Under a Cloud

           

            There is a natural tendency, exacerbated by the commercial requirements of journalism, to inflate the importance of current events.  Each day, after all, must have its headlines.  Sound history, on the other hand, demands retrospection.  Another way of saying this is encapsulated in Francis Bacon’s well-known saw that “Truth is the daughter of time…”  Nonetheless it would appear obvious that the Russian assault on Ukraine is a major world event with long-term repercussions that, however unpredictable at present, are likely to be of historical significance.  Nonetheless this will probably be the last essay I shall devote to it.  I wish I could say that is because the violence seems headed toward some kind of satisfactory termination, but it does not.  I simply have no unique or authoritative ideas.  The press is full of more expert opinion than one can read and far too much amateur emoting than one wants to read.

 

            We keep hearing that since the end of the last global war we have been living in a “rules-based world”.  How this differs from any other period in history is not clear.  After all, the Law of the Jungle is a rule of sorts.  Perhaps Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is slightly more subtle than that, but not much more.  The “rule” he has violated—that big fish do not have license to gobble up any smaller fish of their fancy—would seem to be a fundamental requirement for world peace.  But here it is in conflict with another unstated rule that must be honored to preserve the peace: the rule that one must not provoke big fish.  The big fish, of course, are those armed with atomic bombs.

 

            This is a subject on which it is far easier to bloviate as an olympian critic than to suggest any practical course of action.  When I say God help those world leaders, and especially our own, who have the awful responsibility of responding to Putin’s aggression, it is in a truly prayerful sense, not one of condescension.  But it cannot be wrong to ask questions about our national defense policies when their coherence or current relevance becomes questionable.  Our policy with regard to nuclear weapons has been a defensive one, based on the idea of deterrence.  Postulated when the “nuclear club” was much more exclusive than it is today, it rather sardonically adopted the acronym MAD, standing for “Mutually Assured Destruction.”  Practically speaking, the policy enshrined our belief that not even the evil men in the Kremlin, capable of perfidies yet unknown in world annals, would be so crazy as to launch an attack guaranteed to lead to their retaliatory destruction.  The MAD regime makes it possible for nuclear states to adopt an official or tacit “No First Strike” position, and that offers some psychological comfort.  But it offers no absolute moral guidance.   Quite apart from the fact that the nuclear club long ago abandoned exclusivity, with each increase in its membership actually diminishing rather than expanding security, there are problems with the policy’s intellectual no less than its moral coherence.  It is essentially the policy many of us deride we hear it from the NRA: the only force that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

 

            The policy adopted by the Biden administration, and presumably shared by all of our EU allies, is that we cannot honor Zelensky’s repeated pleas for the establishment of a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine because that would make Putin really mad, mad enough perhaps to….you know what.  So we—meaning those world forces trying to support Ukraine and repel Russian aggression—cannot use one of the most effective military means of doing so.  Thus Putin’s unused nukes are to him highly useful, while ours are useless to us.  President Biden has not, however, completely ruled out any direct confrontation with Russian forces by NATO.  The special circumstance Biden correctly cites is that Ukraine is not a NATO member, and that we are therefore under no treaty obligation to come to its defense.  That is indeed a significant fact, not a mere Jesuitical distinction.  I suppose it means “But if you start in on Latvia, Putin, you’re in big trouble.”  Not that the crushing economic sanctions are only small trouble.

 

            But one of the dictionary definitions of appeasement is “to buy off (an aggressor) by concessions, usually at the sacrifice of principles.”  Putin was already able to gobble up a few choice pieces of the old USSR real estate, including the Ukrainian Crimea, without much serious complaint.  Dictators have shown a tendency to pay more attention to what their adversaries actually do than to what they say.   They note when  “red lines” consistently fade away into pale chalk marks.  One of Stalin’s favorite ripostes, when timorous subordinates hesitantly suggested that this or that policy might arouse complicating reactions by governments “in the West”  was “They will swallow the whole thing!”  The extraordinary thing about it was that he was almost always right.  It’s pretty clear that Putin in a slightly different metaphorical sense wants to swallow the whole of Ukraine.  Should our policy be one of peace at any price?  If not, what is our price limit?  After all the second World War was avoidable.  Many maniacs have headed large armies over the course of the centuries, but none has been so maniacal, to the best of my knowledge, as to insist on achieving through the expenditure of large sums from the national treasury and large casualties in their military forces what they could get by simply demanding it.  If the Western powers had been prepared to accede to all of Hitler’s demands and all of the expansionist ambitions of the Japanese Empire, there need have been no war.

 

            History both leads and misleads.  Thoughts of the Second War come naturally to me because my earliest memories are from those years, and the world in which I grew to adulthood was darkened by its shadow—the so-called Cold War.  The “problem” of Russia has thus been a constant of life.  The collapse of the Soviet Union would appear in the long run to have changed the world less than one would have expected.  We speak of the “lessons of history,” but the lessons are sometimes opaque.  In our changed, inter-wired world Mastercard may prove to be mightier that Migs.  That remains to be seen.  And will our own weary, waning, and increasingly incoherent country be able to refresh itself in what Lincoln once, in another difficult time, called “a new birth of freedom”?