Historians do have some insight into what people involved in deciding to go to war—or to continue a war—might have been thinking. And yet arguments still go on among historians, and will always go on, about why most wars in history have happened. You can have complete access to every document available, no secrets, no records lost, and still know that the archive doesn’t contain any smoking guns. There are no transcripts of a single meeting where no one was intending on war coming in and everyone was intent on war on leaving the room. Even when there’s archival material that comes close to meeting that standard, it’s not always clear that it’s that room or that meeting or that moment where the decision was really made.
Think about any decision at all that you might wonder at and imagine yourself a fly on the wall. You’d quickly realize that there were prior meetings referenced that you weren’t there for. You’d quickly intuit that at least some people there were talking from interested or committed positions that precede any meetings and aren’t within the frame of the institution or government processes that are legitimately part of the decision. You’d realize there were events that were pushing the decision that nobody was talking to exactly that nobody in the room could control. You’d know that there were feelings and forces weighing on the conversation in the room that none of the participants were consciously aware of or referencing directly.
Think, for example, of the Falkland Islands War. The UK government from the late 1960s onward was in fact keen to give the islands to Argentina, seeing them as a useless liability. They’d deliberately created some new economic dependencies between the population of the islands and the Argentinean government. But the small population of people on the islands were resolutely opposed to being ceded to Argentina, perhaps rather understandably in light of the fact that the government of Argentina at that time was a military dictatorship that was torturing and murdering dissidents, and the Falklands population was able to create enough political noise in Parliament in the late 1970s to make an outright transfer of the territory to Argentina impossible. On the other side, Argentina’s military rulers were increasingly desperate because of sustained mass unrest against their government and serious economic problems. If you were that fly on a wall, you would have heard people deliberately and consciously planning a military attack on the islands as a political solution to problems that had nothing to do with the islands, believing that no war would result. Leave that room and cross the Atlantic the day after Argentina seized the islands—seemingly solving their political problem due to mass enthusiasm for the move—and you would have heard that not only had some in the UK government and military predicted the attack, but felt that previous moves by the government had signaled a willingness to accept Argentina’s resolution of the islands’ status. You would have been in a couple of rooms listening as the decision to respond with military force was made.
But there were a lot of rooms that mattered: rooms where two or three people spoke on the side about what they really thought would happen, what they really wanted to accomplish. Sometimes the people in those rooms said something very different to different people; many of those conversations were recorded nowhere and have never been represented by the participants to anyone else. Some of those other rooms were hilariously wrong in assessing the situation; some were deliberately wrong in misrepresenting it for the benefit of some listener. What is more important in determining what came next is what was said in the hundreds of thousands of rooms where people saw themselves as part of the conflict. In press rooms where journalists decided how to report the story, what would sell papers the next day, what the readers wanted to hear, what could be said without triggering a visit from a government censor or a warning from the lawyer. Professors, intellectuals, bureaucrats, all had to rouse themselves and decide what to say as experts or minor actors in the whole drama, to forecast what might happen and to whom. People had to decide whether to line a parade route or write a letter to their MP, whether to lay low and defer protests against the disappearing of dissidents. All of this was part of what caused the war and shaped how it unfolded.
This is an extended detour to get to my main point, which is that the journalists, pundits, experts and mid-ranking government officials who are today professing great bafflement at the unfathomable mystery of the intentions of the Russian government and Vladimir Putin towards Ukraine are either being a bit stupid or are playacting at stupidity. Or both.
It is not that they have the knowledge of that fly on the wall of what is being said—if anything—in the rooms where Putin and his government have gathered to discuss what they mean to do. They are right to say there are many possibilities even if you do not have some form of secret information close to what such a fly might tell you. It could be intended to be a feint designed to express the seriousness of Russian objections to Ukraine being drawn into NATO or closer association to the EU. It could be intended to make some portion of the Russian public more enthusiastic about Putin’s authority. It could be an attempt to distract from the pandemic within Russia or to cover a separate initiative of the Russian government. It could be an attempt to win concessions that have little to do with Ukraine. It could be a test of the resolve of the current US government, of NATO and the EU, or an attempt to stress their resources in a time of crisis. It could be a serious desire to re-annex Ukraine as a first step to rebuilding at least some of the former territorial extent and influence of the Soviet Union. It could be an ego trip for Putin or some group of people around Putin.
All possibilities, many of them not incommensurable or contradictory, and also not an exhaustive list. It could be many of these explanations, and not all of them even need to be accurate per se. As in the lead-up to most wars, people planning war or feinting at it may explain to one another a reason for what they are doing that consciously avoids speaking a truth that none of them want to really dwell on. Henry V and his councillors may concentrate on a recitation of Salic Law and the outrage of an insult from the Dauphin of France and quite consciously never speak to what many of them might know: the king and his nobility want glory and plunder.
What is stupid or pretend-stupid about some of the discussion in the American public sphere is some profession of inability to understand why anybody in Russia, particularly intellectuals, experts, ordinary officials, businessmen, might support an actual war on Ukraine other than to curry favor with Putin or because they are being coerced to do so, and along with that, some thought that all intentions or all support for a possible war, even from Putin, is mysterious, inscrutable and inexplicably irrational.
At least some of the people holding forth now in the American and British public sphere about the possibility of a Russian attack on Ukraine are old enough to have been part of the feverish post 9/11 conversation in the United States about going to war with Iraq. And those who were public figures in that conversation then were likely either supporters of the war or at least understood what the people supporting the war were thinking. Were they inscrutable or mysterious? No, not really. Were they all feeling coerced or needing to conform? Not really, though I suppose a few of them might have been a bit reluctant to speak up, considering attacks directly at the few public figures brave enough to question the way the wars were being planned. Were they all trying to curry favor with the Bush Administration? Sure, quite a few of them—I thought then and still think now that a lot of the senior editors of the major newspapers were trying to make sure they were regarded as reliable partners doing their patriotic duty so that they could get access to the war front once it started.
But a pretty large number of the public figures sounding off in favor of war in Afghanistan and Iraq convinced themselves that both wars were good and necessary and subsequently that a “global war on terror” was absolutely required, with whatever constrictions of domestic liberties and whatever military tactics that might require. These are in some cases the same people, or their immediate successors, who held court at the end of the Iraq War and the end of the war in Afghanistan about how badly planned, badly envisioned, badly decided the wars had been from beginning to end. A few have had the minimum courtesy to reflect on their own mistakes, while many have not. Reflect or not, the entire experience should give most public figures, including experts on security or military planning, plenty of human insight into how a significant swath of a public, from experts to ordinary people, might convince themselves that a dangerous, unnecessary and imprudent war is in fact just, necessary and winnable.
My thought here is similar to observations about how the US press is indulgent, tolerant, permissive and appreciative of complexity when it is reporting on events that is sees itself as part of while tightly constricting what it can imagine or describe when it is thinking about some “them”. (For example, how events in Ferguson Missouri might have been written about if they’d been happening in Pakistan.) Populations and leaders only become inscrutable, mysterious, or unidimensionally self-interested when they’re somewhere else—when there are American policy-makers and planners who need to project their own power by imagining others as pieces on the chessboard rather than human players of the same game.
To use a different game metaphor, that is a tell, and a rather unnerving one. If there is a sign that people who believe themselves to be influential advisors to the decision-makers are trying to imagine themselves at war, it is when they start talking about a potential enemy as mysterious, inscrutable and simplistically motivated by uncontrollable avidity under circumstances little different than the last time those same advisors lined up compliantly to beat the drums of war themselves.
Photo by Jin Yeong Kim on Unsplash
Photo by British Library on Unsplash
Now Tim, please please Prof don’t ask me to write a term paper on the origins of the Great Ukrainian War of 2022. Just give me an “F” and let me go shelter somewhere safe.