Temas de relações internacionais, de política externa e de diplomacia brasileira, com ênfase em políticas econômicas, em viagens, livros e cultura em geral. Um quilombo de resistência intelectual em defesa da racionalidade, da inteligência e das liberdades democráticas.
O que é este blog?
Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.
Estaria a China revertendo às posturas isolacionistas e às políticas protecionistas e introvertidas das antigas dinastias Ming e Qing, afastando-se das doutrinas de portas abertas e de livre comércio dos últimos 40 anos?
Um artigo de história, falando do passado, desperta um intenso debate na China e no exterior, como argumenta este artigo no South China Morning Post, o principal jornal de Hong Kong.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
SCMP Columnist
China Briefingby Wang Xiangwei
Is China closing its doors? Its leaders say no, but actions speak louder than words – and more clarity is needed
An otherwise run-of-the-mill academic article on imperial isolationist policy commissioned by a state-affiliated institution has sparked fierce debate
It shows the unease being felt at home and abroad over the once-unthinkable: that China’s open-door policy of more than 40 years is now in question
Will China open up more to the wider world, as its leaders have repeated tirelessly in public, or is it about to close its doors, as many have privately feared, because of uncertainties at home and abroad?
These two seemingly contradicting questions have been simmering for nearly three years now, as China has largely isolated itself from the outside world through its tough zero-Covid policies and as tensions with the United Stateshave escalated dramatically.
They matter even more now as China’s Communist Party enters the final stretch of preparations for its 20th congress next month, where Xi Jinping is widely expected to cement his status as the country’s most powerful leader in recent decades by securing a norm-busting third term as party chief.
People walk past a screen showing Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Museum of the Communist Party of China in Beijing. Xi is expected to cement his status as paramount leader at next month’s party congress. Photo: AFP
All this helps explain why a recent academic article on the country’s past closed-door policies has caused such a stir in China and overseas, as it brings into the open concerns about Beijing’s broad policy direction.
=========
The article, whose title can be roughly translated as “A Fresh Look at the Isolationist Policy in the Ming and Qing Dynasties”, argues that China’s feudal rulers from the 16th to the 19th centuries did not pursue a policy of complete isolation, as is widely believed, but one of “self-restriction” designed to protect the country’s national interests and sovereignty, and ward off Western invasion and colonisation.
It concluded that voluntary restrictions on border openings made historical sense, even though those policies contributed to China’s decline because its rulers refused to accept advanced Western technology and weaponry.
The 15,000-word article was first published in an obscure journal called “Historical Research” in June and would have likely remained only of interest to a small circle of academics, had it not been shared on social media by the state-affiliated Chinese Academy of History, which commissioned the article.
Since then, it has gone viral, sparking an intense online debate over not only what the article really means to say, but also China’s commitment to reform and opening up.
For many critics, the article is a brazen revisionist attempt to upend the prevailing official narrative that the feudal rulers of the Ming and Qing dynasties had deliberately pursued closed-door policies, which were responsible for China’s waning status and resulted in it being forced to open up by way of the opium wars and their aftermath.
Some went even further by suggesting that the publication of the article was a sign that the Chinese authorities planned to use historical revisionism to signal that they may have had second thoughts about China’s open-door policy at a time when the party has strengthened authoritarian controls at all levels of society and is faced with a hostile international environment that’s unprecedented in recent times.
Proponents of this theory point to the Chinese Academy of History’s status as a high-level institute formed in 2019 with the top leadership’s blessing.
They argue that China’s extreme zero-Covid policy, which has largely closed the country off from the rest of the world for approaching three years now, could be viewed as an experiment to test the resilience of the Chinese economy.
But other commentators have dismissed those criticisms and worries as people making mountains out of molehills and argued that the article was merely an academic exercise in studying the country’s past.
This author tends to agree with the latter view. In fact, the article in question is well researched and well balanced, succinctly and convincingly articulating the reasons behind and highlighting the failures of those feudal policies. But the worrying sentiment emanating from the debate should not be dismissed out of hand.
As tensions rise, China pivots inwards
The fact that this academic article could elicit such strong reactions at home and abroad is truly remarkable, providing serious food for thought.
Until recently, it was almost unthinkable that China’s open-door policy, adopted by Deng Xiaoping more than 40 years ago, could be called into question. After all, the policy of reform and opening up paved the way for China’s economic lift-off. Now the country has the world’s second-largest economy and is the largest goods-trading nation.
China’s top leaders including Xi and Premier Li Keqiang have repeatedly offered reassurances that the country will not close its doors. They have in fact said it will open up wider to the outside world.
But in recent years, their vows have been met with increasing scepticism. Xi has constantly stressed self-reliance and self-sufficiency when it comes to economic and technological development, while pushing for a dual circulation economy which would rely less on foreign technology and consumption.
China’s inward economic shift has come amid rising geopolitical and trade tensions with the US, which has started to impose restrictions on exports of critical components including semiconductors.
The inward pivot is also accompanied by an array of domestic policies, including the common prosperity campaign and regulatory crackdowns on sectors from technology to private education, mainly targeted at non-state enterprises.
Moreover, China’s tight zero-Covid policies have reduced interactions with the international community to a bare minimum.
All these developments have helped conjure up a frightening perception that China is retreating into isolation.
China’s top leaders are under growing pressure to counter this perception. On Wednesday, Li Zhanshu, China’s third-ranked leader, visited Russia, becoming the country’s most senior official to travel abroad since the earliest days of the pandemic. Xi is reportedly set to attend the G20 leaders summit in Bali in November.
Meanwhile, the party congress, which is scheduled to begin on October 16, is expected to hear a policy address from Xi that will outline China’s priorities for the next five years or even longer.
Unless China’s leaders provide much-needed clarity and match their promises with concrete actions, unease and worry emanating from the debate on past isolationist policies will continue unabated.
Notas para participação na emissão de Guilherme Macalossi, “Bastidores do Poder”, na Rádio BandRS, em 9/09/2022, 14:30 hs.
Perguntas:
1. A Rainha Elizabeth II e seu papel na renovação da monarquia de 1952 para cá
PRA: Elizabeth II como rainha acidental, bem diferente, mas tão decidida quanto sua predecessora de quatro séculos antes, a primeira Elizabeth, que rechaçou a Armada espanhola e nem precisou do Francis Drake para isso.
A segunda Elizabeth foi, por assim dizer, uma “rainha acidental”, pois seu pai era o segundo da lista e não estava previsto que se tornasse rei. Foi aquele rei gago, do filme “O Discurso do Rei”. O primogênito, príncipe Edward, desistiu para casar-se com uma americana divorciada duas vezes, e ele era um pouco nazista. O novo rei George VI não gostava do Winston Churchill, mas teve de convidá-lo para ser primeiro-ministro na hora mais sombria da Grã-Bretanha, ameaçada pela invasão das forças nazistas. Se George VI tivesse se alinhado com os pacifistas do gabinete britânico, que consentiram na vergonha de Munique em 1938, o Reino Unido teria se transformado num império tutelado pelo regime nazista.
Ao assumir o trono com apenas 27 anos, tendo assistido e participado das horas mais sombrias da IIGM, Elizabeth nunca perdeu o bom-humor e a simpatia que caracterizaram todo o seu reinado, o mais longo da história das monarquias britânicas.
Ela presidiu, com non chalance, pode-se dizer, ao desmantelamento do Império Britânico, depois que seu pai, ex-vice-rei na Índia, teve de se desfazer de uma das joias da coroa britânica, que a Rainha Vitória tinha ganho de presente da Companhia das Índias Orientais Britânicas, em meados do século XIX. Primeiro foi Suez, em 1957, uma humilhação, quando Grã-Bretanha e França tiveram de retirar as tropas do Sinai, em apoio a Israel numa das raríssimas ocasiões em que URSS e EUA atuaram de acordo, contra o velho colonialismo europeu. Depois foram as colônias africanas, e só restaram algumas no Caribe, poucas pérolas na Ásia, pertencentes à Commonwealth, onde ainda estão Canadá, Austrália e Nova Zelândia, e alguns outros. O último desfazimento do Império, o maior do mundo um século atrás, ocorreu em 1997, quando Hong Kong foi devolvida à China, depois de conquistada nas horrendas guerras do ópio contra o Império do Meio, no século XIX.
Junto com os Beatles, a rainha trouxe bilhões de libras ao povo britânico, pela atração que ambos exercerão no mundo inteira, pela música da banda e pelo charme da Coroa.
2. A monarquia constitucional como sistema de governo
PRA: Trata-se do mais estável e mais democrático regime conhecido em toda a história mundial, ainda que oligárquica no início, ou um pouco menos aristocrático no século XX, quando os trabalhistas do Labour substituíram os Whigs, ou Liberais, como segundo maior partido do regime, dividindo os gabinetes com o Tories, ou Conservadores.
A monarquia constitucional começa mais de 800 anos atrás, com a Magna Carta, de 1215, segundo a qual ninguém está acima da Lei, nem mesmo o Rei, junto com o habeas corpus, ou justiça independente, e o princípio do no taxation without representation, ou seja, o soberano não pode criar impostos ou taxar os súditos sem o seu consentimento.
A Magna Carta foi completada pelo Bill of Rights, de 1689, segundo o qual “o rei reina, mas não governa”, consolidando assim o sistema de governo parlamentar, sob uma monarquia constitucional não escrita, mas costumeira. Desde a Revolução Gloriosa, a Inglaterra, Grã-Bretanha desde 1703 – com a unificação com a Escócia – e depois Reino Unido no século XX (ainda que os irlandeses não concordassem, até 1921), os governos parlamentares se sucederam ininterruptamente nas ilhas britânicas, sem qualquer descontinuidade desde então. É, para os britânicos, o melhor sistema possível, que projeta raízes retrospectivamente desde os tempos medievais, ou pelo menos desde a invasão dos normandos em 1066, Guilherme o Conquistador.
3. A importância do Reino Unido na Europa Moderna
PRA: Foi relevante, mais pelo que impediu de fazer, do que pelo que fez. Impediu Napoleão de submeter toda a Europa, resistiu à tirania de Hitler, que poderia ter dominado toda a Europa por várias décadas se vencesse a resistência de Churchill, e também resistiu, já como sócio menor dos Estados Unidos, à dominação soviética sobre a mesma Europa nos tempos de Stalin. E resistiu contra a Comissão de Bruxelas, nas suas tentativas de enquadrar todos os países membros da CEE e depois UE, sobretudo no caso da moeda comum.
Depois do Brexit, no entanto, ela vai enfrentar um declínio relativo, isolada de uma das locomotivas da economia mundial. Veremos se haverá renegociação com a Comissão e o Conselho europeu.
4. A integridade do Reino Unido e os movimentos separatistas a partir do reinado de Charles
PRA: Existem sinais de possível fragmentação do Reino agora Desunido, sobretudo vindos da Escócia e da Irlanda do Norte. Como sempre, tudo depende de quem paga o quê. O plebiscito escocês de separação foi derrotado porque os escoceses pensaram nas suas pensões.
5. Relação entre Reino Unido e Brasil
PRA: A mais velha relação do Brasil, remontando a Portugal desde os Descobrimentos e a Restauração de 1640, com o mais antigo tratado bilateral ainda em vigor. No século XIX, as elites brasileiras eram financiadas em libras britânicas, mas tinha manias francesas. Depois, os britânicos foram substituídos pelos EUA.
Mas são relações ainda importantes em todos os domínios.
A Rainha esteve no Brasil em 1968, e diversos presidentes brasileiros efetuaram visitas de trabalho ou de Estado ao Reino Unido.
Welcome to The Daily 202! Tell your friends to sign up here. On this day in 1776, the Second Continental Congress dropped “United Colonies” in favor of “United States of America.”
The big idea
New U.S. aid, front-line testimonials, Russian defiance – and Congress
Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks to media before departure at the railway station in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Thursday. The sign on the train reads "The Victory Train". (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
It’s been a big week for the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II, and for The Washington Post’s coverage of Russia’s expanded invasion of Ukraine. Let’s look at some of the critical developments — and a big looming test for President Biden’s policy.
I teased it in the headline, so let’s get right to that test, which you may have missed because it was more of a bureaucratic development than a battlefield conundrum, a diplomatic breakthrough, or a viral social media post featuring the explosive demise of a Russian tank.
Ready? One week ago, Biden asked Congress for another $13.7 billion in new money for the Ukraine war — $7.2 billion to provide Kyiv more weapons and military gear, and replenish U.S. stockpiles of arms sent to Ukraine, $4.5 billion to help the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky, and $2 billion to mitigate energy supply disruptions.
This week, some lawmakers, including Democrats hemmed and hawed at the request and asked the administration for more informationbefore they would commit to supporting it, as Joe Gould and Bryant Harris documented for Defense News.
That included, they reported, Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee chairman Jon Tester (D-Mont.). “I’m not opposed to it; I just want to know what’s in it,” they quoted him as saying.
Others raising questions included Senators Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Thom Tillis(R-N.C.) who both sit on the Senate Armed Services Committee. The panel’s top Republican, James M. Inhofe (Okla.) expressed reservations and pushed Biden to use his authority to send another $2.8 billion in arms to Ukraine before that authority lapses when the new fiscal year opens Oct. 1.
FUNDING FIGHT
The White House requested the money as part of a broader $47 billion emergency package that would also help combat covid, bolster monkeypox vaccine stocks and address disaster needs after floods in Kentucky, my colleague Tony Romm reported.
“The official request sets up a fierce fight on Capitol Hill, where warring Democrats and Republicans face a looming, end-of-September deadline by which they must fund the government — or risk a catastrophic shutdown weeks before the midterm elections,” Tony noted.
The test for the Biden administration comes in two parts: Can they resist calls for the Ukraine package to come in the form of a stand-alone bill? And can they overcome congressional skepticism — as well as growing outright oppositionfrom House Republicans?
Odds are some kind of Ukraine aid legislation will pass. But it’ll require some skillful congressional navigation with threatening government shutdown clouds on the horizon and closing fast.
A WAVERING ALLIANCE?
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is toiling to reassure Ukraine of long-lasting support from Washington and to hold together the coalition of allies and partners even as Russia cuts off energy supplies to Western Europe, sending prices soaring with winter approaching.
My colleagues John Hudson and Missy Ryan chronicled the latest on Thursday: Secretary of State Antony Blinkenmade an unannounced visit to Kyiv and the administration promised another $675 million in U.S. military aid and $1 billion in military financing.
“We will support the people of Ukraine for as long as it takes,” Blinken said in a statement.
John and Missy noted the visit “focused partly on a major new operation that Ukrainian leaders hope can dislodge Russian forces from occupied areas in the country’s east and south, and that U.S. officials believe would put Kyiv on a better footing for potential negotiations with Russia.”
“We know this is a pivotal moment, more than six months into Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, as your counteroffensive is now underway and proving effective,” they quoted Blinken as saying.
“While the Ukrainians have made some gains, they are taking heavy losses, and soldiers say that despite huge foreign support, they desperately need more weapons and ammunition to prevail over the better-equipped Russians,” they reported.
And here, I want to strongly recommend John’s searing, searching report from a day earlier, when he told the painful stories of wounded Ukrainian troops describing their ordeal fighting to retake the strategic southern city of Kherson from Russian forces.
Beyond the tragic human toll, they told John of:
Russian drones tracking Ukrainian forces from so high up in the sky that their targets never heard the unmanned vehicles’ buzz.
Russian tanks emerging from newly built cement shelters, firing on Ukrainian targets, then slipping back into cover, protected from mortars and rockets.
Russian counter-battery radars that let Moscow’s forces target Ukrainian artillery.
Russian hackers taking over Ukrainian drones.
John’s piece serves as something of a corrective to the social-media narrative of the war, in which videos show plucky Ukrainian forces getting the better of heavier but hapless Russians. It’s a reminder that the war looks far from over.
In a surprise move, Ukrainian forces have driven Russian troops back in Kharkiv district, threatening to unseat Putin’s offensive to seize Donetsk.
Now, disclaimer due up front: it is very early days, and it is entirely possible that Ukraine’s push is being hyped to cover for limited progress in the Kherson region.
But overall, Ukrainian sources have proven themselves far more reliable in terms of basic honesty than Russian or American.
The actual fighting in Ukraine is taking place in the shadow of a larger looming confrontation between Russia and NATO.
Trolls are waging information war on both sides, working to keep domestic populations immersed in a steady flood of propaganda.
Ukrainian trolls are in this game too, but overall the past six months of war has seen official Ukrainian sources generally adopt a sensible policy of reasonable honesty with the international press.
No, Kyiv doesn’t reveal everything about its plans, but monitoring sources like the Kyiv Independent (which I now support with a monthly subscription), Ukrinform, and Liveuamap these past months shows a stark difference between American, Russian, and Ukrainian sourced information.
By and large Ukraine’s leaders appear to have recognized that integrity in public communications is far more important than playing information war games.
For good reason — nobody except pundits or true believers trusts anything an American public official says anymore because, well, WMDs in Iraq, anyone?
And obviously you can’t take what any member of Putin’s regime or state controlled media says at face value either. Or at least, not without applying the necessary Kremlin filter to get at what they’re really trying to communicate.
Americans and Russians spend a lot of time trying to control narratives, because both are hegemonic powers that rely on other countries not realizing how weak they are.
By contrast, Ukraine’s defense relies on maintaining solid relationships with partners abroad who will offer support in foul weather as well as fair.
So lying about the challenges its forces are facing doesn’t help — all that would accomplish is create grounds for a future backlash Ukraine might not survive.
That’s why I scrupulously doubt anything coming from an American or Russian source. The regimes that rule either empire have ways of manipulating the media — Russia directly, America indirectly, through restricting access to “unnamed officials” and engaging in public shaming before some mob.
Just the other day the commander in chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces published a remarkable assessment of where the war is heading in 2023, a sober analysis that stands in sharp contrast to blather coming from the fake experts over at the American Institute for the Study of War.
In it, he broadly confirms much of the analysis I’ve posted on this blog over the past few months.
Ukraine still isn’t getting the right kind of aid from its foreign partners. Its counterattacks are going to take months to finish, and at extreme cost in human suffering.
Russia retains extreme advantages in vital military domains and the ability to replenish its low-tech weaponry pretty much indefinitely, even if its stocks of precision weapons are thankfully running low at last.
To push Russia out of Ukrainian territory without atrocious casualties will require the supply of more modern weapons and training Ukrainian soldiers to use them.
This should have begun on the necessary scale months ago to allow for a broad counteroffensive this year, but Ukraine’s allies have failed to organize the necessary effort, proving that NATO had better hope it never goes to war, because hoo boy would that be a hot mess!
In addition, the International Legion was terribly mismanaged, Ukraine just not having the resources to stand up something that complex when the war began and it was already inducting huge numbers of its own people into the defense forces.
Another missed opportunity.
Contrary to the confident prognostications of the smug analysts in D.C. since they realized they were wrong about Kyiv falling in three days, Russia is nowhere near collapse on any front, military or economic. Putin isn’t dead of cancer or deposed or begging for peace.
All those sanctions American leaders have billed as the death knell for Russia’s economy are slowly but surely being bypassed.
Most of the world hasn’t signed on, so re-exporting goods and fossil fuels will slowly compensate for Russia not being able to buy direct from Europe anymore.
At least prices for food and fuel will stabilize — for some. Europe faces a difficult winter and the prospect of long-term energy dependence on the United States, which is not ideal given that US energy is mostly fracked, requiring large-scale sacrifices of rural land.
This isn’t to say the average Russian won’t feel extreme financial pain in the near future or that Russia’s military industry won’t have to radically adapt to keep up the war effort.
But all that does is level the playing field between Ukraine and Russia a little more. Just like sending 16 HIMARS systems and not 160, when they’re otherwise just sitting in arsenals somewhere.
Nothing Ukraine has received so far is sufficient to deliver a decisive blow by any means. And as Ukraine’s own military leadership admits, the situation for their forces remains difficult everywhere along a front line that looks starkly like something from maps of World War 2.
First and foremost is the dangerous situation between Izium and Sloviansk.
For months Ukraine’s defenders have stopped Russian attacks that, if successful, could partially cut off Ukrainian forces in Donetsk, particularly around the heavily fortified Sloviansk-Kramatorsk area.
To stop Ukraine’s pushback in Kherson, Russian forces have apparently redeployed in large numbers.
But despite satellites and drones being able to pick up big movements pretty easily, at more local levels and finer scales it is possible to use cover to conceal more patient concentrations of forces dispatched over time.
So despite the pain being inflicted on Russian forces across the 1300 km of actively contested front line, it remains a distinct possibility that Putin has managed to hide a major offensive formation somewhere.
Such a reserve could allow for a sudden overwhelming push like those that reached the outskirts of Kyiv in February. If Ukraine commits too much of its combat power in Kherson, where Russia may well have boosted its occupying forces from around 7,000 to three times that specifically to draw Ukraine into a difficult grind, that could leave Kyiv’s forces vulnerable elsewhere.
And while Putin certainly likes owning Kherson, given the massive bridgehead Russian forces presently hold across the strategically vital Dnieper river, trading that for taking control of Donetsk is likely a bargain he’ll gladly accept given that a march to Moldova is incredibly unlikely.
So long as Putin’s forces control all of Donbas, he can claim victory and go over to the defensive, forcing Ukraine to spend the next couple years shedding blood taking on entrenched forces.
All while its partners abroad slowly tire of sustaining the fight at the cost to their economies.
Putin’s basic goal in Ukraine now is to wait out America and Europe. Once Donbas is taken he’ll place the conflict on a steady low boil, using imported North Korean artillery and low quality reserve troops to hold the line.
Without more intensive aid to Ukraine, a strategic stalemate is likely even if Ukraine reclaims some territory. Failure to create a truly global sanctions regimes means that only Ukrainian success on the battlefield can erode his position within the Russian state before America probably falls apart completely in 2025.
At that point, Putin will have an opportunity to renew his assault on the rest of Ukraine.
It is therefore absolutely essential for Ukraine to prevent Putin from achieving the last of his stated aims for the war: seizing all of Donbas. Russia has to keep attacking until that is done, something that now appears to be more difficult each day.
This strategic situation means taking the risk of launching multiple offensives this September, striking at any part of the front that appear vulnerable given Russian force concentrations.
Their aim: to liberate territory and inflict such obvious defeats on the Russian military that Putin can’t hope to go over to the defensive or claim victory.
Ukraine has to strain Russian resources at every point it can to both prove to its partners it can go on the attack and prevent Russia from building up a new offensive capability — or drain what it might already have.
In both Kherson and Kharkiv Ukrainian forces appear to be striking at the flanks of Russian formations in an attempt to cut off front line units from support. They likely want to partially surround Russian salients to force them to retreat — or even better for optics, surrender.
On the Kharkiv front, the line of the Siverski Donets river has become the primary buffer between the two sides, water barriers being difficult to push across if the opposite bank is under enemy control.
But the thing about a riparian area is that it tends to have cover, allowing military units to filter in and mass undetected.
Even punch across the river at a weak point the defenders might assume is too well guarded to seize — until it is too late.
Ukraine appears to have done exactly that southeast of Kharkiv, breaking through the Russian lines.
Their target is clear and some reports has leading elements reaching it already: the town of Kupiansk, which lies along the most direct route for supplies heading to Russian forces fighting south of Izium.
If successful — and advancing fifty klicks in no more than a day or two definitely implies momentum — Ukrainian forces will at least bring the Kupiansk area under direct fire, which will all but eliminate any possibility of Russia punching south from Izium.
Why? Check the map above — Kupiansk is a vital node in the Russian supply lines sustaining operations around Izium, one of the earliest places I identified before February as a likely Russian objective.
And so it was.
Cutting the supply lines to Izium means any plan to repeat what Russia did to force Ukraine out of Luhansk won’t work.
All those red arrows threatening the flank and rear of Sloviansk will be cut off.
If that happens, Putin won’t be able to pretend all is going as planned on any front — thousands of troops in bridgeheads across two vital rivers will be at risk.
There’s a reason Ukraine is once again warning of the threat that Putin will use tactical nuclear weapons.
Truth be told, that might well be his only option if Russia’s ground forces are as badly damaged as it will be reasonable to hope if Ukraine pulls this off.
Fortunately for the world, the way Ukraine has to run its defense means that there are actually not a lot of really good targets for Russian nuclear strikes.
After firing several thousand precision missiles into Ukraine, most potential targets are destroyed or spread out that a nuke won’t accomplish substantially more than a conventional warhead.
And any nuclear use carries a real risk of NATO getting involved, which it is now likely that Putin doesn’t want, given that there is no longer much gain in hitting NATO supply bases after so much gear has already made it into Ukraine — and will, thanks to the country’s long borders with NATO.
Four months ago, the threat of missile strikes on NATO bases in a sudden escalation was deadly real. There’s a reason the US has kept a carrier group, a marine amphibious group, and a couple submarines armed with hundreds of cruise missiles near allies in Europe all year.
Now, there’s not much point in hitting a NATO target unless Russia is ready to go nuclear. And if Putin uses a nuke to terrorize Ukraine by vaporizing a civilian area or just setting one off harmlessly high above Kyiv, NATO might well have to get involved directly, and there is then a real chance World War 3 goes real hot, real fast.
This is likely why Russia is playing such dangerous games with Enerhodar — a release of radioactive material from the nuclear plant might serve as well as a direct use of nuclear arms because Russia is setting the stage to insist Ukraine did it.
It would be difficult to impossible to prove conclusively what happened in the short term, and Putin might see the panic a nuclear disaster would produce as serving his interests.
An incident could potentially freeze military operations across Kherson, for example. Or give Russia an excuse to mobilize its population, something that thankfully has not happened yet.
Right now, Russia is still fighting with a hand tied behind its back for fear of what forcing too many middle class Russians to fight in a war they likely despise would do to the stability of the regime. But an incident of sufficient magnitude might give Putin enough of an excuse to push Russia into true total war.
This is why a UN-backed military force should deploy to establish a humanitarian zone — but fat chance of that happening in a world where the UN is determined to be the League of Nations Mark 2.
In any case, Ukraine striking back in Kharkiv and achieving success has the potential to cement real gains as well as create credibility for Ukraine’s argument that it can and will win, if given enough support.
That’s the only way out of this situation now: total support for Ukraine until Russian forces withdraw.
Something about warfare that is rarely conveyed to the general public is the degree to which literally everything is interconnected.
War is anarchy in its purest form, with all organization being held together under the most difficult of conditions.
It’s why war reveals both the best and worst in human beings — our willingness to sacrifice our lives for those at our sides as well as the brutality we are able to inflict on fellow human beings.
Ukraine has had no real choice in this war — Russia has come to destroy an identity, a people, and until Putin’s regime is gone none can ever trust that the silly “Russian World” ideology he appears to believe in won’t lead to him attacking any place where Russian speakers live.
Which includes the West Coast, by the way. So as far as I’m concerned, my security here is directly bound to Ukraine’s.
That’s the hell of war and violence — the ripples they generate spread.
The entire world ought to be behind Ukraine as it fights to free its people from this brutal assault.
That craven America is backing Ukraine for its own geopolitical purposes does not mean that it truly cares about Ukrainians, but it also doesn’t mean that Russia is a friend to every country that doesn’t get along with America.
Russia and America are the same. That’s how international relations works. I didn’t get a degree in it from Berkeley, taught by some of the field’s leading minds, only to fail to recognize the scientific reality of our times.
A multipolar world is upon us all, like it or not, and pretending there are only two teams, Good and Bad, Democracy and Autocracy, is simply suicidal when thousands of nuclear weapons are still deployed all across the planet, waiting to fulfill their destructive purpose.
Half measures usually lead to the worst of both worlds, not a happy compromise. And on certain principles — like one country not getting to try to destroy another — there can be no compromise, or any hope of securing a lasting future peace simply breaks.
America’s invasion of Iraq broke it, though its leaders refuse to see. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has ended it too, though it may take years for the collapse to follow its due course.
So best of luck, Ukraine — you’re fighting for all of us, and the future.
To Kupiansk, Kherson, and beyond!
In the will to fight to defend one’s home lies all hope for humanity, whether the enemy be merciless empire, hoarded wealth, or a fast-changing climate.