After three lengthy blog posts at a pace of one a day, I'm as ready as my readers no doubt are to move on from the subject of Keynes and World War I comparisons. But the world keeps hurling events in my path that leave me more convinced than ever that we are in danger of repeating that history. With pressure now growing in the United States for the White House to confiscate the assets of the Russian central bank and hand them over to Ukraine, we are seeing the groundwork laid before our eyes for a Versailles-style bargaining posture that not only threatens to prolong the war indefinitely but—if it did ever bring it to an end—would lead to a ruinous and most unrestful peace.
Of course, as we discussed last time, the U.S. has in the very recent past expropriated the sovereign wealth of a foreign country—Afghanistan—and specifically its central bank reserves. And while legal experts say that confiscation was on firmer legal ground—due to the fact that we do not recognize the current Afghan government—it was morally, I say, on far shakier terrain. After all, that was a country in a far more vulnerable economic position—facing humanitarian crisis and risk of starvation, one to which the U.S. owed a unique historic debt in the wake of a twenty-year occupation, and one whose central bank assets included—due to the distinctive way the bank was set up—the savings of many ordinary Afghans.
With that odious precedent before us, it may seem like a relatively trivial injustice to seize Russia's foreign currency reserves and repurpose them to serve Ukraine's reconstruction efforts. After all, should not Russia pay the costs for its own war of aggression? If countries could be reduced to a single moral agent, the answer surely would be yes. But, as Keynes wrote in the Economic Consequences of the Peace: "In the great events of man's history, in the unwinding of the complex fates of nations[,] Justice is not so simple. And if it were, nations are not authorized, by religion or by natural morals, to visit on the children of their enemies the misdoings of parents or of rulers."
Keynes wrote with quiet passion about how the Allies at Versailles violated this implicit moral ban on collective punishment. He discusses at length how the Treaty's ultimate provisions not only imposed ruinous demands for reparation payments on Germany proper—but they also took unfair aim at German citizens living abroad. Keynes cites language in the Treaty invoking "the right to retain and liquidate all property, rights, and interests belonging [...] to German nationals, or companies controlled by them," in former German colonies. The great economist editorializes that this means in effect that their "persons and property [...] are deprived of legal status and legal security."
The cry then was "well, they brought it on themselves by invading Belgium!" Just as the cry today rings: "they started it by invading Ukraine!" Of course, the seizure of Russian assets under current U.S. authority is by no means so sweeping as what Keynes describes. Most of the privately-held assets of Russian oligarchs that have been tracked down so far have merely been frozen, in line with standard sanctions procedure. They could then be released back to the owners at a future date as a reward for softening their demands or a carrot to incentivize them to do so. Moreover, these sanctions have been targeted to specific proscribed individuals known to be complicit in Putin's regime.
But in the escalating rhetoric of war mania, politicians are beginning to call for something more radical that looks far more like the scenario Keynes describes. The demands for seizing Russian sovereign wealth, for instance, involve actually taking the assets and giving them to someone else—not just retaining the current temporary block. Similarly, a White House plan from late April asks Congress to authorize new powers that would allow the government to actually "forfeit"—i.e. confiscate—the currently-frozen assets of various oligarchs to which the U.S. has access. An op-ed published by CNN this evening acknowledges that such powers would be unprecedentedly broad—but, they argue, "these are unprecedented times."
Are they, though? Russia is not the first country in the world to launch a war of aggression or to commit gross human rights violations. If we believe that it is acceptable to steal assets belonging ultimately to the Russian people just because we disapprove of the actions of their government, are we saying that we regard this as an acceptable tool to exert foreign policy pressure in other domains? The thinking is demagogic and short-sighted in exactly the way Keynes decries, and if pushed to its logical conclusion, it threatens to send us into a future exactly like the one he warned against: a more isolated, less global, poorer planet trapped in an inflationary spiral and facing an epic hunger crisis.
This is not an exaggeration. As this war goes on, it is becoming increasingly plain that the costs of it could include mass starvation and economic collapse in the Global South. With the stakes this high, the goal of everyone with influence in the conflict should be to achieve peace on minimally-acceptable terms as rapidly as possible. We may bemoan the fact that Putin is the one who chose to raise these stakes. He is the one taking the globe's food supply and economic future hostage. But that doesn't mean compromise is not the least bad option of the ones available; nor does it mean the U.S. is justified in using innocents—including the Russian people—as leverage in turn.
If sanctions are going to have any role—as they were originally supposed to do—in ending Putin's invasion and restoring peace, then there needs to be a possibility of lifting them. If Russian assets are simply seized, liquidated, and given to someone else, by contrast—what incentive would any sanctioned individual have to change course? What would the Russian ruling class have to lose at that point from simply pressing on with the war to its bitter end?
The thinking of U.S. politicians at this point seems to have lost sight of this goal of using sanctions to persuade and to have become a mere thirst for revenge. Tom Malinowski, the sponsor of a congressional resolution echoing these sentiments, said recently from the House floor:
"Can we imagine giving all of Russia’s wealth — the yachts, the bank accounts, the villas, the planes — back to Putin and his cronies as Ukraine lies in ruin, as the Ukrainians bury their dead? We cannot imagine doing that. We will not do that."
This is a deeply troubling statement coming from a U.S. politician, because it seems to imply that our leaders no longer contemplate the possibility of lifting the sanctions at some point in exchange for good behavior. And if we will never lift them on any terms, then we really are in effect inviting Putin and his inner circle to prosecute the war for as long as they can sustain it, because there's no carrot waiting for them in the event they back off. The only incentives they face would be on the side of "winning" and toppling Ukraine.
These are the signs that make me fear we really are in danger of following the path Siegfried Sassoon warned against, in the quote from this WWI-era letter I cited the other day. Recall, he described how a "war of defense and liberation" had become a "war of conquest." My fear is that, as the contours of the war in Ukraine change, the U.S. and our allies will increasingly be following this same trajectory from one to the other.
When Putin first invaded the country, his intent appeared unmistakably to be to seize the Ukrainian capital—no doubt with the goal in mind of deposing its government, purging its current leaders, and installing some puppet rule of his own devising. Such would be an unthinkable disaster, and it was vital that all the world unite in condemning his actions and banding together to support the Ukrainian defense.
But most observers think that Putin has since abandoned that goal—thanks to the fierce Ukrainian resistance—and his forces appear to be focused instead on consolidating his grip on the Donbas—a region that had already effectively entered his orbit several years prior, through an earlier stage of his machinations. Putin never had a right to seize either this territory or the Crimea, which he annexed unlawfully in 2014. But that doesn't mean it's worth prolonging the war to try to retake them, especially not when they were already effectively in Putin's hands at the time this latest war began.
The United States should absolutely continue supporting Ukraine's defense from the invasion across these earlier de facto lines. But it should not be in the business of funding a Ukrainian reconquista of terrain that they had effectively lost years before. Ukrainian resistance to imperial aggression is a valid endeavor. Ukrainian nationalism with territorial ambitions of its own is not something we should get behind.
All the signs are, however, that the two have been conflated in people's minds, and Ukrainian ethno-lingusitic nationalism is coming to be seen as synonymous with the Ukrainian cause. The New York Times ran a rather eerie piece this weekend that described in glowing terms the patriotic decision of some Russian-speakers in Ukraine to learn to communicate primarily in the Ukrainian tongue, so that they would no longer be speaking in the "occupier's language."
The article presented these as voluntary decisions born of a desire to learn, and no doubt they are in some individuals' cases—but to the extent that simply to speak Russian is coming to be seen inside Ukraine as taking the side of the "occupier," the future could be dark indeed for the sizable Russophone minority in the country. And while there has never been any evidence of the kind of large-scale persecution of Russian speaking Ukrainians of the sort Putin claims in his disinformation campaigns, they are still a vulnerable minority. And such persecution, if it did ever come in real life, would not only be a humanitarian atrocity in itself—it would also hand Putin exactly the propaganda he's been looking for—and seeking to manufacture—since this conflict began.
Then there is the law that Ukraine passed, and Zelensky signed, in order to do their part to seize Russian assets and re-appropriate them for Ukrainian ends. This law, which the Ukrainian government would like to see other governments use as a template around the world—including the United States, was described broadly in the press release as enabling the Ukrainian state to confiscate "Russian assets." But how are they defining a "Russian asset"? A piece on NPR provides additional details on whose property might be expropriated and repurposed under its terms: "The new law," they write, "lists a number of offenses, such as giving money to Russia's government or glorifying those who are fighting against Ukraine."
"Glorifying"? That's a rather vague term. And if simply speaking Russian—as, again, one of the country's two largest linguistic groups does on a daily basis as their primary tongue—is coming to be seen as an anti-national act in itself, then we could be heading toward a scenario in which virtually any Russian national living in Ukraine could find their property at risk; and then from there to a situation in which even Ukrainian citizens of Russian descent or who speak Russian in the home could find themselves targeted. And if Ukraine succeeds in pressuring other governments to adopt similar laws, as they are presently urging, it could look very much like what Keynes described above.
Just because Ukraine is the aggrieved party and was viciously attacked doesn't mean they would be incapable of taking such a route. The Ukrainian government is, like any human collective, a flawed and complex thing, and Ukraine is a country with significant ethnic and linguistic tensions, with some downright scary elements fighting on both sides. The U.S. shouldn't remain involved in this fight to the point at which we become implicated in either a civil conflict, or a dispute over territorial claims that predate the 2022 invasion. The goal should be to pursue a policy that makes it desirable on everyone's part—through both carrots and sticks—to agree to an immediate end to hostilities.
No comments:
Post a Comment