Weighing in on the Russian invasion of Ukraine here, but I’ll be brief because I want to get to the main point.
But first, a caveat: Of course the invasion is murderous, just pure aggression that was unnecessary, and Putin is the new Stalin. Old folks like me remember the Soviet-era tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia in 1968, even Hungary in 1956. It was said during the post-World War II era that behind the Iron Curtain the rivers in occupied cities flowed red from the blood of political prisoners and others who fought back at the invaders and their collaborator governments as they were mercilessly executed. But I don’t think the murder of ordinary families and children then exceeded what is going on now in Ukraine.
So, I want to align with every condemnation of what Putin has done; I have to do this up front because what I’m about to write could be misconstrued.
NATO was arrogant, even reckless, in its expansion Eastward. While one can argue that it was only such expansion that kept Putin from walking into the Baltic states (all much smaller than Ukraine), the expansion exposed the legacy NATO countries to increased risks while posing a threat to a revanchist regime in Moscow. Russia did not have to invade Ukraine but it’s not surprising that the militarists in the Kremlin might think that was the best policy, if not for any present-day threat to the country from the West (there is no threat; no one was going to invade Russia) but, who knows, the future might look different.
There’s a clear Monroe Doctrine-like mentality in Russia and China today. Just as we don’t want to be surrounded by hostile states or forces, the same could be said for Russia and China. While it would be far, far better for Russia to have made nice with its neighbors, seeking borders similar to what the United States has with Canada, that’s just not how those people think. The Russians seem to believe in power above all, including making their neighbors be nice to them, ensuring that they are always weaker than Russia (i.e., subservient). As Stalin once said of the Pope, who’d protested his murderous regime, “How many tanks does he have.”
China, too, should realize that the only problem they have with Taiwan, and that Taiwan has with it, is that China is a one-party surveillance state, not simply of George Orwell’s “1984” or “Animal Farm,” but Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” (I’m being nice in the latter reference, actually.)
Russia thinks it’s a great country, just as China thinks it’s the greatest country in history with a culture going back 5,000 years, if not more. There is greatness in those two countries’ histories, but does that mean the rest of the world must lick their boots? They seem to resent like Hell that they are not the leading countries in the world today. I believe they – just like Hitler – think the United States is an “accident of history.”
But revanchism and ressentiment, as the French would say, seem to drive the behavior for these two states on a psychological level. Yet we in the West, and America, have our own ego problems. We think we’ve hit on the formula for world peace – democracy and Free Trade. Well, lots of the world don’t agree. Russia and China seem intent on demonstrating their “greatness” even if it kills the rest of us, having notions of their own empires for an indefinite period in the future (I’m thinking of Hitler’s “thousand year Reich” here, and I guess Putin and Xi Jinping are thinking they can do 1,001 years each), and the Islamists want to restore a 1,400-years-old Caliphate for eternity.
So, Russia and China have maniacally evil intents along with their legitimate security concerns. I don’t buy into relativism or “comparability” much, which is to say we are not as maniacal or evil as they are. But we are not as pure as the driven snow; we are not blameless. The American and European involvement in Iraq and Libya were just criminal – why aren’t any of the Neocons and “W” in jail yet – and we should have followed a criminal justice model in going after Al Qaeda in 2001, as quite a few scholars and analysts (and many Europeans) argued at the time. And we should have been more careful about expanding NATO eastward, even while knowing just how evil Putin was and revanchist he and many of his followers were.