Honestly some of the open-source news has been pretty legit, though I suspect it’s giving us an overly optimistic picture. It’s better than the Mench-grade Twitter resistance guys.
Colleague joined us in Bulgaria today. Had a 2.5 hour line at the Romanian border due to a large number of cars with Ukrainian license plates.
Our driver had the news on the radio. All I could understand was that every fifth word seemed to be “Russkie”.
https://twitter.com/jacksonrichman/status/1501246658088255488?s=20&t=_gmL2gDLtffTK2BGQgC0bA
The translator, bless his heart, just doesn’t have the same panache as Churchill
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It’s one of the most consistently made observations about Putin that he answers aggression with aggression.
https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/1501237810245812224?t=TjRcCdfZ0Dyvrlo28GvLAA&s=19
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The same should be said any time someone quotes a Republican politician.
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tough but fair
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Yeah, I’m pretty pessimistic about the impact this conflict will have on Us oil consumption. I think it will just create more political pressure to open up more sites in the US.
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Isn’t this like the exact scenario where we should be using the strategic oil reserve?
In recent weeks, this argument has caught on across the political spectrum. It has made bedfellows of Ted Galen Carpenter of the libertarian Cato Institute and the seminal German leftist intellectual Wolfgang Streeck, who wrote that “the war over Ukraine” exploded out of the “uncompromising brinkmanship on the part of both the U.S. and Russia.” (War over Ukraine? Given that the only combatants on the ground are Russian invaders and Ukrainian defenders, the implication that this is a battle between the U.S. and Russia over influence is ridiculous.) It has united the economist Jeffrey Sachs, apparently cured of his intoxication with neoliberalism but not from telling Eastern Europeans what to do, and Greek anti-neoliberal politician Yannis Varoufakis. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and progressive economist Mariana Mazzucatto both likened the situation to China convincing Mexico to join an anti-American security alliance. The Guardian ’s populist columnist Owen Jones suggested that the war could have been avoided had there “been an attempt to craft a neutral buffer zone after the Cold War.” (The tweet in question has since been deleted, and Jones apologized for ignoring the rights of the people living in said zone and “sounding like an imperialist playing Risk with the people of Europe.”) The implication is also there in a tone-deaf statement released by the Democratic Socialists of America that called for an end to the war but blamed “imperialist expansionism” for leading to it.
As much as U.S. militarism and imperialism should be criticized, it has to be acknowledged that in Eastern Europe it is not the U.S. or NATO who have been an existential threat. In the twentieth century the formative experience for the countries of the region was direct and indirect Soviet control. States like Hungary, Czechoslovakia, or Poland, although nominally independent, were not free to pursue their own policy—either domestic or foreign. Hungary and Czechoslovakia were invaded by the Soviet Union when they tried to steer off the Moscow-prescribed course. Poland’s Soviet-imposed authorities brutally repressed popular protests in 1956, twice in the 1970s, and in 1981. Ukraine didn’t even have the luxury of formal independence and for their opposition to forced collectivization, Ukrainians paid a dear price: Holodomor, the deliberately engineered famine, killed between three and 12 million people. Eastern European calls for NATO and EU membership stem from this historical experience of oppression. Any analysis that does not acknowledge it is doomed to be incomplete at best and false at worst.
This leads us to the second point: NATO did not expand into “Eastern Europe.” Czechia, Poland, and Hungary in 1999 and the Baltic countries among others in 2004 actively sought membership in the alliance. This is not just semantics. For the historical reasons mentioned above, the West has been a desired political direction associated with prosperity, democracy, and freedom—despite the limitations of Western liberal capitalist democracies and the implementation of that model in Eastern Europe. Being at the receiving end of Russian imperialism, many Eastern Europeans looked forward to membership in NATO as a means of securing their sovereignty. NATO, in other words, would not have “expanded” into Eastern Europe if the Eastern European nations had not wanted it and actively pursued it.
Some pundits might argue that while this history is tragic, it is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things: Whether imaginary or not, Russia has security concerns that the West should have taken seriously. Although the parsimony of this explanation might be tempting, logically it does not hold. Implicitly, it is based on a counterfactual scenario in which NATO is not enlarged and Russia does not attack Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022. It fails at the same time to consider a different counterfactual scenario: NATO enlargement does not happen, and Russia invades its neighbors nonetheless. We cannot know what would have happened.
In the westsplaining framework, the concerns of Russia are recognized but those of Eastern Europe are not. This, again, mirrors the Russian line that “Ukraine’s current regime lacks any sovereignty,” which of course also operates within a framework inherited from the bipolar world of the Cold War. Eastern Europe is something that can be explained but isn’t worth engaging with.
If the westsplainers were to engage in intellectually honest critique of NATO and its expansion and therefore of the war in Ukraine, they would have to, by extension, critique Eastern European politicians and voters who have adopted (although in some cases, like Poland and Hungary, quite spottily) the Western ideals of democracy and national self-determination. They would have to acknowledge that their ideas for how to end the conflict—vague calls for diplomacy or even opposition to NATO, even as Ukrainians on the ground call for active support—may represent American preferences for avoiding conflict or opposing NATO rather than those of Ukrainians.
The result is that hard-nosed realists see the world not as it is but as it appears in their theories and, worse, that Western internationalism, which claims to stand in solidarity with the oppressed, does the opposite: It asks the subaltern to speak, only to ignore them when they ask for military support or self-determination.
Of course, there is no single Eastern European voice and we do not pretend to ventriloquize it. Nor do we offer our own prescriptions; better ones than we could offer have already been given by the Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Polish left. But any analysis of the current conflict needs to get past a framework that only gives voice and agency to the West and to Russia and start listening to Eastern Europeans, especially since it is Eastern Europe that will be dealing with the repercussions of the current war for years to come.
Nailed it.
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I think we are beating the horse dead at this point. Nobody is taking Mearsheimer seriously in the West.
https://twitter.com/McDonaldsCorp/status/1501251630880239619
https://twitter.com/OstapYarysh/status/1501262529531629571
A Big Mac cost half a day’s wages.
No wonder they hate the west
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That’s socialism! How could we do that to our fellow American capitalists, the oil companies?
It seems like it’s happening anyway.
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I mean Mearsheimer says all of this!
https://twitter.com/Charles_Lister/status/1501268895939837954
Seen this in 2 places now so I assume it’s true. Although one said it was waiting on NATO unanimity. Which is a little concerning with Hungary and maybe some others.