Russia's predicament and America's blindness: Why we must both oppose aggressive militarism and defend liberty through whistleblowing journalism

On the war in Ukraine and how it looks to various variants of 'the left':

Russia's claim is that they are at a big disadvantage in the almost unipolar world of liberal capitalism in which the US is still the dominant player. They also may believe that unlike China they cannot bide their time.

In contrast, China as a rising power that may be poised to be the next hegemon, may face the choice of opposing the US in order to carve a larger space for itself, or assimilating itself to the dominant order in order to shape it in turn, presumably in the direction of a government of experts that promises a high rate of growth and standard of living but denies 'Western' liberty, perhaps ultimately because the infotech economy doesn't allow it, or because global warming calls for global management by elites and the activation of moralism in support of gratuitous lifestyle regulations directed at individual citizens, long the tacit recourse of environmentalists. Russia doesn't have that choice. It now only leads in raw materials and energy resources, and has historically been an expansive continental empire, now shown to be ruthless and seemingly without redeeming values.

Russia really looks like a former world power fighting to stave off its inevitable decline. Putin wants to make Russia great again, through any means necessary. Globalists believe that the emergent world order can, and does or will, fairly include everyone. Putin's fear is that Russia is left out. The motive of the shocking aggression is desperation. It looks a lot like old-fashioned colonialism unleashed at the heart of Europe in ways that recall both world wars.

For America and its allies, liberal bureaucratic corporate globalism is the obvious best and only way, and anyone not playing by these rules is a criminal. The other way of seeing it is what former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger argues for in his recent book World Order: international politics is about balance of power, and there has never been and will not be a unipolar world -- the kind of thing Francis Fukuyama was arguing 30 years ago.

But the Russians can also play the pseudo-left-wing card, which can be defined as: Marxist critique of our enemies, aggressive nationalist collective self-aggrandizement (with no need for democracy or liberty) for ourselves and our friends. (In fact, this is not so different from what Islamists have said and done. The US and Western Europe-led 'West' has, since the end of Communism, essentially faced this form of opposition without a positive position.).

The effect in the US and its liberal democratic allies is one of forcing everyone into line in a formation that is totally centrist. A national consensus is then formed around postures of an implacable nationalist self-assertion in opposition to tyranny that is reassuringly based upon, and invoked as the necessary defense of, our supposedly liberal values, which remain, as it were, hors-scène, outside the picture but implied as being there. The images of entrenched and implacable, outraged and enraged, super-tough men fighters standing their ground (images that recall for American readers right-wing militias) in Ukraine communicates this message clearly even as they are embedded in news stories demonizing Russia, in a way that it is admittedly hard to find fault with their doing. This does have the suggestion that we could be dragged into a war, unwanted yet inevitable. The usual wartime consensus is already there.

That we should help the Ukrainians seems to me undeniable and almost obvious. Does it matter how? It surely matters what else we are doing, and what is being said and affirmed -- and also what is left unsaid and implied but incontestable. There are just wars - true pacifists are as rare as they are self-contradictory - but there is no way of prosecuting a war that isn't dangerous. These dangers should be formulated, and some of them deliberately avoided.

The left in this case should both oppose 'them' and still be willing criticize our own government. It shows the strength of a liberal democracy when it can sustain such criticism. It would show that America is of a different spirit than Putin's Russia if the Biden government dropped the charges against Julian Assange. Liberty in the US today is being shipwrecked on the shoals of corporate marketing and government policing surveillance, and the effort to silence whistleblowers and oppositional journalists. Russia is worse on this score, but we are bad enough. Perhaps this is one more indicator that their system and ours are forms of the same one.