It took a while but I think I've figured out my angle on this war.
Obviously, Volodymyr Zelensky is a rockstar and I sure hope he survives. If you haven't seen him in "Servant of the People," definitely check it out. It doesn't seem to be streaming anywhere, but it looks like you can catch some episodes on youtube, e.g. here.
I heard him say the other day that he is Jewish, which makes him all the cooler. If I were a little younger and/or less burdened by family obligations, I'd seriously take him up on his offer to come to Ukraine and pick up a gun.
I've listened to lectures by Vladimir Pozner and John Mearsheimer who are pretty persuasive in the role we played in creating Vladimir Putin, which is what has led to the current crisis. Don't get me wrong, Putin is way out of line here. But we only got "here" because of our own ill-conceived foreign policy over the years since the end of the Cold War.
It started at the beginning. We had a golden opportunity when the Wall came down to "spend" our peace dividend -- and use our status as the only superpower in the world -- to help set Russia on a path to peaceful and prosperous democracy and capitalism. I've previously explained some of the problems with our own implementation of democracy and capitalism both, but at least we're trying. With various ill-advised exceptions -- Iraq and Afghanistan, to name two -- prosperous democratic countries don't start wars nowadays.
So some kind of a post-cold-war Marshall Plan should have been a priority. And over the years following, we should at least have modeled how a decent, prosperous democratic country should behave. But we didn't do that either (Iraq, Afghanstan, etc).
And then there's the NATO question. When the Wall came down, our Secretary of State James Baker told Russia that NATO would not move one inch eastward. That vow was soon broken in the late 1990s and early 2000s when Poland and other former Soviet Bloc states joined up. I've heard various commentators -- including the New York Times, in its analysis of Putin's recent speech -- question what right one country (Russia) has to prevent another country (e.g. Ukraine) from joining up with whatever "club" it wants to join up with. That logic might apply to joining the EU. But NATO is a military alliance AGAINST Russia. That was James Baker's point way back then -- he realized that Russia saw NATO as a threat, and that no matter what form of government the various "buffer" countries might choose, they would not join NATO. Remember how we reacted when Cuba wanted to host Russian missiles, and how we would react if Mexico decided it wanted to do the same? We should have kept to the deal to leave NATO where it was, and concentrated on spreading democracy and capitalism rather than missiles.
But in 2008 in Bucharest we apparently pushed hard even to get Ukraine -- a large, well-armed country right on Russia's border that had been a key part of the former Soviet Union -- into NATO. Germany and France rightly objected and it didn't happen.
As Pozner and Mearsheimer explain, the continued expansion of NATO looks like an existential threat to Russia and to Putin, and also has provided a pretext for Russian aggression, including taking Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, not to mention the current war.
Not only did we squander our opportunity to use our status as the world's only superpower to make Russia prosperous and democratic, but we've squandered numerous opportunities to display -- or gain -- the kind of moral authority that should have come with our superpower status. Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were mainly driven by self interest, and ended up killing or ruining the lives of millions of people in those countries. Our treatment of prisoners and the like didn't help. All of that give rise to new waves of fully preventable terrorism, and it makes it rather hard for us to say that Russia had no right to invade Ukraine. Seems like it had just as much "right" to invade Ukraine as we did to invade Iraq, and the "threat" that Ukraine poses to Russia is actually more credible than any threat that Iraq posed to us. Obviously, I'm not defending the invasion of Ukraine; I'm just pointing out that we set the example for it.
And as I've said before, our handling of the pandemic was another opportunity to display and gain moral authority. With a bit of foresight, we could have made sure that vaccines created at the U.S. Government's expense (like those of Modena and Johnson & Johnson) were rapidly delivered around the world. The way to do that would have been to do whatever it took -- in addition to the original funding to ensure that all the technology we paid for and used to create the vaccines was in the public domain, such that generics would have been able to produce it. For example, Moderna got over a billion dollars and NIH scientists either coinvented or simultaneously invented the vaccine; even if Moderna was entitled to a patent and trade secret protection, we should have simply bought out those rights and let the free market take over. Yes, there would still have been supply chain issues, but those could have been resolved with more money. The point was that vaccines needed to be in arms, and leaving control of the technology in the hands of private parties ensured that the rich countries would get vaccinated first and that many in developing world would still be waiting, which is exactly what causes new variants to arise.
And we could have done the same with the AIDS crisis in Southern Africa in the late 1990s and early 2000s -- made medications available for generic production, at whatever cost -- but instead let millions die.
I honestly think that if we had taken steps to make a working vaccine rapidly available to everybody, including the Russians, and thereby nipped the Covid thing in the bud, it would been a lot harder for Putin to point to portray us as irredeemably decadent, which is a major part of his pretext for invading Ukraine.
Back to Ukraine. Vladimir Pozner, in a slightly different context, reminded me of this quote from Herman Goering, days before he committed suicide:
“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”
That's essentially what the George W Bush administration did to drag our country into Iraq (remember the "mushroom cloud"), and it's also what Putin is saying to the Russian people. He is saying that Ukraine is a threat to the Russian way of life. He might not be completely wrong in that, which is why we should have done more to show the Russians all along a path to a better way of life for all.
