I
One faction of neoconservatives were wittily defined as people for whom it is always 1938. Whoever so defined them may not have considered the possibility that there are also people for whom it is never 1938, and that for some of that latter group even 1938 is no longer 1938 (a very partial version of that last view can be seen in a recently released film in which Chamberlain is credited with having bought the time for Britain to rearm). There are not too many such neocons left within the Republican party: they despised Trump, Trump despised them, neo-isolationism is now a Trumpean position with some cross-party appeal, and many elected Republicans consider it imprudent to dispute any aspect of the Trumpean revelation. But Putin’s words on and action in Ukraine do have a stink of the ‘thirties, with the Ukrainians imagined as what some Germans so memorably called the Poles, “kein staatswürdiges Volk“—’not a state-worthy people’. Ukraine, a month ago recognized by pretty much every other state in the world, is nowadays for Putin what some Germans called Poland: a Saisonstaat, an artificial creation that would not last long. Putin may have intended to install what was once denominated a Quisling, or to carve off and annex more pieces of Ukraine, or he may have intended to put an end to the Saisonstaat, but either the Ukrainians, imperfectly informed, did not realize that they were kein staatswürdiges Volk, or since 2014 Putin has made them more and more aware that they are a nation by so violently insisting on the contrary. Using a terse and memorable part of Ernest Gellner’s definition of a nation, the Ukrainians are in the main now persuaded that they are being done a wrong when either ruled or misruled by another people. It’s admittedly easier to call people a nation than it is to make them one, but Putin seems to have done the trick, and nations, once made, can be pretty durable
A Maryland slave who watched the Army of the Potomac chase after Lee, who’d given them the slip—they’d catch him at Gettysburg–shrewdly pronounced the Confederate gun men the most effective abolitionists who’d ever lived. On the same principle, Putin may be the most effective Ukrainian nationalist who’s ever lived. When people, some of them famous, tweet that journalism’s current focus on Ukraine is in part a species of racism, the vast attention allegedly paid only because the Ukrainians are blonde and blue eyed—some are, some aren’t—that stink of the ‘thirties may be part of what they cannot smell. Nor do they appear to see Putin’s radicalism: violently and wholly annexing neighboring states is extremely rare in the post-war world, and when Saddam Hussein tried it with Kuwait there was hell to pay. Civil wars—Bosnia, Yemen—are often horrifying, but do not give off quite that same smell of the ‘thirties. Annexing territories which are not widely recognized as states—e.g. Tibet—may entail vicious and very protracted brutality, but again, not that particular smell. The twitter crowd deprecating what it thinks excessive attention to Ukraine asserts that what happens to Europeans ought not matter more, even to other Europeans, than what happens anywhere else, to anyone. This is to miss what one might call the neo-Virgilian convictions of many modern Europeans: they’d thought they’d escaped the endless wars of the nations and caged the demon of war precisely by deprecating the absolute sovereignty of European nations, and thus bound unholy Rage in chains. The EU, on this theory a very new kind of empire, is doing the work of a long-vanished one. Ukraine is not in the EU, but the European project is imagined to have somehow diffused this part of its achievement over what Europeans think, however perversely in the eyes of their new critics, is both a continent and a relatively demilitarized civilization. They may be disastrously wrong about this—they certainly were during the Yugoslav Succession Wars–but they are not viciously and malevolently wrong. So far, relatively few people think the focus on Ukraine is racist fetishism of blonde and blue-eyed people misnamed as “Europeans”. A much-quoted Kenyan diplomat instead sees Putin waging an imperial war against a former colony. Maybe one can see Ukraine more clearly from sub-Saharan Africa than from Brooklyn.
II
Recently out of college in the ‘70s, before everyone seemed to be working in finance, most of my friends were working in publishing, law or medicine. A few years later some of them, residents in internal medicine, were mesmerized by a striking new novel titled The House of God, and some of its slang became theirs. I particularly remember the sudden popularity of GOMER, an acronym for “Get out of my emergency room!”, never said to the afflicted, only thought, and if you’d ever worked in or around an ER, comprehensibly so: Gomers included the many-times repeated ODs, also some of the homeless who were lousy, filthy and abusive, also the alcoholic derelicts with body ulcers, diabetes and almost everything else that could go wrong and who furiously refused treatment: the noisome, profoundly self-destructive and abrasive who were probably in the near term doomed. Their looming doom did not mean that my friends didn’t almost always try, furiously, to stave off the inevitable, but with ‘gomer’ The House of God had given them a term that meant that they need not affect false piety while doing so. The House of God also produced another expression the internists used, a proverb: “only steel heals”. This meant that surgeons, in those days mostly men, who at least metaphorically wore cowboy boots and were alleged to comport themselves like fighter pilots, were the only doctors who actually helped anyone—the internal medicine people, in their own opinion more intelligent, more sophisticated and more urbane, also on their own account less cocky, quoted that proverb ruefully and self-mockingly. It wasn’t true, but there were times when it seemed to have felt true.
Last Thursday, watching a panel on Ukraine, an intelligent historian explained why on the available evidence sanctions would never deter Putin from conquering Ukraine, or anything else, and since we’d understandably sworn off sending troops into Ukraine its days were by implication numbered. This wasn’t an absurd guess—I’d published a longish article on the history of sanctions in the early nineties, and reached a similar conclusion: the prospect of sanctions does not deter and the imposition of sanctions does not compel. Economic sanctions tended to be the response of people unwilling to fight but eager to avoid seeming perfectly indifferent to an acknowledged evil, and listening to that panelist, for the first time in decades I remembered that proverb from The House of God: ‘only steel heals’. But steel as a response to a nuclear weapons state will very possibly fail at catastrophic cost, and while the almost-unprecedented sanctions Biden and his EU partners soon announced won’t compel a swift withdrawal from Ukraine, if maintained they will immediately grossly degrade the Russian standard of living, and over time very significantly degrade Russian industry and weapons technology. The sanctions that would do this—locking Russian banks out of SWIFT, banning all exports, by anyone, of anything made with American intellectual property—were the ones no-one thought we’d impose. If they work a lot of Ukrainians may be dead first, and their country may have (at least for the moment) disappeared, so ‘working’ may only mean possibly dissuading the next aggressor by raising the possible cost far in advance of the meditated aggression. But the conventional wisdom had it that sanctions would do absolutely nothing, and the conventional wisdom was almost certainly wrong.
Another part of the convention wisdom was that Russian military advantages, both quantitative and qualitative, were overwhelming, so the war might last a day. In the specialized sections of the net there were persuasive assessments of Ukraine’s apparently fatal decision to maintain so many now-obsolete T 64s, and the less specialized press recounted the failure of those Western states that claimed to wish Ukraine well to provide modern anti-aircraft or anti-shipping missiles, or more than a handful of modern anti-tank missiles, etc. These failures were real, but in the event the Russians at least at first fought badly, and the Ukrainians fought well. It is possible that Putin and perhaps some of his generals shared the conventional wisdom about overwhelming and hence overawing Russian military power, and assumed that real fighting would not happen. The Russian ships conducted an amphibious assault with naval infantry, the Russian paratroops dropped from the air, apparently near Kyiv, Russian specialized units apparently also infiltrated Kyiv, Russian mechanized forces advanced on a daunting series of axes, there were airstrikes against Ukrainian airfields and air defense systems, and assuming that the Ukrainians could see the maps with converging arrows that my daily newspaper published to explain the military situation, they were presumably about to give up on a hopeless job. But the Ukrainians must have missed those maps and instead listened to their President, initially a much-mocked former television comedian supported by only 21% of them on the first day of the war, although by well over 90% of them now, a man who sometimes appears to combine the better qualities of Fred Astaire and Winston Churchill.
So the Ukrainians did fight, on this sixth day are still fighting, and for now Ukraine’s major cities remain under Ukrainian control. People are beginning to remember that cities are fortresses if people are willing to defend them, and apparently one hundred and thirty-five thousand Ukrainians have over the last few days signed up to do just that. The conventional wisdom now is that this will mean that the Russians will quickly turn to siege warfare à la russ, which in Chechnya and Syria meant savage, protracted and indiscriminate bombardment. The conventional wisdom is not always wrong, and the charming and impressive Ukrainian president may well be rotting in the rubble after a few more days. What Putin will do then is unknowable. Does he send his forces to the far west of Ukraine, to Lviv, so that there is no de facto Ukrainian capital, and nowhere to deliver the new weapons, medical supplies and rations the West has now promised? Does he then garrison in perpetuity a territory the size of Texas with a pre-war population of forty-four million, who will then be, by the oldest and most savage of tests, a nation, even if they’ve for now lost their state? If i phone videos of those probable bombardments circulate in the EU and through other NATO states, will the sanctions come off any time soon? If they circulate in Ukraine, will the Ukrainians miraculously decide that they are not in fact a nation? And what if a fair number of Ukrainians, even after savage bombardment, continue to defend their cities as fortresses? Vasily Chuikov, famous for having defended a city as a fortress, once joked about one tiny part of that fortress, a house defended by a platoon commanded by a sergeant, Yakov Pavlov. The German army, Chuikov observed, lost more men trying to take Pavlov’s house than it did taking Paris.
III
Putin’s Russia is not an effective democracy, but it is not a totalitarian state. The sanctions, if maintained, will significantly harm various Russian elites which have until now supported Putin, and various non-elite Russians who have done the same thing. We simply do not know how these groups and individuals will react to this immiseration, or to the sight of their armed forces killing vast numbers of Ukrainians civilians they’ve been told to consider their ‘little brothers’.
Similarly, no one knows what the effect of a Putin victory or a Putin defeat will do to either NATO or the EU, but some of the first signs—talk in Finland and Sweden of joining NATO, increasing seriousness among EU states’ vowing to effectively sanction Russia, more America troops in Poland and Germany—should not encourage Putin. What lessons will people draw in Europe and around the world? My guess is that if it is anything, the invasion is a disaster for the cause of non-proliferation. After the first Gulf War, Indian general Krishnaswamy Sundarji was asked by a New York Times reporter, “What is the principal strategic lesson of this war?” The general replied that it was “If you don’t want to be invaded by the United States, get nuclear weapons.” In the wake of this war, especially if Putin wins it, I think there are going to be a lot more Sundarjists. After all, Ukraine gave up around 1900 nuclear weapons in return for promises by Russia, the United States and the UK to guarantee its security—this was the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. Between them, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have pretty much guaranteed that there will be correspondingly fewer Budapestians, and I’d bet that South Korea, Japan, maybe Taiwan and possibly Poland, will be among the first places they begin to disappear.