Golden Bridges

~ a geopolitical argument, written on July 20, 2022 ~

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Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across. (Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 5th C. BC)

Past & Present

It’s July 20, 2022, and the war in Ukraine seems as if it were only starting. Several weeks ago the Americans celebrated their 1776 revolution against colonialism, and a week ago the French celebrated their 1789 revolution against the monarchy. From 1789 to 1989, democracy went from votes for a privileged few to votes for everybody. European empires went from controlling the world to releasing this control, and letting nations decide their own fates. In 1989 the Berlin Wall finally came down and the Soviet Union dissolved within a few years. But a KGB lieutenant colonel didn’t like it, so he re-created a version of the Soviet Union. Once again, Russian citizens are afraid to speak freely and nations are forced back into the arms of Mother Russia. Once again, we fight for the ideals of national freedom and individual liberty. 

In this essay I’ll argue that Russia is to blame for the present crisis, yet we need to acknowledge that our past actions hamper us in the present. Sergey Lavrov recently admitted that Russia isn’t squeaky clean, and we ought to do the same. For our goal isn’t only to protect Ukraine; we must also fight for a global understanding about the sanctity of the nation state. We need to bolster, with the considerable media and political power we possess, the general international understanding of territorial integrity, so that no one sees the value of following in Putin’s footsteps. This means creating a universal standard that must apply to even our closest friends, by which I mean the US. The stakes are very high here, since they involve the fate of nations and may apply to tricky and seemingly intractable situations like those in Kashmir and Taiwan. To create this universal standard, we need to be ruthlessly honest, to address past infractions, and to commit ourselves to condemnation of any future infraction. 

In struggling against Putin’s Russia, we must also be careful not to trap our opponent in a corner, so that his only option is to keep fighting. On the surface it seems that Russia isn’t trapped, but rather expanding into Ukraine. Yet Russia is walling itself in politically and economically from the rest of Europe and from a large chunk of the world. It’s also trapped in its own political immorality, in a colonial mindset which makes it unwilling to distinguish between power and legitimate control. If Russia continues to berate the West for past colonialism and for recent neocolonialism, and yet it embarks on a new version of the old colonialism, even countries that buy Russian oil and weapons will start asking themselves disturbing questions. Could we be next? If no one respects sovereignty, how safe can we be? 

It’s not in the interest of any country to support a nation which feels free to attack other nations. 

Putin is also violating the implicit international agreement not to use nuclear weapons. This is why the situation is so dangerous and why we need to be very careful about the way we contextualize this war. We need to be forthright about past Western violations of sovereignty (during the colonial period and the wars in Vietnam and Iraq) and we need to underscore a commitment to condemn any such violation in the future, even if the offenders are our friends. 

My final point is about sanctions. While there’s a certain amount of hypocrisy in the present application of sanctions, and while sanctions may or may not be an effective tool, the severity of sanctions is justified in this case because of the following extraordinary conditions: 1) Russia invaded Ukraine in order to control it on a permanent basis, despite its claims about a special military operation which only aims to denazify the country, 2) Russia invaded a large nation that is literally right between the West and Russia, a nation that clearly wants deep political, economic, and cultural integration with Western Europe, 3) Russia has repeatedly threatened the use of nuclear weapons, and 4) Russia has put the West in a situation where it can’t use anything near its full military power, but must resort to other means. Sanctions may not work (especially if they alienate the Russian people themselves, and the rulers remain largely unscathed), yet they are a better option than cruise missiles launched from American submarines. 

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The Question of Blame

The question Who’s to blame for the Ukraine crisis? is complicated, and the answer will be far more displeasing to the Russians than to the Americans. Still, the answer is key to getting out of this mess, which threatens the survival of free societies and the human race.  

The question Who’s to blame? starts off easy to answer, yet gets murky on closer inspection. Putin is clearly wrong to invade Ukraine. He’s also wrong about the West causing this war. And he’s a thousand times wrong to threaten nuclear war. His argument that the West divided Ukraine from Russia is ill-founded: this division was accomplished by centuries of history and more recently by Putin himself — by his brutality in Chechnya, his invasions of Crimea and Donbas, his pipeline threats, his muzzling (and jailing) of the Press, his projected fantasies of a Nazi Ukraine, and his role in turning Russia into an authoritarian state. 

While it’s true that he and other Russians may feel betrayed, hemmed in, and outmanoeuvred by NATO, Russia’s claim to an implicit control over Eastern Europe is an affront to history. It’s not much better than if England were to claim control over Scotland or India — both nations that have long been free to decide their own fates. Perhaps Putin hasn’t got the bulletin: colonialism is dead. Neocolonialism may be alive and well — unfortunately and perhaps inevitably — but the type of control where one nation completely takes over the geography, economics, and politics of another nation is dead. Or it should be, at any rate. National borders are, by and large, one of the handful of principles that make international peace possible. But Putin doesn’t seem to understand this. Instead, he moons over the good old days of the Soviet Union — a phrase which requires italics, unless you admire Stalin, the Holodomor famine of 1932-3, ruthless collectivism, sham democracy, and the invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Putin’s claim to Eastern Europe is especially insulting to nations that suffered 40-odd years of Soviet control.

Yet right and wrong isn’t a black and white situation. It’s understandable that many in the West see Putin’s aggression as both beyond the pale and uniquely horrible. Yet much of the world — including much of the capitalist West — was also horrified by the American wars against Vietnam and Iraq. Blaming Putin shouldn’t blind us to two facts: 1. the US waged unjust, unpopular, brutal wars in the last 50 years against Vietnam and Iraq; 2. Europe, Canada, and other nations didn’t impose sanctions against the U.S. because of their actions in these wars.

In the West we don’t dwell on these two points, largely because the Americans don’t want to hear about them, because the West is preoccupied with finding a response that doesn’t involve direct war with Russia, and because Putin’s actions in Ukraine overpower our memories of Hanoi and Baghdad. Yet the Russian people, and many other peoples in the world, are well aware of these two points. If we aren’t honest about them, how can we be seen as fair-minded?

This isn’t left-wing rhetoric: it’s political history. The West bullied nations for hundreds of years. The Americans invaded Vietnam and Iraq on faulty pretexts, and they killed a great number of innocent civilians. The Vietnamese put the death toll at around three million.

Yet where was the campaign to boycott American goods? Where were the sanctions? Admitting these facts doesn’t make the West more guilty than it is; it just makes it more realistic. If we promote the principles of liberal democracy and territorial sovereignty, we ought to ensure they’re applied equally.

Admitting this also leaves us free to make a distinction between the level of injury in a place like Vietnam — where the French colonial empire and the American neocolonial empire inflicted a high death toll on the Vietnamese — and the present actions of Russia, which potentially inflict a high death toll and also threaten to inflict the ultimate damage on the entire planet: nuclear winter. I return to three reasons why the present situation is exceptional: 1) Russia invaded Ukraine in order to control it on a permanent basis, 2) Russia invaded a nation between the West and Russia, and 3) Russia has repeatedly threatened the use of nuclear weapons. None of these conditions applied in Vietnam or Iraq. This of course doesn’t exonerate the Americans, but it does justify the severity of the Western response and the present sanctions.

If we are to pursue this argument in an international context, we need to take into account the experience of other nations. From my Canadian democratic liberal-capitalist perspective, I could argue that the Americans were fighting against communism in Vietnam and against dictatorship in Iraq, and that Russia on the other hand is fighting against democracy in Ukraine. Yet this argument is less convincing to those brought up in other systems — where democracy may seem less important than poverty, gangs, religion, etc. — and to those who’ve been at the other end of American military power (Cubans, Vietnamese, Chileans, Iranians, Iraqis, etc.). If anyone wonders why many nations aren’t gung-ho about sanctions and the condemnation of Russia, it’s very likely because they get something out of their relation with Russia — most obviously, energy and weapons— and therefore they’re more willing to see the sanctions in terms of hypocrisy. Yet if we committed to applying sanctions universally (if, for instance the U.S. again uses flimsy pretexts to justify the invasion of a country that isn’t a threat to it), then other countries might be more likely to strike a balance between keeping ties with Russia on one hand and criticizing Putin’s war on the other.

Four things follow from being candid about Vietnam, Iraq, and sanctions, and from not assuming that the West is fundamentally superior when it comes to waging war. First, we’re honest with ourselves. Second, we’re more open to understanding the mistakes of the Russians. Third, it allows us to distinguish between the past American neocolonial non-nuclear invasions of Vietnam and Iraq on one hand, and the present Russian colonial and potentially nuclear invasion on the other. Fourth, our candour may also suggest to the Russians that their error in supporting Putin is understandable. Wrong, but understandable. And in this may lie a path to mutual understanding. It may also provide a bridge the Russians might be tempted to cross.

If, on the other hand, we amplify the argument that Russia is unique in its infamy — arguing that we must destroy the Russian economy and degrade its military — we’ll increase the chances that the Russians will harden in their position, and that they may eventually resort to nuclear weapons. Any people who feel they’re not being listened to, who feel they’re being blamed unfairly, who feel that their standard of life is being deliberately downgraded, and who feel they’re being threatened militarily, will react with force. The greater the threat, the greater the force. And no force is greater than a nuclear arsenal.

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Dwelling on the Past

Because some people in the West will object to me bringing up Vietnam and Iraq, I want to explain that I do so not to heap blame on the U.S. Rather, I’m trying to argue for a fair application of standards when it comes to punishing those who violate national sovereignty. These standards are particularly important for nuclear superpowers, because the potential damage of the war they wage is not just greater, but immeasurably greater. Behind everything I argue lies the terrible fact that war waged by a nuclear superpower is fundamentally different from any other type of war. Like long-term environmental disaster, nuclear winter is an existential threat. It’s also a clear and present danger.

In Vietnam, Iraq, and Ukraine, the superpowers strongly objected to the direction a nation was taking. They could have chosen among any number of authoritarian or democratic nations they didn’t agree with, yet they decided to wage war on smaller nations that specifically went against their political and cultural sensibilities, their economic interests, and their geopolitical aims. The biggest problem here isn’t exactly the reason a less powerful nation was attacked. Rather, it’s that a nation of overwhelming power and a huge nuclear arsenal waged war on a sovereign nation that posed no direct threat to it. Americans talk about communism in Vietnam and dictatorship in Iraq, and Russians talk about Nazis and NATO in Ukraine, yet none of these reasons (assuming for the sake of argument that they’re true) justify a full-scale attack on a sovereign state that poses no direct threat.

Being a liberal democrat, I see the argument against dictatorship as far more weighty than the argument against NATO conspiracy, yet American actions in Vietnam and Iraq, combined with their present Donald J. shift away from liberal democracy, do little to strengthen their case. Still, in the balance of the West versus Russia, the actions of Putin are more egregious, for at least four reasons. To begin with, Russia’s military actions in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Ukraine aren’t that different from American military actions in Vietnam and Iraq. Second, Russian authoritarianism is a present fact, whereas Nixon is in the past and Trump and his undemocratic politics aren’t the norm in Europe or the U.S (although the struggle for democracy is still going on in the US). Third, while Western Europe and the U.S. have moved resolutely away from colonialism in India, the Philippines, etc., Russia has moved back toward it in Eastern Europe. And fourth, while neither the West nor the U.S. has threatened to use nuclear weapons, Putin consistently hints that he is prepared to use them. Even if he’s bluffing, we still need to create an international environment where the overwhelming majority of nations condemn — in the strongest possible terms — this type of nuclear poker. And again, non-Western nations are only likely to do this if we uniformly condemn any violation of national sovereignty — including that of the US.

The problem as I see it isn’t one of neocolonial influence, whether this be on political structure, media, economy, or military arsenal. These can be dangerous, especially on less powerful, wealthy or stable nations, yet individual acts of neocolonialism still aren’t nearly as dangerous as the problem of a superpower waging a full-scale colonial attack on a sovereign nation that poses no threat to it. The colonial attack is bad enough, but the whole situation is magnified a hundred-fold by the fact that the attack is launched by a nuclear superpower. Superpowers must be held to the highest standard when it comes to attacking sovereign nations. This is because unleashing the dogs of war isn’t a regional thing. It entails the possible destruction of humanity. Nations like Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela and Colombia (thinking just about Latin America) may wince at the power exercised over them by the US, yet their situation would be a thousand times worse if nuclear winter poisons the skies and oceans. Even if that couldn’t happen, they still have an overwhelming reason to condemn Russia: what if the US decided to forego boycotts and ‘economic persuasion’ and instead put boots on the ground like Russia is doing in Ukraine?

As an English teacher in Canada I’m well-versed in the Chomsky-style attack on American foreign policy. I’ve read and listened to his critiques of all the faults of America. The problem is that he writes all about all the faults all the time, and yet we live in a mixed world, and it’s the mixture of things that we need to evaluate in the end. At which point one can condemn the violence and the neocolonial control, yet commend the fight for democracy and the fight against colonial control. I’m tempted to respond to Chomsky with an elaboration of Churchill’s famous comment: liberal democracy, with all its greed, manipulation, inequality, and hypocrisy, is the worst possible system in the world — except for all the others. Europe and North America clearly control an unfair portion of the world’s wealth and economic power, and they sometimes slip up and create hell for others, most obviously in Southeast Asia and Iraq. Yet they are committed to checking these abuses and to accepting the territorial sovereignty of nations. In this lies the only real chance for world peace. While many are appalled at the recent slide in US politics, the fact is that half the nation is willing and able to fight back. It’s far too soon to write off the US as an anti-democratic or anocratic state.

Some might argue that with great power comes great violence. The same people might ask, What is a superpower supposed to do with states that violate their core principles? What might America have done instead of dropping bombs and lethal chemicals on Vietnam? And what might it have done instead of ripping apart the infrastructure of Iraq? What might Russia have done in Chechnya instead of razing it to the ground? And what might it have done instead of ‘Groznifying’ Donbas and Mariupol? The answer to all these questions is the same: Anything, except use bombs to convince a people to change. Anything but move in with tanks and take from them the very land on which they live.

Shell them with arguments and bomb them with proof. Use economic bullet points instead of hollow-point bullets. Strafe them with sanctions, bombard them with boycotts, barrage them with media. Do anything but rip apart their cities and bodies with bombs. For the world simply isn’t going to survive if superpowers don’t let smaller nations keep their borders and run their own governments, however badly they think they run them. Interventionism of superpowers is a double-edged sword that will cut one side just as well as the other, especially once the threat of nuclear war has been made. The West and Russia should make their best arguments — for liberal democracy or for pan-Slavic unity — and then lead by peaceful example.

In the matter of right and wrong, Putin is clearly in the wrong. His clearly-implied threats of nuclear war are so irresponsible that there are few words strong enough to condemn them. Yet Putin’s culpability isn’t as important as stopping the war and getting back to some sort of global arrangement that ensures survival and encourages prosperity. And to do that, we need to be careful about how we contextualize the situation. If we do this by painting the West as perfect, and the Russians as our evil enemies, they are unlikely to change their ways.

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Sanctions

The West might, at least in part, remove this false sense of superiority by admitting to the Russians that we didn’t impose sanctions on the US when it waged brutal and unprovoked wars against Vietnam and Iraq. In a recent speech, George Bush himself made the parallel between the invasions of Iraq and Ukraine, albeit unintentionally:

The West might acknowledge that Russia in 2003 didn't issue threats about permanently degrading the American economy and military — perhaps because the Russians were at that time consolidating their brutal victory in Chechnya... But still, the Russians didn’t engage in the level of threat we see, for instance, in the February 28, 2022 BBC article, Why the World is Waging Economic War on Russia, where the English Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said that we are “doing all we can to degrade the Russian economy.” I'm not saying that we must back down on sanctions. Personally, I’d scrap many of them, since they’re hurting Europe and since they’ll probably hurt the Russian people more than they’ll hurt oligarchs and Putin (who are skilled in survival and keeping power). In addition, the sanctions run the risk of turning the Russian people themselves against the West.

If, however, we do decide to continue with the sanctions, we should own up to the fact that they’re at least partly hypocritical, and we should articulate clearly and forcefully why the sanctions are justified in this particular case. We should also reassure other nations that the US, or any other state, however powerful it may be, no longer gets a free pass if they invade a country that poses no direct threat to it. Once we do this we can then make the argument that the present severe sanctions are merited because the nuclear genie that Russia has uncorked warrants 1) the most extreme non-military measure, and 2) the compliance of nations who are otherwise reluctant to oppose Russia. It’s in their interests to maintain a world order based on principle rather than force, especially the threat of nuclear force.

If the West doesn’t address the possibility of a double-standard, and if it doesn’t argue for the distinction between past American and present Russian violations of sovereignty, the rest of the world may conclude that we see the life and sovereign rights of a Vietnamese or Iraqi as less important than that of a Ukrainian. If, on the other hand, we admit to a degree of hypocrisy, and then make the argument for extreme sanctions, other countries may see that we’re at least thinking straight and trying to be fair. Who knows, in light of such an admission and such an argument, countries like India, Indonesia, and Brazil might be willing to put more pressure on Russia (China, with its designs on Taiwan, is another matter…). The Russian people might even be willing to admit their own mistakes, if only to themselves. They would then be less likely to support their army in Ukraine. Although this may not allow them to save face, it might help them to avoid feeling uniquely culpable.

In all of this, we have to remember two basic human facts:

1. People don't like to be blamed, whether it’s Americans for Vietnam and Iraq or Russians for Chechnya and Ukraine.

2. People resent being judged and punished when the same standards of judgment and punishment weren’t applied to others. In this case, the Russians resent being punished for lying and brutality when the Americans weren’t punished for lying about the Gulf of Tonkin and the WMDs and for the brutal bombings that followed. The West should remove the implications of superiority here, and admit to what the Russians already know: no one imposed sanctions on the US when it bombed Iraq. No one talked about crippling America or degrading its ability to wage war. Only at this point will Russian citizens — and those nominally aligned with Russia — be capable of really listening to the sanctions argument. Before they make a sacrifice, they need to know that it’s in their interest. They also need to know that those who are asking them to make the sacrifice aren’t going to commit or ignore any similar type of aggression in the future.

The West might also offer the prospect that the Russian invasion of Ukraine can in some distant future be forgiven — that is, if they turn back from war. It's unreasonable to ask Russians to be as brutally honest about their actions as Germans are now, eighty years after World War II. Yet if we admit to our part in the more recent history of war, we may help the Russians to visualize — if only in their quiet moments — a golden bridge, made of regret for the past and hope for the future.

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Collective Action

In the meantime (and it’s looking like it will be very mean for some time to come), we should back Ukraine with arms and we should remain open to dialogue, negotiation, and if possible, understanding. We should admit that while we were inconsistent about sanctions in the past, we’re at present dealing with an unprecedented nuclear confrontation. Nations must do everything they can to stop Russia not because of the fairness of sanctions or the virtues of liberal democracy. Rather, they should oppose Russia because of its violation of territorial sovereignty and for its continued threats about nuclear war. Both of these things — sovereignty and nuclear war — are not particular to the West, but apply to every country. (Even China, which seems intent on violating Taiwanese sovereignty, won’t be able to escape the effects of nuclear winter.) While we are of course free to make arguments in favour of liberal democracy and free trade, it’s more important that we argue for a universal system of national sovereignty, one which can be applied to every nation on Earth. Any nation that violates this system, no matter how powerful they are, should be subject to our collective censure and to our collective punishment.

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Coda

In 1919, at the end of the war to end all wars, and around the time Lenin was consolidating his power, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Whatever that may mean in terms of existentialism and culture, it also warns us that if we leave the Ukraine conflict to the arms dealers, to those whose blood is stirred by the glory of battle, and to those who can’t see past their political noses, it may end like in Yeats’ poem, where a “rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.” Those without conviction will let Russia do what it likes, as long as their comfortable lives aren’t disturbed. The worst will find ways to escalate the war, bathed in their hatred of Russians or Americans, thinking At last, to have this battle out! While Yeats’ vision is a poetic one, and while it gets at the two extremes of Modernist discontent, its political value lies in pointing to the ground between these extremes. In the simplest terms, the best must stand up to oppression without becoming the worst.

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