Plain English with Derek Thompson - Why a No-Fly Zone Over Ukraine Could Be—Literally—the Worst Idea Ever

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

Three in four Americans say the U.S. and its allies should ban Russian aircraft over Ukraine by establishing a “no-fly zone.” Dozens of foreign policy experts agree. So do many Ukrainians. Is this the policy that could end the war, or is it an idea that could end human civilization as we know it? (Maybe it's both.) The author and foreign policy critic Robert Wright joins the podcast to debate the pros and cons of a no-fly zone. Host: Derek Thompson Producer: Troy Farkas Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today we're going to talk about an idea that could end the war in Ukraine or end civilization, as we know it. And that sounds like a pretty dramatic dichotomy, but I actually don't think it's an exaggeration. The idea is a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Now, a no-fly zone is very simply any order that bans aircraft over a certain area. There is a no-fly zone over the White House in Washington, D.C. There were no-fly zones established in Bosnia in the 1990s, in Libya in 2011. And in the last week, a debate has heated up over whether the U.S. and NATO should establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Kick the Russians out of the sky.

Dozens of foreign policy experts are on the record pleading with the U.S. government to build a no-fly zone in Ukraine. You turn on cable news and you will see them and you will hear them. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, one of the most important people in Washington, has pressed for a no-fly zone. President Zelensky of Ukraine has also called for it. Ukrainians that I spoke to in the last episode said they were praying for it. A broad bipartisan majority of Americans, 74% of Americans, including most Republicans and most Democrats, say the U.S. and its allies should impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine. You cannot get Americans to agree on the color of the sky these days, but three and four say yes to this idea.

So far, the White House has said no. Why? Well, the term itself sounds pretty simple. Even safe. A no-fly zone. That doesn't sound like war. It sounds like the opposite of war. Everyone should want Ukraine to be a zone where Russian planes don't fly.

That's obvious. But the term refers to a war. an excellent outcome while concealing a terrible process. To clear the skies over Ukraine, the U.S. and its allies would have to engage Russia in essentially war. Enforcing a no-fly zone would require NATO forces to shoot down any Russian plane that flies over Ukraine. It might require neutralizing Russia's capacity to fire missiles into Ukraine from its own territory. That is, a no-fly zone would have to bomb in Russia to stop Russia from bombing Ukraine. That means war between the U.S. and Russia, war between NATO and Russia, war between nuclear powers.

So to discuss this extraordinary dilemma, today's guest is Robert Wright. Bob Wright is the best-selling author of several books, including the moral animal and non-zero. He is the author of the non-zero newsletter and a foreign policy commentator, and critic. We talk about the history and the logic of no-fly zones, the fierce, fierce debate over this popular policy, the rise of the blob, his loving, or not so loving term for the foreign policy establishment in Washington, and at the end, a deeper consideration of war, moral judgment and war, and why good intentions so often lead to disastrous consequences in U.S. foreign policy.

I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Bob Wright, welcome to the podcast. Well, thanks for having me. Bob, in your own words, what is a no-fly zone? A no-fly zone is a deployment of force in the air that ensures that no enemy aircraft will be in the air. And sometimes they work,

very readily, especially, you know, when you have a clearly superior force and it's not in the kind of political interest of the adversary to challenge it. And this is something we've tried before, no-fly zone. There were no-fly zones in effect in Iraq after the first Gulf War in Bosnia, the 1990s. There was a no-fly zone over parts of Libya in March 2011. That was approved by the United nations. What did we learn from those no-fly zones, their effectiveness, and how are they different from the no-fly zone that we might have to put in effect over Ukraine? Well, there are two differences. First of all, those no-fly zones were relatively easy to establish and maintain. We had clear air superiority over any adversary, and the adversary

didn't have a particular political incentive to challenge the air superiority. That right there is a big difference compared to Ukraine because obviously the Russian Air Force is formidable and obviously Putin is not likely to back down if we tell him that we've decided that actually Ukraine is our space to be in. The bigger difference, the more consequential difference ultimately between those cases in Ukraine is that in Ukraine, the adversary you'd be dealing with is a nuclear power. Russia has thousands of nuclear warheads. I want to do a pro con with you about the case for a no-fly zone over Ukraine. I think you and I come down very strongly in one of these camps, but for the sake of fairness, we'll review both arguments. First, the case for a no-fly zone in Ukraine.

There are a lot of important people who seem to support it. Senator Joe Manchin, who some consider the most important person in Washington, has suggested the White House should consider it. A lot of Washington, D.C., foreign policy and security experts, a lot of people on television are suggesting a no-fly zone. Here are two strong arguments that I've seen. Number one, Andrei Yermak, the chief of staff to the Ukrainian president Zelensky, wrote the following in the New York Times in the past week. Quote, we firmly believe that Russia won't stop at just Ukraine, which would potentially drag NATO into this conflict anyway, end quote. Which is essentially to say, this is a scenario where Russia is looking to expand its empire beyond Ukraine. So whether or not NATO gets involved, Russia will just keep going.

That's number one. Number two, here is a letter co-signed by dozens of DC foreign policy security experts that came out just this week. I'm quoting from it, quote, a U.S. NATO-enforced no-fly zone to protect humanitarian corridors and additional military means for Ukrainian self-defense are desperately needed and needed now, end quote. So here they're saying, we don't need a no-fly zone over the whole country. We can just have a limited no-fly zone over corridors that allow various Ukrainian. to escape that might seem a little bit more measured. So Bob, putting yourself in the shoes of the people making the pro no-fly zone argument, what do you see as their best possible case? Well, first of all, I don't blame Ukraine for wanting a no-fly zone and arguing for one.

it's an existential issue for them. At least it's an existential issue for the regime and for a non-trivial number of Ukrainians. People are dying. It's a horrible situation. And I think that fact accounts for a lot of the support for no-fly zone or various, you know, facsimiles thereof that you're seeing in America. You're seeing a response to a humanitarian tragedy, and that in itself is a healthy thing in the sense that, you know, this is the best part of human nature we're talking about, the part that sees people suffering, and wants to do something about it. And it's not impossible that what Zelensky's saying is true that Putin's aspirations go beyond Ukraine. I think the chances of him exercising any such aspirations in the near or immediate term are extremely slim.

He has his hands more than full in Ukraine. And I also don't read him certainly as challenging NATO powers. I think that would be almost literally insane. All right, Bob, now I'm going to let you unleash your full opinion on this topic. Do you think a no-fly zone of Ukraine is closer to a good? idea or an utterly disastrous idea? I don't think it's a certainly disastrous idea. I think it's just likely enough to be catastrophic at a nearly apocalyptic level that it's an extremely

bad idea. It isn't the case that a no-fly zone would guarantee a nuclear exchange or that it would even move the needle up past 50% probably, but when you're talking about a war that could kill literally hundreds of millions of people, even billions conceivably, moving the needle even one percentage point is considered gravely irresponsible, and I think rightly so. It's also not the case that the response to the no-fly zone, the direct response is envisioned as being a nuclear attack by Russia. the concern is that things just spin out of control. Once you have, in effect, a conflict between Russia and the United States, which is a conflict between Russia and NATO, you've got a wider

regional war, and things can get out of hand. And walk me through the steps by which a no-fly zone would become catastrophic. So step, if step one is we declare a no-fly zone, we disdeme, we dismal, we dispatch NATO or American Air Force and other resources to clear the skies over Ukraine. What happens after that? What are the steps between that and global catastrophe? Okay, for starters, there's a very good chance that Russian fighter jets would immediately challenge American aircraft. Remember, Putin is in the middle of a kind of existential crisis of his own. He got into this situation, I think, through serious miscalculation. And he has real domestic political opposition as a result, probably at both the grassroots and to some extent

the elite level. And I think he believes that if he doesn't now prevail, in Ukraine so that he can say that this has been in some sense a success, whether that means hanging on to a big chunk of eastern Ukraine or at least establishing a strong enough position to negotiate a deal that he can call a success. I think if he feels he can't claim success, you know, he's in such trouble that that's just unacceptable from his point of view. for NATO to suddenly have air dominance is to seriously reduce the chances of his getting anything he can call success. So I think the jets are very likely to be, I think the NATO jets are very likely to be challenged immediately. So right away, you've got a conflict between Russia and NATO

that could well go regional and ultimately nuclear. And aside from that, the standard procedure when you establish a no-fly zone is to first take out any challenges on the ground in the form of anti-aircraft facilities that can detect your planes and or launch missiles against them. And some of those facilities are in Russian territory. So, you know, if we follow standard procedure, we're going to be tempted to start bombing Russia right away. And we're certainly going to do that if their planes start using the ground-based, if their planes or their missiles are using ground-based facilities like that to challenge us. It's interesting because I think one reason why no-fly zone pulls rather well, and it does seem at the moment to poll pretty well with the American public, is that it does, it, it, describes, or at least seems to describe, a very placid outcome while concealing the process. It says Ukraine is simply a zone in which Russian planes don't fly. Well, who's against that?

No one wants Russian planes flying over Ukraine, but it conceals the process by which we try to get to that outcome. What's more, and what you just said made me think of this, no fly zone isn't actually the outcome when it comes to a showdown between NATO and Russia. The outcome, as you said, is something more like a regional war, right? NATO or American Air Force bombs Russian forces. Russia responds by escalating the war somewhere, maybe in the Baltic, maybe by bombing Moldova, maybe by continuing its invasion.

And then the U.S. has to respond to that escalation. And before you know it, we are dangerously close to a scenario where we are talking about deaths, not in the hundreds or thousands, but potentially in the millions. So it's interesting because no-fly zone conceals two things in that interpretation. It conceals the process by which we clear the skies over Ukraine. And it conceals the end result of a no-fly zone, which is not just, oh, no planes over Libya,

no planes over Bosnia. No, it's a nuclear power with the fourth or fifth largest military in the world and one of the most sophisticated air forces in the world. It would simply pour gasoline on a fire. Yeah, no-fly zone sounds like just a passive thing. It sounds like almost just the absence of war. which we're all in favor of. And often, you know, it almost is that simple. Again, in certain kinds of cases, it's just that this is the opposite of one of those kinds of cases. And remember, you know, I am not in the Putin's crazy crowd. I think he's more or less a rational actor, even if the degree of his miscalculation with this invasion suggests he is not in touch with good information about the actual real world out there, which is a little troubling in itself. But even with rational actors,

if you do just the standard kind of war games modeling and see what kind of tip for tats can ensue from a no-fly zone and throw in just a modest amount of kind of fog of war, you can readily get to to nuclear war. Right. I can imagine some people listening to this and having two objections to the case that we're making. Objection number one is that

if you extend our logic too far, or if you simply extend our logic and say, you cannot declare no-fly zones when a nuclear power invades a bordering country, that essentially means that Russia, China,

India, Pakistan, Britain, France, Israel have a kind of de facto opening to invade their neighbors. And then to say, uh, uh, uh, don't try to punish us with military retribution because you know what we got. We got a nuke in the back pocket. And if you come anywhere near us and you try to stop us, we can always lose our minds and maybe bomb you with a nuke. So where does the logic end here. Where does it leave us to say that NATO can't enforce no-fly zone over Russia because these kind of military showdowns between nuclear powers are untenable? I think the unfortunate truth is that in a world of nuclear superpowers, there are some forms of aggression that you can't realistically do anything about.

That said, I do not think it's impossible to build a world where nuclear superpowers don't take advantage of those kinds of opportunities. I've been a big advocate of the United States itself establishing an example of strict compliance with international law in terms of not invading countries. It has not done that. It has invaded Iraq in pretty clear violation of international law. It's had other military interventions that were pretty clearly in violation of international law. American troops in Syria right now are in violation of international law. And the Russians, this is a big grievance of theirs. In 2007, Putin delivered a speech at the Munich Security conference where the speech got a lot of attention because it was very strident. And

And he said, look, the U.S. has been violating international law left and right. They've been expanding NATO. They seem bent on expanding it to as many of our borders as possible. And this is just not acceptable. And at that point, Russia had not committed these kinds of violations of international law. And then the next year in 2008, George W. Bush kind of strong-armed, reluctant European allies into declares. that Ukraine and Georgia would become members of NATO. And look, I'm not making excuses for Putin, okay? You know, what he did is a clear violation of international law. He's the criminal in this case. But I do think that if we really want a world in which countries don't invade other countries, and I do think that's achievable, we have to pay more attention to the strictures of international law ourselves. In the meanwhile, we're going to live in a messier world than I would like, where you have to respect certain kinds of red lines as being lines that if you cross them just bring an unacceptable chance of nuclear war. There is a shared set of assumptions

that have guided American foreign policy in the last few decades that kind of constitute the implicit ideology of the blob, and it tends to lead to a lot of military intervention in various forms, direct intervention, aerial intervention, including drone strikes, proxy intervention, even kind of non-military meddling in countries' internal affairs that can bring blowback of its own. It just seems to some of us that it backfires more often than not. The same with the humanitarian impulse, which has become a bigger part of foreign policy motivation, I would say over the last few decades, a bigger part of the rationale for intervention. It's a great impulse. In my view, it backfires more often than not. Just one example would be Syria.

We turned what would have been a brutally crushed rebellion, which is a horrible thing in and of itself, into a raging civil war that got hundreds of thousands of people killed. And in the end, the leader we had hoped to depose was still running the show anyway. So among the things that characterized the blob are the sense of American exceptionalism, an intended desire to spread American values, a strong and laudable in itself, humanitarian impulse, a kind of almost monarchyan view of the world, dividing it into good and evil, and particularly dividing it along the line of democracies on the one hand and autocracies on the other. Again, laudable impulse, I think it often has bad consequences to create that dividing line because it, for one thing, tends to have the effect

of forging a stronger alliance among the autocracies. And so the kind of, you know, the division of the world between good and evil becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. What is the most important mistake you think the blob made in the run-up to Putin's invasion of Ukraine? Well, in the 1990s, after the Cold War, we at first made some verbal assurances to what was then the Soviet Union that we would not be expanding NATO at all beyond, you know, East Germany, which had become part of West Germany. then in the late 90s the decision was made to actually expand NATO. People warned against this. George Cannon, who is known as the architect of the containment policy that during the Cold War is considered a big success, warned against it vehemently. He said, you know, Russia's going to react badly to this and then people are going to say that's what Russia is like. They're aggressive. He says, and that's wrong. That we will have made them do this. We will have provoked them.

and in 2008 we made the fateful commitment to eventually admit Ukraine and Georgia. We had already expanded it to Russia's borders and encompassed some former Soviet republics, okay, not just former Warsaw Pact nations like Poland and Hungary. So Russia was already finding this deeply threatening and not shockingly. I mean, it's comparable to, say, finding out that Mexico is entering into a pact with China and they will now have Chinese weapons and maybe Chinese troops, who knows, you know, we would totally freak out. You know, people say, well, now we know it was a good idea because look how aggressive they are. But I think a careful look at the evidence and the actual sequence of events strongly suggests that the reason we have a problem in Ukraine is not because we didn't let Ukraine into NATO sooner, but because we expanded NATO. You know, somebody said, I forget who, that, you know, since the Cold War, NATO has been an organization whose mission

is to deal with problems created by its existence. And I think in some cases that that sadly is true. What's the biggest mistake that you think the blob made not in the last decade or two decades, but in the last six months? Is there something that the Biden administration, other people in Washington, D.C. could have done that would have made the invasion of Ukraine less likely, in your opinion? I will say, even before Putin issued that December list of demands, there was a moment that passed almost unnoticed in early November when Biden issued a declaration jointly with Ukraine, it had some title like, you know, joint security, something or other, and it reaffirmed,

Ukraine's right to seek membership in NATO. Some people have called that the last straw for Putin. I will say it was right after that that the troop movements of his started to assume a form that led some people to say, wait, it's looking like we really are going to see an invasion. And again, I don't know why Biden did that. we knew it was to say the least a sensitive spot for Russia, but I will say just consistently we have been almost indifferent to concerns about what's going on in Putin's head and in Russian psychology generally. And if I just had to, you know, if you want my biggest single kind of

grievance about the blob, the people who populate the American foreign policy establishment I think do not do a very good job of just putting themselves in the shoes of all the players around the globe, including the leaders and the people they're leading, you know, the the grassroots sentiment, and working to understand how they view the world and what the red lines for them are. I can imagine some people listen to this and saying, Derek, you and Bob are just asking for appeasement. you're just asking for the U.S. to essentially adopt the views of our nemeses, to give into our nemeses, to listen to autocrats and people who are against liberalism and democracy and do everything possible to appease them and give them what they want just so they don't cause any further

military trouble. What is your response to the appeasement charge? The incident of appeasement that made that term famous, which is, you know, Hitler in Munich and Prime Minister Chamberlain's concession to Hitler consisted of letting Hitler take a chunk of Czechoslovakia and move his troops in. That's not what some of us were advocating in the way of a diplomatic overture toward Russia before the invasion. We were talking about something that would keep him from from putting any troops in Ukraine. And now any realistic deal probably would involve his maintaining troops in Ukraine. So that would be a much truer form of appeasement as a result of not reaching a diplomatic solution before the war, which again, I'm not sure was possible,

but I'm pretty sure we didn't try. You know, we are a species with a whole infrastructure for moral decision-making. And we have moral intuitions about justice and charity and so on, which are great. We're definitely on balance, lucky to have them. However, they were designed for a world that didn't have nuclear weapons, okay? Our species evolved in a hunter-gather environment, basically. And that's the reason I think we need to try to examine our moral reactions from as detached a perspective as possible sometimes, including the very laudable moral reaction of a kind of compassion that wants us to step in and help the Ukrainians who definitely deserve help. You know, the impulse to implement a no-fly zone is entirely laudable.

But if when you step back and look at the implications, you conclude that something designed to help, thousands, tens of thousands, however many people, could imperil hundreds of millions, billions of people, you know, I think you have to pay attention to that calculation. And it's genuinely not easy. And, you know, I have the same feelings as everyone else. I, you know, it's like, you know, I see a Russian tank blown up and I go great. And then on reflection, I think two things. I think, you know, there was some poor sap in that tank who at age 18 did what kids have done all over the world, said, mom, I want to join the army. You know, know, and now he's dead. And then the second thing is, are all these weapons we're sending in, and I don't know the answer to this, are they just going to lead to more suffering in the way they did in Syria? Are they going to lead to a lot more death in suffering without changing the outcome? I don't know the answer to that question. It's complicated. I'm just saying it's a question, we don't automatically ask ourselves. And I think it's the kind of question we need to try to ask

ourselves. We need to step back and do the larger moral calculus and minimize human suffering. My last question for you, Bob, would it be fair to say that at this moment, the U.S. and NATO face a menu of bad options, but that a no-fly zone is simply the worst of those very bad options on the menu. Yeah, I think a no-fly zone is just about the worst of all options I can think of and sort of maybe sending NATO troops in and increasing the chances of a conflict with Russia from like 99%, which a no-fly zone gets you to 100%. You know, it's strange. I grew up in an era where there was such consciousness of the threat of nuclear apocalypse that there was a certain kind of respect for being very, very careful about increasing the chances by even a small amount.

And I think for whatever reason, we've become a little less conscious of the threat. It hasn't been very big, but I think we're at a moment where it's become non-trivial again and a no-fly zone would escalate it from non-trivial to significant. Bob, thank you so much for joining us. I really, really appreciate it. Okay, thanks.