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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"The Third Man"

Nineteen Forty-Nine was a great year for movies, one that earned the ad of a decade later that “movies were better than ever”. Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet” won the Best Oscar, the awards trying to believe that the most quality movies were also the most popular, but the year also included the musical “On the Town”, a blockbuster musical by the young people of Comden and Green and Leonard Bernstein, “Pinkie”, a movie about a mulatto girl trying to live in the South that showed some of the sorrows of segregation, “The Treasure of Sierra Madre”, which was a story as tightly drawn as a Chaucer story, and even the awful “My Friend Irma” remarkable only because it introduced Martin and Lewis, who stole the show with Martin’s suave deliveries, including his signature ability to caress the microphone, and Jerry Lewis, who was not so much imitating a cripple as much as imitating a nerd before there was such a term. It seems that the movies had moved on beyond World War II to pick up the new issues of the post-war world, such as suburbanization in “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” which was produced in 1948, and even in the 1949 and wonderfully comic “I Was a Male War Bride”, where the women were seen as independent minded and responsible and sensible. Cary Grant was the comic foil to Ann Southern’s straight man, the opposite of Burns and Allen, a duo from the era of the Thirties, where Allen played the ditzie foil. Movies were into social issues, such as the overdrawn “Gentleman’s Agreement”. The weekly movie goer didn’t need to read the papers. Those who tuned into the dream factory had plenty of real issues to chew on. The major studios were at work with socially significent stuff, not just with film noir detective and crime stories that portrayed dark emotions shot mostly at night, such as “The Postman Rings Twice” or “Sorry, Wrong Number”, the genre seeming profound because the protagonists were quirky as well as bad. (But, then again, “Richard III” would qualify as a film noir piece.)

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