Putin has invaded Ukraine, and we all agree that’s a bad thing. That’s about all we agree on, though. For the time being, it seems that we are not poised to send any troops to get involved. And for that, I’m extremely thankful. But that leaves us frustrated, doesn’t it? What are we supposed to do? Fight it with our military might? Let it happen, but write a strongly-worded letter about it? Conservatives seem to enjoy blaming this on Biden, hoping that, like Carter, he’ll take the fall for a foreign policy “loss” (because, you know, geopolitics is basically a game of Risk, and life is all about “winners” and “losers,” because apparently many of us never aged past 11). But war deserves a far more just analysis than the usual left-right bickering that passes in this country for political discourse, and so, speaking only for myself, allow me to clarify my position: We should not go to war to defend Ukraine.
If Ukraine falls, we will write her lifespan as 1991–2022, which is unfortunate, but, to be cold about it, it happens. Simply put, sending troops to defend Ukrainian sovereignty makes only slightly more sense than using them to defend Tibetan, or Kurdish, or Sikh, or Chechen, or Basque sovereignty — or, y’know, Cherokee. There are a lot of ethnicities that are under the thumb of more powerful nations that have conquered their land, and while this is definitely a bad thing, it is not an appropriate use of a military to free them from bondage. The purpose of a military is defense, and Russia has not invaded the US, nor has it invaded a NATO country.
It is also worth pointing out the dangerous unintended consequences of going to war. Do you remember the last time Russia tried to conquer a foreign country? The year was 1979, the President was the aforementioned Jimmy Carter, and the country was Afghanistan. The US decided to stop the Russian advance at any cost. And we did. Hooray! And there were no consequences to us at all!
I have already heard the rumblings, though, that we have to stop Putin here, because this is his Czechoslovakia moment, and Biden can’t make the mistake that Neville Chamberlain made in “appeasing” Hitler, setting the stage for WWII. This “appeasement” argument is popular across the political spectrum, and it is long overdue for a serious refutation. Here goes:
The Munich Fantasy
In 1938, Hitler demanded an expansion of Germany. At the time, it is worth noting, private companies in the US were permitted to trade with Hitler’s Germany, and did; only the USSR truly opposed Nazism on the world stage. So, at a conference in Munich, the UK basically had two options: Give in to Hitler’s demands, or say “no” and start a war over it. In hindsight, they should have started a war, right? I mean, giving the Germans the extra year to prepare only made it worse in the long run. Stop them before it’s too late!
So let’s look at the alternate history of that moment. Let’s say, in 1938, that a coalition of European nations (UK, France… who else? Not the USSR, as they were not part of the League of Nations and the UK would never have cooperated with them… not the US, because we didn’t even get involved in 1939) invaded Germany preemptively and crushed the Nazi regime. How would this have played on the world stage? It’s easy, in hindsight, to see Hitler and associate him with his atrocities, but in 1938, what had he done to deserve that? Yes, he was a militant racist overseeing an apartheid state, but was it any more apartheid than a great deal of the US at the time? Did HItler have any less right to Czechoslovakia or Poland than the UK did to India or Iraq, or the French to Vietnam or Algeria, which at the time they controlled completely? Keep in mind that we’d already shrugged our shoulders as Japan had annexed Manchuria and then, in 1937, launched a full-scale invasion of China, committing far more human rights atrocities on the ground than Germany at the time. On what moral ground would any of the allies of WWII have justified invading Germany in 1938, and how would history have viewed this defeated Nazi regime without the Holocaust (which never would have happened) as a key part of its identity?
Let’s try to remember that, as regards word politics, Germany had a legitimate gripe, as did Japan. British-French hegemony over the world markets, through their ill-gotten colonies, meant that new industrial powers such as those in the Axis simply couldn’t compete, and for reasons that were unquestionably unfair. Somehow everyone threw a hissy fit about Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, when literally all of Ethiopia’s neighbors were, at the time, the victims of brutal conquering by other European powers. England only achieved, and maintained, its power through the brutal murder and exploitation of countless souls, most of whom shared the feature of not being white. Why should Germany not also resort to the same tactics, just to pull even with the behemoth that was the British Empire? At least, that was the justification for the Great War of 1914–1918, which Germany was entirely blamed for at Versailles in 1919, and for which they were charged massive reparations that it didn’t finish paying off until 2010. Almost all historians agree that anger over the reparations, and all that this represented, is what drove the German people into such a state of resentment as to fantasize about conquering the whole world. Given that, can you imagine how put-upon the German people would have felt over the course of the 1940s if, just as they were getting their economy moving again, and before they fired a single shot of aggression (or built a single gas chamber), they were summarily invaded by the most powerful empires in the world? How do you really imagine that would have played out afterwards — a peaceful, thankful German population, pulled back from the brink by the noble generosity of British bombers? Or an even angrier, even more resentful Germany, just waiting for its chance to rearm and get revenge?
So yes, if you had a time machine and knew what was going to happen, maybe you can get on board with invading Germany in 1938. But that is not what Neville Chamberlain had. He had two options, both of them bad, and he chose the one that didn’t involve launching a pre-emptive attack on Germany, in a way that I think would have seemed horribly hypocritical and, ultimately, foolhardy. So yes, it sucks that Germany forced a brutal war in the 1940s that killed millions, but I submit that “appeasement” may, even knowing everything we know now, have been the least-bad strategy at the time. We do not know what would have happened over the course of the 20 years after Munich if it had gone differently; we do know that, less than a decade after Chamberlain’s decision, Germany was not only defeated, but its people gave up (seemingly permanently) on the dreams of conquest that had driven them for a century.
But What Do We Do?
Instead of focusing on the fantasy of killing Hitler before the war, as if that would solve everything, why don’t we ask this: How, exactly, did Germany actually change? In 1871, in 1914, and in 1939 — basically once a generation — they invaded France, and then after 1945 they stopped, and now it’s not even a guarded border anymore. Yes, part of this was that they were utterly destroyed, but I would argue that the greatest factor in this transformation was the Marshall Plan. We loaned/gifted Germany over a billion dollars in the late 1940s, the equivalent of over $10B in today’s dollars. This wasn’t string-free, of course; what we wanted from West Germany was a strong ally against Communism, a friendly government and a compatible economic system. What we got, a half-century later, was the economic leader of Europe, and one of the most important, most stable nation-states in the entire sphere of Western influence.
It must be noted that we did not commit to any such “Marshall Plan” approach as the Soviet Union broke up. Although there were abortive attempts to send similar aid, we pretty much let the new Russian Federation fend for itself, and private enterprise, instead of the US government, led the way in investments in the rest of the Eastern Bloc. The result of this privatized recovery was, unsurprisingly, a lot of money wasted, lost to corruption, pocketed, misappropriated … a lot of fancy words for “stolen,” and a lot of profit made on their “investments” by a lot of morally-decrepit oligarchs from all around the Western world. Yes, we’ve given Ukraine about $2B in aid over the past decade (notably, a lot less than Marshall Plan numbers, when adjusted for inflation), but before that we did not effectively support the growth of Capitalism and Democracy in the only way that matters: $$$.
We look on countries like Russia and China as if they’re inherently evil, but no one has done more murdering than the British, or the Americans, or the French, or the Japanese, or the Germans. We are all nations of genocide and violence, of expnasionism and greed, of some psychotic desire to have more, more land, more subjects, more power. Like Yertle the Turtle, always needing to be higher, to have more, just for more’s own sake. So why did it stop? Why have England and America and France and Germany and Japan given up wars of conquest? Why are we, powerful nations all, more invested in collective security than in expanding our borders on the world map? Not to be redundant, but the answer is simple: $$$.
Modern industrial nations profit off a stable world. We sell consumer goods, and we want everyone happy and healthy and making money and buying phones and cars and computers and movie tickets and basketball jerseys and Amazon Prime subscriptions. That is how our economy works, and yes, certain subsets of the economy make money off war (I believe they’re called “the military-industrial complex,” or alternatively, “soulless murdering mutherfuckers”), but for the most part, our wealthy and proud nation-states profit off a stable world.
Russia does not. Russia’s economy, despite its size, has more in common with that of an OPEC country: The undiversified export of a natural resource or two. They don’t make movies, they don’t have tourists, they don’t build microchips. They do, admittedly, win Olympic medals (mostly by cheating, but still), but other than that, who has cared about Russia since 1991? It is this shame, economic and cultural, that drives a nation into the hands of oligarchs and despots, and drives said oligarchs and despots to go all Yertle-the-Turtle on the world and gobble up territory, as though having the Bigger country is the ultimate, er, compensation.
So, in answer to the question posed above: What we do is sigh, accept a really shitty moment for Ukranians, just as it’s a shitty moment for people in Darfur and Uyghur and Myanmar and Afghanistan and Palestine and Navajo Nation and many, many other places around the world. But the lesson here is not that we need to be “tough” or punitive; we have no reason to believe that sanctions will sway Russia any more than they swayed North Korea or Cuba. Russia’s actions are a result of their alienation, from the world economy and culture, and we have seen that the recipe for long-term alliances, even with traditional (or recent) enemies, is sharing the wealth, and not only the wealth, but the paradigm under which global stability, and not military action, is the most profitable path.
There is no short-term solution to this situation. There are, of course, short-term exacerbations, mostly involving guns and bombs and drones (oh my!), all of which will have terrible unintended consequences, as they always do. The long-term solution is to continue to build a world based on cooperation and peace, a world in which even Russia can play a significant part. Then one day maybe Russia will become just as evil as Germany is.
