Ukraine Now. Taiwan Next?
Putin has called the West's bluff. Xi will not have failed to notice.
Over the last few months, a conversation I had 30 years ago keeps popping into my consciousness. It was the end of the Cold War, and a post-Soviet Russian state was on the horizon. I remember talking with a journalist friend about the astonishing potential of that turn of events: the return of Russia as a great power, returning to its ancient nationhood and old religion, moving away from communism, and resuming a major role in world and European affairs. Probably not a democracy, but no longer totalitarian, and worth engaging with as an authoritarian power.
And my friend looked at me as if I were insane. Russia is always a threat, he said. The Kremlin is always the Kremlin — communist or nationalist. America will always have to confront and contain it. And now we have our chance to keep it permanently cut down to size, and protect its neighbors in the future from the threat they’ve always lived under. So what are we dithering about? No pandering to the Russians!
And he wasn’t wrong, was he? This week’s horrifying, brutal invasion of all of Ukraine — an independent sovereign state since 1991 — sure bolsters his case. The brazenness of this assault and the scale of the attempted regime change have shocked even those who had some sympathy for Putin’s worldview. And listening to the tyrant’s rants this week proved to me at least that he always saw the Soviet Union’s hegemony in Eastern Europe as indistinguishable from Russia’s historic destiny. The very distinction I was relying upon — a Russia different than the Soviet Union — is one Putin himself didn’t and doesn’t recognize. Many saw the death of the Soviet regime as a rebirth for Russia. Putin saw it merely as a funeral for Russian power and prestige, which it became his duty to restore.
But that doesn’t mean I was completely wrong either. I was being romantic in a way, believing in something like the tortured “Russian soul” that so many writers have conjured up over the centuries, something uniquely European and Asian, profound, alien, and dark. I had an idea of a future Russia that would perhaps evolve into something slightly more democratic and European, but would never lose its deeper difference, a distinctive Russianness that even Soviet communism was unable to eradicate. And while it couldn’t be just another European country, it need not be an eternal enemy or paranoid pariah either.
In this, Solzhenitsyn was a fascinatingly symbolic figure to me: passionately anti-Communist to the point of utter self-sacrifice, and yet after Communism, also deeply reactionary, nationalist, and illiberal. This is not a pattern often seen in America (though it does seem to be getting more common on the far right). Neocons sometimes failed to understand that opposition to communism could spring from reactionary nationalism as well as liberalism.
And such an emergent authoritarian Russia, in my fantasy, would pursue its traditional national interests rather than sustain a global ideological crusade for equity; and we could live with that. But what are those interests? Here is how Churchill put it, in his famous quote about Russia in 1939, in the fuller context:
I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest. It cannot be in accordance with the interest of the safety of Russia that Germany should plant itself upon the shores of the Black Sea, or that it should overrun the Balkan States and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of south eastern Europe. That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia.
That’s an interesting phrase: “the historic life-interests of Russia.” What did Churchill mean by that? It appears to refer to Russia’s long paranoia about its own region and European backyard, which would, of course, include Ukraine first and foremost. And this paranoid, domineering worldview, especially toward its West, didn’t come out of nowhere. Both France under Napoleon and Germany under Hitler advanced deep into the Russian homeland, and stayed a while, with incalculable human costs for the Russians. And this kind of history deeply shapes national identity. It is no mystery why the Russians get very antsy when the West moves toward them, especially when they feel weak.
And so when NATO, in the wake of our Cold War victory, decided to expand membership all the way to Russia’s borders, many Russian specialists feared triggering the worst kind of response. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake,” George Kennan told Tom Friedman in 1998. “There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else … We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.” (We still don’t, as we have just witnessed.)
Kennan went on: “I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.” Then he went even further: “Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.” Similar misgivings over NATO expansion came from figures such as Kissinger, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Brzezinski, Moynihan, Gaddis, and Burns.
This debate, of course, is unresolvable. We will never know what might have happened if NATO had displayed more magnanimity after our victory in the Cold War, and allowed Russia more dignity and space in the wake of its defeat and collapse. At the same time, it may be that a Putin-style tyrant was always bound to emerge in Russia and bully his neighbors once again — given the long sweep of Russian authoritarianism — and so my friend was also correct. Or it could just be dumb luck or fate that a KGB nationalist who witnessed up close the end of the Soviet Union in East Germany came to dominate the Russian kleptocracy. This debate will go on for a very long time, but it is increasingly academic. Because here we are. Kennan’s and the neocons’ fear have both been borne out. They could both have been right (and wrong) in some measure. And where we are now makes many of these debates moot.
So what now? Of course, Russia will be able militarily to occupy or control Ukraine (at least in the short term), and of course, we are not going to risk nuclear Armageddon to stop it. Since we cannot actually stop it, we will have to impose very serious financial and economic and technological sanctions on Russia and just hope we change the calculus of Putin and his kleptocratic nationalist regime over the medium term. We are also going to have to recommit to the very NATO whose specter helped create this crisis, and push back Russia even further into a corner. We will have to arm a Ukrainian resistance — which could escalate to a new Cold War, or worse.
But what else are we going to do? In the wake of this foul aggression, we have to make sure it fails. Acquiescing in this invasion — let alone justifying it — would tear up the entire international order. Could we still eat crow and commit to Ukraine’s neutrality outside NATO? At this point, that would be a definition of appeasement. So our best hope is that Putin has over-reached, and that this will undo him in the long run.
In fact, whatever our views of the situation before this week, from now on, it seems clear to me that we must do all we can to ensure that Putin becomes a snake that has eaten a porcupine. He has already resuscitated NATO; the invasion will surely intensify a push for Europe’s energy independence; Ukrainian nationality is being forged anew under this kind of assault; and resistance may not be restricted to Ukraine itself. The big anti-war crowds in St. Petersburg and near Red Square must worry the dictator. Make him pay for this assault.
But in one crucial sense, Putin has already won a victory. A nuclear-armed great power has invaded and occupied a neighboring country in Europe, and there is nothing anyone else has been able to do to stop it. Many in the West assumed Putin wouldn’t go that far — surmising that international law, universal condemnation, economic sanctions, and the lack of any serious threat from Ukraine to Russia would restrain him. But he has called our bluff. He has even hinted at Russia’s nuclear capacity to intimidate other states from intervening. And so we have a precedent. Ukraine is a Russian possession. A fact on the ground. All we have been able to do is watch.
All of which brings us to what seems to me to be the larger dimension of this clash: how it will resonate in Beijing and Taiwan. With apologies to Mitt Romney, China is easily the greater geostrategic challenge. And the parallels with Russia are as striking as they are unnerving. China sees Taiwan as part of its national identity in a similar way to how Russia sees Ukraine as part of its. And we are committed to the defense of Taiwan the way we have committed to the defense of Ukraine: kinda, but not really. In the face of this underlying Western ambiguity, the fall of Kiev is news that Xi will be watching closely.
The parallels are not exact, but nonetheless striking. Taiwan is next door to and deeply entangled with China in its history and culture, just as Ukraine is uniquely entangled with Russia. Seeing Taiwan and China (like Ukraine and Russia) as simply random sovereign states with a right to self-determination under international law is correct, so far as it goes. It’s also moral — as majorities of both Ukrainians and especially Taiwanese want independence and have constructed nascent democracies in the wake of autocracy.
But the nationalist passion Russia feels about Ukraine and China feels about Taiwan is real, visceral, and hard for outsiders to understand intuitively. The sense of a rogue region that somehow got away from the homeland is vivid among Russian and Chinese nationalists. This kind of understanding — claiming a “sphere of influence” — is now deemed reactionary by the West’s foreign policy elites, as, perhaps, it should be. But that doesn’t mean that everyone, especially China and Russia, have actually moved past it. Even Americans have very different emotional responses to perceived threats in our own hemisphere compared with the rest of the world. So this is also a culture clash of sorts — globalism and the nation state vs nationalism and spheres of influence.
I’m not saying that this belief in a sphere of influence is a universal view in Russia or China — or that it is justifiable. I’m just saying it is real. And I’m not excusing Putin or Xi from taking a particularly zealous view of this irredentist nationalism, which they both do, for their own personal and political advantage. I’m just noting how national pride deeply informs them, that resentment of the West consumes them, that a sense of historical grievance spurs them on — and that they are not outliers among their compatriots. It is crazy to underestimate the power of this kind of revanchist nationalism — among rulers and ruled. And I fear we underestimated it in the case of Putin.
This means, as Barack Obama once insisted, that Russia will always care much more about Ukraine than we do; and China will always care much more about Taiwan than we do. In those cases, the last thing we should do is promise support that we do not seriously — truly seriously — intend to provide. The vague pledge by the Western powers not to rule out future NATO membership for Ukraine was the worst of all worlds: poking the bear, with no serious intention of fighting it.
What happened this week is that Putin finally called our bluff. The question to me is when and if Xi will decide to do the same.
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Home News
On Monday, I’m checking in for hip replacement surgery. My left hip — as is true for a big swathe of my family — has given way in my fifties and I want to stop hobbling around. I will spare you my high ass pontificating on oxycodone next week, and Josh Barro, the newly minted Substacker, will be filling in. Have fun without me — and I hope to see you all the following Friday.
New On The Dishcast: Edward Luttwak
I first came across Ed Luttwak when I edited him at The New Republic in its glory days. He is a military strategist, historian, and consultant in the “grand strategy” school of geopolitics who has advised many world leaders — and is basically sui generis. He’s the author of almost two dozen books, including “Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook” and, most recently, “The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy.”
He’s a trip — and his personality and brilliance come through in this chat. We discuss Russia’s reassertion after the Cold War, the rise of China as a superpower, and the impact of Brexit. You always learn something from Luttwak, and from this conversation, I learned a lot about Xi Jinping, a dictator unlike anyone in China since Mao, and internationally far stronger. Did you know Xi is obsessed with Goethe?
Ed and I recorded the episode a few weeks ago, so the situation in Ukraine has changed dramatically since then, and he thought Putin was bluffing about invading Ukraine. The reason he gave is simply Putin’s lack of sufficient manpower to hold down a country as vast as Ukraine. We’ll see if that is borne out in due course.
Listen to the whole episode here. That link also takes you to a range of reader commentary on my debate with Anne Applebaum over the reasons for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. The next Russia expert we have scheduled for the Dishcast is Fiona Hill, a former official at the National Security Council, so stay tuned. We’re doing our best to give you the broadest variety of perspectives to understand where we are. A listener writes:
Thank you for the Anne Applebaum interview — it’s one of the reasons I’m glad I renewed my subscription to the Dish. Also thank you for playing the devil’s advocate in the interview — yielding moments of truth, like at 50.43 when you said, “There was no real threat to the United States from leftist regimes that emerged in South America …” I suspect you haven’t read Applebaum’s history of the Gulag the way it was covered in the intro. Should that be true, change that. It’s one of those life-changing books.
Money Quotes For The Week
This quote from 2015 was prescient:
You can listen to the entire lecture from Professor Mearsheimer here. (It’s not often you see a foreign policy lecture get nearly 8.5 million views on YouTube.) If you missed his recent appearance on the Dishcast, check it out.
For seven more quotes we highlighted from the week in news — on the Ukraine crisis, Canadian authoritarianism (no longer an oxymoron), the disturbing case of Quintez Brown, and more — read the full version of the Dish.
Dissents Of The Week: Explaining vs Excusing Russia
After my Dishcast debate with Applebaum, a listener wonders, “Has Andrew Sullivan embraced critical foreign-policy theory?”
As critical race theory attempts to excuse black crime by blaming white supremacy and structural racism, you try to excuse Russia — a “mafia state,” in your own words — for its aggression as a response to its opposition from the West. While you see the problem with critical race theory — that we should be focused on right and wrong (along liberal lines), not black and white — you miss that the same applies to foreign policy: we should not make excuses for an autocratic, criminal state.
Click here to read my response to that listener, along with my response to a longer dissent from a Ukrainian listener. As always, keep the constructive criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Cool Ad Watch
Mark Duffy gathers up his nine favorite beer commercials. This one classes up a rowdy pub with a slow-motion score:
In The ‘Stacks
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about a dozen of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the Ukraine invasion, mental illness in religion and violent crime, and a creative new voting system that could spread nationwide. Below is one example, followed by a new Substacker:
A meditation on the term Nickelbacking, an early form of virtual-signaling.
Welcome, Sarah Haider! (She co-founded the group Ex-Muslims of North America.)
You can also browse all the newsletters that Bodenner and I read on a regular basis here — a combination of our favorite writers and new ones we’re checking out. It’s a blogroll of sorts. If you have any recommendations for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a three-month sub if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Happy sleuthing!
The results for last week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today.
See you next Friday, with Josh Barro.
