Warning: Trump is doing his best to get Ukrainians killed

The Trump administration has accomplished something I didn't think would be where I'd dwell any longer -- thrown me back into my lifelong, all too familiar, posture of opposing a US imperial adventure. I was always a peacenik because our wars seemed so manifestly unjust -- until I saw a little country fighting for its very life against a relentless bully. I knew if I were a Ukrainian, I'd know which side I was on. And, I hope I'd be willing to take risks for my choices.

With the change of regime in this country, the United States is making itself a party to Putin's imperial war against Ukraine's freedom aspirations. 

Phillips P. O'Brien is a Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a close observer of the Ukraine war. He writes:

Our Lady of Kiev

Trump Is Helping Putin Kill Ukrainians. The USA Is Running Down Ukrainian Air Defense in Coordination With Russia.

... Just in the last few days we have incontrovertible proof of how Trump is helping Putin kill Ukrainians—both some now and many more in the future. Its the combination of what the US will not sell Ukraine (even though Ukraine has the money to buy them), the Russian missile campaign against Ukrainian civilians, and how the two come together ...

... Ukraine is desperate to purchase Patriot anti-air missiles, as the Ukrainians are running out of this vital system. These were provided (too late) by the Biden Administration in 2023. From the moment they appeared, however, they revealed themselves to be the most effective air-defense weapons in Ukraine’s arsenal.

... Having Patriots allowed the Ukrainians to keep the power on during the Russian Winter attacks in 2023-2024 and 2024-2025. ... In sum, these are a very effective but expensive system. They have made Ukraine much safer than it would be otherwise. ...

... And the very effectiveness of the Patriots has provided Trump with a weapon to help kill Ukrainians. Even being sparing in their usage, Ukraine is running out. Patriots are an American system and the USA has been the source of most of the missiles. Right now there is no new US aid on its way to Ukraine. ...

... Trump, however, working hand in hand with Putin, is refusing to sell them—even though that would benefit US workers and help the US economy. Indeed, in the last few days he has started boasting about the fact that Ukraine is desperate to buy more Patriots, and he is refusing to make a deal.

... The USA (Trump is the duly elected president with the support of Congress—so this is the official position of the US government) is now working together with the Russian government to see more Ukrainians killed. The USA is encouraging a Russian missile campaign against Ukrainian civilians by letting the Russians know that the US will deprive Ukraine of the means to defend those civilians and no longer provide Ukrainian Patriots.

So, the next time a Russian missile lands in a Ukrainian city and bodies litter the streets, realize this is an act that is being encouraged and supported by the USA. The USA is no longer a defender of democracy in Europe, it is an enabler of dictatorship and death.

Phillips' post is much more detailed and unlocked. Take a look.

Probably misused, but still righteous

I have to admit I was gobsmacked to encounter several iterations of this photo on Facebook. The picture is of the lighted facade of the church in Washington DC which my Episcopalian comrades presumptuously call the Washington National Cathedral. It's the Protestant denomination's big diocesan church in the capitol, only by custom called "national." Episcopalians aren't "the ruling class at prayer" any longer. 

As far as we can tell, though many Christian nationalists intend to be our ruling class, broad based Christian nationalist attention to humble petition to God for the poor and suffering is pretty muted these days.

Nonetheless, I guess I'm happy to see being passed around what is clearly an affirmation of support for the brave and desperate people of Ukraine under Russian attack. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the image derives from an ecumenical prayer service held alongside the Ukrainian ambassador in July 2023.

Anyway, I'm a Christian fully in the camp of supporting Ukrainians in their war for their country and their lives. It has not been simple for me to find myself supporting one side in a war. I've spent a lifetime opposing the wars of the United States empire; I've explored pacifism and find it the better way to live. But not in the case of this conflict. Ukrainians deserve their own country if they want it enough to fight for it and they've shown they do. The Russian invasion is brutal and criminal; it aims at the erasure of a particular history and people. Insofar as the US has been supportive of Ukraine, I think that has been a good use of a tiny fraction of my taxes. 

And I know Donald Trump's infatuation with and capitulation to Russia's strong man is a betrayal of all that is decent in our complex land.

Foul Betrayal (2)

I bemoaned Donald Trump's betrayal of Ukraine and of this country last week. Our country is being disgraced by small empty men and the ignominy is just beginning.

Today I'll outsource commentary on the Trump/Vance boys bullying the brave Ukrainian President in the Oval Office to Phillips P. OBrien, an American historian and professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. 

Just Say Thank You and Shut Up

... The key theme throughout is that Trump is a great man who can work with Putin, while Ukraine needs to shut up, show gratitude, and take what is coming to it. Trump makes that clear when he criticizes the Ukrainians for basically wanting to fight for their freedom and not cave in to Putin, which he terms being “very disrespectful to this country” (this country being the USA—in other words, himself).

Then Trump and Vance go on what can only be called the great gratitude rant. Even though the USA under Trump has approved not a single new dollar in aid for Ukraine, Trump and Vance want Zelensky to constantly say thank you to them. Its, as always, an attempt to be humiliate a democratic state and for Trump to take credit for something other people have done. As Vance finally snaps. “Just say thank you.”

And then Trump lets the cat out of the bag. This was not a meeting or disagreement over the minerals deal. He was trying to pressure Zelensky into agreeing a cease fire along Putin’s lines and Zelensky refused. Trump comes out and says that explicitly at the end.

“You’re buried there. Your people are dying. You’re running low on soldiers. No, listen … And then you tell us, ‘I don’t want a ceasefire. I don’t want a ceasefire. I want to go and I want this… You’re not acting at all thankful. And that’s not a nice thing. I’ll be honest, that’s not a nice thing.

So there we have it. Ukraine should shut up and take Trump’s and Putin’s terms. It is not an independent, sovereign, democratic state, it is a dictator’s plaything which should be eternally grateful for the scraps from Trump’s and Putin’s table.

Thousands of Ukrainians didn't die for this -- and millions of Americans over three generations didn't fight fascism and for more complete democracy for this. As O'Brien goes on to say, it's now up to Europeans to step up and repudiate Trump's betrayal of all the European zone has stood for. Can they rise to their own defense?

The New York Times reports: 

European leaders quickly pledged their continued support for Ukraine on Friday after President Trump’s blistering criticism of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in a meeting at the White House.

Leaders lined up behind Ukraine and praised its embattled president, the statements coming one after the other: from France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Norway, Finland, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Slovenia, Belgium, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Ireland. Canadian, Australian and New Zealand leaders added their voices to the Europeans’.

For once the paper got a headline right: 

The Orange Toddler defends his only friend. What a gaping hole for a soul that monster in the White House reveals.

Foul betrayals

A thoughtful description of Donald Trump's sell out of Ukraine to Putin comes from Kviv via David Rieff in The New Republic:

The Trump Presidency Is an Unmitigated Catastrophe for Ukraine 

Ukrainians aren’t shocked—they have a lot of experience in the betrayal business. ...

... the mood here in the days running up to the third anniversary of the start of the war has oscillated between despair and grim fortitude. It could hardly be otherwise, and for the obvious reason: With the rapprochement between Washington and Moscow, as exemplified by the U.S.-Russian talks in Saudi Arabia that excluded Ukraine, the presidency of Donald Trump has already been proven to be an unmitigated catastrophe for Ukraine.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy apparently will be putting in an appearance in Washington this week to receive our Orange Toddler's ultimatum. There's plenty of speculation about how that will play out, but whatever results almost certainly will be horrible for Ukrainians -- and all of Europe now under the Russian imperial gun.

It's worth remembering the sort of figure Zelenskiy has been over the last three years.

Zelenskiy’s sang froid during his press conference, at what amounts to nothing less than the Trump administration’s betrayal of every promise and commitment the United States has made to Ukraine, both unilaterally and through NATO in concert with Washington’s European allies, was remarkable. It served as a gripping reminder of how important, for all his faults and both the military failures and failures of governance in Ukraine that have occurred during his watch, Zelenskiy’s leadership has been since, in the first hours of the full-scale Russian invasion three years ago, he declined the Biden administration’s offer to evacuate him with his family to Poland, defiantly saying, “I need ammunition, not a ride.”

Even the many Ukrainians who are disenchanted with him in general terms accept that the country could not hope for a better war leader. In this, the oft-made comparison between Zelenskiy and Winston Churchill is anything but hyperbolic. Like Zelenskiy, Churchill before the war was considered something of a buffoon, a political dilettante who had changed parties several times and who had done everything but distinguish himself during various periods as a government minister. And then, of course, immediately after the war, in the so-called “khaki election,” in which the votes of the war veterans proved dispositive, the British public voted Churchill out of office. 

But although many Ukrainians are predicting the same fate for Zelenskiy in a postwar Ukraine, as long as the war goes on, like Churchill between 1939 and 1945, Zelenskiy has proven himself the invaluable man. ...

Donald Trump is going to get away with his crime against brave Ukrainians -- just as he has skated on his crimes from his last tenure and most likely will continue to escape justice for his current even more corrupt and vicious assault on us here at home. This Friday's meeting may -- or may not yet -- resolve the shape of the Ukrainian betrayal.

A vigil in Chicago this week. Ukrainians are not without friends in the States.

Rieff goes on:

... European political elites misunderstood and misunderstand the U.S. in a way their Ukrainian opposite numbers never did. Betrayal is a good teacher in that regard. And throughout its history, from the days of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth to the subjugation of Ukraine by the Russian Empire to the murderous days of Red Power and the Moscow-made famine of 1932–1933, the Holodomor, to the contemporary era in which Ukraine was constrained to give up its nuclear weapons in return for independence and security from Russian revanchism, through to the Biden administration’s consistently insufficient grants of aid, to Donald Trump’s monstrous U-turn, Ukrainians have the misfortune to be connoisseurs of betrayal.

... Then there’s the victory of the Christian Democrats in Germany, and, more importantly, the statements by the soon-to-be Chancellor Friedrich Merz ... Donald Trump, Merz went on, had made it clear that his administration was “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.” The message was clear: As far as Merz was concerned, the fate of Europe was inseparable from that of Ukraine. ...

... if Ukrainians continue to hope, what other choice—besides flight—do they have? Which is why this bitter defiant twist on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous theory of the five stages of grief—defiance, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—is now making the rounds in Kyiv. In the Ukrainian telling, the first four stages are the same. But instead of acceptance, the fifth stage is the polar opposite: It’s “Fuck you.” There are worse ways to prepare oneself for the ordeals that lie in store.

It didn't have to be this way. Biden got off to a good start against Russia's attack on Ukraine, but muffed the follow through. American elites of both parties never really warmed to defending Ukraine; perhaps they were always shamed by encountering a people that was so clear-eyed when it faced utter evil. This country -- so rich, so complacent -- basks in more muted colors.

For me, the historical analogy which the Ukraine war has always brought to the fore is of the European democracies' betrayal of the Spanish Republic in the 1930s. Oh sure, Britain and France were (mostly) glad to see the Spanish monarchy give way to a multi-party Spanish democracy. But that democracy was messy and contained leftist, pro-Soviet elements. Better to allow a Spanish Christian Fascist with German Nazi support go on to murder, pillage, and eradicate this unsavory, short-lived Republic.

In the '30s, abstaining from supporting Spanish democracy only meant Britain, France, and eventually the United States had to fight the Nazis a few years later. This time around, Donald Trump is bringing us in on the side of the Nazis. We, the citizens of these United States, also have been betrayed this week.

War crimes accelerate in Ukraine

As the Trump regime settles in, it would be too easy to look away from horrors far away. But let's not.

Here's retired Australian general Mick Ryan reminding us why Ukraine cannot surrender to Putin's aggression:

Russian Executions of Ukrainian PoWs Continue.

The Prosecutor General's Office in Ukraine this week opened yet another criminal case against Russia for war crimes after a video emerged that shows Russian soldiers executing six unarmed Ukrainian prisoners of war. The events shown in the video, which include the Russian soldiers discussing who should shoot each prisoner of war, apparently occured in the Donetsk region.

The number of executions of unarmed Ukrainian POWs immediately after their capture has increased significantly in the past year. The Ukrainian authorities have recorded in excess of 180 executions of Ukrainian POWs by the Russians since February 2022. Given how much ambiguity there often is in combat operations, there almost certain to have been many more than this number. ...

The prevalence of these crimes in the Russian army indicates that their soldiers are either ordered or incentivised to shoot PoWs by their commanders, or that Russian commanders willingly look away from such events. Either way, it has been systematised now in the Russian system. And the fact that Russian soldiers video these crimes and post them online means they don’t fear any form of retribution from their own commanders.

As such, not only are the individuals who commit the crimes responsible but so is their entire chain of command that has ignored these events. There is simply no way now that any Russian officer can claim in the future that ‘I didn’t know this was occuring’.

For those interested in more details about the magnitude of Russian war crimes committed since February 2022, this report from the Congressional Research Service provides a good overview.

I have to wonder whether under the Trump regime, that government report will be trashed. Get it while you can.

I'm sure Trump's idea of "peace" in Ukraine is that the embattled country must surrender. Ukraine can't.

It's cold in Ukraine this winter

Here I pass along observations from Kateryna Kibarova, a Ukrainian economist and resident of Bucha, writing in Persuasion. 

If you live in Ukraine today, checking the news is your morning routine. You have to understand what is going on—how can you not?

You have to understand which direction the drones are flying from, whether it is dangerous to go outside. If you want to protect yourself, you have to constantly monitor the situation. When the air raid alarm goes off, immediately everyone’s phones in the office start howling. Everyone has the alerts set up.

The Russians have gotten more sophisticated with the air raids. Now they fly lower, at altitudes that make our air defense system operators fear that interceptions will hit houses or schools or kindergartens. They launch drones along the highways so low that they are almost level with cars, or along riverbeds so that they cannot be tracked and shot down. On the one hand, in Kyiv, the sheer number of drones—sometimes 150 per attack—makes it impossible to intercept them all. On the other hand, the cities closer to the front, like Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv, are simply defenseless. They are in a constant state of fear—without air defenses, facing more complex attacks, tougher and more precise than ours in Kyiv. It’s an impossible situation.

The scariest thing is how cold-blooded you become. You're out there driving to work, and you’re turning up the radio, listening to YAKTAK and Svyatoslav Vakarchuk,1 in the car so you don't hear the suicide drones fly overhead. They’re launching the Shaheds2 in just incredible numbers to deplete our missile defense systems, so that we have no protection. And the Russians are constantly threatening to blow up the nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia. In my bag, next to my documents, I keep a special pill. In case of a nuclear explosion or meltdown, it has to be taken to neutralize the first of the waves of radiation. I carry it everywhere I go.

 ...  Many of my friends have gone abroad with their children. I think it’s the right decision because it’s so dangerous for kids to be here right now. This summer, 200,000 more Ukrainians left the country. Now that the winter blackouts are coming, more will leave.

But probably the strangest and scariest part of this situation is that there is already an abyss between us, between those who live in Ukraine and those who have left. Those who have left—even my friends who come here to see their parents or just to see their friends—aren’t embedded in the context of what is happening here anymore. I’m about ninety percent sure they’re not coming back. They have learned the languages of the countries where they live now; their children are going to school; they themselves have got jobs or are receiving welfare support.

Those of us who remain have become very wounded internally, in our spirit. For example: I feel strange when my girlfriend, who emigrated, comes to visit. She’ll make some ordinary comment and laugh, and I’ll get scared that I no longer have these simple, unburdened feelings. ...

Go read it all. Many Ukrainians seem to think something good could come for them from Donald Trump; I doubt this, but I hope they are right and I am wrong.

Ukraine thrown to Putin's mercies

Unlike many of my friends on the generally progressive side of things, I've long believed that US support for the flawed, but democratically legitimate, Ukrainian state was a right action. This is the first US intervention I've supported in a lifetime of rejection of US imperialism, yet support for Ukraine feels the natural continuation of a long trajectory. Russia's war is an imperial war, seeking to subjugate and absorb a people who want the freedom to define their own way. Yes, I'm something of a quasi-pacifist -- but Russia's crimes against an occupied population are heinous and should not be minimized.

The election of Donald Trump presumably means that Ukrainians are to be thrown to Putin's mercies. Europe is unprepared to step up and replace us. This is a crime much akin to western democracies' abandonment in the 1930s of the Second Spanish Republic to Hitler and Mussolini's pet local strongman, Francisco Franco. That betrayal did not slake the appetite of that era's fascists -- this abandonment won't today either. And we in the United States are even less prepared or even able to recover from our folly than we were then. Bad times indeed. 

• • •

Mick Ryan is a retired major general in the Australian Army. He writes a substack of military analysis.

A Peace Plan for Ukraine?: The West’s strategy for Ukraine is no longer failing. It has clearly failed.

... when the combined wealth of NATO’s five biggest members (U.S. Germany, UK, France and Canada) is twenty times that of Russia, and their military outstrips Russia in technology, size and capability, is a searing indictment about the strategic thinking, execution and will in what is currently known as ‘the west’.

It did not have to be that way. But a generation of western political leaders that were conditioned into slovenly strategic thinking by the long post-Cold War peace and the discretionary, slow-paced wars of the past two decades have been unable to sufficiently adjust their mindsets to deal with the ruthlessness of Putin and his supporters.

There is an old Chinese saying: strangle the chicken and frighten the monkey. It is a saying that a PLA General used with a friend of mine one time. In essence, if you wish to shape the behavior of a big competitor, attack and destroy a small ally of the competitor.

Unfortunately, the U.S. and NATO ‘strategy’ for Ukraine over the past three years, as well as their strategic impatience and inclination to enter into negotiations with a Russia that has the strategic initiative, means that the West instead has ‘fed the chicken and encouraged the monkey’.

We will regret this. And so, eventually, will our citizens.

• • •

In 2015, the British journalist Tim Judah, veteran observer of too many wars including the agony in the Balkans in the 1990s and 2000s, published In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine. This is a little book of vignettes from the early stages of the war between Ukrainians engaged in forming their European national identity and others who supported the continuation of life within the Russian imperial sphere. Long before the Russian invasion of 2022, Judah shed light on the creativity and resilience of so many in this benighted part of the world.

Despite being such a big country, Ukraine, for most of us who live the western part of the continent, is, or was, somewhere not very important. ...The aim of this book is not to record a blow-by-blow account of the events that led to the Maidan revolution of 2014, the annexation of Crimea, or the war that followed. ...

What I thought was that between journalism and academic books there was not much that explained Ukraine, that made it a vibrant place full of people who have something to say and tell us. Wherever I went I found, as in few other places I have been, just how happy people were to talk. Then I understood that this was because no one ever asks them what they think. Often when they started to talk, you could hardly stop them. If we listen to people who can understand why they think what they do, and act the way they do.

In Ukraine ... people have been taken for granted for so long, as voters or taxpayers or bribe payers, that when finally the rotten ship of state springs leaks and begins to list, everyone is shocked. But they should not have been. ... This book is about what I saw, what people told me and also those parts of history that we need to know in order to understand what is happening in Ukraine ...

Judah might not find the same openness to conversation today, two years into a devastating, existential war. Or perhaps he might. Ukraine has long surprised us. We do not know yet how the next chapter plays out.

Does Trump really want to run against NATO?

Having grown up in Buffalo, NY,  a city where 150,000 people claim Polish ancestry, I do sometimes wonder whether American voters with eastern European roots might look askance at a Republican party which wants to let Putin's Russia overrun its neighbors. The old country(s) are important to many. There are pockets of ethnic pride in communities across the nation which might make an electoral difference.

Click to enlarge

These are American states where a few votes can make a difference. I would not assume these folks are open to Putin love.

For love or money, people get around

You might think that a deadly war in somebody else's country would repel most people who had any option to stay well away. And, in general, that's true. But there are exceptions.

In Ukraine, from the earliest days of Russia's attempt at conquest, there have been quite a few voluntary international participants. According to the Associated Press:

In early 2022, authorities said 20,000 people from 52 countries were in Ukraine. Now, in keeping with the secrecy surrounding any military numbers, authorities will not say how many are on the battlefield but they do say fighters’ profile has changed.

The first waves of volunteers came mostly from post-Soviet or English-speaking countries. Speaking Russian or English made it easier for them to integrate into Ukraine’s military, [Oleksandr Shahuri, an officer of the Department of Coordination of Foreigners in the Armed Forces of Ukraine] said.

Last year the military developed an infrastructure of Spanish-speaking recruiters, instructors and junior operational officers, he added.

And recruitment is succeeding in Bogota, Columbia where 10,000 highly trained soldiers retire every year. Service in Ukraine is a good deal for these vets.

Corporals in Colombia get a basic salary of around $400 a month, while experienced drill sergeants can earn up to $900. Colombia’s monthly minimum wage is currently $330.

In Ukraine any member of the armed forces, regardless of citizenship, is entitled to a monthly salary of up to $3,300, depending on their rank and type of service. They are also entitled to up to $28,660 if they are injured, depending on the severity of the wounds. If they are killed in action, their families are due $400,000 compensation.

Let's hope these recruits are not bringing a Columbian record of human rights abuses with them.

Meanwhile on the other side of that war, in Russia, hungry Cubans are providing recruits to be ground up in mass human wave operations, according to Reuters:

Cuban seamstress Yamidely Cervantes has bought a new sewing machine for the first time in years, plus a refrigerator and a cellphone - all on Russia's dime.

She said her 49-year-old husband Enrique Gonzalez, a struggling bricklayer, left their home in the small town of La Federal on July 19 to fight for the Russian army in Ukraine. Days later, he wired her part of his signing-on bonus of about 200,000 roubles ($2,040) which she received in Cuban pesos, Cervantes told Reuters.

... On the 100-meter dirt road where Cervantes lives, at least three men have left for Russia since June, and another had sold his home in anticipation of going, she said.

"You can count on one hand those who are left," the 42-year-old said as she surveyed the street from a small terrace where she'd repurposed two broken toilet bowls as flower pots.

"Necessity is what is driving this."

From its onset, the Israeli war on Gaza has presented challenges to Israel's human economy. The war pushes Israel toward becoming ever more an unsustainable, malignant Sparta. Many men who make its modern economy hum were called up to serve in the Israeli Defense Force, while Palestinian laborers were locked out of the agricultural sector to be replaced by whatever migrant workers Israel could import.

According to a report in the Guardian, Israeli recruitment of foreign construction workers is focusing on India.

The industry relied on approximately 80,000 Palestinian workers, who are now barred from entering Israeli territory. As a result, half-finished residential blocks are everywhere, yellow tower cranes waiting motionlessly overhead. In the West Bank, poverty rates have soared.

The economic impact for Israel could also be severe. The finance ministry has estimated the expulsion of Palestinian construction workers is costing 3bn shekels (£656m) a month, and could eventually lead to a loss of 3% of GDP because the building and housing industries owe 400bn shekels in loans.

... “Right now I earn around 15,000 rupees (£150) a month,” said Rajat Kumar, 27, from the north Indian state of Haryana. Though he has a bachelor’s degree, for six years he had been unable to get any other job except construction, earning a salary he described as “peanuts”. The prospect of travelling abroad to a country engulfed in conflict was a small price to pay for regular, well-paid work, said Kumar, who got his first passport in order to apply for a job as a plasterer in Israel.

The job he has applied for in Israel would pay 138,000 rupees a month, with accommodation provided, which he saw as a small fortune. “When I compare it with what I earn here, I can’t think of anything but the better life I and my family will have,” he said.

A bilateral labour agreement was signed between Israel and New Delhi last May, before the war in Gaza broke out, but has since become a priority for both countries. Israeli transportation minister, Miri Regev, said during a visit to India earlier this month that Israel would be “lessening its dependence on Palestinian workers” by replacing them with skilled foreign workers.

As always in contemplating migrant flows, let's hope this is worth it to the human individuals caught up in the flow of people. But people always get around, something US immigration restrictionists fail to understand.

Two meditations on the murder of Alexei Navalny

On this second Sunday of the Christian season of reflection called Lent, I find two of my favorite preachers writing of the murdered Russian activist Alexei Navalny.

Before his death, I had not been aware that Navalny was a Christian. He had placed himself at the dictator Putin's mercy by returning to the Russia he hoped to free after that state had poisoned him. That choice always seemed incomprehensible. Perhaps it is less so in the context of belief that the power of the good is released by a love so strong that killing it only multiplies the amount of love in the world. 

Diana Butler Bass distinguishes between whines of victimization (see Trump and his MAGA acolytes) and taking up the terrible power that is (relatively) selfless love.

Ultimately, a martyr complex is about you, what you’ve lost, what you have sacrificed, your troubles: Look at what I’ve done for others! See what I carry on your behalf. But look how I’m suffering and despised! No one appreciates me! No one says ‘thank you’! You may, indeed, have taken up a cross. However, such adversities can become laden with bitterness — and often become a weapon wielded first at one’s self (self pity) and then at others (manipulation or revenge).

That’s not a cross. That’s a millstone.

But those who find themselves bearing the cross — whether they wind up as martyrs or not — understand that following Jesus isn’t about nurturing and carrying grievances. It is about letting go of what weighs one down to make room for something bigger, a giving of one’s self to love and service to create a different kind of world. You understand that taking this path might involve hardship and trial. You still go — you still take up the cross — not for yourself, but for others.

Taking up a cross isn’t just an inconvenient ordeal, a persistent sin, or annoying demand. Taking up the cross doesn’t mean whining or seeking attention when confronted with trouble. When you take up Jesus’ cross, you choose to surrender the burdens of self-pretension in favor of cumbering yourself with compassion and love of neighbor. This cross puts one in tension with injustice, the powerful, violence, bigotry, and delusions of grandeur. That’s the cross Jesus instructs his followers to pick up. The “yoke” of this cross is ultimately not heavy but light.

For my friend John Kirkley, Alexei Navalny's trajectory provides a "glimpse of truth" -- a fact of the universe in which we live -- as Gandhi once explained in his autobiography. Kirkley says of Navalny:

"It’s fine, because I did the right thing."  One doesn’t have to be a Christian in order to do the right thing.  Christians do not have a monopoly on moral courage.  But Navalny clearly grounded his commitment to nonviolent resistance against evil in Christian faith.  More specifically, [he] trusted in the power of redemptive suffering, in the willingness to suffer for doing what is good no matter the consequences. 

... the point is that suffering is intrinsic to the energetic dynamics of affirming and denying forces in creation, as well as the conscious attention that seeks to intervene in their reconciliation.  Such suffering is not “stupid suffering,” it is simply a given condition for the emergence of life and the manifestation of agape love – a love that acts as a conscious force of attention to catalyze reconciliation.  The suffering of birth pangs is not stupid suffering.  The suffering of the decay of the body over time is not stupid suffering.  The suffering of an exploding star is not stupid suffering.  The suffering of the great flaring forth in the creative fire of the emergence of something out of nothing is not stupid suffering.

Navalny's self-sacrificial choice has released a power we should contemplate. (And, as so often in the history of humankind, it leaves one wondering about what this self-sacrificial heroism means to the women left behind ...)

Christmas in Ukraine

 

At the moment caught here, Russian missiles are not incoming. But they might be at any time; the war against the empire grinds on.

 

Myroslava Tanska-Vikulova writes from Ukraine:  

Strange as it may sound, the aroma of gluhwein [Ukrainian mulled wine] on Independence Square or hot tea that warms Ukrainian defenders at the front – these are our simple pleasures, the ones that help us understand what we’re living for.

In recent years, every Ukrainian has become dependent on one another. The front cannot exist without the rear, but without the front Ukraine’s distinct culture and society would be eliminated.

Since the invasion began, the holidays have taken on a whole new meaning for us. Now it's not just about drinking champagne while the bells ring, or opening presents.

For Ukrainians, Christmas and New Year is a time to thank every defender, a time to remember that it is only because of them that we sleep under warm blankets, to pay tribute to those who have died and those who are still in captivity, to think about those who are currently under occupation and cannot feel free on their native Ukrainian land.

St. Nick via Razom, people-to-people aid to Ukraine

• • •

The Ukraine war puts me in mind of another anti-colonial war, an analogy that I see raised very seldom in this country, yet which seems highly apt to me: the United States War of colonial Independence, 1775-1783.

A rag-tag band of colonials with sophisticated political ideas and mixed motives decided they were ready to throw off a constraining imperial power. The old power despised them as rude farmers and shop keepers. It took their revolt lightly, expecting a quick suppression. Ingenuity and determination among the colonials kept them in the fight and stretched the old empire's military resources. Other world empires propped up the revolt in order to weaken their competitor. There was nothing easy about the U.S. independence struggle, but the insurgent colonists prevailed and the rest is history.

When I think of Ukraine this year, I think of General Washington crossing the Delaware River on Christmas night in 1776 leading his ill-trained, under-equipped Continental Army to challenge the era's most imposing military. 

Few observers would have expected that these improbable amateur troops could endure and win, but they did. Ukraine surviving Russian invasion makes no sense. But Ukraine still lives and carries hope of something better for its people and for all of Europe. I am grateful for the example, however tenuous and imperfect.

Kyiv Christmas tree shines light in darkness in wartime

Last Wednesday, December 6 -- St. Nicolas Day -- the embattled capital of Ukraine lit its civic Christmas tree. Nothing is entirely easy in that embattled country.

"We must follow the rules. At any moment an air alert can sound, and this means everyone must be in a shelter where it is safe." -- Mayor Vitali Klitschko

I was intrigued by the date. Until very recently, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) followed the Julian calendar, as do most Orthodox Christian churches. Those churches' Christmas will fall on January 7 on the Gregorian calendar which most of the world lives by. Launched in early modern Europe, use of the Gregorian dating system has gradually spread across the globe. 

The shift to the new dating system has not been without controversy in the OCU.

... the faithful in Ukraine use[d] the Julian calendar. The question of whether this was desirable arose after the Russians invaded Ukraine through a full-scale invasion. “Today, the Julian calendar is perceived as related to the culture of the Russian Church”, the Church stated, according to the Orthodox Times.

The Church made the decision to switch to a new calendar at the bishops’ council. Only one bishop out of 53 voted against the transition, and one more abstained....

The road to the calendar change was not a formality... It was a move discussed for decades, but people within the Church were afraid that the reform would not be accepted by the faithful. 

“Facebook activists will not go to churches”, the head of the newly created Church, Metropolitan Epiphany, said in 2019. The Church viewed the wish for a calendar transition as supported only by people who did not visit the Church. Therefore, the transition seemed a fantasy. 

... However, after the full-scale [Russian] invasion, the issue gained political weight, and most Ukrainians expressed their support for a calendar change.

It's hard to think of a change more wrenching than changing the dating of major religious holidays to which we are accustomed. 

The Russia/Ukraine war is not some exotic, if awful, border skirmish. It is about, and further encourages, deep changes in how people choose to live, of which the calendar change is just one manifestation.

Ukraine aims to control its own destiny as a part of a western-facing Europe.

Casualties of war-by-peaceful means

The quashing of a panel at the journalistic free speech organization PEN America's World Voices Festival that had included ex-patriot Russians has unleashed a kerfuffle among the commentariat. Two Ukrainians, arriving to participate in another panel about their experiences as writers in the military resistance to Russia's invasion, said they could not speak if the first panel with the Russians went ahead. PEN acceded to their demand and erased the panel that had included the Russians from the proceedings. 

And many liberal US intellectuals felt they had to have an opinion. I want to leap into that fray.

High-end media accounts -- New York Times, The Atlantic -- treat this as an instance of "cancel culture." I think that is wrong. 

What happened here is an instance of forceful, nonviolent, war-by-peaceful means colliding with a culture that has forgotten the compromises raised up by life and death struggles. There's a genuine boycott on ...

Ukraine asks and demands that its soldiers, and by extension its partisans and friends, participate in that boycott of all people and things Russian. By invading a neighboring country and committing atrocities against its population, Russia has broken the compact of civilization between peoples and states. Ukrainians fight their war of resistance -- but they also aim to shame and stigmatize in the interest of a vision of justice.

This is not fair to Russian individuals, perhaps especially those likely to turn up at a PEN conference. These people are not part of Putin's war machine. But this sort of unfairness is exactly how boycotts work. Often those harmed are among the least guilty, either for lack of power or lack of intent to commit the offense that inspires the boycott. But they are also the ones who can be moved to destabilize a situation because they can feel shame.

Let's remember the boycott of South Africa which contributed to the end of that country's apartheid regime. For decades, the Black-led African National Congress called for the rest of the world to boycott and stigmatize white minority rule. Materially it was hard to tell whether this hurt. But when I worked with anti-racist newspapers in the country in 1990, it was abundantly clear which part of the worldwide effort was making a dent among privileged whites: the sports boycott. South African teams were barred from the Olympics and other international competitions. This stung and sapped support for maintaining white rule, even and especially among its white beneficiaries. There was grievance -- sure; but also exhaustion with pariah status. That's how well targeted, rigorously applied, boycotts work.

I don't fault Ukraine for pushing a Russian culture boycott. They are fighting extinction of their hopes and country with every tool they have got.

Yascha Mounk, speaking for highbrow Western liberalism, thinks PEN's decision to cave denigrated a proper concern for respect for each individual.

... a person’s moral standing is not defined by their nationality. There can be no collective guilt by virtue of wrongful birth. ...

This is a powerful and hopeful principle -- but a right of self-defense for an invaded society is also a vital principle, especially those aspects of that defense that are not physically violent. As far as we know, Ukraine is not randomly killings its local remnant of Russia supporters, though the longer this goes on the more danger there is of tit-for-tat murder. (Yes, I know; being unjustly stigmatized and shamed is painful to individuals. So is being killed.) 

A consequence of the cancellation of PEN's panel with the Russians was that the writer Masha Gessen resigned as the organization's vice president. They (Gessen uses they/them) had been supposed to moderate that event. No sensible person disputes Gessen's human rights bona fides.

Gessen, who immigrated from the former Soviet Union as a teenager in 1981 and holds both Russian and American citizenship, has been a prominent critical voice in Russia, where they returned in 1991 to work as a journalist. Their books include “The Man Without a Face,” a 2012 biography of Vladimir Putin, and “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017. In 2013, Gessen moved back to the United States with their family, citing growing persecution of L.G.B.T.Q. people.

But Gessen has been one of the most nuanced commentators here:

Gessen emphasized that they remained a member of PEN, and remained committed to the Russian Independent Media Archive, which they spearheaded. The decision to cancel the panel, Gessen said, “was a mistake, not a malicious act.”

“My objection is not to the Ukrainian participants’ demand,” Gessen said. “They are fighting a defensive war by all means available to them. My issue is solely with PEN’s response."

The whole kerfuffle is a reminder to me that worthy Western non-profits, even ambitious ones like PEN, are profoundly unable to navigate principled struggles where something more than funding is on the line. Most have not needed to be. But we live in times when we must grapple with these contradictions.

Shards from the wide world, mostly about power and who has it

When I share domestic tidbits, I usually know where I think they lead. When it comes to the emerging 21st century global power configurations, I'm a bemused and helpless spectator. Here are some links, some with my commentary in italics.

Atrios: Biden's foreign policy leans towards do the right thing more than any president in my lifetime, as far as I can tell.
I agree, feeling concern and consternation amid inevitable reservations.

John Ganz: I am overly given to viewing things in terms of grand clashes of ideologies and social forces to the point that I can sometimes lose sight of the two dominating spirits of world-affairs: stupidity and vanity.
A useful caution ...

Nathaniel Rachman - marking Mikhail Gorbachev' passing
How politicians deal with opposition, humiliation and defeat is one of the great tests of office. Now more than ever, those in charge of the world’s leading powers struggle to face it. In China, the leadership of the Communist Party has blundered into a disastrous Covid policy, unable to change course for fear of tarnishing its own image. In the United States, a former president has rejected his own electoral defeat, imperiling American democracy. And in Russia, Putin’s vicious resentment of Ukraine’s independence led to this year’s brutal invasion.
Unlike Putin, Xi and Trump, Gorbachev’s was a model of leadership defined not by achieving one’s goals, but by accepting their rejection. He is a reminder that even those who fail spectacularly can redeem themselves by knowing how and when to lose. It is a shame so few leaders today seem ready to do the same.

Brad DeLong - the mysteries of British decline
My view—which may be wrong—has been that Britain’s long relative economic decline since the heights of 1870 has been due to its persistent refusal to invest in its people and in its technology-driving industries. You can say that the first of these has cultural-ideological-political roots—Tories fearing that if people get over-educated they will not respect their betters, and Labour fearing that if people get over-educated they will not respect their parents—and you could be right. You can blame the second on the British Empire making it just too easy to to invest abroad and count on the power of the gunboats to make foreign investments safe. You can then say that those institutional habits persist to this day, and you could be right as well. Perhaps. ...

John Cassidy: In the past six years, the Conservative Party has jettisoned economic skepticism, and embraced wishful thinking and self-sabotage.
Yes, the Tories suck. Or perhaps we see across the pond the natural trajectory of imperial decline?

Meanwhile the far-flung US imperial project grinds along:

Sarah Lazare: In September, the U.S. created a foundation that was supposed to unfreeze Afghanistan’s foreign assets. Yet, interviews with trustees reveal that, in three months, no funds have been disbursed—or concrete plans made—to help the Afghan people.

Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute: While MBS Undermines America, Joe Biden Has His Back on Yemen -- Few people noticed, but the United States Senate came very close to ending America’s complicity in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen earlier this week. But the very same person who had vowed to end that war intervened and stopped the Senate from taking action — President Joe Biden. The White House feared that the Senate resolution would have emboldened the Yemeni Houthi movement. But Biden may have instead signaled the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) that, even as he continues to undermine the United States, America still has his back.  
We're addicted to both fossil fuels and treating the people of the greater Middle East as pawns in American strategic games. You too Joe Biden.

And so to Russia's imperial dreams:

Someone using the handle Daragh at Crooked Timber:
... in many ways the Russian populace is much like the poor-white farmers of the antebellum south – hugely disadvantaged by the system themselves, but willing to support it because it puts them one or two steps up the ladder of oppression. Changing this mentality will be difficult work – potentially the work of generations. But it's work that needs doing if there is going to be a Russia that isn’t inclined to aggressive predation on its neighbours.

Greg Afinogenov: Unlike the American Baby Boomers, who have retained a vision of themselves as the protagonists of history since their teenage years, the utopians among the Soviet shestidesiatniki (“‘60s-ers”) became the occupants, if not of the dustbin of history, at least of its recycling bin. Too old when the USSR collapsed to forge new lives in its wreckage, they were also too young to have benefited much in its prime.

Ghia Nodia: An Imperial Mindset -- What the outcome of World War One was for Hitlerism, the outcome of the Cold War was for Putinism. ...A bigger problem is that, unlike Germany after World War Two, it will be very difficult for Russia to find a place in the world that would be acceptable for its national self-esteem. Before the war, Russia’s economy and institutions did not allow it to become either a true member of the global elite or an alternative center of power like China. It could only desperately punch above its weight—by invading Ukraine—without a chance of ever being truly satisfied. These underlying conditions will not disappear: in fact, they have been made worse as a result of the invasion. Russia will not become a true member of the international elite any time soon, though it may face a choice between being a poor relation of the West or becoming a junior partner of China. In either case, ressentiment will remain.

So to the Ukrainian people whose admirable, involuntary resistance to tyranny, we use to inspire ourselves:

Tom Nichols: This holiday season, many of us will seek peace and a reset heading into the new year by drawing closer to family, taking a break from work, and observing the rituals of our faith. We tend, during this time, to clear our mind of unpleasant things. But as Americans, citizens of the greatest democratic power on Earth, we must not forget that the largest European conflict since World War II is continuing to burn away in Ukraine. A democratic nation is refusing to be conquered by a vengeful imperial power, and it is paying for it with the lives of innocent men, women, and children. As we celebrate the season, let us remember that the Russians have shown no intention of taking a holiday from murder.

I agree with Nichols here -- but seeking to use our wealth and privilege for peace is always a higher calling than victory, even when the struggle is just. I believe Ukraine's cause is necessary and just. And I don't want to forget that justice is not everything. 

Happy New Year!

A city of lights

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, like probably most people reading here, I had never heard of the city of Mariupol. 

Only a year ago, someone made what I assume is a tourism-promotion video, celebrating a municipality that turned itself into a light show for Christmas. What is shown here is gone, blasted to bits, the survivors scattered, a city of about 400,000 people wiped away by conquest.

I am taking time to try to know more about this so-foreign part of Europe. Historian Timothy Snyder's fall lectures at Yale on The Making of Modern Ukraine are available in full and for free. In addition to being a language polymath, he's a charming lecturer. I highly recommend this series.

Shards from bleeding Ukraine

Putin's imperial war to conquer Ukraine could be the end of us all, so I can hardly ignore it. 

George Packer, usually a pretty hard-boiled journalist, felt he had to see for himself. He questions his own objectivity. His story is worth reading in full.

Journalism that waves the banner of moral clarity makes me uneasy. Moral clarity can be blinding, and most subjects worth writing about are complicated. But a few things are morally clear: slavery, and genocide, and Russia’s attempt to destroy Ukraine. ...

It’s absurd to approach this war from a position of neutrality. As a journalistic stance, neutrality is worthless, and usually spurious, because everyone is a partisan of some kind. Objectivity is different: the necessary effort, always doomed to fall short, of rendering reality exactly, like a carpenter striving for plumb, level, and square. What’s most crucial is independence: refusing to surrender your judgment of the truth for the sake of a political cause. 

Journalism doesn’t require an anesthetized moral faculty. It ought to be possible to want Ukraine to win this war and still tell what you see and hear there honestly. 

... Here was another motive [to go to Ukraine]—the strongest and most dubious of all. I wanted a gulp of Ukrainian air. I wanted to breathe its hope. What a thing to ask of people fighting for their lives. 

...I don’t know if Ukraine can win this war, but I know it must. Putin’s Russia is committing crimes that have not been seen in Europe since Hitler and Stalin—leveling cities, terror-bombing civilian populations, creating millions of refugees, using rape and torture to break the will of those under occupation, separating families, detaining and interrogating at least 1 million Ukrainians and sending many to far-off internment camps, preparing to annex entire regions, erasing their language and culture, burning crops, using vital food and energy supplies to blackmail the world. If Western leaders are too afraid of Putin and their own voters to stop him and punish him for these crimes, he’ll know that the West is as weak and pleasure-seeking as he’s always believed. ...

Packer's full-throated endorsement of Ukrainians' struggle to preserve their country and future is wonderfully attractive. I share his moral enthusiasm; I think he's right. But I don't know how many of us that conclusion will leave unscathed.

• • •

Pundits struggle to discern whether Putin is wily and/or evil and/or simply has drunk a disorienting Koolaid. In this tidbit, Susan Glasser wonders ...

... There is also the matter of Putin getting the West wrong. We in Washington hardly have a monopoly on misguided assumptions being a driving factor in international affairs. Many indicators suggest, in fact, that they were a major reason why this war happened. Putin not only failed to understand that Ukrainians would stand and fight against his aggression; he also failed to foresee the U.S. and its NATO allies remaining united and funding the Ukrainian resistance. Moscow’s bogus annexations of more Ukrainian territory seems likely to produce only more Western sanctions—and the possible extension of the war that Putin looks increasingly like he is losing. “The problem is, of course, us misreading him, but also him misreading us,” [security analyst Fiona] Hill observed. 

• • •

Click to enlarge. This is hard to look at.

Retired U.S. General Mark Hertling argues plausibly that the poor condition of the Russian military means "Putin’s recruits are heading for slaughter."

• • •

Kateryna Kibarova explains why she came Home to Bucha.

I'm Ukrainian. I have no children. I am not putting anyone in any danger. I can be useful to my country. I have a very close friend who lives in Great Britain. I had options to go to Poland. But if we all leave, who will defend the country? Who will support the economy? Who will sustain the belief that we will win? And who will make sense of the fact that we have had to endure it all? This is my home. I'm staying here.

• • •

This is still the disunited United States and there are millions of us who are suspicious of our country's repeated martial adventures. We've lived through decades of misbegotten imperial wars. Some caution about enthusiasm for our righteous endorsement of Ukrainian is certainly advised. Author Robert Wright brings a warning.  

Yet many American elites—politicians, journalists, even “think” tankers—have been reacting to this war as if it were a football game or some other purely zero-sum contest. They’ve celebrated Ukrainian gains on the battlefield with no ambivalence, blissfully unaware that dramatic Ukrainian military success was always bound to encourage Kremlin risk taking, raising the chances of regional or even nuclear war. 

Now, with Ukraine’s big battlefield success having been followed by Russian mobilization and Putin’s declared annexation, bliss will be harder to come by even if awareness fails to grow.

Wright published before Putin's current round of nuclear threats. I just know I don't know what to think, but I choose not to entirely look away.

What unifies Americans: Free Brittney!

I was in a laundromat in Reno the other day. The place is a little seedy; the neighborhood is solid working class, but in a slightly decayed sort of way. Mostly white, as far as I could tell. Women were diligently washing and drying mountains of laundry. The place seemed a sort of community gathering center. Retired white men clustered in the corner, talking animatedly.

"It's a terrible thing, what they are doing! They are locking her up for nine years; she didn't do anything. ... She was just trying to do what she does for a living ... we should get her free ..."

I realized they were talking about Russia's imprisonment of Britteny Griner, the WNBA star, tatooed, dreadlocked, Black, married lesbian beauty. 

I could have taken them for likely Trump voters -- in this knife-edge state, there's a good chance I might be right. But they're behind "that gal."

• • •

Tom Nichols, Atlantic writer, puts Brittney Griner's situation into the international context:

Griner was arrested just days before the invasion of Ukraine, which is to say that she was grabbed after Putin and his circle had almost certainly made the decision to go to war. She was perfect for the part that the Russians wanted her to play as a possible bargaining chip. She is a prominent American, but not too prominent. She is gay, Black, and covered in tattoos, the kind of defendant for whom the average Russian will have no sympathy. Detaining her for a minor drug charge must have been an easy call for the Russian intelligence services.

Better yet for the Kremlin, the American determination to get her back home serves a Russian-propaganda purpose. Russia does not value all its citizens equally; some Russians matter and others vanish without trace. The efforts to spring Griner, however, almost certainly feed into a Russian narrative that America, too, does not care about all of its citizens equally and that we value racial or sexual minorities disproportionately—exactly the case that anti-Western hysterics like Putin have been making for years. ...

Unionized sports leaders are keeping keeping the heat on the Biden administration to get her out of there. Sign on with them at Free Brittney!

Intellectual honesty about Russia

By assisting Ukrainians to defend their country, the United States for practical purposes has placed us in a war relationship with the Russian Federation. (Yes, that's the official name of Putin's country.) I realized I was more than a little ignorant of how that massive, historic Eurasian state got from being the threatening Soviet Union of my youth to its current iteration. When the USSR was breaking up in 1989 to 1991, I was busy with domestic campaigns and a season of tech assistance to emerging majority rule South Africa. So I've got a lot of recent history to fill in now that Russia becomes central to us again.

Moscow-born historian Vladislav Zubok, a professor at the London School of Economics, writes a blow-by-blow account of the previously unimaginable in Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union. The unraveling of the second most powerful state in the world involved an intricate dance of actions and inactions, political calculations and miscalculations, internal jealousies and external pressures; Zubok catalogues these exhaustively.

From a slightly more distanced perspective, what happened to the USSR is simpler.

• The state-run command economy installed by Stalin in the 1930s, which endured largely intact to the end, failed to meet the needs or answer the aspirations of Russians and the Soviet empire's associated states.

• The Communist Party of the USSR didn't have a fix -- and its leaders and functionaries plodded on grimly under Stalin's successors without coming to terms with the country's stasis.

• Somehow this sclerotic system elevated Mikhail Gorbachev to its top job as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985. Gorbachev proved to have more innovative ideas for resolving Soviet stasis than his predecessors, but was also ignorant of the nuts and bolts of economic policy and given to naive illusions about how state power worked. He opened up the system, but Zubok passes on a metaphor for what followed:

'He and his followers have no map; their compass is broken. They are under the impression that the ship is sailing westwards, whereas in reality it is heading south. As the voyage becomes more and more difficult, the captain decides that his crew are unreliable saboteurs. So he turns to inexperienced passengers keen to take part in the voyage and lets them deliberate among themselves on the best ways to reach the Promised Land’.

That a person so inept at using power could have risen to the commanding heights of the Soviet Communist edifice is the greatest mystery of it all. One might have expected an authoritarian system would raise up a determined, cunning autocrat (such as Mr. Putin.) Instead, according to Zubok, Gorbachev was a hapless dreamer.

• Boris Yeltsin, with a lot of help from the incompetence of other political figures and Western leaders led by President GHW Bush, pushed his way to the top of the heap in the crack up, pushing out Gorbachev. He served his own interests by facilitating the dissolving of the Soviet Union into a dysfunctional federation of states. He then ruled the Russia that remained intact. In this era, the Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe had bolted for the exits when a chance opened; the Baltic nations followed. The resulting Russian Federation was much diminished, a far cry from the czarist Russian and Soviet empires. And further defections and discontents followed.

• Back in the early 1990s, as the dissolution was happening, the current conflict with an independent Ukraine was foreshadowed; fully 80 percent of Ukrainians voted in a referendum back then to split off from Russia. Neither Gorbachev nor Yeltsin understood then that Ukrainian nationalism was a genuine force. Putin's Ukraine delusions about Ukrainian affection for Russia have a long history.

All the details of this evolution are there in Zubok's volume. I have to admit, collapse still seems a bit incomprehensible in Collapse. The economic context comes closest to making some sense of it all, but the political actors don't quite compute for this reader. No wonder a Vladimir Putin was able to seize control of the resulting rickety Federation. Nonetheless I appreciated reading more background because Russia matters all the more at present.

Zubok has summarized his best explanation for his enormous effort:

‘My book is not an exercise in ‘how the evil empire could have been preserved.’ Rather it is an attempt to be intellectually honest about what happened’.

Do we know where we are going?

The Ukrainians are so brave and so largely admirable. We're so sick of feeling mired in ugly politics -- and literally sick of being sick. Might we be bumbling into war and more war? 

Economic historian Adam Tooze examines the last time the United States utilized what our congress called Lend Lease to aid European good guys in 1939-41. His article is vital history and raises what must be raised. Looking back, we're glad FDR accomplished political wizardry in order to assist Britain. But there is nothing simple about this kind of aid.

In openly declaring our intention to adopt all measures short of war to ensure Russia’s military defeat and in invoking Lend Lease in doing so, we must surely ask ourselves that question, what is our theory of Putin? And beyond Putin what is our model of the escalatory dynamics at work in 2022?

In swathing ourselves in historic garments, are we inviting Putin to do the same? Are we inviting him to fully inhabit the role of the maniacal dictator who can only be crushed out of existence? Are we, as in 1941, crossing the point of no return? Are we, consciously or not, assuming further escalation?

In so doing, are we assuming that escalation will have the same kind of “happy end” that World War II eventually had for the United States in 1945? The kind of “happy end” that makes Lend Lease into a myth shrouded in good feelings - a grand chapter. in the “American story”?

Or, are we, in fact, hoping that 2022 unfolds as 1941 did not? That Putin is not suicidal? That this time the escalation remains confined to Ukraine and Russia? That this becomes, as some American strategists envisioned Lend Lease in 1941, a calculated exercise in using the dogged resistance of a client - then the British now Ukrainians - to attrit a geopolitical antagonist?

Some of our leaders, including ones I'm inclined to credit like Nancy Pelosi, seem a little high on Ukrainian sacrifice and prowess these days. May we not commit to fight a war with Russia to the last Ukrainian ... can Joe Biden find the tight rope and stay balanced? I will say, he seems more prepared for this than anyone we've had in the White House in the last couple of decades.

De-industrialization all around

Part 2: Insights from There Is Nothing For You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill; Part 1 here.

The second theme of this fascinating book that I want to highlight is that the people who built the industrial economy and modern world have been screwed similarly in the U.K., the U.S.S.R., and the U.S. by subsequent economic developments. They are all left-behind people.

Fiona Hill comes from Bishop Auckland, County Durham, in the North East of England. The early industrial revolution was based on coal and the labor of the miners who dug it; her hometown was where much of the coal which powered British commerce and military might came from when the empire ruled much of the globe during the 19th century.

But by the time Hill was born in 1965, English coal country was an economic disaster area. She writes:

In the 1980s, during the period when Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s prime minister, we were the pioneers for a unique form of social and economic malaise — a decline from the heyday of the industrial era that would come to define the entire developed world. The local mines closed,  along with associated manufacturing industries. Businesses were shuttered, communities gutted. Family and friends lost their way of life. Bishop Auckland, my once-prosperous hometown, was a forgotten place.

When she came to the United States in 1989 to pursue her professional fortune, she found her parents' coal town had all too many analogues in this country.

In the decades after I arrived in the United States, the fate of my home area in the United Kingdom was that of every major mining community in the Appalachia region, stretching from Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia in the south up to West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania in the north. America’s coal country too lost the mainstay of its economy and opportunity.

She had struggled for educational and career opportunities and had the good fortune to find a niche as an expert on Russia. Russian forced-march industrialization was the wonder of the inter-European-war world in the 1930s. But by the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, she recognized familiar situations. Post-industrial misery was

... also emblematic of industrial regions across Russia and the former Soviet Union, and indeed in other parts of Europe. This fact was a significant revelation once I moved beyond the narrow confines of the blighted world that I was from and finally began to understand the forces shaping our lives in the twentieth century.

She points out a pattern replicated out across different countries and economic systems.

Structurally, the United Kingdom and the United States — like Russia and other advanced economies — cycled through a rapid buildup of extractive industry and mass manufacturing in the 1920s and 1930s and again at the end of the Second World War. Our nations began the descent into what became known as the postindustrial era in the 1960s, and especially after the 1970s, when they were hit by successive oil shocks.

... The 1980s were the critical turning point. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan helped to drive the nail into the coffin of twentieth-century industry while ensuring that those trapped inside the casket would find it practically impossible to pry the lid off. 

... at the end of the 1980s, the Rust Belt was far more like the Soviet Union and the North East of England than most Americans realized. The United States’ big industries had also developed under a fixed set of technological and economic conditions. They were huge enterprises, centers of mass production, purpose-built for a specific time and place in the first half of the twentieth century. They had been built close to major sources of raw materials, energy, and transportation routes, such as shipping routes across the Great Lakes or down major rivers to the ocean. They had enormous sunken and fixed costs. The enterprises had drawn in hundreds, sometimes thousands of workers, often with central state and local government intervention and direction. 

... [These U.S. towns] were in essence the same kind of big company or mono-industry towns as Dnipropetrovsk (now in Ukraine), Stalingrad (now Volgograd), and Magnitogorsk in the USSR. Regardless of the particular circumstances of their individual creation, they were now outmoded and depleted, their big industries shrinking as they modernized and became automated. 

... Mass industries built the cities, not the other way around. When the industries closed, the place-based economies and societies crumpled in on themselves. ...  It was the same in the U.S., the UK, and the USSR. When the mine or the factory closed, there was no work, nothing to do, and nowhere to go. Thriving industry-built cities became shattered ghost town.

Having grown up in Buffalo in the decades when that city was losing its automotive and steel industries, I find it easy to visualize the economic devastation. (Like Hill, I got out ASAP; apologies to Buffalonians who are still today trying to dig the place out of its doldrums.) What I find novel is Hill's documentation that Soviet heavy industrial cities were experiencing something so similar. Using up and throwing away the land and people who do the work is simply the way of heavy industrial development, everywhere, whether under capitalism or "socialism."

Hill explains very clearly how the consequences of de-industrialization were particularly brutal for many workers of the Soviet Union. In the UK, Labour governments had won the National Health Service and some educational opportunity for working class students like Hill. Russians even under the decayed communism of the Brezhnev era, expected to have guaranteed jobs with social subsidies like housing, health care, and a pension. These weren't good lives, but they were lives. The violent imposition of kleptocratic capitalism in the 1990s was literally fatal to people who had once worked in heavy industries which could not be made profitable. Workers were out on their ears, took to drink, died young, and whole cities were depopulated. Sound familiar?

In Britain and the U.S., the people left behind by de-industrialization do still have the chance to to express themselves in free elections. Winners in the contemporary economy may find their choices incomprehensible, but Hill doesn't. Trump's rise made sense to her.

Populists play in the gaps created by generational and demographic change, divergent economic circumstances, competing social and cultural identities, and along the seams of inequality. ... From my vantage point growing up in the industrial North East, it was easy to see Trump’s allure for American workers. ... On trips to visit my family, I heard plenty of complaints in Bishop Auckland, ... about the way local voters were taken for granted by Labour politicians who wanted a safe seat in Parliament to satisfy their own ambitions. In their view, the Labour Party had abandoned the working class. ... Similarly, in the United States, workers believed the Democratic Party had abandoned them .

Hill's clear-sighted understanding of the failures of UK and US governance didn't make her a Trump believer. She joined his National Security Council because she hoped to use her expertise about Russia to avert terrible choices by an ignorant buffoon. She was at the Women's March in DC when she got the call about the job. She's very much a Russia-hawk, but way too well-informed and realistic to be a contemporary Republican apparatchik, even if they'd have her back after her impeachment testimony. She's a patriotic immigrant U.S. citizen who knows we Americans are sometimes neither wise nor good.

And she has a prescription for bringing the places in the first world where de-industrialization has destroyed individuals, families, and communities: more educational opportunity for children and adults. She has a detailed, thoughtful chapter on how community organizing and education might turn the left-behind places around, all drawn from her own experience. After all, education worked for her ... the girl from Bishop Auckland wasn't supposed to go anywhere and ended up testifying before the U.S. Congress ...

Part 1 about Hill's personal struggles is here.