The good folks at NRO have asked me to try out an Ask Me Anything-style series in the Corner this week. We put up the original invitation on Monday. I’ll be thematically grouping the questions and answering them throughout the week. Naturally, we got some questions and complaints about my views on U.S. support for the war in Ukraine. Tomorrow, I should hit more personal questions, and on Friday, the Irish stuff.
I’ve grouped all the Ukraine questions together and will answer below, at indulgent length.
Jason_MI asks:
I’m confused by the overall tenor of your comments about the Ukraine conflict, taken over time through the Corner, your opinion pieces, and The Editors podcast. I get the impression that you are opposed to the war qua war. But I can’t tell whether you oppose meaningful U.S. support for Ukraine because you believe the U.S. has no material interest in that dispute, or because you believe Russia has a historical or geopolitical right to control Ukraine that persists despite the well-documented war crimes perpetrated by Russia, or because you hold both propositions to be true. Will you clarify your top-line rationale for your position on this question?
Caleb_whitmer asks (among other questions I hope I’ll get to):
If you were put in charge of U.S. foreign-policy-making tomorrow, what would you do to try to end the war in Ukraine?
Jeep wrote a long response with many intelligent things to say on Ukraine and Russia that I agree with, and some I don’t agree with, but asks/comments:
I don’t get your view on Ukraine.
warren_murphy charges me with hypocrisy and dishonesty on the subject:
I would like to know why you engage in so many of the rhetorical tricks employed by the left. As an example, earlier today you accused Rothman of taking distinct incidents of treason by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and imputing them to the entire body of that Church. In the next breath, you take distinct incidents of Ukraine acting against treason by Church officials and characterized the whole of Ukraine’s treatment of the Church and its members thus.
Nor is this an isolated incident. You have exhibited the pattern of omitting the evidence and left us with only the implicit assumption that something bad from the past is still going on despite a constantly changing situation. (Ukraine’s militias are an example of this.) These habits of yours make you resemble Tucker Carlson very much.
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Jason is right that I hate war. I admire martial values as they instill in men discipline and a willingness to sacrifice for the greater good, but wars of choice are the enemy of freedom and the friend of demagogues. War makes normally liberal people argue in favor of collective punishment, torture, etc. An unjust war is just organized mass murder. Nations at war become desperate and try to solve their problems by making them bigger (think Japan attacking Pearl Harbor).
Even our most justified wars involved moral enormities. Think of how the U.K. promised to intervene in Poland’s behalf during World War II — emboldening Poland in its negotiations with Germany and then kicking off a process that would see the U.S. and the U.K. throw Poland to Stalin like a hunk of meat. We had rewarded the very dictator whose pact with Hitler resulted in the dismemberment of Poland and the massacre of her national leaders. Late in the war, the Soviets encircled Warsaw as the Polish Home Army was slaughtered while driving American trucks and Harley-Davidson motorcycles. America’s state propagandists denounced the Poles as fascists, and a few even defected to the Soviet Union after the war to continue their work professionally lying about the Katyn massacre. Wars cost the United Kingdom her empire, and our term as world hegemon will surely end through the same folly. I hope to delay that day.
I think I’ve had a very consistent line on Ukraine for almost a decade now. Since 2014 and 2015, I’ve held that Kyiv’s drift toward the West is a sign of Putin’s fundamental weakness, and his gambles in Ukraine reflect desperation, not a gathering of Hitlerian strength. I’ve consistently argued that our foreign-policy blob overrates the stakes for America in Ukraine. (Here’s another column from February 2015 to that effect.) I have been highly informed and influenced on these issues by a few books: Frontline Ukraine by Richard Sakwa, Who Lost Russia? by Peter Conradi, and, on Ukraine’s history, The Gates of Europe by Serhii Plokhy.
So, let’s set the table for my views on the conflict. Before 2014, I would have said that Ukraine has long been a strategic battlefield between Russia and the West. Ukraine’s internal political divisions in some ways mirrored this geopolitical conflict. Successful Ukrainian statesmen could only manage this tension and seek to diminish it by trying to make Ukraine a nation that does business with both East and West. Ukraine lacked such statesmen, and the West and Russia both, in turns, put forward deals to Kyiv that were bound to make Ukraine’s internal politics unmanageable.
So where does that leave us when contemplating a conflict? By my lights:
(1) Ukraine involves vital Russian interests — Sevastopol and access to the Black Sea being chief among them. Ukraine is among the United States’ most peripheral interests, unless its fate is unnecessarily tied to or conflated with NATO’s or that of the “post–World War II order.”
(2) Russia has advantages in geography, internal dissension in Ukraine, irredentist claims on Crimea, and existing resources that make it easy to meddle in Ukraine.
(3) The West hasn’t even detached Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, and other states in NATO or the EU from their reliance on Soviet infrastructure. To detach Ukraine economically from Russia is a much taller task; a massive, treacherous lift.
(4) Therefore, in a conflict, Russia will be much more likely summon the will and resources to effect its preferred outcome.
(5) Making Ukraine a part of a NATO, or an adjunct to it, crosses Russia’s red lines — not just Putin’s.
(6) Adding Ukraine to NATO would add far more liabilities than assets. The weakest link of the chain is the strength of the whole.
(7) We could drift to a point where we or the Russians conflate the fate of Ukraine and the credibility of the NATO alliance, raising the stakes and the risks of the conflict to an existential level.
During the EuroMaidan Revolution (a subject for another day), Ukraine moved to embrace the West, and all that has followed has been a predictable (and predicted) consequence — both Russia’s intransigence and its willingness to wreck Ukraine, but also the increased repressiveness of the Ukrainian state. To move West, Ukraine had to go after not only the oligarchs that would drag it back to Russia but also the voters that would do the same and the political parties that would stall that project. I hate war because it makes people behave like this to those deemed fifth columnists.
https://twitter.com/MyLordBebo/status/1640375712690454529?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Now, Warren accuses me of a sleight of hand in this piece. He says I charge Noah with taking a series of discrete crimes committed by individuals and declaring the guilt of the entire body of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church. He says I do the same with Ukraine itself when I discuss the eviction of monks or the seizure of their ancient monastery.
But the difference is this: In Ukraine’s case, I’m talking about the policy of the government, passed by the legislature. It passed a law repressing the church, which has resulted in this series of actions. The church’s institutional position, articulated by the metropolitan in Kyiv, was to reject Kirill’s war and seek ways to separate the church from him. You may posit that there’s a secret, internal church policy of doing everything to help the Kremlin, but I don’t see any evidence of this.
I’m against the government’s imposing this kind of collective guilt on people. I don’t hold all Ukrainians guilty of their government’s policy, just as I don’t hold all Americans guilty for interning the Japanese during World War II, but I do hold the government collectively guilty, and government policy can be condemned in national terms.
While I’m here, I want to address the moral argument for supporting Ukraine, too.
Of course Russia is committing atrocities in Ukraine. Of course its invasion is more barbaric and coercive than Ukraine’s state-sponsored cultural repression. Of course many Ukrainians are bravely defending their freedom from Russian tyranny. Pouring out their blood for love of country and the protection of their people is among the noblest of deeds.
My old pal Joe Lindsley was living in Ukraine when the Covid pandemic broke out. He fell in love with the country. And he’s become convinced that the Maidan Revolution of 2014 was the most significant political event since 1776. I don’t begrudge him for falling in love. Americans fall in love with other people’s nationalisms all the time. During the 1848 tumult, it was Hungary. In 2022, it was Ukraine. But for others, I think their late affection for Ukraine falls under what George Orwell described as the spell of “transferred nationalism.” Orwell worried that by transferring out affections, “it makes it possible for [the nationalist] to be much more nationalistic — more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest — that he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge.”
Here’s the catch. In the absence of a real commitment by the American people to bear the costs of effecting a positive outcome in Ukraine, our involvement will extend the war and its attendant evils. It becomes a bloody form of moral vanity, in which our good intentions become Ukraine’s moral hazard. Because Americans correctly sense that there are no vital American interests at stake in Ukraine, their tolerance for supporting it is low: The money goes on a credit card, and it is invested in the American arms industry. The minute the conversation shifts toward sending troops, or getting in more direct conflict with Russia, support plummets.
I don’t go around telling people that if they don’t support immediate war with Kim Jong-un, they support his prison-colony dictatorship. The Chinese are doing a much more effective job at ethnically cleansing Sinkiang than the Russians are at erasing Ukrainian identity. You can tell because respectable Americans call it “Xinjiang” now, implicitly handing it to the Han supremacists, whereas we bend over backwards to erase our Westernized words for Ukrainian cities and use Ukrainian names such as “Kyiv.” China remains our most important non-NAFTA trade partner.
Yet, much to my frustration, the vast majority of people who interact with me on the subject say that I must love Putin. They used to say that I loved Saddam. I wonder what they thought that meant. Did they imagine that I had a small library of Baathist literature on my shelves? Who knows?
I’m grateful that NR lets me expand on this minority position. I’m grateful that Noah talks about the conflict in terms of American interests, which he defines more expansively and sensitively than I do. I’m grateful for Rich’s interactions on the subject.