Dear Friends,
I’m putting up a paywall for the first time on Castalia. This really is meant as a gentle reminder — if you enjoy reading these and have the means — that a paid subscription is deeply appreciated. My intention is for the vast majority of pieces to remain free. For now, I’m experimenting with putting one piece in my two-week ‘cycle’ behind a paywall (and doing so on a rotating basis between the different types of pieces).
The idea with ‘Commentator,’ for people who have recently joined, is to read through the news pretty exhaustively — from a wide variety of sources, domestically and internationally and across the political spectrum — and to use the best/most interesting pieces I’ve come across as a springboard for discussion. A great deal of this for me is thinking through what I want my relationship to the news to be. I don’t want to be consumed by the news and don’t want to be caught up in headlines. Each post involves prioritizing the stories that actually matter — which also means a certain repetitiveness in what I cover. What I find myself coming back to most often is the war in Ukraine (with a pretty pro-Ukrainian stance but always open to new information), AI (adamantly opposed), the buildup of tension with China (wary, watchful), and the duplicity of the U.S.’ military-industrial complex. What I’m much less interested in is the play-by-play of U.S. election politics, political scandal, Trump’s outrages, etc.
WHY DID PUTIN DO IT?
The topic I find myself circling around the most is why the Ukraine war really happened. There are two strong analytical pieces out at the moment — one in The New Yorker, one in The Bulwark — that pretty much reflect my position, which is that Putin took a radical turn to the right in the early 2010s and that, as Ukraine adopted a more pro-Western position in the wake of Maidan, Ukraine found itself on a collision course with Putin.
The invasion — which seemed absurd to most of the rest of the world — made sense to Putin both from a more narrowly pragmatic perspective and from a more messianic ultra-nationalist sensibility. Of the more pragmatic side of the equation, Owen Matthews in a recent book writes, “A confluence of Western weakness in the aftermath of the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, the retirement of Angela Merkel as Europe’s senior statesperson, the electoral weakness of Zelensky and a revamped Russian army seemed to present a once-in-a lifetime opportunity.”
The image of Putin as a bumbling war leader has now become so ingrained that it’s easy to forget how impressive he seemed (not least of all to himself) before the invasion. It was common for journalists to write that he seemed to be ‘made of teflon.’ He had had a decade in which Russia’s geopolitical interests appeared to inexorably advance, whether in Syria, Africa, the Crimea, and with the ‘illiberal’ turn of democracies around the world. Nobody’s quite talking about in these terms, but, with Trump in power, Putin clearly felt he had a partner he could work with. With Biden, and with the Afghanistan withdrawal, he must have believed that the U.S. had returned to an adversarial posture at the same time that the U.S. was in a position of strategic weakness. I happened to be spending time around ex-military people at the beginning of 2022 and that was the general sense — which was not so much shared by the Western public-at-large — that Afghanistan showed America to be in retreat internationally and with America’s perceived weakness a spur to somebody like Putin to probe further.