Monthly Archives: March 2022

By Michael F. Duggan

There is a danger in embracing historical firsts for the sake of firstness.

I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but let’s call it like it is: Madeline Albright believed that there are easy military solutions to complex geopolitical situations. She was an architect of the war in Kosovo—which, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, was done without consulting the UN Security Council in order to illegally annex a part of a sovereign nation—as well as the relentless eastward expansion of NATO, which is one of the primary historical currents leading to today’s crisis in Eastern Europe.

We should be careful not to celebrate impressive form, the careerism and credentialism of firsts uncritically and in a moral vacuum. Judge Ketanji Jackson (for example) is one of the most qualified judges in the country to be a Supreme Court associate justice. She has also proved herself as a jurist, has a thoughtful and tempered view of the law, and there is no reason why her nomination should not be confirmed. She is a deserving “first” and should be celebrated.

By contrast, Madeline Albright, Hillary Clinton, Victoria Nuland, Samantha Power, Condoleezza Rice, and Susan Rice were or are hawkish interventionists who all supported illegal wars that as an aggregate have killed hundreds of thousands of people and still failed to accomplish the primary US war aims. Albright, Clinton, and Power also helped make it acceptable for progressives to embrace (or else shrug off) undeclared wars as a basis for foreign policy. The fact that they are female and held jobs not previously held by women does nothing to ameliorate this.

By Michael F. Duggan

Initially I thought that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was an attempt to annex the Donbas region and some areas along the Black Sea coast with a land corridor connecting it (Donbas) to Crimea. But as time went on, it seemed to be too robust an operation for such limited objectives, and yet not robust enough to take the entire country.

Then, 2-3 weeks ago, I thought that the goal was probably to annex everything east of the Dnieper River while putting direct military pressure on Kiev. But even that portion now seems too large of an area for Russia to successfully take and hold (and a higher percentage of the people in the northern and western portion of eastern Ukraine are non-Russian speakers than in the south and far eastern regions), and the river, although an obvious geographical boundary, does not denote a cultural or linguistic divide. The implication was that, so construed, the invasion and occupation was a horrible miscalculation: an anemic blitzkrieg—light on the blitz and inspiring neither shock nor awe—being fought to a draw over the short term, it would likely fail over a period of months, and that Putin would lose support and might eventually be removed from power.

I now think that Putin and his war planners might be more militarily cunning than they first appeared and that Russia’s real war aim is to annex the Russian-speaking regions of Eastern Ukraine through a brutal, grinding ground war, but not the entire area east of the Dnieper. It would seem that Putin’s only chance to avoid disaster is to settle for this kind of limited goal, to declare that the attack against greater Ukraine was punitive in nature, to declare victory, and cut a deal.

If you want to see what a postwar Ukraine (or Ukraines) might look like, do an image search for a cultural/ethnic/linguistic map of the country.

Michael F. Duggan

George F. Kennan was not a perfect man. His diaries reveal him to be a self-torturing, eccentric, and probably a depressive.¹ But then his importance is to be found in his adumbrate and insight and not in his foibles and shortcomings. He had a knack for prediction in geopolitics and was the most notable Cassandra of the Cold War. Of his own powers he observed with some frustration “…I have usually been several years ahead of my time, but by the time the opinion of the journalistic-political establishment begins (sometimes too late) to struggle up to the same opinions, everyone has forgotten I ever voiced them.”² In this assessment, he appears to have been right. Most of today’s journalists and policy makers still have not caught up to some of his final prophecies.

On February 22, 1946, Kennan sent the famous 8,000 word Long Telegram from the United States embassy in Moscow alerting official Washington of the Soviet menace. It was published as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”—the “X” Article—in the July 1947 number of Foreign Affairs. In it he framed the grand strategy (containment) that, in spite of much modification, tampering, and outright vandalism, allowed the West to prevail in the Cold War. He also predicted the fall of the Soviet Union during this time. More than four decades later, this prophecy came true.

Kennan was not always right; he advocated a German reunificaiton 40 years before it actually happened, which was certainly too early. Once or twice he was way off; in 1949 he advocated booting the Nationalist Chinese out of Taiwan, a recommendation he immediately withdrew.³ Some critics have observed that Kennan was wrong in his prediction of a nuclear holocaust, but then, there is still time—the Bomb still exists along with human fallibility, irrationality, and a dangerous new international crisis.⁴

What else did he do? He was the primary architect of the Marshall Plan, and, as the first Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, he was a player in the rebuilding of Japan, the two most successful U.S. foreign policy initiatives of the 20th century.⁵ In 1950, he warned that if U.S. forces pushed north of the 38th parallel in Korea, it would lead to a dangerously expanded war (it did).⁶ He famously opposed the war in Vietnam and disowned it as an example of his concept of containment. On a side note, in a diary entry dated march 21, 1977, he predict a world ecological catastrophe by the mid-21st century, a prediction that seems more plausible by the day.

Kennan lived to be 101, and more than 15 of those years were after the fall of the Berlin Wall (he died 17 years ago tomorrow). On December 9, 1992, the day after U.S. Marines landed in Somalia, he predicted the failure of the mission.⁷ In a diary entry late in 2001, he confided skepticism about the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan⁸

On September 2002, Kennan gave an interview to Albert Eisele of The Hill in which he expressed his opposition to the invasion of Iraq, noting that “Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before… In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.”⁹ This might have been his last public prophecy about an impending U.S. foreign or military policy.

But in October 1997, years before the American post-September 11 adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, Kennan opined on the Clinton administration’s plans to Expand NATO into Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic—countries whose cultures and histories straddle Eastern and Western Europe. During a dinner speech, Kennan called the idea a “strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.”¹⁰ In January of that year he had written in his diary that “the Russians will not act wisely and moderately to the decision of NATO to extend its boundaries to the Russian frontiers is clear,” and predicted a new bloc consisting of Russia, Iran, and China. In the same entry he foresaw “a renewal of the Cold War.”¹¹ A few weeks later he observed that “The deep commitment of our government to press the expansion of NATO right up to Russia’s border is the greatest miscalculation of the entire post-Cold War period.”¹² Since then NATO has expanded further east into Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (2004), Albania and Croatia (2009), Montenegro and North Macedonia (2020).

We all have sympathy for the innocent victims of Russia’s illegal war. But if George Kennan could see this crisis coming a quarter of a century ago, it seems that today’s policy planners might have been able to do something to help avert it last month.

Notes

1. See generally The Kennan Diaries, Frank Costigliola, ed.
2. Diaries, 517. This quote is taken from the entry of February 4, 1979. See also entry for August 10, 1960, Diaries, 406-407.
3. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan, a Life, 357.
4. See Andrew J. Bacevich, “Kennan Kvetches,” Twilight of the American Century, 43.
5. Diaries, 363.
6. George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1950-1963, 23-24.
7. George F. Kennan, “Somalia, through a Glass Darkly,” At a Century’s Ending, 294-297; Diaries, 630-631.
8. Diaries, 677
9. Albert Eisele, “George Kennan Speaks Out against Iraq,” The Hill, October 2002.
10. Gaddis, 680-681
11. Diaries, 655.
12. Diaries, 656.

By Michael F. Duggan

The problem with historical comparisons is that all analogies eventually break down, especially in the details. Historical understanding is the best basis for understanding geopolitical crises, and yet if you compare the two most comparable events or periods of history, you will find that the dissimilarities outweigh the similarities.¹

It seems that every new enemy of the United State or the West is the next “Hitler.” For years I have believed that equating Putin with Hitler to be foolish, inaccurate, and ultimately dangerous; Hitler was a phobic psychopath and Nazi Germany was a rogue state bent on ethic warfare, continental conquest, and world domination. The subtext of such comparisons is that Hitler cannot remain in power, and thus war to remove him is just and justified.

Rather, Putin fits in with the historical model of the Russian leader as strongman/strongwoman (e.g. Ivan III, Peter, Catherine, Stalin).  If we must compare him to a German leader, a more fitting analogy would be to a consolidator and hardball practitioner of realpolitik like Bismarck, rather than a madman like Hitler (and given that about 24 million Soviets died fighting the Nazis, and that an estimated seven out of ten Wehrmacht solders who died in combat were killed by Soviet forces, comparisons to Hitler will likely poison any possibility for a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine).  Although Putin and Bismarck share some important similarities (e.g. both used war as a basis for foreign policy), there are also some important differences. 

For one, Bismarck was a geopolitical genius who was advised by arguably the greatest military genius since Napoleon, Helmuth von Moltke.  Although Moltke was a Clauzewizian and not a Jominiain, he believed in fighting “kabinet wars”—small, decisive conflicts between professional armies that could be won quickly with minimal cost and which achieved specific war aims.  The wars that the Prussians fought against Denmark in order to annex Schleswig and Holstein in 1864 and against Austria in 1866 are emblematic of this kind of war (the Franco-Prussian War was much larger and threatened to dissolve into a “people’s war” but ended quickly with tremendous violence and a number of decisive German victories).

Moltke hated the idea of a “people’s war”—long, drawn-out, often indecisive conflicts typified by mass destruction and loss of life, in which the peoples of warring nations (or within a nation) were as much at war as the armies that represented or opposed them.  These struggles were founded as much on the passions of the people as on official goals and included the French Revolution, the European democratic revolutions of the 19th century, and the American Civil War. Moltke was horrified by the carnage of our Civil War and specifically wanted to prevent that kind of conflict coming to Europe (on a side note, the idea of total warfare was in part introduced to the Germans by none other than General Philip Sheridan after the American Civil War).²

The point of all this is the fact that the war in Ukraine is exactly the kind of war that Bismarck and von Moltke sought to avoid: a slow, anticipated, underpowered invasion of a large country with an armed and hostile population that will fight until the last person.  A plausible argument can be made that Putin saw himself as having no choice but to invade Ukraine in order to finally make a stand against NATO expansion.  Thus, Ukraine is not a kabinet war a la Moltke, but rather a people’s war initiated by a desperate leader committed to an ugly, protracted conflict no matter what the cost.  It is likely that Bismarck would have fought such a war, but only if his interests depended on it and he had no choice. As things turned out, he never had to.

One of the more insightful books on the period of Bismarck and von Moltke is Geoffrey Wawro’s The Franco-Prussian War.  One of the things that makes this book so interesting for me—not to mention topical—is how Wawro introduces the war in the broader context of a struggle between the proselytizing idealism of Napoleon III vis-a-vis the order-based Congress System of the five powers of Europe (Austria, Britain, France, Prussia, and Russia) that had been established at the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815).³ Louis-Napoleon advocated a kind of United States of Europe centered around a revitalized France and his idees napoleoniennes (Napoleonic ideas) and the active spread of political liberalism. In retrospect, it now seems inevitable that Louis-Napoleon’s policy of proactive liberalism would run afoul of the the ambitions and stark realism of the Prussians—the specific goals and hard-nosed consolidationist outlook of Bismarck. The Prussian chancellor had long considered the French emperor to be a lightweight.  In the general abstract (although not the myriad of specific facts), this sounds a lot like the current ideological divide between the globalist West and Putin’s nationalistic Russia. More analogies.

Although I would not go so far as to embrace the harsh realism of a Bismarck or a Putin, it is notable that the Prussians won the Franco-Prussian War and parts of Alsace and Lorraine were annexed by Germany as Alsace-Lorraine. In terms of geopolitical results, realism generally trumps moralism. If a new cold war is in the offing, then perhaps the U.S. would do well to abandon its heady ideology of economic globalization and embrace moderate realism, like that of George Kennan, whose grand strategy of containment (albeit in much altered form) won the first Cold War.

Notes

1. Karl Popper makes this point in The Poverty of Historicism, 110-111.
2. Regarding Bismarck and von Moltke, see generally Arden Bucholz, Moltke and the German Wars, 1864-1871; Stig Forster and Jorg Nagler, ed.s, On the Road to Total War; Daniel J. Hughes, ed., Moltke on the Art of War, Selected Writings; Philip Sheridan, The Personal Memoirs of P.H. Sheridan.
3. Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War, The German Conquest of France in 1870-1871, 1-15.

By Michael F. Duggan

From the start of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s objectives have been unclear. Is the invasion an effort to annex the Donbas region? Is it a ill advised attempt to permanently occupy and subdue all of Ukraine? Although Russia has now attacked airfields in western Ukraine, most of the fighting has been east of the Dnieper River and along the Black Sea coast. A corridor between Crimea and the Donbas region appears to be complete.

Is it possible that the Russian war planners intend to divide the nation along the Dnieper, a convenient natural demarcation? If Putin wishes to split the country along its central river, he would also want to pressure the national capital (to the west of the river) directly. This may be his aim—thus the corridor the Russians have established from Belarus to the outskirts of Kyiv (Kiev). Of course it is just as likely that Russian forces will continue their slow, blundering occupation of the entire country.

In wide angle, what does the war mean? As Andrew Bacevich observes, the world today is much as it was before the invasion. But one can only wonder if the invasion formally marks the end of economic globalization and the beginning of a multipolar world with a new, multipolar cold war to match. The Cold War of 1945-1991 was based on ideological lines; the new cold war will be between the interests of the oligarchs of the major powers. It will be between a neoliberal capitalist system and authoritarian state capitalism. All the while, the crises of the environment will continue to unfold mostly unabated.

by Michael F. Duggan

If anybody has a feeling for where the war in Ukraine is heading, I’m all ears. Sometimes you can adumbrate the direction of events even in the early stages (for many who read history, the U.S. invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq seemed doomed from the start, and some of us predicted failure before they began). But other than grim and even apocalyptic generalities, this one beats me.

Early on I thought that invasion was Russia’s attempt to bite off the Donbas region and a punitive campaign to underscore Russia’s security claims about NATO expansion. Nobody would be stupid enough to try to take over, occupy, and subdue Europe’s second largest nation with an anemic force of fewer than 200,000 troops, I reasoned. I appear to have been wrong.

So what happens now? Does Russia continue to slowly occupy this Texas-size country? Does the Ukrainian Army melt away into the countryside to fight a protracted asymmetric people’s war, like the Taliban, Vietcong, and European resistance fighters of WWII? How soon after that do the bona fide atrocities start? When Western weapons start flowing over Ukraine’s porous borders with Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania—all NATO countries—will Putin declare a wider war, the way that Nixon did against Cambodia in 1970? What if Poland were to give its old MiG-29s to Ukraine? When Ukrainian pilots fly these planes into Ukrainian combat airspace, will Russia consider it to be an attack by NATO? If the war becomes an open-ended festering sore, what are the odds that somebody at some point will miscalculate and start WWIII and by extension a thermonuclear holocaust? What if heavy ordinance hits one of Ukraine’s 15 nuclear reactors or if zealots take over a power plant and threaten to blow it up or melt it down? At the very least, the war will work strongly against the international cooperation needed to address the unfolding crises of the environment. Again, if anybody sees a realistic way out of this that does not involve catastrophe, I’m listening.

Andrew Bacevich writes that the events in Ukraine do not constitute a departure from the existing historical paradigm. He is right: by itself the war does not inaugurate a new world. Rather it is a continuation of the insane old world—a political and policy world that is as old as humankind’s aggressive, irrational nature. Of course, if the current conflict were to spread and eventually turn nuclear on a global scale, that would be new. It would be the “unthinkable” conflict that the US and the USSR avoided during the Cold War. Because of this, the entire effort of the West should be dedicated to containing the war with the goal of reaching a peaceful resolution as soon as possible. At this point, both of these things seem unlikely or impossible.

The guiding star of US policy should be that nuclear weapons are a far more dangerous and permanent enemy than any temporal human foe or regime.