Let’s start with a bold proposition: if the American right had had the same attitude toward our foreign policy establishment back around 1963 that it has today, we might never have allowed the Vietnam War to have become a decade-long quagmire.
This is the way to understand criticisms emanating from some precincts on the right, such as Tucker Carlson, about the Ukraine crisis, which have in turn generated demagogic attacks from the left. Does Russia have a case against Ukraine or the West in general? Related question: we know that certain American elites—in both parties—have used Ukraine essentially as a money-laundering playground (Hunter Biden isn’t the only bad actor in this story). Beyond American complicity in Ukrainian corruption, the general disgust with our foreign policy elites is well founded. There isn’t the slightest perception among our foreign policy elite that Putin isn’t simply trying to restore the old Soviet Empire: he’s trying to revive the 19th century idea of Russia as the “Third Rome” set against the West and Western liberal democratic principles (emphasis on the “liberal” part of that formula). This anti-Western strain has burrowed deep into Russian thought, and almost no one in Europe or America has taken it seriously. See especially Waller Newell’s perceptive article in Tablet on this point.
And while I am tempted to embrace sending in a few squadrons of A-10 Warthogs to decimate the advancing Russian columns outside Kiev, to do so doesn’t just risk all-out war with a nuclear-armed nation, but to commit the same kind of mistakes we made in Vietnam, namely, that more and more increments of American military power can remedy the situation.
The main point here is not to conceive any possible justification for the Russian invasion of Ukraine or to suggest in any way that the conflict is “our fault,” but to begin considering the idea that the problem is much worse than simply thinking Putin’s supposed madness or megalomania is the source of the trouble. In other words, if some Russian officer put a bullet in Putin’s head today, the problem of an aggressive and anti-Western Russia would remain. This requires some much larger strategic thinking than merely whether NATO should be expanded.
Anyone heard of Alexander Dugin, who is said to be Putin’s chief ideological inspiration? One person who has is Michael Millerman, a young Canadian scholar. (Michael tentatively agreed to record a podcast with me several weeks ago on the subject of Heidegger and Dugin, but he’s gone to ground for the moment.) Here he is from way back in 2014 explaining Dugin on Canadian TV:
And if you have another spare 20 minutes, this speech earlier in the week from the UK’s David Starkey to the New Culture Forum in London is quite good:
Stay tuned for more. Additional podcasts with special guests coming later today and tomorrow.
