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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.

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

By Michael F. Duggan

The growing concern over global climate change, the shocking loss of habitat and biodiversity in recent years, and other issues of the environment (deforestation, the dying off of the world’s reefs, the overharvesting of fisheries, the plastics crisis, pollution generally, various water issues, refugee issues, etc.) is a good thing. The enabler of these crises, the great overarching crisis of our time and of all times is human overpopulation. All of these other issues would be manageable or nonexistent if the population was one-tenth of what it is today. By some estimates, a global population no larger than .5 billion to one billion people would be sustainable (or about the world population between 1600 and 1820, when there were no modern plastics).¹ By other estimates, we surpassed the Earth’s carrying capacity around 1978. ²

Overpopulation is the basis or enabler of the existential threats now facing us. And yet when was the last time you heard a politician mention the issue? How much attention did overpopulation and related issues of economic growth get at the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (COP26)? Are the solutions (such as they are) too difficult, too draconian, too unpopular to even mention? How would the world reduce its current 7.9 billion people to a billion or fewer in a century or less? Could it be done by liberal democratic means? Is the problem of overpopulation too far advanced to be the basis for political discourse? Are we already doomed and nobody in public office has the guts to tell us? How come this is never story on the evening news?

It may or may not be too late to solve the problems that face us. But if there are solutions, we will have to first discuss the problems.

Notes

1. John Gray, Straw Dogs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002) 11.
2. Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) 27.

By Michael F. Duggan

Peter Bogdanovich is gone.

A master technical director who was equally an artist, he was a part of the “New Hollywood” generation of filmmakers that includes Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Milos Forman, Terrence Malick, Mike Nichols, Sam Peckinpah, George Roy Hill, Arthur Penn, Sidney Pollock, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg. He had a good historical sense and knew how to set the feel for a period with music and material culture as well as anybody (few filmmakers knew the 20th century American Songbook better). He had the courage and insight to make artistic, commercially successful, black and white films in the early 1970s (The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon). He was also a master of the screwball comedy (What’s Up Doc?) and even 1910s-20s slapstick (Nickelodeon).

Paper Moon is wonderful (shot in stark monochrome with red and green filters for definition and in wide angel for universal depth of focus). Seldom has an eight-and-a-half-year-old so powerfully upstaged pretty much everybody else in a film (except for Madeline Kahn), and a lot of that was the result of good directing (and amazing father-daughter screen chemistry). The final scene and ending credits are among my all-time favorites.

If the criteria for being a great director is to have made at least one great film, then he makes the cut (The Last Picture Show).