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Michael F. Duggan

More than two months ago, I posted on this blog a prediction stating that if you want to know the likely future boundaries of Ukraine, just take a look at a prewar cultural/ethnic/linguistic map of the nation, and subtract some of the Russian areas. (“Limited Goals?” March 23, 2022).

Russia appears to be consolidating the eastern, Russian-speaking portions of Ukraine along with its eastern Black Sea coast and a land bridge between the two. It is an open question about whether this territory will be absorbed into Russia of whether it will be the Russian vassal state.

At first I was perplexed by Russia’s initial incursion—a beeline corridor directly south from Belarus—with the apparent purpose of taking Kyiv, as well as westward advances from Russia itself. Even beyond its patent illegality, it made no sense. Could it have been a costly, slow-motion, Marlborough-like feint to distract from the real objectives on a strategic scale (Marlborough’s feints were battlefield tactics and operations)? No, it was just a mistake based on miscalculation and overreach.

Now Russia’s strategy looks like a variable, front-wide push to secure the Donbas region and adjacent areas. In terms of strategic goals, it is like the annexation of Kosovo in 1999. In terms of operations, it is a slow, grinding offensive complete with tactical reverses but what could be strategic success. In this sense, it is a little like Grant’s Virginia Campaign of 1864, except that Grant was pursuing the Clausewitzian design of destroying the enemy army, where the Russians appears to be pursuing the Jominian goal of taking and holding territory. The pinching off of salients and the use of massive artillery and rocket barrages, is also reminiscent of the Soviet offensives of WWII.

By Michael F. Duggan

I understand the idea of millionaires and how they may be useful to an economy. I even get multimillionaires.

I don’t get billionaires and why they are allowed. Billionaires may do good and useful things, but they are never benign or neutral. A nation cannot and should not come to rely on their benevolence and humane impulses. They are not citizens; they are forces in the economy and therefore in policy.

By Michael F. Duggan

I have not… cried aloud
In worship of an echo; in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such—I stood
Among them, but not of them—In a shroud
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts…
-Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto the Third, no. CXIII (1816).

During the summer of 1914, a wave of war euphoria swept the cities of Europe.¹  

We have all seen the pictures of young men gleefully or grimly lining up to enlist, and the flickering newsreels of women handing flowers to marching soldiers in English khaki, French blue, and German grey, sometimes stealing a kiss.  One of the most haunting images of the 20^th century is of a crowd of confident young men in front of the Central London Recruiting Depot.  One is left wondering how many in this image died at Loos, the Somme, Passchendaele, or on some unnamed French or Flanders field.  Some, no doubt, lie in unmarked graves

Rather than try to understand the many causes of the war, most of the people of that time were mobilized to action by cries of “Poor Little Belgium!” and the direct appeal of recruitment posters.  By the time the war ended more than four years later, about 20 million people had died, and all that had been accomplished was to set up the conditions for a far more destructive war 20 years later.

Following its entry into the war in April 1917, a similar wave of enthusiasm swept the United States with an intensity bordering on the fascistic and characterized by lockstep conformity enforced by all manner of social coercion. Much of it was the handiwork of George Creel and a government agency called the Committee on Public Information (CPI).²  American towns with German names were changed and the music or Bach and Beethoven was banned in music halls.  In late 1941 and 1942, another wave of patriotism mobilized the nation for another war, but this time it was grim with righteous anger and a desire for vengeance.  Today, the nation—or at least its mainstream media—is in the grip of another wave of war fever, even though Americans are not officially combatants and most Americans do not want their nation directly involved in the fighting. 

Still, to even question the official narrative or to attempt to discuss the context and prehistory of the Russian invasion these days is to invite suspicion.  Although I cannot prove it, my posting of articles on Facebook about the generation-long causes of the war, such as the expansion of NATO deep into the traditional Russian sphere of influence, and more recent ones, like the non-compliance with provisions of the Minsk II agreements, appears to have gotten me into a kind of quiet trouble with some of my friends.

Again, I can’t prove it, and I am not accusing anybody of anything. And I know all too well that Facebook is a poor medium for communicating subtlety and nuance, for ideas generally. I never play for “Likes” or to the crowd (symptoms of the addiction and conformity that social media encourage and welcome), so it is hard to tell.  But at this point, no matter what I post, I get few replies and no more than one or two “Likes” on even the most benign of topics.  Anything I post on the Ukraine war gets no reaction at all.   

As far as I know, I have not been “Unfriended” by anyone, and I would be surprised if there was a messaging campaign encouraging others not to respond to my posts on Ukraine—I am not alleging what George Seldes called a “non-conspiracy of silence.” Rather, when I post something, nothing happens, nothing at all but the awkward e-silence of the great Facebook echo chamber. I certainly cannot blame them, given how the war has been pitched by the American corporate media, and their instincts to want to help suffering Ukrainian civilians is noble and sound. In fact, I have no one to blame but myself for trying to buck the chamber with a minority viewpoint, albeit a moderate one based on history.

What is curious is that these are not censorious people. Quite the opposite, on balance they are good, educated, liberal-minded people—the best. It is the medium and its ability to consolidate the instinct of the moral herd. There is a kind of conformity (I will not call it illiberality) that emerges from misinformed etiquette and ossifies unnoticed into groupthink and a tendency toward unspoken coercion.

But what do they believe?  That a major war has no historical past, no geopolitical context, no lineage of error and misjudgment on both sides?  A narrative of a rogue nation acting without motive other than intrinsic malice trampling on the freedom of a blameless neighbor?  A fairy tale that Putin wishes to reconstitute the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact (if the Russian army couldn’t even make it to Kyiv, what chance does it have of making it to Warsaw, Berlin, or Paris?)? Have they considered that even if the invasion is morally unjustifiable, that it might be historically understandable beyond simplistic categories of freedom versus despotism? Could it be that some modern Americans have fallen prey to the same uncritical, atavistic impulses experienced by people during outbreak of the First World War? What is the saying—the more things change, the less things change?

So, what are Americans cheering for this time, if not the direct commitment of U.S. forces?  Supplying one side with tens billions of dollars of weapons and actionable intelligence without a greater and more direct involvement (does participation in a great powers war really permit that?)? An open-ended war with no possibility of peace in sight? A new cold war to benefit the arms industries? The escalation of a horribly destructive great powers proxy war that could easily turn into a broader regional or global conflict with a nuclear ending? 

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists just moved the time on the Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to Armageddon. For context, it was set at seven minutes—420 seconds—to midnight during the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

Keep on cheering, folks. Just do a little history homework beyond the headlines and clichés in order to know what you are cheering for and why.

Note

1. The late British historian, Michael Howard, observes that although war fever swept through the cities of Europe, “this urban excitement was not necessarily typical of public opinion as a whole.”  The First World War, 32. In his 2012 history on the outbreak of the Great War, The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark downplays the popular idea of the war hysteria during the summer of 1914. 553-54.
2. Robert H. Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War One, 1917-1921 (New York: Harper && Row, Publishers, 1985), 202-203.

Michael F. Duggan

On February 22, 2015—seven years and two days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine—this article of mine appeared in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. I admit that I am a nobody in the world of foreign policy; Realism and Policy is a small online journal with a handful of readers on a good day. And yet it seems that if the article’s prescriptions had been followed, there would likely be no war in Ukraine today.

https://www.georgetownjournalofinternationalaffairs.org/online-edition/crisis-in-ukraine-when-proxies-are-primary

By Michael F. Duggan

“You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe. When it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble.”
-Prince Charles

The Prince of Wales got it right: on the whole, modern British architecture is pretty bad.

In recent years, I have become increasingly alarmed by the newfound verticality of London as it continues on its dubious adventure as Europe’s capital of finance and economic globalization. From the classic sprawling horizontal metropolis with few landmarks higher than St. Paul’s, Big Ben, Tower Bridge, and Westminster Abby, the big money boys (and girls) of new Londontown are bent on making it just another nondescript 21st century copse of abominable high-rises. My guess is that this is the result of the misguided desires of new money types to trash history in favour of something approximating a less interesting version of New York City. Perhaps it is just an expression of the common human mania for the new.

Taken individually, some of the buildings are not so bad, as far as glass and steel go (although, as the Scarlet Pimpernel reminds us, “there is nothing quite so bad as something which is not so bad”), and I know that not all of them are products of British architects or firms. It is just that a modern vertical city has to work as an integrated collective work of art—a giant crystal garden—like Manhattan, if it is to work at all. Modern London, by contrast, looks like Old London with patches of Bahrain or Dubai pushing through the ground like mushrooms after a rain.

My revulsion at what London is becoming got me thinking back to an idea I had a number of years ago, that the historical phases of London and its development provides a kind of Rorschach or Myers-Briggs personality test, and the period of London that you like or most identify with tells a lot about you.

So, which is it? Are you the former classics major enraptured with archeological depictions of the Roman Old City of Londinium? Do you like the dirty, malororous, half-timber city of the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern period—the city of Shakespeare that burned in the Great Fire of 1666? Is it the rebuilt city of Charles II (who straddled periods of the city, among other things), Nell Gwynn, Lord Rochester, Christopher Wren, William Defoe, and Moll Flanders—the London of the Restoration and Augustinian period? Is it the imperial capital of the world of mercantilist globalization, the Georgian city of William Hogarth, William Pitt (both Elder and Younger), and Edmund Burke? Is it the teaming London of Dickens, Ebenezer Scrooge, Bill Sykes, the Artful Dodger, and Victoria and Albert and the Crystal Palace? Is it the diverse, gas-lit metropolis of Conan-Doyle, Holmes and Watson, and Jack the Ripper? Or is it Heroic London of Churchill and the Blitz or Swinging London of The Beatles, Stones, and Julie Christie?

Take you time answering this question; you may pick more than one or arrange them in descending order of preference. And in conversation, pay attention to the answers of other people and their reasons for their choice(s).

So, the next time you are at a party and you meet a historical or cosmopolitan type, ask him/her “what’s you period of London?” If they say “Jane Austen” (as opposed to “Lord Byron”) or “21st century,” make a polite break for the door.

By Michael F. Duggan

It is no exaggeration to report that Samuel Clemens died one hundred twelve years ago this past Wednesday (April 21, 1910), but that Mark Twain lives on. Mostly.

A dark and brooding man—an atheist who railed against God during his last years in works to be published after his death¹—Twain transformed humor. He took the 19th century public lecture format and invented standup comedy. A Confederate deserter, he was an anti-racist (he sponsored the first African-American student to attend Yale Law School), an anti-imperialist, and is arguably the first modern American liberal. He practiced gonzo reporting a century before anybody had ever heard of Hunter S. Thompson or the New Journalism.² As Arthur Miller observes, Twain always included himself in his criticisms of humanity. On that score and so many others, he was completely honest. By his own account, he was not “an American,” he was “the American.”

Although I cannot deny the greatness of his best novels, or that he is our greatest novelist, I have never been able to make it all the way through Huckleberry Finn. I prefer him as an aphoristic philosopher, a misleadingly folksy wit with depth—the “American Voltaire”—and I can (and have) spent hours browsing the three collections of his quotes and sayings that I own. He is as sharp as Dorthy Parker, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde, but with more resonance and heft; the point remains after the smile fades. Humor is the most fleeting of genres, and yet Twain remains as funny, thoughtful, topical, and damning as ever.

The only thing I don’t get about Twain is that he seems to have been free of all prejudices except against Native Americans. I suspect that he may have had a bad experience with an American Indian when he was young (see “Injun Joe”).

Another possibility is that he has to deny Indigenous Americans if his literature is to work (i.e. stories of an America with no past, no inconvenient previous owners). In the Ken Burns documentary on Twain, Arthur Miller (again) observes that Twain wrote about America as if it had no history. If the shores of the Mississippi that Huck and Jim drift on are crowded with the ghosts of dead peoples and civilizations who speak without a Missouri twang, it suddenly becomes distracting and complicated, like all true history. This, in my opinion, is the central problem with Twain.

But on the whole, Twain works. He hated shams and frauds and could see through to the underlying all-too-human motives, including his own (“The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner”). He believed that the best punchline was often an honest straight line. He also loathed echo chambers and one can only wonder what pearls of wisdom he would have had about today’s social media.

Notes

1. “Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!” —The Mysterious Stranger, 240-41.
2. See Alexander Cockburn, A Colossal Wreck, 297.

By Michael F. Duggan

Disclaimer: This idea was suggested to me by a friend who wishes to remain anonymous.

Wars are either decisive or not, and most of the great peace treaties of modern history are not what they purport to be.

In his magnum opus, A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume observes that in order for justice to prevail in the law, there must be a condition of approximate equality between the parties involved.  This concept translates seamlessly into the negotiations that end wars: in order for there to be a genuine diplomatic resolution to conflict, there must be relative parity between the belligerents.  Even with Western military hardware and economic assistance, this observation does not bode well for the Ukrainians.

In the real world, there are two kinds of peace settlements: there are formal acknowledgements of victory and defeat in which the victors divvy up the spoils and the losers take what is given to them (e.g. the Treaty of Paris (1783), the Congress of Vienna (1815), Yalta (1945), Potsdam (1945)), and there are diplomatic bargains to end the hostilities between more-or-less equal adversaries in which both sides achieve some or all of their war aims. The second of these rarely if ever happens (Westphalia? (1648), Utrecht? (1714)). Rather, closely-matched adversaries often fight wars that bog down into a stalemate and either peter out or else one side capitulates and the winners dictate the peace and divvy up the spoils (Versailles (1919)).  In addition to the two kinds of treaties, there are also tenuous ceasefires, like the truce that halted hostilities in the Korean War without a genuine resolution, but let that go. 

The Yalta and Potsdam conferences are especially telling: the two, relatively-equal victors divided the spoils, not on the basis of morality or the fair consideration of the smaller nations involved or as the result of the give-and-take of good faith negotiation, but on the basis of where the Allied armies were when hostilities ended. Because pf this, historian Robert Dallek has called the Yalta conference “the most overrated event of World War II.”¹ 

Some of the summits between the United States and Soviet Union during the 1970s achieved mutually acceptable results because of relative parity and the looming omnipresence of the nuclear standoff and the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction.  These were not peace treaties, and insofar as they dealt with the Arab-Israeli wars, they were inconclusive. But they achieved important arms control agreements.  The gentlemen’s agreement that prevented the Cuban Missile Crisis from turning hot is the paragon example of diplomacy making a dangerous crisis go away by allowing both sides to come away with something they wanted.²     

By contrast the Paris Peace Accords (1973) that ended the American-Vietnamese War was a delaying action, a surrender that allowed the United States a modicum of face saving cover over a lost war.  Anybody who doubts this need only recall images of the U.S. departure from Saigon two years later.  Likewise, the Malta Summit (1989) that ended the Cold War was followed a decade later by a 25-year expansion of NATO right up to Russia’s western borders in spite of early promises of “not one inch eastward.”³   

So what does this mean for the war in Ukraine?  The situation there may be summarized as such: the Ukrainians are understandably determined to defend their nation and retain its prewar borders even though the odds of the throwing the Russians out of eastern Ukraine are small at this point.  Putin is committed to winning in Ukraine—“winning” presumably defined as the annexation/consolidating the Russian-speaking Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and some adjacent areas, perhaps some of the Ukrainian Black Sea coast, and a land corridor between the Crimean peninsula and the Donbas (greater autonomy—but not independence—for the Donbas region was a provision of the Minsk II agreements, which Ukraine chose not to enforce).⁴ 

Given that a Ukrainian victory seems unlikely and that the war aims of the two nations are fundamentally incompatible, we may conclude a number of things:

1. Massive infusions of Western weapons and economic aid to Ukraine could conceivably turn the course of events against Russia. More likely they will only prolong the conflict and will result in greater casualties and destruction on both sides.  What has sprung up is a proxy war on the part of the U.S. and NATO countries in which (as others have suggested) some brave Western commentators appear to be willing to “fight to the last Ukrainian.”⁵
2. Negotiations ending in a treaty that is mutually agreeable is an impossibility short of the most extreme unforeseen circumstances. 
3. If Russia wins, a part of Ukraine will be annexed as a Russian-speaking “East Ukraine” vassal state, or else absorbed as a part of Russia.
4. Even if defeated, the Ukrainian government will remain in power in Kyiv—it will not be overthrown by the Russians (I would argue that this was not the Russian goal)—it will govern over a truncated, Ukrainian-speaking “West Ukraine.”  Postwar West Ukraine will be in bad shape economically and in terms of destroyed property and infrastructure.  Migration of the displaced and impoverished will therefore persist long after the war.
5. What we can look forward to is a long, bitter, and dangerous war that is already dividing the world into camps.                  

If we accept a realistic great powers/sphere of influence interpretation of events, as I do, then the time to cut a deal with Russia guaranteeing a fully intact, geopolitically neutral Ukraine was probably in 2008 when Russia announced that a westward-leaning Ukraine was a direct threat to its national security.  It is too late for such a deal now.

As long as there are large and powerful nations, there will be spheres of influence in which the interests of the local power trump those of outsiders.  This harsh geopolitical fact is a lesson that was forgotten or unlearned by the U.S. foreign policy establishment during the years of unchallenged American hegemony of the post-Cold War period.  It seems that that era is waning.  The sooner that the U.S. foreign policy establishment accepts these realities, the better things will be for this country and for the rest of the world.  Perhaps then we can focus on the problems of the environment that threaten us all.   

Notes

1. Regarding the European military situation in 1945 as determining the postwar spoils, see George Kennan, American Diplomacy, (1951), 85-86.  On Yalta being an overrated event, see Robert Dallek, The Lost Peace (2010), 59.
2. See generally Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight (2008).
3. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early
4. https://www.thepostil.com/the-military-situation-in-the-ukraine/?fbclid=IwAR0SS8VTATcFljPJSXtX2JDJ4mTyumnell0jjjGoYV9VLrgUwiAaF4cDV08, https://www.wionews.com/world/ukraine-failed-to-comply-with-the-minsk-agreements-putin-informs-biden-434964
5. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/washington-will-fight-russia-to-the-last-ukrainian/

By Michael F. Duggan

Thescelosaurus neglectus—mark the name well.  It is a notable discovery in the history of paleobiology.  The species itself is not especially noteworthy, novel, or newly discovered; Thescelosauruses were a common, small, bipedal dinosaur of the late Cretaceous period.  It is a particular fossil that is important. 

Scientists at the Tanis dig site in the Badlands of North Dakota might have found the mineralized remains of an individual animal that was killed on the exact day that a 12-kilometer wide asteroid punched a 180-kilometer-wide hole in what is now the Yucatan Peninsula (the Chicxulub Crater) almost 66 million years ago.  Debris found with the fossil indicate that it is a snapshot of the instant that the Cretaceous Period became the Paleocene (and, more grandly, when the Mesozoic Era became the Cenozoic).  It is the moment that the reign of the dinosaurs ended. 

Tanis has been famous as a dig site for more than a decade because its fossils date from the precise time of the Cretaceous die-off.

Depending on how you measure them, over the past 540 million years, mass die-offs have occurred about about every 27 or 28 million years.  Since the Cambrian Explosion that created the diverging categories of the phyla of biology, there have been at least five cataclysmic die-offs (the ones that ended the Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, and yes, the Cretaceous period).  Our own period appears to be the sixth mass extinction of the Earth’s living history.   

Sometimes I feel a little like the animal represented by this fossil: after about 7,500-15,000 human generations, I happen to live in the time when the existing world is falling apart (although, to be fair, dinosaurs were around for about 180 million years where modern humans have only been here for about 300,000 years—and perhaps as little as 150,000-200,000 years—or around one 600^th of their tenure at most).  

I guess the difference is that humans are both the asteroid and its victim.

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.