By Ben Burgis, Responsible Statecraft, 11/28/23

In 2009, when Israel was bombing Gaza, one of the most prominent advocates of the realist school of international relations, John Mearsheimer, wrote an article explaining that while the nominal goal of Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead” was to counteract Hamas rocket attacks, the underlying purpose was “to get the Palestinians in Gaza to accept their fate as hapless subjects of a Greater Israel.”

He predicted it would fail in this purpose and that armed conflict would persist until the underlying issue of the status of the Palestinian territories was resolved. Sadly, this analysis proved to be as prescient as his more famous warning about mounting tensions between Russia and the West over Ukraine.

In both Eastern Europe and the Middle East, we can see the bitter fruits of policymakers ignoring these warnings. The United States is pumping arms and money into local wars that both threaten to spiral into far larger conflicts. In both cases, the stated war aims of our local proxies are unlikely to be achieved any time soon — if at all. And in each case, veteran advocates of a more restrained U.S. foreign policy have advocated a long-term ceasefire and moves toward diplomatic resolution of the underlying conflict.

University College London professor of international relations Philip Cunliffe, however, has argued that the Left’s foreign policy restrainers are being inconsistent. He thinks we were being driven by “sober realism” on Ukraine but have now “lost it” and let ourselves be swayed by humanitarian emotions about the Palestinians.

This critique doesn’t survive a closer look. It misunderstands the relationship between realist critiques of the aims of war and moral horror at the consequences of war. And it ignores everything the two cases have in common.

A Tale of Two Wars

Neither the terrorist attack on October 7 nor Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were morally justified. They were, however, both predictable and widely predicted. Cautious voices at the heights of the Western foreign policy establishment had been saying that encouraging Ukraine’s long-term ambitions to join NATO could inflame tensions with Russia since the end of the Cold War. And there were numerous similar warnings that Netanyahu’s strategy of simultaneously digging his boot deeper into the necks of the Palestinians and trying to make a separate peace with surrounding Arab states, thus depriving the Palestinians of the one thing they had going for them — the support, however ambiguous and inconsistent, of those states — was a recipe for exactly this kind of explosion.

In both cases, failure to see the warning signs has been compounded by subsequent U.S. policy. While this policy may finally be changing in Ukraine, the Biden administration’s default approach to both conflicts has been to write blank checks. In both cases, there have been signs of regret and hesitation along the way — weapons systems that aren’t sent to Ukraine for a few months out of concerns that they’re too escalatory (and then get sent anyway) or Biden begging Netanyahu for “humanitarian pauses” even as 1.7 million of the more than 2 million residents of Gaza had already been displaced and thousands of children lay dead.

Both Zelensky and Netanyahu have pushed back hard against such squeamishness and both men have, more often than not, gotten their way — even though, in both cases, it seems quite unlikely that our allies’ stated goals will be achieved on the battlefield.

Ukraine retaking both Crimea and every last inch of the Donbas seems supremely unlikely even given another five or 10 years of more war. Similarly, counterinsurgency campaigns with the goal of “eradicating” some terrorist or guerilla force are a dime a dozen around the world. It’s far less common for such campaigns to lead to the actual extinction of the targeted force. As Israeli propaganda itself emphasizes, the top leadership of Hamas is not in Gaza but Qatar. Moreover, after seven weeks of “total war” that Israeli officials themselves are eager to compare to atrocities like the Allied bombing of Dresden, it’s not yet clear how much the Gaza-based operations of Hamas have been hampered.

Meanwhile, as even Elon Musk has realized, displacing millions of Palestinians from their homes and killing and maiming vast numbers of innocents is a recipe for supercharging future recruitment to Hamas or even more radical organizations. As is so often the case around the world, trying to solve long-term geopolitical problems by dropping bombs creates many corpses and few solutions.

In both cases, the most likely consequence of a less belligerent course of action would be some sort of territorial compromise that falls considerably short of perfect justice. I’ve argued elsewhere that liberal democratic principles which in other contexts would be accepted by most Westerners across the political spectrum would entail simply offering West Bank and Gaza Palestinians citizenship in the single state that has de facto existed between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea for the last 56 years. But I’m not deluded about that happening in the short term — and even if a “two-state solution” involved Israel’s full retreat to its pre-1967 borders, that would mean the State of Palestine would be created in 22% of the shared homeland.

Similarly, as hawks have long fretted, any sort of negotiated peace in Ukraine will mean Russia retaining some of the land it illegally seized in the course of a bloody war that it started. These are bitter pills to swallow.

Nevertheless, you’ll find realist scholars and commentators advocating peace in both contexts — and for the same reasons. In both cases, pointlessly prolonging the wars would lead to enormous and avoidable suffering for civilian populations. In both cases, the families of the soldiers whose lives would be sacrificed by pointless extension of the wars can be spared. And in both cases, moves toward diplomatic resolution can head off the terrifying possibility of these wars spiraling into larger regional or even global conflicts.

Cunliffe’s Critique

Cunliffe accuses advocates of peace in both conflicts of selectively choosing not to share graphic images of the Ukrainian victims of the Russian invasion while over-sharing images of Palestinian death and destruction. Providing hyperlinks of articles by me and Branko Marcetic, he says the “strangest saddest cases” on the anti-war Left are those of us “who for long years managed to preserve their intellectual poise and political integrity in the face of monolithic mass conformity, elite hostility, and relentless gaslighting by the mainstream media, only to eventually crumble and succumb to supporting the ‘latest thing.’”

This is a misunderstanding on several levels. For one thing, I know of no case of a left-wing critic of both wars whose position on Israel/Palestine wasn’t the same two years ago. Second, the idea that “mass conformity, elite hostility, and relentless gaslighting by mainstream media” flow in the direction of advocacy for the Palestinians feels like news from an alternate dimension.

While I’ve never particularly enjoyed being called a “Putin apologist” for advocating de-escalation and peace negotiations in Ukraine, that sort of rhetorical ugliness doesn’t even begin to touch the tidal wave of firings, deplatformings, denunciations from politicians of both parties, and mass public shaming that’s come down on advocates of peace in Israel/Palestine since October 7. (There have also been some incidents of free speech crackdowns the other way, as institutions try to prove their “even-handedness,” but no one really denies that it’s been lopsided.) Nothing remotely equivalent has happened to advocates of a negotiated solution in Eastern Europe. There are no trucks driving around university campuses displaying the names of “anti-Ukraine” students and professors. There are no laws against boycotting Ukraine on the books in any state.

Finally and most importantly, Cunliffe misunderstands the relationship between humanitarian concern about the carnage of war and realism about what can be achieved by war. Outrage about one side’s crimes can be — and often is — used to whip up support for wars that will only make everything worse. So, for example, Russian crimes in Ukraine are often showcased for the purpose of bolstering support for prolonging a war whose continuation won’t move the eventual ceasefire line very far, but will result in decades of Ukrainian children being blown up by unexploded cluster bombs.

Furthermore, the grisly atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 are being used to justify mass death and displacement in Gaza, which will do nothing to reduce the threat of future terrorism. But the objection to such deceptive military solutions to long-term geopolitical problems isn’t just that they won’t work.

Anti-war protestors levitating the Pentagon through the power of meditation won’t work either — but if someone wants to dedicate an afternoon to giving it a shot, that’s fine with me. The problem with these awful and pointless wars is that they won’t achieve their stated objectives but they will result in vast numbers of dead, maimed, and psychologically broken human beings.

Cuntliffe isn’t wrong that restrainers feel moral horror about this in the case of Gaza. He’s wrong to think we don’t feel it in the case of Ukraine — or that advocacy of restraint in both cases isn’t a consistent position.

Strana.ru, 11/25/23 (Translation by Prof. Geoffrey Roberts)

Yesterday’s statement by David Arakhamiya [leader of Zelensky’s Servant of the People fraction in Ukraine’s parliament] that the war could have ended in spring 2022 if Ukraine had agreed to neutral status and signed a peace treaty on this basis raises a great many questions.

Based on information from the media and other sources, it seems Russia was ready to leave, without a fight, all the territories it had captured after February 24, 2022, in exchange for Ukraine’s neutral status (i.e. its refusal to join NATO). Moreover, if German Chancellor Schröder is to be believed, Russia was ready to return the entire Donbass to Ukraine on terms of broad autonomy modelled on South Tyrol in Italy.

Ukraine would have liberated almost all of its territories (except Crimea) virtually without a fight. The many thousands of civilians and military personnel who died after April 2022 would still be alive. Ukraine, without losing a single soldier, would have regained regions the Ukrainian Armed Forces tried – with heavy losses and without much success – to liberate during this year’s counteroffensive. As for NATO, Ukraine still has no guarantee of joining the Alliance.

Why did the Ukrainian authorities refuse such a profitable agreement in spring 2022?

Arakhamiya makes two arguments: firstly, it would have been necessary to change the Constitution, and, secondly, there was no trust the Russians would fulfil the agreement.

Both arguments are, to put it mildly, problematic. Yes, it is forbidden to change the Constitution during martial law, but if desired, a way out could have been found to a technical problem by the necessary political will (and since the Ukrainian authorities were negotiating about this at all, they must have seen some options). As for trust, this is an even stranger thesis, since according to the agreement, it was not Ukraine that had to withdraw troops, but Russia. Iin exchange, moreover, only for a decision on a neutral status, which could have been revisited at any time. The issue of trust – whether to “jump or not” – was primarily Moscow’s problem, not Kiev’s.

Subsequently, the Ukrainian authorities named another reason for the refusal – the tragedy in Bucha. However, if we recall Zelensky’s statements at that time, immediately after the tragedy he said that negotiations with the Russian Federation still needed to be conducted.

“Every such tragedy, every such Bucha, will hit you on the wrist in one or another negotiation. But we must find opportunities for such steps,” Zelensky said on 5 April 2022. It was only later that his statements became more categorical.

Hence the president’s main motive for refusing to conclude an agreement with Putin in 2022, is said to be that (perhaps under the influence of the arguments and promises of Western allies) he came to the conclusion that Russia was not ready for a big war and that Ukraine with Western help could completely defeat the Russian army and dictate to Moscow its peace terms, which would include the withdrawal of Russian troops to the 1991 borders, the payment of reparations, etc.

That is, figuratively speaking, Zelensky chose a pie in the sky instead of the bird in his hand.

At the same time, for those who remember the situation at the beginning of April 2022, it is difficult to believe the Ukrainian authorities could have felt so optimistic. The Russian army, having withdrawn troops from the north of Ukraine, launched an offensive in the east – in the Kharkov, Donetsk and Lugansk regions, and the advance of Russian troops continued in the completely surrounded Mariupol. The Ukrainian army experienced a growing hunger for shells. The first deliveries of Western howitzers and shells for them began only in mid-April. And “Hymars” appeared only in June. At that time, no one spoke about the supply of Western tanks and long-range missiles. The United States even blocked the supply of Soviet-style aircraft. In Russia itself there were still no signs of internal unrest. On the contrary, it became clear that its economy had not collapsed under the sanctions, that it had withstood the main blow.

In such conditions, it seems almost incredible that Zelensky could have refuses the extremely attractive “blue tit” of Russia’s withdrawal from almost all occupied territories of Ukraine without a fight, believing in the possibility of getting the “crane” in the form of Moscow’s surrender (which, as we know, hasn’t happened yet).

There must have been some compelling circumstance for Kyiv to reject such favourable conditions for ending the war in spring 2022.

What kind of circumstance became clear from the same interview with Arakhamiya.

He reported that the then British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, came to Kyiv and said that “we won’t sign anything with them at all, let’s just fight.”

The question arises: what exactly did Johnson mean by “we won’t sign anything with them?” There can be only one answer: Western countries refused to give joint guarantees with Russia about the security of Ukraine, which must have been attached to the peace treaty and the neutral status agreement.

Actually, Arakhamiya directly said this: “We were advised by Western allies not to agree to ephemeral security guarantees, which at that time were impossible to give at all.”

Let us recall that according to the then plan, security guarantees were to be given by Russia, leading Western countries and a number of other major world powers. But if NATO countries refused to give guarantees and only the Russian Federation and, possibly, China and Turkey gave them, this would, in fact, mean a complete break in Ukraine’s relations with the Western world. Which Zelensky, naturally, could not do.

In other words, it was the position of the Western allies – “let’s just fight” – that had a decisive influence on the decision of the Ukrainian authorities to abandon any agreement with the Russian Federation in spring 2022.

In this regard, one of the key questions concerning further developments is whether the Western position has changed. Recently, one can constantly find reports in the media that the leaders of the United States and the EU are actively pushing the Ukrainian authorities to negotiate with Russia. However, there is no official confirmation of this – only information with reference to certain sources. Publicly, both the Ukrainian authorities and the authorities of Western countries emphasise that they are not prepared to compromise with the Russian Federation and continue to demand the withdrawal of troops to the 1991 borders.

How things stand in reality will largely become clear from the military and financial assistance provided by Ukraine’s allies – if it is indeed significantly limited (as a number of media outlets predict), it would signal the West’s concept has changed compared to spring 2022.

In his interview, Arakhamiya reiterated Kyiv’s position on negotiations, saying they are not profitable at the moment, since “our negotiating position is very bad.”

But on whose side is time working? If in 2022 it was possible to end the war by liberating almost the entire territory of the country without a fight in exchange for neutral status, now there are no such options. And the alternative is completely different – a long war with all its victims and risks, or peace/truce along the front line with the actual consolidation of Russian control over the occupied territories (and, it is possible, this will also be accompanied by additional demands in the form of the same neutral status, for example).

The main thing is what the conditions and negotiating positions will be in the future, and whether Ukraine’s authorities understand that these may turn out to be even worse than they are now.

By Prof. John Mearsheimer, Substack, 11/26/23

There is a growing body of compelling evidence showing that Russia and Ukraine were involved in serious negotiations to end the war in Ukraine right after it started on 24 February 2022 (see below). These talks were facilitated by Turkish President Recep Erdogan and former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and featured detailed and candid discussions on the terms of a possible settlement.

By all accounts, these negotiations, which took place in March-April 2022, were making real progress when Britain and the US told Ukrainian President Zelensky to abandon them, which he did.

Coverage of these events has focused on how foolish and irresponsible it was for President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson to put an end to these negotiations, given all the death and destruction that Ukraine has suffered since then – in a war that Kyiv is likely to lose.

Yet an especially important aspect of this story regarding the causes of the Ukraine war has received little attention. The well-entrenched conventional wisdom in the West is that President Putin invaded Ukraine to conquer that country and make it part of a Greater Russia. Then, he would move on and conquer other countries in eastern Europe. The counter-argument, which enjoys little support in the West, is that Putin was mainly motivated to invade by the threat of Ukraine joining NATO and becoming a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. For him and other Russian elites, Ukraine in NATO was an existential threat.

The negotiations in March-April 2022 make it clear that the conventional wisdom on the war’s causes is wrong, and the counter-argument is right, for two main reasons. First, the talks were directly focused on satisfying Russia’s demand that Ukraine not become part of NATO and instead become a neutral state. Everyone involved in the negotiations understood that Ukraine’s relationship with NATO was Russia’s core concern. Second, if Putin was bent on conquering all of Ukraine, he would not have agreed to these talks, as their very essence contradicted any possibility of Russia conquering all of Ukraine. One might argue that he participated in these negotiations and talked a lot about neutrality to mask his larger ambitions. There is no evidence, however, to support this line of argument, not to mention that: 1) Russia’s small invasion force was not capable of conquering and occupying all of Ukraine; and 2) it would have made no sense to delay a larger offensive, as it would afford Ukraine time to build up its defenses.

In short, Putin launched a limited attack into Ukraine for the purpose of coercing Zelensky into abandoning Kyiv’s policy of aligning with the West and eventually bringing Ukraine into NATO. Had Britain and the West not intervened to scotch the negotiations, there is good reason to think Putin would have achieved this limited objective and agreed to end the war.

It is also worth remembering that Russia did not annex the Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia until September 2022, well after the talks had ended. Had a deal been reached, Ukraine would almost certainly control a far greater share of its original territory than it does now.

It is becoming increasingly clear that in the case of Ukraine, the level of foolishness and dishonesty among Western elites and the mainstream Western media is stunning.

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 11/21/23

The West’s liberal-globalist elite weaponizes identity politics at home and abroad in advance of their New Cold War bloc’s strategic interests, with there being no principle except for the pursuit of power over their domestic and foreign rivals.

Two statements from leading Ukrainian officials this month about their country’s Russian minority should have raised eyebrows among Westerners but regrettably went unnoticed despite them being deemed unacceptable by that bloc if someone within them said the same about their own minorities. Deputy Prime Minister for European integration Olga Stefanishina claimed that no such minority exists anymore, while Rada Speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk said their rights deserve to be infringed.

The first told a press conference on 9 November that “There is no Russian minority in Ukraine. It does not exist. There is not a single judicially defined community identifying itself as a Russian minority.” As for the second, he told state-controlled TV on Monday that “There are no Russian ethnic minorities in Ukraine as of now and there can be none…If a people do not show respect but commit aggression against Ukraine, their rights should be infringed upon in this field.”

Both comments followed the European Commission recommending in early November that Ukraine begin talks on joining the EU, and the bloc didn’t chastise either of those two officials for what they said about their country’s Russian minority, both of whom claimed that the EU supports their stance. Their comments are counterfactual as proven by the US government’s own official statistics per the CIA World Factbook, which reports that 17% of the Ukrainian population is comprised of ethnic Russians.

This is more than the percentage of African Americans in the US and slightly less than the rate of Hispanic Americans so Kiev’s policy towards its Russian minority would be the same as if Washington denied that either of those two exist on subjective administrative and moral grounds. That former Soviet Republic’s “de-Russification” and “Ukrainization” policies created the aforesaid administrative conditions for precisely that purpose, which in turn provoked an uproar that led to the latter faux moral one.

It’s understandable that any people would protest the state’s aggressive persecution of their ethnicity, language, and even religion like post-“Maidan” Ukraine has done to its Russian minority, and it’s within their UN-enshrined rights to peacefully demonstrate against this. Nevertheless, as all objective observers already know by now, the West only arbitrarily upholds the implementation of international law whenever its policymakers expect to derive some strategic benefit from doing so.

In this case, the West in general and the EU in particular turn a blind eye towards Ukraine’s persecution of its Russian minority, its administrative elimination of them from national legal existence, and its official’s justification of the preceding internationally illegal policies as part of their proxy war on Russia. This selective approach embodies the so-called “rules-based order” as was explained above, the specific standard of which in this example would be deemed unacceptable if applied within the West itself.

This insight shows that the West’s liberal-globalist elite weaponizes identity politics at home and abroad in advance of their New Cold War bloc’s strategic interests, with there being no principle except for the pursuit of power over their domestic and foreign rivals. It’s undeniable that Ukraine’s Russian minority is treated much worse than the US’ African American or Hispanic American ones, yet the US won’t say a word since it agrees with Stefanchuk that Russians deserve to have their rights infringed.

By Armchair Warlord, Twitter (X), 11/25/23

With news breaking that the Ukrainians are moving towards a final, total mobilization against Russia – and me regretting I didn’t post about it yesterday when I had a hunch on the matter – something occurred to me. I’ve underestimated the Russians before. What if I still am?

The Russians, after all, could quite easily attack and seize huge swathes of Ukraine via high-speed maneuver. The Ukrainians have a thousand kilometers of lightly-defended and barely-fortified left flank running from Kharkov to Lvov. The Russians could crash through it quite easily if they actually wanted to and they’ve always had forces in reserve that could do it – these days a huge mass of them. As things currently stand Russian special forces roam at will in Sumy and Chernigov, preying on the thinly-stretched garrisons.

But, no, the Russians have consolidated their position in Ukraine into a convenient stretch of highly defensible terrain in the country’s east and then just sat there, for over a year now, killing Ukrainian soldiers at horrifyingly lopsided ratios. When they can defend, they defend. When they must attack to keep the pressure on, they find some Ukrainian salient and turn it into a shooting gallery. Where they don’t want to push the front up, they just mow the lawn and pull back – they have to have taken the same line of strongholds east of Kupyansk a dozen times by now, each time pulling back and letting the AFU flood the same old trenches with new recruits again.

Ukrainian casualties have been so astronomical they’re now deep into desperate measures trying to keep soldiers in the ranks, drafting women and looking at emptying out the small pool of privileged young students to feed the front. When the war is over, Ukraine will be a broken society in which most of the people willing to fight for an independent Ukrainian state – and a Western-oriented Ukrainian national identity separate from Russia – will be dead.

What if that’s the point? Objectively speaking, if the Russian plan was simply to kill as many Ukrainian combatants as possible, as efficiently as possible, with as little risk to themselves as possible, then they’re doing it. The Russians know full well that the current iteration of Ukrainian national identity is implacably hostile to Russia and they cannot coexist with it – and they’re very coldly killing anyone and everyone willing and able (or coercible) to bear arms in its defense on the battlefield. In their manic drive to expel the Russians and fight for every inch of their land, the Ukrainian leadership is facilitating this.

Is this genocide? No. The Russians are fighting armed combatants. It’s no violation of the law of war to inflict horrific casualties on the enemy, and any comparison with the ongoing war in Gaza will show that the Russians have been meticulous to avoid civilian casualties. Will it have the effect of breaking the Ukrainian nation at the end of the war? Yes.

Is it an ugly thought that the Russians may very well have planned it this way? Very.