MB on Ukraine
Part of an ongoing conversation. A reader with the abbreviated name of MB made a comment so worth study that I repost it here as its own guest column. The words below are his:
Long time reader, first time commenter. Full disclosure: I am Romanian and have lived in the US for more than 20 years, but am not American.
I really dislike Disqus, for the same reasons as Facebook (websites that keep track of me), but this is the first time I read something I strongly disagreed with here so I unblocked Disqus on my computer in order to comment.
Everyone knows that Ukraine is not about to become a NATO member, Putin included. At most, it is going to become an ally, like Israel and Sweden are right now. The reason is that a country cannot become a NATO member, since NATO started enlarging, without first solving all territorial disputes with its neighbors first. It is an official condition for NATO membership. Due to the situations in Crimea and Donbas, this will not happen in the foreseeable future for Ukraine. So no NATO membership, at most NATO partnership. Same for Georgia and Moldova.
Secondly, there is touching naiveté in the idea that Russia is the aggrieved party because it is entitled to its sphere of influence, in which the West is trespassing and hurting Putin’s feelings. Great powers are in active competition and Putin did not refrain from supporting Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, or Nicaragua in the American sphere of influence. Some of these are dictatorships that arrest opponents, some have secret police, probably all falsify elections, etc.. By contrast, even though the Ukrainian government started in a popular revolution with Western support, it won elections and now has democratic support. Why should the US not support it? Why should Putin’s feelings be spared?
Thirdly, it is not true that Russian troops were acting as peacekeepers in South Ossetia, no more than in any of the other frozen conflicts that Russia keeps alive in the former Soviet Union. The Russians were definitely not neutral parties. Georgians are not monsters as far as I know, they have no genocidal tendencies (unlike the parties in former Yugoslavia), and they were trying to take what they thought of as their country back from the Russians. Indeed it was a mistake for Georgians to attack the Russian troops, and they paid the consequences, but right was on their side.
There is no reason to believe that either Georgians or Ukrainians would behave truly badly toward their Russian or Russian-supported minorities. These are democratic countries and their desire for EU membership (or at least association) would have kept them on good behaviour. Yes, many Russians were upset at losing the privileges they had in the former Soviet Union, but a certain desire for revenge after decades and in some cases centuries of colonial rule is natural. And as far as I can tell the worst they suffered was an insistence on learning the local language, which many had not bothered to before, and a temporary removal from high political office.
Anyway, this is pretty clearly just a pretext: Russians are treated equally badly if not worse in their former Central Asian possessions, but because Putin has good relations with those dictators he is not bothered by it.
Russia was indeed humiliated after losing the Cold War, but it was not treated badly. It was treated as an equal, see all those pointless summits and invitations to G7. The corruption and stealing of national wealth were done by the Russians themselves. There were no ruinous war reparations, there was no occupation of Russia’s territory, there was no foreign administration determined to change things, so Russia was treated better than either Germany after WWI or Germany and Japan after WWII. This is in spite of the fact that the Cold War also made millions of victims, almost certainly more than WWI or WWII.
It goes without saying that Russia has been a bad neighbor, exporting communism to neighboring countries and killing or sending to concentration camps the elites (such as schoolteachers and priests) of its colonies. There is no actual point, as for Germany or even Japan, at which Russia renounced its communist and militaristic past and apologized for its crimes. On the contrary, even though Putin is not Stalin, Stalin is still worshipped as a national hero. And the world (US in particular) is still supposed to trust Russia and neighboring countries are still supposed to accede to its demands?
It is not true that Russia’s back is against the wall. There was no specific provocation that triggered the Ukraine invasion, it was the West’s ineptitude and concessions interpreted as weakness (Biden’s approval for the Northstream pipeline). No country is planning to invade Russia. Russia has great relations with China, Iran, India, Brazil, and about half the world (the half that hates the West mostly). This siege mentality testifies more to a Cold War secret agent’s paranoia, for whom every Western influence is dangerous and all Westerners are fascists and Nazis.
Putin is probably a great Russian patriot and wants to make Russia great again, but there is a difference between the methods he uses and those of, say, Konrad Adenauer. His aggression rather makes me think of Hitler’s approach, who used German minorities in neighboring countries as a reason to annex their territories. This led to WWII, not Hitler’s loathsome treatment of Jewish people, so there is no reason to think that because Putin is less evil than Hitler he is less dangerous.
Finally, to emphasize this once more: I think the idea of an American-Russian Condominium, which I first encountered in an Asimov story, is completely misguided because it is just an American fantasy of people like Buchanan and not reciprocated by the Russians. The Russian government is not as considerate of American interests as some Americans with Cold War nostalgia are of Russian ones.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
