Starting Points

 In his classic book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann tries to show us that most of our political conflicts around the globe stem not so much from disagreement as to basic facts—but rather from disagreement as to when exactly we are starting the clock. 

Lippmann's purpose throughout the book has been to show that "public opinion" is not something that merely burbles up of its own accord from an objective assessment of "the facts"—but this is not because there are no such things as objective "facts" about a given conflict. Rather, it is because people are selecting and emphasizing these facts differently in order to support their cause. It is this selection process, more often than outright falsehood, that gives a certain tendency to the stories we tell. And one of the classic modes of selection is to be very precise as to what time we designate as the "start" of our story. 

Lippmann's point becomes especially clear when we examine disputes over national boundaries and what he archly calls "historic wrongs." Lippmann observes that there is a strange time dilation effect that sets in whenever one starts to discuss national conflicts over borders. The two sides to the dispute may agree on discrete facts. But one will start the clock on those facts much earlier than the other, depending on what they wish to emphasize as the fundamental "truth" of the conflict. 

This problem became acute, Lippmann observes, during the debates over the postwar settlement, in the aftermath of World War I. Wilson's Fourteen Points, says Lippmann, emphasized that France had the right to reclaim its historic borders from German aggression—an affirmation that could prove agreeable in theory to all the Allies in the conflict. But what were those historic borders? 

Wilson here chose his words with care, Lippmann observes. "[T]he wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine [...] should be righted," he declared. Wilson, says Lippmann, was pointedly starting the clock at 1871. This was to prevent French officials from claiming more territory than had actually belonged to them in 1871, such as parts of the Saar valley, through the strategy of defining the region of "Alsace-Lorraine" more broadly—which they had otherwise intended to do. 

We are obviously seeing a quite similar dynamic unfold in the conflict over Ukraine today. The two sides and their international supporters may not disagree on fundamental facts (barring overt disinformation, of which there has of course been all too much from the Russian side). But everyone involved in the dispute is "starting the clock" at different points. 

Vladimir Putin chooses to start the clock sometime in the sixteenth century, with the moldering Treaty of Novgorod— or else, even earlier, in the dark ages, amidst the long-perished archives of Kievan Rus. 

More than anything, this choice of when to start the clock reflects what a poor propagandist Putin actually is, despite his reputation as a great master of manipulation. If Putin were better at his job of twisting global opinion, after all, he could have started the clock at something like the 2016 Minsk II Accord. He could have pulled a lugubrious face and declared that he was "just trying to protect the victimized Russian-speaking minorities in the Eastern provinces of the Donbas and to uphold their right to self-determination from the tyranny of the Ukrainian government."

This would have been a lie, of course—Putin's ambitions for carving up Eastern Europe and for restoring the demolished Soviet Empire obviously extend much further than that. But it would have been a better and cleverer lie than the ones he has actually been offering. 

Hitler was smart enough at least to offer cleverer lies along these lines: "I don't want to take over the world!" he pleaded, through crocodile tears—managing to convince a number of prominent politicians and "realist" IR theorists of his sincerity in the process—"I just want to right 'historic wrongs' and protect the self-determination of the poor German-speaking minorities in all these neighboring countries by incorporating them into Germany!"

I think Tucker Carlson, when he went to Moscow to present Putin to the world as a "Man of Peace," was hoping Putin might offer something closer to this cleverer version of the lie. Tucker thought: I'll go to Moscow and interview Putin, and I will show the world that all Putin really wants is a few measly Russian-speaking provinces in Eastern Ukraine, and then the world will see that Western propaganda has lied to them. They will see that Putin is no Hitler-style megalomaniac! They will see that Putin is a reasonable man who can be negotiated with!" 

And Putin so easily could have given Tucker that. He could have played right into this narrative, and would probably have convinced a lot more of the world's easily duped that, in truth, he is a "Man of Peace." 

So too, the "realist" IR theorists of our times, as they did in Hitler's era, wanted Putin to say something like this. And they were ready to fall for the line as soon as Putin delivered it. Mearsheimer et al.—along with the so-called "restraint" wing of the foreign policy think tank community, who attribute all the facts that they don't like about geopolitics to the deluded hive mind of the so-called "blob"— were prepared to say: "See! All along, Putin has just been worried about the Russian-speaking minorities." Or, "He's just been trying to extend Russia's influence throughout its historic sphere of interest, the same way any other great power would," etc. 

But Putin was actually not smart enough for this. He didn't say the line they were all waiting for. Tucker certainly served the opportunity up for him. He teed up the easiest softball any interviewee could ask for. All Putin had to do was swing. But instead, Putin did something very different. Instead of starting the clock in 2016, he started it in the 1500s, or the 800s, or god knows when. "Blah blah blah the Treaty of Novgorod..." 

No "realist" IR theorist or right-wing pro-Putin shill could make much hay with that. That gave them nothing to work with. An American audience is simply not going to be willing to start the clock in the 1500s. They can't be brought to care about the Treaty of Novgorod, whatever that may be—and rightly so. Tucker had to go home looking like a fool, and serves him right. 

Americans start the clock in a very different place. We tend to start it in 2022, when Putin flagrantly invaded his next-door neighbor in an overwhelming show of force that gunned straight for the heart of the Ukrainian state. 

We start the clock there perhaps partly because we tend to be unsympathetic to Putin's regime (and who can blame us?)—but also because this is the event that made the biggest impression on us. To be sure, there was conflict over Ukraine's borders going back years earlier. But February 2022 was when ordinary news readers could no longer ignore it. And, if we start the clock there, it is clear that Putin was the aggressor, and that his invasion was utterly unprovoked and unjustified. 

To this extent, therefore, starting the clock in 2022 serves the Ukrainian cause. It positions Putin (rightly) as the instigator and aggressor in the conflict. 

Yet, it is worth noting that, by starting the clock there, the West is not meekly aligning itself with the goals of Ukrainian nationalists. After all, there is a secondary consequence of starting the clock in 2022 that the hard core pro-Ukraine side does not like. Starting the clock in that year, after all, implies that Ukraine is only entitled to repulse Putin's army from the territory that it has claimed or tried to hive off since 2022. It does not include backing the Ukrainian military in its efforts to reclaim the earlier-annexed Crimea. 

The Ukrainian side, therefore, would much rather start the clock in 2014, when Crimea was annexed, rather than in 2016 or 2022. 

Starting the clock in 2022, therefore, is a move roughly analogous to Wilson's strategic mention of the year 1871 in the Fourteen Points. Wilson was trying to say: France can reclaim land up to the 1871 borders and no further. Just as many Western foreign policy elites today are trying to say: Ukraine can reclaim up to the 2022 borders and no further. We want to back Ukraine in its efforts to cast off Putin's invasion. But we are a little more iffy and wobbly as to whether they should then press on—if it becomes possible to do so—to try to reclaim Crimea as well, or any other territory that they had effectively lost control of prior to 2022. 

Starting the clock in 2014 wouldn't be objectively wrong, by the way. The whole point of Lippmann's analysis is that none of these different starting dates is objectively wrong. But the selection of one over the other as our mental starting point is what reveals the underlying subjectivity and tendentiousness of our analysis. 

We are seeing the same thing in Israel-Palestine today. The pro-Palestinian side and a disturbing portion of the campus left want to start the clock on the day after October 7. This allows them to portray the current war as a product of some fiendish and unprovoked Israeli attack on a defenseless civilian population. They bizarrely erase the events that immediately preceded Israel's war in Gaza. They shove down the memory-hole the recollection of Hamas's massacre of 1,200 innocent people, and of its abduction at gunpoint of hundreds of Jewish civilians, several of them U.S. citizens. 

This allows them to leave unanswered the obvious question that comes to mind whenever one hears the protesters cry for a "permanent ceasefire"—namely, how is Israel supposed to defend its civilians from the next attack just like October 7? How is Israel supposed to adopt a unilateral ceasefire when Hamas is the one currently refusing to accept any of the terms that are being offered? 

But so too, on the other side, many Israeli nationalists wish to start the clock on the day of October 7, and to look no further back. This allows them to ignore the half-century-long military occupation of the West Bank and the problem of the illegal settlements. It allows them to forget the years-long blockade and collective punishment of Gazan civilians that rendered the enclave an impoverished hellhole and has hastened the famine and starvation facing Gaza's civilian population today. 

But then, so too, Palestinian nationalists who wish to start the clock at the point of the blockade of Gaza would also not wish to start it any earlier than that, in turn—for doing so would require acknowledging the election of Hamas, the terrorist group's frequent rocket attacks on Israeli towns and villages, the suicide bombings that killed Israeli civilians during the Second Intifada, etc... And I'm sure one could extend the same logic back through all the previous tit-for-tat cycles of the Israel-Palestine conflict innumerable times over. 

To point out that the choice of our "start-date" is inherently political and tendentious is not to say that we are forced to take a position of complete moral relativism toward these conflicts. It is possible for any reasonable person to see that Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the innumerable war crimes he has inflicted on the country's civilian population since then, were a brutal and horrific escalation of the fighting, no matter the starting date one chooses. 

So too, one does not have to pick a "side" in the Israel-Palestine conflict in order to recognize that both Israeli and Palestinian civilians have a right to live in peace and safety in their current homes, and that actions on either side that willfully or recklessly endanger civilian lives are abhorrent and must be stopped.

The point is more simply to recognize what we are doing when we choose a "start-date," and thereby to see how our disputes over the justness of these wars boils down to something other than mere objective facts. 

Putin, for instance, is not wrong about Ukraine because he is wrong on all the facts. For all I know, he may be 100% correct in everything he says about the "Treaty of Novgorod." I am in no position to dispute him on the point. But I don't care whether he's right about the Treaty of Novgorod. Because a stupid 16th century treaty is not worth killing people over either way. 

The really important thing on any side of these conflicts, then, is never to let the dead abstractions of "nations," "boundaries," "historic wrongs," etc. take precedence over real human beings and real human lives. A "nation" is not worth the sacrifice of a single living child. A "historic wrong" is not worth the shedding of an ounce of now-circulating blood. 

This does not mean that such shedding of blood is always avoidable. People have to defend themselves, and they have every right to do so. But it does mean that every party to all of these conflicts should only pursue their national claims so far as it takes to minimize the loss of blood and bring the fighting swiftly to a close—and no further. 

Perhaps I'm wrong? Perhaps "historic wrongs" and "national boundaries" are more important than I realize, and they are worth spilling innocent blood over? If so, please complete item 5 on Wendell Berry's "Questionnaire." I quote: 

State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.