How To Think About Ukraine Conflict And Our Response
Should we be Team Russia? Or is something more interesting going on?
Update on Friday, roughly 1:40 AM: I don’t normally do this but I thought I’d include this map thank to a friend who sent it in. It’s where Yiddish is spoken, a key test of who really runs Ukraine.
The reason we so often have those closest to a problem solve a problem is that they can tell whether it’s even a problem at all. This is the principle of subsidiarity.
The reason we have strong anti-nepotism laws is to prevent conflicts of interest. I’d argue that the root of the failures of the Trump presidency is that very nepotism — Trump preferred family, and son-in-laws in particular, over his advisors. You can see the temptation clearly — who can you trust if you can’t trust family? — but civilized nations build laws and bulwarks against this sort of corruption. Tribal societies and mobbish ones delight in it.
But what do we do when we have among us people who have an ethnic attachment to that place, so far away from us, who would love to see us use our military to advance their interests? And what do we do when those people have power — indeed preeminence — in that decision making?
Those questions seem to be put to us now in Ukraine as the Russian military has amassed troops on its border. We might ask what even is a border and why ought the current borders be sacrosanct when they do not reflect linguistic, ethnic realities.
I have no special book for Russia or for Putin. Indeed, unlike so many of the armchair foreign policy establishment I have actually been spied on by Russians, as I have been by other nations, notably China, Israel, and even France. And those are just the countries I’m comfortable talking about!
I take it all in stride and not without some pride. So long as it isn’t too dangerous it is somewhat flattering to be a target of espionage. “Why, little old me?”
Of course, it means you have something worth stealing. Nobody breaks into a slum. But you’ll forgive me if I don’t want to surrender that which I’ve built without a fight. It was bestowed to me and entrusted to me to take care of it.
So too with people, so too with nations. And this is why so many Americans take umbrage at the invasion on the Southern border. Patriots sense the invasion into their territory as a personal affront. And recognize that migration has now become a weapon.
Or at least that’s how it ought to be. Congressman Matt Gaetz put it best: “I care more about the US-Mexico border than the Russia-Ukraine border.”
Naturally it’s become a slur to describe someone as Russophilic — “you’re controlled by Putin!” they bray — if you aren’t quite ready to march on Moscow. Still the Russiaphones occasionally have a point. There are quite a number of American business leaders and politicians who are in the Russian orbit. Whilst the smartest in our country were going to Wall Street or Silicon Valley the smartest in Russia were joining the intelligence service or the mob.
I confess to falling somewhat in the middle with the threats the Russians pose. My maternal grandfather, who served in the military and was CIA, was fluent in Russian and a cousin of mine was stationed for the intelligence services in Ukraine so I came at it with a bit of family knowledge.
To be blunt: I am neither a fan, nor a foe of Russia. I wish her well, as Trump said of Russian-Israeli spy Ghislaine Maxwell, but I’m not particularly interested. Keep Russia’s dirty cash out of America, I’d say, but give her the grace and dignity to sell her energy to the West, would be my position. I both admire and fear Vladimir Putin, just as I admire and fear most of the leaders with nuclear weapons at their disposal, my own included.
This ambivalence isn’t good enough for many of these Russophobes. For them Putin — the czar! — is always about to run them out of the shtetl. Of course the real history is a bit more complicated and explored in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s masterly 2002 book — Two Hundred Years Together — which seeks to explore the conflicts and alliances between Soviet Jewry and the Russian state. Many of the attacks against Jews were spontaneous, says Solzhenitsyn, raising the question of Jewish culpability. This book is controversial and you can see why so many of the neocon lovers of Solzhenitsyn treat it as if it doesn’t even exist.
I recommend the review of it in the Guardian which explores that controversy.
But given the Russophobes interpretation of Russian-Jewish history I can’t say I blame the Jews for worrying about another pogrom. After all, only the paranoid ones survived Hitler and the Czar. We’ve all seen Fidler on the Roof, haven’t we? “Matchmaker, matchmaker…”
Alas, some outfits are mismatched for the moment we find ourselves in — and they predominate our chattering, braying Beltway.
Whom might I include here in this rather schizophrenic group? I’ll name names. I’d include commentator David Frum and diplomat Victoria Nuland in this group. Frum is a Canadian-born Jew of Polish lineage whilst Nuland is of Ukrainian-Jewish stock. Frum I’ve met socially — he bet me that Trump wouldn’t win in 2016 a day before the election — while Nuland I know only by reputation. Her husband, Robert Kagan, was involved with the Institute for the Study of War (through his sister-in-law) and which sought to get America involved in a war with Syria. Kagan was also involved with Bill Kristol in lying America into war in Iraq. Frum, Nuland, and Kagan could also properly be considered neocons.
Indeed it’s my contention that some of the Russia hoaxers were, in fact, serving the interests of other regimes, among them Ukraine and Israel.
To those who would question my patriotism I answer this: When you have Russians wanting to kill you or harm you, we can talk. I’ve been around the bend on this. Game respects game, and all that. Russia is a major player and she isn’t going anywhere and efforts to break her, which are really efforts to loot her — see generally the Jewish-Russian oligarchs and also Israeli super spy Bill Browder — are ill-advised in the extreme. She’s a part of the conversation whether we like it or not. You can’t ignore 135 million people with nuclear weapons. Nor the quarter of a billion Russian speakers who belong to Putin’s sphere of influence.
While Mitt Romney might have described Russia as our number one geopolitical threat — that is, when he wasn’t cashing the checks of Russian-Israeli middle manning spy Robert Maxwell, first investor in Bain Capital (yes, I still want to see his taxes)— we cannot afford for Asia’s largest energy producer (Russia) and Asia’s largest energy consumer (China) to unite against us. You don’t want to start a land war in Asia but really don’t want to start a Chinese-Russian energy conglomerate there either.
Indeed that oil wealth makes Russia essential — something Secretary Tony Blinken recognized as early as his college days when he wrote his thesis on using Russian oil to stabilize Western Europe.
My fear is that as we move away from a petroleum-based economy Russia may become more dangerous rather than less.
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There are lots of ways to describe the situation on the Russian — Ukrainian border.
We might, for example, go into the history. We could talk about how Crimea was always seen as part of Russia and that it’s said that Nikita Khrushchev, on a bender, gifted it away.
We could expand upon the geopolitical analysis. Russia wants access to the Black Sea and she will fight to maintain it, Turkey be damned — though with the advances in Turkish drone technology I’d bet on the Turks.
Or we might further explore what Alexander Solzhenitsyn noticed in his book — Two Hundred Years Together — and what bearing that has here. Ukraine is the only country after Israel which has a Jewish head of state. In some of the cities the population of Ukrainian Jews is closer to 50%. Don’t take my word for it. Take that of the New York Times, which discussed its government’s decidedly Jewish secular leadership. This program has been going on for a long, long time. You can even read about that in the New York Times, too. See this article from 1919.
I think some further explanation is warranted. Why does Putin care about the Russians not living in Russia?
He is dealing with a crisis of legitimacy at home. At stake: Can he protect the Russians who aren’t in Russia? And if he cannot, what makes us so sure he can protect those that are in Russia?
It helps to see it with maps and census figures.
And here’s the last Census.
The maps belie the ethnic realities and therefore the political realities.
By some estimates there are as many as 30 million Russians scattered around the world outside of Russia. Many of these Russians are the more adventurous than those who stayed behind and their lives have taken quite a turn since the Cold War nominally ended.
These Russians are barred from university, from jobs, from social life, even, as a sort of punishment for the sins of the Old USSR. In some of the Baltic countries up to a quarter of the population saw themselves without a country.
This state of affairs has gotten considerable attention by none other than old bad Vlad himself who seeks to rectify it.
Queue the Hitler apologies, stat: “Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Führer!”
When you’re as old as I am — and I’m only 33 — you’re used to seeing every character that the Zionists want to dispatch compared to old, dear Adolf.
Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, and so on. All are the Second Coming of Hitler. But 1941 is not 2021. One wonders given how often the powers that be lie if Hitler was even Hitler but not too loudly, okay?!
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Let me be clear what my view is: There are only three real countries in the world — the Anglosphere (AUKUS + Canada), Russia, and China — and that all other countries crew up accordingly. They may not like the terms but they don’t doubt the inevitability. Small powers always pay tribute to the closest great power and the great powers are always in conflict with one another.
Those small countries physically closest to Russia and China will have a somewhat complicated relationship with the great power in their midst. They’ll want to be a part of the Anglosphere and its global trading agreement now that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency but they’ll also seek to avoid angering their larger neighbor.
You see this reality in the dancing that S. Korea or Finland do. Singapore, Hong Kong, really any country with a sizable Chinese minority, may soon find itself under the Chinese imperial control. And yes, that includes Taiwan. We cannot and should not try to stop this process of genetic reunification. Read Amy Chua on this. Her book, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations
These middle-manning countries are often found in the Middle East but they are not exclusively. Ukraine is a middle-manning country between the West, Russia, and Israel. Now Ukraine is one of the poorest countries in the white world. She is a sort of welfare queen. When I met Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in 2017, he described Ukraine as one hand milking two cows.
In the West, we call this alliance the Five Eyes intelligence sphere. It’s gone by many names since Cecil Rhodes walked the Earth.
Call it Anglo-America. Our CIA is a direct outgrowth of it.
“It was once said in American in the 1920s that ‘six institutions rule the world: Buckingham Palace, the White House, the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Vatican and the British ‘Secret Service.’” (Nigel West, British Secret Intelligence Service Operations, 1909-1945, p. 6)
And the 2020s? Everything has changed and nothing has changed.
Apropos of nothing in particular this week marked the centenary of the British Empire — the alliance of the English speaking peoples — at their zenith.
Might these things come in waves? I suppose we shall see. They are awfully hard borders to defend. Defending the people requires rethinking defense.
Interesting article however you're update and map are a huge glaring error. Just so you are aware there are very little Jews in Eastern Europe today and especially Poland. The map's borders should give you a hint. That map is depicting where Yiddish is spoken in 1897 which makes a lot more sense, please correct otherwise this will just be used to discredit.