Thoughts on Ukraine

When the Napoleonic Wars came to an end in 1815, the Great Powers of Europe got together and said, in effect, “Nope. Uh-uh. We ain’t gon’ do that again.” Years of unrelenting warfare had bled Europe dry, shattering empires and bankrupting kingdoms, as armies had swept across the continent destroying whatever was unfortunate enough to lay in their paths, and this had to stop.

At the Congress of Vienna the Great Powers basically sat down and tried to figure out how to do this, and the end result was called the Metternich System, after its principal architect and leading figure, Klemens von Metternich. Von Metternich, an Austrian statesman, was a howling authoritarian reactionary who spent an inordinate amount of time singing close harmony with his ego – he once said, “There is a wide sweep about my mind. I am always above and beyond the preoccupation of most public men; I cover a ground much vaster than they can see. I cannot keep myself from saying about twenty times a day, ‘How right I am, and how wrong they are’ ” – but to be fair, he was good at his job.

The Metternich System, like most substantial diplomatic achievements, was a complex and nuanced thing but at its most basic level it amounted to putting a lid on Europe – turning back the clock to a predetermined point where things seemed to be stable and prosperous (which for von Metternich meant the age of absolutist monarchs) and then locking that into place so that it could never change again.

The Great Powers basically took all of the pieces of territory that had been fought over, annexed, conquered, reconquered, divvied out, taken back, and otherwise bounced around like a hummingbird in a hurricane and divided them out so that everyone would have Enough but not Too Much. Enough to be secure in their own borders, basically, but not so much as to present a threat to their neighbors. And then they said, “That’s it. The borders of Europe are no longer subject to change by war.”

To guarantee this, they instituted a flexible system of alliances among the Great Powers that effectively declared that if one kingdom decided to start anything with its neighbors the rest of them would swing by and pound it back into line.

This worked for about forty years, which was good from a “no actual continent-wide war” sort of perspective, but not really so great from a “liberal democracy and progress” viewpoint. Win some, lose some.

You start to see cracks in it during the Revolutions of 1848 which convulsed much of Europe, but the final nail in the coffin of the Metternich System was the Crimean War of the early 1850s. The Crimean War was a fuzzy and puzzling conflict that even now defies easy explanation – basically the French and the Turks got into a fight over who would control Jerusalem so naturally the British ended up invading what was then Russia but which is now Ukraine (the recent illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia notwithstanding) – but the end result of it was that the Metternich System collapsed, and for the next fifteen or twenty years there was no lid on Europe and the borders were subject to change by war.

This did not end well.

War they got. It was war that united Italy in 1861. It was war that united Germany in 1871 and war that erupted between Germany and France at about the same time. And when the Great Power of Europe decided they needed to fill the Metternich-shaped hole in their diplomatic system with something, it ended up taking them into World War I.

You can draw a pretty straight line from the collapse of the Metternich System to the outbreak of World War I. You can also make a decent argument that World War I and World War II were simply two phases of one large continent-wide war – a Second Thirty Years War – the very thing that von Metternich had tried so hard to prevent.

After World War II there was another, somewhat less formalized, attempt to put a lid on Europe, one that included such things as the Cold War, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, Mutually Assured Destruction, the Helsinki Accords, and so on, but which basically said that the borders of Europe were no longer subject to change by war.

The World War II Settlement lasted nearly eighty years, almost twice as long as the Metternich System. It survived the Cold War. It survived the breakup of the Soviet Union. It survived active attempts to sabotage it from both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.

And, like the Metternich System, it died in Ukraine.

This will not end well.

The brutal, unprovoked assault on Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s Russia that was launched this week will succeed in the short term. The Ukrainians are no match for the Russian military, and the US and NATO are not going to put troops on the ground to stop it. Even if we did it wouldn’t change anything. There will be economic sanctions because We Gotta Do Something, and they’ll hurt Russia but they won’t solve the big problem. Not in the short term.

Ukraine is not a pushover, though. They are a large and proud nation with enough nationalistic fervor and weaponry to sustain a serious campaign of attrition once the old-school tank battles are over. They may well become Russia’s second Afghanistan, a quagmire that slowly destroys their military and bankrupts their government. One can hope, anyway.

This is the first step in Putin’s campaign to destroy democracy as an idea and it will not be the last. The next blow will fall somewhere else, probably sometime soon as he has nothing left but conquest to sustain his power. If it happens in the Baltics then NATO will be obligated to respond and all bets are off at that point. The world has much more powerful weapons now than it did in the 19th century. We’re far more interconnected. We can do much more damage to many more people in a shorter amount of time, just as we could, if we chose, help them more effectively too.

Ukraine is being destroyed by a dictator who no longer cares to hide who he is or what he wants.

There is opposition. Much of the West has united in condemning this outrage, though the American right has been, shall we say, somewhat less than unanimous in this (and fuck them sideways with a Buick for their inerrant ability to side with the callous and the cruel). Perhaps more importantly, there is opposition in Russia. Popular protests have broken out in the streets, a brave move in a country that routinely brutalizes people who do such things. Members of the (essentially powerless) Russian legislature have spoken out, a rare thing. Russian public figures have also spoken out.

The stakes are high.

Blood is flowing.

And how it will end is yet to be determined.

But if there is justice and morality in the world it will see an end to this barbaric assault and a return of sovereignty and peace to the people and nation of Ukraine.