I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live in a world where the media were institutionally free. And where there wasn’t constant and tragic societal damage occurring as a result of the corporate media’s distortions. The consequences of the corporate media’s institutional structure are most horrifying when it comes to the climate crisis—in that case, we might literally lose everything because of the media’s bias. But US foreign policy is another domain where the corporate media has done huge damage.

Massive and Systematic

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky write in the 2002 version of their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: this “book centers in what we call a ‘propaganda model,’ an analytical framework that attempts to explain the performance of the U.S. media in terms of the basic institutional structures and relationships within which they operate”; it’s “our view that, among their other functions, the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them”; structural “factors are those such as ownership and control, dependence on other major funding sources (notably, advertisers), and mutual interests and relationships between the media and those who make the news and have the power to define it and explain what it means”; the “raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print”; regarding these filters, they “fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns”; “a propaganda approach to media coverage suggests a systematic and highly political dichotomization in news coverage based on serviceability to important domestic power interests”; this “should be observable in dichotomized choices of story and in the volume and quality of coverage”; “we will see that such dichotomization in the mass media is massive and systematic”; and “not only are choices for publicity and suppression comprehensible in terms of system advantage, but the modes of handling favored and inconvenient materials (placement, tone, context, fullness of treatment) differ in ways that serve political ends”.

A “propaganda system will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy”; the “evidence of worth may be read from the extent and character of attention and indignation”; “the U.S. mass media’s practical definitions of worth are political in the extreme and fit well the expectations of a propaganda model”; while “this differential treatment occurs on a large scale, the media, intellectuals, and public are able to remain unconscious of the fact and maintain a high moral and self-righteous tone”; and this “is evidence of an extremely effective propaganda system”.

The Media and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

I think that the media distortion is extraordinary and disturbing when it comes to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—an institutionally free media would cover the conflict very differently. Regarding the conflict, there are facts that people who restrict themselves to corporate media simply don’t know. And regarding the conflict, there are attitudes that wouldn’t be so prominent if the media weren’t distorting things systematically.

Chomsky says in a 12 May 2021 Truthout interview: there was a “decision 50 years ago, by both major political groupings” in Israel, “to choose expansion over security and diplomatic settlement—anticipating (and receiving) crucial U.S. material and diplomatic support all the way”; the Israeli victory in the 1967 Arab–Israeli War “was a great gift to the U.S. government”; a “proxy war had been underway between radical Islam (based in Saudi Arabia) and secular nationalism (Nasser’s Egypt)”; like “Britain before it, the U.S. tended to prefer radical Islam, which it considered less threatening to U.S. imperial domination”; “Israel smashed Arab secular nationalism”; US–Israeli relations “had been generally warm but ambiguous” before 1967; after “the war they reached unprecedented heights of support for a client state”; “Israel’s military prowess had already impressed the U.S. military command in 1948, and the ’67 victory made it very clear that a militarized Israeli state could be a solid base for U.S. power in the region—also providing important secondary services in support of U.S. imperial goals beyond”; “U.S. regional dominance came to rest on three pillars”—“Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran (then under the Shah)”; technically, “they were all at war, but in reality the alliance was very close, particularly between Israel and the murderous Iranian tyranny”; and within “that international framework, Israel was free to pursue the policies that persist today, always with massive U.S. support despite occasional clucks of discontent”.

The “Israeli government’s immediate policy goal is to construct a ‘Greater Israel,’ including” (A) “a vastly expanded ‘Jerusalem’ encompassing surrounding Arab villages”, (B) the Jordan Valley, which is “a large part of the West Bank with much of its arable land”, and (C) “major towns deep inside the West Bank, along with Jews-only infrastructure projects integrating them into Israel”; the “project bypasses Palestinian population concentrations, like Nablus, so as to fend off what Israeli leaders describe as the dread ‘demographic problem’”; “Palestinians within ‘Greater Israel’ are confined to 165 enclaves, separated from their lands and olive groves by a hostile military, subjected to constant attack by violent Jewish gangs (‘hilltop youths’) protected by the Israeli army”; meanwhile “Israel settled and annexed the Golan Heights in violation of UN Security Council orders (as it did in Jerusalem)”; the “Gaza horror story is too complex to recount here”; it “is one of the worst of contemporary crimes, shrouded in a dense network of deceit and apologetics for atrocities”; “Trump went beyond his predecessors in providing free rein for Israeli crimes”; so “far, Biden has taken over these programs”; Biden “has rescinded the gratuitous brutality of Trumpism, such as withdrawing the fragile lifeline for Gaza because, as Trump explained, Palestinians had not been grateful enough for his demolition of their just aspirations”; and otherwise the Trump–Kushner “criminal edifice remains intact, though some specialists on the region think it might totter with repeated Israeli attacks on Palestinian worshippers in the al-Aqsa mosque and other exercises of Israel’s effective monopoly of violence”.

I would imagine—regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—that the media has failed to spotlight the human-rights violations that people need to know about. An institutionally free media would—in covering this conflict—be spotlighting these human-rights violations all the time in order to provide people with crucial context. People can read about these human-rights violations in the 12 January 2021 B’Tselem paper “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid”. And also in the 27 April 2021 Human Rights Watch report “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution”.

I would also imagine that the media doesn’t spotlight the point that US policy toward Israel conflicts with the Leahy Law—this is a really important point. Chomsky says in a 2014 interview: “one important action that the United States could take is to live up to its own laws”; one “of them is what’s called the Leahy Law”; “Patrick Leahy, Senator Leahy, introduced legislation called the Leahy Law, which bars sending weapons to any military units which are involved in consistent human rights violations”; there “isn’t the slightest doubt that the Israeli army is involved in massive human rights violations, which means that all dispatch of U.S. arms to Israel is in violation of U.S. law”; “I think that’s significant”; and the “U.S. should be called upon by its own citizens”—and by others—“to adhere to U.S. law, which also happens to conform to international law in this case”.

I think that it’s disturbing when the media fails to provide the context that would allow people to understand (A) the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in general and (B) the horrific and terroristic violence that’s directed against Israeli civilians. Regarding Israeli policy, Israel is involved in a brutal and vicious military occupation—to what extent does the media help people to understand this context? And regarding Israeli policy, Israel is involved in human-rights violations—to what extent does the media help people to understand this context? A 13 October 2023 FAIR piece says: the “New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post combined ran seven editorials on Israel/Palestine between October 7–9”; these “three days of coverage begin the day that Hamas fighters broke out of the besieged Gaza Strip to kill and take captive hundreds of Israeli soldiers and civilians, after which Israel launched yet another massive bombing campaign against the Strip, killing hundreds of Palestinian militants and civilians”; at “no point do these analyses provide readers with the information necessary to comprehend what is happening and why, and they consistently mislead readers about key facts”; the US’s top editorial boards “declined to offer any of the broader historical context that’s urgently necessary to understand the causes—and therefore paths to resolution—of the current violence in Israel/Palestine”; observers “who are serious about wanting an end to violence against civilians would consider its causes”; and the “Times, Journal and Post have shown that they are not up to the task”.

I think that it’s sad, disturbing, and frightening what the media has done—over such a long period of time—regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Chomsky says in his 1989 book Necessary Illusions: the “task of ‘historical engineering’ has been accomplished with singular efficiency in the case of the Arab–Israeli conflict, arguably the most hazardous issue in world affairs, with a constant threat of devastating regional war and superpower conflict”; the “task has been to present the United States and Israel as ‘yearning for peace’ and pursuing a ‘peace process,’ while in reality they have led the rejectionist camp and have been blocking peace initiatives that have broad international and regional support”; “U.S. efforts to derail a political settlement can be traced to 1971, when the administration opted for Kissinger’s policy of ‘stalemate’ and backed Israel’s rejection of a full-scale peace proposal by President Sadat of Egypt that was framed in terms of the international consensus and official U.S. policy”; from “the late 1960s there has been a substantial consensus in favor of a political settlement on the internationally recognized (pre-June 1967) borders, with perhaps minor modifications”; in “the early stages, the terms of this broad consensus were restricted to the rights of existing states, and were, in fact, very much along the general lines of official U.S. policy”; by “the mid-1970s the terms of the consensus shifted to include the concept of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with recognized borders, security guarantees, and other arrangements to safeguard the rights of all states in the region”; at this point, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) “and most Arab states approached or joined the international consensus”; prior “to this, the consensus was strictly rejectionist, denying the right of self-determination to one of the two contending parties, the indigenous population of the former Palestine”; the “United States has been opposed to all of the arrangements of the international consensus, both the earlier plan that conformed to official U.S. policy and offered nothing to the Palestinians, and the later nonrejectionist alternative”; the “media have had the task of presenting extreme rejectionism as accommodation and the soul of moderation”; the media have also had the task of “suppressing the efforts of the Arab states and the PLO to advance a nonrejectionist settlement”; the media’s “services to Israel have gone well beyond praising the ‘benign’ occupation while Palestinians were being subjected to torture, daily humiliation, and collective punishment”; and the media’s “self-censorship over many years has enabled the United States and Israel to block what has long been a possible political settlement of one of the world’s most explosive and threatening issues”.

I want to spotlight the damage that the media has done and the pain that the media has caused. I think that the media’s behavior has—regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—been absolutely sickening given that the media’s “self-censorship over many years has enabled the United States and Israel to block what has long been a possible political settlement of one of the world’s most explosive and threatening issues”. And given that the media has prevented people from understanding the occupation’s horrifying nature.

Norman Finkelstein says in a 2011 book: the “international community, apart from Israel and the United States, has consistently supported a settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict that calls for two states based on a full Israeli withdrawal to its June 1967 borders, and a ‘just resolution’ of the refugee question based on the right of return and compensation”; the “United Nations General Assembly annually votes on a resolution titled ‘Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine’”; regarding the extent to which countries voted in favor of the resolution from 1997 to 2009, the annual vote tallies were 155, 154, 149, 149, 131, 160, 160, 161, 156, 157, 161, 164, 164; regarding the extent to which countries voted against the resolution from 1997 to 2009, the annual vote tallies were 2, 2, 3, 2, 6, 4, 6, 7, 6, 7, 7, 7, 7; Israel and the United States cast—in 1997, 1998, and 2000—the only two negative votes; in 1999, the only three negative votes came from Israel, the United States, and the Marshall Islands; regarding 2006 and 2007 and 2008 and 2009, there were four years in a row where the same seven countries cast the only seven negative votes; these seven countries were Israel, the United States, Australia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, and Palau; in “2002 Israel started building a physical barrier that encroached deeply into the West Bank and took a sinuous path incorporating the large settlement blocks”; the “U.N. General Assembly requested that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) clarify the ‘legal consequences arising from the construction of the wall being built by Israel’”; and in “2004 the ICJ rendered its landmark advisory opinion, which, in the course of ruling the wall illegal, also reiterated the juridical framework for resolving the conflict”.

The “December 2008 invasion of Gaza would prove to be another public-relations fiasco for Israel, on the order of its disastrous Lebanon invasions of 1982 and 2006”; the “civilian casualties and destruction of civilian infrastructure were so massive and evident that criticism of the assault crept even into the mainstream media”; recognizing “that images of dead civilians and massive destruction in Gaza had flooded the world media during the invasion, Israel and its defenders set out to win the spin wars”; “apart from adverse media coverage Israel had to cope with a mountain of human rights reports condemning its crimes in Gaza”; “the scope of the massacre was so appalling that no amount of propaganda could disguise it”; public “outrage at the Gaza invasion did not come out of the blue but rather marked the nadir of a curve plotting a steady decline in support for Israel”; as “polling data of Americans and Europeans, both Gentiles and Jews, suggest, the public has become increasingly critical of Israeli policy over the past decade”; the “horrific images of death and destruction broadcast around the world during and after the invasion accelerated this development”; “the carnage set off an unprecedented wave of popular outrage throughout the world”; whether “it was because the assault came on the heels of the devastation Israel wrought in Lebanon, or because of Israel’s relentless persecution of the people of Gaza, or because of the sheer cowardice of the assault, the Gaza invasion appeared to mark a turning point in public opinion reminiscent of the international reaction to the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in apartheid South Africa”; the “era of the ‘beautiful’ Israel has passed, it seems irrevocably, and the disfigured Israel that in recent years has replaced it in the public consciousness is a growing embarrassment”; it “is not so much that Israel’s behavior is worse than it was before, but rather that the record of that behavior has, finally, caught up with it”; the “truth can no longer be denied or dismissed”; the “documentation of the Arab-Israeli conflict set out by respected historians fundamentally conflicts with the version” that’s been popularized; the “evidence of Israeli human rights violations compiled by respected mainstream organizations cannot be reconciled with its vaunted commitment to ‘purity of arms’”; and the “deliberations of respected judicial and political bodies cast severe doubt on Israel’s avowed commitment to a peaceful resolution of the conflict”.

The “Gaza invasion accelerated the dissolution of blanket Jewish support for Israel”; because “this reflexive Jewish support has historically blocked the path to peace, the prospects for a just and lasting resolution of the conflict are better now than ever before”; the “foundations for such a settlement are the universal, consensual, legal principles ratified in annual U.N. General Assembly resolutions, the 2004 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, and the standards of respected human rights organizations”; were “Israel to abide by these principles a resolution of the conflict would be immediately within reach”; “what Israel has done to the Palestinians is wrong and indefensible”; and “Israel’s refusal, backed by the U.S., to respect international law and the considered opinion of humankind is the sole obstacle to putting an end, finally, to their suffering”.

Chomsky says in the 2014 interview: “the media are somewhat shifting from uniform support for virtually everything that Israel does”; opinion “in the United States is shifting, not as fast as in most of the world, not as fast as in Europe”; opinion “is changing, mostly among younger people, and changing substantially”; until “pretty recently, when I gave talks on these topics, as I’ve been doing for 40 years, I literally had to have police protection, even at my own university, MIT”; police “would insist on walking me back to my car because of threats they had picked up”; meetings “were broken up, and so on”; “a couple of days ago I had a talk on these topics at MIT”; the meeting was not broken up; there wasn’t any police protection; maybe “500 or 600 students were there, all enthusiastic, engaged, committed, concerned, wanting to do something about it”; that’s “happening all over the country”; all “over the country, Palestinian solidarity is one of the biggest issues on campus—enormous change in the last few years”; that’s “the way things tend to change”; it “often starts with younger people”; and gradually “it gets to the rest of the population”.

And he says in a 15 July 2022 Truthout interview: it “may seem strange to say this, in the light of the colossal and unprecedented U.S. support for Israel since its demonstration of its military strength in 1967, but Palestinian hopes may lie in the United States”; there “are cracks in the formerly solid support for Israeli actions”; liberal “opinion has shifted toward support for Palestinian rights, even among the Jewish community”; the “increasingly brutal torture of the 2 million inhabitants of Gaza’s open-air prison has had particularly dramatic effects”; these “shifts have not yet influenced policy, but they are likely to become more pronounced as Israel continues its drift to the right and the almost daily crimes become harder to conceal or explain away”; if “Palestinians can overcome their sharp internal divisions and effective solidarity movements develop in the U.S., changes can come, both at the people-to-people level and in government policy”; and changing “U.S. government policy, if significant, cannot fail to influence the array of policy options for Israel”.

Hamas has carried out a vicious and horrifying terrorist attack against Israeli civilians. A 10 October 2023 NYT piece says: they “were killed waiting for the bus, dancing at a festival, doing morning chores and hiding as best they could”; searching “bullet-riddled houses, streets and lawns, Israeli soldiers are still finding them”; the “soldiers, retaking control of the kibbutzim, towns and settlements near the Gaza Strip that came under attack by Palestinian terrorists over the weekend, have recovered body after body after body”; “Hamas gunmen, hitting more than 20 sites in southern Israel, killed more than 1,000 people, including women and children, and abducted an estimated 150 more people”; and officials “from Israel, the United States, Europe and the United Nations have condemned the violence in the starkest terms, with the U.N. secretary general saying, ‘Nothing can justify these acts of terror and the killing, maiming and abduction of civilians’”.

The media correctly and accurately presents Hamas’s brutal attack as immoral, unjustified, and terroristic. But that doesn’t mean that the media is—regarding the attack and Israel’s response—presenting things in a principled, unbiased, and non-propagandistic light.

Uncomfortable Conversations

A serious and objective media wouldn’t merely adopt the propaganda line that’s convenient for the Israeli leadership—such a media would instead shine a very skeptical spotlight on those who want Hamas’s brutal attack to be talked about in a way that serves a particular political agenda.

An 11 October 2023 FAIR piece says: Hamas’s offensive has “been compared both to 9/11 and to the bloody 1973 war between Israel and a coalition of Arab nations”; an “Israeli military veteran in the New York Post (10/9/23), hardly considered a pro-Palestine publication, blamed Israel for ignoring warnings from Egyptian intelligence about ‘something big’”; an “editorial at Ha’aretz (10/8/23) put the blame squarely on Netanyahu, saying ‘he is the ultimate arbiter of Israeli foreign and security affairs’”; as “‘expected, signs of an outbreak of hostilities began in the West Bank, where Palestinians started feeling the heavier hand of the Israeli occupier,’ the editorial said”; an “article—which questioned why Netanyahu’s government, famously hard-nosed on security, failed to protect the people—was reprinted in the Jerusalem Post (10/7/23)”; and “Alon Pinkas (Ha’aretz, 10/9/23) wrote” that “‘Netanyahu should be removed as prime minister immediately—not “after the war,” not after a plea bargain in his corruption trial, not after an election’”.

A “Wall Street Journal editorial (10/7/23) used the Hamas offensive to downplay Netanyahu’s judicial power grab”; regarding the WSJ editorial, the “Journal also discounted any criticism of the ongoing Israeli blockade of Gaza”; the “New York Times editorial board (10/9/23) said that though Israelis were right to march against Netanyahu’s judicial restrictions, the Hamas attack changed the terrain, because ‘Israel’s military strength depends on its national unity, and Israelis have now come together to defend themselves’”; worse, “the Times gave column space (10/8/23) to Shimrit Meir, a former advisor to far-right Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, to cite Israel’s political division as military weakness, urging the country to close ranks”; Meir “said she hoped that Israel returned ‘to its senses, ending the political crisis and forming a unity government’”; “not only is Knesset opposition to Netanyahu’s internal policies now viewed as some kind of softness on the Hamas attack, but it was the nerve of the people to organize to protect their institutions that opened up the nation to the latest offensive”; the “Washington Post, to its credit, ran an op-ed (10/9/23) from a Palestinian journalist that didn’t necessarily put the blame squarely on Netanyahu, but called on the US to support Palestinian statehood”; however, “Post columnist David Ignatius (10/8/23) jumped in on the idea that the quarrel over the Supreme Court contributed to Hamas’ offensive”; “the Wall Street Journal ran fiercely jingoistic pieces from well-known American neoconservatives like Douglas Feith (10/9/23) and Daniel Pipes (10/8/23), while Mitch McConnell (10/9/23), the Republican Senate minority leader, called for more US support for Israel’s war effort”; and “far from questioning the Israeli government’s preparedness, law professor Eugene Kontorovich (10/8/23) said the US and others ‘must not only refrain from limiting Israel’s operation in Gaza but resolve to oust the genocidal regime in Tehran’”.

Israeli “media have begun looking closely at the Israeli government’s actions to understand how and why this happened”; however, “top US editorial boards are elsewhere, failing to ask questions about intelligence failures and Netanyahu’s hand on the wheel”; instead, “they urged Israelis to put aside the concerns they’ve had about democracy, which brought throngs of liberal and left-wing Israelis into the streets to denounce the Netanyahu government’s neutering of an independent judiciary—a decision that has been likened to the ‘sham democracy’ of Hungary (Foreign Policy, 8/3/23)”; and while “Israelis, including those in the media class, ponder if their country is run by inept and corrupt leadership, much of the US media skip all this and insinuate that now is no longer the time for debate, but a time to brush aside uncomfortable conversations in the face of war”.

Unsurprising Attack, Predictable Dynamics

I find it disturbing when the media obscures the distinction between understanding an atrocity and justifying it—it’s an extremely basic and obvious distinction, so you know that the discourse has reached a genuinely Orwellian low if the media can actually pull this off. Hawks want to (1) exploit enemy atrocities for political gain and (2) avoid any serious discussion—of the atrocities’ context—that might illuminate the hawks’ own ugly contribution and make them look bad.

The 9 October 2023 WaPo piece—referred to above—points out how predictable this explosion was. The piece says: the “carefully planned attacks on Saturday produced atrocities that cannot be denied or justified”; what “happened in Israel on Saturday should not have surprised anyone”; “Palestinian officials had repeatedly spoken of an explosion if there was no political progress on alleviating their people’s suffering”; King Abdullah II of Jordan had said—at the UN—that “‘it will be impossible to converge on a political solution to this conflict’” without “‘clarity on where the Palestinians’ future lies’”; “Egyptian intelligence had reportedly warned Israel of a catastrophe unless there was political progress”; “Palestinian leaders, Jordan’s king and Egyptian officials knew that without hope, something would give”; the “last public talks between Israelis and Palestinians ended in 2014, and at the time, U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry” blamed the Israelis for the collapse of talks; and since “then, no talks have taken place, even while three U.S. presidents—Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden—have invoked the empty mantra of a two-state solution”.

This “absence of a political process was compounded by the recent stoking of religious tensions”; three “days before the Hamas attack, Jordan, the recognized custodian of the holy places in Jerusalem, sent a letter to the Israeli Embassy in Amman protesting the fact that Jewish ‘visitors’ had begun praying loudly on the grounds of the al-Aqsa Mosque”; at “the same time, Israeli police imposed an age restriction preventing young Palestinian Muslim men from entering the mosque itself”; while “secular Palestinian leaders might be open to a political compromise, religious leaders are much less flexible when matters of faith are in question”; “Israeli Jewish nationalists were upending a carefully orchestrated status quo agreement on Muslim holy sites, and their actions have hurt the Christian community in Jerusalem, as well”; last “month in Rome, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, raised the situation with Pope Francis and mentioned it in news conferences and during his first homily”; and he “even said that Gaza was an ‘open prison’—a statement that angered Israelis who have been blindly complacent for so long that they were unable to hear advice even from their friends”.

People “always want to be free of occupation and of colonial foreign settlements on their land”; “Palestinians have been unable to liberate their land using political means”; negotiation “efforts by Mahmoud Abbas, president of the secular Palestinian Authority, have come up empty, as has nonviolent activism to boycott Israel”; as “a result, religious Palestinians have been left with little choice but to attempt to address their own people’s oppression”; there “is no mystery about what must happen next”; even “though it is lower than before, support for the two-state solution among both Israelis and Palestinians is higher than for any other alternative”; “having a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel requires recognition by the United Nations”; the “United States has repeatedly wielded its veto against the very same issue to which it pays lip service”; as “soon as the violence ebbs, President Biden should courageously recognize an independent and democratic Palestinian state living in peace side by side with a secure Israel”; such “a move would need no congressional blessing”; once “a Palestinian state under occupation is recognized by the U.N. Security Council, productive talks between representatives of the state of Israel and representatives of the state of Palestine can then begin in earnest”; and this “kind of proposal might seem fanciful at the moment, but there is no other way forward”.

A 10 October 2023 piece says: “Israel has waged war on Palestinians for decades”; the “deep and lasting human consequences of Israel’s terrifying, perpetual war on Palestinians—prosecuted with indiscriminate cruelty by an occupying army and its de facto proxies, fanatical settler militias—have been plain for anyone willing or inclined to see, for generations”; there’s been a “wholesale imprisonment of a people penned like cattle behind walls and barbed wire fences, where water and electricity, food and fuel, are switched on and off on a colonial power’s whim”; human “rights groups based in Jerusalem, London and New York have published report after report that establishes, as a matter of international law, that Israel has, for a long time, been guilty of apartheid—a state-sanctioned, systemic policy to impose ethnic supremacy over besieged Palestinians with brutal, grinding efficiency”; implicit “in those dense, meticulously chronicled studies was what amounted to a blazing flare intended to seize finally the flighty attention of complicit Western governments and media”; and “Israel’s deliberate, organised oppression is not only unsustainable, it disfigures both the oppressor and the oppressed”.

I think that the idea of both oppressors and oppressed becoming disfigured gets right to the core of things. Two predictable tendencies have unfolded as Israel’s occupation has dragged on—an increasing dehumanization of Palestinians and also an increasing inhumanity on the part of Israel. Noam Chomsky says in a 25 July 2018 Truthout interview: threats “to Netanyahu are primarily from his right”; this “is quite a change from the time when Israel conquered Palestinian lands” in “1967, and soon set forth on its illegal settlement programs”; the “change was predicted early on by those who understood the natural dynamics of crushing people under your jackboot”; one “commentator who was particularly outspoken was the respected Israeli sage Yeshayahu Leibowitz”; and he “condemned the occupation bitterly, not because of concern for the Palestinians, for whose fate he expressed only contempt, but because of the predictable effect on Jews, who, he warned, would become ‘Judeo-Nazis’ as they carried out the tasks of repression and displacement”.

To Live Under a Boot

I recommend the following three sources regarding Israel’s actions:

• the 12 January 2021 B’Tselem paper “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid”

• the 27 April 2021 Human Rights Watch report “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution”

• Norman Finkelstein’s 2018 book Gaza

The first source says: the “Israeli regime does not have to declare itself an apartheid regime to be defined as such, nor is it relevant that representatives of the state broadly proclaim it a democracy”; what “defines apartheid is not statements but practice”; as “painful as it may be to look reality in the eye, it is more painful to live under a boot”; the “harsh reality described here may deteriorate further if new practices are introduced—with or without accompanying legislation”; nevertheless, “people created this regime and people can make it worse—or work to replace it”; that “hope is the driving force behind this position paper”; fighting “for a future based on human rights, liberty and justice is especially crucial now”; and there “are various political paths to a just future here, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, but all of us must first choose to say no to apartheid”.

The second says: about “6.8 million Jewish Israelis and 6.8 million Palestinians live today between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, an area encompassing Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), the latter made up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip”; “Israeli authorities have deprived millions of people of their basic rights by virtue of their identity as Palestinians”; these “longstanding policies and systematic practices box in, dispossess, forcibly separate, marginalize, and otherwise inflict suffering on Palestinians”; in “the OPT, movement restrictions, land expropriation, forcible transfer, denial of residency and nationality, and the mass suspension of civil rights constitute ‘inhuman[e] acts’ set out under the Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute”; under “both legal standards, inhumane acts when carried out amid systematic oppression and with the intent to maintain domination make up the crime against humanity of apartheid”; collectively, “these policies and practices in the OPT severely deprive Palestinians of fundamental human rights, including to residency, private property, and access to land, services, and resources, on a widespread and systematic basis”; when “committed with discriminatory intent, on the basis of the victims’ identity as part of a group or collectivity, they amount to the crime against humanity of persecution under the Rome Statute and customary international law”; and separately “from the inhumane acts carried out in the OPT, the Israeli government violates the rights of Palestinians inside Israel on account of their identity”.

And the third says: what “has befallen Gaza is a human-made human disaster”; in “its protractedness and in its starkness, in its unfolding not in the fog of war or in the obscurity of remoteness but in broad daylight and in full sight, in the complicity of so many, not just via acts of commission but also, and especially, of omission, it is moreover a distinctively evil crime”; in “all likelihood, the lethal trends prefiguring Gaza’s exhaustion as a viable habitat won’t be checked”; “Gaza has not yet crossed the threshold of no return”; “one would have to be blinder than King Lear to believe that diplomatic negotiations in and of themselves might yet yield fruit”; when “the current phase of the ‘peace process’ was inaugurated in 1993, 250,000 illegal Jewish settlers resided in the occupied Palestinian territory”; “by 2016, 600,000 settlers resided in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem)”; the “bitter fruit it yielded in Gaza requires no further comment”; “it is no more likely that Hamas’s strategy of armed resistance can achieve substantive results”; a “strategy of mass nonviolent resistance, by contrast, might yet turn the tide”; and “Gaza’s richest resources are its people, the truth, and public opinion”.

The Ongoing Attack

I don’t understand how the fact that Hamas carried out a horrifying terrorist atrocity means that Israel now—somehow—has either the legal or the moral right to slaughter civilians.

A 10 October 2012 CNN piece says: a “humanitarian crisis is swiftly unfolding in Gaza, as trapped residents, many cut off from food and electricity, face a fourth day of Israeli airstrikes”; “Nadine Abdul Latif, 13, of Gaza City’s Al Rimal neighborhood, said she and her family were told by neighbors and relatives to leave on Monday after Israel said it would target the area”; “they decided to stay as ‘we have no safe place to go to,’ she said”; the “Gaza strip—the coastal enclave that Hamas controls—has been pummeled by airstrikes since Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a ‘complete siege’ on the area, including halting supplies of electricity, food, water and fuel to the enclave”; “Israeli fighter jets struck more than 200 targets in Gaza overnight, the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement”; “Tariq Al Hillu, a 29-year-old resident of Al Sudaniya in northern Gaza, described complete chaos when airstrikes struck his neighborhood Sunday morning”; and his “neighbors were trapped under the rubble, and he could hear their calls for help, he said”.

The “United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Monday warned that the humanitarian situation in Gaza was already ‘extremely dire before these hostilities’ and ‘now it will only deteriorate exponentially’”; “Human Rights Watch (HRW) criticized Gallant’s call for a complete siege as a form of ‘collective punishment’ and a ‘war crime’”; “Omar Shakir, the regional director of HRW, told CNN the comments by Gallant were ‘abhorrent’ and accused Israel of using starvation as ‘a weapon of war’”; and “Shakir also condemned Hamas’ attacks on Israel, saying the ‘deliberate targeting of civilians, indiscriminate attacks, and taking of civilians as hostages’ also ‘amount to war crimes under international humanitarian law’”.

Omar Ghraieb writes in a 12 October 2023 CNN piece: in “Gaza, we have all been glued to the news for the last five days, watching in disbelief as strikes and counterstrikes have been exchanged and the death counts on both sides of the border mount”; Gaza is an “impoverished coastal enclave that some call the world’s largest open-air prison”; Gaza has been “under a suffocating blockade for more than 15 years”; “I write, and the world watches as violence, blood and darkness descend upon us”; what “I see in Western media—erasing Israel’s occupation, its blockade and our suffering—bears no resemblance to what I see out my window”; the “world ignores our plight and denies our humanity, blaming us for our own oppression”; the “bias and selective outrage of Western governments isn’t new”; and they “have never seen or cared about us as we have suffered under Israel’s occupation, violence and discrimination, year after year, decade after decade”.

A 12 October 2023 CNN piece says: medical “and relief workers are pleading for safe passage for the 2 million civilians in Gaza as Israel pounds the enclave with airstrikes and imposes a complete siege”; time “is running out for the residents crammed into the increasingly battered 140-square-mile territory under Israeli and Egyptian blockades, as supplies of food and water run low”; families “are desperately searching for shelter as missiles flatten buildings and towers”; medical “supplies are in dire shortage”; “most of the enclave has already lost power, after the fuel that generates electricity ran out on Wednesday”; at “least 1,500 Palestinians, including 500 children, have so far been killed in Gaza, and over 6,000 others injured, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health”; “Gaza’s health infrastructure is close to a breaking point, Dr. Ashraf Al-Qudra, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, said Thursday”; all “beds are occupied, and there is no room for new patients in critical condition, Al-Qudra said”; and the International Committee of the Red Cross “said hospitals in Gaza ‘risk turning into morgues’ amid power cuts”.

I expect that Israel will—in gut-wrenching fashion—turn the Gaza Strip into a morgue. And we should expect horror—nothing except horror—until international law is finally implemented, the vicious and brutal occupation is finally ended, and the occupation’s wretched machinery finally ceases to showcase “the natural dynamics of crushing people under your jackboot”.

I can’t ever tell whether our eyes are open or shut—I don’t know if people see the flames. I fear that our eyes are both open and shut—a grim possibility. We “see” what’s happening but there’s no machinery within us that’s able to understand what fire means.

I’d imagine that the inability to take seriously what lies outside the present moment has harmed the mental health of informed kids who have—to their horror—learned that their parents’ eyes already are open. And that there won’t be any panic or urgency as the flames close in.

A Smidgen of Panic

This summer should’ve demonstrated to everyone the horrifying reality of the climate crisis—I can’t understand the lack of panic and urgency. A 24 August 2023 Guardian piece says: “Barcelona is handing out water and caps to homeless people and France has recorded its highest overnight temperature since records began, as firefighters in Greece grapple with major wildfires in another brutal European heatwave that has pushed temperatures past 43C (109F) in some locations”; the “combination of heat and drought has put all of Spain on high alert for wildfires”; heat and dryness have affected Spain’s grape harvests and olive harvests; “Spain is the world’s largest producer of olive oil but last year’s crop was down by 50% and this year’s is expected to be as bad”; regarding Greece, “firefighters continued to battle strong winds and hot, dry conditions to try to bring dozens of wildfires under control near the border with Turkey and on the fringes of Athens”; and regarding southern France, 17 fire departments “remained on red alert for extreme heat after several southern towns and cities hit their highest recorded temperatures”.

A 25 August 2023 Foreign Affairs piece says: the “28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) under the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change” is scheduled to start in late November; with “this summer’s catastrophes fresh in people’s minds, COP28 could prove a turning point for adaptation efforts”; never “has the destructive force of climate change revealed itself so widely across the globe, and the explosion of climate-fueled disasters has given billions of people a firsthand understanding of their ferocity—and impact”; efforts “to contain the warming of the planet should always take center stage at international climate negotiations, including COP28”; “negotiators must expand the stage to include adaptation and make sure that” mitigation and adaptation truly go hand in hand; and the “impacts of a changing climate are already here, and they are devastating communities around the world”.

I think that the emotions of panic and anger can be harmful as well as helpful—humans have evolved emotions that cause us to take action. Mark Gongloff was a managing editor of Fortune’s website, a Wall Street Journal reporter, and a Wall Street Journal editor. And he writes in a 16 June 2023 piece: current “policies and practices have the world on pace to hit nearly 3C of warming by the end of the century”; the “world must slash emissions by 43% by 2030 in order to hold warming to 1.5C, by one estimate”; “our species evolved panic as a kind of superpower to avoid being eaten”; in “certain circumstances, and in measured doses, a little existential dread can still be helpful”; “if we temporarily hit 1.5C of warming this year, it will still be theoretically possible to avoid long-term warming beyond that level and all the catastrophic consequences that would come with it”; “first we must kick our fossil-fuel addiction and stop spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere”; and “judging by how little the world’s policymakers seem to be interested in taking such steps, perhaps just a smidgen of panic might be helpful”.

Magical Bubbles

I found very moving the 23 August 2023 NYT piece in which Serge Schmemann reports—from his cottage in Quebec—about climate change. He writes: regarding Canada’s wildfires, “thousands have been forced to evacuate homes in endangered areas”; only “last week, wildfires approaching West Kelowna, a city in British Columbia, and Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, forced evacuation of homes in both cities, and British Columbia declared a state of emergency”; on “Lac Labelle, we were never in direct danger, but the acrid smoke and the unfamiliar drumbeat of crisis from the vast Canadian wilderness hit home”; “the eerie orange haze had invaded the zone in which my family had always thought we could take refuge”; regarding climate change, this was not another report of something happening somewhere far away; and “this was a horizon-to-horizon pall over us, rising from infernos across the great Canadian north”.

I think that a crucial observation—regarding the climate crisis—is that each individual will only take action when they cease to see themselves as somehow encased in a magical protective bubble that doesn’t exist. But where is the point—for each person—where the magical bubble disappears? There’s a big psychological difference between reading about faraway disasters and experiencing something at your cottage—Schmemann writes that “the eerie orange haze had invaded the zone in which my family had always thought we could take refuge”.

I think that each person must come to see themselves as not being somehow encased —regarding climate action, I think that each of us will delay if we each imagine ourselves as somehow encased.

Schmemann writes in the piece: with “the melting Arctic to their north and the immensity of their northern wilderness, Canadians are not strangers to climate anxiety”; “as The Globe and Mail reported, ‘Canada’s summer of fire and smoke’ has still come as a profound shock to the nation, ‘materially and psychologically, as people across the country report a sense of dread about the disaster unfolding just out of sight, and what it portends for the future’”; “as the summer unfolded, it became evident that it’s not just smoke, and not just Canada”; this “has been the summer from climate hell all across Earth, when it ceased being possible to escape or deny what we have done to our planet and ourselves”; here “on the lake, things have quieted down, and the air is mostly clear”; and “it’s hard, very hard, to look out on the familiar lake and forests the way we used to, before the sun was reduced to a murky red dot in an orange sky and an orange pall descended on the children playing on the beach”.

Canada’s Future

A 2023 Maclean’s piece says: there “was a time, not that long ago, when some people imagined Canada would ride out climate change with relative ease”; Canadian agriculture would benefit from longer growing seasons; an ice-free Northwest Passage would open up opportunities; those “visions have faded, as the scale of disorder we’re facing looms larger”; a “recent study by Stanford University scientists, using machine learning to analyze climate models, projected two degrees” of global warming by mid-century even if emissions decrease quickly; what “follows is a portrait of Canada in a world warmed by two degrees”; and this “is not what our country will look like if the world fails to reduce emissions—this is our future even if we do”.

The piece says: in “2005, Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht first coined the term solastalgia to describe the feeling of being homesick while still at home”; it’s “that feeling of loss and melancholia that kicks in as your home environment changes before your eyes, and it will come to define the deep emotional and psychological distress that more Canadians will confront as global warming drives their climate past recognition”; there will be hotter and harder-to-contain fires that will burn indefinitely; last “year, scientists at the Canadian Forest Service and the University of Alberta projected that the annual footprint of charred land in Canada will more than double by 2050 and increase four-fold before century’s end”; “those fires will be fundamentally different—more beastly and less controllable—than the fires we were previously accustomed to”; research has shown that smoke exposure correlates with greater risk when it comes to (A) cancer, (B) cardiovascular disease, and (C) respiratory problems; smoke exposure’s “most unsettling impact may be the lifelong toll it takes on the youngest among us”; research “out of Stanford University in 2019 found that children exposed to wildfire smoke in California had changes in the expression of a gene vital” to immune-system functioning; “in Canada, some 30,000 children who were in utero during B.C.’s 2017 wildfire season were later studied”; those “whose mothers lived in areas with the worst smoke exposure were likelier to be born smaller and pre-term”; they were also sicker; people “talk about climate change as a future threat—a bill that will be collected as our children enter adulthood”; and “for increasing numbers of our kids, its destructive effects have already indelibly marked their growing and vulnerable bodies”.

The piece says: “disasters both sudden (fire, flood, storms) and slow (drought, coastal erosion, sea-level rise)” will displace record numbers of Canadians; a “permanent class of the internally displaced will require care, shelter”, and other resources; and a “survey of 3,000 high school students evacuated from wildfire-ravaged Fort McMurray, Alberta, in 2016 found that, even 18 months later, almost half met the criteria for diagnoses of PTSD, depression, anxiety”, or substance abuse.

I remember seeing—when it was published—a 15 August 2019 Financial Post piece that talked about the benefits that climate change would bring to Canada. The piece says: according “to Moody’s Analytics, Canada will benefit from climate change”; assuming “a one-degree Celsius temperature rise, Moody’s calculates that our economy would be unaffected in 2048”; a “rise of 2.4 degrees would increase GDP by 0.1 per cent and four degrees would boost it by 0.3 per cent”; and “Canada is imposing burdensome costs and regulations to try to prevent what for us would be beneficial warming”.

I think that it makes no sense to suggest that X amount of global warming will benefit Canada—or some other country—when X would mean apocalyptic outcomes for ultra-vulnerable countries like India. First, I think that watching the world burn would be utterly dystopian—I can’t imagine the psychological toll that living in a burning world would exact on the people in the country that was insulating itself. And second, I don’t think that any country would—in a burning and interconnected world—be able to insulate itself from the endless reverberations of a world aflame.

A 11 July 2023 New Yorker piece says: regarding Canada, “the nation has an absolute front-row seat to the crisis”; “wildfires have already burned more of the country this year than in any full year on record”; “Canadian cities have had moments this summer when their air quality was the worst in the world”; “before the fire season started, an economic analysis from the Canadian Climate Institute suggested that climate change could cut the nation’s economic growth in half by 2025”; by “2050, half a million jobs would be lost, ‘mostly from excessive heat that lowers labor productivity and causes premature death’”; “polling earlier this year found that seventy-five per cent of Canadians were anxious about climate change”; “twenty-one per cent of the population was having fewer or no children as a result”; “Justin Trudeau’s government had been making noises about a plan to dramatically cut emissions”; “the government quickly began to back down after a meeting in June with officials in the oil-rich province of Alberta”; and the “task for the government is to make it appear that as much progress as possible is being made (to appease the fifth of Canadians too worried to have children) while causing as few political problems as possible with the industry”.

Large-Scale Changes

I want to underscore the point that we’ll incur large-scale risk if we fail to keep anthropogenic warming below certain thresholds—regarding the climate system, there are big things that can break. A 2023 preprint says: regarding the climate system, tipping elements are large-scale subsystems—of the Earth—“that may transgress critical thresholds (tipping points) under ongoing global warming”; regarding critical thresholds, transgression may have substantial impacts on (1) the biosphere and (2) human societies; and as “anthropogenic global warming continues, tipping elements are at risk of crossing critical thresholds”.

I find the rapid warming of the Arctic very troubling—this warming poses dangers far beyond the Arctic. An 11 August 2022 NYT piece says: the “rapid warming of the Arctic, a definitive sign of climate change, is occurring even faster than previously described, researchers in Finland said Thursday”; one “result of rapid Arctic warming is faster melting of” Greenland’s ice sheet; this faster melting adds to sea-level rise; and regarding rapid Arctic warming, “the impacts extend far beyond the Arctic, reaching down to influence weather” in North America and elsewhere. And a 6 June 2023 NYT piece says that the “first summer on record that melts practically all of the Arctic’s” sea “ice could occur as early as the 2030s, according to a new scientific study”.

I think that it’s very disturbing to imagine what would happen if the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) collapsed—a 25 July 2023 Nature Communications article is titled “Warning of a forthcoming collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation”. Regarding the AMOC’s potential collapse, I recommend a YouTube video that PBS Digital Studios made:

I think that we should do everything possible to protect the AMOC against collapse—I find it hard to get my head around the level of large-scale risk that we’re incurring as we conduct what seems to me to be a shameful, dangerous, and reckless experiment.

Ineffective Carrots

I want to spotlight the extraordinary danger that the Republican Party poses when it comes to the climate crisis. A 4 August 2023 NYT piece says: during “a summer of scorching heat that has broken records and forced Americans to confront the reality of climate change, conservatives are laying the groundwork for a future Republican administration that would dismantle efforts to slow global warming”; the “move is part of a sweeping strategy dubbed Project 2025”; the plan calls for eliminating greenhouse-gas regulations regarding cars, oil wells, gas wells, and power plants; the plan calls for dismantling almost every clean-energy program in the federal government; the plan calls for boosting fossil-fuel production; and the “New York Times asked the leading Republican presidential candidates whether they support the Project 2025 strategy but none of the campaigns responded”.

I don’t know what can be done to incentivize the GOP to support decarbonization. Regarding incentives, Republicans don’t seem to respond to carrots—the GOP seems to just want to give the liberals the finger.

A 7 August 2023 NYT piece says: “technological progress in renewable energy has made it possible to envisage major reductions in emissions at little or no cost in terms of economic growth and living standards”; “in 2009, when Democrats tried but failed to take significant climate action, their policy proposals consisted mainly of sticks”; in “2022, when the Biden administration finally succeeded in passing a major climate bill, it consisted almost entirely of carrots”; “thanks to the revolution in renewable technology, energy experts believe that this all-gain-no-pain approach will have major effects in reducing” greenhouse-gas emissions; “an important part of President Biden’s climate strategy is the idea that” renewable-energy “investments, which have been soaring since his legislation passed, will give many businesses and communities a stake in continuing the green transition”; and “such rational if self-interested considerations won’t do much to persuade people who believe that green energy is a conspiracy against the American way of life”.

The piece says: climate denial has “become a front in the culture wars, with right-wingers rejecting the science in part because they dislike science in general and opposing action against emissions out of visceral opposition to anything liberals support”; “this cultural dimension of climate arguments has emerged at the worst possible moment—a moment when both the extreme danger from unchecked emissions and the path toward slashing those emissions are clearer than ever”; David Brooks correctly “argued that many Republicans dispute the reality of climate change and push for fossil fuels as a way to ‘offend the elites’”; look “at the hysterical reaction to potential regulations on gas stoves”; and “the culture war has become a major problem for climate action—a problem we really, really don’t need right now”.

I suppose that you could—regarding the GOP—ask two questions. First, who exactly sets the culture-war agenda? And second, will the people who set the culture-war agenda decide—at some point—that decarbonization must be reframed as something positive within Republican ideology?

We don’t have to condemn young people to a horrible fate. And we don’t have to destroy our dreams. We can choose to take action—we can choose life and reject suicidal inaction.

What do people think about the climate crisis? How do people feel about the climate crisis? Do parents feel guilty about not taking action, given that inaction means dire consequences for their kids? Do adults feel guilty about leaving behind an unpleasant legacy that today’s children will have to deal with? Do people who participated in downplaying the climate crisis feel remorse? I wonder whether all of the thoughts out there will move in the direction of recognizing that not taking action means lighting one’s own dreams on fire. And I wonder whether all of the emotions out there will cause people to take action.

Lee McIntyre writes in his 2018 book Post-Truth: there “are several excellent resources on the history of how science denial was born in the debate about smoking”; in 1953 “the heads of the major tobacco companies came together to figure out what to do in light of a devastating scientific paper that had recently been published linking cigarette tar to cancer in lab mice”; the executives decided to fund an effort to “convince the public that there was ‘no proof’ that cigarette smoking caused cancer and that previous work purporting to show such a link was being questioned by ‘numerous scientists’”; this effort was successful and provided “a blueprint that could be followed by others who wished to fight scientists to a standstill”; “climate change became a partisan issue in the early 2000s”; by that time there was a well-oiled and corporate-funded machine of science denial; and climate-change “denial may have started with the economic interests of oil companies, but it quickly became a political ideology with potentially catastrophic impact”.

I think that it’s disturbing and infuriating that powerful interests would seek to confuse people about scientific topics. The deception alone is disturbing and infuriating—the trickery becomes murderous when people’s health is at stake. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway write—in their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt—about efforts to undermine public understanding of science. They write about the contributions that four physicists—Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, William Nierenberg, and Robert Jastrow—made to these efforts to deceive the public. Oreskes and Conway write: “Seitz, Singer, Nierenberg, and Jastrow had all served in high levels of science administration, where they had come to know admirals and generals, congressmen and senators, even presidents”; Seitz and Singer had both “previously worked for the tobacco industry, helping to cast doubt on the scientific evidence linking smoking to death”; regarding tobacco litigation, millions of pages of documents were released; these documents “show the crucial role that scientists played in sowing doubt”; the tobacco-industry strategy targeted science and relied heavily on scientists; the scientists received guidance from industry lawyers and from public-relations experts; the released “documents—which have scarcely been studied except by lawyers and a handful of academics—also show that the” tobacco-industry “strategy was applied not only to global warming, but to a laundry list of environmental and health concerns” like (A) asbestos, (B) secondhand smoke, (C) acid rain, and (D) the ozone hole; in “case after case, Fred Singer, Fred Seitz, and a handful of other scientists joined forces with think tanks and private corporations to challenge scientific evidence on a host of contemporary issues”; the tobacco-industry strategy was used in order to attack science and scientists; and the tobacco-industry strategy was used in order “to confuse us about major, important issues affecting our lives”.

I find it shameful that the media failed to respond appropriately to the tobacco-industry strategy—the media was complicit. Oreskes and Conway write: “Seitz, Jastrow, Nierenberg, and Singer had access to power”; they used this power to attack science and to attack their fellow scientists; whatever “the reasons and justifications of our protagonists, there’s another crucial element to our story”; it’s “how the mass media became complicit, as a wide spectrum of the media—not just obviously right-wing newspapers like the Washington Times, but mainstream outlets, too—felt obligated to treat these issues as scientific controversies”; in “2004, one of us showed that scientists had a consensus about the reality of global warming and its human causes—and had since the mid-1990s”; “throughout this time period, the mass media presented global warming and its cause as a major debate”; “another study also published in 2004 analyzed media stories about global warming from 1988 to 2002”; the study “found that ‘balanced’ articles—ones that gave equal time to the majority view among climate scientists as well as to deniers of global warming—represented nearly 53 percent of media stories”; another “35 percent of articles presented the correct majority position among climate scientists, while still giving space to the deniers”; what was presented in the major media diverged from the actual state of the science; and this divergence “helped make it easy for our government to do nothing about global warming”.

I think that everyone should read Oreskes’s and Conway’s book—it describes truly heinous efforts to trick the public. Oreskes and Conway write: a 1974 Science article says that acid “‘rain or snow is falling on most of the northeastern United States’”; chemical “analysis showed that most of the acidity was due to dissolved sulfate”; the “government would have to take acid rain into account when it set rules and regulations for air pollution”; nearly a quarter of Americans “still think that there’s no solid evidence that smoking kills”; “as recently as 2007, 40 percent of Americans believed that scientific experts were still arguing about the reality of global warming”; in “writing this book, we have plowed through hundreds of thousands of pages of documents”; as “historians during the course of our careers we have plowed through millions more”; often “we find that, in the end, it is best to let the witnesses to events speak for themselves”; “we close with the comments of S. J. Green, director of research for British American Tobacco, who decided, finally, that what his industry had done was wrong, not just morally, but also intellectually”; Green said that a “‘demand for scientific proof is always a formula for inaction and delay, and usually the first reaction of the guilty’”; he said that the “‘proper basis for such decisions is, of course, quite simply that which is reasonable in the circumstances’”; and as William “Nierenberg put it in a candid moment, ‘You just know in your heart that you can’t throw 25 million tons a year of sulfates into the Northeast and not expect some…consequences’”.

I like the Nierenberg quote—there’s an absurdity and a profound recklessness to the idea that polluting with abandon will somehow not have consequences. I think that looking at the ecosystems might be the best way to get a sense of just how serious the climate crisis is—we’re carrying out an enormous and frightening assault on nature. A climate scientist named Kimberley R. Miner writes in a 17 August 2023 Nature piece: climate scientists have—for four decades—“advocated for recognition of the destabilization of Earth’s ecosystems”; “climate scientists across a range of fields are faced with comprehensive, esoteric challenges as ecosystems begin to cross tipping points”; knowing “how to look at these huge changes and still be able to relax at the end of the day can be an ongoing problem”; last September, her field team learned that it was “probably too late for half the blue oaks affected by California’s drought in the region in which we were working”; Miner sat outside a meeting the next morning and cried; and a “friend sat with me and explained that she had just recovered from an” extreme episode of climate grief.

A 22 June 2023 Nature article says: a “major concern for the world’s ecosystems is the possibility of collapse”; stress levels are accelerating, extreme-event frequencies are increasing, and intersystem connections are strengthening; “conventional modelling approaches based on incremental changes in a single stress may provide poor estimates of the impact of climate and human activities on ecosystems”; the authors “conduct experiments on four models that simulate abrupt changes”; collapses “occur sooner under increasing levels of primary stress but additional stresses and/or the inclusion of noise in all four models bring the collapses substantially closer to today by ~38–81%”; and the authors discuss “the need for humanity to be vigilant for signs that ecosystems are degrading even more rapidly than previously thought”. The article refers to: “‘ghastly futures’”; “‘widespread ecosystem collapse’”; “‘domino effects on sustainability goals’”; speculation “on ‘end-of-world’ scenarios”; and “an ever-deepening vortex of degradation”.

I wonder which emotions we should have toward the climate crisis—should we cultivate in ourselves whichever emotions are most conducive to action that’s productive? A 2021 Journal of Climate Change and Mental Health article says: various “new terms to capture the emotional responses to the climate crisis include ‘eco-anxiety’ (anxiety experienced in response to the ecological crisis) and ‘solastalgia’ (distress caused by the painful ‘lived experience’ of environmental destruction)”; the authors examined how three negative eco-emotions—eco-depression, eco-anxiety, and eco-anger—each relate to mental health and to pro-climate behavior; “less activating emotions lead to disengagement from a perceived threat”; “more activating emotions predict behavioural attempts to lessen the threat” either by approaching the situation or by avoiding it; the “predicted effects of different negative eco-emotions on action to preserve planetary health are clear”; in “the context of eco-emotions and climate change, eco-depression should inhibit climate action, eco-anxiety should motivate active avoidance, and eco-anger should promote climate action”; the authors found that experiencing eco-anger predicted three things; first, better mental-health outcomes; second, greater engagement in pro-climate activism; third, greater engagement in personal behaviors that were pro-climate; the authors’ “findings implicate anger as a key adaptive emotional driver of engagement with the climate crisis”; the authors’ “results indicate that eco-anger may be a healthy and adaptive form of expressive coping, while eco-depression and eco-anxiety may instead be debilitating”; there’s a caveat regarding causality; it’s “possible that engaging in pro-climate behaviours evokes certain emotions about climate change, rather than the reverse direction”; people whose mental health is poorer might react to climate change more negatively; and the authors’ “research forges a path for future research on what makes people angry about the climate crisis, how to foster eco-anger without simultaneously inducing other negative eco-emotions, and how to harness eco-anger to drive pro-climate action”.

I find it interesting that anger might be the best emotional response to the grim trajectories that threaten us—I don’t think that most people view anger in a positive light, though I could be wrong. A 21 August 2023 Guardian piece says: anger “is by far the most powerful emotional predictor of whether somebody plans to take part in a climate protest, research suggests”; the “study, which asked 2,000 Norwegian adults how they felt about the climate crisis, found the link to activism was seven times stronger for anger than it was for hope”; the “researchers in Norway, a rich oil-exporting country, found that for every two steps a person took along the anger scale, they moved one step along the activism scale”; the “methods were sound and typical for the field but the effect sizes were small, said Cameron Brick, a social scientist at the University of Amsterdam”; the “researchers also only looked at what people said they would do, rather than what they did, he added”; and “messages that make people angry can also push others to shut down, particularly if they feel powerless”.

I think that a lot of people feel powerless—they feel like there’s no action that they can take that might be useful or productive. Despair results when you feel powerless. There are people who look at the climate crisis’s grim trajectories and react—because they feel powerless—with despair. A 2023 Journal of Climate Change and Health article says: a recent multinational study “examined climate anxiety in 10,000 young people in 10 countries with varying climate-related vulnerabilities”; “a concerning proportion of young people reported high levels of” three things; first, distressing emotions; second, associated impacts on functioning; third, negative perceptions of their future; the authors replicated the global study’s methods in order “to generate knowledge about climate emotions and climate anxiety among young people (aged 16–25) in Canada”; young Canadians “report feeling afraid (66%), sad (65%), anxious (63%), helpless (58%), and powerless (56%)”; given “the extent to which young Canadians are experiencing difficult emotions, it is not surprising that young people also reported” daily-functioning and mental-health impacts; young Canadians are experiencing (1) distress and (2) mental-health consequences; regarding (1) and (2), “it is essential to recognize that young Canadians are experiencing” these things “because of the failure of adults, decision-makers, and governments to adequately address the climate crisis”; the mental-health burden of the climate crisis is growing; regarding climate change and Canada’s response, young Canadians feel powerless and betrayed; and regarding climate change and Canada’s response, young Canadians don’t feel cared for, don’t feel valued, and don’t feel protected.

I want to distinguish two types of climate-crisis despair—some people think that we aren’t up to the task of saving ourselves, whereas others think that we’ve already locked in enough destruction to seal our fate. The 2023 Guardian piece says: climate “scientists have raised fears that a glut of doom-laden headlines and negative rhetoric—some of it based on incorrect claims—will push people into despair and stop them from acting”; a “survey of 10,000 young people in 2021 found most agreed with the statement ‘humanity is doomed’”; and “experts suggest the gloom reflects a lack of faith in society, rather than a misunderstanding of the physics”.

I hope that despair will be transformed into whatever emotion—or set of emotions—is most conducive to climate action. People surely understand that the climate crisis threatens their property, their family, and their future—people can become educated if they don’t. The climate crisis is an enormous thing—people might feel powerless. But regarding this crisis, there are countless ways that each of us can make a difference. We can each build up our own sense of being able to achieve climate-related goals. And we can then transmit—to others—that sense of capability. Our fate isn’t sealed—it remains in our hands.

I have some psychiatric problems—my diagnoses are ADHD, OCD, and bipolar. I’m curious about various topics regarding psychiatry—I’ll mention two of them. First, I’ve found that guanfacine—though only temporarily—has been able to wipe away all of my mental illness. I wonder (A) how commonly people experience a remarkable transdiagnostic effect from a drug and (B) what the phenomenon might mean. Second, I experience what I’d call a “fractured consciousness”—I’m always moving from one novel and unprecedented consciousness state into another. There’s no quiet, calm, or stability—something seems to be fluctuating inside my brain in an unhealthy way. The fluctuations happen from one day to the next or even—it seems—from one hour to the next. I suspect that my consciousness will—finally—stabilize once I find the right psychiatric medication. How abnormal is such an experience? Is there research on this topic? What mechanisms might underlie such an experience?

Regarding the guanfacine and “fractured consciousness” topics, I’ve gotten nowhere—maybe there are no answers. I have—additionally—made no progress regarding other psychiatry topics that I’m curious about. But despite the brick walls that I keep running into, I’m constantly impressed with how much researchers are learning about mental illness—the scientific progress gives me hope even though we obviously need to accelerate the pursuit of effective treatments. I’ll use this piece to talk about the mental-illness research that excites me.

I do think—regarding my own situation—that I’ll be able to fix my brain and live a fulfilling life. There are a lot of drugs that I haven’t tried yet. I do feel the urgency—I need to fix my brain problems soon.

Vulnerabilities

We try to treat mental disorders. It would—of course—be world-changing if we could prevent them instead. Apparently a great deal of mental illness occurs because of perinatal disruption to the intricate and delicate process of neurodevelopment. Under what circumstances could a human being be exposed to enormous perinatal disruption and yet end up not suffering from mental illness? And under what circumstances could a human being be exposed to zero perinatal disruption and yet end up suffering from mental illness? I’m curious about both those thought-experiment questions.

A 2019 Annual Review of Clinical Psychology article talks about “the impact of pregnant women’s distress” on “fetal and infant brain–behavior development”. And the authors define distress to include: perceived stress; life events; depression; and anxiety. The article says: “maternal distress affects fetal and child brain–behavior development and increases the risk for child psychopathology”; the “effects of prenatal distress have been documented as early as the fetal stage and are related to increased risks for a host of psychopathologies”; “maternal prenatal distress may be a third pathway for the familial inheritance of risk for psychiatric illness beyond shared genes and the quality of parental care”; there are studies “probing the biological, mechanistic pathways through which maternal distress ‘gets under fetal skin’ as an intermediate phenotype of altered child outcomes”; regarding the potential pathways through which this happens, there are maternal (hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal-axis regulation, immune activation), placental (epigenetic effects, mitochondrial dysfunction), and fetal (brain programming) pathways; “distress during pregnancy is typically a modifiable factor”; “interventions with distressed pregnant women can help women and may positively affect their children as well”; and it “would be a grave perversion of science if research into prenatal maternal distress were interpreted as blaming women for their child’s development”. A 2016 Neuropsychopharmacology article says: “the early postnatal brain is far from maturity and continues to undergo significant developmental processes”; the perinatal period “represents a critical stage of development, rendering the brain particularly vulnerable to organizing (and disorganizing) environmental influences”; “when stress is experienced during this critical early-life period, its impact on brain function can be long-lasting or even permanent, compared with the typically transient effects of stress on the adult brain”; developmental “stress may have long-lasting consequences for the structure and function of several brain networks, ultimately modulating the output of multiple emotional, social, and cognitive behaviors”; it’s “clear that the ultimate outcome of early-life stress depends on several aspects of the ‘stressful’ experience”—“its timing, quality, severity, and duration”; “the developing brain responds to age-specific stress in an age-specific manner, with profound, enduring consequences”; “within the early postnatal period, the type and magnitude of stress-induced changes can vary markedly according to precisely when the stress occurs”; during “stress, synapses in several brain regions are impacted by a cocktail of stress mediators with distinct and concerted actions and mechanisms”; regarding the “individual and concerted actions of these mediators during” vulnerable postnatal periods, these actions should be investigated; the focus of investigation should be these mediators’ effects on (A) individual genes, (B) individual neurons, (C) gene networks, and (D) brain networks; “early-life adversity is a powerful determinant of subsequent vulnerabilities to emotional and cognitive pathologies”; and “understanding the underlying processes will have profound implications for the world’s current and future children”. A 2019 Neurotoxicology and Teratology article says: “brain maturation throughout adolescence occurs” against “a backdrop of genetic and environmental interactions”; these interactions begin before conception and continue “throughout gestation and postnatal life”; it’s now known “that experience during childhood and adolescence can modify the trajectory of the structural and functional changes”—“induced by environment and experience”—“that occur during the rest of life”; during “childhood and adolescence, the brain exhibits sensitive periods when experience can greatly alter its functional and structural characteristics”; these “sensitive periods occur in different brain regions at different times of development and may even occur in different layers of the same cortical region at different times”; “childhood includes the sensitive periods for the development of the sensory and motor systems”; “adolescence includes sensitive periods for social, emotional”, and cognitive development; during adolescence, “the networks subserving these domains are undergoing plasticity based on the experiences of the individual”; regarding sensitive periods, experiences “that occur before or after the sensitive period will have less effect on the maturation of” a neural circuit, “but some plasticity can still occur”; and there is—during the adolescent maturation of complex behaviors—“a vulnerability to exogenous influence and the increased possibility that functional and structural maturation can become abnormal and” that “psychopathology can ensue”.

A 2012 Cerebrum article says: “environmental influences during fetal development are especially potent in the brain”; “the brain’s plasticity during gestation confers both increased vulnerability to environmental exposures and opportunities for therapeutic interventions”; scientists “have found that the consequences of maternal stress depend on the cause, timing, duration, and intensity of the stress, as well as maternal stress reactivity and the genetic susceptibility of the fetus”; overgeneralized “assertions, such as ‘Stress is bad for you and your baby,’ may inadvertently contribute to anxiety and worry among pregnant women”; “issues critical to determining whether prenatal stress exposure has beneficial or deleterious consequences relate to the nature, magnitude, chronicity, and timing of stress”; and regarding what these critical issues relate to, it’s relevant what the pregnant mother’s biological response is to stress, what the pregnant mother’s psychological response is to stress, and what the pregnant mother’s sense of control is over the stressor. A 2018 Nature Neuroscience article says: executive “function (EF) is a broad term, which describes a set of cognitive processes that support” goal-directed behavior; working “memory, specifically, is a resource-limited executive function that relates to the ability to temporarily hold items in mind for manipulation”; findings “highlight the association of maternal inflammation during pregnancy with” (A) the brain’s developing functional architecture and (B) emerging EF; cytokines “(inflammatory markers) and their receptors are expressed throughout the fetal brain and play a role in typical neurodevelopmental processes”; the pro-inflammatory cytokine Interleukin 6 (IL-6) “has been indicated as a mediating factor in processes leading from maternal inflammation to alterations in fetal brain development and subsequent risk for psychopathology”; functional “connectivity within and between multiple neonatal brain networks can be modeled to estimate maternal IL-6 concentrations during pregnancy”; “regions heavily weighted in these models overlap significantly with those” that—in a meta-analysis—support working memory; and maternal IL-6 “directly accounts for a portion of the variance of working memory at” age two. And a 2020 Brain, Behavior, and Immunity article says: increased “cytokines in the intrauterine environment and fetal brain can shape or perturb brain development”; this study provides evidence that (1) “maternal cytokines during pregnancy predict ADHD in early childhood” and (2) “maternal prenatal inflammation is one mechanism through which prenatal risks such as maternal distress influence child psychopathology”; “maternal prenatal inflammation appears to be a promising marker of risk for child ADHD symptoms”; if confirmed, this study’s results “would hold promise that maternal prenatal cytokine concentrations may be an easily obtained, low-cost marker of ADHD risk in offspring”; and if confirmed, this study’s results “would begin to set the stage for trials to reduce risk in susceptible individuals”.

Glutamate

I think that this video—where Dr. Rakesh Jain talks about glutamate—is entertaining and interesting:

Jain talks—in the video—about how powerful and important glutamate is. And indeed, I can say that glutamate seems to be right at the center of every psychiatric disorder. Just consider my own diagnoses—OCD, bipolar, and ADHD.

Regarding OCD, a 2021 Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences article points out: the “evidence-based algorithm for the pharmacological treatment of OCD is distressingly limited”; regarding OCD, much “recent work has focused on the hypothesis that” (1) “glutamate imbalance contributes to OCD” and (2) “glutamate modulators may have therapeutic utility in treatment of” disease that’s otherwise refractory; “these two claims are not equivalent”; “glutamate modulators may be of therapeutic benefit even if glutamate dysregulation is not central to pathophysiology”; “glutamate abnormalities might contribute causally to the development of OCD” even if glutamate modulators aren’t therapeutically effective; several “lines of evidence suggest that glutamate dysregulation may contribute to the pathophysiology of OCD”; glutamate “is the primary excitatory neurotransmitter in the mammalian brain”; glutamate is “involved in virtually everything the brain does”; and “pathological activity of virtually any circuit in the brain could be reflected in a local disruption of glutamate levels”. And the 2022 book Glutamate and Neuropsychiatric Disorders says in Chapter 19: it’s known that stress can trigger psychiatric illnesses; “prolonged and constant exposure to stressful events leads to chronic stress that leads to persistent functional changes”; “stress is one of the relevant factors underlying OCD and other anxiety disorders”; the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis (HPA axis) is activated in response to stressful events; early-life “stress presents a developmental and complex interference in the HPA axis, with changes throughout life that impact the triggering and severity of anxiety disorders and OCD in adulthood”; the “glutamatergic pathway is involved in the mechanism of resilience to stress”; regarding anxiety disorders and regarding OCD, these disorders “have in common the involvement of glutamatergic neurotransmission”; “research suggests that deregulations in glutamatergic activity are critical in OCD”; regarding OCD’s genetic etiology, “genes related to glutamatergic transmission are strong candidates”; and “evidence suggests that glutamatergic hyperactivity may” underlie anxiety disorders.

Regarding bipolar, the 2022 book says in Chapter 8: bipolar disorder (BD) “is a relatively common psychiatric disorder that affects millions of people worldwide”; the “relationship between glutamatergic dysfunction and the pathophysiology of depression either unipolar or bipolar has been documented over the past 20 years”; the glutamate hypothesis of mood-disorder etiology “is expected to complement and improve the prevailing monoamine hypothesis and may indicate novel therapeutic targets”; several glutamatergic-system genes “have been found to be involved in the etiology of bipolar disorder”; both “preclinical and clinical studies have implicated glutamatergic dysfunction in the pathophysiology of mood disorders”; it’s fundamentally important—regarding the effort to discover innovative therapies for BD—that the combination of cellular interactions and molecular mechanisms that’s responsible for BD is understood; NMDA receptors are glutamate receptors; recent “findings from research into the treatment of bipolar disorder suggest” that “effects on NMDA receptors may need to be combined with other cellular and/or molecular effects to provide effective therapeutic responses”; and research “to date justifies the optimism that new pharmaceutical agents targeting the glutamatergic system may play an important role in the treatment of bipolar disorder”.

Regarding ADHD, a 2013 Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews article says: a “number of strands of evidence are converging on energy insufficiency as a prominent factor in ADHD”; there’s work hypothesizing that ADHD symptoms may arise due to (1) astrocytes’ impaired lactate production being “insufficient to meet energy demands” and (2) the “supply of adenosine triphosphate (ATP)” therefore being “inadequate to maintain ion gradients across neuronal membranes”; “the behavioral Neuroenergetics Theory (NeT) predicts the results of many neuropsychological tasks involving individuals with ADHD and kindred dysfunctions”; NeT’s “central thesis is that neurons may not be adequately resupplied with the energetic resources—lactate—that they require for prolonged, precisely timed firing”; there are “energetic pools associated with all cerebral actions, and these consist of the ATP immediately available to the neurons, backed up by astrocytic glycogen, and by the astrocytes’ ability to convert that into lactate to provide the long-term energy required by sustained neuronal firing”; there are—regarding action potentials, postsynaptic potentials, ion-gradient resetting, and glutamate clearance—“energy-demanding processes critical for high rates of information transmission”; the “singular premise that one or more of these processes is disordered in ADHD constitutes our theory, NeT”; there’s a neuron-powering supply chain that involves glutamate, glucose uptake, glycogenolysis, lactate production, the conversion of glutamate to glutamine, astrocytes shuttling the glutamine “to the neurons to restore their pools of neurotransmitters”, and norepinephrine release; failure “of this supply chain at any one of the reactions can undermine functionality of the neuron”; all “pharmacotherapies for ADHD facilitate catecholamine function”; regarding ADHD pharmacotherapies, “what they have in common is their ability to stimulate the release of lactate from astrocytes”; therapeutic “agents such as amphetamine that block the monoamine transporters maintain high extracellular concentrations of norepinephrine”; these high concentrations of norepinephrine stimulate the production—in astrocytes—of cyclic adenosine monophosphate and of lactate; these high concentrations “can help compensate for any of several potential energetic bottlenecks”; dopamine “insufficiency plays no role in ADHD”; and norepinephrine “is an effective therapeutic agent because of its ability to stimulate astrocytes to release lactate”. And the 2022 book says in Chapter 16: regarding ADHD treatment, studies have suggested that “targeting the glutamate system with pharmacological agents may” alleviate ADHD symptoms; regarding memantine, it’s “theorized that memantine’s ability to decrease glutamate signaling is a possible reason for its therapeutic value in ADHD”; “some research has shown that lactate hypo-function in the brain can cause aberrant neuronal firing”, promoting ADHD symptoms; there’s “overwhelming evidence for a relationship between” (A) energy dynamics, (B) glutamate, and (C) ADHD; “the neurotransmitter imbalances seen in ADHD could be due to issues with how the brain obtains energy”; regarding future ADHD-drug targets, there could be benefit in targeting (1) the glutamate system and (2) “systems that can increase energy flow to the brain”; it’s “easy to imagine a situation where lack of brain energy eventually causes catecholamine hypo-function because not enough energy is available to sustain normal neuronal firing”; this “catecholamine hypo-function then promotes an increase in glutamatergic firing, which then puts more energy stress on a” system that’s already vulnerable; this “could create a feed-forward pathological situation that may lead to the symptoms seen in ADHD”; atomoxetine is a current ADHD treatment that “works on the norepinephrine, dopamine, and glutamate pathways”; regarding ADHD-drug development, drugs that—like atomoxetine—both decrease glutamate signaling and increase catecholamine signaling “may help to increase the energy supply to the brain and directly act on the neurotransmitter systems dysregulated”; and “both effects should normalize brain physiology and meliorate the symptoms of ADHD”.

A 2018 Cerebral Cortex article talks about glutamate—I think the article’s images are excellent. The article says: the “newly evolved circuits in layer III of primate dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) generate the neural representations that subserve working memory”; regarding the group II metabotropic glutamate receptors mGluR2 and mGluR3, this “study is the first dissection of mGluR2 versus mGluR3 mechanisms in the higher cognitive circuits of primate dlPFC that generate the mental representations underlying working memory”; the authors “have discovered that, in addition to their astrocytic expression, mGluR3 is concentrated postsynaptically in spine synapses of layer III dlPFC, positioned to strengthen connectivity”; in “contrast, mGluR2 is principally presynaptic as expected, with only a minor postsynaptic component”; “data illuminate why insults to mGluR3 would erode cognitive abilities”; and data “support mGluR3 as a novel therapeutic target for higher cognitive disorders”.

Treating ADHD

I found very interesting the following 2022 commentary that appears as a chapter in a 2022 book about ADHD:

New Drugs To Treat Adhd (2022)

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The commentary says: it’s “widely accepted that ADHD drugs reduce its core symptoms by potentiating catecholaminergic signalling in the prefrontal cortex”; the “intervening decade since we wrote our last review on the pharmacotherapy of ADHD has produced no evidence to question the hypothesis that ADHD is a catecholaminergic disorder which responds to drugs that potentiate noradrenergic and/or dopaminergic signalling in the brain”; attempts “to treat this disorder successfully through neurotransmitter systems that modulate catecholaminergic function or with cognitive enhancers all failed in clinical trials”; and all “of the recently approved drugs and those currently in late-stage clinical development broadly remain within the same pharmacological confines as existing medications”. I wonder whether glutmatergic ADHD drugs will be successful. And will break the “pharmacological confines” that the authors refer to.

I recommend this 2021 CNS Drugs article that talks about how to approach stimulant-refractory ADHD:

Stimulant Refractory Adhd (2021)

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The article says: with “appropriate optimization strategies, the vast majority of patients with ADHD will have a significant reduction in the severity of ADHD with stimulants”; practitioners should check “that the lack of response is not due to alternative explanations”, then consider “augmenting with guanfacine XR or clonidine XR”, and then consider “moving to second- or third-line pharmacological options”; “the choice of medications is currently based on a trial-and-error process”; and it’s “hoped that advances in precision psychiatry will allow more personalized, tailored, and efficient management of patients with ADHD”. I’m not sure whether any of the ADHD drugs that the 2021 article talks about will be winners for me—time will tell. I might—in the end—need at least two drugs to turn out to be winners.

I’m interested in agomelatine—it’s a drug that apparently does all sorts of positive things in the brain. A 2023 Brain Sciences article says that agomelatine (AGM): “increases the availability of norepinephrine and dopamine in the prefrontal cortex”; has “an antidepressant and nootropic effect”; increases a particular protein’s expression and thus (A) optimizes learning, (B) optimizes consolidation of long-term memory, and (C) improves neuron survival; “has been shown to modulate glutamatergic neurotransmission in regions associated with mood and cognition”; “reduces the stress-induced release of glutamate in the prefrontal and frontal cortex”; “is involved in the resynchronization of interrupted circadian rhythms”; and has “beneficial effects on sleep patterns”. And I think that memantine is interesting—it’s one of many glutamatergic medications that I’m interested in, though. A 2020 Expert Opinion on Emerging Drugs article says: memantine “is a noncompetitive antagonist of NMDA receptors”; memantine was tested on ADHD-diagnosed adults; there was a large therapeutic effect; 56% of “participants were clinically negative at the endpoint”; memantine was also tested on ADHD-diagnosed adults in another study; memantine was “much superior to placebo in the reduction of ADHD symptoms”; and memantine “was effective in reducing ADHD symptoms but in our opinion the” drop-out rate suggested issues regarding tolerability.

I’m excited about genetic analysis—precision and personalization are the future of psychiatry, though we must make sure that that future arrives sooner rather than later. A 2015 Therapeutic Innovation and Regulatory Science article says: GRM genes encode for metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluRs); the mGluR network includes “genes in the signaling pathway of GRM genes”; the authors “have identified a small molecule compound, NFC-1, which previously underwent extensive clinical testing and was shown to have stimulatory activity towards mGluR pathways”; the “drug was originally developed in the late 1980s for treating dementia-related cognitive impairment, but was eventually abandoned during Phase III trials in dementia”; “NFC-1, which exhibits stimulatory activity for all three groups of mGluRs, has been shown to improve cognitive functions in animal models”; and “we aim to reposition NFC-1 for use as a targeted therapy for ADHD in patients who are ‘biomarker positive’ for the mGluR/GRM gene network”. And a 2018 Nature Communications article says: “NFC-1 (fasoracetam monohydrate) is a small synthetic molecule and” an mGluR activator; NFC-1 “may have the potential to restore normal glutamatergic activity in ADHD patients with glutamatergic hypofunction due to mutations in” mGluR-network genes; this study’s objectives were to explore—in ADHD-diagnosed adolescents with “disruptive mutations in genes impacting the mGluR network”—the safety, pharmacokinetic parameters, and potential efficacy of NFC-1; and “NFC-1 treatment resulted in significant improvement”.

I’ll use this piece to talk about Washington’s Ukraine-war approach. And I hope that everyone will—before reading this piece—take the time to check out my 28 May 2023 piece “Cartoonization”, since that piece provides some crucial context.

Washington Makes a Big Decision

Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Washington expected a quick Russian victory, planned for a Ukrainian government-in-exile, and then shifted—after Russia’s remarkable military failures—to an anti-diplomacy approach that has continued right to the present. The Biden administration was anti-diplomacy—regarding Russia—before the Ukraine war started. But it was a major decision when the Biden administration moved from (A) generally opposing diplomacy to (B) actually extending a horrifying war.

Chas Freeman comments in a 24 March 2022 interview: “I was stunned when Putin actually invaded Ukraine”; “I don’t think his troops were prepared for it”; there’s “no evidence that they had the logistics in place or that the troops were briefed about where they were going and why”; “it looks like an impetuous decision”; “the United States is not part of any effort to negotiate an end to the fighting”; to “the extent that there is mediation going on, it seems to be by Turkey, possibly Israel, maybe China”; “the United States is not in the room”; and everything “we are doing, rather than accelerating an end to the fighting and” accelerating “some compromise, seems to be aimed at prolonging the fighting, assisting the Ukrainian resistance—which is a noble cause, I suppose, but that will result in a lot of dead Ukrainians as well as dead Russians”. Freeman observes—in the 24 March 2022 interview—that everything “we are doing, rather than accelerating an end to the fighting and” accelerating “some compromise, seems to be aimed at prolonging the fighting”.

I think that it’s interesting how blunt Washington was in April. Look at this video where Lloyd Austin—the US defense secretary—talks about the Biden administration’s Ukraine-war approach:

Austin made these remarks on 25 April 2022 when briefing the press in Poland. Antony Blinken is the US secretary of state and was—during the remarks—standing next to Austin. 

A 26 April 2022 CNN piece says: as “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has transformed into a grinding war of attrition with no meaningful peace deal in sight, the US and its allies have begun to convey a new, longer-term goal for the war”; this new goal is “to defeat Russia so decisively on the battlefield that it will be deterred from launching such an attack ever again”; that “message was delivered most clearly on Monday, when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told reporters after a trip to Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv that ‘we want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine’”; “US officials traveling with Austin said that the message is one that he planned to reiterate, according to a senior administration official”; “Russia coming out of the conflict weaker than before is an idea that other Biden administration officials have referenced”; “US officials, however, had previously been reluctant to state as plainly that the” US’s goal is to (1) “see Russia fail” and (2) see Russia “be militarily neutered in the long term”; US officials had previously remained “cautiously optimistic that some kind of negotiated settlement could be reached”, hence the reluctance; Biden-administration “officials and congressional sources said they believe that the continued military support to Ukraine could result in significant blows to Russia that will impair their long-term military capabilities, strategically benefiting the US”; the “US has begun to send heavier and more sophisticated equipment to Ukraine that it had refrained from providing in the past, including 72 howitzers and Phoenix Ghost tactical drones”; and the “‘way we are looking at this is that it’s making an investment to neuter the Russian army and navy for next decade,’ said a congressional source familiar with the ongoing military assistance to Ukraine”.

A 25 April 2022 Guardian piece says: Austin declared “that Washington wanted to see Russia weakened militarily and unable to recover quickly”; this declaration “marks a shift in Washington’s declared aims underlying its military support for Ukraine”; Austin “was asked if he would now define US goals differently from those set out soon after the Russian invasion”; he “started out with the established administration line about helping Ukraine retain its sovereignty and defend its territory”; he then “added a second goal”, namely that the US wants “‘to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine’”; regarding this second goal, Austin said that Russia shouldn’t “‘have the capability to very quickly reproduce’” the equipment and forces lost in this war; the “US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who travelled with Austin to see Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv, agreed with” Austin’s “formulation of US objectives”; Blinken said that Austin “‘said it very well’”; the “remarks suggested that even if Russian forces withdrew or were expelled from the Ukrainian territory they have occupied since 24 February, the US and its allies would seek to maintain sanctions with the aim of stopping Russia reconstituting its forces”; the remarks “indicated Washington is taking a position in an internal debate within Nato on whether to use the opportunity of Vladimir Putin’s strategic blunder in Ukraine to try to hobble his ability to threaten other countries in the future”; there’s a question of whether—if “the remarks do indeed represent the Biden administration’s aims”—“it was sensible to declare them so bluntly”; and the declaration arguably (1) “weakens Russia’s incentive to withdraw” and (2) “reinforces Moscow’s narrative that Nato is waging a proxy war in Ukraine aimed at weakening Russia and even regime change, deepening Putin’s paranoia”.

And Lieven writes in his 27 April 2022 Responsible Statecraft piece: the Biden administration is—to “judge by its latest statements”—“increasingly committed to using the conflict in Ukraine to wage a proxy war against Russia”; “during his visit to Kiev this week, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated that the U.S. wants to see ‘Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine’”; a “U.S. strategy of using the war in Ukraine to weaken Russia” is “completely incompatible with the search for a ceasefire and even a provisional peace settlement”; this proxy-war strategy “would require Washington to oppose any such settlement and to keep the war going”; “indeed, when in late March the Ukrainian government put forward a very reasonable set of peace proposals, the lack of public U.S. support for them was extremely striking”; and this proxy-war strategy “involves maintaining Ukraine as a de facto U.S. ally” even though “a Ukrainian treaty of neutrality (as proposed by President Zelensky) is an absolutely inescapable part of any settlement”.

I want to spotlight Lieven’s crucial observation that a “U.S. strategy of using the war in Ukraine to weaken Russia” is “completely incompatible with the search for a ceasefire and even a provisional peace settlement”—Lieven says that the strategy and the search are “completely incompatible”.

Bleeding the Enemy vs. Actually Helping Ukraine

Noam Chomsky says in a 16 November 2022 Truthout interview: prior “to Putin’s invasion there were options based generally on the Minsk agreements that might well have averted the crime”; there’s “unresolved debate about whether Ukraine accepted these agreements”; at “least verbally, Russia appears to have done so up until not long before the invasion”; the “U.S. dismissed them in favor of integrating Ukraine into the NATO (that is, U.S.) military command, also refusing to take any Russian security concerns into consideration”; these “moves were accelerated under Biden”; there “was only one way to find out” whether diplomacy could “have succeeded in averting the tragedy”—namely, to try—but Washington ignored this option; “Putin rejected French president Macron’s efforts, to almost the last minute, to offer a viable alternative to aggression”; Putin rejected “them at the end with contempt”; he shot “himself and Russia in the foot by driving Europe deep into Washington’s pocket”; his “crime of aggression was compounded with the crime of foolishness”; Washington “initially expected Russia to conquer Ukraine in a few days and was preparing a government-in-exile”; there were—for military analysts—three surprises, namely (A) “Russian military incompetence”, (B) “remarkable Ukrainian resistance”, and (C) “the fact that Russia didn’t follow the expected U.S.-U.K. model” of war where you “go at once for the jugular” and use “conventional weapons to destroy communications, transportation, energy, whatever keeps the society functioning”; Washington “then made a fateful decision” and decided to continue “the war to severely weaken Russia”; this decision (1) meant “avoiding negotiations” and (2) constituted “a ghastly gamble” where the bet was that a defeated Putin would “pack up his bags and slink away in defeat to oblivion if not worse” instead of destroying Ukraine with conventional weapons; as “the conflict has escalated, the options for diplomacy have declined”; at “the very least, the U.S. could withdraw its insistence on sustaining the war to weaken Russia”; this insistence bars “the way to diplomacy”; and there are establishment commentators who call “for diplomatic options to be explored”, which is a “stronger position” than just calling for the US to stop preventing diplomacy.

Linda McQuaig writes in a 29 June 2022 piece: “Germany, France and Italy have correctly pushed for negotiations towards a diplomatic solution in Ukraine”; “the U.S. is digging in, moving beyond the original goal of helping defend Ukraine to adopting the more ambitious and perilous goal of weakening Russia”; and there’s a “dangerous downplaying of the incomprehensible horrors of nuclear weapons”. A 10 May 2022 Guardian piece says: “Vladimir Putin could view the prospect of defeat in Ukraine as an existential threat to his regime, potentially triggering his resort to using a nuclear weapon, the top US intelligence official has warned”; the “warning on Tuesday came in an assessment from intelligence chiefs briefing the Senate on worldwide threats”; and the “prediction for Ukraine was a long, gruelling war of attrition, which could lead to increasingly volatile acts of escalation from Putin, including full mobilisation, the imposition of martial law, and—if the Russian leader felt the war was going against him, endangering his position in Moscow—even the use of a nuclear warhead”. And a 11 May 2022 CNN piece says: “President John Kennedy once warned that nuclear powers ‘must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war’”; “Kennedy’s superpower logic is resounding poignantly as Putin gets backed into a corner by the strategic disaster of his war, Ukraine’s heroic resistance and an extraordinary multibillion-dollar allied conveyor of arms and ammunition”; the “aggressive Western approach, the slow progress of Putin’s war of attrition and the lack of any diplomatic effort to end the war mean that it is almost certain the Russian leader will get further backed into a dangerous corner”; at “a fundraiser in Potomac, Maryland, on Monday night, Biden confided that he was concerned Putin had yet to devise an exit from the war”; “Putin’s only exit option right now appears to be a capitulation, and a tacit admission that the Western effort, combined with fierce Ukrainian courage, got the better of him—a position that would be politically impossible to adopt”; “it’s hardly alarmist to consider the possibility” that Putin might use nuclear weapons; there’s “no real consensus on what Putin might do if he’s desperate”; and “the US can be criticized for failing to give Putin the kind of way out that Biden was speculating about”.

Benjamin Abelow writes in his 2022 book How the West Brought War to Ukraine: in “the months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the explanation offered for America’s involvement has changed”; what “had been pitched as a limited, humanitarian effort to help Ukraine defend itself has morphed to include an additional aim”, namely “to degrade Russia’s capacity to fight another war in the future”; in “fact, this strategic objective may have been in place from the start”; Freeman made an observation “more than a month before the new U.S. policy was announced”; he observed that everything “‘we are doing, rather than accelerating an end to the fighting and’” accelerating “‘some compromise, seems to be aimed at prolonging the fighting, assisting the Ukrainian resistance—which is a noble cause, I suppose, but…will result in a lot of dead Ukrainians as well as dead Russians’”; the “observation points to an uncomfortable truth”, namely that “America’s two war aims are not really compatible with each other”; “a humanitarian effort would seek to limit the destruction and end the war quickly”; in contrast, “the strategic goal of weakening Russia requires a prolonged war with maximum destruction, one that bleeds Russia dry of men and machine on battlefield Ukraine”; Washington’s “new military objective places the United States into a posture of direct confrontation with Russia”; now “the goal is to cripple a part of the Russian state, its military”; “one must consider what would happen if Russia started to lose, and its overall military capacity was degraded to the point where Moscow perceived itself as vulnerable to invasion”; in “that situation, Russian planners would surely contemplate using low-yield battlefield nuclear weapons to destroy enemy forces”; “the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in May, stated that” (1) “Mr. Putin might use nuclear weapons if there was ‘an existential threat to his regime and to Russia, from his perspective’” and (2) Putin might perceive such a threat “if ‘he perceives he is losing the war’”; if “Russia did use nuclear weapons, the pressure for a Western nuclear response, followed by further escalation, might be irresistible”; and regarding nuclear weapons, “the new U.S. policy is seeking to achieve” the exact scenario—namely, “Russian loss and depletion”—that the Director of National Intelligence warned about.

I find it interesting how open, clear, and obvious Washington’s criminal recklessness is—there’s no effort to conceal it. The media informs us that (1) the goal is to weaken Russia and (2) a weakened Russia might go berserk. The logical tension between (1) and (2) is absolutely remarkable, since the goal is—apparently—to make Russia go berserk. Regarding (1), a 26 April 2022 Stars and Stripes piece says: “Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that allies must ‘move at the speed of war’ to get more weaponry into the hands of Ukrainian forces, following meetings with dozens of foreign military leaders at Ramstein Air Base on Tuesday”; the “gathering at Ramstein was the first monthly meeting of the ‘Contact Group,’ which includes NATO and partner countries”; the “aim of the Ramstein talks was to come to a common understanding on Ukraine’s changing military requirements as its war with Russia enters a new phase, said Austin, who led discussions with officials from more than 40 countries”; and “Austin told the assembled defense leaders” that “‘Ukraine clearly believes it can win and so does everyone here’”. And regarding (2), a 16 December 2022 NYT piece says: the “more setbacks Mr. Putin endures on the battlefield, the more fears grow over how far he is willing to go”; he “has killed tens of thousands in Ukraine, leveled cities and targeted civilians for maximum pain—obliterating hospitals, schools and apartment buildings, while cutting off power and water to millions before winter”; each “time Ukrainian forces score a major blow against Russia, the bombing of their country intensifies”; and “Mr. Putin has repeatedly reminded the world that he can use anything at his disposal, including nuclear arms, to pursue his notion of victory”. 

Looking Inward vs. Looking Outward

I want to emphasize that we control our own actions—we should look in the mirror and make sure that our own Ukraine-war approach is ethical. We shouldn’t be silent about the unethical things that we’re currently engaged in. Unethical things that are—unlike Putin’s actions—under our control.

The 30 September 2022 annexation was an enormous blow to diplomacy. And it’s not like this fact somehow means that we should continue our unethical approach to this war—other people’s wrongdoings can’t somehow justify your own. Look at this image, which shows the four provinces that Putin annexed:

You can see that Russia annexed Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk.

Anatol Lieven writes in his 30 September 2022 Common Dreams piece: the “Russian government’s move today to annex the territories it has occupied in Ukraine is absolutely illegal, as well as a very serious escalation of the conflict”; the “Russian action greatly complicates the search for an eventual peace settlement, as Ukraine and Western nations won’t formally accept nor recognize the annexation”; at “the same time, once these territories have been officially accepted into Russia under the Russian constitution, it will be much more difficult for a future Russian government to give them up”; “U.S. officials should understand that while on the one hand Russia’s annexation of these territories marks a very serious escalation, on the other it also masks a colossal scaling down of Russian ambitions compared to the first months of the war”; the “Kremlin’s original plan was to capture Kyiv, subjugate or replace the Ukrainian government, and reduce Ukraine to the status of a Russian client state”; when “that failed, Moscow hoped to conquer all or most of the Russian-speaking areas of eastern and southern Ukraine”; both “of these plans were foiled by Ukrainian resistance backed by Western weaponry and intelligence”; and now “Putin’s goal seems to be permanent Russian control of a portion of eastern Ukraine (excluding the main cities of Kharkiv, Odessa and Dnipropetrovsk), so as to allow him to ward off attacks by Russian hardliners and claim to the Russian people that his criminal and disastrous war has led to some sort of success for Russia”.

I don’t know to what extent the 30 September 2022 annexation can be undone—I think that we’ll find out what the diplomatic opportunities are when we start to pursue diplomacy. I hope that we’ll abandon the unethical—and risky—anti-diplomacy approach and instead figure out what’s diplomatically possible.

Anti-Diplomacy Hurdles

Samuel Charap and Miranda Priebe write in a 28 October 2022 Foreign Affairs piece: “U.S. President Joe Biden has said that the United States is committed to a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine”; “his administration has taken few, if any, steps to create a diplomatic process that could produce such an outcome”; and the “mantra in Washington is to support Kyiv ‘for as long it takes’ and to rule out, at least for now, practical steps toward diplomacy”. Charap and Priebe write—in a January 2023 study—that “President Biden has said that this war will end at the negotiating table”. The study says that the Biden “administration has not yet made any moves to push the parties toward talks”. And Charap writes in a 5 June 2023 Foreign Affairs piece: many “commentators will continue to insist that this war must be decided only on the battlefield”; “that view discounts how the war’s structural realities are unlikely to change even if the frontline shifts, an outcome that itself is far from guaranteed”; the “United States and its allies should be capable of helping Ukraine simultaneously on the battlefield and at the negotiating table”; and now “is the time to start”. 

Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne write in their piece “Why Are We In Ukraine?”, which appears in the June 2023 issue of Harper’s: regarding the degree to which Washington would “be interested in a negotiated resolution to the war in Ukraine”, there’s “a good deal of evidence” suggesting “that the administration’s real—if only semi-acknowledged—objective is to topple Russia’s government”; the “draconian sanctions that the United States imposed on Russia were designed to crash its economy”; by “repeatedly labeling Putin a ‘war criminal’ and a murderous dictator, President Biden (using the same febrile rhetoric that his predecessors deployed against Noriega, Milošević, Qaddafi, and Saddam Hussein) has circumscribed Washington’s diplomatic options, rendering regime change the war’s only acceptable outcome”; “Washington’s endorsement of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky’s goal of recovering the ‘entire territory’ occupied by Russia since 2014, and Washington’s pledge, held now for more than fifteen years, that Ukraine will become a NATO member, are major impediments to ending the war”; “the conditions required to reach a comprehensive European settlement in the aftermath of the Ukraine war” would be “repellent to Washington’s self-styling as the world’s sole superpower”; that settlement “would need to resemble the vision, thwarted by Washington, that Genscher, Mitterrand, and Gorbachev sought to ratify at the end of the Cold War”; that settlement “would need to resemble Gorbachev’s notion of a ‘common European home’ and Charles de Gaulle’s vision of a European community ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’”; and that settlement “would have to recognize NATO for what it is (and for what de Gaulle labeled it)”, namely “an instrument to further the primacy of a superpower across the Atlantic”. Schwarz and Layne refer to: (1) circumscribing “Washington’s diplomatic options” and “rendering regime change the war’s only acceptable outcome”, (2) “major impediments to ending the war”, and (3) “a comprehensive European settlement” that would be “repellent to Washington’s self-styling as the world’s sole superpower”. 

A 25 August 2022 Foreign Affairs piece says: according “to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement”; the deal was that “Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership”; and the deal was that Ukraine would—instead of joining NATO—“receive security guarantees from a number of countries”. A 2 September 2022 Responsible Statecraft piece says: “Russia and Ukraine may have agreed on a tentative deal to end the war in April, according to a recent piece in Foreign Affairs”; the “news highlights the impact of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s efforts to stop negotiations”; the “decision to scuttle the deal coincided with Johnson’s April visit to Kyiv, during which he reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to break off talks with Russia for two key reasons”, namely (A) “Putin cannot be negotiated with” and (B) “the West isn’t ready for the war to end”. And a 26 February 2023 NYT piece says: “Moscow and Kyiv did conduct direct talks early in the war, first in Belarus and then in Turkey”; by “April, the two sides were discussing an agreement under which Russia would return its troops to preinvasion battle lines in return for a pledge that Ukraine would never seek membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization”; “the talks collapsed”; “U.S. officials say that it was unclear whether a lasting deal could have been reached anyway”; and “Russia insists that Ukraine abandoned talks under pressure from the West”. And Chomsky says in a 9 October 2022 interview where he talks about the 25 August 2022 Foreign Affairs article: in “the light of the well-documented record, it seems to me to require quite a leap of faith to take current US government pronouncements on diplomacy seriously”; the “record seems to me to show convincingly that the US has been impeding meaningful negotiations throughout, by now unequivocally by adopting the official war aims of continuing the war in order to severely weaken Russia”; these “efforts to undermine diplomacy apparently continue”; the 25 August 2022 Foreign Affairs article says that “‘Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement’” in April 2022; the article blames “the failure of these efforts on the Russians” but doesn’t “mention that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at once flew to Kyiv with the message that Ukraine’s” Western “backers would not support the diplomatic initiative, followed by US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who reiterated the official US position that Washington’s goal in the war is to ‘weaken Russia’”; and it’s “a fair surmise that” Johnson’s and Austin’s “visits repeated the official policy”, namely the policy of (1) continuing “the war to severely weaken Russia” and (2) gambling “that Putin won’t use his conventional weapons to devastate Ukraine”.

Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Davies, and Marcy Winograd write in a 9 June 2023 piece titled “The Surprising Pervasiveness of Pro-war Propaganda”: “the U.S. has used its power to derail peace talks and push Zelenskyy not to make compromises that he was, early on in the war, ready to make”; during “talks in Turkey in March 2022, the Ukrainian government accepted territorial compromises as part of its draft 15-point peace and neutrality agreement with Russia”; Zelensky “ruled out trying to recapture all Russian-held territory by force, saying it would lead to World War III”; “Russia agreed to withdraw all its occupation forces”; “the UK and the U.S. intervened and derailed the talks”; the “Turkish Foreign Minister said after a failed NATO conference, ‘Some NATO countries wanted the war in Ukraine to continue in order to weaken Russia’”; “the fact that British and American politicians intervened to block negotiations has been confirmed by Zelenskyy’s aides, Turkish diplomats, and Israel’s then prime minister Naftali Bennett”; during “those talks, what Ukraine asked of the U.S. and other NATO countries was for them to provide collective security guarantees to ensure it would not be invaded again”; and “instead of supporting Ukraine in its negotiations, the U.S. and UK used Ukraine’s dependence on Western support as leverage to undermine the peace talks and turn what might have been a two-month war into a much longer one, with corresponding increases in fatalities, casualties, and physical and economic devastation for the people of Ukraine”. 

Gilbert Achcar writes in a 17 March 2023 Nation piece: one “would have expected that Russia’s escalation of its military gestures against Ukraine in 2021, followed the year after by Russia’s invasion of its neighbor’s territory, would have induced the Biden administration to lay off Beijing (if not to actively mend fences with China) and try to cajole it into exerting pressure on Moscow for a cessation of the war and a UN-sponsored political settlement”; “Beijing threw Washington a line to that effect at the beginning of the war”; in “March 2022, its present foreign minister, then–Ambassador to the United States Qin Gang, published an article in The Washington Post”; the article says that China’s Ukraine-war position is that (1) the “‘purposes and principles of the UN Charter must be fully observed’”, (2) “‘the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries must be respected’”, (3) “‘the legitimate security concerns of all countries must be taken seriously’”, and (4) “‘all efforts that are conducive to the peaceful settlement of the crisis must be supported’”; it “was certainly possible to build upon this statement to work together with Beijing toward a peaceful resolution of the conflict, knowing that Russia’s reckless military adventure has considerably increased its dependence on China”; what “happened is the exact opposite”; “Washington escalated the tension with Beijing through a series of statements and moves, such as upscaling its anti-China Quad alliance with Australia, India, and Japan, founding an odd AUKUS anti-China alliance with Australia and the UK, dangerously extending its North-Atlantic alliance into East Asia and the Pacific at NATO’s May 2022 summit in Madrid, and allowing for gratuitously provocative acts about Taiwan such as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island”; “when Beijing tried again to throw a line, on the occasion of the beginning of the second year since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, by publishing a 12-point plan for a ‘political settlement of the Ukraine crisis,’ it was immediately dismissed by the Biden administration, which even engaged in potentially self-fulfilling prophecies by accusing Beijing of planning to provide Russia with weapons”; the “new Chinese plan reiterates from the onset the principle emphasized by Qin Gang a year ago”; the new plan says that the “‘sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all countries must be effectively upheld’”; “the plan includes the basic principle upon which it should have been possible for Washington to work with Beijing toward a UN-based peaceful settlement of the ongoing war”; “China’s plan does not call for an immediate and unconditional cease-fire, which would risk perpetuating Russia’s present occupation of a significant portion of Ukraine’s territory”; instead “of such a demand that could play into Russia’s hands, Beijing’s plan calls all parties to ‘support Russia and Ukraine in…resuming direct dialogue as quickly as possible, so as to gradually deescalate the situation and ultimately reach a comprehensive ceasefire’”; fortunately, “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did not follow in Washington’s footsteps”; he “requested to meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to discuss with him China’s 12-point document”; on “Thursday, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, spoke over the phone with Qin Gang”; according “to China’s official statement, Kuleba ‘congratulated China on its recent success in mediating the rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and noted that Ukraine takes a long-term view of its relations with China, will continue to strictly abide by the one-China principle and respect China’s territorial integrity, and looks forward to enhancing mutual trust and deepening cooperation with China in various fields’”; this “sheds a particular light on the visit that China’s president Xi Jinping will make to Moscow on Monday”; some have interpreted the visit as “a gesture of endorsement of Russia’s aggression”; and the visit “is more likely to be, after Beijing’s success in restoring diplomatic relations between Riyadh and Tehran, a further and much more important step in projecting China’s role on the world scene as a peacemaker in contrast to that of the United States”. 

Achcar writes in a 2 May 2023 Truthout piece: the “way President Joe Biden’s administration reacted to China’s offer to facilitate a political settlement of the Ukraine conflict clearly reveals Washington’s undeclared objective regarding that war”; the “contrast between the administration’s attitude toward China’s position and the attitudes of some of the United States’s allies is striking”; when “Beijing published its ‘Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis’ on February 24, marking the beginning of the second year since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, Washington immediately dismissed the initiative as a mere decoy”; “the very first of the Chinese declaration’s 12 points reaffirmed a principle that went against Russia’s interest in the ongoing war and in favor of Ukraine’s”, namely “the principle of ‘sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all countries’”; China mentioned “Ukraine specifically more than once when talking about territorial integrity”; there’s “good reason to believe that, far from trying its best to prevent the war, Washington wanted it to occur for the simple reason that the Russian invasion would be, and has been, a godsend for the U.S.’s hegemonic designs”; one “is entitled to believe likewise that Washington did very little to deter Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from invading Kuwait in 1990 (some even maintain that then-U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, let Hussein believe that Washington would not even mind) because that invasion was equally a godsend for its hegemonic designs”; in “both cases, Washington’s global hegemony and allegiance of its Cold War allies were greatly enhanced, after years of decline”; there’s a “very important gap between Washington’s stance and European attempts to build on China’s offer of mediation”; the “key to this contrast lies in the fact that Western Europe is eager to see the war in Ukraine come to an end for the obvious reason summarized by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a major bipartisan strategic think tank”; Cordesman says that the US’s “‘European partners and allies are suffering far more from the economic consequences of their support for Ukraine and rise in global energy costs than Americans’”; Cordesman also says that “the U.S. stands to derive ‘grand strategic benefits’ from inciting Ukraine to pursue the war—‘an investment whose benefits greatly exceed its cost’”; Zelensky “very lucidly confessed”—“to the London Economist on March 25, 2022”—that there “‘are those in the West who don’t mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives’”; according to Zelensky, for “‘other countries, it would be better if the war ended quickly, because Russia’s market is a big one [and] their economies are suffering as a result of the war’”; and “as much as it is right to help Ukraine defend its territory and population against Russian aggression and wrong to seek to force it into capitulation, it is also in the best interest of the Ukrainian people to do everything possible to bring the war to an end on the basis of an acceptable compromise instead of thwarting every possibility to negotiate such a compromise—as Washington has been consistently doing” since before Russia invaded.

Chomsky says in a 23 February 2023 Truthout interview: there is—given “Washington’s lack of interest”—“little media inquiry” into whether there’s “hope for diplomatic efforts to escape the steady drift to disaster”; “enough has leaked out from Ukrainian, U.S., and other sources to make it reasonably clear that there have been possibilities, even as recently as last March”; “two Finnish analysts suggest” that “‘Peace talks are possible if there is a political will to engage in them’”; the Finnish analysts “proceed to outline steps that can be taken to ease the way toward further accommodation”; persisting “on its present course, the war will come to vindicate the view of much of the world outside the West that this is a U.S.-Russian war with Ukrainian bodies”; this is the “view, to quote Ambassador Chas Freeman, that the U.S. seems to be fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian”; this view reiterates “the conclusion of Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison that in the 1980s the U.S. was fighting Russia to the last Afghan”; there “have been real successes for the official policy of severely weakening Russia”; as “many commentators have discussed, for a fraction of its colossal military budget, the U.S., via Ukraine, is significantly degrading the military capacity of its sole adversary in this arena, not a small achievement”; it’s “a bonanza for major sectors of the U.S. economy, including fossil fuel and military industries”; and in “the geopolitical domain, it resolves—at least temporarily—what has been a major concern throughout the post-WWII era”, namely “ensuring that Europe remains under U.S. control within the NATO system instead of adopting an independent course”.

The Horrors of the Proxy-War Approach

I think that Anthony Cordesman lays out very helpfully—in a commentary that was published on 21 November 2022—some reasons why Washington wants the proxy war to continue. He says in the commentary: “Ukraine may need major amounts of U.S. humanitarian, civil, and military aid for years to come”; regarding “rising U.S. opposition to continuing aid to Ukraine”, much of the opposition comes from “ignoring the strategic benefits” the aid “provides to the U.S.”; “the U.S. has already obtained major strategic benefits from aiding” Ukraine; “such aid helps to rebuild and strengthen the role America plays as the de facto leader of the West and other democratic states”; Washington “must allocate its limited aid funds and efforts according to their strategic value to the U.S. and how effectively the money will be used”; Washington must consider “the grand strategic benefits of continuing to provide such aid”; providing “aid to Ukraine effectively has forced Russia to fight a proxy war in which both the U.S. and Europe” have been able to exploit “a massive strategic advantage in both defense spending and total economic resources”; this aid is “one of the best investments the U.S. can make in competing with Putin’s Russia and in advancing its own security”; and Washington’s Ukraine aid “is probably the most cost-effective investment the U.S. and its strategic partners have recently made in national security”.

I don’t know how it’s possible—when people are dying and starving, but also when potential escalation looms—to talk about “major strategic benefits”, “strategic value”, “grand strategic benefits”, America being “the de facto leader of the West and other democratic states”, and Ukraine aid being “the most cost-effective investment the U.S. and its strategic partners have recently made”.

Charles A. Kupchan writes in a 24 February 2023 Responsible Statecraft piece: “the West needs to keep a watchful eye on the negative effects the war is having at the global level”; the “conflict is polarizing the international system”; “many developing economies are suffering from the war’s supply-chain disruptions, which are causing food shortages, high inflation, and in some regions, political unrest”; and disorder “is radiating outward from the war in Ukraine—yet another reason it needs to come to an end sooner rather than later”. And Marlene Laruelle writes in her 25 February 2023 Responsible Statecraft piece: the “humanitarian cost of the war for Ukraine is high (8 million externally displaced, 6 internally displaced, several million people in need of humanitarian assistance, and at least 100,000 to 150,000 killed, including both military and civilians)”; the “reconstruction of the country will be of an incommensurable scale, estimated at around USD 600 billion so far, and while it could be a unique opportunity for a new Ukraine to emerge, it could also become a quagmire both logistically and financially”; the “Global South has refused to be lectured by the West and to succumb to Western pressures about applying sanctions against Russia”; it “continues to see the war as a conflict specific to the North, between two imperialisms and normative orders that drags the rest of the planet far away from the real collective challenges—redistribution of wealth, climate change, sustainability, food security, better representation of the South in international organizations, and the like”; everywhere “in the world, military–industrial complexes are booming”; and “as military expenditures reach unprecedented levels, the global disarmament project” is getting “put on the back burner”.

I find Washington’s proxy war hideous—the war is killing Ukrainians, destroying Ukraine, and starving people worldwide. I find the disorder horrifying, the distraction horrifying, and the starvation horrifying—the risk of escalation introduces a whole additional dimension of immorality. The planet can’t accommodate Washington’s destructive proxy war—there’s no room for such conflict in our perilous time.

The historicizing of discourse has greatly enriched our understanding of the operation of what Antonio Gramsci called the hegemonic ideas of any social order, and has helped us especially to appreciate the power of the way of thinking that appears in a given historical period as “common sense,” in limiting ordinary people’s sense of which courses of action are realistic and which Utopian, and in shaping their verbalization of their own aspirations.

—David Montgomery in his 1993 book Citizen Worker

David Ellerman is one of the most exciting and interesting scholars out there—I recommend that everyone check out his 2021 book Neo-Abolitionism:

Neo Abolitionism (2021)

2.33MB ∙ PDF file

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The book says: the “most problematic institution in the economic system throughout most of the world is not the market or private property but the employer–employee relationship”; in “the technical terms of economics, the employer is renting the employees”; “we have a system of voluntarily renting people by the hour, day, week, or any specified time period”; “the neo-abolitionist critique of the human rental system is based on three theories that converge to the same conclusion”; and the “conclusion, common to the three arguments, is that the employer–employee relationship should be abolished in favor of the system of workplace democracy”. Ellerman writes—regarding the three arguments—that each “approach makes a sufficient case for the abolition of the employment system”. The book says that the “real alternative to the human rental system” is: (1) a “genuine system of private property (getting the fruits of your labor)”; (2) a “genuine system of non-fraudulent market contracts”; (3) a system where “everyone is a member of the democratic enterprise” they work in; (4) a system where “people are jointly working for and governing themselves in the workplace”; and (5) a system where people are “jointly appropriating the positive and negative fruits of their labor”. I think that it’s important for people to read the book—Ellerman clarifies a lot in the short book’s 155 pages.

We should engage seriously with any high-quality and deep criticisms of our economic institutions. Such criticisms will—unfortunately—often elicit knee-jerk ideological reactions that impede serious engagement. And these reactions have become more prevalent as the ideological spectrum has narrowed.

Noam Chomsky says in an October 1994 talk whose transcript is the prologue to the 2003 book Chomsky on Democracy and Education: John Dewey was “one of the outstanding thinkers of the” 20th century; he was part of an independent left that “grows right out of” classical liberalism; “the kinds of ideas that Dewey was expressing” have “origins in straight American traditions, right in the mainstream”; there’s been a “deterioration of functioning democracy in the current age, both at the institutional and at the ideological level”; “the doctrinal system has narrowed under the assault of private power, particularly in the past few decades”; and this assault has made it so that Dewey’s “fundamental libertarian values and principles now sound exotic and extreme”. Chomsky remarks in a March 1994 talk whose transcript is Chapter 15 in the 2003 book: Dewey “was appalled by the narrowing of the scope of meaningful democracy both in practice and in the rising democratic theories of his era, mainly the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the progressive intellectuals of the Wilsonian period who laid pretty much the basis for the modern form of the impoverishment and the attenuation of democratic theory”; Dewey held that “democracy requires that the shadow of big business simply be removed so that the political system can function”; the “very institutions of private power, he stressed, undermine freedom and democracy”; in “a free and democratic society, workers have to ‘be masters of their own industrial fate’”; it’s “‘illiberal and immoral’ to train children to work ‘for the sake of the wage earned,’ not ‘freely and intelligently’ under their own control”; “industry must be changed if democracy is to exist”; industry “must be changed ‘from a feudalistic to a democratic social order’”; all of these ideas from Dewey “are, or at least should be, truisms”; indeed, “they were very common coin”; they “were common ideas among uneducated working people not all that long ago”; regarding these ideas, “all of this is as American as apple pie”; it “has nothing to do with Marxism, Leninism, or any of the other scare words that are concocted by the contemporary commissars”; “it’s all completely down the tubes as the system has become more feudalistic in Dewey’s sense, more fundamentally illiberal, and more closed to the ideals of human freedom that were held, and indeed rightly held, by classical libertarians, those who we profess to honor but in fact constantly kick in the face and whose ideas are simply disappearing from sight”; as “the system has itself become more feudalistic, absolutist, unaccountable, narrow, remote, secret in essentially the classical liberal sense, running right up to Dewey and others of the time, as it has become narrower, the doctrinal system has also correspondingly become narrower”; and the “fundamental libertarian principles—which, as I say, were even common coin among the general population, let alone libertarian thinkers—now sound very exotic and extreme”.

I was honored and thrilled to interview Ellerman—see below my interview with him that I edited for flow. Ellerman and I both contributed hyperlinks. And I’ll issue a spoiler alert regarding the TV series Severance that premiered in 2022.

1) You write in your 2021 book Neo-Abolitionism: the “abolition of slavery abolished not only the involuntary ownership of other people (workers) but also voluntary contractual forms of lifetime servitude”; “that system of lifetime servitude was replaced by the current system”—the employment system—where workers are rented, hired, employed, or leased; hence “the name ‘Neo-Abolitionism’ for the idea of abolishing the employer–employee contract in favor of each firm being a workplace democracy”; the “overall case against the employer–employee system can be based on any one” of “three different rights-based theories”, namely inalienable rights, property rights, and democratic rights; each “approach makes a sufficient case for the abolition of the employment system”; the “three arguments against the human rental system are modern versions of old arguments that descend from the Reformation and Enlightenment in the Abolitionist and Democratic Movement”; the “first argument derives from noting that the old inalienable rights argument” doesn’t only rule out “the long-term contract of lifetime servitude” but instead also “applies against the shorter-term contract to rent oneself out”; the “second argument is the old labor or natural rights theory of private property” that’s “violated when the employer legally appropriates the positive and negative fruits of the employees working in a firm”; the third argument has to do with the distinction—in democratic theory—“between non-democratic social contracts of alienation” versus “democratic contracts of delegation”; the “arguments are rights-based (not utilitarian or consequentialist)”; the “object of criticism is neither a market economy nor private property, i.e., is not ‘capitalism’ in the sense of a private property market economy”; the “system being attacked herein is the employment system”; “the market contract being attacked is the employer–employee contract wherein one party (the employer) employs, ‘gives a job to,’ hires, rents, or leases other persons (the employees)”; the “argument is not that the employment contract is inherently coercive or involuntary”; by “any juridical standards, the employment relation is voluntary”; most “people today were born and raised in an economy based on the human rental system, so it seems perfectly natural”; the “alternative to the human rental system is not ‘socialism’”; “the alternative is a private property market economy where the people who work in each enterprise are the legal members or ‘owners’ of the enterprise”; each “firm would be a private democratic organization where the people working in it are its citizens”; this “condition already holds in the small family businesses or family farms without hired hands, and in worker cooperatives or democratic Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs)”; the “best-known examples of workplace democracy on an industrial scale are in the Mondragon system of worker cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain”; and the “purpose here is not to go into how the legal structure of a democratic firm can be derived from first principles”, but instead “to focus on those first principles themselves (inalienable rights, rights to the fruits of one’s labor, and democratic rights) that apply against the human rental system and” that apply “in favor of workplace democracy”. How many people find your argument—which I don’t think anyone else makes other than you—to be exciting, stimulating, new, and different? 

Excellent summary—thanks. 

I have many worker-ownership friends who enthusiastically support my argument—that’s preaching to the choir, though. Warren Samuels, Robert Dahl, Carole Pateman, and Don Lavoie are—outside my circle of friends—the main well-known people who’ve understood my argument and been influenced by it. 

Regarding Samuels, he strongly supported my approach to property theory. I quote—in my 2021 book Putting Jurisprudence Back Into Economics—some kind remarks from him. He says that my “theory of appropriation seems clearly to be the foremost and most tightly reasoned theory of the production, use, and disposition of final output”. And that my theory of appropriation “is the only theory that examines in detail wherein the law of property is and is not specifically involved and that specifies explicitly the total output of the firm, rather than surplus value, as the object of control and disposition”. I also quote from Samuels’s unfinished paper “On Precursors in the History of Economic Ideas: Is Karl Marx a Precursor of David Ellerman?”—the paper asks “whether, as it turns out, Marx, a foremost 19th century critic of property, was a precursor of Ellerman, arguably the foremost contemporary theoretician of property”. It was flattering to be mentioned alongside a figure as big as Marx, but I don’t think that Marx developed anything like an accurate theory of property. I pointed out to Samuels that Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Thomas Hodgskin took an approach—regarding property—similar to my own and that those two would be appropriate precursors. Samuels died before he could finish the paper. 

Regarding Dahl, he writes—in his 1985 A Preface to Economic Democracy—that he wants to consider “a system of economic enterprises collectively owned and democratically governed by all the people who work in them”. And he comments that he has—in “clarifying my ideas on this question”—“profited greatly from a number of unpublished papers by David Ellerman, cited in the bibliography”. 

Regarding Pateman, you can watch a video where she expresses general agreement—in 2016—after listening to me talk about worker ownership. 

And regarding Lavoie, he was a well-read economics professor—at George Mason University, which is a hotbed of Austrian School economics—who read a manuscript of my 1992 book Property and Contract, engaged with it, and wrote a glowing review. I think that these kind words from Lavoie’s review actually got the book published: 

The book’s radical re-interpretation of property and contract is, I think, among the most powerful critiques of mainstream economics ever developed. It undermines the neoclassical way of thinking about property by articulating a theory of inalienable rights, and constructs out of this perspective a “labor theory of property” which is as different from Marx’s labor theory of value as it is from neoclassicism. It traces roots of such ideas in some fascinating and largely forgotten strands of the history of economics. It draws attention to the question of “responsibility” which neoclassicism has utterly lost sight of. It is startlingly fresh in its overall approach, and unusually well written in its presentation.…

[T]his book’s argument is powerful enough to make me feel the need to go to work on responding to it. It constitutes a better case for its economic-democracy viewpoint than anything else in the literature.

He praises the “radical re-interpretation”—he says that it’s “among the most powerful critiques of mainstream economics ever developed” and also that it’s “startlingly fresh in its overall approach”. Regarding the argument that I present in the book, he generously says that it “constitutes a better case for its economic-democracy viewpoint than anything else in the literature”. 

But unfortunately, the main response that I get is a complete lack of engagement—people just ignore what I’ve written. For example, Putting Jurisprudence Back Into Economics hasn’t gotten a single review yet as far as I know—given the way that incentives are in academia, why should you expect orthodox scholars to publicize unorthodox ideas? 

2) Suppose you’re talking to Bob, who’s never read—or thought—about economic democracy before. Regarding Neo-Abolitionism, how would you explain very clearly and simply what the problem is and what your solution is? 

The problem is that our employment system violates inalienable human rights. The violations are similar to the ones that justify our having abolished your ability—in terms of a legally recognized contract—to sell yourself to a master completely voluntarily. These violations are problematic independent of how voluntarily people are employed or how good working conditions are. 

The solution is a workplace-democracy system that respects these inalienable human rights. Employees would—in this better alternative system—become the members or owners of the firm where they work. Authority relations would remain in these worker-owned firms, but the managers would—directly or indirectly—be the workers’ representatives or delegates. The managers are—in today’s typical firm—the shareholders’ agents, but it’s not like that has to be the case forever. 

3) Regarding Neo-Abolitionism, which scholar would you most like to get engagement from and why? 

It would be exciting to get Randy Barnett’s feedback—he’s an expert on contracts. But I worry that engaging with the book would—for an academic—be a significant and unnecessary risk. It’s interesting to look at what Barnett does in his 1986 paper “Contract Remedies and Inalienable Rights”—he does recognize that a person’s services aren’t factually alienable like the services of a vehicle, but then he never pursues the implications of that observation. In the paper, Barnett draws the safe conclusion regarding the employment contract, namely that the legal system should—if the employer isn’t obeyed and the contract is thus “breached”—only allow damages and not try to force compliance. The obvious conclusion is that the employment contract is—unlike the contract to sell the services of your apartment or car—a fraudulent one. But this obvious conclusion is unorthodox and threatening. I worry that a scholar’s career would—given academia’s incentives—significantly suffer if they took the position that the employment contract is fundamentally flawed. 

We all know that a person’s services are factually inalienable. A hired criminal can’t say—as a defense in court—“I was just obeying my employer”. A person’s services aren’t factually alienable like the services of a vehicle are—the hired criminal is culpable for whatever crime was committed. 

4) Neo-Abolitionism talks about three outlawed contracts—the coverture contract, the subjection pact, and the lifetime-servitude contract—that are similar to the employment contract. The book prompts us to consider a dilemma, namely that we must—in order to be consistent—either (A) outlaw the employment contract or (B) validate the other three. What if someone chooses (B)? 

Only extremists do that—for example, Walter Block. And I’m delighted when people choose that option and show their true colors—non-extremists understand that it would be dystopian if the government were to recognize those three contracts. 

Usually the response to the dilemma is—unfortunately—no response at all. People just ignore what I’ve put forward—why should they call attention to something that they can’t answer? 

5) How many of the three outlawed contracts are irreversible? And imagine we made it legal to transfer your vote away to someone else in exchange for money—would this vote-transferring be irreversible? I think people might get hung up on irreversibility whenever someone compares the employment contract to something seemingly irreversible—the irreversibility aspect might distract from any potential commonalities. 

The reversibility aspect is a red herring that distracts from my actual argument—reversibility isn’t at all relevant to what I argue. I’m happy to talk about reversibility—I want to highlight that it’s wholly irrelevant to what I argue, though. 

As for the hypothetical vote-transferring that you refer to, it would be reversible in the sense that you could do it for just a single election and then not do it the next time around. You could also buy the vote back from the purchaser—as long as they hadn’t used it yet—or buy someone else’s vote to replace the one that you transferred away. As for the coverture contract, it was reversible through divorce. And as for a hypothetical subjection pact, you could imagine a temporary subjection pact that would be undone after five years or something.

As for a hypothetical lifetime-servitude contract, Murray Rothbard writes—in his 1982 book The Ethics of Liberty—about the possibility of buying out such a contract: 

Suppose that Smith, when making his agreement for lifelong voluntary obedience to the Jones Corporation, receives in exchange $1,000,000 in payment for these expected future services. Clearly, then, the Jones Corporation had transferred title to the $1,000,000 not absolutely, but conditionally on his performance of lifelong service. Smith has the absolute right to change his mind, but he no longer has the right to keep the $1,000,000. If he does so, he is a thief of the Jones Corporation’s property; he must, therefore, be forced to return the $1,000,000 plus interest.

You can see how the contract would be reversible. And you could just leave, but the government would—in a world where the government recognized this contract—come after you to make sure that you paid the money you owed. You’d be—if you left—in the same situation as someone in our world who takes out a loan and doesn’t pay it back. 

6) What do you think of the TV series Severance that premiered in 2022? How much relevance does it have to Neo-Abolitionism? A 30 April 2022 CNN piece says: the “critically lauded Apple TV+ sci-fi thriller, renewed for a second season, revolves around Adam Scott’s character, Mark, who’s undergone a procedure called ‘severance’ at his company, Lumon Industries”; his “brain has been altered with an implant that renders him unable to remember what happens during the workday, halving him into what the characters call an ‘innie’ office worker, and an ‘outie’ at home”; the series “is disorienting and surreal, set to a simple four-chord theme (and one hell of an earworm) that evokes dread and horror”; the “more we see of Lumon, the more nefarious its mysterious mission seems”; and in “this era of mass resignations, union strikes and work-from-home revolts, it’s truly an uncannily well-calibrated series debut”. The piece says: 

In one of the show’s most chilling scenes, Helly (Britt Lower), the new severed recruit who’s repeatedly tried to leave—including by threatening to cut her own fingers off with a paper cutter—watches a video from her “outie” telling her she’s not allowed to quit.

“I am a person. You are not,” outie Helly tells her innie. 

I think that the “I am a person” part might be relevant to Neo-Abolitionism—I’m not sure, though. There’s a video that shows this part: 

That was my favorite part of the first season. And Alex Mell-Taylor writes in a 12 May 2022 piece: Severance “successfully links modern corporatism to the religiosity of cults”; “Lumon is a textbook example of a cult, and we see this also in the way the company worships the founding family, particularly their charismatic founder, Kier Eagan”; the “Employee Handbook is written like a bible that espouses Kier’s gospel”; and “Lumon is steeped in an intense religiosity that Mark’s innie has known his entire life”. He writes: 

We are so normalized to the pervasiveness of corporate culture that even satire like Severance can fly over the heads of many of us. We worship our places of work. They have become blind cults where we are willing to give our corporate owners anything they ask of us, even our minds.

I think it’s interesting to consider Mell-Taylor’s comment about workplaces having “become blind cults where we are willing to give our corporate owners anything they ask of us, even our minds”. And he comments: in “contemporary labor circles, modern jobs are sometimes pejoratively referred to as ‘wage slavery’ because of the power imbalance between employees and employers”; one “may ‘voluntarily’ enter into a job, but often only because” one needs money for things like housing and food; and Severance “strains the credulity of the traditional argument defending wage slavery—that the participant agreed to it—by demonstrating how contracts can be weaponized to coerce consent”. 

You see the controlling-implant idea in sci-fi literature like William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer—Severance dramatizes that concept in an ingenious and compelling way. 

But in the first season at least, Severance doesn’t make the big philosophical point about the employment contract. Our normal employer–employee relation treats people as if they’re non-responsible rented things—as if they’re part-time robots. The employees in this relation have signed a contract that legally alienates their self-determination within the scope of the employment—it’s like a robot being programmed. The employees in this relation owe 0% of the liabilities and own 0% of the assets they create—that’s the legal role of a non-responsible rented thing. And consider how an employee suddenly stops being a non-responsible thing when they commit a crime. Suppose that an employee commits assault—the moment the employee’s fist touches someone’s face, the employee somehow instantly blossoms into a fully responsible agent in the eyes of the law.

You can imagine a sci-fi scenario where an implanted chip wipes out (A) your de facto free will and (B) your de facto responsibility. This implant would make the facts—about the worker—align with the way that the employment contract treats the worker legally. And I myself have used—as did George H. Smith—the chip-in-brain metaphor of a chip being implanted in someone’s brain in order to turn them into a part-time robot. But Severance’s first season dramatizes a concept where two factually responsible persons are created from one—no part-time robot is created. 

As for Mell-Taylor’s piece, he evidently thinks that “coercion” is the only concept that could invalidate a contract. That’s not true, though—Neo-Abolitionism gives reasons that don’t have anything to do with how voluntary the contract is. 

7) What’s the best criticism—of your Neo-Abolitionism argument—that you’ve seen so far? And what’s your response?

The most common response is—unfortunately—an annoying one where people (A) ignore the actual argument, (B) insist that the human-rental contract is voluntary even though I explicitly and unmistakably agree with that observation, and (C) rest their case. 

Another response is to say that I’m calling for “socialism”—a private-property market economy of democratic firms fits no current definition of that term, though. People use the weasel word “socialism” when they lack a real counterargument or don’t understand what my actual argument is—using the weasel word lets you bring in various totally irrelevant critiques that have nothing at all to do with my actual argument. 

People should understand that there are about 6500 ESOPs operating quite successfully in the US covering 10% of the private workforce—it’s not like a democratic firm is an abstract idea that hasn’t been tested. You can go see these firms right now if you want to. 

I don’t know of any direct and unsympathetic engagement with the argument. But I know of two unsympathetic scholars—Frank Knight and Israel Kirzner—who never engaged with my actual work but did engage with the point about legally treating people like rented things. Regarding Knight, it seems like he was trying to defeat what he saw as the strongest criticism of the employment system. And regarding Kirzner, he was engaging with Ted Burczak’s 2002 paper “A Critique of Kirzner’s Finders-Keepers Defense of Profit” that quotes “Ellerman at length to see how he conceives the legal ‘thingification’ human beings undergo when they become rented laborers”—according to Burczak, “Ellerman concludes that because it is factually impossible to alienate responsibility for one’s actions, it is unjust for a worker to be transformed by a legally recognized labor rental contract into” a “thing without legal responsibility”. How did Knight and Kirzner respond? Both of them asserted—without any basis—that employing an employee to perform a task is just like employing a machine to do the task. This assertion is false, though—the hired-criminal example shows that it’s inaccurate. 

But most never even get to the point that Knight and Kirzner got to. Most instead fixate on voluntariness—how can one voluntarily alienate responsible agency, though?

8) You say—in Neo-Abolitionism—that your “arguments are rights-based (not utilitarian or consequentialist)”. But aren’t utilitarian arguments perfectly strong ones? 

The utilitarian arguments are—necessarily—so vague and ill-grounded that they wouldn’t support abolishing any contract at all. Only the rights-based approach lets you conclude that a given outlawed contract should be invalid instead of merely regulated. But the rights-based approach is threatening to our employment contract—our current system’s defenders therefore face a logical conundrum. 

You will—if you read slavery apologetics—see that slavery’s defenders (1) talk about slavery’s positive utilitarian role and (2) largely avoid anything as definite as a rights-based argument. A pro-slavery antebellum book refers to “the great problem of slavery” and says: 

This great problem, as we have seen, is to be decided, not by an appeal to the inalienable rights of men, but simply and solely by a reference to the general good. It is to be decided, not by the aid of abstractions alone; a little good sense and practical sagacity should be allowed to assist in its determination. There are inalienable rights, we admit—inalienable both because the individual cannot transfer them, and because society can never rightfully deprive any man of their enjoyment. But life and liberty are not “among these.” There are inalienable rights, we admit, but then such abstractions are the edge-tools of political science, with which it is dangerous for either men or children to play. They may inflict deep wounds on the cause of humanity; they can throw no light on the great problem of slavery.

The quote is from Albert Taylor Bledsoe’s 1856 book An Essay on Liberty and Slavery. 

9) Do we have any way to say whether a democratic-firm system would make workers and consumers better off? I guess that workers want to know what their salary and lifestyle would be like in a given system. And that consumers want to know how innovative a system would be and what quality of goods and services it would deliver. In terms of workers, someone online pointed out that a fast-food worker would experience—if your vision were implemented—the following changes: 

• (A) the worker would be more like a business owner

• (B) the worker would care more about their work

• (C) the worker would take more pride in their work

• (D) the worker would be properly responsible for their work

• (E) you’d no longer have the status-quo situation where the employer takes responsibility when it suits them and then drops responsibility when it doesn’t 

I think that a democratic-firm system would be a very interesting alternative to our employment system.

The workers are important people in a democratic or worker-owned firm—they’re legal members of the firm and not merely hired hands.

I’d certainly expect people to be better off as legal members than as hired hands—that’s not the point, though. It’s not about being better off—it’s about dignity, being legally treated as a responsible person, and not being legally treated as a rented thing. 

10) You write—in Neo-Abolitionism—that the “purpose here is not to go into how the legal structure of a democratic firm can be derived from first principles”. How would democratic firms be structured legally? And generally, how would your system be implemented? 

I go into the legal-structure questions in my 1990 book The Democratic Firm. And in my many journal articles—the ones that come to mind are my 1984 “Theory of Legal Structure” and my 2016 “Worker Cooperatives as Based on First Principles”. 

Tej Gonza, Gregor Berkopec, and I have a 2022 journal article that addresses the issue of legal structure—the abstract says that the “purpose of this paper is to analyze the main features of the US ESOP model and to define a technical description of the European ESOP, which builds on the good features of the US model and improves the flawed features”. 

We’re a long way from any non-fantasy discussion of how to actually make the transition. And I have no special insight into how that history will play out 50 or 100 years from now. 

The overall point is to change corporations so that (1) the workers are the members and (2) the common shareholders hold debt instruments that could have variable income. How will people manage to get from here to there against the power of Wall Street, which can argue—among other things—that “everyone’s” pension would be hurt if common shares were downgraded to debt instruments? There’s a technical argument that nothing has changed as long as the debt instrument is appropriately denominated, but who knows about Wall Street’s “animal spirits”. And you’d expect even more pushback from small- and medium-sized firms—ones that aren’t on Wall Street where shareholders are distant from actual operations—in response to transition being imposed on them. But the US might—if change comes to the US last—be able to draw from other countries’ different transition experiences. 

I’ll share one writer’s speculation on how to transform the corporation: 

Although it is impossible to imagine the easy success of any movement to reform the modem corporation, it is not difficult to suggest points that such reform might encompass. Starting with the understanding that the corporation is the entrepreneur and so entitled to the profits and the capital gains, one would ask, Who are the people of the corporation? And the answer would be that they are first and foremost those who do the work of the corporation, namely, the management and the other workers, and secondarily the stockholders, under the present system, and that they should all be able to share in both rewards and control.

As a first approximation of how these shares should be al­located, one might assume that there is some rationality behind the present distribution. At present, management and other workers get wages and bonuses and fringe benefits, and stock­holders get dividends, and these are the more or less satisfactory result of explicit or implicit negotiations. Each individual’s proper share might then be determined by taking the individual’s income from the corporation, whether wages or dividends or both, and dividing it by the total of all individual incomes from the corporation (not counting interest, which is a cost of doing business). Cash dividends would be paid in accordance with such shares, which would be recalculated annually. In addition to cash dividends—and it is a crucial addition—new stock equal in value to the corporation’s increase in net worth would be issued in the same proportions as cash dividends (or stock would be canceled if net worth fell). This stock—and sooner or later all stock in the corporation—would be inalienable. It could not be sold or be­queathed or pledged as security for a loan or given away; but it could at any time be exchanged with the corporation for a nego­tiable note or bond, or, at the corporation’s option, cash. And such an exchange would have to be made when the owner of the stock left the corporation, retired, was fired, or died. Over the years—within a generation at the outside—most of the present stockholders would be converted into bondholders. They would have their reward. The remaining stockholders would all be ac­tive in the business. They could, of course, like their predeces­sors, run it well or ill; could sell it or merge it or abandon it; but whatever happened, it would be their doing, and they would be the ones to benefit or suffer from it.

Let me state most emphatically that what I call the Labor Theory of Right leads to employee ownership, not to profit shar­ing. Profit is, as we have repeatedly noted, a residual. It is sys­tematically unpredictable. It is, nevertheless, affected by deci­sions regarding everything from product development to marketing. The interests of laborers and owners in such decisions are rarely identical; sometimes they are diametrically opposed. In profit sharing, conflicts are resolved in favor of owners. When laborers and owners are the same people, decisions can turn on the interests of the enterprise rather than on class advantage. Decisions may still turn out to be right or wrong, but they will be so for everyone. There will be neither scapegoats nor windfall profiteers. 

George Brockway wrote this in his 1995 book The End of Economic Man—he was actually the president and chairman of W. W. Norton & Company.

11) To what extent would affluent lifestyles still exist in a world of economic democracy? Someone might say: “I agree with Ellerman’s argument. But I don’t want to be shut out from living a fancy lifestyle. And I think that it would be depressing and wrong to eliminate affluent lifestyles even if I myself don’t enjoy one.” 

There’s plenty of room for non-obscene affluence in an economic democracy—the wealth would be earned according to better and more legitimate principles, though. 

The argument seems weak—what moral relevance does the concern about affluence have? And what makes this concern—even if it does have some moral relevance—more important than a rights-based argument that the person agrees with?

12) I saw a complaint that the following things aren’t clear: how existing companies would become worker-owned; how Apple employees would come up with the millions and millions of dollars that they each would need in order to buy the company; why Walmart workers should get shares worth a tiny microscopic fraction of what Apple employees’ shares would be worth; whether the state would just give these shares—which are people’s shares and people’s pensions—to the workers; how the new system wouldn’t implode the economy; and how it would be ethical for people to appropriate businesses that they didn’t (A) create or (B) risk anything to build. Are any of these challenges valid? 

The ESOP mechanism is the current way people create worker-owned firms—this mechanism doesn’t depend on workers coming up with the money out of their pockets. And owners set up ESOPs completely voluntarily—there’s no coercion of any kind.

We should—regarding the transition—reconstitute the corporation so that (1) the employees are the members and (2) the existing shareholders are the creditors. And (2) is already the de facto situation in publicly traded companies, since the public doesn’t invest in Wall Street companies in order to exercise the right to vote but instead does so in order to receive an income stream.

As for the economy, employee ownership creates companies that are more efficient—not as “efficient” for the previous employers, though—and also more resilient. 

And as for unjust appropriation, one would hope for a more or less voluntary transition—tax breaks could help to grease things. I can’t predict how the transition will happen. 

I think that the simple and obvious idea of a company’s people being its members—instead of its people just being rented—will come around sooner or later. That’s assuming that we don’t destroy the planet first, though—we do have a truly perilous environmental situation that’s rapidly worsening before our eyes. 

13) How much practical value do you expect Neo-Abolitionism’s argument to have? And how much practical value have other abstract arguments had in the past? Chomsky offered this blurb for Neo-Abolitionism when I contacted him: “Deeply grounded and scrupulously argued, Ellerman’s Neo-Abolitionism is a major contribution to envisioning, and creating, a truly free and just world.”

Ideas can have a big effect—history shows this. People can look at my book list titled “The best books on principles for a fair and just private property market economy”—I wrote a description for each of the five books on the list. There are—on the list—two books that I recommend if you want to learn about abstract arguments’ practical impact. First, Garry Wills’s 1978 book Inventing America. And second, the 2009 updated edition of Staughton Lynd’s 1968 book Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism. 

I wrote Neo-Abolitionism for an academic audience—the book isn’t formulated for any purpose other than reaching academics. I definitely want the argument to reach the public—I definitely want the argument to flourish outside the academy. I do hope that others will popularize the book’s argument—that would be great. 

The book lays out the basic arguments that expose the dominant ideology—which condones the renting of people—as deeply flawed. It is—when it comes to big societal changes—important to have an abstract argument. You can’t merely say that you’d like to have a different world where we have democratic firms—you need to have a theoretical case in favor of that other world. 

14) How much practical value does Neo-Abolitionism’s argument have in light of the fact that opposition—often on classical liberal grounds—to the human-rental system is deeply rooted in the American tradition? To play devil’s advocate, is your argument superfluous in light of tradition? 

Classical liberalism provides the best framing for my argument. But the problem is that classical liberals have to actually engage with what I’m presenting. The unfortunate situation is that they have every incentive to ignore my argument instead—from their perspective, why not simply ignore it? 

There are cases where classical liberals have understood the basic factual point about the employment contract but have then refused to draw the obvious conclusion. They agree that a person’s responsible agency is factually inalienable when you’re talking about a lifetime or about criminal activity—they somehow won’t say that it’s also factually inalienable when you’re instead talking about eight hours a day or non-criminal activity. And they will—at the very most, since others don’t even get this far—dodge the entire issue at hand with a completely obvious and totally irrelevant observation, namely that criminal and non-criminal activity are quite different legally. 

James Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in Economics. And it’s interesting to read his following words: 

The justificatory foundation for a liberal social order lies, in my understanding, in the normative premise that individuals are the ultimate sovereigns in matters of social organization, that individuals are the beings who are entitled to choose the organizational-institutional structures under which they will live. In accordance with this premise, the legitimacy of social-organizational structures is to be judged against the voluntary agreement of those who are to live or are living under the arrangements that are judged. The central premise of individuals as sovereigns does allow for delegation of decision-making authority to agents, so long as it remains understood that individuals remain as principals. The premise denies legitimacy to all social-organizational arrangements that negate the role of individuals as either sovereigns or as principals. 

These words are from the 1999 book The Logical Foundations of Constitutional Liberty. There’s a huge contradiction between the employment relationship and Buchanan’s principles—the employment system isn’t at all one where workers “remain as principals” while delegating “decision-making authority to agents”. The “central premise of individuals as sovereigns” denies “legitimacy to all social-organizational arrangements that negate the role of individuals as either sovereigns or as principals”. But nobody would ever say that the employment relation is one where the employees are the principals and where the employer is their agent. It’s doubtful that Buchanan understood this contradiction—he probably just never thought about it. Ideology blinds people—it makes them unable to see what’s right in front of their face.

15) Why do you spend time criticizing Marx? I heard the following: Marx has nothing to do with the effort to challenge the human-rental system; Marx’s errors—whatever they may be—are irrelevant; and Marxists barely exist and have no influence. 

First, Marx still has considerable influence on the left. And there is—in my view—a very harmful dynamic where those defending our human-rental system are happy to agree with the Marxists that our system is based on private property. This agreement obscures (1) the fact that our system is based on the employment contract and (2) the criticism that our system violates the principle that private property is supposed to rest on. Regarding (2), John Bates Clark’s 1899 book The Distribution of Wealth says that a “plan of living that should force men to leave in their employers’ hands anything that by right of creation is theirs, would be an institutional robbery—a legally established violation of the principle on which property is supposed to rest”.

Second, spending more time criticizing Marx helps to clarify that I’m not a Marxist or “socialist”—that clarification is important, since calling me a Marxist or a “socialist” is a common response from the current system’s defenders. One way people will respond to my argument is to ignore the labor theory of property and say that I’m somehow instead promoting Marx’s long-refuted labor theory of value. I want to guard against illiteracy or actual deception—I therefore try to make it extra clear that none of the theories that I promote are Marxist.

I’ll use this piece to point out that the way that our media covers Vladimir Putin is simplistic, inaccurate, and propagandistic. Putin is a war criminal—the 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine is an enormous war crime that makes me sick. And Putin is undoubtedly extremely corrupt—his corruption disgusts me. Putin has done all sorts of horrible things. The point isn’t that there’s necessarily anything good about him—the point is instead that Western media turns him into a cartoon in a way that dumbs us down and makes diplomatic success less likely. You can “cartoonize” a figure—make a two-dimensional and unrealistic version of them—even if the figure is vile and terrible. We should criticize the dangerous and destructive process of cartoonization. And one can criticize the cartoonization of a given figure even if one can’t think of a single good, moral, or admirable thing about the figure.

We should always question our assumptions about Russia and other countries. For example, there is—regarding Russia—a common assumption that members of the nomenklatura became the post-Soviet oligarchs. And Ion Marandici provides evidence—in an interesting 2014 paper—that seems to undermine this idea. I can’t speak to how well Marandici’s paper stands up to scrutiny, but the paper very usefully reminds us to question what we assume to be true.

Turning Putin into a Cartoon Villain

A 30 March 2022 FAIR piece says: even “before Russia invaded Ukraine, Western media have depicted Russian President Vladimir Putin as an irrational—perhaps mentally ill—leader who cannot be reasoned or bargained with”; such “portrayals have only intensified as the Ukraine crisis came to dominate the news agenda”; the “implications underlying these media debates and speculations about Putin’s psyche are immense”; if “one believes that Putin is a ‘madman,’ the implication is that meaningful diplomatic negotiations with Russia are impossible, pushing military options to the forefront as the means of resolving the Ukraine situation”; if “Putin is not a rational actor, the implication is that no kind of diplomacy could have prevented the Russian invasion, and therefore no other country besides Russia shares blame for ongoing violence”; yet “another implication is that if Putin’s defects made Russia’s invasion unavoidable, then regime change may be necessary to resolve the conflict”; “Western media have for years been debating whether Putin is insane”; in “the Daily Beast (3/1/22), Amy Knight, a historian of Russia and the USSR, displayed a remarkable ability to read Putin’s mind, discerning the real motivations of someone she describes as possibly ‘detached from reality’”; the Western media has “offered quite specific, though varying, evaluations of Putin’s mental state from a distance”; these “diagnoses from afar have been going on for a long time”; some “writers (e.g., Guardian, 2/22/17; Daily Beast, 8/9/21) have criticized what is known as ‘Putinology’—the reduction of Russian politics to the analysis of incomplete, and occasionally false, information about Putin and his motives”; it’s “a common Western media tactic to equate and reduce an entire country to its singular (and often caricatured) head of state, usually presented as a cartoon villain with sadistic and irrational motives, to justify further Western hostility towards those countries (Passage, 12/14/21; Extra!, 11–12/90, 4/91, 7–8/99)”; some “contemporary attempts to explain Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by psychoanalyzing Putin make sweeping judgments about his mental state, even while insisting that a professional diagnosis would be necessary to confirm their speculative perceptions of him”; as “of this writing, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hasn’t attempted any conversations with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, while Russian military commanders are declining calls from the Pentagon, likely due to the US sharing military intelligence with the Ukrainian government”; this “silence on both the diplomatic and military fronts risks further escalation instead of a quick negotiated end to the war”; the “Western media caricature of Putin as a psychopathic leader acting on irrational and idiosyncratic beliefs is a convenient propaganda narrative that excuses US officials from taking diplomacy seriously—at the expense of Ukrainian lives and nuclear brinkmanship (Antiwar.com, 3/10/22)”; and it’s “important not to let US officials subvert peace negotiations between the two parties on the evidence-free grounds that negotiations with Russia are pointless”.

A 21 July 2022 FAIR piece says: “FAIR (3/30/22) has previously noted how evidence-free caricatures in Western media of Putin as irrational (and perhaps psychotic) make diplomatic efforts to end the Ukraine crisis seem pointless”; tracing “a connection between Putin and Hitler is an even more insidious attempt to make the idea of a negotiated end to the war seem like a moral outrage”; “there are few better ways to vilify foreign leaders in the West than by making exaggerated accusations that they are Adolf Hitler reincarnate”; the “glib trope demonstrates how frivolously historical comparisons are thrown around to advance US geopolitical goals”; “British journalist Louis Allday (Ebb Magazine, 3/15/22) compiled a list of instances where Western journalists and officials have compared foreign leaders to Hitler—with Hitler sometimes coming off better in the comparison”; “Hitler-like leaders include Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milošević, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and even Cuba’s Fidel Castro”; one “inevitable feature of these Hitler comparisons is frequent reference to ‘appeasement’ when reporting on the US’s dealings with foreign leaders”; this “presents any attempt at diplomatic negotiations with foreign leaders opposed by the US as a misguided or unprincipled effort to placate an irrational or evil dictator bent on expansionist conquest”; before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “British Secretary of State for Defense Ben Wallace worried that ‘there was a whiff of Munich in the air’”; this “was a clear reference to what is commonly perceived to be a failed policy of diplomatic efforts to prevent World War II in the West, when European powers agreed to let Hitler annex part of Czechoslovakia in the 1938 Munich Agreement (BBC, 2/13/22)”; although “establishment Western pundits and officials like to claim that the Russian invasion was ‘unprovoked,’ FAIR (1/28/22, 3/4/22) has pointed out that this self-serving narrative omits a record of conscious provocations against Russia via NATO expansion towards Russian borders, in violation of promises made to Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev”; “New York Times columnist David Leonhardt (5/9/22)” falsely “described the US’s previous foreign policy toward Russia as a ‘strategy of non-confrontation’ rather than encirclement and antagonism”; accusations “of ‘appeasing’ Russia or Putin have been raised towards influential Western officials who have either engaged in diplomacy or advocated de-escalation through negotiations”; an “oft-repeated corollary to the Western media’s frequent Hitler comparisons is that there was little point before the invasion in addressing Russia’s security concerns surrounding NATO expansion and the US’s unilateral abandonment of arms control treaties, since Putin supposedly wanted to recreate the Soviet Union or Russian Empire despite his repeated explicit denials”; “Putin’s alleged belief that the modern state of Ukraine has no right to exist, the argument goes, is proof of his supposed Hitlerian expansionist ambitions”; the “two sources Western media most cite to make this claim are Putin’s speech (2/21/22) recognizing the independence of the separatist Donbas republics, and an essay he wrote last year (7/12/21)”; there have—regarding these two sources—been “blatant misrepresentations”; “when one actually reads both sources, rather than relying on secondhand sources to explain what Putin meant, it quickly becomes apparent that” blatant misrepresentation has occurred; the “hyperbolic comparisons between Russia and Vladimir Putin to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler, as well as constant accusations that anyone who attempts to negotiate with Russia for a peaceful end to the war is engaged in ‘appeasement,’ have cost the world opportunities to de-escalate”; “Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, cohosts of the Citations Needed podcast (10/9/19), point out that the emotionally manipulative and thought-terminating comparisons to Hitler and Munich are designed to suggest” that “‘every so-called dictator is a new Hitler and every negotiation, every potential negotiation even, with those countries is a new Munich, is a new abdication of world responsibility that will inevitably lead’” to “‘a new Holocaust’”; the “extreme caricatures of Putin as equal to or worse than Hitler are setting up Ukraine and the world for a grim fate”; and the “frequent Nazi comparisons and Munich references made by Western media paint those who would prefer a negotiated settlement to years of bloodshed, the risk of World War III and nuclear war as ‘appeasers’ of a Hitlerian dictator with genocidal ambitions”.

I want to highlight these observations from the above FAIR pieces: some “writers (e.g., Guardian, 2/22/17; Daily Beast, 8/9/21) have criticized what is known as ‘Putinology’—the reduction of Russian politics to the analysis of incomplete, and occasionally false, information about Putin and his motives”; it’s “a common Western media tactic to equate and reduce an entire country to its singular (and often caricatured) head of state, usually presented as a cartoon villain with sadistic and irrational motives, to justify further Western hostility towards those countries (Passage, 12/14/21; Extra!, 11–12/90, 4/91, 7–8/99)”; the “Western media caricature of Putin as a psychopathic leader acting on irrational and idiosyncratic beliefs is a convenient propaganda narrative that excuses US officials from taking diplomacy seriously—at the expense of Ukrainian lives and nuclear brinkmanship (Antiwar.com, 3/10/22)”; and the “extreme caricatures of Putin as equal to or worse than Hitler are setting up Ukraine and the world for a grim fate”.

The West’s Incorrect Story

Tony Wood writes in his 2018 book Russia Without Putin: “Western media coverage and analysis of Russia are overly fixated on Putin’s personality”; too “much attention has been paid to the man”; not enough attention has been paid “to the system over which he presides”; the “obsession with Putin’s persona effectively reduces a whole range of political, economic and social questions to the swings of one individual’s mood or morality”; at “best, this is highly misleading, distracting us from the broader structural forces that have done so much to shape Russia’s fortunes in the last few decades”; at “worst, the focus on Putin is dangerously counter-productive, leading to profoundly mistaken ideas about the source of Russia’s ills”; at “the height of the Cold War, Western views of the USSR often came packaged in pat formulas about tyranny and freedom, totalitarianism versus democracy”; “at least there was a sizeable body of writers, scholars, activists and thinkers who could supply a more nuanced perspective, based on first-hand experience”; the “West’s levels of expertise and awareness about Russia have, sadly, declined steeply since then, opening the way for all kinds of ill-informed speculation—often churned out by individuals with no knowledge of the place, let alone of the people or the language—to circulate unchallenged”; and as “a result, public opinion and policy decisions are based on a very shallow understanding of the country”.

For “much of the post-Soviet era, the Russian elite—Putin very much included—were committed to an ideal of alliance or even integration with the West”; over “time, however, it became increasingly clear that this was a one-sided fantasy, and Russia’s elite gradually abandoned it, swapping dreams of integration for a more strident defence of Russian interests”; “it was only with the Ukraine crisis and annexation of Crimea in 2013–14 that Russia finally dropped the idea of alliance with the West”; “Russia’s attempts to forge a pragmatic alliance with the West, and to develop closer trade and economic ties, kept failing”; and “Moscow’s aspirations for alliance or integration were repeatedly ignored or rebuffed by the West”.

Richard Sakwa writes in his 2020 book The Putin Paradox: a “party state ruled the USSR, although the balance of power between the party and the state varied”; in “post-communist Russia, the functional analogue of the party is the administrative regime, giving rise to a regime-state”; a “power system stands outside of constitutional institutions and processes, governed by its own rules and understandings (ponyatiya, a code of mutual comprehension) which together comprise an ‘informal constitution’”; the “administrative regime exercises a pervasive influence over political processes and society”; parties “are shaped, elections are managed and the normative framework of political life is constantly modified in response to evolving challenges but governed by one constant principle—to ensure the autonomy of the regime, to ensure that it is not swallowed by society on the one side or forced to abide by constitutional rules on the other”; the “system is not foolproof, and each electoral cycle is something of a trial for the managerial capacities of the regime”; as “little as possible is left to chance, but because of the dualism inherent in the system—the tension between constitutionally mandated competitiveness and regime-driven managerialism—there are always opportunities for acts of resistance and unexpected events”; this “is a dynamic model of Russian politics, which recognises that the legitimacy of the administrative regime is dependent on its formal compliance with the norms of the constitutional state”; there “is permanent, although seldom creative, tension between authoritarianism and constitutionalism”; this “system is far more complex and sophisticated than a simple one-man personal dictatorship”; the system “is constrained by powerful ‘horizontal’ forces, various interest groups representing deeply entrenched factional communities”; “Putin is by far the most authoritative and pre-eminent element in the regime-state, but he also has to ensure that the various horizontal pressures remain balanced and that constitutional norms retain vitality”; and if “he infringed the unwritten rules, then the system would be destabilised and his power would be jeopardised”.

The “regime-state was not Putin’s invention but was formed in the 1990s”; it “emerged as a distinct type of governance in the Yeltsin period but achieved a peak of functional efficiency under Putin”; the “manipulative techniques of electoral management were forged in the 1990s in conditions of genuine political pluralism, and they were then honed by Putin in a more managerial environment”; “the ‘democratic’ forces, with the help of American advisors, manipulated the 1996 presidential election to get Yeltsin re-elected for a second term, even though his health had collapsed”; the “1996 election is often considered the moment when Russian democracy died”; the “massive abuse of the privileges of incumbency, accompanied by the fear that a” Gennady “Zyuganov victory would halt Russia’s move towards the market and liberal democracy, meant that the self-defined democratic forces intervened to ensure an outcome that would allow the continuation of reforms”; regarding the 1996 election, “the communist leader Zyuganov would probably have won” if “there had been a genuinely free and fair contest”; this “would have provided Russia with the experience of a competitive transfer of power, something the country still lacks”; and “Putin is a product of the system that he inherited, created in part with Western help when in 1996 they ensured Yeltsin’s re-election and with it the Kremlin-oligarch alliance, which in the end delivered Putin”.

And Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne write in their piece “Why Are We In Ukraine?”, which appears in the June 2023 issue of Harper’s: from “Murmansk in the Arctic to Varna on the Black Sea, the armed camps of NATO and the Russian Federation menace each other across a new Iron Curtain”; unlike “the long twilight struggle that characterized the Cold War, the current confrontation is running decidedly hot”; as “former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and former secretary of defense Robert Gates acknowledge approvingly, the United States is fighting a proxy war with Russia”; thanks “to Washington’s efforts to arm and train the Ukrainian military and to integrate it into NATO systems, we are now witnessing the most intense and sustained military entanglement in the near-eighty-year history of global competition between the United States and Russia”; “Washington’s rocket launchers, missile systems, and drones are destroying Russia’s forces in the field”; “indirectly and otherwise, Washington and NATO are probably responsible for the preponderance of Russian casualties in Ukraine”; the “United States has reportedly provided real-time battlefield intelligence to Kyiv, enabling Ukraine to sink a Russian cruiser, fire on soldiers in their barracks, and kill as many as a dozen of Moscow’s generals”; the “United States may have already committed covert acts of war against Russia, but even if the report that blames the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines on a U.S. naval operation authorized by the Biden Administration is mistaken, Washington is edging close to direct conflict with Moscow”; assuredly, “the nuclear forces of the United States and Russia, ever at the ready, are at a heightened state of vigilance”; save “for the Cuban Missile Crisis, the risks of a swift and catastrophic escalation in the nuclear face-off between these superpowers is greater than at any point in history”; to “most American policymakers, politicians, and pundits—liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans—the reasons for this perilous situation are clear”; “Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, an aging and bloodthirsty authoritarian, launched an unprovoked attack on a fragile democracy”; to “the extent that we can ascribe coherent motives for this action, they lie in Putin’s paranoid psychology, his misguided attempt to raise his domestic political standing, and his refusal to accept that Russia lost the Cold War”; “Putin is frequently described as mercurial, deluded, and irrational—someone who cannot be bargained with on the basis of national or political self-interest”; although “the Russian leader speaks often of the security threat posed by potential NATO expansion, this is little more than a fig leaf for his naked and unaccountable will to power”; to “try to negotiate with Putin on Ukraine would therefore be an error on the order of attempts to ‘appease’ Hitler at Munich, especially since, to quote President Biden, the invasion came after ‘every good-faith effort’ by America and its allies to engage Putin in dialogue”; this “conventional story is, in our view, both simplistic and self-serving”; it “fails to account for the well-documented—and perfectly comprehensible—objections that Russians have expressed toward NATO expansion over the past three decades, and obscures the central responsibility that the architects of U.S. foreign policy bear for the impasse”; and both “the global role that Washington has assigned itself generally, and America’s specific policies toward NATO and Russia, have led inexorably to war—as many foreign policy critics, ourselves among them, have long warned that they would”.

Russia “repeatedly and unambiguously characterized NATO expansion as a perilous and provocative encirclement”; opposition “to NATO expansion was ‘the one constant in what we have heard from all Russian interlocutors,’ the U.S. ambassador to Moscow Thomas R. Pickering reported to Washington thirty years ago”; every “leader in the Kremlin since Gorbachev and every Russian foreign policy official since the end of the Cold War has strenuously objected—publicly as well as in private to Western diplomats—to NATO expansion, first into the former Soviet satellite states, and then into former Soviet republics”; the “entire Russian political class—including liberal Westernizers and democratic reformers—has steadily echoed the same”; after “Putin insisted at the 2007 Munich Security Conference that NATO’s expansion plans were unrelated to ‘ensuring security in Europe,’ but rather represented ‘a serious provocation,’ Gorbachev reminded the West that ‘for us Russians, by the way, Putin wasn’t saying anything new’”; from “the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous”; while “Russians protested Washington’s NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests—or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion”; “Washington’s message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting”; normal “diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests—the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War—was obsolete”; “Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States”; while “Russians of every political stripe have judged Washington’s enfolding of Russia’s former Warsaw Pact allies and its former Baltic Soviet republics into NATO as a threat, they have viewed the prospect of the alliance’s expansion into Ukraine as basically apocalyptic”; “because from the beginning Washington defined NATO expansion as an open-ended and limitless process, Russia’s general apprehension about NATO’s push eastward was inextricably bound up with its specific fear that Ukraine would ultimately be drawn into the alliance”; that “view certainly reflected Russians’ intense and fraught cultural, religious, economic, historical, and linguistic ties with Ukraine”; “strategic concerns were paramount”, though; “Crimea (the majority of whose people are linguistically and culturally Russian, and have consistently demonstrated their wish to rejoin Russia) has been the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, based in Sevastopol, since 1783”; since “then, the peninsula has been Russia’s window onto the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and the key to its southern defenses”; up “until its annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia worried that, were Ukraine to join NATO, Moscow would not only have to surrender its largest naval base, but that base would perforce be incorporated into a hostile military pact, which happens to be the world’s most powerful military entity”; the “Black Sea would have become NATO’s lake”; “Western experts have long acknowledged the unanimity and intensity of Russians’ fear of Ukraine joining NATO”; and “Washington fully grasped the cause and intensity of Moscow’s panic over the prospect of the West’s absorbing Ukraine into its orbit, as well as the diplomatic and security accommodations Russia required”.

In “2014, NATO started training roughly ten thousand Ukrainian troops annually, inaugurating Washington’s program of arming, training, and reforming Kyiv’s military as part of a broader effort to achieve—to quote the State Department’s 2021 U.S.-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership—Ukraine’s ‘full integration into European and Euro-Atlantic institutions’”; that “aim, according to the charter, was linked to America’s ‘unwavering commitment’ to the defense of Ukraine as well as to its eventual membership in NATO”; the “charter also asserted Kyiv’s claim to Crimea and its territorial waters”; by “2021, Ukraine’s and NATO’s militaries had stepped up their coordination in joint exercises such as ‘Rapid Trident 21,’ which was led by the Ukrainian army with the participation of fifteen militaries and heralded by the Ukrainian general who co-directed it as intending to ‘improve the level of interoperability between units and headquarters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the United States, and NATO partners’”; given “the weapons and training the Ukrainian military had absorbed, and given Washington’s and NATO’s newly explicit diplomatic, military, and ideological commitments to Kyiv, and—most important—given NATO’s sophisticated program to integrate Ukraine’s forces with its own, Ukraine could now justifiably be seen as a de facto member of the alliance”; beginning “in early 2021, Russia responded by amassing forces on Ukraine’s border with the intention—plainly and repeatedly stated—of arresting Ukraine’s NATO integration”; far “from expressing any ambition to conquer, occupy, and annex Ukraine (an impossible goal for the 190,000 troops that Russia eventually deployed in its initial attack on the country), all of Moscow’s demarches and demands during the run-up to the invasion made clear that ‘the key to everything is the guarantee that NATO will not expand eastward,’ as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov put it in a press conference on January 14, 2022”; “given that, historically, Washington has responded aggressively to situations similar to those in which it has placed Russia today, the motive for Russian aggression in Ukraine is likely not expansionist megalomania but exactly what Moscow declares it to be—defensive alarm over an expansive rival’s military influence in a bordering and strategically essential neighbor”; and to “acknowledge this is merely the first step U.S. officials must take if they wish to back away from the precipice of nuclear annihilation and move instead toward a negotiated settlement grounded in foreign policy realism”.

Washington “will not entertain an end to the conflict until Russia is handed a decisive defeat”; echoing “previous comments by Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared in April 2022 that the goal is to weaken Russia militarily”; “Secretary of State Antony Blinken has repeatedly dismissed the idea of negotiating, insisting that Moscow is not serious about peace”; for “its part, Kyiv has indicated that it will settle for nothing less than the return of all Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia, including Crimea”; “Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba has endorsed the strategy of applying enough military pressure on Russia to induce its political collapse”; neither “Moscow nor Kyiv appears capable of attaining its stated war aims in full”; barring “either side’s complete collapse, the war can end only with compromise”; reaching “such an accord would be extremely difficult”; “Russia would need to disgorge its post-invasion gains in the Donbas and contribute significantly to an international fund to reconstruct Ukraine”; for “its part, Ukraine would need to accept the loss of some territory in Luhansk and Donetsk and perhaps submit to an arrangement, possibly supervised by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, that would grant a degree of cultural and local political autonomy to additional Russian-speaking areas of the Donbas”; more “painfully, Kyiv would need to concede Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea while ceding territory for a land bridge between the peninsula and Russia”; a “peace settlement would need to permit Ukraine simultaneously to conduct close economic relations with the Eurasian Economic Union and with the European Union (to allow for this arrangement, Brussels would need to adjust its rules)”; most “important of all—given that the specter of Ukraine’s NATO membership was the precipitating cause of the war—Kyiv would need to forswear membership and accept permanent neutrality”; “Washington’s endorsement of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky’s goal of recovering the ‘entire territory’ occupied by Russia since 2014, and Washington’s pledge, held now for more than fifteen years, that Ukraine will become a NATO member, are major impediments to ending the war”; “such an accord would need to make allowances for Russia’s security interests in what it has long called its ‘near-abroad’”; and making these allowances “would require the imposition of limits on Kyiv’s freedom of action in its foreign and defense policies (that is, on its sovereignty)”.

Tea Leaf–Reading

Noam Chomsky refers—in a 22 December 2022 Truthout interview—to “the industry of tea leaf–reading that seeks to penetrate Putin’s twisted mind, discerning all sorts of perversities and grand ambitions”. This tea leaf–reading “industry reverses George W. Bush’s discoveries when he looked into Putin’s eyes, saw his soul and recognized it to be good”—the industry “is about as well-grounded as Bush’s insights”. The “tea leaf–reading industry has seized on occasional comments by Putin, generally taken out of context, to conjure” up “frightening images of Russia on the march”.

I think that Geoffrey Roberts’s 2022 essay “‘Now or Never’” demonstrates—regarding Putin—an approach that’s the opposite of tea leaf–reading:

The Immediate Origins Of Putin's Preventative War On Ukraine (2022)

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Roberts writes: this “essay is devoted to the when and why of President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022”; as “far as possible, it refrains from speculation and relies almost entirely on the record of Putin’s public pronouncements during the immediate prewar crisis”; that “public record is currently the best available evidence of his motivations and calculations”; what “this evidence shows is that Putin went to war to prevent Ukraine from becoming an ever-stronger and threatening NATO bridgehead on Russia’s borders”; at “the heart of Putin’s preventative war thinking was an imagined future in which Russia would confront an existential threat”; the “longer war was delayed, he argued in February 2022, the greater would be the danger and the more costly a future conflict between Russia, Ukraine, and the West”; better “to go to war now, before NATO’s Ukrainian bridgehead on Russia’s borders became an imminent rather than a potential existential threat—a statement that he repeated during the course of the war”; pre-emptive “action to preclude an even bloodier conflict in the future is a standard justification for aggressive war, one that is often accompanied by illusions of quick and easy victory”; to “say that Putin believed he had been backed into a corner by Ukraine and the West is not to endorse his perceptions and assessments of the situation”; “greater understanding of Putin’s calculations may help clarify how this calamity came about, how it could have been prevented, and how an even greater future catastrophe might be averted”; it’s quite possible that war could “have been prevented by a Russian-Western deal that halted NATO expansion and neutralised Ukraine in return for solid guarantees of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty”; no “war is inevitable until the moment of decision”; that “was as true in February 2022 as it was in July 1914”; a “constant theme of Putin’s public discourse throughout the pre-invasion crisis was his extreme distrust of the” West, “especially the United States”; and the West could’ve made significant concessions—“in relation to Russia’s security concerns”—that “might have assuaged his darkest forebodings and persuaded him that the risks of peace were lower than those of war”.

Benjamin Abelow writes in his 2022 book How the West Brought War to Ukraine: in “the months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the explanation offered for America’s involvement has changed”; what “had been pitched as a limited, humanitarian effort to help Ukraine defend itself has morphed to include an additional aim”, namely “to degrade Russia’s capacity to fight another war in the future”; “this strategic objective may have been in place from the start”; whether “or not eviscerating Russia’s military has been the American plan from the outset, the policy is not surprising because it follows logically, even predictably, from an overarching Western narrative about Russia that has already been widely accepted”; according “to this narrative, Mr. Putin is an insatiable expansionist who lacks any plausible national security motivations for his decisions”; this “narrative portrays Mr. Putin as a new Hitler, and the Russian move into Ukraine as akin to the Nazi aggression of World War II”; “the narrative portrays any Western desire to compromise and negotiate a quick end to the conflict as wishful thinking and appeasement”; “America’s new military objective thus emerges directly from Western perceptions about Moscow’s motivations and the causes of the war”; “the Western narrative is incorrect”; in “crucial respects, it is the opposite of truth”; the “underlying cause of the war lies not in an unbridled expansionism of Mr. Putin, or in paranoid delusions of military planners in the Kremlin, but in a 30-year history of Western provocations, directed at Russia, that began during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and continued to the start of the war”; these “provocations placed Russia in an untenable situation, for which war seemed, to Mr. Putin and his military staff, the only workable solution”; in “criticizing the West, it is not my aim to justify Moscow’s invasion or exonerate Russia’s leaders”; “I have no brief for Mr. Putin”; “I believe he had alternatives to war”; “I do want to understand him—in the sense of seeking to rationally assess the causal sequence that led him to launch the war”; the “story of an evil, irrational, intrinsically expansionist Russia with a paranoid leader at its helm, opposed by a virtuous United States and Europe, is a confused and strange confabulation, inconsistent with a whole series of directionally aligned events during the past 30 years—events whose significance and meaning should have been readily apparent”; in “fact, the predominant Western narrative might itself be viewed as a kind of paranoia”; incrementally, “in steps small and large, the West has disregarded Russia’s reasonable security concerns, considering them irrelevant, stoking Russian concerns about encirclement and invasion”; at “the same time, the United States and its European allies have implied that a rational actor would be assuaged by the West’s statements of benign intention”; in “many instances, Western leaders, especially from the United States, have actively disrespected Mr. Putin, sometimes insulting him to his face”; in “doing all this, the West has suggested that Mr. Putin is imagining strategic threats where none in fact exist”; this “Western framing—which posits a lack of legitimate Russian security concerns coupled with implied and explicit accusations of irrationality—underlies much of the currently dominant narrative”; and it “also underlies the ideological position of the Russia hawks who play such a prominent role in Washington”.

In “2015, University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer began stating publicly that if the West did not stop trying to integrate Ukraine militarily, politically, and economically, the Russians, out of concern for their security, might feel compelled to take military action, including attempting to ‘wreck’ Ukraine as a way to remove it from the equation”; perhaps “surprisingly, the basic thrust of the historical argument made by Mearsheimer and other critics of NATO expansion seems to be accepted even by some aggressively Russophobic analysts”; a “recent interview with Fiona Hill, a Washington insider and outspoken Russia hawk, illustrates this point”; “she asserts several important points that hawkish analysts are typically loath to acknowledge”; first, “she asserts that in 2007—seven years before Russia’s annexation of Crimea—the U.S. intelligence establishment recognized there was a ‘real, genuine risk’ that in response to NATO expansion Russia might annex Crimea”; second, “she asserts that in 2007, the intelligence community recognized that NATO expansion might precipitate a broader Russian military action, not just one confined to Crimea, but a ‘much larger action’ taken against both Ukraine and Georgia”; third, “Hill asserts that Russia’s participation in the Russo-Georgian war was a response to NATO expansion”; fourth, “Hill states quite directly that, unlike what it did in Georgia, Russia took no action in Ukraine in 2008 because ‘the Ukrainian government pulled back from seeking NATO membership’”; in “these points, especially the final one, Hill directly acknowledges the crucial role that NATO expansion and Western military encroachments have played in motivating Russian actions in Ukraine”; “it appears that, while arguing for a hawkish position, Hill helps make the case for a perspective much like the one presented by Mearsheimer”; “for reasons hard to fathom, she and like-minded policy gurus give this perspective little or no weight” when it comes to their decision-making; regarding their decision-making, “the perspective seems to fade into the background”; instead “of openly acknowledging the untoward consequences of NATO expansion, they attribute Mr. Putin’s recent invasion of Ukraine to an unhinged and unprovoked Hitler-like drive for territorial expansion”; both “Mearsheimer and Hill appear to believe NATO expansion formed the underlying basis for the transformation of Russian behavior that culminated in the Ukraine war”; “both analysts anticipated that, in response to NATO expansion, Russia might seek to ‘wreck’ Ukraine—or, as Hill put it, to turn Ukraine into a ‘fractured, shattered’ nation”; “I find little fundamental disagreement between Hill and Mearsheimer”; “what I do find confusing is that Hill seems not to account in her overall analysis for this important area of agreement between herself and Mearsheimer”; “late in the interview, Hill describes those who point to Western responsibility for the Ukraine crisis as dupes of Russian disinformation”; and in doing “this, Hill seems to disregard her own conclusions about the untoward consequences of NATO expansion”.

There’s “no doubt that Russian perceptions of external threats have been deeply influenced by Russia’s past”; in “addition to the German invasions of World War II and World War I, Russia had, a hundred years earlier, been invaded by Napoleon, whose army reached as far as Moscow”; Richard Sakwa says that Moscow “‘doesn’t have two major oceans to defend itself’” and has no mountains or rivers to defend itself; he says that Moscow is “‘set on a vast north Eurasian plain, with no defensible borders, and a constant sense of threat from the West’”; policy “hawks such as Hill are, of course, aware of this history and geography”; “instead of viewing them as potential psychological reinforcements for legitimate Russian security concerns, these analysts communicate the view that Mr. Putin is engaged in a Hitlerian land grab, a modern version of a pitiless hunt for lebensraum, and that Putin himself is essentially Hitler incarnate—paranoid, living in the imperial past, and driven by an innate Russian militarism”; and this “sort of analysis can be maintained only by disregarding conclusions about NATO expansion that Hill herself has reached and publicly asserted”.

And Chomsky comments in a 9 October 2022 interview: it’s “worthwhile to digress for a moment on US doctrinal isolation”; to “take one of myriad examples, the current issue of the major establishment journal Foreign Affairs—moderate and independent by US standards—has an article on Ukraine and the world by two representatives of the more liberal wing of policy planning and discussion, Fiona Hill and Angela Stent”; they “find incomprehensible the unwillingness of the Global South—most of the world—to join the US in its obviously noble efforts”; the “South even sinks so low as to ‘argue that what Russia is doing in Ukraine is no different from what the United States did in Iraq or Vietnam’—which would indeed be a serious error, but for reasons the authors could not comprehend”; the “South doesn’t even share our distress ‘that Russia has violated the UN Charter and international law by unleashing an unprovoked attack on a neighbor’s territory,’ an unimaginable crime”; the “only explanation the authors can think of for this remarkable lack of understanding” on the world’s part “is Putin’s propaganda machinations”; and it “will be interesting to see if there is a word of critical comment”.

I want to use this piece to talk about the remarkably low level of discourse that we see when it comes to foreign policy—discourse is dishearteningly low-quality on various topics, but it’s particularly bad regarding foreign policy.

Table Stakes for a Meaningful Discourse

Foreign-policy discourse should begin with five simple foundations: (1) we should seek to educate ourselves about the facts regarding the unpleasant side of our own countries’ atrocities; (2) we should—regarding the recent and ongoing atrocities that our own countries are responsible for—make the effort to read the literature about the major ones; (3) one should recognize that there’s only moral value in criticizing state atrocities that one can actually affect and that one is almost always most able to affect one’s own country’s atrocities; (4) we should humanize our victims, spotlight their perspectives, and make sure not to treat them as statistics; and (5) we should have the self-awareness to see that we exhibit extreme hypocrisy when we fail—while expressing selective outrage about official enemies’ atrocities—to criticize our own country’s atrocities.

The five basic foundations are: (1) it’s good to educate ourselves about our own atrocities; (2) we should be literate when it comes to our own recent and ongoing atrocities; (3) we should—because it’s the moral approach—spotlight our own atrocities; (4) we should humanize our victims; and (5) we should be self-aware and not engage in extremely hypocritical condemnation of official enemies’ atrocities. I will—for clarity—repeat the foundations in a bullet-point list:

• (1) it’s good to educate ourselves about our own atrocities

• (2) we should be literate when it comes to our own recent and ongoing atrocities

• (3) we should—because it’s the moral approach—spotlight our own atrocities

• (4) we should humanize our victims

• (5) we should be self-aware and not engage in extremely hypocritical condemnation of official enemies’ atrocities

I wonder what foreign-policy discourse would look like if these five foundations were prerequisites—what if these five basic foundations were actually table stakes regarding foreign-policy discourse? I think that it would be refreshing. And I think that it would lead to a far more intelligent—and moral—foreign-policy discourse. But all five of the foundations are—due to patriotic framings—unacceptable.

Suppose that one accepts the core patriotic notion that America doesn’t commit atrocities—accepting that idea means that the five foundations are unacceptable. And unfortunately, I don’t think that meaningful foreign-policy discourse can occur without the five foundations in place.

An Institutionally Unfree Media

How do patriotic framings get instilled in our minds? Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky write in the 2002 version of their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: this “book centers in what we call a ‘propaganda model,’ an analytical framework that attempts to explain the performance of the U.S. media in terms of the basic institutional structures and relationships within which they operate”; it’s “our view that, among their other functions, the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them”; structural “factors are those such as ownership and control, dependence on other major funding sources (notably, advertisers), and mutual interests and relationships between the media and those who make the news and have the power to define it and explain what it means”; the “propaganda model also incorporates other closely related factors such as the ability to complain about the media's treatment of news (that is, produce ‘flak’), to provide ‘experts’ to confirm the official slant on the news, and to fix the basic principles and ideologies that are taken for granted by media personnel and the elite, but are often resisted by the general population”; in “our view, the same underlying power sources that own the media and fund them as advertisers, that serve as primary definers of the news, and that produce flak and proper-thinking experts, also play a key role in fixing basic principles and the dominant ideologies”; “what journalists do, what they see as newsworthy, and what they take for granted as premises of their work are frequently well explained by the incentives, pressures, and constraints incorporated into such a structural analysis”; these “structural factors that dominate media operations are not all-controlling and do not always produce simple and homogeneous results”; it’s “well recognized, and may even be said to constitute a part of an institutional critique such as we present in this volume, that the various parts of media organizations have some limited autonomy, that individual and professional values influence media work, that policy is imperfectly enforced, and that media policy itself may allow some measure of dissent and reporting that calls into question the accepted viewpoint”; these “considerations all work to assure some dissent and coverage of inconvenient facts”; the “beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda”; a “propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices”; it “traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public”; the “essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news ‘filters,’ fall under” five headings; the first is “the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms”; the second is “advertising as the primary income source of the mass media”; the third is “the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and ‘experts’ funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power”; the fourth is “‘flak’ as a means of disciplining the media”; the fifth is “‘anticommunism’ as a national religion and control mechanism”; these “elements interact with and reinforce one another”; the “raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print”; and regarding these filters, they “fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns”.

A “propaganda system will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy”; the “evidence of worth may be read from the extent and character of attention and indignation”; “the U.S. mass media’s practical definitions of worth are political in the extreme and fit well the expectations of a propaganda model”; while “this differential treatment occurs on a large scale, the media, intellectuals, and public are able to remain unconscious of the fact and maintain a high moral and self-righteous tone”; and this “is evidence of an extremely effective propaganda system”.

The “five filters narrow the range of news that passes through the gates, and even more sharply limit what can become ‘big news,’ subject to sustained news campaigns”; by “definition, news from primary establishment sources meets one major filter requirement and is readily accommodated by the mass media”; messages “from and about dissidents and weak, unorganized individuals and groups, domestic and foreign, are at an initial disadvantage in sourcing costs and credibility, and they often do not comport with the ideology or interests of the gatekeepers and other powerful parties that influence the filtering process”; “the torture of political prisoners and the attack on trade unions in Turkey will be pressed on the media only by human-rights activists and groups that have little political leverage”; the “U.S. government supported the Turkish martial-law government from its inception in 1980, and the U.S. business community has been warm toward regimes that profess fervent anti-communism, encourage foreign investment, repress unions, and loyally support U.S. foreign policy (a set of virtues that are frequently closely linked)”; media “that chose to feature Turkish violence against their own citizenry would have had to go to extra expense to find and check out information sources”; “they would elicit flak from government, business, and organized right-wing flak machines, and they might be looked upon with disfavor by the corporate community (including advertisers) for indulging in such a quixotic interest and crusade”; they “would tend to stand alone in focusing on victims that from the standpoint of dominant American interests were unworthy”; in “marked contrast, protest over political prisoners and the violation of the rights of trade unions in Poland was seen by the Reagan administration and business elites in 1981 as a noble cause, and, not coincidentally, as an opportunity to score political points”; many “media leaders and syndicated columnists felt the same way”; “information and strong opinions on human-rights violations in Poland could be obtained from official sources in Washington, and reliance on Polish dissidents would not elicit flak from the U.S. government or the flak machines”; these “victims would be generally acknowledged by the managers of the filters to be worthy”; the “mass media never explain why Andrei Sakharov is worthy and José Luis Massera, in Uruguay, is unworthy”; “the attention and general dichotomization occur ‘naturally’ as a result of the working of the filters”; reports “of the abuses of worthy victims not only pass through the filters”; “they may also become the basis of sustained propaganda campaigns”; if “the government or corporate community and the media feel that a story is useful as well as dramatic, they focus on it intensively and use it to enlighten the public”; conversely, “propaganda campaigns will not be mobilized where victimization, even though massive, sustained, and dramatic, fails to meet the test of utility to elite interests”; “while the focus on Cambodia in the Pol Pot era (and thereafter) was exceedingly serviceable, as Cambodia had fallen to the Communists and useful lessons could be drawn by attention to their victims, the numerous victims of the U.S. bombing before the Communist takeover were scrupulously ignored by the U.S. elite press”; after “Pol Pot’s ouster by the Vietnamese, the United States quietly shifted support to this ‘worse than Hitler’ villain, with little notice in the press, which adjusted once again to the national political agenda”; attention “to the Indonesian massacres of 1965–66, or the victims of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor from 1975 onward, would also be distinctly unhelpful as bases of media campaigns, because Indonesia is a U.S. ally and client that maintains an open door to Western investment, and because, in the case of East Timor, the United States bears major responsibility for the slaughter”; the “same is true of the victims of state terror in Chile and Guatemala, U.S. clients whose basic institutional structures, including the state terror system, were put in place and maintained by, or with crucial assistance from, U.S. power, and who remain U.S. client states”; propaganda “campaigns on behalf of these victims would conflict with government-business-military interests and, in our model, would not be able to pass through the filtering system”; “a propaganda approach to media coverage suggests a systematic and highly political dichotomization in news coverage based on serviceability to important domestic power interests”; this “should be observable in dichotomized choices of story and in the volume and quality of coverage”; “we will see that such dichotomization in the mass media is massive and systematic”; and “not only are choices for publicity and suppression comprehensible in terms of system advantage, but the modes of handling favored and inconvenient materials (placement, tone, context, fullness of treatment) differ in ways that serve political ends”.

Herman and Chomsky write that they would—using a propaganda model—anticipate: “definitions of worth based on utility, and dichotomous attention based on the same criterion”; “the news stories about worthy and unworthy victims (or enemy and friendly states) to differ in quality”; “official sources of the United States and its client regimes to be used heavily—and uncritically—in connection with one’s own abuses and those of friendly governments, while refugees and other dissident sources will be used in dealing with enemies”; “the uncritical acceptance of certain premises in dealing with self and friends—such as that one’s own state and leaders seek peace and democracy, oppose terrorism, and tell the truth—premises which will not be applied in treating enemy states”; “different criteria of evaluation to be employed, so that what is villainy in enemy states will be presented as an incidental background fact in the case of oneself and friends”; “great investigatory zeal in the search for enemy villainy and the responsibility of high officials for abuses in enemy states, but diminished enterprise in examining such matters in connection with one’s own and friendly states”; “worthy victims will be featured prominently and dramatically”; “they will be humanized”; “their victimization will receive the detail and context in story construction that will generate reader interest and sympathetic emotion”; and “unworthy victims will merit only slight detail, minimal humanization, and little context that will excite and enrage”.

I think that the media is—even if we often challenge what it presents—important in determining what we’re aware of. We simply lack basic awareness—let alone basic literacy, which is a separate thing—regarding certain atrocities that haven’t been covered properly in our media. I think that an institutionally free media would properly cover our atrocities. And that this proper coverage would result in (A) our being aware of our atrocities and (B) our being too self-aware to conduct ourselves in the hypocritical manner that elicits ridicule. I think that both (A) and (B) would be great for us, for our victims, and for the whole world—just imagine the difference that it would make if we were aware of our atrocities and we had a hypocrisy-precluding self-awareness.

Awareness of Our Atrocities

I would say that few Americans have any awareness when it comes to the Iraq War’s events and human toll—how many Americans know what happened over there, what the aggression’s ultimate impact was, and what the aggression’s victims have to say? A 17 March 2023 Guardian piece says: two “decades ago, the United States invaded Iraq, sending 130,000 US troops into a sovereign country to overthrow its government”; “Joe Biden, then chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, voted to authorize the war, a decision he came to regret”; today “another large, world-shaking invasion is under way”; “Biden, now the US president, recently traveled to Warsaw to rally international support for Ukraine’s fight to repel Russian aggression”; after “delivering his remarks, Biden declared” that the “‘idea that over 100,000 forces would invade another country—since world war II, nothing like that has happened’”; the “president spoke these words on 22 February, within a month of the 20th anniversary of the US military’s opening strike on Baghdad”; the “White House did not attempt to correct Biden’s statement”; reporters “do not appear to have asked about it”; the “country’s leading newspapers, the New York Times and Washington Post, ran stories that quoted Biden’s line”; neither “of them questioned its veracity or noted its hypocrisy”; while “Washington forgets, much more of the world remembers”; the “flagrant illegality of bypassing the United Nations”—“this happened”; the “attempt to legitimize ‘pre-emption’ (really prevention, a warrant to invade countries that have no plans to attack anyone)”—“this mattered”; and worst “of all was the destruction of the Iraqi state, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,600 US service members, and radiating instability and terrorism across the region”.

Nalib Salih gives—in a 21 March 2023 piece—some press quotes that portray Iraq’s current situation in a positive light. Salih then comments: “This is how our generational agony is trivialized. Who tells the story of Iraq? The victims and the survivors, or the tourist reporters and the rulers enthroned by unpunished war criminals from Downing Street and the Beltway?” I think that we should all ponder on Salih’s provocative question regarding who tells the story—doesn’t it make sense to spotlight the perspectives of the “victims and the survivors”? And I think that Iraqi victims and survivors should be treated in the way that Herman and Chomsky say—in what I quote above—that certain victims will be treated in the US media: “worthy victims will be featured prominently and dramatically”; “they will be humanized”; and “their victimization will receive the detail and context in story construction that will generate reader interest and sympathetic emotion”. Salih writes: “America’s war against Iraq was not a single explosion in time that happened in a distant then”; it “is here, with us—we can still hear the sirens”; rather “than aftermath(s), the war has afterlives embroidered with ours in a canvas dripping blood as we speak”; “Iraq has become an unlivable wasteland, but those who sound the alarm in the hope of rescuing the future from an expected doom are punished”; and the “normalization of today’s situation comfortably ignores the terror to which Iraqis are subjected”.

Salih writes in a 5 January 2023 piece: in “cafés at night, Iraqis were glued to their television screens”; in “living rooms, mothers’ hands were raised in prayer”; in “Mosul, Basra and the faraway corners of exile, Iraqis’ hearts raced to Moroccans’ chants as Walid Regragui’s Atlas Lions forayed into hitherto uncharted World Cup territories and conquered them in style”; “Spain, Portugal and Belgium were undone by Morocco, and France by Tunisia”; the “‘scrappy’ Saudis, as The New York Times’ lexicon defines them, scored one of the tournament’s finest goals against a bewildered Argentina, now crowned world champion over France”; this “is how we will remember the World Cup”; “Palestine flags in the stands and Arab and North African triumphs on the pitch”; alas, “a few hundred, a few thousand of those who would have cheered were missing”; their “eyes would have glittered as Sofyan Amrabat chased Kylian Mbappe down the left flank, winning the ball with an immaculate tackle that left the wonder kid writhing behind, before orchestrating the play for another raid in Les Bleus’ territory”; those “missing are the children of Fallujah”; they “are asleep now”; the “football field where they would have emulated Achraf Hakimi and Yassine Bounou on chilly winter afternoons is their resting place”; their “mothers are not going to worry about their mud-stained tracksuits tomorrow”; they “are not wearing them”; today, “the field is known as the Martyrs’ Cemetery”; it “is where residents of the once besieged city buried the women and children massacred in repeated United States assaults to repress a raging rebellion in the early years of occupation”; in “Iraq, even playgrounds are now sites for mourning”; the “war entailed showering Fallujah in depleted uranium and white phosphorus”; “US savagery didn’t end there”; twenty “years and incalculable birth defects later, the US navy is naming one of its warships the USS Fallujah”; this “is how the US Empire continues its war against Iraqis”; “Fallujah’s name, bleached in white phosphorus implanted in mothers’ wombs for generations, is a spoil of war, too”; under “‘extraordinary odds,’ reads a US Empire statement explaining the decision to name a warship after Fallujah, ‘the Marines prevailed against a determined enemy who enjoyed all the advantages of defending in an urban area’”; through “this historical revisionism, the US has launched another assault on our dead”; and what “is left is the haunting absence of family members, homes bombed into nonexistence and photographs incinerated along with the smiling faces”.

I wonder how many people know about the sanctions against Iraq—these sanctions are one of the darkest chapters in the entire history of US foreign policy. Ahmed Twaij writes in a 25 March 2022 piece: often “after the demise of political figures, their troubling histories are whitewashed in the name of respecting their memories and the feelings of their families”; the “passing of former United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Wednesday has been no exception”; “Western media responded to the news of her death with a plethora of obituaries eulogising her achievements”; President Joe Biden “proclaimed she ‘was always a force for goodness, grace, and decency—and for freedom’”; for “me as an Iraqi” the “memory of Albright will forever be tainted by the stringent sanctions she helped place on my country at a time when it was already devastated by years of war”; millions “of innocent Iraqis suffered terribly and hundreds of thousands died because of the sanctions which, in the end, achieved almost none of Washington’s policy objectives”; as “we remember Albright’s life and achievements, we must also remember those innocent Iraqi lives lost because of her policy decisions”; the “most prominent memory of Albright that I have in my mind is from an interview she gave to CBS 60 Minutes in 1996”; and in “that now-iconic interview, veteran journalist Lesley Stahl questioned Albright—then the US ambassador to the United Nations—on the catastrophic effect the rigorous US sanctions imposed after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait had on the Iraqi population”. Twaij writes:

“We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,” asked Stahl, “And, you know, is the price worth it?”

“I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright answered, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

With “this response, Albright showed that she sees innocent Iraqi children as nothing more than disposable fodder in a conflict between the US administration and the Iraqi leadership”; she “demonstrated, with no room left for any doubt, that she had no humanity—that she cannot and shall never be described as ‘a force for goodness, grace, and decency’”; “the US imposed sanctions on Iraq to punish Saddam Hussein’s regime, but it was innocent civilians, not the regime officials who suffered”; the “sanctions pushed the already struggling masses into deeper poverty, but only marginally affected the rich, widening the wealth gap in the country”; by “2003, it is estimated that nearly 1.5 million Iraqis, primarily children, had died as a direct consequence of sanctions”; “this devastating toll was hardly surprising, or unexpected”; the “sanctions, implemented in August 1990 by the UN Security Council Resolution 661, included a total financial and trade embargo”; not “only was Iraq barred from exporting oil (its main income source) on the world market for several years, but it was also prevented from importing products from abroad”; this “ban included healthcare equipment and medications, which translated into immeasurable suffering for common Iraqis, but placed no immediate pressure on Hussein’s regime”; according “to UNICEF, the UN Children’s Fund, the death rate of children below five crossed 4,000 a month due to the lack of food and basic medications caused by the sanctions—that is up to 200 babies and toddlers dying avoidable deaths a day”; several “UN officials resigned over the years in protest at this disastrous, ineffective and murderous sanctions policy”; “Albright, the ‘passionate force for freedom, democracy and human rights’, thought it was all ‘worth it’”; to “make matters worse, 13 years after the sanctions were first implemented to pressure the Iraqi regime, the US opted to invade the oil-rich country anyway under the pretence that Hussein managed to amass weapons of mass destruction despite the embargo”; the “years of suffering were for nothing—the sanctions had achieved nothing other than devastating millions of Iraqis who had no say over the actions of those ruling over them”; and “before you write or repost articles about Albright and how wonderful it is to see women pushing boundaries and breaking glass ceilings in politics, take a minute to learn what she chose to do with the power she had—how she supported the devastation and suffering of my people”.

A 1 November 2001 FAIR piece says: “Madeleine Albright’s quote, calmly asserting that U.S. policy objectives were worth the sacrifice of half a million Arab children, has been much quoted in the Arabic press”; “a Dow Jones search of mainstream news sources since September 11 turns up only one reference to the quote—in an op-ed in the Orange Country Register (9/16/01)”; this “omission is striking, given the major role that Iraq sanctions play in the ideology of archenemy Osama bin Laden”; “his recruitment video features pictures of Iraqi babies wasting away from malnutrition and lack of medicine (New York Daily News, 9/28/01)”; the “inference that Albright and the terrorists may have shared a common rationale—a belief that the deaths of thousands of innocents are a price worth paying to achieve one’s political ends—does not seem to be one that can be made in U.S. mass media”; it’s “worth noting that on 60 Minutes, Albright made no attempt to deny the figure given by Stahl—a rough rendering of the preliminary estimate in a 1995 U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report that 567,000 Iraqi children under the age of five had died as a result of the sanctions”; in “general, the response from government officials about the sanctions’ toll has been” a “barrage of equivocations, denigration of U.N. sources and implications that questioners have some ideological axe to grind (Extra!, 3-4/00)”; there “has also been an attempt to seize on the lowest possible numbers”; the “summer of 2001 saw a revival of long-discredited claims that sanctions are not to blame for Iraq’s suffering, but that Saddam Hussein bears sole responsibility—an argument put forward in a State Department report (8/99) issued shortly after the UNICEF report on the deaths of children”; with “renewed concern about biological warfare in the U.S., it’s worth noting an instance of the use of disease for military purposes that has gone almost uncovered”; “Thomas Nagy of Georgetown University unearthed a Defense Intelligence Agency document entitled ‘Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,’ which was circulated to all major allied commands one day after the Gulf War started”; it “analyzed the weaknesses of the Iraqi water treatment system, the effects of sanctions on a damaged system and the health effects of untreated water on the Iraqi populace”; mentioning “that chlorine is embargoed under the sanctions, it speculates that ‘Iraq could try convincing the United Nations or individual countries to exempt water treatment supplies from sanctions for humanitarian reasons,’ something that the United States disallowed for many years”; combined “with the fact that nearly every large water treatment plant in the country was attacked during the Gulf War, and seven out of eight dams destroyed, this suggests a deliberate targeting of the Iraqi water supply for ‘postwar leverage,’ a concept U.S. government officials admitted was part of military planning in the Gulf War (Washington Post, 6/23/91)”; subsequent “documents unearthed by Nagy (The Progressive, 8/10/01) suggest that the plan to destroy water treatment, then to restrict chlorine and other necessary water treatment supplies, was done with full knowledge of the explosion of water-borne disease that would result”; combine “this with harsh and arbitrary restrictions on medicines, the destruction of Iraq’s vaccine facilities, and the fact that, until this summer, vaccines for common infectious diseases were on the so-called ‘1051 list’ of substances in practice banned from entering Iraq”; and deliberately “creating the conditions for disease and then withholding the treatment is little different morally from deliberately introducing a disease-causing organism like anthrax, but no major U.S. paper seems to have editorialized against the U.S. engaging in biological warfare—or even run a news article reporting Nagy’s evidence that it had done so”.

And Hans C. von Sponeck writes in his 2005 book A Different Kind of War: evidence “of the seriousness of the human misery in Iraq became clear in the course of the 1990s”; pressure “mounted on the Government of Iraq and the UN Security Council to come to an agreement upon Iraq’s humanitarian needs in order to avoid a total collapse of Iraqi society”; after “years of frustrating negotiations and the concurrent worsening of Iraqi conditions of life, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in early 1996 finally agreed to work out practical arrangements for the implementation of what became known as the ‘Oil-for-Food Programme’, the humanitarian exemption for Iraq under sanctions”; “I side with those who argue that the UN Security Council failed to carry out its policies within the limits prescribed by the UN Charter”; “comprehensive economic sanctions were implemented by the United Nations without careful predetermination of needs of the civilian population”; the “accompanying UN resolutions were imprecisely formulated, and therefore open to interpretation and political exploitation”; objective “and controllable sanction implementation for the protection of the Iraqi population was thus not possible”; a “date during the 1990–2003 sanctions period at which the UN Security Council had crossed the boundary between acceptable inconvenience for an innocent population or ‘collateral damage’ and unacceptable or illegal treatment of the Iraqi population cannot be defined precisely”; “I would argue that the first step in the direction of violation of international law was taken when the UN Security Council did not respond adequately in its humanitarian policy to the warnings of UN Under-Secretary-General Athisaari and the UN Executive Delegate, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan in 1991 that a human catastrophe of extraordinary proportions was in the making”; and a “second major step towards illegality involved the manner in which the UN Security Council carried out its oversight mandate”.

The “economic sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council were not free from international protest”; the “global outcry against these undiscriminating sanctions grew stronger and stronger in the course of the thirteen years, and did affect national attitudes towards international sanctions policy, regrettably not in those countries that took the uncompromising and hard-line approach in the UN Security Council”; the “Hague Convention of 1907 (referred to also in the Geneva Convention of 1949) includes the so-called ‘Martens Clause’”, which “establishes inter alia the legal value of the public conscience”; the “international protest against economic sanctions therefore strengthens the conclusion that Iraq sanctions violated international law”; years “of sanctions and humanitarian assistance, including the Oil-for-Food Programme, ended in” (A) “a political victory for the hard-liners in the UN Security Council”, (B) “a defeat for the Security Council as an international conflict resolution instrument”, (C) “a rejection of prevailing humanitarian law”, (D) “an affront to the international public”, and (E) “the destruction of a people who had nothing to do with the political and disarmament conflict”; there “was no shortage of warning from the international community, professional organisations, governments, the UN Secretary-General, UN civil servants, church leaders and people with healthy consciences that humanitarian law and human rights were ignored year after year”; the “profound seriousness of the Iraqi tragedy is that it was not accidental nor the result of ignorance”; and the “impact of sanctions and the inadequacy of the humanitarian exemption were known and documented”.

An “Iraqi boy or girl aged six at the beginning of sanctions in 1990 was nineteen at their end in 2003”; in “contrast to their parents, these children will have had a ‘poor’ education at best”; badly “trained, sometimes even untrained teachers, limited teaching aids, outdated or no textbooks at primary and secondary-school levels, and certainly no state-of-the-art access to knowledge at tertiary level—these were the characteristics of education under sanctions”; during “my visits to different parts of Iraq I not only saw the collapsed education system, the run-down classrooms, the empty libraries, the broken-down sanitary facilities, the sewerage in schoolyards, I heard the complaints of headmasters and parents alike”; “I discussed with students and realised their fears about a tomorrow for which they knew they were not well prepared”; “Article 50 of the Hague Convention and Regulations of 1907” says “No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise shall be inflicted on the population on account of the acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly or severally responsible”; knowledge of “and adherence to the Iraqi policies that led to this immense suffering of a people invariably establishes a casual relationship and points to ‘intent’”; evidence “of intent in turn leads to evidence of conscious violation of human rights and humanitarian law on the part of governments represented in the Security Council, first and foremost those of the United States and the United Kingdom”; “the report Professor Marc Bossuyt presented to the UN Economic and Social Council in 2000 came to the grave conclusion that ‘the sanction regime against Iraq has as its clear purpose the deliberate infliction on the Iraqi people of conditions of life (lack of adequate food, medicines, etc.) calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’, i.e., that member governments of the UN Security Council violated article 2(c) of the UN Genocide Convention of 1948”; and regarding what the UN Security Council did “from the beginning of the Oil-for-Food Programme in 1996”, it’s sound to conclude that the sanctions violated—inter alia—(1) the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, (2) the Genocide Convention, and (3) the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Hypocrisy-Precluding Self-Awareness

I want to highlight the interesting point that a certain oblivious tone indicates—if you’re from a country with a foreign-policy record like Canada’s or America’s—that you’re a victim of major indoctrination. Herman and Chomsky write—I give these quotes above—that: “the U.S. mass media’s practical definitions of worth are political in the extreme and fit well the expectations of a propaganda model”; while “this differential treatment occurs on a large scale, the media, intellectuals, and public are able to remain unconscious of the fact and maintain a high moral and self-righteous tone”; and this “is evidence of an extremely effective propaganda system”.

I think that the 6 April 2022 NYT piece “Document the War Crimes in Ukraine” is—given the US record of aggression, war crimes, and atrocities—one of the least self-aware things that I’ve ever seen in the media. The piece says: in “Ukraine, there is no question that Russia is the aggressor”; for “at least 75 years, the international community has undertaken a real but incomplete effort to define wars of unprovoked aggression as crimes in and of themselves”; in “the words of the Nuremberg tribunal, ‘To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime’”—“‘it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole’”; the “entire invasion would appear to be a crime of aggression, which would presumably reach Mr. Putin”; “the world has also identified crimes that are unacceptable even in the fog of battle”; objectively “gathering and documenting evidence is a powerful way to cut through the muck and preserve the possibility that someone might someday be held accountable”; it “holds out the possibility, however slim, that someday a judge will declare the orders to fire on a village or hospital illegal and that that legal judgment might one day serve as a deterrent in the next war”; war “crime investigations are a powerful political tool that can be used to underscore the dignity of victims and the lawlessness of the invaders”; the “Russian Army’s actions give every appearance of violating these rules”; even “if the process is difficult and stretches into months and years, it is important that history be left a forensic, credible, verified and judicially processed record of the specific crimes in Ukraine”; those “responsible should be named, their actions specified, and if at all possible, the guilty should be locked away”; “it is also imperative to make sure that the horrific evidence of criminal atrocities on display in Bucha and so many other places is promptly collected while it is still there and that witnesses are questioned while their memories are still raw”; posterity “must know what really happened”; and justice “must be given a chance”. I think that the piece provides an interesting test—how many Americans can read those words and not be aware of the elephants in the room? Herman and Chomsky write—I quote this above—that the propaganda model anticipates (1) “great investigatory zeal in the search for enemy villainy and the responsibility of high officials for abuses in enemy states” and (2) “diminished enterprise in examining such matters in connection with one’s own and friendly states”. The NYT piece demonstrates (1). And the NYT has demonstrated (2)—or worse than (2)—for decades and decades.

I also want to highlight the enormous and persistent confusion where someone will point out the hypocrisy of the Ukraine-war outrage and then the interlocutor will say “Are you trying to apologize for Russian aggression?”. The point isn’t to apologize for anything that Russia has done—the point is simply to point out how shockingly and grotesquely selective our outrage is. The outrage should be expanded to include what we do—it shouldn’t be gated outrage that excludes what we do. An official enemy does something—enormous outrage follows. We do something just as bad or even worse—no outrage whatsoever follows. And people who aren’t inside the Western bubble can see how absurd our ultra-selective outrage really is—they notice how furious and disgusted we are when official enemies commit atrocities and how timid and reticent we become when our own governments do bad things. The problem is the stunning inconsistency—the problem is the stunning selectiveness.

Chomsky says in a 23 February 2023 Truthout interview: regarding the Iraq War, the US media did—at “the time of the massacre”—“report what was going on”; “I can do no better than to quote at length from the damning compilation of much of that reporting that Australian journalist John Menadue published in 2018”; that’s “NATO, for those willing to learn about the world”; “enough of this deplorable whataboutism”; orders “from on high are that it is outrageous to compare the new Hitler’s assault on Ukraine with the misguided but benign U.S.-U.K. mercy mission to help Iraqis by ousting an evil dictator—whom the U.S. enthusiastically supported right through his worst crimes, but that’s not proper fare for the intellectual class”; “however, we should be fair”; not “all agree that it’s improper to raise questions about the U.S. mission in Iraq”; recently “there was much ado about Harvard’s rejection of Human Rights Watch Director Kenneth Roth for a position at the Kennedy School, quickly rescinded under protest”; “Roth’s credentials were lauded”; Roth “even took the negative position in a debate, moderated by noted human rights advocate Samantha Power, on whether the Iraq invasion qualifies as humanitarian intervention”; “Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights, argued it did qualify”; how “lucky we are that at the peak of the intellectual world, our culture is so free and open that we even can have a debate on whether the enterprise was an exercise in humanitarianism”; and the “undisciplined might ask how we would react to an analogous event at Moscow University”.

I got the idea for this piece when I watched this Chomsky interview—that Times Radio conducted on 19 April 2023—in which the aforementioned foundations of meaningful foreign-policy discourse are strikingly absent:

In the interview, Chomsky says—this is my transcription—about the Ukraine war: “I am not seeking to excuse anything”; “I’m talking about the extreme hypocrisy of claims about how this is the worst thing that ever happened when it’s a fraction of what we do all the time”; this hypocrisy is why “the Global South is watching with ridicule as pompous Western commentators try to lecture them”; and this hypocrisy is why “they laugh in ridicule”.

We Should Take Our Atrocities Seriously

I think that it’s chilling to witness how state atrocities remain a laughing matter in America all these years after a social movement—against the Vietnam War—civilized the country enormously. A 20 May 2022 CNN piece says: speaking “from the lectern at the Southern Methodist University in Texas on Wednesday, Bush railed against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s autocratic rule and the impunity that enabled ‘the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq’”; “he quickly corrected himself as the audience erupted in laughter”; Bush added “‘I’m 75’”, “blaming, in jest, his age for the slip of the tongue”; the “video made the rounds on social media, but it did not elicit laughs from everyone”; “many quipped darkly that the blunder was the closest Iraqis would get to Bush admitting to launching the bloody 2003 invasion of Iraq under a false pretext”; “the war in Iraq wreaked death and destruction across the country”; “unlike Ukraine, where Putin’s brutal invasion was met with Western outrage and skepticism of Russia’s narrative, the Western mainstream media had few scruples about reproducing the Bush administration’s WMD allegations about Iraq, paving the way for that country’s invasion”; the “Arab world continues to suffer the consequences of that botched war to this day, and the grievances are alive and well”; and “the US has not yet issued an apology to Iraqis, and almost two decades after the invasion, some—at least those in Bush’s audience on Wednesday—are still laughing about it”.

Belén Fernández writes in a 22 May 2022 piece: everyone “has by now heard about the latest gaffe by former United States president and unconvicted war criminal George W Bush, father of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and other fantastically bloody escapades”; to correct himself, Bush said “‘I mean, of Ukraine’”; after the correction, he added “‘Iraq, too, anyway’”; he added this comment—about Iraq—“slightly under his breath”; “the effective annihilation of a nation is hardly a laughing matter”; ditto “for the reduction to a split-second ‘Iraq, too, anyway’ of hundreds of thousands of deaths, countless massacres of Iraqi civilians, the forcible displacement of millions of people, and the saturation of the country with toxic and radioactive munitions that continue to cause congenital birth defects, cancer, and all manner of other maladies nearly two decades after the launch of the ‘wholly unjustified and brutal invasion’”; “this is not the first time Bush has unintentionally said something deeply revealing about his own belligerence”; nor “is it the first time that he has joked about the whole premise of the Iraq war”; in 2010 then-President Obama joked about predator drones; never “mind that US military drones were then, as now, notoriously associated with the indiscriminate killing of civilians in various foreign lands”; in “July 2006, during the G8 conference in none other than Russia, an unattended microphone captured the banter between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, his faithful accomplice in the quest to obliterate Iraq”; it “was less than a week into the latest effort by Israel—another imperial accomplice—to obliterate Lebanon via a 34-day bombing campaign that ultimately killed some 1,200 people, mainly civilians”; Bush said “‘Yo, Blair’”; “the pair had a good laugh over the important matter of a sweater Blair had gifted Bush”; the “duo then proceeded to discuss the bloodshed in Lebanon, which in Bush’s view could be resolved not by getting Israel to stop massacring people but rather by getting Lebanon’s Hezbollah organisation—which, logically, was fighting back—‘to stop doing this s***’”; and regarding “the 2022 Iraq-I-mean-Ukraine gaffe at the George W Bush Presidential Centre in Dallas”, the “‘wholly unjustified and brutal’ decimation of a country” was “condensed into a single imperial wisecrack”.

And Nathan J. Robinson writes in his 6 April 2022 Current Affairs piece: if “you are a person who is sensitive to the pain of others, and who does not discriminate morally between Americans and non-Americans, the U.S. can seem a downright perverse place”; part “of the problem is that the U.S. is geographically isolated from most countries that fall on the receiving end of its foreign policy decisions, a kind of cocoon, where most people have never had to see the aftermath of a city being bombed”; despite “the undercurrent of violence in American life domestically—the police killings, the prisons, the shootings—the country has not had its cities ravaged by war like so many others”; even “when foreign policy consequences are covered by the media, pictures on the news are carefully censored so as not to be too disturbing, and Central Americans, Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, etc. become a distant abstract Other whose pain doesn’t register”; in “the press, there is a straightforward hierarchy of lives, in which European and U.S. victims of crimes and natural disasters are given far more attention than African, Asian, and Latin American lives”; “U.S. policy and drug consumption has fueled monstrous violence just over the border in Mexico, but things that happen on the other side of the border might as well be happening on a distant planet for all the attention they get in the U.S. press”; “if you are not a member of the group on the receiving end of particular acts of subjugation and oppression, it can very difficult” to “see through the stories that are told to justify that subjugation and oppression, or to find the ugly facts that are kept out of the mainstream”; “Americans still do not really understand the truth about what our country did in Vietnam and Central America, let alone Afghanistan and Iraq, just as Brits generally still think their empire was something noble to be proud of”; most “of us in our everyday lives don’t run into people like, say, the maimed victims of the U.S. bombing campaign in Laos, so nobody thinks about it”; we “need to start noticing the ‘normalization’ of the atrocious”; “Chomsky has cited a Vietnam-war era instance in which a children’s museum offered an exhibit where patrons could simulate attacking a Vietnamese village”; this “insane simulation of psychopathic destruction was installed by people who probably had no qualms about it—normal Americans who loved their families and believed in Freedom”; when “I talked recently to” Chomsky, he recounted “a time he and his wife went to see a movie in Boston in the early 1950s”; the “film was about the Hiroshima bombing, and what made the experience so disturbing for Chomsky, to the point where he recounts it with a shudder even today at 93 years old, is that he realized when he got to the cinema that the film was being presented as an exploitation film, playing in a theater that usually showed porn”; there’s “a whole genre of lurid real-world footage of atrocities presented for entertainment”; and as “footage of Japanese civilians with their skin peeling off played on the screen, the audience of Americans was laughing hysterically as if they were watching Charlie Chaplin or the Marx Brothers”.

I hope that we will—regarding foreign policy—overcome the disturbing opposition to the basic foundations of a healthy, serious, and meaningful discourse. Our security depends on that transformation—this isn’t just about integrity, morality, and our victims’ fate.

I find psychiatry to be one of the most fascinating things in the entire world—I’ll use this piece to share some thoughts about it. Keep in mind—as you read this piece—that I’m a complete layperson. You should definitely take everything I say—about psychiatry—with a grain of salt, since I’m about as far from an expert as you can get.

Trajectories and Outcomes

I’ve had a whole rainbow of psychiatric issues throughout my life—I’ve been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, OCD, ADHD, and autism. I think that ADHD has—throughout my life—been my main problem. I always had a lot of skepticism about the autism diagnosis—for example, ADHD and autism seems to me to be conceptually inseparable in the domain of social difficulties. Edmund Sonuga-Barke and others write in an 11 October 2022 article: “overlap and ambiguity is common across the symptoms that define different diagnostic categories”; this “creates problems, especially in research that relies on questionnaires or highly structured interviews, which may incorrectly assign symptoms”; “there may also be shared neuropsychological mediators” between distinct diagnostic categories; executive-function deficiencies—“common in ADHD”—are also seen in autism, depression, and anxiety; and these deficiencies seem to drive ADHD’s co-occurrence with depression particularly and also autism.

I took guanfacine in 2018—it was a major event in my life, since the treatment effect was so dramatic. I could function—it was life-changing. I could see—and hold—things in my mind, including things that I’d never visualized in my life and that I hadn’t witnessed since childhood. My Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire score went way up. And I went—socially and work-wise—from being completely dysfunctional to being effortlessly competent. There’s tons more to say about my 2018 experience—it was quite something for me to go through that mental rearrangement. I lost the treatment effect after only a week, but regained it—again on guanfacine—five years later in 2023. I don’t know what level of consistent treatment effect I’ll be able to get from guanfacine, but I’m hopeful about the situation.

I’m sure that it’s common for people to have some negative emotions when a psychiatric medication works extremely effectively—how can one not worry about losing the treatment effect? What about the emotions that arise when you imagine how radically different your life trajectory and life outcomes would’ve been had you been diagnosed and treated at the age of 10 instead of at the age of 20, 30, or 40? Sandra Kooij writes in the 2022 book Adult ADHD: the “diagnosis of ADHD has a lot of impacts”; for “some patients, the diagnosis is a huge relief”; the “problems appear to be related to a disorder that they have had all their lives”; at “that moment, or a little later, sadness and anger arise over everything that has gone wrong in their lives”; the “process of diagnosis causes a patient to examine his or her life retrospectively”; this “can be confronting, as patients have often had to deal with failure”; diagnosis “and treatment lead to a better perspective, so that patients get an overview of the repetitive nature of their problems”; the “pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place”; it “takes time to process things and give them a place”; “this also applies to acceptance”; one’s “whole life may be viewed from a different perspective because of the diagnosis”; for “many patients, everything changes at the same time”; and it’s “important to make it clear to a patient that the acceptance process can be accompanied by strong feelings (sadness, anger, shame, fear, perhaps relief) and that these reactions are normal”.

The State of the Broader System

I see psychiatry through my keyhole—I have no idea whether my experience reflects the actual state of the broader system. I want to know how often ADHD is properly diagnosed and treated—to what extent does proper diagnosis and treatment happen for the general public as opposed to just for wealthy people? It seems to me that it’s essential that an ADHD sufferer sees a psychiatrist who really, really, really: (1) knows what they’re doing in terms of both diagnosis and treatment; (2) understands the latest literature on diagnosis and treatment; (3) knows how to approach a situation where a patient has been a “moving target” symptomatically; (4) knows how to avoid various harmful—or even tragic—blunders; and (5) approaches psychiatry with humility. Regarding (5), I’ve witnessed various times a certain rigid, arrogant, and dogmatic approach in psychiatry—I can imagine that that approach is the scourge of medicine in general.

A 2022 Pharmacology and Therapeutics article says: ADHD’s “prevalence lies at approximately 5% in children and adolescents and at approximately 2.5% in adults”; the “disorder follows a multifactorial etiology and shows a high heritability”; patients “show a high interindividual and intraindividual variability of symptoms, with executive deficits in several cognitive domains”; “ADHD is associated with high rates of psychiatric comorbidities”; regarding ADHD, “insufficient treatment is linked to adverse long-term outcomes”; patients “with ADHD show executive deficits in several cognitive domains, e.g., visuospatial and verbal working memory, inhibitory control, vigilance, planning and reward regulation”; ADHD symptoms “show a high variability on the interindividual and intraindividual level and need to be viewed within the context of a chronic neurodevelopmental disorder”; “making a diagnosis is challenging”; the “diagnostic process is aided by assessment tools (rating scales, semi-/structured interviews) and guided by classification systems (e.g., DSM-5 or ICD-10), but relies mainly on the classical skills of psychiatrists”, namely “a careful and comprehensive clinical interview and behavioral observation of the patient and respective family members/caregivers as well as an observation of their interactions”; since “(insufficiently treated) ADHD negatively affects many long-term outcomes (e.g., academic achievement, employment status, traffic accidents), timely and adequate treatment is crucial”; ADHD causes “substantial functional impairment”; and ADHD “leads to a serious societal burden”. I think that it’s important to highlight a painful truth regarding ADHD—proper treatment at age 10 will yield very different life outcomes from proper treatment at age 30. It’s a race to diagnose and treat the ADHD sufferer as soon as possible, since the goal is to minimize the avoidable damage—I just quoted an article that says (1) “timely and adequate treatment is crucial” and (2) “insufficient treatment is linked to adverse long-term outcomes”.

Optimization and Effectiveness

I have no idea—in terms of statistics—what psychiatrists actually do when they treat ADHD. At what frequency do psychiatrists actually follow the 2021 guide “A clinician’s guide for navigating the world of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder medications”? The guide talks about layering doses, combining formulations, and combining molecules. And it says: the “rule of thumb is to titrate until there are no breakthrough symptoms or residual functional difficulties or one encounters a dose-limiting side effect or has reached the maximum dose”; one “should then consider trying an alternative molecule” that “may address breakthrough symptoms at the beginning, the middle, or the end of the day”; a “patient can be “partially better but not well”; clinicians and patients “may be tempted to be satisfied with 30% improvement, even though the evidence is clear that such minimal improvement almost inevitably means continued functional impairment”; for “most patients, further improvement is possible”; and long-term “trials demonstrate that nearly 75% to 80% of patients can achieve >50% symptom reduction and achieve symptomatic remission”. I wonder (A) how many ADHD sufferers take medication but are far from optimization, (B) how clinical trials ensure that everyone in the trial is genuinely and truly optimized, and (C) whether optimizing ADHD medication actually yields stunningly good outcomes at a stunningly high rate.

The guide says “no breakthrough symptoms or residual functional difficulties”. And “achieve >50% symptom reduction and achieve symptomatic remission”. And “normalized”. I would find it very informative to see interviews with—and documentaries about—ADHD patients who illustrate what different levels of symptom reduction might look like. And who illustrate what “symptomatic remission”—and lack of “residual functional difficulties”—might look like. ADHD medications have been in use for a long time—how many people are out there whose stories might help to illustrate these medications’ effectiveness? My own story might turn out to be a success story—in a way—if I can figure out my medications. It’s 2023, though—there should be 1000s and 1000s of these stories at this point, so it’s more than a little bit strange that the stories aren’t abundant and prominent.

Big, Active, Lively!

I really wish that there were some big, active, and lively forum where experts would answer psychiatry questions—it feels lonely, demoralizing, and bleak when no such forum exists. I’ll share some of my burning questions—I’ve already asked a couple above—about psychiatry.

First, suppose you get a great short-lived effect from a medication like escitalopram. How often will that effect ever return—and “stick”—if you raise the dose enough? Will pursuing that great effect inevitably lead to more tolerance and disappointment?

Second, how often do patients have a “breakthrough” with one medication that then causes their other medications to work differently? Suppose a patient has totally failed guanfacine and Adderall XR. They increase their dose of escitalopram, feel a lot better right away, find that the guanfacine suddenly works extremely well, and find that the Adderall XR—thanks to what the guanfacine is now doing—suddenly works extremely well too. It’s like one medication “lays a foundation” for another one that previously didn’t work whatsoever. And can’t this “breakthrough” phenomenon lead to a situation where the patient has to titrate the same medications—including ones that the patient isn’t even taking any longer—over and over? It’s like this phenomenon yields a “circular” process instead of a “linear” one.

Third, I always want to read all about the patients who are—for a given medication—in the 99th percentile in terms of how good their response is. Where’s the literature on these special responders, though? I don’t just want to see how they performed on one or another test—I want to read their descriptions of what it felt like to respond in the way that they did, what their life was previously like, and what their life is like post-response. I always want to start out my investigation of a drug with the question “What can this drug do at its very best?”. But you never seem to hear about these 99th-percentile people.

Fourth, where’s the literature on the issue of patients who need—and can tolerate—high doses of medications? I personally regard this as a very disturbing problem—is it possible to estimate how big this group of patients is? Consider that patients have gone their whole lives—maybe even committed suicide—without ever discovering that they just needed an unusually high dose of one or more medications in order to get a life-changing treatment effect. Or have been—without knowing it—a single dose increase away from discovering that a life-changing treatment effect was possible with a given medication. It’s remarkable to think about the stakes, the serendipity, and the injustice. I can’t say how accurate Scott Alexander’s 31 March 2021 piece is—there’s criticism in the comment section—but I highly recommend the piece, which makes one think about how the FDA determines what a safe maximum dose of a given drug is. We know that some patients need high doses of medications—can’t we run careful tests in order to ensure the patient’s safety as we go above a given threshold? We know that there will—with every drug out there—be small numbers who respond to very tiny doses as well as small numbers who need very large doses. Would it be helpful to look more closely at the physiologic effects on the individual and not worry so much about how many milligrams it took to get there?

Fifth, how effective is nefazodone really? Has it really been an incredible and life-changing medication for people with treatment-resistant mental illness, how interesting is its mechanism of action, and could future drugs be designed to work in a similar way? And does Scott Alexander make a strong point in his 25 April 2015 piece when he writes that “drugs with rare but spectacular side effects get consistently underprescribed relative to drugs with common but merely annoying side effects, or drugs that have more side effects but manage to hide them better”? I didn’t fact-check the piece—I found the argument interesting, though. He writes: “SSRIs, the class which includes most currently used antidepressants, are very safe in the traditional sense of ‘unlikely to kill you’”; on “the other hand, there’s increasing awareness of very common side effects which, while not disabling, can be pretty unpleasant”; about “50% of users report decreased sexual abilities, sometimes to the point of total loss of libido or anorgasmia”; “something like 25% of users experience ‘emotional blunting’ and the loss of ability to feel feelings normally”; nefazodone “is an equally good (and maybe better) antidepressant that does not have these side effects”; on “the other hand, every year, one in every 300,000 people using nefazodone will go into ‘fulminant hepatic failure’, which means their liver suddenly and spectacularly stops working and they need a liver transplant or else they die”; “nefazodone is practically never used”; it’s “actually illegal in most countries”; there “are something like thirty million people in the US on antidepressants”; if “we put them all on nefazodone, that’s about a hundred cooked livers per year”; if “we put them all on SSRIs, at least ten million of them will get sexual side effects, plus some emotional blunting”; the “same doctors who would never dare give nefazodone, consider Seroquel a perfectly acceptable second-line treatment for depression”; “if my calculations are right, low-dose Seroquel causes an extra cardiac death once per every 20,000 patient-years”; that’s “ten times as often as nefazodone causes an extra liver death”; when “treatment with an SSRI fails, nefazodone and Seroquel naively seem to be equally good alternatives”; “nefazodone has a death rate of 1/300,000 patient years, and Seroquel 1/20,000 patient years”; “I conclude either doctors are terrible at thinking about risk, or else maybe a little too good at thinking about risk”; doctors “want to do what’s best for their patients”; “they also want to do what’s best for themselves, which means not getting sued”; no “one has ever sued their doctor because they got a sexual side effect from SSRIs, but if somebody dies because they’re the lucky 1/300,000 who gets liver failure from nefazodone, you can bet their family’s going to sue”; “it’s a matter of comparing zero percent chance of lawsuit with non-zero percent chance of lawsuit”; “if a doctor has 100 patients at a time on antidepressants, and works for 30 years, then if she uses” nefazodone “as her go-to antidepressant, she’s risking a 1% chance of getting the liver failure side effect once in her career”; that’s “small, but since a single bad lawsuit can bankrupt a doctor, it’s worth taking seriously”; a nefazodone lawsuit “would be a tough lawsuit to fight”; when “someone dies of nefazodone toxicity, everyone knows”; and “the same facet of nefazodone that makes it exciting for the media makes it exciting for lawsuits”. I want to highlight the fact that people will say that nefazodone is the sole medication that allows them to be free from mental illness—consider the stakes and the injustice. How often does liver damage ever occur after special protocols are put in place? Is there no way to be vigilant enough so that no liver damage ever occurs?

Sixth, have researchers made any effort to respond—both at a basic level and in a thorough and detailed way—to the various harsh criticisms of psychiatry? I have in mind a 1 April 2019 New Yorker piece, then a 2023 Deutsche Welle documentary about antidepressants, then a 2020 Psychiatric Times conversation, and then a 2020 article that asks whether “antidepressant drugs worsen the conditions they are supposed to treat”. I get the impression that researchers don’t want to engage with these criticisms, but that expert silence could—if it’s the case that specious criticisms are getting a lot of traction with people—result in significant damage to both individuals and society. I myself would love to know what the basic—as well as the thorough and detailed—response would be to the various criticisms. Lee McIntyre writes in a 2021 article: “in a pathbreaking new study by Philipp Schmid and Cornelia Betsch, we now have the first experimental evidence that it is possible to break the grip of resistance on scientific topics”; in “their study, Schmid and Betsch ran six online experiments with 1,773 subjects in the United States and Germany on topics such as climate change and vaccine denial”; “what they found was astonishing”; fighting “back against science deniers not only had a positive effect on changing their beliefs, but also the effect was greatest for subgroups who had the most conservative ideologies”; in “the course of their work, Schmid and Betsch tested four possible ways of responding to subjects who had been exposed to scientific misinformation”, namely “no response, ‘topic’ rebuttal, ‘technique’ rebuttal, and both kinds of rebuttal”; topic “rebuttal consisted of providing subjects with factual information to correct the bogus content of a message they had just heard”; “‘technique’ rebuttal” borrows “a page from the finding that virtually all science deniers engage in a common form of reasoning”; this “consisted of pointing out the dangerous manipulative techniques—cherry-picking, reliance on conspiracy theories, use of fake experts, illogical reasoning, or use of impossible standards—to mitigate the impact of the science denier’s misinformation”; the “clear result of this study was that providing no response to misinformation was the worst thing one could do”; “researchers found that it was possible to mitigate the effects of scientific misinformation, either by using content rebuttal or technique rebuttal, and indeed that both were equally effective”; there “was, however, no additive advantage when both content and technique rebuttal were used together”, so one “does not have to be an expert on the content of science to push back against science denial”; “in light of both the experimental and anecdotal evidence, perhaps it is worthwhile to try to convince scientists that they should become more engaged in the effort to make science deniers change their beliefs”; regarding engagement with science denial, the “experimental evidence has shown that it can have an effect and indeed that choosing not to intervene leads to the worst possible outcome”; “Schmid and Betsch’s work has shown that there is more than one way to fight against science denial”; there’s “a crucial role for scientists to play in these efforts”, though; “‘technique rebuttal’ can be quite effective”, but there’s “an equal role for ‘topic rebuttal,’ where scientists can bring their expert knowledge to the forefront and explain not just the findings but also the process of science”; and if “one will not engage with people who are ignorant or willfully ignorant, then misinformation will rule the day”.

I think there needs to be an online place where people can actually get high-quality expert answers to their questions about (1) psychiatry in general and (2) their own treatment. The rift between the experts and the public couldn’t expand any wider—it’s disheartening, tragic, and unnecessary.

Turning on the Lights

I should add a huge question to the ones that I’ve asked so far in this piece—how can we create a situation where we see a steady flow of life-changing drugs that dramatically reduce the burden of ADHD, depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses? I suppose that the two big issues are (A) where the money should come from and (B) where the funds should be directed.

I was—regarding (A)—disturbed to read a 2013 International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology article that says: in “the past few years, several high profile pharmaceutical companies, based worldwide, have decided to shut down major research activities within the neuroscience area”; the “withdrawal of pharmaceutical companies from neuroscience research is a serious concern to the whole community, including researchers, clinicians, patients and scientific organizations”; and “major concerns arise from the knowledge that leading world pharmaceutical companies are not as much focused on these areas as in previous years, dashing the hopes of millions of patients for new and more effective drugs in the near future”. Dean Baker writes in his 2015 book Rigged: “patent-supported research is particularly ill-suited for the pharmaceutical sector, as well as for the medical equipment sector”; it’s “likely that a system of directly funded research, paid for by the government, would be considerably more efficient for the development of new drugs and medical equipment”; there’s “no way to determine in advance the effectiveness of an alternative funding mechanism to replace patents and copyrights”; there “are good reasons for believing that an alternative would be at least as effective, especially in the case of patents”; and the “prospect of having fully open research, where the incentive is for dissemination rather than secrecy, would almost certainly lead to more rapid progress than the current patent system”. And Steven Johnson writes in his 2010 book Where Good Ideas Come From: the “premise that innovation prospers when ideas can serendipitously connect and recombine with other ideas, when hunches can stumble across other hunches that successfully fill in their blanks, may seem like an obvious truth, but the strange fact is that a great deal of the past two centuries of legal and folk wisdom about innovation has pursued the exact opposite argument, building walls between ideas, keeping them from the kind of random, serendipitous connections that exist in dreams and in the organic compounds of life”; ironically, “those walls have been erected with the explicit aim of encouraging innovation”; the walls have many names—“patents, digital rights management, intellectual property, trade secrets, proprietary technology”; the “problem with these closed environments is that they inhibit serendipity and reduce the overall network of minds that can potentially engage with a problem”; traditionally, “organizations that have a strong demand for innovation have created a kind of closed playpen for hunches”; ironically, “R&D labs have historically functioned as a kind of idea lockbox”; “the hunches evolving in those labs tended to be the most heavily guarded secrets in the entire organization”; allowing “these early product ideas to circulate more widely would allow rival firms to copy or exploit them”; that secrecy “comes with great cost”; and protecting “ideas from copycats and competitors also protects them from other ideas that might improve them, might transform them from hints and hunches to true innovations”. I think that innovation will—regarding drugs for mental illness—probably accelerate significantly if research becomes open and freely shared.

I wonder—regarding (B)—how much debate there is over which hurdles are slowing drug innovation the most. The 2013 International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology article says: the “lack of translation from animal models to clinical efficacy makes it difficult to generate human models of psychiatric disease that provide a good concept for expensive clinical trials in patients”; it’s “often observed that molecules work very well in animal models, but when transferring to patients, they do not”; “most of the model tests lack the precision and sophistication required to model complex behavioural disorders such as, for example, depression and schizophrenia”; and “what is needed is to develop animal models that more closely mimic specific dimensions of psychopathology”. And a 2023 Molecular Psychiatry article says: “we argue that there is a need for a paradigm shift in the methodologies used to measure animal behavior in laboratory settings”; the “stagnation in developing remedies for mental illnesses seems puzzling in light of the outstanding technological advances that have been made in brain research over the last three decades”; “for translational psychiatry, the gap between bench and bedside has remained as wide and deep as a few decades ago”; there’s “a general understanding that this gap is partly due to a limited relevance of the behavioral assays in animals to the human disease”; the “primary unmet objective in basic psychiatric research is to translate biological measures and findings in the laboratory to the symptom-based categorization as defined in the existing disease-diagnostic systems”; the “Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative addresses this challenge with a framework that provides a taxonomy for mental illnesses that is based on genetics, behavioral neuroscience, and psychological measures”; and “we believe that the evolving RDoC framework together with utilization of various rodent species models in a dynamic but controlled semi-natural setup could be the Rosetta Stone for revealing neuronal mechanisms of emotions in humans”.

A 2019 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences piece says: all “of science depends on basic research, research that has the goal of understanding a system rather than the goal of fixing or building it”; anyone “who has close experience with a brain disease knows that current medicine is mostly groping in the dark with these disorders”; and it’s “the job of basic science to turn on some lights”. I find it absolutely fascinating to read what Amy Arnsten has to say about the illuminations that might give us therapeutic breakthroughs—she has an excellent 2015 talk titled “Prefrontal Cortical Circuits in Schizophrenia”:

She comments in the Q&A section: “I’ve been very sad to see how many drug companies have given up on neuroscience because it’s so complicated.”

Arnsten writes in a 2022 Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews article: our “experience of ourselves, and the world around us, can be altered by changes in our brains caused by exposure to uncontrollable stress”; under “healthy conditions we are able to process events with appropriate ‘top-down’ regulation and optimism governed by the prefrontal cortex (PFC)”; “with exposure to uncontrollable stress, the orchestration of brain circuit connections shifts such that we can lose perspective and experience our universe through an ‘Aversive Lens’”; this “can be seen most clearly in patients with major depressive disorder, who focus on negative events, even experiencing a neutral stimulus as sad”; these patients “lose pleasure in rewarding events, a condition known as anhedonia”; recent “research in nonhuman primates has begun to illuminate the neural bases for this phenomenon, where activation of Brodmann Area 25 (BA25), a major output of the PFC to the subcortical structures that mediate emotion, increases responses to threat and induces anhedonia”; these “data are consistent with the over-activation of BA25 in patients with depression, and the relief of symptoms when BA25 activity is normalized”; research in monkeys has discovered (1) “the PFC circuits that normally provide ‘top-down’ regulation of BA25” and (2) “how these circuits are weakened by stress exposure”; we “have learned a great deal about the neural circuits involved in PFC top-down regulation of emotion and their vulnerability to stress exposure”; we’re “beginning to understand how BA25 can activate visceral, somatic and emotional responses through its connections to subcortical structures”; and we “still have insufficient knowledge”—regarding “the molecular regulation of these circuits”—relative to what’s “needed to develop superior treatments”.

Roshan Cools and Amy Arnsten write in a 2021 Neuropsychopharmacology article: the “primate prefrontal cortex (PFC) subserves our highest order cognitive operations”; it “generates our mental arena, and subserves our highest order functions, such as abstract reasoning, working memory, high-order decision making, planning, and organization, providing top-down control of attention, actions, and emotions”; “understanding neuromodulatory influences on PFC circuits can help to explain why these circuits are so often impaired in mental disorders”; the PFC “is tremendously dependent on a precise neurochemical environment for proper functioning”; depletion “of noradrenaline and dopamine, or of acetylcholine from the dorsolateral PFC (dlPFC), is as devastating as removing the cortex itself”; “serotonergic influences are also critical to proper functioning of the orbital and medial PFC”; most “neuromodulators have a narrow inverted U dose response”; studies “in monkeys have revealed the molecular signaling mechanisms that govern the generation and modulation of mental representations by the dlPFC, allowing dynamic regulation of network strength, a process that requires tight regulation to prevent toxic actions”; research “in monkeys has already led to new treatments for cognitive disorders in humans, encouraging future research in this important field”; “there are large arenas where little or no research has been performed in this field”; there “are many outstanding questions in this field”; and “the power of neuromodulatory influences on the primate PFC” means that we must understand the relevant mechanisms if we want to (A) know what causes many disorders and (B) have “superior therapeutics”.

A 2019 ACS Chemical Neuroscience article says: the “prefrontal cortex is essential for both executive function and emotional regulation”; there’s increasing recognition of (1) the “interrelationships among these behavioral domains” and (2) these domains’ “sensitivity to serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, 5-HT)”; prefrontal “cortex receives serotonergic inputs from the dorsal and median raphe nuclei and is modulated by multiple subtypes of 5-HT receptor across its layers and cell types”; extremes “of serotonergic modulation alter mood regulation in vulnerable individuals”; “the impact of serotonin under more typical physiological parameters remains unclear”; optogenetic “and chemogenetic manipulations of dorsal raphe 5-HT neurons reveal that serotonin has a greater impact on executive function than previously appreciated”; domains “that appear sensitive to fluctuations in 5-HT neuronal excitability include patience and cognitive flexibility”; a “growing literature suggests 5-HT modulation of these prefrontal circuits is unexpectedly flexible to alteration during development by genetic, behavioral, environmental or pharmacological manipulations, with lasting repercussions for cognition and emotional regulation”; here “we review the cellular and circuit mechanisms of prefrontal serotonergic modulation, investigate recent research into the cognitive consequences of the serotonergic system, and probe the lasting consequences of developmental perturbations”; early “stress significantly increases individual vulnerability to adult psychopathology”; early “life stress has been shown to alter prefrontal 5-HT receptors”; “differential regulation of 5-HT receptor expression during development tightly controls the activity and the establishment of the local circuitry within the prefrontal cortex”; disruption “to the 5-HT system at a critical time window during development leads to alterations in serotonergic modulation of prefrontal cortex and results in impaired cognitive and emotional behaviors in adulthood”; and “exposure to stress during development affects expression and function of 5-HT receptors in the prefrontal cortex and is likely to alter cognitive behavior that depends on serotonergic modulation of prefrontal cortex”.

A 2022 Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews article says: the “regulation of energy metabolism represents a major challenge for the nervous system”; it’s “estimated that the energetic needs of the adult human brain account for approximately 20% of the body’s oxygen consumption, although the brain represents just 2% of total body’s weight”, while “the metabolic cost in the developing brain is even higher”; this “is mainly due to the complexity of neuronal morphology and the highly energetic processes required to sustain and regulate neuronal transmission and synaptic plasticity”; stress “and higher cognitive functions underlying complex behaviours further increase cerebral energy demands in terms of glucose oxidation and oxygen consumption”; overall, “the energetic cost of brain activities must be efficiently covered by mitochondrial respiration”; it’s “not surprising that even small alterations in metabolic processes may severely affect neural functions, thereby increasing vulnerability for brain disorders”; cellular “energy metabolism is regulated mainly by mitochondria which are the cells’ powerhouse for producing ATP but also acknowledged as key regulators of a variety of processes, including reactive oxygen species (ROS) production, calcium buffering, apoptosis, lipid biogenesis and hormones biosynthesis”; over “the last decade, emerging studies have highlighted a bidirectional interplay between mitochondria bioenergetics and psychosocial stress”; chronic “stress has been considered as a key factor for the development and progression of many neuropsychiatric conditions, including anxiety and mood disorders, currently affecting millions of individuals worldwide”; these “mental disorders represent a major personal, societal, and economic burden”; “there is an urgent need to understand the biological mechanisms underlying these conditions and find novel therapeutic strategies”; strong “evidence has linked the role of mitochondria and oxidative stress to anxiety and depression”; regarding “generalized anxiety disorder, the role of mitochondria appears to be more complex”; “results indicate a complex relationship between mitochondrial activity and stress-related psychopathologies, although the causality of mitochondrial functions in the generation of these diseases still needs to be shown”; in addition to the “role in stress and anxiety, mitochondrial dysfunctions may also contribute to the etiopathogenesis of other major mental conditions, such as mood disorders and schizophrenia”; in “support of a possible mitochondrial dysfunction hypothesis of bipolar disorder, Kasahara et al. observed altered day-night rhythms in a transgenic mouse line for a human mitochondrial disorder, called chronic progressive external ophthalmoplegia”; this “mouse line carried a neuron-specific accumulation of partially deleted” mitochondrial DNA “that caused a behavioural phenotype resembling bipolar disorder”; over “the last years, increasing data have suggested a mitochondrial aetiology of autism spectrum disorder (ASD)”; it’s “reasonable to hypothesise that stress-induced changes in mitochondrial functions could effectively alter neuronal transmission and synaptic plasticity”; stressful “experiences such as reductions in maternal care, changes in diet and exposure to aversive stimuli” are “known to lead to long lasting epigenetic modifications in the degree of DNA methylation/demethylation or histone post-translational modifications such as acetylation”; evidence suggests two things; first, “that alterations in mitochondrial function do impact” cognitive processes; second, that these alternations may be causatively “linked to the onset of psychiatric disorders”; and understanding “the connections between mitochondria and cognitive functions could pave the way to” next-generation approaches that target “mitochondria to alleviate neuropsychiatric conditions”.

A 2020 Annual Review of Clinical Psychology article says: convincing “evidence across various fields of inquiry has reliably demonstrated over the past two decades that adversity in childhood is associated with increased risk for both psychopathology and chronic health problems throughout the lifespan”; the “psychological and biophysical sequelae of stress exposure originate in evolutionary mechanisms designed to enable an individual to respond to an environmental threat”; “acutely these may be adaptive”; “in excess, these processes produce broad systemic physiologic and psychological disruption”; the “mitochondrion, well-known for its role in cellular energy production, represents a critical nexus of biological, psychological, and social factors that underlie the mechanisms and consequences of the stress response”; psychosocial “factors impact biological processes through physiological systems that are highly integrated with mitochondrial functioning”; mitochondria “are subcellular organelles with broad functions in energetics, cell-signaling, and hormone production”; mitochondrial “structure and function are exquisitely responsive to the environment and serve as both a target and mediator of the stress response”; there’s “a profound impact of mitochondrial dysfunction on psychological processes, with increasing evidence demonstrating associations of stress-related mitochondrial dysfunction and psychopathology”; “findings indicate that mitochondria may play a critical role in neuronal integrity and synaptic transmission”; “mitochondria may provide the biological link between psychosocial stress and psychiatric outcomes”; accumulating “evidence from animal models and recent human studies has identified mitochondria as a critical intersection point for psychosocial factors and stress physiology”; “many questions remain” despite “improved understanding of the wide-ranging roles for this organelle in regulating key stress-related processes”; the “mechanisms that underlie these processes are highly complex”; “the relationship between stress, mitochondria, and psychiatric disorders is non-linear, with bidirectional interaction among multiple interwoven physiological systems”; allostasis “is a complex collection of physiological functions, which allows an organism to adapt and maintain stability in a dynamic environment”; in excess, allostatic “processes are overextended, leading to maladaptive, pathological functioning”; there’s “emerging evidence indicating that chronic stress generates maladaptive alterations in mitochondria, which contribute to allostatic processes, ultimately promoting aging and disease”; research “provides a foundation for the opportunity to expand our understanding of risk and resilience and identify therapeutic interventions targeting these biological mechanisms”; further “studies are needed that seek to elucidate how mitochondria contribute to neuronal circuits”; and continued “efforts across relevant fields should be focused on translating this emerging area of research into clinical applications”.

Amy Arnsten, Min Wang, and Constantinos Paspalas write in a 2012 Neuron article: the “highly evolved neuronal networks of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) subserve working memory, our ‘mental sketch pad,’ by representing information in the absence of sensory stimulation”; the “dlPFC expands greatly over evolution, with no exact counterpart in rodents, and an enormous extension from nonhuman to human primates”; comparisons “of dendritic complexity in human versus animal cortices have shown that the basal dendrites of dlPFC deep layer III pyramidal cells are the ones most increased in primate evolution, with increases in both dendritic complexity and the number of spines”; the “dlPFC representational machinery interacts extensively with posterior cortices, providing top-down regulation, for example, to suppress irrelevant operations or enhance the processing and storage of a nonsalient but relevant stimulus and to reactivate long-term memories onto the mental sketch pad as a key part of memory retrieval and recall”; the “representational properties of the dlPFC arise from extensive neural connections that have greatly expanded in human evolution”; these “circuits engage in an ever-changing, intricate pattern of network activation that underlies the contents of thought and provides top-down regulation of attention, action, and emotion”; multiple “neuromodulatory arousal systems project to the dlPFC, and we are now learning that neuromodulation plays an essential role in shaping the contents of our ‘mental sketch pad,’ thus coordinating arousal state with cognitive state”; “physiological research has shown that neuromodulators can rapidly alter the strength of dlPFC network firing on a timescale of seconds, through powerful influences on the open states of ion channels residing near network synapses, a process called dynamic network connectivity (DNC)”; this “work has shown that the highly evolved circuits of dlPFC are often modulated in a fundamentally different manner than are sensory/motor or subcortical circuits, providing great flexibility in the pattern and strength of network connections”; these “neuromodulatory processes allow moment-by-moment changes in synaptic strength without alterations in underlying architecture and can bring circuits ‘on-line’ or ‘off-line’ based on arousal state, thus coordinating the neural systems in control of behavior, thought, and emotion”; “this extraordinary flexibility also confers great vulnerability”; “errors in this process likely contribute to cognitive deficits in disorders”; “genetic and environmental insults to DNC contribute to cognitive deficits in mental illness and in advancing age”; and understanding “and respecting these actions will be key for the development of effective treatments for higher cognitive disorders in humans”.

Data “indicate that there are ionic mechanisms that can cause rapid losses of dlPFC network excitation while maintaining the architectural integrity of the immensely complex networks needed for mental representation”; “there can be a momentary weakness in dlPFC function (e.g., a potential stressor that takes dlPFC ‘off-line’ and switches control of behavior to more habitual, subcortical mechanisms), quickly followed by a return to more thoughtful, top-down dlPFC regulation when safety is assured”; the “recurrent excitatory working memory microcircuits in deep layer III of dlPFC interconnect on dendritic spines”; these “spines are predominately long and thin”; increases “in calcium-cAMP signaling open ion channels in” these spines; opening these ion channels gates network connections; generalized “increases in calcium-cAMP signaling during fatigue or stress disengage dlPFC recurrent circuits, reduce firing and impair top-down cognition”; inhibition “of calcium-cAMP signaling by stimulating α2A-adrenoceptors on spines strengthens synaptic efficacy and increases network firing”; “optimal stimulation of dopamine D1 receptors sculpts network inputs to refine mental representation”; guanfacine stimulates α2A-adrenoceptors; “infusion of guanfacine directly into dlPFC improves working memory”; “systemic administration of guanfacine improves a variety” of “cognitive functions, including spatial working memory, behavioral inhibition, top-down regulation of attention, and rapid associative learning”; a “recent study has shown that guanfacine improves impulse control by inhibiting responses to an immediate, small reward in order to wait over a delay for a larger reward”; all “of these tasks require behavior to be guided by mental representation”; guanfacine “strengthens the efficacy of dlPFC microcircuit connections, enhancing mental representation and top-down regulation of behavior”; “guanfacine is now being used to treat a variety” of “disorders in human patients, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder”; research “on the primate dlPFC has revealed that the highly evolved microcircuits underlying representational knowledge are modulated in a unique manner, different from sensory/motor and subcortical circuits”; these “differences must be respected if we are to understand the neurobiology underlying higher cognitive disorders and thus create effective treatments”; guanfacine’s success shows “that understanding the unique modulation of higher cortical circuits can lead to effective treatments for humans”; and it’s necessary to (1) “understand how genetic and environmental alterations in higher cognitive circuits impact their physiological integrity” and (2) learn how to identify function-restoring targets.

Arnsten and Wang write in a 2016 Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology article: medications “to treat cognitive disorders are increasingly needed, yet researchers have had few successes in this challenging arena”; coupling “our knowledge of higher primate circuits with the powerful methods now available in drug design will help create effective treatments for cognitive disorders”; “guanfacine serves as an example of successful translation from research in animals to cognitive disorders in humans”; several “factors facilitated guanfacine's translation from animals to humans”; first, extensive “guanfacine dose/response curves were available from both young and aged monkeys that allowed identification of a potential dose range”; second, guanfacine “had also been approved for use in humans as an antihypertensive, thus allowing open-label explorations of effective doses in patients”; “this type of exploration is not possible with new compounds”, though “more extensive Phase II testing might achieve similar goals”; third, “research in monkeys and open-label trials also helped to identify the most appropriate methods for easing side effects”; this “knowledge facilitated the success of the more expensive Phase III trials”; many “hurdles must be overcome in the successful development of cognitive enhancers”; “a major challenge in translating cognition-enhancing drug actions from animals to humans is identifying the appropriate dose range”; this “is complicated both by narrow, inverted, U-shaped dose response curves, in which there is loss of efficacy when the dose is a little too high, and by the typical variability in optimal dosages between individuals, such as because of variations in levels of the endogenous transmitter”; the “use of monkeys to identify an approximate dose range prior to Phase II testing in humans may be helpful in facilitating this process”; “monkey research is expensive”; “human research is more so, so it may actually be considered a cost-effective approach”; and “expanding dose-finding in Phase II (especially for low doses) and creating experimental designs that allow optimal individual dosing may facilitate success in this complex space”.

Many “key areas for future research on the primate cortex would facilitate the development of informed treatments for mental disorders”; “although we have learned a lot about the molecular needs of the” dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, “investigators have conducted no or very little research on the needs of other cortical areas that may be modulated in unique ways”; “the gap between molecular biology and studies of the primate cortex is growing, as studies of the primate cortex are generally performed by researchers who have little background or interest in pharmacology or molecular biology, whereas molecular biology is focused on mouse models and cell cultures for which genetic tools can be used”; “scientists know almost nothing about the modulation of most of the primate cortex”; research “on other cortical areas that have immediate clinical relevance will be especially important, e.g., the subgenual cortex (Brodmann area 25) in regard to depression, the orbital” prefrontal cortex “in regard to disorders such as OCD, and the entorhinal cortex and parietal cortices that are afflicted in” Alzheimer’s disease; “most of the cortex remains unexplored”; it “would be particularly interesting to examine the molecular regulation of the primate subgenual cortex (Brodmann area 25), given its enriched serotonin innervation, role as a visceromotor center, and immediate relevance to depression”; a “major need for future research is to learn what causes the neurodegeneration of higher cortical circuits in schizophrenia” and in Alzheimer’s disease; “researchers do not know how stress signaling events might interact with the molecular mechanisms involved in healthy spine pruning that begins in teen years, nor how all these events interact with the genetics of schizophrenia”; our “growing understanding of the unique regulation of higher cortical pyramidal cells may also help us understand the origins of degeneration in” Alzheimer’s disease; regarding Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia, “we must understand what is causing these degenerative processes”; research “in monkeys may be helpful in viewing the molecular processes that weaken association cortical circuits”; as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex “has built-in mechanisms to take its circuits offline, dysregulation of these events may contribute to their susceptibility to degeneration”; and recognizing “the unique regulation and vulnerabilities of the primate association cortices may help guide future research in protecting higher cognitive functions”.

I view my life in a very positive light—I’m in a great place mentally. I’ve been through a lot of tough times, but I look at it all through a scientific lens—I look at the pain of the past and see hope for the future. I hope to attain my incredible guanfacine effect permanently. And I think that it would be—right now at least—too overwhelming to imagine places even higher than what guanfacine has awakened for me. The “dlPFC representational machinery interacts extensively with posterior cortices, providing top-down regulation, for example, to suppress irrelevant operations or enhance the processing and storage of a nonsalient but relevant stimulus and to reactivate long-term memories onto the mental sketch pad as a key part of memory retrieval and recall”—that quote from the 2012 Neuron article speaks to me on an extremely deep level, since the words capture so well what my 2023 guanfacine experience was all about. It was all about “top-down regulation”. And suppressing “irrelevant operations”. And processing and storing “nonsalient but relevant” things. And reactivating “long-term memories onto the mental sketch pad”. Lots of questions come to mind—where had all those memories that rushed onto my mental sketchpad been residing, how could I see so vividly things that I’d never visualized in my life and that I hadn’t witnessed since childhood, how was my brain—which grouped my long-term memories in such an interesting fashion—able to organize all of my long-term memories in such a useful and logical way, and how did these systems in my brain spring to life if they’d never been online? I can’t be the only one to have had a response like this to guanfacine or some other ADHD medication—I hope to read similar stories from others. I think that the future is bright—we just have to turn the lights on.

We all have dreams regarding the future—global heating might render them delusions, though. We face a grim climate-crisis trajectory that will—if we remain passive—leave no space for the visions that inspire us to work hard every day. There are—fortunately—ample opportunities. We can bend the trajectory and make our ambitions make sense.

Rapidly Approaching

A 20 March 2023 CNN piece says: the “world is rapidly approaching catastrophic levels of heating with international climate goals set to slip out of reach unless immediate and radical action is taken, according to a new UN-backed report”; the “‘climate time-bomb is ticking,’ said António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, in a statement to mark the launch of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s synthesis report on Monday”; the “report draws on the findings of hundreds of scientists to provide a comprehensive assessment of how the climate crisis is unfolding”; the “science is not new—the report pulls together what the IPCC has already set out in a cluster of other reports over the last few years—but it paints a very stark picture of where the world is heading”; and the “impacts of planet-warming pollution are already more severe than expected and we are hurtling towards increasingly dangerous and irreversible consequences, the report says”.

The “biggest threat to climate change action is the world’s continued addiction to burning fossil fuels, which still make up more than 80% of the world’s energy and 75% of human-caused planet-heating pollution”; despite “the International Energy Agency saying in 2021 that there can now be no new fossil fuel developments if the world is to meet climate commitments, governments are continuing to approve oil, gas and coal projects”; the “Biden administration has just greenlit the hugely controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska”; once “operational, it is projected to produce enough oil to release 9.2 million metric tons of planet-warming carbon pollution a year—equivalent to adding 2 million gas-powered cars to the roads”; “China is planning a huge expansion of coal—the dirtiest of fossil fuels”; and in “2022, it granted permits for coal production across 82 sites, equal to starting two large coal power plants each week, according to a report last month”. 

A 20 March 2023 Guardian piece says: scientists “have delivered a ‘final warning’ on the climate crisis, as rising greenhouse gas emissions push the world to the brink of irrevocable damage that only swift and drastic action can avert”; the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of the world’s leading climate scientists, set out the final part of its mammoth sixth assessment report on Monday”; the “comprehensive review of human knowledge of the climate crisis took hundreds of scientists eight years to compile and runs to thousands of pages”; in “sober language, the IPCC set out the devastation that has already been inflicted on swathes of the world”; extreme “weather caused by climate breakdown has led to increased deaths from intensifying heatwaves in all regions, millions of lives and homes destroyed in droughts and floods, millions of people facing hunger, and ‘increasingly irreversible losses’ in vital ecosystems”; and “Monday’s final instalment, called the synthesis report, is almost certain to be the last such assessment while the world still has a chance of limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the threshold beyond which our damage to the climate will rapidly become irreversible”. 

More “than 3bn people already live in areas that are ‘highly vulnerable’ to climate breakdown, the IPCC found, and half of the global population now experiences severe water scarcity for at least part of the year”; in “many areas, the report warned, we are already reaching the limit to which we can adapt to such severe changes, and weather extremes are ‘increasingly driving displacement’ of people in Africa, Asia, North, Central and South America, and the south Pacific”; all “of those impacts are set to increase rapidly, as we have failed to reverse the 200-year trend of rising greenhouse gas emissions, despite more than 30 years of warnings from the IPCC, which published its first report in 1990”; temperatures “are now about 1.1C above pre-industrial levels, the IPCC found”; and if “greenhouse gas emissions can be made to peak as soon as possible, and are reduced rapidly in the following years, it may still be possible to avoid the worst ravages that would follow a 1.5C rise”.

And Robert Pollin says in a 26 February 2023 Truthout interview: “there is a great deal of evidence demonstrating that we continue to move relentlessly toward a climate abyss”; concentrations “of the three main greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide—reached record highs in 2021, with preliminary evidence finding that this upward trend continued in 2022”; the “average global temperatures for 2015-2022 are likely to have been the eight warmest years on record”; the “temperature in the U.K. reached 105° Fahrenheit for the first time on record, while three states in Germany experienced their driest summer on record”; average “daily temperatures were sustained at over 110° F during the heat wave in India this past May, while monsoon flooding in Pakistan in July and August inundated about 9 percent of the country’s total land area”; and a “Washington Post article from last July titled ‘India’s Deadly Heatwave Will Soon Be a Global Reality’ reported that” as “‘the climate warms, conditions once experienced only in saunas and deep mineshafts are rapidly becoming the open-air reality for hundreds of millions of people, who have no escape to air conditioning or cooler climes’”. 

Russia’s “invasion of Ukraine led to oil and gas supply shortages, especially in Europe, which is heavily dependent on Russian supplies”; these “supply shortages enabled the oil giants to jack up prices and reap unprecedented profits”; “the six largest Western oil companies—ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, Equinor and Total—made $200 billion in profits in 2022, more than any previous year in the history of the industry”; the “oil companies, in other words, are feasting as the world burns”; in “addition to Big Oil’s record-shattering profits in 2022, global fossil fuel subsidies also doubled, from roughly $500 billion to $1 trillion in 2022”; this “spike in fossil fuel subsidies came after the 2021 Glasgow Climate Pact committed to phasing out these subsidies”; coal “was also revived in 2022”; this “was due in part to the natural gas shortages created in Europe by the Ukraine war”; “the largest increases in coal consumption were not due to the war, but rather to the continued increases in consumption in India and especially China”; and “China now accounts for about 50 percent of all global coal consumption”. 

As for “where can we possibly also see significant positive developments”, we can start “with the enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) last August”; the law “is mostly a measure to channel large-scale financing into clean energy investments”; “as a result of the IRA passing, clean energy investments immediately spiked in the last three months of 2022 to $40 billion, equal to the total level of such investments for all of 2021”; “most of this new investment money has been flowing into Republican-dominated states, where, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, not a single Republican member of Congress voted for the law”; “a large percentage of the new jobs being created by these investments, including in the Republican-dominated states, are reserved for union members”; “a fundamental new reality could be emerging out of the IRA”, namely “that working people will begin to see how the green energy transformation can be a major engine for creating good union jobs, in red states just as much as in blue states”; this “is a central idea behind the Green New Deal, as has been advanced in the U.S. for over a decade by excellent groups like Labor Network for Sustainability, the BlueGreen Alliance and Reimagine Appalachia”; if “this point does become broadly recognized, it could deliver unprecedented levels of support for a global Green New Deal”; there “have also been major positive developments in Europe over the past year, which responded to the collapse of Russian oil and gas supplies by sharply increasing energy conservation measures and accelerating the roll-out of solar, wind, and other renewables”; “the point should become increasingly evident throughout Europe that the green energy transformation will be an engine for expanding job opportunities and raising working-class living standards—in other words, a clear alternative to the austerity economics that dominates in Europe today”; as “this point sinks in, the level of political support for funding” the transformation “at much higher levels could also grow correspondingly”; regarding the “election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in October”, his “election victory needs to now be buttressed by large increases in financial support for forest protection in Brazil and elsewhere, and more generally, for Green New Deal projects in the Global South”; and this “hasn’t happened so far, despite pledges made by rich countries at the most recent November climate summit in Egypt”.

The Choices We Make Now

A 20 March 2023 Toronto Star piece says: there’s “a girl sitting in a Grade 5 class today”; by “the time she graduates from high school, in just seven years, the decisions the world makes around carbon emissions will determine the environment she grows up in”; on “Monday, the planet’s leading climate scientists offered two starkly different glimpses of that future”; one “in which nations realize massive, rapid and sustained cuts to greenhouse gas emissions and yank the planet back from the brink of disastrous climate change consequences”; “one in which we don’t”; by “2030, scientists warn, countries such as Canada must slash carbon emissions by almost half to prevent that fifth-grader from living out her old age in a world with increased floods, fires, crop failures, forced migration and infectious disease outbreaks, and to zero by 2050”; that “was the conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Synthesis Report”; climate “change may have once felt like something you had to squint deep into the future to see”; and “Monday’s report shows that the choices we make now will profoundly alter the planet today’s children live in”. 

The “report is the world’s most comprehensive assessment of the current state of climate change”; the “last synthesis report came out in 2014, and acted as both a major impetus and the scientific underpinning for the historic Paris Agreement, when nearly all the world’s governments agreed to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050”; that “goal is necessary to keep the world within 1.5 degrees of warming, a critical guardrail that, if overshot, will lead to increasingly destructive planetary outcomes, some irreversible”; and the “actions pledged by nations so far are insufficient to keep the world within that guardrail, and would result in 2.8 degrees of warming by the end of the century, the UN’s initial assessment found”. 

A 22 March 2023 CNN piece says: the “world is facing a looming global water crisis that threatens to ‘spiral out of control’ as increased demand for water and the intensifying impacts of the climate crisis put huge pressure on water resources, a UN report has warned”; by “2050, the number of people in cities facing water scarcity is projected to nearly double from 930 million people in 2016 to up to 2.4 billion, the report found”; and without “action to address the problem of water scarcity, ‘there definitely will be a global crisis,’ said Richard Connor, the report’s lead author, at a news conference to launch the report”. 

A 13 March 2023 CNN piece says: from “lengthy droughts to severe flooding, the intensity of water-related disasters around the world has increased over the last two decades as global temperatures climbed to record levels, according to new research”; the “study from NASA scientists published Monday in the journal Nature Water found that increasingly frequent, widespread and intense droughts and floods were linked more strongly to higher global temperatures than to naturally changing weather patterns, like El Niño and La Niña”; this “suggests these intense events will increase as the climate crisis accelerates, the study says”; “UN scientists recently concluded” two things; first, “droughts that may have occurred only once every 10 years or so now happen 70% more frequently”; second, “heavy rainfall that used to happen once every 10 years now occurs 30% more often”; while “2022 was not included in the study period, vast swaths of the world saw extreme events last year, including the deadly flooding that submerged a third of Pakistan as well as the severe European drought that caused some rivers to dip to historic lows”; and “California, which has been experiencing a historic megadrought triggering severe water shortages, has been suddenly pummeled by heavy rain and snowstorms over the last few months”. 

And regarding the climate crisis, Noam Chomsky says in a 28 October 2021 Truthout interview: the “basic facts are brutally clear, more so with each passing year”; in “brief, any hope of avoiding disaster requires taking significant steps right away to reduce fossil fuel use, continuing annually with the goal of effectively phasing out fossil fuel use by mid-century”; we “are approaching a precipice”; a “few steps more, and we fall over it, forever”; falling “off the precipice does not imply that everyone will die soon”; “there’s a long way down”; “it means that irreversible tipping points will be reached, and barring some now-unforeseen technological miracle, the human species will be entering a new era”; it’ll be an era “of inexorable decline, with mounting horrors of the kind we can easily depict, extrapolating realistically from what already surrounds us—an optimistic estimate, since non-linear processes may begin to take off and dangers lurk that are only dimly perceived”; and it “will be an era of ‘sauve qui peut’—run for your lives, everyone for themselves, material catastrophe heightened by social collapse and wholesale psychic trauma of a kind never before experienced”. 

I find it incredibly disturbing how we will—if we remain passive—lock in an era of the following things that Chomsky refers to: (1) “inexorable decline”, (2) “mounting horrors”, (3) “‘sauve qui peut’”, (4) “material catastrophe”, (5) “social collapse”, and (6) “wholesale psychic trauma”. 

A Massive Political Struggle

I think that the climate crisis is extremely grim—there’s infinite pain coming our way if we don’t take collective action to change our self-destructive societal course. There are solutions, though. And there’s still time to act. 

People can join various organizations and help move the needle. It’s essential to remember that someone can have a demanding career and also do climate activism on the side—it’s been shown that this is possible, so it’s not like it’s a choice between (A) one’s career and (B) activism.

I want to highlight that we face political barriers—not technological or economic ones. Pollin says in a 3 April 2023 Truthout interview: “purely as an analytic, economic and policy challenge—i.e., independent of all the forces arrayed to defend fossil fuel profits at all costs—it is entirely realistic to allow that global CO2 emissions can be driven to net zero by 2050”; “true net zero emissions—with the ‘net’ referring only to CO2 absorption through afforestation at a level of perhaps 5 to 10 percent of current emissions—is entirely feasible technically and economically”; and “it will continue to be a massive political struggle”.

I’ll use this piece to talk about whether it was necessary to integrate Ukraine into NATO. Someone might read my 12 February 2023 piece—which talks about the history that preceded the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine—and say “Maybe integrating Ukraine into NATO was indeed ‘highly provocative’, but how else could we have protected Ukraine from Russian aggression?”. This piece will address that question—I’ll quote from various commentaries and then give my own thoughts.

Clarification

I assume that everyone reading this piece knows that (1) Putin is a murderous thug, (2) Russia is a kleptocracy, and (3) Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was an enormous war crime. These points are completely obvious and uncontroversial—that’s why it’s demeaning to have to say them over and over.

There is—disturbingly—a fundamental conflation of what it means to understand and what it means to condone. To understand the Kremlin is not to condone Russian atrocities. The Kremlin has security concerns—understanding these doesn’t mean supporting Russian crimes. To understand the Russian support for Putin is not to say that Putin is a moral—or effective—leader. A 2017 article says that “results suggest that the main obstacle at present to the emergence of a widespread opposition movement to Putin is not that Russians are afraid to voice their disapproval of Putin, but that Putin is in fact quite popular”—how can we help democratize Russia if we don’t understand the basis of Putin’s popular support? We want to understand the Russian people and their leaders—understanding is a good thing that helps us improve the world.

Matlock’s Commentary

Jack F. Matlock Jr. writes in a 5 November 2022 commentary: “it is not Russian interference that created Ukrainian disunity but rather the haphazard way the country was assembled from parts that were not always mutually compatible”; the “territory of the Ukrainian state claimed by the government in Kyiv was assembled, not by Ukrainians themselves but by outsiders, and took its present form following the end of World War II”; to “think of it as a traditional or primordial whole is absurd”; and this “applies a fortiori to the two most recent additions to Ukraine—that of some eastern portions of interwar Poland and Czechoslovakia, annexed by Stalin at the end of the war, and the largely Russian-speaking Crimea, which was transferred from the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic (RSFSR) well after the war”.

The “lumping together of people with strikingly different historical experience and comfortable in different (though closely related) languages, underlies the current divisions”; if “one takes Galicia and adjoining provinces in the west on the one hand and the Donbas and Crimea in the east and south on the other as exemplars of the extremes, the areas in between are mixed, proportions gradually shifting from one tradition to the other”; there “is no clear dividing line, and Kyiv/Kiev would be claimed by both” traditions; from “its inception as an internationally recognized independent state, Ukraine has been deeply divided along linguistic and cultural lines”; Ukraine has nevertheless “maintained a unitary central government rather than a federal one that would permit a degree of local autonomy”; the “constitution gave the elected president the power to appoint the chief executives in the provinces (oblasti) rather than having them subject to election in each province—as is the case, for example—in the United States”; and the “map of election results in 2010” shows “how closely the political divide in Ukraine parallels the linguistic divide”.

I’ll include two maps—an ethnolinguistic one and then one showing the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election results—from Wikimedia Commons. A user named Yerevanci created the first and a user named Vasyl` Babych created the second:

I recommend the 9 December 2013 WaPo piece “This one map helps explain Ukraine’s protests”—that piece includes the first map above.

Matlock says: the “Ukrainian revolution of 2014 started with protests over President Yanukovich’s decision not to sign an agreement with the European Union”; the “United States and the EU openly supported the demonstrators and spoke of detaching Ukraine from what one might call the Russian (past Soviet) security sphere and attaching it to the West through EU and NATO membership”; never “mind that Ukraine was unable at that time to meet the normal requirements for either EU or NATO membership”; violence “started, first in the Ukrainian nationalist West, with irregular militias taking over the local offices headed by Yanukovich appointees”; on “February 20, 2014, demonstrations in Kyiv, which up to then had been largely peaceful, turned violent even though a compromise agreement had been reached to hold early elections”; many “demonstrators were shot by sniper fire and President Yanukovich fled the country”; demonstration “leaders claimed that the government’s security force, the Berkut, was responsible for initiating the shooting”; “subsequent trials failed to substantiate this”; and in “fact, most of the sniper fire came from buildings controlled by the demonstrators”.

The “United States and most Western countries immediately recognized the successor government”; “Russia and many Russian-speaking Ukrainians considered Yanukovich’s ouster the result of an illegal coup d’etat”; a “rebellion occurred in the Eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk and Russia supported the rebels with military equipment and irregular forces”; in “Crimea, local leaders declared independence and requested annexation by Russia”; a “referendum was conducted under the watchful eye of ‘little green men’ infiltrated from Russia”; there “was no resistance by Ukrainian military or police forces”; “Russia officially annexed the peninsula when the referendum resulted in an overwhelming pro-Russian vote”; and there “was no fighting and no casualties in Crimea”.

In “February 2015 an agreement was reached (‘Minsk agreement’) to bring the Donbas back under Kiev’s control by allowing a degree of autonomy, including election of local officials, and amnesty for the secessionists”; unfortunately, “the Ukrainian legislature (Verkhovna Rada) has refused to amend the constitution to provide for a federal system or to proclaim an amnesty for the secessionists”; separate “sets of U.S. and EU economic sanctions against Russia have been declared in respect to the Crimea and the Donbas”; and “most have seemed to stimulate hostile emotions rather than encourage solution of the problems”.

What “needs to be understood is that Russia perceives these issues as matters of vital national security”; “Russia is extremely sensitive about foreign military activity adjacent to its borders, as any other country would be and the United States always has been”; and it “has signaled repeatedly that it will stop at nothing to prevent NATO membership for Ukraine”.

One “persistent U.S. demand is that Ukraine’s territorial integrity be restored”; “the U.S. is party to the Budapest Memorandum in which Russia guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in return for Ukraine’s transfer of Soviet nuclear weapons to Russia for destruction in accord with U.S.-Soviet arms control agreements”; what “the U.S. demand ignores is that, under traditional international law, agreements remain valid rebus sic stantibus (things remaining the same)”; when “the Budapest memorandum was signed in 1994 there was no plan to expand NATO to the east and Gorbachev had been assured in 1990 that the alliance would not expand”; and when “in fact it did expand right up to Russia’s borders, Russia was confronted with a radically different strategic situation than existed when the Budapest agreement was signed”.

Ukraine “can never be a united, prosperous country unless it has reasonably close and civil relations with Russia”; that means—among other things—“giving its Russian-speaking citizens equal rights to their language and culture”; and the “legal arguments and appeals to abstract concepts are beside the point”.

Mearsheimer’s Commentary

John Mearsheimer writes in his 2014 Foreign Affairs piece “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault”: “the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis”; “Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008 should have dispelled any remaining doubts about Putin’s determination to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO”; and “despite this clear warning, NATO never publicly abandoned its goal of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance”.

Yanukovych—in November 2013—“rejected a major economic deal he had been negotiating with the EU and decided to accept a $15 billion Russian counteroffer instead”; that “decision gave rise to antigovernment demonstrations that escalated over the following three months and that by mid-February had led to the deaths of some one hundred protesters”; on “February 21, the government and the opposition struck a deal that allowed Yanukovych to stay in power until new elections were held”; “it immediately fell apart, and Yanukovych fled to Russia the next day”; the “new government in Kiev was pro-Western and anti-Russian to the core”; “it contained four high-ranking members who could legitimately be labeled neofascists”; “the full extent of U.S. involvement has not yet come to light”; and it’s “clear that Washington backed the coup”.

For “Putin, the time to act against Ukraine and the West had arrived”; shortly “after February 22, he ordered Russian forces to take Crimea from Ukraine”; “soon after that, he incorporated it into Russia”; the “task proved relatively easy, thanks to the thousands of Russian troops already stationed at a naval base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol”; “Crimea also made for an easy target since ethnic Russians compose roughly 60 percent of its population”; and most “of them wanted out of Ukraine”.

Putin next “put massive pressure on the new government in Kiev to discourage it from siding with the West against Moscow”; “he has provided advisers, arms, and diplomatic support to the Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, who are pushing the country toward civil war”; he “has massed a large army on the Ukrainian border, threatening to invade if the government cracks down on the rebels”; and “he has sharply raised the price of the natural gas Russia sells to Ukraine and demanded payment for past exports”.

Given “that most Western leaders continue to deny that Putin’s behavior might be motivated by legitimate security concerns, it is unsurprising that they have tried to modify it by doubling down on their existing policies and have punished Russia to deter further aggression”; the West is relying “on economic sanctions to coerce Russia into ending its support for the insurrection in eastern Ukraine”; in “July, the United States and the EU put in place their third round of limited sanctions, targeting mainly high-level individuals closely tied to the Russian government and some high-profile banks, energy companies, and defense firms”; they “also threatened to unleash another, tougher round of sanctions, aimed at whole sectors of the Russian economy”; “even if the United States could convince its allies to enact tough measures, Putin would probably not alter his decision-making”; history “shows that countries will absorb enormous amounts of punishment in order to protect their core strategic interests”; and there’s “no reason to think Russia represents an exception to this rule”.

Quigley’s Commentary

John Quigley writes in his 9 May 2022 Responsible Statecraft piece: the “situation of the Russian speaking population in the eastern reaches of Ukraine first drew international attention in 1994”; the “Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, which shortly thereafter was re-named Organization on Security and Co-operation in Europe, understood that the existence of clusters of Russian speakers in newly independent states on Russia’s periphery was a recipe for conflict”; the “situation was reminiscent of how the stranding of populations of German speakers after the World War I collapse of the German and Austrian empires helped bring about World War II”; the “Conference began quiet efforts in preventive diplomacy, to convince the newly independent states to treat their Russian populations fairly”; “Crimea was a particular focus of the Conference’s attention”; the “Conference asked three of its member states—Germany, Italy, and the United States—each to appoint an ‘expert on constitutional matters’ to ‘facilitate the dialogue between the Central Government and Crimean authorities concerning the autonomous status of the Republic of Crimea within Ukraine’”; and “I was appointed by the U.S. State Department”.

The “dilemma, as I shuttled back and forth between Kyiv and Simferopol, the Crimean capital, was that Crimea fell under Ukrainian sovereignty, but its population was majority Russian and saw no reason to be part of Ukraine”; in “meetings with Crimean authorities, I was confronted with claims for independence based on self-determination”; “I tried to find a way for the Ukrainian government to give enough autonomy that the Crimeans would stop demanding separation”; after “a series of meetings with Ukrainian and Crimean officials, I devised a plan for full-throated autonomy for Crimea, as a treaty that could have been concluded between Ukraine and Crimea”; to “protect Crimea from infringement, I included international oversight to be exercised by the CSCE”; Quigley’s “treaty went nowhere, however”; the “CSCE High Commissioner for Minorities, a seasoned Dutch diplomat named Max van der Stoel, told me that the Ukrainian government would not abide international oversight”; he “may have been correct, but the CSCE was not prepared to pressure the Ukraine government on the matter”; “Ukraine cracked down on the Crimean Republic, and the conflict remained unresolved”; tension “simmered until 2014, by which time Russia was prepared to act to take Crimea back”; and “Crimea was then formally merged into the Russian Federation”.

A “similar ethnic dynamic developed in the Donbas”; there “the sentiment on the part of the Russian speaking population was less for separation from Ukraine than for autonomy”; in “2014, agreement between Russia and Ukraine was brokered by Germany, France, and the United States, whereby Ukraine would formalize autonomy for the Donbas”; “Ukraine President Volodomyr Zelensky came into office saying he would follow through on this pledge”; “if Ukraine does anything even close to implementing the Minsk agreement, Russia could say that the aim of its invasion has been accomplished”; regarding the Donbas, “it would not be difficult for Ukraine to offer more autonomy than it has to date”; the “Russian military assault seems to have pushed many Russian speakers in the Donbas to embrace Ukraine”; they “may be less demanding on autonomy than before”; a “renewed Ukrainian commitment on autonomy could be framed by the Russian government as a victory”; and any “potential deal could be sweetened for Russia if Ukraine were to show flexibility on the status of Crimea”.

Lieven’s Commentary

Anatol Lieven writes in his 15 November 2021 Nation piece “Ukraine: The Most Dangerous Problem in the World”: since “the Ukrainian revolution and the Donbas rebellion of 2014, successive Ukrainian governments have vowed to recover the Donbas—by force if necessary”; despite “a ceasefire in 2015 that suspended full-scale war, probing attacks and retaliations by both sides have led to repeated clashes, as in March and April of this year”; and successive “US administrations have expressed strong support for the Ukrainian side and for future NATO membership (so far blocked by Germany and France)”.

Perhaps “the most tragic aspect of the seemingly unending Donbas dispute is that, while it may be one of the most dangerous crises in the world today, it is also in principle the most easily solved”; a “solution exists that was drawn up by France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine and endorsed by the US, the European Union, and the United Nations”; this “solution corresponds to democratic practice, international law and tradition, and America’s own past approach to the settlement of ethnic and separatist conflicts”; “it requires no concessions of real substance by either Ukraine or the US”; the “depth of Russia’s commitment to this solution would of course have to be carefully tested in practice”; and “if US administrations, the political establishment, and the mainstream media have quietly buried it, this is because of the refusal of Ukrainian governments to implement the solution and the refusal of the United States to put pressure on them to do so”.

The “solution to the Donbas dispute lies in the ‘Minsk II’ agreement, reached in February 2015 by the leaders of France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine meeting under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe”; the “key military element of Minsk II is the disarmament of the separatists and the withdrawal of Russian ‘volunteer’ forces, together with a vaguely worded suggestion for the temporary removal the Ukrainian armed forces (exclusive of border guards)”; the “key political element consists of three essential and mutually dependent parts”, namely (1) demilitarization, (2) “a restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty, including control of the border with Russia”, and (3) “full autonomy for the Donbas in the context of the decentralization of power in Ukraine as a whole”; the “Minsk II Protocol was endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council, including the United States”; “Samantha Power, then US ambassador to the United Nations, told the Security Council in June 2015” that the “‘consensus here, and in the international community, remains that Minsk’s implementation is the only way out of this deadly conflict’”; regarding the Trump and Biden administrations, both “subsequent US administrations have officially supported the Minsk II Protocol”; the “settlement envisioned by Minsk II has not come to pass”; and three “intertwined issues have so far blocked implementation”, namely (A) “the inability to reach agreement between Kiev, Moscow, and the separatist leadership on the terms of permanent Donbas autonomy”, (B) “the sequence in which the establishment of local autonomy and the resumption of Ukrainian control of the border with Russia are to occur”, and (C) “how to secure the long-term autonomy of the region against an attempt by Kiev to impose central control”.

The “Ukrainian parliament did pass a law on special status for part of the Donbas on March 17, 2015, but the law was only provisional, and it was not to come into effect until after Donetsk and Luhansk held elections under Ukrainian law and allowed the restoration of Ukrainian authority”; Ukraine “made no commitment to revise its constitution to provide for decentralization and Russian language rights—moves that are absolutely essential if the inhabitants of the Donbas and other Russian-speaking areas are to feel like full citizens of Ukraine, and which should be insisted upon by the United States and the European Union as a matter of democratic principle”; the “Ukrainian parliament granted far more limited powers to the region than those envisioned under Minsk II”; in “particular, all powers over the police and courts were reserved to the central government in Kiev”; this “limited offer by the previous government of President Petro Poroshenko faced strong opposition in the Ukrainian parliament, and it has effectively been withdrawn by the present administration of President Volodymyr Zelensky”; Zelensky “has declared that Ukraine is not in fact bound to offer permanent autonomy to the Donbas”; and the “Russian government has refused to consider a settlement on these terms”.

A “new US approach to peace in Ukraine should begin with a public restatement by the Biden administration of America’s commitment to the principles of Minsk II in particular, and to the idea of a pluralist, multi-ethnic, and federal Ukrainian republic in general”—it’s “only on this basis that Ukraine can ever be brought back together again and that Ukrainian stability, security, and unity can be guaranteed in the long term”.

Repeated “opinion polls in the Donbas and (before 2014) free elections there indicated that many of its inhabitants favored autonomy for the region within Ukraine and that equally large majorities in eastern and southern Ukraine favored a multi-ethnic state with official status for the Russian language and culture, not the ethnic-nationalist state promoted since 2014 by a succession of Ukrainian governments backed by the West”; between “independence in 1991 and the revolution in 2014, Ukraine was evenly balanced between supporters of an ethnic version of Ukrainian identity in the country’s western and central regions, and supporters of a civic version (with a strong guaranteed role for the Russian language and culture) in the east and south”; the “events of 2014, and the conflict with Russia that followed, have led to a situation in which ethnic nationalists (with Western backing) dominate national politics in Kiev”; and these ethnic nationalists’ program “remains highly unpopular in the Russian-speaking areas and is overwhelmingly rejected in the Donbas”.

To “bring about a peace settlement, it is necessary to eliminate or discount the factors that brought about a failure of the Minsk II agreement”; the chief factor “is Ukraine’s refusal to guarantee permanent full autonomy for the Donbas”; the “main reason for this refusal, apart from a general commitment to retain centralized power in Kiev, has been the belief that permanent autonomy for the Donbas would prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and the European Union, as the region could use its constitutional position within Ukraine to block membership”; and the “official US commitment to eventual Ukrainian NATO membership—however empty in real terms—has in turn inhibited the United States from playing a positive role in resolving the conflict”.

The US will—if it “drops the hopeless goal of NATO membership for Ukraine”—“be in a position to pressure the Ukrainian government and parliament to agree to a ‘Minsk III’ by the credible threat of a withdrawal of US aid and political support”; regarding a settlement, the US should promote two main terms, namely (1) a “Ukrainian constitutional amendment establishing the Donbas region as an autonomous republic within Ukraine (including those parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces currently controlled by Ukraine)” and (2) a “constitution for the Donbas Autonomous Republic (including its constitutional relationship with Ukrainian national institutions in Kiev) to be submitted to the people of Donetsk and Luhansk in a referendum supervised and monitored by the UN and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe”; if “a majority of voters in the Donbas oppose the constitutional amendment, then they will have chosen to remain within Ukraine under its present unitary constitution”; “in the likely event of approval in the referendum, the amendment would then be submitted to the Ukrainian parliament”; and if “the parliament rejected it, a new internationally supervised referendum would be held giving the people of the region a straight choice between rejoining a unitary Ukraine and becoming independent, with a future option to join the Russian Federation”.

Annexation “is not Russia’s preferred option for the future of the region”; “Moscow could have annexed the Donbas (as it did Crimea) at any time during the past seven years but has refrained from doing so”; “Moscow is determined to defend the Donbas against any attempt at Ukrainian reconquest”; “for good political and strategic reasons, it would much prefer that the Donbas remain a pro-Russian autonomous part of Ukraine”; and “if Ukraine launches a new war, annexation will certainly follow, leading to a new crisis in Russia’s relations with the West”.

Ukraine must take “control of the border with Russia” only after “the referendum on autonomy and the establishment of a regional government under the Ukrainian constitution”; this is important in “order to secure the establishment and maintenance of autonomy”; the “police and courts in the Donbas Autonomous Republic would come under the regional government”; military “security would be provided by a UN peacekeeping force drawn from neutral countries outside Europe and established as part of a Security Council resolution in support of the peace settlement”; “US and NATO forces would not be included, nor would Russian forces or those of countries allied to Russia”; and this “peacekeeping force would also supervise and certify the disarmament of the existing separatist armed forces, the withdrawal of all Russian forces, and the withdrawal of the Ukrainian armed forces from their present positions in Donetsk and Luhansk”.

The “United States, of course, has a federal system, as do Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and South Africa”; there “can thus be no objection from democratic principle to a federal system for Ukraine, or to special autonomy for the Donbas”; given “the vast differences in language and culture between different parts of Ukraine, a federal constitution would seem the best political system for the country as a whole”; failing “that, ‘asymmetric federations,’ in which certain regions enjoy special status or one autonomous region exists in an otherwise unitary state, are also an accepted part of certain democracies”; the “‘Good Friday’ peace agreement of 1998 that brought an end to the Northern Ireland conflict is especially pertinent to a solution to the Donbas conflict”; and this “agreement has also been widely suggested as the only possible model for an eventual settlement of the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan and the unrest in the Indian portion of that territory”.

Ideally “a peace settlement would also include a treaty establishing Ukrainian neutrality for the next generation, modeled on the Austrian State Treaty and associated Austrian law on neutrality of 1955, but to be ended or renewed after 30 years”; though “not strictly necessary, such a treaty would remove the greatest motive by far for Russian interference in and intimidation of Ukraine”; “Ukraine and the United States would sacrifice nothing by such a treaty, since it is impossible for Ukraine to join NATO so long as the Donbas conflict and Crimean dispute remain open”; “the treaty would be a barrier against any future Russian attempt to dominate Ukraine, for it would also rule out Ukrainian membership in any Russian-dominated alliance”; this “treaty would therefore prevent Russia from repeating its bid to draw Ukraine into the Eurasian Union, an attempt that provided the initial spark for the Ukrainian revolution of 2013–14”; from “Moscow’s point of view, this would be a blow”, since “Ukrainian membership is essential to any hope of making the Eurasian Union into a serious international bloc”; “Ukrainian membership in NATO and the EU, far from strengthening those bodies, would in fact drastically weaken them”; on “balance, therefore, Ukrainian neutrality would disadvantage Russia more than the West”; as “for Ukrainian membership in the EU, this is ruled out for at least a generation to come by Ukraine’s corruption, political dysfunction, and lack of economic progress”; the “deep internal problems of the EU also make Ukrainian membership in the near to medium term quite implausible”; at “$285 million a year (in 2020), US economic development aid to Ukraine does not begin to meet Ukrainian needs, let alone help prepare the country for EU membership”; the “miserable examples of corruption in the new EU member states of Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia, and of chauvinist authoritarianism in Hungary and Poland, also make it exceptionally unlikely that the EU would seek a large and impoverished new Eastern member for many years to come”; “Ukrainian politicians might wish to study the examples of Finland, Sweden, and Austria during the Cold War”; and these “states lost nothing through neutrality and developed as prosperous, law-abiding, democratic Western societies that were able to join the EU after the Cold War ended”.

The “Minsk proposal for a solution to the Donbas conflict ignores the other territorial dispute between Russia and Ukraine, the Russian annexation of Crimea”; since “Russia has annexed Crimea (in accordance, it seems, with the wishes of a majority of the region’s population), no Russian government can give it up short of decisive defeat in war”; and like “other such issues in the world (Kashmir and Kosovo, for example), this question will simply have to be shelved until it is either quietly forgotten or fundamental changes in the international scene permit its solution”.

These “proposals will meet with strong opposition from Ukrainian nationalists and their supporters in the West, including some in the US Congress”; such “opponents, however, have a duty to say what they themselves are proposing as an alternative to a settlement based on the Minsk II Protocol”; “the only basis for a settlement is that of the Minsk II Protocol”; and at “present, the US approach to Ukraine is a zombie policy—a dead strategy that is wandering around pretending to be alive and getting in everyone’s way, because US policy-makers have not been able to bring themselves to bury it”.

Lieven says in a 22 June 2022 Nation piece: regarding “the Donbas republics, France and Germany brokered a very sensible agreement whereby they would become fully autonomous parts of Ukraine”; as “I have argued previously in The Nation, this was the only way in which Ukraine could retain these territories—but Ukraine refused to implement the agreement, fearing that these territories would act as a Russian ‘fifth column’ within Ukraine”; and this “raises the obvious question of why on earth, if the Ukrainian” parliament “and government fear the eastern Donbas so much, they should want it back again”.

The “only solution to these disputes, it seems to me, lies through the United Nations and respect for local democracy—something that has been completely ignored both by Russia and the West”; in “Crimea, a referendum on Russian or Ukrainian sovereignty should be organized by the UN”; in “return, Russia should agree to a similar referendum in Kosovo, where the vast majority of people also clearly support independence from Serbia, just as a majority of Crimeans clearly favor belonging to Russia”; “Moscow’s lifting of its veto would allow Kosovo to be accepted as a member of the United Nations, and would greatly reduce the danger of another disastrous conflict in the Balkans”; the “US argument that there is no parallel between these cases is a piece of legalistic casuistry, which the present head of the CIA, William Burns, acknowledges in his memoirs to be completely empty”; in “the Donbas, a UN peacekeeping force should be established on the whole territory of the two provinces, accompanied by a mission tasked with organizing a referendum there after a fixed period that will allow most refugees to return home”; this “referendum should be on a district-by-district basis”; and the “likely result, it seems logical to assume, will be that most of the people of the separatist republics, who have been bombarded by Ukraine for the past eight years, will opt to remain independent, while the areas that have been invaded and devastated by Russia in the past four months will opt to stay with Ukraine”.

Back “in February and early March, this war could legitimately be seen as an existential one for Ukraine”; the “initial Russian plan was clearly to capture Kyiv and turn Ukraine into a client state”; that “plan was however comprehensively defeated, and given Russian military losses and Western military support for Ukraine, it cannot be revived”; “Ukraine, with Western help, has won a great victory, and secured its freedom to move towards membership of the European Union—and the EU, not NATO, is the truly important institution when it comes to integration into the West”; the “war has now become a struggle over very limited amounts of territory in eastern and southern Ukraine, of a kind miserably familiar from other postcolonial conflicts”; if “it is ever to end, it will have to do so sooner or later through some form of pragmatic compromise”; and the “interests both of Ukraine and of humanity demand that we should seek this compromise now, not after years of suffering and destruction, with dire side effects for the wider world”.

Greene’s Commentary

Bryce Greene writes in his 4 March 2022 FAIR piece: a “major turning point in the US/Ukraine/Russia relationship was the 2014 violent and unconstitutional ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych, elected in 2010 in a vote heavily split between eastern and western Ukraine”; his “ouster came after months of protests led in part by far-right extremists (FAIR.org, 3/7/14)”; weeks “before his ouster, an unknown party leaked a phone call between US officials discussing who should and shouldn’t be part of the new government”; the “US involvement was part of a campaign aimed at exploiting the divisions in Ukrainian society to push the country into the US sphere of influence, pulling it out of the Russian sphere (FAIR.org, 1/28/22)”; in “the aftermath of the overthrow, Russia illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine, in part to secure a major naval base from the new Ukrainian government”; the “New York Times (2/24/22) and Washington Post (2/28/22) both omitted the role the US played in these events”; and in “US media, this critical moment in history is completely cleansed of US influence, erasing a critical step on the road to the current war”.

In “another response to the overthrow, an uprising in Ukraine’s Donbas region grew into a rebel movement that declared independence from Ukraine and announced the formation of their own republics”; the “resulting civil war claimed thousands of lives, but was largely paused in 2015 with a ceasefire agreement known as the Minsk II accords”; the “deal, agreed to by Ukraine, Russia and other European countries, was designed to grant some form of autonomy to the breakaway regions in exchange for reintegrating them into the Ukrainian state”; unfortunately, “the Ukrainian government refused to implement the autonomy provision of the accords”; Lieven writes in “The Nation (11/15/21)” that the “‘main reason for this refusal, apart from a general commitment to retain centralized power in Kiev, has been the belief that permanent autonomy for the Donbas would prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and the European Union, as the region could use its constitutional position within Ukraine to block membership’”; “Ukraine opted instead to prolong the Donbas conflict, and there was never significant pressure from the West to alter course”; “there were brief reports of the accords’ revival as recently as late January”; “Ukrainian security chief Oleksiy Danilov warned the West not to pressure Ukraine to implement the peace deal”; “Lieven notes that the depth of Russian commitment has yet to be fully tested, but Putin has supported the Minsk accords, refraining from officially recognizing the Donbas republics until last week”; the “New York Times (2/8/22) explainer on the Minsk accords blamed their failure on a disagreement between Ukraine and Russia over their implementation”; this “is inadequate to explain the failure of the agreements, however, given that Russia cannot affect Ukrainian parliamentary procedure”; the “Times quietly acknowledged that the law meant to define special status in the Donbas had been ‘shelved’ by the Ukrainians, indicating that the country had stopped trying to solve the issue in favor of a stalemate”; there “was no mention of the comments from a top Ukrainian official openly denouncing the peace accords”; and nor “was it acknowledged that the US could have used its influence to push Ukraine to solve the issue, but refrained from doing so”.

By “December 2021, US intelligence agencies were sounding the alarm that Russia was amassing troops at the Ukrainian border and planning to attack”; “Putin was very clear about a path to deescalation”; Putin “called on the West to halt NATO expansion, negotiate Ukrainian neutrality in the East/West rivalry, remove US nuclear weapons from non proliferating countries, and remove missiles, troops and bases near Russia”; these “are demands the US would surely have made were it in Russia’s position”; unfortunately, “the US refused to negotiate on Russia’s core concerns”; the “US offered some serious steps towards a larger arms control arrangement (Antiwar.com, 2/2/22)—something the Russians acknowledged and appreciated—but ignored issues of NATO’s military activity in Ukraine, and the deployment of nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe (Antiwar.com, 2/17/22)”; on “NATO expansion, the State Department continued to insist that they would not compromise NATO’s open door policy—in other words, it asserted the right to expand NATO and to ignore Russia’s red line”; “the US has signaled that it would approve of an informal agreement to keep Ukraine from joining the alliance for a period of time”; “this clearly was not going to be enough for Russia, which still remembers the last broken agreement”; the “US instead chose to pour hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine, exacerbating Putin’s expressed concerns”; had “the US been genuinely interested in avoiding war, it would have taken every opportunity to de-escalate the situation”; and the US instead “did the opposite nearly every step of the way”.

In “its explainer piece, the Washington Post (2/28/22) downplayed the significance of the US’s rejection of Russia’s core concerns”; the WaPo piece says that “‘Russia has said that it wants guarantees Ukraine will be barred from joining NATO—a non-starter for the Western alliance, which maintains an open-door policy’”; “NATO’s open door policy is simply accepted as an immutable policy that Putin just needs to deal with”; and this “very assumption, so key to the Ukraine crisis, goes unchallenged in the US media ecosystem”.

Chomsky’s Commentary

Noam Chomsky makes some interesting points—about Ukraine—in this 2 March 2015 interview that was broadcast live:

Chomsky says: it was “a pretty remarkable concession” when Mikhail Gorbachev agreed “to have Germany join a hostile military alliance led by the only superpower”; NATO “moved right up to Russia’s borders” under Clinton despite the concession; there’s “a very natural settlement to this issue”, namely (1) “a strong declaration that Ukraine will” become neutral and (2) “some more or less agreed-upon choices” about “the autonomy of regions”; “those are the basic terms of a peaceful settlement”; and “we have to be willing to accept it” or else “we’re moving towards a very dangerous situation”.

Chomsky says that “US military equipment was taking part in a military parade in Estonia a couple hundred yards from the Russian border”. I found a 24 February 2015 WaPo piece—titled “U.S. military vehicles paraded 300 yards from the Russian border”—that says: “Russia has long complained bitterly about NATO expansion, saying that the Cold War defense alliance was a major security threat as it drew closer to Russia’s borders”; the “anger grew especially passionate after the Baltic states joined in 2004, and Russian President Vladimir Putin cited fears that Ukraine would join NATO when he annexed the Crimean Peninsula in March last year”; “U.S. tanks rolled through the streets of Riga, Latvia, in November for that nation’s Independence Day parade, another powerful reminder of U.S. boots on the ground in the region”; and the “United States has sent hundreds of military personnel to joint NATO exercises in the Baltics”.

And Chomsky refers to a resolution that “the new government in Ukraine” passed—“like 300 to eight or something”—“announcing its intention to take steps to join NATO”. I found a 23 December 2014 NYT piece—titled “Ukraine Vote Takes Nation a Step Closer to NATO”—that says: the “Parliament, firmly controlled by a pro-Western majority, voted overwhelmingly, 303 to 8, to rescind a policy of ‘nonalignment’ and to instead pursue closer military and strategic ties with the West”; former “President Viktor F. Yanukovych, who was toppled in February and fled to Russia after months of protests in Kiev, the capital, pushed Parliament to adopt the policy in 2010, shortly after he took office”; the “law had defined nonalignment as ‘nonparticipation of Ukraine in the military-political alliances’”; and the “revised law, which was a priority of President Petro O. Poroshenko, requires Ukraine to ‘deepen cooperation with NATO in order to achieve the criteria required for membership in this organization’”.

Cohen’s Commentary

Stephen F. Cohen talks—in his 2019 book War With Russia?—about how low discourse has sunk. He says in the first chapter, which is an abridged version of his 27 August 2014 Nation article:

I want to speak generally about this dire situation—almost certainly a fateful turning point in world affairs—as a participant in what little mainstream media debate has been permitted but also as a longtime scholarly historian of Russia and of US-Russian relations and informed observer who believes there is still a way out of this terrible crisis.

Regarding my episodic participation in the very limited mainstream media discussion, I will speak in a more personal way than I usually do. From the outset, I saw my role as twofold.

Recalling the American adage “There are two sides to every story,” I sought to explain Moscow’s view of the Ukrainian crisis, which is almost entirely missing in US mainstream coverage. What, for example, did Putin mean when he said Western policy-makers were “trying to drive us into some kind of corner,” “have lied to us many times” and “have crossed the line” in Ukraine? Second, having argued since the 1990s, in my books and Nation articles, that Washington’s bipartisan Russia policies could lead to a new Cold War and to just such a crisis, I wanted to bring my longstanding analysis to bear on today’s confrontation over Ukraine.

As a result, I have been repeatedly assailed—even in purportedly liberal publications—as Putin’s No. 1 American “apologist,” “useful idiot,” “dupe,” “best friend,” and, perhaps a new low in immature invective, “toady.” I expected to be criticized, as I was during nearly twenty years as a CBS News commentator, but not in such personal and scurrilous ways. (Something has changed in our political culture, perhaps related to the Internet, but I think more generally.)

Until now, I have not replied to any of these defamatory attacks. I do so today because I now think they are directed at many of us in this room and indeed at anyone critical of Washington’s Russia policies, not just me.…

None of these character assassins present any factual refutations of anything I have written or said. They indulge instead in ad hominem slurs based on distortions and on the general premise that any American who seeks to understand Moscow’s perspectives is a “Putin apologist” and thus unpatriotic. Such a premise only abets the possibility of war.

Some of these writers, or people who stand behind them, are longtime proponents of the twenty-year US policies that have led to the Ukrainian crisis. By defaming us, they seek to obscure their complicity in the unfolding disaster and their unwillingness to rethink it. Failure to rethink dooms us to the worst outcome.

Equally important, these kinds of neo-McCarthyites are trying to stifle democratic debate by stigmatizing us in ways that make our views unwelcome on mainstream television and radio broadcasts and op-ed pages—and to policy-makers. They are largely succeeding.

Cohen says that something “has changed in our political culture, perhaps related to the Internet, but I think more generally”. And that there’s an effort “to stifle democratic debate”.

He says—in the same chapter—that the following things aren’t true: (1) the agreement that the EU—with US backing—offered Yanukovych in November 2013 was “a benign association with European democracy and prosperity”; (2) “Yanukovych was prepared to sign the agreement, but Putin bullied and bribed him into rejecting it”; (3) thus “began Kiev’s Maidan protests and all that has since followed”; (4) today’s “civil war in Ukraine was caused by Putin’s aggressive response to the peaceful Maidan protests against Yanukovych’s decision”; and (5) the “only way out of the crisis is for Putin to end his ‘aggression’ and call off his agents in southeastern Ukraine”.

He says—regarding (1), (2), and (3)—that the facts are the following: the “EU proposal was a reckless provocation compelling the democratically elected president of a deeply divided country to choose between Russia and the West”; so “too was the EU’s rejection of Putin’s counterproposal for a Russian-European-American plan to save Ukraine from financial collapse”; on “its own, the EU proposal was not economically feasible”; offering “little financial assistance, it required the Ukrainian government to enact harsh austerity measures and would have sharply curtailed its longstanding and essential economic relations with Russia”; nor “was the EU proposal entirely benign”; it “included protocols requiring Ukraine to adhere to Europe’s ‘military and security’ policies—which meant in effect, without mentioning the alliance, NATO”; and “it was not Putin’s alleged ‘aggression’ that initiated today’s crisis but instead a kind of velvet aggression by Brussels and Washington to bring all of Ukraine into the West, including (in fine print) into NATO”.

He says—regarding (4)—that the facts are the following: in “February 2014, the radicalized Maidan protests, strongly influenced by extreme nationalist and even semi-fascist street forces, turned violent”; hoping “for a peaceful resolution, European foreign ministers brokered a compromise between Maidan’s parliamentary representatives and Yanukovych”; it “would have left him as president, with less power, of a coalition reconciliation government until early elections in December”; within “hours, violent street fighters aborted the agreement”; “Europe’s leaders and Washington did not defend their own diplomatic accord”; minority “parliamentary parties representing Maidan and, predominantly, western Ukraine” formed the new government after Yanukovych fled; among these minority parties was “Svoboda, an ultranationalist movement previously anathematized by the European Parliament as incompatible with European values”; “Washington and Brussels endorsed the coup and have supported the outcome ever since”; the “February coup” triggered everything “that followed, from Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the spread of rebellion in southeastern Ukraine to the civil war and Kiev’s ‘anti-terrorist operation’”; and “Putin’s actions were mostly reactive”.

And he says—regarding (5)—that the facts are the following: the “underlying causes of the crisis are Ukraine’s own internal divisions, not primarily Putin’s actions”; the “essential factor escalating the crisis has been Kiev’s ‘anti-terrorist’ military campaign against its own citizens, mainly in Luhansk and Donetsk”; “Putin influences and no doubt aids the Donbass ‘self-defenders’”; considering “the pressure on him in Moscow, he is likely to continue to do so, perhaps even more directly, but he does not fully control them”; if “Kiev’s assault ends, Putin probably can compel the rebels to negotiate”; and “only the Obama administration can compel Kiev to stop, and it has not done so”.

Twenty “years of US policy have led to this fateful American-Russian confrontation”; “Putin may have contributed to it along the way, but his role during his fourteen years in power has been almost entirely reactive”; and regarding Putin’s reactiveness, it’s “a complaint frequently directed against him by more hardline forces in Moscow”.

In “politics as in history, there are always alternatives”; the “Ukrainian crisis could have at least three different outcomes”; the worst one would be that the “civil war escalates and widens, drawing in Russian and possibly NATO military forces”; in “the second outcome, today’s de facto partitioning of Ukraine becomes institutionalized in the form of two Ukrainian states”; the “best outcome would be the preservation of a united Ukraine”; this third and best outcome “will require good-faith negotiations between representatives of all of Ukraine’s regions, including leaders of the rebellious southeast, probably under the auspices of Washington, Moscow, the European Union, and eventually the UN”; “Putin and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, have proposed this for months”; “Ukraine’s tragedy continues to grow”; thousands “of innocent people have already been killed or wounded”; “there is no wise leadership in Washington”; “President Barack Obama has vanished as a statesman in the Ukrainian crisis”; “Secretary of State John Kerry speaks publicly more like a secretary of war than as our top diplomat”; the “Senate is preparing even more bellicose legislation”; the “establishment media rely uncritically on Kiev’s propaganda and cheerlead for its policies”; and “American television rarely, if ever, shows Kiev’s military assaults on Luhansk, Donetsk, or other Ukrainian rebel cities, thereby arousing no public qualms or opposition”.

And Cohen makes—in a 13 November 2019 interview with an organization that I happen to find extremely problematic but that I think has done good interviews—some interesting observations. Quoting from the transcript: “ultimately you have a situation now which seems not to be widely understood, that the new president of Ukraine, Zelensky, ran as a peace candidate”; this “is a bit of a stretch and maybe it doesn’t mean a whole lot to your generation, but he ran a kind of George McGovern campaign”; the “difference was McGovern got wiped out and Zelensky won by, I think, 71, 72 percent”; he “won an enormous mandate to make peace”; “that means he has to negotiate with Vladimir Putin”; “what’s important and not well reported here” is that “his willingness to deal directly with Putin” actually “required considerable boldness”, since “there are opponents of this in Ukraine and they are armed”; some “people say they’re fascists but they’re certainly ultra-nationalist, and they have said that they will remove and kill Zelensky if he continues along this line of negotiating with Putin”; “his life is being threatened literally by a quasi-fascist movement in Ukraine”; “he can’t go forward with full peace negotiations with Russia, with Putin, unless America has his back”; and maybe “that won’t be enough, but unless the White House encourages this diplomacy, Zelensky has no chance of negotiating an end to the war, so the stakes are enormously high”.

Since “the end of the Soviet Union”, Washington’s stated policy has been to promote democracy—and “particularly constitutionalism”—“in the former Soviet territories”; Yanukovych “had been by all ratifying European monitoring organizations freely and fairly elected”; it “had been a fairly clean election”; “he had already agreed to move elections up”; “I think within nine months you could vote him out”; the 2014 overthrow was “essentially a street coup”; Obama supported Yanukovych’s overthrow “within hours”; it was “a turning point” and “a very important moment”; it was “a blow to constitutionalism, the very cause that we claimed to be promoting, so we need to think about that”; and Obama’s support “sent a message about what the United States really was prepared to” say.

Abelow’s Commentary

Benjamin Abelow writes in his 2022 book How the West Brought War to Ukraine: in “the months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the explanation offered for America’s involvement has changed”; what “had been pitched as a limited, humanitarian effort to help Ukraine defend itself has morphed to include an additional aim”, namely “to degrade Russia’s capacity to fight another war in the future”; “a humanitarian effort would seek to limit the destruction and end the war quickly”; “the strategic goal of weakening Russia requires a prolonged war with maximum destruction, one that bleeds Russia dry of men and machine on battlefield Ukraine”; “America’s new military objective places the United States into a posture of direct confrontation with Russia”; and now “the goal is to cripple a part of the Russian state, its military”.

The “underlying cause of the war lies not in an unbridled expansionism of Mr. Putin, or in paranoid delusions of military planners in the Kremlin, but in a 30-year history of Western provocations, directed at Russia, that began during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and continued to the start of the war”. Abelow writes—regarding this history—that Washington has done the following things either on its own or with European allies:

• Expanded NATO over a thousand miles eastward, pressing it toward Russia’s borders, in disregard of assurances previously given to Moscow

• Withdrawn unilaterally from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty and placed antiballistic launch systems in newly joined NATO countries. These launchers can also accommodate and fire offensive nuclear weapons at Russia, such as nuclear-tipped Tomahawk cruise missiles

• Helped lay the groundwork for, and may have directly instigated, an armed, far-right coup in Ukraine. This coup replaced a democratically elected pro-Russian government with an unelected pro-Western one

• Conducted countless NATO military exercises near Russia’s border. These have included, for example, live-fire rocket exercises whose goal was to simulate attacks on air-defense systems inside Russia

• Asserted, without pressing strategic need, and in disregard of the threat such a move would pose for Russia, that Ukraine would become a NATO member. NATO then refused to renounce this policy even when doing so might have averted war

• Withdrawn unilaterally from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, increasing Russian vulnerability to a U.S. first strike

• Armed and trained the Ukrainian military through bilateral agreements and held regular joint military training exercises inside Ukraine. The goal has been to produce NATO-level military interoperability even before formally admitting Ukraine into NATO

• Led the Ukrainian leadership to adopt an uncompromising stance toward Russia, further exacerbating the threat to Russia and putting Ukraine in the path of Russian military blowback

Abelow lists those eight things that Washington has done during the past three decades. And he writes:

Although it is impossible to know the specific motivations that led Mr. Putin to invade Ukraine, a combination of factors was likely at play: (1) the ongoing arming, training to NATO standards, and integration of the military structures of Ukraine, the United States, and other Western powers through non-NATO arrangements; (2) the ongoing threat that Ukraine would be admitted to NATO; and (3) concern about possible new intermediate-range missile deployments, exacerbated by a concern that the U.S. might deploy Aegis, offensive-capable ABM launchers in Ukraine regardless whether Ukraine was yet a member of NATO.

He lists three factors—the de facto integration of Ukraine into NATO, the possibility of Ukraine’s formal entry into NATO, and the issue of “intermediate-range missile deployments” and “offensive-capable ABM launchers”.

Abelow asks who: “bears responsibility for the humanitarian disaster in Ukraine, for the death of thousands of Ukrainians, both civilians and soldiers, and for the impressment of Ukrainian civilians into the military”; “bears responsibility for the destruction of Ukrainian homes and businesses, and for the refugee crisis that is now adding to the one from the Middle East”; “bears responsibility for the deaths of thousands of young men serving in the Russian military, most of whom surely believe, like their Ukrainian counterparts, that they are fighting to protect their nation and their families”; “bears responsibility for the ongoing harm being inflicted on the economies and citizens of Europe and the United States”; “will bear responsibility if disruptions in farming lead to famine in Africa, a continent that depends heavily on the importation of grain from Ukraine and Russia”; and “will bear responsibility if the war in Ukraine escalates to a nuclear exchange, and then becomes a full-scale nuclear war”. In “a proximal sense, the answer to all these questions is simple”, namely that “Mr. Putin is responsible”; he “started the war and, with his military planners, is directing its conduct”; and he “did not have to go to war”.

The “provocations that the United States and its allies have directed at Russia are policy blunders so serious that, had the situation been reversed, U.S. leaders would long ago have risked nuclear war with Russia”; “the United States and its European allies have implied that a rational actor would be assuaged by the West’s statements of benign intention”; the implication has been “that the weapons, training, and interoperability exercises, no matter how provocative, powerful, or close to Russia’s borders, are purely defensive and not to be feared”; “the West has suggested that Mr. Putin is imagining strategic threats where none in fact exist”; this “Western framing—which posits a lack of legitimate Russian security concerns coupled with implied and explicit accusations of irrationality—underlies much of the currently dominant narrative”; and this framing “also underlies the ideological position of the Russia hawks who play such a prominent role in Washington”.

The “war in Ukraine probably would not have taken place” had Washington and its NATO allies: “not pushed NATO to the border of Russia”; “not deployed nuclear-capable missile launch systems in Romania and planned them for Poland and perhaps elsewhere as well”; “not contributed to the overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014”; “not abrogated the ABM treaty and then the intermediate-range nuclear missile treaty, and then disregarded Russian attempts to negotiate a bilateral moratorium on deployments”; “not conducted live-fire exercises with rockets in Estonia to practice striking targets inside Russia”; “not coordinated a massive 32-nation military training exercise near Russian territory”; “not intertwined the U.S. military with that of Ukraine”; and “etc. etc. etc.”. Abelow “would suggest that had any two or three of the many provocations discussed here not occurred, things would be very different today”.

Washington’s words and actions “may have led Ukrainian leaders, and the Ukrainian people, to adopt intransigent positions toward Russia”; instead “of pressing and supporting a negotiated peace in the Donbas between Kiev and pro-Russian autonomists, the United States encouraged strongly nationalistic forces in Ukraine”; and Washington “poured weapons into Ukraine, stepped up military integration and training with the Ukrainian military, refused to renounce plans to incorporate Ukraine into NATO, and may have given the impression to the Ukrainian leaders and people that it might directly go to war with Russia on Ukraine’s behalf”.

Washington’s words and actions “may have affected Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who won his 2019 election, with over 70 percent popular support, running on a peace platform”; “in the end he failed to carry through”; even “with war looming, he would not compromise for the sake of peace”; shortly “after Zelensky was elected in 2019, Stephen F. Cohen suggested in an interview that Zelensky would need the active support of the United States to overcome pressure—including threats against his life—from Ukraine’s far right”; without “this support, Cohen predicted, Mr. Zelensky would not be able to seek peace”; and to “my knowledge, Zelensky never received any substantial American support to pursue his peace agenda”.

Zelensky “met in Munich with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz” five days before the 2022 invasion—according “to the Wall Street Journal, Scholz proposed to broker a peace deal”. Abelow quotes the following from a 1 April 2022 WSJ piece, which says that Scholz told Zelensky:

that Ukraine should renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal between the West and Russia. The pact would be signed by Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden, who would jointly guarantee Ukraine’s security.

Mr. Zelensky said Mr. Putin couldn’t be trusted to uphold such an agreement and that most Ukrainians wanted to join NATO. His answer left German officials worried that the chances of peace were fading.

Zelensky “said Mr. Putin couldn’t be trusted to uphold such an agreement and that most Ukrainians wanted to join NATO”—his “answer left German officials worried that the chances of peace were fading”. And Abelow writes:

In a recent interview, Richard Sakwa suggested that Mr. Zelensky could have made peace with Russia by speaking just five words: “Ukraine will not join NATO.” Sakwa continued: “If Putin was bluffing [about the decisive importance of NATO expansion], call his bluff. Instead…we had this catastrophic war.…It was a frivolous approach to the fate of a nation and, above all, the fate of his own people.”

Abelow quotes Sakwa’s observation that Zelensky never tried to avoid war. And Sakwa’s criticism that not trying was “‘a frivolous approach’”.

My Own Thoughts

I think that all of these commentaries—that I’ve quoted from—show that the media gives people a very simple story that doesn’t line up with the actual record. Russia hawks will tell you: (1) Yanukovych was overthrown in 2014 in an event that wasn’t a coup, (2) Russia then illegally annexed Crimea and illegally invaded the Donbas, (3) this Russian response demonstrated that Russia was committed to aggression, and (4) the right path forward was—given (3)—to integrate Ukraine into NATO and forget about doing diplomacy with the Kremlin.

I think that (1) is false. Ukraine had a democratic constitution—it wasn’t a dictatorship. People overthrew an elected official—that’s called a coup. It remains a coup even if you think that there was something wrong with the election—election results can be challenged in court. And it’s not just that Yanukovych’s overthrow was a coup—it looks like he’d been fairly elected and that he was willing to hold early elections.

I think that (2) is true. It’s interesting to note Western hypocrisy on the topic of international law—Westerners who condemn Russia’s illegal behavior shouldn’t ignore their own governments’ illegal behavior.

I think that (3) is incorrect. Russia’s actions had a context around them—that doesn’t make the actions less illegal, but does affect how one should view those actions. Look at the fact that Russia’s only warm-water naval base is in Crimea. And look—see above the quotes from Matlock and also from Quigley—at the whole history of Crimea. Consider Russia’s security interests, the fact that a Washington-backed coup had just taken place, and the issue of how anti-Russia and dedicated to ethnic nationalism and opposed to local autonomy the new government was. I can’t speak to what the Kremlin thought about the extent to which the US had been involved in the coup—I don’t know what the leaked phone call actually demonstrates—but that’s potentially another component. I think that this notion—that Russia proved itself to be committed to aggression—requires you to strip away the context of the actions.

I find it incredibly disturbing to see Russian actions being presented to people context-free—why negotiate with the Kremlin if they’re committed to aggression and annexation and conquest? Isn’t negotiation appeasement—and isn’t war the only option—if Putin is Hitler? Russia has—for 30 years—made it absolutely clear that Ukraine is a red line regarding NATO. The highest-level US analysts have—for 30 years—pointed out that Ukraine is a Russian red line regarding NATO. We’ve known for a long time about the Kremlin’s view on how Ukraine connects to Russian security interests—the 2022 invasion was a major war crime but doesn’t necessarily mean that Moscow poses a threat to other countries.

And I think that (3) was incorrect, so naturally I think that (4) was a catastrophically irrational conclusion to draw. There wasn’t any good reason to think that Putin was Hitler or that diplomacy was impossible—it was unnecessarily provocative to pursue NATO integration and to give up on diplomacy. Integrating Ukraine into NATO was—frankly—a fine way to ensure Ukraine’s destruction and possibly far worse.

I’ll use this piece to talk about information filtration and the Ukraine war. The media has been docile—when it comes to the Ukraine war—to an extraordinarily disturbing degree.

Information Filtration

Regarding foreign policy, it’s interesting to consider two filters that exist when it comes to the information that the public receives. The first has to do with government secrecy—David N. Gibbs has an excellent 1995 article about this topic:

Secrecy And International Relations (1995)

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He writes: the “defining feature of the Internal Threat approach is that the general public is considered the principal target of government secrecy”; the “practical implications of this perspective are disturbing for the researcher”; and if “the Internal Threat approach is correct” then “much of our research is and must be conducted without important or even vital information”.

The second has to do with the media’s institutional structure—the media are free from government coercion but aren’t institutionally free. We often get Orwellian media coverage—for example, there is a clear record that shows that Washington provoked the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, but the media will constantly refer to the invasion as “unprovoked”. And Gibbs writes in his 1 January 2002 FAIR piece “Forgotten Coverage of Afghan ‘Freedom Fighters’”, which provides an example of Orwellian media coverage: there’s been “a fairly dramatic and Orwellian shift in the tone of public discourse regarding Afghanistan”; “Islamic extremism is now viewed with great hostility”; “in the 1980s U.S. policy strongly supported such extremism”; and “there is scarcely any recognition that a little more than a decade ago” the “U.S. press waxed eloquent about the Afghan ‘freedom fighters’”. Gibbs describes a situation where past coverage was completely erased from awareness—the media proceeded with extreme amnesia.

These two levels of filtration determine what reaches the public and what the public knows—these two levels shape public consciousness. The 1995 article is about actual literal secrecy—that’s the first level. And the 2002 piece is about the Orwellian coverage that our media provides—the media filters out certain information, since the media operates under institutional constraints. The media doesn’t just filter information—the media also assembles facts within an ideological framework—but you can see the stark instances where something is completely unknown that would be right in the spotlight in an unconstrained media.

Was the Invasion Provoked?

The media has obliterated the past regarding what preceded the Ukraine war—this is as Orwellian an erasure as the one that Gibbs describes in his 2002 piece. It’s common to see comments like this in the press:

The magnitude of the Russian gambit is staggering. Whatever Mr. Putin’s ideas on how Ukraine should relate to Russia, whatever his grievances over Western encroachment on what he perceives as Russia’s sphere of influence, whatever his views on Russia’s place in Europe and the world, an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign European state is an unprovoked declaration of war on a scale, on a continent and in a century when it was thought to be no longer possible.

This was a war crime—this was an act of aggression. This was a heinous invasion that’s starving millions and might get us all killed. The invasion was completely unjustified—it’s not like the decision to invade could ever be justified morally or legally. But how was it “unprovoked”?

Let me recommend two useful pieces—Bryce Greene’s 4 March 2022 FAIR piece and Gibbs’s 6 February 2022 Truthout piece—that share important information about provocation. You can read the pieces and ask yourself how prominently the information contained in them appears in the media—I think that an institutionally free media would spotlight the record of provocation. Greene starts his piece as follows:

Many governments and media figures are rightly condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine as an act of aggression and a violation of international law. But in his first speech about the invasion, on February 24, US President Joe Biden also called the invasion “unprovoked.”

It’s a word that has been echoed repeatedly across the media ecosystem. “Putin’s forces entered Ukraine’s second-largest city on the fourth day of the unprovoked invasion,” Axios (2/27/22) reported; “Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine entered its second week Friday,” said CNBC (3/4/22). Vox (3/1/22) wrote of “Putin’s decision to launch an unprovoked and unnecessary war with the second-largest country in Europe.”

The “unprovoked” descriptor obscures a long history of provocative behavior from the United States in regards to Ukraine. This history is important to understanding how we got here, and what degree of responsibility the US bears for the current attack on Ukraine.

That’s true—this “history is important to understanding how we got here, and what degree of responsibility the US bears for the current attack on Ukraine”. And Gibbs concludes his own piece as follows:

In undertaking these interventions, the U.S. was laying the groundwork for future conflicts with Russia. If U.S. officials were looking for trouble and seeking to increase global insecurity, they could not have done a better job.

Given all these historical affronts, it should come as no surprise that the Russian people longed for a more authoritarian leader—like Putin—who would stand up to the increasingly distrusted U.S. Despite his authoritarian style, Putin has been inarguably popular and has dominated Russian politics since first coming to power in 2000.

U.S. officials cannot go back in time to correct past mistakes; in all probability, they will never regain Russia’s trust. However, we do have an opportunity to deescalate tensions. The key Russian demand is a firm U.S. guarantee that Ukraine will not be allowed to join NATO. U.S. officials should be open to this demand, as a basis for a full settlement, and should forgo their obsession with relentlessly projecting U.S. power through NATO. Surely this outcome would be better than a new Cold War with a nuclear-armed Russia, which is becoming a serious risk.

Gibbs says that Washington “was laying the groundwork for future conflicts with Russia”. And that US officials “could not have done a better job” if they “were looking for trouble and seeking to increase global insecurity”.

Were US Officials Warned?

US officials were warned about NATO expansion. I recommend that people read (1) Michael MccGwire’s excellent 1998 article about NATO expansion and (2) the 1997 open letter that MccGwire’s article refers to:

Nato Expansion (1998)

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26 June 1997 Open Letter To President Clinton

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Regarding the 1997 open letter, MccGwire writes: “fifty former US senators, cabinet secretaries and ambassadors, as well as US arms control and foreign policy specialists, stated their belief that ‘the current US-led effort to expand NATO…is a policy error of historic importance’”; eminent “and highly respected individuals made up this bipartisan group”; the “five senators included Sam Nunn, a long-standing expert on defence”; “Arthur Hartman and Jack Matlock, ambassadors to Moscow, 1981–7 and 1987–91, were among twelve signatories of that rank”; “Professors Richard Pipes and Marshal Shulman (former members of the National Security Council, but on opposite sides of the US debate on Soviet policy in the 1970–90 period) both signed the letter, as did Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defence in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and Paul Nitze, who was President Reagan’s arms control supremo in the 1980s and a leading member of the hawkish ‘Committee on the Present Danger’ in the 1970s”; and former “NATO Assistant Secretary-General Philip Merrill and logistics chief Maj. Gen. Christian Patte were also among the signatories, as was Admiral Stansfield Turner, former Director of the CIA”. 

And MccGwire writes that the 1997 open letter “was not the first time that experienced professionals had warned against extending NATO eastwards”—in “May 1995, a group of retired senior Foreign Service, State Department, and Department of Defense officials wrote privately to the US Secretary of State expressing concern about a policy that ‘risked endangering the long-term viability of NATO, significantly exacerbating the instability that now exists in the zone that lies between Germany and Russia, and convincing most Russians that the United States and the West [were] attempting to isolate, encircle, and subordinate them, rather than integrating them into a new European system of collective security’”. The 3 May 1995 letter reads: 

May 3, 1995

Dear Mr. Secretary:

We are a group of retired Foreign Service, State Department, and Department of Defense officers who served during the Cold War. We are concerned by the potential consequences of the administration’s policy of promising to extend NATO membership to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. In our view, this policy risks endangering the long-term viability of NATO, significantly exacerbating the instability that now exists in the zone that lies between Germany and Russia, and convincing most Russians that the United States and the West are attempting to isolate, encircle, and subordinate them, rather than integrating them into a new European system of collective security.

At the same time, we are conscious of the desirability of taking reasonable steps to allay the fears of the Czechs, Hungarians, and Poles, who, understandably after their long domination by the Soviet Union, are anxious to find security in some close Western connection. We have not noted in the published criticism of possible NATO expansion a recognition of these desires, which must be given serious consideration.

One of our former colleagues, Ambassador Jonathan Dean, a longtime policy-maker and practitioner in the field of European security, proposes changing current American policy on this issue through inclusion of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in the Western European Union, the defense arm of the European Union, instead of in NATO; NATO-Russian security assurances for the belt of states from the Baltic to Albania, and Russian membership in an Advisory Committee on European Security. While all of us do not endorse every word of his paper, we are impressed by his arguments and believe they should be considered in developing an alternative to the NATO expansion policy.

John A. Armitage, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Department of State, 1973–1978

Robert R. Bowie, Counselor, Department of State, 1966–1968

William I. Cargo, Ambassador to Nepal, 1973–1976

William A. Crawford, Ambassador to Romania, 1961–1965

Richard T. Davies, Ambassador to Poland, 1973–1978

Martin J. Hillenbrand, Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany, 1972–1976

U. Alexis Johnson, Deputy Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, 1961–1964 and 1965–1966

Ambassador to Japan, 1966–1969

James F. Leonard, Jr., Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, 1977–1979

Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Ambassador to the USSR, 1987–1991

Paul H. Nitze, Secretary of the Navy, 1963–1967; Deputy Secretary of Defense, 1967–1969; Special Advisor to the President and the Secretary of State on Arms Control Matters, 1985–1989

Herbert S. Okun, Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, 1985–1989

James K. Penfield, Ambassador to Iceland, 1961–1967

Jack R. Perry, Ambassador to Bulgaria, 1979–1981

John D. Scanlan, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, 1981–1982

William E. Schaufele, Jr., Ambassador to Poland, 1978–1980

Galen L. Stone, Ambassador to Cyprus, 1978–1981

Emory C. Swank, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, 1969–1970; Ambassador to Cambodia, 1970–1973

Philip H. Trezise, Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, 1969–1971

NATO expansion happened despite these 1995 concerns about “the potential consequences of the administration’s policy”. And also despite the concerns expressed in the 1997 open letter. 

In 1999 NATO admitted Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic—in 2004 NATO expanded further when Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia were admitted. A 2 May 1998 NYT piece quotes a prescient warning from George Kennan: 

His voice is a bit frail now, but the mind, even at age 94, is as sharp as ever. So when I reached George Kennan by phone to get his reaction to the Senate’s ratification of NATO expansion it was no surprise to find that the man who was the architect of America’s successful containment of the Soviet Union and one of the great American statesmen of the 20th century was ready with an answer.

“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.”

“What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,” added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed “X,” defined America’s cold-war containment policy for 40 years. “I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.

“And Russia’s democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we’ve just signed up to defend from Russia,” said Mr. Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926 and was U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952. “It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are—but this is just wrong.”

Kennan says that the expansion serves no legitimate purpose, will antagonize the Russians, and will generate unnecessary hostility—he points out that expansion will elicit a hostile reaction that will then be used to justify expansion.

Was a Promise Broken?

There are assertions that Secretary of State James Baker never promised Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO wouldn’t expand eastward—look at Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s 7 January 2022 comment:

NATO never promised not to admit new members.

It could not and would not—the “open door policy” was a core provision of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty that founded NATO.

The Russian president at the end of the Cold War, Mikhail Gorbachev, was asked directly about this in an interview in 2014, and said very clearly that the topic of NATO expansion was not discussed at all in negotiations about German reunification that led to the end of the Cold War.

There was no promise that NATO wouldn’t expand.

Secretary of State James Baker said the same thing.

Blinken says that there “was no promise that NATO wouldn’t expand”. And look at Condoleezza Rice’s 28 January 2022 comment:

Largely because of German objections, we did not offer Membership Action Plan to Ukraine and to Georgia in 2008. And we could debate whether or not we would be here had we done that, but we didn’t. And so the idea that we somehow crossed some line with the Russians, I think, is a figment of Vladimir Putin’s imagination, just like the idea that somehow Jim Baker, all the way back in 1990, said we would never move east. What we were talking about at the time was East Germany, not—nobody was even imagining Czechoslovakia or Poland or Hungary at that time.

Rice says that the idea—“that somehow Jim Baker, all the way back in 1990, said we would never move east”—“is a figment of Vladimir Putin’s imagination”.

NATO continued to expand—after 1990—further and further east. And apparently a promise had indeed been made to Gorbachev—Blinken and Rice are apparently wrong. The National Security Archive website has a 12 December 2017 posting that says:

U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).

The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels. 

One can explore the declassified documents. And see whether “subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were” indeed “founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels”.

A 29 November 2009 Spiegel piece says: there “is widespread agreement among all political parties in Moscow, from the Patriots of Russia to the Communists to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, that the West broke its word and short-changed Russia when it was weak”; the “question of what Moscow was in fact promised in 1990 has sparked a historical dispute with far-reaching consequences for Russia’s future relationship with the West”; and after “speaking with many of those involved and examining previously classified British and German documents in detail, SPIEGEL has concluded that there was no doubt that the West did everything it could to give the Soviets the impression that NATO membership was out of the question for countries like Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia”.

Joshua Shifrinson writes in a 1 April 2016 International Security article: “during the diplomacy surrounding German reunification in 1990, the United States repeatedly offered the Soviet Union informal assurances against NATO’s future expansion into Eastern Europe”; in “addition to explicit discussion of a NATO non-expansion pledge in February 1990, assurances against NATO enlargement were epitomized and encapsulated in later offers to give East Germany special military status in NATO, to construct and integrate the Soviet Union into new European security institutions, and to generally recognize Soviet interests in Eastern Europe”; “the United States privately entertained greater ambitions for dominating post–Cold War Europe than many former policymakers and scholars have detailed”; “the United States presented assurances to the Soviet Union that were meant to look powerful, while the United States maneuvered to dominate post–Cold War Europe”; “even as the United States pledged to address Soviet security concerns, it staked out self-interested positions for post–Cold War Europe”; and “the United States exploited Soviet weaknesses despite presenting a cooperative façade”.

Shifrinson addresses the fact that the promise was informal: “even Russian leaders claiming a broken promise do not argue that the Soviet Union received a formal deal”; “not only are formal agreements often the codification of arrangements that states would make regardless of a formal offer, but if private and unwritten discussions are meaningless, then diplomacy itself would be an unnecessary and fruitless exercise”; “analysts have long understood that states do not need formal agreements on which to base their future expectations”; and put “simply, explicit and codified arrangements are neither necessary nor sufficient for actors to strike deals and receive political assurances”.

And a 15 June 2015 piece says: most “legal systems somehow accommodate the creation of binding evaluative standards through non-written materials”; international law “distinguishes itself from other legal systems by virtue of the generous room it reserves for legal normativity generated through non-written materials”; “when it comes to the production of binding evaluative standards, the ‘non-written’ has always enjoyed a privileged position in international law”; “the designation of non-written materials as sources of legal normativity by virtue of customary law and general principles is not specific to international law”; “international law stands out” because “customary law and—to a lesser extent—general principles enjoy a prominent role”; and international law also stands out “because it allows the extraction of a great deal of legal materials from other non-written materials like oral promises as well as tacit agreements between states”.

Is NATO a Purely Defensive Alliance?

It’s worth pointing out that NATO isn’t a purely defensive alliance—look at NATO’s 2011 military intervention in Libya, which was an offensive regime-change operation.

Muammar Gaddafi was tortured to death—a 16 October 2012 Human Rights Watch report talks about footage that shows that “a militiaman stabbed him in his anus with what appears to have been a bayonet”. NATO officials were not—as far as I can tell—upset about his death or how he died. And Hillary Clinton displayed great pleasure—and showed no regret at all—when she heard about Gaddafi’s death. A brief 20 October 2011 CBS report says that Clinton “joked when told of news reports of Qaddafi’s death by an aide in between formal interviews”—we have video of her joke. The CBS report says that she “shared a laugh with a television news reporter moments after hearing deposed Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi had been killed”.

I recommend three pieces—a 17 March 2021 Foreign Policy piece, then a 3 December 2020 BBC piece, and then a 5 February 2012 NYT piece—that talk about the Libya intervention’s ghastly consequences. The 2012 piece says:

“When they came into Ménaka, they were yelling, ‘Allahu akbar.’ What does that mean? We don’t do that sort of thing when we fight,” said Bajan Ag Hamatou, a lawmaker from Ménaka. His brother, Aroudeïny Ag Hamatou, the mayor of a small town outside Ménaka, said, “A lot of buildings were destroyed.”

Bajan Ag Hamatou angrily blamed the West for having created a mess in his backyard.

“The Westerners didn’t want Qaddafi, and they got rid of him, and they created problems for all of us,” he said. “When you chased Qaddafi out in that barbaric fashion, you created 10 more Qaddafis. The whole Saharo-Sahelian region has become unlivable.”

I find it disturbing that there seems to be no detailed analysis of the Libya intervention’s consequences for Libya itself as well as for the “‘whole Saharo-Sahelian region’”—I found nothing robust.

What Did William Burns Say?

William Burns—he’s the CIA director—says in his 2019 book The Back Channel:

The issue of expanding NATO’s membership to include Russia’s former Warsaw Pact allies was a deeper challenge. Yeltsin and the Russian elite assumed, with considerable justification, that Jim Baker’s assurances during the negotiation of German reunification in 1990—that NATO would not extend its reach “one inch” farther east—would continue to apply after the breakup of the Soviet Union. That commitment, however, had never been precisely defined or codified, and the Clinton administration saw its inheritance as fairly ambiguous. While Clinton himself was in no rush at the outset of his administration to force the question of enlarging NATO, his first national security advisor, Tony Lake, was an early proponent of expansion. Lake argued that the United States and its European allies had a rare historical opportunity to anchor former Communist countries like Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in a successful democratic and market economic transition. A path to NATO membership would offer stability and reassurance, a compelling answer to historical fears of vulnerability to a revanchist Russia, as well as a newly reunified Germany. Amid the chaos of the former Yugoslavia, this argument struck a chord with Clinton.

Others in the new administration were less convinced. Talbott, and later Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, worried that starting down the road to formal enlargement of NATO would undermine hopes for a more enduring partnership with Russia, undercutting reformers who would see it as a vote of no confidence in their efforts, a hedge against the likely failure of reform. We shared similar concerns at Embassy Moscow. In a fall 1995 cable, we laid out the quandary: “The challenge for us is to look past the [government of Russia’s] often irritating rhetoric and erratic and reactive diplomacy to our own long-term self-interest. That demands, in particular, that we continue to seek to build a security order in Europe sufficiently in Russia’s interests so that a revived Russia will have no compelling reason to revise it—and so that in the meantime the ‘stab in the back’ theorists will have only limited room for maneuver in Russian politics.”

In an attempt to buy time and test Russian attitudes, the Pentagon developed the “Partnership for Peace,” a kind of NATO halfway house that would build trust by offering all former Warsaw Pact states—including Russia—a formal relationship with NATO. Clinton indicated at the outset that PfP membership “can also lead to eventual membership in NATO,” but there was no explicit signal of any decision to expand at that stage. Yeltsin and Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev indicated their interest in participating in PfP, dragging out talks in hopes of slowing down any movement toward NATO expansion. Nevertheless, momentum gathered over the course of 1994 toward enlargement, with Clinton declaring publicly in Warsaw in July that the question was not if but when. At an OSCE summit in Budapest in December, Yeltsin lashed back. He declared publicly that the end of the Cold War was in danger of becoming a “cold peace,” and accused Clinton and the NATO allies of “giving up on democracy in Russia.” In a later private conversation with Clinton, Yeltsin was equally direct about his concerns. “For me to agree to the borders of NATO expanding toward those of Russia,” he said, “would constitute a betrayal on my part of the Russian people.”

“Hostility to early NATO expansion,” we reported just after the Budapest outburst, “is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.” We tried to counter the characteristically American tendency to think that the right process could solve almost any substantive problem. “The Russian elite is much more focused on outcomes now,” we wrote in a subsequent cable. “When consultations on Bosnia or NATO expansion or other neuralgic issues don’t—in Russian eyes—affect Western behavior, resentment and disillusionment are bound to follow. In those circumstances, the process serves mainly to remind Russians of their own weakness.”

Burns says that Embassy Moscow reported—“just after the Budapest outburst”—that anti-expansion hostility was “‘almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum’” in Russia.

NATO has a program—the Membership Action Plan (MAP)—that helps aspiring members prepare to join. And Burns’s book contains an excerpt—from a February 2008 “personal email to Secretary Rice, which she later shared with Steve Hadley and Bob Gates”—that includes the following text:  

Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests. At this stage, a MAP offer would be seen not as a technical step along a long road toward membership, but as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Today’s Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze.…It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. 

Burns says that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin)”. And that in “more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests”. 

And then we have a leaked 1 February 2008 memo that Burns wrote—it’s titled “Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines” and it includes the following text:

NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains “an emotional and neuralgic” issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene.…

Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face. 

Burns says in the leaked 2008 memo: “Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests.”

What Did Washington Do From 2014 Forward?

Jens Stoltenberg—he’s the secretary general of NATO—says at a 7 April 2022 press conference: 

Let me just start by reminding everyone that NATO Allies and NATO have supported Ukraine for many years. After the illegal annexation of Crimea and Russia’s first invasion in 2014, also into Donbas, NATO Allies and NATO have provided significant support with equipment, with training, 10s of 1000s of Ukrainian soldiers have been trained, and then when we saw the intelligence indicating a highly likely invasion Allies stepped up last autumn and this winter. Then after the invasion, Allies have stepped up with additional military support, with more military equipment.

Stoltenberg says that NATO has—since 2014—“provided significant support with equipment, with training, 10s of 1000s of Ukrainian soldiers have been trained”. And “then when we saw the intelligence indicating a highly likely invasion Allies stepped up last autumn and this winter”. 

Derek Chollet is the State Department’s counselor. And a 14 April 2022 Responsible Statecraft piece says:

A senior Biden administration official recently admitted that prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States made no effort to address one of Vladimir Putin’s most often stated top security concerns—the possibility of Ukraine’s membership into NATO. 

When asked on a podcast published on Wednesday by War on the Rocks—a U.S. foreign and defense policy analysis website—whether NATO expansion into Ukraine “was not on the table in terms of negotiations” before the invasion, Derek Chollet, counselor to Secretary of State Antony Blinken replied that “it wasn’t.” 

Chollet’s remarks confirm suspicions by many critics who believe the Biden administration wasn’t doing enough—including offering to deny or delay Ukraine’s NATO membership—to prevent Russia from launching a war against Ukraine. 

“We made clear to the Russians that we were willing to talk to them on issues that we thought were genuine concerns they have that were legitimate in some way, I mean arms control type things of that nature,” Chollet said, adding that the administration didn’t think that “the future of Ukraine” was one of those issues and that its potential NATO membership was a “non-issue.”

“This was not about NATO,” said Chollet, who contradicted himself moments later, saying, “In perpetrating this totally unjustified and unprovoked war, [Putin’s] goal was to try to divide the U.S. from Europe and weaken NATO.”

Of course Putin himself stated publicly many times before the invasion that indeed, Ukraine’s potential NATO membership was a key security concern for Russia. 

Weeks before Russia launched its war against Ukraine, Putin claimed that Russia’s concerns about NATO enlargement were being ignored. “We need to resolve this question now…[and] we hope very much our concern will be heard by our partners and taken seriously,” he later said. 

War on the Rocks’ Ryan Evans told Chollet that he takes Putin’s claims about NATO “seriously,” adding, “I’m a little struck by the refusal to even talk about the issue of NATO expansion.”

“We talked about NATO in saying that NATO is a defensive alliance. NATO is not a threat to Russia,” Chollet said. 

The media should definitely spotlight the fact that the State Department’s counselor “admitted that prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States made no effort to address one of Vladimir Putin’s most often stated top security concerns—the possibility of Ukraine’s membership into NATO”.

Formal membership was not the only issue regarding NATO—there was also the issue of de facto NATO membership. I quoted Stoltenberg on the matter of equipment and training. And Noam Chomsky says in a 4 May 2022 Truthout interview:

President Zelenskyy was elected in 2019 with an overwhelming mandate for peace. He immediately moved to carry it out, with great courage. He had to confront violent right-wing militias who threatened to kill him if he tried to reach a peaceful settlement along the lines of the Minsk II formula. Historian of Russia Stephen Cohen points out that if Zelenskyy had been backed by the U.S., he could have persisted, perhaps solving the problem with no horrendous invasion. The U.S. refused, preferring its policy of integrating Ukraine within NATO. Washington continued to dismiss Russia’s red lines and the warnings of a host of top-level U.S. diplomats and government advisers as it has been doing since Clinton’s abrogation of Bush’s firm and unambiguous promise to Gorbachev that in return for German reunification within NATO, NATO would not expand one inch beyond Germany.

Chomsky says that the US refused to back Zelenskyy, preferred the “policy of integrating Ukraine within NATO”, and “continued to dismiss Russia’s red lines and the warnings of a host of top-level U.S. diplomats and government advisers”. And Chomsky points out that Washington has been dismissing these red lines and these warnings “since Clinton’s abrogation of Bush’s firm and unambiguous promise to Gorbachev”.

The integration should be right in the spotlight—everyone should know about it. There was—leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—a highly provocative situation where Ukraine was becoming a NATO member in all but name. Everyone should read the 1 September 2021 White House statement “Joint Statement on the U.S.-Ukraine Strategic Partnership”. And should also read the 10 November 2021 State Department press release “U.S.-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership” that appeared about 100 days before the invasion happened. It’s important to read the September 2021 statement, read the November 2021 press release, and ask how the Kremlin would view each of them—the media doesn’t talk about this crucial context of integration.

Power thrives on historical amnesia—a power system can operate much more freely when nobody knows about all of the skeletons in its closet. And journalists should—if they want to challenge power—spotlight the fact that Washington’s Ukraine-war policy very much resembles what happened in the 1980s regarding Afghanistan.

In this piece I’ll talk about irrelevant populations, the horrors of the 1980s, and today’s hideous bargain.

Irrelevant Populations

Washington’s Ukraine-war policy is—as my 4 January 2023 piece points out—to prolong the war in order to weaken Russia. I interview Anatol Lieven in my 19 January 2023 piece—he says:

there’s a view in the American establishment that Ukraine offers the chance to degrade—at very low cost to the US—the Russian Armed Forces and Russian power. And this view doesn’t suggest a great deal of concern about—or attention to—the suffering of the Ukrainian people. So if that’s your perspective, it doesn’t really matter how many Ukrainians or Europeans freeze as long as America goes on funding the Ukrainian army and providing it with heavy weapons—the populations are irrelevant. 

I’m reminded of a conversation that I had way back in 1989—in Islamabad—with a US diplomat. I tackled him at a party and said: “Look, the Soviets are leaving—they’ve shown that they really are leaving. So why are you still pouring money into the Afghan mujahideen, who we know by now are profoundly problematic, deeply extremist, at odds with one another, and so forth?” And he said: “Getting the Russians to leave is not enough—we want to inflict the kind of humiliation on them that they inflicted on us in Vietnam.” There wasn’t a single scrap—not the slightest element—of concern for Afghanistan or the Afghan people in what he said. It was totally irrelevant to him how many of the Afghan people died in the process. 

It’s absolutely clear to me that some elements of the American establishment adopt this callous approach. But I think General Milley—for example—cares about the suffering populations. 

I also think he cares about the wider issues at stake, including the solidarity of the Western alliance—there are already fairly strong indications that the Europeans are increasingly aware that they’re suffering economically because of this war and that America is profiting from it rather handsomely. 

It’s disturbing to think that “some elements of the American establishment adopt this callous approach”.

You would have to be a real monster to want to prolong a war—with all of its horrors, all of its risks, all of its destruction—in order to degrade an adversary. That’s what Washington is doing, though—that’s also what Washington did in the 1980s.

The Horrors of the 1980s

Hillary Clinton says in a 28 February 2022 MSNBC interview: “remember, the Russians invaded Afghanistan back in 1980”; “although no country went in, they certainly had a lot of countries supplying arms and advice and even some advisers to those who were recruited to fight Russia”; “it didn’t end well for the Russians”; “the fact is that a very motivated and then funded and armed insurgency basically drove the Russians out of Afghanistan”; and “I think that is the model that people are now looking toward”.

What’s the Afghan model? There’s an extremely good book on this topic—Diego Cordovez’s and Selig S. Harrison’s 1995 book Out of Afghanistan. I urge people to read the overview and Chapter 4:

Overview

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Chapter 4

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In the overview they write: “this account makes clear that Soviet objectives in Afghanistan were limited from the start”; “after stumbling into a morass of Afghan political factionalism, the Soviet Union resorted to military force in a last desperate effort to forestall what it perceived as the threat of an American-supported Afghan Tito on its borders”; differences “surfaced soon thereafter within the Soviet leadership over the wisdom of this decision, leading as early as 1983 to serious probes for a way out that were rejected by an American leadership bent on exploiting Soviet discomfiture”; the “advent of Gorbachev in 1985 immediately resulted in the intensified pursuit of a settlement”; the Red Army was—despite “the widespread stereotype of a Soviet military defeat”—“securely entrenched in Afghanistan when the Geneva Accords were finally signed on April 14, 1988”; the “Red Army did not withdraw in the wake of a Waterloo or a Dien Bien Phu”; and confronted “by a military and political stalemate, Gorbachev decided to disengage because the accords offered a pragmatic way to escape from the growing costs of the deadlock and to open the way for improved relations with the West”.

Washington was “divided from the start between ‘bleeders,’ who wanted to keep Soviet forces pinned down in Afghanistan and thus to avenge Vietnam, and ‘dealers,’ who wanted to compel their withdrawal through a combination of diplomacy and military pressure”; the US government “did its best to prevent the emergence of a U.N. role”; once “the U.N. process started, Washington gave nominal support to the negotiations but refused to become even superficially involved”; “Gorbachev’s emergence encouraged the ‘dealers’ in Washington to work for greater U.S. cooperation with the U.N. diplomatic effort that is the focus of this book”; the “‘bleeders’ fought against the Geneva Accords until the very end, arguing unsuccessfully that the United States should insist on the replacement of the Afghan Communist regime as a condition for signing the agreement”; “both superpowers invoked noble objectives”; “both treated Afghanistan in reality as a pawn in their global struggle”; for “much of the war” US “policy amounted to ‘fighting to the last Afghan’ because the United States failed to couple its support for the mujahideen with support for the U.N. peace effort”; and “while Moscow is the villain, there are no heroes, except for the silent majority of Afghans who survived the horrors of the war years and are now left to rebuild their ravaged land with little help or sympathy from a world that has forgotten them”.

And Harrison writes in Chapter 4: “Moscow made its first serious attempt to find a way out of the Afghan quagmire during the fifteen-month tenure of Yuri Andropov, from November 1982 until his death in February 1984”; many “of his close associates cite persuasive evidence that Andropov was prepared to withdraw Soviet forces under the aegis of the United Nations despite opposition from the armed forces and from more orthodox Communist leaders”; precisely “what type of settlement he was ready to accept was never tested because Pakistan and the United States were in no mood to bargain”; with “the Cold War at full tilt, the dominant power groups in Islamabad and Washington deeply distrusted Soviet motives in the U.N. negotiations and regarded it as desirable, in any case, to keep Soviet forces pinned down in a no-win commitment”; and there “can be no doubt about the fact that the United States strongly disliked the U.N. approach to a settlement during 1983 and that the American attitude tipped the scales in the debate within the Pakistani leadership between April and June”.

Noam Chomsky says in an 11 May 2022 Truthout interview: current “U.S. policy calls for a long war to ‘weaken Russia’ and ensure its total defeat”; the “policy is very similar to the Afghan model of the 1980s, which is, in fact, now explicitly advocated in high places”; and since “that is close to current U.S. policy, even a working model, it is worthwhile to look at what actually happened in Afghanistan in the ’80s when Russia invaded”.

We “have a detailed and authoritative account by Diego Cordovez, who directed the successful UN programs that ended the war, and the distinguished journalist and scholar Selig Harrison, who has extensive experience in the region”; the “Cordovez-Harrison analysis completely overthrows the received version”; they “demonstrate that the war was ended by careful UN-run diplomacy, not by military force”; Soviet “military forces were fully capable of continuing the war”; the “U.S. policy of mobilizing and funding the most extremist radical Islamists to fight the Russians amounted to ‘fighting to the last Afghan,’ they conclude, in a proxy war to weaken the Soviet Union”; the “‘United States did its best to prevent the emergence of a U.N. role,’ that is, the careful diplomatic efforts that ended the war”; US “policy apparently delayed the Russian withdrawal that had been contemplated from shortly after the invasion”; the authors show that the invasion “had limited objectives, with no resemblance to the awesome goals of world conquest that were conjured up in U.S. propaganda”; the “chief CIA officer in Islamabad, who ran the operations directly, put the main point simply”; and according to this officer, the “goal was to kill Russian soldiers—to give Russia their Vietnam, as proclaimed by high U.S. officials”.

The bleeder-vs.-dealer distinction “shows up very often”; the “bleeders usually win, causing immense damage”; in “the Carter administration, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was a dealer, who suggested far-reaching compromises that would have almost certainly prevented, or at least sharply curtailed, what was intended to be a limited intervention”; “National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was the bleeder, intent on avenging Vietnam, whatever that meant in his confused world view, and killing Russians, something he understood very well, and relished”; “Brzezinski prevailed”; he “convinced Carter to send arms to the opposition that was seeking to overthrow the pro-Russian government, anticipating that the Russians would be drawn into a Vietnam-style quagmire”; when “it happened, he could barely contain his delight”; when “asked later whether he had any regrets, he dismissed the question as ridiculous”; his “success in drawing Russia into the Afghan trap, he claimed, was responsible for the collapse of the Soviet empire and ending the Cold War—mostly nonsense”; “who cares if it harmed ‘some agitated Muslims,’ like the million cadavers, putting aside such incidentals as the devastation of Afghanistan, and the rise of radical Islam”; and the “Afghan analogy is being publicly advocated today, and more importantly, is being implemented in policy”.

I think that it is—given the 1995 book’s importance—absolutely remarkable how little impact Out of Afghanistan has had on American culture and society. A brief 1995 Foreign Affairs review calls the book “a rich, impressively documented account” and says: “Harrison, a longtime student of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and Cordovez, the United Nations’ principal intermediary through much of it, team up to give the first detailed and behind the-scenes account of how the Soviets stumbled into, floundered in, and worked their way out of the last of the great duels of the Cold War.” And a brief 1996 International Affairs review says: “The book certainly contains much that will surprise or interest.” The volume is utterly damning and the authors have stellar reputations, but the account has been kept in the shadows and denied the spotlight it deserves—the contents are too inconvenient to be given attention.

David N. Gibbs writes in his 2000 review essay “Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Retrospect”: it “has always been assumed that the Soviets welcomed the opportunity to occupy Afghanistan, and that Soviet officials viewed the occupation in a manner very much like that of Western officials, i.e., as a major strategic asset”; “Out of Afghanistan, in contrast, presents new evidence that directly contradicts this interpretation”; the “divisions in the Reagan Administration are discussed in considerable depth”; certain “Administration officials sought to cooperate with UN mediation efforts, and these officials argued that military support for the Mujahiddin must be coupled with diplomatic efforts”; this “group, ‘the dealers’ as Harrison terms them, initially appear to have been in the minority, although their clout grew toward the end of the Reagan years”; “a second group, the ‘bleeders’, welcomed the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and sought to ‘bleed’ Soviet forces”; this “latter group, which was influential in the CIA and other ‘operational’ departments, disdained UN diplomacy”; “they sought a military defeat for the Soviet Union”; and the authors “emphasize that the bleeders were uncooperative with UN mediation efforts and sought to sabotage them”.

Gibbs says:

Part of American skepticism resulted from a conviction—unjustified as it turned out—that the Soviet Union would never leave Afghanistan via a diplomatic settlement. However, Cordovez and Harrison offer an additional reason: CIA director William Casey and other key Reagan Administration officials sought to prolong the war as much as possible and to delay a withdrawal. General Edward C. Meyer, who was US Army Chief of Staff, stated: “Casey would say that he wanted them out, but he actually wanted them to send more and more Russians down there and take causalities” (quoted in Cordovez and Harrison, p. 103).

It has long been assumed that the United States and Pakistan wanted the Soviets to leave Afghanistan and that US military pressure had the long-term objective of ending the Soviet occupation. Cordovez and Harrison argue that this interpretation is inaccurate and, on the contrary, key American and Pakistan officials sought to keep Soviet troops in Afghanistan as long as possible to maximize their losses. These officials also sought to block any diplomatic efforts that might enable a face-saving Soviet withdrawal.

It’s utterly shocking to think that key US “officials sought to keep Soviet troops in Afghanistan as long as possible to maximize their losses”. And “also sought to block any diplomatic efforts that might enable a face-saving Soviet withdrawal”.

I don’t know how much has been written on the question of how much horror, suffering, and destruction it would’ve been possible to avoid if the Soviets had withdrawn in the early 1980s—surely an enormous amount could’ve been prevented. It was obviously grossly immoral to do what Washington did—that’s not in question.

Richard Cohen writes in a 22 April 1988 WaPo piece: “it was never the goal of Reagan administration ideologues to win the war in Afghanistan”; “that seemed beyond reach”; their “intention was to pay the Soviets back a bit for the humiliation of the United States by their clients, the communists of Vietnam”; the “intent in arming Afghan rebels was to bleed the Soviets”; it “was, of course, immaterial that Afghans were being bled too (life is not fair; you have to break some eggs to make an omelet)”; and it “was equally immaterial that Afghanistan, with U.S. aid, could become an Islamic fundamentalist state as anti-American as the ayatollah’s across the border in Iran”.

Elisabeth Leake writes in her 2022 book Afghan Crucible: the “Afghanistan of the 1980s was a place of potentials”; “Afghan modernizers’ ideas and aspirations mattered and reflected a time and place where it seemed possible that either side could succeed in fundamentally reshaping Afghanistan”; aspirations “for a reinvigorated modern Afghanistan crumbled under the weight of a war that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions”; “Afghanistan in the 1980s was one of the Cold War’s killing fields”; it “was a battlefield in the worldwide superpower competition between the United States and Soviet Union that devolved into widespread, life-shattering violence”; and “what was left in 1989 when the Soviets finally withdrew their troops was ruin and ruination”. Rodric Braithwaite writes in his 2011 book Afgantsy: “probably somewhere between 600,000 and 1.5 million Afghans were killed in the Soviet war”; millions “more were driven from their home to seek refuge in Pakistan and Iran”; the “complex relationships which governed the Afghan way of life were overturned almost beyond repair”; and “the Communist regime and the Soviet intervention” caused “physical, social, moral, and political damage” that was—due to “more decades of war and foreign intervention”—“almost impossible to repair”. And regarding the Soviet–Afghan War’s civilian deaths, John W. Dower writes—in his 2017 book The Violent American Century—that “civilian fatalities may have ranged from as many as 850,000 to almost twice that number”.

Today’s Hideous Bargain

In the 11 May interview Chomsky comments: the “dealer-bleeder distinction is nothing new in foreign policy circles”; Paul Nitze prevailed over George Kennan, “laying the basis for many years of brutality and near destruction”; Henry Kissinger had a conflict with William Rogers regarding Middle East policy; “Kissinger, whose ignorance of the region was monumental, insisted on confrontation, leading to the 1973 war, a close call for Israel with a serious threat of nuclear war”; regarding dealers and bleeders, these “conflicts are perennial, almost”; and today “there are only bleeders in high places”.

Regarding the current war in Ukraine, Chomsky says: the bleeders’ ongoing policy “entails that we reject out of hand the kind of diplomatic initiatives that in reality ended the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, despite U.S. efforts to impede them”; Washington’s ongoing policy means gambling that the Russian leadership won’t “resort to the means of violence they unquestionably possess to devastate Ukraine and set the stage for possible general war”; and as “for the ‘collateral damage,’ they can join the ranks of Brzezinski’s ‘agitated Muslims’”.

I find it interesting—and horrifying—that “there are only bleeders in high places”. There was Paul Nitze vs. George Kennan; there was Henry Kissinger vs. William Rogers; and there was Zbigniew Brzezinski vs. Cyrus Vance. But now there’s no conflict—today there are no dealers at the top.

An 18 November 2022 piece says: “from numerous perspectives, when viewed from a bang-per-buck perspective, US and Western support for Ukraine is an incredibly cost-effective investment”; “Russia is a primary adversary of the US, a top tier rival not too far behind China, its number one strategic challenger”; in “cold, geopolitical terms, this war provides a prime opportunity for the US to erode and degrade Russia’s conventional defense capability, with no boots on the ground and little risk to US lives”; “US spending of 5.6% of its defense budget to destroy nearly half of Russia’s conventional military capability seems like an absolutely incredible investment”; the “US military might reasonably wish Russia to continue deploying military forces for Ukraine to destroy”; “on so many levels, continued US support for Ukraine is a no-brainer from a bang for buck perspective”; “Ukraine is no Vietnam or Afghanistan for the US, but it is exactly that for Russia”; and a “Russia continually mired in a war it cannot win is a huge strategic win for the US”.

You can ask whether our policy actually is a bargain from the bleeders’ point of view—there’s a risk of escalation, things might get out of control, and the bleeders might not be at all happy with the outcome.

But this hideous bargain means killing Ukrainians, destroying Ukraine, and starving people worldwide—the risk of escalation adds a further dimension of immorality. The ethics are definitely ghastly—there’s no question about that. The bleeders’ policy requires us to put even more skeletons into our overfilled closet—our skeletons join Brzezinski’s.

Anatol Lieven is a policy analyst and journalist and author—he’s a visiting professor at King’s College London and he’s a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Lieven is a major scholar when it comes to world affairs and it was a huge honor for me to be able to interview him again—I also interview him in my 4 June 2022 piece.

Everyone should check out Lieven’s 6 January 2023 piece where he writes: barring “a breakthrough by either side, the prospect is that of an indefinite and bloody stalemate along the present battle lines, reminiscent in many respects of the situation on the western front in World War I”; the “question would then be how long it will take—and how many people will have to die—before both sides become exhausted and decide that there is no point in continuing the struggle”; the “scene would then be set for an unstable ceasefire such as has existed between India and Pakistan in Kashmir” or for “a much larger version of the ceasefire in the Donbas from 2015 to 2022”; and such “a ceasefire would be better than the present massive bloodshed in Ukraine”.

A ceasefire would—“unless accompanied by successful negotiations to reach a settlement or at least minimize armed tensions”—“be fraught with negative elements”; there’s “no realistic chance that a Russian breakthrough could lead to the capture of Kyiv”; it’s “not even remotely likely that Russia could capture Kharkiv”; “Russia’s withdrawal from Kherson to the left bank of the Dnieper River makes an offensive against the Ukrainian Black Sea ports of Mykolaiv and Odessa virtually impossible”; and “if Russia captures the whole of the Donbas region and strengthens its land bridge to Crimea, it seems highly likely that Putin would claim that key Russian goals (as set out at the start of the invasion) have been achieved, and that Moscow would then offer a ceasefire and peace talks without preconditions”.

And make sure to check out my 4 January 2023 piece where I talk about how broken the Ukraine-war discourse has been.

I was honored and thrilled to interview Lieven—see below my interview with him that I edited for flow and organized by topic.

Clarifications

1) Suppose that a ceasefire were implemented—would the boundaries remain jagged and arbitrary until a peace treaty were established? 

A stable ceasefire in Ukraine could lead to a limited redrawing of the front lines. And also to a demilitarized zone, which would separate the two sides and reduce the likelihood of future clashes.

You can look at examples from around the world. Korea’s Armistice Line runs where the fighting stopped—it’s the same thing in Kashmir. And Kosovo is a mostly officially unrecognized state, which also contains something resembling a de facto border between Mitrovica in the north—which is de facto part of Serbia to a great extent—and the other 90% of Kosovo. The line in Cyprus stops where the Turkish army decided it’d got everything that it wanted. And incidentally, Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Cyprus didn’t lead to Turkey being expelled from NATO, so evidently the Western conscience—and addiction to law—on such things has a flexible side. One of many such moments.

A long-term ceasefire along the existing lines would leave 85% of Ukraine free to do its best to move—with Western help—towards membership of the European Union. 

And it’s important to remember that—given Moscow’s ambitions at the start of the war—a permanent de facto settlement along the present battle lines would be very painful for Russia in addition to being extremely painful for Ukraine. The overwhelming consensus back in February—including in the Western intelligence community—was that Russia would conquer three quarters of Ukraine and turn it into a client state. After that, the assumption was that Russia would at least conquer the whole of Russian-speaking eastern and southern Ukraine—essentially half the country. But instead Russia has only managed to capture half of Luhansk and most—not all and not even the provincial capitals of—Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. That’s all that Russia has added to what it’s held since 2014—Crimea and the eastern Donbass. So it does have to be said that Ukraine has—with Western help—already achieved a historic victory. 

Remember also that this isn’t just a victory compared to Russian hopes—and Western fears—back in February. This is a colossal transformation in terms of the past 400 years of Russian domination of Ukraine—I don’t think the West sufficiently recognizes how significant this change is and the true extent of Ukraine’s victory and Russia’s defeat.

2) And with a ceasefire in place, wouldn’t there be an urgent need to establish a peace treaty ASAP, given that a peace treaty would set the two sides up to relax tensions, shift resources from war to peaceful reconstruction, and ultimately even integrate with each other? 

There are indeed various negative consequences—just look at the situation on the Korean peninsula since 1953—of not having a peace treaty. For one thing, there will doubtless be episodic violence if you don’t have one—look at the long-term ceasefire in the Donbass from 2015 to 2022 or at the ongoing situation in Kashmir. 

But unfortunately, I see little hope of getting to a peace treaty in the foreseeable future, so I expect that the best we can hope for is a lasting ceasefire.

As for integration, I can see no prospect whatsoever now for a reintegration of Russia and Ukraine as societies. Personal and familial relations still exist between Ukrainians—including the many Ukrainian immigrants in Russia—and Russians, so hopefully those personal connections will be restored to some extent over time. 

3) Where would the ceasefire line be if Gideon Rachman’s proposal were implemented? Rachman writes in his 12 December 2022 FT piece: “neither Russia nor Ukraine is in a position to achieve total victory”; “the political positions of the two countries are too far apart to make a peace agreement possible”; and “both countries are suffering severe losses that could make a ceasefire attractive”. Rachman says that Lawrence Freedman—the author of the 2022 book Command: The Politics of Military Operations From Korea to Ukraine—“sees a possibility of ‘military to military negotiations on disengagement’” and “thinks the Korean armistice points to the possibility of ‘stopping the fighting, by separating the forces’”. 

These proposals imply—without directly saying—that the ceasefire line should run along the lines of battle, which at present stretch from the left bank of the Dnieper River round to the Donbass. 

And that’s indeed the most likely outcome, since the lines of battle seem—on balance—unlikely to change very much. Then again, it’s unwise to make firm predictions—we’ve been surprised so often during this war. 

4) Regarding a peace treaty, how relevant is neutrality at this point? Henry Kissinger says—in his 17 December 2022 Spectator piece—that a “process has mooted the original issues regarding Ukraine’s membership in Nato”. And that the “alternative of neutrality is no longer meaningful, especially after Finland and Sweden joined Nato”. 

The reality is that Ukraine is a military client state of the US at this point. 85% of Ukraine is—in purely military terms—part of the West. So neutrality would mean no American bases and no NATO membership but also wouldn’t lead to Russia dominating Ukraine militarily. The real point of a treaty of neutrality would be simply to give a Russian leader something that he could spin as an accomplishment—the Russian leader needs to be able to claim that he’s achieved something in fighting this disastrous war, which has been such a catastrophe for Russia. That’s why neutrality is important. 

And by the same token, the reality is that Ukraine can’t ever join NATO unless NATO is prepared to go to war. NATO would have to be ready to send its air forces into Ukraine and send its navies into the Black Sea, either of which would—I’d say—absolutely ensure some sort of Russia nuclear response, though it wouldn’t be a full-scale bombardment of the US. You go back to the old Cold War question—in the last resort, would the US risk its very existence for the sake of Hamburg? And in this case it wouldn’t be Hamburg—it wouldn’t even be Warsaw initially, but instead NATO airfields in Poland. My sense is that the European will would simply collapse at that point and that you’d have millions—possibly tens of millions—of people on the streets of Europe demonstrating for a ceasefire and a peace settlement. So that’s why there isn’t going to be NATO membership for Ukraine. 

But we’re talking about the elements of an eventual peace settlement, which is—I think—very far away. 

I just got back from Pakistan—I’ve been going there for 37 years now. Kashmir has—throughout those 37 years and during the 40 years prior to that—been dragging on, and on, and on, and on. People have been trying to improve relations, calm tensions, achieve a peace settlement, and prevent nuclear war—I’ve participated in numerous exercises and meetings. There was one occasion—under President Musharraf—where it seemed there really was a chance of a peace settlement, though it was blown for a whole set of reasons that I won’t go into. 

One should never give up hope. We might—at some stage in the next six months or so—be able to move towards a ceasefire. But a peace settlement is going to take much, much longer. 

5) Can one reasonably say that what you or other pro-diplomacy people want Washington to do means “forcing”—or “imposing”—anything on the Ukrainians? Charles A. Kupchan writes in a 2 November 2022 NYT piece: it “is time for the United States and its allies to get directly involved in shaping Ukraine’s strategic objectives, managing the conflict, and seeking a diplomatic endgame”; “prudent avoidance of war between NATO and Russia necessitates” direct “U.S. involvement in Ukraine’s operational planning”; “Mr. Putin’s effort to subjugate Ukraine has already failed, and pushing for Russia’s total defeat is an unnecessary gamble”; the “United States and its allies also need to be concerned about the rising economic and political threat that a long war poses to Western democracy and solidarity”; sooner “rather than later, the West needs to move Ukraine and Russia from the battlefield to the negotiating table, brokering a diplomatic effort to shut the war down and arrive at a territorial settlement”; “transitioning from war to diplomacy provides hope of ending the killing and destruction, containing the mounting risk of a wider war between Russia and NATO, and reducing harm to the global economy and democratic resilience on both sides of the Atlantic”; and the “mounting risks that the West faces in Ukraine necessitate that the United States and its NATO partners get more involved in managing the war and in setting the table for an endgame”. I’m not sure whether Kupchan’s piece calls for “forcing”—or “imposing”—anything on the Ukrainians. 

The Ukrainian government isn’t compelled to take Western advice—nothing should be imposed on them. 

But it’s also not fair or reasonable to say that the West should be compelled to keep giving Ukraine billions of dollars of military and economic aid—nothing should be imposed on the West either. And the Ukrainian government is—of course—overwhelmingly dependent on this Western aid. 

Prospects

1) How and why have the perceived prospects for a peace settlement changed since June? You say in my 4 June 2022 piece that we “already know most of the basic elements that the peace deal will have to include”—“the fundamental question is how many people inside Ukraine and outside Ukraine will have to die before we implement what we know we will have to implement sooner or later”. 

A few things have happened over the past six months. 

First, Russia has—legally according to Russia, but illegally according to everyone else—annexed two Ukrainian provinces that it’s occupied since the start of the war. It hasn’t actually even managed to capture or keep the two provincial capitals, so these are very limited areas. But this annexation does create an immense additional barrier to any formal peace settlement. 

Second, the Ukrainian army has continued to make considerable progress in its counterattacks—Russia has been driven from whatever it held in Kharkiv, forced to withdraw from the port city of Kherson, and prevented even from occupying the whole of the Donbass region that Putin cited as one of his key reasons for going to war. So Russia has been doing very badly militarily. 

Third, the Ukrainian government and army have repeatedly declared that their goal is to retake all of the territory lost since 2014—including Crimea—and that this goal is non-negotiable.

Fourth, Russia has called up 300,000 conscripts, though of very uncertain quality. 

And fifth, Russia’s economic decline has so far proven to be surprisingly slight—the West was hoping for something like a 30% decline, whereas 4% is the general analysis. Meanwhile, the sanctions have—along with Russia’s response to them—done enormous economic damage to Europe. 

Will that damage push Europe toward peace? That depends on how bad this winter—and if the war continues, the next one—turns out to be. We also have to see who becomes US president in 2024. One shouldn’t forget that a good deal of the Western European agreement with—or subservience to—the US has been due to the Biden administration being in power instead of the Trump administration.

But above all, the future will be decided on the battlefield. Ukraine will—without any question at all—attack again in an effort to get back all of its lost territory. Ukrainian failure might mean Ukrainian support for a ceasefire. Ukrainian success would—on the other hand—raise the acute issue of what Crimea’s future will be. And therefore of whether Russia will use nuclear weapons to defend Crimea, which some well-connected Russian friends have said to me would be a very real possibility. The question would be—in this scenario—whether the Biden administration or the Europeans would step in and say: “OK, you’ve now gone far enough—you’ve recaptured all of the territory you’ve lost since February. Now it’s time to stop.” But of course, telling the Ukrainians to stop doesn’t guarantee that they will—you hear many messages saying that the Ukrainian army is actually determined to go on.

We can’t say what will happen on the battlefield—we’ve been surprised so many times already. So far the Ukrainians have surprised us with their resilience and successes, but I suppose it’s possible that the Russians might surprise us. And I’m told from Moscow that the Russians will offer a ceasefire—and kick the territorial issues down the road for negotiation—if they can capture the whole of the Donbass. It then becomes a question of whether the Ukrainians would accept that. 

I think we’ll probably face months more of heavy fighting. Much depends on how bad the winter is—that’ll determine whether there will be further offensives in the winter or whether both sides will build up their reserves for the spring. But certainly come the spring there will be extremely heavy fighting again in Ukraine. And meanwhile, Russia is doing everything in its power to destroy as much as possible of the Ukrainian economy. 

2) How bleak is the territorial situation? You say in the June piece that there’s “been no Russian claim—so far—to anything beyond Crimea and the Donbass”, but that’s no longer true. You have a 30 September 2022 piece about the “Russian government’s move today to annex the territories it has occupied in Ukraine”—you say that this “Russian action greatly complicates the search for an eventual peace settlement”. 

I can’t imagine—right now—an actual peace settlement. But you don’t need that for a lasting ceasefire—you get the ceasefire and then you negotiate and negotiate and negotiate over the territorial issues. 

You can point to situations—like Cyprus since 1974, Korea since 1953, the Indo-Chinese front line since 1962, or Kosovo since 1999—where there’s no war but also no peace settlement. In Kashmir you’ve had long periods of semi-ceasefire—between India and Pakistan—with much shorter periods of intense warfare. And unfortunately, the ceasefire in Kosovo produced an unstable outcome where Serbia and most of the international community haven’t recognized Kosovo’s independence—a NATO peacekeeping force has had to protect Kosovo, protect Kosovo's remaining Serbian minority, and prevent a new war. 

Regarding Cyprus, you’ve had peace on the island, but there’s still no agreement on the status of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. That’s maybe the best possible outcome for Ukraine, since the Republic of Cyprus managed—amazingly—to join the European Union despite the lack of any reintegration agreement.

It’s unlikely that a ceasefire in Ukraine would be as stable as that one—in Cyprus, one side had an overwhelming military advantage and also had achieved all of the territorial gains it wanted. But even Kashmir or Korea is better than the full-scale warfare we see going on now in Ukraine. So a ceasefire is way worse than a peace settlement but way better than nothing at all. We can—once we get a ceasefire—try our best for an actual peace settlement. 

The Battlefield

1) What can Russia actually do through attacking Ukrainian infrastructure? Noam Chomsky writes in his 22 December 2022 Truthout piece: 

I claim no military expertise. I do follow military analysts, and find most of them supremely confident, with opposing conclusions—not for the first time. My suspicion is that General Milley, former chair of the joint chiefs, is probably right in concluding that neither side can win a decisive military victory and that the cost of continuing warfare is enormous for both sides, with many repercussions beyond.

If the war goes on, Ukraine will be the primary victim. Advanced U.S. weapons may sustain a battlefield stalemate as Russia pours in more troops and equipment, but how much can Ukrainian society tolerate now that Russia, after many months, has turned to the U.S.-U.K. style of war, directly attacking infrastructure, energy, communications, anything that allows the society to function? Ukraine is already facing a major economic and humanitarian crisis. As the war persists, Ukrainian central bank officials fear that “People could flee Ukraine in droves, taking their money with them, potentially crashing the national currency as they seek to exchange their Ukrainian hryvnia for euros or dollars.”

Chomsky cites the 15 December 2022 WaPo piece “Russia is destroying Ukraine’s economy, raising costs for U.S. and allies”. 

First, the attacks can wear down the Ukrainian people’s will. 

Second, they can badly damage Ukrainian munitions production and make Ukraine even more dependent on Western aid. 

Third, they can do so much economic damage to Ukraine that the West will have to go on and on pouring massive sums of economic aid into Ukraine in order to keep Ukraine going. 

And fourth, they can make joining the European Union a more and more remote prospect for Ukraine. 

But there’s a view in the American establishment that Ukraine offers the chance to degrade—at very low cost to the US—the Russian Armed Forces and Russian power. And this view doesn’t suggest a great deal of concern about—or attention to—the suffering of the Ukrainian people. So if that’s your perspective, it doesn’t really matter how many Ukrainians or Europeans freeze as long as America goes on funding the Ukrainian army and providing it with heavy weapons—the populations are irrelevant. 

I’m reminded of a conversation that I had way back in 1989—in Islamabad—with a US diplomat. I tackled him at a party and said: “Look, the Soviets are leaving—they’ve shown that they really are leaving. So why are you still pouring money into the Afghan mujahideen, who we know by now are profoundly problematic, deeply extremist, at odds with one another, and so forth?” And he said: “Getting the Russians to leave is not enough—we want to inflict the kind of humiliation on them that they inflicted on us in Vietnam.” There wasn’t a single scrap—not the slightest element—of concern for Afghanistan or the Afghan people in what he said. It was totally irrelevant to him how many of the Afghan people died in the process. 

It’s absolutely clear to me that some elements of the American establishment adopt this callous approach. But I think General Milley—for example—cares about the suffering populations. 

I also think he cares about the wider issues at stake, including the solidarity of the Western alliance—there are already fairly strong indications that the Europeans are increasingly aware that they’re suffering economically because of this war and that America is profiting from it rather handsomely. 

2) What do you think about the notion that Russia is pathetic in terms of ground operations but has a limitless capacity to bomb Ukraine? 

The Russian ground forces certainly have performed pretty poorly, though it must also be said that there simply were not enough of them to do the job they were given.

Russia has demonstrated a very great capacity to destroy Ukrainian energy infrastructure with missiles and drones. But Russia hasn’t yet tried to destroy cities for the sake of destroying them. It’s mostly bombarded places—like Mariupol and Soledar—that it was trying to capture and has used massive bombardment toward that end. 

Very interestingly, it hasn’t even tried to destroy the Ukrainian-government buildings in Kyiv—in contrast, America went for the jugular in Iraq and didn’t exercise any such restraint. 

We’ve seen heavy bombardment—going both ways—in the Donbass. There’s been extensive destruction in the eastern Donbass, which is one reason why the local population there is angry at Ukraine—it’s just like how people in cities Russia has bombarded are naturally furious with Russia. And now Russia is bombing infrastructure—above all, electricity and energy. But there hasn’t been any Korea-style or WW2-style carpet bombing of cities beyond the front lines. 

I myself doubt that the Russians would attempt to destroy Kyiv—Kyiv is a sacred city for the Russian Orthodox Church and has many historical religious monuments that the Russians wouldn’t ever want to destroy. 

What Does Ukraine Want? 

1) You say in the June piece that “it’s absolutely apparent that there are profound splits in the Ukrainian government”—to what extent is that still true? And what’s Zelensky’s own stance? You say in the June piece that “Zelensky’s own statements—let alone those of other Ukrainian officials—have become tremendously contradictory”, though maybe that’s no longer the case. It’s unpleasant to read the 19 December 2022 piece “Kyiv slams Kissinger over call to negotiate with Russia for peace”, though one of course has to approach political statements with caution and rationality.

The answer to that is I do not know—none of us know. 

Shamefully, the Western media is simply not trying to report on Ukrainian internal politics—we have more speculation about what’s going on in Moscow even though people have no way to find that out, whereas it would be possible to dig a bit when it comes to Ukraine. 

Suppose a ceasefire were—at some point—on the table with at least partial Western support. Would Zelensky back it or reject it? That’s the obvious question. I think we can be pretty sure that he would—if he backed it—face really serious opposition within Ukraine just like he did when he proposed peace terms back in March. But we simply don’t know what he would do in that situation. 

2) And what about the Ukrainian people? What’s their stance toward diplomacy? Jonathan Steele writes in a 15 December 2022 piece: 

The Gallup organisation organised a telephone poll of Ukrainians in September. It found that masses of respondents did not share the official line of flag-waving support for the military. Although 76 per cent of men wanted the war to continue until Russia is forced to leave all occupied territory including Crimea, and 64 per cent of women had the same view, the rest—a substantial number of people—wanted negotiations.

When the survey results were analysed according to Ukraine’s regions they were particularly telling. In areas closest to the front lines where the horror of war is felt most keenly people’s doubts about the wisdom of fighting until victory are highest. Only 58 per cent support it in southern Ukraine. In the East the figure is as low as 56 per cent.

Gallup’s findings are significant. What people tell pollsters in the privacy of a telephone call is more reliable than what they say when interviewed face-to-face by reporters, especially when the dominant media narrative consists of morale-boosting messages about Ukrainians’ resilience and impressive courage.

It is time for the Left to find its voice. We should publicise these opinion poll findings and call for a ceasefire. Let the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, by himself or through the appointment of an authoritative envoy, contact Kyiv and Moscow and try to broker an immediate cessation of hostilities. Take advantage of winter and the general reduction in military activity and freeze the conflict where it is.

At some point there will have to be negotiations about a political end to the war and a withdrawal of Russian forces but it will take months, if not years to achieve agreement. The priority is to stop the killing and this can be done at once. Let the Western Left, in solidarity with progressive forces in Ukraine and Russia themselves, take up the burden of campaigning for an armistice, in other words for peace.

It’s very interesting to see Steele’s comment that the results were “particularly telling” when “analysed according to Ukraine’s regions”. 

Ukraine is at war—it’s pretty difficult to find out what the feelings of ordinary Ukrainians are. There’s been massive repression of opposition political parties, of independent media, and of very large numbers of ordinary people—the Ukrainian government shouldn’t be blamed too harshly for this, given that a certain amount of repression is inevitable in these circumstances. 

There has indeed been a Gallup poll suggesting that a significant minority—especially in the areas closest to the fighting—would in fact be in favor of a compromise peace.

Trying 

1) How much could support for an option move the needle with Ukrainian public opinion? To what extent would Ukrainian public opinion change if Washington—and Zelensky himself—were trying to achieve a ceasefire? And what if Washington—and Zelensky himself—were trying to achieve an actual peace settlement? 

A peace settlement is for later on—the priority is to look for a ceasefire. For a reasonably stable ceasefire, you’d have to change both the Ukrainian government’s opinion and Ukrainian public opinion. But for a peace settlement, you’d have to change the actual governments in Ukraine, Russia, France, and possibly the US. And change the composition of Germany’s governing coalition as well. 

There have been opportunities regarding a peace settlement. We should’ve backed Zelensky before the war—he was ready to offer a treaty of neutrality but Washington wasn’t behind him. Or we should’ve strongly backed Zelensky’s peace proposal in March. 

But that possibility seems to have ended, so it looks like the initiative for a ceasefire will have to come from Russia or America. Or from France and Germany if large numbers of their citizens demand peace in order to end the economic suffering that the war is causing—the schedule of forthcoming elections means that the French and German governments don’t have to fear electoral backlash in the near future, though, so pro-diplomacy forces might have a disadvantage when it comes to putting pressure on European governments. 

2) Should pro-diplomacy people be deterred when they read—in the 19 December 2022 piece—the harsh comments from Kyiv in response to what Kissinger wrote? 

Of course not. 

Remember that all elected and appointed officials—in America, France, and Germany—have sworn an oath of loyalty to their respective countries. Those oaths are to the sovereign people in those countries—the American people, the French people, and the German people. These officials have not sworn an oath of loyalty to Ukraine. And in the end, these officials have to remember who elected them and for what purpose—I think that that’s the bottom line.

There seems to be a danger that the Ukrainian military will carry out a coup against Zelensky if Zelensky proposes a serious peace settlement—think about that a second. That means that we say we’re supporting Ukrainian democracy but nationalist extremists in Ukraine are ultimately—through the threat of a military coup against Zelensky—determining our policy. If that threat is real then it means we’re in a very, very dangerous—and also a very, very stupid—position where America and the West have made huge interests dependent not on Ukrainian democracy but on the Armed Forces of Ukraine and their most extreme elements. You do have to think about how often in the past America has allowed local allies—often completely undemocratic ones—to hijack its strategy in various areas. 

3) I want to talk about a broad point about diplomacy—isn’t it important to stress that we can’t know what the prospects for a goal are until efforts are made? You don’t learn what’s possible through armchair speculations, do you? A 2 December 2022 WaPo piece says: “If an enduring peace can be had through negotiation—and we won’t know if it can until we explore that prospect—then negotiations would be in America’s interest.” The idea is that you discover through trying—we “won’t know if it can until we explore that prospect”. 

You discover through trying—things can worsen in terms of the facts on the ground, but you certainly get nowhere without trying.

Again and again you hear this line that Putin has shown that he’s not interested in negotiations and not interested in a peace settlement. That’s totally untrue—Putin is interested in a peace settlement on certain terms that the Kremlin regards as sufficient. Foreign Minister Lavrov has stated that this means Ukrainian recognition of Russian sovereignty over the areas Russia has annexed—that’s obviously unacceptable to Ukraine, but it’s also dramatically smaller than what Russian aims were back in February, so it’s therefore simply untrue that Moscow is still committed to maximal goals in Ukraine. 

We don’t know what will happen in the spring. But given the Russian performance so far, it’s hard for me to imagine another Russian offensive to capture Kyiv or Odessa, except in the highly unlikely event that Western support for Ukraine were to cease altogether.

There’s lots of commentary about how the GOP is an incredibly—shockingly—harmful and dangerous organization. It’s true that election deniers did badly in the 2022 midterms, but the GOP remains as big a threat as ever in 2023.

In this piece I’ll talk about: the bird’s-eye view of the GOP; attacking democracy in one sense; attacking democracy in a broader sense; what Republicans believe; the F-word; the DeSantis threat; and the opposition to science.

The Bird’s-Eye View of the GOP

Noam Chomsky gave—on 11 April 2019—an incisive analysis of the GOP. Everyone should check out what he says:

The GOP serves “extreme wealth and corporate power”. But you “can’t get votes that way, so you have to do something else to get votes”, hence the crazy stuff about abortion and guns and everything else.

It disturbs me that these distractions—like abortion and guns—are used to mobilize votes for a harmful neoliberal legislative agenda. And it disturbs me that these distractions are so harmful in themselves—just look at the horrifying racism of replacement theory or at the way that people don’t trust scientists. These are dark forces—it’s obscene to harness them for political gain.

Attacking Democracy in One Sense

Imagine a GOP where the base respected electoral outcomes, the GOP had no tolerance for politicians who didn’t respect electoral outcomes, and there was zero penalty for a GOP politician who said that they respected electoral outcomes—what would it take to get to that GOP?

A 22 September 2020 Vox piece provides evidence that “there is a consensus among comparative politics scholars that the Republican Party is one of the most anti-democratic political parties in the developed world”—the GOP has demonstrated “systematic disinterest in behaving according to the democratic rules of the game”. And a 17 June 2022 Guardian piece observes that the GOP’s “very few voices siding against Trumpism are being shunned and ostracized”.

A 5 December 2022 piece says: “the GOP remains a party loaded with politicians who still don’t accept the 2020-election results”; “Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is now arguing that even the U.S. Constitution should not stand in the way of his wild determination to overturn his defeat”; “it’s great that with one conspicuous exception in Arizona, 2020-election deniers are grudgingly accepting their own 2022 defeats”; and “in a dangerous epidemic of election denial, approximately 100 percent of election deniers remain in one political party”.

It’ll “be time to happily conclude that Republicans don’t represent a threat to democracy” when they: (1) “begin treating voting as a right rather than a privilege”; (2) “look back at the attempted insurrection of January 6, 2021, and its chief instigator with universal contempt”; and (3) “stop fighting every conceivable advance in self-government, as though democracy itself represents an existential threat to their principles”.

A 13 December 2022 Atlantic piece says: “defeat of prominent election deniers around the country in last month’s midterm elections is cause for relief and maybe even tempered celebration, but not complacency about the dangers to democracy”; “far too many prominent members of the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election remain in office for anyone to rest easy”; on “January 6, 2021, 147 Republicans, including eight senators, voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory”; all “eight senators remain in office”; of “the 139 representatives who objected, 124 ran for reelection, and 118 of those won”; “some were more actively involved in the paperwork coup than others”; a “series of stories at Talking Points Memo, based on former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s text messages, spotlights how many of the worst plotters are still in office”; and the “threat to democracy is coming from inside the House—and Senate”.

A 24 December 2022 NYT piece says: a “precariously narrow but consequential slice of the electorate broke with its own voting history to reject openly extremist Republican candidates—at least partly out of concern for the health of the political system”; these voters’ decisions, “discernible in surveys and voiced in interviews, did not necessarily lay to rest concerns about the ability of the election system to withstand the new pressures unleashed upon it by Mr. Trump”; in “Arizona, Michigan and Nevada, Republican primary voters nominated candidates campaigning on Mr. Trump’s election lies for secretary of state, the office that in 40 states oversees the election system”; in “all three, those candidates lost”; and the “rout eased the immediate concern that strident partisans who embraced conspiracy theories about hacked voting machines, foreign meddling and smuggled ballots might soon be empowered to wreak havoc on election systems”.

A “review of the election outcomes in several states, along with interviews with voters, political strategists, pollsters and political scientists, suggests that what happened in November was something less than a clear repudiation of an anti-democratic push in the Republican Party”; while “election deniers suffered losses across the board, in states like Nevada and Arizona they still won nearly half the vote”; “in interviews, Republicans and independents who rejected election deniers often said they did so for other reasons, like the candidates’ stances on abortion or a more general sense that they were too extreme or too closely aligned with Mr. Trump”; in “most statewide races, Democrats enjoyed conventional advantages over election-denier Republicans, fielding much better-funded campaigns with more unified support from their party”; and on “the Republican side, many election deniers ran poorly financed and generally lackluster campaigns, with almost no monetary support from Mr. Trump or other national Republicans, and depressed the use of mail-in voting by inundating their supporters with dire warnings about its insecurity”.

The “narrowness of some of the election deniers’ losses, and the diversity of factors that likely played into them, have led some experts to caution that November’s results should not be mistaken for a wholesale rejection of anti-democratic politics”.

States United Democracy Center, Protect Democracy, and Law Forward published two useful documents in 2022 about the threat to formal democracy in the US:

2022 A Democracy Crisis In The Making

2.75MB ∙ PDF file

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Download

2022 Year End Numbers

438KB ∙ PDF file

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Download

The second document says: “we have catalogued more than 400 legislative proposals that would enable election subversion”; the proposals have—“throughout the last two years”—“morphed and become more far-reaching and aggressive”; the “first round of these legislative proposals will die out as the 2021-22 state legislative sessions draw to a close”; the “question now is to what extent the trend will continue and evolve”; “moves made in the Texas legislature as it prepares for its 2023 session (discussed in Part III of this memorandum) suggest that the fever has not broken”; and “with the Supreme Court set to issue a decision regarding the independent state legislature theory sometime next year, the legal underpinnings of legislature control of election administration could change dramatically”.

A 29 November 2022 piece from Protect Democracy’s site says: in “key races for offices that will oversee the 2024 election in battleground states, election deniers were defeated and the authoritarian threat was dealt a significant setback”; according “to experts surveyed by the Authoritarian Threat Index, the overall threat to democracy fell from a 2.6 on a 1-5 scale in October to 2.0 in November, the lowest level since the start of the index in 2017”; and this “drop—one of the steepest measured—puts the United States, in November 2022, only just outside the bounds of the ‘range of a normally functioning consolidated democracy’”.

But the piece also says: although “voters rejected specific authoritarian candidates, they did not reject anti-democracy positions across the board”; “almost half of the country remains open, at least tacitly, to authoritarian factions and candidates”; Trump “remains a leading candidate for a major party nomination”; and his “closest competitor, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, has emulated many of Trump’s authoritarian tactics, as well as inventing some of his own”, including “the weaponization of law enforcement for voter suppression purposes, attempted enforcement of speech codes, and removing separately elected officials from office based on differing views”.

Attacking Democracy in a Broader Sense

It’s crucial to contextualize everything within the GOP’s broader attack on democracy. Parliamentary democracy functions based on norms, so you can undermine it without breaking any laws whatsoever—it’s not like the system will somehow necessarily function just because insurrectionists are held at bay.

Chomsky says in a 23 June 2020 interview: “we’re seeing something pretty interesting”; parliamentary “democracy has been around for 350 years, starting in England in 1689 with the so-called Glorious Revolution, when sovereignty was transferred from the royalty to the parliament”; parliamentary “democracy is not just based on laws and constitutions”; in “fact, the British constitution is maybe a dozen words”; it’s “based on trust and good faith, the assumption that people will act like human beings”; and Mitch McConnell is “in many ways the real evil genius of this administration, dedicated to destroying democracy long before Trump”.

Norman Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann write in their 2012 book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, which is the best book to read on McConnell’s 100% non-illegal assault on democracy: “we identify two overriding sources of dysfunction”; the “first is the serious mismatch between the political parties, which have become as vehemently adversarial as parliamentary parties, and a governing system that, unlike a parliamentary democracy, makes it extremely difficult for majorities to act”; and the “second is the fact that, however awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier”.

In “the past, tough negotiators who played hardball had a basic respect for their opponents and some sensitivity to the consequences of their tactics”; they “did not try gleefully to embarrass their counterparts in the other body or the other party to score political points, or push so far that the collateral damage of their actions truly hurt large numbers of Americans”; add “to that the cynical exploitation of the rules to demolish the regular order in Congress and to damage policy deliberation in the service of the permanent campaign”; holds, “filibusters, and other delay and obstruction tactics have been around since the beginning of the republic”; “as we look at the panoply of tactics and techniques for throwing wrenches and grenades into the regular order of the policy process, which the new and old media’s outside agitation encourages and even incites, we do not see business as usual”; the “target is no longer an individual judge or cabinet member hated for a real or imagined ideological leaning”; the “pathologies we’ve identified, old and new, provide incontrovertible evidence of people who have become more loyal to party than to country”; as “a result, the political system has become grievously hobbled at a time when the country faces unusually serious challenges and grave threats”; and the “single-minded focus on scoring political points over solving problems, escalating over the last several decades, has reached a level of such intensity and bitterness that the government seems incapable of taking and sustaining public decisions responsive to the existential challenges facing the country”.

A “Westminster-style parliamentary system provides a much cleaner form of democratic accountability than the American system”; a “party or coalition of parties forms a government after an election and is in a position in parliament to put most of its program in place”; the “minority party will be aggressively adversarial, but it is unable to indefinitely delay or defeat the government’s program”; when “the next election arrives (not quickly, as in the U.S., before that program has made itself felt, but in four or five years), there is no confusion in the public over which party is to be held accountable”; and if “the government is thrown out of office, the minority party can govern on its own terms, within an institutional setting and political culture that accepts the legitimacy of the new government and the policy changes that will follow”.

We “believe a fundamental problem is the mismatch between parliamentary-style political parties—ideologically polarized, internally unified, vehemently oppositional, and politically strategic—that has emerged in recent years and a separation-of-powers system that makes it extremely difficult for majorities to work their will”; students “of comparative politics have demonstrated that the American policy-making system of checks and balances and separation of powers has more structural impediments to action than any other major democracy”; now “there are additional incentives for obstruction in that policy-making process”; witness “the Republicans’ immense electoral success in 2010 after voting in unison against virtually every Obama initiative and priority, and making each vote and enactment contentious and excruciating, followed by major efforts to delegitimize the result”; “because of the partisan nature of much of the media and the reflexive tendency of many in the mainstream press to use false equivalence to explain outcomes, it becomes much easier for a minority, in this case the Republicans, to use filibusters, holds, and other techniques to obstruct”; and the “status quo bias of the constitutional system becomes magnified under dysfunction and creates a take-no-prisoners political dynamic that gives new meaning to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s concept of ‘defining deviancy down’”.

The “dysfunction that arises from the incompatibility of the U.S. constitutional system with parliamentary-type parties is compounded by the asymmetric polarization of those parties”; the GOP has become (1) “ideologically extreme”, (2) “contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime”, (3) “scornful of compromise”, (4) “unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science”, and (5) “dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government”; the “Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government’s role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties”; and this “asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for ‘balance,’ constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance”.

I’ll join together three block quotes that Ornstein and Mann give from Mike Lofgren’s 2011 Truthout piece “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult”:

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.

…

The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance, the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a “high functioning” institution: filibusters were rare and the body was legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights.

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

…

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

Ornstein and Mann write that “Lofgren’s frustration may make him more prone to hyperbole than other old-school Republicans”. And that “his observations hit home with many of them, as they do with us”.

A 30 April 2012 WaPo review of the 2012 book says: “Mann and Ornstein rightly blame the news media for doing a mediocre job covering the most important political story of the last three decades”, namely “the transformation of the Republican Party”; they “see a ‘reflexive tendency of many in the mainstream press to use false equivalence to explain outcomes,’ when Republican obstructionism and Republican rejection of science and basic facts have no Democratic equivalents”; and it’s “much easier to write stories ‘that convey an impression that the two sides are equally implicated’”.

Jane Meyer writes in a 12 April 2020 New Yorker piece: under “McConnell’s leadership, as the Washington Post’s Paul Kane wrote recently, the chamber that calls itself the world’s greatest deliberative body has become, ‘by almost every measure,’ the ‘least deliberative in the modern era’”; longtime “lawmakers in both parties say that the Senate is broken”; in “February, seventy former senators signed a bipartisan letter decrying the institution for not ‘fulfilling its constitutional duties’”; “Dick Durbin, of Illinois, who has been in the Senate for twenty-four years and is now the second-in-command in the Democratic leadership, told me that, under McConnell, ‘the Senate has deteriorated to the point where there is no debate whatsoever—he’s dismantled the Senate brick by brick’”; after “Barack Obama was elected in 2008, McConnell used the filibuster to block a record number of bills and nominations supported by the Administration”; and as Majority Leader, McConnell “has control over the chamber’s schedule, and he keeps bills and nominations he opposes from even coming up for consideration”.

Meyer writes:

Norman Ornstein, a political scientist specializing in congressional matters at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, told me that he has known every Senate Majority Leader in the past fifty years, and that McConnell “will go down in history as one of the most significant people in destroying the fundamentals of our constitutional democracy.” He continued, “There isn’t anyone remotely close. There’s nobody as corrupt, in terms of violating the norms of government.”

It’s incredibly disturbing to think that bad media coverage allowed McConnell to get away with the project of “‘destroying the fundamentals of our constitutional democracy’”.

70 former US senators signed a bipartisan open letter—WaPo published it on 25 February 2020—that says: we “do not want to give the impression that we served in some golden age when the Senate operated like clockwork and its members embraced one another as one big happy family”; of “course, that was never the case”; our “concern is that the legislative process is no longer working in the Senate”; Senate “committees have lost responsibility for writing legislation”; rules “allowing extended debate, a feature of the Senate that is essential to protecting the rights of minorities, have been abused as the filibuster and cloture have shut down action on the Senate floor”; it “is now commonly said that it takes 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate”; this “is new and obstructionist”; “it takes 60 votes to invoke cloture in the once relatively exceptional event of a filibuster”; filibusters “are now threatened as a matter of course, and are too readily acceded to”; and neither “in committee nor on the floor do rank-and-file members have reasonable opportunities to advance their positions by voting on legislation”.

Chomsky says in a 20 March 2021 Truthout interview:

The stimulus bill has its flaws, but considering the circumstances, it’s an impressive achievement. The circumstances are a highly disciplined opposition party dedicated to the principle announced years ago by its maximal leader, Mitch McConnell: If we are not in power, we must render the country ungovernable and block government legislative efforts, however beneficial they might be. Then the consequences can be blamed on the party in power, and we can take over. It worked well for Republicans in 2009—with plenty of help from Obama. By 2010, the Democrats lost Congress, and the way was cleared to the 2016 debacle.

The strategy is to “render the country ungovernable”—“the consequences can be blamed on the party in power, and we can take over”.

Arson is an attractive political strategy if you don’t care about anything. Burn the country down when the other party is in power—induce gridlock, deny the other party any kind of legislative achievement that they might get credit for, and harm the country as much as possible. Then roar back into power based on the wreckage that you’ve brought about. And based on the anger—and the frustration—that you’ve brought about.

You wouldn’t pursue this strategy if you cared about your country, its people, or the world. And the procedure seems—to me at least—to require an uninformed electorate that blames the incumbent party for what the arsonists have done.

What Republicans Believe

What do Republicans actually believe? What are their attitudes toward democracy and violence? You can see disturbing data in the 28 June 2021 piece “U.S. Conservatives Are Uniquely Inclined Toward Right-Wing Authoritarianism”—“26% of the U.S. population qualified as highly right-wing authoritarian, Morning Consult research found, twice the share of the No. 2 countries, Canada and Australia”.

Paul Krugman writes in a 25 April 2022 NYT piece: “I don’t think political reporting has caught up with how thoroughly QAnonized the G.O.P. has become”; “roughly half of Republicans believe that ‘top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings’”; “66 percent of Republicans buy into ‘white replacement theory,’ agreeing wholly or partly with the claim that ‘the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate with voters from poorer countries around the world’”; and given “this mind-set, ambitious Republican politicians naturally pursue policies devised to play to the base’s paranoia and accuse anyone who opposes these policies of being part of a nefarious conspiracy”.

You can see troubling results in the 1 November 2021 piece “Competing Visions of America”. And in the 27 October 2022 piece “Challenges in Moving Toward a More Inclusive Democracy”, which says: a “majority of Republicans (55%) agree with” replacement theory; regarding the 2020 election, a “majority of Republicans (58%) falsely claim that the election was stolen from Trump”; and 27% of Republicans mostly agree “that there is a storm coming to restore rightful leaders”, “that violence may be necessary to save the country”, and “that the government, media, and financial worlds are controlled by Satan-worshipping pedophiles”.

A 28 December 2022 piece says: “many election deniers ran for offices that would include some degree of control over elections”, but “few campaigns focused on how the 2022 election might affect the health of our democracy”; although “several prominent election deniers lost their races, a few succeeded, and the election results contained other indications of threats to the democratic political system”; many “Members of Congress who voted not to certify the results of the 2020 election kept their offices, and two attendees of the Jan. 6 rally that led to the riot won election”; “because the Republicans won a majority of seats in the House, congressional investigations into Trump’s involvement in Jan. 6 will likely come to an end”; “the public expresses a strong commitment to democratic norms in the abstract but fails to apply these norms consistently in practice”; “data shows that partisanship makes attachment to leaders and loyalty to particular groups a primary consideration for many voters”; “a substantial number of Americans say they believe the country needs a leader willing to violate some of the rules and norms of democratic society”; and a “majority of Republicans (57%), and even more than a third of Democrats (36%), agree that we could use a leader who will break some rules”.

The F-Word

Was America “fascist” from 1917 to 1921? Thomas Meaney writes in a 3 October 2022 NYT review that talks about Adam Hochschild’s 2022 book American Midnight: at “a time when professional doom-mongering about democracy has become one of the more inflationary sectors of the American economy, it is tonic to be reminded by Adam Hochschild’s masterly new book, ‘American Midnight,’ that there are other contenders than the period beginning in 2016 for the distinction of Darkest Years of the Republic”; by “some measures—and certainly in many quarters of the American left—the years 1917-21 have a special place in infamy”; the “United States during that time saw a swell of patriotic frenzy and political repression rarely rivaled in its history”; “President Woodrow Wilson’s terror campaign against American radicals, dissidents, immigrants and workers makes the McCarthyism of the 1950s look almost subtle by comparison”; as “Hochschild vividly details, the Wilson administration and its allies pioneered the police raids, surveillance operations, internment camps, strikebreaking and legal chicanery that would become part of the repertoire of the American state for decades to come”; Wilson “jailed his charismatic Socialist opponent, the 63-year-old Eugene Debs, for opposing America’s descent into the carnage of the First World War, with the liberal press in lock step”; and Hochschild “stresses how the Wilson administration drew on America’s experience in the Philippines, importing torture and counterinsurgency techniques back to the mainland”.

Chomsky calls what happened under Wilson “street fascism”—it’s not that the government was totalitarian, but there was fascism in the streets. He comments in an 8 December 2022 Truthout interview: fascism “in the streets is Mussolini’s Blackshirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts”; it’s “violent, brutal, destructive”; American Midnight is a “penetrating study” that recounts “in vivid detail” the “shocking story” of “the most vicious period of violent repression in U.S. history, apart from the two original sins”; as “usual, Black people suffered the most, including major massacres (Tulsa and others) and a hideous record of lynchings and other atrocities”; immigrants “were another target in a wave of fanatic ‘Americanism’ and fear of Bolshevism”; hundreds “of ‘subversives’ were deported”; the “lively Socialist Party was virtually destroyed and never recovered”; and labor “was decimated, not only the Wobblies but well beyond, including vicious strike-breaking in the name of patriotism and defense against the ‘reds’”.

The “level of lunacy finally became so outlandish that it self-destructed”; “Attorney-General Palmer and his sidekick J. Edgar Hoover predicted an insurrection led by Bolsheviks on May Day 1920, with feverish warnings and mobilization of police, army and vigilantes”; the “day passed with a few picnics”; and widespread “ridicule and wish for ‘normalcy’ brought an end to the madness”.

The madness ended, but not “without a residue”; as “Hochschild observes, progressive options for American society suffered a severe blow”; a “very different country could have emerged” but for the vicious repression; and what “took place was street fascism with a vengeance”.

You can—putting aside the horrors of street fascism—talk about (1) the symptoms that we associate with fascism or (2) the actual fascist ideology.

The GOP does indeed exhibit the symptoms. Chomsky says in a 16 June 2021 Truthout interview: “the fascist symptoms are there, including extreme racism, violence, worship of the leader (sent by God, according to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo), immersion in a world of ‘alternative facts’ and a frenzy of irrationality”; the symptoms are also there in “other ways, such as the extraordinary efforts in Republican-run states to suppress teaching in schools that doesn’t conform to their white supremacist doctrines”; and what “actually happened for 400 years and is very much alive today must be presented to students as a deviation from the real America, pure and innocent, much as in well-run totalitarian states”.

But what about the actual fascist ideology where the state controls the business classes and the rest of the social order, the party controls the state, and the maximal leader controls the party? Chomsky says that the GOP’s “commitment to the most brutal form of neoliberalism is apparent in the legislative record, crucially the subordination of the party to private capital, the inverse of classic fascism”—GOP politicians’ commitment to serving private power is the exact opposite of what you’d see from ideologically fascist politicians.

The US has long been ripe for an unprecedentedly dangerous leader who’s dedicated, rational, and brutal. It’s good that we’ve seen—instead of that figure—various self-destructive crooks instead. A 10 November 2016 piece quotes this comment from Chomsky:

The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen. Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response.

It’s crucial to change the situation in the US—urgently—so that there isn’t such an easy path for an “honest, charismatic figure” to take.

The DeSantis Threat

What threat does Ron DeSantis pose? I’m not sure whether he’s the “honest, charismatic figure” that Chomsky has been warning about for decades. But DeSantis does have certain clear policy goals that he pursues in a systematic manner—Trump basically had no policy goals.

A 2 January 2023 Vanity Fair piece provides some useful hyperlinks and says that DeSantis: (1) “thinks it’s okay to treat human beings like chattel”; (2) is “dangerously anti-science”; (3) “wants to make it harder for people to vote and had Floridians arrested as part of another one of his political stunts”; (4) is “anti-free speech, particularly the kind of free speech that says the United States hasn’t always been great for non-white people”; (5) is “waging a war on trans people”; (6) signed “the dystopian, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation formally known as the Parental Rights in Education Act”; (7) is “a massive bully”; (8) is anti-abortion; (9) “supported Donald Trump until it was no longer politically expedient to do so”; (10) “saw ‘no need’ for the Respect for Marriage Act”; (11) “made it harder for protesters to speak out about injustice and easier for anti-justice people to hit protesters with their cars”; (12) “has no interest in preventing gun violence”; and (13) is apparently “an awful person and has been for many years”.

Zack Beauchamp writes in a 28 April 2022 Vox piece: DeSantis “has steadily put together a policy agenda with strong echoes of Orbán’s governing ethos—one in which an allegedly existential cultural threat from the left justifies aggressive uses of state power against the right’s enemies”; broadly “speaking, both Orbán and DeSantis characterize themselves as standing for ordinary citizens against a corrupt and immoral left-wing cosmopolitan elite”; these “factions are so powerful, in their telling, that aggressive steps must be taken to defeat their influence and defend traditional values”; in “such an existential struggle, the old norms of tolerance and limited government need to be adjusted, tailored to a world where the left controls the commanding heights of culture”; since “the left can’t be beaten in that realm, government must be seized and wielded in service of a right-wing cultural agenda”; and these ideas “are widely shared among far-right thinkers and parties across the Western world”.

In “the United States, Trump was supposed to be the avatar of this far-right thinking”; “it turned out he was too self-absorbed and haphazard to successfully implement a New Right agenda”; “Trump’s most notable legislative achievement” was a “tax cut written by old-school, pro-business conservatives”; in contrast, “DeSantis is actually walking the New Right walk”; his “policy agenda has been described as ‘competent Trumpism,’ but that’s a bit misleading”; “Trumpism was never a coherent intellectual doctrine”; and what “DeSantis is doing is taking far-right ideas and making them into policy reality”.

In “June of last year, Hungary’s far-right government passed a law cracking down on LGBTQ rights, including a provision prohibiting instruction on LGBTQ topics in sex education classes”; nine months later, DeSantis “signed the so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill banning ‘classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity’ up through third grade”; according “to some knowledgeable observers on the right, these two bills were closely connected”; this “is not a one-off example”; most “recently, there was DeSantis’s crackdown on Disney’s special tax exemption”; “using regulatory powers to punish opposing political speech is one of Orbán’s signature moves”; and on “issues ranging from higher education to social media to gerrymandering, DeSantis has followed a trail blazed by Orbán, turning policy into a tool for targeting outgroups while entrenching his party’s hold on power”.

The “American federal system delegates huge amounts of power to state governments, enough to severely undermine democracy within a state’s boundaries”; the “United States has a long history of state-level authoritarianism”; “Jim Crow laws, in addition to being a form of racial apartheid, were also designed to guarantee indefinite Democratic control over Southern states”; in “this political context, any diffusion of Hungarian-style culture-war authoritarianism to the state governments is extremely disturbing”; this diffusion could accelerate “a decade-plus process of democratic decline in Republican-governed states”; and if “DeSantis is in fact creating a blueprint for American Orbánism that Republicans across the country choose to follow, the implications for American democracy could well be disastrous”.

The Opposition to Science

I urge everyone to look at the images in the 8 November 2022 NYT piece “Ocean-Eaten Islands, Fire-Scarred Forests: Our Changing World in Pictures”, which says: collected “here is a roundup of some of the best visual journalism about climate change that New York Times journalists have produced over the past few years”; from “methane-spewing feedlots in the Texas Panhandle to a hurricane-drowned church in Louisiana, and from ocean-eaten Easter Island in Chile to fire-scarred New South Wales in Australia, our visual journalists have gone out to take the pulse of an ailing planet”; the “Great Salt Lake has already shrunk by two-thirds, as a broad swath of Utah around it parches”; the lake’s “troubles are closely linked to the health and economy of an entire region”; many “of the world’s most vulnerable to the ravages of climate change live in South Asia, where rising temperatures are making it harder than ever to address poverty, food insecurity and health challenges”; and floods “in Assam, India, in June affected more than half a million people across nearly 1,000 villages”.

Krugman writes in an 18 July 2022 NYT piece that the “fundamental reason we appear set to do nothing while the planet burns” is that “the modern G.O.P. is hostile to science and scientists”.

And Chomsky says in a 22 April 2021 Truthout interview: in “2008, John McCain ran for president on a ticket that included some concern for destruction of the environment, and congressional Republicans were considering similar ideas”; the “huge Koch brothers energy consortium had been laboring for years to prevent any such heresy, and moved quickly to cut it off at the pass”; under “the leadership of the late David Koch, they launched a juggernaut to keep the party on course”; it “quickly succumbed, and since then has tolerated only rare deviation”; the “capitulation, of course, has a major effect on legislative options, but also on the voting base, amplified by the media echo-chamber to which most limit themselves”; climate “ranks low in concern among Republicans, frighteningly low in fact”; 14% “of Republicans think that the most severe threat in human history is a major problem (though concerns seem to be somewhat higher among younger ones, an encouraging sign)”; and this “must change”.

Chomsky comments:

The Global South cannot deal with the crisis on its own. To provide substantial assistance is an obligation for the rich, not simply out of concern for their own survival but also a moral obligation, considering an ugly history that we need not review.

Can the wealthy and privileged rise to that moral level? Can they even rise to the level of concern for self-preservation if it means some minor sacrifice now? The fate of human society—and much of the rest of life on Earth—depends on the answer to that question. An answer that will come soon, or not at all.

It’s chilling to think that time is running out—the answer “will come soon, or not at all”.

Humanity has to overcome many grave threats, but we can only do so if discourse dramatically improves. And this requirement makes today’s discourse disturbing to witness. 

I find the Ukraine-war discourse particularly ominous—look at what Noam Chomsky says in his 2 June 2022 Truthout piece: 

The ghastly experiment is operative U.S. policy, and is supported by a wide range of opinion, always with noble rhetoric about how we must stand up for principle and not permit crime to go unpunished. When we hear this from strong supporters of U.S. crimes, as we commonly do, we can dismiss it as sheer cynicism, the Western counterpart to the most vulgar apparatchiks of the Soviet years, eager to eloquently denounce Western crimes, fully supportive of their own. We also hear it from opponents of U.S. crimes, from people who surely do not want to carry out the ghastly experiment that they are advocating. Here other issues arise: the rising tide of irrationality that is undermining any hope for serious discourse—a necessity if Ukraine is to be spared indescribable tragedy, and even if the human experiment is to persist much longer.

It’s frightening to consider (1) “the rising tide of irrationality that is undermining any hope for serious discourse”, (2) the reality that we need serious discourse “if Ukraine is to be spared indescribable tragedy”, and (3) the reality that we need serious discourse “if the human experiment is to persist much longer”. 

It’s bleak to look at our current situation—it’s also hopeful to imagine a world where discourse isn’t like this and we can approach problems sensibly. I’ll use this piece to talk about: the basic issues regarding the war in Ukraine; how irrational the Ukraine-war discourse is; media bias; pro-diplomacy voices; and two things we know.

The Basic Issues

The basic issues are (A) the need to pursue diplomacy and (B) Washington’s opposition to diplomacy. 

Regarding the need to pursue diplomacy, it’s true that the Kremlin could capitulate at any moment—one never knows if more fighting will yield a surrender. Opposing diplomacy means the risk of extending the war, though. And extending the war poses a whole range of threats. 

First, the threat of further bloodshed—I found it harrowing to read the 18 June 2022 NYT report “Death in Ukraine”, whose introduction refers to “the crack of gunfire on the streets and the wails of loss out of shattered windows”. The report says that three victims “died as thousands of others have died in Ukraine, from the spray of metallic shards that burst from an artillery shell”; a woman, her two children, and a church volunteer were “only a dozen or so yards away” when an artillery shell hit; they “didn’t stand a chance”; all “four slumped to the pavement, dead or unconscious and dying”; the “family dog, also hit and wounded, yelped in terror”; blood “splattered on the face of the church volunteer”; and “the scene of the bodies, lying motionless by a bridge they had crossed seeking safety, was eerily calm”. The report also says: on “average, nearly three children have been killed in Ukraine every day since the war began”; the “Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office reported on Friday that some 322 children had died during the war”; they “include a 6-year old Ukrainian boy who was sitting on a swing on a playground in Lysychansk on Monday afternoon when shrapnel tore through his body”; and through “tears, a neighbor in that eastern town described to local news outlets how he had run to the child after hearing an explosion”.

Second, the threat to millions of innocent lives abroad—a 15 September 2022 piece refers to “70 million pushed closer to starvation by the war in Ukraine”. A 13 December 2022 piece is titled “Children dying in Somalia as food catastrophe worsens”—the piece says that a “two-year drought has decimated crops and livestock across Horn of Africa nations, while the price of food imports has soared because of the war in Ukraine”. And a 1 December 2022 Voice of America piece says: “United Nations and partners on Thursday appealed for a record $51.5 billion in aid money for 2023, with tens of millions of additional people expected to need assistance, testing the humanitarian response system ‘to its limits’”; “the U.N. Global Humanitarian Overview estimates that an extra 65 million people will need help next year, bringing the total to 339 million in 68 countries”; according to the report, nine “months of war between Russia and Ukraine have disrupted food exports and about 45 million people in 37 countries are currently facing starvation”; and more “than 100 million people have been driven from their homes as conflict and climate change fuel a displacement crisis”. The piece quotes the UN’s Emergency Relief Coordinator, who refers to “‘shockingly high’” humanitarian needs and cites “the war in Ukraine and drought in the Horn of Africa”. 

A 2 January 2023 NYT piece says: an “enduring global food crisis has become one of the farthest-reaching consequences of Russia’s war, contributing to widespread starvation, poverty and premature deaths”; “as deep winter sets in and Russia presses assaults on Ukraine’s infrastructure, the crisis is worsening”; food “shortages are already being exacerbated by a drought in the Horn of Africa and unusually harsh weather in other parts of the world”; the “United Nations World Food Program estimates that more than 345 million people are suffering from or at risk of acute food insecurity, more than double the number from 2019”; the “food shortages and high prices are causing intense pain across Africa, Asia and the Americas”; “U.S. officials are especially worried about Afghanistan and Yemen, which have been ravaged by war”; “Egypt, Lebanon and other big food-importing nations are finding it difficult to pay their debts and other expenses because costs have surged”; even “in wealthy countries like the United States and Britain, soaring inflation driven in part by the war’s disruptions has left poorer people without enough to eat”; and “no region has been immune” to food-price increases.

Third, threats to Ukraine’s infrastructure and economy. You can read in the World Bank’s Fall 2022 economic update for Europe and Central Asia: Ukraine’s “GDP is projected to contract by 35 percent in 2022”; Ukraine’s “recovery and reconstruction needs across social, productive, and infrastructure sectors total at least $349 billion” according to the World Bank’s recent estimates, which is an amount “more than 1.5 times the 2021 GDP of Ukraine”; the war’s repercussions “are expected to reverberate beyond the short term” due to “destruction of productive capacity, damage to arable land, and reduced labor supply”; the economic harm will be especially bad “if refugees do not return, which becomes increasingly likely as the war becomes protracted and they establish their lives in host countries”; wars “inflict particularly severe damage to productivity for several years, through reducing and disrupting the labor force, weakening capital deepening, disrupting value chains, hindering innovation, and inducing poverty”; and poverty “in Ukraine is projected to increase from 5.5 percent in 2021 to 25 percent in 2022, with high downside risks if the war and energy security situations worsen”. And you can read an August 2022 report—from the World Bank, the Government of Ukraine, and the European Commission—that aims “to assess the impact of the war on the population, human development, service delivery, physical assets, infrastructure, productive sectors and the economy”. The report says that “the impact of the invasion will be felt for generations, with families displaced and separated, disruptions to human development, destruction of intrinsic cultural heritage and reversal of a positive economic and poverty trajectory”—the report puts total damage at $97 billion as of 1 June 2022, total losses at $252 billion as of 1 June 2022, and total needs at $349 billion as of 1 June 2022. 

A 16 December 2022 CBC piece says that “Russia has rained missiles on Ukrainian energy infrastructure almost weekly since early October after a series of battlefield defeats”—analysts “have said Russian strikes targeting energy infrastructure are part of an attempt to freeze Ukrainians into submission after battlefield losses by Russian forces”. And a 13 December 2022 Voice of America piece says that the “United Nations reports Russia has destroyed 50% of Ukraine's energy infrastructure, putting millions of people at risk of sickness and death as temperatures continue to plunge”—the “World Health Organization reports at least 715 hospitals and health care facilities have come under attack and been destroyed or damaged”. 

A 15 December 2022 WaPo piece says: two “months of relentless missile and drone attacks by Russia have decimated Ukraine’s critical infrastructure and blown a hole in projections for the country’s war-ravaged economy”; at “a closed-door meeting last week at the National Bank of Ukraine, which now has a military checkpoint just outside its headquarters, central bank officials pondered what might happen if Russia’s attacks intensify”; people “could flee Ukraine in droves, taking their money with them, potentially crashing the national currency as they seek to exchange their Ukrainian hryvnia for euros or dollars”; the “Ukrainian government could be left without international reserves to pay for critical imports and unable to meet its foreign debt obligations”; “Russia’s invasion has destroyed hospitals, ports, fields, bridges and other parts of the country’s critical infrastructure”; agricultural “exports have been decimated”; “with energy systems decimated, Kyiv and its partners face a head-splitting challenge”; and key “pillars of the economy—coal mining, industrial manufacturing, information technology—cannot function without electricity or internet service”. The piece says: 

“How does an economy function at all—while supporting the war effort—with this level of damage to civilian infrastructure? I don’t think we’ve ever seen this,” said Simon Johnson, an economist at MIT who is in communication with Ukrainian officials. “I can’t think of any economy that’s ever tried to do this.”

I think that everyone should reflect on Simon Johnson’s comment. And Chomsky says in his 22 December 2022 Truthout piece: 

I claim no military expertise. I do follow military analysts, and find most of them supremely confident, with opposing conclusions—not for the first time. My suspicion is that General Milley, former chair of the joint chiefs, is probably right in concluding that neither side can win a decisive military victory and that the cost of continuing warfare is enormous for both sides, with many repercussions beyond.

If the war goes on, Ukraine will be the primary victim. Advanced U.S. weapons may sustain a battlefield stalemate as Russia pours in more troops and equipment, but how much can Ukrainian society tolerate now that Russia, after many months, has turned to the U.S.-U.K. style of war, directly attacking infrastructure, energy, communications, anything that allows the society to function? Ukraine is already facing a major economic and humanitarian crisis. As the war persists, Ukrainian central bank officials fear that “People could flee Ukraine in droves, taking their money with them, potentially crashing the national currency as they seek to exchange their Ukrainian hryvnia for euros or dollars.”

Chomsky says: “If the war goes on, Ukraine will be the primary victim.” And I think that it’s indeed upsetting to imagine what will happen if Russia continues to go after infrastructure. 

Fourth, threats to Ukraine’s fragile environment—it’s important to consider how permanent today’s environmental damage can be. A 29 August 2022 piece says that “scientists are increasingly concerned about the environmental consequences of the destruction” as “the war in Ukraine drags on”—the piece refers to: rivers “being polluted by wrecked industrial facilities, sewage works, and overflowing coal mines”. And the 15 December WaPo piece says that as “much as one-third of the country’s forests have been destroyed”.

Fifth, an existential threat to you and me and everyone else—a longer war means more gambling on the nuclear-weapons front. This threat is maybe more distant in people’s minds, but it shouldn’t be. Everything that a human being could value is at stake when we gamble on this front—the most selfish person alive will therefore want to pursue diplomacy.

I’ve barely even mentioned the damage to Ukraine’s culture—a 19 December 2022 NYT piece investigates how the invasion has “systematically destroyed Ukrainian cultural sites” and has “dealt a grievous blow to Ukrainian culture”. 

And I haven’t even mentioned how the war has channeled desperately needed resources toward weaponry—an 18 December 2022 NYT piece says that the “prospect of growing military threats from both China and Russia is driving bipartisan support for a surge in Pentagon spending, setting up another potential boom for weapons makers that is likely to extend beyond the war in Ukraine”. This “surge” recalls Dwight Eisenhower’s following words from his 16 April 1953 speech: 

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953.

The climate crisis is harming us right now in dramatic ways—we must use our resources for decarbonization, but we’re still pouring vast resources into weapons, so humanity is “hanging from a cross of iron” more than ever before. 

It should be clear that opposing diplomacy is—given all of these threats—a remarkable position to take. 

As for Washington’s opposition to diplomacy, Chomsky says in the June piece: “If we can escape cynicism and irrationality, the humane choice for the U.S. and the West is straightforward: seek to facilitate a diplomatic settlement, or at least don’t undermine the option.” 

US policy is indeed in opposition to “the humane choice”. A 26 April 2022 CNN piece makes it clear that the goal is not to pursue a negotiated settlement—the piece says: 

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has transformed into a grinding war of attrition with no meaningful peace deal in sight, the US and its allies have begun to convey a new, longer-term goal for the war: to defeat Russia so decisively on the battlefield that it will be deterred from launching such an attack ever again.

That message was delivered most clearly on Monday, when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told reporters after a trip to Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv that “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”

A National Security Council spokesperson said that Austin’s comments were consistent with what the US’ goals have been for months—namely, “to make this invasion a strategic failure for Russia.”

“We want Ukraine to win,” the spokesperson added. “One of our goals has been to limit Russia’s ability to do something like this again, as Secretary Austin said. That’s why we are arming the Ukrainians with weapons and equipment to defend themselves from Russian attacks, and it’s why we are using sanctions and export controls that are directly targeted at Russia’s defense industry to undercut Russia’s economic and military power to threaten and attack its neighbors.”

US officials traveling with Austin said that the message is one that he planned to reiterate, according to a senior administration official. Russia coming out of the conflict weaker than before is an idea that other Biden administration officials have referenced. US officials, however, had previously been reluctant to state as plainly that the US’ goal is to see Russia fail, and be militarily neutered in the long term, remaining cautiously optimistic that some kind of negotiated settlement could be reached.

The piece is clear—US officials “had previously been reluctant to state as plainly that the US’ goal is to see Russia fail, and be militarily neutered in the long term, remaining cautiously optimistic that some kind of negotiated settlement could be reached”. 

Linda McQuaig says in a 29 June 2022 piece: “Germany, France and Italy have correctly pushed for negotiations towards a diplomatic solution in Ukraine”; “the U.S. is digging in, moving beyond the original goal of helping defend Ukraine to adopting the more ambitious and perilous goal of weakening Russia”; and “in late April, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Russia should be ‘weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine’”. 

McQuaig cites a 25 April 2022 Guardian piece, which says: the “US defense secretary’s declaration that Washington wanted to see Russia weakened militarily and unable to recover quickly, marks a shift in Washington’s declared aims underlying its military support for Ukraine”; the “remarks suggested that even if Russian forces withdrew or were expelled from the Ukrainian territory they have occupied since 24 February, the US and its allies would seek to maintain sanctions with the aim of stopping Russia reconstituting its forces”; it “also indicated Washington is taking a position in an internal debate within Nato on whether to use the opportunity of Vladimir Putin’s strategic blunder in Ukraine to try to hobble his ability to threaten other countries in the future”; if “the remarks do indeed represent the Biden administration’s aims, there is a separate question of whether it was sensible to declare them so bluntly”; and it “arguably weakens Russia’s incentive to withdraw, reinforces Moscow’s narrative that Nato is waging a proxy war in Ukraine aimed at weakening Russia and even regime change, deepening Putin’s paranoia”. 

Chomsky says in a 16 November 2022 Truthout piece: 

Prior to Putin’s invasion there were options based generally on the Minsk agreements that might well have averted the crime. There is unresolved debate about whether Ukraine accepted these agreements. At least verbally, Russia appears to have done so up until not long before the invasion. The U.S. dismissed them in favor of integrating Ukraine into the NATO (that is, U.S.) military command, also refusing to take any Russian security concerns into consideration, as conceded. These moves were accelerated under Biden. Could diplomacy have succeeded in averting the tragedy? There was only one way to find out: Try. The option was ignored.

Putin rejected French president Macron’s efforts, to almost the last minute, to offer a viable alternative to aggression. Rejected them at the end with contempt—also shooting himself and Russia in the foot by driving Europe deep into Washington’s pocket, its fondest dream. The crime of aggression was compounded with the crime of foolishness, from his own point of view.

Ukraine-Russia negotiations took place under Turkish auspices as recently as March-April. They failed. The U.S. and U.K. opposed them. Due to lack of inquiry, part of the general disparagement of diplomacy in mainstream circles, we don’t know to what extent that was a factor in their collapse.

Washington initially expected Russia to conquer Ukraine in a few days and was preparing a government-in-exile. Military analysts were surprised by Russian military incompetence, remarkable Ukrainian resistance, and the fact that Russia didn’t follow the expected U.S.-U.K. model (also the model followed by Israel in defenseless Gaza) of war: go at once for the jugular, using conventional weapons to destroy communications, transportation, energy, whatever keeps the society functioning.

The U.S. then made a fateful decision: Continue the war to severely weaken Russia, hence avoiding negotiations and making a ghastly gamble: that Putin will pack up his bags and slink away in defeat to oblivion if not worse, and will not use the conventional weapons which, it was agreed, he had, to destroy Ukraine.

If Ukrainians want to risk the gamble, that’s their business. The U.S. role is our business.

Chomsky says that the decision was made to continue “the war to severely weaken Russia, hence avoiding negotiations and making a ghastly gamble”. 

A 20 May 2022 piece says: the “US and UK are eyeing the complete defeat of Russia in Ukraine”; breaking “with other NATO members that prefer a negotiated settlement, an American official stated the war ends with the ‘defeat’ of Russia and a high-level British official said Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘must lose’”; speaking “to an Italian outlet, UK Foreign Minister Liz Truss said Russia must be defeated in Ukraine, and there were no exit ramps for Putin”; the “comments by Truss were in response to French President” Emmanuel “Macron suggesting the West could end the war by making compromises with Moscow”; along “with Paris, Germany and Italy are pushing for a diplomatic over a military resolution”; however, “the White House appears in line with Downing Street”; on “Friday”, US Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith “called for the defeat of Russia”; and “Washington has been committed to the militaristic path in Ukraine” since the start of the invasion. 

The war must be fought in order to so severely weaken Russia that no further aggression is possible—that’s the official policy. And it immediately follows that there can’t be negotiations. 

And additionally, it immediately follows that punishment of Russia must be harsher than the Treaty of Versailles—Chomsky says in the June piece: 

Let’s think about it. How do we ensure that Russia can never again invade another country? We put aside here the unthinkable question of whether reshaping U.S. policy might contribute to this end, for example, examining Washington’s openly declared refusal to consider any Russian security concerns and many other actions that we have discussed.

To achieve the announced goal, it seems that we must at least reenact something like the Versailles Treaty, which sought to ensure that Germany would not be able to go to war again.

But Versailles did not go far enough, as was soon made clear. It follows that the new version being planned must “strangle the demon” in ways that go beyond the Versailles effort to control the Huns. Perhaps something like the Morgenthau Plan.

That is the logic of the pronouncements. Even if we don’t take the words seriously and give them a limited interpretation, the policy entails prolonging the war, whatever the consequences are for Ukrainians and the “collateral damage” beyond: mass starvation, possible terminal war, continued destruction of the environment that sustains life.

The “limited interpretation” already entails “prolonging the war”. And then the “logic of the pronouncement” goes even further.

Chomsky says in the June piece: “to oppose or even act to delay a diplomatic settlement is to call for prolonging the war with its grim consequences for Ukraine and beyond”; this “stand constitutes a ghastly experiment”; and the “ghastly experiment is operative U.S. policy”. He refers—in an 11 May 2022 Truthout piece—to the “grotesque experiment with the lives of Ukrainians”, which is a policy that means that we will “ensure that millions starve from the food crisis”, “toy with the possibility of nuclear war”, and “race on enthusiastically to destroying the environment that sustains life”. And he refers—again in the May piece—to “the hideous experiment to which we are enthusiastically committed today”. 

Chomsky conveys—when he says that our risky policy is “a ghastly experiment”, a “grotesque experiment”, and a “hideous experiment”—that our position is utterly shocking. And that our position isn’t merely wrong but is instead completely indefensible.

These are the basic issues—(A) the need to pursue diplomacy and (B) Washington’s opposition to diplomacy—that I wish that the media and the political culture would spotlight. 

Irrationality

We have a broken Ukraine-war discourse that distracts from the basic issues—what should be spotlighted is instead ignored. Chomsky says in a 15 March 2022 Truthout piece, which came out not long after Russia’s 24 February 2022 invasion: 

Before responding, I would like to stress the crucial issue that must be in the forefront of all discussions of this terrible tragedy: We must find a way to bring this war to an end before it escalates, possibly to utter devastation of Ukraine and unimaginable catastrophe beyond. The only way is a negotiated settlement. Like it or not, this must provide some kind of escape hatch for Putin, or the worst will happen. Not victory, but an escape hatch. These concerns must be uppermost in our minds.

Our broken discourse doesn’t elevate what “must be in the forefront of all discussions of this terrible tragedy”—or what “must be uppermost in our minds”—but instead marginalizes the most morally and humanly important issues. 

I’ll talk about some absurdities that I’ve come across. 

First, someone will bring up the decades of provocation that preceded Putin’s criminal invasion—a 4 March 2022 FAIR piece talks about this history—and get called a pro-Putin apologist. It’s shocking that anyone could fail to understand the difference between saying that an invasion was provoked and saying that an invasion was justified—the concepts are completely different. 

Second, it’s not true that normal diplomacy is “surrender” or “appeasement”—normal diplomacy means that both sides get things that they want. 

Third, it’s completely irrelevant what the odds are that diplomacy will succeed—you’ll nevertheless hear the odds invoked. A 11 May 2022 CNN piece includes an example of this non sequitur: “While the US can be criticized for failing to give Putin the kind of way out that Biden was speculating about, such an initiative would be hard—and might not work anyway.” There are many things in life that “would be hard” and “might not work anyway”. The point is to try diplomacy—think about the human consequences.

I have a 4 June 2022 piece where I ask Anatol Lieven about uncertainty: 

This is a very elementary point, but should we try our best to achieve peace even if doing our best might fail? There’s a lot of focus on the Kremlin and how hopeless it is to negotiate with the Kremlin, but we don’t control the Kremlin, whereas we do control our own actions—we can choose to do our best. 

That’s just it. 

I get very tired of this endless line that basically puts thoughts into Putin’s head. So people say: “It wouldn’t have done any good to offer a treaty of neutrality before the war, since Putin wanted to invade Ukraine anyway.” And I say: “How do you know, since we didn’t offer it? You’re speculating.” 

The point is that—in diplomacy—you can only go based on a country’s official demands and public statements. You negotiate on the basis of those things. 

You can do all sorts of behind-the-scenes deals and so on, but your starting point is the official demands—maybe Putin would’ve invaded anyway even if we’d offered a treaty of neutrality, but we never offered it, so we don’t know what would’ve happened. 

Lieven agrees that a focus on the Kremlin moves attention away from what we ourselves can actually control—my question says that “we don’t control the Kremlin” and that “we do control our own actions”. 

And regarding this third absurdity, there’s a whole industry dedicated to trying to figure out what’s in Putin’s mind—a 16 December 2022 Slate piece says that Putin “dreams of restoring the Great Russian Empire of Peter the Great”. We should try diplomacy because it’s indefensible—given the human consequences—not to. So it’s irrelevant what’s in Putin’s mind.

Furthermore, the industry doesn’t approach this project in a proper way—we all recognize that US politicians’ comments have to be interpreted with care, so that same rationality should be applied when Putin says something about Peter the Great. Chomsky refers—in the 22 December piece—to “the industry of tea leaf-reading that seeks to penetrate Putin’s twisted mind, discerning all sorts of perversities and grand ambitions”. The “industry reverses George W. Bush’s discoveries when he looked into Putin’s eyes, saw his soul and recognized it to be good”—“it is about as well-grounded as Bush’s insights”. 

Fourth, there’s a prominent instance of doublethink in the Ukraine-war discourse. Chomsky refers—in the 22 December piece—to “the tales concocted in Western propaganda about Putin’s plans to conquer Europe, if not beyond, eliciting fears that coexist easily with gloating over the demonstration of Russia’s military incompetence and inability even to conquer towns a few miles from its borders”. 

I’ve seen these—and other—absurdities. They’re sometimes presented with harsh derision, unhealthy confidence, and lack of curiosity.

Couldn’t Russia use a ceasefire to prepare to conquer Ukraine? This concern recalls the issue of whether something like the Morgenthau Plan would be needed to eliminate the Russian threat—how far do you have to go to allay this fear? And Lieven writes in his 8 November 2022 Time piece: “NATO and the European Union between them now include all the significant countries on the continent of Europe except for Russia and Ukraine”; “Ukraine is by now also to all intents and purposes a U.S. ally”; “U.S. and allied forces in Europe are entirely capable of defending NATO against Russia”; a “Russian nuclear threat does exist as a result of the war in Ukraine”, but “the Russian army has demonstrated conclusively that it is simply not capable of attacking NATO with any prospect of success”; Russian troops “failed to capture Ukrainian cities 20 miles from the Russian border”; and it’s “sometimes argued that if a ceasefire is reached in Ukraine, the Russian government could successfully rebuild its forces to conquer the whole of Ukraine, or even threaten NATO”. Lieven asks what the West “would be doing while Russia is rebuilding its forces”—wouldn’t we be “building up the Ukrainian forces” and “strengthening our own”? Given this Western activity, “why would a Russian government think that a second war would stand any better chances than the first”? And on “what basis is Russia supposed to create such formidable forces”? Russia “has a GDP barely one twentieth that of the U.S., E.U. and U.K. combined”—its “young men are flooding across Russia’s borders to escape military service”. Historically, “economically much smaller nations have defeated powerful ones” on “the social and cultural basis of ferociously motivated armed forces drawn from martial societies”—is “that the picture presented by Russia and the Russian army today”? 

Shouldn’t negotiations just be between Ukraine and Russia? A 7 November 2022 CNN piece says that the State Department spokesperson “said that any diplomatic solution needs to be worked out by Ukraine and Russia”. Not every pro-diplomacy person calls for the US to get involved in negotiations—Chomsky says that if “Ukrainians want to risk the gamble, that’s their business”. But Lieven does call for US involvement and writes in his 22 September 2022 piece: 

Any peace initiative will have to come from the United States. France and Germany are too weak to act independently from Washington. The Ukrainian government’s ability to negotiate is crippled by (understandable) fury at the Russian invasion and Russian atrocities; by pressure from Ukrainian hardliners, especially in the military; and, increasingly, by the government’s own rhetoric, which is committing Ukraine to goals (like the recovery of Crimea) that could only be achieved by total military victory over Russia.

To date, the Biden administration’s position has been that peace negotiations are purely a matter for Ukraine. Together with Russian actions, this stance contributes to making a peace process virtually impossible. It is also both politically and morally wrong. The United States has given military assistance (including intelligence assistance in the killing of Russian commanders) that have made America very nearly a co-belligerent in this war. 

This and U.S.-led sanctions against Russia have caused Americans serious economic loss and involved the United States and its citizens in grave risks. The impact on Washington’s allies in Europe and on the world economy has been even worse, threatening key Western partners with food shortages and internal revolt. In the very worst case, America could face the possibility of annihilation in nuclear war.

In these circumstances, to say that the United States has no right to engage in negotiations and put forward its own proposals for peace is an abdication of the Biden administration’s moral and constitutional responsibility to the American people. Moreover, the involvement of third parties in brokering peace settlements and proposing their terms is entirely legitimate in terms of international tradition and America’s own past policies elsewhere.

A peace process cannot be initiated unless both sides abandon preconditions for talks that are completely unacceptable to the other side. A good starting point for talks could be the proposals made by the Ukrainian government itself back in March, which met Russian demands on certain key issues including neutrality. The fact that Putin explicitly and favorably cited Ukraine’s peace proposal in his speech announcing Russia’s partial mobilization may offer a glimmer of hope for diplomacy.

If the Biden administration does not explore this potential chance of peace, the consequences of a continued escalatory spiral could be disastrous for all concerned. Russia has shown that it retains considerable potential for escalation, both in terms of mobilization and the massive targeting of Ukrainian infrastructure and the Ukrainian government—something that is also very likely to lead to casualties among U.S. advisers in Ukraine.…

War is a highly unpredictable business, and the course of the Ukraine war has defied the expectations of most analysts, myself included. So far, it has done so to the advantage of the Ukrainians. That will not necessarily always be the case. To seek peace and break the present escalatory spiral is in the interests of Ukraine itself, as well as those of America and the world.

Lieven says that Washington should be involved in negotiations—the position that Washington shouldn’t be involved is “morally and politically wrong” and “contributes to making a peace process virtually impossible”. 

Is Lieven’s piece calling for anything that constitutes “forcing”—or “imposing”—anything on the Ukrainians? One can debate whether Lieven is simply calling for “pursuing” diplomacy. 

And remember that Chomsky is only calling for Washington to open the door to diplomacy—not for Washington to get involved in negotiations—so it’s not like Lieven’s piece expresses the only possible pro-diplomacy position.

Regarding the Ukraine-war discourse, it’s true that you should not—given the historical record—expect rationality and nuance during wartime. But the current situation is arguably worse than what we’ve seen in the past. I saw a comment—which I think captures just how bad things are—that “the culture has declined to the point that in large circles (including the ‘internet left’), a phrase questioning in any way the rigid Party Line elicits a torrent of abuse, demonization, lies, utter irrationality”. 

Media Bias

The media certainly hasn’t helped the discourse around this horrifying war—it’s straightforward to examine the media’s output, though difficult to assess the harm that that output actually does. I have the sense that many people simply tune out the silly and propagandistic coverage—these people don’t imbibe propaganda but also would be much better informed if coverage were good. Graham E. Fuller says in my 6 August 2022 piece:

I don’t think that I’ve ever seen—in my entire life—such a dominant American media blitz as what we’re seeing regarding Ukraine today. The US isn’t only pressing its interpretation of events—the US is also engaging in full-scale demonization of Russia as a state, as a society, and as a culture. The bias is extraordinary—I never saw anything like this when I was involved in Russian affairs during the Cold War.

That’s a remarkable comment from Fuller—the “extraordinary” bias goes beyond anything that he saw when he “was involved in Russian affairs during the Cold War”.

A 2 December 2022 FAIR piece says: a “crucial function of a free press is to present perspectives that critically examine government actions”; “such perspectives have been hard to come by”—regarding the NYT and WSJ coverage of this war—even “as the stakes have reached as high as nuclear war”; and elite “newspapers continue to offer a very narrow range of expert opinion on a US strategy that favors endless war”.

I saw this comment: “When the state beats war drums, the media patriotically leap to their task and funnel uncritically whatever they’re being fed. Happens routinely.” You can see a good example of the routine if you look at the Gulf War—Chomsky writes in a May 1991 piece: 

This record is, again, highly informative. The possibility of a negotiated settlement was excluded from the political and ideological systems with remarkable efficiency. When Republican National Committee Chairman Clayton Yeutter states that if a Democrat had been President, Kuwait would not be liberated today, few if any Democrats can respond by saying: If I had been President, Kuwait might well have been liberated long before, perhaps by August, without the disastrous consequences of your relentless drive for war. In the media, one will search far for a hint that diplomatic options might have been pursued, or even existed. The mainstream journals of opinion were no different. Those few who felt a need to justify their support for the slaughter carefully evaded these crucial issues, in Europe as well.

To evaluate the importance of this service to power, consider again the situation just before the air war began. On January 9, a national poll revealed that 2/3 of the US population favored a conference on the Arab-Israeli conflict if that would lead to Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. The question was framed to minimize a positive response, stressing that the Bush administration opposed the idea. It is a fair guess that each person who nevertheless advocated such a settlement assumed that he or she was isolated in this opinion. Few if any had heard any public advocacy of their position; the media had been virtually uniform in following the Washington Party Line, dismissing “linkage” (i.e., diplomacy) as an unspeakable crime, in this unique case. It is hardly likely that respondents were aware that an Iraqi proposal calling for a settlement in these terms had been released a week earlier by US officials, who found it reasonable; or that the Iraqi democratic forces, and most of the world, took the same stand.

Suppose that the crucial facts had been known and the issues honestly addressed. Then the 2/3 figure would doubtless have been far higher, and it might have been possible to avoid the huge slaughter preferred by the administration, with its useful consequences: the world learns that it is to be ruled by force, the dominant role of the US in the Gulf and its control over Middle East oil are secured, and the population is diverted from the growing disaster around us. In brief, the educated classes and the media did their duty.

It’s the same routine today—a great deal is being “excluded from the political and ideological systems with remarkable efficiency”. 

The media’s coverage of the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline sabotage gives a striking illustration of media bias. Chomsky says in the November piece: the “strong U.S. efforts to block Nord Stream long preceded the Ukraine crisis and the current fevered constructions about Putin’s long-term imperial designs”; the US efforts “go back to the days when Bush II was looking into Putin’s eyes and perceiving that his soul was good”; “President Biden informed Germany that “‘there will be longer a Nord Stream 2’”—and the US “‘will bring an end to it’”—if “Russia were to invade Ukraine”; one “of the most important events of recent months, the sabotage was quickly dispatched to obscurity”; “Germany, Denmark and Sweden have conducted investigations of the sabotage in their nearby waters but are keeping silent about the results”; and there “is one country that certainly had the capability and motive to destroy the pipelines” but this “is unmentionable in polite society”.

The media should’ve pursued—from the start—the obvious question of whether Washington carried out the sabotage. And should be asking why Germany and Sweden haven’t released their investigations’ conclusions—the obvious idea is that these two countries don’t want to confront the US and therefore aren’t revealing what they’ve found. Just look at Biden’s 7 February 2022 comments: 

It’s not that we know that Washington carried out the sabotage—the issue is that the media should be looking into whether Washington did this. 

A 7 October 2022 FAIR piece says: official “US opposition to the pipeline has been well-established over the years, giving Washington ample motive to destroy the pipelines, but most newsrooms uniformly suppressed this history, and attacked those who raised it”; we “still don’t know for certain who was behind the pipeline bombing, but there is a solid prima facie case for US culpability”; the “explosion is a watershed moment in the escalation toward a direct confrontation between nuclear powers”; and media “malfeasance on this topic doesn’t just threaten the credibility of the press, but literally imperils the whole of human civilization”.

A 26 December 2022 NYT piece meanders around and around instead of asking the obvious question. The piece does refer to “the question of why, if Russia bombed its own pipelines, it would begin the expensive work of repairing them”—there’s another question to ask as well. 

Pro-Diplomacy Voices

There are various pro-diplomacy voices in the US—it’s interesting to read the 24 October 2022 letter that 30 Congressional Progressive Caucus members signed:

24 October 2022 Letter To President Biden

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The letter says: the members believe that “it is in the interests of Ukraine, the United States, and the world to avoid a prolonged conflict”; the members urge President Biden “to pair the military and economic support the United States has provided to Ukraine with a proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire”; “if there is a way to end the war while preserving a free and independent Ukraine, it is America’s responsibility to pursue every diplomatic avenue to support such a solution that is acceptable to the people of Ukraine”; the “alternative to diplomacy is protracted war, with both its attendant certainties and catastrophic and unknowable risks”; “Russia’s invasion has caused incalculable harm for the people of Ukraine, leading to the deaths of countless thousands of civilians, Ukrainian soldiers, and displacement of 13 million people, while Russia’s recent seizure of cities in Ukraine’s east have led to the most pivotal moment in the conflict and the consolidation of Russian control over roughly 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory”; the “conflict threatens an additional tens of millions more worldwide, as skyrocketing prices in wheat, fertilizer and fuel spark acute crises in global hunger and poverty”; and a “war that is allowed to grind on for years—potentially escalating in intensity and geographic scope—threatens to displace, kill, and immiserate far more Ukrainians while causing hunger, poverty, and death around the world”.

There was a fierce backlash against the letter. Pramila Jayapal chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus—a 25 October 2022 Guardian piece says that the “blowback from Democrats was so intense” that she “was forced to issue a ‘clarification’” within “hours of the letter being dispatched”.

Charles A. Kupchan writes in a 2 November 2022 NYT piece: it “is time for the United States and its allies to get directly involved in shaping Ukraine’s strategic objectives, managing the conflict, and seeking a diplomatic endgame”; “prudent avoidance of war between NATO and Russia necessitates” direct “U.S. involvement in Ukraine’s operational planning”; “Mr. Putin’s effort to subjugate Ukraine has already failed, and pushing for Russia’s total defeat is an unnecessary gamble”; the “United States and its allies also need to be concerned about the rising economic and political threat that a long war poses to Western democracy and solidarity”; sooner “rather than later, the West needs to move Ukraine and Russia from the battlefield to the negotiating table, brokering a diplomatic effort to shut the war down and arrive at a territorial settlement”; “transitioning from war to diplomacy provides hope of ending the killing and destruction, containing the mounting risk of a wider war between Russia and NATO, and reducing harm to the global economy and democratic resilience on both sides of the Atlantic”; and the “mounting risks that the West faces in Ukraine necessitate that the United States and its NATO partners get more involved in managing the war and in setting the table for an endgame”.

Samuel Charap and Miranda Priebe write in a 28 October 2022 Foreign Affairs piece that a protracted war: “could benefit Washington to the extent that it weakens Moscow and forces it to pare back its ambitions elsewhere”; would likely “sustain the deep freeze in U.S.-Russian relations, potentially jeopardizing cooperation between Washington and Moscow on issues of global importance, such as arms control”; and would mean global economic disruption in which the “United States’ most important trading partners and allies in Europe would be the hardest hit, mainly because of higher energy prices”. The “country that would suffer the most—in terms of lives lost, infrastructure destroyed, and economic devastation—is Ukraine”. And even “a conflict that continues at a lower level of intensity would disrupt the economy and scare off investment, complicating the country’s economic recovery”.

The “United States could be doing more to enable diplomacy”; “Washington has coalesced around the view that it should let the war play out because escalation risks can be managed, Ukraine will keep winning, and Russia will eventually be forced to accept defeat”; “Russia can either accept the terms laid out by the G-7 now or it can accept them once it has been defeated on the battlefield”; it’s “possible that this optimistic scenario will come to pass”, but “the assumptions underlying it are questionable”; the result will—if these assumptions prove wrong—“be at best a protracted conflict and at worst a catastrophic escalation”; and laying “the groundwork for eventual negotiations could reduce the risk of these dangerous outcomes”.

The “United States can do more to create the conditions for eventual negotiations to succeed”; “Washington could begin discussions with its allies and Ukraine about the need for all parties to demonstrate openness to the prospect of eventual talks, and to moderate public expectations of a decisive victory”; the “Biden administration could work with these partners to develop shared language to that effect and feature it more prominently in official statements”; making “‘this war will only definitively end through diplomacy’ as much of a mantra as ‘supporting the Ukrainians for as long as it takes’—and emphasizing that one does not contradict the other—could help begin to change the narrative”; the “United States can also make clear that a negotiated settlement would not be an act of capitulation”; the “G-7 statement anticipates an outcome—effectively, total Russian surrender—that seems highly implausible”; diplomacy will—by definition—“entail some give-and-take, so it is important to be vague about the terms of a possible settlement at this stage”; “the Biden administration should consider keeping all lines of communication with Moscow open, from the president on down, both to signal openness to an eventual negotiated end to the war and to have channels in place to facilitate peace talks when the time is right”; and these steps “could mitigate the risks of dramatic escalation and indefinite war”.

And Barry R. Posen writes in a 4 January 2023 Foreign Affairs piece: the “most promising course would be for the United States to nudge the two sides to the negotiating table, since only Washington has the power to do so”; Washington “has decided not to do so”; “so the war goes on, at a tragic human cost”; if “it wanted to, the United States could develop a diplomatic strategy to reduce maximalist thinking in both Ukraine and Russia”; “to date, it has shown little interest in using its leverage to even try to coax the two sides to the negotiating table”; those “of us in the West who recommend such a diplomatic effort are regularly shouted down”; and if “this bloody, costly, and risky stalemate continues for another year, perhaps that will change”.

Regarding the opposition to diplomacy, one hopes that things are changing in high places. Chomsky writes—in the 22 December Truthout piece—that the US and the UK “are still insisting that the war must be fought to severely weaken Russia, hence no negotiations, but even in their inner circles there is some softening in this regard”. And Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies write in a 3 January 2023 Common Dreams piece: Boris Johnson and Joe Biden “have made a shambles of Western policy on Ukraine, politically gluing themselves to a policy of unconditional, endless war”; “NATO military advisers reject” this anti-diplomacy policy “for the soundest of reasons”, namely “to avoid the world-ending World War III that Biden himself promised to avoid”; “U.S. and NATO leaders are finally taking baby steps toward negotiations”; and “the critical question facing the world in 2023 is whether the warring parties will get to the negotiating table before the spiral of escalation spins catastrophically out of control”.

Two Things We Know

Diplomatic progress seems distant. Ted Snider writes in a 5 December 2022 piece: the “Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 provided the best diplomatic solution to the crisis”; whoever “killed the Minsk agreement, Putin agrees with Zelensky that it is dead”; ten “days after Zelensky said it could not be revived, Putin said that agreeing to the Minsk agreement had been a mistake he would not repeat, suggesting there would be no Minsk III”; “Zelensky does not trust that Putin won’t take advantage of the lull provided by a Minsk III agreement to build up his forces before violating it and terrorizing Ukraine with renewed force”; “Putin doesn’t trust that Zelensky will negotiate a settlement on the eastern territories that will calm the complicated strife”; they “both, nearly simultaneously, announced that the most promising hope for a diplomatic solution to the crisis is dead”; and “the only thing the two leaders agree on”—in the end—is that “it is not at all clear what the road to a negotiated settlement would look like”. And Gideon Rachman writes in a 12 December 2022 FT piece: “neither Russia nor Ukraine is in a position to achieve total victory”; “the political positions of the two countries are too far apart to make a peace agreement possible”; and “both countries are suffering severe losses that could make a ceasefire attractive”. 

But we know two things. First, armchair speculations won’t tell you what’s possible—you can only find that out through trying. And second, it’s hard to imagine diplomatic progress if the US doesn’t abandon its current goal of weakening Russia.

I haven’t been publishing much lately because I’ve been titrating ADHD medication—my process has been tedious but I’m very hopeful that it’ll be successful. The titration reminds me of doing an eye exam in a way—you increase the dose and ask whether the new effect is better.

I’ll use this short piece to talk about ADHD’s costs, how ADHD science challenges DSM—and DSM-5—assumptions, and ADHD-medication effectiveness.

ADHD’s Costs

A 23 October 2020 article says: ADHD “is a common childhood-onset neurobiological disorder that has been demonstrated to affect approximately 6 to 10% of children and 4.4% of adults”; despite “the estimated prevalence of adult ADHD of 4.4% in the USA, only a minority of patients are recognized and engaged in treatment”; a large-scale study found “only 10.9% of adults with ADHD in the USA were obtaining treatment, even though 40% of adults diagnosed with ADHD sought out treatment with a healthcare professional during the prior year”; and Medco Health Solutions performed another study that “evaluated managed healthcare plan subscribers using the plan’s prescription benefit plans from 2000 to 2005 and identified that only 1.2% of young adults (ages 20 to 44) received treatment for ADHD”.

And the article points out: from “the clinical standpoint, there has been increased recognition that adults with ADHD exhibit symptoms that extend beyond the DSM-5 delineated symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity-impulsivity”; deficits including “cognitive domains like response inhibition, non-verbal working memory, verbal working memory, emotional and motivational self-regulation, planning, and problem-solving, are frequently identified in adult patients”; and “adult ADHD patients frequently experience emotional dysregulation characterized by affective disturbances, impulsivity, mood lability, and emotional over-reactivity”.

One can of course contest the facts—maybe Big Pharma is inflating the problem in order to reap profits. But it would be a remarkable situation if only “10.9% of adults with ADHD in the USA were obtaining treatment”. Or if “only 1.2% of young adults (ages 20 to 44)” were receiving ADHD treatment, which is only 27%—about a quarter—of the 4.4% figure that the article gives for the estimated prevalence. That means—whether you’re talking about around 10% or around 25%—that there are a lot of untreated people with ADHD walking around out there.

I can’t speak to what the media coverage is like overall—it certainly seems like there’s a lot of talk about the dangers of medication, but maybe there are also lots of articles about the costs of undertreatment for all I know.

We can all understand—regarding ADHD—that undertreatment destroys lives. It’s unbelievably tragic. And there are different levels of tragedy—it’s a tragedy if you end up moving between unfulfilling jobs instead of having the career that you dreamed of having, but it’s far more tragic if you end up in a car accident that kills you and/or someone else.

It’s striking to consider how undertreatment of ADHD affects crime and incarceration. There’s an interesting chapter—in the 2022 book Clinical Forensic Psychology—that says: “ADHD is highly prevalent in offender populations, yet for many the diagnosis has been missed or misdiagnosed”; identifying “this subgroup of the population, who present with complex mental health needs, is not just a matter of conferring health gain for the individual”; there “are also clear advantages for the custodial system itself and, more broadly, for society associated with increased productivity, decreased resource utilization, and reduced rates of reoffending”; and early “diagnosis may mean that early interventions can be put in place that might interrupt, or even prevent, the antisocial trajectory and pathway to crime that lies in wait for some individuals with ADHD”.

You can imagine how profound the issue might be—it’s a matter of (1) how bad undertreatment is and (2) what happens to society given the level of undertreatment. There are many potential benefits if undertreatment is aggressively tackled—the chapter refers to “increased productivity”, “decreased resource utilization”, “reduced rates of reoffending”, and the potential to “interrupt, or even prevent, the antisocial trajectory and pathway to crime”.

Can you quantify the economic damage that ADHD does? A 6 February 2022 article attempts to do this and says: this “comprehensive societal analysis of the excess economic burden of ADHD among children and adolescents found the total societal costs associated with ADHD in the US in 2018 to be ∼$19.4 billion among children and $13.8 billion among adolescents with ADHD”; these “findings demonstrate the substantial economic burden of ADHD in children and adolescents in the US and highlight the current unmet need in these populations”; and we could “improve various aspects of the patient’s life across life stages and reduce the economic burden from a societal perspective” if we “improved intervention strategies as well as policies and awareness around ADHD”.

The article concludes that we might “reduce the clinical and economic burden of ADHD in children and adolescents” if we develop “more effective, safe, convenient, and accessible intervention strategies”. And that we might “help alleviate the long-term implications of ADHD”—and “ultimately reduce the economic burden across the life course”—if we improve ADHD-symptom management.

As for the total economic impact in the US, an October 2012 review says: this “article comprehensively reviews studies reporting ADHD-related incremental (excess) costs for children/adolescents and adults and presents estimates of annual national incremental costs of ADHD”; overall “national annual incremental costs of ADHD ranged from $143 to $266 billion”; most “of these costs were incurred by adults ($105B–$194B) compared with children/adolescents ($38B–$72B)”; for “adults, the largest cost category was productivity and income losses ($87B–$138B)”; for “children, the largest cost categories were health care ($21B–$44B) and education ($15B–$25B)”; spillover “costs borne by the family members of individuals with ADHD were also substantial ($33B–$43B)”; and despite “a wide range in the magnitude of the cost estimates, this study indicates that ADHD has a substantial economic impact in the United States”.

Challenging DSM Assumptions

There are certain DSM criteria that are used to diagnose ADHD. But an 11 October 2022 review says that the “current review and accompanying perspectives highlight the way in which research data increasingly challenges some core assumptions of the current DSM paradigm”—“scientific progress is challenging some of the core assumptions of the current DSM model of ADHD and the way it is conceptualized with regard to related disorders”.

The review says: a “core assumption in DSM is that ADHD is a category with nonarbitrary boundaries that distinguish cases from noncases”; a “second DSM assumption is that, despite its obvious surface level heterogeneity (i.e., symptom profiles, co-occurring conditions, and impairment), ADHD represents a causally distinctive condition at a deeper level, marked by a common etiology and pathophysiology”; and DSM “also assumes that ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition unfolding across development from its roots in early childhood”.

The review also says: “cases that manifest clinically in a similar way” show “great heterogeneity in genetic and environmental risk, underlying pathophysiology and associated neuropsychological deficits and differences”; no “particular factor or combination of factors represent a necessary and sufficient basis for the condition”; such “heterogeneity almost certainly contributes to the very small ADHD-related effects reported in recent large-scale neuroimaging and genetic studies”; at “the same time, there also appears to be considerable genetic, environmental, and neuro-psychological/−biological overlap between ADHD and conditions that DSM conceptualizes as distinct from it”; and this “encourages a fundamental remapping of ADHD symptoms to their underlying causes”.

There are—due to “awareness of clinical and neurobiological heterogeneity in ADHD”—“calls for a more a personalized approach to intervention”. It’s “hoped that future research will use a more targeted approach with refined ADHD phenotypes”—the review asks whether medications that “indirectly impact catecholamine function” might “be more suitable for a subpopulation of individuals with ADHD”, which would mean that studying these medications “in the larger ADHD population might yield an overall inadequate response”.

Medication Effectiveness

We understand very little about the brain—the more you read the literature on the brain the more you see just how little we know. A brain scientist once told me that actually working with the organ induces humility.

But you don’t need to understand the brain in order to do a trial-and-error titration process—take a look at this useful information:

2022 Adhd Medication Guide

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2022 The Evaluation And Treatment Of Adhd

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2021 A Clinician's Guide For Navigating The World Of Adhd Medications

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There are various molecules to try regarding ADHD treatment—you can even combine different molecules.

I recognize that—given individual variability—there are no algorithms. But some ADHD medications have been in use for decades—I’d therefore love to see a lot more detail in the guidance. I’m surprised at how little the guidance says—how long should you spend at each dose in order to assess it, how should the medication make you feel, does a given undesirable state indicate a too-high or too-low dose, and how can changes in state be interpreted pharmacokinetically?

The 2021 guide above talks about what to do when breakthrough symptoms happen. And says that one should—for end-of-day breakthrough symptoms—consider the following options: (1) increasing the dose, (2) changing to a formulation that lasts longer, (3) adding a nonstimulant, (4) adding an end-of-day short-acting stimulant to a long-acting stimulant, and (5) layering two doses—one in the morning and one at around noon—of long-acting stimulant. So as you can see, optimization can mean more than titrating a single molecule—you might have to layer doses, combine formulations, or combine molecules.

The guide stresses how important optimization is. Studies “around the world have demonstrated the need to gradually adjust the dose and titrate for optimal effect”—many “consumer databases have shown that quite often ADHD medications are being prescribed at doses below what was shown to be the optimal effective dose”. A “recent study with MPH DR/ER dosed in the evening for ADHD children demonstrated that ADHD symptoms could be decreased from 42 to 11 after 6 weeks of dose titration”. This study points—along with others—to “the importance of appropriate titration to optimize outcomes in our patients with ADHD”. These “children were highly symptomatic with ADHD scores that were moderate or severe on all 18 items”, but after “6 weeks their ADHD symptoms were mild or none on average”.

The “rule of thumb is to titrate until there are no breakthrough symptoms or residual functional difficulties or one encounters a dose-limiting side effect or has reached the maximum dose”—one “should then consider trying an alternative molecule” that “may address breakthrough symptoms at the beginning, the middle, or the end of the day”. A patient can be “partially better but not well”—the question is “are they normalized, are they partially better but still symptomatic, are their symptoms still causing functional difficulties at various points throughout the day or in certain areas of their life”.

I wonder how many ADHD sufferers take medication but are far from optimization—I also wonder how clinical trials ensure that everyone in the trial is optimized.

And I’d like to know what the biggest success stories are that you can point to when it comes to ADHD medication—I think that that’s an intriguing starting point for any psychiatric medication even if it’s not representative. I want to see some interviews with patients who had the best possible response to ADHD medication—it would be remarkable to hear these people’s stories, hear their descriptions of what treatment was like, and hear their thoughts looking back on their lives.

You’d have to dive into the data in order to investigate how well ADHD medication works in general when optimized. And it’s important to make sure that Big Pharma’s influence doesn’t taint investigation on this front—they naturally have an incentive to exaggerate things. The guide says: “ADHD medications have some of the highest effect sizes of any medical intervention”; clinicians and patients “may be tempted to be satisfied with 30% improvement, even though the evidence is clear that such minimal improvement almost inevitably means continued functional impairment”; for “most patients, further improvement is possible”; and long-term “trials demonstrate that nearly 75% to 80% of patients can achieve >50% symptom reduction and achieve symptomatic remission”.

What does it mean to experience “no breakthrough symptoms or residual functional difficulties”? And how common is this experience? What does it mean to “achieve >50% symptom reduction and achieve symptomatic remission”? The guide says that “nearly 75% to 80% of patients can” do this. What does it mean to be “normalized”—or “well”—as opposed to “partially better but still symptomatic”?

I would find it very informative to see interviews with—and documentaries about—ADHD patients who illustrate what different levels of symptom reduction might look like. And who illustrate what “symptomatic remission”—and lack of “residual functional difficulties”—might look like. ADHD medications have been in use for a long time—how many people are out there whose stories might help to illustrate these medications’ effectiveness?

This piece will look at: the challenges that the authorities face in trying to get rid of shadow libraries; our copyright system’s massive inefficiencies; responses to the shadow libraries; and how much harm piracy does.

I don’t know how many readers are familiar with shadow libraries—perhaps some readers have read about Z-Library. The point is that a remarkably vast number of copyrighted publications are easily accessibly for free online. A 4 November 2022 piece says: pretty “much every book ever written is available online for free”; “millions are shared through central hubs, commonly known as ‘shadow libraries’”; “Z-Library is one of the largest shadow libraries on the Internet”; “the site offers over 11 million books and 84 million articles”; and the site “has attracted a steady userbase and many millions of monthly visitors”.

The authorities recently brought the hammer down on Z-Library. A 17 November 2022 piece says: with “nearly 12 million books, Z-Library advertised itself as the largest repositories of pirated books on the Internet”; the “site had millions of regular readers who found a wealth of free knowledge and entertainment at their fingertips”; this “reign ended abruptly two weeks ago when the U.S. Department of Justice seized its domain names as part of a criminal investigation”; and the “two alleged masterminds have been arrested and will be prosecuted”. And a 26 November 2022 piece says that “the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed the indictment and complaint against two alleged operators of Z-Library”.

A Hopeless Effort

I personally don’t think that the authorities can stop the shadow libraries—I think that it’s a hopeless effort. People can—as far as I know—still use Z-Library itself on Tor and on I2P. And this seems like an unwinnable game of Whac-a-Mole—you can easily and quickly put a website up, whereas it takes a long time for the authorities to take one down. My understanding is that taking a website down doesn’t actually harm, hinder, or affect the underlying machinery behind that website—a replacement website can therefore rapidly spring up because the operation is still intact and was never damaged in any way.

Anna’s Archive is active on the normal internet—no need for Tor—and has an “About” page that says: “This website was created by Anna, the person behind the Pirate Library Mirror, which is a backup of the Z-Library shadow library.” And I estimate that people with 300 terabytes of disk space have the ability to personally mirror the totality of the shadow-library material that exists—maybe that’s irrelevant, but the fact that people can personally mirror the totality of the content in question might make it harder to crack down on shadow libraries.

It’s true that the authorities actually arrested two people associated with Z-Library, but a 23 November 2022 piece says that those two Z-Library people “made things easier for the FBI” and seemingly failed to make “the slightest efforts to conceal their identity online or to cover their tracks”—in sharp contrast, “Anna stated in an interview with Torrent Freak they are doing all they can to conceal their identity or to prevent leaving any trace while incorporating operational security of the highest order”.

A 30 November 2022 Vice piece refers to “‘shadow archivists’” who “maintain online repositories like LibGen and Z-Library, which host massive collections of pirated books, research papers, and other text-based materials”—the piece says that “maintaining a shadow library is time-consuming and often isolating for the librarian or archivist” and that it “makes perfect sense why a shadow librarian involved in this work for years may throw in the towel”. But the piece concludes with the comment that “as long as shadow librarians and archivists disagree with current copyright and institutional knowledge preservation practices, there will be shadow information specialists”. And with comments from Anna: shadow “‘library volunteers come and go, but the important part is that the content (books, papers, etc) is public, and mirrored far and wide’”; as “‘long as the content is widely available, new people can come in and keep the flame burning, and even innovate and improve’”; “‘it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle’” once “‘the content is out there’”; at “‘a minimum, we have to make sure that the content stays mirrored, because if that flame dies, it’s gone’”; and it’s “‘relatively easy’” to ensure that the content remains mirrored.

Massive Inefficiencies

Dean Baker has fascinating things to say about patents and copyrights—everyone should check out Chapter 5 of Baker’s free 2016 book Rigged:

Chapter 5 Of Rigged

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Baker writes—in Chapter 5—that there are “solid grounds for questioning the extent to which patent and copyright protection are efficient mechanisms for supporting innovation and creative work”. The “justification for granting these monopoly protections is that the increased innovation and creative work that is produced as a result of these incentives exceeds the economic costs from patent and copyright monopolies”, but there’s “remarkably little evidence to support this assumption”—“the cost of patent and copyright protection in higher prices is apparent” and yet there’s “little evidence of a substantial payoff in the form of a more rapid pace of innovation or more and better creative work”. We have—“over the last four decades”—strengthened patents and copyrights based on the “explicit assumption” that the “increased incentive for innovation and creative work” would more than offset the higher prices. He cites the 2011 review “Economic Effects of Copyright” from Christian Handke. And says that Handke “notes that the evidence with copyrights, like the evidence with patents, is ambiguous as to whether they are a net economic positive”.

Baker observes: “there are clearly substantial costs associated with copyright protection”; these costs “have increased substantially as a result of digital technology”; and the “response of the U.S. government has been to promote stronger and more punitive laws and to require third parties to share in enforcement costs”. It “becomes more costly and difficult” to enforce copyright as “technology increases the ease of reproducing and transferring copyrighted material”. You “inevitably impose greater costs on society” when you try—despite technological change—to maintain copyright enforcement.

He points out that we have—in order to protect the entertainment industry’s business model—passed laws to contain digital technologies and the internet. But technological “change has destroyed many sectors of the economy”—the “spread of digital cameras essentially destroyed the traditional film industry, causing the collapse of two major U.S. corporations, Kodak and Polaroid, and leading to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs”. Nobody “would have considered it a reasonable strategy to block the spread of digital cameras”.

Baker outlines—as an alternative to the copyright system—a tax-credit system that would support creative work. The “goal of the creative work tax credit is to make a large amount of material available to the public that can be transferred at zero cost”—putting “more material in the public domain in different areas is a positive benefit, as long as people value this work”.

He also looks at the “striking” arithmetic of publicly financed textbooks—textbooks “are an enormous expense for college students”. Households “are on a path to spend more than $10.5 billion on them in 2016, or $500 per student”—the “figure is even higher for full-time students”.

Public “funding could produce a large number of textbooks free from copyright restrictions”—an “appropriation of $500 million a year (0.01 percent of federal spending) to finance textbook writing and production would cover 500 books a year, assuming an annual cost of $1 million per textbook”. After “10 years, 5,000 textbooks would be available in the public domain to be downloaded at zero cost, or printed out in hard copy for the cost of the paper”. This system would offer “enormous cost savings to students”; would offer “more flexibility to professors, who could combine chapters from different textbooks without the need for time-consuming and costly permission requests”; and would make it much simpler to update textbooks, since there’d be “no need to have a complete new edition to add one or two additional topics”. Anyone “could still produce textbooks under the copyright system”, so copyrighted textbooks would compete with publicly financed ones—few professors would use a publicly financed textbook if it was low-quality, so there’d be “a clear market test of the quality of the publicly financed work”.

Baker says that switching to “alternative mechanisms to patents and copyrights for supporting innovation and creative work” could “lead to substantial savings for households and businesses”—he shows speculative calculations in this table:

You can see $15.4 billion in potential savings for “Recorded music and video material”, $7.4 billion for “Educational books”, and $15.1 billion for “Recreational books”.

The “total potential savings are $435 billion, or 2.4 percent of GDP”—Baker concludes that there’s “little reason to believe that the gain from the innovation and creative work that is induced by these forms of protection is remotely comparable to the costs, especially when considering the potential benefits of alternative mechanisms for providing incentives”.

And Baker comments that the “prospect of having fully open research, where the incentive is for dissemination rather than secrecy, would almost certainly lead to more rapid progress than the current patent system”.

Responses to the Shadow Libraries

A 15 November 2022 Slate piece says that Z-Library’s shutdown “has left many students, particularly in the global south, scrambling for access to research and educational materials”. Z-Library was—for “a 21-year-old medical student in South Sudan”—“a crucial resource for accessing medical textbooks”. The student says that the books are “‘really expensive’”, that he doesn’t have any real access to public libraries from which to borrow”, and that the library can—even if the book is there—have “‘a ratio of 135 students to one book’”.

A PhD student says that she ‘“was heartbroken’” when she heard about the shutdown. She attends the National Institute of Advanced Studies—whose “parent organization is a world-class university”—but says that “not all books are available” in her “relatively well-funded university library”. A “single book can cost her half of her monthly salary—a price that seems particularly unreasonable when she needs to read only one chapter”. She says that she and other PhD students “‘are just on our stipends’”.

Khaled Faisal is a Bangladesh University of Professionals PhD student who “feels platforms like Z-library bridge the knowledge gap between the global north and the global south”—students “in the global north often have access to academic papers through their institutions”, but “institutions in developing nations often can’t afford the cost”. The “average cost of a journal article is around $30”. And additionally, academics and students have to “shell out money before even knowing if they really need access to the paper at all”—“it can be hard to know from reading just the abstract (a summary of a paper that is available for free) if the study will be relevant to your work”.

Faisal “uses Z-library to help him access research articles that are behind a paywall without subscribing to all journals he might need papers from”—he’s a lecturer too and says that his “‘students need resources’”. He “acknowledges that pirated book websites like Z-library undoubtedly hurt book and journal publishers—and, of course, authors”. And says that publishers have a responsibility to “consider the impact of steep price tags”—publishers “‘really, really need to think that they need to make their work easily accessible and affordable’”.

A 17 November 2022 WaPo piece quotes an author—Nisha Sharma—who says that her “‘concern with Z-Library is the people who read free pirated fiction for entertainment when they have the ability to purchase fiction’”. She says that there’s “‘a completely separate argument’” regarding textbooks—textbooks are “‘part of a larger problem with the education system’”. And the piece also quotes a journalism student—Marena Herron—who says that you “‘have to understand that the majority of Z-Library users were just there for the textbooks’”.

The Authors Guild says—in its 11 October 2021 report to the Office of the US Trade Representative—that digital “book piracy is a major threat facing authors’ livelihoods today”. The report gives the following quote from Sarina Bowen: “‘Z-Library is killing us. A book we release in the morning is up on Z-Library by lunchtime.’” And the Authors Guild says—in its 2 June 2020 testimony to Congress—that there’s “a clear correlation between the growth in piracy and the decline in incomes of authors”. The testimony cites Imke Reimers’s 2016 study Can Private Copyright Protection Be Effective? and gives the following quote from the study: “‘While physical formats are not affected by piracy protection, closer substitutes for online piracy such as legally distributed ebooks see a mean differential protection-related increase in sales of at least 14 percent.’”

A 7 December 2022 Wellesley Times piece says: the “average college student will spend $1,200 a year on textbooks”; “textbook prices have on average increased around 1,000%” since the late ’70s; this increase is “incredibly concerning when coupled with the troubling trend of increasing costs to higher education overall”; Z-Library “offered millions of students accessible materials and alleviated a financial burden”; and Z-Library “was never going to be a permanent solution to the problem”.

A 16 November 2022 Voice of America piece quotes Dave Hansen—the executive director of Authors Alliance—who refers to “‘how broken our copyright system is’”. Hansen notes that “the site hosted millions of scientific research articles, many of them taxpayer-funded”. And he comments: “‘It’s sad that for so many years, the issue of access to that research has been deemed too intractable to solve, leaving millions of people around the world who are desperate to learn and build upon that research out in the cold or dependent on sites like Z-Library.’”

And Joe Karaganis says in the 2018 book Shadow Libraries, which he edited: devices “remain poor substitutes for books in many situations and print is heavily favored over screen reading across all of the student groups (to the point where students routinely print out materials they have downloaded”; this “marks our study as a transitional one, catching the moment of widespread digitization of materials and related infrastructure but not yet the digitization of the wider teaching, learning, and research ecosystem, and not the stabilization of legal models and frameworks that can keep pace with the growth of higher education and the global scale of emerging knowledge communities”; the “democratization of access to higher education is a stunning if also complicated and still-evolving achievement”; the “democratization of access to the written products of that achievement is incomplete and passes, in middle- and low-income countries, through mostly informal channels”; “this informal copy culture is shaped by high prices, low incomes, and cheap technology—and only in very limited ways by copyright enforcement”; “shadow libraries, large and small, will remain powerful facts of educational life” as long as “the Internet remains ‘open’ in the sense of affording privacy and anonymity”; “the language of crisis serves this discussion poorly”; this “is an era of radical abundance of scholarship, instructional materials, and educational opportunity”; and the “rest is politics”.

How Much Harm Does Piracy Do?

There are challenges to the picture that the Authors Guild presents. Piracy will presumably reduce book sales to at least some extent—the issue then is how much, but apparently it’s hard to interpret the data. Take a look at these studies:

Estimating Displacement Rates Of Copyrighted Content In The Eu

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Global Online Piracy Study

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Immersive Media And Books 2020

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The first study says: the results do not—in general—“show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements”; this “does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect”; and an “exception is the displacement of recent top films”.

The second says: a “majority of the academic literature on the matter finds a negative net effect of illegal consumption on legal sales”; “a meta-analysis of the literature finds the evidence insufficient to conclude with certainty that piracy harms legal sales”; “there are several opposing interactions between piracy and legal consumption, some of which have a negative impact on sales, some positive and some neutral”; and the “relative strength of these interactions is likely to differ between content types and channels”. The study observes the following about those who consume content from illegal sources: “for each content type and country, 95% or more of pirates also consume content legally and their median legal consumption is typically twice that of non-pirating legal users”.

The third “confirms earlier studies in finding statistical evidence that illegal consumption of music, books and games displaces legal consumption”, though “the displacement coefficients are surrounded with substantial uncertainty”. The study observes that book pirates are—compared to the general survey population—more likely to buy ebooks and audiobooks and print books, borrow ebooks and audiobooks and print books, and own library cards.

And you can imagine a scenario where publishers’ revenues decreased drastically due to piracy—publishers would then have to turn to alternative funding models or else go out of business. The assumptions are that piracy really does reduce revenues and really could pose this existential threat, but there is—arguably—no alternative that would keep publishers alive if the copyright model no longer could. We all lose if publishing dries up.

Noam Chomsky says at a 19 March 2013 event: making the journals’ content freely accessible means that “the journals go out of business and nobody has anywhere to publish”; “there are ways around this, but the ways around it involve collective action”; and “there ought to be a public subsidy for creative work”. There would be “incredible savings” under a public system—“everything would be open”.

I want to use this piece to draw attention to two commentaries—Anatol Lieven’s 8 November 2022 Time piece and Noam Chomsky’s 16 November 2022 Truthout piece—that discuss the Biden administration’s foreign policy. I wrote previously—on 23 September 2022—about the various grave dangers associated with the administration’s approach to the war in Ukraine.

Background Information

Lieven refers—in his commentary—to the National Security Strategy (NSS) of 2022:

2022 National Security Strategy

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The document says: “the post-Cold War era is definitively over and a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next”; “people all over the world are struggling to cope with the effects” of shared cross-border problems; these problems are soluble only through cooperation; and we must face these problems in “a competitive international environment” that hinders cooperation.

He also refers to the Wolfowitz Doctrine. There’s an 8 March 1992 NYT piece about a classified document that had “been circulating at the highest levels of the Pentagon for weeks” and was “provided to The New York Times by an official who believes this post-cold-war strategy debate should be carried out in the public domain”—the document “makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy”.

Chomsky refers—in his commentary—to a 1995 STRATCOM document:

Stratcom 1995

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The document says: “it hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed”; the “fact that some elements may appear to be potentially ‘out of control’ can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts within the minds of an adversary’s decision makers”; it “should be a part of the national persona we project to all adversaries” that “the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked”; “nuclear weapons always cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict in which the US is engaged”; and “deterrence through the threat of use of nuclear weapons will continue to be our top military strategy”.

And he refers to the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) of 2022:

2022 Nuclear Posture Review

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The document says that the Biden administration “conducted a thorough review of a broad range of options for nuclear declaratory policy—including both No First Use and Sole Purpose policies—and concluded that those approaches would result in an unacceptable level of risk in light of the range of non-nuclear capabilities being developed and fielded by competitors that could inflict strategic-level damage to the United States and its Allies and partners”.

He refers to two 2021 remarks as well—one from a piece in Proceedings and one from a press briefing—that STRATCOM head Admiral Charles Richard made. The first remark is as follows: “We must acknowledge the foundational nature of our nation’s strategic nuclear forces, as they create the ‘maneuver space’ for us to project conventional military power strategically.” And the second remark is as follows: “I don’t have the luxury of deterring one country at a time, right? I have to deter all countries, all the time, in order to accomplish my mission sets.”

He refers—lastly—to the Clinton Doctrine. A 1999 Department of Defense report lists—among “U.S. vital national interests”—a need to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources”:

1999 Dod Annual Report

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The report warns that America will—when the “interests at stake are vital”—do “whatever it takes to defend them, including, when necessary, the unilateral use of military power”.

Chomsky’s 1 January 2005 piece observes: the 2002 W. Bush NSS “was widely criticized among the foreign-policy elite”; the Clinton Doctrine was “more expansive than Bush’s NSS”, but was “barely even reported”, since it was “presented with the right style” and “implemented less brazenly”; and the Clinton Doctrine “advocated ‘unilateral use of military power’ to defend vital interests, such as ‘ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources,’ without even the pretexts that Bush and Blair devised”.

Lieven’s Piece

Lieven writes that the Biden administration’s “strangely fearful” 2022 NSS is mostly “devoted to the dire threats to the U.S. and allied position in the world”. The supposed threats are Russia and China—there’s the “occasional glance at Iran and North Korea”.

The document misidentifies where the dangers are—the actual grave “dangers to the U.S.-led democratic West” are mainly either “internal to our societies” or “consequent on climate change”—and calls the climate threat “‘potentially existential’” even while “shockingly and entirely” downplaying it.

The “NSS misses what ought to be a blindingly obvious fact”—“America’s political and military position in the most important parts of the world” is “virtually unassailable by any outside power” if “the U.S. stands on the defensive on the basis of its existing alliance systems”.

The Russian army has—in Europe—“demonstrated conclusively that it is simply not capable of attacking NATO with any prospect of success”. Lieven asks whether “Russian troops that failed to capture Ukrainian cities 20 miles from the Russian border” can “threaten Warsaw, let alone Berlin”.

It “is sometimes argued that if a ceasefire is reached in Ukraine, the Russian government could successfully rebuild its forces to conquer the whole of Ukraine, or even threaten NATO”. Lieven points out that the West would—while the Russians did this—be “building up the Ukrainian forces” and “strengthening our own”. And asks why a Russian government would “think that a second war would stand any better chances than the first”.

Lieven questions how Russia is “supposed to create such formidable forces” when it “has a GDP barely one twentieth that of the U.S., E.U. and U.K. combined” and its “young men are flooding across Russia’s borders to escape military service”.

European societies’ “tremors of ease” have “little to do with fear of the Russian army”. One fear “stems precisely from fear of Russian military weakness”—the fear is that “the Ukrainian army might defeat Russia so thoroughly as to threaten the reconquest of Crimea and the naval base of Sevastopol, and that to prevent this Moscow would resort to the use of tactical nuclear weapons”. The other fear “relates to energy shortages due to the cut-off of Russian gas supplies”—this fear is leading “to a desire for a ceasefire in Ukraine, not to calls for the abandonment of Ukraine, let alone submission to Russian hegemony in Europe”.

And the US has an alliance system—in East Asia—that’s “not as strong and all-encompassing as in Europe” but “quite strong enough to render absurd the idea of China expelling America from the region”. For “Beijing to invade Japan or Australia, or credibly threaten to do so, China would have first completely to eliminate the U.S. and Japanese navies, virtually ensuring in the process its own annihilation in a nuclear war”.

China remains—outside East Asia—“both much weaker and much more cautious than much U.S. commentary suggests”. China “has no strong and reliable allies in the region”—the US has “a military partnership with India”. China “has one small naval base (at Djibouti) in the Indian Ocean”—the US “has several giant ones”.

Taiwan is the “one great difference in military terms between the U.S. position in Europe and in East Asia”—it’s “increasingly hard for America to defend” Taiwan. It’s “an issue of immense military danger for America” if “America commits itself to the defense of Taiwan”, but Taiwan isn’t a formal US ally, so the US “is therefore not legally obligated to defend it”—the US “has every strategic interest in trying to reduce tension over Taiwan, and to continue by all possible means the ambiguity over Taiwan’s status that has maintained peace in recent generations”. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan “would be a gross crime against humanity and international legality” and “would probably strengthen, not weaken, the U.S. position and U.S. alliance system in Asia”.

Lieven says that he’s presented facts—about “the strengths of a U.S. defensive position” regarding Russia and China—that “cannot be seriously contested on the basis of objective evidence”. And asks what exactly “the U.S. foreign and security establishment” is “setting out to defend”. The answer “cannot very well be the U.S. alliance systems as they existed in 1988 or even in 2004, after the East European and Baltic States were admitted to NATO”—“these allies in themselves are secure against attack”.

Lieven writes that the US “foreign and security establishment has come to accept as its basic position the ‘Wolfowitz Doctrine’ of 1992”, which “sets out as the fundamental goal of U.S. strategy permanent American primacy, not only in the world as a whole, but in every region of the world”. Other states will have influence beyond their own borders only insofar as the US permits it—the US will also have to shape domestic systems and policies according to its wishes.

This doctrine has—in Europe—“led to the belief that NATO must be extended without limits into the former USSR, although a row of former U.S. diplomats, including the present director of the CIA, William Burns, warned that this would very likely lead to conflict with Russia”.

This doctrine means—in Africa and the Middle East—that “Russian influence must be opposed even when it is being used against Islamist extremists who are the common enemies of the West and Russia”. And means—in Africa—that “Chinese investment must be opposed even if it is strengthening the economies of faltering states whose collapse would threaten the interests of the West”.

And this doctrine means—in East Asia—that the US “must oppose China’s claims in the South China Sea while (in the NSS) committing itself to defend Japan’s claim to the uninhabited and strategically worthless Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, even though they were previously recognized by the U.S. as part of China and are also claimed by Taiwan in its capacity as the ‘Republic of China’”.

Lieven concludes that the NSS is prepared to risk American allies’ “very existence”—as well as America’s own—in “the name of defending U.S.-led democratic alliance systems that are not in fact threatened”.

The NSS is willing to take these existential risks for “places that are not actually U.S. allies”. And for “commitments that weaken, rather than strengthen, American interests and America’s position in the world”.

The NSS is willing to take these existential risks—and pursue these commitments—for “the sake of a universal U.S. primacy that has never been honestly presented to the American people as the purpose for which their taxes are being paid and their lives risked”—maybe “if asked a majority of Americans would say yes to this goal” but “the question should be put to them honestly and clearly”.

Chomsky’s Piece

Chomsky writes—regarding the war in Ukraine—that the “options for diplomacy have declined” as “the conflict has escalated”. And that it’s uncertain whether there’s “still an opportunity for the kind of diplomatic efforts that mainstream establishment voices are calling for”.

The US could—at minimum—“withdraw its insistence on sustaining the war to weaken Russia, thus barring the way to diplomacy”. Establishment voices call for something stronger—for “diplomatic options to be explored before the horrors become even worse, not only for Ukraine but far beyond”.

Chomsky says that “very mild liberal calls for considering a diplomatic option alongside of full support for Ukraine are at once subjected to a torrent of vilification”. He cites—to illustrate how these calls for considering diplomacy are sometimes quickly and fearfully withdrawn—a 25 October 2022 Guardian piece.

He points out that people in the mainstream establishment—who call for diplomacy—aren’t subjected to this treatment. He cites—to illustrate the how pro-diplomacy establishment voices aren’t vilified—a 2 November 2022 NYT piece titled “It’s Time to Bring Russia and Ukraine to the Negotiating Table” and a 28 October 2022 Foreign Affairs piece titled “Don’t Rule Out Diplomacy in Ukraine”.

Chomsky cites a 5 November 2022 WaPo piece titled “U.S. privately asks Ukraine to show it’s open to negotiate with Russia”. And says that concerns—about “a destructive war” and “increasingly ominous potential consequences”—might be “reaching the neocon war hawks who seem to be driving Biden’s foreign policy”.

Europe “is being badly hit by the cutoff of Russian supplies and the U.S.-initiated sanctions”—the “most dramatic hit to the European economy is the loss of cheap Russian gas”, while Russian minerals also “play an essential role in Europe’s industrial economy”. It “remains an open question whether European leaders will be willing to supervise Europe’s economic decline and increased subordination to the U.S.”. And “whether their populations will tolerate these outcomes of adhering to U.S. demands”.

Regarding nuclear weapons, Chomsky cites three pieces—a 27 October 2022 piece titled “Pentagon’s Strategy Won’t Rule Out Nuclear Use Against Non-Nuclear Threats”, then a 2022 piece titled “The Biden Nuclear Posture Review: Resetting the Requirements for Nuclear Deterrence”, and then a 28 October 2022 piece titled “‘A terrifying document’: Critics say Joe Biden’s nuclear policy makes the world more dangerous”.

Chomsky writes that it’s a “fair assessment” that the new NPR is “‘a terrifying document’” that “‘keeps the world on a path of increasing nuclear risk’” and increases—“‘in many ways’”—the nuclear risk. The danger was “already intolerably high” before the new NPR.

And Chomsky writes—in response to Admiral Charles Richard’s remarks that nuclear weapons provide “‘maneuver space’” and “‘deter all countries, all the time’”—that such a doctrine makes nuclear deterrence a “cover for conventional military operations around the globe”. As “Daniel Ellsberg put it, nuclear weapons are constantly used, just as a gun is used in a robbery even if it is not fired”.

This “doctrine is not very new”—the “documents have been public for decades and quoted in critical literature that is kept to the margins”.

A 1995 STRATCOM document says that “nuclear weapons must be constantly available because they ‘cast a shadow’ over conventional use of force”. And that the US should create a perception—one where the US is irrational and vindictive and where some US elements are uncontrollable—in order to “frighten those who might have thoughts of interfering”.

The 1995 document was “within the framework of the overarching Clinton doctrine that the U.S. must be ready to resort to force”—“multilaterally if we can, unilaterally if we must”—in order to “ensure ‘uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources’”.