A Fight for Survival

For those interested, I have written a piece about Yaroslav Trofimov and have recorded a podcast with Phillips O’Brien. Trofimov is the chief foreign-affairs correspondent of the Wall Street Journal. O’Brien is a professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews. Each has important things to say about the Ukraine war, in his own way.

Trofimov has been a war correspondent for decades. He has covered wars in the Middle East, in particular. For the Journal, he served as a correspondent in Iraq. He was also the paper’s bureau chief in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In recent years, he has been covering Ukraine. His reporting has been invaluable. This war is different for him, given that he was born and raised in Ukraine.

He and I talked about a number of issues: personal, political, military, historical — even psychological.

Phillips O’Brien has had a British career — graduate studies in England; teaching in Scotland — but he was born and bred in Boston. He has thought and written a great deal about Ukraine and Russia. In our podcast, we discuss some essential questions.

Will the war “determine the fate of the world”? Earlier this month, the chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, said, “The outcome of this war will determine the fate of the world.” Is that going too far? Not from a European perspective, says O’Brien. And certainly not from an Eastern European perspective.

How about an American one?

Further questions for Professor O’Brien: Are the Ukrainians running out of weapons? Running out of personnel (which is to say, bluntly, bodies)? If the United States turns its back on Ukraine, will Ukraine have enough allies to stay in the fight? Another way of asking this is: What is NATO without America?

Putin has allies: China, Iran, North Korea, etc. Iran and North Korea have supplied Russia with “finished munitions,” O’Brien says. China has not yet gone that far. China, a major power, is an interesting player in this terrible, bloody drama.

Where I live, there are lots of beliefs about Ukraine and Russia. Here are some: In 2014, Washington engineered a coup in Ukraine. NATO provoked Russia into war. Ukraine is full of Nazis. Zelensky is corrupt. Russian-speakers in Ukraine want to be part of Russia. Zelensky cratered a peace deal early on.

O’Brien observes, “The Russians have gained far more geopolitical leverage out of the millions they’ve spent on information warfare than the billions they have spent on the military.”

In a previous podcast, a previous Q&A, I spoke with Eliot A. Cohen, another professor of strategic studies. He brought up Zara Steiner, the late historian. One of her books is called “The Triumph of the Dark.” It is about the 1930s. Are we about to see another triumph of the dark? I discussed this with Cohen, and I discuss it with O’Brien — whose doctoral adviser was Professor Steiner.

So, big issues (all too). Again, my piece on Yaroslav Trofimov is here, and my Q&A with Phillips O’Brien is here.