The Breakdown - What the West Got Wrong on Ukraine

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. The breakdown is sponsored by nexus.io, Arculus, and FtX, and produced and distributed by CoinDesk. What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, February 27th, and that means it's time for Long Reads Sunday. Before we get into that, if you're enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to get deeper into the conversation, come join us on the breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or come to bit.combe, breakdown pod. Now, today for LRS, we're going to read three threads related to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Starting point is 00:00:50 Two of them are about why the West got it wrong on Ukraine, offering very different pictures, and the third is, well, something a little bit different that I'll share at the end. I share these perspectives not because I necessarily agree with them, but because I think these are the questions that we're asking now, and it's important to ask them. It's important to ask them out loud to be able to have the conversation. The first is from Constantine Kissen, who's a comedian, the co-host of TriggerPod, which is also a YouTube channel. And Constantine talks a lot about woke culture and the problems thereof, which he'll see through this thread. He writes, The Why You Were Wrong About Ukraine and Will Be Again, Megathread. and I'm going to excerpt it so there's a whole historical section in here that you should go back and read if you're enjoying it.

Starting point is 00:01:35 There will be no invasion, they said. Putin is just saber-rattling, they told you. It's just Biden trying to escalate the situation so he can look good by diffusing it, they explained. Anti-establishment voices on both left and right, voices of reason, urged us to be careful. They argued often convincingly that Russia must not be provoked, that concessions must be made to secure peace. And you believe them. You believe them for the same reason I would have believed them. You believe them because the establishment voices kept lying to you. You believe them because you know that Western leaders are corrupt, dishonest, war-mongering incompetence who have led us into a series of pointless counterproductive wars. You believe them because you don't want a confrontation with a nuclear superpower on the other side of the world over some piece of land you'd struggle to find on a map. And they were making good points, were they not? Surely they were right when they explained that the reason all of this is happening is that ever eastwards expansion of NATO. We mustn't poke the Russian bear, as one friend put it. and aren't we here in the West guilty of the same or worse? Sure, Russia annexed a peace of Ukraine in 2014

Starting point is 00:02:32 and orchestrated a civil war in the country's eastern regions. But what about Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan, where our involvement has killed more people for no discernible benefit to anyone except ISIS and the Taliban who thrived in the chaos we created? And isn't it true that people in eastern Ukraine are mostly Russian speakers? Isn't it true that they voted in referendums

Starting point is 00:02:51 for their right to self-determination? Isn't it true that these lands were historically part of Russia? wasn't, in fact, Russia founded in Kiev, today's capital of Ukraine? There will be no invasion, in other words. And if there is, well, it's Russian land populated by Russian speakers who want nothing more than to be rightfully reunited with their historic motherland. This narrative is persuasive precisely because it contains grains of truth. It is true that NATO has expanded eastwards since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Starting point is 00:03:18 It is true that American and British interventions in the Middle East were calamitous, and that's why we, that is you and I, oppose them at the time. It is true that the people in eastern Ukraine speak Russian, that referendums were held, that these lands used to be a part of the Russian Empire, and that the history of what we now call Russia began with the Kiev and Rus. But to leave the discussion here is myopic and absurd. And this is where Constantine gets into a long historical section, which again, I encourage you to go read. But we're going to pick back up when he writes, The crisis in Ukraine is a symptom of a far bigger problem, one about which I have been warning for some time. The West is divided, distracted, and weak.

Starting point is 00:03:54 A terrible pandemic has ravaged the minds of Western elites for decades, turning us into a self-loathing, nihilistic people whose main preoccupation is self-flagellating while hypnotically reciting the wrongs of our past. It does not matter how much economic, military, or technology power you have if you are unwilling or unable to use it to achieve your objectives. The reason Russia invaded Ukraine and will continue its expansionist policies is the same reason why China is expanding into the South Sea and moving in on Taiwan, because they can. While here in the West, we talk endlessly about equality, diversity, and social justice, and the rest of the world, things are much simpler. People respect, strength, and despise weakness. And the more weakness fear and hesitation the West shows, the worse this problem

Starting point is 00:04:33 is going to get. The events of the last few days are not the beginning of the end, or even the end of the beginning of this broader geopolitical struggle. They are a sign that the disease of the Western mind has metastasized sufficiently, and our enemies know it. The collapse of the West is coming, and save for a miraculous recovery, there's nothing any of us can do. about it. So clearly, this is the anti-woke argument, the culture war argument, about who we are supposed to be as a fundamental causal factor in Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Nexo is a trusted and easy to use crypto platform, where you can buy cryptocurrencies at the touch of a button and start earning up to 18% annual interest that is paid out daily.

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Starting point is 00:06:36 One of the largest exchanges in the U.S. FDXUS is also the only leading exchange that supports both Ethereum and Solana NFTs. When you trade NFTs on FTCX, you pay no gas fees. Download the FTCX app today and use referral code breakdown to support the show. Let's jump now to Melissa Chan, a reporter at the Washington Post. The prevailing belief from experts the last few weeks is that Putin wouldn't try something like this. Not a criticism of expertise, but it's a reminder that rational people analyzing things do not take into account enough the possibility that some autocrats are crazy.

Starting point is 00:07:15 I see the same approach to analyzing Xi Jinping. There is an assumption he is rational. This is why he wouldn't do X or Y. But what if hubris being surrounded by yes men in power make men nuts? Not enough credence is given to this possibility in foreign policy. Erdogan is another example. He's chosen to ignore all as economists and run an economic policy in his country. Strong eye alone can fix it energy here, leading to a collapse of the lira and debilitating inflation in Turkey. This was not rational, yet he did it anyway. History is literally littered with examples of leaders who start acting totally nuts because of their power.

Starting point is 00:07:49 Yet modern-day policymakers mostly ignore this fact, when there have been so many data points and focus mainly on what rational people would do. tyrants, they're not like us. Only a handful of people around the world ever experienced that level of power and the mental impact. This is why crazy worst-case scenarios need to be taken seriously rather than always shove to the fringe of the Gentile policy world. As some have pointed out, not all experts, of course. Policy folks in the Baltic states have been far less sanguine, for example. And again, this is not a criticism of the deep knowledge people have. My point is we should really take the crazy factor more seriously. So one thing that this second argument from Melissa does differently than the first argument is that it does put agency with the leaders, the leader in this case, who made the decision to actually take the action to invade. That's different than the first analysis, which mostly

Starting point is 00:08:38 focuses on our part of the problem, and how our mental deficiency in the West created an incentive or an opportunity for these leaders to think differently, to think that we were weak. This is not a critique of either of these two positions. I think they both add something to the discourse, but it's hard not to notice the solipsism of us sitting around here in the West talking about what we got wrong while the actions of others are actually shaping what's happening. What's problematic about Melissa's argument is that the diagnosis of acting rational has to incorporate what the objectives are by which rationality is going to be assessed. If your goal, for example, is something that seems fundamentally irrational to your

Starting point is 00:09:20 opponent's mind, then the completely rational actions you might take to get there will seem, as Melissa calls it, crazy. The problem is that an assessment of crazy leads to an assessment of unpredictability, which isn't necessarily the case. It shows that we have a very hard time understanding fundamentally different prioritizations and goals. It is a weakness for us, at least from a foreign policy perspective, to not be able to reorganize rationality based on a goal that may itself seem irrational to us right from the beginning. Now, I don't want to get too much deeper into this because I don't want to go speculate about Putin's motivations, and I'm not enough of a Russia expert or a Putin expert to know to what extent the arguments I've seen that,

Starting point is 00:10:04 for example, this was always going to be a crisis because to him it is a historical accident to be righted on a fundamental level that Ukraine is not part of Russia. I just don't know how valid those things are, so it's hard for me to state about what that seemingly irrational goal might be. What I know is that it's dangerous to write things off as just crazy. But I think the point that Melissa is getting at that we need to understand global leaders, world leaders, through a lens that may not be the same as our own, is important. However, there's another piece of this story that I still am having a hard time getting my hands around and sifting through the copious amounts of information on either side.

Starting point is 00:10:45 And that is what average Russians think about this. I'll share one more thread this time from Sam Green, a professor of politics at King's College London, whose writing has been featured on the show a couple times this week. He wrote, one more thread today, and then I'm going to take a break and decompress for a while. This one's about protests in Russian public opinion. There have been about 1,700 arrests at anti-war protests across Russia today, and NLW note this was after the first day of fighting. Given the propensity of these numbers to lag, the actual number is probably higher. We don't know how many people came out to protest. It may not have been very many. but it will have likely been 10 to 20 times the number who were arrested at least. Bear in mind that the Russian protest scene has been dormant since riot police more or less

Starting point is 00:11:27 wiped the streets with Navalny supporters in the early months of 2021. After that, the opposition called off protests out of concern for the physical welfare of their supporters. Given the level of ambient repression, the fact that anyone is coming out at all is striking. Striking as well as the fact that the riot police came out before the protesters did, especially in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but not only according to report. And the police didn't exactly behave themselves. At least one of my friends in Moscow was delivered to a police station unconscious with a fractured skull. Now here's what my research

Starting point is 00:11:58 suggests about protests in general, and in Russian in particular. People are most likely to turn against the state when it presents an immediate and unavoidable threat to their ability to imagine a future better than the present. When threats are diffuse, people find individual ways of coping. When they're concentrated, they have no choice but to come together to seek a solution that helps everyone. We also know that protests are driven by moral shock, when the state begins to do something that not only offends a person's sense of right and wrong, but that alters their sense of what the state might do in the future. This can cause a panic and a now or never response. Without the ability to interview protesters, I cannot know what's driving the mobilization in Russia right now,

Starting point is 00:12:35 or how much it might grow, but we can form reasonable hypotheses. We know that this war presents a concentrated threat in the form of the damage it will do to ordinary Russians' livelihoods for decades to come. So it is possible that some protesters are mobilizing to prevent their futures in those of their children from being foreclosed. Indeed, that idea that Putin has just robbed Russia of its future is one of the most common refrains I'm seeing in anti-war posts on social media. We also know that this war may cause a moral shock. Anecdotal evidence and a bit of survey evidence suggest that most Russians didn't take the prospect of war seriously and have thus been caught off guard. While Russia has been

Starting point is 00:13:11 been to war before, Russians are mostly accustomed, like Americans or Brits, to seeing their bombs fall on far-off places of which they know little, a category that includes for most Russians, Chechnya. Ukraine, on the other hand, is both close and familiar. Tens of millions of Russians have Ukrainian heritage, or indeed were born there. They have family and friends there. The cities they are bombing are cities many of them have visited. The violence in Ukraine, coupled with the violence in the streets at home, may, and I emphasize may, make many Russians very uncomfortable. It may suggest the potential of both sides of violence to escalate. That too may be a future many Russians will want to avoid. Clearly, Putin will have thought about this. This was a risk everyone knew about

Starting point is 00:13:52 going into this war. That's why he had the riot police ready to go. Putin will have calculated that he'll survive. He may well be right, he often is, but not always. I think the important thing about this thread, clearly, is that we do ourselves a disservice when we view global events, these liminal moments between two different normals as solely the purview of individual leaders. They often start there as the decisions of individual leaders. They almost never end there. They end in thousands rising in the street to protest their country's actions. They end in thousands in a different street, rising to confront an aggressor. They end in thousands in far-off places telling their elected officials what they are and are not

Starting point is 00:14:37 willing to deal with when it comes to how their country is involved and inserts itself into this situation. It can feel extremely disempowering and like there is no room for agency when the tidal waves of history come crashing. But it is never as true as it seems. I want to say thanks again to my sponsors for supporting this show, nexo.io, Arculus and FTX. And I want to say thanks to you guys for listening. Until tomorrow, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.

The Breakdown - What the West Got Wrong on Ukraine

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