The Story So Far

When will America get wise to itself?

One of the frustrating things about writing a newsletter is watching the world go by. In this case it’s the steady flow opinion about the three-way war in Ukraine. Write a newspaper column, a sense of authority, however misplaced, is buttressed by the presence of other writers and readers. In the case of Ukraine, authority depends mostly on the columns of others and authors of books.

Helpful but not nearly enough, is Johnson’s Russia List, which Economic Principals skims every edition three or four even five times most weeks. David Johnson is a great journalist. In his home on Chincoteague Island, Virginia, he agglomerates twenty to thirty items, complete with links or full texts, then sends his list out to subscribers.

A question that has interested EP all along has been the reception of the war by the American public, which depends, in turn, on the English-language press. All the more interesting, then, is the reception accorded. Hubris: The American Origins of Russia’s War against Ukraine (Harvard, 2024), by Jonathan Haslam. For those deeply interested in the war, or in intellectual history in general, the book is riveting. EP could barely put it down to write.

Haslam a well-respected historian of the Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. He is the author of Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence (Farrar, Straus, 2016) and Russia’s Cold War: From from the October Revolution to the Fall of the Wall (Yale, 2012), and several other books.

He is the George F. Kennan Professor in the School of Historical Studies of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. There may be no better-informed or more disinterested writer on the topic, unless it is David Johnson himself, and Johnson publishes clips, not books.

Hubris is a stunner, at least to a reader who has followed Russia’s story via JRL since the late Nineties. Its gist is conveyed by its title. Its kernel is a quotation of Sir Rodric Braithwaite, Britain’s ambassador to the Soviet Union and Russia, 1988-92:

The belief that it was the world’s sole superpower led America into one diplomatic misjudgment after another over the next three decade [from 1991].

NATO enlargement is the villain of Hubris. Haslam divides his book into two parts. The first covers the administrations of American presidents who were mostly uninterested in foreign relations or inattentive to them. The second describes the creep of neoconservatism into the administrations of Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

The people of Ukraine on all sides of their issues are the qualified heroes. Vladimir Putin is the victim. Having begun well-disposed toward the West and eager for economic integration, he is embittered by successive rebuffs. Haslam concludes:

Through his resort to war, Putin could in the end bring about what he was determined to forestall: the collapse of his regime and the fall of all those who serve it. This is exactly what happened to Nicholas II, who ultimately chose war to save his autocracy… But are we prepared in any way for this? Have we learned anything?

Hubris was published last September. Yet no notice has been taken of it except for a single critical review in Foreign Affairs. The mention of the Foreign Affairs brings to mind the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank strongly supportive of both NATO and Ukraine. The role of the West’s military-industrial complex in fomenting the war hasn’t begun to be probed, much less written.

Long before beginning to write EP, I (and the rest of the world) lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and America’s war in Vietnam. The missile crisis was touch and go, and great though the danger was, the confrontation ended quickly and well, but Vietnam was slow-motion earthquake followed by a tsunami.

I have marveled ever since at the way America slowly got wise to itself. There were all those “ boots on the ground,” of course: something like sixty thousand Americans and two million Vietnamese dead. But some larger lesson was drawn. Thirty years passed before an all-volunteer American army charged into Afghanistan and Iraq.

Nothing was necessary about Vietnam and Iraq. Nothing was necessary about the war in Ukraine, either. Proposals for the “Finlandization” of the breakaway nation were proposed and prepared long before the Russian invasion. All that was necessary was to halt NATO expansion. Why wasn’t it done.

Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson resurrected the concept of groupthink, a term introduced by sociologist William Whye in 1952.

Convictions in among a small group of advisors that their plan was superior to all others, producing catastrophic results is as a convincing explanation of the election of 2024,

Might groupthink be as the root of the war in Ukraine, as it clearly was in Iraq and Vietnam? If so, will a deeply divided America get wise to themselves in time to preserve some degree of autonomy in what’s left of Ukraine? Maybe.

But the broader implication of that question won’t be addressed before the presidential election of 2028.That’s the story that interests EP most. Hubris is essential reading for anyone interested in American foreign policy.

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