Robert Wright's Nonzero (private feed for eveningglass@gmail.com)
Society & Culture:Philosophy
Hi! This week I decided that, instead of writing a long piece, I’d record a long rant.
If you want to listen to it, you can click the play button above or listen to it in a podcast app. (If you haven’t set up the Nonzero feed in a podcast app yet, just click “Listen in podcast app” above.)
Or you can read excerpts below.
The main theme of the rant is my concern that America won’t learn the right lessons (as I seem them) from the Russia-Ukraine war. A subsidiary theme is my concern that America’s incipient failure to learn those lessons is driving me crazy. (The emotional climax of the podcast—not included in the excerpts below—is when I and my dog Frazier happen to issue cries for help at almost exactly the same time.)
OK, so here are some excerpts, which amount to a bit less than half of the total monologue:
[2:05] So why is the war driving me crazy? Well, first, war is horrible in itself. There's a huge amount of suffering in and around Ukraine right now…
There are other concerns. One is that it could get a lot more horrible. It could get wider, it could become a NATO versus Russia war, which would in turn carry some risk of it going nuclear. I don't think that's gonna happen. I don't think it'll become a wider war, and if it does I don't think it'll go nuclear, but obviously we're closer to this kind of thing that we’ve been in a long time.
Another thing is just that the war has been a real setback for something I hold very dear, which is international law…
[3:13] First of all, it's a setback for international law just in the sense that the invasion of Ukraine was a clear violation of a bedrock principle of international law: Don't invade countries!
And then there's the fact that if the war ends anytime soon, it will probably constitute a second kind of setback for international law--in the sense that all the peace deals being talked about now would leave Russia with much more than it had before it invaded. So it would be a kind of positive reinforcement for invasion, for violating international law.
And yet if the war doesn't end fairly soon with a peace deal then fighting will continue, suffering will grow, and possibly something truly catastrophic will happen. So it seems like there's just really no good plausible outcome at this point.
[4:13] But probably the thing that's driving me craziest is that it's becoming clear to me that we will probably not learn the lessons that I think should be learned from this war. At least, that's my fear. And one thing I want to do in the course of this monologue is get a little clearer on what I think those lessons are, why I worry they won't be learned, and what kinds of things we can do to increase the chances that they will be learned.
So one lesson that I fear we won't learn is that we should have negotiated more seriously in advance. If you look at a deal that I think might have prevented the invasion—agreeing not to expand NATO any further, and guaranteeing a kind of neutrality for Ukraine, and also granting autonomy to those two provinces in the Donbass (not independence, which is what Putin will now demand, unless he demands that they be annexed by Russia, but just autonomy within Ukraine)—we didn't come anywhere near offering that, as I understand it. Certainly in the discourse that's conducted on op-ed pages and cable news shows by foreign policy experts there was almost no discussion of making anything approaching an offer to Putin that seemed very likely to be accepted.
So we certainly didn't test the waters. I mean, we'll never know for sure what would've forestalled the invasion. [But] I didn't understand what the harm was in trying. And in any event my point is that if you look at the offers that a lot of people—including some of those not willing to make them—thought would forestall the invasion, they would be much preferable to what it looks like we will wind up with [via] any peace settlement, at least as of right now.
So anyway, my point is that one lesson of this should be: Try to negotiate seriously. I think that's one lesson that should be learned. [But] I think it won't be, and that's partly because a kind of conventional wisdom has developed that, “Oh, this wasn't really about NATO… We now have good reason to believe that Putin had this expansionist agenda all along"—and so on.
[7:23] I don't think there's nothing to be said for that side of the argument. I don't think that what happened with the invasion of Ukraine was just some kind of national security calculation by Putin. But I just don't see the evidence that Putin has been so single mindedly possessed by an expansionist impulse and some romantic notion of restoring the Russian empire and so on that he was impervious to serious diplomacy.
But that is the meme that's kind of taking hold, I think: Putin as just so psychologically other from us—either semi-crazy or just possessed by what's called a mystical nationalism or whatever—that there's just no reasoning with the guy; he was gonna do what he was gonna do.
[8:23] I think that may be a slight exaggeration of the conventional wisdom that's taking hold, but not by much. And I think the problem isn't just that this is going to lead the Blob—You know, the foreign policy establishment—to conclude that there was little if any point in negotiating with him; I think it threatens to lead to a conventional wisdom that expanding NATO wasn't a big mistake in the first place, which I think it definitely was.
…
[10:30] I do concede that the story of Putin's motivation is definitely more complicated than NATO expansion. He's worried about Ukraine being drawn away via the magnetism of the Western European economy… about Ukraine joining the EU… He certainly has this idea that Ukraine is, in some sense, culturally a part of Russia and doesn't really have a long history as a truly independent and internally coherent nation.
All of these things are factors and all of them together pushed Putin beyond some point of critical mass where the invasion happened. But the fact that all of these things were part of the critical mass doesn't preclude the possibility that taking away just one of them would've kept this from reaching critical mass, right?
Like, for example, in order to start a wildfire, you need two things. You need a field of dry grass, and you need somebody to light a match. It takes both of those to reach critical mass. You take away either one, the wildfire doesn't happen. Well, if you only control one of those, the lighting of the match, that's the thing you don't do.
[12:06] Same with NATO expansion. That's the thing we had control of. And it's true that if you take away Putin's distinctive psychology or you take away various other things, then the war doesn't happen. But if the one thing that you can control that's part of the critical mass is the NATO expansion, that's the thing you don't do. At least, that's the kind of relationship I'm positing among these various factors.
Of course, there's no way of knowing for sure. But I just think there's a lot of evidence and I've written about this in the newsletter… And yet, I really see already the Blob managing to craft a conventional wisdom according to which no, no it was kind of just this crazy guy Putin—What were we to do?
[13:21] And, you know, I think one reason this is driving me so crazy is that I've been here before. In 2003 I opposed the Iraq war. And when it went so badly awry, and everyone conceded it was a mistake, I hoped that what I thought were the right lessons from that war would be learned. I don't think they were.
And they weren't even learned at the most mundane level, right? Like, course correction 101, when you commit a huge foreign policy blunder should be: Well look at the people who wholeheartedly supported the policy who were in positions of influence—the people running the magazines and the think tanks and so on, and maybe think about replacing them, right?—or at least, kind of, lower their credibility score or something. But none of that happened…
[16:39] And so at that most elementary level we didn't learn our lesson. And I think that if you ask, “Why was the Blob so unwilling to negotiate, to forestall the invasion of Ukraine?” part of the answer is because it consisted of basically the same people who thought invading Iraq was a great idea.
…
[22:43] And I guess if there's an even higher-level source of my frustration with the idea of the Blob coming out of this smelling like a rose it's that, you know, I think the Blob, left to its own devices, is steering us toward another Cold War. And I just don't think we can afford that. If you're remotely familiar with my ideology, you know that I think we need to get very serious, very fast about solving a whole lot of global non-zero-sum problems--certainly including climate change, but certainly going well beyond that. And, you know, we just don't have time for this shit—the planet doesn't.
You know, we made it through the decades after the development of nuclear weapons without a nuclear holocaust. Great. But we now face a number of problems, including the possibility of nuclear annihilation, that qualify as existential, I think. (And by the way, America's mishandling of the Russia-Ukraine situation has gotten us closer to the brink of nuclear war than we've been in a long time.) And it's going to be very hard to handle all of these non-zero-sum problems effectively if the current trajectory of American foreign policy continues.
…
[24:30] I don't want to overly simplify the story. There is disagreement within the Blob, and they don't get together and hold meetings devoted to figuring out how to push their narrative. It's not like a conspiracy. And you know, there are very few things that everyone with any influence in the foreign policy establishment agrees exactly on
But still there's a large area of consensus… And if you ask, “Well, why didn't more people take seriously the possibility of trying to reason with Putin?” I think the answer at the most generic level—Well, if you've been reading the newsletter, you may be able to guess what I think the answer is at the most generic level. And by way of giving you a clue, I might turn the question around and say, “What strength, what psychological strength, if exercised, might have led people to believe they could negotiate with Putin and then to negotiate with him successfully.?”
The answer is... Yes—cognitive empathy! Just understanding what's going on inside another person's head, doing your best to understand how the world looks to them.
[26:10] I think the people who dominated the foreign policy discourse in the run-up to the Ukraine war by and large had pretty simplistic ideas of what was going on inside Putin's head. I wrote about this in the newsletter in a piece called something like, Why Didn't Biden Seriously Negotiate Over Ukraine
And in that piece, I said it was common in the Blob to depict Putin as crazy or irrational or unfathomably strange. And I quoted Michael McFaul, the former us ambassador to Russia, who in a Washington Post piece said, and this is a quote, “If Putin thought like us, maybe some of these proposals [such as agreeing not to expand NATO] might work. But Putin does not think like us. He has his own analytical framework, his own ideas and his own ideology, only some of which comport with western rational realism.”
[27:13] So I think that was part of the problem, is just people not saying “Hey, maybe in important respects Putin is like us—he's like an American president [who] would not welcome Mexico joining a Russian-led or Chinese-led military alliance. (And in fact, American presidents have sponsored coups and started wars over much more remote threats, much farther away than Mexico.) …
And now that the invasion has happened, it's extremely hard to make the argument that maybe we could have negotiated successfully with Putin and that therefore, maybe the Blob is somewhat responsible for the invasion having happened because the Blob failed to basically present us with that option—It's hard to make that argument now without getting shouted down.
And one big reason for that is the kind of confused idea that to explain why somebody did something is to absolve them of moral blame—so if we talk about what was going on inside Putin's head that led him to invade, and if those things going on in his head included reactions to things that America had done, that is somehow intended to absolve him of blame.
[28:56] That's not the idea. And by the way, one virtue of taking international law seriously, as I do, is that you settle the blame question right away and then can move on to talk about causes, because as a legal matter, there's just no doubt: He's the one who invaded, OK? Case closed. He's the criminal—we're done with that. But we can still talk about causes in hopes that in the future we will do a better job of preventing things like this from happening…
Now again, there are certain kinds of explanations for his behavior that are acceptable in the Blob. One of them is, you know, he is crazy. Another is he's possessed by this expansionist impulse that's rooted in mystical nationalism and some determination to restore Russia to its former imperial glory. Those kinds of explanations are acceptable. And, curiously, they completely absolve the US of any role whatsoever in creating the circumstances that led to the invasion.
[30:47] So you are allowed to advance explanations for Putin's behavior so long as they depict him as being kind of insulated from influence by the West. I mean, the one kind of influence that is acceptable is to see him as amenable to threats, to punishment. You know: If only we had been tougher on him, if only we had been more hawkish, if only we had terrified him more—those kinds of things are acceptable. So actually, let me give you an example of an acceptable explanation. I mean, this is so acceptable that on CNN, Jake Tapper led an hour with it. These are the opening seconds of a Jake Tapper hour:
“The tragedy and Russian military barbarism unfolding before our eyes in Ukraine is horrifying. And the road to it was partly paved with two decades of misplaced optimism, appeasement, and Western leaders too eager to look the other way when it came to Vladimir Putin.”
Okay, so appeasement—that's an acceptable explanation of why Putin invaded Ukraine… All those times we kept appeasing him. Like all those times that we did the exact opposite of what he asked us to do: Like, he asked George W. Bush, Don't cancel the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty, Don't invade Iraq, [of Clinton] Don't bomb Serbia, Don't expand NATO… Everything he asked us to do, we said, “fuck you.” That's Jake Tapper's idea of appeasement…
[33:47] Quick interjection: I don't think the people in the Blob are bad people. They think they're doing the right thing. And they probably are doing more of that than I grant them. I certainly don't think they're like intentionally misleading us or intentionally corrupting foreign policy.
However, I do think the rules of discourse they help enforce have the effect of impeding the honest and clear analysis of mistakes we've made. And, one reason I'm frustrated, I think, is that during war time, these discourse policing rules get enforced much more tightly. And the rules themselves become more stringent. Suddenly anything that could be remotely construed as trying to absolve Putin of blame—like starting a sentence with, “Well, can we look at this from Putin's point of view”—you're courting trouble just to say something like that. You know, “You're a Putin apologist, or you're just reciting Putin talking points.”
…
[38:54] I want to assure you, I don't have a monocausal view of why any of this happened. The Ukraine thing has led me to study up on Vladimir Putin, as it has many people. And I'm more aware of his eccentricities, including temperamental ones. I'm more aware of his conception of Russian history and maybe Russian destiny that contributed to this. But again, I think all we know for sure is that a critical mass of things pushed him into invading Ukraine. And having considered all the evidence, I am still firmly of the belief that although you can never know for sure about how history might have unfolded if things had had been different, I am convinced that there is a very good chance that a more prudent American foreign policy could have prevented this invasion and led to a world with much better prospects than the world has now.
[40:00] And again, my big fear is that we are just not going to learn that lesson. That is the main source of the frustration that, as you can probably tell, I feel…
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