Domestic but Mainly Foreign Policy Meditations, on the Fourth of July
Why Your Freedoms Require Active Defense
In his Wall Street Journal op-ed this weekend, “Happy birthday America,” Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky defiantly praises the American experiment while eloquently comparing the war in Ukraine to the American Revolution, in which the thirteen colonies gradually, over many years, were inspired finally to take up arms in defense of their self-declared independence against the coercive encroachment of the British empire. Zelensky says,
a decade ago the current boss of Russia wrote that “America is not exceptional.” What he did later shows what he really meant. Many tyrants in human history have claimed global influence, but none of them could inspire the rest of the world to strive for the best in human nature. That’s why today’s Russian tyrants, like all tyrants are fundamentally weak and their regime will crumble over time. When any tyrant hates America and denies its exceptional role in the struggle for freedom, he recognizes his own inevitable defeat. To Russian tyranny, I say the world needs more not less American exceptionalism.”
He is right, and to all the right wing populist firebrands who flatter themselves they’re so smart on their podcasts to distrust the status quo’s support for Ukraine—thinly arguing the war is really a territorial dispute owing to NATO’s enlargement, and not a compelling US priority, so it’s none of our business, because it’s actually our fault—one might contend: if Britain were to say America was not a real country, because it was once under British dominion, and both countries spoke English, so by that logic, would it permit a British invasion of America?
There’s a guy at work who subscribes to the Nato enlargement theory, with whom I’ve been arguing, who also he tells me, doesn’t trust anything the media or the government says. Sometimes I find the theories of these armchair philosophers can best be refuted with commonsense, a pragmatic appraisal of the current situation.
Without condescending to debate whether NATO provoked Putin, or to debate to what extent Europe should pull more of its own weight, and if you can’t see through how certain news outlets portray it, that a bloodthirsty dictator invaded a sovereign country, murdering civilians, raping teenage girls, and deporting children, and if you don’t see why America should spend a tiny fraction of GDP to secure Europe from this savagery, to me there’s no better argument than your own eyes to make the case for arming Ukraine.
My coworker also says that by prolonging the conflict we’re getting Ukrainians killed, as if Vladimir Putin weren’t the one bombing apartments and hospitals; and my friend’s sympathy for the Ukrainian people here clashes with his NATO theory supporting the convenient belief that it’s none of our business. Oh… So you agree it’s fucking horrible that Putin is committing genocide? And this is all because of NATO? Come on.
And I would argue, if the war in Ukraine is a territorial dispute, then was the Revolutionary War or the War of 1812 reducible to a territorial dispute?— My friend began debating with me saying, “You know Putin has a point about Ukraine…”
According to this obscene perversion of logic, would Britain have a “point” then that America is a part of Britain today, rather than an independent country?
Fiona Hill and Angela Stent write in their 2022 Foreign Affairs article, “The World Putin Wants,”
He {Putin} likened himself to Peter the Great, who waged “the Great Northern War” for 21 years against Sweden—“returning and reinforcing” control over land that was part of Russia. This explanation also echoes what Putin told U.S. President George Bush at the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest: “Ukraine is not a real country.”
The United States was, of course, once a colony of Great Britain. So were Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, and numerous other states that have been independent and sovereign for decades. That does not make them British or give the United Kingdom a contemporary claim to exert control over their destinies, even though many of these countries have English as their first or second language. Yet Putin insists that Ukraine’s Russian speakers are all Moscow’s subjects and that, globally, all Russian speakers are part of the “Russian world,” with special ties to the motherland."
To read his op-ed in the Journal, I thought— Who better than the man leading Ukraine’s fight against a fascist Russia than Zelensky, to re-state the fundamental values supposed to be at the heart of American national identity—in the context of Putin’s war. And amid these times of pathetic theoretical, hyperintellectual self-laceration, the president of Ukraine whenever I hear him, sometimes I’m struck that he knows the American character better than Americans know themselves.
In each of the half dozen posts I made about the War in Ukraine so far, I hope I have been no less than emphatic that Ukraine’s war is our—indeed an American—war, in the sense not just that they are defending our interests against Russia, but that Ukraine is fighting for American values. And I think the populist reflex from support is perhaps the most dreadful measure of how profoundly far a sizable contingent of the nation has drifted from its founding values. Indeed Rebecca Burgess acknowledges the Declaration of Independence is a “foreign policy statement.” In her Law and Liberty article, “To Make a People in the Eyes of the World,” she writes,
The Declaration is the public rationale that the Continental Congress issued to the world, explaining “with a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” why it had voted on July 2nd, 1776, to break from Great Britain. Thus, while the Declaration is indeed a statement of the governing principles by which our break from Whitehall and our future government was to be judged, it is also a foreign policy statement. By drawing the proverbial line in the sand that any government’s failure to take account of the truth that “all men are created equal” and that a failure by government to secure men’s individual rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” gives a people justifiable grounds for “abolishing” its allegiance and ties to that government, the Declaration’s promoters were putting the world on notice that its revolutionary principles extended far beyond the sliver of the North American continent they inhabited. Even the monarchies and despotisms that then ruled the vast majority of the rest of mankind recognized the revolutionary moment for the rest of the world in this one government, for the first time in history, coming into being, whose legitimacy explicitly rested on the claims of human nature and not on common blood, soil, language, religion, or ancient tradition.
The contemporary global crisis of self-esteem furthermore has precipitated a deep crisis of self-confidence. This makes Westerners unprepared for the challenges of the future they seem pathologically unwilling to face, with particular consequence for America. For America is supposed to be a confident country. Indeed the idea of a free nation is the most confident political idea ever conceived in history. As Margaret Thatcher said, “America is not a country, it is a philosophy.”
Nevertheless though we are a nation of immigrants, originally founded by refugees seeking freedom, over the last couple decades we have sought increasingly to limit immigration with quotas and caps, effectively killing what has long been a major source of our economic dynamism and cultural flourishing. We have gone from defending and advocating for women’s rights and liberties to erasing women’s protected status with transgender activism, coercively pressuring women to share bathrooms, locker-rooms, sororities, and prisons, and to compete athletically with men.
We used to understand that the first goal of self-government was to defend the weak from the strong. But now thanks to progressive lawmakers, DA’s and prosecutors, violent criminals are increasingly defended at the expense of their weak victims. The ethical value of free speech, enshrined in the first amendment, was never a subject of contention until recently. Now we think it’s permissible to cancel and ban speech that hurts or triggers people’s narcissism, and police the internet for disinformation. Both Democratic and Republican parties want to ban Tik Tok and regulate social media, fundamentally because they think the internet is corrupting the youth. On one level we’re mixing the first amendment up with the far flung national security concern that Tik Tok could be used to spy on us and make young people communists, as if Gen Z weren’t socialists anyway. On another level dystopianly, we’re sacrificing our free expression for the serenity of our “mental health.”
David Samuels writes in his Unherd article “The Puritan Spirit of America’s Civil War,
That a central aim of the American experiment was to create a sense among disparate peoples of belonging to a single whole has been a relatively uncontroversial statement throughout even the worst periods of the country’s history. The agreement that every citizen inherently possessed the same rights as every other citizen, however incomplete in practice, has been a powerful engine for social change, from the fight to end slavery to the campaigns for women’s rights and gay marriage. Yet while the slogan e pluribus unum— “out of many, one” — retains its place in the American currency, it is hardly embraced by most of the country’s leading social and political voices, who depict the country’s history as an unrelieved march of racism and oppression, opposed by the forces of justice.
Where the idea of an American nation or community is increasingly rejected as a remnant of a hegemonic and oppressive past, the celebration of particularity reigns. There is the mandatory replacement of the American flag by sectarian banners — the Black Lives Matter flag for Black History Month; the ever-changing LGBTQA+ symbols for Pride Month — along with elaborate ceremonies of printing new postage stamps, and rewriting history books to focus on the laudable achievements of tribal heroes. These rituals of civic replacement are eagerly embraced by both the oligarchs and the state, and celebrated by large corporations, city halls, the US Congress and US Embassies around the world. Meanwhile, the failure to participate — by, say, flying a large American banner instead — is cause for suspicion of allegiance to a bygone order that has turned rancid, like the bitter-enders down South who decorate their pick-ups with Confederate flags.
Back to foreign policy, my preferred subject.
Although we have flirted with isolationism before World War I and then again before World War II, since the second world war at least Americans finally seemed to accept their special role in the world. Now we’re wondering again whether it’s really in our interest to fight tyranny and unfreedom abroad. Since the “forever wars”— or you might say, since successfully stamping out terrorism—Americans once again are questioning whether it’s their responsibility to “act as the world’s police.” This wonderment tends to accompanied by a weird sense of guilt and shame, as if the Middle East would’ve been better off without our interventions.
We think we killed a lot of innocent civilians and lost a lot of American lives. Like Saddam Hussein didn’t kill innocent civilians. And between killing hundreds of thousands of people in the Iran-Iraq war, his invasion of Kuwait, using chemical weapons on his own Iraqi’s, and attempting genocide against the Kurdish minority, do we really think we should’ve let this guy alone to stockpile WMD’s and build nukes?
Please.
And some of us might think well we weren’t making Afghanistan any better… That’s wrong, but even if it were right, do you think Afghanistan is better off now that we left? With women and girls barred from going to school, college and work while the population starves from punishing taxes?
John Bolton mounts a defense of America’s special role against cynical self-interested isolationism in his recent National Review article, “Civilization Not Isolation.” He says,
Of course, the West’s performance has been far from perfect. While the last century’s three great wars were truly existential, not every battle in those conflicts was. In the Cold War, for example, we fought along with European and Asian allies in Korea and Vietnam. Our participation in both remains controversial, but they were fought in the context of an ongoing global struggle, and despite the cynics, they were fought based on high ideals. Those who claim that these and other cases are reflections of Western (especially American) imperialism should carefully consider what my former boss Colin Powell often said: “The only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead.”
With all this retreat, what people don’t get in America now is liberty and freedom are moral assertions for which one has to fight, as we asserted and fought for them in the American Revolution, and as we have been fighting for them ever since, and as we fight for them around the world today, not least by arming Ukraine. The way human nature elementally is, brutal and arbitrary— liberty is not given, and unless it is defended as the bold assertion it is, a “self-evident" truth, one sooner or later will cease to have liberty as a political principle. That’s a fact.
The reason I write blog posts like this is I’m worried that, in America especially, the West is failing to embody the virtues requisite to sustain liberty, without which liberty is not possible. It doesn’t exist unless we consciously undertake to command it. But behaviorally I think people are being socialized to reject liberty pathologically. People have become so anxious, conscientious and obsessed with pleasing, they are incapable of acting assertively living independently, and speaking their minds freely. People have become so lazy and cynical they are unwilling to take the risks required for scientific discovery, artistic creation, innovation, and entrepreneurship. People quote Orwell a lot these days, but I fear the Huxleyan apocalypse where we surrender our liberties just to passively experience personal pleasure, personal safety, and personal comfort.
But it’s the relentless theorizing obfuscating actual reality, that grinds my gears the most. Of course I mean the postmodern left, long obsessed with using Marxist theory to deconstruct and lay waste to the European Enlightenment, but there is also the postmodern right equally drowning in misanthropic, self-loathing intellectualism. Take Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen’s Regime Change, the latest installment in his argument that liberty is a dead end, and that free markets have made us victims of our own success, advocating a “post-liberal” order. People like him call themselves Catholic “integralists,” who actively deny the separation of church and state and delude themselves the state is warranted to build social cohesion from the bottom up. The free world’s suicide note is being drafted by characters like Deneen, in addition to Ibram X Kendi.
My debates over supporting Ukraine with my friend at work brought me back to Timothy Snyder’s Foreign Affairs essay, “Ukraine Holds the Future,” in which he magisterially underlines the threat of postmodern notions of truth to civilization, while supporting the argument that freedom is a moral assertion that necessitates active defense. For our purposes, he beautifully connects the War in Ukraine to the morality of the American Revolution. Read this slowly.
The defense of Putin’s regime has been offered by people operating as literary critics, ever disassembling and dissembling. Ukrainian resistance, embodied by President Volodymyr Zelensky, has been more like literature: careful attention to art, no doubt, but for the purpose of articulating values. If all one has is literary criticism, one accepts that everything melts into air and concedes the values that make democratic politics possible. But when one has literature, one experiences a certain solidity, a sense that embodying values is more interesting and more courageous than dismissing or mocking them.
Creation comes before critique and outlasts it; action is better than ridicule. As Pericles put it, “We rely not upon management or trickery, but upon our own hearts and hands.” The contrast between the sly black suits of the Russian ideologues and propagandists and the earnest olive tones of Ukrainian leaders and soldiers calls to mind one of the most basic requirements of democracy: individuals must openly assert values despite the risk attendant upon doing so. The ancient philosophers understood that virtues were as important as material factors to the rise and fall of regimes. The Greeks knew that democracy could yield to oligarchy, the Romans knew that republics could become empires, and both knew that such transformations were moral as well as institutional. This knowledge is at the foundation of Western literary and philosophical traditions. As Aristotle recognized, truth was both necessary to democracy and vulnerable to propaganda. Every revival of democracy, including the American one of 1776 with its self-evident truths, has depended on ethical assertions: not that democracy was bound to exist, but that it should exist, as an expression of rebellious ethical commitment against the ubiquitous gravitational forces of oligarchy and empire.
All the incentives are arraigned against it, your conscious, free execution of your free choices as an individual, doing what you want, speaking your mind, being independent and standing up for what you believe regardless of public opinion. One might with justification wonder whether living assertively, as opposed to passively and reactively, is still worth it, with the mainstreaming of woke ideas in the workplace, at home and at school and their repressive functions. However, that's exactly why if one is to be free, one must resist coercion as much as possible, within the limits of one’s abilities. In proportion to the growing scope and power of coercive authority, the case to defend one’s assertive liberty proportionally becomes more urgent. The conservative Supreme Court has been stellar in rolling back the generational constructionist bowdlerization of the constitution, but they can’t restore our founding doctrine alone.
The more you feel surrounded and alone as a result of pressure to conform with the herd—your totalitarian localizing community red or blue—the more imperative it is that you act independently and contradict the herd. Do you think the American colonists cared that the numbers weren’t on their side against the British Empire? What if Ukraine had chosen to surrender to the superiority of the Russian military lining up on their border? What if on the eve of the invasion, Zelensky had left Ukraine to save his life, as he was offered?
In more or less perfect understanding of the necessity to actively defend moral assertions, I, for example, don’t hold forth on why the Iraq War was justified, or why this trans stuff threatens women’s individual liberty everywhere I go, or every waking moment. But I don’t think I respond to social pressure, indeed I’m happy to resist, to contradict and disagree with people, as my integrity regarding my own ideas dictates. I wear a pin with the Ukrainian and American flag together, whenever I’m in public. When people ask me about it, I am gratified to discourse on the importance of resisting the most heinous regional aggressor since Saddam Hussein, defending NATO, and deterring Xi in the Asia Pacific.
I try to live as freely, independently, truthfully, honestly and bluntly as I can afford. I think that to understand how assertive gestures—such as free speech, free association, free inquiry, skepticism, a commitment to factual truth—directly connect to defending democracy goes a long way towards maintaining the relative peace conducive for freedom to flourish. That is to have peace, one has always to be psychologically prepared for war. It’s no coincidence that one may even feel the most free in a state of conflict.
With Russia, China and Iran knocking on our door, Westerners should welcome conflict. I don’t tell people I merely support “aid” to Ukraine. I tell them I support “arming” Ukraine.
— Jay