Category: Writings

I don’t usually write two columns at once, but these topics seem closely related enough.

In the last few days, it’s become apparent that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, currently the most senior member of SCOTUS, has a legal conflict of interest in virtually any case he might hear in the future.

It’s not that we didn’t know he had one, mind you. It’s just that now he’s trapped between two rather damning syllogisms:

1.) He knew his wife was deeply involved in an effort to invalidate the 2020 presidential election with no legal basis, and did nothing, making him both complicit to an illegal act and ethically bankrupt for not recusing himself from a directly related SCOTUS case;

2.) He did not know that his wife was deeply involved in an effort to invalidate the 2020 presidential election, and therefore he is an oblivious idiot not to be trusted with anything.

Whether 1) or 2) reflects the actual reality of the situation, I suspect, will remain mostly fodder for SCOTUS historians. Either one is bad. The first bookend of his SCOTUS career was his damning confirmation hearing; now we’re just picking out the decor of the second.

My intention here, though, is not to condemn or bury Thomas. My intention is rather to draw some attention to who is drawing attention to his dilemma. Rhetoric is an act, and art, of selection; we chose what we want to talk about, and choose what we do not talk about, for effect.

The news cycle has been dominated by Ukraine lately, and for good reason, as Vlad Putin has unwittingly managed to do something that hasn’t happened since the 90s – unify the West – and Zelensky and Ukraine have turned my go-to wear of nondescript green shirts (and among many other things, the surprising utility of the average Ukraine tractor’s torque in hauling abandoned tanks) into a statement of principled defiance. It helps, of course, if you have a shoulder-fired anti-tank missile handy when you make such statements, but when your opponent has both the symbol and the signified, I sense driving a T-72 tank that was obsolescent in 1989 into Ukraine is not a strong career or life investment.

But where is a corrupt (or oblivious) SCOTUS justice in the news? Page 2, if that. I read multiple newspapers like a starving wolf that hasn’t eaten in days, and I learned about this on Reddit, which is the internet equivalent of a slightly upscale back alley with well-spoken hoodlums too busy sharing cat videos to mug you. Surely the papers can take a day off from Ukraine updates to notice the rot? A slight shift in coverage is not going to stop a nuclear exchange.

The steady normalization of corruption would seem to be the answer. Of course Thomas is corrupt. Did anyone think he wasn’t corrupt, save perhaps Virginia Thomas, who once dialed up Anita Hill and demanded that she apologize? Corruption is the norm. Corruption is a feature.

Perhaps it’s only the absence of corruption that makes a story now, which is why the West has reacted so positively to Ukraine’s position. As corrupt as Ukraine has been over the years, the existential threat of invasion has given them (and the West) an interesting chance at a reset back to immediate post-WWII moral clarity. Yes, Russia, like many other autocrat-run countries, does not have our best interests in mind. Maybe it wasn’t a bad idea to keep a few armored divisions and a shitload of planes and submarines placed exactly where force can deter Soviet ambition.

But if America has a monoculture, it is one of weariness. We are all exhausted. If not from work, from Covid, corruption, racism, or rank stupidity. Surely yet another unqualified, powerful elite figure texting their wishes to other unqualified, powerful elite figures is not news. It is expected. And it is expected of us, too, to be corrupt.

As the astute political philosophers collectively known as Lynyrd Skynyrd once pointed out, “Does your conscience bother you? Tell the truth.” Why, fellow Southerners, you’ve probably also broken the law to smear your political opponents with the purpose of holding onto the Presidency of the United States! Haven’t you? Tell the truth.

I am not a particularly good or pleasant person, and there are some things I regret, but no. I have yet to do that or anything remotely similar, nothing that would land me in jail or prison via any twist of reasoning. I won’t even cheat in a board game. I am sensitive to false guilt-projection; just because a SCOTUS justice is corrupt (or oblivious) doesn’t meant that I am corrupt (or oblivious), or I would make a similar corrupt (or oblivious) choice in similar circumstances – or, for that matter, that anyone else would automatically descend into an oozy pile of sleaze, a position largely filled solo by Ted Cruz most days.

But that’s the trick. To get a SCOTUS seat, you have to accept a certain degree of corruption. It is a political position, Democrat or Republican. America largely accepts this. We call them “judges” and Chief Justice Roberts calls them “umpires” but they are closer to the political officers that the Soviets used to enforce correct thinking in military units – our big American innovation is to pit them against each other instead of the rank and file. They could only be “judges” if there was general agreement in America about most core values, and as there is not, they can’t be judges. They can only enforce this or that value and mask it with arbitrary “legal” reasoning.

Perhaps the only sin of Clarence Thomas, then, is that he got caught, and there is no possible coherent defense. But it is hard to defend, much less want to preserve, a society where the crime is not a sin, but being caught is the sin, and where the more elite you are, the less accountable you are. Perhaps his fan-base should dwell upon that, if they can stop wanting to be him long enough, but the Gingrich-Clinton-Trump era has largely deadened our national sensitivity to corruption. We can barely feel the ache that signals the cavity, and thus, we don’t bother to brush. But the absence of pain is not contentment. It is only a lack of signal.

Indeed, this notion is the going theory on why Putin miscalculated so badly in invading Ukraine; he literally didn’t know his armed forces were in piss-poor readiness, through a combination of rank corruption and relying on yes-men. The bulk numbers should have told him something, of course. Readers may recall that in the first real-time CNN-broadcast full-scale conventional war on the planet Earth, and in the first (and last) use of the Powell doctrine, a U.S.-led coalition put together a force of over a half-million personnel and nearly the full power of its air assets to retake tiny Kuwait in 1991, and Russia couldn’t muster half that for a huge county like Ukraine or enough aircraft to get air superiority on Day 1.

Throw in a total defeat on the public relations side and the implosion of the Russian economy, and the syllogism remains. If Putin knew the invasion was doomed, he’s quite complicit in not just its launch, but its failure; if he didn’t know the invasion was doomed, well, this column is turning into an Mad Libs exercise, isn’t it?

Now that the Cold War is turning Warm again for good, some thoughts.

The Cold War reached its zenith when I was a kid in the 1980s, but it only manifested itself indirectly from my perspective.

One way was by the siren song of G.I. Joe toys, which thankfully failed to recruit me into the armed forces. They usually fought Cobra, but old school Joes who read the comics will remember the Joe’s frenemies, the October Guard, led by Colonel Brekhov. Any of those stalwart Soviets were always quick to point out that the Joes were only the running dogs of capitalist imperialism.

The second way was via a long series of history textbooks in public school that not only prepared me for division-level command through copious diagrams of the Battle of Chancellorsville and the D-Day invasion, but made clear that the Soviet Union and communism together constituted the antithesis of the American way of life. Whatever that was.

The third way was by film and television, as I don’t think there was a single instant in the decade when there was not a film in theaters that didn’t have a Russian bad guy. They were portrayed as honorable occasionally, but misguided, miserable cogs of the Soviet machine at best. 1987’s The Living Daylights comes to mind, where the default hero of the West, James Bond, saves the Russians from their own corruption – and in passing, Afghanistan from the opium trade. Yeah.

But those angles were all blatant. The fourth way was through actual books, not the standard drivel in school. On the pop end, there was stuff like 1986’s Red Storm Rising, where Tom Clancy laid out a fairly realistic scenario for how a conventional World War III might play out. This led to a pre-Wikipedia crash course on military matters. I learned about the Fulda Gap, where a doomed delaying action by the 3rd Armored and 8th Infantry would constitute the opening of NATO’s depressing game plan to hold West Germany or lose Europe. I noticed it might play out before I managed to enroll in college.

The dice were favorable, however. German reunification was followed by Soviet collapse, though I didn’t know yet that this collapse had started well before I was born, perhaps as early as the ’68 invasion of Czechoslovakia, of which the current Ukraine situation reminds me.

All of that was too distant to have much of an effect, though. Not until later did I grok that the obvious propaganda was not entirely propaganda. One can go back farther than the 19th century to offer further proof, but that’s far enough to note that the United States and Russia, as nations, have almost no strategic interests in common. Their respective economies and cultures are distant at best. Save for Alaska, they are on opposite ends of the world and have discrete spheres of influence with few overlaps. The WWII alliance did not even span the war – it ended in truth well before Berlin fell. This means that when either side ventures outside of those spheres, conflict is inevitable.

Chris Crawford’s classic PC game Balance of Power, another must-stop of the 1980s, is my first go-to when thinking about the U.S. and Russia. You score influence points by bluffing the Soviets to back down in external conflicts around the globe. However, the game rarely lasts long enough for those points to matter. If one side eventually refuses to back down – and this can happen over the slightest trifle anywhere on the globe – a nuclear exchange commences and you lose. It is very, very hard to get to the end of the game still intact (much less ‘win’) without learning a single and powerful lesson – the two superpowers had a hard limit on how much they can throw their weight around without destroying the world. Hence the endless proxy wars.

In real life, the U.S. ‘won’ the balance of power. The Fulda Gap scenario became obsolete when Germany reunified and Poland joined NATO. None of the former Soviet republics to this day can muster anything close to the endless divisions that would have stormed Germany in the 1970s. They don’t have the money or resources to maintain massive motor-rifle and tank divisions, or keep up with American military technology. Even Putin’s Russia.

Supposedly.

Watching Putin slowly push the West around and test what it’s willing to tolerate for the last fifteen years has been interesting. Russia is no conventional military threat to Europe anymore. But it retains its nukes, and this places it in the same category as North Korea, an entity that can never quite be confronted directly. However, Russia is far away, making it seem less pressing. The comparably tight geography of Korea makes removing the entire U.S. Eighth Army a bad idea – the 2nd Infantry is still there decades later – but there is no pressing need to garrison Europe with American troops to hedge against a Russian invasion, even today.

Not even after Georgia. Not even after Syria. Or even the annexation of Crimea.

Until maybe now.

Putin has been working for over a decade on a sufficient casus belli to give him control over Ukraine through annexation or puppetry, and thus move his western military border to Poland. He’s decided now, probably as he senses he can divide NATO enough with rhetoric to escape both a military confrontation and most of its sanctions, that the time is now to reclaim the biggest of the breakaway Soviet states.

Today, Feb. 21, as Russian troops invade southeast Ukraine, even the NYT won’t call it an invasion. But I think NATO has handled the situation surprisingly well so far. With the possible exception of Germany, the big players – the U.S., Britain, and France – are speaking mostly in unison, and sharing their intelligence gathering in an unusually public way, particularly Britain. The most important tool in their arsenal is not any threat of military intervention, though I think they could use their fleet-in-being powers more effectively; rather, it is their ability to collectively deny Putin any legitimacy. Even if Russia seized the eastern half of Ukraine and installed a puppet government, NATO could help turn the remainder into a heavily armed rump state and eventually force Russia out through attrition, not to mention gain a few new members, such as Sweden, Finland, and a rump Ukraine.

Thus there is no military solution for Putin here. He could occupy much of Ukraine, but he won’t be able to hold it very long, even if the buildup goes past 200k. The longer he keeps forces inside Ukraine’s borders, the more likely NATO will drop the sanction hammer, as they’ve already seen the possible tricks – the five-day war of Georgia, the proxy war in Syria, and the carving-off annexation of Crimea being the most obvious. All that’s left of the usual casus belli options is the hackneyed false-flag operation and the transparent claim of Ukraine actually being part of Russia all along, and we’ve seen multiple versions of both already. If his plan was to occupy the breakaway regions and offer to stand down in return for absorbing them, only to return next year to take more, we are already past that point.

The question, then, is if NATO can offer Putin an out that he will take that doesn’t allow him to claim yet another win. Eventually in the coming weeks, probably sooner than later, there should be a simple NATO ultimatum – withdraw Russian forces from Ukraine, or get the full sanctions treatment plus a Western supply chain at the disposal of west Ukraine.

I know, I’m dabbling in military matters here that I can’t possibly fully appreciate. But I do understand the language being employed, and in particular, that justification for war is always more than a legal fig leaf. It allows soldiers, diplomats, leaders, and common citizens the ability to think differently. Are my orders legitimate or a roadmap for war crimes? Is the other side acting in good faith when they negotiate, or are their intentions nefarious? Should I resist an invading force or capitulate? When people think differently via argumentation, they can act differently, even if the facts of the ground haven’t changed an iota. Thus the difference between a “legitimate” or “legal” Russian occupation of eastern Ukraine for “peacekeeping” to prevent “genocide,” and an autocrat’s reckless wielding of his nuclear arsenal as bald intimidation. The “winner” in Ukraine will be who tells the best story. I suggest that story should be one where Putin gets to show he pushed NATO around some, and NATO shows it can collectively stand up to Putin, but no territory changes hands. A white peace, in other words.

Unfortunately, I think we might be past that possibility now.