Dear Reader,
The stupid questions were the right questions. That is one lesson, The Pineapple would argue, from the last 20 years of Western intervention. What’s the end goal here? Will X action make things better or worse? What happens after you get rid of the bad guys? Who actually are the bad guys? Not asking these questions led to catastrophe in the Middle East, a catastrophe devised by generally-trusted statesmen, carried out by experienced military leaders, and supported (until it was too late) by the media at its most insistent. So even those of us with little expertise have the right to chime in as we watch Vladimir Putin’s wicked invasion of Ukraine. In this instalment of Pineapple Juice, the newsletter’s occasional roundup of the best writing from elsewhere, I’m highlighting the stupid questions.
1. What peace are we aiming at? This is a principle from the great military historian and theorist Basil Liddell Hart, who wrote:
The objective in war is a better state of peace—even if only from your own point of view. Hence it is essential to conduct war with constant regard to the peace you desire.
Seems obvious, but you hear a lot of politicians—and especially commentators—talking without any reference to a final goal. Are sanctions, for instance, supposed to do justice, or to bring down Putin, or to hasten the end of the war? Or is it the case that anything is justified as long as it qualifies, somehow, as a strike against Moscow? As Daniel Drezner observed in the Washington Post:
Russia has engaged in egregious actions that warrant economic coercion. There are multiple reasons why sanctions are the appropriate policy choice. But whether the goal is to compel Russia into concessions or contain Russia’s capabilities, some thought needs to be given about how the sanctions are supposed to work and the conditions under which they can be lifted. Those thoughts need to be codified and articulated to Russia and the rest of the world.
To sound social science-y about it, the sanctioners need to have a theory of the case. Otherwise, all this behavior is just an exercise in maximizing the economic pain of ordinary Russians without any conception of what that will achieve. One thing it could achieve is a Russian populace that embraces the demented imperial ambitions that Putin embodies. Another is to capsize a tottering global economy.
To aim at peace does not mean abandoning war: it may be, as Patrick Porter argues, that trying to rush a peace deal is fruitless—“at this point it is simply too hard to agree a bargain that all sides can live with, or even the terms of any ceasefire.” In that case, aiming at peace means helping the Ukrainians to fight out an advantageous stalemate:
The least bad strategy at this point may be to inflict enough pain to reach a stalemate later, whereby victory at reasonable price and “maximal” aims become too remote, and where all sides can agree to both win and lose, in a measure.
For Aris Roussinos, by contrast, the window for a peace deal is already closing. But whatever the road to a settlement looks like, it’s vital that some kind of peace, rather than a kind of open-ended aggression, is the object of our hopes.
Porter’s suggested final deal is close to what I’ve seen several sane analysts proposing: “A prudent ‘middle’ might involve ratifying Russia’s prior theft of Crimea, agreed Ukrainian neutrality, Russian withdrawal, and demobilisation near the border.”
2. What are the unintended consequences of intervention?
As Freddie de Boer points out:
When people are agitating for war, they imagine a frictionless universe in which intent determines outcome. But the law of unintended consequences rules, and even aside from the inevitable civilian casualties, the very real possibility that we could lose, and the potential for nuclear conflict, there are all manner of ways American intervention in Ukraine could go sideways. That is the unmistakable lesson of the past two decades of conflict for the United States—it can always get worse in ways you never foresaw.
Happily, the politicians in this case are wiser than the pundits, many of whom have embarrassed themselves calling for military interventions which would lead to a major war involving nuclear powers. But watching the “North Koreanization” of Russia’s economy and society, and the willingness to exploit the grey area between direct and indirect military support, you have to hope our leaders know what they’re doing. What’s the best way for them to support Ukraine, work towards peace, and avoid starting World War III—oh, or starving the world’s poor? I don’t know. I’m just asking the stupid questions.
3. Is this an outbreak of war fever? “For the first time in 30 years I feel myself to be an Austrian,” wrote Sigmund Freud on the outbreak of World War I. “All my libido is given to Austria-Hungary.” 21st-century liberal democracies suppress certain passions—the love of nation, the ardour for glory, the willingness to risk everything for a great cause; war brings them rushing back, even if only vicariously, and it’s easy to be swept along.
Here is a detailed account of what that looked like in the US in 2003, when US officials simply abandoned themselves to the certainty that war was coming. The historian Mark Mazarr, cited at length in the piece, observes that this wasn’t the first time:
George Ball, the famous dissenter in the US escalation decisions for Vietnam, wrote of the fact that analytical arguments simply bounced off people who believed they “must” do something. “To my dismay,” he wrote of the reactions to his prescient arguments that US strategy in Vietnam was bound to fail, “I found no sympathy for these views.” … Official statements of US commitment to South Vietnam, Ball continued, “had the sound and solemnity of a religious oath: ‘We now take the decision to commit ourselves to the objective of preventing the fall of South Vietnam to Communism.” The solemnity of a religious oath—exactly the right way, I think, to understand the convictions that burst to the fore after 9/11.
The phrases to watch for over the coming days and weeks are “We cannot stand by,” “Doing nothing is not an option” (as though all the weapons and sanctions were nothing!), “History shows that appeasement never succeeds,” etc.
4. What is the war about? For Joe Biden, this is an episode in “the battle between democracy and autocracy.” Boris Johnson, similarly, has never “seen an international crisis where the dividing line between right and wrong has been so stark, as the Russian war machine unleashes its fury on a proud democracy.” Putin’s outrage isn’t only a moral abomination because it’s an unjust war which will kill many thousands of innocent people: it’s an assault on behalf of their values against our values.
Is that, actually, the heart of the conflict? If so, how come India, the world’s biggest democracy, is sitting on the sidelines, and how come Poland, regularly dragged over the coals by the EU for its allegedly undemocratic practices, is at the forefront of supporting Ukraine and its desperate refugees? If Russia launched an unjust and murderous invasion of, say, Turkey, and the Turks rallied brilliantly and united around Erdoğan, would that be a completely different situation, far less worthy of our compassion and interest, because Erdoğan is an authoritarian leader? I only ask these stupid questions because when people believe that what they hold sacred is at stake, they are far more likely to advocate doing stupid things. As Ross Douthat once recalled of an earlier moment when fundamental values seemed to be in the balance:
I think a lot about the way that September 11, which happened when I was in college, made a whole cohort of young people and intellectuals feel like this was the end of decadence that we’d been waiting for, that at last there would be some grand purpose to life, some civilizational struggle for our times. And what came of that? Not an American renewal, not a successful crusade for democracy and human rights: just a lot of dead people in the Middle East and a war that’s devolved into the droning of terrorists and the perpetual management of frozen conflicts. That’s an example of what in the book I call the perils of anti-decadence: we can and should be discontented with our situation, but we should recognize all the ways the revolutionary or crusading alternatives can end like the Iraq war, or for that matter World War I—in death and futility and grief.
5. What is this doing to Western democracies?
Hard to say this without sounding lame, but the response to the war has in several ways followed the pattern of “cancel culture”: to quote Matthew Zeitlin, “you’re seeing a very fast cascade of formal and informal sanctions in a highly moralized atmosphere, calls for condemnation from a wide range of actors, and lots of stuff happening in banking/payment systems.” Well, nobody deserves cancellation more than a man who launches a horrific war out of the blue. But now the wave of moralized collective punishment has reached Tchaikovsky (who is being dropped from concert programmes in Cardiff and Zagreb), Dostoevsky (in Italy, a lecture on the novelist has been postponed) and any number of Russian performers and sportspeople. The Russianist Gary Saul Morson, in a tremendous article for First Things, describes well well the unbalanced, vengeful spirit in the air:
In the spirit of moral clarity, anything “Russian” has become immoral. Consider that in the Netherlands a Russian grocery store was vandalized, a Russian Orthodox church was defaced, and a Russian school intimidated into going offline. The “Russian supermarket” in fact specialized in food from many Eastern European countries, and could more accurately have been called a “Slavic supermarket,” but as its Armenian owner explained, “nobody knows what that means.” The Russian church, which serves Orthodox Christians from several countries, actually collected money for the Ukrainians. The Russian school’s pupils included Estonian, Uzbek, and Ukrainian students. “People think that the Russian language is spoken only in Russia,” the director sighed, but anyone who knows recent history is aware that it is the language of educated people in several former Soviet republics.
At the same time, in the public denunciations of scholars like John Mearsheimer for questioning recent Western policy towards Ukraine, there is the potential beginning of a new McCarthyism, not just against those who wink at Putin’s crimes, but against those who fail to analyse it in the approved manner.
Arta Moeini senses in all this a decisive moment in the shrinking of the public square: an attempt “to condition public opinion into ‘correct’ acceptable speech patterns in the service of the ‘noble lie’—using the good heart of most ordinary citizens and their repulsion at human suffering as bait.” Perhaps that always accompanies war. In which case, add it to the many reasons to pray for a swift peace.
Image: Sigmund Freud (Wikipedia/Creative Commons)