These days a vast majority of the media is more interested in advancing an ideology than reporting current events. And most media personalities and elected officials seem to have trouble holding more than one complex idea in their head at any given time. This post aims to clear up some of this muddled thinking on the current Russo-Ukrainian conflict.
Putin is a power-hungry, NATO didn’t make him go to war, and Biden may be right on some things and wrong on everything else.
I think there’s a sense in which the human mind appreciates simple, straightforward answers to simple, straightforward questions. And we also like to know who to blame when things go horribly wrong. But reality doesn’t usually fit into neat boxes like that.
That’s why multiple things concerning the Russo-Ukrainian War can be true all that the same time. Putin can be a bad dude willing to slaughter civilians by the hundreds to reclaim Ukraine. And he can still hate NATO, but that doesn’t mean NATO made him do it. At the same time, the Biden Administration’s verbal contempt for Putin and calls for sanctions are the right things to do, but its gutting of the American energy industry and its lies about inflation are inexcusable.
And I don’t know about you, but I’m not particularly confident in the Biden Administration’s ability to respond to the Russo-Ukrainian War, especially after its horrendous handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. That country and American veterans are still reeling from that debacle.
This is why I am being driven crazy by pundits and academics who point to one thing and claim that it is the cause of the current conflict. A recent article published by The Economist titled “John Mearsheimer on why the West is principally responsible for the Ukrainian crisis” is an a prime example of this. To sum up, Mearsheimer claims that the expansion of NATO pushed Putin to invade Ukraine.
Dennis Prager said something insightful on his radio show this week when he asked if it were more likely that Ukrainians today wish they hadn’t gotten friendlier with the West or wish they had joined NATO. I think one could make a reasonable argument that NATO membership would have been a deterrent against Russian invasion, but we won’t be able to know that now.
As I’ve explained in a previous post, wars begin because of a constellation of factors. Also, even political actors under immense pressure always have a degree of agency (ability to act independently). The West didn’t make Putin do anything. That being said, constraints (limits on agency) like the actions of others and the potential blowback for future actions can influence an actor’s decisions. While westernization of Ukraine did weigh into Putin’s calculations, it didn’t force his hand.
Also, if Ukrainians want to become more democratic and embrace the values of the West, why should we accept that Russia thinks it has veto power over that?
Americans can have divergent opinions on the Russo-Ukrainian War without committing acts of treason.
Since before the current conflict began, we’ve been told by most talking heads and politicians that America has a duty to defend democracy around the world. Never mind that those same people condemned President Bush’s calls to defend and expand democracy during the War on Terror. But this is part of a long American tradition going back to World War I. Before the U.S. officially entered WWI, Wilson and his PR specialists argued that American involvement in the war was necessary to “make the world safe for democracy.”
We can (and should) debate the merits of various philosophies that have and do undergird American foreign policy elsewhere. The point is that it’s obvious that politicians pull out the defend democracy trope to convince Americans to support wars that, since the American Civil War, require popular support to enter and continue fighting.
Even when the call to “defend democracy” could be justified, it puts those who oppose American intervention in the precarious position of seeming to be anti-democracy. Never mind that Ukraine is one of, if not the most corrupt state in Europe and certainly falls short of democratic principles when its leaders destroy their political opposition. But then again, some Canadian and American politicians do the same thing, so the rest of us must be operating with an outdated definition of democracy.
Instead of taking dissenting views seriously, critical voices like Tucker Carlson’s are attacked. And then it gets worse. For example, recently Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) accused Former Democrat Congresswoman and U.S. Army Reserve Officer Tulsi Gabbard spreading treasonous lies because Gabbard expressed deep concerns over the U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine that have yet to be secured.
Russia has fired over 900 missiles into Ukraine and ignored cease-fires designed to protect civilian life while dead Ukrainians lie under piles of rubble. But an American senator is more interested in accusing someone currently serving in our armed forces of committing a serious crime punishable by death.
Keith Olberman took it a step further with this recent tweet: “They (Carlson and Gabbard) are Russian Assets and there is a war. There’s a case for detaining them militarily. Trials are a sign of good faith and patience on the part of democracy.” According to this “democracy expert,” trials are the gifts democratic systems may choose to distribute when convenient, not the hallmark of a free system. Sadly, Olberman’s tweet is just the tip of the iceberg.
Democracy is worth defending, and like charity, it starts at home. Democratic principles protect everything from the moronic speech of Romney and Olberman to the valid dissent from Tucker Carlson (with whom I do not personally agree on this particular issue) and Tulsi Gabbard. If we can’t civilly and thoughtfully discuss how to intervene in Ukraine, or whether or not we should in the first place, we’re a poor excuse for a democratic republic. Maybe we should get our own house in order before we go meddling in someone else’s.
Sanctions can be useful, non-violent means of coercion when globalization doesn’t come back to bite us.
After the initial invasion, the West banned Russia from SWIFT, an international messaging system that facilitates global financial transactions. Other sanctions include a drastic reduction to Russia’s high-tech imports, the targeting of the Russian banking system, the freezing of Putin and other oligarch’s assets.
Private companies like Pfizer, Sony, Disney, YouTube, Verizon, Hilton, Starbucks, Shell, Amazon and many others have pulled out of or limited their business Russia, and Russian athletes and musicians have been barred from competitions and performances, respectively. As a result, the Russian rouble, which was in bad shape before, is taking a substantial hit.
It wasn’t until March 7th that the West began cutting its energy ties with Russia. Even so, the draw-down of European reliance on Russian gas and oil will take up to a year to complete. In this way, Russia is still somewhat benefitting from its status as the source of over a third of European energy imports.
Conservative Americans blame Biden for shutting down the Keystone Pipeline and other sources of domestic energy production, and rightly so. Gas prices started to sore well before the possibility of a Russo-Ukrainian War, so Joe, don’t pee on our legs and tell us it’s raining.
To make matters worse, if the West continues to embrace the tenets of the Green New Deal and refuse to extract its own oil and natural gas, any energy sanctions against Russia will mean more business for states like Iran. And since Iran just fired some missiles near an American outpost in Iraq, it doesn’t seem wise to line those pockets.
Meanwhile, America recently opened up talks with Venezuela despite our current sanctions against the Latin American country. Our lack of domestic energy production is putting us between a moral rock and an ethical hard place.
Couple this with the fact that Russia is the leading grain exporter globally (Ukraine is the 5th), a major exporter of a key fertilizer additive and exporter of nickel, which is required for electric vehicles and other tech, and we’re in for some wide reaching ripple effects.
Globalization in and of itself isn’t a bad idea; it has led to the development and democratization of non-western countries, for one thing. But when the prosperity of the West relies on the resources of hostile nations, we’ve got a problem. The flip side is that trading partners are have an incentive to avoid going to war with each other. It seems to me that we need to balance the benefits and drawbacks of a globalized economic system.
But that would require nuance rarely seen in Washington, D.C. Let’s hope that changes.
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