Note: The essay is a bit long, but I haven't seen any other attempt to confront the two arguments, pro and anti-Putin and pro and anti-Trump, directly, with the impartial spectator as the trial judge.
Thanks Robert for this excellent article. I’d love to know who the other members of the dinner discussion were. I can suspect who a few were. It’s too bad Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator” isn’t involved in the war negotiations.
Interesting dinner conversation! My take on reading all the press reports I can on the subject make me believe that the illegal coup in Kiev was a US planned and financed provocation against Russia. One of its goals was to throw Russia out of Crimea, where it had its only military base on the Black Sea. Putin is no slouch and knew that would be an existential security breach that would seriously weaken Russia's ability to protect itself from NATO and the US. Don't forget that this provocation occured after many years of Russia expecting to become a member of the EU and even NATO, but was instead ignored and basically blackballed. Russia was no longer Communist, no longer a belligerant colossus astride the globe, it was instead a newly changed nation advancing toward democracy and requiring help to do so, had a capitalist ecomomy, although ravaged by venal western interests and espoused a national Christian religion. Its only flaw was its ability to match the US in nuclear weapons and its refusal to bow to the imperial throne in Washington. That is why we have the mess in Ukraine today and the very real possibility of nuclear destruction heading our way. Make of that what you will!
For me, the world changed when Xi and Putin, with determined demeanors, shook hands in early 2022 just before the SMO. That photo was for me the most significant geopolitical event I have seen, greater than the dissolution of the USSR. They were determined to overturn the West's geopolitical hegemony of 500 years, so much so that they took this great risk of initiating a kinetic war against the West.
This is an ideological struggle, not purely geopolitical. The West cannot accept that it cannot lead the world, that it is not necessarily the most capable and civilized. It has a radical belief in its ideology. Russia and China also have a strong ideological belief in basically a multipolar civilizational world which enables them to function independently without being de facto colonies of Western ideology and power.
So I think the scope of your debate, such as it focused on law and geopolitics, simply avoided the elephant in the room, and so it's lessons are also limited in scope.
I agree, I deliberately limited the discussion to the proximate causes of the Ukraine conflict. But any deeper dig would reveal that the things you talk about in your comment.
I imagine that there was a certain logic to the thinking within all the formerly neutral states of Eastern Europe and the Baltic as NATO crept Eastwards. "NATO intends to eventually fight Russia. If we don't join, our entire country will become the battlefield. If we do, the battlefield will likely be to the East of our country."
For me, the economic advantage to the West of creating a new client-state by regime-change in Russia (continuation of the Yeltsin project) far outweighs the likelihood of a fools errand to re-establish a Russian Western Empire populated by hostile non-Russians, as a cassus-belli.
I would add that when Russia complained about the failed US color revolution in Belarus on the basis of the Budapest Memorandum, the official US response was that the Memorandum was not binding. (I don't recall more than that, but I can chase it up if asked - still assembling info on a question asked re your previous post). The data scientist Peter Turchin also has an amusing case study comparative analysis of post-1991 Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus in his 2022(?) book "End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path to Political Disintegration". Belarus comes top, followed by Russia.
For what it's worth, iirc Scott Horton's book "Provoked" has circa 7,000 citations / footnotes logging Western provocations of Russia.
Finally, it's worth noting that the war began in 2014 and that the war is for keeps. We need to be careful. Ukraine at least twice now (2014 and 2024) has attempted to capture Russian nuclear weapons depots (interestingly, the first time was brilliantly successful, commanded by a US-trained cavalry officer, but US intelligence was bad).
The last time we had a similar crisis, *both* sides lost control over not only their nuclear forces but also their nuclear launch authorizations (down to individual US air force pilots and Russian submarine XOs). We're lucky the SMO gets around Russian nuclear doctrine by being a peacetime operation (level 2 of the 5 levels of war status) so nuclear launch authorization doesn't go below General Gerasimov. If you're in a war and trained to use nukes to blow away a mere platoon, as they are, then any O4 / major will be able to authorize a nuke. Evidence for these propositions: look at the battlefield nuclear warfighting part of the 2024 update of US Army TRADOC ATP 7-100.1 https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN40737-ATP_7-100.1-001-WEB-4.pdf; and the late Daniel Ellsberg's last book "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner"
At the very beginning of the war in Ukraine, while expressing opinions was still inconsequential, Barnie Sanders innocently asked: What would we (the US) do if Mexico plans to enter a military alliance with Russia or China?
As someone noted earlier, it is only appropriate that in the expression "rules-based international order", the word rules is in plural as there are different rules for different countries.
Thank you for fairly presenting both sides of both arguments in a nearly entertaining context, an effort I have not seen anyone else attempt. I have only one quibble and one complaint. The quibble: it's not "a bit long" given the topic and indeed is a masterful combination of broad coverage presented succinctly. No apologies needed.
My complaint regards Putin's defense. Prosecution and defense both summarize the international history well. The prosecution asserts, "The Maidan uprising was a popular pro-European revolt against a corrupt oligarchic regime." The defense rebuts it as "a nationalist coup against a democratically elected president, promoted, orchestrated, and financed by the CIA, which, aimed, among other things, to ‘de-Russify’ Ukraine by forbidding the use of Russian as a state language." The prosecution follows up, "... Putin['s complaint does not] warrant breaching Article 51 of the UN Charter. ... Russia was never in danger ..., nor were the Russian minorities on Ukraine threatened with genocide. And there is little to be said for the way the Russians have actually conducted their ‘special operation’."
The defense pulls its punch by omitting factual evidence that -- even if Russian minorities were not threatened with genocide as the prosecution might choose to define it -- the post-Maidan Ukrainian state denied "universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion" as required by Article 55, item c of the United Nations charter.
The defense should note these denials range from cultural (banning or limiting Russian language use in schools, public offices, and mass media), through religious (suppressing the Russian Orthodox Church), to existential (murders of labor union protestors in Odessa and eight years of shelling civilian areas of Donbas). The US and NATO used exactly this argument to justify their "breaching Article 51" in Kosovo in 1998-99. As for Russia's "special operation," simply comparing Ukrainian civilian casualty figures reported in the WESTERN media with those of any US intervention in the last several decades as well as Israel in Gaza shows the Russians have chosen tactics that substantially limit civilian casualties by comparison.
Adam Smith might not count me an "impartial observer," but I find these omitted defenses to be convincing.
Kudos for a thought-provoking piece that encourages us to conduct our ongoing discussions of this controversy in a more civilized manner.
Thank you. Of course, I could have said much more about Ukraine's own contribution to the conflict -especially the provocations you mentioned. But I tried to keep my essay focussed on the two poles: there should have been three, but that made it messy!
Ukraine is to Russia what Egypt was to Rome, a breadbasket. The Russian economy with 140 million population has the same GDP as Australia with 35 million population. Most of the Russian GDP is from Oil and Gas extraction. What is the rest of the population doing? It is shameful that, after 3.5 years of war the Europeans have made so little contribution to the Ukrainian war effort. The war against Russia offers the West the opportunity to test all its military equipment and weaponry, yet we hear none of this. Is it all like the troop transport vehicle being developed for the British Army, some eight years behind schedule and allowing modifications to every aspect of its use? Surprise me. We learn today that some 30 senior Tories have taken up senior positions in Defence Companies, some of them American. If the Russians manage to defeat Ukraine there will be hell to pay in Western Capitals.
I regret it is one of the problems with older people, especially Joe Biden. Putin is a millenianist who wants to live for a thousand years. We have little to fear from him using nuclear weapons.
I would have appreciated some figures. Japan, Canada and Germany are second, third and fourth in GDP behind the US. Russia was allowed in the G8 for a while but was thrown out for some misdemeanour prior to invading Ukraine. My son spent some years in Australia and told me of the 35 million so I never checked. Tell me, what does Russia export, apart from oil and gas and misinformation.
Thanks Robert for this excellent article. I’d love to know who the other members of the dinner discussion were. I can suspect who a few were. It’s too bad Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator” isn’t involved in the war negotiations.
Interesting dinner conversation! My take on reading all the press reports I can on the subject make me believe that the illegal coup in Kiev was a US planned and financed provocation against Russia. One of its goals was to throw Russia out of Crimea, where it had its only military base on the Black Sea. Putin is no slouch and knew that would be an existential security breach that would seriously weaken Russia's ability to protect itself from NATO and the US. Don't forget that this provocation occured after many years of Russia expecting to become a member of the EU and even NATO, but was instead ignored and basically blackballed. Russia was no longer Communist, no longer a belligerant colossus astride the globe, it was instead a newly changed nation advancing toward democracy and requiring help to do so, had a capitalist ecomomy, although ravaged by venal western interests and espoused a national Christian religion. Its only flaw was its ability to match the US in nuclear weapons and its refusal to bow to the imperial throne in Washington. That is why we have the mess in Ukraine today and the very real possibility of nuclear destruction heading our way. Make of that what you will!
The author completely glosses over the fact that Zelensky and his crew had already killed over 10,000 civilians before Putin decided to intervene.
Lord???????
For me, the world changed when Xi and Putin, with determined demeanors, shook hands in early 2022 just before the SMO. That photo was for me the most significant geopolitical event I have seen, greater than the dissolution of the USSR. They were determined to overturn the West's geopolitical hegemony of 500 years, so much so that they took this great risk of initiating a kinetic war against the West.
This is an ideological struggle, not purely geopolitical. The West cannot accept that it cannot lead the world, that it is not necessarily the most capable and civilized. It has a radical belief in its ideology. Russia and China also have a strong ideological belief in basically a multipolar civilizational world which enables them to function independently without being de facto colonies of Western ideology and power.
So I think the scope of your debate, such as it focused on law and geopolitics, simply avoided the elephant in the room, and so it's lessons are also limited in scope.
I agree, I deliberately limited the discussion to the proximate causes of the Ukraine conflict. But any deeper dig would reveal that the things you talk about in your comment.
Robert Skidelsky
I imagine that there was a certain logic to the thinking within all the formerly neutral states of Eastern Europe and the Baltic as NATO crept Eastwards. "NATO intends to eventually fight Russia. If we don't join, our entire country will become the battlefield. If we do, the battlefield will likely be to the East of our country."
For me, the economic advantage to the West of creating a new client-state by regime-change in Russia (continuation of the Yeltsin project) far outweighs the likelihood of a fools errand to re-establish a Russian Western Empire populated by hostile non-Russians, as a cassus-belli.
I think you're right: expansion is the political west' lifeblood. It can't accept non-western ways of life.
Thank you.
I would add that when Russia complained about the failed US color revolution in Belarus on the basis of the Budapest Memorandum, the official US response was that the Memorandum was not binding. (I don't recall more than that, but I can chase it up if asked - still assembling info on a question asked re your previous post). The data scientist Peter Turchin also has an amusing case study comparative analysis of post-1991 Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus in his 2022(?) book "End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path to Political Disintegration". Belarus comes top, followed by Russia.
For what it's worth, iirc Scott Horton's book "Provoked" has circa 7,000 citations / footnotes logging Western provocations of Russia.
Finally, it's worth noting that the war began in 2014 and that the war is for keeps. We need to be careful. Ukraine at least twice now (2014 and 2024) has attempted to capture Russian nuclear weapons depots (interestingly, the first time was brilliantly successful, commanded by a US-trained cavalry officer, but US intelligence was bad).
The last time we had a similar crisis, *both* sides lost control over not only their nuclear forces but also their nuclear launch authorizations (down to individual US air force pilots and Russian submarine XOs). We're lucky the SMO gets around Russian nuclear doctrine by being a peacetime operation (level 2 of the 5 levels of war status) so nuclear launch authorization doesn't go below General Gerasimov. If you're in a war and trained to use nukes to blow away a mere platoon, as they are, then any O4 / major will be able to authorize a nuke. Evidence for these propositions: look at the battlefield nuclear warfighting part of the 2024 update of US Army TRADOC ATP 7-100.1 https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN40737-ATP_7-100.1-001-WEB-4.pdf; and the late Daniel Ellsberg's last book "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner"
At the very beginning of the war in Ukraine, while expressing opinions was still inconsequential, Barnie Sanders innocently asked: What would we (the US) do if Mexico plans to enter a military alliance with Russia or China?
As someone noted earlier, it is only appropriate that in the expression "rules-based international order", the word rules is in plural as there are different rules for different countries.
Agree.
Thank you for fairly presenting both sides of both arguments in a nearly entertaining context, an effort I have not seen anyone else attempt. I have only one quibble and one complaint. The quibble: it's not "a bit long" given the topic and indeed is a masterful combination of broad coverage presented succinctly. No apologies needed.
My complaint regards Putin's defense. Prosecution and defense both summarize the international history well. The prosecution asserts, "The Maidan uprising was a popular pro-European revolt against a corrupt oligarchic regime." The defense rebuts it as "a nationalist coup against a democratically elected president, promoted, orchestrated, and financed by the CIA, which, aimed, among other things, to ‘de-Russify’ Ukraine by forbidding the use of Russian as a state language." The prosecution follows up, "... Putin['s complaint does not] warrant breaching Article 51 of the UN Charter. ... Russia was never in danger ..., nor were the Russian minorities on Ukraine threatened with genocide. And there is little to be said for the way the Russians have actually conducted their ‘special operation’."
The defense pulls its punch by omitting factual evidence that -- even if Russian minorities were not threatened with genocide as the prosecution might choose to define it -- the post-Maidan Ukrainian state denied "universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion" as required by Article 55, item c of the United Nations charter.
The defense should note these denials range from cultural (banning or limiting Russian language use in schools, public offices, and mass media), through religious (suppressing the Russian Orthodox Church), to existential (murders of labor union protestors in Odessa and eight years of shelling civilian areas of Donbas). The US and NATO used exactly this argument to justify their "breaching Article 51" in Kosovo in 1998-99. As for Russia's "special operation," simply comparing Ukrainian civilian casualty figures reported in the WESTERN media with those of any US intervention in the last several decades as well as Israel in Gaza shows the Russians have chosen tactics that substantially limit civilian casualties by comparison.
Adam Smith might not count me an "impartial observer," but I find these omitted defenses to be convincing.
Kudos for a thought-provoking piece that encourages us to conduct our ongoing discussions of this controversy in a more civilized manner.
Thank you. Of course, I could have said much more about Ukraine's own contribution to the conflict -especially the provocations you mentioned. But I tried to keep my essay focussed on the two poles: there should have been three, but that made it messy!
Ukraine is to Russia what Egypt was to Rome, a breadbasket. The Russian economy with 140 million population has the same GDP as Australia with 35 million population. Most of the Russian GDP is from Oil and Gas extraction. What is the rest of the population doing? It is shameful that, after 3.5 years of war the Europeans have made so little contribution to the Ukrainian war effort. The war against Russia offers the West the opportunity to test all its military equipment and weaponry, yet we hear none of this. Is it all like the troop transport vehicle being developed for the British Army, some eight years behind schedule and allowing modifications to every aspect of its use? Surprise me. We learn today that some 30 senior Tories have taken up senior positions in Defence Companies, some of them American. If the Russians manage to defeat Ukraine there will be hell to pay in Western Capitals.
I think the West were terrified by risk of escalation.
I regret it is one of the problems with older people, especially Joe Biden. Putin is a millenianist who wants to live for a thousand years. We have little to fear from him using nuclear weapons.
I would have appreciated some figures. Japan, Canada and Germany are second, third and fourth in GDP behind the US. Russia was allowed in the G8 for a while but was thrown out for some misdemeanour prior to invading Ukraine. My son spent some years in Australia and told me of the 35 million so I never checked. Tell me, what does Russia export, apart from oil and gas and misinformation.