Responding to criticisms, and the Senate "national security" bill

A Ukrainian trench on February 7, 2024. Photo via Getty Images

My article yesterday on why I continue to think the war in Ukraine is a huge disaster has generated some interesting comments — mostly critical.

In general, people who follow or subscribe to me online are passionately convinced that I should abandon my initial intuition, articulated here on this very Substack two years ago, that Russia invading Ukraine would be a huge disaster. Not that I ever ruled out the Russian government being capable of doing disastrous things, but in late 2021 and early 2022, the obviously disastrous consequences of Russia invading Ukraine was a significant part of why I was intuitively skeptical that Russia would actually go through with it. (I still don’t buy the common folklore that US intelligence agencies were gloriously vindicated by their supposedly accurate predictions, because there’s still a lot that’s yet to be fully reported and understood about the role of US intelligence services in Ukraine during the pre-invasion period, and how publicly-disseminated US intel “leaks” might have had the effect of undermining diplomatic engagement at a critical moment — making war more likely by impressing on Putin that if he didn’t follow through and invade, he’d be proving himself skittish or intimidated. So these US intel leaks weren’t just detached, neutral predictions based on an impartial analysis of the available evidence — they were actively and by design influencing the actual course of events.)

Anyway, I see no compelling reason to revise my two-year-old assessment that Russia invading Ukraine would be a huge disaster. Because it seems to have demonstrably been a huge disaster by a wide array of metrics, such as:

• The enormous number of casualties. Precise counts are feverishly disputed among partisans of both sides, which each have a vested interest in either inflating or deflating the numbers. I know “both sides” is often ridiculed as an arbitrary equation of two asymmetrical sides, but that’s not what I’m doing here — sometimes “both sides” really are just doing the same thing. Pro-Ukraine commenters have an interest in inflating the number of Russian casualties, and deflating the number of Ukrainian casualties. Pro-Russia commenters have an interest in inflating the number of Ukrainian casualties, and deflating the number of Russian casualties. Anyone who declares with 100% confidence that they know the correct casualty count, I have to reflexively mistrust, because they’re usually just substituting their own wish-casting hunch for any legitimate factual data. But even if you want to lowball it and say there’s been 150,000 total killed in the war (I’ve heard as high as 500,000 dead, and 900,000 total casualties) that’s still a giant disaster, made all the more ghastly by such a large proportion of those casualties coming in primitive, grinding trench warfare, which is probably one of the bleakest of all possible ways for humans to kill each other.

• Attacks escalating on Russia itself, including the growing frequency of attacks on critical Russian infrastructure like factories, airports, bridges, railways, and fuel depots. Not to mention the bombing and destruction of Russian border villages, whose plight is often ignored, including by the Moscow political class which is quite distant, geographically and otherwise, from these settlements just over the border from Ukraine.

• Dramatic deterioration of relations between the US and Russia, the world’s two leading nuclear superpowers, to the point where a senior-level Russian government official told me it’s worse than it’s ever been in 90 years — literally since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the US and Soviet Union. Putin suspended adherence to the New START treaty in February 2023, and the US reciprocated several months later, leaving mutually unregulated the two largest nuclear weapons stockpiles on Earth. It’s the first time in decades that there is no operational arms control agreement that provides a mechanism for two-way regulation of the US and Russian arsenals.

• We’re strangely supposed to believe it’s a wonderful thing that Europe is re-arming and re-militarizing — a phenomenon which doesn’t seem to have the greatest historical track record. But maybe it will come as a thrill to Donald Trump, who the media is currently melting down over (shocking, right) because of his latest comments on NATO, recounting that he once told an unnamed leader of a European country that that they “gotta pay,” or else Russia might have their way with them. So now, as was apparently desired by Trump and others, additional resources are in fact pouring in to European defense-industrial production, especially the Eastern European countries that are the most ancestrally and rabidly anti-Russia. Why anyone is heartened by this rapid acceleration of NATO’s military capacity, particularly on the Eastern plank, I’m not exactly sure.

I could go on much longer. Obviously to mention all these disastrous consequences of the Russian invasion is not to somehow deny that the US and NATO also played an outsized role in precipitating and exacerbating the disaster. The fact that people are so resistant to assigning multi-directional responsibility for a multi-dimensional disaster is just a symptom of black-and-white thinking and war partisanship, which are both major cognitive distortions.

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Here are some direct comments I got:

Jon Kurpis writes: “Great points and genuinely unbiased. You are correct about the change in attitude as I've also seen it in my periphery. My personal opinion has always been pro Russia leaning w/o originally heaping praise & always urging caution. And by "pro Russia leaning" I mean understanding of their grievances. The Ukraine War is an unmitigated disaster. And because of that, I’ve come to openly root for Russia in that the faster they win the less lives will be ultimately lost.”

MT: How do you know that the faster Russia “wins,” the fewer lives will be lost? Anyone who’s “rooted” for Russia over the past two years has effectively been rooting for the continuation of grotesque attritional warfare with no apparent end in sight. Russia still won’t define what it means to “win,” other than to give some cliched broad parameters like “de-militarization” and “de-Nazification” — which they’ve repeated since the beginning of the war. When I was in Russia two months ago, my impression was that the ultimate Russian war aims have gotten progressively maximalist, although no one really has any clue how those war aims are supposed to be achieved. So it’s a reverse-image of the substantive and analytical muddle exemplified by the pro-Ukraine position, which also seems to basically amount to: ramp up military-industrial production, continue fueling the perpetual war of attrition, and hope for the best. My tentative conclusion: Nobody knows what they’re doing. To me, this doesn’t compel any rooting interest in either “side.” Why can’t you just “root against” both, or at least abstain from having a rooting interest at all? Similar to how no one’s obliging you to “root” for either Biden or Trump, even though the brain-poison of partisanship ends up coercing untold millions of people to do so anyway?

Diamond Boy writes: “I find the political Gnosticism of the liberal imperium abhorrent. Everywhere they go they lay waste. The promotion of democracy and human rights is always a cloak, they have ulterior motives, usually just old fashion, greed. The global American empire is a war machine.

So I find myself rooting for Putin. I am the person you warn about.”

MT: What I can’t relate to here is the seemingly unexplained logical leap from critiquing what you describe as “liberal imperium” or “the global American empire” to “rooting for Putin,” who himself presides over his own smaller-scale “empire” — if you want to call it that — and most definitely presides over a “war machine,” if we’re going to use that term. The Russian economy is now being largely buoyed by massively profligate military spending — i.e, throwing tons of money into Russia’s own defense-industrial sector, the thing that is sometimes pejoratively referred to as a “military-industrial complex.” Why would there be some obligation to root for one military-industrial complex over another? How about just opting out of rooting for any military-industrial complex, given the analytical distortions and misallocation of resources those complexes invariably produce?

Furthermore, if you’re so repulsed at the political Gnosticism implied by American liberal imperium, you might want to familiarize yourself more with the parallel political Gnosticism that currently animates Russian war theology, with its kind of teleological conviction in the primacy of an envisioned “Eurasionist” world order. When I was in Russia, I heard directly from prominent exponents of this belief. They talk about how the war has brought a great civilizational purification process in Russia and beyond. Like it’s a war of cosmic redemption or something. As the theological beliefs have intensified, my impression was that the war aims have likewise become more and more maximalist. Why would you feel obliged to “root” for this — just because you’re rooting against its opponent? Why not decline to root for either?

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At around 6:00am EST this morning, the Senate finally passed the giant “national security” funding bill that’s been pending for several months. At $60 billion, this would be the largest tranche yet of US appropriations for Ukraine since the start of the war. There’s also more than enough additional billions for Israel and the “Indo-Pacific” to keep all arms manufacturers across the land happy. The bill passed 70 to 29, which is a level of consensus that the Senate can hardly ever muster for anything except giant new war expenditures:

And the final consensus was actually artificially underrepresented, because some of the biggest interventionist stalwarts in the Senate — like Tom Cotton (R-AR) Ted Cruz (R-TX) Lindsey Graham (R-SC) Marco Rubio (R-FL) Rick Scott (R-FL) Tim Scott (R-SC) — all voted NAY while still avowedly and even fanatically affirming their support for the underlying substance of the bill. Lindsey Graham did not have a sudden revelation and decide he no longer supports sending arms to Ukraine. Instead, he’s making a political calculation that voting NAY will have certain political benefits, without impeding ultimate passage of the bill, which he steadfastly supports. Senate Republicans believe it’s in their interest this election cycle to emphasize that they’re unflinchingly prioritizing immigration policy above all else, and a segment of the Senate Republican caucus is intent on coordinating that political strategy with Trump. So the final pro-war consensus would be something more like 80 or 85 votes if everyone was voting strictly on their support or lack thereof for the policy substance.

Speaking of “strategies,” the Ukraine portion of the bill implicitly concedes that there actually is no “strategy” with respect to US policy in Ukraine, almost two full years into the endeavor, because by calling for a “strategy” to be produced, one would have to infer that no “strategy” presently exists — and that no strategy was apparently demanded before the passage of this additional $60 billion. Funds first, strategy later. (Or never.)

One of my takeaways from speaking to US, European, Russian, and Ukrainian officials this past year is that nobody has a realistic and articulable “strategy” for resolving the war — they’re all just barreling forward with the indefinite attritional warfare, and waiting for something to happen. Absolute genius stuff.