Monthly Archives: February 2022

Michael F. Duggan

Yesterday German Chancellor Olaf Sholz announced that his country would provide weapons (Stinger antiaircraft missiles and antitank weapons) to Ukrainians fighting the Russians. Russia has put its nuclear forces on a high alert status. It also has an announced policy stating that it may use tactical nuclear weapons in a conventional conflict.

In spite of their impressive resistance to the Russian invaders, there is no way that Ukraine could defeat Russia should the latter decide to go all-in. Likewise, there is no reasonably way that Russia could successfully occupy and pacify all Ukraine without doing irreparable damage to itself. Given this—and with even more foreign weapons thrown into the mix and with thousands of Russian nukes at a heightened state of readiness—what could possibly go wrong? At best the announcement of Russia raising its nuclear alert status to what is perhaps the equivalent to DEFCON3, means that they are feeling the pressure.¹ One only hopes that Putin is not becoming unhinged by it.

Given how dangerous this crisis is and the fact that Russia has undoubtedly received the message that much of the world condemns its invasion of Ukraine, it follows that the entire diplomatic effort of the West should be geared toward the de-escalation of this dangerous crisis with an ceasefire as an initial goal.²

Can Putin be bargained with at this point? Probably not by officials or advisors representing the United States or President Zelensky. Things may be too poisoned by now (how do you negotiate with someone who your side has characterized as a monster?). A friend of mine suggested that the commanders of the Ukrainian army could plausibly meet with Putin or his representatives. That might be a way out of this crisis: if Putin was to say: if Ukraine pledges to abide by the Minsk II provisions for greater autonomy for the Donbas region, I will order the withdrawal of Russian forces. I don’t know if it will happen, but as a guest on a political talk show, a former military man, recently observed, something like this would fit with the Russian modus operandi: go in with force and pull out when you get what you want (the Russian incursion in Georgia, in 2008 was the example he gave).³

Notes

1. David E. Sanger and William J, Borad, “Putin Declares a Nuclear Alert, and Biden Seeks De-escalation,” The New York Times, February 27, 2022.
2. Some of the countries that support Russia or are still doing business with them include Belarus, Brazil, China, Cuba, India, Myanmar, North Korea, Pakistan, Syria, and Venezuela.
3. Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson, February 27, 2027.

By Michael F. Duggan

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past three days, you probably know that the new Cold War has turned hot. Russia has invaded Ukraine.

Last week I wrote on this blog that Biden and Putin must not paint themselves into corners (or force the other side into one) and that crisis diplomacy requires both sides to make concessions.  When the respective sides of a negotiation process make inflexible demands that the other side cannot or will not accept, conflict becomes inevitable.  This is what has happened.

The two irreconcilable positions are 1). Russian security claims and the threat that Moscow perceives from 25 years of NATO expansion.  2). United States support for the expansion of NATO and for the government in Kiev.   

The Russians, long aggrieved at the quarter-century expansion of NATO far into the traditional Russian/Soviet sphere of influence, demanded that Ukraine never be allowed to join the pact and that it roll back its territory to the lines at the end of the Cold War.  For the United States, both of these demands were nonstarters.  Given that the parameters of the preinvasion discussions were based on two immovable objects, they were destined to fail.  But there were also proximate factors that aggravated the situation.   

For example one of the provisions of the Minsk II agreement was for greater autonomy for the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.  This was ignored by the West which continued to support western Ukrainian forces for eight years, openly announcing weapons shipments and scoffing at the idea that NATO enlargement threatened Russian interests.  The Americans, publicly contemptuous of Russian security claims, demanded that they deescalate their military buildup.  But Russia is all about buffer zones, and a threat to its national security strikes at the heart of their deep-seated insecurity. 

President Biden might have given a personal assurance that NATO would stop its expansion at its current limits.  This might have bought enough time to defuse the situation.  He might have then been in a position to offer to help resolve the Ukrainian civil war and address issues related to greater autonomy for the Donbas region.   

Why did Putin choose to invade now?  After seven years of non-enforcement of Minsk II, and with a bloody civil war, which by some accounts has cost upwards of 14,000 lives, on his front doorstep, it is likely that his patience ran out.  He told the United States what his demands were; the United States and NATO refused and made no concessions.  As it turned out, he was not bluffing and the invasion of a sovereign nation followed.  The United States has been a force for good in the world, but it must try to see the situation as the other side sees it and realize that other nations have legitimate national security interests. As for Putin, there is never an excuse to invade another country—even ones involving fundamental national interests—as long as peaceful alternatives exist.   

What of the U.S. response to the invasion (i.e. sanctions)?  Russia is likely capable of economic self-sufficiency and likely figured-in the economic consequences as a part of its calculus.  Sanctions don’t work against Russian and probably never will. For Putin economic consequences are obviously a distant secondary consideration relative to what he regards to be Russia’s national security interests.  Unfortunately, there is not much else the U.S. can do at this point in terms of deterrence other than express outrage and pile on more ineffectual sanctions as Russia and China draw closer together.

So what can the U.S. do?  As a world leader, the United States should try to contain and mitigate this rapidly-unfolding situation.  At this point, Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy would have been trying to open back channels in order to tamp down the crisis. But with the baffling Russophobia that has gripped the U.S. foreign policy Blob for the past two decades such a sensible response might be too much to hope for.

This is an extremely dangerous crisis, and what the U.S. should not do is to escalate the conflict by sending in combat assets (troops, helicopters, armored vehicles, military aircraft, etc.) into Ukraine or along its borders with NATO countries. Remember, the U.S. and Russia still have thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at each other.  To his credit, President Biden has resisted the temptation to intervene militarily.  We are obliged to not start a world war that could easily turn nuclear.

What else can the U.S. do?  If Putin is stupid enough to try to fully take over and occupy the second largest country in Europe, a country with a population of 44 million people, using a force of fewer than 200,000 troops, then the U.S. should allow refugee status for many western Ukrainians fleeing the violence.

And what about the Russians?  At this point, there appear to be three possible courses that this illegal attack could take:

1. Russia could bite off the Donbas region in a similar way that NATO allowed for Kosovo to break away from Serbia in 1999.
2. Additionally, the invasion could be a punitive measure forcing Ukraine at gunpoint to agree to not join NATO.
3. Russia could try to take over and occupy all of Ukraine and install a puppet regime.  Again, one would hope that they are not dumb enough to try this.

Time will tell which course events will take.

In case the invasion or the possibility of a wider war in Europe is not enough to keep you up tonight, consider that Ukraine has 15 nuclear reactors within its borders and extremists on both sides.

By Michael F. Duggan

One hundred thirty eight years ago last Sunday, 25-year-old New York Assemblyman, Theodore Roosevelt, received a telegram at the Statehouse in Albany.  It said that his wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt, had given birth to a baby girl the night before, and that both were doing well.  It was February 13, 1884.  A number of hours later another telegram arrived urging him home to his brownstone on 57^th Street in Manhattan as soon as possible. 

As David McCullough writes, “There has been no sign of sun in days… The Times that morning called it suicide weather.  It covered most of the Northeast—rain, unending fog, rivers over their bank.  In New York, traffic barely moved on the rivers.”¹  Roosevelt’s train took longer than usual to make the 140-odd miles between Albany and New York City.

Before he arrived, his sister Corinne and her husband, Douglas Robinson, Jr., had returned from Baltimore.  They were greeted at the door by her and Theodore’s brother, Elliott.  “There is a curse on this house,” he told them.  “Mother is dying and Alice is dying too.”  Martha “Mittie” Bulloch Roosevelt had typhoid fever; Alice was dying of Bright’s disease, a 19^th century term for nephritis (kidney disease).  Theodore arrived about an hour later around 11:30 PM. 

McCullough continues, “Mittie died at three o’clock the morning of February 14, her four children at her bedside.  Alice lingered on another eleven hours.  Alice died at two that afternoon, Theodore still holding her.”  The child, also named Alice, would survive.

The events of that day nearly destroyed Roosevelt.  He marked his diary for February 14 with a large black X and the caption, “The light has gone out of my life.”²  Roosevelt finished out his term in the New York Assembly before going to the North Dakota Bad Lands to collect himself as a rancher.  His sister, Anna (“Bamie”) would take care of baby Alice. Roosevelt, the youngest assemblyman to ever sit in Albany, had already made a name for himself as a reformer. But there was still something of a dilettante about him. As historians have observed, the legendary Theodore Roosevelt that we all know is the transformed man who returns toughened by the Bad Lands.

Roosevelt is supposed to have never mentioned his first wife again, not even to his daughter.  His autobiography makes no mention of her.  He would marry again, this time to his childhood friend and sweetheart, Edith Kermit Carow.  Together they would have five children.  But his relationship with his oldest daughter would always be fraught.  “I can either run the country,” he said as president, “or control Alice, not both.”  She would become the headstrong and occasionally shocking first daughter—“Princess Alice”—and eventually the granddame and meanly quotable, holy terror of the Washington social scene (she famously quipped “If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me”).  She would outlive all of her younger half-siblings.  Alice Roosevelt Longworth died on February 20, 1980, 96 years and six days after the death of her mother.

Notes

1. David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981) 291.  All McCullough quotes are taken from pages 291-292.
2. Edward P. Kohn, ed., A Most Glorious Ride, the Diaries of Theodore Roosevelt 1877-1886 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015) 228.

By Michael F. Duggan

The current Ukrainian crisis appears to be driven by four dynamics.  The first is the sphere of influence muscle-flexing by the Russians in response to the generation-long eastward expansion of NATO, and, in a more proximate sense, Western support for the anti-Russian fores in Ukraine.  As Ambassador Kennan observed in 1997: “The deep commitment of our government to press the expansion of NATO right up to the Russian border is the greatest mistake of the entire post-Cold War period,” and “a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.”¹  The Russian military buildup on its border with Ukraine and naval maneuvers off of Ireland are meant to tell the West: see, this is how it feels.   

As a friend of mine recently observed, the second dynamic is the Biden administration’s desire to look tough in foreign affairs in the wake of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.  This has led them to overreact to the Russian military buildup, thus setting up a situation that feels like the Cuban Missile Crisis.  If things go well, Biden becomes JFK and the prospects for the 2022 midterms will be better for the Democrats and by extension the president’s domestic agenda.  

The third dynamic is the strongly pro-Ukrainian stance of the United States which has been further bolstered by lobbying.² American support for Ukraine is also a means of opposing Russia on the assumption that any nation that rejects economic globalization with the U.S. as its guardian hegemon must be actively opposed.  All of this is made worse by a Secretary of State who appears to be committed to the conventionalist clichés of the foreign policy Blob and a desire to humble Russia.

The fourth and overarching dynamic is the implications of Russian gas and petroleum sales to Western Europe and its increasing economic dependence on Russia and China generally (these observations take some of the wind out of the sails out of the argument that Putin is a would-be Hitlerian maniac bent on invading Europe). Thus, as one observer has noted, tough actions by the U.S. might be aimed more at keeping Europe in the Western sphere rather than keeping Russia and China out of it. ³    

It is difficult to understand why Americans and Europeans just don’t get it: as long as there are large nations, there will be spheres of interest in which the security concerns of the local hegemon trump those of outsiders. Russia has been invaded a number of times from the west.  In essence a large land empire, it is preoccupied with protecting its borders with buffer zones—a sphere of influence that has been reduced to virtually nothing since the end of the Cold War.  If you search “NATO enlargement” online and look at the map of its expansion since 1990, you will quickly understand why Russians feel as if their Cold War rivals are encroaching upon them.   

To understand Russia’s concerns over the expansion of NATO, one need only reverse the situation.  Suppose that the Soviet Union had triumphed in the Cold War and that a revitalized Warsaw Pact was now in Canada or backing anti-U.S. forces in a civil war there after supporting the overthrow of a democratically-elected, pro-U.S. government.  How would the United States feel about having a hostile pact on its northern border?  How would it react?  This characterization is a close equal-but-opposite scenario to the situation in Eastern Europe in recent years and the prospect of Ukrainian membership in NATO.  As the Quincy Institute has suggested, some strategic empathy on the part of Western policymakers would serve them well.⁴

Those who think that the Russians are intent on invading and occupying Ukraine would do well to ask what would be the benefit of such an ill-considered action. With a landmass greater than either France, Germany, or Spain, Ukraine is the second largest country in Europe after Russia. How would Russia, or any nation, invade, conquer, and occupy a hostile country of more than 44 million people—many of them strongly anti-Russian—with a force of fewer than 150,000 troops? If invasion is their true intention, it could be to secure the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

Although the U.S. and NATO member states appear to be acting in a well-choreographed way, the situation is dangerous: a tense standoff between nuclear powers in which a hot-headed lieutenant or some extremists on either side could spark a wider conflict.  Given this, the overall situation may not be as well in hand as we would like to think.  As JFK famously observed during the Cuban Missile Crisis, “There is always some son-of-a-bitch who doesn’t get the word.” It is the chaos of these S.O.B.s that could thwart the efforts of those seeking to control events.

The other danger is one well-known to anyone who has studied the Cold War: that of a rapidly-evolving crisis in which ratcheting-up tensions may result in a situation that may not be so easily ratcheted-down again.  If this high-stakes game of chicken reaches a point where one side or the other cannot deescalate without losing face, then war becomes a possibility.  Biden must not paint himself into a corner or force the Russians into one.

Diplomacy at this point should be dedicated entirely to the lessening of tensions (in contrast to the shrill whipping-up of the crisis by American and British media over the past month).  In October 1962, President Kennedy knew that he had to give Khrushchev something that he could show his team.  It is a fundamental rule of great powers crisis management: unless war is your goal, you must allow your opponent cover to save face.  This is not appeasement—nations with thousands of nuclear warheads can bargain from a position of strength until the nukes themselves become the enemy—it is crisis diplomacy.⁵  

The media must take the pressure off of Biden to act tough by giving him credit for a good first year.  In addition to returning balance and sanity to the presidency, he got 200 million shots in American arms in his first 100 days, as promised.⁶  In spite of uniform opposition by the GOP he passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, and, with modest Republican cooperation, the $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.  These are monumental accomplishments. He has also nominated candidates to fill 82 federal judgeships, 46 of whom have been confirmed.⁷  

Critics say that President Biden has not brought unity to the government and the country.  To these people, I would ask: how do you make amends with an opposition party openly flirting with fascism and, with a handful of exceptions, is rigidly against you?  On a related note, the Build Back Better Bill was not “stalled” in the Senate; it was obstructed by an entire party, an in-house representative of Big Coal, and a baffling turncoat from Arizona.

Biden’s first year was one of impressive domestic achievements.  If the Build Back Better Bill and the John Lewis Voting Rights Bill have to wait, so be it.  They represent issues that the Democrats can run on in the 2022 midterm races while standing on solid accomplishments.  Biden also got the U.S. out of the fruitless twenty-year war in Afghanistan.  Simply put, there was no graceful way to do it, so he did it decisively, which shows that he has more guts than all of this three predecessors.  He needs no vindication, and pundits who had forgotten about the war years ago need to put down their false indignation now that it is over.  They should be ashamed of themselves for this and for their hysterical lockstep reporting of a dangerously escalating situation in Eastern Europe.  If the corporate media recognizes President Biden’s important achievements, perhaps his administration will not feel the need to embrace brinksmanship in foreign policy.

In the meantime, President Biden should give Mr. Putin a private assurance that the U.S. will halt NATO expansion at its current limits on the condition of an immediate and permanent de-escalation of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border. He should also offer to initiate talks about ending the civil war in Ukraine. The Western media and U.S. officials should immediately tone down their provocative rhetoric and start talking in terms of resolving the long term and proximate causes of this crisis.  

Notes

1. See George Kennan, The Kennan Diaries, Frank Costigiola, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014) 656 and John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan, an American Life (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011) 681.
2. https://theintercept.com/2022/02/11/ukraine-lobby-congress-russia/?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=theintercept&utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwAR0JBQsduhhFXed83ojznFn6L_HTvOho-hjHwfNe1hW-avXgEy36lHqTD0M
3. https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/02/11/americas-real-adversaries-are-its-european-and-other-allies/
4. https://quincyinst.org/event/u-s-russia-relations-can-strategic-empathy-be-a-way-forward/
5. Andrew Bacevich has called Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis “‘Appeasement’ by almost any definition of the term,” but he agrees that it was successful.  I prefer to think of Kennedy’s handling as crisis diplomacy against a strongly ideological, but ultimately rational counterpart.  See Bacevich, The Washington Rules (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010) 87.
6. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/21/us-vaccinations-200m-100-days-biden
7. https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_judges_nominated_by_Joe_Biden