The war in Ukraine, from the Biden-Blinken perspective, is necessary for two or three reasons of a dubious moral character. One is that funding the government of Ukraine slows or halts ‘Russian aggression’. The second pretext for funding the war is that to not do so would set a precedent of not resisting aggression. Plainly the first two pretexts reinforce one another.
The third reason is that Russia is trying to restore the former Soviet Union territorially. Yet it was the former Soviet Union that occupied the former Russian territory. When the Soviet Union’s leadership collapsed it was quite natural that the Russian Federation would assert its right to restore its territory including Ukraine when strong enough.
A ancillary reason for funding a war in Ukraine is Polish paranoia and fear of Russia. Apparently they perceived the effort of Russia to recover its lost land taken by the Soviet Union as trying to restore the Soviet Union. Poland had a Warsaw pact puppet communist government following the end of the second world war when Soviet Armies occupied nations captured by German Nazis. Reasonably the Soviets were slow to vacate those nations and restore capitalist regimes. Communists were after all communists and apathetically oriented toward capitalism or even national socialism that fueled the Nazi war machine.
It good time, about a half century, the Soviet government withdrew its forces stationed I Eastern European nations coinciding with the end of the Cold War. I had just completed a course in Chemical war defense when the Soviet Union withdrew its forces from East Germany. The movie ‘Total Recall’ was released about that time. It was an era of uncertainty and hope. President Reagan was way ahead of the curve of peaceful change at the time. Some politicians never did catch that wave, such as Bill Clinton and Joe Biden.
One historian wrote in a text book on Russia circa 2000 that the Russian Federation had been given a bloody stump by the amputation of Russia into several nations at the end of the Cold War v 1.0 and that how the west addressed the problem was problematic. The legal firm of Clinton, Biden, Blinken and Obama decided the only acceptable way was to accept Vladimir Lenin’s internal divisions of Russia into administrative entities and apply those districts, rather than that of nations, to the post-Soviet states. Ukraine had never been an independent nation before the west decreed it so, while the Russian Federation was just recovering from being water boarded and drowned by communists for 70 years.
Russia recovered its Crimean land during the Obama administration and began its recovery of Eastern Ukraine following the election of Joe Biden. President Putin was too aware of the Biden, Blinken, Obama, Clinton lawyer’s approach to and attitude about the independence of Ukraine. It was less unbiased that the Supreme Court of the United States was in decided making the Dred Scott decision.
A neutral, unbiased court did not exist in the west for Russian to seek compensation in for the theft of Ukraine from Russia. In fact the west played on fears of the former Soviet Union returning that would seek to conquer eastern Europe that were completely false. As I mentioned earlier Russia only sought to recover lost regions of Russia and that definitely did not include formerly independent Eastern European nations. Russian leadership was not crazy though that of the west may have unbalanced an irrationally exuberant in its global expansion economically at the end of the Cold War 1.0. Perhaps Polish leadership and that of England sought to use U.S. military power as a lever for traditional European expansion into Russia. Ukraine plainly was a paradigm for European colonialism in an era when colonialism was dead. Anisotropic military power permitted carpet-bagging hegemony when the west took poisoned pawn Ukraine en passant in 1994.
Decades ago I read a good little philosophy collection edited by JJC Smart on Utilitarianism. I seem to recall a point-counterpoint dialogue between Smart and Williams in the work with Smart advocating for utilitarianism and Williams arguing for particular moral decisions instead of those based on formulas (such as the greatest good for the greatest number of people). Williams’ approach is relevant in the case of the Ukraine conflict when the Biden administration have used logical paradigms to advocate for the necessity of funding weapons for the war. Nothing is said by the administration about particular profits and investments gained by funding the conflict and splattering hundreds of thousands of human beings instead of seeking a fair, negotiated peace settlement dividing Ukraine between the principal belligerents (not including the U.S.A.), instead statements are made that a precedent would be set for not fighting against aggressions and aggressors.
There are a pair of problems with that logic. One is that there aren’t valid legal precedents for war between nations although victors and more powerful alliances may put losers and sometimes (rarely) others on trial. Instead of the phrase ‘history is written by the victors’ that is generally valid only in a totalitarian society, a more accurate cliché would be ‘war crimes trials are held by the victors’.
The other problem with the logic is that rather than legal precedents or abstract moral rules being applied to real politics and issues such as the moral right to engage in war, pragmatism and particulars rather than formulas determine the decision of a powerful nation such as the United States of America to commence or support war. Regardless of what sort of conclusion that present Ukraine war takes, the decisions by future Presidents of the united States to engage in foreign wars or to fund foreign wars will be made with particular reasons and circumstances informing the decisions rather than solely abstract philosophical and moral principles. At any rate it would be challenging to say that American leaders have always gone to war or fund foreign wars for reasons concerning abstract moral and logical circumstances. The choice to not intervene in the Rwandan genocide was made more for logistical reasons rather than those of local utilitarian values.
If there is an abstract moral consideration that ought to take priority over particular circumstances it should be the value of human life. In diplomacy one should understand that people will sacrifice their lives sometimes to put their nation back together or to have freedom from oppression. Neutral third parties with power to arbitrate should seek to create lasting peaceful and fair relations between belligerent nations rather than to throw in whole hog for one side most useful to the third party arbitrator.
Sartre writing in Being and Nothingess touched upon the subject of colonialism and colonialist attitudes and language use (addressed more fully in a later tome The Critique of Dialectical Reason). Language too, as well as signs and other semiotic symbols may become ossified. Ossified praxis in the proprietary vocabulary of colonialist dehumanizes its victims. Even history may be warped and bent to serve colonial interests. ‘News’ reported on events and political rationale emphasizes the viewpoint of colonists. The Biden administration’s failure to comprehend the Russian point of view on its historical claim to Ukraine is a typical-even an archetypal example of the ignorance and bias in language implicit structurally with adverse colonialism displacing natives. The phenomenon is so 20th century (Sartre developed his description perhaps considering French colonial missions and wars in Indochina and Algeria) and harmful to American global interests economically and as human beings trustworthy to other human beings.
Creating peace directly and fairly with optimal economic operations for all is requisite in this era of declining ecosphere health that is a consequence of human economic practices based on natural resource exploitation (of non sustainable resources). While humans fight one another the environment continues decay. Oceans are warming, oxygen in oceans decreasing and acidification rising, not to mention excess atmospheric heating, biospheric habitat loss of mass species extinction.
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