Terror is Our Present Time

Terror is the temper of our century in public affairs and in literature.

The Twenty first Century is only a quarter over and so it might seem too early to assess the temper of the times for the century. But a quarter into the cavalcade of centuries has already set its defining emotions. The Seventeenth Century started with the tragic mode of Shakespeare and Webster, as that was continued later in the century with Racine and Pascal. The Eighteenth Century abruptly changed to the comedy of Pope who shared a sense of humans as all too human and therefore comic as continued later in the century by Hume and Locke, who thought people to be reasonable and accommodating. “Gulliver’s Travels“ is, after all, a satire in that it exaggerated features to comic extreme, as by making British royalty into Lilliputians, even if the book presents, as a whole, a very tragic view of the human condition. The book was published in 1726, just a year past the quarter century mark. The Nineteenth Century of Romanticism and melodrama was set early with Wordsworth and Coleridge in their “Lyrical Ballads' in 1798 and Jane Austen’s inquiry into all the conflicting and well articulated motives was over by the quarter century mark, however well developed by Dickens later on in the century to high melodrama, including the insufferably bathetic “A Christmas Carol''. Darwin emerged much later in his century but the writers he combined, Malthus and Lyll, of his “Geology”, had been there at the beginning of theNineteenth Century. Modernist greats such as Picasso and Joyce and Kafka and Freud appeared in the early Twentieth Century and so it is possible to see already the strictures and the impulses of that. The epic literature of that century largely preceded the epic warfare of the century: the two world wars and the Cold War.

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The Decade of the Forties

The temper of the Forties was resiliance.

Memory is a first resource for capturing the aura of a decade, every decade defined by its specific theme and concern, as the Depression was in the Thirties, which began in the crash of 1929 and ended abruptly in 1940 hen the United States became the Arsenal of Democracy and everything was paid for on government credit and that made the Depression disappear. The Forties as a decade was marked by the Second World War and its recovery afterwards and the looming Cold War and ended in 1950 with the Invasion of South Korea. Here are three ways to take the temper of the Forties: personal memory, the movies of the time, and the cultural structure implanted in the period to accomplish particular goals but also provide meaning for the decade.

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A Century of Decolonization

Colonialism is cultural not economic.

Suppose European  colonialism began with Columbus, though other people, like the Chinese and the Arabs and also the Israelites, who colonized the Canaanites. were also peoples who invaded and controlled for long times a less culturally advanced people. What conquerors do is bring their religion, dominate the natives with their own political structure and, by the way, gain economic advantage, as when the Israelites descended into a land of milk and honey and that Cortez did find gold enough to laden ships to travel back to Spain. What the American colonists found were settlements  for places to live. They had some fertile land but only some of it and went to the east coast of America because Europe was not hospitable to those people. They had nowhere else to go and that meant being willing to displace or kill the indigenous people.

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Cold War Nightmares

The prospect of nuclear anihilation was and is terrifying.

No atomic bombs were ever used during the Cold War and by the time of the end of it in 1987 it had become clear that Mutually Assured Destruction had worked to deter the use of atomic weapons. They had not been abolished by law, as had chemical warfare, but like chemical warfare were not useful as military weapons because chemical weapons were unreliable and nuclear weapons more than reliable for wiping out the country that used it first. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Millay said to Russian military leaders exactly what the United States would do if the Russians used even tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine and that warning was heeded. Nuclear weapons were off the table and the threat that the United States had or would develop a protection against nuclear weapons, however much its cost and implausibility, had been part of the decision by the USSR to give up the Cold War.

But the prospect of a nuclear exchange that would devastate the United States, the Soviet Union and Europe dominated all their imaginations during the time of the Cold War. Nuclear warfare was the apocalyptic event that everyone dreaded even while the various homelands remained intact and the United States and Europe became even more prosperous while the Soviet Union was in economic decline, which was the real reason the Soviet Union had to capitulate. It couldn’t come close to meeting American military expenditures. So the Cold War was filled with forebodings and we have to rely on books, films, and academic studies of what atomic war would be like to provide the texture of the Cold War, to spell out what never eventually happened but what might well have been.

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War in the Fifties

The Cold War was the war of the century.

I was already an experienced political hand when I opened up my sixth grade first issue of Junior Scholastic of the fall term which announced the invasion of South Korea. I had been following the events in Korea in the New York Post ever since the war started in June. And much before, in 1948, I had listened to H. G. Kaltenborn say on the radio in his staccato voice that  Dewey would win and both I and Harry Truman went to bed after that news and were both surprised in the morning to find that Truman had won though my personal choice of the American Labor Party, whose standard bearer was Henry Wallace and backed by Socialists and Reds, had not even won New York State and so did not even have a symbolic victory.

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The Hostage Question

Hostages are poignant and casualties are horrific.

Hamas is each day releasing 50 hostages in exchange for 150 people held in Israeli jails. The whole world watches the daily event of the hostages taken in ambulances to Israeli hospitals, footage of reunions, and snippets of what their captivity had been like, even though it means stalling the invasion of Israel to destroy Hamas because of its massacre of southern Israel on  Oct. 7th. President Biden says the release of the hostages has been front and center ever since the hostages were taken and that  rescuing the hostages results, Netenyahu states, because of Israeli military pressure rather than pondering the regrettable casualties that are the result of pursuing the war. Why are the hostages so important even though there are only hundreds of hostages while many thousands of Palestinian civilians, including women and children, die as the result of Israeli artillery. Isn’t that disproportionate?

The reason hostages are seen as more precious than civilians is existential. Hostages are particular while civilian casualties are statistical. A hostage is a person absconded and in grave danger of dying and so suspended between life and death and that leads to, well, suspense, which means concern for whether that particular person will die, a person full of feeling and personal lives, those recounted by un-hostaged relatives, and therefore precious because of their anguish. On the other hand, civilians are at any moment either dead or alive, mourned if gone but that over and done with, or else still alive and subject to the chance of a bomb falling on them or on the building which collapses on top of them. Some people have bad luck while others don’t even though the odds are worse in some places rather than others. Palestinians remind the world of the number of casualties even as Israelis have to remember what happened on Oct. 7th so as to explain why reprisal was justified. The media find the story of hostages a better story to cover because of individual biographies while all the media can show of casualties are bodies in shrouds, but the media is telling the story of the hostages because of its inherent poignancy: a person captured or released who was available to be killed.

There are precedents other than war of the poignancy of people under a sword of Damocles suspended under a thread, and so in recognition of immediate death, but still alive. Think of the Chilean miners a decade ago who were trapped underground world wide television closely following for days their eventual rescue while not covering the auto deaths on the highways at the same time  except as a record of a particularly grisly one without covering the people who had lost live ones. Car accidents are just statistical and to be alleviated by seat belts and driverless cars rather than saving the guy who gets behind the driver’s seat to some unknown fate. Also think of Billy Wilder’s most cynical movie,”Ace in the Hole”, from 1951, where newspaperman Kirk Douglas creates dispatches of a trapped miner that leads to a carnival atmosphere and Douglas extends the time until he would be freed so as to do it more safely until  the point that the miner dies, which is now a lose rather  than an inspiration for hope, which is what everyone admires as a token of humanity, however manipulated by Douglas for his own advantage.  

A way to overcome both hostages and casualties is to point to the grievances of one party and neglect those on the other side to the point that Palestiniians will claim that Oct. 7th was done by the Israelis to itself while Israelis will say that Gaza residents did not overthrow the Hamas regime and so those Palestinians afre being liberated by Israeli attacks on Gaza. A bit of hyperbole that is rhetorical and self-serving. But underneath the faux humanitarianism are the historical grounds for each side. Israelis were on the land for three or four thousand years and Palestinians claim that the land is part of the essential Muslim territory. There are quibbles about which side engaged in bad faith, the Israelis expelling the Palestinians during their War for Independence, the Israelis claiming that the Palestinians mostly left when they expected to return to their homes when Arab armies had taken over the area when they won the war. Both sides justify their own history, though I do find telling that the Palestinians never accepted any one of the many partitions offered to them. The Palestinian view “from the river to the sea” can be considered either principled or foolhardy or both.

It is no wonder then that political scientists will abandon historical rights and consider only realpolitik: what is useful rather than what is right. Japan had interests in getting scrap metal from the US and access to Indonesian oil so as to pursue its war against China. The US had been leery of Japan becoming a great Pacific power and so had conquered the Philippines in the Spanish American War so as to keep it from Japan. But realpolitik can go just so far. Hitlrr did not need a war for Germany to be prosperous and glorious. His daring risked too much. George Bush did not need to recapture Kuwait even if Iraq's control of it raised oil prices. The US adjusts to OPEC without going to war with it, Sunni nations useful for longer geo-political ends.The Palestinians and the Israelis are implacable foes for religious reasons and the US sides with the Israelis for domestic political reasons based on the idea that Israelis are westerners and Arabs are only slowly becoming that. Cultural affinities triumph over geo-political interests.

There is another way to explain the plight of hostages and casualties that takes advantage of their two properties: hostages as poignant and casualties as horrific. Biden uses both of them to accomplish his own goal, which is to get things to settle down rather than in war solve the problem once and for all, despite what Netenyahu and his most ardent supporters may want. Biden said a few days after the hostage taking that freeing the hostages was the first priority and would encourage humanitarian pauses so as to allow that. That Biden view may well have been heartfelt even though any pause would allow Hamas to regroup. The best Netanyahu could do was to use the poignancy of the hostages to say that only military pressure would allow Hamas to release hostages. And Biden, apparently with his active intervention, arranged for a trade between time and hostages, putting aside the Palestinians left out of jail. Then Biden talked about extending the days for exchange and possibly extending the situation into a full truce, which is counter to the Netanyahu position that Hamas has to be destroyed or else it will rise again and massacre Israelis. But Biden is concerned that the Palestinian casualties are so considerable that it will stain Israel permanently, there always people to blame the Jews for doing what other nations do regularly, as was the case when  the US engaged in unacceptable behavior in Vietnam, killing civilians that were called “combatants'' because they were running away from American helicopters. So, by their own terms, Hamas would have won the war they expected: able to fight another day, thanks to American intervention. Biden would hope the Israeli people would kick out Netenyahu and elect a government that wpoui;ld supp[ort a two-state solution. Biden is sincere in what he says about Hamas and Israelis but is also cagey in the way he tries to leverage American power to his own ends, which means looking in the long run for a gradual accommodation between Israelis and Palestinians, over the course of generations, so deep is the chasm between them.

Contemporary Anti-Semitism

Marxist-Leninism did it.

These times, following but also before the Oct. 7th, 2023 massacre of Israelis in southern Israel, show the worst anti-Semitism since when the German guards left the concentration camps because of the approaching Soviets, Americans and Brits, which was in early 1945, when I was four years old, born and being bred in New York City because my mother and a sister had left Poland for America in May, 1939 and so were not exterminated as were her other brothers and sisters and brethren. I want to untangle the various forms of anti-Semitism and particularly the version of it currently in vogue, never mind that anti-Semitism is a persistent matter some 2500 years old.

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Responsibility in Israel and Gaza

Moral words on war are not illuminating.

Which side, Israel or Gaza, has the onus of the carnage each creates? Tube obvious answer is whomever started first, which is the case with Hamas, which runs the people in Gaza, and so Israelis are free to do whatever they  need to do to rid themselves of the Hamas menace, given that they kill women children, babies, the elderly and other people who are clearly non combatants. Hamas engages in genocide of the Jews, though with very few results but a sufficient warning that all measures can be taken to avoid that. Either one side or the other side can prevail. The media do not clarify the issue of who to blame. They shallow the original outrages against the Israelis, presenting footage of the destruction and then interviewing grieving Israeli survivors, and now present footage of the carnage in Gaza which provides footage of wounded Palestinians and interviews with loved ones back in the United State. Is it that whomever suffers lastly are the victims that are to gain sympathy? That can’t be right. I have also heard said that Isradlis should flatten Gaza, never mind that eliciting a response was certainly part of the plan by Hamas to draw Israelis into the tunnels under Gaza, a plan that the Israelis are reluctant to implement because of the carnage against civilians which will result. Moreover, most wars are not justified by which side loses the most citizens. The Germans lost more people than did the English speaking  but the Germans aren't judged as having morally won the war. There are bigger ideological issues at stake which encapture the actual events of war. The Confederates did not think they were wrong in having maintained slavery because they lost the Civil War. The Southerners just re-established slavery by another name less than a generation later.

The view that the first outrage requires and therefore justifies the response is not the way either the Americans or the Israelis see it. They both claim that, unlike Hamas, they are  subject to the international laws of warfare so as to limit atrocities such as the killing of civilians, even though it has been an established fact since air power arrived that civilian casualties were to be regarded as collateral damage for destroying military targets and thereby morally acceptable. That is no comfort to the Gaza civilians. 

A way out of the moral quandary is to invoke the idea of responsibility, which means a decision, whether individual or collective, which leads to subsequent results. I have heard it said that Gazans are responsible for what happens to them because they voted in Hamas twenty or so years ago, even though there have been no further elections, and the Gazans have not revolted against Hamas and then negotiated for what are their own interests rather than let Hamas remain in place and treat  Gaza as only a launching ground against Israel. But that is to treat “responsibility” very narrowly. The term  means, after all, the ability to respond, which means doing only what it is actually capable of doing. A person is not responsible because they cannot fly on their own arms, but they are responsible, in a democratic nation like the United States, for the electorate to pick officials who will or will not allow abortion or raise or lower taxes. But if you look at the Arab world, few if any of those nations do engage in democratic politics. Rather, they regard themselves as passive observers of politics, victims, if you prefer, of politics. Social scientists think it takes a long time for a  people to evolve so that they own and are agents of politics. So while there might be some dissenters among them, it is unreasonable to think that Gazans will revolt against Hamas.

This redefined definition of responsibility as meaning all the circumstances that constrain decision making means consulting any number of the causes of the present war and not rely just on, as pro Gazans argue, only to the fact that the Israelis control the exits and entrances of food, fuel and people and are therefore to be regarded as an occupied territory. That is not the way the Israelis set Gaza up when they vacated Gaza. They bombed their own synagogues so as not to blame the onus of that on the Gazans. They left their hydroponic tanks which provided produce to  sell; to Europe. Offered as well was a two billion dollar development fund that was rejected because controls would be in place to prevent corruption and the accumulation of arms. There were architectural plans for a high speed rail transit system up and down the Gaza Strip. That would lead to Gaza as an economic and social entity and, eventually, to be integrated with the West Bank as a separate state solution, which was turned down  by Arafat as well as Hamas. So responsibility has to be attached to Palestinian people and bodies and not just to the Israelis unless everything follows from the responsibility for the creation of Israel itself, that being the central and significant injustice. Do the pro-Palestinian advocates really believe the slogan “Palestine from the River to the Sea”? Because that would mean no compromise is possible and so the war should continue indefinitely rather than ever cease. Do those who carry those banners take responsibility for unending war? The only peace possible is a two state solution whereby both sides have to give up something dear. The Israelis have to accept that Judea and Samaria, parts of biblical Israel, will be accepted as a Palestinian state in what is now called the West Bank. And what Palestinians have to accept is that a separate state, even including tunnels and roads that6 make Gaza continuous with the West Bank, once Gaza is rid of Hamas and absorbed by the Palestine Authority, is that it would have no army and no airport, but a lot of autonomy and economic development.

Another moral term that is used today so as to provide a way to grasp the situation, such as “responsibility”, because moral terms are supposed to be objective and so cover both sides to a conflict, is the standard of humanitarianism, which goes beyond and is inclusive of the rules of war. Both sides are responsible for being humane and so Israel should supply Gaza with food, water, electricity and the like to spare Gaza civilians and the latest reports are that water will be supplied. The question is whether it is humane for the Israelis to tell Gazans to leave Gaza’s northern region as difficult as that may be. On the one hand, you can’t tell a civilian population to evacuate according to the rules of war but it seems sensible advice given the battle that is about to begin.  And so one can despair about using any moral terms to confront the situation and make sense of it, moral terms just weapons mobilized by the sides of the parties to use as part of their own ammunition, Israelis pointing to the original atrocities and Gazans to the present one, both sides sure of their moral standing, rather than looking at the long time and complex causes and consequences, such as whether Israel should exist at all, which is the root question. George Marshall back in 1948 said it should not be recognized because it would lead to endless warfare, and that has come to pass, however it may be that Israelis think that a breakthrough with Saudi Arabia would make Israel a normal nation in the Middle East rather than a Western enclave inserted in an Arab area. Maybe this war will be the last one. People always say that about many wars.

Two Sisters

Shedding and acquiring guilt with regard to the Holocaust and other historical and ordinary problems.

My mother, originally known as Manya Demba, later Mary, grew up in Czenstochowa, Poland, a cathedral town close to the German border and famous for the shrine of the Black Madonna. She in later years told me that Easter Sunday was when youths would raid the Jewish ghetto and beat up people. My mother worked at a handbag company, never having gone past the sixth grade, while her sister, later anglicized as “Rae”, was a nanny and so got extra food and clothing from her employer. But war was impending. They had been through the Munich Crisis. Polish troops had been mobilized and my mother remembered the hypnotic power of Hitler on the radio, which she could well enough understand because of her Yiddish. (She later said that English was difficult to learn because its letters did not easily convey the sounds and meanings of the language while Polish was transparent, its letters indicating what was said). My mother planned to immigrate to Palestine and was learning Hebrew and Jewish history in preparation for that when a rich relative who had prospered as a baker in  America, much more so than his three brothers who had gone to America also as bakers a generation before, came to visit Czenstochowa, partly to provide money and also, I am inclined to think, to gloat a bit about his prosperity. He offered to sponsor the two young women, my mother and one of her sisters, Rae, to come to the United States by paying the fare and guaranteeing they would not be destitute, giving them food and housing, and so akin to the wards who populate nineteenth century English novels. The two girls decided to do that and departed on the luxury ship “Batory” in May of 1939, reportedly the last Polish ship to leave Poland before the war, my mother insisting in later years that boys took her dancing on the higher class decks while her sister was seasick. That was the most courageous thing the two sisters ever did, however many were the people who immigrated from Europe to America, never again to see the families from which they had departed. Most of her own relatives, including a number of sisters, were killed in the concentration camps after the war began.

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Cold War Nightmares

It is fun to refight the battles in the Civil War or in the Second World War. The dead have all been counted and the battles are so complex that there might have been very different outcomes in many of them. War is more complicated than chess if for no other reason that the values of the elements of force can change over time. So long range artillery are more important in the Russia-Ukraine War than are jet planes. Maybe Italy wouldn’t have been such a long slog that was not decisive if Mark Clark had better handled Salerno. Would Hawaii have been invaded if we lost at Midway? What if Union forces had not taken the heights on the first day of Gettysburg or Grant had not persisted on the second day of Shiloh and turned defeat into victory? So many imponderables that are no longer at anyone’s expense. Unless you worry that Jefferson Davis and Hitler might have won. Now, those would be nightmares.

On the other hand, I don't like to refight the Cold War. I lived through the entire thing, from the late Forties through 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and I had nightmares throughout the period. During the Korean War, friends of mine in junior high school sang “MIG’s are a’comin; their planes are In sight” to parody the then popular tune “Shrimp Boats Are A Comin”. I calculated that I would survive a nuclear attack in my neighborhood, the central Bronx, if the A Bomb hit Lower Manhattan but not if it landed in Midtown. My friends and I were asked to tell our school how we went back and forth to home, probably for the innocuous purpose of redistricting school catchment areas. We took it as meaning that the school authorities could find where our bodies laid, though, of course, no one would bother. I dreamed of whether radiation was like a sunburn that fried me and, in my dreams, avoided windows because the shards of glass would riddle me as sure as a tommy gun. Pamphlets told me a brief coating of soil would keep me from radiation, but that didn’t help inside an apartment building. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, when I was a graduate student, a young woman was heard on Telegraph Avenue, in Berkeley, yelling out that she didn’t want to die and my friends and I made plans to go to the Oregon coast because I thought the wind currents were west to east and so likely to have little fallout. The crisis eased when Russian ships carrying missiles turned back from the American blockade of Cuba but I did not know at the time that there was a secret agreement that Kennedy would withdraw the Jupiter IRBM’s from Turkey because they were only offensive missiles in that they took time to get fueled and so could only serve as a first strike, not a response to the enemy's nuclear strike. There were so many loose ends in mutual deterrence that it seems likely that one of them would ignite the nuclear fire. Early on, writers wondered about what a war would be like. Collier’s Magazine, while in the Fifties, before it folded, had a sense that a war might be punctuated with atomic bombs but more conventional warfare might obtain. It believed the Allies would conquer Russia by land although New York City would have been hit by two nuclear attacks. Comic book artists imagined that the Soviets would attack the west coast of South America with an army. Science fiction authors postulated the Soviet occupation of America. Then there was the later version, which estimated, according to Herman Kahn in his “On Thermonuclear War”, that by the mid Sixties, it was now possible to annihilate the civilization of the attacked enemy, and so led to movies like “Fail Safe” and Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”. No way out of a conventional war then, only the apocalypse.

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Where Morals Can't Go

Hobbes is treated by intellectual historians as a pessimist because people are so anxious to enter into a social contract that will protect their lives and livelihood that they will rush to anyone who offers such guarantees, including potential leaders who are demagogues or charlatans, so long as they offer peace and security. Never mind that Hobbes gives a back door way to democracy because he is saying that the authority for leadership is the result of the consent of the governed in that the popular majority decides whether they can live with the going or the proposed political arrangement. John Locke, on the other hand, is to be regarded as an optimist in that there is never an end to how people can form a new social contract, a new one created as soon as an old one ends, people always political in that they can frame an ever more useful constitution-- or, at least, the British are always able to. Moreover, there is, in addition to the overall social contract, there are any number of individual contracts that people can make which are mutually advantageous, such as contracts for employment, or to rent land, each crafted that is voluntary and reasonable, even if some people can arrive at a disadvantage as when a person agrees to work for low wages because poor people need the work more than the rich people need to hire one or another of them. Bad contracts are still effective except when people’s lives are endangered, and so slavery is prohibited by Locke as an individual contract because becoming a slave means putting one’s life in danger. And, according to Locke, people have innate rights, regardless of the nature of the constitution or the laws, whereby people are recognized as morally free to act because such things, like free speech or privacy, are recognized as part of a person’s nature rather than just the sufferance allowed by the government. It would therefore seem, in Locke’s view, that morality orders most of social life in that people can appeal to government, freely agreed to contracts, and personal rights, as allowing people to defend, of right, their dignities. But the Lockean question remains: where are the areas of social life where morality doesn’t prevail? What parts of social life have no moral sway, either because of a general social contract, or a particular contract, or as a matter of right? Where is the abyss into which people can descend where there is no morality?

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Wartime Atrocities

Let us try to sort out the terms that are now being applied to the newly discovered wartime atrocities found north of Kiev, that term neutral in that it remains problematic whether these events of Russian troops killing civilians, executing them after they are tied behind their backs, is to be treated as a war crime or even a genocide which is what Zelensky says is the case because the Russians are out to eliminate Ukraine as a people. Biden regards them merely as war crimes and regards Putin as a butcher and a war criminal and wants independent authorities to put on trial those who are responsible. Those events of killing civilians are vile and horrendous and certainly to be condemned, but whether to try them is a good question. Today, we say that killing civilians is a war crime because it does not fulfill a military objective. In similar fashion, it is considered a violation of the rules of warfare not to execute prisoners of war and expect combattants to either be wearing a uniform or some insignia or, at the least, be enrolled in a military so that the person is not regarded as a terrorist. But these restrictions only apply to the defeated. Japanese commanders were executed for having mistreated prisoners of war and Germans for having used slave labor camps. But the victors get scot free. Gen. Curtis LeMay was not prosecuted for leveling Japanese cities, the bombing of civilians treated as collateral damage while artillery aimed at civilians is regarded, now as then, as culpable. You could argue that hurting the morale of civilian targets is a military goal, but in that case Russians are now engaged in hurting morale by killing people and so should not be regarded as a war crime.

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War By The Book

Some wars are those of necessity in that a civilization is in danger of perishing even if the odds of persevering are slim. That was the case in the Second World War and with the War between the Greeks and the Persians in the Fifth Century B. C. and also, I think, with the Spanish Armada, which was out to destroy what the Protestant Reformation had created. Most wars are less so in that a negotiated peace could have gotten most war aims without the need for carnage. The colonies could have worked out a way to remain tied to Great Britain if Parliament had been willing to negotiate with Benjamin Franklin, the reluctant revolutionary. The North could have swallowed an independent Confederacy, leaving it to its cruelty and rural idiocy while it remained dependent on Northern capital and industry, which in fact is what happened for the hundred years that followed the end of the American Civil War. The Spanish American War was unnecessary for the United States to take over the declined Spanish Empire as part of its economic sphere of influence, sometimes deciding to keep territories, as in Puerto Rico, or give them up, as in Cuba, or hold them only for a half century, as was the case with the Philippines. The logic of the geo-political order trumps the need for war. The same is the case with Ukraine. What appears in newspapers in the past few days are limited Russian war aims--a Ukraine pledge not to join NATO and the annexation into Russia by some eastern Ukraine provinces--could have been agreed to by negotiation before the war started were Putin willing to give up or even defer trying to reconstitute the Russian Empire at the time of Catherine the Great. But some leaders are itching for a fight and we think that prudent leaders are the ones who are reluctant to wager the stakes of war, that you might lose your seat at the table and not just the stakes that had been anted up.

The war of Russia on Ukraine can be understood as a war to rectify the borders of what had happened when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, just like the border wars that occurred when Yugoslavia did in the 1990’s. But those were just ethnic conflicts that got out of hand because concentration camps and ethnic cleansing sullied the point by introducing these matters in Europe for the first time since the Second World War. Putin, on the other hand, was to rectify back to the Eighteenth Century and declared war to do so when that had not been necessary to achieve his major objectives. So Biden decided to take sides in the war very vigorously but without shedding American blood on the grounds that Putin had gone to war in the first place. The war itself was the casus belli for taking sides when Biden could have said that let Putin take Ukraine in that it was outside of the Western sphere of influence even though Ukraine was more culturally allied to Europe. But Biden did not let that pass and so has applied the measures available--arms shipments and economic warfare-- to counter Putin. It is clear that either Biden or Putin is the winner, never mind whatever happens to Zelensky and his people.

How do you keep up this war or any war in a way that is responsible and judicious, which means risking not too much to make sure as to command the resources that will allow a side to win. FDR managed he war wisely, by general accounts, because he did not panic but thought that time was on his side in that his ever increasing arms and mobilization would work to create overwhelming force and that the only danger was that the American people might lose heart and give up on the sacrifices, though the protection of two oceans meant that the domestic front was never seriously threatened. The domestic front was pretty normal, prosperous, in fact, even though casualties mounted. FDR made clear to his people that they should not be distracted from his war aims. It was not a war to protect the British Empire nor a war to rescue the Jews. It was an alliance against Fascism and not to repel Stalinism. FDR was, therefore, careful and circumspect, carefully marshaling his resources and avoiding disruptive matters.

Biden is following this circumspect manner. He is not overly ambitious, not suggesting that Putin will fall (until yesterday), even though many commentators were saying that Putin’s fall is now inevitable. Putin used assistance to overcome Ukraine as he could while not escalating the chips on the table by unlimbering the Western arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, that being the hole card that Putin may or may not keep in reserve. All in all, Biden is playing by the book in that he minimizes risk and consults his allies on every forward move. That is supposedly the right way to wage war, even though some exceptional politicians, like Lincoln, was dramatic in shaking things up to reshuffle the deck as when he announced the Emancipation Proclamation, but that was also a considered move to mobilize the war as one about freedom rather than just union, and only did so after a victory, so that the war was moving towards its endgame even though it really wasn’t yet there, tht waiting for the continued attrition of the Confederate forces. Similarly, D-Day knew that repulsing the invasion of Europe was Hitler’s last chance while a defeat for the Allies on June 6, 1944 meant only that Eisenhower would have to be replaced by a general who could do the trick the next spring-- providing that the Germans did not develop new weapons that could significantly change the war.

Who are the people who could master how to wield a war? It is difficult to say. Monarchists would say that the terms of office for President or Prime Minister are too short so that they have rough experience so as to master their own administrations much less international statecraft. The difference is that politicians who rise in a democracy often have had decades of experience before they achieve the highest rung and so have played many parts and have met enough foreign leaders that they are familiar with handling world events. And so Biden can be thought of as having been seasoned enough to know the playbook he is handling, having been in the Senate for more than thirty years and then as Vice President for eight. But experience is not the best preparation. Lincoln was not experienced. Kaiser Wilhem was experienced but insufficiently circumspect to see the awful nature of a new war. George H. W. Bush was experienced but still got himself into a quagmire where he had to enforce a no fly zone where he was thereby ever vulnerable to Saddam Hussein's missiles and the very experienced people around George W. Bush got themselves in a situation where everybody was firing on Americans. So experience is not the answer even if Biden rests on it but relies even more on judgment to determine how to read the invisible book from which he reads.

So if going by the book is just being careful and deliberate, Biden is measuring up. He has unified NATO so as to shore up his defenses and shipped arms to fight an offense and protected the home front by not putting Americans at risk. He has denounced aggression and it seems to be successful in getting the support of the American people. But none of these matters have been tested in that the Russians have not done something significantly stabilizing? Would Americans rally to the cause if there were serious cyber warfare attacks against the homeland or if Poland was required to answer the Russians for a bit of chemical warfare against Ukraine? It is hard to say, given how weak are the reasons for our war with Russia over Ukraine. After all, it is about just the fact that there was a war at all and that wars engender civilian casualties, which is perhaps not at all a cause for major escalation. The war between democracies and autocracies would seem a pretty thin reed on which to continue a war with damages to our side, especially since most of the war aims,by Putin, which is Ukraine not in NATO and eastern provinces of Ukraine ceded to russia matters that could have been accomplished by negotiation and still available, or so it seems to Zeelensky. Nothing to fight a major war over. So far, Biden playing by the book has been lucky.

Biden said yesterday that He thought Putin did not deserve to stay in power. That was backtracked as meaning that Biden was just responding to seeing the Ukraine refugees in Poland, just as when he said Putin was criminal because of the slaughter of civilians. But commend biden for saying to the American people what he means, which is that Putin is criminal whether or not there is a war crimes tribunal and that, so too, Putin does not deserve to remain as the head of russia given his misbehaviors, and that no one in the west will feel safe if Putin stays in office and so, sooner or not much later, there will be a reckoning about russian leadership. Biden confides to the American people the sense that the American people sense is the truth. But there may be something more hinted at, which is that we are in the end game in the war, that Putin is clearly losing the war, what with hunkering down around Kiev and not trying to defeat it, and bolstering mainly in Ukraine's east. That is why Biden, more aware than the rest of us about the real situation in the Russian armed forces, can be thinking about the future, or when Putin will leave office. He would not be talking about that if Putin’s worst was still ahead. My fear, however, is that Biden is wrong and the worst might be yet to come, however careful has been Biden’s management of this war.




Some wars are those of necessity in that a civilization is in danger of perishing even if the odds of persevering are slim. That was the case in the Second World War and with the War between the Greeks and the Persians in the Fifth Century B. C. and also, I think, with the Spanish Armada, which was out to destroy what the Protestant Reformation had created. Most wars are less so in that a negotiated peace could have gotten most war aims without the need for carnage. The colonies could have worked out a way to remain tied to Great Britain if Parliament had been willing to negotiate with Benjamin Franklin, the reluctant revolutionary. The North could have swallowed an independent Confederacy, leaving it to its cruelty and rural idiocy while it remained dependent on Northern capital and industry, which in fact is what happened for the hundred years that followed the end of the American Civil War. The Spanish American War was unnecessary for the United States to take over the declined Spanish Empire as part of its economic sphere of influence, sometimes deciding to keep territories, as in Puerto Rico, or give them up, as in Cuba, or hold them only for a half century, as was the case with the Philippines. The logic of the geo-political order trumps the need for war. The same is the case with Ukraine. What appears in newspapers in the past few days are limited Russian war aims--a Ukraine pledge not to join NATO and the annexation into Russia by some eastern Ukraine provinces--could have been agreed to by negotiation before the war started were Putin willing to give up or even defer trying to reconstitute the Russian Empire at the time of Catherine the Great. But some leaders are itching for a fight and we think that prudent leaders are the ones who are reluctant to wager the stakes of war, that you might lose your seat at the table and not just the stakes that had been anted up.

The war of Russia on Ukraine can be understood as a war to rectify the borders of what had happened when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, just like the border wars that occurred when Yugoslavia did in the 1990’s. But those were just ethnic conflicts that got out of hand because concentration camps and ethnic cleansing sullied the point by introducing these matters in Europe for the first time since the Second World War. Putin, on the other hand, was to rectify back to the Eighteenth Century and declared war to do so when that had not been necessary to achieve his major objectives. So Biden decided to take sides in the war very vigorously but without shedding American blood on the grounds that Putin had gone to war in the first place. The war itself was the casus belli for taking sides when Biden could have said that let Putin take Ukraine in that it was outside of the Western sphere of influence even though Ukraine was more culturally allied to Europe. But Biden did not let that pass and so has applied the measures available--arms shipments and economic warfare-- to counter Putin. It is clear that either Biden or Putin is the winner, never mind whatever happens to Zelensky and his people.

How do you keep up this war or any war in a way that is responsible and judicious, which means risking not too much to make sure as to command the resources that will allow a side to win. FDR managed he war wisely, by general accounts, because he did not panic but thought that time was on his side in that his ever increasing arms and mobilization would work to create overwhelming force and that the only danger was that the American people might lose heart and give up on the sacrifices, though the protection of two oceans meant that the domestic front was never seriously threatened. The domestic front was pretty normal, prosperous, in fact, even though casualties mounted. FDR made clear to his people that they should not be distracted from his war aims. It was not a war to protect the British Empire nor a war to rescue the Jews. It was an alliance against Fascism and not to repel Stalinism. FDR was, therefore, careful and circumspect, carefully marshaling his resources and avoiding disruptive matters.

Biden is following this circumspect manner. He is not overly ambitious, not suggesting that Putin will fall (until yesterday), even though many commentators were saying that Putin’s fall is now inevitable. Putin used assistance to overcome Ukraine as he could while not escalating the chips on the table by unlimbering the Western arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, that being the hole card that Putin may or may not keep in reserve. All in all, Biden is playing by the book in that he minimizes risk and consults his allies on every forward move. That is supposedly the right way to wage war, even though some exceptional politicians, like Lincoln, was dramatic in shaking things up to reshuffle the deck as when he announced the Emancipation Proclamation, but that was also a considered move to mobilize the war as one about freedom rather than just union, and only did so after a victory, so that the war was moving towards its endgame even though it really wasn’t yet there, tht waiting for the continued attrition of the Confederate forces. Similarly, D-Day knew that repulsing the invasion of Europe was Hitler’s last chance while a defeat for the Allies on June 6, 1944 meant only that Eisenhower would have to be replaced by a general who could do the trick the next spring-- providing that the Germans did not develop new weapons that could significantly change the war.

Who are the people who could master how to wield a war? It is difficult to say. Monarchists would say that the terms of office for President or Prime Minister are too short so that they have rough experience so as to master their own administrations much less international statecraft. The difference is that politicians who rise in a democracy often have had decades of experience before they achieve the highest rung and so have played many parts and have met enough foreign leaders that they are familiar with handling world events. And so Biden can be thought of as having been seasoned enough to know the playbook he is handling, having been in the Senate for more than thirty years and then as Vice President for eight. But experience is not the best preparation. Lincoln was not experienced. Kaiser Wilhem was experienced but insufficiently circumspect to see the awful nature of a new war. George H. W. Bush was experienced but still got himself into a quagmire where he had to enforce a no fly zone where he was thereby ever vulnerable to Saddam Hussein's missiles and the very experienced people around George W. Bush got themselves in a situation where everybody was firing on Americans. So experience is not the answer even if Biden rests on it but relies even more on judgment to determine how to read the invisible book from which he reads.

So if going by the book is just being careful and deliberate, Biden is measuring up. He has unified NATO so as to shore up his defenses and shipped arms to fight an offense and protected the home front by not putting Americans at risk. He has denounced aggression and it seems to be successful in getting the support of the American people. But none of these matters have been tested in that the Russians have not done something significantly stabilizing? Would Americans rally to the cause if there were serious cyber warfare attacks against the homeland or if Poland was required to answer the Russians for a bit of chemical warfare against Ukraine? It is hard to say, given how weak are the reasons for our war with Russia over Ukraine. After all, it is about just the fact that there was a war at all and that wars engender civilian casualties, which is perhaps not at all a cause for major escalation. The war between democracies and autocracies would seem a pretty thin reed on which to continue a war with damages to our side, especially since most of the war aims,by Putin, which is Ukraine not in NATO and eastern provinces of Ukraine ceded to russia matters that could have been accomplished by negotiation and still available, or so it seems to Zeelensky. Nothing to fight a major war over. So far, Biden playing by the book has been lucky.

Biden said yesterday that He thought Putin did not deserve to stay in power. That was backtracked as meaning that Biden was just responding to seeing the Ukraine refugees in Poland, just as when he said Putin was criminal because of the slaughter of civilians. But commend biden for saying to the American people what he means, which is that Putin is criminal whether or not there is a war crimes tribunal and that, so too, Putin does not deserve to remain as the head of russia given his misbehaviors, and that no one in the west will feel safe if Putin stays in office and so, sooner or not much later, there will be a reckoning about russian leadership. Biden confides to the American people the sense that the American people sense is the truth. But there may be something more hinted at, which is that we are in the end game in the war, that Putin is clearly losing the war, what with hunkering down around Kiev and not trying to defeat it, and bolstering mainly in Ukraine's east. That is why Biden, more aware than the rest of us about the real situation in the Russian armed forces, can be thinking about the future, or when Putin will leave office. He would not be talking about that if Putin’s worst was still ahead. My fear, however, is that Biden is wrong and the worst might be yet to come, however careful has been Biden’s management of this war.





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The End Game for the War

History is unkind to the people who lose wars. Rather than go back to their corners and renew a war after having become refreshed, as happened for hundreds of years between France and England, regimes and monarchs are overthrown, something new happened after the English Civil War: the King was executed. That had not been the original war aim of Parliament. The French king was killed after the French Revolution and the French Emperor deposed after the Franco-Prussian War and a new republic was established. The Kaiser lost the First World War and he was deposed as well, and there was regime change in Germany, all unexpected, and Hitler was a suicide when the Allies were taking control of Germany even though Claus von Staufffenberg thought that if he had successfully assassinated Hitler a year before, Germany might still have retained some German conquests in a subsequent negotiation with the Allies. Not likely, given the carnage of the war. Some revenge was necessary. Germany had gotten off lightly after World War I with reparations as had the reparations paid by France to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War.

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A New Kind of War

There is a revolution going on in how to fight wars. Putin is fighting the old way with tanks and troops while Biden is fighting the new way with economic pressure and weapons sent to his proxy war against Russia. That means Putin’s old war can occupy territory and even decapitate Ukraine’s government but at such a cost to the Russian economy that Russia will be either permanently enfeebled or require an internal revolution to make it right, and that might finally put an end to the schloratic Russian Empire, which would be an improvement on the geopolitical map. But first step back before rushing to the future.

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Why Not Partition?

Partitioning a country into its parts because ethnic and social differences make it difficult for them to work together is a distasteful but not a bad resolution to the problem and so not a failure but a creative way to solve international relations. The partition of Poland in the late 18th century put up a bd precedent because Poland got nothing from it while Prussia, Russia and Austria gobbled up its pieces, the nation not restored for another hundred years when, by that time, Poland as a civilization had industrialized and developed a domestic, Polish, literary culture, whose roots went back to the time of the scientific revolution. Think instead of more successful partitions. Slovakia and thee Czech Republic separated more or less amicably in the nineties and the largest and historically most significant partition was between India and pakistan, however many people died during the separation, Both are better off following their independent entities, Pakistan as authoritarian  and turned west so as to dominate Afghanistan, while India has flourished asa democratically oriented and industrious society with Hindu domination. You cannot say it would have been better off if Hindus and Muslims had tried to go it together rather than each alone in the years since independence in 1947.

In fact, the two great events that shaped the United States can best be understood as a successful and an unsuccessful partition. Unlike the French and English revolutions, where the opposing sides were not centered in regions, the American revolution was an attempt to partition its American colonies from the homeland because they were far away even though the two were similar in politics and culture. It did not have to be if British politicians were more accommodating to Ben Franklin, the de facto Secretary of State of the colonies. The other and unsuccessful partition was the attempt by the Southern states to separate from the Union. The Southern states were a contiguous area shared by geography, economic and social institutions although putatively also shared with the North in Republican principles. The failure to partition allowed the North to allow the South for a century more in its rural idiocy until the North intervened so as to make it again a single country though Southern politics persist in its long lasting tendency to subvert voting rights and allow police violence. Still a bit partitioned.

Consider now the current situation with Ukraine. After the western takeover of Ukraine in 2014, Obama said to Putin that there would need to set up a peace conference to regularize new borders. But Putin has been unwilling to do so because the West will pull a fast one or because Putin prefers to act unilaterally so as to establish that he is just acquiring what he always had, not on the sufferance of the West, and with some good reason, in that Ukraine had been part of the Russian Empire for hundreds of years, back to the twelfth century when Russians and Kievians founded it. So, when three days ago, Putin took over the two eastern regions of Ukraine as part of Russia, I thought this a masterstroke in that it meant he was avoiding sending two armies south to encircle Kiev and decapitate the Ukraine government and so set up a full scale war which Putin might quickly win and then sit tight to wait for everyone to calm down. But, instead, Putin was biting only what he could chew: only the part of Ukraine that is heavily backed by Russian speaking and Russian favorable residents, (Jen Psaki said yesterday that an invasion aimed at Kiev from the north has not been ruled out.) 

Regarding that invasion from the south as a war rather than recognizing it as a  de facto partition was a mistake on Biden’s part, excused only in that he had so clothed himself in the flag of sovereignty and was considering only events of a decade old. But, as usual, Biden has been cagey. He said yesterday the level of sanctions against Putin would depend on what Putin did, and how much further his troops went west. Alittle, fewer sanctions and more a lot of sanctions, knowing that the sanctions would not create severe pain to the Russian regime unless they were well extended. So, in effect, Biden is offering a peace treaty that will not be called that: an agreement on how far into Ukraine the Russians will go so as to partition the east from the rest of a more fully westernized area of Ukraine. 

Nothing much happened today. The United States Defense Department insists that Putin is preparing for war but Putin has not invaded the two regions in eastern Ukraine it has declared as independent and so triggered Biden to say tha the invasion had begun and required American and European sanctions. The journalistic commentaries of all these events have been very poor, reduced to saying Putin must be a madman, the only exception Thomas Friedman who noted that here are false moves by the West, particularly the movement of NATO to Russia’s border in 1997, which I thought was wisee even if belligerent because it meant the eastern part of Europe would be second class citizens, subject to Russian influence, rather than part of the European enterprise. I still don;t know why everyone can’t calm down and then draw boundaries and mutual guarantees. That is what peacemaking is about.


A Primer on the Russia-Ukraine War

When, in the first decade of the Eighteenth Century, Peter the Great had ships built for him by Holland, a great maritime sea power, he could take on what was then regarded as the Swedish Empire. Peter succeeded in his Great Northern War and the Swedish Empire was no more. Ever since, for three centuries now, Russia has tried by war to alter the divide between Europe and Russia, sometimes to the East and sometimes to the West. The main division remains the one between Catholic and Protestant countries in Europe, ones that experienced the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and rapid industrialism, to the more scloratic processes that define Russia. The standard division draws a line where the small countries on the eastern edge of the Baltic are within Europe: Lithuania Catholic as was when it was in confederation with the Poles since the Middle Ages; Latvia Protestant, a remnant of that Swedish Empire; and Estonia, because it's people were sent by the Soviets to that territory, atheist then and probably Russian Orthodox today. Poland was the unfortunate buffer between the Russians and Soviets on the East, to which they shared a common boundary, and the equally hated Germans to the West, also with shared boundaries. The southern flank of Eastern Europe was distrusted to the Soviets and the Russians, they always claimed to dominate those territories. Madelyn Albright, who was Clinton’s Secretary of State, was fully aware that the setbacks in Russian power would be temporary after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and tried to arrange measures that would make the division between Russia and Europe more permanent and in accord with the traditional division between the two. Albright had the Baltic states and Romania tied into NATO, which meant that an attack upon one was to be regarded as an attack against all, and so the military integrity of the continent was associated with the economic ties that had been created in the European Union. That would allow whatever storm arose when new more belligerent Russia arose, which happened with Vladimir Putin. Putin always regarded the movement of NATO to its Russian boundary as hostile even if NATO and Biden regard it as a defensive alliance, though the only one there is to defend against is Russia, NATO sending troops to Afghanistan which it regarded as having been an attack against the United States. Defensive versus offensive doesn’t mean much.

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The Boxing Match Between Ukraine and Russia

The curious thing behind the ramping up of a possible war between Russia and Ukraine is how the important actors have all limited their options, either overtly or implicitly or by secret agreement, so as to create a kind of Marquis of Queensbury set of rules about how the contest will proceed. The United States has taken off the table sending American troops to Ukraine, which means that they will have to fight it out alone against the very formidable Russian military. Biden suggests that the Russians will take serious casualties, but could probably occupy the entire country, and so will rely on economic pressures to make the russians relent or arrive at some settlement, perhaps with an increased area under Russian control, or economic pressure so significant that russia has to accept a humiliating surrender, which would not make russia look well to China, which Biden believes is the real reason for Russian swagger so that it does not become a very minor antagonist to China. NATO has also stipulated its own self control. It will send munitions to Ukraine but will beef up the military only in the nations already affiliated to NATO to insure that the conflict doesn’t spill over into the Eastern front NATO members. Even more important are the unstated constraints on Russia and the United States. There is no discussion at all about nuclear weapons even given the fact that Russia and the United States have the two largest nuclear arsenals in the world. It seems that nuclear weaponry between the two is passe, and reading the arrangements that ended the Cold War, it seems that the general in charge of the Soviet Rocket Forces are selected or approved of by the United States and so I presume that the guy to be in charge of NORAD is vetted by Moscow. Also, I presume that there are secret agreements between Russia and the United States as to limits on cyberspace. Neither will pull down the electrical grid of the other even if the two will be mischievous and try to get into secret codes of the other so as to spy on one another.

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What's Next?

When dealing with politics or whatever is large enough as a social matter to be considered history, those of us who are viewers or observers or whatever is the audience to politics and history always await what will happen next, knowing that, except for people who are alarmists or very certain about how well off they may be when the world ends, there is no end of new things, just like in a soap opera, where characters emerge and reemerge if the audience likes them or pass from the scene to new figures and their problems. In politics, there is always a new campaign, a new Young Turk, a superannuated figure who lingers on to become President, and new configurations whereby Jews and Blacks and women and Gays can become part of the political elites as well as the political masses. There are new issues, like climate change, and older issues, like abortion or voting rights, that get revived with a slightly different spin. Politics is like going to a carnival where you pick out which game you wish to take part in. The only cost to the game is the willingness of time and attention to deal with it, everyone is a master strategist or a tout who predicts which horse will win. Consequently, the viewers or observers are always trying to construct the succession of events as comprising a story so as to make sense of those events. What candidate will peak too early (like Kamala Harris) or just hold on, like Joe Biden, when, in fact, Biden was always ahead in the popularity contest even if he did not make headway in the delegate votes until after the South Carolina Primary. Nixon thought a candidate should peak just right while Nixon thought you go full out all the time. So, at the moment, a viewer like me thinks politics is at a lull, the dust up over Afghanistan over, waiting for whether Biden can pull off his reconciliation and infrastructure bills, neither voting rights or police violence going to amount to much, Biden a hero if both of the major bills pass and a good chance for him to retain congressional control after the midterms, while losing both will make him regarded as a failed President, and the press uncertain what to make of it if Biden gets infrastructure but has to be very scaled down to get reconciliation of what has now been called social infrastructure, which means the extension of entitlements, which is always the goal of Liberal politics. My theory is that there are lulls and moments of high drama, as when John McCain sustained the Affordable Care Act over President Trump’s objection, partly out of policy and partly out of pique. Isn’t that usually the case?

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Historical Mysteries

An historical mystery arises when historians consider why events happened and, after considering all the forces that are at work, there is no satisfactory explanation for why the event or events took place. A good example of an historical mystery is the outbreak of World War I, a topic rigorously investigated from the overly ample materials of the circumstances and events of what is called The July Crisis that occurred after Prince Ferdinand (and his wife) had been assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914 and had for some reason precipitated a World War from which we might say we did not all recover until the Soviet Union collapsed and Germany was reunited in the late 1980’s. How had this apocalypse, none of its member states believing it would happen (Germany mistakenly thinking it would be a short war), had nevertheless occurred?

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