Counterblast Against Compact
The publication's open letter on the Russo-Ukrainian War is a disgrace
Claire Berlinski’s The Cosmopolitan Globalist (If you’re not a subscriber, why not?) pointed me toward a new publication titled Compact, which was founded by a pair of conservatives and a leftist. Its ideological orientation and raison d'être are perhaps worthy of analysis, but what attracted my attention (courtesy of Joshua Treviño; see here) was the open letter just published there, titled “Away from the Abyss” and signed by a group of intellectuals and pundits. The letter is an appeal to the Biden Administration to, in effect, abandon its support for Ukraine against Russia and engineer an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire.” The spirit in which this appeal is made may be deduced from the letter’s opening paragraph:
Leading interventionists in the United States and Europe are goading the West into an abyss of war and suffering, from which there can be no easy return. We, the undersigned, inhabit a wide range of political opinions and disagree about many things. But on this one urgent point, we speak as one: The crisis created by Russia’s war on Ukraine demands de-escalation, not imperial aggrandizement and schemes of regime change.
“Away from the Abyss” makes passing reference to “Russia’s wrongful invasion” of Ukraine—a rather mild way of describing V. Putin’s brutal, unprovoked act of aggression and the countless war crimes that have been committed by the Russian armed forces. But the letter reserves its righteous indignation for “interventionists” in the United States and Europe who are guilty of “escalation,” seek “imperial aggrandizement,” and are plotting “regime change.” It is they, not the Russian despot, whom this open letter brands as the real aggressors.
To be sure, the letter includes some pro forma handwringing over the suffering of the Ukrainian people. But what gives the game away is its call for “good-faith negotiations toward a permanent peace that takes into account Ukraine’s right to self-determination and Russia’s legitimate security needs.” On the surface this may sound reasonable enough, but on analysis it’s a prize specimen of delusional thinking—perhaps, even of bad faith. I incline to the latter view, as I find it impossible to believe that people graced with such glittering intellectual credentials could really believe a single word of “Away from the Abyss.”
Let it be clearly understood: To associate “Russia’s legitimate security needs” with its invasion of Ukraine is to legitimize that invasion. Effectively, it accepts V. Putin’s false and lying claim that his act of aggression is defensive in character, an attempt to defend Russia from NATO, in Putin’s telling a predatory alliance that threatens Russia’s existence. To put the matter bluntly, these claims are all lies. NATO poses no threat to Russia, and the people who put their names to “Away from the Abyss” surely know it. More than once, Putin has told the world that he regards Ukraine as a fake country with no right to an independent existence. Since the beginning of the present war, this has been the dominant theme of Russian propaganda. Therein lies the cause of the Russo-Ukrainian War.
The despot’s real aim is to recreate the defunct Soviet imperium, first and foremost by dominating Ukraine, an ambition with deep historical roots. The tsars and the Bolsheviks believed, as Putin believes today, that Russia without Ukraine could never be a great power. From the perspective of St. Petersburg and Moscow, the Ukrainian national idea has always been seen as a threat. In the 1930s, Stalin sought to eliminate that threat with a genocidal famine and a vicious purge. The memory of those horrors lives with the Ukrainian people; they stand up against Russian aggression today because they know what lies in store for them if Russia wins.
As for the charge that “interventionists” are pursuing “regime change,” this is a canard. If by chance Putin’s great miscalculation should lead to his ouster, who would miss him? But the United States and the NATO alliance are not engaged in some nefarious scheme to engineer a change of regime. What they’re doing is aiding Ukraine in the defense of its national existence. Given the Russian armed forces’ dismal performance thus far, it may well be that incompetence and defeat on the battlefield will lead to a coup or a popular uprising. If that does happen, the responsibility for Putin’s removal will rest with Putin himself.
Finally, “Away from the Abyss” doesn’t bother to explain how that “immediate humanitarian ceasefire” is to be engineered. There’s the clang of the usual boilerplate: ”good-faith negotiations,” “dialogue,” “diplomacy,” etc. The assumption seems to be that a little common sense is all that’s needed to bring this unfortunate incident to an end. How the atavastic passions roused by a bloody, destructive war are to be tamed is left for other people to figure out.
“Away from the Abyss” calls for “prudence, not self-righteous posturing”: a clear case of projection. Nothing could be more self-righteous and at the same time so free of constructive suggestion than this disreputable screed, and I suspect that some of those who signed will live to regret it.
Note
I’ve written several pieces on Ukraine and Russia, two of which bear on the arguments put forth in “Away from the Abyss”:
“Stalin & Putin & Ukraine”: Tracing the connections between two genocidal crimes, one past, one present
“Tannenberg Revisited”: The pundits thought that Ukraine was doomed. Here’s why they were wrong
Thank you again for clearing the air on this issue, especially to the rightward part of the political spectrum, with your deeply informed views (in such contrast to the blowhards of the alt-Right, views not held by even Trump).
One of the many ironies of the Russian-Ukraine war is that it has cleared away any serious contention that Russia's invasion has anything to do with NATO. As you wrote, it's about nothing but reassembling the Russo-Soviet imperium, a "lite" version with a new mafia-like nomenklatura and the commanding heights of the Russian economy (energy and other extractive industries) mostly back in the hands of the state. The hoped-for transformation of the 1990s -- Russia moving from empire to nationhood, a state-dominated to a largely private economy, and autocracy to greater democracy -- failed -- maybe failure was inevitable, maybe we were naive to think otherwise -- never happened.
The real problem is that the West hasn't provided enough lethal aid to hand Putin's head to him quickly enough. It's not surprising the Putin's toadies in the West are leading the outcry to prevent Ukraine from winning now that Russia has lost as badly as it has and to distract attention from how wrong they were. But Russia hasn't lost badly enough, not enough to force Putin to the negotiating table, once it's clear he can't get anything if he doesn't.
"As for the charge that “interventionists” are pursuing “regime change,” this is a canard. If by chance Putin’s great miscalculation should lead to his ouster, who would miss him?" You make a very good point. The main purpose of western democracies assisting Ukraine is to preserve its freedom and territorial integrity, thereby preventing an illegal expansion of Russia territory and increase in its power to affect policy in Europe.
A putative win by Ukraine could be considered a win for "The West", but that is not the same as seeking regime change (or destroying Russia or Russian culture) as some RU propagandists claim). If the Putin regime - including Putin himself, of course - were to be replaced by something or someone else, that would be as a result of internal forces within Russia reacting to the Ukraine debacle that Putin brought on himself, not because European or American policy had regime change as its primary goal.