Thoughts on Activism and the Russia-Ukraine War

I have just a few more thoughts on the exchange Scott pointed to yesterday. I have no interest in rekindling the Chomsky Wars; suffice to say that Dr. Chomsky’s strength is not now and has never been the foreign policy conduct of countries which are not the United States of America. But I do have some brief points to make regarding how we can think about the Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from an anti-war perspective.

The anti-war case that Chomsky describes and that has also been described in other areas (for example Katie Halper’s show “Useful Idiots,” with Scott Ritter) essentially rests on three equally weak pillars. The first is that the anti-war cause is served by undercutting the ability of a victim of aggression to resist that aggression. This is a position that anti-war activists during the Vietnam War would have correctly regarded as spectacularly disingenuous; the war would have ended rapidly if the Viet Cong had ceased resistance, if the North Vietnamese government had ceased its support of the Viet Cong, or if China and Russia had ceased their support of North Vietnam, but no one would mistake advocacy for such a position as “anti-war,” especially if they regarded the United States as the aggressor in the conflict.

The second pillar is to reconfigure Russia as the victim of Ukrainian (or more broadly Western) aggression, and thus to argue that the correct anti-war position is to refuse support to the aggressor. We’ve discussed this elsewhere, but even if you grant that US and NATO behavior over the past three decades has made Russia’s uncomfortable and that Russia is justified to be rather irritable about the whole thing, there is no way in which Russia was justified in launching a war of conquest against a non-NATO country under the legal and moral rules that anti-war activists tend to hold dear. Russia can barely make a case for a preventive war (which is illegal under most formulations), much less a pre-emptive war, and thus if Russia is justified then pretty much every country in the world can conduct whatever war it likes. This is not, I daresay, a direction that anti-war activists want to push.

Finally, the anti-war case resorts to the idea that war is hell, that Russian victory in inevitable, and thus that its best to cut support to Ukraine in order to get things over with and force the Ukrainians to the negotiating table as rapidly as possible. There are all kinds of practical and theoretical problems with this argument at the best of times (nature of settlement depends on military balance, military action is harder to predict than you think, etc.) but this is not the best of times; “certain defeat for Ukraine” does not begin to describe the military situation that now exists between Russia and Ukraine, as there is a non-trivial chance that Ukraine will defeat Russian forces in the field.

All of these, in their own way, have as their source a “the strong do what they wish and the weak suffer what they must” mindset. I cannot over-emphasize that principled anti-war activists, writers, and thinkers should stay as far away from this mindset as possible, as it is the very antithesis of concepts of law and justice in international society. I worry that much of the objection that anti-war thinkers have had to the Western response has been essentially attitudinal; it’s not as if aid for Ukraine is inherently a bad thing, but the folks who are most strongly in favor of aid tend also to be the folks who are the loudest cheerleaders for things that anti-war activists don’t like, including the defense industry, a big Pentagon budget, and foreign wars of choice.

Anyway, a few links:

• Does Putin need the Russian street?
• Ukrainian forces are being trained on Western equipment in Germany.
• Biden administration planning to seize, not freeze, Russian assets.
• The distinction between offensive and defensive weaponry is now and always has been dumb.

Finally, Cheryl and I chatted a little bit about the question of Finland and Sweden joining NATO on the latest pod. Here’s a more extended discussion:

Every problem is an opportunity, and some analysts have pointed out that adding Finland and Sweden to the alliance’s portfolio gives Russia more area to threaten. With the performance of the Russian military in Ukraine thus far, however, it seems like the Finns and Swedes are firmly on the “asset” side of the ledger. Finland’s decision to acquire 64 F-35As significantly increases Russia’s vulnerability on its northern flank, as the Panthers can threaten Russia’s air defense network in ways that conventional fighter-bombers cannot. The prospect of staging other NATO aircraft to Finnish airfields during a crisis also puts Russia at considerably greater risk.

Finally, the full accession of Finland gives NATO far greater access to Russia’s north than it currently enjoys.  NATO can already take advantage of Norwegian arctic territory, but access to Finland has the potential to give NATO a much clearer view of Russian military dispositions in the north, especially the bases of the Russian Northern Fleet and of Russia’s ballistic missile submarine flotilla.