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My sense has been that Russia seems impossible to integrate into "the West" or the vague general projects of Europe because it is historically something defined by being what *isn't* Europe or Asia. Even this boolean sociological expression has more specific context for its topics: the European and Asian powers under which the Rus and other peoples were subjects and gradually integrated as a group (Vikings, the Horde) were the inverse expressions of their geographic continental spheres' cultural centers. That is to say, even the initial formation of the Rus was either influenced or differentiated by particular long-distance warrior cultures, on the earlier and western side by immensely capable seafaring frontier settlement exploration, and with ensuing centuries eastern nomadic horse geniuses, neither of these representing the prominent intellectual or artistic center of either medieval Europe or South or East Asia (I think the Vikings tended to trounce and smoosh those regularly, as a thing).

Besides its innate suggestion of other aspirations of western countries' historical appetites, "the West" lacks easy luster as an idea/attributes because it offers no guidance or historical instruction on how human societies ought to live alongside the natural world. Any prescriptive cosmology or cultural core which does not predict or treat the ecosystem's critical current state of health (arguably an outcome, if hijacked, of the principled individualistic values of "the West") does not easily attract a popular ethical/moral/cultural/political/economic clarity or forwards inspiration. Plato and Aristotle hint at overlapping ideas (this is likely what the discussion of Atlantis was about presumably, which only seems topical now to alien weirdos or something), but it's oddly never been an influential criteria in western ideas or governance. The western fine art painting movement of note which focused upon the natural landscapes of the outdoors occurred as a reaction to industrialism and colonial ambitions but also kind of empowered them while also alongside the rise of mystic nationalism. Basically the romantic paintings of the wilderness from the 19th century are difficult to separate from the sentiments of Manifest Destiny or dudes like Fitzcarraldo. Ralph Waldo Emerson was excited by the benefits of an eremitic perspective, but he never entirely left society nor took to considering trying to create a community (tellingly I think, Emerson's retreat was into the experiment of lifestyle for himself and explaining to everyone about it, but I also haven't read him or about him in like 15 years so maybe I can be fact-checked here).

Also, maybe my idiosyncratic requirements for stuff are not the centrally determining factor here. Still, I want to believe.

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I think you mean Thoreau, not Emerson, but point taken. The Biblical tradition does offer a vision of how human societies ought to live alongside the natural world, which has been secularized in, for example, Romanticism. A great interpreter of this tradition, especially for the non-religious, is Northrop Frye. In his The Great Code, he notes that the Biblical point of view is opposed to pantheism in that "the feeling of the numinous, of divine presence, may be experienced in or through nature, but should not be ascribed to nature." Ascribing divinity to nature is a form of idolatry.

Still, man's relationship with nature is central to his ultimate redemption. Frye says that "what the Bible gives us is not so much a cosmology as a vision of upward metamorphosis, of the alienated relation of man to nature transformed into a spontaneous and effortless life." He quotes Hosea ("I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven, and with the creeping things of the ground") as a prophet of the message that "The ultimate secrets of nature will not be revealed until man has stopped the self-destructive activity that prevents him from seeing what kind of world he is really in."

We once lived in harmony with nature, in Eden (which can be viewed as pre-urban, pre-agricultural human society). Now, in our state of exile, we are alienated from nature and each other. However, through "the creative work that transforms the amorphous natural environment into the pastoral, cultivated, civilized world of human shape and meaning," we can ultimately achieve a second, collective Eden: the way out is through. Even in this life, on an individual level, we can overcome our alienation from nature, since "the reader completes the visionary operation of the Bible by throwing out the subjective fallacy along with the objective one. The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared."

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The West can be thought of as the descendents of the empires of Charlemange, Cnut the Great, the Teutonic Kinghts and the Iberian pennisula. The center was France, where Western Civilization got its start in the 10th century. It is Catholic in orgin, from whose Marriage and Family Program the WIERD psychology evolved, according to Joseph Henrich. Poland adopted Catholicism rather than Orthodox Christianity and can be thought as Western in some ways, particularly since a large portion of the country was under German (either Prussian or Austrian) for a century and a half.

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The American right opposes the Ukraine war because they see it as another neocon plot in essence. Nuland and Co find some countries with some tensions (there are plenty) and do everything they can to make it worse. With luck some crisis can be provoked which leads to lots of overpriced defense contracts and people in NatSec getting to feel like important movers and shakers. As Tucker put it, when the SU fell a lot of these people had nothing to do so they created their own problems to solve with other people as playthings.

Liberals in 2014 got this. But 2014 was a different universe. Putler had not yet hacked the voting machines to elect Trumpler. Gay marriage wasn’t event legal yet! And so you got people like Obama wondering why the fuck we were sponsoring coups in places like Ukraine and turning them into cia bases. But the great awokening and the resistance brought moral clarity to it all. Russia was to be the great white male enemy.

And so we can’t treat the matter the way it should probably be treated. As something more like the Franco Prussian war or the Crimean war, that is non-ideological power struggle. Someone once compared Putin to napoleon III and I felt that was pretty apt comparison. That wouldn’t make Bismarck the good guy, and Nuland ain’t even Bismarck.

As to russias merit or demarits, Tucker simply notes that it can keep some basic public order its its cities, which makes it better on at least one important metric. We could do the same if we wanted, and you don’t need to have a tsar to do so.

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My problem with the "neocon plot" line of thinking, which used to be more common on the left, is that it denies agency to anyone but the villains (ie, the American foreign policy establishment) in the story. The US made a number of blunders in its post-USSR relationship with Russia, such as pushing NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine in 2008. After 9/11, Russia cooperated with the US on counterterrorism (eg, provided intelligence in Afghanistan), and the Bush administration should have done more to cement those ties instead of pursuing a quixotic democracy promotion agenda.

But foolish idealism and lack of long-term planning are not evidence of a plot. The Ukrainians were perfectly capable of overthrowing their own government, and no American action necessitated, or justified, Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Putin had his own motivations for the war, including long-standing denial that Ukrainians are a legitimate people and anger at the Bolsheviks for how the borders of Soviet Ukraine were drawn.

I don't see how Russia can be framed as "the great white male enemy" when Ukraine is actually more demographically white than Russia. We get further from the truth when we see the world through an American culture war lens and make foreign conflicts all about ourselves. That is part of my criticism of Tucker Carlson: he was more interested in scoring domestic political points than shedding real light on a complex and ugly situation.

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That Russia and Putin have their own interest and that many of them are deplorable is true but also somewhat irrelevant. The question is what effect our actions have. Did they help or hurt the situation? What were we trying to accomplish and were those actions likely to accomplish them?

It's hard to see what was gained via the Ukraine coup. If they could do it themselves without our help then all the better, it's more legitimate and less threatening. If the coup wouldn't happen without us all the better, the coup was really fucking stupid. If you don't like a trade deal you just wait a short time till the next election and pass new laws. None of our actions since then have been good either.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world/europe/cia-ukraine-intelligence-russia-war.html

The real problem Ukraine has is that our "allies" in the country are not any better at running the country than our supposed enemies. It's a shitshow no matter which faction is in power. Getting involved is like getting involved in the Iran/Iraq war, everyone is a bad guy and nobody wins (except the arms dealers). There isn't some scenario where if only Ukraine joins "the west" they become some prosperous amazing country.

American foreign policy is mostly done for domestic reasons. Why did we invade Iraq?

1) They were brown people from a certain part of the world

2) Some brown from the same part of the world did 9/11

3) People wanted to rage out over 9/11

4) The Bush Admin thought it would play well politically and was right at the start

5) The Bush Admin had a personal beef in the matter

6) A lot of people would make a lot of money off it

There is no grand strategy there. Just politics and interests. Was Saddam a bad guy? Did he have interest and take actions we didn't like? Sure, but that didn't make the invasion a smart move.

Imagine trying to explain the US actions in Iraq if that stuff was off the table as an explanation. Hard to do.

Putin works as an enemy because he's a "heretic white". He's white and he doesn't endorse the progressive white consensus or do what he's told. Brown people can get away with Queers for Palestine because they're brown. Whites can join team white by going full progressive (when Sweden joined NATO they didn't wave the Swedish Flag, they waved the Pride Flag). But to be a heretic white, especially ones that boomers remember hating from the 1980s, beautiful. All those Russian degrees people earned in the 80s don't need to go to waste!

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While the Iraq invasion was a horrible mistake, you’re overemphasizing cynicism and underplaying incompetence as a motivating factor. I recommend this article (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/opinion/saddam-hussein-cia-iraq.html) about Saddam Hussein’s mindset in the run-up to the war: “Mr. Hussein believed the C.I.A. was all but omniscient, and so, particularly after Sept. 11, when Mr. Bush accused him of hiding weapons of mass destruction, he assumed that the agency already knew that he had no dangerous weapons and that the accusations were just a pretense to invade. A C.I.A. capable of making an analytical mistake on the scale of its miss about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was not part of his worldview.” Essentially, Hussein was too paranoid to save his own skin, and the CIA was too myopic to understand his mindset.

Rather than being too cynical, the Bush administration was actually too idealistic in believing that a flourishing Iraqi democracy was both possible and would somehow address the root causes of terrorism. Instead, as the current example of MBS in Saudi Arabia shows, economic modernization imposed by absolute monarchy is a more realistic model for the region. A truly cynical, and thus effective, Bush administration would have recognized Hussein as a bulwark against Iran and a mutual foe of Islamist terror. Instead, Hussein’s ouster allowed an expansionist Iran to further penetrate the Middle East and an even more ruthless terrorist group than Al-Qaeda (the Islamic State) to establish itself.

As far as Ukraine goes, it’s a different situation than Iraq since it’s not an America-initiated war (even if the US was strategically inept in the run-up) and there are no Western boots on the ground. Ross Douthat (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/17/opinion/ukraine-aid-russia-united-states.html) has presented the realist case for continued aid to Ukraine: “the best reason to continue sending aid is to make it easier to negotiate an armistice on terms favorable to Ukraine’s survival and resilience — since any such terms will become less and less favorable if we’re seen as abandoning the Ukrainians in advance.” Western aid to Ukraine could thus be seen as an investment in a rules-based international order in which the cost of attempting to annex another country is prohibitively high, rather than the backing of a forever war to achieve total Ukrainian victory.

While I’m skeptical of democracy promotion efforts and wars of choice like Iraq, investing in a more stable world order (which will ultimately need to include Russia) does redound to America’s economic and security benefit. Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan probably helped encourage Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, and a sudden withdrawal of American aid for Ukraine would probably have similar unforeseen consequences (or foreseeable, eg, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan that could trigger a global recession). America can’t afford to be the world’s policeman, but it also can’t afford to hunker down in a bunker and let the world burn.

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