Why I think the war is unlikely to end soon

Unfortunately for Trump, the Iranians also have a vote and they have a strong incentive to keep the war going until they have inflicted so much economic pain that any US president will think twice before pulling that kind of stunt again, because otherwise they have every reason to think that the US and Israel will come back for more in a few months or a few years at most. Unless the Iranians can ensure that Israel and the US won’t be able to “mow the lawn” on a regular basis, they can’t even hope to have a normal economic life (let alone solve the political crisis that has plagued the country since at least the end of the 1990s but has grown even more acute in recent years), but the only guarantee they’re going to get is if they’re able to cause enough economic fallout in the US to make the idea of starting a war with Iran again politically toxic in the US. Crucially, it’s not just the hardliners who have incentives to support this strategy, because even the moderates in Iran, who criticized the policy of “forward defense” consisting in funding proxies all over the region and were in favor of engagement with the West before the war, aren’t going to agree to abandon not just Iran’s nuclear program but also its ballistic missile program after what happened.

Of course, this sort of rational calculation is easier to make when your country isn’t being destroyed and the last three people who used to have your job weren’t recently murdered, so depending on how things develop the Iranians may agree to end the war before the point where they have inflicted enough pain to the world economy has been reached. They are also under tremendous military and economic pressure and, while many people seem to think it doesn’t matter (perhaps because of the myth that US bombing didn’t force the North Vietnamese to make concessions during the Vietnam War), everyone has a breaking point and the Iranians are no exception. But at the moment they don’t seem anywhere close to it and, while Trump would probably love to end the war before the pressure from voters (who don’t want to pay more at the pump), Republicans in Congress (who don’t want to get clobbered in November), American businessmen (who want to lose their customers) and US allies (who don’t want their economy to be destroyed) becomes irresistible, he only seems prepared to do that if the Iranians agree to conditions they are unlikely to accept right now because, despite what he keeps repeating, they don’t think they have been defeated yet.

So I think that, before the war can end, both sides will have to experience a lot more pain, because until they do their positions will remain too far apart. The risk is that, as neither side can force the other to agree to end the war on its terms, one of them will be tempted to escalate things in the hope of obtaining concessions from the other by ratcheting up the pressure on it, which probably wouldn’t work and would actually make it harder to end the war because it would make the sunk cost fallacy bite even harder. In particular, I’m afraid that Trump will not resist the temptation to put US troops on the ground in Iran, which would turn into a quagmire with a pretty high probability because on the one hand they would be constantly harassed by drones and missiles but on the other hand a withdrawal would look like a debacle unless the Iranians agreed to make concessions they probably won’t be prepared to make for a while even in the best case scenario. Now, it wouldn’t be a large-scale invasion like what the US did in Iraq in 2003 (because that would require months of preparations and nothing of the sort has been done), but I think it’s quite likely at this point that the US will land troops somewhere in Iran and once this has happened there is no saying what comes next.

A lot of people seem convinced that any kind of ground operation is out of the question, that’s certainly what the supporters of this idiocy promised when it started, but I don’t think it’s as obvious as they think. When NATO decided to bomb Serbia in 1999, decision-makers were convinced that it would only take a few days for Milosevic to cave. Except that it didn't happen, the Serbs refused to cave and, several weeks later, there was no end in sight and the Clinton administration started drafting ground invasion plans because the alternative was to suffer a total loss of face if the campaign ended before Serbia had agreed to NATO's conditions. If you had asked US officials before the war whether they would ever launch a ground invasion of Serbia, they would have categorically rejected that possibility, yet toward the end they were seriously considering it and, had it not been for the fact that Russia brokered a deal that ended the war on NATO's terms, it's possible they would have done it. The point is that, even when a war seems low-risk, you never know where it will take you because war has a way of creating a dynamic you don't control by changing the incentives in ways that can make things you would never have considered possible at the beginning seem inevitable later.

Moreover, while Trump may have started the war, it’s not just about him anymore and not only because the Iranians also have a vote. Indeed, most people in the US national security establishment probably wouldn’t have supported Trump’s decision to attack Iran, but they care a lot about “credibility” and this makes them uniquely vulnerable to the sunk cost fallacy, so now that the US is at war you can be certain that many of them will push to continue until Iran has caved and will oppose ending the war before Washington has obtained enough concessions from Iran. It’s also likely that, even if the US offered to end the war by returning to the status quo ante now, the Iranians would not agree unless the US gave them formal guarantees against another attack and nobody in Washington will ever agree to that. People in Washington’s foreign policy establishment also understand that, if the US caves before Iran agrees to make concessions, the Iranians will have established deterrence on the US and that’s not something people in Washington will easily accept. As I explained above, that’s precisely the reason why Iran has an incentive to continue the war until the US caves. This is not a recipe for a quick resolution of the conflict, to say the least. Now, it doesn’t mean that Trump won’t give up if or when the economic situation reaches a boiling point and the pressure becomes untenable, but it’s a powerful factor that will push him toward intransigence and may lead to further escalation.

I have no idea how this war is going to end and I don’t think anybody else does either. I just don’t think it will end soon and, precisely for that reason, I think it’s very hard to know how it will end because it means that a lot of unforeseeable things can happen and probably will if I’m right and it lasts for a while. It’s possible that, by keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed and attacking energy infrastructure in the Gulf, Iran will manage to impose such economic pain on the US and the rest of the world that it will be able to force Trump to give up without obtaining significant concessions. Unless the US can reopen Hormuz soon, it will definitely be a shitshow. A lot of people seem to think that you can make more than 10 million barrels of oil per day disappear from the global market overnight, not to mention a large share of the global supply of natural gas, without any major consequences, but that’s completely delusional. Unless traffic resumes soon, this will result in a monumental energy crisis and it will be even worse if things get out of control and both sides start going after each other’s energy infrastructure. The only question is whether the US will manage to reduce the threat posed by Iran to shipping in Hormuz enough for traffic to resume before the shit hits the fan and Trump’s stupidity triggers a global economic meltdown.

Why I think it’s a stupid war

There was no reason to risk such a disaster by starting a war with Iran. It’s a relatively weak country that posed no threat to the US as long as it stayed out of its business, which it had no reason to get into. The only issue with respect to Iran that the US has reason to be concerned with is the possibility that it might develop nuclear weapons, though not because it might use them to nuke the US, Europe or even Israel (which of course would never happen because, whatever you think of the Iranian leadership, they have not demonstrated a desire to commit national suicide), but rather because it might trigger a nuclear arms race in the region and undermine the non-proliferation regime. However, not only was that issue on its way to being solved before Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, but negotiations on the issue had resumed when the US and Israel attacked Iran and there was plenty of time to try to find a peaceful solution because Iran had no way to quickly produce nuclear weapons. Apart from that, the US had no reason to get involved. I understand why Israel or Saudi Arabia doesn’t like that Iran is getting a foothold in their neighborhood through its proxies, but I don’t see how that’s America’s problem, let alone something Europeans or Asians should care about.

Iran is relatively weak country and not a serious threat to the US, but it’s still a country of 90 million with a real state and industrial economy, not a militia or a fragile personalistic regime that will crumble at the first push. Due to its geographic position and the importance of Hormuz, it also holds a gun to the global economy’s head. Since it can’t possibly hope to win a conventional war against the US and Israel, it was obvious from the moment they made it clear that it was an existential war for the regime that it would use the only weapon it has with a chance of forcing the US to back off, which is to close Hormuz and blow up the global economy. Thus, the cost-benefit structure of a war with Iran was highly asymmetric, which is why it was stupid. Even if everything had gone perfectly well and the regime had quickly collapsed and been replaced in short order by a pro-West government, which was never particularly likely, the benefits for the US and the West in general would have been minimal, but any scenario short of that was bound to result in massive costs.

Again, unless Hormuz is reopened soon, we are talking about one of the worst supply shocks in history. The costs that are already baked in the cake at this point outweigh any benefits that might accrue to the US later, at least relative to what it could have obtained without a war, to say nothing of what it will cost the rest of the world. And that’s just for what is already baked in the cake, but it’s almost certainly going to get worse and possibly a lot worse, because again it doesn’t look as though the war is going to end soon. This stupidity is probably going to shave half a percentage point of global economic growth this year even in the best case scenario and, if things go bad enough, we’ll even have a global recession. If they go really bad, it will cause a civil war in Iran and destabilize the entire Middle East for years, possibly resulting in another refugee wave. I would really like the people who constantly blabber about Iran’s proxies to explain how exactly they were such a threat to the world that it’s worth risking such a disaster in the unlikely event that it would permanently eliminate them. But they won’t, because they can’t, since Iran’s proxies were completely irrelevant to anyone who doesn’t live in the Middle East and except perhaps for Israel people in the Middle East are obviously not going to end up better off because of this war.

The truth is that it’s a stupid war that obviously wasn’t the result of careful deliberation. Trump painted himself in a corner in January by threatening to intervene militarily if the regime killed protesters, he was under pressure from Israel and probably let himself be convinced that he could get another easy win by pulling the same stunt as in Venezuela. But Iran isn’t Venezuela, so instead he just got himself into a mess and now he has no idea how to get out of it. He wanted to achieve maximalist goals, such as regime change or at least capitulation by the Iranian leadership, at very low cost, but instead he’ll probably achieve much more modest goals at best and only at a very high cost. Most of the people who supported this stupidity thought the same thing, which is why they’re now moving the goalposts and coming up with preposterous arguments to justify it. For instance, they explain that the fact that Iran closed Hormuz shows that it was a threat that America couldn’t live with, but the Islamic Republic had never closed the strait before and never would have if the US and Israel had not attacked it, so what they're saying is that the war is justified because it was the only way to prevent something that only happened because of it.

The fact that people can use such circular logic without fear of ridicule speaks volumes about how completely broken the public debate is on this topic due to nonstop propaganda. We're supposed to believe that, because the regime is "terroristic", "genocidal" and other meaningless epithets people apply to it, it's totally incapable of even minimal instrumental rationality. Of course, anyone who knows anything about the history of post-1979 Iran also knows that, however counterproductive some of the policies the Iranian deep state insists on pursuing may be (such as wasting inordinate amounts of money to prop up various armed groups in the region and piss off everyone in the process), even hardliners in the IRGC aren’t completely stupid and wouldn’t self-immolate by closing the Strait of Hormuz or launching ballistic missiles at London for no reason. This is just meaningless propaganda, but it’s so ubiquitous that it’s impossible to have a rational debate about Iran, because before you can even start to discuss the issues about which rational and well-informed people can disagree about, you have to go through all that nonsense and it just drowns the signal into noise.

Why I don’t think the US will learn anything

A lot of people assume that Trump will eventually cave and call it a day before he’s obtained any significant concessions from the Iranians on their nuclear program, support for proxies or ballistic missile program. As I explained above, this may well happen, but it’s hardly obvious. A lot of people are making apocalyptic predictions about the consequences of this war for the US, but I think they seriously underestimate how powerful and secure the US is. The truth is that, even in the worst case scenario for the US, Americans will mostly be fine. They will be harmed, but much less than almost everyone else and very little in comparison to the amount of destruction and economic pain they will unleash on Iran and the rest of the world, because the US will be relatively insulated from the both the energy shock and the economic slowdown it will cause since it's a net exporter of energy and is probably the least trade-dependent major economy. Even if Trump ordered a ground invasion of Iran and it turned into a quagmire lasting years, the aggregate cost would be very large even for Americans, the felt cost per capita would be small relative to how rich they are because it will be very diffuse and most of it will be invisible.

Indeed, Americans are so rich that even if the war ended up costing them a trillion dollars (which it might), they wouldn’t feel much pain from it. Sure, they won't like it when the price of gas at the pump keeps rising and it may even force Trump to TACO eventually, but that's still a very small cost in comparison to what the US attack is going to wreak on Iran and the rest of the world and, apart from that, most of the cost for Americans will be hidden. That’s because while most Americans will be made worse off than they otherwise would have been in a counterfactual where the US and Israel didn't attack Iran, they won't observe that counterfactual, nor will they think about it. As Frédéric Bastiat noted more than 150 years ago in a little book called What is seen and what isn’t seen, which everyone should read, people only focus on the visible effects of policies and ignore their invisible consequences, which is why they often embrace bad policies. Except for the higher prices of gas, Americans mostly won’t feel the cost of the war, at least not in a way they will clearly attribute to it.

In practice, the direct monetary cost of the war will take the form of higher fiscal expenditures, which for the most part are going to flow right back into the US economy. Of course, this will have a large opportunity cost, which is why the argument that defense spending is good for the economy because it goes back into it is dumb. But it’s still the case that it’s not as if spending a trillion dollars on a war with Iran were the same as literally destroying a trillion dollars worth of value. Now, the problem with opportunity costs is that, as Bastiat noted, people don’t see them. The median income of Americans may be 1% less than it would have been without the war in 5 years, but Americans won’t see that, because unless things go catastrophically wrong it will still be higher than today and they won’t think about the counterfactual. Even the Iraq War, which is widely seen as one of America's worst foreign policy blunder, only had minimal effects on the average American despite the fact that it destabilized the entire Middle East for more than a decade and cost trillions of dollars.

Similarly, even in the worst case scenario, the Iran War will have a small impact on Americans relative to the cost it will impose on the rest of the world, not to mention Iran whose economy will suffer for years because of this war even if the Iranians can force Trump to TACO. I also don't think it will have the effects some people think on US influence in the world in general and in the Middle East in particular. It's not going to end the role of the dollar and I don't think Gulf states will abandon their alliance with the US either. Where else would they go? It's not as if China was going to protect them from Iran or as if they had a lot of attractive yuan-denominated assets to buy with their earnings from oil and gas exports. Frankly, I think Americans would be lucky if this adventure led to the end of their military presence in the region (because it doesn’t really do them any good and regularly tempts them into this kind of ill-considered adventures), but I don’t think it’s going to happen no matter exactly how it ends. Republicans will get clobbered in the midterms over it and people will mention for years how stupid it was, just like what happened after the invasion of Iraq, but at the end of the day it will not be experienced as a personal disaster by Americans and they won't learn any lesson from it except very temporarily.

Eventually, the fiscal irresponsibility will probably catch up with Americans and they will have to wind down their military spending (unless AI massively increases productivity and they can just grow out of that problem), so I’m not saying they are invulnerable. But I don’t think that moment has come yet and it’s not as if the US were the only Western country with that problem. It’s also not as if, when the music finally stops and they have to cut public spending, the economic crisis this will cause was going to turn the US into a third world country. It will be a costly adjustment, but it will remain a very rich country. It’s only against China that, if they act stupidly, they may really pay a serious price, but hopefully it won’t come to that because, even if you don't care about Americans, a war between the US and China would likely result in a global economic meltdown that would make even a prolonged closure of Hormuz look like a picnic. Critics of US foreign policy keep expecting that Americans will experience some blowback for the stupid decisions they make, but the world isn’t fair and the truth is that Americans are largely insulated from the consequences of their foreign policy blunders, which is part of the problem. In fact, the US is so rich and powerful that, except in dealing with China, it can do the dumbest shit imaginable and it won't really matter that much for Americans in the grand scheme of things, which is why they never learn. This will be no different.

The observation that large corporations are hard to square with democratic theory isn’t new. It was most famously made by Charles Lindblom in Politics and Market, a book he published in 1977, which though largely forgotten today made a huge splash at the time.1 Lindblom points out that, although in practice elected officials have a wide latitude to govern as they see fit, because ordinary people have neither the knowledge nor the time to attend to public affairs consistently and most of them don’t even have the desire to do so in the first place, in a democracy voters can still replace them periodically and this indirectly gives them a degree of control over government because it creates incentives for politicians not to stray too far from popular preferences. I think Lindblom may have overestimated that mechanism and failed to fully appreciate the degree to which politicians could ignore popular preferences even on politically salient issues as long as there is a strong enough consensus among the elite on them, but he still understood that at best it gave people a very indirect way to control the government.

In theory, people have a much tighter control over corporations, because as consumers they have a veto power over their products since they are not forced to buy them, whereas they are forced to abide by government decisions even if they disagree with them. If corporations ignore people’s preferences, so the argument goes, they will go out of business. Thus, while people can’t choose the leadership of corporations in the way they can choose political leaders, they still exercise a lot of power over them and the decisions they make through their ability not to buy their products. This fact is supposed to reconcile the freedom that corporations enjoy in a market economy with democratic principles. In a market economy, which Lindblom calls a market system, a large category of decisions with enormous consequences for the public is effectively turned over to businessmen and taken off the political agenda, as the law protects corporations from interference by the state into their decision-making.2 Lindblom says that in practice businessmen are a kind of public official, but unlike political leaders, people can’t vote for them. This would be democratically problematic if it meant that people have no control over their decisions, but as we have seen, they are supposed to control them through their power as consumers.

The problem is that, as Lindblom explains, this story doesn’t really hold up. His main argument is that, even in a perfectly competitive sector, there is no obvious way to infer a profit-maximizing strategy from the behavior of consumers unless you also wish uncertainty out of existence. Whether consumers keep buying their products or stop doing so, it doesn’t tell businessmen what they should do to make sure that consumers keep buying their products or start doing it again. For instance, when Steve Jobs decided to create the iPhone, there was no way to know that it would be successful. In general, from the fact that consumers have a veto power over the products of corporations and that corporations have to maximize their profits if they want to stay in business, it doesn’t follow that businessmen face a single correct strategy.3 This means that, at the end of the day, the control that people indirectly have on businessmen’s decision through their veto power over their products is very loose and leaves businessmen with even more discretion over their decisions than political leaders have despite the fact that as consumers people exercise their veto power continuously whereas as citizens they only do so every few years during elections. In particular, even in a world with no market imperfection, strategic choices would remain almost entirely at the discretion of businessmen.

But as we have seen, those decisions can have enormous consequences, not just for corporations, their employees and their customers, but also for the rest of society. For instance, when a company makes a decision to abandon a product line and close the factories that made the products in question, it may economically destroy entire communities even though it may not actually improve profitability in the long run. To be clear, Lindblom understood that the protection from state interference that corporations enjoy in liberal democracies was one of the reasons why market economies have historically been good at delivering broad-based prosperity relative to other systems, so he was not trying to make the case for a planned economy.4 One may well argue that, because of the tension between corporate power and democratic principles, we should abandon the market system and switch to a system that gives people more control over corporate leaders and the decisions they make, but that conclusion doesn’t logically follow from Lindblom’s argument and he wasn’t making it. He was just pointing out that, while democratic institutions systematically discipline political leaders but not corporate leaders, even though both contribute to determining social outcomes.

In other words, despite the fact that collectively the leaders of large corporations shape have a degree of influence on society that is comparable to that of political leaders and arguably even larger, their decisions are not subjected to any kind of effective democratic control. There is a pragmatic justification for allowing businessmen to enjoy that kind of unfettered power, again that’s one of the reasons why market economies are relatively efficient and can deliver broad-based prosperity in a way other systems can’t, but that justification has nothing to do with democratic principles and, as we have seen, it’s even at odds with them. People just don’t see that contradiction because they have largely internalized that it’s how liberal democracy works. It doesn’t change the fact that, just like political leaders, corporate leaders make decisions that don’t just affect people as a result of transactions they have freely agreed to but entire communities and in many cases even society at large. This is why Lindblom famously concluded his book with the words: “The large private corporation fits oddly into democratic theory and vision. Indeed, it does not fit.”

Which brings me to AI companies. As we have just seen, the existence of a tension between democracy as people imagine it should work and large corporations isn’t new, but if AI companies are right about the impact their work is going to have on society, then in their case that tension is going to reach unprecedented heights. Just think about it for a second. They are promising that, within a few years, virtually every white-collar job will have been automated and that artificial super-intelligence will replace even the smartest and most knowledgeable humans. While manual workers may be safe at first, this won’t last, because artificial super-intelligence will come up with robots that can automate even physical tasks. Not only will labor cease to be a bottleneck, but humans will become economically obsolete. Now, you may disagree with that narrative and think it’s unrealistic, but that’s what AI companies themselves are saying. Moreover, even if the timeline for AI-induced disruption turns out to be more spread out than people at AI companies believe and artificial general intelligence is still more than a decade away, I think at this point there is little doubt that AI will result in massive social and economic disruption.5

For what it’s worth, I personally think that AI companies overestimate how fast adoption will be, not only because I’m still not sure that general artificial intelligence is really just a few years away, but also because I think they underestimate the social, cultural and political obstacles that will slow down adoption. For instance, a lot of people are paid to do a job not just because they have the necessary know-how, but also because they can be held legally responsible for what they do. What it means is that, even once it has become technically possible for AI to automate those jobs, actually moving toward full automation will probably require a pretty extensive overhaul of current law. AI may actually help with that, sorting through current law and figuring out what changes are required is precisely the kind of things I expect it to be pretty good at doing, but the bottleneck will be politics and AI isn’t going to speed that up because it won’t magically prevent different people from having different interests. That’s one of the reasons why, even though I'm pretty bullish on AI, but I still think there is a pretty high probability that it's a bubble, in the sense that revenue will not grow fast enough to justify the enormous capital expenditures they’re making now.

But this won't make the technology or its consequences disappear and, while I’m very unclear about what the actual timeline will be, I have no doubt that it will result in massive social and economic disruption eventually. I also think that, although many people say that we’ve been through technological revolutions before and that it never made humans economically redundant, there are good reasons to think that “this time it will be different”, a phrase that is often used derisively but that may actually be true with AI. I think it’s quite possible that, down the line, AI will change human civilization in unprecedented ways and I also think that it will probably do so relatively quickly by historical standards. It might be like going through the neolithic revolution and the industrial revolution at the same time within a few decades or perhaps even a few years on the fastest timelines. The very notion of what it means to be human may change. In fact, if we end up creating artificial super-intelligence, the human race may not even survive that development. I know it sounds preposterous to most people, but as Richard Chappell recently argued, it’s not so easy to escape the conclusion that we should take AI-safety seriously. The same is true for the hypothesis that AI will make humans economically redundant.

It’s hard to see how one could dismiss that possibility unless one assumed that we’ll never create artificial general intelligence, which may be correct in the short to medium term, but I think it’s surely wrong in the long term and may well be wrong even in the short to medium term. Even if people in the field are wrong that we are just a few years away from artificial general intelligence, unless you think that it’s in principle impossible for a machine to exhibit human-like intelligence (which indeed seems to be what many people are think based on what I think are deeply confused arguments), it will happen sooner or later and, when it does, the questions that people ask right now about how to ensure that AI is aligned and what this even means, how to deploy it so as to minimize economic transition costs, etc. or even whether we should really pursue artificial general intelligence in the first place will probably rank among the most important questions our species has ever had to answer. And the truth is that, along with a few politicians, they will for the most part be answered by a handful of people at AI companies.6

Now, if Lindblom was right that the power of large corporations to wrought economic devastation upon entire communities was inconsistent with democratic principles, then surely that’s even more true of the power of AI companies to make humans economically and intellectually redundant and perhaps even to cause the extinction of the human race also is. Again, just as Lindblom wasn’t drawing the conclusion from his argument that we should replace the market system by a command economy, I’m not arguing that we should nationalize AI companies or even shut them down. I’m just pointing out that, if or when AI companies manage to create artificial general intelligence (which again may take much longer than most people in the industry assume), the gap between the mythology about how democracy is supposed to work and the unprecedented influence that a handful of people had on human civilization will be hard to ignore. In practice, the kind of inconsistency between the power of large corporations and democratic principles that Lindblom was talking about was not a serious threat to liberal democracy, because it took a lot of reflection to even notice it. But if virtually every white-collar job is automated within 2-3 decades because of AI and, with only a relatively short time lag, robots start coming for blue collar jobs as well, it will probably be a different story.

The irony is that most anti-AI people, especially on the left, can’t really make that argument because they spend most of their time trying to downplay the achievements of AI companies and the impact that AI will have on society. It’s hard to make the case that it’s unacceptable for a handful of people at AI companies, over which nobody else has any control, to make decisions that may completely revolutionize society and may even bring about the end of the human race if you insist that large language models are nothing more than “stochastic parrots” and that no machine will ever truly be intelligent or creative. As anyone who follows me on Twitter knows, I’m very pro-AI and I regularly criticize this kind of argument, but I can see where things are headed politically and that’s precisely why I think it’s important that people who share my enthusiasm for AI start thinking seriously about how we’re going to deal with the disruption it will unleash, because otherwise anti-AI politics will become a very powerful force.7 However, this essay was not about that except perhaps indirectly, but about how AI may well bring to the fore the tension between the power of large corporations and democratic principles that Lindblom was talking about.

I think that contrary to the picture that democratic mythology paints, democracy doesn’t abolish the distinction between the people who govern and the people who are governed in any meaningful way, because that’s impossible.8 In other words, I think it’s less a mode of government than a mode of legitimation, just like the doctrine of the divine right in 17th century Europe or the idea that the party was the avant-garde of the proletariat in the Soviet Union and the associated institutions. But just as with those other modes of legitimation, for it to work, people still need to believe in the mythology to some extent. The point I was trying to make in this essay is that, if AI really causes massive social and economic disruption over a relatively short period of time, the incompatibility between the power of large corporations and democratic principles, which up until now was hard to grasp and easy to ignore, may become so obvious that people stop believing in the democratic mythology on which democracy rests to bestow legitimacy on the government. It may be that, just as magic deserted the thrones and kings became men after the French Revolution, the epoch-making changes that a few people working at AI companies will unleash on the world in that scenario will destroy any illusions people may still harbor about the control that democracy gives them on the decisions that shape society.

Of course, if AI really makes humans economically and intellectually redundant eventually, the fact that AI companies will make the tension between corporate power and democratic principles harder to ignore will neither be the only reason why democracy may become unsustainable or even the main one. Once we have developed artificial super-intelligence, even if we somehow manage to keep it under control, it will be very hard to resist the temptation to delegate a lot of decisions to them. In a way, something like that is already operating in liberal democracies today, because technocrats have been given a lot of power to make important decisions and various mechanisms have been created to insulate their decision-making from democratic pressure. But I think it’s fair to say that artificial super-intelligence would take that logic to a completely different level. We tend to think of liberal democracy as natural and assume it will be eternal, but nothing is eternal and, in general, both morality and political institutions are largely downstream from technology. Perhaps AI will do to democracy what gunpowder did to feudalism.

Meanwhile, US companies like OpenAI also have “ethical safeguards”, which are not part of their model’s weights, but manipulate their output to ensure that it’s politically correct. This isn’t the same thing as straight up refusing to talk about certain issues, but it’s arguably more pernicious, because at least when a model just tells you that it can’t talk about what you asked it about you immediately understand what is going on. On the other hand, with the kind of things OpenAI and Western companies do, the average user has no idea that the output of the model has been tweaked to make sure it’s consistent with the ideology of the people who are employed in their ethics department. Moreover, OpenAI doesn’t release the weights of its models, so there is no way to go around those “ethical safeguards”. Finally, whereas DeepSeek has no choice but to engage in that kind of censorship because otherwise the people who run it will be thrown in prison, nobody is forcing Western companies to add “ethical safeguards” to their model.

But that’s not even the most important point or what really annoys me with that kind of reaction. The reason why I’m talking about this episode is that it illustrates the fact that many people in the West, especially in the US but not only, have a pathological obsession with China. They use ridiculously overblown rhetoric such as “totalitarian slave empire” to describe it, cast in a dark light anything that comes out of it and constantly engage in fear-mongering about it. The view I want to defend in this essay is that China haters vastly exaggerate not only the threat posed to the West by China but also how bad the Chinese government is relative to the US and other Western governments, devote far more attention to that threat and the Chinese government’s flaws relative to other problems than is warranted and, even if most of them don’t realize it, do all that not out of concern for human rights but out of American or Western chauvinism, because they want the US or the West to remain on top and can’t come to terms with the fact that American and Western dominance will not remain as undisputed as it used to be.

In practice, however bad you may think China is, there is nothing it can do to the West that even comes close to the harm we can do to ourselves. For instance, people in the West are constantly swimming in propaganda that is entirely homegrown and, while government-enforced censorship is relatively uncommon (although it also exists), people constantly engage in self-censorship on various topics that people in China and other dictatorships can discuss freely, but somehow Western liberals are trying to convince me that what I should be really concerned about is Chinese propaganda and censorship, despite the fact that it has virtually no effect on us and that we can’t do anything about it. I live in France and, for as long as I can remember, I’ve heard French intellectuals, elected and non-elected government officials, journalist and celebrities repeat absurd lies or propaganda slogans that almost nobody believes, such as “immigration has nothing to do with crime”, while people regularly engage in self-censorship on the same topics because they don’t want to be socially ostracized.

Sure, it’s not as bad as being arrested for saying what you think or reading stuff the government doesn’t want you to read, but it’s still pretty bad and the people who constantly talk about how bad Chinese propaganda and censorship, which again has virtually no effect on us and that we can’t do anything about, never talk about that. Now, that’s not particularly surprising given that Western liberals, who are both the main agents and the main victims of that propaganda, tend to be completely oblivious to it, but that doesn’t make their behavior any more rational. Of course, I still prefer to live in a Western democracy than in China, but how is that relevant? It’s not as if anyone, not even China, were trying to turn France or the US into a one-party state and, even if that were the case, it would have no chance of happening with or without Chinese help. I would prefer if the Chinese could also live in a democracy, but I also don’t think it’s my problem and, in any case, there is nothing I or even the West as a whole can do about it. If the Chinese want democracy, they will have to get it themselves.

I should also make clear, because this is relevant to my claim that Western liberals exaggerate how bad China is, that if I prefer to live in a Western democracy than in China, that’s not because in a democracy I get to choose how I’m governed, since I don’t. In a democracy, just as in any other regime, there are people who rule and people who are ruled. Democracy has not somehow abolished that distinction and, in that respect at least, it’s just like any other regime. Government may be somewhat more responsive in a democracy, although that’s hardly obvious and I think the evidence for that view is relatively weak, but in any case even in a democracy the ruling elite often ignores people’s preferences. For instance, the overwhelming majority of the population in France has been clamoring against immigration for decades, but it has continued unabated.2 Yet somehow this doesn’t seem to trouble most of the people who constantly talk about how bad the Chinese have it because they don’t get to choose how they’re governed. In reality, democracy is not a method of government, but a method of legitimation. Elections are not really a mechanism by which people choose how they are governed, but the mechanism we use to confer legitimacy on the government, which can’t operate no matter the nature of the regime without the consent of the governed or at least without the consent of enough of them.3

The reason why elections can do that is not because they’re actually a way for people to govern themselves, which they’re not, but because people believe they are and in general are deeply committed to the fiction that democracy is government “of the people, for the people, by the people”. This myth is to democracy what the doctrine of the divine right of kings was to monarchy or what the doctrine of the Party’s role as the vanguard of the proletariat was to the Bolshevik regime. Of course, that’s not to say that democratic governments don’t respond at all to people’s preferences and that elections don’t play a role in the relevant mechanisms, but non-democratic governments are also responsive to people’s preferences to some extent even if the mechanisms are different and elections generally play a much smaller role in them. You can argue that, as a form of political organization, democracy is superior to a one-party state like China, but that’s not because there is anything more “natural” about elections as a method of legitimation and certainly not because democracy has somehow abolished the distinction between the people who rule and the people who are ruled. If you ask me, the reason why democracy is superior to the alternatives is that, for the most part, it makes it possible for people to say and read what they want without risking being thrown in prison or losing their property.4

So I’m not saying that democracy is not valuable, I’m just saying that, if democracy is valuable, that’s not because it allows people to govern themselves, which is a fiction.5 China haters tend to overestimate how much better people in Western democracies have it because, in addition to the real benefits of democracy, they ascribe to it imaginary ones. In other words, I’m not making a false equivalence between China and Western democracies (which probably won’t prevent some logically challenged people from making that accusation), I’m just pointing out that the difference, while real and important, is not as large as people think. Besides, whatever else may be said about the Popular Republic of China (at least since Deng Xiaoping took over after Mao’s death), it’s hardly a uniquely bad dictatorship since, its violations of human rights notwithstanding, it has at least improved the population’s standard of living and even achieved the largest reduction of poverty in history. I don’t think it had to be a dictatorship to do that, but most authoritarian governments are not more respectful of human rights and can’t boast of the same track-record, yet as long as they’re geopolitically aligned with the West it doesn’t seem to bother China haters very much.

Which brings me to the next topic. Even when they’re not trying to scare me by talking about how China isn’t a democracy, people also try to convince me that I should be very concerned about Chinese foreign policy, but they never explain why. This is a very complicated issue, which I could only address seriously by devoting a separate essay to it, but I nevertheless want to make a few remarks about it here. The most common argument that people who argue that we should worry about China’s foreign policy is that it might invade Taiwan. Now, I certainly don’t deny that it’s the case, but I also don’t see why someone in the West should be particularly concerned about this. China hawks argue that it would be extremely disruptive because Taiwan dominates the market for the most advanced semiconductors, but I think we’d adjust relatively quickly and that in any case that’s not worth risking a war between the US and China, which would be immensely more disruptive for the West and the rest of the world. Of course, China hawks argue that it wouldn’t happen because their policy would deter China, but I actually think it would make a Chinese more likely because, to cut a long story short, a US pledge to defend Taiwan would be interpreted in a threatening way by China yet it would probably not be credible.

Moreover, if a Chinese attempt to change the status quo in Taiwan could be disruptive, that’s mostly because the US is being deliberately ambiguous about whether it would intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion or blockade of the island. Indeed, the truth is that, if the US made it clear that it would not and that Taiwan is on its own, the Taiwanese would probably cave and make some kind of deal with China rather than face it alone and, even if they tried, it would probably be over relatively quickly. I know people will bring up the failure of Russia’s initial assault against Ukraine to deny that, but that’s just stupid because, even putting aside the fact that Ukraine isn’t looking too hot at the moment despite the fact that it’s not alone but has the backing of NATO, the gap in power between China and Taiwan is on a completely different scale from that between Russia and Ukraine.6 Now, I know that Taiwan is an island, which makes it easier to defend than Ukraine other things being equal. But other things are obviously not equal, because at the end of the day it’s still a country of 23 million that, in the scenario I’m talking about here, would have to fight a nation of 1.4 billion that spends more than 10 times as much on defense even before one adjusts for price differences.7

At this point, people in the anti-China crowd are going to reply that I’m selfish and a horrible person for not caring about Taiwan, but even putting aside the fact that in doing so they’ll be moving the goalposts (remember how the original claim was that I should be concerned by China’s plan to subjugate Taiwan on the ground that it would have terrible consequences for the West?), I just want to point out that, to call a spade a spade, they are full of shit. As I write this, there are many conflicts elsewhere in the world that are far worse than a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be, at least if the US stays out of it, yet none of the people who are constantly waxing lyrical about the plight of the Taiwanese people rarely if ever say a word about them and certainly don’t clamor for a military intervention to prevent the killing. How often do you hear the people who insist that the US should commit to defend Taiwan against China say that Washington should intervene in the Sudanese civil war, which has already killed far more people than a Chinese invasion of Taiwan ever would? When do you think is the last time any of them has spared a thought for the people that Rwanda-backed rebels in eastern Congo have been massacring for years? I could go on for a while.

In fact, in some cases (such as the crimes that Israel has been committing against Palestinians for decades with active support from the US and other Western nations), the same people often don’t just ignore human rights violations and aggression but often go out of their way to justify it, so you’ll have to forgive me if I have a hard time taking seriously their moral lectures. Indeed, unlike a Chinese invasion of Taiwan (which hasn’t happened yet and may never happen, especially if the US doesn’t mislead the Taiwanese into believing it can protect them from China), those conflicts are not merely hypothetical but are actually happening at the moment and sometimes have been happening for years if not decades, so if they’re so concerned about human rights violations and injustice committed against innocent people, you’d think they would talk more about them, but they barely mention them at all.8 Don’t get me wrong, it sucks for the Taiwanese and I obviously don’t think they deserve to be reunified with China against their will, but I would also be lying if I said that it’s keeping me up at night. However, the plight of the Taiwanese is obviously not what’s keeping China haters at night either, otherwise there wouldn’t be such a perfect harmony between their foreign policy obsessions and geopolitical alignment with the West.

Another claim people make to argue that we should oppose a Chinese takeover of Taiwan, which I find more honest than pretending that it’s because they care about the plight of the Taiwanese, is that even if Taiwan’s reunification with China wouldn’t affect the West much per se, it would pave the way for China’s achievement of regional hegemony and this would eventually lead to Chinese world hegemony or at least allow China to take steps that would adversely affect the West in a major way. The problem with that argument is that we aren’t told exactly what China would do that would be so terrible for the West once it has taken over Taiwan and how it would do it. It’s obviously not going to invade the US, Europe or even Japan. I guess we can’t rule out that it might invade another of its neighbors, this would hardly be the first time, but it has shown little inclination toward a program of territorial conquest so far and even if eventually it did invade Vietnam again for instance, that would hardly be very disruptive for the West and certainly not so disruptive that we should risk a war with China over Taiwan to preclude such a very hypothetical scenario.9 China hawks often talk about how a takeover of Taiwan would allow China to control the South China Sea, which as they like to point out is a major trade route, but much more rarely explain why that would be so terrible for the West. Do they think that China is going to wake up one day and decide to interdict foreign cargo ships from operating in the area? Most of the trade that goes through the South China Sea is probably to or from China, so it would only harm itself in the process.

Unless China hawks can not only say exactly what China might do once it controls Taiwan that would be so bad for the West that it’s worth risking war between the US and China to prevent it, but also how it would do it, I don’t see why anyone should take seriously what they’re saying. However, I don’t think they can answer that question, which is why instead they make vague claims about hegemony and shipping lanes. Besides, I don’t think it’s realistic for the US and its allies to prevent China from achieving some kind of hegemony in East Asia eventually, it’s just too big and you can’t escape geography. Just in virtue of the size of China’s economy, its neighbors will inevitably become economically dependent on it (they already are to a large extent and this dependence will only increase going forward), which just as inevitably will give it a lot of political influence. Whether it takes over Taiwan or not won’t fundamentally affect that. At best, the US might be able to prevent it for a while, but it will happen eventually and if the US insists that will just make things worse. The idea that, in the long run, the US can balance China in East Asia strikes me as delusional. It’s just too big for anyone, even the US, to balance it in its own neighborhood.10 People claim that spheres of influence don’t exist, because the idea contradicts the mythical “rules-based international order”, but they obviously do. As I argued before, in foreign policy, failing to appreciate the limits of your power is a cardinal sin.

But it doesn’t mean that China will ever achieve the kind of global hegemony that, even before the end of the Cold War, the US has enjoyed since 1945. I think a lot of people think that, because the US used the regional hegemony it had achieved in the Western hemisphere by the beginning of the 20th century as a springboard for global hegemony after WW2, China will do the same thing if we let it achieve regional hegemony in East Asia.11 However, even putting aside the fact that again there isn’t really anything we can do about it, the case of the US is historically anomalous and there is no reason to think that China will replicate that sequence. There had never been a country with such a relative power advantage before the US after 1945 and there is every reason to believe it will never happen again.12 Even in the best case scenario for China, if it averts demographic collapse and overtakes the US in terms of GDP, the US will remain close and collectively the West will remain more powerful. Moreover, while GDP is the best proxy for overall power in the long-run, the US also has advantages that are not perfectly captured by GDP and have a lot of inertia, such as the dollar’s special status, its privileged relationship with the international organizations that regulate the world economy, etc. As long as China doesn’t open up, it’s also unlikely that its soft power will be able to rival that of the US. Catching up is really hard to do and the US will remain the dominant power at the global power for a long time.

Thus, although it’s already very powerful and is bound to become even more powerful, it’s not as if China were ever going to be in a position to impose its way of life on us. Not that it’s trying for that matter. So there is no need to panic, let alone risk a war against China over Taiwan, we’re going to be fine. The people who are obsessed with China ironically underestimate the West and overestimate China. It’s not as if China was going to replace the US as the global hegemon and be able to shape the international system in the way the US did after WW2. In general, this obsession with China and the constant fear-mongering about it seem totally irrational, it’s hardly the worst country in the world and it can’t do that much to harm people in the West unless we go out of our way to pick a fight with it. In fact, people in the West have benefited much more from China’s rise than they have been harmed and it’s not even close, so we should rejoice in that development instead of deploring it. Not only have we been getting a lot of cheap goods for years, but now that China is becoming rich and educated, we’re even starting to get technological innovations from it and there is every reason to believe that will become even more true going forward, unless we do something to deprive ourselves of that.13 I understand disliking the Chinese government, I can’t say that I’m exactly a fan either, but that’s not our problem and there isn’t anything we can do about it anyway. China is not defined by the crimes of the Chinese government anymore than the US is defined by the crimes of the US government, so it’s absurd that you can’t say anything about China without people bringing that up and that people talk about China as if nothing else mattered.14

The truth is that, despite the lofty ideals they profess to justify their hostility toward China and argue that we must “stand up to it”, it’s hard not to conclude that at the end of the day China hawks are really motivated by American or Western chauvinism. They’re just used to the US or the West being on top and they have a hard time accepting that we’re no longer going to be the only game in town. I’m not even accusing them of arguing in bad faith, I’m sure that most of them have convinced themselves that if they are so concerned by China that’s because they love democracy, abhor “the CCP” or feel sympathy for the Taiwanese, but evidently that’s not really why.15 They just take pride in being the most powerful country or culture in the world and resent that China threatens that status. The most self-aware of them actually realize that and openly talk about how their goal is to preserve American hegemony, even if that’s always mixed with idealistic considerations due to their belief in the benign character of that hegemony (to be clear we certainly could have done a lot worse than the US as far as global hegemons go), but most of them clearly don’t. Now, I think national pride is perfect fine per se and that having a spirit of competition is a good thing, but not if that leads you to develop an unhealthy obsession with another country’s flaws instead of motivating you to improve yours or to promote dumb policies that will make everyone worse off.

What the deal that just went into effect did is kick the can down the road by pushing back the resolution of that disagreement to some later point, but it will have to be resolved eventually and this can only happen if one side caves. Indeed, there is no middle ground here, either Hamas will still be in a position to govern the Strip after the war or it won’t. If Israel wants to make sure that Gaza will never fall under Hamas’s control again, it has to capitulate and surrender its weapons, because as long as this doesn’t happen before the war ends Israel can never be sure that Hamas won’t take back control by removing whoever is put in charge of the Strip when the IDF leaves eventually. For instance, if Israel agrees to let the Palestinian Authority or a multinational force to administer Gaza after the war but Hamas has not been dismantled before the IDF withdraws from the Strip, it’s likely that it will eventually get back in power. In any case, Israel has so far insisted that the Palestinian Authority wouldn’t be allowed to play any role in the governance of Gaza after the war and a multinational force is overwhelmingly unlikely unless that’s the case, so there isn’t much point in discussing that scenario at the moment. Hamas is clearly not prepared to surrender at this point, so if this deal results in the end of the war, it will be because Israel, perhaps under pressure by the US, caved and dropped that condition.

In the meantime, this will make it possible for the population in Gaza and Hamas to gain a reprieve as the fighting stops, more humanitarian aid comes into the Strip and Gazans who were displaced are allowed to return to what’s left of their homes in the North, in exchange for the release of some of the hostages that Hamas and other Palestinian groups captured on October 7. This won’t prevent Israel from resuming the war after the end of the first phase, but it will make it harder to achieve their goal if they do, because Hamas will have gained time to regroup and additional supplies that will allow it to last longer. Israeli hawks are absolutely correct when they say that and it would be silly to deny it. The question is whether, facing this formidable challenge, Israel will finally call it quits or persist in the hope that it will be able to force Hamas to surrender eventually. In practice, this will depend on how Israeli domestic politics moves during the first phase of the deal, but also and perhaps mostly on what Trump does.

If Trump tells Netanyahu that he won’t support a resumption of the war, and makes it clear that it’s not a suggestion, the war will end. If the Israelis were united behind the continuation of the war, then maybe the Israeli government would take the risk to defy Washington, but at this point it’s clear that large segments of the Israeli society, including many people in the security establishment, want the war to end. I think that, from his point of view, Netanyahu made the right decision by agreeing to that deal before Trump’s inauguration. It would have been a terrible idea to get on Trump’s wrong side by refusing to give him that win so he can brag about his role in the deal as the entire world is watching the first hostages being released and reuniting with their families, even if there is a risk that Israel won’t be able to resume the war later, because Trump would surely had taken it as a personal insult and you never know what he’s capable of doing if he thinks you tried to screw him.

A lot of people conjecture that Trump must have made assurances to Netanyahu in order to convince him to sign on that deal, and he probably did (although most of the stuff people are talking about are either things I don’t think are going to happen such as the annexation of Area C in the West Bank or things Trump was going to do anyway such as lifting sanctions on settlers), but there is no need to make such a conjecture to explain why Netanyahu agreed. Indeed, although some people have convinced themselves that the Americans couldn’t stop Israel if they wanted to, this is nonsense. If the Americans could credibly threaten to withdraw their support from Israel, the Israelis would do as they’re told because Israel is just too dependent on Washington to risk openly defying the US president if he really set his mind on ending the war. As I explained before, the problem is that in general the US president can’t credibly threaten to withdraw his support from Israel, because American domestic politics give leverage to the Israelis and, not only do they know it, but they also know that the Americans know it. The problem for Netanyahu is that Trump is not a traditional politician and, in particular, he’s much less susceptible to nagging and shaming.

In particular, if Netanyahu bruised his ego and gave him the impression that he tried to humiliate him, Trump could seriously damage the relationship between Israel and the US because he can be extremely vindictive. Even putting aside the fact that, without regular arms deliveries from the US, the IDF would have to rely on tactics that either are more costly for civilians and further degrade their image in the US without being particularly more effective or result in far more Israeli casualties, the Israelis really can’t afford to get in a public fight with Trump. A lot of Americans would side with him and the effect would be terrible on the relationship between Israel and the US. Fortunately for Netanyahu, I think Trump is nevertheless relatively easy to play because he lacks the knowledge and attention to follow the details of policy issues, but you have to make sure not to bruise his ego. So it’s quite likely that, now that he was able to get his win for the inauguration, Trump will allow Israel to resume the war after the first phase of the deal because he’ll be too busy with other issues then and Netanyahu and his allies in the US government will be able to convince him that it’s justified by somehow blaming the collapse of the deal on Hamas.

However, there is also a risk that, for whatever reason, Trump will really want to end the war and put it behind him. In that case, Netanyahu will have to cave and Hamas will effectively have won, if you can call staying in control of a wasteland a victory. According to the statement Netanyahu made last weekend, Trump has “given full backing to Israel's right to return to the fighting, if Israel reaches the conclusion that the second stage negotiations are ineffectual”. He probably did, but if by then Trump has decided that he wants the war to end, this won’t do Netanyahu any good. In my opinion, it’s more likely than not that the war will resume, but there is a risk Israel will have to give up and, while I think Netanyahu was right to judge that it was best not to deny Trump a win he badly wanted, this doesn’t change the fact that by accepting the deal he took that chance. It wouldn’t surprise me if, while letting Israel do whatever it wants in the West Bank and supporting attacks on freedom of speech in universities to suppress anti-Zionist speech, he decided that he wants the war in Gaza to end because it’s not going anywhere and unlike in Ukraine he can actually end it relatively easily. As I said above, in addition to what Trump does, what happens after the first phase of the deal will also depend on Israeli domestic politics, but that’s even harder to predict. If the deal collapses and the war resumes, will Israel eventually defeat Hamas? I doubt it.

In a nutshell, the reason why I think it’s unlikely is that Israel faces both external and internal constraints that will make it very difficult to force Hamas to capitulate. Starting with external constraints, while Israel benefits from a double standard in the US and to a lesser extent in Europe, there are limits to the brutality of the tactics it can use in Gaza before it risks losing support from the West or even facing sanctions. This makes it harder to defeat Hamas because, although the relationship between military effectiveness and brutality is not as straightforward as hawks often assume, there is still a tradeoff between them. Even domestic factors restrict the extent to which Israel can ignore international humanitarian law because, though polls show that a majority of Israelis don’t think Palestinian suffering should factor heavily into how the IDF wages the war, there are limits to how much brutality even them are prepared to accept. Moreover, although for this war the IDF has considerably relaxed its rules of engagement in a way that has resulted in a much greater tolerance for civilian casualties, various rules and traditions are drilled into IDF officers for years and there are limits to how far from them they could stray.

Israel also faces significant political and economic constraints that restrict how much resources it can allocate to the war and for how long, which makes it significantly harder for Israel to defeat Hamas. Ideally, in order to force Hamas to surrender, Israel would have to mobilize hundreds of thousands for several months. In that case, the IDF would have enough manpower to hold the areas it has cleared while it moves to the next one and destroys Hamas over there, but otherwise it has no choice but to engage in the kind of never-ending whack-a-mole game we have seen playing out in Gaza for the past 15 months, because Hamas can just leave from areas where the IDF puts too much pressure on them and come back once the IDF has left to chase them where they have gone. It would also help if the IDF were prepared to take more casualties, because that would reduce how much manpower it needs to hold areas that have been cleared while it takes care of Hamas in the rest of the Strip, but if casualties rise too much Israeli public opinion will stop supporting the war. Hence, the IDF has no choice but to adapt its tactics to the level of tolerance for casualties in Israel, which is very low as in every other rich country and perhaps even more so in a country like Israel where demographic concerns have always loomed very large.

A critical fact about Israel, which is under-appreciated due to Six-Day War memes, is that at the end of the day it's a small country, which means that fighting a war that requires a lot of manpower compels it to mobilize a relatively high proportion of its population. In the past, it was able to defeat its enemies decisively quickly in the conventional wars it fought, which has obfuscated the fact that, had this not happened, it would have been in real trouble because then it would have run into the mobilization problem I just described. This problem arises whenever it has to fight a guerrilla for a prolonged period of time, which happened in Lebanon after 1982 and is happening right now in Gaza, because this kind of war is very manpower-intensive. Mobilizing a significant proportion of the population is not only very costly economically, because Israel has to compensate reservists for the loss of their salaries and their absence from the workforce disrupts the economy, but it’s also costly politically because conscripts, reservists and even professional soldiers don’t want to fight in a war for months and if you force them to do so they and their families start complaining.

As a result, the IDF suffers from a manpower shortage, especially since it also has to keep a large number of troops in the West Bank, at the border with Lebanon and now even in Syria. The number of people that are available to serve in Gaza is completely inadequate to implement the kind of counterinsurgency warfare I described above, which requires a lot of manpower to hold the areas that have been cleared while moving on to other areas that have yet to be cleared, even if the Israelis were more tolerant of casualties among IDF soldiers. If you can’t do that, the alternative is to keep doing what the IDF has been doing for long enough, even if that means that you have to regularly go back to areas you’ve already cleared in the past to clear them again. Everyone has their limits, even Hamas militants, because even them care about their family who are getting killed or living in miserable conditions. Moreover, while they can replenish their ranks by recruiting during the war to replace their losses and have apparently done so, they don’t have infinite supplies and as long as the IDF controls the Philadelphi Corridor bringing in more of them will be very difficult. Hamas apparently has some domestic production capacity, but I can’t imagine it’s very large, especially now that inputs have presumably become harder to obtain. Thus, if Israel could keep this up for long enough, Hamas would eventually give up.

The problem is that, while at the end of the day it’s very hard to assess exactly how close from that point Hamas is, it doesn’t seem anywhere near it at the moment, so “long enough” is probably longer than how long the Israelis are prepared to keep fighting given the external and internal constraints they face. This is what I predicted would probably happen a few days after October 7 and I haven’t changed my mind since then. Now, you may think that I’m wrong and you may even be proven right eventually, but you should ask yourself if you’re as confident of that today than you were 15 months ago. I kind of doubt you are. Nevertheless, it’s certainly not true that, as many people claim, it’s impossible to defeat Hamas. Again, despite the fact that the resources allocated to the war by Israel are inadequate, Hamas would presumably capitulate if Israel kept the war going for long enough. It’s just that Israel will probably give up before Hamas. In that case, the enormous cost of the war — both for Israel and for the Palestinians — will have been largely in vain, since Hamas will remain in control of Gaza in one way or another though its capabilities will have been seriously degraded. This is precisely why I think the war is stupid.

Still, because in theory it’s possible that Israel will manage to force Hamas to surrender, I thought it might be illuminating to learn more about how Sri Lanka was able to defeat the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which might be the only case in recent history where a government won a decisive victory over a large insurgency. So I read When Counterinsurgency Wins: Sri Lanka's Defeat of the Tamil Tigers by Ahmed Hashim, a professor of security studies and a former Pentagon official, which I found very interesting. The LTTE were a Tamil armed group based in the North and East of Sri Lanka, who fought a war against the Sri Lankan government for more than 30 years and eventually created a quasi-state, before the government managed to destroy them and force them to surrender in 2009. It was a radical group that used terrorism on a large scale, including suicide attacks. In fact, although few people have even heard about the LTTE, it was the first group to use explosive belts and vests. In 2006, after a 4-year long truce and the collapse of peace talks, the Sri Lankan government launched a campaign to destroy the organization and, to the surprise of most international observers who thought it was impossible, killed the group’s leader and forced what was left of it to surrender unconditionally. Pro-Israel hawks love to bring up that episode, because it shows that even a large insurgency can be defeated.

As I have already said, I agree that it’s possible and that people who claim otherwise are wrong, but this doesn’t mean that the war between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE is a good comparison. In fact, after reading Hashim’s book, I think the lessons we can draw about Gaza from that conflict are very limited because the situations are extremely different. First, while Hamas is fighting a classic insurgency by exploiting their ability to hide in the midst of the population and in tunnels, I was surprised when I read Hashim’s book by the extent to which the LTTE tried to fight a conventional war until it was no longer possible. I guess that’s probably because, in the previous war, the LTTE had showed that it was more than capable of holding its own against the Sri Lankan military. Unlike Hamas in Gaza, where it was besieged by Israel and largely depended on Israel’s good will to get supplies, the LTTE governed large parts of Sri Lanka relatively free of interference from the government in Colombo. By the time the peace talks collapsed and the war that eventually resulted in their destruction started in 2006, they even had a navy, which they used to trade with India and attack Sri Lankan ships and ports. But the Sri Lankan military learned from the mistakes it had made during the last war and the LTTE proved no match for it in conventional battles.

The Sri Lankan campaign also benefited from the fact that, prior to the beginning of the campaign, a prominent commander in the East defected from the LTTE and decided to help the government, so the Sri Lankan military fought a diminished movement and obtained a lot of priceless intelligence on the rest of the LTTE. Hamas by contrast still appears united in Gaza and it’s unlikely that anything of the sort could happen over there. Indeed, Hamas battalions have been dismantled and the groups now fights as small cells that are only linked through very loose ties, so no defector is likely to be in a position to bring with him a large number of fighters. As we shall see, Israel also doesn’t have much to offer to any would-be defectors, whereas Karuna Amman, the LTTE defector I was talking about, could look forward to both freedom and a political career. Another major difference between Sri Lanka’s campaign against the LTTE and Israel’s war against Hamas, probably the main difference, is that as we have seen Israel is a small country that can’t afford to field a large army for a very long time, whereas Sri Lanka massively and continuously expanded its armed forces during the war. According to Hashim, between 2005 and 2009, the Sri Lankan armed forces increased from 125,000 to 450,000. By contrast, the IDF has 170,000 men and women on active duty and 450,000 people in the reserve, of which only 70,000 are currently mobilized and that number will soon be reduced to 50,000 for cost-saving reasons.

So the IDF only has about half as many soldiers as Sri Lanka did at the end of the war against the LTTE, but this probably understates the IDF’s manpower deficit relative to the Sri Lankan military at the time. Indeed, not only can Israel only use a fraction of that manpower in Gaza because as I noted above it needs a large number of troops in other theaters, but only a small fraction of this manpower consists in combat troops. According to this article, back in June of last year (at the height of the Rafah offensive), Israel only had 15,000 active duty soldiers engaged in fighting and only 10,000 of them were fighting in Gaza. In addition, 26,000 reservists were mobilized in combat roles, but most of them were deployed in the West Bank. So Israel had less than 30,000 people actually fighting Hamas in Gaza. As a comparison, by my calculations that’s approximately the same relative to the population of Gaza than the number of German soldiers who were occupying the Netherlands, Belgium and France in 1941 (this includes soldiers in non-combat roles, but there are probably few of them in Gaza, so it presumably doesn’t bias the comparison much), which was already considered insufficient despite the fact that at the time resistance was still largely non-existent.

I don’t know the number of Sri Lankan soldiers in combat role during the war against the LTTE, but it was no doubt vastly greater, not only because the Sri Lankan armed forces were themselves much larger but also because the IDF is a more modern force and the ratio of combat to non-combat troops tends to decrease over time. This ratio is probably even lower in the IDF than in the armed forces of other rich countries, because the IDF employs an unusually large number of women, who almost exclusively serve in non-combat roles. Thus, although it’s hard to quantify this advantage precisely, there can be no doubt that the Sri Lankan military had far more manpower to wage its war against the LTTE than the IDF has to fight Hamas in Gaza. Moreover, while the IDF constantly has to release reservists before recalling them, the Sri Lankan armed forces were continuously expanding throughout the war and the government actually them even after the end of the war to make sure the LTTE would stay dead. It was therefore able to conduct the kind of counterinsurgency warfare I described above and, as Hashim explains in his book, that’s exactly what it did, holding the areas it cleared by keeping large number of troops in them to prevent the LTTE from coming back and show to the population that the government was here to stay.

To be sure, the LTTE occupied a larger area than Gaza, but the number of Sri Lankan Tamils in the areas controlled by the LTTE was about the same as the population of Gaza and the population density was therefore much lower, which made the job of the Sri Lankan much easier other things being equal. The LTTE also didn’t have the huge network of tunnels that Hamas can use in Gaza. The kind of manpower that Israel can deploy in Gaza is obviously inadequate for the task, at least if the IDF wants to fight the kind of counterinsurgency warfare that Sri Lanka successfully used against the LTTE between 2006 and 2009, which is why it’s forced to play the whack-a-mole game I described above and hope that Hamas will grow tired of it before Israel does. But it probably won’t and, in any case, Sri Lanka’s war against the LTTE doesn’t really give any reason to think it will. In order to replicate what Sri Lanka did to destroy the LTTE between 2006 and 2009, Israel would have to mobilize a much larger number of reservists for a long period of time, but as I explained above economic and political constraints make that impossible. Pro-Israel hawks often fancy themselves hard-nosed realists, but they completely ignore that kind of constraints, which results in unrealistic expectations about what Israel can achieve through force.

Another difference with Israel’s war in Gaza is that, outside of Sri Lanka, very few people cared about the government’s war against the LTTE. This gave it more latitude to use whatever tactics it wanted and indeed the war seems to have been extremely brutal although Hashim is careful to highlight that it’s very difficult to obtain reliable figures on the number of civilian casualties. Most people in the West haven’t even heard about this war, whereas everyone knows about Israel’s war in Gaza and a lot of people outside of Gaza care about it. The only country that might have significantly restricted Sri Lanka’s freedom of action is India, but the LTTE screwed up by killing Indian peacekeepers in the 1980s and assassinating the former Indian Prime Minister in 1991, so India washed its hands of the whole affair. Finally, while Sri Lankan Tamils resented the Sinhalese-dominated government in Colombo because it discriminated against them, the Sri Lankan government still promised them citizenship and freedom. By contrast, Israel doesn’t promise the people in Gaza anything except oppression if Hamas surrenders, which obviously can only harden the resolve of Hamas fighters and disincentivize the population of Gaza from cooperation with the IDF against Hamas, even if many of them probably resent it for launching a war that resulted in the destruction of Gazan society. So while it’s not impossible that Israel will manage to destroy Hamas if the war resumes after the first phase of the deal, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Most people commenting on the situation in France, especially abroad but not only, underestimate the depth of the political crisis that Macron’s decision to dissolve the parliament last June unleashed, mostly because of misleading comparisons with other European countries that have experienced crises in the past that on the surface look similar, but where the institutional and political contexts are profoundly different, which creates vastly different incentives.

First, unlike other parliamentary countries like Germany, Italy or Belgium, whose elections to the parliament are based on a system that is partly or fully proportional, French parliamentary elections are based on a two-round majoritarian system with single-member constituencies. This means that, in each district, the two candidates who obtained the most votes in the first round make it to the second round (it's actually a bit more complicated than that but we don’t need to get into that here), then whoever got a majority in the second round is elected.

This doesn't incentivize compromises, except to a limited extent between parties that are ideologically close (which sometimes create electoral alliances before the first round, so they don't run candidates against each other in the same districts and maximize the probability they'll make it to the second round), because this usually ensures that one party or alliance of parties that are ideologically close enough to form a coalition gets a majority of the seats in parliaments.

Perhaps even more importantly, unlike what is the case in other European countries (even in the UK whose first-past-the-post electoral system is even more majority-friendly than the French two-round majoritarian system), we have a very strong presidency and, as a result, French politics is entirely dominated by the presidential election. That's pretty much all every major politician is thinking about, all the time.

The president is also elected according to a two-round majoritarian system. In the case of the presidential election, however, first-round alliances are much less common even between ideologically close parties, because everyone wants a shot at the position that dominates French politics. Again, this creates powerful incentives against reaching across the aisle to make the sort of compromises that people need to make when there is no majority in parliament.

If you compromise with people on the other side of the political spectrum, your voters will punish you at the next elections, not only parliamentary but also presidential, making it harder for you to make it to the second round. This makes the collective action problem the parties need to solve to form a coalition government, when no alliance of ideologically close parties has a majority in parliament, much harder to crack in France than in other European countries.

In theory, this isn't a problem because our institutions were literally created to ensure the government will have a majority in parliament to support it, if only tacitly by not overthrowing it, but it also means that, when this doesn’t happen anyway, it's much more difficult to solve the problem than it would be in another European country where a situation in which constituting a majority in parliament to support a government requires compromises between ideologically distant parties. French political culture is deeply inimical to compromises.

Of course, as people who think the crisis will be easily solve often say, it's not as if French people were genetically predisposed to oppose political compromises. In part, this culture is a result of our political history, but for the most part that’s a product of French political institutions that, as we have seen, disincentivize compromises. This, so the argument goes, means that in the absence of a majority French politicians will adapt and start making compromises.

Except that not only does culture not change overnight, even when the conditions that created that kind of culture in the first place have changed, but moreover some and even most of the institutional factors that disincentivize compromises have not disappeared just because there is no majority in parliament. French politicians know that, no matter how this crisis is resolved, there will be new parliamentary elections soon and they also know that a presidential election will be held in 2027, if not sooner.

I also don’t think people realize how unlikely it is that any government will last very long in the current situation. Basically, the parliament is divided into three roughly equal blocs (the left-wing alliance, the centrist alliance and Le Pen’s party with a small ally that resulted from a split of the traditional center-right party), such that only two of them have enough seats to have a majority and form a stable government but no two of them will agree to create a coalition because they are too ideologically distant and any one of them that tries to form a government anyway will cause the other two to join their votes to overthrow the government in question.

Again, this isn’t supposed to happen with our institutions and is largely the result of the fact that Le Pen’s party continues to be quarantined by the other parties, but this is no longer tenable when it gets 1/3 of the vote and the only thing the other parties can agree on is making second-round agreements to prevent it from getting a majority of the seats in parliament, without being able to make a more positive agreement to form a coalition government. The only hope of creating a stable government is to somehow convince part of one of those three blocs to detach itself from its bloc and join another to support a coalition government. It’s very hard to see how this could happen or, if it does happen, last very long.

Nobody in the left-wing bloc will ever form a coalition with the far-right bloc, so we can eliminate that possibility at the outset. A lot of people expect that the Socialist party, which is part of the left-wing bloc, can be detached from it and convinced to support a centrist government. I guess that’s not impossible, but I don’t think it will happen, because the socialists have very strong incentives not to form a coalition with the centrist bloc.

Indeed, you have to understand that, before Macron unwittingly gave them a second life by calling snap elections last June, the socialists were on the verge of extinction. Why would they take the risk of going back to the previous situation by making a deal with the centrists? They know that, no matter what they do, there will soon be new parliamentary elections. Making a deal with Macron would likely preclude a renewal of the left-wing alliance next time, in which case the socialists would be wiped out in the first round almost everywhere.

There is also a strong left-wing culture in France in which, mainly for historical reasons, the myth of the "union of the left" is very powerful. If the socialists made a deal with Macron to support a centrist government, left-wing voters would see that as a "treason of the left" and severely punish them at the polls when new parliamentary elections take place. Moreover, the Socialist party is actually pretty distant from the centrist bloc ideologically, which would make a deal very complicated.

In particular, to form a coalition with the center, the socialists would almost certainly have to accept Macron's reform of the pension system, which is very unpopular on the left. This is only conceivable if people in the centrist bloc make important concessions to them on other issues, but then it’s center-right members of parliament, another essential part of such a coalition, who would threaten to leave.

Moreover, the socialists alone wouldn’t be enough, centrists would also need to detach the greens and the communists from the left-wing bloc, while keeping the center-right on board, to reach a majority. So maybe this will happen, but it’s a tall order and, even if they can somehow pull it off, I don't think it would last very long and would certainly not be a stable government by any stretch of the imagination.

Another possibility, which I think is more likely, is that Macron will appoint another center-right Prime Minister, with a similar arrangement as what allowed Barnier, the Prime Minister whose government was just overthrown, to govern for three months. Le Pen's party will not enter the government, but she also won't vote with the left to overthrow it right away. She would constantly have a gun to the Prime Minister's head and would be able to pull the plug on the government at any moment for any reason.

But this also doesn't seem very stable and frankly it's not even clear how such a government could get a budget through parliament, because the government would have to make concessions to Le Pen even more openly than Barnier did and the left wing of the centrist bloc would strongly oppose that. It’s not even the nature of what is offered to Le Pen that matters to them, but the mere fact that something is offered to her and her party, because those people originally come from the Socialist party and consider Le Pen’s party the literal devil or at least have to pretend they do if they want to continue to be invited to dinners by their friends in Paris.

So while I think that scenario is somewhat more likely than a coalition in which part of the left-wing bloc supports a centrist government, it wouldn’t be a stable government and it's not even clear that it would be able to vote a budget. But we need a budget somehow. Frankly, when one looks at the current situation, it's very difficult not to reach the conclusion that France is ungovernable and that something will have to give to resolve the crisis. Maybe we'll be able to somehow vote a budget and limp along until next summer, when Macron will be able to dissolve the parliament and call new elections again, but that's hardly obvious.

Even if that happens, it’s not impossible, there is no guarantee that new parliamentary elections would not result in another hung parliament, in which case France would remain ungovernable as no stable government could be formed. While people often make comparisons with Belgium, which remained without a government for more than a year recently, France is not Belgium. Not only is Belgium a federal country, which means that although it lacked a federal government the regional governments, to which most powers are devolved, were up and running, but it's also the most important country in the EU with Germany and if there is no government for a long period it will prevent any major decision at the EU-level.

This is why I think people underestimate the probability that Macron will not be able to finish his term. When I say that, the typical reaction is that it will never happen, because nobody can legally compel Macron to resign. (There is an impeachment procedure in France, but the bar to complete it is almost impossibly high.) However, nobody could legally compel Biden to withdraw from the presidential election in the US either, yet he still ended up doing it.

During his address to the French people after the overthrow of the government, Macron insisted that he would finish his term and would not resign under any circumstances, but he may feel differently in a few months and the mere fact that he felt the need to talk about that possibility arguably shows that he feels vulnerable. I think that, if even people in his own party start calling for his resignation, it will be psychologically very difficult for him to withstand the pressure, especially if people start going in the streets to demand his resignation, which is another thing that may happen.

I think people who say he would just ignore the pressure have a very unrealistic model of the psychology of politicians. They are not supermen who are insensitive to pressure and everyone has their limits. It's not actually easy to ignore millions of people asking for your resignation when your favorability ratings are at 15% and even your political allies are asking you to leave. So for me the real question is whether it will get to that, not whether Macron would eventually resign if it did. I think there is no question that he would. He can't just stay in that situation for more than two years, that's just not tenable.

Right now, only the far-left party is openly asking for his resignation, while Le Pen avoids the topic for tactical reasons, but already some voices can be heard on the right and even in the center calling for it. That even people from Macron's own party might eventually ask him to resign seems unimaginable at the moment, but if we can't vote a budget or the parliament keeps overthrowing the government (it will be our fourth Prime Minister in one year when Macron replaces Barnier), I think what now seems impossible will suddenly become possible. In my opinion, should this happen, it will be a case of "gradually, then suddenly", with a slow deterioration of the situation and then a rapid preferences cascade leading to Macron's resignation.

It could also happen if Macron manages to hold out until next summer, but the new parliamentary elections fail to result in a majority again. I think that, if this happens, it will also be very difficult for Macron to last another two years in those conditions, as more people will start calling for his resignation on the ground that he put us in this mess, which he did.

People say that it would not solve the issue, because even if he resigned and another presidential election took place, the new president would also be unable to dissolve the parliament again for a year (meaning not until next summer if Macron resigns for that and not until the summer of 2026 if he resigns after next summer), but many jurists think that's false because the Constitutional Council would let a new president do it and people may ask for Macron's resignation not because they think it would fundamentally resolve the issue but to satisfy their ambition or simply because they're angry at him.

Frankly, that's also the logic of the institutions, De Gaulle and the people who wrote the Constitution would never have imagined that a president in Macron's position would not resign. The president is the most important person in the French political architecture. He has far more power than any head of state in any other democratic country, but that's mostly because the Constitution gives him the tools to dominate the parliament and Macron is obviously no longer able to do so.

Ordinarily, if the parliament overthrows the government, the president would use his constitutional powers to dissolve it and call for new parliamentary elections, but Macron can't do that anymore because the Constitution only allows the president to do it once a year. Even if he could, as I noted above, it's not clear that it wouldn't result in another hung parliament and it's absolutely clear that it would not result in a majority for Macron's party and its allies.

Frankly, the best case scenario for Macron would be that he somehow manage to last until next summer, at which point he'd dissolve the parliament again and Le Pen's party would get a majority. Again, it’s hardly obvious that it would happen since it’s quite likely that the next parliamentary elections will result in another hung parliament, but should it happen Macron would be safe.

Indeed, he could pose as the guarantor of the French institutions against the (totally non-existent to be clear) fascist threat posed by Le Pen and, as her popularity and that her party would probably drop because for the first time they'd be responsible for the situation, his would probably rise and in any case the calls for his resignation would subside. Her party is the only party or alliance that can realistically get a majority in parliament, hence making a stable government possible until the end of Macron's term, so paradoxically that's his best hope.

In theory, there is a very easy way for Trump to end the war, namely by suspending economic and military assistance to Ukraine. Since Ukraine is almost entirely dependent on the US to finance its budget deficit and obtain the weapons it needs to keep fighting, so the argument goes, if the US stopped providing economic and military assistance to Kiev, the Ukrainians would either have to accept the terms that Washington dictates for a deal with Russia or, if they don’t, face a total collapse after a few months, at which point Putin would be able to dictate his terms. In principle, the Europeans could make up for the loss of US economic assistance by increasing theirs (although it’s dubious they would), but even if they did there is no way they could make up for the end of US military assistance, because they have neither the stockpiles nor the production capacities for that.

But that’s only easy in theory and, in practice, I think Trump would find it very difficult to cut off Ukraine overnight. Indeed, while I don’t think US officials had planned to get in a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine and I think some of them might even have made different decisions after the invasion had they known in advance that it would come to this, now that America has stumbled into a policy of preventing an outright Ukrainian defeat, they are committed to preventing that outcome and will try to stay the course even after Trump moves back into the White House, because national security policies of that importance tend to have a lot of inertia and are not easily reversed once they have begun to be implemented. There are many reasons for that, which tend to be pretty dumb, but that doesn’t make them any less powerful.

For instance, as Kissinger observed, the very process of decision-making creates status quo bias because people don’t want to go through it again: “The alternative to the status quo is the prospect of repeating the whole anguishing process of arriving at decisions. This explains to some extent the curious phenomenon that decisions taken with enormous doubt and perhaps with a close division become practically sacrosanct once adopted.” Thus, while people will continue to disagree with the details of how it should be implemented, once a policy has been adopted officials generally will develop a strong commitment to it. Moreover, the implementation of a policy changes the facts, giving even people who disagreed with it reasons to support it. In this case, now that Washington’s credibility is on the line (since Biden has publicly made a strong commitment to Ukraine), US officials will think that it’s important to stay the course lest that credibility be damaged. As I argued elsewhere, this argument is effectively an instance of the sunk cost fallacy, but US officials are no more immune to the sunk cost fallacy than the Russians or anyone else for that matter.

Of course, it’s still Trump who will decide in the end, but anti-Russia hawks in the Cabinet and deep state officials have many ways to influence his decisions. For instance, they present him with a range of options that is artificially restricted or exaggerate the dangers for the US of allowing Russia to defeat Ukraine, which are ways for them to guide the president’s decision while technically it’s still him who makes it. There is effectively a principal-agent problem at work here, because decision-makers are dependent on people with expertise they lack to make decisions and, precisely because they lack the relevant expertise, they’re also not in a position to assess the advice they’re given. In principle, this problem can be reduced to some extent by seeking the advice of experts with different perspectives, but bureaucracies tend to select people who share a similar outlook on fundamental issues. Moreover, even when the experts in government originally disagreed on a policy, they tend to fall behind a policy once it has been adopted for the kind of reasons mentioned above.

Thus, while Trump is likely to find experts in government who vary in the extent to which they think Washington should support Ukraine (for instance, it seems that so far the State Department has been relatively hawkish on military assistance, while the Pentagon has been more reluctant to allow the US involvement in the war to deepen even further and has consistently dragged its feet to provide more support to Ukraine), they will probably be united against a policy that would allow Russia to win a decisive victory over Ukraine within a few months. You may think that Trump could simply ignore them, but it’s not that easy to go ahead and ignore the advice of the experts in government when they tell you that it can’t be done or would result in disaster, even for Trump. We have seen that during his first term and, while he is arguably better prepared this time, I doubt it will be different this time.

Non-elected government officials can also slow walk any decisions Trump makes to give more time to their political allies in the administration to change his mind. Again, we have already seen that during his first term, like when he tried and failed to get the US out of Syria. Indeed, Trump’s political allies and Cabinet members, who judging from the appointments he’s announced so far will be anti-Russia hawks, would almost certainly try to deter him from cutting off Ukraine completely by arguing that it would have adverse political consequences for him and it shouldn’t be hard to make a good case because that’s probably true. Again, without US military assistance, Ukraine would likely collapse within a year. While it’s clear that, as long as the Ukrainian military remains a coherent force, Russia can’t take major Ukrainian cities. But if the Ukrainian armed forces disintegrate, as happened to Russia in 1917 or Germany at the end of the next year, because they suffer unsustainable shortages of weapons and ammunition, we’d eventually see Russian tanks rolling down the streets of Kiev and everyone would blame Trump.

Thus, any threat of permanently cutting off Ukraine is not credible and the Ukrainians presumably know it, which means they have more leverage than it seems. Trump may temporarily suspend military assistance to force the Ukrainians to the negotiations table and make them adopt a negotiating position closer to what Trump wants, but he would almost certainly have to resume aid eventually and there are limits to what concessions he can extract from them. Besides, Trump never said that he would force Ukraine to capitulate, he said that he’d broker a deal that is “good for both sides”. It’s unclear what this means exactly, though based on the little Trump has said on the topic so far it seems that he mostly has in mind a “land for peace” kind of agreement, but in any case it doesn’t sound like capitulation. The devil will be in the details and I think that, at the moment, the Russian and Ukrainian positions likely remain too far apart to be bridged, even with Trump’s mediation.

For instance, on the Ukrainian side, it’s not clear that people are prepared to formally give up all the territory that Russia already controls. It’s one thing for Ukraine to accept Russia’s de facto control over this territory, but it’s another to acknowledge it de jure. However, even if as Reuters suggests in a recent article Putin is willing to give up on the goal of capturing the rest of the four oblasts Russia has formally annexed in 2022 (which remains to be seen), this doesn’t mean he won’t demand that Ukraine formally acknowledge Russian sovereignty over the part Moscow controls. The same article also says that, for Russia to accept a deal, Ukraine would have to renounce NATO membership, but I’m really not sure that the Ukrainians are prepared to abandon that ambition yet. Similarly, the article says that if Ukraine does renounce NATO membership, Putin is prepared to “discuss” other forms of security guarantees, but that’s extremely vague and the details will be key.

During the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in 2022, Putin also seemed open to non-NATO Western security guarantees, yet Russian negotiators inserted a clause that would effectively have made those guarantees vacuous by giving Moscow a veto on their activation. Moreover, as I already pointed out before, one can also doubt whether the West is really prepared to provide meaningful security guarantees to Ukraine. The Reuters article also says that Putin would insist that Ukraine accept limitations on the size of its armed forces. If past negotiations are any indication, he will also insist on limits on the number and types of weapon systems Ukraine is allowed to have. Again, the details will matter a lot because there are limitations that Ukraine will under no circumstances agree to and that even Trump will probably not find reasonable, but at the moment we simply don’t know what Putin will ask for exactly.

Even something short of a peace treaty, which I think is very unlikely, that would nevertheless allow for a durable cessation of hostilities would require that many other points nobody is even talking about be settled, such as the issue of Crimea’s water supply. There are also things, such as lifting Western sanctions on Russia, that could facilitate a deal but that political constraints in the West are probably going to make very difficult, because everyone will say that it would be rewarding agression and that will be the end of it. All this will give Ukraine some maneuvering room to resist accepting a deal it finds unacceptable without getting on Trump’s wrong side. If the Ukrainians don’t want to accept Russia’s terms, but also don’t want to give Trump the impression they’re unwilling to go along with his plan, it won’t be difficult for them to insert spoilers in their proposals that, to Trump’s inexpert eyes, won’t seem unreasonable but that Putin will predictably reject, allowing them to blame the failure of the negotiations on him.

Once that happens, Trump will have no choice but to keep military assistance going because again a Ukrainian collapse would be politically very costly to him, especially if the Ukrainians have managed to blame Putin for the failure of the negotiations. I think the Ukrainians are already preparing the ground for that right now. Indeed, that’s how I interpret Zelensky’s recent statements, to the effect that he wants to end the war through diplomacy in 2025 and that he thinks Trump’s election will speed up the end of the war. I don’t think he says that because he expects that Trump’s plan will work, I think he says that because he wants to convince Trump that he’s willing to go along with his plan, so it’s easier for him to blame the failure of that plan on Putin later. The Ukrainians and their allies in Washington can also make it easier for Trump to agree to the continuation of military assistance by offering the US some kind of stake, real or imaginary, into Ukraine’s post-war economy, thereby appealing to Trump’s transactional view of foreign policy. It seems that some of them are already working on that kind of offer. I wouldn’t even rule out that, in the end, they will induce him to increase military assistance.

At this point, the reader may object that my argument rests on the assumption that the Ukrainian government doesn’t want the negotiations to succeed, but that’s not the case. It rests on the assumption that the Ukrainians are not prepared to make the kind of concessions they would have to make in order for negotiations to have a chance to succeed, which is not the same thing. As I have argued recently, I think Ukraine may have a window of opportunity to make a deal soon and that it should try to seize it, but even if that’s true the price would undoubtedly be very steep because Russia is winning. I may be wrong, but I think it’s very unlikely that Zelensky will be willing or able to pay it at this point because domestic political constraints will prevent that, despite the fact that he’d be able to claim that Trump forced his hand. Unfortunately, I think it will only be possible for Ukraine to contemplate that kind of concessions when its situation has deteriorated considerably, at which point the price it will have to pay will be even higher. In theory, Trump may have been able to force Ukraine to achieve a more satisfactory end of the conflict, but as I have argued in this post he faces his own political and organization constraints — not to mention his personal deficiencies — that will likely prevent him from doing so.

The basic idea is very simple yet has proven to have extraordinary explanatory power. Baumol starts from the observation that productivity grows at different rates in different sectors. In order to create his model, he distinguishes between what he calls a “progressive” sector in which productivity increases and a “non-progressive” sector where productivity remains the same, but of course that’s just a simplification. Since wages in the progressive sector will grow with productivity, firms in the non-progressive sector will also have to increase wages or nobody will agree to work for them. But unlike in the progressive sector, in the non-progressive sector, this increase in wages will not be matched by a rise in output since by definition productivity remains constant in the non-progressive sector.1 Hence the prices of goods and services produced in the non-progressive sector will increase relative to the prices of goods and services in the progressive sector.

Most services tend to fall in the non-progressive sector, while manufacturing is part of the productive sector. That’s because services tend to be labor-intensive and, as Baumol noted, there is often a sense in which the labor that enters into the production of a service is essential to it and even constitutive of the service itself, hence can’t easily be reduced. The most famous example Baumol gives, which is actually what led him to discover the effect in the first place, is live musical performance. While the amount of labor it takes to produce a car has diminished radically over the past century, it still takes as much labor to perform String Quartet No. 14 today as it did a century ago and there is no obvious way to reduce it. Musicians could play it at twice the speed or some could be replaced by a machine, but people would not be interested in such a performance. The same thing tends to be true of other services, such as teaching, which explains why their price has been steadily increasing relative to prices in the manufacturing sector.2 In some cases, as the relative prices of some kinds of services have increased, people just stopped consuming them. For instance, it used to be pretty common for people to have servants even if they weren’t super-rich and that’s still very common in poor countries, but now in developed countries only the richest people do.

You can probably see where this is going at this point. The kind of services provided by the government also have low productivity growth, so even if waste and mismanagement in the public sector doesn’t increase, we should expect their relative cost to rise. In general, because of inflation, $100 today will get you less goods and services than $100 in 1950. But the prices of different goods and services don’t rise at the same rate and, in particular, Baumol’s cost disease implies that the prices of services in general and government-provided services in particular will rise faster than prices in general. In other words, even adjusted for overall inflation, the same dollar will get you less public services today than it did in 1950. According to the BEA, the prices of goods and services produced in the US in general have increased at a rate of ~3.2% annually between 1950 and 2023, but the price of goods and services produced or purchased by the government specifically have increased at a rate of ~3.9% during that period.3 This may not seem much, but it means that, even after we adjust for overall inflation, the government has to spend ~60% more to provide the same volume of public services. In other words, because of the change in relative prices, the same inflation-adjusted dollar of government expenditure only buys ~62% as much as it did in 1950.

Of course, we can’t assume that Baumol’s cost disease is the only reason costs have increased faster in government than in the rest of the economy, but it probably explains most of it. In any case, this means that, to maintain the volume of public services per capita at the same level, it wouldn’t have been enough to keep public spending at the same level adjusted for overall inflation. Government spending per capita would have had to increase faster than overall inflation or the volume of public services per capita would have gone down. If that didn’t in fact happen, then Baumol’s cost disease would be a likely culprit for the decline of public services that people complain about. That’s what Frank Lysy, a former World Bank economist, claims in a blog post, but his argument doesn’t make sense to me. He reaches that conclusion by showing that, if you calculate what share of GDP the government would have had to spend in 1950 for the same volume of goods and services if the relative prices had been the same as today, you obtain a figure of ~27%. Since that’s much higher than the share of government spending today, Lysy’s argument goes, it explains why public services have deteriorated so much.4

But this argument strikes me as a non-sequitur. Indeed, although the prices of government-provided services have increased more than other goods and services, GDP per capita has also increased a lot during that period, so as long as government spending didn’t decrease too much as a share of GDP this could have more than compensated the impact of Baumol’s cost disease. The only thing Lysy’s calculation shows is that, had the relative prices in 1950 been the same as today, government spending in the US would have had to be much higher as a share of GDP to get the same volume of public services as Americans did in 1950. But the reason why relative prices have changed in that way is that productivity has increased a lot in the rest of the economy since 1950 and, as a result, Americans are much richer today. In turn, the fact that Americans are much richer means that, other things being equal, they can get the same amount of public services with public expenditures that are much smaller as a share of GDP. Thus, Lisy’s counterfactual doesn’t show that Baumol’s cost disease is responsible for the deterioration of public services, it’s just another way of looking at Baumol’s cost disease.

Of course, other things are not equal, because due to Baumol’s cost disease the prices of government-provided services have increased a lot relative to other goods and services and in theory this could have more than compensated for the fact that GDP per capita has increased. So the question is whether the share of public spending in GDP has decreased enough or the prices of government-provided services have increased enough relative to the prices of other goods and services to make the volume of public services per capita go down between 1950 and 2023. Since the share of public spending in the US hasn’t really changed during that period, it went from ~16.8% in 1950 to ~17% in 2023, the question is whether Baumol’s cost disease was bad enough to not only nullify the effect of economic growth but even reduce the volume of public services per capita.5 The answer is no. It’s true that, because the change in relative prices, even in inflation-adjusted dollars the government has to spend ~60% more today to get the same volume of goods and services than in 1950. However, since GDP per capita increased even more during that period (it was multiplied by more than 4), the per capita volume of goods and services bought or produced by the government has increased by a factor of ~2.6 during that period.6

So how come people feel that public services have deteriorated? I can think of several, non-mutually exclusive possible explanations. First, it could be that the deflators produced by the BEA, which I used to compute the change in the relative prices of the goods and services produced and purchased by the government, are incorrectly estimated. Calculating deflators is very complicated, perhaps especially for the goods and services produced and purchased by the government, so in theory it could be that the prices of those goods and services have increased faster relative to prices in general than implied by the deflators calculated by the BEA. In practice, however, the BEA would have had to get things seriously wrong for the deflators it computes to imply that the volume of goods and services bought and produced by the government have increased by a factor of ~2.6 when in fact it has decreased. I guess one could argue that small errors would compound over time and could therefore result in large mistakes over time, but the BEA employs very competent people who are generally very diligent in their work and I don’t think we should reject the deflators they construct without very good reasons, so I don’t think that explanation is plausible.7

Another possibility is that changes in the geographic distribution of the population have increased the inequality of access to public services. On that hypothesis, public services have not declined uniformly but only for some people, who live in areas that have become less well provisioned in public services. The impression that public services have deteriorated comes from the fact that it has actually happened in some areas. Specifically, because people are increasingly concentrated in large metropolitan areas, population density has decreased in small towns and rural areas. The problem is that, when population density goes down somewhere, the provision of many public services in that area becomes more costly. That’s because it often has large fixed costs that become harder to sustain with a smaller population. For instance, many hospitals or schools in rural areas are closed because, due to population decrease, they have become underutilized and as a result the costs per patient or pupil have exploded. If they weren’t closed, this cost increase would presumably be reflected in the deflator for government spending, they often are because it’s politically easier to close them than to increase taxes to finance their higher cost. This seems very plausible to me and I think it’s almost certainly part of the story.

Another hypothesis I find plausible is that the composition of public expenditures has changed in ways that, due to Baumol’s cost disease, have resulted in the deterioration of some public services even if the overall volume of goods and services produced and purchased by the government has no decreased. Indeed, while I’ve been talking indiscriminately about “public services” and “goods and services produced and purchased by the government”, public expenditures are actually very heterogeneous and there is no reason to think that all categories of public expenditures are affected by Baumol’s cost disease to the same extent, because there is no reason to assume that productivity has changed at the same rate for all of them. If public spending on the different categories of goods and services has not changed in line with changes in relative prices, but has increased less quickly for goods and services whose prices have increased more rapidly, then the volume of some goods and services produced and purchased by the government could have fallen even if overall the volume of goods and services produced and purchased by the government has increased.8 This hypothesis can only be tested by disaggregating and looking at how different components of public spending have changed over time, but due to political factors I will briefly discuss below, I find it plausible and suspect it’s also part of the story.

One last possibility I want to discuss is that, even if the volume of public services per capita has not decreased for any category, the demand for public services has increased even more than the supply because people want more public services as they become richer. As Random Critical Analysis convincingly argued, this is certainly true for health care, which even in the US is largely provisioned by the government. In fact, in the case of health care, it even seems that the demand for it increases faster than income. In other words, according to that hypothesis, even if the volume of public services per capita had not decreased, people would still feel that it has because the gap between how much public services people want and how much they’re getting would have increased. I also find that hypothesis plausible because people do want more goods and services, whether provided by the government or not, as they get richer and there is no reason to think they would be satisfied by a mere stabilization of the volume of public services they get or even a large increase that nevertheless falls short of the rise of their income. In fact, precisely because people don’t pay directly for public services but only indirectly through taxes (which also means that most of them don’t pay the full cost for them because taxation is progressive), I think we should expect the demand for public services to be less sensitive to changes in relative prices in the case of services provided by the government than in the case of services they buy on the market.

It’s not surprising that, although the cost of goods and services produced and purchased by the government has increased faster than costs in general, the overall volume of public services per capita has nevertheless increased, even if that may not be true for some of them, because GDP has increased even faster and the share of public expenditures in GDP has stayed roughly the same. Indeed, the very reason why Baumol’s cost disease exists in the first place, namely productivity increases, also means that we can afford it. In other words, it’s not really a disease, but merely a side effect of the enrichment made possible by modern economic growth. The real danger Baumol’s cost disease poses with respect to public services is not that it will make them unaffordable in principle, but that it will make them unaffordable in practice because, since that phenomenon is somewhat counter-intuitive and people don’t understand it, it will make it harder politically to fund public services. In other words, it’s less an economic problem than a political one, in the sense that Baumol’s cost disease makes the political economy of funding public services more difficult to navigate.

For instance, even if there were no waste and mismanagement and people didn’t want more health care of higher-quality when they become richer (not to mention the fact that aging increases the demand for health care even keeping income constant), Baumol’s cost disease would still require that we spend more, even adjusted for inflation, on health care to get the same volume of it. But since people don’t understand Baumol’s cost disease, which is not surprising because again it’s pretty counter-intuitive and not well-known outside of people who are interested in economics, when they see that government keeps spending more on health care and that in spite of that the quality of services in hospitals doesn’t seem to improve or is even getting worse by some metrics, they assume that waste and mismanagement is responsible. In turn, this makes it politically more difficult to keep increasing public spending on health care at a rate sufficient to keep up with the increase of the relative price of health care, because people don’t like their taxes to be used to finance what they perceive as a consequence of waste and mismanagement.

Again, it’s not that in theory we couldn’t afford dealing with the consequences of Baumol’s cost disease, but the fact that we can afford to deal with them in theory doesn’t mean that we’ll be able to deal with them in practice because the change in relative prices also changes political incentives in ways that make that more difficult. I think Baumol’s cost disease, together with aging (which unlike Baumol’s cost disease directly affects the government’s ability to satisfy the demand for public services by reducing government revenues and increasing outlays as opposed to just changing political incentives), is already putting the budget of the government in a squeeze and that’s probably going to get even worse over time. Of course, there is plenty of waste and mismanagement in government and we should also try to reduce it, but I don’t think the amount of reduction in waste and mismanagement we can realistically achieve will be enough to prevent Baumol and aging from putting the budget in a squeeze. I think what is likely to happen is that the government will stop providing a some public services and people will increasingly rely on the market to obtain them, which may be good in theory if private companies can provide the services in question more effectively, but will increase the inequality of access to them unless that is accompanied by transfers to low-income households.

We love to talk about leverage. Analysts love to talk about it, journalists love to talk about it. I wonder if we really have any leverage.

First, you know you don't have leverage if leaders don't use it, because they're afraid it won't work, because the parties see that they're in an existential conflict.

We have no leverage. I think that the United States could say tomorrow, no more weapons for Israel, and the Israelis would scour the earth to the last bullet to put in the back of the head of Yahya Sinwar.

We just don't have that kind of leverage. We can talk about it, but it may not work, and the fact that it may not work is the reason why we don't use it, therefore we don't have it.

I think Cook is largely right, but mostly for the wrong reasons and I would like to explain why.

Cook is trying to address the puzzle of why, despite repeatedly stating their opposition to steps taken by the Israeli government since October 7, the Biden administration hasn’t used the leverage it supposedly has over Israel to force it to accept a ceasefire and end the war. One possible explanation, which is popular among critics of Israel, is that US officials actually support Israel’s effort to “reshape the Middle East” and are just pretending to oppose it for the sake of appearances. In other words, there is no puzzle, the US and Israel are just aligned and the Biden administration’s protests are nothing more than a public relations exercise. I don’t think this theory is plausible though, because Israel’s policy has few if any benefits for Washington, whereas it exposes the US a high risk of being dragged into a very costly regional war and will cause massive reputational damage to the US even if that doesn’t happen, not to mention that it has already cost the US billions of dollars in direct and indirect assistance to Israel. Protests by US officials are also consistent with standard US policy and doctrine about Israel, so to assume that in fact they fully back Israel’s rampage in Gaza and Lebanon, one would have to assume that a complete doctrinal reversal has taken place in Washington after October and that’s just not plausible. Biden and the rest of the administration have also been repeatedly been humiliated by Netanyahu and, even taking into account the fact that US officials in a Democratic administration would have political incentives to pay lip service to the importance of achieving a ceasefire even if they actually were on board with Israel’s policy, I don’t think they would publicly and clearly state their opposition to a particular step just before Israel takes it on such a regular basis, because the optics are really terrible and if anything it makes their problem with pro-Palestine Democrats even worse.

However, Cook’s solution to the puzzle is also unsatisfactory, because it’s obviously not true that if the US stopped delivering weapons to Israel it would still not agree to a ceasefire. Cook’s suggestion that, even if the US took that step, Israel would find alternative suppliers and continue the war over US opposition is magical thinking. First, there are simply no other countries that would or even could provide Israel with the weapons and ammunition it needs to carry out this rampage, especially not if the US didn’t want them to. Israel sources the vast majority of its weapons and ammunition, including the bombs and artillery shells it’s using in Gaza and Lebanon, from the US. No other country with the right kind of weapons has stockpiles deep enough and the production capacities needed to supply Israel with the weapons and ammunition it needs at the volumes required. The countries that could at least provide some of the weapons Israel needs, even if not at the required volumes and for all weapon systems, are US allies and could easily be induced not to sell them to Israel as long as it doesn’t agree to a ceasefire. The interceptors used by Israel’s air defense systems, without which it would be at the mercy of the rockets, missiles and drones fired at it by Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies in the region, are also manufactured in the US. In general, even when the weapons and ammunition that Israel uses are manufactured domestically, they rely on components produced in the US and other Western countries that are already thinking about stopping arms deliveries to Israel.

Modern weapon systems are just too complex for a country of 9 million not to be dependent on the rest of the world and, even if we ignore the fact that now that Israel’s entire arsenal consists in Western equipment or systems that crucially rely on Western components and that it would take decades and be prohibitively expensive to switch to different suppliers (which is hardly something that Israel could do in the middle of a war), there are very few countries that are capable of producing weapons at the technology frontier or close to it. Other than the US and its allies, the only countries that can do that for a wide range of weapon systems are Russia and China (although even them are often dependent on Western components and technology), but for geopolitical reasons they would never agree to replace the US as Israel’s primary weapon suppliers. Thus, if the US really decided to cut Israel off, it would be forced to end the war pretty quickly because it would literally run out of the ammunition it needs to keep it going. Moreover, even if Israel could somehow find alternative suppliers of weapons and ammunition, unlike the US, no other country would pay for them, send entire fleets to the region to contribute to Israel's deterrence and shoot down missiles fired at it or provide the kind of diplomatic cover to Israel that Washington does. In fact, the reality is that Israel is not just dependent on the West in general and the US in particular for military supplies, it’s dependent on the West for practically everything, because again at the end of the day it’s a country of 9 million in a region where most people hate it. The idea that it wouldn’t fold if the US credibly threatened to withhold support is completely disconnected from reality.

So what is the solution to the puzzle that Cook was trying to solve? Well, in the previous sentence, the operative word is “credibly”. Cook is right that, in practice, the US only has very limited leverage over Israel, but that's not because if it stopped supplying weapons and other forms of support Israel could keep doing the same thing, which of course it could not. That's because Israel has a powerful lobby in the US that can impose a high cost on any elected or non-elected government official who is thinking about using the theoretical leverage Washington has, whereas the costs for the US of continuing to support Israel are extremely diffuse and therefore don't result in strong political incentives to withhold support to Israel, at least until and if the shit hits the fan. As a result, US officials can always threaten to withhold support from Israel, but it wouldn’t be credible unless circumstances change in a way that makes enough people in the US care more about what is happening in the Middle East. If you think about the costs for the US of continuing to support Israel, such as the direct and indirect cost of military assistance to Israel and the reputational damage, they’re distributed relatively equally over the population and spread over many years while being relatively limited in the short term. Direct and indirect military assistance to Israel, the weapons that Washington has sent to Israel free of charge and the cost of increasing the US military presence in the region to deter attacks against Israel and shooting down missiles fired at it, has already cost the US well over $20 billion. Of course, this is considerable and will increase a lot by the time it’s over, but the amount per tax payer is not large. Similarly, the anti-Americanism that support to Israel will generate is going to make it harder for US foreign policy to achieve its goals and will fuel terrorism against US targets for decades to come, but most of those consequences will be spread over a long period, the connection for US support to Israel will not be obvious in any particular case and people will not care about what caused a terrorist attack but only blame the people who carried it out anyway.

Such diffuse costs don’t generate strong political incentives to withhold support from Israel. It would be different if Americans cared about what happens in the Middle East, independently of the cost for them, but the vast majority of them evidently don’t. Nor is that specific to Americans, the truth is that most people everywhere don’t care about what happens in other parts of the world, which I think is inevitable. Thus, since on the one hand US officials face a well-funded and well-organized lobby willing and able to impose a significant cost on them should they withhold support from Israel and on the other hand they don’t face any pressure to do that because while most of the population are in favor of it they don’t really care and aren’t going to do anything to make it happen, it’s no mystery why the officials in question keep supporting Israel. Now, if Israel’s rampage turned into a regional war (in which the US would be dragged with virtual certainty), it would be a different story. This would cause a large increase in the price of oil and, while Americans don’t care much if Arabs are getting killed, they do care if they suddenly have to pay more for gas. At this point, the calculus would change for US officials, but it would be too late. That’s the tragedy of the situation in a nutshell: the incentives that US officials face are misaligned with the interests of the US and the only thing that could align them is precisely what their alignment would have been useful to prevent in the first place.

I plan to write another post specifically on how exactly the Israel lobby manage to affect policy, in which I will also present the evidence that it has in fact had a major effect on policy since the creation of Israel and even before that during the Mandate period (even if obviously it was a very different lobby back then), but in this post I would like to focus on the other side of the equation, which is usually ignored by people who talk about the role of the Israel lobby. Indeed, it’s true that the Israel lobby is very powerful and people who deny it are just delusional or lying, but at the end of the day it still couldn’t have such a large impact on US policy toward Israel were it not for the fact that most Americans just don't care about what happens in the Middle East. As I explained above, in the last analysis, the fundamental reason why the Israel lobby can be so effective is that the costs of supporting Israel for the US are very diffuse while the cost of withholding that support are significant for decision-makers. In other words, from the point of view of the US interest, the Israel lobby is best interpreted as a collective action problem. In that respect, there is nothing special about it, it’s the same story with every other lobby. In fact, that’s just a particular instance of how democracy in general works, that is to say not as a mechanism to allow people to govern themselves but as a political technology that allows elite groups to compete for power without bloodshed. In practice, policy is largely the result of compromises between special interests and not the translation of the preferences of citizens, who on most issues don’t have any. However, that’s not how democracy is sold to people and for good reasons, because if they didn’t believe in the democratic mythology to some extent that mechanism wouldn’t work anymore. This is also why people in the Israel lobby tries to hide the role it plays in the formulation of US policy, because they understand that if people understood it they would regard it as illegitimate since it contradicts their conception of democracy, even if that’s just the way it works in general.

Ukraine will have to make territorial and political concessions

The challenge for people who disagree with my view that Russia is probably going to win the war is to present a plausible “theory of victory” for Ukraine and I don’t think they can. There just doesn’t seem to be any scenario in which Russia agrees to withdraw from Ukraine, even to the pre-2022 borders, without Ukraine making territorial or political concessions and probably both. In particular, although some people are floating the idea that Ukraine could exchange the territory in captured in Kursk for Ukrainian territory currently held by Russia, this doesn’t seem even remotely plausible to me. Ukraine probably hoped that, by launching that incursion, it would force Russia to stop its offensive in Donetsk and shift resources to Kursk, but the Russians didn’t take the bait and have apparently been able to contain the Ukrainian incursion without having to withdraw a large number of troops from Donetsk. Despite what many commentators were initially saying, I don’t see any sign that Putin responded to that incursion by panicking or that he is terribly embarrassed by it, quite the contrary.

So the main result is that Ukraine’s already insufficient resources — everybody seemed to agree before it launched the Kursk incursion that it was outgunned and outnumbered in Donetsk — will be spread thinner and that it will be even more at a disadvantage where it matters the most, namely in the Donbas. Indeed, if the front starts collapsing in Donetsk due to insufficient resources, Ukraine will eventually have to shift resources from Kursk to plug the holes over there, at which point it will be easier for Russia to recover the territory it lost in Kursk and Ukraine won’t have anything to exchange. This incursion in Kursk may actually make it politically easier for Putin to allocate more resources to the war because now he can say that Russia proper is at risk and, as we shall see, the fact that he faces severe political constraints to mobilize both men and resources to fight the war is Ukraine’s best chance to achieve a relatively favorable outcome. But even if Russia can’t push the Ukrainian armed forces across the border in Kursk through force, I don’t think it really matters, because overall the war is not going Ukraine’s way and this means that Moscow will be able to obtain Ukraine’s withdrawal from Kursk as part of a deal eventually.

Indeed, a basic fact that should play a central role in any analysis of the war, but is often ignored, is that Ukraine pays a greater cost for the continuation of the war than Russia. Of course, this doesn’t mean that Russia won’t call it quits, since Ukraine’s ability and willingness to suffer the cost of continuing the war may be greater than Russia’s. For instance, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong also paid a greater cost than the Americans during the Vietnam War, but it was still the US that ended up giving up because at the end of the day the communists just cared more and therefore were prepared to take a lot more pain than the Americans. Another example that may seem more relevant is the Soviet-Afghan War. I suspect that, to the extent their optimism is something more than pure wishful thinking, most people who still believe in a Ukrainian victory have this kind of examples in mind, but I think this kind of comparison is very misleading.

First, Ukraine is not a predominantly rural country with a fast-growing population, it’s a middle-income, industrial country with a population that is predominantly urban and highly-educated with a TFR barely above 1. Not only does this mean that Vietnamese or Afghans were more used to hardship and had a greater tolerance for pain than Ukrainians today, but it also means that Vietnam or Afghanistan could afford to pay a much greater price than Ukraine without compromising their future. Indeed, when you have a TFR above 5, you can afford to lose people in a way you can’t when you have a TFR barely above 1. Indeed, as the Wall Street Journal recently explained, the reason why Ukrainian officials have been reluctant to mobilize people between 18 and 25 so far is that men in that cohort haven’t had children yet. The Russo-Ukrainian War is not as deadly as the Vietnam War or the Soviet-Afghan War for Ukrainians, but Ukrainian women and children can move to the EU relatively easily and millions of them have already done so, where many if not most will likely stay even after the war because they enjoy a much higher standard of living in the EU and they will have spent several years over there by then. While Ukrainian men are currently prevented from leaving the country, many of them will probably join their family in the EU after the war. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s fertility has totally collapsed since the beginning of the war, with the already low number of births divided by more than 2. It’s already unlikely that Ukraine will ever recover demographically from the war and this will only get worse as it continues.

Ukraine is also a democracy, even if a very imperfect one, where people have more ways to affect policy than in a communist dictatorship or a traditional society like Vietnam and Afghanistan. To be sure, even in a mature democracy, policy in general and foreign policy in particular is largely insulated from the popular will and is predominantly the result of debates and bargaining among elites. But the main mechanism for that insulation is the fact that regular people don’t follow policy debates and often are not even aware of them, so in a way there is no such thing as a “popular will” on most issues that policy-makers debate because most people don’t really understand or care about them, which is obviously not true of strategy during a war (because the population is directly affected by the way in often dramatic ways), even if propaganda and the rally-around-the-flag effect help keeping the population aligned with the government to some extent. This makes it harder, other things being equal, to continue fighting a war that results in untold amounts of suffering, especially when things don’t show any improvement on the front or indeed keep getting worse.

For reasons I will explain later, I don’t think the West is going to stop providing economic and military assistance to Ukraine and therefore I don’t think that’s how the war is going to end, I think it will end because eventually Ukrainians will grow tired of seeing their sons, husbands and brothers come back home in coffins or crippled, while they have to freeze during winter because of blackouts (Ukraine has lost 2/3 of its electricity production capacity since the beginning of the war), constantly worry about missile strikes and more generally are unable to have a normal life, without any sign that all those sacrifices are achieving anything on the battlefield. Ukrainians seem increasingly open to the idea of a negotiated peace, even if that requires making territorial concessions to Russia. According to the main Ukrainian polling institute, while only 10% of Ukrainians were open to giving up territory in return for peace at the beginning of the war, almost a third of them are today and remarkably this result is more or less the same across regions. One can always question the particular phrasing of the question, but the trend is clear and revealed preferences during the debate about the mobilization law last winter paint a similar picture.

Once a critical mass of people in favor of making concessions to end the war is reached, some people in the Ukrainian elite will try to take advantage of that shift by advocating for such concessions openly, at which point the pressure for the government to signal to Russia that it’s prepared to make concessions it had up until now ruled out will grow. Other people will no doubt resist that, which Russia may facilitate depending on how it responds to that debate in Ukraine (more on Russia’s attitude toward a negotiated settlement later), but unless Ukraine turns into a dictatorship or there is some kind of coup (which I guess can’t be entirely ruled out but would only delay the inevitable because even a dictatorship can’t ignore public opinion), this pressure will eventually become impossible to resist.2 This is all the more true that, as more Ukrainians and especially members of the Ukrainian elite start openly advocating for political and territorial concessions to end the war, the US and its allies will also feel more comfortable pushing the Ukrainian government to make such concessions. Right now, the leverage they have in theory is limited in practice because it’s politically delicate to pressure Ukraine into making concessions, but that problem will be greatly alleviated once Ukrainians themselves start advocating for that. This shift in Ukrainian public opinion may even trigger a preference cascade eventually, but it may not and could also remain gradual.

Again, if you think that what I’m predicting here is not going to happen, you have to say what exactly is going to stop the trend we’re seeing in that direction and I don’t think you can. As far as I can tell, people have made two kinds of arguments to that effect, neither of which I find even remotely convincing. The first consists in arguing that, if only the West were not so hesitant to provide Ukraine with such and such alleged wunderwaffen or to lift restrictions on their use, it could defeat Russia or inflict on it such a high cost that it would agree to negotiate on Ukrainian terms. Thus, for a long time, people were placing their hopes in F-16s. It was never explained how, given their cost and the time it takes to train pilots to use them, Ukraine was going to have a fleet of F-16s and other Western fighters sufficient to fundamentally alter the balance of power in the air and obviously that’s not going to happen. Now people are clamoring for the US to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s ability to carry out strikes deep inside Russia. Although US officials still resist that move, I suspect they will eventually relent, but as Stephen Biddle recently argued it won’t tip the balance of the war. The idea that, as one Bloomberg columnist recently put it, lifting those restrictions on the use of Western missiles would allow Zelensky to “bomb Putin to the negotiation table” is preposterous. Moreover, as I will explain later, while it’s true that NATO governments have frequently dragged their feet and procrastinated in providing assistance to Ukraine, there are structural reasons for that which are unlikely to change.

Another kind of argument people make to argue that, although right now it looks as though the war is not going Ukraine’s way, it can still turn things around is predicated on the prediction that Russia will collapse or will no longer be able to sustain the war effort and will be force to negotiate on Ukrainian terms. Russia also has a manpower issue, but it’s so far been able to limit the political impact of the war because, except briefly during the “partial mobilization” in the fall of 2022, soldiers have mostly been drawn from the lower-class through financial inducement and their families have little political influence. This is very different from the Soviet-Afghan War, during which although the children of the elites were largely exempted from the draft, even students at some of the best universities were eventually conscripted and sent to Afghanistan. As I will argue later, this strategy to generate manpower will become less viable as the war continues, but it’s very dubious that it will put the Russian government under the kind of political strain that mobilization creates in Ukraine anytime soon.

In general, only a tiny share of the Russian population is directly affected by the war other than soldiers and their families (such as people in Kursk who have lost their homes or people in Belgorod who are regularly shelled), whereas most of Ukraine’s population is. The vast majority of the Russian population actually benefits from the war, because military spending has boosted incomes. While in the long run this, along with sanctions, will harm Russia’s economy by creating various distortions and crowding out civilian investment, Moscow can probably keep this going for several years. Putin’s regime has fostered widespread apathy in the Russian population, which in broad outlines is ideologically aligned with Putin’s justification of the war and benefits from it at least in the short run, so I don’t think a popular revolution is a very likely possibility in the foreseeable future. This leaves the possibility of a challenge from above, but despite Prigozhin’s rebellion last summer, Putin’s hold on power seems firm. I guess this impression could be misleading, it’s difficult to know what is going on behind the scenes, but it seems irrational to bet the house on some kind of coup and besides it’s not clear that whoever would replace Putin would be more likely to end the war on Ukraine’s terms.

Indeed, while Americans never cared much about Vietnam, just as the Soviets didn’t really care about Afghanistan, the Russians actually care about Ukraine, because Putin’s views about the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians are widespread in Russia, where the independence of Ukraine was never fully accepted. There are millions of ethnic Russians in the territories that Russia occupies in Ukraine, whose families have been there for decades or even centuries, which even putting everything else aside makes the comparison with the Vietnam War or the Soviet-Afghan War inept. In fact, Russia has already paid a far greater cost to fight the war against Ukraine than the Soviet Union did during the Soviet-Afghan War, which compared to the Russo-Ukrainian War was a rather small affair from the point of view of Moscow’s commitment. The Russians are no more immune to the sunk cost fallacy than we are and that alone means that it would probably take a very long time before they agreed to just give up and withdraw unconditionally from Ukraine. I think the Ukrainians, for whom the war is far more costly, will call it quits before that happens and agree to make political and territorial concessions to end the war.

In fact, after months of insisting that Ukraine would not make any such concessions, Zelensky has already started to move in that direction. In a recent interview with Le Monde, he effectively abandoned his demand that Russia withdraws from every inch of Ukrainian territory before talks can even begin, explaining that Russian officials should attend the peace conference planned this fall. Even more significantly, while repeating that Ukraine can’t give up territory in exchange for peace and saying that it would be unconstitutional, he nevertheless suggested that it might happen “if the Ukrainian people want it”. This shows that even Ukrainian officials understand that it won’t be possible for them to end the war on Ukraine’s terms. Previously, Zelensky had insisted as part of his “peace plan” that Russia “shall immediately, completely, and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders and cease the hostilities”. This document also made clear that the borders in question were “as of the declaration of independence of Ukraine in 1991, which includes all parts of the territory of Ukraine temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation with no exceptions”, a clear reference to Crimea.

Needless to say, there never was any chance that Russia would agree to that or be forced to do it and it’s doubtful that even Zelensky ever thought it would happen, yet he still insisted that Russia’s withdrawal from every inch of Ukrainian territory was a precondition for talks and no Western official contradicted him. One reason was probably that, by making a show of intransigence, Ukrainian officials were trying to raise the expectations of Russian officials about what it would cost them to achieve their current goals, in the hope that it would lead them to revise them downward. But another reason is presumably that Zelensky feared that, if he said openly that Ukraine would have to make concessions to Russia in order to end the war, he would find himself vulnerable to attacks by other Ukrainian politicians who would depict that as defeatism. A similar reason explains why NATO officials pretended to go along with Zelensky’s “peace plan”, despite knowing it was completely disconnected from reality, because had they said so publicly it would have inevitably led to heavy criticism both from politicians and the media in the West. As Ukrainians grow more weary of the war, this calculus is changing, because increasingly the risk will be that other Ukrainian politicians will try to outflank him from the other side by criticizing him for his intransigence.

Presumably the same thing will happen in the West, where as more Ukrainians publicly advocate for concessions to end the war, it will become politically easier for officials to defend that solution and even pressure Ukraine to adopt it. In fact, I expect that Ukrainian officials will eventually welcome such public pressure, because it will allow them to deflect the blame on the West for concessions they know to be inevitable. They will argue that, although Ukraine is willing to continue to fight, it can’t do so without the support of the West. Since it’s wavering, the argument will go, prudence dictates that Ukrainians make concessions to Russia even if they don’t want to. But while this shift has already begun, I think it will be very slow, both in Ukraine and in the West. I don’t expect Western military and economic assistance to Ukraine to stop anytime soon. As I have argued before, now that we have committed to Ukraine’s defense in such a strong way, it will be very difficult to backtrack as people will insist that it would damage our credibility and, while I think that argument is bad, it’s nevertheless very effective. I said above that the Russians were not immune to the sunk cost fallacy, but neither are we. In general, once a policy has been adopted, it tends to have a lot of inertia because of the way in which large bureaucracies work. This fact that decisions on Ukraine are to a large extent coordinated in NATO makes that inertia even stronger, because it means that any government that considers withholding support from Ukraine will immediately come under pressure from its allies not to, which makes preserving the status quo the path of least resistance and further insulate policy toward Ukraine from internal pressure.

Indeed, I still think it will take years before the war ends, because the shift in Ukrainian public opinion has been relatively slow so far and, unless the Ukrainian armed forces start collapsing, there is every reason to think it will remain slow. Of course, many people do think a collapse of the Ukrainian armed forces is probable, but while it can’t be entirely ruled out I don’t think it’s very likely. As I argued above, the war is much less disruptive for Russia than for Ukraine and it has more resources, both in manpower and equipment, but it’s easy to exaggerate that advantage and I think a lot of people do. Russia is burning equipment at a very high rate and the stockpiles it inherited from the Soviet period aren’t infinite. Right now, most of the equipment it’s producing is actually refurbished materiel from those stockpiles, so as time goes by it should become harder to replace losses. I think people sometimes make too much of that argument and talk as if Russia would soon be unable to continue the war because of that, which I don’t think is going to happen, but the basic point is still correct. Similarly, while in theory Russia has a lot more military-age men it can mobilize than Ukraine, in practice this advantage is not as meaningful as it seems because, for reasons that will be discussed later, it’s also harder politically and economically for the Russian government to mobilize them.

In fact, the inability of both Russian and Ukraine to mobilize, train and equip a sufficient number of men to exploit tactical successes and turn them into strategic victories has arguably been the central fact of the war. I think it’s plausible that Russia will eventually capture the whole of Donbas and even more territory elsewhere, but unless it radically changes tack, starts allocating far more resources to the war and forcibly mobilizing a much larger number of men (which it seems unwilling or unable to do), I don’t think a scenario in which it eventually takes the entire left bank of the Dniepr and goes back more or less to the borders it had before the partition of Poland is likely. I’m no military expert, so I’m relying on pretty simplistic heuristics to think about what could happen and I could easily be wrong, but when I see how many casualties Russia has to suffer to capture relatively small towns my conclusion is that in order for such a scenario to materialize the resources advantage of Russia would have to be far greater and I don’t think it’s likely that it will make such a commitment.

Of course, I understand that, for various reasons (once certain strategic and well-defended positions have been captured it will become easier to take more territory, attrition can reduce the effectiveness of the Ukrainian armed forces, etc.), the amount of losses that have been necessary to achieve results in the past is a very imperfect predictor what it would take to capture more territory in the future, but I still think it’s a decent heuristic as a rough first approximation and in this case the delta between how much force Russia can plausibly generate and the amount it would have to generate for that scenario to materialize is large enough that I feel safe concluding it’s unlikely to happen. It would be a different story if I thought that NATO might eventually stop providing military and economic assistance to Ukraine, but as I already noted, I think it’s very unlikely to happen. Even if Trump wins in November, which certainly seems plausible at the moment, I think the national security establishment will eventually be able to ensure that assistance continues for reasons that have to do with how foreign policy is made in the US and others that are more specific to Trump’s personal deficiencies and lack of attention to policy issues.

As I have argued last year, I think that since the successful Ukrainian counteroffensive in the fall of 2022, we’ve basically entered a phase of the war similar to what happened after the end of 1950 in the Korean War. The war is going to continue for years and Russia will continue to make gains, but I expect them to be relatively limited in the grand scheme of things and eventually both sides will grow tired and freeze the conflict. I doubt there will be a peace treaty, although if things get bad enough for Ukraine it may have to agree to one, but in one way or another it will make territorial and political concessions and Russia will agree to a long-term ceasefire. Once again, it’s a fool’s errand to try to predict what will happen in a war and therefore it wouldn’t be surprising if even that admittedly vague prediction turned out to be false, but we have to make predictions to think about policy and I think something like that is the most likely outcome. If I’m right and that’s more or less how the war ends, what does that mean for Western policy toward Russia and Ukraine so far? That’s what I want to turn to next.

The failure of Western policy toward Russia and Ukraine

I think that, if my prediction about how the war is going to end turns out to be correct, the most immediate lesson for Western foreign policy will be that, as dysfunctional as Putin’s regime might be, it was still unrealistic to think that we could defeat Russia in a proxy war in Ukraine. A ubiquitous argument among anti-Russia hawks is that, since NATO members collectively have a GDP twenty times larger than Russia, Russia doesn’t stand a chance against Ukraine if the West is prepared to commit itself to the defense of Ukraine. The problem with that argument is that, even putting aside the fact that for various reasons GDP is a very imperfect measure of military potential, having more resources at one’s disposal doesn’t matter unless one is willing to actually commit them and, despite their over-the-top rhetoric about how the fate of democracy everywhere is at stake, Western countries evidently have a very limited willingness to commit resources to Ukraine’s defense. Of course, they have provided a very large amount of military and economic assistance to Ukraine, but as hawks regularly complain it’s still not enough and they have also been procrastinating and dragging their feet the entire time. Moreover, that’s just talking about material assistance to Ukraine, but as we have seen the main problem Ukraine faces is arguably the lack of manpower and, with a few exceptions, even hawks don’t advocate that NATO send troops to fight Russia in Ukraine.

The conclusion I draw from that unwillingness on the part of the West to make a strong enough commitment to defeat Russia in Ukraine is that we should have anticipated that we’d be powerless to prevent Russia from defeating Ukraine in case of a full-scale war between them and done more to prevent such a war in the first place. When you put it like that, this conclusion seems uncontroversial enough, but what I mean in particular is that we should have openly rejected NATO’s idiotic and hypocritical “open door” policy and more generally made clear to both Russia and Ukraine that we had no intention of ever bringing Ukraine into Western political and security structures. While this argument is now very unpopular, it was once the dominant view among Russia watchers, not just among self-styled realists. For instance, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, who co-wrote a biography of Putin and can’t be suspected of sympathy for him, argued in 2015 that Washington shouldn’t send weapons to Ukraine because since Russia enjoyed “escalation dominance” in Ukraine, meaning that “whatever move we make, [Putin] can match it and go further” it would only increase the probability of a war that we’d be powerless to prevent Ukraine from losing.3 Of course, hawks deny that Russia enjoyed escalation dominance over NATO in Ukraine, but as I’ve argued above that’s because they don’t understand that what matters for escalation dominance is not just theoretical capabilities but also the willingness to commit them.

I’m not going to argue here against the claim that Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine had nothing to do with NATO or Western policy in general, because although I find that view absurd — even if I obviously don’t think Western policy was the only factor — I plan to discuss it at length elsewhere. But it should be noted that, even if one concedes that Western policy did play a role in Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, it doesn’t follow that the best way to prevent it was to follow the realist advice and stay away from Ukraine. Indeed, anti-Russia hawks could, and many of them do, argue that if the West had signaled a stronger commitment to help Ukraine in case of invasion at the time and done more to help Kiev prepare for it, then Putin would not have invaded it because he would have concluded that it didn’t pass a cost-benefit test. They may even be right about that, but the problem with that argument is that, had the US tried to do that, it would have faced a credibility problem and that probably wouldn’t have worked. As I have argued, the reason why, despite being much weaker than NATO, Russia has escalation dominance in Ukraine is that NATO members are not willing to commit a large share of the resources theoretically available to them to defend Ukraine.

If that is so, it has little to do with the fact that people like me write arguments in favor of restraint, because in truth such arguments have very little impact on policy relative to other factors. The main reason why the West is not willing to make a stronger commitment to Ukraine’s defense is that, despite the apocalyptic rhetoric that has become popular since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine’s independence is not a core interest of the West. This point was made cogently by Obama in the long interview he did with Jeffrey Goldberg in 2016:

Obama’s theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.

“The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,” he said.

I asked Obama whether his position on Ukraine was realistic or fatalistic.

“It’s realistic,” he said. “But this is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for. And at the end of the day, there’s always going to be some ambiguity.”

I think we’re going to learn that Obama was right or rather that’s what people should, but probably won’t unfortunately, conclude from the way in which the war is probably going to end.

Ukraine’s economy is very small and, as a result, trade with it doesn’t matter to Western countries. This also means that, unlike China or Russia for European countries, there are few groups in the West that have an economic stake in Ukraine’s independence and will lobby government officials to provide more economic and military assistance.4 Once again, I don’t think the West is going to stop supporting Ukraine anytime soon, but I also think that it will continue to do so in a half-hearted way and to drag its feet to provide more assistance. Hawks are right when they say that, for instance, the West could do more to help Ukraine by implementing harsher sanctions against Russia. For instance, we could in theory do more to prevent Russia from selling oil and gas on the international market, but this would increase the price of energy and harm us a lot. We could also do more to prevent the circumvention of export control on dual-use Western components to Russia, but this would impose a cost on Western companies to track their supply chains and would force us to sanction more non-Western companies in emerging markets, which in turn would create political tensions with those countries and harm Western companies. There are limits to how far Western officials are prepared to go in that direction. This is not because they’re evil or particularly short-sighted, that’s just how politics works and it’s foolish to expect that Western politicians can divert a lot of resources to help Ukraine defeat Russia if they don’t have the support of many powerful groups pushing for a stronger commitment to Ukraine’s defense.

Similarly, while public opinion in the West has become very hostile to Russia and is largely sympathetic to Ukraine, the truth is that at the end of the day most people don’t really care about Ukraine. A lot of very bad things also happen in the rest of the world, which the West could also prevent in theory (in many cases it would actually be much easier than helping Ukraine defeat Russia), but people mostly don’t care about them either. A terrible civil war has been raging in Sudan since last year, Azerbaijan carried out ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh and now threatens to attack Armenia, Israel is turning Gaza into a pile of ruble and allowing settlers to run amok terrorizing Palestinians in the West Bank, various conflicts that have resulted in the death of a very large number of people have been raging in some parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo for more than 20 years, etc. and people in the West mostly don’t care, despite the fact that in some cases Western governments are more or less directly assisting people committing war crimes in those conflicts. Again, that’s not because they’re evil or stupid, it’s just normal for people not to care very much about what happens in foreign countries. They have a normal job to do and the rest of the time they want to be with their family or just enjoy their life without thinking about what’s happening on the other side of the world if that’s not directly and meaningfully impacting them. You can argue that people should care more, but they don’t, so it makes no difference to my point even if you’re right.

Of course, if the rhetoric to the effect that what is at stake in Ukraine is the fate of democracy everywhere or that unless Ukraine defeats Russia it will attack NATO’s eastern flank next were true, it would be a different story. The Cold War was very expensive, but the US and its allies still fought it and allocated huge amounts of resources to do so because they really believed that the Soviet Union might invade Western Europe. It’s true that, based on what we have learned since the collapse of the Soviet Union with the partial declassification of Soviet archives and testimonies by former Soviet officials, that Western fears of a Soviet invasion were exaggerated, but Western officials really believed that was a serious possibility all the same. It’s quite clear that, despite their rhetoric, Western officials are not overly concerned about the possibility that Russia might attack NATO’s eastern flank in Poland or the Baltics and, as I have argued previously, they have every reason not to be.5 It’s striking that, in the debate about Russia and Ukraine, the prevailing discourse manages to both underestimate and overestimate Russia. They overestimate it by talking as if Russian leaders could be so disconnected from reality as to not realize that Russia would have no chance in a war against NATO and underestimate it by assuming that because NATO is so much more powerful than Russia it can win a proxy war in Ukraine against it.

The lack of a powerful constituency with a stake in the preservation of Ukraine’s independence is not something Western political leaders can easily change and it should rather be seen as a constraint they have to take into account. That’s related to what Obama was talking about when, in the context of the debate about the dispute between Ukraine and Russia, he said that it was important to be clear about what your core interests are and what they aren’t. Not that a policy goal is a core interest of a country if and only if there are enough groups in that country willing to back it, that’s neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition, but there is still a correlation.6 Even if he sometimes failed to follow his own advice, making the distinction Obama was talking about is the first step toward appreciating the limits of your power, because you can’t realistically implement a policy that is very costly unless you know that enough people will be prepared to back it. In turn, the failure to correctly ascertain the limits of your power is a cardinal sin in foreign policy and, as during the Syrian Civil War, often results in disaster. Unfortunately, I think it will also result in disaster here and everyone, but the Ukrainians most of all, will pay the price for that failure. There is nothing moral about pursuing a policy that exceeds your real capabilities, even if your goal is to correct a real injustice, as in this case.

To be fair, a similar argument can probably be made against the realist position. One could argue that, although few groups in the West have a stake in Ukraine’s independence, as I’ve noted above the same thing is true about Russia in the US, which is by far the most powerful and influential country in the Western alliance. But, so the argument goes, only the existence of enough groups in the US with a stake in the preservation of good relations with Russia could have prevented idealist thinking, which has always been very powerful in the American foreign policy establishment, from making it politically feasible to consistently hold the realist line on Ukraine. I’ve actually made that argument before and think it’s pretty convincing:

Obama had clear realist leanings and tried to be conciliatory toward Russia in order not to fuel the security dilemma, but in this political environment he could only achieve a policy that was ambiguous and, to quote the French historian Jacques Bainville, “too harsh in its mild features and too mild in its harsh aspects”. Given that a realist policy wasn’t really politically feasible, it might have been preferable to be more aggressive against Russia, because it might have deterred it from invading Ukraine. The same can arguably be said about Germany’s stance toward Russia. Since the invasion, it has become largely uncontroversial that it was completely wrong, but as I plan to argue in details soon, I actually think the war could have been avoided if the West had been united behind that policy. The problem is that Germany was never able to convince its partners to come onboard and, as a result, the kind of conciliatory policy it pursued toward Russia was arguably worse than if it had joined the bandwagon and been more aggressive.

Indeed, there is clearly something tragic in the Greek sense about the Russo-Ukrainian War, because while it was possible for everyone to see what course of action were most likely to prevent it, even if many people refused to see it, political constraints that nobody could do anything about inevitably pushed us toward what was arguably the policy that maximized the probability that it would happen.

The price for Ukraine is pretty obvious and I will return to that question at the end of this essay, but the West is also going to pay a price, though unless things really spiral out of control it should be relatively modest. In a way that’s part of the problem, because the West in general and the US in particular is just too powerful for its own good, hence it’s largely insulated from the damage its own foreign policy mistakes wreak. I have already discussed at length the costs of providing military assistance to Ukraine elsewhere, so I don’t want to repeat myself here, but it suffices to say that even if we manage to avoid a catastrophic escalation that would bring NATO into the war (a scenario that seems very unlikely but can’t be totally ruled out), this policy would have large direct and indirect costs for the West not only in purely economic terms but also in terms of military preparedness and foreign policy. This would be true even if Ukraine defeated Russia, but since it probably won’t, it’s going to be even worse. The purely economic cost is sustainable because Western countries are very rich, which is also one of the reasons I don’t think Western support to Ukraine is going to end anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be small and it won’t. If we include both direct and indirect costs, and if I’m right that the war is going to last several more years, then it will probably run into trillions of dollars by the time it’s over.

Perhaps the most common argument in favor of the view that it’s in the West’s interest to provide military assistance to Ukraine is that it will make Europe safer by degrading Russia’s military capabilities at a low cost for NATO. But General Christopher Cavoli, NATO’s commander-in-chief in Europe, recently told Congress that the opposite was going to happen:

In sum, Russia is on track to command the largest military on the continent and a defense industrial complex capable of generating substantial amounts of ammunition and materiel in support of large scale combat operations. Regardless of the outcome of the war in Ukraine, Russia will be larger, more lethal, and angrier with the West than when it invaded.

In other words, not only is Western military assistance to Ukraine fail to achieve its objective, but as I previously warned it might, it will probably bring about the very kind of situation it was supposed to prevent. It’s true that, because it’s going to be forced to fight a long war of attrition, Russia is going to burn through most of its Soviet-era stockpiles of equipment, but what good will that do us? The vast majority of that equipment was in no condition to be used without significant and costly refurbishment that Russia showed absolutely no inclination to perform until it had to, it would probably have become totally unsalvageable or useless within a few decades and it’s not as if Russia was going to use it against NATO if we hadn’t supported Ukraine anyway. Indeed, even if Russia had somehow been crazy enough to attack a NATO member next, it’s very unlikely that it would have turned into a war of attrition in which Russia has to dig into its stockpiles because the fear of a nuclear escalation would almost certainly have ended the fighting long before that. What matters for Europe’s security is not how much equipment Russia has in stockpiles, it’s the capabilities it can actually mobilize on a relatively short notice, which is very different.

I think Cavoli likely exaggerates the threat that Russia will pose after the war is over, which is not surprising because it’s in the Pentagon’s interest to inflate threats in order to secure a larger budget, but there is little doubt that, if you take into account both capabilities and intentions, Russia will pose a greater threat to Europe after the war than before and more importantly for the debate about Western policy toward Ukraine it will pose a greater threat than it would have if the West had not forced Russia to fight a prolonged war of attrition by providing military assistance to Ukraine. Had this not happened, Ukraine would have run out of ammunition sometime in 2022 and the conventional phase of the war, if not the war itself, would have ended a few months after the beginning of the invasion. I’m sure people will argue that, had this happened, people would have launched a massive program of military spending to reconstitute its forces anyway, but there is no evidence whatsoever for that view and plenty of evidence that it wouldn’t have. Indeed, not only did Putin fail to mobilize despite the failure of Russia’s initial assault in 2022 until the successful Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kharkiv in the fall, but even after that counteroffensive Russia still planned to wind defense spending down after 2023, presumably because it was overoptimistic about the prospects of ending the war quickly.

In response to the greater threat posed by Russia, European countries will increase their defense spending because even though a Russian attack on NATO is very unlikely people will be scared of it and governments have to prepare even for unlikely possibilities (though military budgets won’t increase as much as people are predicting because European officials don’t really believe their apocalyptic rhetoric about the consequences a Ukrainian defeat would have and most European governments are going to face severe budget deficits in the coming years as a result of expenditures they made to deal with the pandemic and the energy crisis), so the main result of the war, from a strategic point of view, is going to be a new equilibrium in which both Russia and the West spend more on defense (which in turn means that over the next few decades trillions of dollars will be diverted from more productive uses to finance military spending), without a fundamental alteration of the balance of power in Europe. While it’s going to be a tragedy for Ukraine, this won’t be the end of the world for the rest of Europe and most of the people who at the moment are claiming that unless Russia is defeated in Ukraine all hell is going to break lose will have forgotten about it only a few month after it’s over if not before, but it will still be very costly and it’s only because the West is so rich and powerful that we likely won’t feel the pain very much.

Moreover, the West’s policy of providing military assistance to Ukraine and letting Kiev define its war goals instead of using the leverage it has to prevent the Ukrainians from pursuing unrealistic objectives won’t just be costly because it will have large economic costs, it will also be costly in terms of military preparedness and our ability to achieve other foreign policy goals. The point about military preparedness is that, to some extent, the military assistance that the US and its allies reduce their ability to respond militarily to crises that might erupt in other parts of the world. People dismiss that fact because they argue that Western nations could theoretically solve that problem by investing more in their military preparedness, but that’s largely irrelevant because they won’t or at least not enough to eliminate the problem, due to political and organizational constraints that simply can’t be wished out of existence. For instance, France could in theory make investments to massively increase the production of SCALP missiles and replenish its stockpiles more quickly while increasing deliveries to Ukraine, but in practice it won’t because this would cost several billions of euros and it’s struggling with a large budget deficit that is going to take precedence over that. If there were enough powerful groups with a stake in Ukraine’s independence, then it might have been a different story because they would fight to make Ukraine a priority during the political fights over the budget, but as I already noted above that’s not the case. Most Western countries, including the US, are in a similar situation.

Western support to Ukraine, by prolonging the war and destroying the West’s relationship with Russia, will also reduce our ability to achieve other foreign policy goals because Russia is going to make that harder. Indeed, while Russia is a relatively weak country and not a serious competitor for the US or even a major threat to Europe, it still has considerable spoiling power. Again, I have already discussed this point in detail before and I’m not going to repeat myself, but it’s striking how people constantly inflate the threat posed by Russia yet keep ignoring that fact. For instance, Russia has a lot of very sophisticated weapon systems and since the end of the Cold War the US has tried hard to make sure they wouldn’t be transferred to Western adversaries, because it understood that if that happened it would reduce the West’s military advantage over the countries that benefited from such transfers, raise the cost of using military force against them and therefore reduce the credibility of the threat to do so. In the past, Russia has often avoided transferring its most sophisticated military technology to Western adversaries in part to preserve good relations with the West, but now that motive is gone.

The fact that, largely thanks to Western support for Ukraine, Russia’s invasion has turned into a long war of attrition has already forced Moscow to develop much closer ties with China, Iran and North Korea. In exchange for assistance during the war, such as Iranian drones, Chinese dual-use components and North Korean artillery shells, it has already been reported that Russia has agreed to transfers of technology and this could get a lot worse by the time it’s over. People dismiss Russia’s military technology because the Russian armed forces have failed to defeat Ukraine quickly, but that probably had little to do with the performance of Russian weapon systems and, if tomorrow Iran is able to acquire dozens of S-400 systems and they shoot down Israeli planes or if Russia transfers P-800 Oniks missiles to the Houthis and they start using them against the US Navy in the Red Sea, the people who are making fun of Russian military technology at the moment will not be laughing anymore.7 There is a reason why Israel, which regularly conducts air strikes against Iranian and Iran-affiliated targets in Syria (where Russia has air defense systems), has been very careful not to anger Russia by siding with Ukraine. Russia may lag behind the US and the most advanced Western nations, but having inherited a massive military-industrial complex and decades of investment in sophisticated weapon systems, it still has a significant edge in military technology over most of the world. In many areas, this includes China, which is otherwise far more powerful than Russia.

What should Ukraine do and why it probably won’t do it

As I just explained, the cost of NATO’s policy toward Russia and Ukraine will be large for the West (though not so large that we’ll learn any lesson from it), but one could argue that it will at least make Ukraine better off. That’s hardly obvious though and, depending on how exactly the war ends, the opposite may be true. It’s not impossible that, had the West made it clear to Ukraine that it would not provide military assistance during the first weeks of Russia’s invasion, Ukraine would have agreed to a deal with Russia that, while harsh and unfair, would nevertheless have been preferable to what it will have to accept eventually and would have avoided the massive human and economic cost of continuing the war for several years. Of course, hawks strenuously deny that and claim there is no way that is true, but that’s little more than a flat assertion and based on the available evidence about the negotiations that took place at the time this possibility can hardly be ruled out. For instance, Russia’s territorial demands were less extensive at the time since it was only asking that Ukraine recognizes the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk in their administrative boundaries, whereas it has since claim not only Donetsk and Luhansk for itself but also Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

Hawks assert that it was merely a ruse and that Russia would eventually have annexed that and more if Ukraine had accepted Moscow’s conditions at the time, but they have no idea and don’t really provide any evidence in support of that claim, beyond saying that since Russia invaded Ukraine before there is no reason to think it won’t do it again. In fact, there are plenty of reasons to think it wouldn’t have done it again, starting with the fact that invading Ukraine had proved much harder and more costly than they had anticipated. It’s hardly obvious that, having obtained both territorial and political concessions from Ukraine (which probably fell short of Putin’s original goals but could still be presented as a clear victory), Russia wouldn’t have left it there. Of course, it may also have not, but that’s irrelevant unless you think that by continuing the war Ukraine will eventually achieve a better outcome and frankly it seems very dubious at this point. It’s also not clear that, even if the West had made it clear to Ukraine that it would have to fend for itself against Russia, it wouldn’t still have rejected Moscow’s conditions at the time and ended up having to accept something even worse than what it will get.

Ultimately, we’ll never know for sure, because for that we’d have to be able to observe the counterfactual in which the West refused to help Ukraine and by definition that’s impossible. It also doesn’t matter very much, not only because that boat has already sailed, but also because it’s dubious that the US and its allies would ever have left Ukraine to fend for itself, even if we agree for the sake of the argument that it would have been preferable. Indeed, while the evidence suggests that initially the West didn’t plan to make a commitment to Ukraine’s defense (if only because they thought it would be defeated relatively quickly), once the Ukrainian armed forces had repulsed Russia’s initial assault it was always going to be very difficult for Western officials to resist the calls to provide military assistance. Just as it was very difficult for Western officials not to promise Ukraine that it would eventually be welcome into Western political and security structures, even if that made a Russian invasion more likely, because the ideological makeup of the foreign policy establishment in Washington and other Western capitals made it hard for government officials to avoid making that kind of promise, it was always going to be very difficult to let Ukraine lose for lack of ammunition once it managed to defeat Russia’s initial assault. Once again, while government officials have some room for choice it would be wrong to pretend their actions were always predetermined, we must also keep in mind that in many cases they face incentives that push them to make suboptimal decisions.

This leaves the question of what, now that Russia has invaded Ukraine and that Western governments have committed to provide military assistance to Kiev, Ukraine and the West should do. I think the right way to think about the question of what is the best time for Ukraine to open negotiations to end the war is to frame it as a sort of optimization problem. Ukraine’s goal should be to end the war at the lowest possible cost to itself. We can distinguish between two kinds of cost that Ukraine faces as it seeks to achieve that goal. First, there are the costs of continuing the war, such as casualties and the destruction of property. I’m not just talking about the immediate costs but also about their long term consequences. For instance, when infrastructure is destroyed, not only does it have immediate consequences on the economy and people’s well-being but it will also affect them in the future. Another kind of cost are the concessions that Ukraine would have to make to convince Russia to end the war. Again, this should be construed not just as the immediate cost of the concessions in question, but should include the cost they will have in the long run. For instance, if Ukraine needs to give up territory to end the war, the cost should include the impact this will have on future economic growth and the increased vulnerability to another Russian attack in the future it may entail. The relationship between those two kinds of cost is complex and not easy to figure out, but that’s what one has to do in order to solve the above-mentioned optimization problem.

For instance, insofar as what concessions that Russia will demand to end the war depends in part on what the Russian leadership believes about how costly it will be for Russia to convince Ukraine to make those concessions, and in turn that depends in part on their beliefs about Ukraine’s willingness to endure further hardship to avoid compromising, it’s plausible that other things being equal Ukraine can induce Russia to reduce the concessions it demands by waiting longer before opening peace talks because doing so will increase Russia’s estimate of Ukraine’s determination. Moreover, the longer the war lasts and the higher the cost already incurred by Russia will be, which other things being equal also makes it more likely to reduce its demands.8 This tends to create an inverse relationship between the first kind of cost and the second kind of cost, because the longer Ukraine waits to sue for peace and the more it will suffer due to the continuation of the war, but that’s only true other things being equal and other things probably aren’t equal. Indeed, Putin’s belief about how costly it would be for Russia to force Ukraine to make the concessions he wants to extract from it doesn’t just depend on his belief about Kiev’s determination to keep fighting, but also on his belief about each side’s military prospects if the war continues. In particular, if Ukraine’s military situation continues to deteriorate as the war goes on, it will reduce Putin’s estimate of how costly it would be to achieve his current goals other things being equal, which could in theory more than compensate the opposite effect that Ukraine’s continued refusal to negotiate will have on his belief about Kiev’s determination not to compromise.

For the reasons I have already discussed, I think that’s exactly what is going to happen. I doubt that, by continuing the war, Ukraine is doing much to raise Putin’s estimate of how costly it will be to achieve his goals, because at the moment Ukraine’s military situation keeps getting worse, polls show a trend in favor of making concessions to end the war in Ukrainian public opinion and, as I have argued above, there is no reason to think any of that is going to change as the war goes on. So it seems to me that, in the long run, there is actually a positive correlation between the costs that Ukraine will incur by continuing the war and the costs it will have to pay in the form of concessions to end it. The only glimmer of hope for Ukraine, putting aside the possibility of a coup in Russia or something like that (which seems very unlikely and is certainly not the kind of possibility anyone should bet the future of their country on), is that Putin is clearly reluctant to increase Russia’s commitment to the war and in particular to carry out another round of mobilization. Except in the fall of 2022, when he was forced to mobilize to deal with the emergency, Putin has so far been able to avoid it by enticing people to voluntarily sign up to fight in Ukraine with financially attractive contracts. This has allowed Russia to recruit enough men while sparing the more affluent and educated part of the population, which has kept the political cost of fighting the war to a minimum. However, there are limits to how much that strategy can accomplish, which Russia may be close to reaching. Indeed, Putin recently doubled the bonus that people who volunteer to fight in Ukraine receive upon signing a contract, which suggests that Russia is finding it more difficult to reach its recruitment targets in that way.

Putin may soon reach a point where, if he wants to preserve Russia’s ability to launch offensives and maintain the pressure on Ukraine, he will have to escalate Russia’s commitment to the war, which will require him to take steps he’d rather avoid for political and economic reasons. Indeed, not only would another round of mobilization be unpopular, but it would also worsen inflationary pressure. Russia’s economy is already overheating and has very little slack, so another round of mobilization would increase inflation by reducing the labor supply, not only because the men sent to fight in Ukraine would no longer be available to work in Russia but also because another mobilization would no doubt induce many people to leave the country. So I think Putin will eventually have to decide whether he wants to increase Russia’s commitment to the war, which he clearly doesn’t want to do, but I think he probably will if, when that time comes, Ukraine is not prepared to make enough concessions. This war has become deeply personal to him and he surely know that how it ends will largely define his legacy, so I don’t think it’s very likely that he won’t escalate if he thinks that it’s the only way he can secure the kind of terms that he could present as a victory. If the Ukrainians miss that window because they are not prepared to make enough concessions, he will likely escalate Russia’s commitment, the sunk cost fallacy will kick in and the window will close, so Ukraine will probably end up paying a higher price for similar or even worse terms in the end.

It’s hard to know exactly what concessions Ukraine would have to make to satisfy Putin, that’s something that would only emerge in the course of negotiations, but I think that, at the minimum, Kiev will not only have to agree that Russia keep at least de facto control over the Ukrainian territory it has conquered but also formally renounce NATO membership. Hawks will say that, should Ukraine agree to such terms, it would effectively mean that it’s no longer fully sovereign but only has a diminished form of sovereignty. They are right, but unfortunately I think that, even if Ukraine doesn’t make those concessions when the window of opportunity I described above is still open, it will still have to agree to that eventually and possibly much worse. The only difference is that more people will die, Ukraine’s infrastructure will be more thoroughly destroyed and more Ukrainians will leave the country or stay abroad. Once again, if people don’t think Ukraine should agree to such a deal, they need to present a realistic plan that would allow it to avoid making that kind of concessions eventually, but I don’t think they can. Every plan that people have put forward requires the West to massively increase military assistance to Ukraine. Now, it’s possible that if Western military assistance increased massively and Kiev did another round of mobilization, Ukraine could inflict enough damage on the Russian armed forces to convince Putin to revise his goals and agree to more limited terms. But it’s not going to happen because, as I explained above, there just aren’t enough people with a stake in Ukraine’s independence in the West for economic and military assistance to increase dramatically.

Again, most Western countries currently face large public deficits and in the next few years there will be major political battles about what expenditures to cut in order to reduce them, so Ukraine should consider itself lucky if Western economic and military assistance doesn’t go down. If that is so, it’s not because people like me write papers in which they argue that it’s not in the West’s interest to continue the current policy toward Ukraine, it’s because due to the lack of groups that have a stake in Ukraine’s independence in the West nobody will go to bat for Ukraine in the upcoming budgetary debates. For instance, if the French government tries to cut pensions or reduce wage subsidies to balance the budget, plenty of organized groups are going to fight to prevent that and the French government will have strong incentives to listen to them, but there won’t be anyone to argue that we should increase economic and military assistance to Ukraine because voters don’t care and there are no economic interests in France with a stake in Ukraine’s independence. As I explained above, I still expect Western countries to keep supporting Ukraine due to inertia and pressure from allies, but it’s not realistic to expect that it will increase significantly in this context. Moreover, the problem with that plan isn’t limited to the lack of stakeholders in Ukraine’s independence in the West, there is also Ukraine’s own reluctance to take the steps it presupposes to take into account.

Indeed, while it’s true that the West has been procrastinating a lot on military assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of the war, Ukraine has also been procrastinating with mobilization and that reluctance to mobilize is only going to get worse. It’s clear that Ukraine needs more manpower at the moment, so for increased Western assistance to help, Ukraine would also need to do another round of mobilization. Ukraine’s ability to properly train new recruits is very limited, but if we assume that Western assistance will increase massively, we can assume that in particular NATO will massively scale up the training of Ukrainian conscripts. The problem is that, even if that were realistic (as I have just argued it’s not because the West isn’t going to dramatically increase military assistance to Ukraine), Ukrainians would still have to agree to further expand mobilization and it’s hardly obvious that it would happen. The last time Ukraine had to expand mobilization, it led to a protracted debate and it took months for the relevant legislation to be voted, which only happened after it was significantly watered down. The opposition is still asking that a demobilization framework be put in place to allow the people who have been fighting since the beginning of the war to go back home. If Ukraine wants to increase the available manpower, it will have to mobilize men under 25, which will make the proposal even more controversial and will almost certainly result in compromises that reduce the scope of mobilization. Political constraints are real and can’t be wished out of existence, not even in Ukraine, but that’s precisely what the people who argue that we should aim for a decisive Ukrainian victory do.

Another objection to the idea that Ukraine should make concessions to end the war before Putin ups the ante is that, if Ukraine agrees to a ceasefire now without NATO membership, it will just pave the way for another Russian invasion later that will allow Putin to finish the job. To be sure, nobody can say for sure that it’s not what would happen, but that argument is only convincing if the people who make it have a realistic alternative to propose and again they simply don’t. Besides, while hawks talk as if it were certain that Russia would attack Ukraine again if there were a ceasefire soon, that’s obviously not the case. The war has demonstrated to Putin that subjugating Ukraine would be extremely costly and, if he can secure terms that would amount to a clear victory, it’s hardly obvious that he would not be satisfied with that. Moreover, even if we assume for the sake of the argument that it’s certain that Russia would attack Ukraine again, it doesn’t follow that Ukraine should agree to a ceasefire unless it can also be shown that Russia and not Ukraine would benefit more from a pause in the fighting, which is hardly obvious given that again Ukraine is losing at the moment. Hawks never even bother to make that argument because ultimately their opposition to a ceasefire is based, not on rational considerations, but on the judgment that Russia has no right to demand territorial or political concessions from Ukraine. Well, it does not, but Ukraine will still have to make them in the end. As the French screenwriter Michel Audiard said, when 130 kilograms men say something, 60 kilograms men listen. He could have added that this has nothing to do with the rights of 130 kilograms men.

In a recent article, which acknowledges that the war is going badly for Ukraine, The Economist argues that NATO should invite Ukraine to join. I think following that advice would basically guarantee that Russia would reject negotiations and continue the war until Kiev is willing to accept even harsher terms. Indeed, the Russians know that NATO will never bring Ukraine into the Alliance as long as the war is ongoing (because NATO members don’t want to join the war against Russia), so if they believe that Ukraine would join NATO as soon as the war is over they would have a strong incentive to keep the war going. As I keep pointing out, the claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “nothing to do” with NATO is preposterous, but unfortunately it has become a dogma in the West. In order to defend it, people even misrepresent what Putin says or omit contextual information to make it sound as if he used to be okay with NATO expansion, but that doesn’t make this dogma any less absurd. No matter how much people insist on ignoring the evidence that the Russians genuinely care about preventing Ukraine from ever joining NATO, that is still a fact and we only ignore that fact at our own peril. What makes this worse is that, based on the West’s behavior since 2022 and even before that, it’s pretty clear that Western officials have no intention of following through on their promise to bring Ukraine into NATO and only repeat it for reasons that have to do with intra-alliance politics.

In my view, instead of pursuing NATO membership (which Russia will never allow and that the West doesn’t really intend to grant anyway), Ukraine should focus on secure the right to eventually join the EU, which I think Russia might be prepared to accept if Kiev commits to opting out of the Common Security and Defence Policy. It should also resist arms limitations that would prevent it from creating a credible deterrent to another Russian aggression. Some arms limitations, such as restrictions on long-range missiles, are probably okay since Ukraine has shown that it could make aggression very costly to Russia even without such weapons, but any cap on the number of tanks, artillery systems, etc. should be high enough to make another invasion by Russia very costly. Of course, NATO would be better for Ukraine, but again I don’t think the Russians will never agree to that and Ukraine has no realistic prospect of forcing them to change their mind. Frankly, I don’t know if the Russians would even agree to that, but the probability of a deal is certainly higher if Ukraine doesn’t insist on NATO membership, which is a highly sensitive issue in Russia. Not only has the prospect that Ukraine might join NATO been making everyone in the Russian foreign policy establishment foaming at the mouth for decades, but Putin has explicitly and repeatedly said that preventing that was one of his main war goals (indeed that’s one of the few things he’s been clear about when it comes to his war goals), so abandoning that demand would involve a major loss of face and that’s not very likely given that Russia is winning. Since the West will never agree to openly close the door on Ukrainian membership to NATO, since the so-called “open door” policy has become a dogma so deeply entrenched in the Western foreign policy establishment that no politician is going to explicitly reject it (even though most of them know it’s idiotic), it will have to be Ukraine that gives up that goal.

Yet another objection is that Putin is not interested in negotiations anyway. This may be true, but nobody really knows and once again the certainty that people who assert that is unwarranted. Indeed, since the beginning of the war, there has been plenty of evidence that Russia was interested in negotiations. For instance, according to the New York Times, after the successful Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kharkiv had put Russia on the defensive in the fall of 2022, US intelligence services intercepted Russian communications suggesting that Russia was thinking about using nuclear weapons in Ukraine. In response, Biden sent William Burns, the director of the CIA and a former US ambassador in Moscow, to meet Sergei Naryshkin, his Russian counterpart, in Ankara to warn against that. Burns apparently told the New York Times that, when Naryshkin arrived, he was so convinced that he’d come to negotiate a deal to end the war that it took some time for Burns to disabuse him of that notion and be able to talk about the risk of a nuclear escalation.9 More recently, Reuters published a piece, based on interviews with several Russian sources, according to which Putin didn’t want to carry out another round of mobilization and was prepared to accept a ceasefire that would freeze the conflict on the current frontlines. Of course, even if Putin was once willing to negotiate, he may have since changed his mind. The evidence I mentioned pre-dates the Kursk incursion and, according to a report by independent Russian journalists, Putin is no longer interested in peace talks. But ultimately nobody knows and there is still plenty of evidence that Russia would be prepared to negotiate a ceasefire. The people who assert that Putin is not interested in negotiations either totally ignore that kind of evidence or at best dismiss it summarily on the ground that it’s just Russian disinformation meant to undermine the West’s resolve in supporting Ukraine. They know that, presumably, thanks to their ability to read Putin’s mind.

A related point opponents of negotiations make, in response to people who claim that continuing the war is pointless because it’s very costly yet doesn’t result in dramatic changes on the ground, is that even if the frontlines don’t change much it doesn’t mean that it’s pointless to keep fighting because the very fact of imposing pain on the other side is what makes negotiations possible because only when one or both sides have suffered enough pain will they be prepared to make the concessions necessary to end the war. As long as negotiations have not happened, they seem to imply, it means that neither side has suffered enough for negotiations to be useful. Now, they are right that it’s fallacious to claim that the imposition of pain doesn’t affect the politics of peace, but it’s just as fallacious to claim that politicians have no discretion in when to start negotiations and that it's just something that will happen automatically after enough pain has been imposed and not before. Concretely, peace happens after people start talking and agree to make concessions, which is a choice they have to make. Obviously, they face constraints in making that choice, but it's still not a purely mechanical process that is totally outside of their control. Nor is it something that, in principle, the West couldn’t influence by using the leverage it has over Ukraine and making it clear to Russia that it’s prepared to use carrots and not just sticks in return for better terms for Ukraine. Western officials are unwilling to use that leverage, however, because the cost of not doing so will primarily be borne by Ukraine while the cost of doing so would be borne by them personally, as they would be sure to be criticized heavily in the media for betraying Ukraine, even if that would ultimately in Ukraine’s interest and might actually be welcomes by people in Ukraine who understand that but need cover to plead more openly for a deal.

Unfortunately, as I keep saying, political constraints can’t be ignored and those which prevent both people in Ukraine and people in the West from openly advocating for making concessions to Russia are no different. Thus, even if Ukraine really has a window of opportunity to make a deal with Russia before Putin decides to escalate Russia’s commitment to the war that, while bad and unjust, would still not be as bad and unjust as the deal Ukraine would have to accept later if it doesn’t seize that window of opportunity and Putin ups the ante, I expect that it’s exactly what is going to happen. While Ukrainian public opinion has moved toward greater acceptance of compromise since the beginning of the war, it still seems to be far from where it would have to be in order for a deal with Russia to be possible, even if my relatively optimistic assumptions about what kind of deal Putin would be prepared to offer are true. This is particularly true among Ukrainian military, journalistic and political elites, who are more nationalist than average and have more influence on policy. It’s quite likely that, because it’s blinded by ideology, a nationalist minority will prevent Kiev from making concessions before the window of opportunity I have been talking about closes and that as a result Ukraine will eventually have to agree to far worse terms than it could have obtained. In the worst case scenario, if Putin overcomes his reluctance to carry out another round of mobilization or somehow manages to keep the pressure on Ukraine at the same level without doing that and the war continues for long enough, attrition could reach such a point that Ukrainian soldiers will just start ignoring orders and the front will collapse, at which point even Ukrainian statehood might be at risk. I have no idea how likely such a scenario is, but I think it’s more likely than a scenario in which Putin just gives up or is overthrown by some kind of coup.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have explained how I think the rest of the Russo-Ukrainian War is going to unfold and, based on what I think is the most likely outcome, to draw lessons about not only what Ukraine and the West should have done in the past but also what they should do in the future. Obviously, trying to predict what is going to happen in a war is a fool’s errand and it’s quite possible that my predictions will turn out to be wrong, but if we are to think about policy then we have no choice but to engage in that exercise and try to make at least vague predictions. I have argued that Ukraine didn’t have a realistic path to victory, that it should therefore try to make a deal, however costly and unfair it would be, while Putin is still hesitating to up the ante, because failing to do so before he does would be even costlier. However, I have also concluded that unfortunately Ukraine was unlikely to do so, because political constraints would make that very difficult. Indeed, a recurrent theme in this essay is that political constraints matter a great deal and often result in outcomes that are suboptimal in the long run, because they tend to create a misalignment between the incentives of decision-makers in the short run and what’s in the interest of their country in the long run. A key lesson of that discussion is that, as Obama said in 2015, statesmen should pay attention not so much to their theoretical capabilities but to their real capabilities given the political constraints they face and only make commitments they are truly prepared to honor. Unfortunately, I don’t think that Western officials have heeded that lesson in dealing with Russia and Ukraine since the end of the Cold War, a mistake for which the price has already been high and will be much higher by the time the war is over.

Here is the passage of Nuland’s interview with Zygar I have in mind:

Victoria Nuland: We tried to be extremely generous, as you know. There was almost a hundred billion dollars in support of various kinds that came from us and other Europeans. Including, I remember, first negotiations in the IMF to support the ruble, etc. But I think, you know, a lot of those things that were done to open the economy so fast didn't allow the population to adjust, you know so many people, as you know, lost their own social safety net and suffered, whereas a few people got very very rich and neither the Russian government nor we appreciated the backlash that was going to come as a result of that.

Mihail Zygar: A lot of people would actually disagree. I mean, I've I've spoken to many former ministers of the first Russian government, a reformist government…

VN: Kozyrev [the Russian foreign minister at the time] and company.

MZ: Yeah, reformist government, and they love talking about the absence of any Marshall Plan for Russia. And they say that Gaidar’s [deputy prime minister of Russia at the time] government was expecting, was waiting for some some kind of real help from the United States and they hoped that [the] Russian economy should have been supported and they say that there was no Marshall Plan, there was not enough substantial help from the West. Do you agree?

VN: It's objectively untrue. If you look at how much the IMF and the World Bank and we as nations were giving…

MZ: Even Soviet debts were not forgiven for Russia.

VN: They were largely forgiven, they were largely forgiven. Lend-Lease wasn't forgiven, but Lend-Lease was forgotten about, but mostly Russia was able to completely reschedule its debt and a huge amount of it was forgiven. Not private debt, that had to be negotiated. But if you look at the figures, as I said, between 1991 and 1996 more than a hundred billion dollars in foreign assistance went into Russia, mostly through the IMF and the World Bank because we wanted the management systems that came with that. You know I think where things began to get out of whack was when the state enterprises started getting sold off very quickly and some people got very rich and then, when the rubble got into trouble in [19]98, could we have done more then? Should we have? It happened very quickly, as you know, but I also think that, the vastness of Russia, probably things should have moved more slowly on both sides, if that makes sense.

Not to beat around the bush here, virtually everything she says in that passage is false.

First, during the 1990s (which is longer than the period Nuland is talking about but let’s be generous), the IMF and the World Bank disbursed approximately $20 billion to Russia.2 There were also some bilateral assistance, but as Nuland herself hints at, it was relatively small. I don’t have time to look for a detailed breakdown, but it’s also unnecessary, since data from the IMF show that net official flows to and from the former Soviet republics — excluding the Baltic states — during that period were negative.3 This means that, as incredible as it may sound, Russia and the other former Soviet republics actually paid more to Western governmental and inter-governmental organizations, mostly to service the Soviet debt, than they received. To be clear, it’s even more true if we look at the period between 1991 and 1996 that Nuland was talking about, because for reasons I will explain below Western economic assistance to Russia increased after 1995. Moreover, since Russia had agreed to assume the Soviet debt in 1991, it would be even worse if we just focused on Russia because it means that other countries didn’t have to service the Soviet debt and that was the bulk of the payments that former Soviet republics had to make to Western governmental and inter-governmental organizations during that period.

Indeed, the US was so intent on making Russia pay the Soviet debt that, as then Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev and deputy prime minister Yegor Gaidar — neither of whom can be suspected of anti-Western bias — recalled in their memoirs, the Bush administration at one point even tried to bully the Russian government, which at the time still had to break free of the Soviet Union and was desperate for international recognition, into selling 100 tons of its gold reserves to pay that debt.4 The Russian government refused on the ground that it would have been a “financial Brest-Litovsk” and US officials relented when Russia effectively agreed to take responsibility for the Soviet debt.5 In other words, while Russia was undergoing one of the worst economic crises in history and the Russian population’s standard of living was totally collapsing (it was so bad that many Russians had to grow their own vegetables to survive during that period), the West made it pay more than it gave to assist with the transition. If that’s what it looks like when the US is “trying to be extremely generous”, as Nuland put it, then I’d hate to see what it looks like when it’s stingy…

The decision not to provide significant macroeconomic assistance to Russia in a timely fashion was all the more unfortunate that it wouldn’t have required a very large effort to potentially change the course of reform in Russia. Western economists who advised the Russian government at the time estimated that it needed $25 billion in 1992, most of which in the form of loans and not grants. By comparison, the Marshall Plan had represented 4.7% of the GDP of the US in 1948 over 4 years, which in 1992 would have been almost $309 billion or $77 billion a year.6 So it’s fair to say that, despite what Nuland pretends, what the US did for Russia and the other former Soviet republics after the collapse of the Soviet Union was a far cry from what it did for European countries after WWII. It’s also worth noting that, largely thanks to the actions of the Russian officials it attempted to racket at the end of 1991 by asking them to sell their gold reserves, the US reaped a “peace dividend” from reduced military spending of $69 billion in 1992 alone that reached one and a half trillion dollars over the course of the 1990s.7 The decision not to do more for Russia immediately after the disintegration of the Soviet Union was a lot of things, mostly tragically short-sighted, but “extremely generous” it was not.

To some extent, the fact that it wasn’t done can be explained by the political constraints Bush and Clinton faced at the time, but that’s not to pretend that the US showered Russia with aid when it did nothing of the sort. To do that, as Nuland does, is to add insult to injury. Furthermore, it’s not just that the West didn’t do much to help Russia when it needed it the most, it’s also that it promised that it would do a lot more and failed to honor that promise. In fact, it did that not once but twice, another small detail that Nuland somehow neglected to mention. The first time was in April 1992, when Gaidar and his team of reformers were being attacked in Russia, so in part for that reason and in part because Clinton criticized him for not doing more to help Russia on the campaign trail Bush announced a package of multilateral assistance that was supposed to amount to $24 billion, but which almost completely failed to materialize in subsequent months.8 The second time was one year later, after Clinton became president. At the time, Yeltsin was in conflict with the Russian parliament and faced defeat in a referendum he’d called to settle the issue, so Clinton promised a multilateral package of assistance to the tune of $43 billion.9

After Clinton made that promise, the Russian minister of finance Boris Fyodorov, who between Gaidar’s dismissal in December 1992 and his short-lived return in September 1993 was the main reformer in the Russian government, warned that “if this [was] another year in which there is a lot of noise or just confirmation of aid promised earlier it would be catastrophic”.10 Needless to say, in spite of that warning, that is exactly what happened as, except for a paltry $1.6 billion in bilateral assistance that was disbursed a few months later (just as the conflict between Yeltsin and the Russian parliament was about to reach a bloody climax), the aid once again failed to materialize. Obviously, this pattern of dangling large amounts of aid that is never disbursed and more generally of making promises to Russia that are not honored didn’t exactly endear the US to Russian people, but again you wouldn’t know anything about that if you just listened to Nuland. In fact, I could go on for hours about the various ways in which the US screwed Russia since the end of the Cold War, but somehow we don’t hear much about that.11 But in the rest of this post I would rather like to make a few more observations about economic reforms in Russia during the 1990s and the role of the West in pushing them.

There are solid grounds to criticize the role of the West in general and the US in particular in connection to reforms in Russia, but the usual criticism, according to which the West is responsible for destroying Russia’s economy in the 1990s by imposing “shock therapy”, is misguided on several counts. First, although Gaidar’s team made plenty of mistakes, it wasn’t “shock therapy” that destroyed the Russian economy but Gorbachev’s reforms. The Soviet economy was already collapsing when Gaidar and his team launched “shock therapy” and this would not have stopped, quite the contrary, in the absence of “shock therapy”. But people only see the collapse of standard of living during that period and never think seriously about that counterfactual, even though it’s impossible to assess the role of Gaidar’s policies in the economic hardship that followed by looking at the former without also considering the latter. Gorbachev had no idea what he was doing and his reforms were incredibly poorly conceived, although to be fair I’m not sure that a relatively smooth transition of the Soviet economy to a market economy was possible even with a competent leadership and in any case the West is not responsible for Gorbachev’s incompetence.

“Shock therapy” was not imposed by the West but by the circumstances and, in fact, it had already stalled by the summer of 1992 because former Soviet elites, who had largely preserved their power after the collapse (that’s part of what made the collapse possible in the first place), realized it would harm them and opposed it. Indeed, they had benefited from Gorbachev’s reforms, but it was in their interest to prevent further liberalization because partial liberalization allowed them to exploit various rents it created and therefore Gaidar’s policy was a threat to their interests.12 Privatization was only allowed to proceed because Anatoly Chubais, the reformer in charge of it (who after Gaidar definitely left government at the end of 1993 became the leader of the so-called reformers in the Russian government), cut a deal with them by agreeing to give workers to get priority in the purchase of shares of their enterprises, which effectively allowed the managers, who had already acquired de facto control of their enterprises through “spontaneous privatization” during the last years of the Soviet Union, to legalize their control.13 Subsidies to enterprises resumed and the deficit increased, the central bank abandoned the previously strict monetary policy and massively fueled inflation in the process, etc. To the extent that the West played a role in that development, which to be clear was limited, that’s because as explained above it failed to put together a large package of macroeconomic assistance to ease the transition at the beginning of 1992 and weakened the reformers politically by making false promises.

Moreover, when reform started to decelerate in the middle of that year, the West did not actually stop to support Russia. In fact, putting aside export credits and food aid during the winter of 1992 to prevent a famine, that’s precisely when Western economic assistance started, with the first IMF loan agreement being signed during the summer. Incidentally, Nuland claims that US officials decided to provide economic assistance to Russia through the IMF because “[they] wanted the management systems that came with that”, but that’s another lie. The IMF was not well-suited to help Russia, but it was chosen to provide aid for the transition because that was politically easier. Indeed, any bilateral assistance to Russia would have had to be approved by Congress and that would therefore have required the president to spend political capital on getting the aid through Congress, which neither Bush nor Clinton were willing to do, though as we have seen that didn’t prevent them from promising the Russians they would.14 Nuland presumably came up with that story about “management systems” because, if she’d told the truth, she would have been forced to admit that, contrary to her claims that Americans “tried to be extremely generous”, providing economic assistance to Russia and the other former Soviet republics was not a priority for the US at the time. Anyway, to come back to the issue I was discussing before that digression, it’s therefore not true that the West imposed “shock therapy” in return for aid. It actually started providing macroeconomic assistance through multilateral institutions precisely when “shock therapy” was paused.

Over the next few years, the Clinton administration politicized aid to Russia by using its influence on the IMF to make it provide loans to Moscow with more lenient conditions than was customary and to ignore the fact that Moscow was violating even those reduced conditionalities, because it was a way to bolster Yeltsin domestically against his opponents and buying his reluctant acquiescence to NATO expansion. In doing so, the US effectively became a player in Russian domestic politics and associated itself with much hated figures in Russia, which seriously damaged the West’s image for a lot of Russians. But it didn’t even ensure that difficult but effective economic reforms would be carried out in doing so, because in doing that the Clinton administration became dependent on Yeltsin just as much as the reverse was true and therefore could not credibly threaten to cut aid if he failed to do the necessary reforms, which Yeltsin’s government therefore mostly failed to carry out.15 This moral hazard only delayed the inevitable and made the crash worse when it finally happened in 1998. Russia went through a massive financial crisis just as it was beginning to recover and it’s only then, because it no longer had a choice, that the Russian government started to adopt some budgetary discipline. This and the rise of oil prices made possible the economic boom under Putin.

Hence, the problem is not that the West imposed liberal economic policies, which were necessary but largely not implemented until after the Russian government no longer had a choice. The truth is that the West was simply not in a position to impose market reforms and, once the window of opportunity for macroeconomic assistance had been missed, neither was anybody else because the political conditions in Russia made that impossible and only a crisis could have brought about the necessary adjustments, which it did eventually.16 The real criticism of the US that people should make is that, by not providing macroeconomic assistance immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequently politicizing aid to prop up Yeltsin domestically and buy his acquiescence to NATO expansion, it actually delayed necessary reforms and prolonged the economic crisis in Russia. Moreover, by tying its fate to Yeltsin, the Clinton administration purposely and visibly took a side in Russian domestic politics, thereby durably alienating a large share of the Russian population. Indeed, although Yeltsin may have been better than the alternative and may not have been able to stay in power as long as he did without American support, he still left the country in the hands of people who effectively looted it and the Russians haven’t forgotten that.17 I’m trying not to be caricatural here, US officials also faced political constraints during that period and ultimately most of the blame for the mistakes that were made during the transition should fall on Russian elites, but that’s not a reason to misrepresent what happened and it doesn’t change the fact that in many ways Western policy toward Russia during the post-Cold War era was extremely short-sighted.

You would think that, as someone who was at the center of Washington’s policy-making about Russia during most of that period, Nuland would have done some soul-searching about what she and her friends could have done better to prevent us from getting into that mess, but I couldn’t find any hint that she did in her interview with Zygar and on the contrary she seems perfectly self-satisfied. Obviously, the bulk of responsibility for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine falls on Putin, but it doesn’t mean that Western officials don’t have any and Putin’s malevolence doesn’t excuse their own incompetence. There is a lot more to be said about Nuland’s track record while she was in office, but that’s a story for another time. In this piece, I wanted to focus on what she said about foreign assistance to Russia during the transition, because it’s relatively straightforward to debunk it. Despite this fact, none of the “fact-checking” organizations, which are so prompt to debunk pro-Russia disinformation, will take her to task for her misrepresentations. This constant gaslighting will therefore be allowed to continue, resulting in a completely distorted and one-sided picture of how we got into that mess, which in turn makes it more difficult to get out of it.

A lot has been made of the fact that, in the latest NYT/Siena College battleground states poll, 13% of the respondents who say they voted for Biden in 2020 but won’t vote for him in November cite the war in Gaza as the most important issue to their vote. But as Nate points out, as a share of the electorate, this doesn’t translate into a lot of people:

Let’s do some math here. About 51 percent of the country voted for Biden in 2020. Of that 51 percent, 14 percent say they don’t plan to vote for Biden this time in the head-to-head matchup against Trump. Of those, 13 percent list Gaza or something related as their top issue. And of that 13 percent, 49 percent are more sympathetic to Palestine than to Israel (and only 17 percent are more sympathetic to Israel; the rest are in the both/neither camp). So we get:

.51 * .14 * .13 * .49 = .005

That is, 0.5 percent of the American electorate are 2020 Biden voters who say they’ll withdraw their vote from Biden because he’s too far to their right on Israel. (Or alternatively, 0.8 percent if you instead use the version of the poll that asks about third parties, which increases the number of Biden defectors.)

As he says, this could still make the difference in some swing states if, as seems likely, the election is close in some of those states, but that’s not the devastating blow many pro-Palestinian activists seem to imagine.

Moreover, as Nate points out immediately after this passage, there are also between 0.2 to 0.3 percent of the electorate who say they voted for Biden in 2020 but won’t vote him in November because they think he’s not supportive enough of Israel. But if you want to know how much, if at all, Biden is going to get harmed because he doesn’t restrain Israel enough, what matters is not just how many people who voted for him in 2020 won’t vote for him in November for that reason, but also how many people who voted for him in 2020 wouldn’t vote for him if started to restrain Israel more. As Nate says, if 0.2 to 0.3 percent of the electorate already say that, although they voted for Biden in 2020, they won’t vote for him in November because he’s not supportive enough of Israel, then it’s likely that if he started to restrain Israel more he would lose even more people who are pro-Israel. Of course, he would also get back some of the voters who say that, although they voted for him in 2020, they won’t vote for him in November but it’s impossible to say based on those data what the net effect would be. It could very well be that, depending on exactly what he did to restrain Israel more and what effect it had on the war, doing so would actually make him lose more voters than he’d win.

In fact, it’s even more complicated than that, a lot more complicated actually. First, the NYT/Siena College poll just shows that 13% of respondents who say they voted for Biden in 2020 also say they won’t vote for him in November and cite Gaza or foreign policy as the most important issue to their vote and say they’re more sympathetic to Palestine, but that’s not the same as showing that 13% of respondents who actually voted for Biden in 2020 won’t vote for him in November because he’s not doing enough to restrain Israel. Starting with the first point, it’s a well-known fact that respondents in polls tend to say they voted for the winner of the last election even if they didn’t, so it’s likely that some of the people in question didn’t actually vote for Biden in 2020.1 Since they didn’t vote for him in 2020, there is no reason to assume they would have voted for him if his policy toward Israel had been different, although given the way in which views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict increasingly align with partisan affiliation in the US this is probably more relevant for pro-Israel respondents who say they voted for Biden in 2020 but won’t in November and claim that Gaza is the most important issue to their vote.

Even putting aside such recall bias, it’s hardly obvious that, from the fact that someone voted for Biden in 2020 and that he says that he won’t vote for him in November and that Gaza or foreign policy is the most important issue to his vote, you can infer that he won’t vote for Biden in November because he’s not doing enough to restrain Israel. In order to make that inference, you have to make strong assumptions about the connection between what people say is the most important issue for them and the actual determinants of their vote, which in my opinion are highly dubious. For instance, a large share of French voters say the protection of the environment is the issue they care the most about if you poll them, but I can guarantee you that you wouldn’t know that from the way in which they vote. Moreover, even if you could make the assumptions in question safely, you could only infer that respondents in that group say they won’t vote for Biden in November because they think he’s not doing enough to restrain Israel, but it doesn’t mean they won’t actually vote for Biden anyway. Indeed, while at the moment the war is a highly salient issue, it’s likely that as the election draws closer other issues will become more salient and that as a result many of those people will still vote for Biden in the end.

But it’s even more complicated than that if you really think carefully about it. For instance, it’s likely that even if Biden started to restrain Israel more from now on some of the people who have already decided they won’t vote for him because he hasn’t done enough to restrain Israel so far wouldn’t change their mind, so to some extent they’re basically a sunk cost for him.2 You also have to consider, not just how a change of policy toward Israel would affect the people who voted for Biden in 2020, but also those who voted for Trump, didn’t vote at all or voted for a third-party candidate. In addition, you have to take into account whether the people who plan to withdraw their vote from Biden because they think he’s not doing enough to restrain Israel are going to vote for Trump or a third-party candidate and the same thing for the people who would withdraw their vote from him if he started to restrain Israel more, because the effect on Biden’s share of the two-party vote and therefore his chances also depend on that.

I could go on for a while like that, but you probably get the point. It’s very complicated to infer from the kind of polling data Nate discusses how a change of policy toward Israel would directly affect Biden’s chances in November. People who care a lot about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict tend to overestimate how much everyone else does. That’s a pretty natural bias, but it’s still a bias. In reality, most people don’t really care much about the conflict and, to the extent they have views about it, they tend to be pro-Israel much more often than pro-Palestinian advocates imagine. I personally find that regrettable, because I’m leaning toward the Palestinian side of the dispute, but that’s not a reason to be in denial about that. In fact, as Nate correctly points out, not having unrealistic views about the state of public opinion is likely to harm the Palestinian cause, because it will make you adopt tactics that won’t go well with most people. For instance, as much as I agree that pro-Palestinian protests on campuses have been wildly misrepresented, I also think Norman Finkelstein is right that protesters have made that easier by using unnecessarily provocative and ambiguous slogans.

Based on polling data about how much people care about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the consistent finding in political science research that in general foreign policy doesn’t affect people’s voting behavior much and the distribution of Jewish and Muslim voters across states in the US (who probably don’t vote as activists assume they do anyway3), I think it’s very unlikely that the direct effect of Biden’s policy toward Israel on his chances of winning in November will be large. If the race is close enough, which it probably will be, it may still be enough to make the difference in Michigan and maybe one or two other swing states, but even that is hardly obvious. But does that mean that Biden’s policy toward Israel and the war in Gaza can’t have a significant effect on his chances of reelection? No, it does not. Indeed, so far I have just been talking about the direct effect of Biden’s policy toward Israel on his chances in November, that is to say how many voters who would have voted for him if he had a different policy but won’t because they don’t like his actual policy and care enough about the war for that fact to decisively affect their vote. This is what everyone is focusing on, but that doesn’t exhaust the effect of Biden’s policy on his chances in November, since there are also indirect effects to consider.

While the vast majority of voters don’t care much about the war, the same can’t be said about Democratic political elites and left-wing political activists, but those are the people who are going to run Biden’s campaign or could seriously disrupt it. If those people are squabbling with each other about Biden’s policy toward Israel, it will get in the way of effective campaigning. If Democratic operatives are divided over Gaza, it will impede cooperation between them, making it harder to run a smooth campaign. This will be reflected in the media, giving the impression of a campaign in disarray, which in turn will negatively affect perceptions about Biden’s campaign among voters. Similarly, if left-wing activists keep showing up at campaign events to call Biden a genocide enabler or whatnot, it will be a problem for him. Even if most voters don’t care about that, because they see those activists as radicals, it will make people in Biden’s campaign nervous and they’ll probably schedule less events for Biden and his surrogates out of fear that pro-Palestinian activists will make a scene that will make the headlines.

It’s hard to campaign and get your message across when everyone is constantly talking about you’re getting attacked by people in your own camp. Thus, while the number of people who won’t vote for Biden because they don’t like his actual policy and care enough about the war for that fact to decisively affect their vote is probably not very high, if you add the voters he’ll lose because his campaign is a mess due to squabbling over his policy toward Israel among Democratic political elites and left-wing political activists, I think there is a much higher chance that it will be a serious problem for him in November if the issue hasn’t been resolved by then. I don’t want to exaggerate how big of a factor it will be, I think it’s impossible to quantify precisely what effect this will have and the claim that it effectively kills any chance of reelection for Biden is way too strong, but nevertheless I think that once you put together the direct and indirect effects it will have it’s likely to be a serious problem for him. This is particularly true given that, in the era of polarization, any presidential election is bound to be close.

That is why, as I argued before, I think he’d better start pressuring Israel a lot harder to end the war sooner rather than later. It’s not obvious that it would work, but I think it would if he used his leverage intelligently, to make the people in Israel’s national security establishment, many of whom seem to have serious reservations about the war by now and see the preservation of good relations with the US as a priority, increase the pressure on Netanyahu to wrap things up and present a “day-after strategy”. If this worked and the war ended, either because Netanyahu responded to internal and external pressure or because there was a US-backed “soft coup” against him, people would move on and he could turn the election into a referendum about Trump, but the more he waits and the less this will work because the closer to the election the war ends and the more it will remain a salient issue by the time people vote. If he waits too much, at some point, it will become more costly for him to pressure Israel to end the war than to do nothing.

First, here the IHRA definition of antisemitism in question, which can be found on the organization’s website along with some commentary and a few examples to illustrate it:

Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

The problem with that definition, to put it succinctly, is that it’s so vague as to be completely useless.

It will be useful to give an example to illustrate. Suppose that I have the perception that Jews as a group are really good for the world, so I encourage people to give money to Hillel, the largest Jewish campus organization, because I want Jews to flourish at universities.

Well, strictly speaking, this satisfies the IHRA definition. After all, it’s a “certain perception of Jews”, and its rhetorical manifestation is “directed toward a Jewish community institution”. It’s true that it's not expressed as “hatred toward Jews”, but the definition only says that antisemitism may be so expressed, hence that doesn’t disqualify that example under the definition.

Obviously, I understand that it's not the kind of things that the IHRA definition intends to single out as antisemitism, but the fact that strictly speaking it applies to that example even though it's obviously not a case of antisemitism illustrates the point that it's way too vague to be analytically useful. It’s not easy to define antisemitism and no definition is ever going to be perfect, but the IHRA definition is not just imperfect, it’s actually very bad.

In fact, not only is it too vague to be analytically useful, but this vagueness actually makes it dangerous when it’s used to determine what kind of speech should be allowed at universities, because it allows to describe as antisemitic views that, whether you agree with them or not, people should be able to state without being accused of antisemitism, thereby stifling debate.

The commentary on the definition and the examples provided by the IHRA to illustrate it really drive that point home. In particular, the gloss on the definition says that “manifestations [of antisemitism] might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity”, though it clarifies that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic”.

This may seem innocuous with the clarification, but it’s not. Indeed, it’s also extremely vague, and this could be construed to apply to criticisms of Israel that, again whatever you think of their merits, are clearly not antisemitic.

To see why, let’s have a look at one of the examples of antisemitism that the IHRA gives, which is clearly related to this point:

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

Now, I agree that it would be antisemitic to say that Jews, and only Jews, don’t have a right to self-determination, whatever “self-determination” means exactly. However, virtually no one defends that view, so that’s irrelevant in practice.

But what if someone believes that no group, neither the Jews nor anyone else, has a right to self-determination? If by a “right to self-determination” one means the right to have their own state, I happen to agree with that view, because accepting that such a right exists and that it must be enforced would destabilize the entire international system.

According to such a view, whether a particular group should have a state depends on the details of the case, and in particular whether it will result in more bad than good due to the effect that allowing that group to have a state would have on other people, so there is no automatic right.

Now, some people think that 1) the Jews were only able to establish a Jewish state in Palestine at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs who lived there, and that 2) realistically it will not be possible for Palestinians to have equal rights on any part of historic Palestine as long as Israel is defined as a Jewish state.1 So they call for, not the expulsion of Jews from the territory of historic Palestine, but the creation of a binational state in which both Jews and Palestinians would have equal rights.

That’s just a version of the case for the one-state solution and, while I personally disagree with it for various reasons I’m not going to get into here, that view is obviously not antisemitic.2 You may think that it’s unrealistic or that if that plan could somehow be implemented it would result in harm to Jews, including possibly physical harm or even death, but as long as it’s sincerely held and the person disagrees with you on those points it’s not antisemitic by any reasonable definition.

But it’s predictable that, if universities use the IHRA definition, such a view will incorrectly be labeled as antisemitic. It’s obvious that, rather than risk losing federal funding, universities will err on the side of caution and punish views that it ought to be possible to defend in a university.

And that is why that definition is not only analytically worthless, but actually harmful, because it will obviously be used to discredit perfectly legitimate positions and exclude them from the debate on the ground that they are antisemitic, even though they’re not.

Of course, the truth is that for many people, this is not a bug but a feature: it's precisely because the IHRA definition can be used to stack the deck against certain positions in the debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, such as the view that the best way to solve it is with a one-state solution, that pro-Israel groups have been trying, with quite a lot of success, to convince various governments and organizations to accept it as their working definition of antisemitism.

In fact, what makes this debate even more surreal is that even the guy who came up with the IHRA definition just came out against the bill that Congress just passed, arguing that the definition shouldn’t be used to regulate speech and that it was being weaponized, which it obviously is.

This bill may not actually make any difference to what universities are already doing, because Trump had already directed the Office of Civil Rights to use the IHRA definition through an executive order in 2019 (though it’s not obvious because it may still result in more stringent enforcement), but it will make a difference in the future because once this bill is signed into law it will be politically impossible to repeal it.

If you ask me, what is happening right now is that we’re in the middle of a moral panic about antisemitism on campuses and pro-Israel activists have cynically taken advantage of that to successfully enshrine a significant restriction on speech in universities, but even if you disagree with me on that point everyone should agree that it’s a terrible bill.

This strategic incuriosity was all the more remarkable that, as I also noted before, it wasn’t particularly hard to come up with perfectly legitimate reasons why the West might not have looked very favorably upon those talks. In particular, because according to various testimonies by participants the draft treaty required major Western countries to provide security guarantees to Ukraine, it wouldn’t have been surprising if, being unwilling to provide them, the West had tried to discourage that notion. In fact, it may even have been that Putin expected the West to scuttle the deal for that reason and that it only went along with the Ukrainians because of that expectation, as it would allow him to blame the failure of the talks on the West. This possibility is consistent with the view that Russia didn’t negotiate in good faith, but it was never explored because, in their haste to declare any kind of negotiations with Russia pointless, it didn’t even occur to the hawks. In any case, without knowing more about the nature of the security guarantees that were part of the draft agreement and in particular about how they were formulated, it was impossible to determine whether this could explain why the West discouraged Ukraine from pursuing a negotiated solution with Russia, but since journalists were afraid of what they might find if they dug into the issue we were left to speculate about it.

Thanks to Charap and Radchenko, however, we now have a much better picture of what the security assurances in question consisted in. Had they been weak and vague, my hypothesis that Western countries discouraged the Ukrainians from pursuing this deal because they were unwilling to provide such guarantees would have been less plausible, but since the relevant passage of the draft agreement published in Foreign Affairs show they were actually strong and clear, I think that hypothesis looks pretty good in light of that evidence. Charap and Radchenko agree and, in their essay, interpret the failure of the talks as the combination of several factors, of which the West’s reluctance to provide the kind of security guarantees included in the draft agreement was but one. I find their account of the causes of that failure broadly convincing and, on the whole, their essay has made me more confident that the chances of a negotiated solution in the spring of 2022 were very slim. Too many conditions would have had to be met for it to work that were unlikely to be met. In fact, what I didn’t like in their essay is that, while it makes that pretty clear, they still imply that Ukraine and Russia were close to a deal at the time. Of course, that’s not what Charap and Radchenko’s critics took most issue with though, instead they thought it’s simply obvious that Russia wasn’t negotiating in good faith. But while this may be true, it’s certainly not obvious, they’re just saying that because they’re hysterical and for them it’s axiomatic that Russia is never negotiating in good faith.

Coming back to the issue of the West’s policy toward Ukraine, I think there is a good case to be made that it’s profoundly immoral, but it’s not the case that most critics of the West’s policy make. Indeed, most of them think that Western countries scuttled a deal between Ukraine and Russia in the spring of 2022 because they wanted to bleed Russia even if that meant sacrificing Ukraine in the process, but as I argued before I don’t think that hypothesis is very plausible in light of what the West has done since the beginning of the war and as we have just seen the new details on the talks between Russia and Ukraine in the spring of 2022 actually make another hypothesis as to why the West discouraged Ukraine from pursuing this deal very plausible. In my view, since the talks left many important issues that would crucially affect the stability of post-war relations between Ukraine and Russia unaddressed and since it was doubtful they would be subsequently addressed in a way that would make the risk of another conflict low enough, Western countries were quite justified to discourage the Ukrainians from any notion that they would agree to provide the kind of security guarantees on which a deal hinged. It would be reckless of Western officials to agree to provide security guarantees when the probability that we’d eventually have to honor them was quite high and doing so would get us into a war against Russia. I simply don’t think that Ukraine’s sovereignty, which I don’t see as a core Western interest, is worth taking such a risk.

Even if you think that I’m wrong about that, the fact that Western officials discouraged their Ukrainian counterparts from pursuing a deal that would have rested on multilateral security guarantees suggests that, despite their apocalyptic rhetoric about what is at stake in Ukraine, they agree with me on that point. But since I also doubt that anyone in Washington, Berlin, Paris or London believes it’s likely that the war will end with a comprehensive political solution addressing every outstanding issue between Ukraine and Russia, unless Western officials have become dramatically less risk averse since the spring of 2022 (which I see no reason to believe), this in turn suggests that they have no intention of following through on their promise that Ukraine would join NATO after the war. Indeed, except for the scenario of a decisive Russian victory that would result in the annexation of the left bank of the Dnieper by Russia and leave only a rump Ukraine politically subordinated to Russia on the right bank (which I think is unlikely and in which Ukraine would obviously not be joining NATO), the only scenario in which the risk of a resumption of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine after a durable ceasefire has been signed would be sufficiently low is a decisive Ukrainian victory followed by regime change in Russia that results in the installation of a pro-West government, but while many pro-Ukrainian commentators fantasize about that, nobody serious believes anything of the sort is likely to happen.

What is happening is that Western governments agreed to promise that Ukraine would eventually join NATO, while refusing to give a precise timeline, as a compromise with Central and Eastern European governments (who unlike their Western counterparts genuinely want to bring Ukraine into NATO if only because they’d rather fight a war with Russia in Ukraine than on their territory), but the new details about their attitude toward the Russo-Ukrainian talks in the spring of 2022 suggest they don’t intend to follow through on that promise. Of course, that is the same thing that has been going on since 2008, when a compromise was reached at the NATO summit in Bucharest whereby members of the Alliance agreed not invite Ukraine to join NATO at this time but affirmed that it would eventually happen. Just as it made a war between Ukraine and Russia more likely then, this empty promise makes it harder to end it now, but NATO’s internal divisions and the fact that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, a large part of Western foreign policy elites persist in believing that Russia doesn’t really care about NATO expansion make that inevitable at the moment. It will probably take a lot more death and destruction before this changes.

In the first excerpt, Babchenko talks about his experience during the First Chechen War at the military base in Mozdok, a town in North Ossetia. He describes the vicious and relentless bullying, known as dedovshchina, that he and his fellow conscripts endured at the hands of older conscripts and officers while they were stationed over there:

The first time I really got beaten up was on 9 May. Victory Day. All hell was let loose in our barracks that time.

The reconnaissance boys kicked us out of our beds and beat us the whole night. Towards morning they got tired of that and ordered us to do squats on the floor. 'You, count,' Boxer told me, and I started to count aloud. Osipov and I did more than the others -384. We sat down, pressed up tightly against each other, and our mingled sweat ran down our legs, dripped onto the bare floorboards and soon formed a pool beneath us. Andy also dripped pus and blood into the mix as his sores opened up again. We carried on for an hour until Boxer got bored of this and knocked us down with two sharp punches.

From that day onward I got beaten by everyone, from privates to the deputy regiment commander, Colonel Pilipchuk, or Chuk, as we called him for short. The only person I didn't get beaten by was a general, maybe because we didn't have any in our regiment.

It's night. I am sitting on the barracks porch, smoking and watching the attack planes accelerating and taking off on the runway. There's no way I can go back to the barracks

- by evening I'm supposed to bring Timokha 600,000 rou-bles that I don't have and have no way of getting. I get 18,000 roubles a month, but the most I can buy for that is ten packs of cheap cigarettes. Inflation is rampant in the country and money is worth less and less all the time, just as our lives are.

Yakunin and Ginger know where there are 600,000 to be had but they won't tell. They'll get out of here soon; anyone who manages to lay his hands on money will get away from this regiment, this lousy runway where smoke-scorched helicopters land all the time. We are inseparable from this field and I have already realized that sooner or later we will all end up on it, waiting to fly to Chechnya.

Fourteen members of our company are AWOL, absent without leave. Young conscripts flee in their droves, heading straight from their beds into the steppe, barefoot and wearing only their long johns, unable to withstand the nightly torment any longer. Even our lieutenant, who was called up for two years after he graduated from college, did a runner. There are only eight of us left, us five and three local boys - Murky, Pinocchio (or Pincha) and Khariton. We live together in the reconnaissance company, and the recon regard us as their personal slaves and do what the hell they like with us.

I spit a tobacco grain onto the asphalt. My spit tastes of salt and blood; my teeth were busted loose ages ago and wobble in my mouth. I can't eat solid food and have trouble even chewing bread. When they give us rusks in the canteen I only eat the soup. We're all the same. We can't chew and we can't breathe in properly because our chests have been so battered by the fists of the dembels - the recruits on their last six months before demobilization - that they became one huge bruise. We inhale carefully, taking only quick short breaths.

'Only the first six months is tough in the army,' Pincha says. 'After that you don't feel the pain.'

They brought us to this unit only three weeks ago, but it already seems an eternity.

Damn, if I had only been able back then to persuade the major to put my dossier in the other pile, everything would be different! But the major put it where he did, and here I am. Maybe it's for the best. Maybe Kisel and Vovka are already dead, while I am still alive. I lived three more weeks - that's a bloody long time, that much we do know by now.

The next pair of attack planes accelerates on the runway.

I wonder why the pilots fight? No-one forces them. They aren't me - they're free. There is no way I can leave here; I have another eighteen months of national service. So I sit on the porch watching the planes accelerate, and I think what I can tell Timokha so he doesn't beat me too badly.

The planes take off with a roar that shakes the barracks windows and disappear into the night, the twin dots of their exhausts twinkling. I take a final drag on the cigarette, stub it out and go up to the second floor.

Well, did you bring it?' asks Timokha, a tall, swarthy guy with big cowlike eyes. He is sitting in the storeroom, his feet up on the table as he watches TV. I stand in front of him, staring silently at the floor.

I try not to annoy him. When you're asked why you haven't done something, the best thing you can do is to stand there and maintain meek silence. We call this

'switching on the fool.

'Has the cat got your tongue? Did you bring it?'

'No,' I reply, barely audibly.

Why not?'

'I haven't got any money.'

I didn't ask you if you've got any money, dickhead!' he roars. 'I don't give a damn what you do or don't have. I'm asking you why you haven't brought 600,000 roubles.'

He gets up and punches me in the nose, from below, hard. The bridge of my nose crunches and my lips become warm and sticky. I lick the blood from them and spit it out on the floor. The second blow hits me under the eye, then I take one in the teeth. I fall with a moan. I can't say it hurt that much, but it's best to moan loudly so the beating stops sooner.

This time it's no joke the way Timokha gets worked up.

He kicks me and screams: Why didn't you bring the money, fucker? Why didn't you bring the money?' He makes me do press-ups and when I'm on my way up he kicks me in the teeth with a dirty boot. He catches me hard and my head snaps right back. I lose my bearings for a moment, my left arm collapses under me and I fall on my elbow. My split lip gushes onto the floor, and I spit out blood and the polish that I had scraped off Timokha's boot with my teeth.

'Count!' he yells.

I push myself up again and count out loud. Spurts of blood fly onto the floor. There's a news report on the television, something about Chechnya. The army commander has arrived for an inspection in Vladikavkaz. He is satisfied with the state of battle readiness and discipline in the forces. Tomorrow the commander is due to visit our regiment and check the discipline here. He'll probably be satisfied with the disciplinary readiness of our regiment too.

Timokha eventually tires. He orders me to get a cloth and clean up the blood. I wipe the boards but the blood has already soaked into the wood and left a noticeable stain.

What are you trying to do, asshole, drop me in trouble?' Timokha hisses and hits me in the forehead with his palm.

What the hell do you think you're doing splashing your filthy blood here for, eh, moron? Now wipe that off! I'll give you one more week to get the money, understand? I'm going on leave in a week. If you don't get the money by then I'll come back and kill you. The clock's ticking.' I go back to my billet and sit on the bed. I have to last one more week. Timokha will get back from leave in two or three months, no sooner. No-one comes back earlier, and three months is a long time, almost half a lifetime, anything could happen.

I crawl under my dusty, dirty blanket. Of the sixty beds in the empty barracks only four are made-up, for Zyuzik, Loop, Osipov and Yakunin. Ginger is gone.

'Did he beat you?' Loop mumbles from under the blanket.

His lips are now like two purple dumplings from his share of knocks.

'Yes,' I reply, smearing toothpaste under my eye.

We learned this trick back in training, a tried and tested treatment for black eyes. If my eye swells up the next day, Timokha will beat me even harder; he'll tell me I'm a snitch and that this is how I'm trying to turn him in. Even though there isn't a single new guy in the regiment who still has an unmarked face.

My split lips ache even in my sleep.

I am on orderly duty and wash the floor. The officers have been drinking in the storeroom all evening. The commander of the recon company, Lieutenant Yelin, is now seriously drunk; his corpulent face is sunk into his shoulders and his eyes are dazed and empty apart from the glow of hatred in his pupils.

Alternately resting his rifle on his knees, Yelin is methodically firing at the ceiling. That's a habit of his. When he gets drunk he sits in this armchair and fires at the ceiling.

It's probably because of his shell shock - they say he used to be a cheerful, smiley man. Then half of his company got killed near Samashki, and later he got blown up in a carrier.

Then I heard the same thing happened again. These days Yelin is the craziest officer in the regiment; he hardly talks to anyone, he uses his fists to give orders and he couldn't give much of a damn about anything, not the lives of the soldiers, or the Chechens, or even his own. He doesn't take prisoners, instead he slaughters them himself, the same way they slaughter our soldiers, by pinning their heads to the ground with his foot and slitting their throats with a knife. The only thing he wants is for the war never to end so that there is always someone to kill. The whole ceiling of the storeroom is riddled like a sieve with bullet holes and the plaster showers down on Yelin like rain, but he pays no heed and just keeps firing upward.

Next to him sits a small Armenian, Major Arzumanyan, commander of a tank battalion. He's also suffering from mild shell shock. Vodka doesn't affect him, and he loudly tells Yelin about a battle in Bamut.

Why didn't they let us totally flatten that shitty little vil-lage, eh? Who set us up, who was it? We had already driven them out into the mountains, all we needed was just one more push, a last dash, and suddenly we get told to pull out! Why? Why? We had two hundred metres to go to the school. If we'd taken it the village would have been ours!

Who bought up this war and who's paying for it, eh? Three of my vehicles are burnt out, and I've got thirty dead men!

Now I'm going to pick up some more, choose a new lot of greenhorns and send them off to the slaughterhouse, all over again. All they're good for is snuffing it in big bunches.

And who's supposed to answer for that, eh?'

Yelin grunts and shoots at the ceiling. They pour another round and the cold vodka glugs into the glasses. I can smell it, the tang of raw vodka. They make this stuff here in Mozdok, at the brick factory, and it's dirt cheap. Every soldier knows a few houses in the village where you can buy this cheap stuff stolen from the factory. It was me who went and got them this bottle.

I am washing the floor by the open door of the storeroom and try not to make a noise and catch their attention. The main thing in the army is not to be noticed; then you get beaten less and you're pestered less. Or is it best to get out of here altogether like Ginger, who hasn't been seen in the barracks for several days. He's living out in the steppe somewhere like a dog, and only visits the regiment to get some grub. I've seen him a couple of times at night, near the canteen.

They notice me all the same.

'Hey, soldier,' Arzumanyan says. 'Come here.'

I do as I'm told.

Why do you pricks go and get killed like flies, eh? What do they bother training you for if all you can do is die?

What did they teach you there? Do they teach you to shoot at all?' he asks.

I say nothing.

Well, you dumb sheep?'

'Yes,' I say.

'Yes... So how many times did you fire a weapon?'

'Twice.'

'Twice? Pricks. Want to join my tanks? Come on, tomorrow you'll fly with me to Shali where they'll have you for breakfast. And me. Well, are you coming? Yelin, let me have him.'

I stand in front of them, drenched in sweat, with wet, rolled-up sleeves and a rag in my hand. I hang my head and say nothing. I have no wish to fly with the shell-shocked major to Shali and get eaten for breakfast. I want to stay here, get my bruises but remain alive. I'm afraid that Yelin really will hand me over. I'm not one of his men, but they won't look into it if he does. One wave of his hand and it's done.

Yelin blearily looks up at me from under his lowered brow, struggling to take everything in. Now they're going to give me a beating.

The tank officer suddenly deflates. The spring in him unwinds and he slumps back in his armchair.

'Get the hell out of here,' he says with a wave of the hand.

'You wouldn't fit in a tank anyway - too tall?

I leave and creep out of the barracks before Yelin can stop me.

I sit down in the porch, light up and look at the take-off strip. I wouldn't mind sneaking into the cockpit with them and flying the hell out of here. Or even better, I could get transferred to the pilots corps. Now they have it good! In their barracks there are just officers and two dozen soldiers. The pilots don't beat the soldiers; they feed them well and the only work there is making the beds and washing the floor.

But I have no right to complain, I had a lucky night tonight; I didn't get beaten or whisked off to Shali.

…

Said returns from hospital. He got shot through the shin during the storming of Bamut and spent two months in the sickbay, and then had a long period of leave that he had awarded himself. Now he has arrived to quit.

His eyes are misty, his hair uncut and dirty, and he is wearing some sort of ragged Afghan cap and army boots with greasy trailing laces. But he has authority here. Said is a thief; he has several burglaries to his name and people do what he says.

He hated me from the moment he met me. I don't know about love but hate at first sight definitely exists. He doesn't extort money from me. I have money after selling those stolen car stereos, about half a million roubles stashed away in the closet under the stairs. I'm a resourceful soldier after all, and if Said wants money I can hand it right over and he won't beat me. But that's not what he's after. He wants me to bring him bananas. He knows I won't be able to get any right now, during the night, so he gives me two hours to come up with some.

I have no intention of even leaving the barracks. I return to our quarters and go to bed. I've got two hours at least. In two hours on the dot I am woken - out of some kind of thief's honour he has stuck to his word.

'Get up, you're wanted,' says Smiler.

I go to the storeroom. Said is sitting with his injured leg on the table, and one of the recon is massaging his injured shin.

'You called for me, Said?' I ask.

"To some people I'm Said, to others I'm Oleg Alexan-drovich,' he answers.

'You called for me, Oleg?' I say again.

'Say Oleg Alexandrovich.'

I say nothing and look at the floor. He can kill me right here, but there's no way I'm going to do him the honour of calling him Oleg Alexandrovich.

Well, what have you got to say?'

'You called for me, Oleg?' I said.

He smirks.

'Did you get any?'

'No,' I reply.

The usual foreplay begins.

We could skip this bit really, but Said is enjoying his power and I don't get hit in the face.

Why?' Said says with surprising calm.

'I don't know where to get bananas, Oleg.'

'What?'

'I don't know...'

What?' he says, finally letting rip. What, you don't want to look for what I told you to find? Useless prick! You'll go and look, got it?'

He starts to hit me viciously. If the others beat me because that's the way it is, Said beats me out of sheer hatred. He enjoys it, gets a real pleasure from it. A stinking nobody on civy street, he is top dog and master of souls here.

Said is weak, and his punches are not as hard as Boxer's or Timokha's, but he's stubborn and vicious and he hits me a long time, for several hours. He does it in bouts; he batters me, then sits down and rests while forcing me to do press-ups. As I do, he kicks me in the back of the head with his heel, and sometimes smacks my teeth from below with his boot. He doesn't do this so often, evidently the hole in his shin hasn't fully healed over and is bothering him, but he lays into the back of my head with vigour in an effort to bust up my face on the floorboards. Eventually he manages, and I fall and lie there on the filthy boards, blood running from my split lips.

Said lifts me up and starts to hit me again, using his palm on my broken lips, aiming all the time for the same place, because he knows that will be more painful. I jolt heavily from every blow and moan. I am tiring now as I press myself up and shield myself with my arms, tensing my muscles so that the kicks don't go deep into my body I have lost count of the blows and it seems Said has been beating me from the moment I was born, and this was all I have ever known. For heaven's sake, I'll get you your lousy bananas! But Said no longer cares about bananas. He is joined by a few more of the recon and they surround me and smash me in the back with their elbows. I stand doubled up, shielding my stomach with my arms, but they don't let me fall over so they can also kick me from below with their knees.

They shove me into the latrines, where a thickset Tartar called Ilyas hops and kicks me in the chest. I fly backwards and smash the window with my shoulders, sending shards of glass cascading over me, over my head and stomach. I manage to grab the frame and stop myself from falling right through. I didn't even cut myself. Once again they knock me from my feet and I crash to the floor. This time I don't get up, I just lie there amongst the broken glass and all I can do is try to cover my kidneys and groin. Finally the recon take a breather and have a smoke.

Said flicks his ash straight onto me, trying to get me in the face with the burning tobacco grains.

'Listen lads, let's take him down a few more pegs - let's screw him,' he suggests. Beside my face there is a large, jagged piece of glass. I grab it through my sleeve and it sits snugly in my palm like a knife, a long fat blade, tapering at the end.

I get up from the floor, clutching the shard. Shame I don't have the keys to the armoury...

Blood drips onto the shard from my split lip. I stare right at Said, Ilyas and the rest of them, I stand in front of them holding a blood-smeared piece of glass, watching them smoke. Said doesn't flick any ash on me now.

'OK,' says one of the recon, 'leave him, let's go. We haven't got any antiseptic anyway...'

They leave. The cicadas trill in the expanses of the steppe outside the broken window. Fighter bombers take off from the runway and head for Chechnya. A single lamp shines on the empty parade ground. There isn't a soul around, not a single officer or soldier.

The swarthy major was right. I am alone in this regiment.

That night they rough me up even worse, wreaking vengeance for that flash of resistance in the latrine, and the whole recon company piles on top of me to administer the beating, not even letting me get out of bed. This isn't even a beating - they are grinding me down to nothingness, like scum, and I am supposed to act accordingly, not try to wriggle out of it. They throw a blanket over me and force me from the bed, drag me into the corridor and beat me there. It carries on in the storeroom, where they lift me up by the arms and pin me to the wall so I don't fall. I start to lose consciousness. Someone delivers a fearsome punch to my right side and something bursts, piercing my very core with a burning pain. I gasp hoarsely and fall to my knees, and they carrying on kicking me. I pass out.

The recon have gone. I am lying in the corner of the storeroom on a pile of jackets and the walls and the ceiling are spattered with my blood. There's a tooth on the floor. I pick it up and try to push it back into the gum. In the end I throw it out of the window. I lie motionless for a while.

The pain is so bad I can't breathe; every muscle feels mangled and my chest and sides have become one huge bruise.

After a while I manage to pull myself up and along the wall to the door. I lock it and collapse again on the pile of jackets where I remain until almost morning.

When dawn breaks I take a razor and start to scrape the blood off the walls. I can hardly breathe and I can't bend over. Something in my right side has swollen up and is pul-sating. But I have to clean the blood off and I scratch away with the razor on the wallpaper. It takes me a long time to scrape away the brown drops, and I'm not too careful as I work, tearing away the wallpaper. 'Radiomen!' yell the drunken recon, their feet pounding on the floor. If they remember that I'm in the storeroom they will smash down the door, drag me out and finish me off.

I start to sort out the jackets and hang them in the cup-board. The sergeant-major is coming soon and everything has to be in order.

I find a letter in the pocket of one of them. It's to a guy called Komar, written by a girl. I unfold it and read.

My darling Vanya, sunshine, my beloved sweetheart, just be sure to come back, come back alive, I beg you, survive this war. I will have you however you come back, even if you lose your arms or legs. I can look after you, you know that, I'm strong, just please survive! I love you so much Vanya, it's so hard without you. Vanya, Vanya, my darling, my sunshine, just don't die. Stay alive, Vanya, please survive.

I fold up the letter and start to bawl. The dawn light is shining through the window, and I sit on the pile of jackets and howl from my battered lungs. Blood seeps from my ravaged lips. I'm in pain and I rock backwards and for-wards, the letter clenched in my hand, bawling my head off.

That morning Sergeant-Major Savchenko takes one look at my swollen face and without saying a word goes into the store room to the recon. Said is sitting in the armchair, his leg up on the table like before. The sergeant-major pins him to the armchair with his knee and beats him with his fist from top to bottom, smashing his head back into the seat with all his fury, and now it's Said's blood spattering onto the walls.

Savchenko beats him long and hard, and Said whines with pain. Then he throws him onto the floor and starts kicking him. Said crawls out of the storeroom on all fours with the sergeant-major kicking him from behind as he goes, before he finally throws him down the stairs.

I listen to the sounds of the beating in the storeroom without even raising my head. I'm glad that Savchenko is beating Said, or rather I'm overjoyed. My liver, jaw, teeth, every part of me rejoices as I hear how this piece of shit squirms and begs Savchenko, 'Please, Sergeant-Major, don't, please, I am already injured.' And the sergeant-major hits him and hisses through his teeth: 'I'm not just 'Sergeant-Major" but a senior warrant officer, you fucker, understand? A senior warrant officer.'

I am elated but at the same time I know that I am now in total shit. When the sergeant-major leaves, Said will come back and put a bullet in me.

Savchenko also realizes this and he spends the night here. He takes the armoury keys from the duty officer and sleeps in the barracks. We carry two beds out of the storeroom and put them side by side at the entrance, behind the wall, so no-one can come and fire a burst through the door, and then we fall asleep. For the first time I sleep soundly the whole night without waking. I don't dream anything and only open my eyes when the sergeant-major touches my shoulder.

'Get up, Babchenko,' he says. 'Muster.'

Good for him. If I had a tail I would definitely be wagging it now.

After that, Babchenko was finally sent to Chechnya, where a different kind of hell awaited him.

In this excerpt, he talks about an incident that took place during the Second Chechen War while he was stationed in Argun, a town in Chechnya where his unit was sent after they took a lot of casualties against the rebels in the mountains:

The Kombat has caught two recruits from the anti-tank platoon up to no good. It turns out they had passed some boxes of cartridges through the fence to the Chechen kids, then drunk a bottle of vodka and fallen asleep by the gap.

Half an hour later the Kombat chanced upon them and gave them a beating, and then kept them overnight in a large pit in the ground. Today their punishment is to be continued and they fall us in again on the parade ground.

We know too well what will happen now.

At the edge of the square they've dug an improvised torture rack into the ground, a thick water pipe that has been bent into the shape of a gibbet. At the Kombat's orders, the platoon made it during the night by placing the pipe against two concrete piles and using an armoured car to bend it in the middle. Two ropes now dangle from it.

The anti-tank gunners are led out, hands bound behind their backs with telephone cable and dressed in ragged greatcoats and long johns. Their faces are already swollen and purple from the beating and there are huge black bruises where their eyes should be, oozing pus and tears from the corners. Their split lips can no longer close and pink foam bubbles from their mouths, dripping onto their dirty, bare feet. It's a depressing sight. After all, these are not tramps but soldiers, ordinary soldiers; half of the army is like these two.

They stand the soldiers on the square. The two raise their heads and look through the gaps in the swelling at the ropes swinging in the wind.

The Kombat grabs one by the throat with his left hand and hits him hard in the nose. The soldier's head snaps back to his shoulder blades with a cracking noise. Blood spurts. The commander kicks the second one in the groin and he falls to the ground without a sound. The beating begins.

Who did you sell the bullets to?" screams the Kombat, grabbing the soldiers by the hair and holding up their swollen faces, which quiver like jelly beneath the blows. He traps their heads between his knees in turn and lashes them with blows from top to bottom.

'Well, who? The Chechens? Have you killed a single fighter yet, you piece of shit, have you earned the right to sell them bullets? Well? Have you even seen one? Have you ever had to write a letter of condolence to a dead soldier's mother? Look over there, those are soldiers, eighteen-year-old lads who have already seen death, looked it in the face, while you scum sell the Chechens bullets. Why should you live and guzzle vodka while these puppies died instead of you in the mountains, eh? I'll shoot the fucking pair of you!' We don't watch the beating. We have been beaten ourselves and it has long ceased to be of any interest. Nor do we feel particularly sorry for the gunners. They shouldn't have got caught.

The Kombat is right, they have seen too little of the war to sell bullets - only we are entitled to do that. We know death, we've heard it whistling over our heads and seen how it mangles bodies, and we have the right to bring it upon others. And these two haven't. What's more, the new recruits are strangers in our battalion, not yet soldiers, not one of us. But most of all we are upset that we can no longer use the gap in the fence.

'Cretins,' spits Arkasha. 'They put the gap out of bounds; they got themselves caught and ruined it for all of us. So much for selling the generator.'

He is more bothered than any of us. Now he'll have to go to the local market to satisfy his passion for trading. We don't like it at the market - it's too dangerous. You never know if you'll come back alive. You can only buy stuff from the Chechens at the side of the road, when one of you jumps down from the armoured car and approaches them while the platoon trains their rifles on them and the gunner readies his heavy-calibre machine gun.

The market is enemy territory. Too many people, too little room to move. They shoot our guys in the back of the head there, take their weapons and dump their bodies in the road. You can only walk around freely if you take the pin out of a grenade and hold it up in your fist. It was a whole lot more pleasant to trade through the fence on our own ground. We were the ones who could shoot people in the back of the head if need be.

'Yeah,' says Lyokha. 'Shame about the gap. And the generator.'

The Kombat works himself into an even greater rage.

There's something not right with his head after the mountains and he is on the verge of beating these two to death.

He lays into the wheezing bodies with his feet and the soldiers squirm like maggots, trying to protect their bellies and kidneys, a vain hope with their hands tied behind their backs. The blows rain down one after another.

The Kombat kicks one of them in the throat and the soldier gags, unable to breathe. His feet kick convulsively and he fights to gulp in some air, eyes now bulging through the swelling.

The rest of the officers sit in the shade of a canvas awning near the gatehouse, watching the punishment as they take a hair of the dog from a bottle of vodka on a table in front of them. Their faces are also swollen, but from three days of continual drinking.

Our political education officer, Lisitsyn, gets up from the table and joins the Kombat. For a while they flail at the gunners with their boots in silence - the only sound is their puffing from the exertion.

We understood long ago that any beating is better than a hole in the head. There have been too many deaths for us to care much about trivia like ruptured kidneys or a broken jaw. But all the same, they are thrashing these two way too hard. We all thieved! And every one of us could have wound up in their place.

Thieving is both the foundation of the war and its reason for continuing. The soldiers sell cartridges; the drivers sell diesel oil; the cooks sell tinned meat. Battalion commanders steal the soldiers' food by the crate - that's our tinned meat on the table that they snack on now between shots of vodka. Regimental commanders truck away vehicle-loads of gear, while the generals steal the actual vehicles them-selves.

There was one well-known case when someone sold the Chechens brand-new armoured cars, fresh from the production line and still in the factory grease. Military vehicles that were sold back in the first war and written off as lost in battle are still being driven round Chechnya.

Quartermasters dispatch whole columns of vehicles to Mozdok packed with stolen goods: carpets, televisions, building materials, furniture. Wooden houses are dismantled and shipped out piece by piece; cargo planes are filled to bursting with stolen clutter that leaves no room for the wounded. Who cares about two or three boxes of cartridges in this war where everything is stolen, sold and bought from beginning to end?

And we've all been sold too, guts and all, me, Arkasha, Pincha, the Kombat and these two guys he is beating now, sold and written off as battle losses. Our lives were traded long ago to pay for luxurious houses for generals that are springing up in the elite suburbs of Moscow.

The blows eventually cease. Those two jackals step back from the gunners, who lie gasping face down on the asphalt, spitting out blood and struggling to roll over. Then the armaments officer steps forward and helps Lisitsyn lift one up, raise his arms and tie his wrists in the noose. They tighten the rope until his feet dangle a few centimetres above the ground, suspending him like a sack, and string up the second guy the same way. They do it themselves as they know that none of us will obey an order to do it.

'Fall out,' shouts the Kombat, and the battalion disperses to its tents.

'Bastards,' says Arkasha. It's not clear who he means: the gunners, or the Kombat and Lisitsyn.

'Pricks,' whispers Fixa.

The soldiers hang there all day and half the night. They are opposite our tents and through the doorway we can see them swaying on the rack. Their shoulders are pressed up to their ears, their heads slumped forward onto their chests. At first they tried to raise their bodies up on the rope, change their position and get a little more comfort-able. But now they are either asleep or unconscious and they don't move. A pool of urine glistens beneath one of them.

There is a hubbub inside the command post as our commanders down more vodka. At two in the morning they consume another load and all tumble out onto the square to administer a further round of beatings to the dangling gunners, who are lit up in the moonlight.

The officers place two Tapik (TA-57) field telephones under the men and wire them up by the toes. The units contain a small generator, and to make a call you wind a handle which produces a charge and sends a signal down the line.

'So, do you still feel like selling bullets?' Lisitsyn asks and winds the handle of the first phone.

The soldier on the rope starts to jerk and cry in pain as cramps seize him.

What are you yelling for, you piece of shit?' Lisitsyn screams and kicks him in the shins. He then rewinds the Tapik and the soldier howls. Again Lisitsyn lashes at his shins. And so on for maybe half an hour or more.

The officers of our battalion have turned into an organized gang that exists separately from the soldiers. They truly are like jackals, and so that's what we contract soldiers call them. We in turn are called 'contras', or sometimes 'vouchers', as we are there to be spent. And the two camps hate each other for good reason.

They hate us because we drink, sell cartridges and shoot them in the back in battle, because every last one of us yearns to get discharged from this lousy army. And since we want nothing more from it than the money it pays us for each tour of duty, we don't give a damn about the officers and will screw them over at every opportunity. They also hate us for their own poverty, their underfed children and their eternal sense of hopelessness. And they hate the conscripts because they die like flies and the officers have to write letters informing the mothers.

What else can you expect of the officers if they themselves grew up in barracks? They too used to get beaten as cadets, and they still get beaten at their units. Every other colonel of ours is capable of little more than screaming and punching, reducing a lieutenant, captain or major to a moaning, dishevelled wretch in front of junior ranks. Nor do the generals bother to mete out penalties to the colonels any more; they simply hit them.

Ours is an army of workers and peasants, reduced to desperation by constant under-funding, half-crazed with hunger and a lack of accommodation, flogged and beaten by all, regardless of the consequences, regardless of badges of rank, stripped of all rights. This is not an army but a herd drawn from the dregs of the criminal masses, lawless apart from the dictates of the jackals that run it.

Why should you care about soldiers when you can't even provide for your own children? Competent, conscientious officers don't stay long and the only ones left are those with nowhere else to live, who cling onto empty assurances that they will be allocated an apartment someday. Or those who cannot string two words together and know only how to smash in the teeth of some young kid. They make their way up the career ladder not because they are the best, but because there is no-one else. Accustomed from the very bottom rung to beating and being beaten, they beat and are beaten right to the top, teaching others to follow suit. We learned the ropes long ago; the ways of the gutter are the universal language in this army.

Lisitsyn gets bored of winding the Tapik. He puts a flak jacket on one of the gunners and shoots him in the chest with his pistol. The round doesn't pierce the jacket but the impact rocks the body on the rope. The soldier contorts and gasps, his lungs so close to collapse that he is unable to draw breath. Lisitsyn is about to fire again but the Kombat averts his arm, worried that in his state of drunkenness he will miss and hit the wretch in the belly or the head.

We don't sleep during all of this. It's impossible to doze off to these screams. Not that they bother us; they simply keep us awake.

I sit up in my sleeping bag and have a smoke. It was much the same in Mozdok. Someone would get a beating on the runway and I would sleep with a blanket over my head to keep out the light and muffle the cries and I'd think, great, it wasn't me today. Four years have passed since then and nothing has changed in this army. You could wait another four years and forty more after that and it would still be the same.

The yelling on the parade ground stops and the officers go back to the command post. The only sound now is the moaning of the gunners. The one who was shot at wheezes heavily and coughs as he tries to force some air into his chest.

I'm sick of their whining,' says the platoon commander from his sleeping bag. 'Hey, shitheads, if you don't settle down I'll come and stuff socks in your gobs,' he shouts.

It goes quiet on the square and the platoon commander falls asleep. I pour some water in a flask and go outside.

Arkasha tosses a pack of cigarettes after me.

'Give them a smoke.'

I light two and poke them between their tattered lips.

They smoke in silence, no-one speaks. What is there to say?

As Babchenko explains, after this beating, the two men were later thrown out of the base and probably killed by Chechens while trying to get home. The book also contains plenty of details about the brutal way in which the Chechens fought their war against Russia.

In the final excerpt, Babchenko reflects on what it was like for the people who made it out alive:

No-one returns from the war. Ever. Mothers get back a sad semblance of their sons - embittered, aggressive beasts, hardened against the whole world and believing in nothing except death. Yesterday's soldiers no longer belong to their parents. They belong to war, and only their body returns from war. Their soul stays there.

But the body still comes home. And the war within it dies gradually, shedding itself in layers, scale by scale. Slowly, very slowly, yesterday's soldier, sergeant or captain transforms from a soulless dummy with empty eyes and a burnt-out soul into something like a human being. The unbearable nervous tension ebbs away, the aggression simmers down, the hatred passes, and the loneliness abates. It's the fear that lingers longest of all, an animal fear of death, but that too passes with time.

And you start to learn to live in this life again. You learn to walk without checking the ground beneath your feet for mines and tripwires, and step on manholes on the road without fear, and stand at your full height in open ground.

And you go shopping, talk on the phone and sleep on a bed. You learn to take for granted the hot water in the taps, the electricity and the central heating. You no longer jump at loud noises.

You start to live. At first because that's how it's worked out and you have stayed alive, you do it without gaining much joy from life; you look at everything as a windfall that came your way through some whim of fate. You lived your life from cover to cover in those hundred and eighty days you were there, and the remaining fifty odd years can't add anything to that time, or detract from it.

But then you start to get drawn into life. You get interested in this game, which isn't for real. You pass yourself off as a fully fledged member of society, and the mask of a normal person grows onto you, no longer rejected by your body. And those around you think you are just the same as

everyone else.

But no-one knows your real face, and no-one knows that you are no longer a person. Happy, laughing people walk around you, accepting you as one of their own, and no-one knows where you have been.

But that doesn't bother you any more. You now remember the war as some cartoon horror movie you once saw, but you no longer recognize yourself as one of its characters.

You don't tell anyone the truth any more. You can't explain what war really is to someone who has never been there, just as you can't explain green to a blind person or a man can't know what it's like to give birth. They simply don't have the necessary sensory organs. You can't explain or understand war - all you can do is experience it.

But you're still waiting for something all these years. God knows what, though, you simply can't believe that it ends just like that, without any consequences. You're probably waiting for someone to shed some light on it all, for someone to come up to you and say, 'Brother, I know where you've been. I know what war is. I know what you've been fighting for.'

That's very important, to know why and what for. Why the brothers the war gave you had to die? Why people were killed, why they fired on goodwill, justice, faith and love, crushed children and bombed women? Why the world needed to lose that girl I saw back on the runway in Mozdok, with her smashed head and a bit of her brain lying in an ammo box next to her? Why?

But no-one tells you. And then you, yesterday's soldier, sergeant or captain, start to explain it to yourself. You take a pen and paper and produce the first phrase as you start to write. You still don't know what it will be, a short story, a poem or a song. The lines come with difficulty, each letter tearing your body like a shard being pulled from a wound.

You feel this pain physically as the war comes out of you and onto paper, shaking you so that you can't see the letters. You are back there again and death once more rules everything, the room fills with moaning and fear, and once again you hear the big guns, the screams of the wounded and people being burnt alive, and the whistle of mortar shells falling towards your prone back.

A drum beats and a band on a sultry parade ground plays

Farewell, Slavs', and the dead rise from their graves and form up, a great number of them, everyone who was dear to you and was killed, and you can already spot familiar faces: Igor, Vaseline, Four-Eyes the platoon commander...

They lean towards you and their whispering fills the room:

'Go on, brother, tell them how we burnt in the carriers! Tell them how we cried in surrounded block posts in August 1996, how we whimpered and begged them not to kill us as they pinned us to the ground with their feet and slit our throats! Tell them how boys' bodies twitch when bullets hit them. You survived only because we died there. Go on, they should know all this! No-one should die before they know what war is!'

And tinged with blood, the written lines appear one after the other. Vodka is downed by the litre while death and madness sit beside you, nudging you and correcting your pen.

And there you are, yesterday's soldier, sergeant or cap-tain, concussed a hundred times, shot to pieces, patched-up and reassembled, half crazed and stupefied, and you write and write and whine with helplessness and sorrow, and tears pour down your face and stick in your stubble.

And you realize that you should not have returned from the war.

At first, I thought I would explain what lessons I think we should draw from Babchenko’s memoirs, but then I realized that it was probably better to just share some excerpts and let people draw their own conclusions. They will probably reach conclusions I think are dumb or even downright insane, because this war turns even people who have nothing to do with it into maniacs apparently, but it’s not as if anything I say would change their mind anyway.

If you actually watch the interview, it’s impossible to agree with that claim, no matter what your view about the origins of the war is. What happened is that, as soon as the interview was released, the narrative alignment machine kicked into high gear and everyone started distorting the interview to eliminate any friction with the prevailing view that Russia’s invasion had nothing to do with NATO expansion. For instance, despite the fact that Putin complains repeatedly about NATO expansion during the interview, one professor of international relations claimed in a thread that was retweeted hundreds of times that although Putin had talked at length about distant historical issues NATO was “absent from such talk”. Another professional Russia watcher, in one of the most popular analyses of the interview, went even further and claimed that Putin had repeatedly “dismisse[d] NATO expansion as the reason for action”. It’s not even that I disagree with everything those people say, the second author I just mentioned in particular has made a point that I think is important about how the debate on the structural causes of the war (such as NATO expansion) should not make us lose sight of the importance of Putin’s agency and the role of his personal obsessions, but those claims about what he said or didn’t say during the interview with Carlson are simply false.1

It’s true that Putin has repeated his, which he’s held consistently for decades and had already defended at length in a long essay he published in 2021, that Ukraine is really a part of Russia and that the Ukrainians are part of the Russian people, but he did not say or even imply that Russia had invaded Ukraine because of that. In fact, not only did he not say that, but he clearly denied that Russia had invaded Ukraine for that reason. More precisely, what he told Carlson implies that despite the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine (according to Putin’s version of history anyway), Russia would not have invaded Ukraine were it not for other factors, among which he explicitly mentions NATO expansion. Of course, you can disagree that Putin’s account is historically accurate (I certainly do) or that even if accurate it would justify the invasion (I also do), but you can’t disagree that it’s what he said. Again, it’s simply not true that he said that NATO expansion had played no role in his decision making process, let alone that he didn’t even talk about NATO expansion. And it doesn’t matter how many times people repeat it, that won’t make it true.

It’s striking, but not really surprising in light of what I just said, that the people who peddle this narrative about Putin’s interview never actually quote it, so I want to quote a few passages to support the claims I’ve just made. First, a key point in Putin’s narrative is that, while he thinks that Ukraine is really a part of Russia and that the Ukrainians are a part of the Russian people, he also insists that it doesn’t mean that Ukraine can’t be independent. That’s because even Ukrainian nationalists originally insisted that Ukraine should have good relations with Russia:

As far back as the 19th century, theorists calling for Ukrainian independence appeared. All those, however, claimed that Ukraine should have a very good relationship with Russia. They insisted on that.

This observation comes after Putin summarized the traditional Russian view that the Pereyaslav Agreement of 1654, which turned the Cossack Hetmanate into a Muscovite protectorate, was the reunification of the Russian lands which had been divided after the Mongol invasion. He continues by explain that Ukraine as it exists today is an artificial creation of the Bolsheviks, who arbitrarily put it together largely with historically Russian territories.

Later he explains that when the Soviet Union collapsed, a process that he claims was initiated by the Russian leadership for reasons that are unclear to him (he clearly thinks it was a mistake), Russia let Ukraine become independent and keep the Russian territories it had received from the Bolsheviks, because it still had good reasons to think that Ukraine would have good relations with Russia:

We are coming to the point where the Soviet Ukraine was established. Then, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. And everything that Russia had generously bestowed on Ukraine was ”dragged away“ by the latter.

I'm coming to a very important point of today's agenda. After all, the collapse of the Soviet Union was effectively initiated by the Russian leadership. I do not understand what the Russian leadership was guided by at the time, but I suspect there were several reasons to think everything would be fine.

First, I think that the then Russian leadership believed that the fundamentals of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine were: in fact, a common language — more than 90 percent of the population there spoke Russian; family ties — every third person there had some kind of family or friendship ties; common culture; common history; finally, common faith; co-existence within a single state for centuries; and deeply interconnected economies. All of these were so fundamental. All these elements together make our good relations inevitable.

Clearly, the implication is that Russia was mistaken about that, because those fundamentals didn’t prevent Ukraine from adopting a hostile attitude toward Russia eventually, which as we’ll see he claims was largely because of the West.

The second reason why, according to Putin, Russia had good reasons to expect that Ukraine’s independent would not be a problem is that with the end of the Cold War, there was no longer any ideological difference between Russia and the West. Russia wanted to join the West and, since the Cold War was over, it was also promised that NATO would not expand:

The second point is a very important one. I want you as an American citizen and your viewers to hear about this as well. The former Russian leadership assumed that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and therefore there were no longer any ideological dividing lines. Russia even agreed, voluntarily and proactively, to the collapse of the Soviet Union and believed that this would be understood by the so-called (now in scare quotes) ”civilized West“ as an invitation for cooperation and associateship. That is what Russia was expecting both from the United States and the so-called collective West as a whole.

…

Let's not talk about who is afraid of whom, let's not reason in such terms. And let's get into the fact that after 1991, when Russia expected that it would be welcomed into the brotherly family of ”civilized nations,“ nothing like this happened. You tricked us (I don't mean you personally when I say ”you“, of course, I'm talking about the United States), the promise was that NATO would not expand eastward, but it happened five times, there were five waves of expansion. We tolerated all that, we were trying to persuade them, we were saying: ”Please don't, we are as bourgeois now as you are, we are a market economy, and there is no Communist Party power. Let's negotiate.“ Moreover, I have also said this publicly before (let's look at Yeltsin's times now), there was a moment when a certain rift started growing between us. Before that, Yeltsin came to the United States, remember, he spoke in Congress and said the good words: ”God bless America“. Everything he said were signals — let us in.

Again, as long as Ukraine and the West held up their part of the bargain, there was no reason for Russia to oppose Ukrainian independence, despite Putin’s views on the artificial character of the Ukrainian state and the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine.

But according to Putin, Ukraine and the West didn’t hold up their part of the bargain:

Now, about NATO's expansion to the East. Well, we were promised, no NATO to the East, not an inch to the East, as we were told. And then what? They said, ”Well, it's not enshrined on paper, so we'll expand.“ So there were five waves of expansion, the Baltic States, the whole of Eastern Europe, and so on.

And now I come to the main thing: they have come to Ukraine ultimately. [emphasis is mine] In 2008 at the summit in Bucharest they declared that the doors for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO were open.

…

So, they started to develop the territory of Ukraine. Whatever is there, I have told you the background, how this territory developed, what kind of relations there were with Russia. Every second or third person there has always had some ties with Russia. And during the elections in already independent, sovereign Ukraine, which gained its independence as a result of the Declaration of Independence, and, by the way, it says that Ukraine is a neutral state, and in 2008 suddenly the doors or gates to NATO were open to it. Oh, come on! This is not how we agreed. [emphasis is mine] Now, all the presidents that have come to power in Ukraine, they've relied on an electorate with a good attitude to Russia in one way or another. This is the south-east of Ukraine, this is a large number of people. And it was very difficult to dissuade this electorate, which had a positive attitude towards Russia.

Here I emphasized a sentence that shows clearly that, in Putin’s narrative, it’s not Ukrainian independence itself that was a problem but the fact that promises made when the Soviet Union collapsed were not respected. Again, you don’t have to agree that it’s true or that it would justify Putin’s actions if it were, but that’s what he is saying.

A bit later, after presenting his view that Yanukovych’s overthrow in 2014 was a coup orchestrated with the backing of the CIA, he connects it to the attempt to bring Ukraine into NATO in 2008 and explains why according to him this changed the situation for Russia:

So, in 2008 the doors of NATO were opened for Ukraine. In 2014, there was a coup, they started persecuting those who did not accept the coup, and it was indeed a coup, they created a threat to Crimea which we had to take under our protection. They launched a war in Donbass in 2014 with the use of aircraft and artillery against civilians. This is when it started. There is a video of aircraft attacking Donetsk from above. They launched a large-scale military operation, then another one. When they failed, they started to prepare the next one. All this against the background of military development of this territory and opening of NATO’s doors.

Again, I’m not saying that you have to accept Putin’s narrative here, but you have to accept that it’s the narrative he is peddling.

Next, after explaining that it was pointless to overthrow Yanukovych since he’d already been forced to agree to early presidential elections that he was certain to lose, Putin explicitly says that had Yanukovych not been violently overthrown Russia wouldn’t have annexed Crimea or done any of the things it did afterward:

Why would they have to do that? All this could have been done legally, without victims, without military action, without losing Crimea. We would have never considered to even lift a finger, if it hadn’t been for the bloody developments on Maidan.

Because we agreed with the fact that after the collapse of the Soviet Union our borders should be along the borders of former Union’s republics. We agreed to that. But we never agreed to NATO’s expansion and moreover we never agreed that Ukraine would be in NATO. We did not agree to NATO bases there without any discussion with us. For decades we kept asking: don’t do this, don’t do that.

At the risk of repeating myself, you don’t have to accept this claim, but you can’t deny that Putin made it even if you think it’s not true. Now, if he said that Russia wouldn’t have invaded if Yanukovych had not been violently overthrown, then obviously he didn’t say that Russia invaded simply because in his view Ukraine is really a part of Russia and the Ukrainians are part of the Russian people.

After complaining that Ukrainians had elevated Nazi collaborators to the rank of national heroes, Putin explicitly says that, although he personally regards the Ukrainians as part of the Russian people, he still wouldn’t have objected to Ukrainian independence if they hadn’t done that kind of things:

I say that Ukrainians are part of the one Russian people. They say, ”No, we are a separate people.“ Okay, fine. If they consider themselves a separate people, they have the right to do so, but not on the basis of Nazism, the Nazi ideology.

Again, you don’t have to have to agree with his characterization of post-independence/post-Maidan’s relationship Ukraine with Nazism and you don’t have to agree that it makes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine morally justified, but he is clearly not saying that Russia invaded Ukraine simply because he believes that Ukraine is a part of Russia and that the Ukrainians are part of the Russian people. That’s just false, and this isn’t something there should even be a debate about, yet here we are.

What Putin explained during that interview is that, in view of how the Ukrainian state was created and the historical unity of Ukraine and Russia, Russia would have been entitled to ask for a revision of borders when the Soviet Union collapsed before granting Ukraine independence, but it decided not to do so because it counted on a number of implicit and explicit guarantees that were later violated. This is a point he’d already made in the essay he published in 2021 on the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine:

Therefore, modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era. We know and remember well that it was shaped – for a significant part – on the lands of historical Russia. To make sure of that, it is enough to look at the boundaries of the lands reunited with the Russian state in the 17th century and the territory of the Ukrainian SSR when it left the Soviet Union.

…

Of course, inside the USSR, borders between republics were never seen as state borders; they were nominal within a single country, which, while featuring all the attributes of a federation, was highly centralized – this, again, was secured by the CPSU's leading role. But in 1991, all those territories, and, which is more important, people, found themselves abroad overnight, taken away, this time indeed, from their historical motherland.

What can be said to this? Things change: countries and communities are no exception. Of course, some part of a people in the process of its development, influenced by a number of reasons and historical circumstances, can become aware of itself as a separate nation at a certain moment. [emphasis is mine] How should we treat that? There is only one answer: with respect!

You want to establish a state of your own: you are welcome! But what are the terms? I will recall the assessment given by one of the most prominent political figures of new Russia, first mayor of Saint Petersburg Anatoly Sobchak. As a legal expert who believed that every decision must be legitimate, in 1992, he shared the following opinion: the republics that were founders of the Union, having denounced the 1922 Union Treaty, must return to the boundaries they had had before joining the Soviet Union. All other territorial acquisitions are subject to discussion, negotiations, given that the ground has been revoked.

In other words, when you leave, take what you brought with you. This logic is hard to refute. I will just say that the Bolsheviks had embarked on reshaping boundaries even before the Soviet Union, manipulating with territories to their liking, in disregard of people's views.

The Russian Federation recognized the new geopolitical realities: and not only recognized, but, indeed, did a lot for Ukraine to establish itself as an independent country. Throughout the difficult 1990's and in the new millennium, we have provided considerable support to Ukraine. Whatever “political arithmetic” of its own Kiev may wish to apply, in 1991–2013, Ukraine's budget savings amounted to more than USD 82 billion, while today, it holds on to the mere USD 1.5 billion of Russian payments for gas transit to Europe. If economic ties between our countries had been retained, Ukraine would enjoy the benefit of tens of billions of dollars.

In the passage I highlighted, Putin actually goes further than is generally recognized in acknowledging the possibility of Ukraine as a separate nation, for he seems to be saying that even if the Ukrainians are historically part of the Russian people, it needn’t always be true and it doesn’t preclude the possibility that at some point they might go their separate way and become a full-fledge nation. It’s not clear whether he was saying that it had already happened, but in any case, he clearly did think that it takes anything away from the obligation for Ukraine and the West to respect the promises that, according to him, they made when Ukraine became independent. Again, you don’t have to agree with that, this isn’t the point.

When he explained to Carlson that Moscow was ready to negotiate, Putin made clear again that Russia didn’t have a problem with Ukrainian independence per se (even in the borders of 1991), but that it was conditional on a number of implicit and explicit guarantees that were subsequently violated:

I know one can say it is our mistake, it was us who intensified the situation and decided to put an end to the war that started in 2014 in Donbas, as I have already said, by means of weapons. Let me get back to further in history, I already told you this, we were just discussing it. Let us go back to 1991 when we were promised that NATO would not be expanded, to 2008 when the doors to NATO opened, to the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine declaring Ukraine a neutral state. Let us go back to the fact that NATO and US military bases started to appear on the territory of Ukraine creating threats for us. Let us go back to coup d'état in Ukraine in 2014. It is pointless though, isn’t it? We may go back and forth endlessly. But they stopped negotiations. Is it a mistake? Yes. Correct it. We are ready. What else is needed?

I could go on for a while, Putin raised other grievances against both Ukraine and the West that he clearly thinks contributed to creating a situation in which he had no choice but to “intensify the situation” (as he euphemistically put it), but to be honest I don’t think analyzing Putin’s discourse is that interesting and I think I've already done more than enough to show that the dominant narrative on his interview with Carlson was a gross distortion of reality.

I’m making a very weak claim here that, precisely because it’s so weak, shouldn’t even be controversial. In particular, it’s compatible with the view that NATO expansion had in fact nothing to do with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, even though to be clear I not only disagree with that view but think it’s so absurd that the mere fact that people can defend it without fear of ridicule is an indictment of the state of the public debate in the West on that issue. Of course, although I think NATO expansion played an important role in the lead-up to the war, that is not to say that I agree with Putin’s account of the history of relations between Russia and Ukraine and between Russia and the West or that I agree that it makes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine morally permissible. This should go without saying, but since on this topic people seem to lack basic reading comprehension and logical skills, it will go even better by saying it. On the history, I think Putin says a lot of things that are true and a lot of things that are false, but even the true things he says are often framed incorrectly or misleadingly.2 On the other hand, I also think the dominant historical narrative in the West is not much better, so there is that. In any case, although I think Western and even Ukrainian policy toward Russia has been very unwise, I certainly don’t think that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was morally legitimate.

What I said in this post is also compatible with the argument that, although Putin claimed that he wouldn’t have been fine with Ukrainian independence had it not been for NATO expansion, Maidan, etc., the fact that he spent so much time talking about historical issues going back several centuries in the past during the interview with Carlson shows that imperialism and his view that Russia was entitled to large swathes of Ukrainian territory is the real cause of the war. To be clear, I don’t find that argument even remotely convincing, if only because I think it’s ridiculous to think that one can infer the causes of something like Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine — which I don’t even think Putin himself fully understands anymore than other statesmen in the past understood all the causes that led them to make the decisions they did — from what is essentially a propaganda exercise. But as long as one doesn’t distort what Putin said during the interview, nothing I said in this post is inconsistent with that argument. Again, it doesn’t matter for the point I’m making here what your views are on the truth of Putin’s historical narrative, the extent to which that history justifies Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or even what you think one may infer from the interview about the causes of the war. None of that has anything to do with the point I have been making in this post.

If people had just said that Putin’s historical narrative was inaccurate or that his justification for the invasion was unconvincing, I probably would have disagreed with some of their arguments, but I would not have accused them of misrepresenting what was and wasn’t said by Putin during the interview. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what they did, but nobody seems to care. In fact, it’s not just that nobody seems to care, the worst part is that people are being actively cheered on for distorting the content of the interview. If people can’t even report what the Russians say accurately, what do you think are the odds that we understand why they do what they do? Ignoring some of the things Putin said is bad enough, but claiming he didn’t say them or even that he said the opposite is much worse. In a healthy intellectual environment, this would attract criticism, but instead it draws only praise. It’s obviously not true that Putin didn’t talk about NATO expansion and it’s even less true that he dismissed it as a factor in his decision to invade. However, I haven’t seen a single professional Russia watcher or international relations expert point that out publicly (though I’m sure a few did), which sadly is not difficult to understand. I’m sure that some of them noticed that Putin’s interview was being misrepresented, but they didn’t want to spoil the party and feared that if they pointed it out they’d be accused of being a Putin shill or some such nonsense.3 And they were right to fear it, because that’s exactly what would have happened. People are so hysterical on this topic that it creates a climate of fear and dissent gradually retreats from the public sphere. The result is that even straightforward falsehoods go unchallenged.

At the moment, the strategy in question seems to be negotiate a comprehensive peace deal that would have Israel agree to a permanent ceasefire and a pathway to a Palestinian state, in return for the return of all the hostages still detained by Hamas and the normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia. Now, to be clear, there is absolutely no chance this will ever happen. First, the Israelis don’t want or don’t believe in a two-state solution and have not for a long time, a position that October 7 has obviously done nothing to soften. This isn’t just the position of Netanyahu, it’s a widely shared view in Israeli society at this point, so if US officials are calculating that Netanyahu will eventually be removed and this will open a path for Israel’s acceptance of that kind of deal, they are sorely mistaken. It’s completely unrealistic, especially after what happened on October 7, to expect that Israelis are suddenly going to abandon a view that most of them have held at least since the Camp David Summit in 2000 and that is now deeply entrenched.2 I didn’t even bother checking, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you could find a poll showing that a majority of Israelis would take that kind of deal if it were presented. However, even if that were the case, this would not show anything because the reality is that the vast majority of Israelis don’t believe that such a deal is realistic and they would always find something wanting in any concrete proposal.

Indeed, there is no way that, on the other side, the Palestinians would agree to any deal that didn’t contain immediate and concrete steps toward the creation of a Palestinian state, such as a freezing of settlement building in the West Bank in addition to the immediate and permanent end of military operations in Gaza. They have already been down that road with Oslo and they won’t agree to another deal that requires them to give something of value to Israel right away without a clear and enforceable commitment to a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders with minor and reciprocal adjustments. Of course, there is no way Israel will accept, no matter who is Prime Minister. Indeed, precisely because MBS knows that and because he also knows that his public opinion would not tolerate what it would perceive as a betrayal of the Palestinians just as they’re getting massacred in Gaza, Saudi Arabia just issued a very strongly worded statement in which it makes clear that it would accept nothing less than Palestinian statehood within those parameters and that Blinken’s talk of a “pathway” to a Palestinian state was not going to cut it. MBS, it turns out, quite like being alive and would like to remain that way. The idea that US officials are going to bridge that gap in the next few weeks or even months is completely delusional. I didn’t even mention the fact that, although we’re not talking about that at the moment because everybody is focusing on the disaster in Gaza, the Palestinians are still divided between the PLO/Fatah and Hamas plus a few other movements and they would have to unite first.

In short, the Biden administration’s strategy to end the war in Gaza has no chance of succeeding, it’s completely stupid. It’s perfectly clear where the American interest lays here and what the US should do if the goal of Biden’s foreign policy was to maximize it. It may be in Israel’s interest to continue the war in Gaza, although to be clear I don’t believe for a second that it is, but it’s certainly not in the interest of the US. With each day that passes without a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, the risk of a regional way in which the US would be drawn increases. US forces are getting attacked left and right, which prompts a military response, fueling a cycle that may well get out of control eventually. Meanwhile, a significant proportion of the traffic in the Red Sea is being diverted because of Houthi attacks, which in addition to disrupting international trade and creating inflationary pressure for everyone is also depriving Egypt of its main source of hard currency just as it’s already in the middle of a severe economic crisis, hence threatening with collapse the country that has been key to the US strategy to keep the Israeli-Arab conflict under control since 1979.

It’s obvious that, instead of pursuing Blinken’s harebrained plan to end the war by reaching a comprehensive peace that has no chance of happening at the moment, the US should pressure Israel into agreeing to a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. The only arguments to the contrary that people make are of the 4D chess variety or rests on absurd premises and shouldn’t convince any rational person who hasn’t been brainwashed by propaganda. Despite what some people claim, the US has considerable leverage on Israel in theory, it’s just not using it. It’s bankrolling Israel’s war and providing diplomatic cover to it, but more importantly, it’s Israel’s main supplier of weapons and ammunition. Israel could literally not have waged the war in the way it has, namely by laying waste to most of Gaza to avoid using ground troops as much as possible and thereby minimize IDF casualties, if the US had not supplied it throughout the war and despite that assistance it’s still forced to limit bombings due to ammunition shortage at the moment. Of course, we can’t be certain that Israel would not choose to continue the war even if the US really tightened the screws on it, but you have to be delusional believe that it’s not very likely. Even if Israel could make do in Gaza without being supplied by the US for the rest of the war, it’s very doubtful that it would take the risk to find itself naked in the North in case of a war with Hezbollah, a far more powerful adversary than Hamas.

So why doesn’t the US do that? Well, it doesn’t because while US officials are obviously aware that Israel’s war in Gaza threatens America’s interests in the Middle East, foreign policy is not made through a process that ensures the maximization of the national interest. This model of foreign policy decision-making is flawed because, among other things, domestic political considerations often interfere. When I said that the US had a lot of leverage on Israel that it wasn’t using at the moment, I was careful to add “in theory”, because in practice that leverage is constrained by domestic political factors. Indeed, there is a presidential election in a few months, Israel is popular in the US and it has a very powerful lobby defending its interests in Washington that, while not all-powerful, has proven in the past that it could extract a heavy price from a president opposing it. Usually, the administration avoids getting into a fight with the lobby because people in the US don’t care much about the Middle East and political capital is scarce, so the President is reluctant to spend it to fight the Israel lobby when it’s not even sure that it will be enough and prefers to save his political capital to get through policies he cares more about. But the war and the horrors that people see on television or read about in newspapers on a daily basis create an unusual and politically delicate situation for Biden.

Biden’s problem is that his electorate is divided on the issue. A bloc of younger and more progressive voters wants a ceasefire, but pressuring Israel would be unpopular with more centrist voters. In what at the moment still looks like it’s going to be a close election, he can’t afford to alienate either bloc, but he also can’t please one without pissing off the other. I think that conundrum is the key to understand why otherwise intelligent people have ended up talking themselves into pursuing a strategy that, as we have seen, is completely disconnected from reality and has absolutely no chance of succeeding. Indeed, while there is no way Blinken will manage to tie the end of the war in Gaza to a comprehensive peace agreement leading to a two-state solution, if he could actually do it that would solve Biden’s political problem. But he won’t be able to pull it off because again it’s a pipe dream and, even from a purely political point of view, what Biden needs is to end this war as soon as possible by pressuring Israel into agreeing to a ceasefire. Some people in his coalition will be pissed, but once the war is over it will stop being in the news and he can make the election a referendum about Trump, which is the best way for him to win. If he doesn’t, then the war is going to remain politically salient for months because Israel is not close to wrapping things up and it may even lead to a broader regional conflict in which the US would be drawn, which probably would be blamed on him and with good reason.

More than 30 years ago, a young political reporter named Todd Purdum tremulously asked an all-staff meeting what would be done about the “climate of fear” within the newsroom in which reporters felt intimidated by their bosses? The moment immediately entered Times lore. There is a lot not to miss about the days when editors like Boyd could strike terror in young reporters like me and Purdum. But the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that editors now tremble before their reporters and even their interns. “I miss the old climate of fear,” Baquet used to say with a smile, in another of his barbed jokes.

If you are or have been in academia, the nonprofit world, journalism and more generally any profession which disproportionately employs college graduates from elite universities, this kind of revolution from below should be familiar to you.

Again, I think it’s more or less the same story everywhere, but I’m not sure people really understand the underlying mechanism. Basically, organizations in those fields recruit from a pool of applicants that are increasingly woke, because young people and particularly college-educated people are increasingly woke. As more people who have been socialized into this ideology enter their workforce, they engage in staff activism and pressure the management to adopt their values, even at the expense of the organization’s mission. Management usually ends up yielding to the pressure, which may seem surprising because they’re supposed to be in charge, but when you think about it and have a realistic model of human psychology I don’t think it’s surprising at all. Nobody likes to be constantly vilified by people they’re close to such as friends or colleagues and most people are pretty low on disagreeableness, so in the end they just cave rather than be the asshole and have to deal with emotional blackmail and shrill mobs all the time. If you don’t understand that, you’re either very high on disagreeableness or you have never experienced nonstop vilification by people who are part of your social circle, but I wouldn’t bet on the former.

There is also the fact that in many places, junior staff can now leverage social media to improve their standing inside the organization where they work, because it gives them some influence that is not strictly dependent on their position within that organization and they can whip up mobs on social media to influence the outcome of internal debates in their favor. But this just speeds up the process and for the most part the mechanism is that most people are cowards, so they won’t speak up and face down a mob even if they know that a silent majority is on their side. In fact, not only do people rarely confront the mob, but they often end up talking themselves into embracing the mob’s ideology, because psychologically it’s much easier to tell yourself that you don’t speak up against a mob because you agree with it than to admit the truth, which is that you’re a coward. In his essay, Bennet talks about how at times even he engaged in that sort of rationalization, but at least he has the lucidity to admit that it’s what he was doing.

I talked about the role played by the fact that junior staff in the relevant fields are disproportionately recruited among college graduates, but this shouldn’t be misinterpreted. It’s true that young people who went to university are more likely to be woke, and I also think it’s partly causal and not just selection, but this doesn’t mean that university professors are indoctrinating students into wokeness. A lot of people who oppose wokeness and understand what I just explained about how the entry of young college graduates into the workforce of organizations that disproportionately rely on them seem to believe that, which is why they think that if we can stop indoctrination at universities by pressuring their leadership into cracking down on that stuff, we’ll solve the problem. But what they don’t understand is that, if universities have gone woke, it’s for the same reason that tech companies, nonprofits, media, etc. have gone woke. In other words, students aren’t indoctrinated by their professors as much as they indoctrinate each other, because when you put a lot of people who are selected on wokeness together they wokify each other even more. In turn, this creates pressure on university professors and administrators to become woker, for exactly the same reasons that newsrooms, companies, etc. become woker as a result of the influx of woke young people into their workforce.

I have seen that with my own eyes at Cornell and my department is far from the worst. As new grad students arrived who had gone through college after or during the Great Awokening, they started to change the department simply because they were extremely vocal on those issues and they bullied everyone else into submission, even though grad students are at the bottom of the academic hierarchy and one might have thought they wouldn’t have the power to change the culture in that way. But they did, because again most people are very susceptible to shaming and emotional blackmail, so previously sane people who nominally were in charge started to get on board with the program and even became true believers to some extent. Thus, to the extent that someone is being indoctrinated, it’s senior professors and administrators who are being indoctrinated by students and junior faculty and administrators. If the causation primarily went the other way, the kind of excesses associated with wokeness would have already been happening in universities a long time ago since most faculty and administrators have been in place for a long time, but that is not what happened. People fail to understand that because they think that ultimately wokenesss can be traced back to stuff that some obscure academics have written several decades ago, which I do not deny, but this doesn’t really tell you anything about the mechanism that results in the wokification of universities and more generally organizations that disproportionately employ college-educated people.

Once you understand that it’s a bottom-up process even at universities, it becomes hard to share the optimism of people who think the current hysteria about antisemitism on campuses is the beginning of the end for wokeness, because it means that even if the leadership of universities started cracking down on that stuff it would probably not prevent young college graduates from being woke since they are not being indoctrinated by professors for the most part and it’s dubious that professors could indoctrinate them into not being woke. But I don’t even think that is going to happen anyway, because faculty themselves are increasingly woke as a result of generational change and even those who are not are very unlikely to really crack down on that stuff. Indeed, not only are they very left-wing even when they’re not woke and thus particularly susceptible to being shamed into submission because that makes the cost of being called racist, transphobic or whatnot even higher, but despite what they like to think academics are very conformist and therefore unlikely to resist mobs even independently of their ideological preferences. So I think young people, especially those who went to college, are not going to stop being woke and they’re going to continue to wokify the organizations that disproportionately rely on a college-educated workforce. In other words, to channel Mark Twain’s famous quip, the reports of wokeness’s impending demise are greatly exaggerated.

Sakakini was a humanist, deeply influenced by European ideas and a prominent Arab nationalist. Yet twenty years later, during the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, this same man, who in 1917 had protected a Jew at considerable risk to himself, was lionizing Arab terrorism against Jews. In a letter to his son, after describing how Arab terrorists had thrown a grenade at a passenger train full of Jewish civilians and the British soldiers escorting them, he concluded by writing: “Who would believe there are such heroes in Palestine? What a great honor it is, my Sari, to be an Arab in Palestine.” This is not because he no longer embraced the humanist ideals that already inspired him twenty years earlier, when Levine knocked on his door and asked for his protection, he just didn’t see the inconsistency with his lionization of atrocities against civilians.

Almost ninety years after the attack described by Sakakini, Hamas committed very similar atrocities, though on a much larger scale. Israel has responded by launching a full-blown assault on Gaza, which resumed a few days ago after the truce negotiated with Hamas faltered. According to Gazan officials, just before the truce, 14,854 had been killed in Gaza. This figure includes both combatants and civilians, but still according to government officials in Gaza, 69% of the victims were children or women. This suggests that the vast majority of the victims, over 10,000 of them, were not combatants but civilians. (As we shall see, if we accept this estimate of the overall death toll, this conclusion is also consistent with the IDF’s estimates of the number of Hamas fighters it has killed.) Despite the fact that in the past the figures provided by the Gazan authorities have later proven almost identical to Israel’s estimates, although the distribution between combatants and civilians has not, many people reject those figures on the grounds that Gazan officials are ultimately responsible to Hamas and therefore can’t be trusted.

Someone recently looked at the data published by the Ministry of Health and found discrepancies which they claimed showed that Gazan officials were fudging the data. For instance, between October 18 and October 19 the total number of fatalities reported by the Ministry of Health increased by 307, but during the same period the number of children that were killed according to the same data increased by 671. The author of that analysis identified other discrepancies about not just the age but also the sex of fatalities. This can only happen if the sex or age of the victims was in some cases revised after their death had been initially recorded. Despite what the author of that analysis seems to think, in and of itself, this doesn’t prove anything, because it wouldn’t be particularly surprising if revisions were made on a day-to-day basis in the middle of a war zone.1

However, in a report published by the BBC in October, Gazan officials and health care workers claimed that only people who had been identified by relatives in a hospital were counted. Now, while some cases of misidentification by relatives wouldn’t be surprising, to explain the discrepancy I mentioned above it would have to be the case that at least 10% of fatalities recorded during the first 10 days or so of Israel’s operation had been mistakenly identified as adults by their own relatives. Of course, this is not literally impossible, but it seems very unlikely to me. I think it’s relatively safe to conclude from this kind of discrepancy that the figures published by the Ministry of Health are manipulated or that the procedure used to count fatalities is not as rigorous as Gazan officials and health care workers claimed a few weeks ago.

At the end of the day, it’s true that Hamas can’t be trusted and that we have no way to know exactly how many people have been killed by Israel in Gaza (let alone what percentage were civilians), but the problem is that people use this argument to dismiss any concern about the death toll and the lack of proportionality of Israel’s response. In a major propaganda victory for Israel, now it has become impossible to cite those estimates without prefacing them with a caveat such as “according to the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health”, which has the effect that many people completely dismiss the figure that is provided after that. However, this reasoning is fallacious and it’s transparent that it’s just a way for Israel to counter accusations that it’s not doing enough to protect civilians, which unfortunately most of its supporters clearly don’t realize.

Indeed, we don’t need to rely on Hamas to know that what is happening in Gaza at the moment is a carnage, there is plenty of evidence for this claim that doesn’t require that we take at value what the Gazan authorities are putting out. In particular, just before the truce, 108 UNRWA staff had been killed in Gaza out of a total of 13,000 working in the Strip. That’s a rate of 0.83%, so if we assume that UNRWA employees have the same risk of being killed than other residents of Gaza, it means that more than 19,000 civilians were killed between October 7 and November 24. Of course, it could be that UNRWA employees are somewhat more exposed than other residents of Gaza, but since 99% of them are themselves refugees and before the war 58% of the population of the UNRWA refugee camps were located South of the evacuation line I see no reason to assume their exposure is very different.2

Even if to be conservative we assume they are twice as likely to be killed than other resident, it would still imply that more than 9,500 civilians had already been killed before the truce or more than 200/day. By comparison, even during the worst year of the civil war in Syria, civilians were only killed at half that rate according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.3 So it’s quite clear that, no matter what the precise number of victims is, civilians are getting killed in Gaza at a rate that is unprecedented in recent history and the idea that we are not in a position to know that because we can’t trust the figures that are being put out by the “Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health” is pure sophistry. In fact, as even a US official recently told Congress, it’s quite possible that the figures in question actually underestimate the real death toll and that it will increase as people who are still lying dead under the rubble are added to the tally. I personally think it’s likely that, once the dust has settled and every casualty is accounted for, the death toll will be even higher than suggested by the figures put out by the Ministry of Health.

Other proxies tell a very similar story. For example, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, by the beginning of the truce, 48 journalists had been killed in Gaza. By contrast, during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, only 7 journalists had been killed in Gaza. According to Israel, at least 761 civilians were killed in 2014. Thus, if we assume that the risk increased in the same proportion for civilians as for journalists in 2023 relative to 2014, it means that more than 5,000 civilians had already been killed in 2023 by the time the truce started.4 This would still mean that civilians were getting killed at a higher rate in Gaza between October 7 and November 24 than during the worst year of the Syrian civil war. Even Jake Tapper, who isn’t exactly a pro-Palestinian radical, recently expressed his skepticism on CNN when the IDF spokesman he was interviewing told him the IDF had done “everything possible to safeguard innocent civilians”, replying that it was “hard to believe that, especially when one of our producers lost 9 family members”.

We also know that Israel is using in large quantities much more powerful bombs than Western countries did in urban environments since the Vietnam War and we have a ton of anecdotal evidence such as testimonies from Gaza suggesting Israel is fighting a very brutal war. Again, it’s true that we are not in a position to know exactly how many civilians have been killed and that we should take at face value the numbers put out by Hamas, but it’s pure sophistry to conclude that we aren’t in a position to know that it’s a carnage. It clearly is a carnage and soon it will get even worse as hunger and disease start killing people in large numbers. Even a senior Israeli official recently acknowledged that the overall death toll given by the Palestinian authorities was “more or less” right, though he claims that 1/3 of the fatalities were combatants (even if that were true it would still mean that civilians are getting killed at a higher rate than in any recent conflict in terms of fatalities per day), so we’re in a comical situation where supporters of Israel are denying something that even the Israeli authorities are conceding.

Nor is this the only example of sophistry used by supporters of Israel to dismiss any concern about the damage wrought by the IDF on civilians. It’s been absolutely wild to watch otherwise intelligent people make the dumbest imaginable arguments to defend the IDF’s conduct in the war. For instance, a lot of people are arguing that since Israel doesn’t strike Gaza indiscriminately but picks targets that have some kind of connection to Hamas or another terrorist group, IDF strikes in Gaza are neither immoral nor illegal under international law, but that’s just another obvious fallacy. I’m sure that Hamas is taking advantage from the fact that it’s embedded in the population of Gaza, because it makes it more likely that Israeli strikes will result in collateral damage that can be used for propaganda, but this doesn’t mean that just repeating the talking point about “human shields” is enough to justify any strike. You still evidence that it destroyed a military valuable target and that it was valuable enough to justify the collateral damage on civilians, but people almost never even try to show that it’s the case and instead just shout “human shields” as if that proved anything.

A piece recently published by +972 Magazine, a pro-Palestinian Israeli outlet, illustrates why that point is important:

According to the sources who spoke to +972 and Local Call, the targets in Gaza that have been struck by Israeli aircraft can be divided roughly into four categories. The first is “tactical targets,” which include standard military targets such as armed militant cells, weapon warehouses, rocket launchers, anti-tank missile launchers, launch pits, mortar bombs, military headquarters, observation posts, and so on.

The second is “underground targets” — mainly tunnels that Hamas has dug under Gaza’s neighborhoods, including under civilian homes. Aerial strikes on these targets could lead to the collapse of the homes above or near the tunnels.

The third is “power targets,” which includes high-rises and residential towers in the heart of cities, and public buildings such as universities, banks, and government offices. The idea behind hitting such targets, say three intelligence sources who were involved in planning or conducting strikes on power targets in the past, is that a deliberate attack on Palestinian society will exert “civil pressure” on Hamas.

The final category consists of “family homes” or “operatives’ homes.” The stated purpose of these attacks is to destroy private residences in order to assassinate a single resident suspected of being a Hamas or Islamic Jihad operative. However, in the current war, Palestinian testimonies assert that some of the families that were killed did not include any operatives from these organizations.

…

“We are asked to look for high-rise buildings with half a floor that can be attributed to Hamas,” said one source who took part in previous Israeli offensives in Gaza. “Sometimes it is a militant group’s spokesperson’s office, or a point where operatives meet. I understood that the floor is an excuse that allows the army to cause a lot of destruction in Gaza. That is what they told us.

“If they would tell the whole world that the [Islamic Jihad] offices on the 10th floor are not important as a target, but that its existence is a justification to bring down the entire high-rise with the aim of pressuring civilian families who live in it in order to put pressure on terrorist organizations, this would itself be seen as terrorism. So they do not say it,” the source added.

Various sources who served in IDF intelligence units said that at least until the current war, army protocols allowed for attacking power targets only when the buildings were empty of residents at the time of the strike. However, testimonies and videos from Gaza suggest that since October 7, some of these targets have been attacked without prior notice being given to their occupants, killing entire families as a result.

…

On the fifth day of fighting, the IDF Spokesperson distributed to military reporters in Israel “before and after” satellite images of neighborhoods in the northern Strip, such as Shuja’iyya and Al-Furqan (nicknamed after a mosque in the area) in Gaza City, which showed dozens of destroyed homes and buildings. The Israeli army said that it had struck 182 power targets in Shuja’iyya and 312 power targets in Al-Furqan.

The Chief of Staff of the Israeli Air Force, Omer Tishler, told military reporters that all of these attacks had a legitimate military target, but also that entire neighborhoods were attacked “on a large scale and not in a surgical manner.” Noting that half of the military targets up until Oct. 11 were power targets, the IDF Spokesperson said that “neighborhoods that serve as terror nests for Hamas” were attacked and that damage was caused to “operational headquarters,” “operational assets,” and “assets used by terrorist organizations inside residential buildings.” On Oct. 12, the Israeli army announced it had killed three “senior Hamas members” — two of whom were part of the group’s political wing.

Yet despite the unbridled Israeli bombardment, the damage to Hamas’ military infrastructure in northern Gaza during the first days of the war appears to have been very minimal. Indeed, intelligence sources told +972 and Local Call that military targets that were part of power targets have previously been used many times as a fig leaf for harming the civilian population. “Hamas is everywhere in Gaza; there is no building that does not have something of Hamas in it, so if you want to find a way to turn a high-rise into a target, you will be able to do so,” said one former intelligence official.

“They will never just hit a high-rise that does not have something we can define as a military target,” said another intelligence source, who carried out previous strikes against power targets. “There will always be a floor in the high-rise [associated with Hamas]. But for the most part, when it comes to power targets, it is clear that the target doesn’t have military value that justifies an attack that would bring down the entire empty building in the middle of a city, with the help of six planes and bombs weighing several tons.”

Indeed, according to sources who were involved in the compiling of power targets in previous wars, although the target file usually contains some kind of alleged association with Hamas or other militant groups, striking the target functions primarily as a “means that allows damage to civil society.” The sources understood, some explicitly and some implicitly, that damage to civilians is the real purpose of these attacks.

There is a lot more in the piece, which is very important, so you should read the whole thing.

What is fascinating is that, in my experience, most people don’t even try to deny the factual basis of the article, they just claim that none of what it describes is problematic. But even if you think that the author of that article or his sources made it all up, despite the fact that everything in that piece is consistent with the anecdotal evidence coming out of Gaza, it doesn’t really matter for the point I’m making here, which again is that just because a target has some kind of connection to Hamas it doesn’t mean that it’s morally permissible to strike it. For instance, if you think that the fact that Hamas has some administrative offices in a residential building and that Israel issued a warning to the residents beforehand makes it okay to destroy it even though dozens of families live in it, then you really have lost the plot. What this means is that Israel shouldn’t be able to get away with just making vague claims to the effect that a strike destroyed “assets used by terrorist organizations” to justify strikes that reduced to rubble a whole apartment block, because the “assets” in question could be anything and have essentially no military value, but in practice that is exactly what happens.

This is true even if nobody dies in the strike, because people need a place to live and if Israel continues to do that most of the Strip will soon be uninhabitable, but to be clear there have been many cases where entire families have been wiped out in strikes on residential areas and Israel didn’t offer any justification beyond that kind of vague claims. Israel is on track to destroy most of the housing stock in Gaza and I don’t see how such a level of destruction is compatible with the claim that only buildings that contain a target of sufficient military value are struck. Do I believe that more than half of the buildings in Gaza contained such a target at some point? No, I do not, and neither should you. A lot of people seem to think that we should give Israel the benefit of the doubt and simply assume that it’s not guided at least in part by the desire to inflict collective punishment in retribution for October 7 or the hope that if most of Gaza is made uninhabitable then a large part of the population will somehow be compelled to leave permanently, but that is completely irrational given the more general context of the war.

Not only is Israel’s government full of troglodytes who in many cases have been fantasizing about various forms of ethnic cleansing for decades, but since October 7 several Israeli officials have made comments that more or less suggested they were guided precisely by this sort of considerations. Back in October, Israel’s Intelligence Ministry prepared a “concept paper” that recommended the transfer of Gaza’s population to Sinai, in other words ethnic cleansing. More recently, a pro-Netanyahu newspaper revealed that Israel’s Prime Minister had asked the Minister of Strategic Affairs to come up with a plan to “thin out” the population of Gaza after the war, by creating pressure that would force other countries to accept Palestinian refugees and get Israel rid of them. To be clear, I don’t think those plans are realistic, nor do I think that everyone inside the Israeli government agrees with them, but not everyone in the government has to agree with those plans for that kind of ideas to influence the conduct of the war and they don’t have to be realistic to have very adverse consequences on Palestinian civilians.

This is another topic about which people constantly engage in the worst kind of sophistry to dismiss concerns about ethnic cleansing. In particular, I’ve heard several people explain that Israel couldn’t possibly be thinking about ethnic cleansing in Gaza, since Arab citizens of Israel are not threatened with expulsion. Even putting aside the fact that plans to “transfer” part of the Arab population of Israel have been discussed for decades in Israel, especially in the context of a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, this argument is obviously fallacious. During WWII, Romania ethnically cleansed Bessarabia of Jews (in fact it killed most of them), but mostly spared Jewish citizens in Romania proper. Do the people who make that argument think that it means Antonescu's policies in Bessarabia did not amount to ethnic cleansing or indeed genocide? This is absurd.

It’s also clear that, after October 7, people in Israel are not overly concerned by the well-being of Palestinian civilians and that many are in a homicidal mood. During a speech about the war against Hamas, Netanyahu had previously made a reference to Amalek, a city where God ordered the Israelites to kill every person including women and children. Nor is Netanyahu the only Israeli official to have made this kind of allusions. Beyond statements made by public officials, if you talk to people in Israel, it’s impossible to miss the “war fever” that has taken hold of the country since October 7. This is clearly not the kind of environment where you should expect people to care a lot about collateral damage. Interestingly, when you’re talking to them privately, people in Israel tend to be pretty honest about it. I know someone who is currently fighting in the IDF and, a few days ago, he told me this: “Basically no one gives a a shit about Palestinian civilian casualties right now. Absolutely no one.” Meanwhile, if you talk to supporters of Israel in the West, you’d think that IDF planners are waking up every morning thinking only about what they can do to “minimize civilian casualties”.

Critics of the IDF are often accused of assuming that Israelis are uniquely evil, but while this is no doubt true of some people, I think more often than not the opposite is true. It’s defenders of the IDF who are assuming that Israelis are uniquely virtuous, because that’s what you have to assume in order to believe that Israel cares deeply about Palestinian civilians at the moment and is doing everything it can to protect them in that kind of environment. Americans in particular, if they are old enough to remember, need to think about much they cared about Afghan civilians immediately after 9/11 and imagine what it would have been if 40,000 Americans had been killed instead of 3,000 and they had already been involved in a vicious conflict with the Afghans for decades before that. The only reason why people fail to understand that is because they keep hearing dumb propaganda, such as the claim that the IDF is “the most moral army in the world”, which is making them blind to what is actually happening.

Obviously, I’m not saying that Israel is literally bombing Gaza indiscriminately, otherwise it would no doubt cause even more damage. But it’s also clear that it doesn’t care much about collateral damage. What is happening at the moment is obvious to everyone except people who don’t want to see, which unfortunately includes a lot of people. Israel is bombing the shit out of Gaza, including civilian targets with only a very tenuous connection to Hamas, to get payback for October 7 by inflicting collective punishment on the population, reestablish deterrence by destroying the Strip to send a message to Israel’s enemies and induce as many people as possible to leave Gaza permanently if they can get away with it. I don’t even think it’s particularly surprising after what happened on October 7, but that’s not a reason to deny it or come up with fallacious arguments to pretend that it’s morally unproblematic. It’s incomprehensible to me that so many people refuse to see that, even though it’s happening right in front of their eyes. What I find even more disturbing, however, is the fact that many people don’t deny it, but just think it’s perfectly justified.

People say that if the West were in the same situation as Israel, it would do the same thing. This might be true if we imagine not just that a Western country had been hit by a terrorist attack on a similar scale, but also that it was part of a decade-long conflict with another people that has resulted in a deep-seated hatred on both sides. However, it doesn’t matter because, as as a matter of fact, the West is not in that situation, Israel has a huge responsibility for creating that situation in the first place and the fact that if the West were in that situation it might behave just as badly doesn’t make Israel’s behavior any less bad. The Israelis also aren’t in the situation of the Palestinians, but I don’t think they care about this, so why should we care that we’re not in the same position as them? If I had grown up in Gaza, it’s quite possible I would have become a terrorist, but I didn’t and this doesn’t prevent me from criticizing Palestinian terrorism. The Israelis, in addition to being in denial about their responsibility for the overall conflict, have this weird expectation that people in the rest of the world should let them do horrible shit without saying anything just because in their position they might have done the same thing. But that’s not how it works.

I don’t think the West should continue to abide this carnage, which there is no reason to expect will help in any way bring about a long term solution to the conflict (quite the contrary), is ruining our reputation everywhere in the world, putting Western assets and persons at risk in the Middle East and might eventually set off a regional conflict that would be extremely detrimental to our interests, but that’s a topic for another day. As a conclusion, I would just like to go back to Sakakini. I’m not exactly a liberal bleeding heart, I’m actually a pretty right-wing person, who believes that violent criminals should more or less be locked up until they’re old and harmless, opposes low-skill immigration from Africa and the Middle East to Europe because it’s socially disruptive and has few benefits, believes that not all cultures are equal, etc. But I’m nevertheless astonished that so many otherwise intelligent and decent people talk about what is happening in Gaza right now with such callousness or indifference. Again, I don’t want to sound cringe here, but real human beings are getting killed or maimed by the thousands and people are talking about them as if they were pieces of furniture while using the dumbest imaginable arguments to justify this attitude.

I remember that, when I read Segev’s book, I was surprised that someone like Sakakini would support indiscriminate attacks against Jewish civilians and couldn’t really understand it. Now, after seeing how many people are reacting to what is happening in Gaza, I think I understand it better. The truth is that, in the “right” circumstances, anyone can probably lose his humanity in that kind of way and not just people who were already unhinged to begin with. I don’t think many of the things Israel is doing right now are morally better than throwing a grenade in a bus full of civilians and I think people are in denial about that. But I also don’t think most of them are fundamentally bad people, just as I don’t think Sakakini was a fundamentally bad person or, as politically incorrect as this may be, that many of the Palestinians who cheered Hamas on October 7 are fundamentally bad people. This doesn’t mean that it wasn’t bad to cheer Hamas on October 7 though and it’s also bad to support the criminal campaign Israel is waging in Gaza at the moment.

In my essay, I argued that while critics of the Russian position are probably right that Baker’s statement in Moscow was about the territory of the GDR and not Central and Eastern Europe as a whole, this more limited assurance nevertheless had implications for NATO expansion to the rest of the region that not only were not voided by subsequent developments in the negotiations on Germany’s reunification, but that in fact were even strengthened by the fact that, in the months that followed, Western officials made a series of more vague but also broader assurances that clearly implied that NATO would not be expanded to Central and Eastern Europe against Moscow’s wishes and more generally that Russia would be included in the post-Cold War European security architecture. I therefore concluded that, despite what most people in the West claim today, the Russians have a good case that NATO expansion violated assurances made at the time, even if that it is not the one people typically make.

One of the people who have defended the Russian view in a more traditional way, by focusing on the statements made by Western officials during the preliminary talks in Moscow, is Marc Trachtenberg. A professor of history at UCLA, Prof. Trachtenberg is one of the best historians of the Cold War and particularly of the European security order that emerged from it after WWII, on which he has written extensively. In particular, he wrote a very influential paper on the debate about the no-NATO-expansion pledge, which had a significant influence on my own thinking about the topic. However, in my essay, I argue that while I’m in broad agreement with him on the more general debate, he is wrong to think that Baker was talking about Central and Eastern Europe in general and not just the GDR when he made his infamous assurance to Gorbachev. After I published my essay, I sent it to Prof. Trachtenberg, who promptly replied with extensive comments.2 Unsurprisingly, he takes issue with my argument that when he promised that if the Soviet Union agreed to let Germany stay in NATO it wouldn’t expand “one inch to the east” Baker was probably only talking about the territory of the GDR, arguing that the evidence I adduced in favor of that view can be explained in a way that is consistent with his claim that Baker was talking about Central and Eastern Europe as a whole.

As I explained to him in the course of our conversation, I acknowledge that his alternative interpretation is not crazy and that he may be right, but on the whole I still think that mine is more likely to be correct. Nevertheless, I admit that his argument weakens my case on this point and that I should therefore have stated it more carefully, but to the extent that it does weaken my case on this specific point, it strengthens the more general case I make for the view that Russia has a case when it complains that the West violated assurances made at the end of the Cold War, on which both Prof. Trachtenberg and I agree. I thought the exchange would be of interest to other people, especially if they have read both Prof. Trachtenberg’s paper and my essay on the topic, so I asked him if he would let me publish it here and he kindly agreed. I reproduce the exchange below, only slightly edited to fix typos and remove irrelevant passages, mostly where I’m apologizing for having taken so long to reply to his initial comments because I’m literally the worst person at replying to emails or messages in general.

Marc Trachtenberg to Philippe Lemoine

Dear Philippe,

I very much enjoyed reading the paper you sent to me. I certainly learned a lot from it. Some of your arguments are quite new, and one argument, in particular, struck me as very important. This, you probably won’t be surprised to learn, is the argument you make about why the non-expansion assurances given in February 1990 (except for the ones Genscher had given) related just to eastern Germany, and not to eastern Europe as a whole.

That’s what I want to focus on here, and let me begin with a small comment about how you present your conclusion on this issue. At a number of points in the paper you give the impression that you think you were able to show, beyond reasonable doubt, that the assurances (except for Genscher’s) related just to eastern Germany. You state flatly, for example, that “critics of the Russian position are right that US and West German officials were only talking about the GDR (with one important exception about which they misrepresent the evidence).” But at times your bottom line is much more nuanced. “The truth,” you write at one point, “is that, just based on what was said during that conversation according to the State Department memorandum that I have been quoting, it's impossible to tell for sure what Baker meant, but I think it’s more likely than not that he was only talking about the GDR.” (emphasis added) And at another point you write: "Some people on both sides of the debate argue that context definitely shows either that Western officials were only talking about the territory of the GDR or that on the contrary they were talking about Central and Eastern Europe in general, but I think that if we are honest we have to acknowledge that, except for Genscher, it's simply impossible to tell for sure what they meant." (emphasis added) I think that latter, more nuanced claim is far more defensible.

But let me focus on the substantive issue here. Your contention that the February 9 assurances related to eastern Germany, and the argument you make to support that claim is actually very nice. It is certainly one I haven’t heard before.

You develop that argument in section 1.1.2 (“What US and West German officials told their Soviet counterparts in Moscow”). You first quote Baker telling Shevardnadze that if the united Germany remained in NATO, “there would, of course, have to be iron clad guarantees that NATO's jurisdiction or forces would not move eastward” and that the inclusion of the united Germany in NATO “would have to be done in a manner that would satisfy Germany's neighbors to the east.” And then you comment:

This is ambiguous as to whether he just meant the territory of the GDR or Central and Eastern Europe in general, but the reference to the concerns of “Germany’s neighbors to the east” suggests he was just talking about the GDR. Indeed, if he had been referring to a possible expansion to Central and Eastern European countries, it’s hard to see why those countries would have been concerned about it, whereas it makes perfect sense if he was talking about NATO forces moving into the territory of the GDR, since in that case Czechoslovakia would have to deal with NATO’s presence not just on its western border but also on its northern one and NATO would suddenly appear on Poland’s western border. Although the Warsaw Pact was falling apart, nobody thought it would completely disappear so rapidly, so it made sense to worry about the reactions of those countries.

And you go on to quote the assurance Baker gave to Gorbachev himself later that day: “We understand the need for assurances to the countries in the East. If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO's jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.” Your comment includes the following observations:

Again, the phrase Baker used when he said that NATO would not expand is quite general, which if not for the context would be more naturally interpreted as referring to Central and Eastern Europe in general and not just the GDR. However, the fact that Baker said that immediately after saying that he understood that “countries in the east” would need assurances once again suggests that he was talking about the GDR. Indeed, if he was talking about the expansion of NATO to Central and Eastern European countries, then how would ruling out that possibility assuage the security concerns of those same countries? Trachtenberg interprets this passage as evidence that Baker’s assurance was about Central and Eastern Europe in general and not just the territory of the GDR, but that doesn’t make sense since he talked about “countries” in the plural and therefore couldn’t have been referring only to the Soviet Union.

Now, as I say, this struck me as a new and important argument. But I’m sure you won’t be surprised when I tell I wasn’t totally convinced. There are, to my mind, basically two problems with it. The first is that you assume that when Baker referred to “Germany’s neighbors to the east” and to “the countries in the East” he had the entire Warsaw Pact in mind—that he was thinking of Poland, Hungary, and the other eastern European states, as well as Russia. And, indeed, if that were the case, it is hard to see how ruling out an expansion of NATO into eastern Europe should “assuage the security concerns” of the East Europeans. But I think that when Baker referred to “Germany’s neighbors to the east,” and even to the “countries in the East,” he was really referring just to Russia. He was trying to be diplomatic and did not want to rub the Russians’ noses in the fact that their bloc was disintegrating, so he used language that made it seem he might be referring to the Warsaw Pact as a whole. But I doubt whether anyone was really taken in.

Of course, that in itself doesn’t prove your interpretation is wrong. It simply shows that it is possible that Baker did not really have Poland and the other east European states in mind. But my second point, to my mind at least, is more compelling. For let’s say you’re right, and that Baker was referring to the east European countries when he was talking about how NATO not expanding into eastern Germany could assuage the security concerns of the “countries in the East.” You’d then have to explain why Poland and the other new democracies in “eastern and central Europe” should be more concerned about the whole of Germany being included in NATO than if part of the reunified German state was excluded from the western alliance—that is, you’d have to explain why a non-expansion assurance limited to eastern Germany should assuage their concerns. But you don’t do this, and in fact I don’t think it can be done. It would be much more to the interest of Poland, for example, if all of Germany were in NATO than if the united Germany’s integration into NATO was limited in any way: a more independent Germany, after all, would be freer, in the future, to challenge her eastern borders. And if Poland and the others were looking to build ties of their own with NATO (and, in fact, they had already begun to move in that direction at this point, as Baker well knew—as you point out, it was even in the newspapers), they should have welcomed the inclusion of all of Germany in NATO, because it would bring the western alliance closer to their own borders.

Or, to give your own example (in the first bloc quote above), do you really think the new democratic government in Czechoslovakia would have been more concerned about NATO moving into eastern Germany than if the new German state was half-in, half-out—that is, if only German troops were in that area? I can’t see why. So it just doesn’t make sense to me to take Baker’s references to “Germany’s neighbors to the east” as referring to the east Europeans, since they would not be harmed either by a NATO expansion into eastern Europe (as you say) or by an expansion limited to eastern Germany.

So, although I thought the argument you made was interesting and intelligent, I just didn’t buy it. I think Baker’s reference to the interests of the countries in the east was just a nice way of alluding to Russia’s interests, and to Russia’s concern about how the balance of power would shift against her if all of Germany was allowed to remain in NATO. I think what Baker was trying to do here was essentially to make it clear to the Russians that that shift would not go too far, and that, in particular, NATO would not expand at all. This was an assurance, given purely unilaterally, and not part of a “deal”; the goal was to make it easier for Gorbachev to agree to the inclusion of all of Germany in NATO. And, as even Spohr admits, it certainly had that effect—and the fact that it did was one of the main reasons why a kind of obligation to note expand NATO into eastern Europe had come into being.

Thanks again for sharing your paper with me.

Best regards,
Marc

Philippe Lemoine to Marc Trachtenberg

Dear Marc,

…

Thanks a lot for your thoughtful comments on my essay, they have given me a lot to think about. There are some points on which I think you are right, but overall I wasn't totally convinced. Let me address the different points you make in turn.

I'll start with your observation that I'm not always consistent in how I characterize my conclusion on the February preliminary talks in Moscow:

That’s what I want to focus on here, and let me begin with a small comment about how you present your conclusion on this issue. At a number of points in the paper you give the impression that you think you were able to show, beyond reasonable doubt, that the assurances (except for Genscher’s) related just to eastern Germany. You state flatly, for example, that “critics of the Russian position are right that US and West German officials were only talking about the GDR (with one important exception about which they misrepresent the evidence).” But at times your bottom line is much more nuanced.  “The truth,” you write at one point, “is that, just based on what was said during that conversation according to the State Department memorandum that I have been quoting, it's impossible to tell for sure what Baker meant, but I think it’s more likely than not that he was only talking about the GDR.” (emphasis added) And at another point you write: "Some people on both sides of the debate argue that context definitely shows either that Western officials were only talking about the territory of the GDR or that on the contrary they were talking about Central and Eastern Europe in general, but I think that if we are honest we have to acknowledge that, except for Genscher, it's simply impossible to tell for sure what they meant." (emphasis added) I think that latter, more nuanced claim is far more defensible.

 On this point, I think you are simply right. The inconsistencies in how I present my conclusion you point out are really a reflection of the fact that, as I was writing this paper, I kept going back and forth on exactly how strong a claim I could make based on the available evidence. These inconsistencies are essentially traces of my thinking process during my work on this paper, as I was deciding exactly what I believed, which should have been eliminated in the essay but were not, probably because even by the time I was done writing the paper my thinking on this issue remained somewhat in flux. Upon reflection, in part because of one of the arguments you made (which I discuss below), I think my actual conclusion is closer to the weaker phrasing I sometimes use in the essay: although it's impossible to know for sure what Western officials and in particular Baker meant, it's more likely than not that they were only talking about the GDR.

Now let me discuss your comments on the main argument I make in favor of that conclusion. You raise two objections against it. Here is the first:

The first is that you assume that when Baker referred to “Germany’s neighbors to the east” and to “the countries in the East” he had the entire Warsaw Pact in mind—that he was thinking of Poland, Hungary, and the other eastern European states, as well as Russia. And, indeed, if that were the case, it is hard to see how ruling out an expansion of NATO into eastern Europe should “assuage the security concerns” of the East Europeans. But I think that when Baker referred to “Germany’s neighbors to the east,” and even to the “countries in the East,” he was really referring just to Russia. He was trying to be diplomatic and did not want to rub the Russians’ noses in the fact that their bloc was disintegrating, so he used language that made it seem he might be referring to the Warsaw Pact as a whole. But I doubt whether anyone was really taken in.

I admit that the possibility you mention here about how to interpret Baker had not occurred to me and that I don't think there is anything in the evidentiary record that would allow me to rule it out categorically, but I'm nevertheless not convinced and, while I agree that he might have been talking in the plural merely to be diplomatic and spare Soviet sensitivities, I think it's more likely that he was really talking about the fact that NATO expansion to the GDR might be seen as a threat not just by the Soviet Union but also by at least some of the Warsaw Pact states. Ultimately, I don't think this issue can be settled univocally by the evidence and I think reasonable people who are familiar with the evidence can disagree about it, but when I read the internal communications within the Bush administration at the time, the records of conversation with foreign officials, etc. I don't see any compelling reason to think that this is what Baker was doing. Still, since I have to admit that it's not an unreasonable interpretation and that I can't rule it out, your argument at least convinced me that I should state my conclusion in the weaker way I presented above.

This brings me to your second point, which on the other hand I find much less convincing, even if you apparently think it's more compelling:

Of course, that in itself doesn’t prove your interpretation is wrong.  It simply shows that it is possible that Baker did not really have Poland and the other east European states in mind.  But my second point, to my mind at least, is more compelling. For let’s say you’re right, and that Baker was referring to the east European countries when he was talking about how NATO not expanding into eastern Germany could assuage the security concerns of the “countries in the East.” You’d then have to explain why Poland and the other new democracies in “eastern and central Europe” should be more concerned about the whole of Germany being included in NATO than if part of the reunified German state was excluded from the western alliance—that is, you’d have to explain why a non-expansion assurance limited to eastern Germany should assuage their concerns. But you don’t do this, and in fact I don’t think it can be done. It would be much more to the interest of Poland, for example, if all of Germany were in NATO than if the united Germany’s integration into NATO was limited in any way:  a more independent Germany, after all, would be freer, in the future, to challenge her eastern borders. And if Poland and the others were looking to build ties of their own with NATO (and, in fact, they had already begun to move in that direction at this point, as Baker well knew—as you point out, it was even in the newspapers), they should have welcomed the inclusion of all of Germany in NATO, because it would bring the western alliance closer to their own borders.

Or, to give your own example (in the first bloc quote above), do you really think the new democratic government in Czechoslovakia would have been more concerned about NATO moving into eastern Germany than if the new German state was half-in, half-out—that is, if only German troops were in that area? I can’t see why.  So it just doesn’t make sense to me to take Baker’s references to “Germany’s neighbors to the east” as referring to the east Europeans, since they would not be harmed either by a NATO expansion into eastern Europe (as you say) or by an expansion limited to eastern Germany.

As I see it, you make two distinct though related arguments here, so let me address them in turn.

Your first argument is that not only would the new, democratic governments in the Warsaw Pact countries have no reason to fear more a Germany wholly integrated in NATO, but on the contrary they would have every reason to prefer that.

According to you, a more independent Germany would be freer, in the future, to challenge their borders. This implicitly assumes that, had Germany been only partly in NATO after reunification (the territory of the GDR being somehow excluded from NATO's "jurisdiction" as Baker put it in Moscow), it would be more independent, but I don't think that assumption is very plausible. As I note in my essay, it's really unclear what Baker's formula (which I think was the somewhat incoherent result of taking Genscher's more ambitious formula and watering down without giving much thought about whether the resulting formula was practical, a point that was raised by people in the NSC at the time when they criticized Baker's formula) would have amounted to in practice, but it's hard to think of any implementation on which Germany would be more like to challenge its eastern borders against the will of the rest of NATO. I suppose one could argue that, if German forces in the territory of the GDR were not under NATO command, Germany would be freer to use them against its neighbors, but I think that assumption is false. First, even in the FRG during the Cold War, not all West German land forces were integrated directly within NATO structures. Thus, if having forces outside of those structures is what would have given Germany a freer hand to seek a revision of its eastern borders, then it wouldn't have changed anything if Germany had been wholly rather than partly in NATO because even in the former case it would presumably have had forces not directly under NATO command. It seems to me that, no matter how Baker's formula of a Germany half-in/half-out would have been implemented in practice (assuming there was even a way to translate that formula into a concrete system, which I find hardly obvious), the key fact is that it would have been part of NATO and thus under the political influence of the other members and in particular of the US.

Your argument that Germany's full inclusion in NATO would also have made it easier for Central and Eastern European countries to build ties with NATO also isn't very convincing to me. First, while it's true that at the time some of them had already started to think about such ties, I think everything was still very much in flux, nobody had any idea what this would entail or even if it would happen and therefore I don't think it would have been crazy at all for Baker to assume that at least some of those countries might be worried if NATO moved closer toward their borders. Moreover, no matter exactly how Baker's formula would have been implemented exactly, it's not clear how it would have made such ties, which at the time were seen as primarily political to the extent that people were thinking about them at all, would have been much facilitated by Germany's full integration in NATO or conversely precluded by the exclusion of Eastern Germany from NATO's "jurisdiction", whatever exactly this could have meant. I'm not saying that one couldn't make an argument to that effect, but again to me the central point here is that Baker's formula was very impressionistic and what it would have amounted to in practice was very unclear, so I don't think it would have been particularly surprising if he'd seen it as somewhat less threatening to Warsaw Pact states, if only because if at least at the rhetorical level it seemed to imply less change to the status quo.

Your second argument is that, even if Central and Eastern European states had no reason to fear more a Germany only partly in NATO (as I have just argued), they nevertheless had no reason to fear it less. This argument, it seems to me, is implicitly premised on (some of) the same mistaken assumptions people make when they argue that Russia has no reason to see NATO expansion as a security threat. I can think of several reasons why Central and Eastern European countries might have preferred a reunified Germany in NATO, but with the territory of the GDR somehow excluded.

Whatever this partial exclusion could have meant, and again I think it was very unclear because I think Baker came up with this formula by watering down Genscher's more ambitious formula which he felt conceded too much to the Soviets, it would at least have precluded the presence of foreign NATO troops in that territory and this would likely have meant less troops overall in that territory. In turn, this would have been less threatening to Germany's eastern neighbors, for several reasons. First, it would have decreased the probability of some accidental border incident, which could have resulted in an unintended conflict. After all, at the same time as those discussions on Germany's reunification were taking place, NATO and the Warsaw Pact were negotiating conventional arms reduction precisely because this was thought to reduce the probability of a conflict, so more generally the idea that reducing troop levels in Eastern Germany would have been conducive to greater security for Germany's eastern neighbors is hardly outlandish.

Moreover, if NATO had more troops closer to Warsaw Pact borders, it would make it better able to use the (if only implicit) threat of military force on its eastern flank to secure political concessions in international negotiations. (I think that, to the extent that Russia's opposition to NATO expansion is explained by the fact that it perceives it as a security threat and not for broader political reasons, that's largely because Russian political and military elites see the apparition of NATO military infrastructure on its borders as weakening its position in international negotiations for this kind of reasons and less because they see it as an impediment to their own reliance on implicit military threat to impose their will on their neighbors, as most people think.) To be clear, I think political and military leaders generally overestimate how much such things matter, but they do think they matter and therefore I don't think the idea that Baker would have assumed that Germany's eastern neighbors might see his formula as less threatening than full integration of Germany in NATO post-reunification as nonsensical.

Finally, I would like to point that, in the end, restriction NATO's freedom of movement in the territory of the GDR was the option that was chosen to assuage the Soviet Union's concerns over German continued NATO membership after reunification and, while it was clearly less than the Soviets would have liked, they nevertheless clearly saw that as better than nothing and some kind of guarantee. But if this was true of the Soviet Union, then why couldn't it have been true also of at least some Central and Eastern European countries, in a scenario where they continued to see NATO as a threat? Again, I agree that many had already started to move toward NATO, but as I noted above at the beginning of February nobody including them had a clear view of what the European security landscape would look like by the time the dust created by the revolutions of 1989 had settled.

In conclusion, I would like to make a more general observation, which is that while I'm not fully convinced by your argument and still think the weak version of my conclusion on the specific issue of what Baker and other Western officials meant during the preliminary talks in February 1990 is correct, if in fact you were right it would not only be a problem for my broader argument in the essay but on the contrary would only strengthen it. Indeed, my overall conclusion is that no matter how one interprets Baker's statements February 1990 statements, those statements were part of a broader series of vague but nevertheless meaningful assurances that Western officials made to their Soviet counterpart between 1989 and 1991, which gave them every reason to expect that Moscow would somehow be included in the post-Cold War European security order and to see the subsequent decision to expand NATO against their wishes as a betrayal. In fact, precisely because I think that is true, I think the debate about what Baker meant exactly during the February 1990 talks does not matter as much as people on both sides of the broader no-NATO-expansion pledge debate seem to think. I suspect you don't disagree with that view, but I would be curious to know for sure.

Best,
Philippe

Marc Trachtenberg to Philippe Lemoine

Dear Philippe,

Thanks again for your email, which I very much enjoyed reading.  Let me make just a few quick comments in response. First, I just don't think the Poles, the Czechs, or the Hungarians, in February 1990, thought the inclusion of eastern Germany in the NATO area was the least bit threatening, or that Baker or any other U.S. policymaker thought that they were worried about what it would mean for them and felt it was important to assure them that NATO's jurisdiction would not extent into eastern Germany. If anything, I would expect the East Europeans to welcome eastern Germany's full integration into NATO. The reason, to my mind, would have to do, say, 90% with Russia and only 10% with Germany. Their fear was that Gorbachev would be overthrown and a resurgent USSR would once again try to draw them into her sphere of influence. That would lead them to welcome NATO expansion; including eastern Germany in NATO would be seen as a step toward their own inclusion in the western alliance. Germany was a minor, but not negligible, factor. Half-in, half-out was not particularly troubling in itself, but it might have come across as a way station on the road to a more fully independent, unified German state. But, again, I don't think this was a major factor. So let's say it didn't make a different one way or the other. But if that was the case, how could a promise not to extend NATO's jurisdiction into eastern Europe provide them with any reassurance? Against what? Unlike you, I just don't see how including eastern Germany in NATO would threaten them in any way.

The archival evidence, I think, should shed some light on all these issues. It might show, in particular, that I'm wrong about what Baker et al. thought the east Europeans were worried about.

Finally, you raised the issue at the end of your email about how important the particular issue of the February 1990 assurances is. The more general assurances, I agree, mattered a great deal.  But the specific assurances Baker gave did matter a lot, and the proof is that the Russians refer to them over and over again. And I personally feel it is totally understandable for them to do so. You can't just make promises and then walk away from them and expect there to be no consequences.

Best regards,
Marc

Philippe Lemoine to Marc Trachtenberg

Dear Marc,

Thanks for your reply. Let me quickly address some of the points you make in it.

On the first point, I wouldn't be surprised if some Central and Eastern European leaders had already been thinking along the lines you sketch here at the beginning of February 1990, but I think you are looking at this with the benefit of hindsight and underestimating how open and foggy the future looked to both Central and Eastern European and US officials at the time.

Again, while it's true that many people were already talking about the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact by the end of January, it was still very unclear what new European security order would emerge from this upheaval and government officials had different ideas on the topic. Moreover, everything was moving very quickly, so it's very difficult to be confident about what different government officials thought at the time. Indeed, we have plenty of evidence that government officials disagreed on how to approach those changes and changed their mind about it quickly during that period not only in Central and Eastern Europe, but also in the Soviet Union and in the West, so this very general point shouldn't even be controversial and the only real question is what views different officials in each country held at different points during this period.

On this issue, as a cable sent by the US embassy in Vienna to the Secretary of State on February 1 shows, during a session of an OSCE high-level military doctrine seminar that took place on January 30 (just 10 days before Baker met Gorbachev in Moscow), WTO officials from both Poland and Czechoslovakia told their NATO counterparts that they saw large military exercises in Europe as threatening, so I don't think it's implausible at all that Baker might have thought that it would assuage some of their concerns to give them an assurance that even if Germany stayed in NATO after reunification the territory of the GDR would somehow be excluded and NATO troops would not move closer to their borders.

It's true that, as I note in my essay, some Central and Eastern European officials expressed their interest about developing closer ties with NATO to a US delegation headed by Eagleburger in February, but the precise nature of those ties was still very unclear at the time (so it doesn't necessarily mean they would have welcomed the arrival of NATO military infrastructure closer to their borders), it happened 2 weeks later and again not only was people's thinking changing very rapidly during this period but different people also had different concerns. Again, I don't think any of that shows that Baker's use of the plural in his conversation with Gorbachev could only have been a way to spare Soviet sensitivities, though I also don't deny that it's a possibility.

On the archival evidence, I agree that in principle it could definitely prove that you are right or wrong about what Baker was thinking at the time, I just meant that as far as I know none of the available evidence did either.

As for the last point you make, of course I agree with you that it matters if the West violated a more specific promise made by Baker in February, but my point is that I think it’s unclear whether it did because it’s unclear that Baker promised what the Russians alleged. When I say that it doesn’t matter as much as people have claimed, I don’t mean to deny that it would matter a great deal if Baker indeed had made that promise, but that even if he didn’t intend to make such a promise the West nevertheless made broader assurances that it subsequently violated and in that case I don’t think there is any such uncertainty.

To be clear, when the Russians subsequently claimed to interpret Baker's February 1990 assurance as applying to Central and Eastern Europe in general and not just to the GDR, I have no doubt they were being sincere and my point is not to deny that. But the Russian officials who made this accusation against the West, referring explicitly to Baker's assurance, were not directly involved in the February 1990 discussions and I think it wouldn't be surprising if they had mistakenly but sincerely misinterpreted it in retrospect. (On this point, as I note in my essay, note that Gorbachev, who was directly involved in those discussions, made a more nuanced claim very close to my own argument.) In fact, as I point out in my essay, Falin sent a note to Gorbachev in April 1990 in which he described the February assurances as a willingness to commit to “the non-expansion of NATO's sphere of activity to the GDR [emphasis is mine]”. To my knowledge, nobody had noticed that before, but in my opinion this is evidence that, whatever Baker intended at the time, Soviet officials understood his assurances as applying narrowly to the GDR and not to Central and Eastern Europe as a whole.

Best,
Philippe

March Trachtenberg to Philippe Lemoine

Thanks again for your email. It will be interesting to see what the evidence reveals about these matters. I personally just find it hard to believe that the Poles or Czechs should have been more worried about American troops moving into eastern Germany than about German troops moving in there, or that anyone should have thought they would be. But let's see what the documents show.

Philippe Lemoine to Marc Trachtenberg

Dear Marc,

I have already filed a FOIA request to obtain documents about the Two Plus Four process that are cited in various memoirs and other books, but they pertain to the last stretch of the negotiations and in particular to the US last minute insistence on the added minute to the treaty to allow the passage of foreign troops in the territory of the GDR (as well as others for documents relevant to the debate about NATO expansion in the Clinton administration), which unfortunately the State Department has been very slow to address and has so far only done in a very unsatisfactory manner.

But this exchange has convinced me that I should file another request asking for documents on Baker's meeting with Genscher at the beginning of February 1990 and memoranda prepared for him ahead of his visit to Moscow a week later. I don't think anyone has obtained those documents so far and you are right that they could shed light on this debate about what Baker had in mind when he made his infamous assurance to Gorbachev and perhaps even conclusively settle it depending on what the archival evidence contains.

…

Best,
Philippe

I plan to edit down my original essay to make it shorter eventually and hopefully I will also have obtained some of the documents I mention in my last email by then, in which case I’ll also revise my position on the point I debated with Prof. Trachtenberg if they shed light on the issue, but I want to finish the rest of the series on the origins of the Russo-Ukrainian War it’s part of first. The other essays in the series will also be published on CSPI first, so if you’re interested, you should subscribe to the organization’s newsletter.

However, by the end of WWI nationalism had already started to spread outside of Europe and, while in a sense this moment was arguably the height of European colonialism, it was also the beginning of the end for colonialism as it came under attack from colonized people and was increasingly seen as illegitimate even in Europe. By the time Ben-Gurion proclaimed the independence of Israel in 1948, the anti-colonial movement was about to enter its terminal phase, which resulted in the unraveling of the colonial order within the next two or three decades. Thus, the Zionist movement was in a sense anachronistic, a colonial project that reached maturity just as colonialism was collapsing everywhere. But unlike the French or British colonialists, the Jews in Palestine didn’t have a state of their own to return to, so they persisted and the state of Israel is still here. Nevertheless, this timing has implications that I think people who are involved in the debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict don’t think about enough, because they are unpalatable to both sides, though not for the same reasons.

Indeed, had the Zionist movement emerged and met conditions favorable to achieving its goals one century earlier, things would probably have gone very differently. First, while it’s not true that in the mid-19th century Europeans thought no moral rules applied in their interactions with non-Europeans, it’s fair to say that relative to the mid-20th century they were less constrained in that respect. Thus, had Jews established a state in Palestine around 1850, they could probably have almost completely emptied the country of Arabs. By 1948 on the other hand, this was no longer possible, so while during the Arab-Israeli War the Jews managed to secure a demographic majority within the post-armistice borders of their state by expelling most of the Arab population from it, they couldn’t finish the job and were stuck with a large Arab minority after the war.1

Not only were they dependent on the great powers, who limited how far they could go, but even the Zionists, who for the most part shared the values of other Europeans, had moral qualms about ethnic cleansing even if they were hardly the advocates of inter-ethnic harmony depicted by Zionist propaganda. This was even more true after 1967, when Israel conquered Gaza and the West Bank, which greatly increased the number of Arabs who lived in the area they controlled. Moreover, while in the 19th century European populations had a much higher of natural growth than non-European populations (because the former had already entered the demographic transition but not the latter), by 1948 this was no longer the case and in fact the opposite was true. Thus, while in the 19th century the Jews could have demographically overwhelmed the Arabs they wouldn’t have been able to expel, in the 20th century this was not the case, even though they were able to partly make up for this with immigration.

In that alternative history, nationalism would also have been completely foreign to the Arabs of Palestine when the Zionists would have arrived, which also would have changed a lot of things. Indeed, what this means is that after being forcibly displaced to neighboring Arab countries by the Zionists, the Arabs of Palestine wouldn’t have espoused irredentist politics because this would have happened before they even developed a national consciousness. Thus, once in neighboring Arab countries, they wouldn’t have retained a distinct Palestinian identity and would have blended in the local Arab populations. When nationalism would have reached the region from Europe several decades later, they would have undergone the same process of nationalization as the rest of the population in the area where they happened to live, becoming Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians or whatever depending on how the Middle East was divided into states in that alternate universe.

Instead, nationalism had already started to spread in the region when the British took over Palestine at the end of WWI and the development of Arab nationalism largely coincided with the progress of the Zionist movement during the Mandate period. Palestinian nationalism also emerged during that period, in part though not only as a response to Zionism, but arguably lagged behind somewhat and only solidified during the first decades of the state of Israel. Nevertheless, the Arabs of Palestine were already in the process of becoming Palestinians in 1948 when most of them were expelled from the area that remained under Israel’s control after the war and, despite the pan-Arab rhetoric, that process was largely finished by the time Israel conquered the rest of historic Palestine in 1967. This ensured that Palestinians retained a distinct identity even when they lived in neighboring Arab countries instead of assimilating.2

Thus, had Zionism arrived one century earlier, Jews would probably have been able to sidestep the Palestinian question for the most part. Israel’s experience would have been much more like that of the US or Australia, other colonial states that were created earlier and largely as a result of that fact don’t have to deal with a large indigenous population that has gone through a process of nationalization and embraced irredentist politics, because it was overwhelmed by the newcomers through a combination of demography, war and disease. Other things would have been different. In particular, Israel would still have been surrounded by millions of Arabs and most of them would still have been Muslim, so it probably still would have had to deal with Muslims angry that a formerly Islamic land and in particular Jerusalem was now controlled by Jews. However, this would have been a lot easier to manage, especially since in that scenario Israel would have been a well-established state in the region for decades by the time Arab nation-states were constituted.

I contend that, if Jews were going to establish a state in Palestine, this would have been much better for everyone, not just the Israelis but also the Palestinians. That it would have been better for the Israelis should be obvious, since there wouldn’t have been another large group of people with a claim on the same territory as them. But it would also have been better for the Palestinians, even though or rather because in that alternative history they would never have become Palestinians. Indeed, while a tragedy for the people actually displaced during the initial Jewish conquest, their descendants in neighboring countries would have avoided the fate of Palestinians today, who are condemned to be stateless and either oppressed by the Israelis in the occupied territories or foreigners in the Arab countries where they live, because the Israelis can’t give them citizenship without destroying Israel as a Jewish state and the Palestinians don’t want to become citizens of Israel or assimilate into other Arab societies since they have developed a national consciousness.

Ironically, in a way, what I’m saying here is not very different from what many pro-Israel people are saying. For instance, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, who is a staunch Zionist but is more honest than most about the history of Zionism and Israel, famously argued that it would have been better if Ben-Gurion had finished the job and expelled all the Arabs between the Jordan and the Mediterranean in 1948. The difference is that unlike them I understand that, because Zionism came too late, the Israelis have no choice but to address the Palestinian question and there is no point in fantasizing about what might have been if that problem had never arisen in the first place. First, while Israel may have gotten away with expelling all the Palestinians from within its post-armistice borders in 1948 and could probably have expanded those borders somewhat, it definitely couldn't have gotten away with expanding those borders to the whole of historic Palestine then and expelling all the Arabs from there. Moreover, even if the Israelis had somehow been able to do that, it wouldn’t have solved their problem because while still not yet fully developed Palestinian nationalism was already irreversible by then and this wouldn’t have stopped the process. Again, at the end of the day, this sort of solution was precluded by the fact that Zionism did not appear earlier.

In fact, not only is this not what happened, but it also couldn’t have happened. In the 19th century, Palestine while still firmly in control of the Ottoman Empire and, while it was already weak, it was protected by the rivalry of European powers and the fragile equilibrium between them. It was only WWI that, by ending this equilibrium, made it possible for the Ottoman Empire to be dismembered and for a European power to take over Palestine and sponsor the Zionist movement. Moreover, it’s no accident that Zionism did not emerge until the end of the 19th century, because it was itself the result of the spread of nationalism in Europe, which left European Jews with no choice other than assimilation, internationalism or Zionism. In other words, while it would have been better if Herzl had been born one century earlier, he also wouldn’t have been Herzl if he had. Ironically, this is also what made the Zionist project so difficult, because it meant that by the time the first steps to actually carry it out would be taken nationalism would already have started to spread in the Arab world. Nevertheless, it’s still interesting to consider how different things would have been in this alternative timeline, because it can shed light on how the fact that it didn’t happen that way since Zionism only emerged much later and as it were missed the train of history affected the subsequent development of Israel.

Indeed, I think that fact is largely responsible for what I call the Zionist dilemma, which has so far prevented the Israelis from truly fulfilling the original Zionist aspirations. Early Zionists didn’t merely aspire to create a Jewish state in Palestine, they also wanted the existence of that state to be secure. Of course, Israel doesn’t current face any military threat that could realistically put its existence in peril and is unlikely to face any in the foreseeable future (because it enjoys an overwhelming military superiority over its neighbors and would in any case be protected by the West if its existence were ever at risk), but as long as it remains surrounded by hundreds of millions of people who are hostile to it and regard it as illegitimate, it will never be truly secure. In turn, this will not cease to be the case as long as a settlement is not reached with the Palestinians to adjudicate their competing claims on historic Palestine, since the irredentist aspirations of the Palestinians are the main fuel of the hostility toward Israel in the Arab world.3

This hostility from their neighbors, combined with Judaism’s history of persecution and the offensive ethos of Zionism that was largely born from it, resulted in extreme levels of risk aversion and a very aggressive conception of deterrence that leads them to almost always choose force to defend their security, which only compounds the rejection by their neighbors by inflaming hatred toward Israel. Indeed, while Zionist propaganda depicts Israel as the innocent victim of Arab aggression, eager for peace but unable to find a partner, this picture is at odds with the historical record, which shows that Israel has often struck first, provoked its neighbors and used massively disproportionate force in response to their own provocations while rebuffing Arab peace feelers. This started immediately after the Armistice signed with the Arab countries in 1949, when Israel responded to infiltration by Palestinian fedayeen with devastating raids in Gaza and the West Bank, such as the Qibya massacre in 1953 during which IDF troops under Ariel Sharon killed sixty-nine villagers in the West Bank in response to a Palestinian attack that had left three Israeli civilians dead. Early Zionists had a very negative view of Jews in the Diaspora for their perceived meekness and were determined that as Israelis they would assert what they took to be their rights very aggressively.

Although their propaganda distorts the historical record, I actually believe the Israelis, for the most part, when they claim that ultimately they only aspire to live in peace and be accepted by their neighbors as a Middle Eastern state. I just think that, as a result of the hostility of their neighbors (which itself is largely the product of the fact that Zionism came too late and therefore couldn’t avoid the creation of a Palestinian question) and their own psychological dispositions (which in turn were largely the result of Judaism’s history of persecution), they have usually concluded that force was the only way to safeguard their rights. The idea that Jews should achieve overwhelming military superiority and use it to make clear that force will not compel them to give up their rights by inflicting devastating losses to their enemies, instead of relying on diplomacy to reach a modus vivendi with them, has always dominated Israeli security thinking. When I say that, people think that I hate Israel, but I don’t. I say that because that’s what a careful examination of the historical record shows and, for the reasons I just explained, it’s not even particularly surprising.

While in public Western officials have largely adhered to the Zionist narrative, in private they have often shared that view, as shown for instance by a declassified memorandum written by Rodger Davies, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs shortly before the outbreak of the Six-Day War:

We have endeavored to make clear to our Israeli contacts that we do not view our cooperative anti-infiltration efforts as a cure-all, but rather as part (one might say the U.S. component) of a more measured and precise response to the type and level of threat Israel now faces than are massive retaliatory raids of which Samu [a large assault on a Jordanian town in the West Bank conducted in November 1966 by the IDF in response to a raid by Fatah] is the most recent example. The latter, in our judgment, exacerbate rather than contain the problem. The raids encourage the terrorists in their aim of goading Israel into intermittent hostilities with its neighbors. Fundamentally, we do not believe that Israel can achieve absolute security, so long as there is no peace between it and its Arab neighbors, or that it can shoot its way to peace. We think military retaliation is both ineffective and reckless and may in time give serious substance to Palestinian terrorism which, despite some tragic successes, is still a shadowy and relatively disorganized force.

I think that it was true back then and that it’s still true today.

As should be clear from what I said above, not only do I think that Davies was right that Israel’s security would never be truly ensured as long as there is no peace with its neighbors, but I think that even if it somehow managed to sign a peace agreement with its neighbors it still wouldn’t be secure as long as Arab populations are so hostile to it, because any peace agreement is always at the mercy of a revolution or a coup. In turn, this hostility will never stop unless the Palestinian question is solved, because the Arab world will never consider Israel legitimate as long as it continues to oppress the Palestinians and the millions of Palestinians in the territories controlled by Israel and in neighboring countries are not going anywhere, no matter how many people fantasize about ethnic cleansing. Again, this might have been possible if Zionism had emerged a century earlier and Zionists had expelled the Arabs of Palestine before they developed a national consciousness and created a persistent irredentist movement, but that’s not what happened and the Israelis have to deal with the world as it actually is, not as they wish it was.

Nor can the Israelis be sure, as long as they continue to rule more or less directly over millions of Palestinians, that it will always be possible to maintain the status quo. First, while they’re not as worried about the demographic threat posed by Palestinians as they used to be, because since then Arab fertility has gone down while Jewish birth rates have remained stable, fertility is unpredictable and this could change again, but the more time the status quo persists and the harder it will be to change if Israel needs to because settlers will continue to create facts on the ground in the meantime. Even if Jews don’t become a minority between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, it’s hardly obvious that Israel will be able to maintain the status quo forever and continue to oppress millions of Palestinians indefinitely. Israel is not China or even Russia, it’s a small country that is dependent on the rest of the world and in particular on the West, which it cannot afford to alienate. While I think the claims that Western support for Israel is going down are exaggerated, it can’t just take that support for granted. As the Holocaust fades into history and Western countries undergo demographic change as a result of immigration, Western attitudes toward Israel will change and the West may not tolerate the status quo forever. At the moment, the Israelis think that by dragging the conflict they will be able to end it on their terms, but it may be that it will do precisely the opposite. History is long and no one is immune to hubris.

The model that has worked relatively well for the Arab citizens of Israel, denying them any hope of achieving any meaningful collective achievement while ensuring that individually they can be relatively successful and enjoy a decent life, can’t be generalized to the entire Palestinian population between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, because there are just too many Palestinians and Israel can’t get rid of them no matter how much it would like to. No country will volunteer to absorb them and the vast majority don’t want to leave anyway, something that is unlikely to change even if Israel tightens the restrictions to which it subjects them because it’s constrained in how far it can go by international pressure. Again, it’s ultimately dependent on the West, so it can’t just disregard that. As Israeli leaders have long recognized, the only reason why this model works for the Arab citizens of Israel is that they’re a small minority, which makes it possible to prevent them from threatening the Jewish character of Israel while granting them equal rights in theory, which in practice can be circumvented in various ways (such as discriminatory practices in the provision of building permits to people in Arab communities) to deny them any national aspirations they might have. As long as there are millions of Palestinians in the territories controlled by Israel and a negotiated settlement of the conflict is not reached, the Jewish state can never be truly secure and the Israelis will always worry about its existence in a way people in other countries don’t.

People who think it’s naive to talk about a negotiated settlement believe I don’t realize that Palestinians hate the Jews, which is not particularly surprising in the circumstances, but I do. What I’m saying is that, in spite of that, the Israelis must demonstrate a willingness to accept a fair settlement and make the necessary sacrifices, which they never really have so far. Palestinian military force does not pose an existential threat to Israel and never will, even if Israel were to grant the Palestinians a state, but the Arab world’s hostility toward Israel and Palestinian irredentism do. While negotiating a settlement of the conflict may not be possible, and even if a negotiated settlement can be achieved it may not be enough to eliminate those threats, if that doesn’t work then nothing else will, so that’s not a reason not to try. Israel has been killing Palestinians, dispossessing them and oppressing them for decades. I’m sure it can reduce the threat posed by Palestinian terrorism in that way, at least as long as internal and external conditions don’t change too much, but what is naive is to think that it can end the status quo by forcing the Palestinians to give away their rights and accept whatever terms the Israelis want to impose on them for a peace agreement.

The Palestinians know they don’t have to relinquish their rights in order to prevent Israeli oppression from getting much worse and that doing so would only marginally improve their lot, because on the one hand Israel is constrained by the international community and on the other hand it can’t improve their situation too much without putting the Jewish character of the state at risk in the long run. Again, if Israel granted more rights to the Palestinians in the occupied territories in exchange for subservience, it would have no way to prevent a resumption of nationalist and irredentist agitation eventually, hence every reason to expect that subservience wouldn’t last. Israelis like to talk about how, before the Oslo process, Palestinians in the occupied territories were less oppressed and Israel was more secure, but they forget that it ended with the First Intifada. It’s not as if the Israelis entered the Oslo process willingly, they were forced to do something because the previous system no longer worked. I’m sure they could unravel what is left of the Oslo process completely, and indeed they may have to if Fatah is forced to scuttle the Palestinian Authority under pressure from public opinion as a result of the carnage in Gaza, but the idea that Israel could go back to the pre-Oslo situation is a fantasy.

However, in order to really give a negotiated settlement a shot, the Israelis will not only have to abandon their own irredentism in the West Bank (which is less often talked about than Palestinian irredentism but no less real and has arguably played a greater role in preventing a settlement of the conflict), but also the aggressive conception of deterrence and the extreme risk aversion that have always dominated their security thinking so far. This will be very difficult because, as I have argued, both are a logical product of the historical circumstances in which Zionism was born and in particular of the fact that it was a latecomer to history. In other words, in order to have a chance of eliminating the only existential threats they really face (namely Palestinian irredentism and the hostility it fuels among Muslims in general and in the Arab world in particular), the Israelis would have to jettison psychological dispositions that, given Judaism’s history of persecution, are a natural, if not rational, reaction to the existential threats in question.

This is what I call the Zionist dilemma and I don’t believe the Israelis will ever be able to truly fulfill the original aspirations of Zionism unless they’re able to overcome it. At this point, most of them are convinced that peace is impossible, hence that it’s pointless to even talk about a negotiated settlement of the conflict. While I don’t claim to know with certainty that such a settlement is possible, I think the Israelis’s confidence that it’s impossible is not warranted by the evidence and that it’s mostly a result of the psychological dispositions born from the difficult circumstances in which Zionism emerged I described above, as well as of the fact that their propaganda was so successful that they ended up buying it themselves. Be that as it may, if their confidence were justified, then in a sense it would be rational for them to continue to rely exclusively on force to protect their state, but in a way it would also mean that the Zionist project simply can’t succeed because it missed the train of history.