew in 83. Able Archer nearly started the war because of that Russian paranoia we keep talking about.
–I recently ran a scenario a few years ago for a large sample of very liberal people. Who started contemplating a mass murder of thousands of refugees. It was quite illuminating to watch them talk about mounting mass machine guns at the point debarkation. It was a fantasy scenario. 200 people were given the talk, and at least 30 percent were on board with some form of mass machinegun like scenario.
Anyway, if it were up to me, we’d be the ones building underground bunkers in Washington, just to freak them out.
–The original purpose of the Interstate highway system was to build mass civilian shelters under the overpass.
Malaya, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines,
–All defeated by the British except perhaps the Phillipines who had developed quite effective counterinsurgency tactics. I have studied that quite a bit. I also don’t think you quite understand Vietnam very well or what happened in the cold war.
–Look I dont have the ability as a coolidge to do thousand word answers. It seems were the only one s paying attention to the thread. Feel free to email directly, you have that now.
This is perhaps the core of our disagreement, though the article you link to certainly does describe a moral response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So we may be talking past each other to some degree.
This was as insulting and as morally bankrupt as saying something like, All I am saying is that America did exactly as Nazi Germany did and declared war on countries that did not first attack them.
Such a statement while factually true is misleading at best and more likely just stupid. America and Nazi Germany were nothing a like and their reasons for going to war were radically different as were the outcomes of their wars. It is the same with Ukraine and Cuba. The situations were totally different, the motivations involved were completely different, and America’s opposition to Castro was morally justified response to aggression and Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is indefensible. To say that American and Russia are acting exactly the same when it comes to Cuba and Ukraine is just flat wrong.
Since ethnic Russians began to exist in the 8th century saying people attacked them for thousands of years is a bit off. I know of two invasions that aimed at the conquest and enslavement of the Russian people one was in the 13th Century and that basically succeeded and the Mongols more or less enslaved the Russians for just about a century. The second such invasion was 1942 when Nazi Germany invaded their ally Russia. That pretty much sums it up. Every other war I can think of was neighbors to Russia trying to halt their expansion or simply to change Russia’s foreign policy or was a defensive move to stop Russian attacks on themselves.
Russians have built up propaganda about how they are constantly being attacked betrayed and enslaved. They have milked the Mongol invasions as an excuse for aggressive wars for 600 years. So they get a lot of mileage out of the two real invasions they have suffered but most of it just propaganda to serve as pretext for their aggressive moves. In in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia the Russia put out that Georgia a country of 4.5 million people was planning on invading Russia and taking Krasnadar from them. So they were only invading to defend themselves from the vicious Georgians. Lies, dangerous lies, yes, but lies all the same.
True! Russians actions are rational they want to be a hegemonic power in their region and lessen the power of the US in particular and the West in general. We should not allow of that of course and we don’t have to allow it. We can work to make the cost to the Russians grow every greater as they continue to play out this power game and they will have have to fold at some point or launch an incredibly destructive war they can’t win. At that point they will again have a chance to join the West in being productive, peaceful and stabilizing. Until they chose to do that we need to increase their costs for operating as they do not make excuses for them nor feed free countries and people to them.
I have been listening to Professor Steven Cohen on The John Bachelor Show over the years and at first was sceptical (not least of all because he often expressed them in the far left Nation magazine).
A partial description of his views from Wikipedia:
Cohen has argued in The Nation that the USA continued the Cold War after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, without US leaders acknowledging that they were doing so.[16] He says that a flawed interpretation of an “American victory” and a “Russian defeat” since the time of Bill Clinton had led to treating post-communist Russia like a defeated nation, even though Russia still possesses weapons of mass destruction inherited from the USSR. Cohen says that this “triumphalism” led to the expectation that Russia would submit completely to American foreign policy..[16] Cohen argues that Clinton, contrary to the promise of his predecessor, extended NATO eastward and implemented a strategy of containment. Russia inevitably reacted with suspicion. Moreover, Cohen cites the cancellation of the ABM Treaty in 2002 and the refusal of admission to the WTO at the G8-summit in Saint Petersburg 2006. Cohen also criticises the “pointless demonization” of Vladimir Putin as an “autocrat”.[16][17]
But he has brought me around recently; especially when he refers to ” the War Party”, which seems, in many ways, to be congruent with “the Deep State”. Cohen says the reason for the animosity is that old lefty bugaboo – the military industrial complex…
America and Nazi Germany were nothing a like and their reasons for going to war were radically different as were the outcomes of their wars. It is the same with Ukraine and Cuba. The situations were totally different, the motivations involved were completely different, and America’s opposition to Castro was morally justified response to aggression and Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is indefensible.
–So the US launching terrorist bombing campaigns against civilians is completely different from Russia…because the US had good reasons and were just doing what was best for their colonial subjects.
–Supporting Truilllo in the DR and Papa and Baby Doc in Haiti. Go read Red Heat by Alex Von Tunzelman then come back here and make the argument.
–Anyways I agree that Russia has made a big deal out of its invasions, though I think your skipping over a lot of the different problems and migratory waves.
–However as I said to Claire I think we have gone pretty far afield of my being annoyed at the BS that is the EU. I encourage you to start your own post on Russia, Ukraine and what not. You seem to have a fair bit of knowledge on the subject.
Strawman for many different reasons including that we didn’t have colonial subjects.
Red herring
Understood. I want to make one more comment to just clarify my view of what you are saying and what you believe and then I will let it all drop if you wish. If you don’t want to answer my next comment that is fine but I am curious about your view.
You should know, @torywarwriter, that your habit of destroying the quoting makes it difficult enough to follow your comments that I’ve given up. Please use the quote buttons on the posts to get proper attribution, then, when you’ve inserted a paragraph in reply, click the “quote” button in the editor to unquote just your reply paragraphs.
I will quote, in part, the Nigel Farage comment from your OP:
In support of Farage you wrote:
and you wrote:
So you seem to think that Farage was speaking truth to Kirchek and that Russia had been provoked by a hostile power (EU) attempt to wrest territory and influence from Russia.
However there was no European Imperialism in the Ukraine of any kind. The only reason that Ukraine or anyone else would want to join NATO is the thought that Russia is hostile to an independent Ukraine. Farage is saying that the Ukrainians only think Russia is hostile to an independent Ukraine because the EU told them this was true? Russia was not responsible for this itself? The EU treating Ukraine like an independent country that could make trade deals was both an example of “imperialism” and a provocation to Russia so flagrant and hostile that it is perfectly understandable for Russia to break its treaty with Ukraine and invade it?
It seems to me that Farage’s entire statement is false from beginning to end. There was no EU imperialism, if you don’t want the countries near you to make alliances for their safety don’t threaten them, making trade deals with independent countries is not a provocation and the EU is not a hostile power to Russia and has no interest in taking any “Russian” territory. But you called it true.
I am not sure what your point is here. We in the West have the power to strengthen the countries in the near aboard of Russia and make Russian aggression to expensive for Russia to sustain or we can allow their aggression to stand and continue. That is our choice. Farage seems to be on the side of allowing Russian aggression to go forward because it is “understandable”. That does not seem so much “true” as foolish, ignorant and cowardly. Do you stand by Farage’s statement that you quoted?
I think it better to return to your former skepticism. Cohen is wrong here across the board. Russian behavior is dictated by its internal situation more than any outside actions and definitely not by the cancellation of the ABM treaty. Russian have never felt it necessary to abide by the terms of any treaty it signs while making great hay of any violation of another party. Breaking treaties is the default Russian policy their only reaction to Bush withdraw is that he did it legally. The Russians would have simply violated the treaty without withdrawing from it. They probably found Bush’s formal legal withdraw to be cute but foolish.
No inside Russia they never dealt adequately with the old Communist ruling class. Being masters of corruption, the ability to be corrupt being a kind of currency for the Soviet ruling class, the old Communists knew exactly how to take advantage of the new economic freedom in Russia to profit and so the old Communist ruling class became the new Oligarchy. Also even the much reduced Russia is not really a nation but an Empire of conquered people. Russians are taught from childhood about every imperial conquest was not really a conquest but was done to save Mother Russia from invasion or to actually save the conquered people and protect them. The fact that so many conquered people wanted to leave Russia and be independent was a blow straight at the heart of the Russian character and it hit many people in the wrong way. I mean the conquered people should be eternally grateful for Russia conquering them to resent it and want to be free was just base ingratitude.
Then when the Russian army lost the first Chechnya war that was it. They turned to a strong man to lead them one that could bring them military victory instead of defeat and they found that strongman in Vladimir Putin.
Jeff Smith (View Comment):
Cohen also criticises the “pointless demonization” of Vladimir Putin as an “autocrat”.[16][17]
If Putin should not been seen as autocrat he should stop murdering independent journalists, allow the formation of independent media companies and stop murdering opposition politicians. Doing that would go a long way to stop the “pointless demonization” of Putin. He might even be persuaded to hold fair and free elections inside Russia as well. Then no one would think him an autocrat.
am not sure what your point is here. We in the West have the power to strengthen the countries in the near aboard of Russia and make Russian aggression to expensive for Russia to sustain or we can allow their aggression to stand and continue. That is our choice. Farage seems to be on the side of allowing Russian aggression to go forward because it is “understandable”. That does not seem so much “true” as foolish, ignorant and cowardly. Do you stand by Farage’s statement that you quoted?
–But you dont have the power to strengthen the countries in the near abroad of Russia do you? If you did there would be no civil war in Ukraine sponsored by Russia.
–I have never stood by or not stood by Farages statement on the subject. Other than I do believe he is right that the West provoked a confrontation with Russia, and has sacrificed Ukrainians in a pointless war that we have chosen not to win. Thats what I think. We should have done more.
–I think its cowardly, foolish and ignorant to start a war, the West wasnt willing to do what was necessary to win.
–The Wests actions are just like when George H W Bush asked the mud people in Iraq to rise up in revolt and then did nothing while Hussein murdered thousands.
–I dont believe in half measures.
The EU was set up and acquiesced to, if not actually approved, by the same Europeans who found the nuclear freeze movement ego-syntonic even though it was a Soviet psyops operation designed to freeze Soviet strategic superiority in place. I’d say they can have their would-be EUSSR and its government by unelected commissions behind the mask of a fake Parliament except that they don’t have the decency to keep it to themselves.
Good on Farage.