Emphasis via bolding is mine. – Natylie

By Paul Grenier, ACURA, 2/29/24

Anatol Lieven’s and George Beebe’s “The Diplomatic Path to a Secure Ukraine” serves as a refreshing antidote to the usual mainstream account of the Ukraine conflict. They provide objective, factual data on the demographic, economic-industrial, and troop strength gaps — not to say chasms — separating Russia and Ukraine today. They further note, in a similarly realistic vein, that attrition warfare by no means favors Ukraine:

… in a war of attrition, the numbers, munitions and economy of one side falter before the other does so, leading to a collapse either of the army or the home front. As things stand at present, if either side in the Ukraine War eventually cracks, it seems likely to be Ukraine.

This circumstance, Lieven and Beebe conclude, should motivate even ardent supporters of Ukraine to start negotiations with Russia immediately, since delaying will only serve to put Kiev in an even weaker position. They point to President Putin’s apparent openness to such negotiations – an openness hinted at during his Feb. 8, 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson — as an encouraging sign. (What the Russian president in fact understood to be the purpose of such negotiations, however, remains, to me at least, somewhat mysterious.)

The authors raise the question, and it is an entirely rational question in the context of proposing negotiations, as to why the Russian side would wish to participate, given their present successes on the battlefield in this war of attrition.  The crux of their argument runs as follows:

Russia … has shown that it can block the further expansion of NATO into ex–Soviet republics, but it cannot fight its way into Western recognition that Russia has a legitimate role to play in Europe’s security order, nor can it reduce the potential for direct war with NATO absent diplomatic engagement with the United States and Europe. In sum, although Russia can make progress on demilitarizing Ukraine, it still has some significant reasons to want an understanding with the West over Ukraine and the broader European security order [emphasis mine – PRG]

Parenthetically, it would appear that the authors are framing this conflict – accurately, in my view — as a conflict transpiring between Russia and the ‘collective West’ and not, as popular narratives often would have it, as a war Russia is waging on Ukraine.  Whether or not this is what the authors intended to say, certainly this is precisely how Russia’s political and intellectual elites understand the current war.  Russian political elites, with good reason, view the present war as between Russia and the collective West, and they view the West as using Ukraine as an instrument to assist the West in weakening Russia.  I will not spend time here explaining why I agree that such a framing is in fact rational.  Anyone who cares to can read the prior work of such scholars as John Mearsheimer or look up the suitable quotes from  President Biden, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and a great many others. What follows from such a framing are some considerations both tactical and political-philosophical (or simply political) that it is my purpose, in what follows, to explore.   

In respect to tactics, if and to the extent that Russia views the United States and its closest allies as their true foe, then it is entirely possible that the Russians will not see bringing the war to a rapid end, or trying to seize large swaths of territory, as a near-term or even medium-term goal.  Although this is speculation, it seems likely that the Russian side is turning back against the United States the ‘bleed Russia’ strategy that, they no doubt accurately surmised, was the intent of the West at the outset of the war (hence all the sanctions, hence the ‘let’s create another Afghanistan for Russia’ rhetoric, etc.).  

And why wouldn’t Russia be thinking in such terms?  After all, how many more packets of 60 billion dollars can the West afford to provide to prop up Ukraine?  When that cash finally dries up, how much loyalty will a population no longer receiving paychecks or pensions still feel toward their Western ‘benefactors’?  When that day comes — i.e., when the cash runs out — Russia might manage to achieve a political settlement inside Ukraine corresponding to its original war aims even without the physical occupation or military conquest of Ukraine’s large territory.  To be sure, this would in no way, in itself, lead to a cessation of hostilities between Russia and the U.S., but it would nonetheless represent a noteworthy defeat for the United States, a defeat dwarfing the earlier Afghan fiasco in its global geo-political implications. 

The United States, in other words, may well have a far greater interest of its own in coming to the negotiating table than is suggested by the authors of “The Diplomatic Path to a Secure Ukraine.”  Which brings us to the key question: Is it true that negotiations between the U.S. and Russia can succeed in an atmosphere without trust?  

America Not What It Used to Be

On the one hand, as Lieven and Beebe point out, “Moscow and Washington have decades of useful Cold War experience in constructing, implementing, and monitoring a wide range of security agreements despite mutual distrust and broader geopolitical competition” (emphasis mine – PRG).   And yet, what this ignores is that Cold War II is unfolding in a U.S. that differs strikingly from even the U.S. that existed as late as the 1980s, under Ronald Reagan.  In the intervening years a whole generation of students has been educated by professors steeped in French post-structuralist theory (Foucault and the like).  The key point is not so much that ‘truth’ (today always in scare quotes) has disappeared, as that it is simply assumed that truth only ever exists in reference to some particular power configuration: ‘truth’ is now simply an expression of someone’s interests, and nothing more.  

Let us consider, for a moment, the style of argumentation now pervasive in nearly all discussions of foreign affairs.  As Matthew Dal Santo has helpfully pointed out, today, questions of fact are no longer proven or disproven by appeals to logic and material evidence, but instead only ever by pointing out in whose interests it is to accept or deny a given proposition.  

Did the U.S. play a role in the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines (which, incidentally, was a massive violation of international law as well as an attack on Germany)? Which side, Russia or Ukraine, was purposely shelling civilian areas of Donbas after 2014 and, year after year, killing innocent women and children? Which side was shelling the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant in 2022 – 2023 after it had been occupied by Russian troops?   In all such cases, the answer is allegedly already known in advance prior to any material evidence – even though, to be sure, such real evidence is never even sought.  ‘It definitely wasn’t our side, it wasn’t our team doing something wrong or illegal,’ we are repeatedly assured. After all, to assert otherwise would be to repeat ‘Putin talking points’! 

This new American rhetorical style is by no means specific only to Russia or to the Ukraine war.  To speak out against the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, or the destabilization of Syria and Libya starting in 2011, was similarly dismissed on the basis that questioning such policies was tantamount to promoting the interests of Assad and Qaddafi. Conformance to U.S. policy objectives has become the measure of truth.

But how can diplomacy take place between the U.S. and other states, if the U.S. has renounced the givenness of factual reality, if it has substituted for reality a utilitarian narrative whose veracity, on the one hand, and whose correspondence to American interests on the other hand, is always considered an identity?  

Let it be granted, for the sake of argument, that what concerns American policy makers is not philosophical profundity but ‘what works.’  It is apparently widely assumed in Washington that the reduction of international politics to a conflict of warring interests does work, such that, if our application of pressure is continuously escalated, eventually the other side will be forced to accept the American picture of ‘reality’ and learn to ‘play ball’ according to our rules. 

In the present case under consideration, will this ‘methodology’ (one can’t call it diplomacy) produce the desired results?  In theory, at least, it could work if Russians were fully analogous to Pavlovian dogs that can be trained to respond to external stimuli – now the ‘pain’ of economic sanctions, now the ‘pleasant’ feelings of being told that they will be accepted by Europe and made part of its ‘security order.’  Apparently this approach did produce results for the American side in the 1990s. Many Russians bought what was on offer back then.  It appears, however, that today’s Russia  is different.  Despite Putin’s recent statement to Tucker Carlson that Russia is now, like the West, ‘bourgeois,’ this is evidently not true.  A bourgeois population sees everything in terms of interests, especially interests that bring comfort. But Russians today are becoming once again philosophers, which means that they are willing to accept pain rather than accept as ‘true’ something they know to be false.  This might be considered Russia’s own ‘revolution of dignity.’  

Today’s Russians, therefore, will be unimpressed if American and E.U. diplomats come to them with a peace agreement, saying, ‘sign here, this time we will observe all our promises.’  Why will they be unimpressed? Because Russians have a memory. They recall that the Minsk II agreements, despite having been duly accepted by their ‘Western partners’ and even made subject to international law via the UN Security Council, were subsequently not only not observed; as we later learned from no less a personage than Angela Merkel, there had never even been any intention to observe them.  This has since been publicly admitted by both the European and Ukrainian signatories of the Minsk agreements.  

This latter point, shocking as it is, demonstrates how far Western ‘rationality’ has degraded since its birth in the Enlightenment, and this despite the West’s frequent efforts to justify itself by reference to its glorious founding in the Enlightenment rationality of, in particular, Immanuel Kant.  Whatever there may be that is questionable in Kantian epistemology, there was nonetheless much that is of value in Kant’s practical ethics.  We may recall, for example, that in article 1 of Kant’s famous essay on the topic of peace, the philosopher states that no peace treaty can be regarded as valid if made with the secret reservation of material for a future war.   Well, in the Ukraine case, this was precisely what happened, although the ‘material for a future war’ was sent to Ukraine by its Western partners for the most part after their signing of the Minsk peace agreements.  As for Kant’s article of peace number 6  — forbidding the use of assassins and treachery, or otherwise engaging in actions that “would make mutual confidence impossible in a subsequent state of peace,” it suffices to recall the assassinations of a number of Russian civilians and journalists by agents of Ukrainian intelligence (acts not yet condemned by the U.S. side); Ukraine’s so-called Peacekeeper (Mirotvorets) hit list (not yet condemned by the U.S. side);  the never honestly investigated Nord Stream pipeline explosions – and, nota bene, this is very far from being a complete list – to realize how thoroughly the West has rejected its own Kantian inheritance of rationality and morality.  Finally: Kant famously taught that it is always immoral to treat others as a mere means to one’s own ends, and yet that is precisely how the U.S. has treated Ukraine: as an object to be used to ‘kill Russians’ in a proxy war, and as a means to teach distant China a lesson.

If this discussion were happening in the usual U.S. media space, it would be at this point that the counterarguments, like an avalanche, would begin to rain down about the evil of the Russian side.  The historical record would be appealed to so as to illustrate the thuggish behavior and perfidy of the Russian president in particular.  Some of these narratives would be true.  Has Putin sometimes displayed thuggishness? No doubt he has – as have U.S. leaders, and their counterparts in England, Germany and France. 

All sides can play this game, which literally has no end, of pointing out the other side’s past perfidy, while ignoring one’s own.  History can only become a constructive aspect of a diplomatic process if the standards of truthfulness are sufficiently present as to allow for a shared reality.  In the ideal case, the warring sides would come to recognize that all are to blame, even if not equally. The important thing is that all participants  begin to see the often tragic nature of past historical choices and gain thereby at least some modicum of empathy for the other side.  The transformative power of the historical perspective so understood – understood, in other words, as tragedy — is the topic of Nicolai Petro’s extremely insightful The Tragedy of Ukraine.

At present, U.S. officialdom and mainstream media, implausibly assign all the blame for the Ukraine war to the Russian side (Russia’s ‘unprovoked invasion’).  Still worse, the U.S. side holds fast to a narrative about Russia that, in a number of important respects, has no basis in reality at all.  For example, that Russia ‘hacked the 2016 American election,’ even though there is no evidence for it. Or that Russia turned President Donald Trump into its helpless sock puppet, despite Robert Muller’s two-year long investigation failing to present any evidence of it.  Nor does the historical record support it. 

To be sure, Russia’s own historical narratives, at the official level, are also often unconducive to fruitful dialogue.  For example, it is true that during WWII many Ukrainians, in the wake of the horrors of collectivization, faced a tragic choice between evils which, at the time, may have been hard for many to assess – which is not to make excuses for those who actively participated in Nazi war crimes.  Russian historical narratives become self-serving and alienating to the extent that they fail to acknowledge the tragedy of Ukraine in the 1930s and 1940s.  

What is to be done?

The most fundamental question is rarely what we will do; more often it has to do with what we are.  In the case of the United States, it has long since become obvious that we are no longer very serious.   What must we do to become serious?  We need to accept  that reality is firstly something given, before it is created (by us).  Only a reality that is accepted as given – not manufactured — can be a shared reality, and therefore become the material for forging a successful diplomatic settlement. Only by making clear that we accept reality – in other words, by being truthful – can we begin to earn the trust of the other side. 

Such a return to reality will be an arduous task.  In the U.S. and in E.U. states, it will likely require a fundamental rethinking of educational systems and curricula.  It will necessitate finding some very different criteria than presently in use for selecting our key civil servants and elected officials.  (One does not have to be a Simone Weil to realize the pervasive, and pervasively corrupting influence of money in the American selection process and on American culture and civil society more generally.)

Unfortunately, such a process of reform might last a generation, assuming it is ever embarked on at all — and yet the dangers of leaving the conflict between the U.S. and Russia unresolved do not countenance such delay.  Though the following measures will clearly be insufficient to effect a full cure, they might at least jump-start our moribund diplomatic process by beginning to restore trust:

• Stop demonizing Russia. Stop denying to Russians the right to define their own sense of who they are; stop insisting that Russia is not legitimate until and unless it accepts American values and sense of what is ethical.  Questions of gender, for example, should be viewed as something that each culture can best define for itself.  This would represent a return to the ‘live and let live’ version of liberalism for which the U.S., in former times, was admired even by many Russians. Russians will never accept the current iteration of American liberalism, which illiberally dictates: ‘live as we do.’   
• The U.S. government, in some official capacity, should publicly admit that the Russiagate scandal had no sufficient basis in fact and should hold those government officials who manufactured it to account.  U.S. representatives should commit, henceforth, to contradicting any media stories that continue to make use of that narrative, and they themselves should promise to stop making use of it as a means of demonizing Russia, and stop treating Russia as an untrustworthy state for what was entirely (except to a trivial extent) a U.S. – manufactured narrative. 
• It hardly seems plausible, in the near term, that the U.S. side will admit to having sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines, even though no one has come up with a more plausible explanation of what happened than Sy Hersh.  It would be easier, and therefore more likely to take place (granted, this is still most unlikely) for the U.S. to offer, using its own financing, to collaboratively restore the destroyed pipelines and to not object to the restoration of Russian sales of gas to Germany and Europe.  This might have the long-term beneficial effect of reviving the German economy and not thereby creating the danger that an angry and impoverished German populace eventually grow tired altogether of its relationship with the United States.  Of course, ideally, we would see a genuinely neutral, professional and open investigation of the Nord Stream incident in which experts from all sides, including Russia, would have access to all the evidence. 
• Commit to abandoning, immediately, the politicization of international sports, including the Olympics, and commit to never again preventing Russian sports teams from participating, and under their own flag.  Even better: apologize for having done so in the past. 

I agree with George Beebe and Anatol Lieven (who at least hint at this outcome) that a final settlement with Russia over Ukraine will entail the acceptance by the West that Ukraine will never become a member of NATO. This is a necessary but not a sufficient requirement, at least from the Russian perspective.  The Russian side will insist that not only will Ukraine never be a de jure member of NATO, neither can it ever be a de facto member, as it was already becoming in the years prior to the outbreak of hostilities, given Ukraine’s arming by the U.S., its participation in exercises with NATO troops, the placement of advanced U.S. weapons systems within Ukraine and the planned expansion of those systems to ever more sophisticated ones.  

Right up to the torpedoed (by the U.S. and England) peace negotiations in Istanbul in April 2022, Russia repeatedly declared its willingness to accept a neutral and independent Ukraine. For the Russian Federation to be willing today to accept such a neutral and independent Ukraine, the U.S. must first take decisive steps to restore trust.  Otherwise, negotiations, even if started, will prove fruitless; the war will continue, tens or even hundreds of thousands of soldiers will die, and in the end, as now seems almost certain, the Russian side will impose its own, very different terms.

Paul R. Grenier is an essayist and translator who writes frequently on political philosophy, urbanism and foreign affairs. His essays have appeared in American Affairs, The National Interest, The American Conservative, Solidarity Hall, Consortium News, The Huffington Post, The Baltimore Sun, Ethika Politika, Johnson’s Russia List, Russkaya Idea, Tetradi konservatizma, and in translation in Russian, Spanish and French. He holds graduate degrees in International Affairs and Geography (Columbia University) and a certificate from the Harriman Institute of Columbia University where he studied Russian intellectual history under Marc Raeff. He worked for many years as a simultaneous interpreter for the U.S. Defense and State Departments, interpreting for Gen. Tommy Franks and serving as lead interpreter for US Central Command’s peacekeeping exercises with post-Soviet states. He was a research director at the Council on Economic Priorities, where he led collaborative projects between US and Russian academics on military-economic affairs. He was a founding editor at Solidarity Hall. In October 2016 he was keynote speaker at the Berdyaev Readings Conference in Paris. He lives in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.