The Greek historian Thucydides argued that countries go to war for three reasons: honor, fear and interest. He put honor first, and yet that is probably the least appreciated aspect of foreign policy today. Historian Donald Kagan, in his essay “Honor, Interest, Nation-State,” recounts how since antiquity, nations have put honor ahead of interest. “For the last 2,500 years, at least, states have usually conducted their affairs and have often gone to war for reasons that would not pass the test of ‘vital national interests’ posed by modern students of politics.”
“On countless occasions,” he continues, “states have acted to defend or foster a collection of beliefs and feelings that ran counter to their practical interests and have placed their security at risk, persisting in their course even when the costs were high and the danger was evident.”
Americans instinctively understand this when our own honor is at stake. The rallying cry during the Barbary Wars, “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute,” has almost become part of the national creed. I am no fan of Karl Marx, but he was surely right when he observed that “shame is a kind of anger turned in on itself. And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring.”
Both the first and second world wars cannot be properly understood without taking the role national honor plays in foreign affairs. Similarly, Vladimir Putin’s constant testing of the West only makes sense when you take into account the despot’s core conviction that the fall of the Soviet Union was a blow to Russian prestige and honor.
Jonah Goldberg, “Humiliating Mexico Over Border Wall Would Be a Big Mistake”, TownHall.com, 2017-01-27.
December 30, 2018
QotD: The national honour
July 22, 2018
Trump and Putin … with all this smoke, there has to be a smoking gun, right?
Colby Cosh pours cold water on the still-smouldering hopes of the “smoking gun” enthusiasts:
If the president can be found guilty of “Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors” that is another thing, but that would require courtroom-worthy evidence of action, as opposed to indications of presidential doctrine or feeling or even strong hints of compromised personal interest. Trump did behave in Helsinki like someone who is beholden to Russia, or who is anxious for a rapprochement with Putin’s state. Yet he was, and this could not have come as a surprise, quick to try reversing himself later — emphasizing how tough he has been with Russia and how tough he is prepared to continue to be. Grrr!
Since I’m not on a diet of television news, I tend to interpret this as Trumpian “leadership” technique. They are the actions of someone who is convinced that anything can be accomplished by means of erratic emotional style and business-literature verbal tactics. These include cheap personal praise for negotiating opponents, which has become a perfectly foreseeable theme of Trump as a diplomat. (The tactical corollary is that very popular or highly esteemed people are especially vulnerable to outbursts of surprise criticism, and that has been a feature of Trump, too.)
It does not really cost the United States anything for Trump to praise Putin as skilled and strong (as a tyrant, he has been effective at maintaining domestic moral legitimacy, even if judged by the cost in shed blood) or to portray Kim Jong Un as a young man coping with terrible responsibilities. (Trump’s distaste for NATO is more dangerous as rhetoric, but did the other member nations forget for a while that political legitimacy within the United States is a prerequisite for the organization’s existence? If in the long run we devote a little more attention to the necessary housekeeping, Trump may have done the world a service.)
[…] The midterm congressional elections will be held with a long-forgotten fact re-emerging in the American popular consciousness: that much of the president’s power to set foreign policy and foul up trade is actually the property of Congress, and could be reclaimed after a century of careless delegation.
Perhaps some Americans are beginning to consider that it does not matter most whether you are with the good guys in the Trump/anti-Trump drama. Which is not to say you do not want to be one of the good guys. But the opportunity for American millennials, considered as a generation on the cusp of electoral dominance, is not just to kick Trump out, but to renovate the presidency so that the republic can survive having an unsuitable or even compromised person as president. Everybody got that? Are we good? Eyes on the ball, people.
July 18, 2018
A great World Cup?
At Spiked, Mick Hume looks back at what we were told to expect from the hosting nation of the 2018 World Cup:
FIFA 2018 World Cup opening ceremony
Via Wikimedia Commons
Everybody agrees that the 2018 World Cup has been a roaring success. Yet remember how recently we were being warned that it would be the equivalent of a humanitarian disaster?
Before a ball was kicked we were assured that English and other international fans would all be beaten up, if not eaten alive, by armies of ‘neo-Nazi’ Russian hooligans, and that President Vladimir Putin would cynically exploit the World Cup ‘like Hitler did the 1936 Olympics’, as a tool in his plot for global domination and world war.
British government ministers and officials boycotted the tournament after the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal (the expense-account restaurants of Moscow might have missed their presence, but it’s unlikely anybody else did). And England squad member Danny Rose reportedly told his family ‘don’t come to Russia’, because of ‘fears that they would be racially abused’.
Questions were asked about why there were relatively few England fans at the team’s opening games in Russia. In the face of such sustained scaremongering, it might rather seem a wonder that anyone braved the journey.
Yet once the actual football kicked off, what happened? None of the above. Instead the World Cup immediately became a glorious, thrilling spectacle, capturing the imagination of fans worldwide amid a rolling party atmosphere across Russia.
This follows the similar reality gaps between political scaremongering and sporting success around other recent World Cups and Olympic games, notably London 2012. It should surely be a reminder to us all to ignore the agenda-driving doom-mongers in future and remember that, in the end, the game’s the thing. There is no chance of keeping politics out of sport, but we might at least try to keep sport out of politics and reject attempts to use our great sporting occasions as political footballs. (Rider: the idea of staging the next World Cup in Qatar still seems bonkers, but…)
October 4, 2015
April 22, 2015
Denmark’s Bornholm Island draws Russian attention
At Strategy Page, Austin Bay talks about the unusual attention paid to a Danish island in the Baltic Sea by Russian military forces:
Denmark’s Bornholm Island apparently troubles Vladimir Putin’s 21st-century Kremlin war planners as much as it vexed their Cold War Soviet-era predecessors.
More on Bornholm’s specifics in a moment, but first let’s cover one more example of Putin Russia’s aggressive wrong doing. According to an open-source Danish security assessment, in mid-June 2014, three months after Putin’s Kremlin attacked and annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, Russian aircraft carrying live missiles bluffed an attack on Bornholm. Though the report doesn’t provide the exact date, the bomber “probe” occurred during the three-day period the island hosted a touchy-feely “peoples festival.” The festival’s 90,000 participants were unaware they were seeking peaceful solutions on a bulls-eye.
The Bornholm faux-attack reprised Soviet Cold War “tests” of Danish defenses and is but one of a score of serious Russian military probes since 2008 designed to rattle Northern Europe. These Kremlin air and naval probes, backed by harsh rhetoric, have led Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland to reassess their military defenses. “Nordic cooperation” with an emphasis on territorial defense was the first formulation. The Nordics, however, acknowledged ties to Baltic states (and NATO members) Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Since the Crimea invasion, Denmark and Norway (NATO members) want to reinvigorate NATO military capabilities. Continued Russian aggression in Ukraine has led a few habitually neutral Swedes to voice an interest in joining NATO.
Bornholm Island (via Google Maps)
Back to Bornholm: the island’s location and geology irritated Soviet-era Kremlin strategists. Located in the Baltic Sea east of peninsular Denmark, north of Poland’s coast and to the rear of what was East Germany, Bornholm gave the Free World outpost north of and behind Warsaw Pact lines.
Soviet communications security officers despised the place. Bornholm’s electronic intercept systems, quite literally, bugged them.
As for geology, unlike Jutland’s flat peninsula, Bornholm is rock. In the 1970s, while serving a U.S. Army tour in West Germany, I heard a senior officer describe Bornholm as “sort of a Gibraltar.” His exaggeration had a point. Dig tunnels and Bornholm became a hard target for Soviet conventional weapons.
March 26, 2015
Tsar Vladimir is merely following the pattern of Philip of Macedon and Napoleon
When he’s not droning on about domestic politics, Victor Davis Hanson has interesting historical patterns to point out:
Nothing that Vladimir Putin has done in gobbling up territories of the former Soviet Union is new. In fact, he simply apes every tyrant’s time-honored four-step plan of aggression.
From Philip of Macedon to Napoleon, aggressors did not necessarily have a grand timetable for creating an empire. Instead, they went at it ad hoc. They took as much as they could at any given time; then backed away for a bit, if they sensed strong opposition was building — only to go back on the offensive when vigilance waned.
Hitler did not realistically believe in 1936 that he would within five years create an empire from the Atlantic to the Volga. Instead, he started out by moving incrementally — in the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia — testing where he might grab land without a war, always both surprised at the ease of his success and full of contempt for the appeasers who had so empowered him.
So too Putin. Once the Obama administration had reset the mild punishments of the Bush administration for carving out parts of Ossetia, Putin went back on the move. Obama’s reset was a green light for Putin. Who in the real world of serious diplomacy shows up in Geneva with a red plastic toy reset button, complete with a mistranslated Russian label? When Putin soon sized up the Obama administration’s appeasement around the globe — from fake red lines for Syria, to a scramble out of Iraq, to chaos in Libya — he moved into Crimea. And then he waited.
Western sermons followed; outrage grew. Then the Western hysterics predictably passed, as popular attention went back to the Kardashians and Miley Cyrus’s metamorphosis from Disney girl to vamp. After a bit of digestion, Putin was ready for his next Anschluss. He repeated the formula in Ukraine: a persecuted Russian-speaking minority, an anti-Russian illiberal government, civil unrest, denial of a just and much-needed new plebiscite, a need for paramilitaries to help out their brethren, a Russian army standing nearby just in case, a few bombers buzzing the West, and magnanimous promises to leave crumbs for the victims.
February 6, 2015
“Green men” finally triumph over the “Cyborgs”
Unfortunately, the “green men” are almost certainly Russian special forces troops, while the “cyborgs” were a rag-tag bunch of Ukrainian defenders of what remained of Donetsk’s modern airport terminal:
Late last week pro-Kremlin separatist militias — aided and very likely led by “green men” — defeated the last band of Ukrainian “Cyborgs” defending Donetsk’s airport. Two years ago the airport was touted as one of Eastern Europe’s most modern air hubs. Today it is, like many neighborhoods in the Donetsk region and villages along the Russia-Ukraine border, a miserable ruin.
For Ukrainians, Donetsk’s airport had become a national symbol. Media compared its stubborn Ukrainian defense to the legendary World War II Battle of Stalingrad, which pitted Red Army defenders against invading Nazis. In Ukraine’s narrative, the Ukrainians were defending Soviet forces, the Kremlin’s “green men” and their proxy militias the invaders.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, is an adept propagandist. In Putin’s insistent rendition, the Kremlin’s militias are Stalingrad’s glorious Russian soldiers reborn. Ukrainian defenders he scorns as “fascists.”
[…]
“The green men”: They wear green uniforms, without insignia, and masks. They pack sophisticated weaponry and gear. I associate their media nickname with, obviously, alien invaders, and invaders they are. They led the Russian invasion of Crimea; they appear, furtively, in Eastern Ukraine. They are Russian Army special operations troops. They advise the separatists. They seize key terrain. Credible sources have them participating in tactical combat.
The 1994 Budapest Accord leaves no doubt they are invaders. Putin wants the 1994 Budapest Accord to disappear down the global memory hole. Ukraine signed the Accord and gave up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for territorial security assurances by Russia. The U.S. (Clinton Administration) and Great Britain guaranteed the deal. If the U.S. had not guaranteed the Accord, I doubt Kiev would have signed it. In late February 2014 Putin shredded the Accord and invaded Crimea. Denuclearized, Ukraine’s resistance was futile.
But here’s the mistake Washington and London would like you to ignore: The U.S. (Obama administration) and Great Britain failed to support Ukraine.
January 26, 2015
Tsar Vladimir I is making “dangerous history”
Austin Bay looks at the risky but rewarding path of aggression and propaganda undertaken by Vladimir Putin:
Russian president Vladimir Putin made dangerous history in 2014. His invasion of Crimea and subsequent annexation of the peninsula shredded the diplomatic agreements stabilizing post-Cold War Eastern Europe.
Then Putin ignited a low-level war in Eastern Ukraine. Despite a September 2014 ceasefire agreement, Putin’s overt covert war-making continues in Eastern Ukraine. The Kremlin has concluded that Western leaders, European and American, are weak and indecisive.
Putin, unfortunately, knows how to use specific tactics in operations designed to achieve his strategic goals.
Military analysts typically recognize three levels of conflict: the tactical, the operational and the strategic. The categories are general, and distinctions often arguable. Firing an infantry weapon, however, is a basic tactical action. Assassinating Austrian royalty with a revolver is a tactical action, but one that in 1914 had strategic effect (global war). U. S. Grant’s Vicksburg campaign (1862-63) consisted of several Union military operations around Vicksburg (many unsuccessful). The campaign’s concluding operation, besieging Vicksburg, was an operational victory that gave the Union a strategic military and economic advantage: control of the Mississippi.
Putin’s Kremlin uses propaganda operations to blur its responsibility for tactical attacks in Ukraine. International propaganda frustrates Western media scrutiny of Russia’s calculated tactical combat action. Local propaganda targets Eastern Ukraine. Earlier this month, Ukrainian journalist Roman Cheremsky told Radio Free Europe that despite suffering criminal bullying by pro-Russian fighters, Kremlin “disinformation” is convincing Eastern Ukraine’s Russian speakers that Ukrainian forces are “bloodthirsty thugs.”
[…]
Oil’s price plunge, however, has also slammed Putin, threatening the genius with political and economic problems that, if prices remain low, could erode his personal political power. Energy revenue declines do far more damage to Putin than the economic sanctions Western governments have imposed.
So what’s a brilliant, innovative, thoroughly unscrupulous and utterly amoral strategist to do?
According to the AP, this week (Jan. 20), Iran and Russia signed “an agreement to expand military cooperation.” Iran and Russia are old antagonists, but given current circumstances vis a vis the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, Tehran and Moscow may be following an old Machiavellian adage: “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The deal includes counter-terror cooperation, military training and “enabling each country’s navy to use the other’s ports more frequently.”
For years Iran has sought Russian air defense weapons, presumably to thwart a U.S. strike on its nuclear facilities. However, the agreement’s naval port clause attracts my interest. About a third of the globe’s exported oil moves on tankers through the Persian Gulf’s Indian Ocean outlet, the Strait of Hormuz. To spike oil prices, Iran often threatens to close Hormuz. If Iran actually tried to shut the Strait, Western nations have assured Gulf Arab oil producers that they will respond militarily.
December 18, 2014
The Tsar’s new clothes
At Samizdata, Johnathan Pearce suspects that the folks at NATO headquarters are not getting as much sleep these days as they used to:
… it appears that the image of Putin as this ruthless, chess-playing genius wrongfooting silly old Cameron, Merkel, and the chap with the funny moonface from France is not quite standing up to scrutiny. Here’s a report by Bloomberg:
“The foundations on which Vladimir Putin built his 15 years in charge of Russia are giving way. The meltdown of the ruble, which has plunged 18 percent against the dollar in the last two days alone, is endangering the mantra of stability around which Putin has based his rule. While his approval rating is near an all-time high on the back of his stance over Ukraine, the currency crisis risks eroding it and undermining his authority, Moscow-based analysts said.
In a surprise move today, the Russian central bank raised interest rates by the most in 16 years, taking its benchmark to 17 percent. That failed to halt the rout in the ruble, which has plummeted to about 70 rubles a dollar from 34 as oil prices dived by almost half to below $60 a barrel. Russia relies on the energy industry for as much as a quarter of economic output, Moody’s Investors Service said in a Dec. 9 report.
Now might also be a good time to remind ourselves of the “curse of natural resources”.
It would be worth wondering what are the odds that Putin can last a lot longer in power. That said, a sobering thought is that when regimes are in deep trouble, they can do desperate, crazy things, as Argentina did in 1982 by invading the Falklands. If I were a planner for NATO right now, I’d be having a nervous Christmas and New Year ahead of me.
September 13, 2014
Ukraine’s PM – “We are still in a stage of war and the key aggressor is the Russian Federation”
In the Guardian, Martin Williams reports on the situation in eastern Ukraine:
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, wants to destroy Ukraine as an independent country and resurrect the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian prime minister Arseny Yatseniuk has said.
Yatseniuk told a conference of European politicians his country was “in a stage of war” with Russia, as renewed clashes broke out between the Ukrainian army and pro-Russian rebels in the east and Moscow sent a second convoy of trucks into Ukraine without Kiev’s consent.
Continuous rocketfire could be heard overnight in the eastern city of Donetsk. The city council said shells had hit residential buildings near the airport, although no casualties were reported.
Ukraine’s military said it had successfully repelled a rebel attack on the government-held Donetsk airport. But a column of three Russian multiple rocket launchers was seen moving freely through the rebel-held city on Saturday morning.
Speaking at a conference in Kiev attended by European and Ukrainian politicians and business leaders, Yatseniuk praised the economic sanctions imposed on Moscow. He said: “We are still in a stage of war and the key aggressor is the Russian Federation … Putin wants another frozen conflict [in eastern Ukraine].
“His aim is not just to take Donetsk and Lugansk. His goal is to take the entire Ukraine … Russia is a threat to the global order and to the security of Europe.”
September 9, 2014
The Russian-Ukrainian War
Paul Goble summarizes Konstantin Gaaze’s ten questions and answers about the war between Russia and Ukraine:
Gaaze’s first question is “Why did we (they) act as we (they) did with them (us)?” His answer: “President Putin considers that the Ukrainian state exists only because he agrees to its existence.” Consequently, “Moscow has acted from the false hypothesis that ‘Ukraine is not a state,’” something for which several thousand people have already paid with their lives.
But Kiev, the Moscow writer says, has also operated from a false hypothesis.” Ukrainian leaders believed that “Russia will not provide essential assistance to the local uprising in the east of Ukraine because it is intimidated by Western sanctions.” But Moscow isn’t, and it has intervened. Consequently, Ukraine has had to fight, and many have suffered as well.
His second question is “What has been obtained and how did the war end?” In Gaaze’s view, “the east of Ukraine belongs to people whose names we in fact do not know. Kiev has lost part of its territory but forever have been marginalized the future of the non-existence Novorossiya.”
“It will never become part of Russia,” Gaaze says, but “in the near term, it will not be part of Ukraine either. Millions of people thus are condemned to live in an enormous Transdniestria, to live between two armies, one of which (the Russian) is committed to destroy the other (the Ukrainian).” The first is only waiting for the order to do so.
Gaaze’s third question is this: “Was Putin fighting with Ukraine or with the West?” the answer is with both, but the results are different. “Kiev did not lose the war, but it did not win it either. The West,” in contrast, “lost the first round of the new Cold War. Moscow did what it wanted,” while the West did not act decisively because of various fears about the future.
“But the first round of the cold war is not the entire war,” Gaaze says. The West can recover. NATO can rearm. “There will be other rounds,” and Russia “will not be able to win them.”
September 5, 2014
September 2, 2014
Tsar Vladimir I
One of the problems that Western politicians have in dealing with Vladimir Putin is that they can’t decide what he wants or even why he wants them. They’re struggling because they keep misreading individual actions as being either nationalistic or ethnic, when they should really be described as “imperialistic”. Putin is trying to recreate the old USSR, but without the Communist Party running things — he’s trying to recreate Imperial Russia:
Americans have been grasping to find explanations for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s serial aggressions in Europe. We keep searching for bumper stickers we can understand, so we gravitate to simple explanations like “geopolitics” or “nationalism,” not least because such notions promise solutions. (If it’s about geopolitics, cutting a deal with Putin will stop this; if it’s about nationalism, it’ll burn itself out when Putin has recaptured enough ethnic Russians around his borders.)
And, of course, there’s always “realism.” In this month’s Foreign Affairs, John Mearsheimer argues the Russo-Ukraine war is basically the West’s fault. (We expanded NATO, we supported the Maidan protesters, we were generally just mean to Russia, etc.) It’s a classic Mearsheimer piece: a beautifully-written, attention-seeking exercise that insists on the brilliance of realists while bucking the innate moral sense of most normal human beings. (Consider, for example, his 1993 Deep Thoughts about how maybe it would be good for Ukraine and Germany to develop active nuclear weapons programs.)
That doesn’t mean I disagree with the overall evaluation that America’s Russia policy since 1992 — insofar as we’ve had one — has been remarkably obtuse. (That pretty much describes most of our foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, but I will not digress here.) I, too, objected to expanding NATO, deplored the arrogance of people like Madeleine Albright, and lamented the repeated lost opportunities to bring Moscow closer to the Western family to which it belongs by both heritage and history.
Very little of what’s happened in the past 20 years, however, has much to do with what’s going on in Ukraine right now. And nothing excuses Russia’s war against a peaceful neighbor, especially not arid theories of realism or flawed historical analogies.
Putin is not a realist: very few national leaders are. Realism is much loved by political scientists, but actual nations almost never practice it. Nor is Putin a nationalist: indeed, he hardly seems to understand the concept, or he would not have embarked on his current path.
July 18, 2014
Russia’s foreign policy just went over the ledge
Tom Nichols discusses what the destruction of Malaysian Airlines flight 17 means for Russia:
Here’s what the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 means: Russia, with Vladimir Putin at the wheel, just drove off the edge of a cliff.
Now, by this I don’t mean that the United States and the European Union are going to charge in with a new round of sanctions, provide lethal aid to Ukraine, patrol the skies of Ukraine, or anything of that nature. The West didn’t react in time, or with enough resolve, to the initial invasion and partition of Ukraine last spring, and there’s no reason to think our reaction will be any more effective or resolute this time. It would be reassuring to think America and Europe will now fully engage on the problem of Russian aggression, but it’s unlikely.
As far as Russia’s future is concerned, however, it doesn’t matter. The moment Flight 17 exploded was the moment that Putin’s foreign policy officially went over the ledge, and with it his dreams of restored Russian greatness.
Until now, Moscow claimed it was protecting the interests of Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine. That was nonsense right from the start, but it was nonsense the Americans and Europeans decided they could live with, as galling as it was. (Who, after all, protects the rights of Russians in Russia? Certainly not Putin.) The West looked away as Putin seized Crimea, as we conveniently convinced ourselves that this was some odd ethnic quarrel in which we had no say. Now that a civilian airliner has been blown out of the sky by a Russian missile, however, there can be no further denial that Russia is actively pursuing a major proxy war against its neighbor in the center of Europe, and with a brutality that would make the now-departed marshals of the old Soviet high command smile with approval. This is no longer a war on Ukraine, but a war on the entire post-Cold War international order.
