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Timothy Snyder is a serious historian and evidently a deeply moral man. The opposition he has expressed to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine has been consistent and compelling. He has now distilled that opposition into a list of telegraphic points. They remind one of Clemenceau’s remark on the appearance of Wilson’s Fourteen Points: ‘God had only ten’. Snyder has given us fifteen.
They are clear but misleadingly simple. Like Russia’s aggression, they may mean different things to different people; like the involvement of outside powers in any internationalised civil war, they invoke a number of real and symbolic interests and rationales. The war in Ukraine isn’t exactly a civil war set on an international template like those that took place in Syria or Afghanistan… unless one draws the map back in time by regarding it as the bloody coda to an imperial dissolution that surprised many people by occurring mostly bloodlessly more than 30 years ago.
Snyder, however, reads history forward, not backwards, in his fifteen points. He suggests that Russia seeks to recreate an empire and an imperial model rather than mourn their loss; and so the only response – the only moral and practical response – must be to resist that recreation, and to do so again in blood, until achieving total victory against the Russian aggressor, for the sake of Ukraine, Russia, Europe, and the world.
To counter each of Snyder’s points is not easy. But here one tries for the sake of some future student of history wondering how the people running the world at the turn of the 21st century succeeded – from Kosovo to Iraq to Libya and Syria and now to Ukraine (and possibly beyond) – in resurrecting not the horrors of the 20th century so much as the myopic and cynical geopolitics of the second half of the 19th, which took another three-quarters of a century to be overcome.
Snyder may be right that ‘the world’ needs to believe in a worthy set of abstractions in order to care about Ukraine. Notwithstanding its size and geography, it is still a far away country of which most people beyond its borders know next to nothing. But that is a different matter from why Ukraine must fight to win. Conflating the two sets of aims may be necessary (for some, at least) but it continues to be very risky. And is it not too cynical to say that ‘victory’ is nowadays almost everywhere a pernicious abstraction. Ukraine ultimately needs the world more than the world needs Ukraine.
Snyder’s points follow (with rejoinders in italics):
Why does the world need a Ukrainian victory?
1. To halt atrocity. Russia's occupation is genocidal. Wherever the Ukrainians recover territory, they save lives, and re-establish the principle that people have a right not to be tortured, deported, and murdered.
There are three conflated and contestable points: 1. That a Ukrainian victory, whatever form it takes, will mean an end to atrocity, however defined; 2. That to oppose or even qualify such a victory, assuming it means an end to the Russian occupation of all Ukrainian territory, is to endorse genocide; and 3. That only one side in this war is fighting for a principle. All that may be true; but most of the world’s population beyond Ukraine, some parts of Europe, and the Boston-to-Washington axis, is still not convinced.
2. To preserve the international legal order. Its basis is that one country may not invade another and annex its territory, as Russia seeks to do. Russia's war of aggression is obviously illegal, but the legal order does not defend itself.
Russia’s war of aggression is obviously illegal but it is a political fact. The rest of this point is a non sequitur. If the parties involved in Ukraine were so keen to preserve the international legal order, they would have found a way to prevent this invasion from happening in the first place. Once it happened, the legal order, at least with regard to Ukraine, became at best an irrelevancy, at worst a hindrance.
3. To end an era of empire. This could be the last war fought on the colonial logic that another state and people do not exist. But this turning point is reached only if Russia loses.
As noted above, the era of empire ended a long time ago, except for the Left-wing opinion that regards any multinational polity – the EU, NATO, et al. – as a kind of empire. But imperialism is alive and well, and will remain so as long as the international legal order remains contingent on the power of sovereign states.
4. To defend the peace project of the European Union. Russia's war is not directed only against Ukraine, but against the larger idea that European states can peacefully cooperate. If empire prevails, integration fails.
Again, the point relies entirely on presumed symbolism, which may not, in fact, be universally understood and shared. In the event, the EU seems to be doing just fine, winter weather permitting.
5. To give the rule of law a chance in Russia. So long as Russia fights imperial wars, it is trapped in repressive domestic politics. Coming generations of Russians could live better and freer lives, but only if Russia loses this war.
This is a more obvious point which is hard to dispute, for where is war not the health of the state? But Russia has gone a long way away from the rule of law. To ‘give the rule of law a chance’ in the midst of the type of total political collapse of the Russian ruling system (in other words, a revolution) implied by this point would ask rather a lot. Can one imagine a full victory for Ukraine that does not bring about a revolution in Russia? Would Russia’s enemies and critics be satisfied with anything less?
6. To weaken the prestige of tyrants. In this century, the trend has been towards authoritarianism, with Putinism as a force and a model. Its defeat by a democracy reverses that trend. Fascism is about force, and is discredited by defeat.
Another bit of presumed symbolism. Tyrants also seem to be doing fine around the world, with or without the prestige of Putinism. Unlike the liberal international order, most tyrannies and their politics are local.
7. To remind us that democracy is the better system. Ukrainians have internalized the idea that they choose their own leaders. In taking risks to protect their democracy, they remind us that we all must act to protect ours.
Fine, except for the inconvenient point that Russia has based its intervention on the extra-democratic attempts, some successful, conducted by Ukrainian forces and their external allies against democratically-elected leaders there. Which is to say, few proxy wars have much to do with democracy. It’s not entirely clear or self-evident that this one does. Instead it is self-evidently a fight for sovereignty and independence. Are those aims not worthy enough?
8. To lift the threat of major war in Europe. For decades, a confrontation with the USSR and then Russia was the scenario for regional war. A Ukrainian victory removes this scenario by making another Russian offensive implausible.
This is too vague to make much sense of. It suggests that Ukrainians are Sobieski at the gates of Vienna. Given the difficulties the Russians have had in just the Donbas for the past eleven months, the ex-Red army needs more than shoes to conquer Europe. It’s Russian weakness, not strength, that Europeans and their friends need to worry about for the foreseeable future.
9. To lift the threat of major war in Asia. In recent years, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan has been the leading scenario for a global war. A Ukrainian victory teaches Beijing that such an offensive operation is costly and likely to fail.
This point is entirely speculative. It’s hard to believe that Professor Snyder has the power to read the minds of teachers and students in Beijing.
10. To prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons. Russia, a nuclear power, then invaded. If Ukraine loses, countries that can build nuclear weapons will feel that they need to do so to protect themselves.
This point, it’s sad to say, is moot, given what has already taken place in Iraq, Libya, Iran, North Korea...
11. To reduce the risk of nuclear war. A Ukrainian victory makes two major war scenarios involving nuclear powers less likely, and works against nuclear proliferation generally. Nothing would reduce the risk of nuclear war more than Ukrainian victory.
This point, it’s also sad to say, is alive and well, but arguably in exactly the opposite way Professor Snyder describes.
12. To head off future resource wars. Aside from being a consistent perpetrator of war crimes, Russia's Wagner group seizes mineral resources by violence wherever it can. This is why it is fighting in Bakhmut.
See the answer to point number six. The symbolism goes too far. If a resource war breaks out somewhere else in the world, it won’t be because of anything happening in Ukraine unless it is already linked to Ukraine (eg energy supplies, commodity shortages, etc.).
13. To guarantee food supplies and prevent future starvation. Ukraine feeds much of the world. Russia threatens to use that food as a weapon. As one Russian propagandist put it, "starvation is our only hope."
The first half of this point does not follow from the second. Yes, Russia has used food as a weapon. But if it stopped doing so tomorrow, that would neither ‘guarantee food supplies’ nor ‘prevent future starvation’.
14. To accelerate the shift from fossil fuels. Putin shows the threat that hydrocarbon oligarchy poses to the future. His weaponization of energy supplies has accelerated the turn towards renewables. This will continue, if Russia loses.
It is already happening, and will continue to happen, regardless.
15. To affirm the value of freedom. Even as they have every reason to define freedom as against something -- Russian occupation --, Ukrainians remind us that freedom is actually for something, the right to be the people they wish to be, in a future they can help shape.
There is no freedom without peace.
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