Wait A Moment: Aren't We Already Committed To World War III? What Will It Cost?

I've kept returning to Anne Applebaum's Atlantic piece that I linked Tuesday, The Russian Empire Must Die. Let's keep in mind that this wasn't written by a raving right-winger; it was published in almost the most prestigious of establishment outlets (I don't know if she shopped it to Foreign Affairs) and written by a fully formed, fully vetted member of the liberal Democrat establishment with credentials comparable to, say, Secretary Blinken, who is currently following policies with goals that, while not as clearly expressed, are at least congruent with those Ms Applebaum outlines in her essay.

Her argument is clear:

Ideas move across time and space, sometimes in unexpected ways. The notion that a country should be different—differently ruled, differently organized—can come from old books, from foreign travel, or just from its citizens’ imaginations. At the height of the Russian empire, in the 19th century, under the rule of some of the most ponderous autocrats of their time, a plethora of reform movements flowered: social democrats, peasant reformers, advocates of constitutions and parliaments.

. . . Most suffered from one major blind spot: Neither then nor later did most Russian liberals understand that the imperial project itself was the source of Russian autocracy. The White Russian armies lost to the Bolsheviks in part because they would not join forces in 1918–20 with newly independent Poland or would-be independent Ukraine. Democratic ideas did not triumph in either the branch or the trunk in the years that followed the Russian Revolution, partly because the state needed to use so much violence to keep Ukraine, Georgia, and the other republics inside the Soviet Union.

Still, even the decades of fear and poverty that followed the Russian Revolution did not eliminate the belief that another kind of state was possible.

. . . They lost, of course, to yet another dictator who is using an imperial war to eliminate his enemies and spread fear across Russia.

. . . Russian liberals have failed before. They failed in the 1900s, they failed in the 2000s, and they are failing now. They failed to stop Putin, failed to prevent this catastrophe from unfolding. Some of them failed, at least until recently, to understand how Russian imperialism has fed and nurtured Russian autocracy[.]

I quoted her overall conclusion on Tuesday:

I have argued before that there is no guarantee that American democracy can survive, that what happens to America tomorrow depends on the actions of Americans today. But the same is true of Russia. The country’s future will be shaped not by mystical laws of history but by how its leaders and citizens absorb and interpret the tragedy of this shocking, brutal, unnecessary war. The best way that outsiders can help Russia change is to ensure that Ukraine takes back Ukrainian territory and defeats the empire.

Her argument, as far as we can parse it out, is that Russia is a problem. It has been a problem at least since the 19th century. The problem can be traced to its imperialism. Russian liberals, however well-intended, have failed repeatedly to solve the Russian problem. Outsiders must help Russia change, since Russians themselves have failed. Thus we must aid Ukraine in this project, although the overall project is greater than Ukraine, it's ending the imperialism that feeds Russian autocracy.

I'm not completely comfortable with this; it seems to be at least a first cousin of sloganeering about the war to end wars, or the war to make the world safe for democracy, with its scope somewhat reduced to making it the war to end Russia as we know it. But slogans have never been the real cause of anything. Nevertheless, even if Russia is a problem that needs urgent fixing, the US otherwise guaranteed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, under which the borders of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan were to be guaranteed in return for those countries surrendering their former Soviet nuclear weapons. In addition, there can be no question that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a violation of the UN Charter, which the US has frequently used to justify its own policy goals.

But if those were the sole issues, we wouldn't have a bigger problem, which is that even leaving nuclear armageddon aside, solving Ukraine alone will still be like pulling the fatal thread. Secretaries Austin and Blinken expressed US objectives in the Ukraine war on April 25:

At a press conference in Poland after a surprise visit to Kyiv, Lloyd Austin was asked if he would now define US goals differently from those set out soon after the Russian invasion. In response, he started out with the established administration line about helping Ukraine retain its sovereignty and defend its territory.

Then Austin added a second goal: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” That meant Russia should “not have the capability to very quickly reproduce” the forces and equipment that had been lost in Ukraine.

. . . The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who travelled with Austin to see Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv, agreed with his formulation of US objectives, saying: “I think the secretary said it very well”.

I've been saying here for quite some time that Austin and Blinken appear to have been able to establish Ukraine policy as a completely separate carveout within the administration, with Biden's role closely circumscribed to the extent that he and his immediate staff aren't allowed to deviate from carefully crafted, minimalist expressions dictated to them by State and Defense. This has worked up to now.

However, as the Guardian link above points out, the view of the mission within the State-Defense carveout has expanded from the simple obligation of restoring Ukraine's borders under the Budapest Assurances to the larger objective of weakening Russia militarily to the degree that an invasion of Ukraine (or by implication any other former Soviet state) can't be repeated. And this isn't so far from Ms Applebaum's goal of solving the Russia problem by dissolving its empire.

This is going to be expensive, and why shouldn't it be? I've been posting fanciful maps here now and then of people's ideas about what a post-imperial Russia might look like; another one is at the top of today's entry. The implication of all these projected scenarios, if it's never expressed directly, is this is what Russia would look like after a Tom Clancy fantasy of World War III. And if you play around with this kind of fantasy, this is precisely what you're going to get, a Treaty of Delhi, say, that codifes agreements made by the allied powers in the Auckland Conference, which results in a map like the one above.

If you're going to fix Russia, you're talking about something at the level of World Wars I and II, followed by something comparable to the Congress of Vienna. The current US strategy of nickel-and-diming a few dozen billions in aid to Ukraine every few weeks isn't going to cover that kind of cost, even if US military forces are never directly involved.

Right now, there seem to be two separate factions in the establishment, whether either recognizes it or not: there's the Blinken-Austin-Applebaum faction that thinks fixing Russia is a priority, while there's the Pelosi-Harris faction that places priority on climate change, pansexualism, and the alliance with the Lumpenproletariat. If we're going to have World War III, we simply can't pay for both. My guess is that neither faction thinks it can rely on Biden to make an effective decision, and that's where things will stand for the foreseeable future -- except that circumstances are inevitably going to force a choice.