Vlad and Me

I n the U.K.’s Mail on Sunday, columnist Peter Hitchens begs for “civilised debate, rather than McCarthyite intolerance, on the Ukraine issue.” He complains that “even before the Putin invasion those, like me, who opposed goading Russia were defamed as ‘Putin apologists’ (I have for years referred to him as a sinister tyrant) and falsely accused of ‘parroting Russian propaganda’.”

Hitchens says that since the invasion he is “constantly accused of ‘justifying’ the action, even though I clearly, and without hesitation, condemned the invasion as barbaric, lawless and stupid, and have never deviated from this view.”

Well, all I can say is: #MeToo. I too have spent the last eight years regularly arguing against the drift of American and Western policy in Ukraine. Only one interlocutor who strongly disagreed with me stayed strictly to the issues rather than resorting to ad hominem, Casey Michel. But beyond that, I have never run into a good-faith debate about these issues. I’ve never had the pleasure of someone stating my own views back to me in a way I would recognize before proceeding to disagree with my premises, or present an alternate slate of facts. And unlike Peter, I have given up.

It’s worth setting the record straight. For years, I’ve tried to patiently outline the differences between Western Putinists — usually obscure moral cretins who see Putin as a salutary scourge of our civilization’s decadence — and those, like Mr. Hitchens and myself, who might be called nervous realists. We believe Western powers are pursuing goals that are ultimately marginal to us, but dear to Moscow, that our leaders and foreign-policy thinkers are in the grip of powerful delusions about the post–Cold War world, or that their thinking has been compromised by ideology.

I’ve argued that, both constitutionally and practically, America’s security is ultimately in the hands of the American people. When they are not enthusiastic about joining a conflict, it presents hard limits to the state’s ability to effect the strategic outcomes that our foreign-policy mandarins desire. I think the story of American foreign policy, from the Clinton administration’s use of sanctions and air power, to the Obama administration’s sponsorship of moderate rebels, to Hillary Clinton’s attempts to define “smart power,” are all failed attempts by the foreign-policy establishment to route around the limits that are set by the American people’s sense of security and consequent lack of interest in optional foreign conflict.

I have been a consistent skeptic of interventionism and find Edmund Burke’s great fears to be my own: “I must fairly say I dread our own power, and our own ambition; I dread our being too much dreaded. . . . We may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing, and hitherto unheard-of power. But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.”

I argued that Putin’s initial annexation of Crimea was a sign of desperation and weakness. This has been my consistent view, constantly rearticulated up to the start of this war. The critics didn’t notice, or more probably don’t care. For years afterward I am accused of “admiring strong men” like Putin and believing him to be a genius. A former spook and professor at a naval college took time away from sexting other people to accuse me of being on the Kremlin payroll.

And for years I argued against arming Ukraine. The Brookings Institution, Atlantic Council, John McCain, and Ted Cruz argued that doing so was necessary to prevent war. The Brookings report argued at the time, “History makes clear that the only way to stop such aggression from precipitating a regional or even worldwide conflagration is to deter and defend against it as early as possible.“

PHOTOS: Russian-Ukraine War

I took it at the time to be like the predictions of being greeted as liberators. Nonsense. This wouldn’t prevent conflict, and it might precipitate it. Hitchens, myself, and the handful of others, building on warnings from George Kennan and predictions from John Mearsheimer protesting these investments in Ukraine, lost all the policy debates. When the regional conflagration started, nobody went back to our old columns or to the old Brookings report and concluded that the Brookings prediction of deterrence was wrong, and that we critics were right. Instead they said, “Aha, Putin is evil. Take the L.”

Why would they? They didn’t go back to award prizes for my 2016 column predicting exactly what would happen in Afghanistan, either. If all this argumentation was done to be taken seriously by our opponents as critics and interlocutors, it was for naught.

I’ve realized something. Hitchens’s hecklers and mine intuit one thing correctly. If Russia or Putin ever did humiliate the United States and Europe, our case against the direction of our foreign policy would be proven outright. That’s true. If you are so mentally deranged that you look at world events as only an occasion for Twitter arguments, I may never have been on Vlad’s side, but he may yet ride to my assistance.

That is not a day we welcome. The U.S. can miscalculate and so can Russia. Their mistake would not justify ours. It would be folly to depend, even for argument’s sake, on the competence of Russian military planning. Historians have made their careers outlining the delusions that afflicted almost every nation and its leaders in the lead-up to and conduct of World War I. We don’t write what we do out of spite, but out of Burke’s “dread” for our nations.

To Hitchens, whom I have admired greatly for some time, I say now is the time to apply realism to the trolls and demagogues and even to many of the think-tankers and mandarins on the other side. Our case is that they are mishandling grave matters, that they are hubristic and deluded about their own nations and about grand strategy. We think they are casting themselves, absurdly, as great statesmen like Churchill. You and I, having read just a little more history than can fit into a two-hour movie, don’t even belong to that cult in the same way they do. Why, then, should we ever have expected them to treat their powerless critics fairly?

Realism means admitting that our leadership is unworthy, deluded, and stupid. Really they are unprepared, or unfit for their roles. They have led us from one disaster to the next for over two decades. But we may avoid the worst calamity in spite of their failures. We may be saved the miscalculation of others. Or our salvation may be that the huge treasury of power and advantage bequeathed to our nations by previous generations cannot be wasted entirely, even by foolish heirs like these. Or it may be by pure dumb luck, or the grace of God.