Casleton's Monthly: Ukraine edition

News & Politics

Hello! Welcome to the inaugural edition of Casleton’s Monthly, a newsletter with a “news roundup” and topical essay. This month’s essay is on US media coverage of the Ukraine crisis.

Here are a few articles from the past month that are worth reading:

First, the backstory on the famous photo from Guantanamo Bay. This picture was, in fact, taken by a military photographer and was not intended to outrage the public.

Second, the plan in Berlin to create the biggest car-free urban zone in the world! Germans are famously fond of biking, but the prospects of this plan to change cities is not limited to Germany.

Third, the effort to make Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, a saint. Her work is, unfortunately, more relevant than ever, given our world’s massive poverty and inequality. She is a happy reminder that the most inspiring people are always anarchists :)

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Essay: Ukraine Between Russia and the United States

Russian forces are teeming on the Ukrainian border. The US is leading a group of Western European nations — some eager, some reluctant — to deter Russian aggression. And the US media churns ever onward, pumping out more articles and opinion pieces by the day. Amid this welter of commentary, it is difficult to orient oneself, much less to discern a thoroughly worked out understanding of the goals of US foreign policy.

If there is a prevailing framework in the media, it is this: the US is basically good and Russia [read: Putin] is basically bad. The only question is what we, the good guys, can do about the bad guys. One camp advocates a show of force to put Putin in his place. Another camp suggests that we should quietly back away, recognizing that the good guys cannot fight every battle.

In other words, while the exact policy prescriptions differ, the general outlook is that the US represents the forces of order and Russia the forces of disorder. Fiona Hill — a high-level analyst in the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations — has articulated this view with ringing confidence. A “Russian assault would challenge the entire UN system and imperil the arrangements that have guaranteed member states’ sovereignty since World War II — akin to the Iraq invasion of Kuwait in 1990[.]” This is certainly an evocative comparison: it brings to mind that resounding US military victory, the First Gulf War. Making Putin a latter-day Saddam Hussein nicely reinforces the accepted framework, a rogue nation on one side, and the American-led do-gooders on the other.

There is, however, an irony here. One can hardly think of Iraq and destabilizing invasions without thinking of… the United States’ illegal and region-destabilizing invasion of Iraq in 2003. Yet reading Hill’s remarks, one would hardly know that the US has, beyond the tragedy of the Iraq war, a miserable track record when it comes to compliance with the international system that she extols. To take one well-known example, John Bolton, who worked for both the Bush and Trump administrations, made it clear that the US rejected the authority of the International Criminal Court because the Court could hold US citizens accountable for war crimes in Afghanistan and Israeli citizens accountable for human rights abuses against Palestinians.

Usually this antipathy for international institutions and laws remains below the rhetorical surface of commitments to “human rights” and “democracy.” But if you listen to the right people, the message is crystal clear. Richard Perle, an apparatchik of the Reagan and Bush II administrations, made the point vividly in the early days of the war in Iraq. “What will die in Iraq is the fantasy of the United Nations as the foundation of a new world order. As we sift the debris of the war to liberate Iraq, it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions.” Perle was at least prescient in one crucial respect: there was, and is, a lot of ‘debris’ in Iraq. The fruit of the Bush administration’s decision to cast off ‘liberal conceit’ was exactly what one would expect — catastrophic destruction for the civilian population of the invaded country, and no accountability for the politicians governing the aggressor nation.

We can thus smell the odor of hypocrisy in much of the commentary on Russia. Russia must obey the rules of the international order, or face the consequences. The US, on the other hand, can run roughshod over the rules of this order so long as it declares that it is doing so with good intentions. This is simply a double-standard. One of the few people willing to point this out is Peter Beinart. He has clearly laid out the way the Biden administration chooses to speak of a “rules based” international order rather than “international law’, because talking about international law would expose the US to an obvious criticism: it does not care about international law. “If Mr. Biden and [Secretary of State] Blinken declared that America upholds international law, critics might ask how that squares with Washington’s continuing bipartisan love affair with sanctions so punitive that both current and former U.N. special rapporteurs have likened them to economic war… Or [critics] might question why the United States still maintains a law that authorizes an American president to use military force to extricate Americans who are prosecuted by the International Criminal Court.”

This sheds some light on the allegedly mysterious thinking of Vladimir Putin. He feels justified in disregarding the constraints of international law because he, rightly, sees that countries like the US will do so when it is in their interest. Fully one half of the American political spectrum cannot appreciate this because it believes the US is basically compliant with international norms. The other half of the American political spectrum simply thinks the international system is illegitimate, and so what matters is not following the law but pure American self-interest, which Putin opposes. So long as these two views dominate US political discourse, the American public will not see the forest for the trees. The latest Russian outburst is a symptom of a larger problem, which is a fundamentally weak system of international laws and institutions. Until the US puts its weight behind this system, outbursts by “rogue” nations will be the rule rather than the exception.