Sorry America, Ukraine isn’t all about you
As the Ukraine crisis tips further into full-scale bloodbath and civil war, we seem to be getting more clueless than we were before this crisis started. That’s a pretty low bar to measure against, and the consequences of our cluelessness about what’s driving the various sides could be catastrophic for everyone.
One of the biggest problems is that everyone who riffs on Putin and Ukraine frames their analysis through a very narrow, Americanized lens, as if the only thing on everyone’s minds out there is us, America. Either Putin is behaving evilly because he fears America’s empire of liberty and freedom; or Putin is behaving perfectly rationally because the evil American empire has bullied Putin into a corner, forcing him to annex Crimea and support pro-Russian separatists.
Other Anglo-American “experts” frame Putin’s actions as if we’re all playing a sophisticated version of Risk. In this framing either Putin is driven by some genetic need to revive old Russian imperialism, conquering lost territory because he’s been so pained all these years, like a man reaching for a missing limb; or conversely, Putin apologists say he’s legitimately securing a buffer region to protect Russian interests from American-Western encroachment.
All of these versions have truth to them, but they all share one huge blind spot: What role does domestic Russian politics play in Putin’s policies in Ukraine? For that matter, how does domestic Ukrainian politics inform interim leader Turchynov’s or Yarosh’s moves?
Every hack knows that “all politics is local” — but we rarely apply this adage to understanding the politics of the rest of the world. The reason in Russia’s case is obvious: We don’t understand that part of the world, and aren’t much interested in it either, except insofar as they provide proxy ammo to our own domestic political spats. Our best and brightest foreign policy elites never strayed far from the warped hick mindset of that Vietnam War colonel in Full Metal Jacket:
“We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out.”
It’s much easier analyzing Kremlin policy in Ukraine on the assumption that America is always on Putin’s mind in his every decision — because hell, we’re on our minds 24/7, obviously we must be on everyone else’s minds too.
