If you’re looking for a reason to feel sympathetic to Russia, the real one is that its current behavior is really rooted in some old and not entirely unwarranted pathologies.
If Prussia was an army with a state, modern Russia is a security apparatus with a state. And I mean “modern” in the sense of the latest iteration of the Russian nation to pull itself back together after the Mongols flattened its predecessor.
Russia’s history is basically an unending liturgy of other states attempting to conquer it and failing to do so or to hold it, but being repelled at the cost of vast numbers of its people and much of its wealth. The Mongols, Tatars, Turks, French, British, Germans, Germans…
That is the frame through which Russia’s policy makers view everything. No sooner had they genuinely neutralized the threat from the east, quite literally by conquering virtually all of the steppe not under “civilized” Chinese control than the Turks pose an existential threat from the south.
They mostly resolve that problem in their favor, again with much bloodshed and the repressed devastation of southern Russia and Ukraine, and then France appears to the west. 10% of the civilian population frozen to death later and they’ve repelled that threat, but the UK has decided they’re a threat and launched a limited invasion.
And on, and on, through the history of the 20th century, which is way worse than anything else since the Mongols.
The proximate issues at hand are clear enough; the Russian state is a manifestly untrustworthy actor when it comes to anything security-related, and it views the continued existence of a stable, prosperous US as a threat.
But understanding how it became this way in the first place is something we’re bad at, and that needs to inform our policy more.
I'm skeptical that there's really a "deal" to be had here. Yes, the 2008 Bucharest Declaration was a mistake, but what prompted Putin's 2014 intervention wasn't NATO but an EU association agreement. Putin does not want a neutral or "Finlandized" Ukraine. He wants Ukraine as Russian client state - ideally he likely wants Ukraine in the Eurasian Union and in CSTO.
I know the familiar narrative that the US and the west have been overly focused on denying Russia a sphere on influence. I think the reality is a lot more mixed. For all the condemnation it drew at the time, the west quickly moved on from the Georgia War. Nobody in the western world has pushed back on Russian intervention in Nagarno-Karabakh. The west has rarely sought to counter Russian influence in Central Asia. Even Ukraine spent most of the post-Soviet years as a Russian client state which few in the west really challenged.
What changed the equation for Ukraine was domestic pressure to align with Europe. (On that note, I think Matt is overly cynical about western intentions and underplays that there is a lot of genuine sympathy in official circles for Ukraine's western / European aspirations.)
Last point, I want to push back on Matt's dismissal about inviolability of post-Soviet borders. It's not that borders can't or shouldn't ever be changed - borders should not be changed by force. Obviously that hasn't always been true. (And all major powers - certainly the US, but also Russia - were offenders in the 19th Century and before.) But no changing borders by force really has been a central organizing feature of the post-WWII settlement, and has likely been a significant factor in the decline of global conflict, given how much historical conflict has been driven by conflict over land.
Crimeans probably want to be Russian, and that's fine. But the means matter. A reasonable rapprochement deal would be something like an interim UN administration, an internationally monitored referendum (which would likely confirm Russian sovereignty), and perhaps provisions like Northern Ireland whereby residents are eligible for Ukrainian passports as well.
The claim that 'there is a lot of genuine sympathy in official circles for Ukraine's western / European aspirations' is clearly true in many context, especially in Washington and London.
However, this 'symapthy' does not extend to unanimous support for Ukrainian membership of either NATO or the EU. Ukraine will not be admitted to NATO as France and Germany will veto it; in any case it would be absurd to admit a country to a mutual defence pact when it is currently engaged in irregular warfare within its own borders, against forces supported by a nuclear superpower.
EU membership prospects are no better; for one thing EU enlargement is on the back burner and has been for a while, with little appetite in European capitals for a further round of enlargement. For another, Ukraine is even more corrupt, less democratic, poorer, and has a larger population than the currently troublesome group of Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. It's miles from meeting the criteria for membership.
What I would say is that there isn't an *inherent* Western desire to see Ukraine aligned with the west. Had Ukrainians preferred to remain Russia-aligned I don't think there would be significant pushback.
But that's different from a situation where the Ukrainian public by and large prefers to align with the west. And coupled with the fact that Putin's Russia is an authoritarian revisionist power, that drives a lot of sympathy for Ukraine. And it's clear that even western alignment short of full EU or NATO membership is a red line for Putin.
(For what it's worth, the US and most western powers opposed the breakup of the USSR and had things worked out such that Ukraine remained in some sort of post-Soviet federation I don't think any western capital would have lost any sleep over it. If anything, many in the EU would be happy for the EU's current western boundary to become permanent.)
I think NATO interventions in Serbia and the former Yugoslavia were good, but I also admit I'm skeptical about Kosovo independence. It's a complicated situation, but it was an exception to international law and practice and has created a negative precedent that Russia has used.
(It also isn't clear to me that in the long run a Kosovo that remained loosely federated with Serbia wouldn't be a better outcome. It's not totally clear to me that having it as a small de facto international protectorate that is decades away from joining the EU is all that positive in the long run.)
Northern Cyprus is not recognized, so in that case the principle is upheld. Kosovo was an independence movement with foreign backing, which is the most common way for countries emerge. Russia didn't go for an independent Crimea, it annexed it. It's also giving Russian citizenship to residents of it's two puppet republics, which is not happening in Kosovo. So, yes, Russia seeks to invade, occupy, and annex its neighbors.
Northern Cyprus is occupied by NATO member forces though. Are NATO members gonna sanction themselves in the same way they sanction Russia over Crimea?
I’m okay with the existence of Kosovo (and I’m okay with Crimea being part of Russia as it was in the past). I’m just pointing out that Serbia’s borders changed after a war, so I don’t see how they changed without force.
If your red line is annexation, are you advocating for the recognition of the Luhansk and Donetsk republics?
Finally, I could have used the Golan Heights or something similar, but I specifically wanted examples where NATO forces were involved.
No, Northern Cyprus is occupied by Turkish soldiers. There are British bases in Cyprus, which predate the creation of Northern Cyprus. If Greek military police beat up protesters in Athens, was that a NATO military action? The US doesn't have to recognize other countries or statelets. I'm against recognizing annexations by countries of their neighbor's territory through force. Aggressive war for territorial expansion lead to disaster in WWI and WWII for the world and is still a bad idea. It's unfortunate that Russia is so enamored of it, and holds up Stalin as an exemplar now, who loved it so. It will cause a lot of destruction in the world and to Russia itself.
Okay, I accept that Turkey acted without NATO authorization and the British presence on Cyprus dates back to the colonial times. That doesn’t explain why they don’t face crippling sanctions right now (maybe only Turkey, if you want to use the argument that the British were there before the UN was created). The Greek military police beating up protesters won’t change any borders.
We agree however that wars of aggression are bad, which is why I was happy to see NATO terminate the occupation of Afghanistan.
Why do you see Afghanistan as a war of aggression? The Taliban allowed a military force to plot and execute a military strike on the United States and then protected them. The US then declared that a casus belli and overthrew the hostile Taliban government. Do you think the US had no justification for attacking Afghanistan? Do you think the war in the Donbas is a war of aggression?
Northern Cyprus does face crippling sanctions right now. Russia didn't face crippling sanctions after it failed to leave the Transdniester Republic (despite agreements) or when it attacked and quasi-annexed parts of Georgia (most of the leadership in the two breakaway republics are Russian citizens). It was only after it did it again in Ukraine and then shot down a civilian airplane (and lied about it repeatedly), that the sanctions began to bite. Everyone is getting sick of Russia pulling the same stunt over and over again.
What I think is most likely to happen is not a full on invasion of Ukraine in its entirety, but Putin entering the separatist regions of Ukraine already not under the control of the central government (Donbass). He is unlikely to face an insurgency there and probably hopes that this minor incursion will not spark a united and ferocious response from the U.S. and its European allies.
The trouble with this strategy is that if Putin cleaves off the most pro-Russian areas of the country, the rest of Ukraine will be pushed even closer to the West. Partially out of irredentism, but also because a large number of anti-US voters will no longer be Ukranians.
It’s hard to see why (the remainder of) Ukraine wouldn’t clamor to join NATO after that. Is that a desirable outcome for him?
I think the realist/great power/sphere of influence analysis goes something like this:
- Putin doesn't need Ukraine to be a functioning client state.
- Putin does need Ukraine to not be a functioning NATO ally that can serve for forward positioning.
Therefore, once Crimea is "safely" Russian territory (and thus he's not making a mess for ethnic Russians), long term unresolvable Ukrainian civil war is an acceptable outcome because Ukraine is a geographical buffer state even if it's a wasteland. So he doesn't need to invade and hold territory, he just needs to arm pro-Russian factions.
Putin seems satisfied with current situation but he could easily capture port cities and disturb commerce in Ukraine pretty significantly with limited effort.
I think an underrated part of this saga is Putin’s “nostalgia” for medieval Russia, namely the fact that the Russia we know today was born in Kyiv in the 9th century. Yes, he’s a cagey negotiator and may be blustering about an invasion to win concessions from the West… but I dunno, maybe he’s really serious about goals that transcend politicking. In the past, he’s spoken (almost jealously) about the loose US-Canada border and the united cultural community it reflects. If he wants something similar for Russia and Ukraine, I don’t think we can safely count out the idea of an invasion, despite the massive potential downsides.
>>A peaceful, stable Ukraine that successfully fights corruption and that builds commercial ties to central and western Europe could become rich. . . And its prospects as a country under quasi-occupation by the Russian military, wracked by constant political instability and with tons of people fleeing, are not good at all.
>>Russia would be, at potentially great cost, picking up something essentially worthless to them.. . .
>>There really ought to be a win-win here where Russia doesn’t invade Ukraine, Ukraine disavows NATO membership, the western powers acknowledge the referendum that incorporated Crimea into Russia, Russia acknowledges that Ukraine can follow the footsteps of Sweden, Finland, and Austria into the EU without violating neutrality, and everyone goes back to buying and selling natural gas instead of killing each other.<<
I believe this is a fundamentally wrong view of the situation and especially of Russia's view of its strategic interests. And I think we're totally misunderstanding the debate as one of Ukraine's possible entry into NATO, despite what Russia is saying.
It's hard to believe that Putin is *that* worried about a military threat on his western flank (despite 1812 and 1941 and all that). But we *do* know what he is worried about, because he has acted against that threat constantly: and this is a dissatisfied Russian population, fed up with the corruption and economic incompetence of the Putin regime. Like Xi, though more so, he fears the ire of the people rising against him, and threatening the rule of him and his fellow oligarchs. And one source of that ire is seeing nearby countries pick an alternative model, and flourishing. In particular, East European countries that enter the EU, and see growth rates far exceeding those of Ukraine or Russia, not to mention (in most instances) far more political freedom.
*That's* what Putin and his cronies ultimately fear. So the idea that it's a "win-win" for Ukraine to join the EU and grow more than Russia is just wrong. Putin *wants* Ukraine to stay relatively poor and misgoverned (relative to Russia at least) so it can't serve as a model for his subjects to aspire to. That's how he can keep Ukraine from becoming a strategic threat to the survival of his regime.
The only confusing thing here is his focus on NATO. I think it's a stalking horse, and a stand-in for the EU. Imagine that Europe (with the US) says, OK, Ukraine will never join NATO, but we would welcome its joining the EU (after passing some qualification tests). Would Putin be fine with that deal?
I've seen this argument before, and it likely has some merit, but it neglects the fact that Russia has hated NATO expansion for decades, even before Putin. Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin strongly opposed it, yet the West did it anyway, partially because Russia was so weak and chaotic in the 90s that they couldn't really do much about it. But the grievances kept building up over time, and now Putin sees a chance to fix the mistakes of the 90s and re-alter Europe's security landscape.
There are also historical and cultural factors at play. Seeing Ukraine, the actual birthplace of "Russian" civilization under the Kievan Rus, falling fully under the Western umbrella would likely be intolerable to most average Russians, let alone the hardliners in Putin's government.
There's truth to this but as with many things it's complicated. NATO expansion was deeply unpopular with Yeltsin and his circle, but it's also true that (although it was driven by weakness) they did consent to it. Putin for his part consented to NATO expansion into the Baltics in the early 2000s. And both under Yeltsin and early under Putin there were Russian inquiries about *joining* NATO. (Or joining politically while keeping outside the military structure, a la France between De Gaulle and Sarkozy.)
I think it would probably have been better if a separate European defense alliance - led by the EU - had been stood up at that time and used to incorporate Eastern European states. But to be fair that counterfactual falters a little bit on how difficult it has been to coordinate EU-wide defense policy even now absent US leadership. And it's also not clear that a revisionist regime like Putin's wouldn't view that as equivalent to NATO expansion (especially if the US were involved in arming and coordinating such an alliance).
The other big missing factor when we talk about US/Russian estrangement post-91 is the Yugoslav Wars, especially the '99 NATO campaign in support of Kosovo. That, even more than enlargement, drove Russian fears that NATO were just a tool against Russia and its allies.
The timeline on which Ukraine could prosper due to its western affiliation is entirely irrelevant to Putin's personal ambitions. He is 70, his career won't be in any way affected by Ukraine becoming a role model thirty years from now.
I seriously doubt Putin has any interest in occupying Kiev or the Western, ethnically Ukrainian regions of Ukraine. However, he very well might want to bite off more of the majority Russian portions of Donetsk and Luhansk. His motives are irredentist, much like France wanted to take back Alsace and Lorraine in 1914 but had no interest in annexing Saxony or Hesse even after Germany surrendered.
The additional territory and population Putin wants are relatively small, an area the size of Maryland or New Jersey with a couple million inhabitants. The real risk is that Putin might invade territories he doesn’t want to keep to use as bargaining chips, much like 1914 France backed Russian power plays against Austria Hungary, not because France cared who ruled Silesia, but because France needed Russian participation in a war against Germany to have any hope of recapturing its lost provinces.
The idea that Putin has become isolated in his own echo chamber and is simply being irrational does seem the most likely explanation. Why else would Putin want to steer Russia on a path of becoming to China what Canada is to the US, instead of aligning with Germany and the EU in an European orientation where Russia in time could be the first among equals?
It would hardly be the first time an autocratic leader who has purged dissenters has lost touch with reality and damaged his country.
"So-and-so is simply irrational" is always a possibility, but I think it tends to be too cute by half if we're trying to understand or predict modal behavior.
Agreed, it's not a complete statement and doesn't mean a person doesn't have clear goals. It could be their actions aren't reasonably calculated to achieve their goals --- or their goals themselves are wacko and out of line with the rest of their world. For example, a fantasy of recreating a medieval Rus that includes Kiev, or exterminating neighboring countries for "lebensraum", or whatever.
Autocratic rulers have to create weird power bases. There are still a lot of hardliners in powerful positions in Russia, right? Could be that his hand is forced, and if he doesn’t play this game there’s some other equally bad constituencies that need appeasement.
That’s why negotiations with autocracies are really hard, we can’t know what the hell is going on. And we don’t have assets in Russia to the extent we did during the Cold War.
What's rational in a given situation depends on what you value. In this case, I think there are at least two reasons why Putin is not pursuing such an approach, and given those reasons, his approach is not at all irrational:
1. Defense: NATO (and therefore the US) is foundational to the European security architecture outside of Russia's current sphere of influence. Putin seems to sincerely believe that the US is out to get him - leaving aside whether we agree with that, it's hard to see how he could integrate Russia into a defense architecture centered around American power without becoming not just first among equals among European nations but also essentially a subordinate power to the US. Russia really needs the breakup of NATO in order to form a European security establishment with itself as the first among equals.
2. Culture and politics: I think Putin is skeptical, and rightly so, that most Western European countries would accept Russia as a full member, much less a leading member, of Europe without unacceptable changes. Especially if they don't have to because of NATO protection. Look at some edge cases here:
-Hungary: member of NATO, member of the EU, somewhat Russia aligned or sympathetic. Hungary is the subject of quite strong attacks for its cultural conservatism (especially on LGBT issues and immigration) and explicitly pro-Christianity stance. Under Orban, Hungary has also pursued changes to its political system to give Orban a leg up. Yet even so, Hungary is significantly freer and more democratic than Russia is, or has been probably ever. Why should we expect an EU that condemns Hungary to accept an even more conservative, undemocratic Russia?
-Poland: member of NATO, member of the EU, non-Russia aligned. Poland has been subject to many of the same attacks as Hungary, though to a lesser extent. My impression is they have not gone as far as Hungary in pursuing either culturally conservative government policy or undemocratic constitutional changes.
-Turkey: member of NATO, NOT a member of the EU, complicated relationship with Russia. Turkey has seen its pursuit of joining the EU put on hold and dashed for many reasons, first and foremost its quasi-authoritarian system under Erdoğan. Yet even after all of Erdoğan's changes, it is arguably still a much freer state than Russia.
Russia is not going to become more LGBT friendly, or Muslim immigrant friendly, than Hungary or Poland. Russia is not going to become more democratic than Hungary, Poland, or Turkey. Given that, why should Russia be confident that they have a place in Europe these days?
Hungary is the subject of attacks because of mass embezzling of EU funds, eroding the rule of law and selling out to competitors of EU for favors. Being under attack for their values is the government's propaganda line. They get some verbal criticism for their "cultural conservatism", sure, but that's pretty much all there is to it. Both Article 7, the withholding of the recovery funds, and the likely withholding of the structural funds are explicitly in response to rule-of-law violations. The EU has very limited power to handle conflicts of interests between its members, and relies on national courts honestly upholding EU law, so a government replacing the judiciary with meatpuppets is a huge red flag to them.
In any case, the EU has already bit more with its eastern expansion than it can chew. EU member states have veto powers over a wide range of decisions; members abusing those powers would threaten the stability of the union. I think they have become quite wary of accepting more countries with an immature political culture.
Hungary has been strongly criticized for all of those things, but I think you're really underselling the LGBT criticism. E.g. to take just one example, you have the prime minister of the Netherlands saying Hungary must leave the EU or repeal the LGBT law passed last year. "My goal is to bring Hungary to its knees on this issue." That's quite a statement!
Anyway, let's say you're right and the LGBT issue isn't that significant. Is Russia going to be MORE in line with how the EU wants its member countries to do business than Hungary in regards to things like judicial independence? No, not while Putin or people like him are in charge. So my fundamental point in response to the point above stands: Russia does not have an integrated place in Europe without fundamental changes to their regime that are unacceptable to Russian leaders.
Words are free and might get Rutte some votes. The Council has dragged its feet even about confronting Hungary's gross misuse of EU funds (which is clearly illegal, unlike gay rights which are in theory not really the EU's business).
Russia has, of course, no chance of joining the EU anytime soon. But it does need the EU as a business partner (and the EU hasn't been particularly picky about its business partners), could have a more equal relationship with the EU than with China, and a pro-Russia (or even just neutral on Russia) position will probably become politically untenable in the EU if Russia indeed invades and occupies an EU neighbor. So I think the post is correct that a war would be pretty damaging to Russia. That's probably why the Ukrainian government is willing to call Putin's bluff, even though they would pay a huge price if it turns out not to be a bluff.
How much Putin has changed since his KGB years? He used to run smaller operations, now he runs bigger ones, but still, his overarching theme is classic divide-and-conquer, arrange client relationships, but of course keep them on their toes. It's not like he really cares or even has a big goal in front of him.
He is not a visionary. He's fucking with Ukraine because that's what he does with everyone. He managed to buy Hungary easily (and with this the EU is already divided), Poland seems a tougher nut, but it's not like they are causing any problems.
Turkey was on the path to EU membership before their autocratic turn, after which they were rebuffed and moved away from Europe while becoming more autocratic
Eh, the EU was slow walking Turkey's membership status long before Erdogan was elected. This was openly discussed in my EU law class in 2002, before Erdogan even became prime minister.
Right, Erdogan is another example of an autocratic leader whose decisions have inexplicably driven his country's economy into the ground, in a way that's hard to understand unless it's because he's unaccountable and pushed away anyone who doesn't tell him what he wants to hear - he's started drinking his own Kool aid, thinking he knows more about interest rates and inflation than everyone else. The worst case scenario for Ukraine and Russia is probably that Putin has become similarly detached from reality and alternative viewpoints.
It's amazing to me that Matt can write this column without a word about China/Taiwan, which is a key strategic reason that it's important to reassert the inviolability of national sovereignty and to work out the details of a potent sanctions regime. Similarly, Matt makes no mention of the impact of a Russian invasion on the Baltics, Poland and other former-Soviet bloc states.
This criticism is certainly fair, but I think the article still articulates some key ideas. It's important for Putin to understand that it really is the principle of the issue. Which is why there won't be a big reward for Putin for not invading (he's not actually holding the west hostage), but there will be penalties for doing so. At the same time, western leaders probably should look for a way to help Putin save face backing down, because that is a win-win outcome. Ukraine making a statement about NATO membership might be enough.
Excellent post! My only disagreement is that I think you miss just how risky an invasion of the Ukraine would be for Russia short term. It's a big place with lots of people, and Russia's army is comparatively small with no experience in maneuvering combined arms divisions and corps. And those divisions and corps require huge amounts of petrol, rations, socks, etc. Just to deploy that army and drive it into the Ukraine without opposition would be tough--think of those Russian GIs deployed out there in the snow waiting for the "Go!" signal, burning petrol to keep warm. We should be able to give Putin a way to avoid that.
The Russian Orbat is a pale shadow of what it was at the height of the Soviet Union. Where it failed miserably in Afghanistan. Military success in such a Russian adventure in Ukraine will not be measured in territory conquered but in how many millions are turned into refugees. Who will be heading West.
Why should we care if Hitler invades Poland, it doesn't really change our position... Maybe France & England made a mistake sticking up for them. Could've just waited for the Polish insurgency to wear out the Germans.
I get it, it's not the 1930s, but perhaps pushing back against unprovoked aggression is simply a good idea when dealing with bad actors.
Push back is occurring. Ukraine is being supplied with weapons and training. Russia is being threatened with sanctions.
If you think that's not enough, feel free to advocate for specific further measures. But it's unhelpful to imply there's no pushback when clearly there is
"Don't let your mouth write checks you can't cash" seems like one important leg for one's ideological stool. Not every geopolitical problem is amenable to a nice, tidy, US-driven solution.
The problem with the endless Munich/1939 allegories is that Britain and France failing to step up alongside Czechoslovakia ended up undermining their strategic position vis-a-vis Germany, forcing them to eventually fight Germany under much less favorable circumstances than if they had jumped in in 1938 alongside Czechoslovakia and possibly the USSR.
There is no such issue here. The installation of a Russian puppet government in Kyiv does not fundamentally change the security calculus in Europe, where the EU alone has over 2.5x Russia's population and 10x its GDP. This is without even considering the UK, Turkey, or (most importantly) the US.
The key lesson of that era was that not intervening earlier made the situation much much worse later. You could say that US foreign policy has been aggressive ever since. And no matter the blunders, I'm not sure that's been wrong.
Chamberlain tried to stop Hitler. His plan was to arm sufficiently to make war a mistake for Germany. He did that. Unfortunately Hitler was a psychopath so he went ahead and made the mistake.
Even once the war started, it should not have turned into the nightmare it did. Germany would have lost the stalemate Britain and France planned for it. Unfortunately, again, the French made incredible tactical errors that lost France in six weeks.
In a way the real lesson is whatever you do better be very well planned and executed, rather than a simplistic “aggression is good” rule
I think people also fail to give the Hitler-Stalin pact credit as well for why WW2 started. Stalin invaded Poland also and was every bit as much responsible for starting WW2, it just tends to get swept past on account of the Soviets ending up on the Allied side.
Yes. Also, the one potential outcome that everyone seems to forget is that if the Allies had gone to war over Sudetenland, they could have lost. It's not like a win was guaranteed. Conversely, as you note, if the Allies don't use an incompetent strategy in the Battle of France, Chamberlain's reputation might be very different today.
France lost world war II, because of world war one. The moment the armies cracked, they quit, because they did not want another great war. I don’t know if they could have known they would at the time though.
I don't think that's the key lesson, because you can point to at least as many examples where being trigger-happy made it worse. I think the key lesson is don't rule out the small chance your adversary might turn out to be a crazed genocidal maniac, yet able to keep control of the machinery of a major industrial military power in a way that's never been seen in the world before or since. In short, not a terribly generalizable lesson, but also not one to forget.
If the Allies had intervened earlier it would have prevented WWII but history would not have known that. Future historians in that reality could be drawing the wrong lesson that the Allies were trigger happy.
It's an incredibly difficult problem of counter-factuals in history, but IMO better to err on the aggressive side.
You're correct about the key lesson, but that doesn't apply here since, as noted, the status of Ukraine does not meaningfully affect the ability of the EU and NATO to deter military aggression by the Russian Federation against EU or NATO members.
Earlier intervention in WWII may indeed have made a difference, as the German military was less prepared, and handing over Czechoslovakia gave Germany access to the relatively advanced Czech manufacturing base, including some highly usable tank designs. The Allies would have been less prepared as well, of course, but we must compare against the benchmark of how poorly the French war effort went in reality.
That's a hot take! I do agree that if the Allies had intervened earlier it would have lacked public support and history could have looked at it as a Vietnam. But it was absolutely the right thing to do and would have prevented WWII. Churchill was right in 1930s.
real military question for which I don't know the answer:
Have I just overlearned Afghanistan, or does it seem like occupying a country is harder than it used to be back in the day?
Or were more "pre-20th century" takeovers about changing the ruler at the top with little impact to the people, such that there wasn't so much civilian resistance? Or maybe the opposite, that governments were so weak that changing the boss didn't really matter to many people, at least not enough to work up a revolution?
Depends what you mean by "back in the day" - before, say, the French Revolution, most places you were just going to have a King anyway, what did it matter to you whether that King spoke the same language as you or not?
... and with a few exceptions (Joan of Arc, Sicilian Vespers), people would generally accept whatever King ended up in control of them.
After that, there started to be a possibility of popular participation in government, and then it started to really matter that you were in the same country as the rest of your national community. You can see this in the rise of nationalism in central Europe before the 1848 revolutions, in Eastern Europe until the 1876 rising in Bulgaria and then gradually after that across the non-European colonies.
By the 1950s, occupying a colony was much harder than it had been because decolonisation would no longer necessarily mean "new boss, same as the old boss", but there was a real chance at something better.
There's a reason that any colony that wasn't obviously decolonising turned into a war by the mid sixties, whether that was a formal colony like Angola or an informal one like Vietnam.
At least part of the answer is that earlier occupiers felt a lot less compunction about killing gigantic swathes of the local population, or losing a bunch of their own soldiers. The US in Afghanistan was trying to achieve its war aims while minimizing civilian and US military deaths.
I think there's more to it than that; it's a change in mentality. George Orwell wrote this in 1940 (in "England Your England"):
"The Empire was peaceful as no area of comparable size has ever been. Throughout its vast extent, nearly a quarter of the earth, there were fewer armed men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state."
And V.S. Naipaul wrote something very memorable (I think in "India: A Wounded Civilization") about the Indian peasants hired to build fortresses and walls for the British occupiers. He said they hadn't even thought about what they were doing, except that it was a way to earn some money.
Maybe that was always something of an overstatement but it was certainly much more true in the past than it is today. Humans everywhere on earth think in political terms now, so the old way of doing things is totally unrecoverable. There are conservative pundits (most recently Bruce Gilley) who talk about the potential benefits of restoring colonialism, but it's a complete fantasy.
Another way of putting this is to look at who the British (and others) took those (non-settler) colonies from. The Indian independence movement of the twentieth century might have been split a bunch of ways, but none of them wanted to reinstate the Mughal Emperors.
I think it is also the case that a considerable portion of India remained under the control of whomever the local ruler was - the British just did a deal with him directly and otherwise left things as they were. So for quite a lot of Indians there was not much change.
It's not a guarantee, but it clearly can succeed in at least some cases if (1) you are able to work at it long enough and (2) there isn't an outside power actively encouraging the occupied locals to fight on. The PRC's domination over the past 70 years of the "Inner Asian Frontier" (not just Xinjiang, but Tibet and Qinghai, and to a lesser degree of brutality Inner Mongolia, Gansu, and Ningxia) demonstrates this on a very large scale and the Sri Lankan central government's defeat of the LTTE and Tamil separatism in general over the 1980s to early 2000s demonstrates it in a small scale. You can argue that these actions were immoral, but they've clearly been effective.
Maybe it has something to do with technology. My impression is that the amount of damage an individual or a disorganized group could do to a state increased dramatically in the mid-20th century, maybe as a result of better weapon designs and mass production. That would just be a guess though.
Never forget that France and Britain failed to protect the independence of Poland and that a couple million of their citizens died in the forlorn attempt. Every Jew in France who was killed would have lived but for the catastrophic mistake of trying to protect Poland while lacking the means to do so.
Hitler was going to genocide Poland regardless of Western intervention. Living space was a real and central part of his and top-Nazi thinking. Concerns over intervention might've sped up Hitler's timetable, due to their mobilization, but Hitler was going to try to take over Eastern Europe no matter what.
To be clear, you're saying that we shouldn't have opposed Hitler? Or that we should have opposed him earlier but once he got too strong let him do his thing?
Im talking about Britain and France, not the US. They should have continued their military build up after the invasion of Poland without declaring war. Of course they made no military attempt to defend Poland, they just declared war but didn’t really fight til May 1940
Conversely I'd say the Allies should have attacked from the west the moment Hitler invaded Poland. He gambled that they wouldn't. The debacle of May 1940 would've never happened.
It was also a case of bad intelligence. The Western Allies believed that Poland could hold out against Germany for 6 months when it turned out to be 3 weeks. Thus, whatever plans they might have had were dead in the water.
The Munich analogy is really unhelpful in this situation because a war with Russia is not a feasible path the West could take, due to a host of factors like nuclear weapons. There is only so much "pushing back" the West can do in this situation, since they don't have the leverage of a military option. Thus, diplomacy and negotiation has to be on the table.
Russia surely won't try to occupy all (or most of) Ukraine, for the reasons this article lists.
Much more likely would be a "minor incursion" along the lines of what they did with Georgia 14 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War carving off the most sympathetic (in Ukraine, the most ethnically Russian) areas. As an aside, the Georgian war also illustrates that what's going on is not "unprecedented" or "the first war in Europe" in however long, as pundits often like to say.
The issue with this line of thought is that it doesn't answer any of Putin's stated security concerns. Seizing only sections of eastern Ukraine will leave an anti-Russian regime in power in Kyiv & will only make Ukraine more anti-Russian due to cleaving off the most Russia-sympathetic parts of the country.
So, if you're worried about NATO troops or weapons being based in Ukraine, or even just worried about an increasingly EU-aligned Ukraine destabilizing authoritarian rule in Russia, a small-scale seizure of some of the eastern territory & integration of the breakaway republics makes your problem worse, not better.
It's weird. I'm no expert but it seems like Russia doesn't have much of a military move they can make if they don't want Europe-aligned neighbors. Whatever they do is going to put them next to *more* Europeyness.
As far as I understand it, the concern is more about keeping a reasonably-sized buffer area between Moscow/core territory and the NATO frontline, which is understandable.
Yeah, that's a plausible case for why even a limited move could be harmful to Russia. But one can at least see a case for why they'd want to carve out a buffer zone. And maybe Ukraine can't get much angrier than it already is.
Of course, history is full of countries making moves that end up not being great for themselves.
My guess is that Putin's end game is to exploit the crisis to get Ukraine to adopt neutrality (a la Austria after WWII) and then do everything he can to subvert the Ukrainian population's desire to lean westward and integrate economically with the rest of Europe, as opposed to the Russian community of states.
I just spent several weeks in Istanbul and wondered, if the Bosphorus is the boundary between Europe and Asia, where on the circumference of the Black Sea the other boundary is, since you have to cross back if you make a full circuit. Wikipedia says ancient geographers considered it to be the estuary of the Don, which would put Georgia in Asia.
"Europe" as a continent itself is a flawed concept; there is no good way to lop off some bits of Eurasia from the rest. It's all one continent! Third-grade teachers really tried to pull a fast one on us with this business of Europe and Asia being different continents because they're separated by a giant mountain range. You can't fool me; the Ural Mountains are not an isthmus!
Of course, I'm aware Europe as a continent reflects cultural geography, not physical geography. In which case "Asia" is the nonsensical concept, and the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent should also be their own continents.
I really think the whole region stretching from Greece to India is its own thing, even though our categories split it across Europe, Asia and some vague non-continent called "Middle East"
There's a sense in which Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the MiddleEast should be considered four subcontinents attached to one big continent. It definitely feels weird that we've settled on one continent, one subcontinent, one thing that we pretend is just unproblematically Asia, and one thing whose relationship to Asia we try not to mention.
Modern geographers say the Caucasus mountains (ie the watershed/ridgeline), which puts almost all of Georgia in Asia. Adopting the conventional view that the border goes from the Bosphorus, through the Black Sea, along the Caucasus, through the Caspian Sea, up the Ural River and then along the Ural mountains to the Arctic, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan join Russia and Turkey as countries that are in both Europe and Asia.
Politically, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia are treated as being European, so they are granted membership of things like the Council of Europe, OSCE and UEFA.
Israel is in UEFA (Europe) and Australia in AFC (Asia) for football as well. But things like the Council of Europe and OSCE are a bit more serious about their boundaries.
Heck, the Dallas Cowboys are in the National Football Conference East, the Indianapolis Colts in the AFC South, and the St. Louis Rams (a few years ago) were in the NFC West.
One knew all along there would be consequences for how we teach geography to school children.
Tajikistan is in the OSCE too. I know the guy who used to be their country rep. To be fair it's the Organization *for* Security and Cooperation in Europe, and you don't have to be *in* Europe to be for those things.
Anyway isn't Matt's point that NATO is being unnecessarily ambitious if it wants to include every European country (and even some non-European or semi-European ones, like the US and Turkey)?
It seems like Blob thinking to me. The stated purpose of NATO is to preserve peace in Europe, not to grant membership to every country in Europe as an end in itself. If offering membership to one particular European country increases the risk of war in an obvious way, then they shouldn't do it.
I agree with that, regardless - NATO membership for Ukraine or Georgia should be based on it reducing the risk of war with Russia, and if it doesn't, then it shouldn't happen.
I guess I wonder if a Ukrainian insurgency might be less effective than Iraq's or Afghanistan's was because the Ukrainians have much more to lose (even taking into account how badly their economy has underperformed for the last three decades). Sort of like how the Nazis had a harder time pacifying Greece and Yugoslavia than France. Do wealthier people have the stomach for guerrilla warfare, and are they as willing to make the necessary sacrifices? Same logic holds for Taiwan, but even more so.
The Greek and Yugoslavian resistances both also received regular arms shipments from the British across the Mediterranean, whereas (AFAIK) supply drops into France were very limited for most of the war because they required aircraft that were needed elsewhere (until a brief period in the lead-up to D-Day).
I'm not sure how much of a factor this was, since getting total # of guns shipped figures is hard, but it is an intriguing difference IMO because it makes WWII Greece/Yugoslavia similar to later largely successful guerrilla wars (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Afghanistan) in that there was a consistent supply line of arms being shipped to the insurgents.
It could be that the terrain in Greece, and in at least some parts of Yugoslavia, is more conducive to guerilla warfare than in France. It might also depend on the population structure. Apparently, in 1950 the median age in France was about 35, while in Serbia (taken as a proxy for Yugoslavia) it was about 25. Also, neither Greece nor Yugoslavia was on a major front for most of the war, so there were probably fewer German troops there than there might otherwise have been.
Well, there was a fairly active French Resistance. But more importantly, the German occupation of France, outside of the Vichy south, was fairly gentle all things considered (unless you were Jewish). In the East . . . not so much.
This is sort of a chicken-egg situation. Was the French Resistance less active because the German occupation of France was more gentle, or was the German occupation of France more gentle because the French Resistance was less active? I think it was more the latter than the former.
I think the German occupiers were simply not as negatively inclined toward the French. It was a great posting during the war! So I guess I'm a bit more inclined toward the former.
Compare that to the Nazi occupation of Ukraine. Many (most?) Ukrainians were overjoyed to see the Soviets thrown out. They could have been willing collaborators with the Germans if the Nazis simply hadn't seen them as a lesser race to be exploited and destroyed.
I don't know what will happen in Ukraine. However it seems clear to me that Russian history since at least 1905 is dominated by catastrophic conflicts. The Nazi invasion was not their fault (though Molotov-Ribbentrop didn't help...) but most of the rest was initiated by them. Seems well, well, well overdue to put the guns away and focus on building a functional society.
Agreed. It's hard to think of another country than Russia that has so underperformed its potential from what you'd expect looking at human capital and natural resources. Maybe some Latin American countries...but I don't think most of them either match Russia in terms of the level of education of the population, etc.
Over what timeframe? Through brutal, heinous autocracy in the first half of the 20th century, Russia transformed itself from a dirt-poor agrarian backwater into a first-rate industrial power. That's not a defense in any respect, but I'm sure we could think of a number of brutal, heinous autocracies that accomplished nothing. The Khmer Rouge on the small end, or maybe even Maoist China with the Great Leap Forward and other colossal screwups.
Yes, and it's normal for poor countries to catch up to rich ones in relative terms unless they're badly governed. Alec Nove, in the final edition of his "Economic History of the USSR", pointed out that GDP per capita didn't increase as a percentage of the US level between 1913 and 1991. That doesn't seem like a success story.
As appealing as an EU-yes, NATO-no solution for Ukraine is, I have to say I'm sobered by the Netflix dystopia in Occupied -- which posits a similar situation for Norway (it's a Norwegian production)
So this inspired a weird thought. It looks like our primary rival for the 21st century is going to be China. Russia and China have now entered into some sort of alliance. The added strength of Russia may encourage Chinese adventurism in places like Taiwan. Given that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is likely to a) tie up much of Russia's conventional military power for the foreseeable future; and b) help demonstrate the folly of invading territories that do not want to be invaded, maybe it would be a good thing for the US in the long run.
Yes, as you and Matt note, there's a cynical, "realist" US perspective that says "Russia wants to encourage European remilitarization, push the EU closer to the US, strain EU-China ties, and potentially bog itself down in a long-term guerrilla conflict? Where do I sign up?"
This neglects the awful human toll of any war, of course, and preventing such a war should be a priority as a result - but even the war comes to pass, it's not necessarily a net negative for the US from a strategic POV.
I'm not sure the US really wants European remilitarization. It's fun to be the top dog, and many in the Blob would be unhappy with a rearmed France/Germany duo leading a NATO that's increasingly independent of the US.
The US has been pushing for Germany to re-arm for 3 admins now. There’s absolutely a strong desire for European rearmament so that the US is freer to concentrate on China. We can’t take on Russia and China at once by ourselves, and it’s increasingly absurd that a polity with over 2.5x as many people and 10x the GDP of Russia is overmatched by it militarily to the point that US assistance is required for deterrence.
I know we keep pushing the European NATO states to increase the percentage of their GDP they devote to military spending. We've been doing that a long time. But the fact that there are no consequences from us for their not seriously increasing that percentage sheds some light about how much we really want that to happen.
Even Trump, for all his bluster, in the end didn't really do much about it.
This feels similarly eerie to the question of how to motivate Russia not to invade Ukraine. I'd be interested to understand what "consequences" you would suggest we place on Europe NATO states for not increasing their military spending.
I think an easy, successful Russian occupation of Ukraine, or just a successful threatening of Ukraine with concomitant Western concessions, would affect Xi's calculation of PRC policy toward Taiwan. Just like a grinding, draining Russian occupation of Ukraine might make Xi think long and hard about upping the threat to Taiwan.
Oddly enough, "pivoting toward Asia" also includes successfully dealing with Putin's threat toward Ukraine. Things are connected.
Ukraine differs from Taiwan in that the US doesn't actually have any security commitments to Ukraine. If Russia invades Poland or Estonia and we do nothing, I think that would be a pretty big green light to China to go ahead and invade Taiwan. However, I'm not sure that our letting Russia invade Ukraine, or even giving minor concessions to prevent it from doing so, is going to function as much of a signal to China.
Then again, my main rule of foreign policy is that nothing is every as straightforward as it seems.
Our security commitment to Taiwan is purposely ambiguous. Heck, we don't even recognize it as an independent nation, unlike Ukraine. Our main effort in Taiwan is to supply them with weapons and training, which we're increasingly doing with Ukraine as well.
From the opposite perspective, maybe those countries are thinking that if they engage in said adventurism now, any negative long-term consequences it will produce will be balanced out by embarrassing Joe Biden and increasing the likelihood of regime change in the next American election, thereby (re-)installing a much more favorable American president.
I agree with your solution. But it may be hard for Biden to get Ukraine to agree to no NATO given how much hot air America has used to puff up Ukraine's illusory perception of their own leverage. And domestically, Biden would be criticized as giving in to Russia. Look at a map, and it's obvious that Ukraine is a poorly chosen issue to have a showdown with Russia.
The nice thing about NATO access is that Biden doesn't need to be the bad guy. Since consent for NATO accession must be unanimous, If Paris or Berlin want to make the concession, they can take the heat while the Biden admin remains publicly committed to supporting Ukraine's ability to join NATO, even if privately they think Ukraine joining is not a great idea.
That guest column was pretty bad.
If you’re looking for a reason to feel sympathetic to Russia, the real one is that its current behavior is really rooted in some old and not entirely unwarranted pathologies.
If Prussia was an army with a state, modern Russia is a security apparatus with a state. And I mean “modern” in the sense of the latest iteration of the Russian nation to pull itself back together after the Mongols flattened its predecessor.
Russia’s history is basically an unending liturgy of other states attempting to conquer it and failing to do so or to hold it, but being repelled at the cost of vast numbers of its people and much of its wealth. The Mongols, Tatars, Turks, French, British, Germans, Germans…
That is the frame through which Russia’s policy makers view everything. No sooner had they genuinely neutralized the threat from the east, quite literally by conquering virtually all of the steppe not under “civilized” Chinese control than the Turks pose an existential threat from the south.
They mostly resolve that problem in their favor, again with much bloodshed and the repressed devastation of southern Russia and Ukraine, and then France appears to the west. 10% of the civilian population frozen to death later and they’ve repelled that threat, but the UK has decided they’re a threat and launched a limited invasion.
And on, and on, through the history of the 20th century, which is way worse than anything else since the Mongols.
The proximate issues at hand are clear enough; the Russian state is a manifestly untrustworthy actor when it comes to anything security-related, and it views the continued existence of a stable, prosperous US as a threat.
But understanding how it became this way in the first place is something we’re bad at, and that needs to inform our policy more.
That guest column was probably the worst thing I've read on SB (which has mostly been uniformly good).
I'm skeptical that there's really a "deal" to be had here. Yes, the 2008 Bucharest Declaration was a mistake, but what prompted Putin's 2014 intervention wasn't NATO but an EU association agreement. Putin does not want a neutral or "Finlandized" Ukraine. He wants Ukraine as Russian client state - ideally he likely wants Ukraine in the Eurasian Union and in CSTO.
I know the familiar narrative that the US and the west have been overly focused on denying Russia a sphere on influence. I think the reality is a lot more mixed. For all the condemnation it drew at the time, the west quickly moved on from the Georgia War. Nobody in the western world has pushed back on Russian intervention in Nagarno-Karabakh. The west has rarely sought to counter Russian influence in Central Asia. Even Ukraine spent most of the post-Soviet years as a Russian client state which few in the west really challenged.
What changed the equation for Ukraine was domestic pressure to align with Europe. (On that note, I think Matt is overly cynical about western intentions and underplays that there is a lot of genuine sympathy in official circles for Ukraine's western / European aspirations.)
Last point, I want to push back on Matt's dismissal about inviolability of post-Soviet borders. It's not that borders can't or shouldn't ever be changed - borders should not be changed by force. Obviously that hasn't always been true. (And all major powers - certainly the US, but also Russia - were offenders in the 19th Century and before.) But no changing borders by force really has been a central organizing feature of the post-WWII settlement, and has likely been a significant factor in the decline of global conflict, given how much historical conflict has been driven by conflict over land.
Crimeans probably want to be Russian, and that's fine. But the means matter. A reasonable rapprochement deal would be something like an interim UN administration, an internationally monitored referendum (which would likely confirm Russian sovereignty), and perhaps provisions like Northern Ireland whereby residents are eligible for Ukrainian passports as well.
The claim that 'there is a lot of genuine sympathy in official circles for Ukraine's western / European aspirations' is clearly true in many context, especially in Washington and London.
However, this 'symapthy' does not extend to unanimous support for Ukrainian membership of either NATO or the EU. Ukraine will not be admitted to NATO as France and Germany will veto it; in any case it would be absurd to admit a country to a mutual defence pact when it is currently engaged in irregular warfare within its own borders, against forces supported by a nuclear superpower.
EU membership prospects are no better; for one thing EU enlargement is on the back burner and has been for a while, with little appetite in European capitals for a further round of enlargement. For another, Ukraine is even more corrupt, less democratic, poorer, and has a larger population than the currently troublesome group of Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. It's miles from meeting the criteria for membership.
Don't disagree with any of this.
What I would say is that there isn't an *inherent* Western desire to see Ukraine aligned with the west. Had Ukrainians preferred to remain Russia-aligned I don't think there would be significant pushback.
But that's different from a situation where the Ukrainian public by and large prefers to align with the west. And coupled with the fact that Putin's Russia is an authoritarian revisionist power, that drives a lot of sympathy for Ukraine. And it's clear that even western alignment short of full EU or NATO membership is a red line for Putin.
(For what it's worth, the US and most western powers opposed the breakup of the USSR and had things worked out such that Ukraine remained in some sort of post-Soviet federation I don't think any western capital would have lost any sleep over it. If anything, many in the EU would be happy for the EU's current western boundary to become permanent.)
The “no changing borders by force” includes Kosovo and Northern Cyprus?
I think NATO interventions in Serbia and the former Yugoslavia were good, but I also admit I'm skeptical about Kosovo independence. It's a complicated situation, but it was an exception to international law and practice and has created a negative precedent that Russia has used.
(It also isn't clear to me that in the long run a Kosovo that remained loosely federated with Serbia wouldn't be a better outcome. It's not totally clear to me that having it as a small de facto international protectorate that is decades away from joining the EU is all that positive in the long run.)
I think ending ethnic cleansing is good, especially when it’s happening very close by.
Northern Cyprus is not recognized, so in that case the principle is upheld. Kosovo was an independence movement with foreign backing, which is the most common way for countries emerge. Russia didn't go for an independent Crimea, it annexed it. It's also giving Russian citizenship to residents of it's two puppet republics, which is not happening in Kosovo. So, yes, Russia seeks to invade, occupy, and annex its neighbors.
Northern Cyprus is occupied by NATO member forces though. Are NATO members gonna sanction themselves in the same way they sanction Russia over Crimea?
I’m okay with the existence of Kosovo (and I’m okay with Crimea being part of Russia as it was in the past). I’m just pointing out that Serbia’s borders changed after a war, so I don’t see how they changed without force.
If your red line is annexation, are you advocating for the recognition of the Luhansk and Donetsk republics?
Finally, I could have used the Golan Heights or something similar, but I specifically wanted examples where NATO forces were involved.
No, Northern Cyprus is occupied by Turkish soldiers. There are British bases in Cyprus, which predate the creation of Northern Cyprus. If Greek military police beat up protesters in Athens, was that a NATO military action? The US doesn't have to recognize other countries or statelets. I'm against recognizing annexations by countries of their neighbor's territory through force. Aggressive war for territorial expansion lead to disaster in WWI and WWII for the world and is still a bad idea. It's unfortunate that Russia is so enamored of it, and holds up Stalin as an exemplar now, who loved it so. It will cause a lot of destruction in the world and to Russia itself.
Okay, I accept that Turkey acted without NATO authorization and the British presence on Cyprus dates back to the colonial times. That doesn’t explain why they don’t face crippling sanctions right now (maybe only Turkey, if you want to use the argument that the British were there before the UN was created). The Greek military police beating up protesters won’t change any borders.
We agree however that wars of aggression are bad, which is why I was happy to see NATO terminate the occupation of Afghanistan.
Why do you see Afghanistan as a war of aggression? The Taliban allowed a military force to plot and execute a military strike on the United States and then protected them. The US then declared that a casus belli and overthrew the hostile Taliban government. Do you think the US had no justification for attacking Afghanistan? Do you think the war in the Donbas is a war of aggression?
Northern Cyprus does face crippling sanctions right now. Russia didn't face crippling sanctions after it failed to leave the Transdniester Republic (despite agreements) or when it attacked and quasi-annexed parts of Georgia (most of the leadership in the two breakaway republics are Russian citizens). It was only after it did it again in Ukraine and then shot down a civilian airplane (and lied about it repeatedly), that the sanctions began to bite. Everyone is getting sick of Russia pulling the same stunt over and over again.
What I think is most likely to happen is not a full on invasion of Ukraine in its entirety, but Putin entering the separatist regions of Ukraine already not under the control of the central government (Donbass). He is unlikely to face an insurgency there and probably hopes that this minor incursion will not spark a united and ferocious response from the U.S. and its European allies.
The trouble with this strategy is that if Putin cleaves off the most pro-Russian areas of the country, the rest of Ukraine will be pushed even closer to the West. Partially out of irredentism, but also because a large number of anti-US voters will no longer be Ukranians.
It’s hard to see why (the remainder of) Ukraine wouldn’t clamor to join NATO after that. Is that a desirable outcome for him?
I think the realist/great power/sphere of influence analysis goes something like this:
- Putin doesn't need Ukraine to be a functioning client state.
- Putin does need Ukraine to not be a functioning NATO ally that can serve for forward positioning.
Therefore, once Crimea is "safely" Russian territory (and thus he's not making a mess for ethnic Russians), long term unresolvable Ukrainian civil war is an acceptable outcome because Ukraine is a geographical buffer state even if it's a wasteland. So he doesn't need to invade and hold territory, he just needs to arm pro-Russian factions.
Putin seems satisfied with current situation but he could easily capture port cities and disturb commerce in Ukraine pretty significantly with limited effort.
I think an underrated part of this saga is Putin’s “nostalgia” for medieval Russia, namely the fact that the Russia we know today was born in Kyiv in the 9th century. Yes, he’s a cagey negotiator and may be blustering about an invasion to win concessions from the West… but I dunno, maybe he’s really serious about goals that transcend politicking. In the past, he’s spoken (almost jealously) about the loose US-Canada border and the united cultural community it reflects. If he wants something similar for Russia and Ukraine, I don’t think we can safely count out the idea of an invasion, despite the massive potential downsides.
>>A peaceful, stable Ukraine that successfully fights corruption and that builds commercial ties to central and western Europe could become rich. . . And its prospects as a country under quasi-occupation by the Russian military, wracked by constant political instability and with tons of people fleeing, are not good at all.
>>Russia would be, at potentially great cost, picking up something essentially worthless to them.. . .
>>There really ought to be a win-win here where Russia doesn’t invade Ukraine, Ukraine disavows NATO membership, the western powers acknowledge the referendum that incorporated Crimea into Russia, Russia acknowledges that Ukraine can follow the footsteps of Sweden, Finland, and Austria into the EU without violating neutrality, and everyone goes back to buying and selling natural gas instead of killing each other.<<
I believe this is a fundamentally wrong view of the situation and especially of Russia's view of its strategic interests. And I think we're totally misunderstanding the debate as one of Ukraine's possible entry into NATO, despite what Russia is saying.
It's hard to believe that Putin is *that* worried about a military threat on his western flank (despite 1812 and 1941 and all that). But we *do* know what he is worried about, because he has acted against that threat constantly: and this is a dissatisfied Russian population, fed up with the corruption and economic incompetence of the Putin regime. Like Xi, though more so, he fears the ire of the people rising against him, and threatening the rule of him and his fellow oligarchs. And one source of that ire is seeing nearby countries pick an alternative model, and flourishing. In particular, East European countries that enter the EU, and see growth rates far exceeding those of Ukraine or Russia, not to mention (in most instances) far more political freedom.
*That's* what Putin and his cronies ultimately fear. So the idea that it's a "win-win" for Ukraine to join the EU and grow more than Russia is just wrong. Putin *wants* Ukraine to stay relatively poor and misgoverned (relative to Russia at least) so it can't serve as a model for his subjects to aspire to. That's how he can keep Ukraine from becoming a strategic threat to the survival of his regime.
The only confusing thing here is his focus on NATO. I think it's a stalking horse, and a stand-in for the EU. Imagine that Europe (with the US) says, OK, Ukraine will never join NATO, but we would welcome its joining the EU (after passing some qualification tests). Would Putin be fine with that deal?
No, he would not.
I've seen this argument before, and it likely has some merit, but it neglects the fact that Russia has hated NATO expansion for decades, even before Putin. Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin strongly opposed it, yet the West did it anyway, partially because Russia was so weak and chaotic in the 90s that they couldn't really do much about it. But the grievances kept building up over time, and now Putin sees a chance to fix the mistakes of the 90s and re-alter Europe's security landscape.
There are also historical and cultural factors at play. Seeing Ukraine, the actual birthplace of "Russian" civilization under the Kievan Rus, falling fully under the Western umbrella would likely be intolerable to most average Russians, let alone the hardliners in Putin's government.
There's truth to this but as with many things it's complicated. NATO expansion was deeply unpopular with Yeltsin and his circle, but it's also true that (although it was driven by weakness) they did consent to it. Putin for his part consented to NATO expansion into the Baltics in the early 2000s. And both under Yeltsin and early under Putin there were Russian inquiries about *joining* NATO. (Or joining politically while keeping outside the military structure, a la France between De Gaulle and Sarkozy.)
I think it would probably have been better if a separate European defense alliance - led by the EU - had been stood up at that time and used to incorporate Eastern European states. But to be fair that counterfactual falters a little bit on how difficult it has been to coordinate EU-wide defense policy even now absent US leadership. And it's also not clear that a revisionist regime like Putin's wouldn't view that as equivalent to NATO expansion (especially if the US were involved in arming and coordinating such an alliance).
The other big missing factor when we talk about US/Russian estrangement post-91 is the Yugoslav Wars, especially the '99 NATO campaign in support of Kosovo. That, even more than enlargement, drove Russian fears that NATO were just a tool against Russia and its allies.
The timeline on which Ukraine could prosper due to its western affiliation is entirely irrelevant to Putin's personal ambitions. He is 70, his career won't be in any way affected by Ukraine becoming a role model thirty years from now.
I seriously doubt Putin has any interest in occupying Kiev or the Western, ethnically Ukrainian regions of Ukraine. However, he very well might want to bite off more of the majority Russian portions of Donetsk and Luhansk. His motives are irredentist, much like France wanted to take back Alsace and Lorraine in 1914 but had no interest in annexing Saxony or Hesse even after Germany surrendered.
The additional territory and population Putin wants are relatively small, an area the size of Maryland or New Jersey with a couple million inhabitants. The real risk is that Putin might invade territories he doesn’t want to keep to use as bargaining chips, much like 1914 France backed Russian power plays against Austria Hungary, not because France cared who ruled Silesia, but because France needed Russian participation in a war against Germany to have any hope of recapturing its lost provinces.
The idea that Putin has become isolated in his own echo chamber and is simply being irrational does seem the most likely explanation. Why else would Putin want to steer Russia on a path of becoming to China what Canada is to the US, instead of aligning with Germany and the EU in an European orientation where Russia in time could be the first among equals?
It would hardly be the first time an autocratic leader who has purged dissenters has lost touch with reality and damaged his country.
"So-and-so is simply irrational" is always a possibility, but I think it tends to be too cute by half if we're trying to understand or predict modal behavior.
Agreed, it's not a complete statement and doesn't mean a person doesn't have clear goals. It could be their actions aren't reasonably calculated to achieve their goals --- or their goals themselves are wacko and out of line with the rest of their world. For example, a fantasy of recreating a medieval Rus that includes Kiev, or exterminating neighboring countries for "lebensraum", or whatever.
Autocratic rulers have to create weird power bases. There are still a lot of hardliners in powerful positions in Russia, right? Could be that his hand is forced, and if he doesn’t play this game there’s some other equally bad constituencies that need appeasement.
That’s why negotiations with autocracies are really hard, we can’t know what the hell is going on. And we don’t have assets in Russia to the extent we did during the Cold War.
What's rational in a given situation depends on what you value. In this case, I think there are at least two reasons why Putin is not pursuing such an approach, and given those reasons, his approach is not at all irrational:
1. Defense: NATO (and therefore the US) is foundational to the European security architecture outside of Russia's current sphere of influence. Putin seems to sincerely believe that the US is out to get him - leaving aside whether we agree with that, it's hard to see how he could integrate Russia into a defense architecture centered around American power without becoming not just first among equals among European nations but also essentially a subordinate power to the US. Russia really needs the breakup of NATO in order to form a European security establishment with itself as the first among equals.
2. Culture and politics: I think Putin is skeptical, and rightly so, that most Western European countries would accept Russia as a full member, much less a leading member, of Europe without unacceptable changes. Especially if they don't have to because of NATO protection. Look at some edge cases here:
-Hungary: member of NATO, member of the EU, somewhat Russia aligned or sympathetic. Hungary is the subject of quite strong attacks for its cultural conservatism (especially on LGBT issues and immigration) and explicitly pro-Christianity stance. Under Orban, Hungary has also pursued changes to its political system to give Orban a leg up. Yet even so, Hungary is significantly freer and more democratic than Russia is, or has been probably ever. Why should we expect an EU that condemns Hungary to accept an even more conservative, undemocratic Russia?
-Poland: member of NATO, member of the EU, non-Russia aligned. Poland has been subject to many of the same attacks as Hungary, though to a lesser extent. My impression is they have not gone as far as Hungary in pursuing either culturally conservative government policy or undemocratic constitutional changes.
-Turkey: member of NATO, NOT a member of the EU, complicated relationship with Russia. Turkey has seen its pursuit of joining the EU put on hold and dashed for many reasons, first and foremost its quasi-authoritarian system under Erdoğan. Yet even after all of Erdoğan's changes, it is arguably still a much freer state than Russia.
Russia is not going to become more LGBT friendly, or Muslim immigrant friendly, than Hungary or Poland. Russia is not going to become more democratic than Hungary, Poland, or Turkey. Given that, why should Russia be confident that they have a place in Europe these days?
Hungary is the subject of attacks because of mass embezzling of EU funds, eroding the rule of law and selling out to competitors of EU for favors. Being under attack for their values is the government's propaganda line. They get some verbal criticism for their "cultural conservatism", sure, but that's pretty much all there is to it. Both Article 7, the withholding of the recovery funds, and the likely withholding of the structural funds are explicitly in response to rule-of-law violations. The EU has very limited power to handle conflicts of interests between its members, and relies on national courts honestly upholding EU law, so a government replacing the judiciary with meatpuppets is a huge red flag to them.
In any case, the EU has already bit more with its eastern expansion than it can chew. EU member states have veto powers over a wide range of decisions; members abusing those powers would threaten the stability of the union. I think they have become quite wary of accepting more countries with an immature political culture.
Hungary has been strongly criticized for all of those things, but I think you're really underselling the LGBT criticism. E.g. to take just one example, you have the prime minister of the Netherlands saying Hungary must leave the EU or repeal the LGBT law passed last year. "My goal is to bring Hungary to its knees on this issue." That's quite a statement!
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/eu-leaders-vow-to-bring-hungary-to-its-knees-over-anti-lgbt-law/ar-AALoXn1
Anyway, let's say you're right and the LGBT issue isn't that significant. Is Russia going to be MORE in line with how the EU wants its member countries to do business than Hungary in regards to things like judicial independence? No, not while Putin or people like him are in charge. So my fundamental point in response to the point above stands: Russia does not have an integrated place in Europe without fundamental changes to their regime that are unacceptable to Russian leaders.
Words are free and might get Rutte some votes. The Council has dragged its feet even about confronting Hungary's gross misuse of EU funds (which is clearly illegal, unlike gay rights which are in theory not really the EU's business).
Russia has, of course, no chance of joining the EU anytime soon. But it does need the EU as a business partner (and the EU hasn't been particularly picky about its business partners), could have a more equal relationship with the EU than with China, and a pro-Russia (or even just neutral on Russia) position will probably become politically untenable in the EU if Russia indeed invades and occupies an EU neighbor. So I think the post is correct that a war would be pretty damaging to Russia. That's probably why the Ukrainian government is willing to call Putin's bluff, even though they would pay a huge price if it turns out not to be a bluff.
How much Putin has changed since his KGB years? He used to run smaller operations, now he runs bigger ones, but still, his overarching theme is classic divide-and-conquer, arrange client relationships, but of course keep them on their toes. It's not like he really cares or even has a big goal in front of him.
He is not a visionary. He's fucking with Ukraine because that's what he does with everyone. He managed to buy Hungary easily (and with this the EU is already divided), Poland seems a tougher nut, but it's not like they are causing any problems.
Turkey was on the path to EU membership before their autocratic turn, after which they were rebuffed and moved away from Europe while becoming more autocratic
Eh, the EU was slow walking Turkey's membership status long before Erdogan was elected. This was openly discussed in my EU law class in 2002, before Erdogan even became prime minister.
Right, Erdogan is another example of an autocratic leader whose decisions have inexplicably driven his country's economy into the ground, in a way that's hard to understand unless it's because he's unaccountable and pushed away anyone who doesn't tell him what he wants to hear - he's started drinking his own Kool aid, thinking he knows more about interest rates and inflation than everyone else. The worst case scenario for Ukraine and Russia is probably that Putin has become similarly detached from reality and alternative viewpoints.
It's amazing to me that Matt can write this column without a word about China/Taiwan, which is a key strategic reason that it's important to reassert the inviolability of national sovereignty and to work out the details of a potent sanctions regime. Similarly, Matt makes no mention of the impact of a Russian invasion on the Baltics, Poland and other former-Soviet bloc states.
4th to last paragraph
This criticism is certainly fair, but I think the article still articulates some key ideas. It's important for Putin to understand that it really is the principle of the issue. Which is why there won't be a big reward for Putin for not invading (he's not actually holding the west hostage), but there will be penalties for doing so. At the same time, western leaders probably should look for a way to help Putin save face backing down, because that is a win-win outcome. Ukraine making a statement about NATO membership might be enough.
Excellent post! My only disagreement is that I think you miss just how risky an invasion of the Ukraine would be for Russia short term. It's a big place with lots of people, and Russia's army is comparatively small with no experience in maneuvering combined arms divisions and corps. And those divisions and corps require huge amounts of petrol, rations, socks, etc. Just to deploy that army and drive it into the Ukraine without opposition would be tough--think of those Russian GIs deployed out there in the snow waiting for the "Go!" signal, burning petrol to keep warm. We should be able to give Putin a way to avoid that.
The Russian Orbat is a pale shadow of what it was at the height of the Soviet Union. Where it failed miserably in Afghanistan. Military success in such a Russian adventure in Ukraine will not be measured in territory conquered but in how many millions are turned into refugees. Who will be heading West.
Why should we care if Hitler invades Poland, it doesn't really change our position... Maybe France & England made a mistake sticking up for them. Could've just waited for the Polish insurgency to wear out the Germans.
I get it, it's not the 1930s, but perhaps pushing back against unprovoked aggression is simply a good idea when dealing with bad actors.
Push back is occurring. Ukraine is being supplied with weapons and training. Russia is being threatened with sanctions.
If you think that's not enough, feel free to advocate for specific further measures. But it's unhelpful to imply there's no pushback when clearly there is
No I agree with what Biden is doing and disagree with MattY's posture towards Russia. So I reframed his arguments on a famous past example.
I tend to strongly agree with MattY on economic issues and disagree with him on foreign policy. He seems rather isolationist.
Matt is similar to Peter Beinart in that they're scarred by their initial support for the Iraq War. Sort of like when NBA refs make "makeup calls."
"Don't let your mouth write checks you can't cash" seems like one important leg for one's ideological stool. Not every geopolitical problem is amenable to a nice, tidy, US-driven solution.
The problem with the endless Munich/1939 allegories is that Britain and France failing to step up alongside Czechoslovakia ended up undermining their strategic position vis-a-vis Germany, forcing them to eventually fight Germany under much less favorable circumstances than if they had jumped in in 1938 alongside Czechoslovakia and possibly the USSR.
There is no such issue here. The installation of a Russian puppet government in Kyiv does not fundamentally change the security calculus in Europe, where the EU alone has over 2.5x Russia's population and 10x its GDP. This is without even considering the UK, Turkey, or (most importantly) the US.
The key lesson of that era was that not intervening earlier made the situation much much worse later. You could say that US foreign policy has been aggressive ever since. And no matter the blunders, I'm not sure that's been wrong.
It’s hard to generalise across unique situations.
Chamberlain tried to stop Hitler. His plan was to arm sufficiently to make war a mistake for Germany. He did that. Unfortunately Hitler was a psychopath so he went ahead and made the mistake.
Even once the war started, it should not have turned into the nightmare it did. Germany would have lost the stalemate Britain and France planned for it. Unfortunately, again, the French made incredible tactical errors that lost France in six weeks.
In a way the real lesson is whatever you do better be very well planned and executed, rather than a simplistic “aggression is good” rule
I think people also fail to give the Hitler-Stalin pact credit as well for why WW2 started. Stalin invaded Poland also and was every bit as much responsible for starting WW2, it just tends to get swept past on account of the Soviets ending up on the Allied side.
Yes. Also, the one potential outcome that everyone seems to forget is that if the Allies had gone to war over Sudetenland, they could have lost. It's not like a win was guaranteed. Conversely, as you note, if the Allies don't use an incompetent strategy in the Battle of France, Chamberlain's reputation might be very different today.
To that end:
https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/a-blunted-sickle.287285/
France lost world war II, because of world war one. The moment the armies cracked, they quit, because they did not want another great war. I don’t know if they could have known they would at the time though.
France lost World War II because they left the middle of their country undefended thinking there was no way Germany would attack there.
I don't think that's the key lesson, because you can point to at least as many examples where being trigger-happy made it worse. I think the key lesson is don't rule out the small chance your adversary might turn out to be a crazed genocidal maniac, yet able to keep control of the machinery of a major industrial military power in a way that's never been seen in the world before or since. In short, not a terribly generalizable lesson, but also not one to forget.
If the Allies had intervened earlier it would have prevented WWII but history would not have known that. Future historians in that reality could be drawing the wrong lesson that the Allies were trigger happy.
It's an incredibly difficult problem of counter-factuals in history, but IMO better to err on the aggressive side.
No, it is better to err on the side of diplomacy and *not having a war*. Wars should be a last resort.
Absolutely. *Aggressive* diplomacy.
You're correct about the key lesson, but that doesn't apply here since, as noted, the status of Ukraine does not meaningfully affect the ability of the EU and NATO to deter military aggression by the Russian Federation against EU or NATO members.
Earlier intervention in WWII may indeed have made a difference, as the German military was less prepared, and handing over Czechoslovakia gave Germany access to the relatively advanced Czech manufacturing base, including some highly usable tank designs. The Allies would have been less prepared as well, of course, but we must compare against the benchmark of how poorly the French war effort went in reality.
So was Chamberlain right in appeasing Hitler over Czechoslovakia?
How about intervening over the Sudentenland? Or when Hitler began openly rearming?
That's a hot take! I do agree that if the Allies had intervened earlier it would have lacked public support and history could have looked at it as a Vietnam. But it was absolutely the right thing to do and would have prevented WWII. Churchill was right in 1930s.
real military question for which I don't know the answer:
Have I just overlearned Afghanistan, or does it seem like occupying a country is harder than it used to be back in the day?
Or were more "pre-20th century" takeovers about changing the ruler at the top with little impact to the people, such that there wasn't so much civilian resistance? Or maybe the opposite, that governments were so weak that changing the boss didn't really matter to many people, at least not enough to work up a revolution?
Depends what you mean by "back in the day" - before, say, the French Revolution, most places you were just going to have a King anyway, what did it matter to you whether that King spoke the same language as you or not?
... and with a few exceptions (Joan of Arc, Sicilian Vespers), people would generally accept whatever King ended up in control of them.
After that, there started to be a possibility of popular participation in government, and then it started to really matter that you were in the same country as the rest of your national community. You can see this in the rise of nationalism in central Europe before the 1848 revolutions, in Eastern Europe until the 1876 rising in Bulgaria and then gradually after that across the non-European colonies.
By the 1950s, occupying a colony was much harder than it had been because decolonisation would no longer necessarily mean "new boss, same as the old boss", but there was a real chance at something better.
There's a reason that any colony that wasn't obviously decolonising turned into a war by the mid sixties, whether that was a formal colony like Angola or an informal one like Vietnam.
At least part of the answer is that earlier occupiers felt a lot less compunction about killing gigantic swathes of the local population, or losing a bunch of their own soldiers. The US in Afghanistan was trying to achieve its war aims while minimizing civilian and US military deaths.
I think there's more to it than that; it's a change in mentality. George Orwell wrote this in 1940 (in "England Your England"):
"The Empire was peaceful as no area of comparable size has ever been. Throughout its vast extent, nearly a quarter of the earth, there were fewer armed men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state."
And V.S. Naipaul wrote something very memorable (I think in "India: A Wounded Civilization") about the Indian peasants hired to build fortresses and walls for the British occupiers. He said they hadn't even thought about what they were doing, except that it was a way to earn some money.
Maybe that was always something of an overstatement but it was certainly much more true in the past than it is today. Humans everywhere on earth think in political terms now, so the old way of doing things is totally unrecoverable. There are conservative pundits (most recently Bruce Gilley) who talk about the potential benefits of restoring colonialism, but it's a complete fantasy.
Another way of putting this is to look at who the British (and others) took those (non-settler) colonies from. The Indian independence movement of the twentieth century might have been split a bunch of ways, but none of them wanted to reinstate the Mughal Emperors.
I think it is also the case that a considerable portion of India remained under the control of whomever the local ruler was - the British just did a deal with him directly and otherwise left things as they were. So for quite a lot of Indians there was not much change.
(YMMV on whether it was trying hard enough.)
I think there’s a Laffer curve of brutality. Too brutal, and you engender more resistance. Not brutal enough, you also engender more resistance.
It's not a guarantee, but it clearly can succeed in at least some cases if (1) you are able to work at it long enough and (2) there isn't an outside power actively encouraging the occupied locals to fight on. The PRC's domination over the past 70 years of the "Inner Asian Frontier" (not just Xinjiang, but Tibet and Qinghai, and to a lesser degree of brutality Inner Mongolia, Gansu, and Ningxia) demonstrates this on a very large scale and the Sri Lankan central government's defeat of the LTTE and Tamil separatism in general over the 1980s to early 2000s demonstrates it in a small scale. You can argue that these actions were immoral, but they've clearly been effective.
Maybe it has something to do with technology. My impression is that the amount of damage an individual or a disorganized group could do to a state increased dramatically in the mid-20th century, maybe as a result of better weapon designs and mass production. That would just be a guess though.
Most of them were about elite replacement.
Never forget that France and Britain failed to protect the independence of Poland and that a couple million of their citizens died in the forlorn attempt. Every Jew in France who was killed would have lived but for the catastrophic mistake of trying to protect Poland while lacking the means to do so.
Let's not forget that the USSR was also interested in extinguishing Poland's independence.
Hitler was going to genocide Poland regardless of Western intervention. Living space was a real and central part of his and top-Nazi thinking. Concerns over intervention might've sped up Hitler's timetable, due to their mobilization, but Hitler was going to try to take over Eastern Europe no matter what.
To be clear, you're saying that we shouldn't have opposed Hitler? Or that we should have opposed him earlier but once he got too strong let him do his thing?
Im talking about Britain and France, not the US. They should have continued their military build up after the invasion of Poland without declaring war. Of course they made no military attempt to defend Poland, they just declared war but didn’t really fight til May 1940
Conversely I'd say the Allies should have attacked from the west the moment Hitler invaded Poland. He gambled that they wouldn't. The debacle of May 1940 would've never happened.
It was also a case of bad intelligence. The Western Allies believed that Poland could hold out against Germany for 6 months when it turned out to be 3 weeks. Thus, whatever plans they might have had were dead in the water.
The Munich analogy is really unhelpful in this situation because a war with Russia is not a feasible path the West could take, due to a host of factors like nuclear weapons. There is only so much "pushing back" the West can do in this situation, since they don't have the leverage of a military option. Thus, diplomacy and negotiation has to be on the table.
Russia surely won't try to occupy all (or most of) Ukraine, for the reasons this article lists.
Much more likely would be a "minor incursion" along the lines of what they did with Georgia 14 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War carving off the most sympathetic (in Ukraine, the most ethnically Russian) areas. As an aside, the Georgian war also illustrates that what's going on is not "unprecedented" or "the first war in Europe" in however long, as pundits often like to say.
The issue with this line of thought is that it doesn't answer any of Putin's stated security concerns. Seizing only sections of eastern Ukraine will leave an anti-Russian regime in power in Kyiv & will only make Ukraine more anti-Russian due to cleaving off the most Russia-sympathetic parts of the country.
So, if you're worried about NATO troops or weapons being based in Ukraine, or even just worried about an increasingly EU-aligned Ukraine destabilizing authoritarian rule in Russia, a small-scale seizure of some of the eastern territory & integration of the breakaway republics makes your problem worse, not better.
It's weird. I'm no expert but it seems like Russia doesn't have much of a military move they can make if they don't want Europe-aligned neighbors. Whatever they do is going to put them next to *more* Europeyness.
As far as I understand it, the concern is more about keeping a reasonably-sized buffer area between Moscow/core territory and the NATO frontline, which is understandable.
Yeah, that's a plausible case for why even a limited move could be harmful to Russia. But one can at least see a case for why they'd want to carve out a buffer zone. And maybe Ukraine can't get much angrier than it already is.
Of course, history is full of countries making moves that end up not being great for themselves.
My guess is that Putin's end game is to exploit the crisis to get Ukraine to adopt neutrality (a la Austria after WWII) and then do everything he can to subvert the Ukrainian population's desire to lean westward and integrate economically with the rest of Europe, as opposed to the Russian community of states.
But is Georgia in Europe?
I just spent several weeks in Istanbul and wondered, if the Bosphorus is the boundary between Europe and Asia, where on the circumference of the Black Sea the other boundary is, since you have to cross back if you make a full circuit. Wikipedia says ancient geographers considered it to be the estuary of the Don, which would put Georgia in Asia.
"Europe" as a continent itself is a flawed concept; there is no good way to lop off some bits of Eurasia from the rest. It's all one continent! Third-grade teachers really tried to pull a fast one on us with this business of Europe and Asia being different continents because they're separated by a giant mountain range. You can't fool me; the Ural Mountains are not an isthmus!
Of course, I'm aware Europe as a continent reflects cultural geography, not physical geography. In which case "Asia" is the nonsensical concept, and the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent should also be their own continents.
I really think the whole region stretching from Greece to India is its own thing, even though our categories split it across Europe, Asia and some vague non-continent called "Middle East"
There's a sense in which Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the MiddleEast should be considered four subcontinents attached to one big continent. It definitely feels weird that we've settled on one continent, one subcontinent, one thing that we pretend is just unproblematically Asia, and one thing whose relationship to Asia we try not to mention.
Modern geographers say the Caucasus mountains (ie the watershed/ridgeline), which puts almost all of Georgia in Asia. Adopting the conventional view that the border goes from the Bosphorus, through the Black Sea, along the Caucasus, through the Caspian Sea, up the Ural River and then along the Ural mountains to the Arctic, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan join Russia and Turkey as countries that are in both Europe and Asia.
Politically, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia are treated as being European, so they are granted membership of things like the Council of Europe, OSCE and UEFA.
They let Israel and Australia into Eurovision, so whatever
Israel is in UEFA (Europe) and Australia in AFC (Asia) for football as well. But things like the Council of Europe and OSCE are a bit more serious about their boundaries.
Heck, the Dallas Cowboys are in the National Football Conference East, the Indianapolis Colts in the AFC South, and the St. Louis Rams (a few years ago) were in the NFC West.
One knew all along there would be consequences for how we teach geography to school children.
If you go across sports it's even more fun: Dallas is East (Football) but Houston is West (Baseball), while Oklahoma City is Northwest (Basketball).
Tajikistan is in the OSCE too. I know the guy who used to be their country rep. To be fair it's the Organization *for* Security and Cooperation in Europe, and you don't have to be *in* Europe to be for those things.
Anyway isn't Matt's point that NATO is being unnecessarily ambitious if it wants to include every European country (and even some non-European or semi-European ones, like the US and Turkey)?
It seems like Blob thinking to me. The stated purpose of NATO is to preserve peace in Europe, not to grant membership to every country in Europe as an end in itself. If offering membership to one particular European country increases the risk of war in an obvious way, then they shouldn't do it.
I agree with that, regardless - NATO membership for Ukraine or Georgia should be based on it reducing the risk of war with Russia, and if it doesn't, then it shouldn't happen.
Age-old dispute. Georgia is in the Caucasus mountains, meaning it's directly on the border.
While on the border, Georgia considers itself to be in Europe, and is culturally European. That settles it for me.
What does "culturally European" mean here? Is it just about being Christian rather than Muslim?
Religion is certainly the biggest thing, though there many secular traditions that go along with that too
I guess I wonder if a Ukrainian insurgency might be less effective than Iraq's or Afghanistan's was because the Ukrainians have much more to lose (even taking into account how badly their economy has underperformed for the last three decades). Sort of like how the Nazis had a harder time pacifying Greece and Yugoslavia than France. Do wealthier people have the stomach for guerrilla warfare, and are they as willing to make the necessary sacrifices? Same logic holds for Taiwan, but even more so.
The Greek and Yugoslavian resistances both also received regular arms shipments from the British across the Mediterranean, whereas (AFAIK) supply drops into France were very limited for most of the war because they required aircraft that were needed elsewhere (until a brief period in the lead-up to D-Day).
I'm not sure how much of a factor this was, since getting total # of guns shipped figures is hard, but it is an intriguing difference IMO because it makes WWII Greece/Yugoslavia similar to later largely successful guerrilla wars (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Afghanistan) in that there was a consistent supply line of arms being shipped to the insurgents.
Notably, the Axis executed an astonishing number of Greek civilians (70,000, or about 1% of the total population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_occupation_of_Greece#Axis_atrocities) and lost a lot of occupying soldiers (8,000-13,000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_resistance).
Does anyone have the equivalent figures for France?
It could be that the terrain in Greece, and in at least some parts of Yugoslavia, is more conducive to guerilla warfare than in France. It might also depend on the population structure. Apparently, in 1950 the median age in France was about 35, while in Serbia (taken as a proxy for Yugoslavia) it was about 25. Also, neither Greece nor Yugoslavia was on a major front for most of the war, so there were probably fewer German troops there than there might otherwise have been.
Well, there was a fairly active French Resistance. But more importantly, the German occupation of France, outside of the Vichy south, was fairly gentle all things considered (unless you were Jewish). In the East . . . not so much.
This is sort of a chicken-egg situation. Was the French Resistance less active because the German occupation of France was more gentle, or was the German occupation of France more gentle because the French Resistance was less active? I think it was more the latter than the former.
I think the German occupiers were simply not as negatively inclined toward the French. It was a great posting during the war! So I guess I'm a bit more inclined toward the former.
Compare that to the Nazi occupation of Ukraine. Many (most?) Ukrainians were overjoyed to see the Soviets thrown out. They could have been willing collaborators with the Germans if the Nazis simply hadn't seen them as a lesser race to be exploited and destroyed.
I don't know what will happen in Ukraine. However it seems clear to me that Russian history since at least 1905 is dominated by catastrophic conflicts. The Nazi invasion was not their fault (though Molotov-Ribbentrop didn't help...) but most of the rest was initiated by them. Seems well, well, well overdue to put the guns away and focus on building a functional society.
Agreed. It's hard to think of another country than Russia that has so underperformed its potential from what you'd expect looking at human capital and natural resources. Maybe some Latin American countries...but I don't think most of them either match Russia in terms of the level of education of the population, etc.
Over what timeframe? Through brutal, heinous autocracy in the first half of the 20th century, Russia transformed itself from a dirt-poor agrarian backwater into a first-rate industrial power. That's not a defense in any respect, but I'm sure we could think of a number of brutal, heinous autocracies that accomplished nothing. The Khmer Rouge on the small end, or maybe even Maoist China with the Great Leap Forward and other colossal screwups.
Their GDP/capita capped out around half Western Europe's. That's not a first-rate industrial power in my book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Soviet_Union
Yes, and it's normal for poor countries to catch up to rich ones in relative terms unless they're badly governed. Alec Nove, in the final edition of his "Economic History of the USSR", pointed out that GDP per capita didn't increase as a percentage of the US level between 1913 and 1991. That doesn't seem like a success story.
That's just "industrialization," not "transforming into a first-rate industrial power."
Agree. There certainly are other examples (Argentina, for instance) but none that is nearly as consequential.
That's hard when the elites benefit from the status quo, and even from these conflicts.
As appealing as an EU-yes, NATO-no solution for Ukraine is, I have to say I'm sobered by the Netflix dystopia in Occupied -- which posits a similar situation for Norway (it's a Norwegian production)
So this inspired a weird thought. It looks like our primary rival for the 21st century is going to be China. Russia and China have now entered into some sort of alliance. The added strength of Russia may encourage Chinese adventurism in places like Taiwan. Given that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is likely to a) tie up much of Russia's conventional military power for the foreseeable future; and b) help demonstrate the folly of invading territories that do not want to be invaded, maybe it would be a good thing for the US in the long run.
Yes, as you and Matt note, there's a cynical, "realist" US perspective that says "Russia wants to encourage European remilitarization, push the EU closer to the US, strain EU-China ties, and potentially bog itself down in a long-term guerrilla conflict? Where do I sign up?"
This neglects the awful human toll of any war, of course, and preventing such a war should be a priority as a result - but even the war comes to pass, it's not necessarily a net negative for the US from a strategic POV.
I'm not sure the US really wants European remilitarization. It's fun to be the top dog, and many in the Blob would be unhappy with a rearmed France/Germany duo leading a NATO that's increasingly independent of the US.
The US has been pushing for Germany to re-arm for 3 admins now. There’s absolutely a strong desire for European rearmament so that the US is freer to concentrate on China. We can’t take on Russia and China at once by ourselves, and it’s increasingly absurd that a polity with over 2.5x as many people and 10x the GDP of Russia is overmatched by it militarily to the point that US assistance is required for deterrence.
I know we keep pushing the European NATO states to increase the percentage of their GDP they devote to military spending. We've been doing that a long time. But the fact that there are no consequences from us for their not seriously increasing that percentage sheds some light about how much we really want that to happen.
Even Trump, for all his bluster, in the end didn't really do much about it.
This feels similarly eerie to the question of how to motivate Russia not to invade Ukraine. I'd be interested to understand what "consequences" you would suggest we place on Europe NATO states for not increasing their military spending.
Remove more troops, take the pivot to Asia seriously.
If they are indeed worried about their security, they'll up their game.
I think an easy, successful Russian occupation of Ukraine, or just a successful threatening of Ukraine with concomitant Western concessions, would affect Xi's calculation of PRC policy toward Taiwan. Just like a grinding, draining Russian occupation of Ukraine might make Xi think long and hard about upping the threat to Taiwan.
Oddly enough, "pivoting toward Asia" also includes successfully dealing with Putin's threat toward Ukraine. Things are connected.
Ukraine differs from Taiwan in that the US doesn't actually have any security commitments to Ukraine. If Russia invades Poland or Estonia and we do nothing, I think that would be a pretty big green light to China to go ahead and invade Taiwan. However, I'm not sure that our letting Russia invade Ukraine, or even giving minor concessions to prevent it from doing so, is going to function as much of a signal to China.
Then again, my main rule of foreign policy is that nothing is every as straightforward as it seems.
Our security commitment to Taiwan is purposely ambiguous. Heck, we don't even recognize it as an independent nation, unlike Ukraine. Our main effort in Taiwan is to supply them with weapons and training, which we're increasingly doing with Ukraine as well.
From the opposite perspective, maybe those countries are thinking that if they engage in said adventurism now, any negative long-term consequences it will produce will be balanced out by embarrassing Joe Biden and increasing the likelihood of regime change in the next American election, thereby (re-)installing a much more favorable American president.
I agree with your solution. But it may be hard for Biden to get Ukraine to agree to no NATO given how much hot air America has used to puff up Ukraine's illusory perception of their own leverage. And domestically, Biden would be criticized as giving in to Russia. Look at a map, and it's obvious that Ukraine is a poorly chosen issue to have a showdown with Russia.
The nice thing about NATO access is that Biden doesn't need to be the bad guy. Since consent for NATO accession must be unanimous, If Paris or Berlin want to make the concession, they can take the heat while the Biden admin remains publicly committed to supporting Ukraine's ability to join NATO, even if privately they think Ukraine joining is not a great idea.