What America Should do About Russia's Invasion of Ukraine

From a comment I left in a Facebook thread asking me what America should do about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:

I try to look at all countries, including America, the way a Martian would. If a Martian were trying to identify the most peace-loving and the most war-loving countries on this planet, where would the Martian rank America?

Of course I could be wrong, but my guess is that the Martian—judging by military budgets, overseas military bases, and number of “military actions”—would find America to be off the charts. The Martian would probably be intrigued to note that it’s only Americans who can’t see this. I would try to address the Martian’s perplexity by explaining that human perception is massively distorted by something called the fundamental attribution error. Were the concept new to the Martian, I would advise the Martian to use the Internet to look up this extremely important key to human behavior.

Anyway. I think that unless Russia’s war in Ukraine blows up into something bigger, up to and including the end of human civilization, it will be resolved by guarantees of Ukraine neutrality, meaning no western forces in and no NATO for Ukraine (this would probably apply to Georgia, too). These have been Russia’s demands since 2008, when America first started urging NATO to admit Ukraine and Georgia as NATO’s 31st and 32nd member states, and when Russia began making clear that it would go to war rather than allow such a thing to happen.

It’s interesting to note that George Bush Sr.’s Secretary of State James Baker promised Gorbachev that in exchange for the Soviet Union acquiescing to a unified Germany becoming part of NATO (an extremely bitter pill for the USSR to swallow, given what Germany did to Russia in WWII), NATO would not expand “one inch” further east. After which, we flipped the entire Warsaw Pact into NATO and expanded the alliance all the way to Russia’s western border.

All of this is of course memory-holed in America, where Putin simply wantonly invaded Ukraine for no reason other than Peter the Great/Hitlerian dreams of conquest.

To me it feels like 1979, when Iranian students took the US embassy in Tehran and the hostage crisis began. Most Americans believed the whole thing started that day, that Iranians were just evil and for no reason wanted to give America a black eye, etc. I was 15 at the time and that’s what I thought. 1954, Mosaddegh, the entire history of US meddling and the coup that installed the murderous Shah regime…all memory-holed.

It’s always like this, but citizens seem not learn from the obvious patterns. Maybe it’s because the fight itself is so captivating; because the factors that led to the fight were hazy and not particularly cinematic and so went unnoticed by most people at the time; because once the fight is on, powerful, primitive emotions kick in and not just occlude the ability to reflect and to reason, but are so pleasurable that they cause people to *resist* reflection and reason, lest reason get in the way of the emotional high of The Good Fight.

It’s interesting to consider that the solution to conflicts is often obvious from the beginning, but ego prevents the actors from adopting the obvious solutions except at the brink. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is a perfect example. America had positioned Jupiter nuclear missiles in NATO member Turkey, on the USSR’s border. America launched the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba in 1961 (followed by the Operation Mongoose terror campaign). Cuba asked the USSR to position nuclear weapons in Cuba to forestall another US invasion and further US meddling. Khruschev agreed. America picked up the activity in satellite photos, blockaded Cuba, and threatened to sink any Soviet vessels that tried to breach the blockade.

Again, all the foregoing history is memory-holed in America. In the American popular imagination, without provocation Khrushchev aggressively and wantonly moved nuclear missiles into Cuba, after which brave John Kennedy cooly and intelligently faced Khruschev down. All that’s taught is the story of how America *resolved* the Cuban Missile Crisis. You have to go searching on your own if you want to understand what America did to *provoke* the Cuban Missile Crisis.

None of this is about blaming America, hating America, or Whataboutism, or any other such bullshit that people commonly throw up to protect their emotional attachment to the feeling that their own country is Good and the adversary is Bad. Mostly it’s about understanding that other people don’t see us the way we see ourselves, and understanding that other people don’t see themselves the way we see them. This is as old as Sun Tzu, but it’s given not much more than lip service, again and again with disastrous results.

Anyway, eventually the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved by the Soviets publicly agreeing to remove their nuclear missiles from Cuba; by America publicly promising not to invade Cuba anymore; and by America secretly promising to remove its Jupiter nuclear missiles from Turkey (secrecy required to save face for President Kennedy, even though “Please remove your nuclear missiles from just a few miles from our border, where they’re needlessly provocative” was exactly America’s complaint about what the Soviets were doing in Cuba).

The solution to Russia’s war in Ukraine seems equally obvious. Getting to it without blowing up the world is another matter.

It’s worth noting in this regard that we did almost blow up the world before resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis. There’s much more on this, but just from Wikipedia:

During the blockade, "the US Navy dropped a series of ‘signalling’ depth charges (practice depth charges the size of hand grenades) on a Soviet submarine (B-59) at the blockade line, unaware that it was armed with a nuclear-tipped torpedo with orders that allowed it to be used if the submarine was damaged by depth charges or surface fire. As the submarine was too deep to monitor any radio traffic, the captain of the B-59, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, decided that a war might already have started and wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo. The decision to launch these normally only required agreement from the two commanding officers on board, the Captain and the Political Officer. However, the commander of the submarine Flotilla, Vasily Arkhipov, was aboard B-59 and so he also had to agree. Arkhipov objected and so the nuclear launch was narrowly averted.

“On the same day a U-2 spy plane made an accidental, unauthorised ninety-minute overflight of the Soviet Union's far eastern coast. The Soviets responded by scrambling MiG fighters from Wrangel Island; in turn, the Americans launched F-102 fighters armed with nuclear air-to-air missiles over the Bering Sea.”

That’s the kind of shit that happens during the Fog of War. We have been unbelievably lucky, more times than any species deserves to be lucky. If you doubt that, Google Nuclear Close Calls.

I wish that instead of relying on luck, we would spend a little more time considering what could be done to avoid these wars and other crises. Because once they’ve begun, they seem not to get resolved except at the brink. One day, maybe this time, we’ll get to the brink and still won’t resolve it. We’ll go over. Over and out.