Don't get your hopes up.

Warning to fellow Americans: Putin and Russia are not giving up and going home anytime soon.

Putin acted aggressively and boldly.  He screwed up. 

He broke a rule for a great power. Now he cannot afford to lose.

The American news has a hopeful and happy tone. Ukraine is resisting Russia. Ukraine drones are shooting Russian tanks. We see video images of disabled Russian vehicles. Financial sanctions are working even before they are implemented. The ruble is down. The Russian stock market is closed. We hear rumors that wealthy Russian oligarchs are unhappy with Putin. Ukraine's President Zelensky looks like a hero. There are war protesters in Russia. Americans are waving blue and yellow flags. Republicans who had been praising Putin are backtracking. The underdog might win.

The news is looking great! We feel a thrill. Maybe we should feel dread, instead. 

Great powers dare not lose fights. Their ability to avoid future fights require they not lose current ones. It is better for Putin to burrow in, commit more troops, and generally increase the intensity of fighting than to lose. Better to fight for a decade, if that is what is required, than to give up. He cannot lose face. 

Americans old enough to remember the war in Vietnam remember face. We carelessly took over the French colonial mission in Vietnam and redefined it as a war to stop communist dominos. We committed. By the 1968 Tet Offensive there was no mistaking that the war was hopeless. Yet we continued fighting for another six years, with 500,000 troops at one point, over 40,000 dead, B-52 bombing raids, napalm drops, deforestation, and civil unrest at home. Why did we persist when it was hopeless? We could not lose face. Our war aim changed to being able to leave "with honor." Losing would mean that the USA was not an unstoppable steamroller of military power. The domino was no longer communism's spread. The domino was perception that the U.S. military could be defied.

Stars and Stripes: Vietnam at 50

Putin is stuck.  As the Cold War matured a norm emerged. Nuclear powers would not threaten using those weapons for the offensive purpose of expanding their national boundaries. The norm served to keep the peace. Every nuclear power has the ability to cause immeasurable damage and then endure the same. Great powers must avoid head-to-head collisions, accomplished by using non-nuclear proxies.  

Until this month, Putin played by the Cold War rules of the game. There have been Russian soldiers in the Donbas for a decade, but they were in unmarked uniforms and they pretended to be local freedom fighters encouraging independence for a potential breakaway region. It was a legal fiction. Now Putin has Russian troops, tanks, and missiles at war with Ukraine.

Putin cannot appear to lose. Russian solders cannot have died in vain. 

Nor, of course, can Ukraine lose. Their soldiers and civilians have died for Ukraine independence. That cannot be in vain.

NATO cannot lose face. Otherwise dominos of Baltic states and Poland may fall, a repeat of 1938. That cannot be allowed.

The U.S. cannot lose face, either, but will. Biden will be criticized for weakness and appeasement whatever happens short of the immediate collapse of Russia and getting videotapes of Trump kneeling to Putin.

There will be no winners in Ukraine. The best possible outcome is not Ukraine victory. That would endanger the peace. The best outcome is that everyone loses just a little, but can live with the disappointment, while publicly pretending they are happy.

Don't cheer for a quick Ukraine victory.  Cheer for a quick end to the fighting. 

"I would like you to do us a favor though."

Ukraine wanted the Javelin missiles Congress had authorized.

Trump said there was a holdup. 

He needed a favor.

With so much news coming so fast it is easy to forget the connection to the first impeachment of President Trump.

Below are pages from the transcript of the testimony of Ambassador William Taylor, the chargé d'affaires at the U.S. embassy in Kiev in 2019. He expresses for himself his dismay at seeing military aid to Ukraine held up, with release conditioned on support for Trump's re-election.

The tendered quid pro quo was "crazy."

Military aid was conditioned

Aid to Ukraine in jeopardy 

"President Trump wanted President Zelensky in a box."

Here is a link to the full transcript: 

https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/06/politics/taylor-impeachment-deposition-transcript/index.html

Age and experience

War, huh, yeah
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Say it again, y'all
War, huh (good God)

              The Temptations, "War," 1969 

The War in Vietnam created the Anti-War movement, which coincided with the young adulthood of the Baby Boom generation, which coincided with the flowering of the Black Civil Rights movement, Women's Liberation, The Pill, Marijuana, and the Counterculture. It also coincided with the music of Motown, the California Beach Sound, the Beatles and the British Invasion generally, Bob Dylan, protest songs, and overall, to my ear, the greatest popular music of all time.

Trigoboff, in graduate school

People who were young and politically active in marches protesting wars in 1969 are in their 70s now. We are witnessing from our homes a military invasion of a smaller country by a larger one. In 1969 the USA said it was engaged in a preventative war, to stop communist dominos from falling, holding the line at South Vietnam. Russia now asserts theirs is a preventative war, to stop NATO encroachments, holding the line at Ukraine.

Michael Trigoboff was young in 1969. He teaches Computer Science at Portland Community College. He has changed as he got older, but he remembers the music.

Guest Post by Michael Trigoboff

Trigoboff, recent

We Boomers were young once, and very idealistic. Our parents had just won World War II and their message to us was that everything was going to be wonderful from now on. We bought it. Then we reached adolescence, and began trying to put our idealism into practice. I organized a local group of SANE (Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy) when I was in high school. An organizer from the group came to our meeting and I asked him what specifically we could do to end the possibility of nuclear war. I will always remember what he told me: “If I knew the answer to that, I would be out doing that instead of being here at this meeting.” That was one of my first clues, but I was too young to pick up on it.

Later on in the 60s, I became a hippie. Long hair, bell bottoms, marijuana, the whole nine yards. Those of us boomers who had musical talent wrote songs that expressed our idealism. One of those was Wooden Ships, about the aftermath of a nuclear war:

Horror groups us as we watch you die,
All we can do is echo your anguished cry,
Stare as all human feelings die,
We are leaving, you don’t need us. . . .

Another song, Goodbye and Hello by Tim Buckley, expressed our generational idealism much more explicitly. Here’s how it starts, but it’s worth reading the whole thing:

The antique people are down in the dungeons
Run by machines and afraid of the tax
Their heads in the grave and their hands on their eyes
Hauling their hearts around circular tracks
Pretending forever their masquerade towers
Are not really riddled with widening cracks
And I wave goodbye to iron
And smile hello to the air

They were the obsolete, old, antique people. We were the new children. We were leaving, they didn’t need us.

But you know what happened to those of us who managed to survive long enough to get older? Experience.

The 1970s came along and nine out of ten of our hippie brothers and sisters who were going to help us bring a new psychedelic cosmic consciousness into the world were suddenly doing cocaine, dressing up in polyester leisure suits, and dancing in discos. The Vietnam War we were opposed to came to an end, and the North Vietnamese took over with such authoritarian communist brutality that they produced a huge wave of Vietnamese “boat people” refugees.

The Chinese Communist “cultural revolution” sent intellectuals and graduate students (which I was at the time) “down to the farm” to be “educated” by the peasants. I remember being at a party back then. I was saying what a crime this was and some SDS type turned to me and said, “Maybe come the revolution, we’ll have to send you down to the farm.” And I thought to  myself, “Maybe come the revolution, I’ll have a sniper rifle and I’ll put a bullet through your fucking head.”

Those of us who were capable of learning from experience were starting to see that idealism had its downsides, and the “antique people” actually knew a thing or two, and that not only did they need us, but we needed them.

It’s the function of young people to bring new ideas into the world. It’s the function of old people to act as ballast, to introduce enough friction into the process that the young people don’t end up performing their very own version of Pol Pot’s Killing Fields or the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

We boomers were karmically blessed by not having our “revolution” come to pass. There’s no telling what horrible crimes we might have committed if our young idealism had been given free rein.

How to create a national hero

The U.S. offered Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy an offer to evacuate from Ukraine.

His response:

"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride."

Can't we all get along?

Try listening and empathy.

In theory, we want politicians who are open-minded and willing to consider all sides.

Not really. 

Today I share a Guest Post from Oregon State Senator Jeff Golden. He wrote urging people to abandon the "blast furnace" of partisan news. We share our lives with people who see the world differently. Engage with them, he writes. Find out what they are hearing and how it shapes what they think.  

Jeff Golden

That attitude is deeply out of fashion now. Trump is the archetype contrary example of what is expected of a politician. Voters who vote in primary elections want a warrior. Their warrior. Politics is war by other means. Activist voters want an advocate. Anything less is a RINO or DINO, a partisan in name only.

Golden risks being in a lose-lose situation. His desire to be open and empathetic risks appearing indecisive and weak and disloyal to partisans Democrats. That same attitude wins him few friends on the right. He is, after all, a Democrat and therefore "the enemy."

Golden was a classmate at college, but I did not know him then. We met in Medford, when our lives intersected doing politics. Like me, he got elected as a Democrat and served as a Jackson County Commissioner, a reddish-purple polity. Like me, he has been involved in public radio and television for decades. I have supported his campaigns over the years. He is probably more liberal/progressive than I am.

Guest Post by Jeff Golden

Oregon State Senator

This week I complete my fourth session in the Oregon legislature. All four, longtime Salem watchers tell me, have been surpassingly strange. 

2019 and 2020 were disabled by minority walkouts that drew the national spotlight to Oregon for weeks. Walkout threats and the related run-down-the-clock tactic of requiring lengthy bills to be read in full (these days by robot-chipmunk computer voices rather than human clerks) continued into the 2021 and 2022 sessions as well, alongside Covid-19 restrictions that ruptured the traditional connection of citizens to their legislators. Stir in the frantic work of triaging human suffering from the pandemic, wildfire and lethal heatwaves and you end up with the most disrupted four years Oregon government’s seen.

We all feel the disruption. It exhausts and worries us. I worry about the precious time we’ve lost tackling problems we’ve already kicked down the road for too long. But there’s a bigger worry. This pandemic’s deepened our social/political divide such that the polarization of the Obama and Trump years, so troubling at the time, feels in retrospect like courteous philosophical disagreement. Politics and Covid fever have brought many people to a point of sheer contempt and something close to hatred for a broad swath of their Rogue Valley neighbors. 

An hour or two on social media makes that clear. There the dueling narratives are 1) a fascist wave is rolling across the land, with cowardly sheep bowing down to ruthless tyrants, and 2) we’re dealing with a mob of gullible paranoid idiots who are content to see some of us die and all of us suffer for the “freedom” to flaunt sensible science-based rules.

You could be thinking one of those narratives sounds about right. If so, it might be time for reflection. Is it likely that tens of thousands of our valley neighbors, people you’ve likely shared volunteer or social or school-connected time with, have turned into monsters and zombies that scorn all your values? I don’t think so either. What I think we have is a whole lot of people struggling mightily to get through a fierce ordeal, in part by claiming more certainty than they really feel and doubling down more rigidly in reaction to the insults they hear from believers in the other narrative. We’re creating a dark and dangerous spiral. 

Ponting this out severely annoys some people. “Spare me, dude,” went one response to a recent comment I made online, “from your lame Kumbaya. Those people will destroy this country if they can. Sympathy for them is helping them do it.” I get what he was saying. I want to be clear that the way out isn’t to surrender our core values and beliefs—for me, the imperative to push every way I can for changes that give our kids and their kids better odds for inheriting a planet with stabler climate and a fairer economy. I don’t care who gets mad in the process. Remembering the humanity of those who menace us doesn’t remotely mean surrendering.

So what does it mean? Three habits help—none earth-shaking or perfect, all practical:

         1) Dial back your consumption of blast-furnace media, those websites and outlets whose business model is poking your reptile brain into anger and resentment.

         2)  Find ways to listen fully—and that doesn’t mean thinking up your response while the other person’s talking—to people you like and can’t agree with. This is harder than it should be; check out livingroomconversations.org for good tips.

         3) Breathe. Often. It makes easier the business of remembering that everyone’s struggling.

Are you skeptical that any of this will help? You should be. Next week marks the 32nd anniversary of the LAPD’s famous beating of Rodney King, who later asked the world “Can’t we all just get along?” The years since point to a big NO on that, and that thinking otherwise isn’t likely to bring a better future. 

I don’t know that it will. What I do know is that we Oregonians, we Americans, are edging closer every year to ripping our communities and each other to shreds. So the really important question probably isn’t whether dealing with each other more respectfully will make much difference. It’s closer to this: What lies ahead if we don’t?

                                         ----    -----    -----

Senator Jeff Golden represents District 3—Medford, Phoenix, Talent, Ashland, Jacksonville and the Applegate Valley—in the Oregon Senate.  You can reach him at sen.jeffgolden@oregonlegislature.gov.

Russia's popular war in Ukraine

     "Kremlin myth-making regarding war: Moscow’s wars are just, defensive, triumphant, and preventive."

       Carnegie Moscow Center

It's the go-to story for Russia. They are surrounded and besieged by armies from the West. Their lives are at risk.

Russian history is marked by devastating invasions. In the 13th century the Golden Hoard of Mongolian horse archers was stopped at the gates of Vienna. On their way they conquered the Kievan Rus people, sacked nearly every city, and initiated 300 years of rule. Then Napoleon. Then Hitler. American schoolchildren understand that American soldiers won World War II, with some uncertain help from our allies. Americans suffered 418,000 total deaths in that war. Russians know a different story. Russians lost over 24 million lives. National WW2 Museum.

Putin tells Russians that Ukraine is a puppet of the West. Ukraine isn't being invaded. It is being released from Western control. Russia's peril will persist. There are NATO forces in the Baltic states, in Poland, in Turkey. The wars of liberation in Georgia and Crimea that reduced their encirclement were quick and easy and a source of pride for Russians. The Russian public was not inconvenienced. Half of Russians blame the USA and NATO for the war in Ukraine. Another 16% blame Ukraine. Four percent blame Russia. 

Comments by Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson got significant publicity in Russia. They validated the narrative of Russia under threat. Trump called Putin "pretty smart" and described Russia's operation as if it were a crafty and wildly successful real estate acquisition:

He’s taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions,” he said, “taking over a country — really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people — and just walking right in.

Carlson

Tucker Carlson says the real threats to democracy are cancel-culture, job-killing Democrats, not Putin. Russian television is re-broadcasting Carlson's show and translating him this way:

"They're promoting war, not to maintain the democracy that is Ukraine. Ukraine is not a democracy. It has never been a democracy in its history and it's not now. It is a client state of the Biden administration."

The Trump-Carlson position is not aging well. Ukraine looks like a victim. It is another iteration of the brutal reality expressed by Athenians to the leaders of Melos. "The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer as they must." Russia has the vastly superior army and they also have nuclear missiles. They can conquer Ukraine and the West dare not stop them.

Republicans who would normally jump on the Trump bandwagon are holding back. Carlson is backpedaling. On Thursday's show Carlson said “I don’t think anybody approves of what Putin did yesterday. I certainly don’t." Americans are coming to a consensus that Putin is a villain with a voracious appetite for expansion. Americans are reminding themselves now that Putin has nuclear weapons. We can strike indirect blows with sanctions, but what if that doesn't work? He is proving himself "unreasonable."  What if he isn't playing careful chess and doesn't care that NATO's rooks and bishops overpower his. There is no stopping a voracious nuclear power.

After taking control of Ukraine, what if he says to the U.S. and NATO that Estonia has always been Russian and Estonians want to be Russian and that Estonia is a client state of the West and he won't stand for it. What if he says that if the West wants its 100 largest cities and every one of its capitals obliterated that is up to us, but his tanks are moving in. What if he says his goal is world peace made by restoring justice and self-determination to Estonia? 

What if this isn't chess after all? It is war. As Russians will hear it from state-controlled media, this is a defensive war to protect the lives of Russians.

La Bamba

"I read the news today, oh boy. . .
And though the news was rather sad
Well, I just had to laugh. . .
I'd love to turn you on."

            The Beatles, 1967. A Day in the Life

The news from Ukraine looks bad. We don't know how it will play out. There is good reason to worry.

We are at an inflection point. This could be the beginning of a series of events, like August 1914, that will lead to total war if one miscalculation leads to another. Or, it could just blow over. The political news in the U.S. is a mess of "could-a, should-a, would-a" in contrary directions. The situation is either overblown or a catastrophe. Putin is a genius, a villain, or doing what any prudent head of state would do. Ukraine is an innocent victim or a den of Nazis.

It exhausts me. I want to stop the world and get off--words I remember from a 1961 play by that name. The Beatles had suggested a way to retreat from the world, and young people in 1967 did so: Marijuana. Turn on. Drift off in a cloud of smoke.

Not me. I retreat my way, like Frank Sinatra sang in 1969. My way is to put on headphones and listen to music of my youth. It is my oasis, the best music of all time. Classic and timeless.  

La Bamba. Who can possibly listen and resist the sheer joy of it? Take two minutes for Richie Valens' own voice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp6j5HJ-Cok

I was mistaken. I sent a link to the song to a 17-year-old, sure she would love it. The song was nothing to her. I re-discovered the obvious. Music is not timeless. Music lives in the temporal world along with the news, oh boy. It is fashion, like hairstyles and Levis.

Rick Millward is a close reader and frequent commenter on this blog. He is a musician, songwriter, and music producer. He gave me a lesson.

Guest Post by Rick Millward

Popular songs resonate with us for two main reasons:
Repetition and marketing
Context and timing 

Rick Millward

First, songs gain success through “spins”, initially on radio and now on the various streaming internet sources. Thousands of songs are released into the market every week, and those that gain popularity usually have big promotion budgets and campaigns financed by the record companies. With the onset of adolescence young people start making choices, in a large measure driven by a desire to become seen and respected as distinct individuals, but also by the cultural norms at the time. Music is one of the ways that teens define their peer group, like fashion and slang, and music is marketed to them in this way. Secondly, popular music follows the overall cultural trends and songs tend to sound somewhat alike within each genre. Teens tend to associate certain songs with events in their lives, like young couples having “our song”. This emotional connection fades with maturity, but never completely disappears and in fact, hearing the song years later will often bring back a pleasant or bittersweet memory.

La Bamba was released in 1958, as the teen idol fad, led by Elvis Presley, was gaining steam. It’s a dance song, and it hit the market just as teens were adopting the “free form” styles that were a highlight of the ‘60s, like “The Twist”.

Musically, La Bamba is an electrified version of a traditional Mexican folk song played at celebrations and other gatherings. It is sung in Spanish, which gave it a unique charm and was presented by an Elvis-like young singer named Richie Valens. As such it stood out on the radio, and though it was not a number one hit, it has endured to be considered one of the most influential rock and roll songs of the era. Like most recordings at that time, it was recorded live, and while having captured the energy of the performer, is not particularly well done technically. A remake done in 1987 is more polished and was used in a biopic about Valens, and did reach #1.

It’s always dangerous to predict what young people will find entertaining and popular but in its original form doesn’t fit in with current pop music, which is dominated by the hip hop/rap style and to a lessor extent EDM (Electronic Dance Music) so it doesn’t sound like what they are listening to. In addition, coming from what is quickly becoming their grandparents' era, there is an automatic rejection of the song because it’s old. This of course could change if an enterprising artist covered the song in the current style, (which would be an interesting exercise) and released it as something new.

                                           -----     -----    -----

Note:  Rick Millward was part of the Nashville songwriter community, where he produced two EMMY nominated soundtracks. Now in Southern Oregon, Millward is part of the music scene centered around winery tasting rooms. His new record Loveland is available on Spotify and other streaming platforms. He will perform at the Naumes Winery - Sun, Feb. 27, 3-6PM

 

Those who don't remember the past. . .

History becomes fable. 

We don't remember the past. We create it for ourselves to suit our needs.

Baby Boomers know what "Munich" means. It means Britain's Neville Chamberlain thinking we had "appeased" Hitler by letting him annex an area of Czechoslovakia. We learned a lesson, and have applied it for eight decades: "Appeasement" doesn't work to stop an aggressor. History is more complicated, but never mind. It is fable, heuristic. 

Chamberlain

August 1914 has faded from memory. Diplomats, foreign policy experts, and "intelligence service" professionals know the history, but the punditry and public has rejected that group and whatever they knew. The left thinks foreign policy experts are discredited by decades of error as regards Vietnam and Iraq. The political right considers them Deep State enemies of Trump. 

Boomers barely remember "the Bay of Pigs." It is an uncomfortable memory because for a majority of Americans, JFK was a hero. People on the left remember the CIA planned an operation to overthrow the government of a neighboring country. We carried it out led by partisans in the U.S. The takeaway lesson for the left is CIA deceit and malevolence. The political right remembers it differently. We bailed out midway on the Cuban anti-communist crusaders. An indecisive Democrat let Cuba stay communist. 

It serves no one to liken the Bay of Pigs operation to Russia in Ukraine. There is a lesson of big-power entitlement and the use of proxies to be acknowledged, but that is an uncomfortable fable because it positions us as the big-power aggressor. That idea conflicts with another American heuristic: Anyone we disagree with we call Hitler, especially if they exercise power in an unwelcome way.

We name-call Hitler. Obama is Hitler. Trump is Hitler. Putin is Hitler. By process of logic, since Putin is Hitler and since JFK (either a hero or weak) cannot be Hitler. Whatever happened in the Bay of Pigs might be wrong, but it is not what Putin has done in Ukraine using partisans to overthrow a nearby government. 

"Afghanistan" ended so badly that it became instant fable. America was nation building. Afghans have their own politics, culture, and religion. We learned they liked being Afghans.  We were fooled by a Potemkin Village of support for us. We got played. 

Potemkin Village is a fable so clear it needs no explanation.

Vietnam has not become a fable yet. Boomers and our elders remember Vietnam in too many different ways. Some remember it as patriotic service. Others remember it as a fruitless waste. The geopolitical lesson was "Vietnam syndrome." That means reluctance to use the American military lest we discover ourselves stuck in a costly, immoral quagmire. It also means its opposite. "Vietnam syndrome" was criticism, meaning the U.S. was too reluctant to face up to its duties as a peacekeeper. When Boomers die off, Vietnam may become like "Munich," an event with a single big clarifying meaning.

Yesterday in this blog I suggested Ukraine might be understood as a border skirmish between two countries, Ukraine and Russia. It is Ukraine now, but each have some claim to the affiliations of people of the Donbas. Neville Chamberlain justified Hitler's seizing the Sudetenland because of the principle of "self-determination." Chamberlain's decision did not age well. It was a ruse by Hitler. He didn't care about self-determination. His plan was European domination. That might be Putin's too.

Why would anyone, now Putin, invite the death of so many people, including his own soldiers? Why attempt to dominate Europe when one could sell it natural gas and enjoy neighbors in peace and prosperity?  

There is another lesson of history: We honor conquerors. The man who greatly expanded the territory and prestige of Russia is remembered as Peter the Great. Napoleon communicated a vision of the greatness of France. His Grand Armée departed for Russia with 400,000 soldiers and returned with 35,000 survivors.  He is remembered and celebrated in France.

Napoleon's tomb.

Good borders, good fences.

"Good fences make good neighbors."
    From: Mending Wall, by Robert Frost


Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

   From Declaration of Independence, by Thomas Jefferson

Ukraine is just another European border war.

Americans are hunting for an analogy or historical reference to make sense of Ukraine. Knowing that Ukraine is "another _____" would tell us how to think.

Maybe this is another 1938, with Putin playing the role of Hitler grabbing the Sudetenland. In that case, it is the prelude to his grabbing Poland as part of a yet grander goal of grabbing all Europe. Americans know how to think about that. Don't appease. Stand firm now. Nip this in the bud. The fate of the world hangs in the balance.

Maybe this is another Afghanistan for Russia, the equivalent of our Afghanistan or Iraq or Vietnam. That would mean that events in Ukraine are another flex of big-power muscle and ambition that leads into a quagmire for the invader. We know how to think about that, too. Oppose the big power but avoid direct conflict. Send arms and support to the resistance. Let the big power exhaust itself trying to occupy and control a national independence movement. 

Maybe we should think of this as another scrimmage in the endless "Great Game" played by nations. The West pushed the ball east, deep into the opponent's territory in a big play after 1989 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Now, the Russian team, under a new coach, is pushing the ball back, having recaptured solid yardage in the Caucasus  and now making incremental gains in Ukraine, three yards and a cloud of dust. We know how to think of this, too: Push back and play the game, but don't take it more seriously than it is. It is the endless push and pull of great powers. This isn't an existential threat or anything to fire missiles over. 

Maybe it is yet another European border dispute. That is the repeated and endless story in Europe. There is some mismatch between a national border and a group of people inside it. They would rather be independent or part of another country. Maybe the border is a result of some dynastic issue or long-ago treaty. Maybe the enclave is a residue of Ottoman conquest, then reversal, that put Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics, or some version of Protestants on the wrong side of some line. For some reason Catalonia is part of Spain, but not exactly and not comfortably. Alsace is French again. Tiny Belgium has two languages. Switzerland has four. Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo are all jumbled and fight constantly. 

We know European border wars are dangerous and draw other countries into war. In 1914 Serbian nationalists killed an Austrian prince, and within a month the whole world was at war. We know we should avoid that, and yet--if this is another 1938--we need to nip Putin's advance in the bud. Unless, of course, it is really another Vietnam, in which case we shouldn't. 

The other way to think about this is that border disputes are essentially trivial in the greater scheme of things. Border disputes are local fights, hugely important to the participants, but not to the greater world. Neighbors fight. Families fight. It is perhaps a fight over an inheritance, or some perceived slight at a wedding. Who knows?

We learn to stay out of these disputes. We don't understand the inside of a marriage. We don't really understand just how "Russian" the people are in the disputed areas and whether they want to fight about it. We don't know if the local governments are popular or corrupt. Yes, there will be fighting and killing. It happens all the time in jumbled areas. People will die. Russians will shoot; Ukrainians will shoot back. Borders may move. We didn't know or care much about the borders before; why now?  Even if we do care and are horrified by the mutual violence, do we think that our getting involved makes things better? 

If people in the Donbas region want to be Russians, in the long run they will be Russians. Ukraine will be better off when rid of them. Governments rule by the consent of the governed. If Russias are unwelcome, or make themselves so, then they will have another Afghanistan mess on their hands. Ukraine nationalism will do the work Americans are tempted to do. People will suffer and die. It will be ugly. That is baked in. This is a border dispute, their border dispute.

"That dream of hegemony hasn't worked out."

Russia may invade Ukraine.

This isn't just their fight. It is also our fight.

We aren't just interested bystanders. We were involved from the beginning and are still involved. We will impose sanctions on trade and finances and the flow of natural gas.  Americans are imagining the pain we will mete out. We aren't yet imagining what Russia will do to us in return. Of course they will do something. They must. I don't expect missiles, but we have vulnerabilities. Our power grid. The internet. Our currency. Our government. Something. Do we imagine ourselves to be invulnerable?

We are experiencing one of the consequences of the end of the Cold War. We felt triumphant. We were the colossus astride the world. We thought we would be wise to run up the score on Russia. 

Herb Rothschild offers a perspective on the events and American mindset that brought us to this moment. He has been resisting U.S. militarism for decades. A graduate of both Yale and Harvard, Rothschild joined the English Department at LSU in his home state of Louisiana. He promoted civil rights and civil liberties in that state from 1966 through1976. He recently published a book about this decade of struggle for justice,The Bad Old Days. He worked in the Peace Movement in Louisiana, New Jersey, and Texas. He continues that work in retirement in Southern Oregon.

Guest Post by Herbert Rothschild, Jr.

The purpose of demonizing others is to discount their humanity. They can’t feel what we feel, desire what we desire, or fear what we fear. So, there’s no point in even listening to them, much less giving any credence to what they might say. That makes life easy . . . until it doesn’t.

Whatever else one might say about Donald Trump’s foreign policy, he didn’t demonize the leaders of other nations. He seemed to save that for his rivals at home. Nothing came of his meetings with the leader of North Korea, primarily because, once he couldn’t get Kim Jung-Un to unilaterally dismantle his nuclear weapons program, Trump’s dream of the Nobel Peace Prize faded and he had no interest in, or understanding of, long-term diplomacy. For a time there, however, a long-overdue new possibility had opened. Regarding Russia, there was always the suspicion that Putin somehow had Trump by the short and curlies, but during Trump’s term the new Cold War that Hilary Clinton and the U.S. foreign policy establishment had been pleased to initiate was put on pause.

Now, we have returned to the policies, psychology and propaganda that characterized the first Cold War. It’s so comfortable to get back to a time when the U.S. drive for global dominance always had an excuse at hand. Putin is a power-hungry tyrant who won’t play by the rules of the much-vaunted “rules-based order” the U.S. has presided over since the end of WWII, the first (but never acknowledged) rule of which is that only the U.S. gets to invade other nations to attempt “regime change.”

But suppose we were really interested in saving the Ukrainian people from the devastating pain that so many people in other nations suffered when the U.S. and the Soviet Union conducted the hostilities of the first Cold War on their soil. We might, then, try to see the world from the point of view of someone living in Russia who isn’t a demon but a human being.

Hawkish media

We might then see a Western military alliance that didn’t disband when the Eastern military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, disbanded following U.S. assurances to Gorbachev that the West would respect Russia’s security concerns. We might then see NATO take in new members that brought soldiers and weapons ever closer to Russia’s borders, including the 2004 admission of the Baltic Republics, which share Russia’s northwest border. We might note Russia’s repeated protests, and the especially vigorous protests in 2008 when NATO announced an intention to eventually admit Georgia and the Ukraine. And we might note that Russia keeps asking the U.S. and NATO to pledge not to admit Ukraine as a way to resolve the present crisis, and that such a request is repeatedly characterized as a “non-starter” by our negotiators.  

Some people in the U.S. have tried to inject into the current conversation this rather simple principle of diplomacy—trying to see the other side’s point of view and giving them a chance to prove that they aren’t just blowing smoke—but they aren’t getting much of a hearing. Shades of our build-up to the invasion of Iraq. When an administration wants hostilities, the drums of war beat louder and louder.

At the start of the 1990s, we could have built an international order in which every nation’s legitimate interests were acknowledged. But no. The U.S. had become the sole superpower, and we were going to keep it that way. That dream of hegemony hasn’t worked out. We’ve squandered our wealth on fruitless wars, Russia finally has had enough, and China’s growth into a superpower cannot be stopped no matter how many naval task-forces we put into the Pacific. But on the bright side, the military contractors have flourished. 

Dems wise up. GOP gets stupid. Part Two.

Republican voters are embracing the crazies in their party. They are pruning their RINOs. 

Suicidal.

Yesterday I wrote that there are signs Democrats are avoiding political suicide. Democratic voters are saying "NO!" to the progressive college-town academic elite portion of the Democratic coalition. That subset of Democrats are "woke" on race, uncomfortable with policing, and opposed to border enforcement. People of all political persuasions consider them "preachy" and "judgmental." That elite coalition contains the thought leaders, but not the voters. When moderate Black voters in South Carolina chose Biden, it should have sent a clarifying message to the party. Party leaders still imagined they had a progressive governing majority. They didn't. 

A political temptation dangles in front of Democrats in the form of a national spokesperson. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez understands modern media and manipulates it brilliantly. She is articulate and photogenic. She says things that sound good to a lot of Democrats. But voters are leading the party away from that temptation, and back toward the center. The San Francisco School Board recall was the most recent iteration of this.

Republicans are doing the opposite. They have a national spokesperson in Donald Trump. Like AOC, he understands modern media, manipulates it brilliantly, has a point of view, is articulate, and can photograph to look like a powerful CEO. Voters are embracing his message, and him personally.

Trump drives a hard bargain. He insists GOP officeholders accept the full Trump package: 

     ***Trump won the 2020 election in a landslide. He was robbed.

     ***The January 6 insurrection was done by patriots.

     ***Vice President Pence had the right and duty to overturn the election.

     ***State officeholders in Arizona, Georgia, and other battleground states who oversaw the 2020 election were derelict and disloyal when they failed to reverse the election. 

   

No one is immune from Trump's wrath. Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, and many others pay a price for heresy. 

Trump's power in the GOP comes from the fact that a majority of Republican voters support Trump.  A February 8 Pew poll reports that 57% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters think Trump bears no responsibility at all for the Capitol riot. And 66% of Republicans said they believe Trump won the 2020 election, some say certainly (33%), some probably (33%).

We see the effect of that loyalty to Trump in contested primary elections. Ohio's has an election for an open U.S. senate seat. There are well-known, well-funded GOP candidates vying for the nomination. They are competing to be as Trump-positive as possible. Here is a 30 second ad from candidate Mike Gibbons, who calls himself "Trump tough" and calls opponents J.D. Vance and Jane Timken "Washington Wimps."

https://youtu.be/OVpwHH7ga3A

In the open senate race in Pennsylvania, there is a similar competition for Trump's blessing. GOP organizer Val Biancaniello said, "Trump is looming over this whole thing. Everyone knows if Trump comes out and endorses a candidate, then all bets are off."

There is one giant hope for Democrats: Trump front and center, continuing to claim he was robbed. Biden is unable to project a powerful, confident narrative of progress on peace and prosperity. The Democratic message is bad. A Trump message of election fraud is worse. 

Democrats can hope that GOP candidates have no choice but to soil themselves winning their nominations. Some Republicans will be Trump-positive, willingly and eagerly. They will continue to say newsworthy, cringeworthy things. That is where the money is in GOP fundraising. Madison Cawthorn writes me frequently, soliciting money. He proudly calls himself "the Donald Trump of Congress!"

GOP candidates may try to win nominations while preserving wiggle-room ambiguity. Trump-positive Republican candidates are pouncing on that, even in blue states like Oregon, where the Trump-positive candidate is calling out opponents for timidity in failing to say the election was stolen. Winning candidates will be stuck with what they said. They will also be stuck with what people like Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Green continue to say which spreads the message of an extreme GOP. 

Republican candidates are in a tough spot. They are led by a narcissistic con man with an extraordinary gift for marketing and persuasion. He has created a block of extreme and loyal voters. They are pushing candidates off a political cliff into unelectable Trump-craziness. 

Democrats have no message-leader in Biden, but voters on their own know they aren't comfortable with the preachy judgements and policies of elite scolds. Better to have no leader than a bad one.