I don’t pretend to understand American empire or why the U.S. does anything at all. I don’t have any special knowledge. But for some reason, I’ve never believed the U.S. version of what’s happening in Ukraine.
I look at this stuff now and think, Well, there may be activity on Russia’s borders or inside Ukraine, but maybe not. Those two soldiers may be Russian and may be on active duty, but I cannot draw any conclusion.
I do not appreciate having to think this way—not as a reader and not as a former newsman. I do not like reading Times editorials, such as Tuesday’s, which institutionalizes “Putin’s war” and other such tropes, and having to say, Our most powerful newspaper is into the created reality game.
A few things can be made clear in all this. Straight off the top it is almost certain, despite a logical wariness of presented evidence, that Russia has personnel and weapons deployed along its border and in Ukraine.
I greatly hope so, and whether they are on duty or otherwise interests me not at all.
First of all, it is a highly restrained approach to a geopolitical circumstance that Moscow recognizes as dangerous, Washington does not seem to and Kiev emphatically does not. In reversed circumstances, a troubled nation would have long back turned into an open conflict between two nuclear powers. Fig leafs have their place.
I have written before on the question of spheres of influence: They are to be observed if not honored. Stephen Cohen, the Russianist scholar, prefers “spheres of security,” and the phrase makes the point plainly. Russia cannot be expected to abandon its interests as Cohen defines them, and considering what is at issue for Moscow, the response is intelligently measured.
Equally, Moscow appears to recognize that without any equilibrium between the Russian-tilted east and the Western-tilted west, Ukraine will be a bloodbath. Irresponsible as it has proven, and with little or no control over armed extreme rightist factions, Kiev cannot be allowed even an attempt to resolve this crisis militarily.
One has to consider how these things are conventionally done. I had a cousin who piloted helicopters in Vietnam long ago. When we spread the conflict to Laos and Cambodia he flew in blue jeans, a T-shirt, sneakers and without dog tags. “If you go down, we don’t know you,” was the O.D.
A directly germane case is Angola in the mid-1970s. When the Portuguese were forced to flee the old colony, the CIA began supplying right-wing opportunists in the north and south with weapons, money, and agency personnel. Only in response did Cuba send troops that quickly proved decisive. I remember well all the howls of “aggression”—all of them hypocritical rubbish: American efforts to subvert the movement that still governs Angola peaceably continued for a dozen more years.
The Times editorial just noted is headlined, “Vladimir Putin Hides the Truth.” This is upside-down-ism at its very worst.
It is not easy to put accounts of the Ukraine crisis side by side to compare them. Think of two bottles of unlabeled wine in a blind taste test. Now read on.
I do not see how there can be any question that Moscow’s take on Ukraine and the larger East-West confrontation is the more coherent. Read or listen to Putin’s speeches, notably that delivered at the Valdai Discussion Club, a Davos variant, in Sochi last October. It is historically informed, with a grasp of interests (common and opposing), the nature of the 21st century environment and how best outcomes are to be achieved in it.
Altogether, Moscow offers a vastly more sophisticated, coherent accounting of the Ukraine crisis than any American official has or ever will. This is for one simple reason: Neither Putin nor Lavrov bears the burden American officials do of having to sell people mythical renderings of how the world works or their place in it.
Continue reading “The great game” →
