Motus Mentis

The chattering classes are atip at the titillating prospect of a Russian operation into Ukraine. The appeal is obvious: above all, they can imagine a surge of patriotic cohesion, a nation united against a familiar external foe — the Russkies — that much of our colossal Deep State still misses with a poignancy that is almost touching, but which makes sense if you know much about the arcane history of our defense and intelligence agencies. Just think: the American people set their petty squabbles aside! — and fall in, with that good old indomitable Yankee spirit, behind a re-energized Joe Biden, roused like Theoden for a great, final battle for the defense of the American Way.

This is absolutely crazy, of course. No American in his right mind wants this, and things have fallen apart far too much for this deeply fractured nation to unite behind something so completely irrelevant. (An invasion from Mars might still do it, I suppose, but at this point just barely — and even that would depend on where in America they landed. If they started by blasting the District of Columbia to smithereens, most Americans would at this point just show up to cheer them on, and to toast marshmallows.) Furthermore — and this is putting it mildly — if Joe Biden is a charismatic wartime leader, Michael Moore is an NFL cornerback.

Ukraine, besides being one of the most corrupt nations on earth (ask the Bidens!), has been a part of Russia, or a satellite of Russia, for centuries. It is of immense importance for Russian security, and our idiotic foreign policy since the fall of the Soviet Union — a policy that, if we had had any wisdom at all, would have placed top priority on cultivating Russia as a friend and ally — has instead been to do everything possible to humiliate and threaten them, in particular by pushing NATO right up to their very doorstep (perhaps that should be “doorsteppe”). Imagine if, after a strategic setback here in America, Russia swollen with pride in its temporary global hegemony, had done the same — sending arms, building bases, and installing puppet governments — in Canada and Mexico. We have had our Monroe Doctrine for 200 years, delineating our protected sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere; what have we left Russia? With this expansion, and with our bluster, we have given Vladimir Putin very little choice but to stand up for his nation’s strategic interests — and what’s more, we have set ourselves up for a very bad embarrassment, because if push comes to shove I think that we are going to find that very few ordinary Americans, on either Left or Right, are really going to want to go to war, against a nuclear-armed Russia on its own front porch, for the sake of Ukraine, if there’s any way out of it. (Once things become kinetic, and the question is no longer a dreamy abstraction, people are going to worry far more about escalation and the realistic possibility of nuclear conflict than they will about protecting a nation most people couldn’t even find on a map.)

Putin, knowing this, will make his move, probably occupying only the eastern provinces of Ukraine and blowing Ukraine’s army effectively out of existence, all of which should take a few days or weeks. The U.S., having rattled its saber and drawn its lines in the sand, and with Joe Biden shaking his fist at the sky like Abe Simpson, will do nothing — and American prestige, to the extent that it lingers on at all, will find new depths of shabby decrepitude.

I could be wrong, of course: the people running the Biden administration, keenly aware that they have at this point little to lose, might just “cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.” That would be a very, very bad idea indeed — but the more I think about it, the more I realize that there are periods in history when whether a thing is a stupendously bad idea doesn’t really matter much at all, and that we are living through one of those times.