Ukraine, Ukraine. What is the problem with the Ukraine? It is the latest crisis of the times. It is a fifth alarm fire in geopolitics, and the news of the war supersedes trucker protests in Canada and the global Coronavirus pandemic. Russia invaded the borders of the Ukraine in late February 2022 and has continued to advance and conquer space within the country in the weeks that followed.
I will confess that I am not a good source for the latest details on the war for I gave up on closely following news cycles back in 2018, and furthermore it is currently Lent. I am avoiding all news like the plague, and yet how could I not know that Russia has invaded the Ukraine? You simply cannot avoid this episode. Uber sends push notification to your phone telling you to donate for Ukrainian refugees. Slack channels at work fill up with posts denouncing the atrocious war in the Ukraine, and at all-hands zoom calls the company leadership needs to address questions on how they will support affected business partners. Cars driving around the city now how have mini Ukraine flags sticking out their windows, and any set of programmable lights have been converted to the bicolor flag of blue and yellow.
All this hoopla begs the question: what is the Ukraine? A cursory review of the Wikipedia page is instructive. First, under the etymology and orthography section one learns that the Ukraine roughly translates to “the borderlands” in old Slavic. It is not the exactly an inspiring name that conjures up the ideal of a free and independent nation. Geographically speaking it occupies a strategic region of Eastern Europe on the Black Sea. Its crucial locality can explain why it has a centuried history of being warred over. The list of former rulers includes the Kievan Rus’ federation, the Mongolians, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, the Tsardom of Russia, the Cossack Hetmonate, and the Bolsheviks. On top of its tactical geographic placement, it is also highly productive agriculturally being one of the largest grain exporters in the world.
These facts matter little to the media-saturated American, because this crisis is not about the realities of history. Americans have an innate ability to possess excessively strident opinions about what should happen in a country on the other side of the globe which they will never set foot in. Of course these opinions are not their own, but what they are told to express from the oracles they subscribe to. Americans could probably say very little about the Ukraine if you asked them three months ago. The well-read sorts of the intelligentsia could talk about the annexing of Crimea and perhaps the War in Donbas that followed. Nevertheless, they would not claim that the security of the Ukrainian state was paramount to their mental well-being. Yet here we are with a new crisis gripping the nation that seems to even overshadow the infamous January 6th “insurrection”.
A year and a half ago there was a highly divisive presidential election in the United States, but the Ukraine was not a major topic of debate. It was a smorgasbord of Trump’s failure on Coranavirus, the race riots of Biden’s America, the impending climate crisis (soon!), the economy, jobs, education, and a regurgitation of conservative and liberal issues from the previous elections. In fact the only real concern about Russia then was the allegations that President Donald Trump was either intentionally or unintentionally a puppet controlled by Vladimir Putin. That whole line of reasoning begs the question as to why Putin would wait until after his puppet left the White House in order to invade the Ukraine. However such obvious absurdities are the norm of the age, and one should not be surprised by them anymore.
There is a valid four letter reason for the present hysteria: NATO. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was established in 1949 in the aftermath of the Second World War. The organization is a mutual defense agreement in response to an attack by an external party on any member state . It was originally 12 founding members including the United States, Canada, and major Western European countries. From there it expanded in the 1950s to include Greece, Turkey, and Germany. The fall of the Soviet Union marked a first and second wave of former Soviet states such as Poland, Hungary, the Baltic states, and along with other Eastern European nations. Of course a country does not join NATO, but rather it “ascends” into NATO as if the organization is a heavenly body. NATO has reached a total of thirty members presently. Unsurprisingly, the United States’ “greatest ally”, Israel, is not one of those members. NATO’s newest crop of members joined in 2009, and it included Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia. There is an obvious trend towards enveloping Eastern Europe with NATO considering Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, and Ukraine as aspiring members. In fact, prior to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, Putin was quite explicit with NATO when he demanded that NATO promises to cease expanding eastwards. It was a demand which NATO unequivocally refused.
That is the crux of the matter. Russia has invaded an aspiring NATO member. Now the NATO members have to scramble a sufficient response. The Ukraine never joined NATO, so there is no treaty for mutual defense, but nevertheless it is a challenge to the liberal Western hegemony. NATO has been the backbone to the security of Western governments since before my lifetime. It is an established order with ambitions to expand further and has a mission focused on promoting “democratic values“. Unfortunately for NATO, many important member countries are grappling internally with cultural and social discord that occasionally breaks out into violence. Arguably the linchpin of NATO is the United States, and a simple retrospective of the media landscape paints an apocalyptic picture of the future of its democracy.
The American Empire has been crying out in pain since the election of President Trump. The election of President Biden seems to have done little to quell its fear. It will be another growing crack in the powerful facade of Neoliberal America if Russia can successfully conquer strategic parts of the Ukraine and keep them. Can an old and tired Europe, which is heavily reliant on Russian gas exports, muster a military counter response to Russia? I could ask many more hypothetical questions, but it is safer to simply wait with patience and watch from the sidelines as history plays out. This is not said from a point of aversion or apathy. Rather the American Empire through its many institutions has spent the last decade outcasting the warrior caste of its historical population. The lauded men from the Greatest Generation placed in today’s society would likely commit too many unpardonable “isms” to be included in mainstream America. The New Americans came here for consumerism and a high standard of living. The American Empire will have to rely solely on mercenaries, sociopaths, a dwindling number of true believers, and its technological edge for any major wars it may face on the horizon. I doubt my fellow citizens partaking in the Ukraine hysteria realize any of this, but it is a truth that rumbles deep in their psyche. Reality will eventually bring it to the forefront.
