Dispatch Lite: How could NATO have done this to poor, innocent Russia?
What if NATO's expansion has successfully checked Russia's expansionist ambitions rather than encouraged them?
Good morning, Line readers. What a grim week. It’s especially grim because we fear Vladimir Putin’s war machine is just getting started. We’ll continue doing our best to cover this tragedy.
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Also, a programming note: The Line will operate normally next week, and basically normally the week after, but the week after that — March 21-25 — will be a holiday for us. Bad timing, we know. But we are parents to young children and that’s the March Break week. One day, we hope to be a large enough operation to have sufficient staff to operate at least a skeleton shift during such periods. Right now, though, Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson are the skeletons, and their kids would like to see them from time to time.
So mark your calendars: we’re off March 21-25, barring some massive, Earth-shattering news development we simply can’t ignore. And to be honest, that doesn’t feel all that unlikely these days, does it?
Please enjoy this week’s somewhat rushed Line editors dispatch video between the delightful Jen Gerson and a harried Matt Gurney, who had to get a some seven-year-olds laced up and onto the ice in time for a hockey game against a hated local rival
As the world continues to watch the horrors unfolding in Europe, we in our cozy Western enclaves are left to re-discover uncomfortable realities about the geopolitical circumstances around us. Namely, the world is not as safe as once we had thought, and America is not the only great power capable of inflicting atrocities on a smaller, sovereign nation for its own benefit. In fact, watching the situation in Europe play out, we're reminded that America is not a uniquely evil entity at all — and that many of the moral errors it has committed were made precisely because the neighbourhoods in which it presumed to operate are neither peaceful, easy, nor kind.
These are old lessons of history and history — unlike ideology — is messy and complicated. And as we once again draw out those long-forgotten lessons, we find ourselves confronting old arguments as well.
Namely, we see a lot of thoughtful individuals offering the contrarian argument that NATO and the West are ultimately to blame for the invasion in Ukraine because of our military alliance's expansion into Russia's traditional sphere of influence. This undermined the old Russian empire's dignity, the argument goes, and fomented Cold War paranoia that was bound to break out into an aggressive military response.
We at The Line expect this decades-old position will be debated for decades more to come, but in light of the events of the last week, we find it less compelling than ever. We offer the following three problems with this line of argument.
The first is that it falls into the trap of assuming that NATO — and, by implication, America — is the Main Character of global history.
In the minds of the NATO blamers, neither Russia's domestic political intrigues, Vladimir Putin's personal ideological commitments and sanity, nor the histories and cultures of the actual regions in question are given greater weight than NATO's scheming or Joe Biden's speaking skills. The solipsism and self-regard that this argument implies is, in truth, both stunning and entirely in keeping with the United States' national character (and the West in a broader sense). By this metric, it's America/the West, and only America/the West, that is the true global protagonist. The rest of humanity are just bit-players in a grand Western narrative.
As Canadians, we find these assumptions particularly offensive. Ours is a country that exists between America and Russia, and while we may disagree with specific American military engagements and tactics — and will say so! — we are not hapless serfs of American imperialism. Let's lay out our choices plainly: a middle power like Canada can ally itself with Russia, China, NATO, or find some form of interdependence with a patchwork of one-on-one military alliances. Even if we were to take our economic interdependence with America out of the equation, NATO is our best option by far. We mean ... Jesus. Duh.
We will pick NATO 999 times out of 1,000 and so will most free people living in democratic societies. Because the other options are clearly, obviously much, much worse: NATO is the certified preferred military alliance of the free peoples on this planet.
We welcome historical self-reflection and improvement, but America cannot allow itself to wallow so deeply in its own self-flagellating narcissism that it forgets this fact. America is not the Main Character of our shared history, but it is a leader within the global community, and must rise to that role and NATO with it.
The second line of the "it's NATO's fault" argument analogizes the Monroe Doctrine to justify Russia’s aggression. The foreign policy doctrine, first proposed in 1823, was originally intended to assert America’s dominance and influence in the western hemisphere, particularly in opposition to the interests of old world European colonizers. If America gets to play this game, why not Russia?
A couple of problems with this: firstly, America engaged in some exceptionally heinous shit under the auspices of the Monroe Doctrine, and if we can rightly criticize those actions now, why are we giving Russia a pass to embark on a similar path in this godforsaken year of 2022? Does Russia get a free invasion for every historical atrocity America has committed? Why? What, is this bomb one apartment block, get two free? Do any other countries get to play? And why are we pretending that America, for all its many faults, is on the same moral level as an illiberal, kleptocratic autocracy that is literally in the process of shutting down its free press and threatening anti-war protesters with jail? This is just morally confused reasoning.
Now most people, when they invoke the Monroe Doctrine comparison, are trying to draw a direct line between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Cuban Missile Crisis. If America would not allow missiles in Cuba in 1962, why can't Russia similarly impose itself on the countries that border its territory — indeed, countries that used to be part of the old Soviet empire?
Well, fair play. We suppose that's why America invaded, bombed and annexed Cuba at the first mention of missiles being placed there.
Oh … wait … that's not what happened?
Well, no. America certainly was no fan of Castro, and had infamously supported an effort to overthrow him, but when that effort at the Bay of Pigs went pear-shaped, Kennedy explicitly chose to not throw America into the fight. Later, in the presence of actual Soviet missiles, the U.S. enacted a short-lived naval blockade (a “quarantine,” they called it) which was resolved more or less peacefully. The U.S. agreed not to invade Cuba, and to remove obsolete missiles from Turkey after a face-saving delay. In exchange, the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba and pledged to not reintroduce them.
While no one would claim the U.S. always acted honourably in its dealings with Cuba, we note that that the U.S. was able to maintain its sphere of influence without throwing thermobaric bombs at civilian targets in Havana.
If you want to further draw the parallel to the Cuban Missile Crisis: Ukraine has no nuclear missiles, and a military that is a fraction the size and capacity of Russia's. In fact, Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal to Russia in the '90s in exchange for ironclad guarantees from Western nations to come to its aid should its borders be threatened. These are promises that every party has now broken. The lesson to other nations in the future will be clear, to the detriment of long-term disarmament efforts: never give up your nukes. Build them if you can!
Ukraine does not represent any existential threat to Russia, and any talk about joining NATO or acquiring nuclear weapons can only be interpreted as a defensive posture against Russian hostility. And hey-oo.
The last and most ridiculous claim of the "NATO gone dunnit" crowd is embedded in the word "expansion." The word implies that NATO expanded into Europe by force. But that isn't quite right now, is it?
NATO didn't put boots on the ground in Poland and say: "join us, or else." Free people in democratic societies ultimately chose to sign up to our military alliance, and they're free to leave and re-join the Russian Motherland if they choose to do so.
They don't. And there's a reason for that — after a few decades of living under Soviet domination, almost all of eastern Europe ran away from that option like Godzilla crashing into the sea, both middle fingers in the air, yelling "Nope!" These countries chewed through the door to join our protection racket. They entered a pact that would make it difficult for Russia to re-claim its traditional "sphere of influence" against the wills of the peoples actually living in that sphere.
That ought to tell you something about who the imperialists are in this equation.
We at The Line are not apologists for the United States. We protested the War in Iraq when we were young. No one can claim we've been inconsistent on this file. If we opposed that invasion, which was predicated on dodgy intelligence about an imminent threat to a global power, we're on safe ground protesting this one as well.
We are open to the argument that NATO's expansion may, indeed, have contributed to the calculus that led us to the war in Ukraine. We just don't know by how much. Further, that claim is undermined by the counterfactual: What if NATO's expansion has successfully checked Russia's expansionist ambitions rather than encouraged them? Both positions are unprovable, and as we've said above, we expect historians and military scholars will debate the question for many years to come.
But the fact that Russia chose to enact a full-throated invasion of a non-NATO aligned state precisely at a moment of perceived Western disunity and weakness should offer more evidence for one position than the other.
Roundup:
OK, folks, that’s all for us. Remember: next week is normal, the next week mostly normal, and then we’re taking a week off. And please, throw us a few bucks and become a full member of The Line’s growing legion of supporters today.
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