"Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” George W. Bush, September 13, 2001
The polarizing “with us or without us” approach to U.S. diplomacy has a distinctly anachronistic ring, though it is not without contemporary parallels. Nearly all nations and powerful stake-holders would agree that terror is not to be sided with, but the devil lies in the details. What is terror? What is legitimate in the name of self-defense? Who started it? Where is it going? Is state-sponsored violence not a form of terror? On whose moral authority is a horrific action deemed not to be terror but self-defense or even a step to liberation?
In general terms, nation states get away with terrible actions, if not outright terrorization, because their killing machines are cloaked in statist terms that posit the militant effort a military necessity.
Non-state actors, religious zealots, and separatists fare less well in the court of legality, but they, too, often enjoy a measure of public opinion and media support.
And there are indeed some terrible conflicts where a sudden flip in the power equation redefines history, where a bad cause becomes a good cause, and not just by winning, but because it represents values deemed in some manner superior to the system it replaces.
George Washington’s “irregulars” defeated the prestigious British army and Mao’s unkempt bandits defeated Chiang Kaishek’s well-oiled military machine to the applause of history.
On the other hand, the rise of the fascism and the temporal triumph of the likes of Adolf Hitler, no matter how you slice and dice it, is not a moral cause. The defeat of outright evil is a win; one up for mankind.
The problem, though, is it is not always easy to see in advance which way the long arc of history is bending.
Suffice to say there is now enough information about Russia’s unwarranted invasion of Ukraine to suggest not just a losing cause, but something akin to evil in terms of morality and public opinion.
It is unlikely that Putin’s relentless war against Ukraine will ever be seen as the masterwork of a latterday George Washington or even Mao Zedong. More likely it will be seen as the insane strivings of a modern day Adolf Hitler who must be defeated for the sake of the common good.
Inasmuch as the frontline in Ukraine is an existential fight to preserve the sanctity of national borders in the Westphalian tradition, Russia must withdraw. The stakes of this unnecessary battle are high enough to threaten enveloping the entire world in war. Even short of world war, it is forcing the world into two diametrically-opposed camps.
When it comes to defeating the Hitlers of the world, it is not so much “are you with us or against us?” as “are you against fascist terror?”
Thus oft-ridiculed, and deservedly ridiculed refrain of George W. Bush has gained a new life with the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Russia annexation of Crimea in 2014, while serving some of the same irredentist aims and cloaked in some of the same unilateral claims of sovereignty, was disturbing, and posed a foreign policy conundrum, but it did not polarize the world into two camps.
For the Russian takeover of Crimea was achieved mostly by stealth, at a time of inattention. It was a fait accompli almost before it was over. More importantly, it did not involve outright violence, even if it was predicated on threats and bullying.
It was one of those topics upon which reasonable people could argue and disagree.
But Moscow’s success in Crimea bolstered Putin’s ego and sense of infallible destiny. When Putin set his sights on Kiev and the heart of Ukraine, he premised the invasion on a swift three-day blitzkrieg intended to decapitate the Zelensky government and present the world with a fait accompli.
Diplomats might protest, the disdain and shock would be considerable, but had it been successful, the very success of the operation could be parried to promote the idea that what Ukrainians really want is to be part of Russia, and that’s why resistance is futile.
But the resistance was stronger than expected and not at all futile. Asexplained by Yale historian Timothy Snyder:
“When Russia began its full-scale invasion that month, the American consensus was that Ukraine would crack within days and that Zelens'kyi would (and should) flee. Instead, he stayed in Kyiv despite the approach of Russian assassins and the Russian army, rallied his people, and oversaw the successful defense of his country.”
World opinion, not state actors, was up in arms about Putin’s war. World opinion, not state actors, led the call to sanction Russia.
Everywhere in the democratic world, but most especially Europe, untrammeled public opinion was predictably outraged at the sight of tanks crossing borders. The specter of a massive land war in Europe, with its notoriously porous flatlands, and troubled twentieth century history, came as a great shock. A capital city of a sovereign state was under siege.
Russia’s surprise attack, massive invasion and occupation evoked memories of Hitler and Stalin trampling over their neighbors, and though the Kremlin might spin it, it could not be construed in a positive light.
Fear of offending Russia continued to hem in state-led outrage, especially in Europe, and most especially in Germany, which prided itself on a special relationship with Russia, but even the U.S. had its share of Russia-leaning observers, including Donald Trump, whose attitude was, “so what?”
For a man shorn of any meaningful ideology, there was no point in letting the suffering of others destroy his beautiful relationship with Russia.
The continued public outrage around the world at the sight of a belligerent big country invading a neighbor at peace, launched in the form of a sudden attack after months of denial, posed a challenge for China’s pro-Russian media coverage from day one.
CCTV News, which I monitored daily, had little to say, and what little it said was less than convincing, because its editorial stance put it woefully out of tune with more seasoned observers of European history.
Not just out of tune with the usual suspects in the U.S. and NATO, Japan, Australia and so on, but out of tune with the man-and-woman-on-the-street outrage at this disturbing turn of events.
The persistence of Russia’s heavy-handed military incursion, combined with documented reports of massacres in Bucha and massive civilian casualties, continued to pose a PR problem for Beijing. Not so much because sustaining the pro-Russian view was out of favor in Washington and Brussels, but because the war clearly flew in the face of China’s proud view of itself as a peace-loving nation that respected national sovereignty.
The Chinese media has consistently presented a pro-Russian view of events, censoring any indication of Russian wrongdoing. Implicit and tacit support for Putin’s bloody incursion has thus become an albatross around the neck of Beijing’s image-makers for all the world to see.
The optics of the much-vaunted Sino-Russian “no-limits friendship” is a nagging problem, even though China, especially before February 2022, had a reasonable, if not entirely justifiable, desire to balance U.S. hegemonic power with a strategic lean to Moscow.
Beijing’s natural desire for a trouble-free border with Russia is also understandable, especially given the acrimony of the 1950’s Sino-Soviet split, Russia’s well-known historic territorial grabs of Qing Dynasty dominion and, troublingly, the salient nuclear-tipped tensions in the face of Soviet “revisionism” in the 60’s and 70’s.
China’s need to protect itself from the Russian threat that was the major impetus driving U.S.-China relations from 1972 onwards, not the much-vaunted diplomacy of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
In today’s topsy-turvy political world, the inflammatory rhetoric of Trump bears strange parallels with China on the topic of Ukraine.
Again, according to historian Timothy Snyder, an esteemed academic who rarely minces words,
“Trump never speaks about the Russian invasion itself. He never recalls Russian war crimes. He never mentions that Ukrainians are defending themselves or their basic ideas of what is right. He certainly never admits that Zelens'kyi is the democratically-elected president of a country under vicious attack and who has comported himself with courage. The war, for Trump, is just a scam -- a Jewish scam.”
When backing the wrong horse, sometimes the impulse is to double down rather than admit a mistake. In China, those who persist in endorsing Beijing's diplomatic tilt toward Russia may find reassurance in knowing they are not isolated in this stance. Even Donald Trump, a former U.S. president, is doubling down on the same dubious approach.
