Congratulations to Kaja Kallas on Her Reelection
A Word of Gratitude to NATO’s Biggest Hardliner
“Indifference is the mother of all crimes,” —Kaja Kallas, writing in the Economist
Why the War in Ukraine Matters
I first heard of Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas when I read her hawkish essay in Foreign Affairs, “No Peace on Putin’s Terms,” outlining the necessity for the west to do everything they can to defeat Putin, at any price. Since the war began, and I was already decidedly hawkish, her piece was formative in the further hardening of my convictions.
Drawing on the still recent history of Russian tyranny in Eastern Europe, which has particular salience for her own country, as well as personal resonance with her mother and grandmother having been deported to Russia under the USSR, she made a very persuasive argument that Putin cannot be appeased, because Russia, as history has shown, never backs down. Not until they are defeated, like most regimes with expansionist histories. She wrote in Foreign Affairs that since Russia gave NATO an ultimatum, leave Russia alone or risk war with a nuclear power, in 2021,
…horrors that we thought belonged to history have once again happened in Europe. Russia is waging a genocidal war in Ukraine, shocking the world with the magnitude of its war crimes. It is targeting civilians, destroying civilian infrastructure, and using mass killings, torture, and rape as weapons of war.”
“This is not an accident,” she notes, “but rather a feature of the Russian way of war.”
This crucial observation of hers was central to the evolution of my conviction that Ukraine needs to win, and Russia needs to lose, and that there can be no in between. Between total victory and any compromise, the reality is unless Ukraine has total victory, it will result in a total defeat, not just for Ukraine, but for NATO and the whole world. That is because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is really not as much a war on Ukraineans, as it is integral to Putin’s wider war on the international rules-based order, the United States in particular. And if that rules-based order were to be cowed by Putin’s threats of nukes, or if for whatever reason, we were to relinquish Ukraine to Russia, it would constitute a crushing blow approaching, in fact, a defeat for the post-war system, ushering in a terrifying winner-take-all future. Kallas asserted,
“Now is not the time to push for premature peace. Unless Russia abandons its goal of conquering new territory in Ukraine, peace talks have little chance of achieving anything. History shows that appeasement only strengthens and encourages aggressors and that aggressors can be stopped only with force. As the prime minister of Estonia, a frontline NATO country that endured half a century of Soviet occupation, I know what peace on Russia’s terms really means. Russian peace would not mean the end of suffering but rather more atrocities. The only path to peace is to push Russia out of Ukraine.”
Before reading this, my defense of Ukraine was at once empathetic and principled. My sympathy for the Ukrainean people, especially after having not long before Russia’s invasion read Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom and Anne Applebaum’s The Twilight of Democracy, my horror at Russia’s asymmetrical warfare in 2014 blocking Ukraine’s attempt at accession to EU membership, combined with a red-toothed internationalism stirring in my heart, Russia’s invasion last February, as I watched it unfold on CNN with Putin lining up troops on the border, seemed to pop directly out of one of the books I was reading.
I was overcome with a mix of outrage and humanitarian feeling, and it was a conviction that freedom to all people was under threat—if it were in Ukraine—that made my defense of Ukrainean sovereignty primarily moral in nature. A universalism about me commands me to think that I am not worthy of my own liberty unless I value the liberty of Ukraineans equally.
As an American exceptionalist, who believes like the founding fathers, that American freedom is of the highest value only because freedom is objectively in the universal interest of all human beings morally, as a universal human right, making freedom therefore applicable everywhere in the entire world: where I see Ukraineans fighting for their liberty from Russian colonizers, I see free human beings fighting for American aspirational ideals, and I identify with them as I would with any of my fellow citizens. From this standpoint, I think I would be a bad American and it would be unamerican if I were not to recognize the west’s duty to help Ukraineans in fighting their neofascist Russian oppressors.
Finish Russia Off
Moreover, it was not until reading Kallas’s essay, that I began to perceive that Russia cannot simply be forced out of Ukraine or contained, but Russia actually had to be defeated. And if Ukraine can be helped to take Crimea and the Donbas, and if we in the west allowed Ukraine to strike within Russian territory with our weapons, then that would be even better. Give Ukraine everything, I say. Tanks, long range missiles, air defense missiles, drones, and fighter planes. Without challenging Russia directly, but similar to how George HW Bush’s stance towards Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait saying, “this aggression will not stand,” we should make it abundantly clear that the west will not idly tolerate Putin’s unprovoked aggression, and short of fighting the war ourselves, we should give Ukraine all the assistance they need, whatever the cost, as much as it takes (not just “as long” as Biden said lamely), as fast as we can; and most important, we should openly endorse Ukraine’s right to decide victory on their terms. This is Kallas’s line of thinking, and it is firmly my own. Under the section of her essay cleverly titled “Freedom isn’t Free,” she says,
“…to win, Ukraine needs our support—military, political, moral, and financial. Ukrainian victory means a Russian withdrawal from Ukraine. It means an independent, democratic, and whole Ukraine that is free to choose its foreign policy and alliances. Ukrainian victory also means full accountability for war criminals, including those responsible for the crime of aggression committed against Ukraine. And it means that the aggressor will pay for everything it destroyed. To that end, the UN General Assembly passed a landmark resolution in November stating that Russia must be held accountable for its aggression against Ukraine and recommending the creation of a registry of damages. The resolution also recognized the need for Russia to make reparations for injuries caused by its violations of international law. Only this kind of Ukrainian victory can guarantee of peace and security for countries around the world.”
Estonia’s Tax Collection is Better Than Ours
I couldn’t agree more. And the Estonian prime minister is not only Europe’s biggest Russia hawk, but she presides over a highly efficient tax system, praised by the Tax Foundation, as noted in an article I stumbled on recently in National Review, “Tax like the Estonians,”
“It’s one of the easiest countries in the world in which to do business, and it is home to many start-ups and unicorns(new firms with valuations over $1 billion). It ranks highly on economic-freedom indices given its low debt burden and efficient regulation,” Dominic Pino says.
“Estonia has a flat, 20 percent income tax on both individuals and corporations. The tax on corporations, however, is not levied when the income is made, as it is in the U.S., but rather when it is distributed. That means that a business pays the tax when it issues dividends or buys back shares. Recipients of dividends are not taxed on that income, to avoid double taxation. This system improves economic incentives by not punishing profits as such, and it avoids all the deductions and complications that come with calculating corporate net income in the U.S. system.”
A Beacon of Neoliberalism
And ideologically on issues of foreign and domestic policy on the whole, there is no one in Europe who better than Kallas embodies our neoliberal dual ideals of: fiscal restraint and minority rights. As historian Robert English described it in an interview in the Washington Post,
“She’s economically conservative, very pro-free market, but she’s very socially liberal, young and dynamic.”
He said, “She’s staunchly pro-European and anti-Putin.”
Kallas has expressed support for LGBT rights and renewable energy, and as I read in the Economist a couple weeks ago, she has welcomed the largest number of Ukrainean refugees as a share of her country’s population, compared to any European country. 5%
Thankfully because Estonians value their national security more than superficial appeals to their identity, Kallas won a landslide reelection victory against her nationalist challenger in Estonia’s parliamentary election the other week. She has earned the nickname Europe’s, “iron lady.” The New York Times has listed her as the possible next chief of NATO.
Eastern Europe is quite a bit safer with Kaja Kallas in power, and our overly cautious leaders in the west, Biden, Macron, Scholz should take the lead from her. Ramping up defense spending and weapons deliveries to Ukraine, we should also be outspoken in our advocacy for Ukraine to decide their own destiny however the hell they wish.
—Jay