Picking the Wrong Side

 

 Kids my age who started grade school in the mid-1950s had ideas about World War II. Most of our fathers had served in it, and all of our parents had lived through it. At varying levels of knowledge we understood that it had been a war of good against bad, and that we were the good guys and the Germans and Japanese were the bad guys. And of course we were right. Maturity, increased knowledge, and appreciation of the complexity, nuances, and ambiguity of geopolitics did nothing to challenge the accuracy of that kid’s judgment.

Not all wars are like that. Sometimes it is the Hapsburgs and Bourbons fighting over not principles but only who gets what power where. Sometimes there is an ethical distinction, but only between very bad and worse. But sometimes wars are a conflict between a right side and a wrong one, and in those cases people need to see it and take the side of those in the right.

A few decades ago it mainly was the Democrats in this country who had difficulty doing that. Many of them failed to see Soviet communism for what it was and the Cold War for what it was – fundamentally a conflict between freedom and tyranny, right and wrong. Too many of them preached a false notion of a moral equivalence between the sides, and some, such as Edward Kennedy, at least intermittently sided with the Russians. These days it mainly is Republicans who have that difficulty, and by coincidence with regard to a conflict involving Russia.

Under Vladimir Putin Russia became more authoritarian toward its own people and more aggressive toward other nations. Putin made it fairly clear that he would like to regain many or all of the lost territories of the old Soviet empire. His agents and police murdered his political opponents both in Russia and other countries and ran a low level cyber war against the United States and some of its allies. Then, earlier this year, his armed forces attacked Ukraine with a goal of overthrowing its government and seizing its territory – failing in their objectives while committing atrocities, massacres, and war crimes. The Ukrainians defended themselves strongly and effectively, and at present are winning or at least in stalemates on the ground. The Ukrainians had threatened no one and invaded no one. Ukraine’s independence was guaranteed by an international agreement signed by governments including Russia’s. In internal politics and foreign policy Ukrainians had been moving or trying to move toward the more liberal practices of countries to their west. One does not have to romanticize Ukraine as exemplar of liberalism and democracy to see who is right and who is wrong in this war.

Yet many Republicans and their supporters in the conservative media fail to see it, or worse are picking the wrong side. Some such as Tucker Carlson have sided with the Russians explicitly. Others have done so by implication. They are actively hostile to the Ukrainians and have little or nothing bad to say about Putin and the Russians. (Cathy Young has written a good article at The Bulwark covering some of the stupid, petty, and vulgar reactions to Zelensky’s visit to the United States and his speech at the Capitol.)

One should wonder why they do it. A simple answer would be that they like Putin and what they think he stands for. Trumpists, Catholic integralists, and national conservatives may see the supposed tough, traditional, Christian, nationalistic state Putin advertises as better than what they consider to be the weak, decadent, godless, liberal globalism of this country and most of Europe. Whatever the reason, it is a change for Republicans. The party of Eisenhower, Goldwater, Reagan, the Bushes, Dole, Romney, and McCain would not have been a comfortable place for people supporting anti-American dictators against those trying to resist them. I wish it were not one now, but it surely seems to be.

Still most Republicans do favor the Ukrainians in the war, but many of them question the amount, usefulness, and strategic benefit of the aid sent to Ukraine. That is normal and easily understandable political behavior, especially after the government’s fiasco in Afghanistan. However I think that, with some perhaps important but strategically irrelevant exceptions, they are wrong. I think our country is getting a bargain in Ukraine. America and its allies are going to have plenty to keep them busy for years with China. They do not need to have to deal with a rebuilt version of the Soviet empire threatening Europe at the same time. The Ukrainians have been brave and effective in the war. If with our aid they can stop this anschluss of Putin’s, it could save us from needing to return to Europe in much greater strength and perhaps having to stop his next one directly with our own forces in a NATO country. That would be expensive. 

War News

Some things about the war in Ukraine are obvious. The Russians are the aggressors, and the war is the fault of their dictator Putin. There is fighting on more than one front, and the Ukrainians have not been overrun. Many Ukrainian civilians have been killed, and many others have become refugees. Some things about the war are difficult or impossible to know accurately in the midst of the fighting, such as counts of casualties in both armies, the effectiveness of various weapons and tactics, the degree to which Russian controlled territory is actually under their control, how much and how effectively Ukrainian guerrillas are operating behind Russian positions, and so on. The fog of war is real, and it is well known that early reports on conflicts are often incomplete, tinged by propaganda, or even completely wrong. War correspondents in Ukraine have a difficult job.

The job of writers and journalists back in the United States is far easier, and one should expect better than what some are producing. There is a lot of ignorance and dishonesty out there – some of it about the war and some about the history and background. I have read more than one story reporting that the Germans’ decision to increase spending on defense is a departure from nearly eighty years of post World War II pacifism. The truth is that from the 1960s through the 1980s West Germany fielded the largest NATO army deployed in Europe and dropped its defenses after the fall of the Soviet Union less out of pacifism than a pragmatic opinion that the threat had disappeared. Other stories talk of the war in Ukraine as ending a seventy five year European order of peace and unity. The truth is that from 1947 to the fall of the Soviet Union what Europe had was not a peaceful order but an armed truce between hostile forces facing each other across the iron curtain. A peaceful European order goes back only about thirty years, and even then one has to ignore a few things in the Balkans, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine. Various political hacks in the traditional media try to blame the war for price inflation in the United States, ignoring the fact that the rate of price inflation was high and climbing before the Russians invaded Ukraine, and the fact that under both Trump and Biden, the US government manufactured money at inflationary rates.

There is also worse. Various people, mainly Trumpists including Trump and anti-American leftists, seem to have a soft spot for Putin. One can believe that Biden has handled things badly or that America should avoid pushing Russia into becoming a client state of China or that admitting Ukraine to NATO would be a mistake or simply that this should not be our fight, without becoming an apologist for or fan of what the Russians are doing.