Realism and Policy

By Michael F. Duggan

“Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!”
-Daisy Buchanan

About an hour ago, I realized that the action in The Great Gatsby takes place in 1922, and therefore the longest day of the year that Daisy was hoping to not miss was 100 years ago today. So I got into the car, put in a CD of Bix and Tram, and drove to Scott and Zelda’s grave in nearby Rockville. It was a gorgeous sunset.

In addition to the perennial pens, pennies, and little gin bottles left on the slab was a green light bulb. Clever.

By Michael F. Duggan

For several months, I along with many other commentators, have predicted that the primary Russian war aim in Ukraine is to annex some of the eastern, predominately Russian and Russian-speaking parts of the Country. Although the initial Russian incursion in the north and northeastern parts of Ukraine appeared to be aimed at taking Kyiv—and although the withdrawal of Russian forces there, the northeastern rim of Ukraine, and Kharkiv have been reported as bona fide defeats for them—this part of the invasion now appears to have been a feint to spread out Ukrainian forces and to draw them away from the eastern and southeastern parts of the country. The consolidation of the eastern regions by Russian forces may bear this out. If it was a miscalculation, they now have adjusted their operations and logistics to a more realistic and effective strategy.

What the war may boil down to then is a broader and more intense version of the Ukrainian Civil War from 2014 to early 2022. The lines will be further to the west—the annexed territory will be deeper and wider than that previously held by the Russian-Ukrainians of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions—and the fighting will be heavier. It will be a proxy war on the part of the United States, thus keeping alive the possibility of miscalculation and dangerous escalation by both sides.

It could settle into a festering war of position (think of the fixed lines, trenches, artillery barrages, and raids of the Western Front during WWI, only with 21st century weaponry and without massed infantry assaults). This appears to be a likely and least-bad outcome and one that will last until one or both sides get tired of the killing. Of course, if the front does “simmer down” over time, the result could be a landmine laden armed border—a no man’s land—like the Demilitarized Zone in Korea. Or it could escalate into a larger and far more destructive conflict. The summer and fall may tell.

The Russians now appear to have the upper hand in eastern Ukraine. But as more, and more sophisticated American and British weapons arrive on the battlefield, we can expect a sharp uptick in the intensity of the fighting over the coming weeks and months. It will be a long, deadly summer in eastern Ukraine and perhaps in western Russia.

By Michael F. Duggan

My doctorate is in American History with minors in Modern European History and Western Philosophy (mostly in the philosophy of science), so if you are a physicist and this seems like a dumb or commonplace idea, please just scroll through to the next essay.

One of my favorite thinkers is Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716). A bona fide polymath, he is on my shortlist for the “smartest person who ever lived” (for me, the smartest people are those who posit an original, plausible, non-theistic cosmological model relative to the most advanced models of the day). In addition to his cosmological model, Leibniz made contributions in biology, computation, diplomacy, ethics, geology, history, the law, library science, logic, mathematics, philosophy, political theory, psychology and theology, as well as other areas. He famously invented calculus independently of Isaac Newton, and while Leibniz had the better notation, Newton had better lawyers. He wrote in at least 6 language and may have had understanding in as many as 12.¹

Leibniz outlined his cosmological model in a short work written near the end of his life called The Monadology.² It was not published during his lifetime. Where the Newtonian model is commonsensical and demonstrable, Leibniz’s outline is cryptic, rationalistic (as opposed to empirical), counterintuitive, and largely untestable. Interestingly, modern developments in physics (special and general relativity and quantum mechanics) showed that, although the model of Newtonian mechanics is useful as a heuristic instrument in predicting things like ballistic trajectories and orbital decay, it is not a an accurate representation of the true nature of the physical world. By contrast, Leibniz’s model dovetails with the ideas and models of modern physics and has been embraced by some prominent physicists.³ Thus, although the Newtonian cosmos was killed off by Einstein more than a century ago, the cosmology of Leibniz lives on as a productive model. The Monadology is also one of my favorite books.

On the night of April 25, 2022, I decided to read before going to bed and chose The Monadology. There are many fascinating ideas in this book and Leibniz presents them successively as short sections, as if working up from basic provisions to describe an overall outline or basis for the cosmos, to include consciousness. It reads as of he is merely transcribing something that he has already worked out in his head, inventing the rules of a functional universe as if he was God. Each section is like a brick in a building or like the monads (atoms) that make up his world. In section 17, for example, he beautifully and succinctly describes why consciousness cannot be accounted for or reduced to mechanical processes. His idea (a version of panpsychism) is that consciousness is an irreducible characteristic intrinsic to monads. This idea is one of the few remaining thorns in the side of the modern emergence (evolutionary) view of consciousness. This time I skipped ahead to sections 61 and 62.

In these sections, Leibniz describes the interconnectedness of all things in the universe and their instantaneous affect on one another, as instantaneous action at a distance. This struck me as conceptually identical to the modern idea of quantum entanglement, the “spooky action at a distance” that vexed Einstein and is a fly-in-the-ointment to the classical elegance and simplicity of his Special Relativity.

In the Einsteinian universe of special and general relativity, action is limited to the speed of light (with the possible exception of the expansion of space itself during the inflationary period).⁴ But Leibniz saw space as an abstraction of relationships of objects to one another as well a plenum of physical objects.

But Leibniz saw space as an abstraction of relationships of objects to one another as well a plenum of physical objects.⁵ He does not appear to have considered space itself (as opposed to objects in it) in Einstein’s terms as a realm with physical qualities, dictates, and limitations. Leibniz’s concept of space as abstraction knows none of the limitations of physical space.

Therefore, if we posit an underlying abstract universe that is an infinite mathematical matrix (as Leibniz does), then instantaneous action at a distance would be permissible. Given that Leibniz’s model does not preclude or prohibit Einsteinian space, then perhaps “spooky action at a distance” is a manifestation or function of this primal, mathematical realm on its physical overlay (as Pythagoras and Plato (and Max Tegmark?⁶) might believe). It would be the prior mathematical matrix overriding the limitations of the physical cosmos. As such Leibniz appears to be positing a robust idealist model in which abstractions exist actively in the world outside of of minds and beyond the relationships and ratios of known physical laws.

I do not know by what means or mechanism the abstract Leibnizian world would assert itself on the physical Einsteinian universe, but then nobody has described or explained the mechanism by which multiple universes peel off from each other during probabilistic events in the multiverse implied by the ideas of Hugh Everett.⁷ And yet his ideas are widely and increasingly embraced.⁸

I sent this idea in an unsolicited email to two prominent physicists and received no reply, so it is most likely a dumb idea with no future—an incongruous intermixing of two fundamentally distinct realms by a non-physicist, a meddling amateur—or else an idea that others have already hit upon in a different form. Anyway, there it is.

Postscript July 7, 2022
A few weeks after posting the essay above, I searched “quantum entanglement” and “Leibniz” on the Internet. One of the things that came up was a wonderful article from 2021 by Professor Ludmilar Ivancheva of Bulgaria titled “Leibniz’s Monadology and its insights concerning quantum Mechanics.”⁹ This article is an overview, an intellectual history, of the many areas in which Leibniz’s ideas either presage, inform, or find modern analog in modern physics. Turns out I was scooped by many years and in a multiplicity of areas that I had not even considered (e.g. the “holographic and fractal nature of reality;”). Although I should have known better, at least I have the satisfaction of having come up with an idea on my own, even if many others had hit on it long before.

Note

1. https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/45824/how-many-languages-did-leibniz-speak
2. See G.W. Leibniz’s Monadology, An Edition for Students, Nicholas Rescher, ed. (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991).
3. For example, see Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos (Oxford University Press, 1997).
4. Regarding inflation generally, see Alan H. Guth, The Inflationary Universe (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1997).
5. Leibniz “also believed in the plenum. But he maintained that space is merely a system of relations.” See Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1945) 70. For a more in-depth discussion of the complexities of Leibniz’s concepts of space, see Benson Mates, The Philosophy of Leibniz (Oxford University Press, 1986) 227-240.
6. The physical world seems to run on finely-tuned mathematical relationships. See Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). See also Martin Reese, Just Six Numbers (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2001). Perhaps this fine tuning is the result of the cosmological natural selection suggested by Lee Smolin in The Life of the Cosmos and elsewhere. But these relationships allow the physical world to work the way it does. My idea is that a greater mathematical realm would allow a process not permitted by the limits of the physical world.
7. Hugh Everett, III, “Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics,” (Review of Modern Physics, v. 29, no. 3. July 1, 1957), 454-462.
8. Tegmark, 228-29.
9. Papers pf BAS Humanities and Social Science, Vol. 8, 2021, No. 2, https://www.papersofbas.eu/images/Papers_2021-2/Ivancheva.pdf.

By Michael F. Duggan

As the world sleepwalks toward a third world war, there is a way to end the conflict in Ukraine in short order and with democratic legitimacy.

First, working through the United Nations, a ceasefire would be declared by both sides and the armies would stop on their current lines. A peacekeeping force from non-aligned nations would come in to observe and oversee the ceasefire.

The U.N. would then call for a referendum in the Donbas region and perhaps some adjacent areas. On the ballot would be the following choices: 1). This region will remain a part of Ukraine, only with greater autonomy (essentially in line with the home rule provisions of the 2015 Minsk II agreement). 2). This region will become an independent nation. 3). This region will become a part of Russia. The referendum would be overseen by observers from both sides as well as by U.N. personnel. All sides would then abide by the majority outcome of the referendum. Ukraine would also have to pledge military neutrality in regard to NATO and Russia.

Needless to say, this will not happen.

By Michael F. Duggan

I let down my guard. After Henry Kissinger and the Editorial Board of The New York Times embraced positions of deescalation in Ukraine last week, I posted a modestly optimistic (for me) essay yesterday. My hope was that with The Times coming to its senses, a measure of sane realism might be returning to the coverage of the war and to the polices of the war managers themselves. Strike that.

Last night I spoke with a friend who harbors no such illusions like the ones under which I briefly labored. He pointed out a powerful op-ed in The Times yesterday by Christopher Caldwell yesterday, suggesting that there is plenty of blame to go around regarding the war in Ukraine and that the United States and the nations of Europe may be heading like sleepwalkers toward a Summer of 1914-like crisis, only with nuclear weapons.¹

To this I pointed out that President Biden had just announced that the United States would not be providing Ukraine with rockets that have a range greater than anything we have given them to date.² My friend would have none of it.

Here is how it plays out: even if the U.S. does not give Ukraine these weapons, it is possible that another NATO country will. With the more-than $50 billion in military aid already supplied to Ukraine (almost the equivalent to Russia’s entire annual military spending) and with more on the way, it is possible that Ukrainian forces could hit Russia it with shorter-range rockets and other ordnance.

If rockets start raining down on Russian towns and cities, all bets are off. It will likely initiate a vast increase in Russia’s military spending, perhaps by the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars, and they will go all in. If the missiles or rockets that hit Russia were provided by NATO country, the return address for a Russian response could be that country or countries. At that point, you have a general European war—i.e. a world war. Even if the missiles used up to that point in the escalation are not nuclear-tipped, the losing side of World War III will be compelled to even the score with nukes (and it is stated Russian policy to meet a conventional attack on Russian soil with tactical nuclear weapons). Game over.

In retrospect it is clear that the historical lesson for October 1962 was not the Munich Crisis of 1938, but the August Crisis of 1914. So it is today.

In the future—assuming that there is one—when an optimistic feeling comes over me about the situation in Eastern Europe, I will just lay down and wait until it passes.

Note

1. See Christopher Caldwell, “The War in Ukraine May be Impossible to Stop. And the U.S. Deserves Much of the Blame,” The New York Times, May 31, 2022.
2. For the distinction between the weapons and systems in question, see Sebastien Robin, “Biden Decoded: Ukraine Will Get HIMARS Rocket Systems, But Not Longer-Range Missiles,” Forbes, May 31, 2022.

By Michael F. Duggan

Could it be that realism and therefore the basis for a peace process may be in the offing in regard to the war in Ukraine? Remotely addressing the World Economic Forum at Davos on May 23, Henry Kissinger said that the United States should push for peace in Ukraine, even if it meant pressuring its government to cede territory to Russia.¹

I have long had mixed feelings about Kissinger; on the one hand, he is a frequently brilliant interpreter of history, and I like some of his ideas on spheres of influence and the geopolitical balancing of powers. On the other hand, he is a theorist and former practitioner of realpolitik—perhaps even crackpot realism—rather than of the moderate Kennan variety. What Nixon and Kissinger did to Cambodia is unforgivable.

The Editorial Board of The New York Times has also shifted toward a de-esclatory position.² My hope is that they might be coming to its senses, either because of Kissinger or independently. Call me an optimist, but I can’t help wonder if a realistic understanding of the of the war and its historical context might be percolating upward at The Times and elsewhere. You don’t have to dig deep to find that the Russian-Ukrainian situation of the past few decades is a lot messier than the mainstream would have us believe. Perhaps the dangers of waging a vicious proxy war against another nuclear power are also starting to sink in. If The Times bolts from the standard narrative, then a peeling off of support in favor of the proxy war might be possible. Of course the real question is whether anybody in Biden administration or in the foreign policy Blob are listening.

We realists are a frustrated lot these days, but we can hope.

Notes

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/25/world/europe/henry-kissinger-ukraine-russia-davos.html
2. https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/05/25/new-york-times-repudiates-drive-for-decisive-military-victory-in-ukraine-calls-for-peace-negotiations/

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