The Turning of the Tide

Top Stories of the Year: #1

I spent the week before Christmas counting down the top stories of 2022.

At #5 is the continuation of the covid pandemic—and the fact that most people are ignoring it. At #4 is the Dobbs anti-abortion ruling and what it says about the real meaning of conservative jurisprudence. At #3 is the entirely predictable return of inflation. At #2 is the voters’ rejection of Republican attempts to gain the power to overturn future election results.

The obvious choice for top story #1 is the war in Ukraine: the return of aggressive military conquest to Europe, and the valiant struggle against it that has united Europe and revived the NATO alliance.

More broadly, the story of this year is the failure of dictatorships around the world and a revival of the global cause of liberty.

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I spent the last part of 2021 and the first few months of 2022 warning about Russia’s impending invasion of Ukraine and its wider implications.

There is Belarus, which is now fully a Kremlin puppet, grounding an Irish airliner on its way from Greece to Lithuania so that it can arrest and torture a dissident. And there is Russia’s campaign of assassinating critics on British soil, which may just be starting. It is a campaign to extend Putin’s tyranny indefinitely across the rest of the world, leaving nowhere safe from the rule of his whims.

With this context, you can see why this conflict isn’t just about Ukraine, much less about some tiny contested sliver of Ukraine. If Colonel Putin wants to restore Russia’s Soviet-era empire, with its pretensions to global influence, he is going to have to do a whole lot more invading and annexing, a whole lot more threatening and intimidation and assassination….

This is not about Russia’s historical ties to Ukraine—which, if you know what those ties are, would put you unambiguously in favor of Ukrainian independence—nor is it about some imaginary threat to Russia from NATO. It is about Putin’s need to crash down all semblance of order and rationality in world affairs and break down all barriers between might and right.

Ukraine is just the beginning. It is his big test of exactly how much he can get away with.

This is why I said, “The line must be drawn here.”

No more letting the dictators set the terms, extend their arbitrary rule over the rest of the world, and inspire imitators in our own back yard. No more falling back while they advance.

Yet I didn’t rate Ukraine’s chances against Russia very highly, predicting, “A guerilla war by a relatively small, under-equipped Ukrainian army with no air support will probably not stop Russia, though it may bleed them significantly.” At least I added this: “But we should not forget Russia’s profound weakness.”

You can say that again. This turned out to be the big story of the war: unexpected Ukrainian strength and unexpected Russian weakness.

As I wrote in the first days of the invasion, “Courage and defiance have radiated from every level of Ukrainian society.”

What is most noticeable is that this kind of courage extends widely to the elites in Ukrainian society—in distinct contrast to the relationship between the common man and the elites in Russia. Boxing legends Vitali Klitschko, who is the mayor of Kyiv, and his younger brother Wladimir have both signed up to fight. Former president Petro Poroshenko was photographed slinging a rifle with a regiment outside Kyiv. And above all there is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian who got elected literally because he played the president in a TV comedy and people liked his character. Zelensky was criticized for his apparent complacency in the lead-up to the invasion, and a lot of people thought he was in over his head—but in the crisis he has risen magnificently to the occasion. He refused an American offer to evacuate him from the capital, proclaiming, “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.” The other translation I’ve heard is, “I need bullets, not a taxi.” I don’t know if this is more accurate, but it is more literarily satisfying. Two days ago, he signed off a call with his fellow European heads of state by telling them, “This might be the last time you see me alive.” This is not mere showmanship because everybody knows it could be true.

A Ukrainian journalist describes the electrifying effect of Zelensky’s example, asking, “How do you control a country of 44 million Ukrainians who suddenly have something to believe in?”

It is not often that you can say unambiguously that a single decision by a single man changed the course of history. There are often cases where there are so many larger forces at work that if one person acted differently, others would have taken his place. But Zelensky’s decision not to evacuate, to ask for “bullets, not a taxi,” is one of those rare irreplaceable decisions.

Zelensky’s finest hour is recorded for us on video: a Facebook video he posted on the evening of the first day of the invasion showing himself and top officials of his government on the streets of Kyiv, defying the very real and immediate threat to their lives.

Good evening, everyone. The leader of the party is here, the head of the presidential administration is here, Prime Minister Shmyhal is here, Podolyak is here, the president is here.

We are all here, our soldiers are here, the citizens of the country are here. We are all here protecting our independence, our country, and we are going to continue to do so. Glory to the defenders of Ukraine. Glory to Ukraine.

With this, Russia’s invasion was doomed.

Vladimir Putin seems to have been taken in by his own propaganda. He thought that Ukraine really did not have a separate national identity and that they would not fight to be independent of his oppressive kleptocracy. So he thought that at the first touch of military force, the government would fold and the leaders would flee. When they didn’t, when they showed fierce resistance instead, he did not have a plan for how to win, nor did he have the actual military capability to do it.

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As I said, this is about much more than Ukraine. I described the electrifying effect on Europe.

I have always supported the idea behind the European Union, the concept of uniting the continent in connections of peaceful trade and cooperation so that it never re-enacts the horrific bloodletting of the 20th Century. But this goal has often been lost in the actual implementation of the European Union, which seemed organized instead as a vehicle for meddlesome regulation. Yet the invasion of Ukraine seems to have reminded the European Union why its exists and has motivated it members to live up to their original mission….

For years, people have been trying to make Europe happen, and Zelensky finally did it.

For those who doubt that this war is about freedom versus dictatorship, over at Discourse, I traced the history behind the current war, a history of Ukrainians “making their own decisions about what kind of government they wanted to have.”

The roots of the current conflict go back to 2004, when Ukrainians took to the streets in a successful protest against a Kremlin puppet leader’s attempt to rig the presidential election to stay in power. When that same leader later wormed his way back into power in 2014, Ukrainians rose up again to protest his attempt to draw Ukraine into an alliance with Vladimir Putin’s Russia and pull it away from the European Union. Putin’s subsequent invasion of Crimea and the Donbas, and his buildup to the current, larger invasion, were a response to that rejection.

Everything that led up to this war happened because Ukrainians decided they wanted one model of government, the Western model of liberal democracy, over the Putinist model of authoritarian kleptocracy. More to the point, the nature of Russia’s regime also helped push it toward war. Putin viewed Ukraine as a threat precisely because it was a liberal competitor and a haven for dissidents that showed the Russian people an alternative to his corrupt rule.

See also my Symposium interview with Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko, who describes the long historical roots of Ukraine’s “contractual idea of politics,” i.e., the consent of the governed.

That’s why this has turned into a conflict with global ramifications that I called World War Z: “a reminder that the liberal international order is still strong and living—and that dictatorship is a zombie creed, still moving but dead inside, waiting to be banished back to its crypt.”

I also explained the more direct US interest in this conflict.

We have so far given about $50 billion in military aid to Ukraine, and it has been worth every penny. For a fraction of our annual military budget—and an even smaller fraction of what we have spent on recent wars—we have exposed the weakness of one of our only two geopolitical rivals, and we have made it even weaker by destroying a substantial portion of its army. All without having to send American troops to do the fighting.

We have also deeply damaged Putinism as a model of government that might appeal to other nations. By exposing Russian weakness, the Ukrainians have shown that authoritarianism’s blustering claims of strength are a lie and that free nations are incomparably stronger.

The ancient Chinese sage Sun Tzu said that the highest form of war is “to win without fighting.” That is exactly what we are doing by supporting Ukraine—all of which is captured in a great joke told by Zelensky.

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In the days before Christmas, Volodymyr Zelensky made a surprise visit to Washington, DC, where he met with President Biden and gave a speech to Congress asking for more support. In doing so, he could cite Ukraine’s success on the battlefield, particularly its big counteroffensive in the second half of the year. As I observed in late September:

Ukraine needs strong support from Europe and the United States for a flow of aid, weapons, ammunition, training, intelligence, and advice. So they needed to show that they can do something with all that support. They needed to show that they can win. And they have.

That’s the message that has emerged from this latest counteroffensive: Give the Ukrainians everything they ask for, because they can win.

If you scoff at Ukraine needing outside support to win, recall that this is how the United States gained our own independence as a nation. This is why Washington crossing the Delaware was so important, and why the Battle of Saratoga in late 1777 was the crucial turning point of the war. By showing that we could fight and win, we won crucial support from France, including the troops and ships that helped us win the decisive Battle of Yorktown. So there is a long and noble history of local resistance against an empire earning, through valor in battle, the foreign support that makes victory possible.

In the case of this latest visit, Zelensky returns home with the promise of Patriot missile defenses, which will help him counter the latest Russian strategy: a constant missile barrage that is calculated, not just to terrorize the Ukrainian people and leave them without power and heat, but to exhaust their air defenses and make them more vulnerable to the Russian air force.

The current administration’s policy toward Ukraine has been the one really good part of Joe Biden’s presidency. (That, and the fact that Biden is not notably active on Twitter.) One of my top stories of last year was the disastrous and chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan, which created a precedent of American weakness and emboldened dictators, including Putin. It left me with very low expectations for how Biden would respond to the invasion of Ukraine. Yet so far he has come through with strong and unwavering support for our allies, and this has reversed a lot of the damage he caused in the previous year.

Meanwhile, much of Biden’s political opposition on the right has disgraced itself. Many mainstream, old-line Republicans like Mitch McConnell have done well, but Zelensky’s appearance in Washington touched off another meltdown of envy and resentment among the nationalist conservatives.

Check out Cathy Young’s rundown of this spectacle at The Bulwark, in which she ruminates on the reasons for the reaction.

Partly, it’s simply partisanship: If the libs are for it, we’re against it, and the more offensively the better. (And if the pre-Trump Republican establishment is also for it, then we’re even more against it.) Partly, it’s the belief that Ukrainian democracy is a Biden/Obama/Hillary Clinton/”Deep State” project, all the more suspect because it’s related to Trump’s first impeachment. Partly, it’s the “national conservative” distaste for liberalism—not only in its American progressive iteration, but in the more fundamental sense that includes conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: the outlook based on individual freedom and personal autonomy, equality before the law, limited government, and an international order rooted in those values. Many NatCons are far more sympathetic to Russia’s crusade against secular liberalism than to Ukraine’s desire for integration into liberal, secular Europe.

Vladimir Putin has certainly been working hard to appeal to the prejudices of religious conservatives, portraying himself as a champion of traditionalism and a fighter against “wokeness.”

Another sign that Russia is losing is Vladimir Putin giving a speech in which he invoked Western debates over “cancel culture” and tried to present himself as a defender of J.K. Rowling. For her part, Rowling was having none of it, pointing to Putin’s own tendency to “cancel” his political opponents. One wag joked that this is proof that Russia “is no longer capable of manufacturing culture war materiel internally: substantially all of its memes and talking points are Western imports.”

This is transparently absurd propaganda, yet it has gone over with many of the supposed critical thinkers of the “Intellectual Dark Web,” a degeneration I analyzed in response to Jordan Peterson’s ill-informed and credulous pro-Putin position.

A lot of conservatives are actively rooting for Putin because they need him to win, because a Russian loss undermines the key claims of their ideology.

I don’t think anybody did a better job than David Frum of summing it up the dilemma of the nationalist conservatives: “Everything they wanted to perceive as decadent and weak has proven strong and brave; everything they wanted to represent as fearsome and powerful has revealed itself as brutal and stupid.”

One of the consequences of the war in Ukraine is that, combined with the defeat of the pro-insurrection faction in November’s election, it reveals the weakness and vicious folly of the nationalist conservative ideology that has been trying to establish itself domestically. (And to put a further end to that story, two days before Christmas, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act, which will make a future insurrection much more difficult.)

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The war in Ukraine has turned out to be part of a broader global crisis of dictatorship.

In recent months, Iran has been convulsed by a broad new uprising against a regime that is almost universally viewed by its subjects as immoral and illegitimate.

What makes the current uprising in Iran so unusual…is that it is a revolution spearheaded by schoolgirls….

This is a very dangerous point for the regime, because by killing children they are galvanizing profound hatred of the whole Islamic system. How many people are going to continue to stand by and watch them murder children? Perhaps more important, how many of the regime’s enforcers are going to be willing to keep on committing these crimes?

The deepest failure of the Islamic regime is ideological. “Morality police” killing schoolgirls—that sums up the fundamental contradiction that is now fully out in the open.

China is facing a similar upheaval. Partly, this has its roots in the regime’s failed response to covid, which has focused solely on one anti-pandemic measure, the only one the regime really knows how to implement.

Having failed at all other pandemic measures, what does China have left? Something that comes naturally to a regime that also runs vast prison complexes and concentration camps: locking people up. It’s the Law of the Instrument: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like it needs to be pounded down….

The result is the massive effort over the past two months to put most of the population of Shanghai, a city of 26 million, under house arrest….

To complete the dystopian feel of it all, residents shouting from their windows to protest the lack of food were answered by a government drone broadcasting a message telling them to “control your soul’s desire for freedom.”

This laid the groundwork for a broader protest movement that broke out in the last month.

Protesters have demanded “free expression” and “democracy, rule of law, freedom of expression.” They have shouted, “We want freedom, we want human rights,” held up blank white papers as a pointed commentary about censorship—an idea borrowed from recent Russian protests—and most startlingly, they have called for Xi Jinping and the Communist Party to “step down.”

[F]rom the beginning, the protests have been about more than just covid. The fact that they were touched off by an event in Xinjiang has made them also a protest of China’s genocide against the Uighurs in Xinjiang. (The Shanghai protests started at an intersection of Urumqi Road, as a symbol of solidarity with the Uighurs.) This is also evidence that people across China—especially the students who have been spearheading these protests—are much more aware of what has been happening in Xinjiang than anyone realized….

[I]nstead of a series of disparate protests, each about one local issue, the regime now faces protests around the country that are about all of the issues at once. 

Other Chinese citizens are simply fleeing. I recently came across a story from a reporter who went to investigate Latin American immigration to the US and found Chinese nationals flowing through Ecuador and into Central America on their way here, a massive flow of money and talent from China to the US.

These simmering protests—a low-grade civil war between dictatorial regimes and the people they supposedly rule—will be one of the big stories to watch in the next year. The fall of either the Iranian regime or the Chinese Communist Party would be an event almost on par with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In the meantime, the turning of the tide against dictatorship is manifested in one of the most subtle but profound phenomena to emerge from Ukraine’s heroic resistance against Putin: a kind of NATO patriotism.

NATO isn’t even fighting directly in the current war. The NATO powers have been backing Ukraine with training, weapons, intelligence, and money, all of which have been crucial in turning the tide in the war, but NATO is not doing any of the actual shooting. Yet for a lot of people who are cheering on Ukraine, especially Europeans and particularly Eastern Europeans, NATO has become an object of pride and devotion. Clearly, NATO is the stand-in for a larger issue, which you can observe from the fact that this pro-NATO sentiment seems to extend to NATO-aligned powers as far away as Taiwan.

What I think we are seeing is the birth of a kind of pan-liberal patriotism, a sense of pride and devotion directed toward free societies in general. If that’s the case, then—well, I love NATO, too. And I am very happy that this is a thing now.

Toward the end of the year, I hailed all of these events as an end to the freedom recession.

For the past fifteen years or so, the world has been in a “freedom recession” or a “democratic recession.” The 1990s and early 2000s saw a sustained burst of liberation following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since then, however, dictatorship, authoritarianism, and strongman rule have reasserted themselves across the globe.

The relapse is turning out to be temporary, and from Ukraine to Iran to China—and hopefully, soon, many other places—it is the dictators who are on the defensive and the cause of freedom that is on the rise.

The Tracinski Letter covered all of this very extensively and from many angles, and this overview is just a small sampling.

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For all the storm and stress of this year—and the heavy price the Ukrainians have been paying for their liberty and ours—the resurgence of the cause of freedom makes 2022 on balance a pretty good year. It also gives us a lot to look forward to in 2023.

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