Useful idiots

Here’s a brain teaser for you: When was the last time Russia was invaded by those awful people to the West of them in Europe. You know. The ones who are “encircling” them?

Hint: 1941, when Hitler double-crossed Stalin and staged Operation Barbarossa. And of course, there was Napoleon.

Now. When was the last time Russia invaded one of those countries? Answer: When they invaded Ukraine in 2022, as they had previously in 2014. And then there was Georgia in 2008. And Czechoslovakia in 1968, Hungary in 1956, Estonia in 1941, Finland in 1939, and Latvia in 1944. And they never really left the satellite countries they invaded in World War II until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Tucker Carlson wants to know how we would react if one of our neighbors- say, Mexico- was a hostile power. Interesting; I always thought the Trumpenvolk thought that Mexico was our enemy! Well, two things. First, Ukraine is “hostile” to Russia only inasmuch as Russia would kind of like to gobble it up, and Ukraine is reluctant to be gobbled. And secondly, as Mona Charon pointed out yesterday, whatever would do in that situation, we wouldn’t be massing troops on the Rio Grande preparing to stage a pre-emptive invasion!

Yeah, I know. We kind of did that a long time ago, and Mexico was no more hostile to us than Ukraine is hostile to Russia today. But that was before the Civil War, in which the people who were hungriest to grab Mexican land with which to carve out new slave states lost.

William Buckley pointed out many years ago that it won’t do to draw a false analogy between America’s sphere of influence and Russia’s. A man who pushes an old lady in front of a bus and a man who pushes her away from the bus and to safety are both pushing an old lady around, but their behavior is not morally equivalent. The events in Eastern Europe are not the playing out of some Russian equivalent of the Monroe Doctrine. Not all “spheres of influence” are morally or legally equal. Attempting to dominate one’s neighbor through military intimidation and coercion in direct violation of international law is simply not the same thing as guaranteeing the independence of one’s neighbor against somebody else doing so by the threat or use of military power. The argument that the United States is being hypocritical by maintaining its own sphere of influence while denying Russia’s right to do the same is about as disingenuous as you can get.

Yes, there have been times- the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the CIA-engineered coup against the Marxist but democratically elected Allende government in Chile come to mind- when the United States has acted just as Russia is acting now. But those incidents simply do not justify Russia in doing the same thing, nor do they destroy the distinction between protecting one’s neighbors from outside aggression and committing aggression against them ourselves!

Russia has a history of being an expansionist power. And it has just as long a history of being paranoid about “encirclement” from the West- although how it’s possible to be “encircled” on only one side is hard to see. Vladimir Putin doesn’t really expect NATO to invade Russia, and besides, Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO. At least not yet. But he does want to dominate Europe. That means weakening the EU and especially NATO as much as possible. Donald Trump did a great deal of the work for him when he scoffed at NATO’s significance, lied about the degree to which our NATO allies were contributing to the alliance, and generally undermined our alliances in Europe as well as in the rest of the world. The Nord Stream pipeline drove a further wedge in NATO and Germany seems more concerned with oil than with European security.

This past week I read a letter to some editor or other by a guy who wanted to know why we should care about Ukraine. Well, here’s the thing: if Putin can manage to divide NATO when it comes to the invasion of Ukraine, it won’t simply be a matter of a precedent being set for strong countries to invade and bully smaller ones and get away with it. It won’t simply be a matter of it becoming clear that bad guys can get away with that kind of stuff with impunity and that no effective mechanism exists for getting in the way. It won’t simply be a matter of our hand in Asia being weakened by further evidence that the United States has become an isolationist paper tiger that will let anybody get away with anything and will simply cave in if pushed. It won’t simply be a matter of our economic and geopolitical interests all over the world- and especially in Europe, where the countries with which we have our closest cultural and economic ties are located- being threatened. The mechanisms by which world peace has been maintained, more or less, ever since the end of World War II will be to all intents and purposes destroyed.

This isn’t the Eighteenth Century anymore. However the unrealistic among us might want to decry “globalism,” we are a part of a global economy in a world which jet planes and ICBMS have made uncomfortably small. The nations of the world- including ours- depend on each other, and what happens in one part of the world affects everyone, and not only the people in that particular region. The day is long, long past when the United States can depend upon the oceans on either coast which seperate us from the Old World to protect us from what happens on their opposite shores. World War II was caused to no small extent by the blindness created by the very kind of isolationism and false security which characterizes both political parties and most of the American people right now. If Russia dominates Europe politically and economically, or if China not only dominates Asia but replaces us as the strongest political, military, and economic power on the planet the consequences for the United States and everybody who lives in it will be catastrophic.

Putin and his pipeline have driven a wedge into the NATO alliance, and Ukraine invasion #3 will doubtless weaken the alliance further. Our precipitate bugouts from Iraq and especially Afghanistan (where we had suffered a grand total of 212 combat casualties since 2014) have strengthened the impression around the world that the United States lacks the will to follow through on its commitments; Putin would love nothing more than to cause our allies to waver in their commitment to NATO. Germany is already waffling. The next step: an invasion of one of the NATO member states in the Baltic, also former Soviet satellites.

Ukraine is not at present a member of NATO, and Russia is determined that it should not be. We are not formally obligated to come to the defense of Ukraine, and that’s a good thing, because given the state of our military deployment in Europe (and NATO’s) there isn’t a thing we could do to stop Putin from doing whatever he wants in Ukraine. But an invasion of, say, Estonia would be a different matter. The heart of the NATO alliance is Article Five of the NATO treaty, which obligates all member states to come to the aid of any other member state that is attacked. Estonia is a member of NATO. If Russia invaded Estonia or another NATO member state, and NATO didn’t respond with military force, NATO would effectively cease to exist and Putin would have a free hand in Europe. If some of the members of NATO balked at fulfilling their obligation to Estonia under the treaty, the alliance would be seriously and perhaps fatally wounded.

Donald Trump’s undermining of the alliance and his alienation of the other members of NATO, combined with the growing impression around the world that the United States does not honor its commitments to its allies, has caused members of the European Union to increasingly move in the direction of making their own arrangements for the defense of the continent on the assumption that America simply cannot be relied upon. Doubtless the isolationists who make up such a large proportion of the American electorate would see that as a good thing, laboring as they do under the delusion that Russian expansion would be anything but economically and strategically disastrous for the United States, not only in the area of trade and military relations with the nations of Europe but around the world. China is watching what happens in Ukraine with great interest. So is Taiwan. After all, yet another example of America’s lack of resolution would go a long way toward encouraging Bejing to move against its democratic former province which it longs to bring back into the fold.

There is no doubt that the United States has engaged in some foolish military adventures in past decades. We failed to see the folly of taking over for the French in Vietnam. The second Gulf War was an unmitigated blunder; it was widely foreseen that whatever one might say about Saddam Hussein, his removal would plunge Iraq into chaos. Ironically, Afghanistan- a war we engaged in because the Taliban was sheltering Osama bin Laden and al Quaeda- was one of the least costly wars in our history; we sustained slightly more than two thousand casualties in the twenty years we fought there. Now that the Taliban is back in control, al Quaeda, ISIS, and other Islamic terrorist organizations will once again have an unchallenged and essentially invulnerable base of training and operations. Even so, a case of sorts can be made that we should have been satisfied with deposing the Taliban and driving al Quaeda out of the country (though it’s hard to see what would have been gained by accomplishing that and then allowing them to regain power once we left). The alternative would have been the very permanent garrison in Afghanistan, playing mostly a support role, that both of our last two presidents and apparently the American people thought was too high a price to pay despite the lack of casualties.

Clearly, there was never going to be a democratic Afghanistan, any more than there could have been a democratic Iraq or a democratic Vietnam. Nation-building and the notion that it’s possible to establish democracies in countries with no tradition of democracy has been thoroughly discredited. There are plenty of lessons to be learned from the blunders of the past several decades. But we seem to have learned the wrong lessons. And in the process, we seem to have forgotten the lesson that we should have had etched in our memories for all time by the most disastrous war in modern history.

Instead of learning discrimination and discernment in our use of military power, and its intelligent and careful use to achieve specific, well-defined, achievable and limited objectives, our mistakes seem to have taught us not to use it at all, and to repeat the blunder of withdrawing into Fortress America and sticking our heads in the sand, somehow assuming that what happens on the other side of the world doesn’t affect us. That’s a conclusion which no thoughtful, intelligent person can take seriously in the Twenty-First Century. As the World Wars should have taught us, it wasn’t even a viable proposition in the Twentieth. The world has grown too small, and its nations too interdependent. And there is no going back.

Vladimir Lenin used to talk about the “useful idiots” in the West, who helped advance Russia’s agenda through their naivette and gullibility. Such people helped pave the way for Adolf Hitler in the years leading up to the Second World War. The isolationists of that period even used some of the same slogans we hear today. “America First” was the battle-cry of Hitler’s enablers before it was adopted by the enablers of Vladimir Putin.

The actions of Putin and Xi and the other bad actors in today’s world affect us even more directly in today’s interdependent world than did those of their predecessors in the 1930’s. This is a dangerous world we live in. Forces are on the move which we cannot allow to work their will unopposed. At this point there is little that we can do to deter Putin. He will almost certainly invade Ukraine, and impose a government friendly to Moscow and hostile to the United States and NATO. The divisions in NATO will be exposed, and draw us closer to the day when a move against the Baltic states by Russia will bring about an Article Five crisis which likely will achieve Putin’s goal of effectively destroying the alliance and putting Russia into a position it was unable to achieve throughout the Cold War: effectively becoming the preeminent power in Europe. And only a fool can believe that we will not pay a heavy economic, political, and strategic price for letting it happen, not only in Europe but throughout the world.

We are about to find out that economic sanctions such as President Biden threatens will not be enough to deter Putin. And neither the nations of Europe nor the American people seem to have the stomach for the military buildup and the resolute use of hard power which alone can stave of a hard lesson in why what happens on the other side of the world does affect us and is absolutely our business.

Hopefully, this time we won’t learn that lesson through another world war. We need to revitalize both our commitment to NATO and the alliance itself. We need to vastly increase our military presence in the region and thus our ability to speak to Putin in the only language he understands. However unpopular the axiom, “If you would have peace, prepare for war” might be, history leaves no doubt as to its wisdom. The only way to deter Putin from staging another invasion that actually would trigger Article Five of the NATO treaty and bring about World War III is to make it as clear as we can that it would be a bad idea. And the only way to do that is to present him with a situation in which the cost of invading his neighbors is high enough that he will decline to pay it.

Liberty and anarchy are two very different things

During the Carter administration, a peace demonstrator at the White House carried a sign which read, “Nothing Is Worth Dying For.”

Unlike most signs carried at protests and demonstrations, that one drew a great deal of attention. Someone pointed out that if nothing is worth dying for, then neither is anything worth living for. I would guess that the young man who carried that sign hadn’t thought his slogan through that far. People who are caught up in movements often don’t.

Being a history buff, I’ve long been aware of the White Rose, a group of idealistic German students who opposed the Nazi regime. Hans and Sophie Scholl are the best-known of the many members of the group who paid for their courage with their lives. The Scholl siblings were guillotined for passing out anti-Hitler leaflets at the Ludwig Maximillian University in Munich.

The leaflets were slapdash, typewritten, and mimeographed affairs, and it’s easy to see them as naive and futile gestures. It’s hard to see what practical effect they could possibly have had. But practicality was beside the point. They said things that needed to be said:

Isn’t it true that every honest German is ashamed of his government these days? Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes—crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure—reach the light of day?

and

Since the conquest of Poland, 300,000 Jews have been murdered in this country in the most bestial way … The German people slumber on in dull, stupid sleep and encourage the fascist criminals. Each wants to be exonerated of guilt, each one continues on his way with the most placid, calm conscience. But he cannot be exonerated; he is guilty, guilty, guilty!

The White Rose bore witness. Like the “Tank Man” of Tiananmen Square, its members stood in the way of totalitarian terror and shouted, “Stop!” Many of its members paid with their lives. They considered what they had to say worth dying for. And bearing witness against the Nazi nightmare gave their lives meaning, as well as their deaths. Few of us will lead lives as worth the living as Hans and Sophie Scholl.

Just today, I became aware of another youthful resistance group in Nazi Germany with a floral name. It was far more practically oriented and far larger. Many of its members, too, paid for their defiance of the regime with their lives. Its members, too, said “no!” to coercion and terror. But without denigrating the individual sacrifices of the Edelweißpiraten (“Edelweiss Pirates”), their agenda wasn’t quite as lofty.

The Edelweißpiraten weren’t protesting the Holocaust or the other crimes of the German government. They simply were opposed to compulsion in principle. They didn’t like being told what to do. Again, without diminishing the courage of its individual members, some of whom were just as nobly motivated as the members of the White Rose, the program of the Edelweiss Pirates as a group boiled down to words which needn’t be chiseled into granite on any monument: “You can’t make me!” Some had no particular political or moral agenda at all. They simply didn’t want to be told what to do.

Sometimes a thin line can separate principle and childishness. None of us likes to be told what to do. But the grownups among us not only are willing to be told what to do in certain areas but insist on it. Any thoughtful adult realizes that rules are necessary for any group to function in a peaceful and constructive way and that without laws that restrict individual liberty, civilization itself would be impossible.

“You can’t make me!” might almost be America’s national slogan. ” Liberty!” was the battle-cry of the American Revolution, and when Baron von Steuben came here from Prussia to train George Washington’s army, he nearly despaired. How can an effective army ever be built, he wondered, when the soldiers who comprised it refused to follow an order unless the reason for it was explained first, and they agreed with it?

But follow orders they did- and disobedience was duly punished. Although the first Continental soldier to be condemned for cowardice and desertion, Ebeneezer Leffingwell, received an eleventh-hour pardon from Washington because of his “previous good character,” the general warned that those who emulated Leffingwell in the future would be shot. And they were.

Washington did not hesitate to order the compulsory vaccination of his soldiers against smallpox, a precedent that seems to be lost on a great many contemporary Americans, including certain Republican governors. And the Supreme Court has consistently ruled that compulsory lockdowns and quarantines as public health measures lie well within the constitutional authority of states under the Tenth Amendment. In fact, the principle is so well established in American law- and has been, since the earliest days of the Republic- that it’s difficult to take the odd claim that quarantines and lockdowns and vaccine mandates violate individual rights seriously. Such objections are really more on the order of a childish, petulant “You can’t make me!”

The idea that there is somehow a constitutional right to endanger the health of others- and thus their rights- by refusing both vaccination and reasonable restrictions on their movements and activities if they decline to be vaccinated would be a hard one to defend from the writings of the Founders or the history of American constitutional law. Far from being somehow a violation of the principles of liberty, “vaccine passports” are not only reasonable, at least in principle, but well established in legal precedent as constitutionally legitimate tools in times of pandemic. In fact, in 1824, John Marshall, the fourth Chief Justice of the United States, made the parenthetical observation in Gibbons vs. Ogden, a case involving maritime rights, that quarantine laws “form a portion of that immense mass of legislation which embraces everything within the territory of a state not surrendered to the general government.” If, for religious or other reasons, an individual declines vaccination, fine. But in such a case it falls well within the authority of the state to quarantine that person for the sake of the public good, a point which the Supreme Court has acknowledged ever since the days of John Marshall!

Why are we even debating this?

Are mandates and lockdowns and quarantines necessary? Are they prudent? Nobody argues that unnecessary restrictions on the bodily autonomy or movements of American citizens are legitimate or desirable. But whether they are necessary or prudent in any specific case is a medical question rather than a legal one, to be answered by epidemiologists rather than by lawyers, judges, and politicians. And despite the ongoing attempt by COVID-minimizers to exaggerate the very small number of medical professionals who dissent from it, and often their credentials, the consensus of the medical experts is firmly on the side of their use, at least in general principle, and has been ever since the pandemic began.

Granted, it’s inevitable that a society that places as much emphasis on individual liberty as ours, there should be a perennial debate about its limits. Tom Paine railed against taxation, for example. Even Chief Justice Marshall wrote that “The power to tax is the power to destroy.” But the courts have consistently upheld the power of taxation, despite the healthy suspicion of its use by conservatives ever since the foundation of the Republic. The reason is obvious. George Washington put it well: “It is essential that you should practically bear in mind that towards the payment of debts there must be revenue; that to have revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant.” James Madison, the author of the Constitution, wrote, “The power of taxing people and their property is essential to the very existence of government.”

But perhaps the most relevant quotation of all comes from Benjamin Franklin: “Friends and neighbors complain that taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might the more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us.  We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly.”

One of the “taxes” we have paid in this pandemic has been laid upon us by folly, levied through our slowness to embrace and implement sensible and reasonable public health measures in the face of what is now the deadliest pandemic in the nation’s history. We have paid it in the lives of friends, neighbors, and relatives, at the present moment about 837,000 of them. The number of deaths we suffered in the Civil War is not precisely documented, but it seems to have been somewhere around 750,000. During this pandemic, America has matched and exceeded the butcher’s bill for the deadliest war we’ve ever fought, and in half the time. Yet amazingly, there are those who continue to minimize the pandemic and resist common-sense measures whose constitutionality is established beyond any reasonable doubt on the ground that they violate “individual liberty!”

There is a difference between a prudent suspicion of heavy-handed government (and there can be no doubt that in some cases the government has been heavy-handed in its handling of this pandemic) and what the British call “bloody-mindedness.” There is a difference between a proper concern for the preservation of our legitimate rights and the selfish, unreasonable assertion of the “right” to compromise the rights of others.

Those who strive to preserve individual freedom against arbitrary and unnecessary government restrictions are worthy of praise. But it seems to me that modern libertarianism- and conservatism generally- more and more frequently mistake principled resistance to tyranny with a petulant, childish whine of “You can’t make me!.” Sometimes, as was the case with the White Rose and the Edelweiss Pirates, people and movements find themselves fighting the good fight side by side. But that doesn’t mean that their motivations are identical, equally thoughtful, or equally valid. To be an extremist and a selfish jerk is not the same thing as being a freedom fighter!

A liberal society (in the broad, Enlightenment sense of the term “liberal”) seeks to strike the optimum balance between protecting individual rights from being violated by an overbearing government, and from being violated by other individuals. Achieving that balance requires a clear understanding that, as someone once said, “You have every right in the world to swing your fist- but only until it comes into contact with my nose.”

And to refuse to be vaccinated without taking measures to avoid exposing others to a virus one may be carrying without even knowing it is to make firm contact with the nose of others. Not only is it to risk being a personal vector of infection, but it also means keeping us further from reaching herd immunity and giving the virus further opportunity to spread and evolve. True, the Omicron variant seems to be less deadly than previous iterations of the virus, but it’s also far more contagious and seems to have made some progress toward making our vaccines less effective.

Contrary to what many of us seem to think, “I don’t wanna, and you can’t make me” isn’t really the same thing as “Give me liberty or give me death!” License and liberty are entirely different animals. Speaking theologically, human government is fallen, potentially dangerous, and worthy of suspicion not because it’s government, but because it’s human.

But individuals are also potentially dangerous, and also worthy of suspicion because they, too, are human, and therefore fallen. My political faith tells me that the Constitution has invested in the individual the authority to serve as a check on the fallen, human government. But my religious faith, on the basis of Romans 13, tells me that in His wisdom God has instituted the government as a check on the fallen, human, individual.

To lose the proper balance between the two is to risk either tyranny on one hand, or anarchy on the other. And human rights evaporate just as quickly under the one as under the other.

ADDENDUM: The Supreme Court has struck down President Biden’s requirement that employees of large businesses either be vaccinated or undergo weekly testing by a vote of 6-3. It did uphold the mandate for healthcare workers by a worrisome margin of only 5-4.

Given the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, I’m not surprised. But I guess it just goes to show that conservative justices are just as liable as liberal ones to allow controversial political debates to cloud their reading of the Constitution.

ADDENDUM II: Or not. The Court did uphold the mandate for healthcare workers, and the Tenth Amendment argument is predicated on the authority to quarantine and to utilize other restrictive measures in times of pandemic being vested in the states and not in the Federal government.

A very strong case can be made that the United States led the world in COVID deaths during too long a period (a nation with four percent of the world’s population- the most scientifically advanced nation in the world- for quite a while had 20% of the world’s COVID deaths) because while every other industrialized democracy on Earth was undertaking a coordinated nationwide effort to control the pandemic, we had a president who claimed that the virus was no worse than the flu, would mysteriously vanish overnight, and to the extent that it was worth addressing at all was an issue for the states alone. In the process, Mr. Trump ignored the obvious Federal role in coordinating the efforts of the individual states, even to the point of mismanaging the allocation of equipment and supplies under Federal control, arguing that it wasn’t the Federal government’s problem. The degree to which a worldwide (and therefore nationwide) pandemic demands a greater role for the Federal government is a matter worth debating, even to the point of asking whether the Federal government’s mandate in the Preamble to the Constitution to “promote the general welfare” might not in extraordinary circumstances modify the Tenth Amendment’s reservation of such powers to the states. But thinking the matter through, I have to admit that the Court’s ruling in the matter of the Biden mandate for the employees of large companies is in accord with precedent after all.

I would argue that the mandate itself was a matter of common sense. But a strong case can be made that under the Tenth Amendment, it’s something the states rather than the Federal government should address.

Again, we face the troublesome difficulty presented by our living in a smaller world in the Twenty-First Century than the one in which the Constitution was written, in which commerce is global and the automobile and the jet plane have replaced the horse and carriage and the wind-powered ship. Worldwide pandemics weren’t the threat in 1789 that they are today; even viruses had a harder time traveling back then. What once were national problems are now global ones, and what were once local and state problems now have national and even worldwide implications. As an adherent of Antonin Scalia’s “dead Constitution” philosophy, which sees the Court’s role as interpreting the words of the Constitution as written rather than adapting them to a changing world, I actually have a certain amount of theoretical sympathy for what apparently was the Court’s reasoning.

Maybe amendment is the answer. Maybe the Federal government needs explicit constitutional authority to deal with matters which in the modern world are as national as they are local, if not more so. But I have to think that the extraordinary situation posed by COVID justifies the view that “promoting the general welfare” in a nationwide epidemiological crisis implies Federal authority under the Constitution to act even in a realm that historically has been seen as the purview of the states.