Kick the Dog Until It Bites, Then Shoot It

"History repeats itself, but in such cunning disguise that we never detect the resemblance until the damage is done." - Sidney J. Harris

When the Germans agreed to lay down their arms at the end of the First World War, they did so on the basis of a few key understandings. They assumed they were entering treaty negotiations as a “junior partner” — on the losing end of the war to be sure, but considering they still occupied a sizable chunk of Allied territory, they did not expect to be treated as a thoroughly vanquished participant. This was not the “unconditional surrender” the demolished Axis Powers would have to swallow at the close of the Second World War.

But pressingly, they wanted their people to be able to eat. The British blockade of Europe had forced starvation on the German homeland. During the “Turnip Winter” of 1917-1918, nearly a million Germans died from starvation or malnutrition, and the next winter — right around the corner when the war ended in November 1918 — promised to be worse. The German army was capable of fighting on for another year, perhaps two. It had some very nasty weapons coming down the pike, and could surely have inflicted horrendous further losses on the Allied Powers. But they saw the writing on the wall, and they put an end to the war with the understanding that the British blockade would be lifted as winter set in.

But the British didn’t lift the blockade. Instead, with the Germans disarmed and in a position of vulnerability, the Allies used the blockade to force them to agree to every line item of the infamous Treaty of Versailles. It was a list of conditions that seemed suited to a defeated enemy with opposing soldiers currently raising flags in its capital, not an army that ended the war entrenched in an opponent’s territory damn near their capital. Over a half million more German civilians starved to death that winter while the terms were piled on. Germany eventually signed.

German society was effectively smashed in the ensuing decade. The Weimar Republic was created and staffed by the diplomatic and intelligence arms of the victorious Allies. The previous German aristocratic leadership lost their official powers but were free to go fox hunting with their cousins in England while the German people suffered under the monetary apocalypse of hyperinflation - that most extreme regressive taxation — which allowed an international menagerie of financiers and criminals to loot the country’s economy once its currency was destroyed.

In their immiseration during the 1920s, the Germans nurtured a fiery list of grievances. In 1933, they elected Adolph Hitler to redress them, and the rest is history.

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Comparisons between modern post-Cold War Russia and interwar Germany are apt, but not in the way the neoliberal chattering class often claims. For a variety of reasons I won’t get into deeply here (another post perhaps), the West is imprisoned by a Second World War framework. Nations in every conflict are either America or Germany, free and democratic or fascist and evil. Leaders between nations are either Roosevelt or Hitler — within nations either Churchill or Chamberlain.

No, Vladimir Putin isn’t Hitler. He’s a uniquely Russian figure that rose through uniquely Russian power channels within a uniquely Russian historical and cultural context. The key similarities instead lie in the way the victorious powers in both the First World War and the Cold War behaved toward the losing side. While imagining themselves the enlightened inheritors of a holy just new world order that must by some magic writ perpetuate for all eternity, they instead both acted much the same as so many other victors in so many other major conflicts throughout world history — arrogant, short-sighted, and possessed by a vengeful need to kick their vanquished foe in the stomach as it tries to get back on its feet.

Let’s take a trip back to 1991. When the Soviet Union collapsed, that it would do so without violence was very much in doubt. They had troops all over central and eastern Europe, and would need to peacefully withdraw them back to Russia before the former Warsaw Pact states achieved any real sovereignty. But withdraw the Russians did, and while doing so they also agreed to something that would have been unthinkable just a few years before - the immediate reunification of Germany and its inclusion into NATO, an explicitly anti-Russian military alliance led by the United States.

But Russia did not agree to this without conditions, and here is where the fog of history gets a bit thick. In an agreement never set down in writing but understood by leading officials in Russia - and since admitted to by several high ranking Western officials of the time — in exchange for the Soviet Union’s peaceful dissolution, NATO would not extend one inch east of its new German frontier. NATO, so the West claimed, would shift into a mostly economic cooperation network. A sort of proto European Union with defense guarantees. Russia would avoid the indignity and the threat of having its Cold War nemesis set up shop within its traditional Orthodox sphere.

Once the Soviet Union was gone and with Mother Russia on her heels, the West immediately began plans to backtrack on this agreement. Bt the end of the 1990s, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic would all become NATO members. In 2004, seven more Eastern European countries, including the Baltic states, would be added. The vanguard of Western military power had formed up right on the Russian border. And though Russia seethed during the early stages of this advance, she was far too weakened by concerns at home to do much about it.

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The 1990s were a nightmare for Russia, a decade of humiliation absolutely comparable to what the Germans suffered during the 1920s. After promising to help post-Soviet Russia reform and get back on her feet economically, the West instead set loose the most predatory elements of its globalized financial apparatus. Much as Allied money interests gutted the German economy after Versailles, so too did the West ally with kleptocrats and criminals within Russia to loot the Russian economy and immiserate the population. The currency was debased for easy foreign buying and then destroyed. Elements of formerly state-run industries were converted into vouchers and given to every Russian citizen, who then sold them off to anyone with access to foreign currency that could actually buy things like food and medicine. This capital share was gobbled up by the ruthless gangsters now referred to as Russia’s “oligarchs.” By the end of the decade, seven of these men controlled over 50% of the Russian economy.

Russian governance became an explicitly criminal enterprise abetted by globalist Western sharks who installed stooges like Boris Yeltsin as they took their cut and pushed NATO chess pieces up to the Russian border. Advisors who had gone to Russia with a sincere intent to reform the economy, such as preeminent systems expert Jeffrey Sachs, resigned in disgust at the feeding frenzy.

In ways similar to Weimar Germany, Russian society collapsed in the face of such economic devastation. Organized crime ran the actual day-to-day functioning of many areas. The life expectancy nationwide dropped from the high 60s to the low 50s during the decade, an astonishing decline heavily influenced by the death rate of the young male population. Drug abuse, alcoholism, and violence decimated this demographic, where “deaths of despair” occurred by the millions. With the number of male suitors plunging and resources hard to come by, the phenomenon of the “Mail-Order Russian Bride” appeared. The indignity suffered by a people as things get so bad that their daughters are sold off to the rich elites of its former enemies is just impossible for most in the West to understand.

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Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000 very much as a reactionary measure to the malignant piracy from without and within. His first major effort was to reassert the Russian state as distinct from kleptocratic oligarchic control. It was not a conquest of the oligarchs so much as a mutually-beneficial detente. They would be free to run their industries and buy yachts in the Maldives, and Putin would have concrete leadership within a sovereign state government that would run itself like an actual country again rather than an international skimming pond.

Putin came from their world, having cut his teeth in the brutal halls of St. Petersburg politics. He often operated like a gangster, and intimidated or sidelined opponents accordingly. But he was also a firm believer in Russian historical preeminence and importance on the world stage, and in the early days his behavior suggested that the best way he thought to do that was to work with the West geopolitically while establishing control over an assertive Russian administrative state at home. His reconstituted federal police force pushed Russian mobsters and uncooperative oligarchs to new posts abroad - such as London and New York and Miami - and cracked down on domestic dissent. At the same time, he made overtures to Western countries that suggested he was willing to connect Russia to the post-Cold War world order led by the United States — the world’s first true unipolar omnipower. Putin was the first world leader to offer his sympathies to George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks, and he offered Russian assistance and intelligence on the Taliban in Afghanistan. He even brought up the idea of Russian inclusion in NATO to Bill Clinton in 2000. After all, if it was no longer an anti-Russian military alliance, why not?

These offers were rebuffed, and rebuffed in a manner that reflected the prevailing opinion among the foreign policy intelligentsia in the West. Explicitly and repeatedly, they made it clear that they considered Russia a second rate power at best, unfit for a place at the big boys table. And of course they knew Putin’s overtures were not out of the kindness of his heart. He wanted to make it clear that the days of Boris Yeltsin drunkenly feeling up skirts in the Kremlin while Russia was gutted like a deer carcass were over, and that opposition to provocations like the eventual 2004 NATO expansion into the Baltics would be much more vehement. As in the 1920s and 30s, the victors of the last great conflict didn’t much care about the protestations and posturing of their weakened adversary. After all, they claimed, Russia was just a gas station with a country attached. What the hell were they going to do about it?

The first real sign that Russia was indeed prepared to do something about it came in 2008, when NATO announced its plan to lay out a path to membership for two more countries: Georgia, a small country on the eastern coast of the Black Sea — and Ukraine. It was the most aggressive provocation by NATO expansion yet. Both countries were former Soviet states, and neither was anywhere close to the Atlantic Ocean (NATO, after all, stands for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization). That NATO announcement perhaps marked the true beginning of the period of hostility that recently erupted on the plains of Ukraine.

Ukraine had represented the single most glowing hot red line for Russia since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Its breakaway from Russia as an independent state in 1991 was viewed as a humiliation by many in Russian leadership, including Putin. Russia considered Ukraine one of the key ancestral regions of the Russ people, and the Ukrainian capital city of Kiev one of the most important seats of Russian power and culture - one that Stalin had ordered defended to the death during the Second World War. Moreover, while a rather distinct ethnic Ukrainian people populated the west of the country, its east was populated by millions of ethnic Russians, and the two groups formed adversarial blocks within post-Cold War Ukraine that would later engage in civil war in the 2010s.

On top of all this, Ukraine constituted a buffer zone between Russia and the West. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union had both brutally defended what they considered their “spheres of influence.” Millions died in proxy conflicts along these frontiers, from Korea to Vietnam to Chile to Algeria. The Cuban Missile Crisis - the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war - was one such conflict, as the United States made it clear that they would glass Cuba and indeed the entire Soviet Union if the Russians set up nuclear missiles on its doorstep. Let us remember that the Monroe Doctrine — an 1823 declaration by the United States that entire Western Hemisphere was its rightful dominion, immune to European interference — is perhaps is the most ambitious and presumptuous establishment of a “sphere of influence” in human history. The concept cannot be dismissed when it comes to the degree to which Russia considers Ukraine to be its own Cuba, only more so considering the historical and cultural linkages between the two regions.

But while NATO cast its gaze more aggressively toward Ukraine in 2008, it was Georgia that saw the outbreak of violent resistance to NATO expansion in the summer of that year. Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, a distilled product of the globalist petri dish - pushed through Ivy League fellowships and U.S. State Department grooming programs before being plugged into Georgian politics — took the NATO announcement of planned membership for his country very seriously. He also took seriously the requirement that aspiring members not be involved in active territorial disputes around their borders, and Georgia was dealing with a separatist movement in a small ethnic Russian region called South Ossetia. Saakashvili moved to crush the separatists once and for all and thus pave the way toward NATO, but this time the Russians decided to bite back. They invaded the breakaway region right after the 08 Olympics and controlled it within a couple weeks. Georgian NATO membership was dead on arrival, and an era of more active hostilities between Russian and the West had begun.

As for Saakashvili, his Western handlers later relocated him to the real central battlefield of this warming showdown — Ukraine, where he became governor of Odessa.

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Under the leadership of the Obama administration, the West proceeded much more aggressively to absorb Ukraine into its orbit after 2008. Much like Russia in the 1990s, Ukraine had been used as a money laundering playground for world elites since the fall of the Soviet Union. It was one of the poorest countries in Europe, and yet by 2010 it was flooded with shady NGOs and ghost companies and high-paying absentee board seats (Joe Biden’s son Hunter would hold one such seat at Burisma). Underneath its cartoonishly corrupt overclass, Ukraine was a fundamentally divided society. Nationalist factions and ethnic Russia militias were escalating their animus toward each other, and portents of civil war were in the air before things snapped in 2014.

The “Maidan Revolution” that ousted elected president Viktor Yanukovic has been presented to Western audiences to be a wholly organic people’s movement against a tyrannical Russian puppet. But one doesn’t have to dig into super-secret evidence to realize that this was not the case. The efforts of the U.S. State Department in conjunction with the already entrenched NGOs conducted much of their business out in the open. When street protests began in Kiev in late 2013, money poured into directing and supporting them through the winter, with food and concerts and visits by Western officials such as John McCain and viciously anti-Russia State Department vice chair Victoria Nuland - who even Salon Magazine once warned was a human time bomb that might one help press the world toward global war. Ukrainian television channels were created to propagate the revolutionary line. The whole thing was pushed until the pressure had to give.

By early 2014, the protests in Kiev included - and were often directed by — elements of several nationalist militias such as Right Sector. Eventually shots were fired, and hundreds of people were killed. Thanks to Western media messaging at times explicitly directed by U.S. State Department and intelligence assets, the violence was depicted as a black-and-white crackdown by the Yanukovic police forces on peaceful protesters. But the testimony from those on the ground, including many of those same peaceful protesters, told a murkier story. The nationalist militias had been talking for months about the need to push the crisis to a decisive point, and there were many reports that gunfire first erupted not from the police lines, but from windows and rooftops around Maidan Square occupied by militia members. An incredibly detailed forensics report issued in the wake of the violence makes the case that the first shots came from nationalist snipers in the surrounding buildings, and claims that they fired at both police and protestors alike in order to trigger a street battle. If this is true, they succeeded. Yanukovic was forced to flee Ukraine for his life, and he ended up in Moscow shortly thereafter.

Thus began a hot conflict in Ukraine that continued unabated until the recent Russian invasion - an invasion that joined an active war rather than initiate a new one from peacetime. A pro-West nationalist government — one about which U.S. officials openly bragged about stocking with their preferred personnel — took power in Kiev, and immediately began antagonizing the ethnic Russian population in the east of the country with aggressive policies such as removing Russian as one of Ukraine’s two official languages, as it had been since 1991. Those eastern populations saw the new government as illegitimate - having taken power violently from an elected administration - and civil war began in the Donetsk region. Militias attacked back and forth. Thousands of civilians were killed, and brutal nationalist paramilitary organizations such as the Azov Battalion were given free rein to counter “insurrectionary” Donetsk forces. Russia responded swiftly in the spring of 2014 by seizing Crimea, their most aggressive land grab since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The tug of war over Ukraine had become hot. Putin’s 2022 invasion is just the latest escalation. The Madian Revolution - no matter the particulars of its violence - had pushed the Western expansion into Eastern Europe into a zone where Russia had time and again said it would take what it perceived to be defensive action. And so it has.

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This longwinded patch of historical background is not meant as an absolute justification for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine - more of a rejoinder to the wholly insufficient rhetoric clogging up Western information channels. As has been noted by others critical of the Western role in the lead-up to all this, the responsibility for the latest round of violence lies at the feet of Vladimir Putin. You pull the trigger, be prepared to explain yourself, and suffer or defend against consequences as they come. But what is happening as of this writing in the West is the kind of hot-blooded and poorly informed delirium that often precedes very, very bad decisions. You’ll get the official regime platform just about anywhere you look, from television to social media to nonstop hysterical panic from an already disgraced foreign policy ecosystem in and around Washington. Putin is evil, Ukraine is just an innocent victim, Russians are terrible, a “No-Fly Zone” over Ukraine wouldn’t trigger a Third World War, and even if it did, that’s good and we would definitely win it.

Nothing about what I’m seeing in the West right now suggests a system or a culture in full control of its faculties, except perhaps the clear resistance of Biden himself to escalate to direct conflict with the Russians. History has a sense of humor. And that resistance may itself be history by the time you read this. Things can move very quickly. And if you are reading this, it may sound mealymouthed and without resolve or appropriate horror at the carnage in Ukraine. What about what Putin has done? What about the Russian role in this escalation? Indeed, and you’ve got no shortage of places to find such content.

But in every conflict, each party — and we are absolutely a party to this - must do a couple of very important things as it debates between escalation or deescalation. The questions are not meant to cede the moral or strategic ground to the enemy, though you may end up doing some of that. It’s meant to provide an understanding of how you got it here so you can find the least disastrous way to get out of it, and ideally in such as a way as to minimize the chances of getting here again.

First, we must try to understand the other party’s position. As the statesman George Kennan did in the 1950s when he guided the West’s “containment strategy” of the Soviet Union, you must understand where your enemy is coming from even if you intend to counter him. What I’ve tried to lay out here is some of the context that guides Russia’s actions, informs its grievances, and defines its perceived security threats. Ceding Ukraine to the West’s dominion has always been out of the question for them, and they were always willing to go to war over it. “Well, who are they do say what another country can or can’t do?” Behold the cruise missile strikes in Kiev as an answer to that question. Sometimes nations see no other path to resolution than force of arms. Ask the Cubans in 1962 how much their sovereignty mattered to a United States that absolutely refused to have Russian missiles on its doorstep.

Second, we in the West must ask ourselves whether our leaders truly did everything they could to prevent things from getting to this point — or if, on the flip side, they actively and consistently pressed their advantage. The answer in this case is clearly the latter, and whether they did so thinking the Russians wouldn’t retaliate in the way they have is unclear. Influential foreign policy think tanks in the United States have guided a strategy of gradual exacerbation of Russia’s anxieties and weaknesses in an effort to finally neutralize her as a potential geopolitical adversary. It’s an ambitious and, it seems to me, unbelievably reckless and arrogant strategy. You can read an outline of it over at the RAND Corporation, who graciously provided public documentation of this plan of Versailles-level aggressive hubris. Putin pulled a very big trigger in Ukraine, but to pretend that Russia is lashing out against innocent neighbors out of delusional paranoia is patently false.

We helped guide the world to this place. We kicked the dog as it lay the ground, over and over, and it decided to bite. A problem we face is that influential people really do believe that now that it has bitten, it’s time to shoot the dog so that it stays down for good. You can find grand plans for the partition of Russia bandied about the open. Musings of nuclear exchange litter news programs. War drums can be heard over the hill.

May cooler heads prevail.