Dear Friends,
I’ve been busy novel-writing and haven’t been paying much attention to this dumpster fire of a planet. These posts are meant to think through the news from a slightly broader/more philosophical perspective than what’s mostly available. At the partner site @Inner Life,
writes on Elie Wiesel’s lessons for Israel/Palestine.Best,
Sam
ISRAEL/GAZA AND GREAT POWER LOGIC
The first, most obvious thing to say about the Isarel/Gaza war is how little anyone really knows about what’s actually happening. There’s an aspect of Baudrillard’s 1991 essays, ‘The Gulf War Did Not Take Place’ to this — the most significant event in the world; with all eyes riveted on it; and a paltry understanding of Israel’s actual military objectives, of the strength of Hamas within Gaza, of the scale of civilian devastation.
In the absence of good information, everybody simply imposes their own pre-fabricated narrative on the situation. The war is fought internationally, with everybody hurling around their different labels — “genocide,” “war crime,” “colonial,” “anti-Semitic,” whatever it is — while the conflict is largely a black box.
To a surprising extent, in the serious analysis I’m reading, it is that court of public opinion, actually, that matters just as much as anything else. Israel believes there’s a window given it to it by the U.S. to achieve its strategic objectives in Gaza. Once that window fades — and public sentiment in the West turns — Israel will have to settle for what it has. In a real sense, then, the war is being fought in Harvard Yard almost as much as it is in the Middle East.
There is a very straightforward explanation for the absence of good on-the-ground information: Israel blocking access to Gaza for international journalists. The result is that, in assessing the damage done by the Israeli strikes, international observers are largely absent, and there’s a back and forth on how much to trust the Hamas-run Health Ministry. The U.S. position has been to dismiss it out of hand, but, based on BBC reporting and more boot-strapped analysis, I get the sense that the Health Ministry’s recording of deaths is basically accurate.
In any case, what’s become clear is that Israel’s strikes have escalated and have moved out of range for what can be considered proportionate to 10/7. That’s the verdict of a New York Times analysis, comparing the Gaza War with past conflicts. And, more interestingly, that’s the verdict of Haaretz, contending, “The Israeli army has dropped the restraint in Gaza, and the data shows unprecedented killing.” Or, as Anthony Blinken blithely admits, “There does remain a gap between the intent to protect civilians and the actual results that we’re seeing on the ground.”
Even for people like me, who are sympathetic to Israel, that’s an appalling thing to have to take in: 18,000 dead as a kind of blood-ransom for 1,300; and an utter breakdown in the humanitarian situation of Gaza, with nine out of ten Gazans unable to eat daily.
That toll is all the more difficult to absorb given the almost complete opacity of Israel’s actual goals from the fighting. In an interview from Israel, Brookings fellow Natan Sachs gives the most convincing analysis I’ve come across so far. “Their operational goals are twofold: to eliminate Hamas’s capability to govern the Gaza Strip and to carry out offensive operations such as October 7th from the Gaza Strip,” says Sachs of IDF strategy. What their goal is not, emphasizes Sachs, is “to eradicate Hamas writ large.”
I am a bit haunted by a line I read in Yossi Klein Halevi’s op-ed in the immediate aftermath of 10/7, in which he argued that the main point of the war would be to restore “Israel’s deterrence.”
From the perspective of great power politics, what matters in a situation like this has nothing to do with civilian casualties but with the ability to institute dominance. Israel lost its dominance in the glitch of 10/7, and its reinstatement of dominance is truly terrifying. Within Israel’s military establishment, there’s the clear sense that the war in Gaza, as intense as it is, is a sideshow compared to potential conflagrations with Hezbollah or with Iran itself. As Sachs, the Brookings scholar puts it, “But the truth is that [Gaza] actually pales in comparison to the war that so far has not broken out.”
That is not a pleasant outlook — and it’s very far from the logic of “human rights” or of “international law” — but it is also, let’s face it, a great deal of how the world works. Powers have a logic of their own - with Israel in this case understood as a regional power — and Israel’s need to push Hamas away from its immediate border and to reinstate a favorable political dynamic in the region at large is a set of considerations that should not be taken lightly. In any case, in all the outrage for Israel’s actions in Gaza (much of it warranted), I have yet to hear a coherent argument for what Israel should do instead. (Is Israel just supposed to pretend that 10/7 didn’t happen?)
With an event like the Gaza War, we get into the kind of situation that the Western mindset, in particular, seems singularly unequipped to deal with: the domain of no-good-alternatives, in which either binary (‘we stand with Israel no matter what’; or ‘we condemn Israel’s actions entirely’) is unavailing. The Gaza War forces us (not that many people have felt so compelled) to deal with the world in more complicated terms. Israel has its rights as a power to reassert dominance and to take its revenge for 10/7 — and Hamas’ interweaving of its fighters into the fabric of life in Gaza make it so that those operations are impossible without loss of civilian life. On the other hand, the idea of “surgical strikes” is clearly a myth. Israel has been insisting on use of heavy bombs and on widespread aerial attacks, which, as The New York Times observes, recall the Blitz — or the civilian bombing of Germany. It’s not defensible. There is a heavy moral accounting for it. But, at the same time, it belongs to the domain of great power politics — the logic of how nations assert their power and hold on to it.
U.S. SUPPORT FOR UKRAINE DRIES UP
And, meanwhile, the thing that I’ve been afraid for a year-and-a-half has pretty much come to pass — the United States bailing on support of Ukraine, not at all for anything that’s changed on the ground there, but simply because the grinding, attritional war doesn’t sustain itself in the news cycle and, also, because U.S. domestic politics are collapsing into complete dysfunction.
This has always been Putin’s grand strategy for the war — simply to wait it out, assuming that his autocratic system is tougher and more tenacious than the alternative proffered by the “fickle West.” Unfortunately, it’s looking like he might be on to something. I had assumed that the critical moment was November, 2024, when a possible Trump reelection would have spelled the end of support for Ukraine. So I’m surprised and saddened to see this happening a year ahead of Putin’s schedule, with Republican Senators holding up aid to Ukraine because, of all things, they insist that the aid package be accompanied by tough measures at the U.S.-Mexico border. According to The New York Times, a classified Senate briefing with administration officials “devolved into a partisan screaming match” — and with Democratic Senator Chris Murphy matter-of-factly saying, “We are about to abandon Ukraine.”
The geopolitical lesson for me, both in Gaza and in Ukraine, is the extent to which public opinion really does matter. I think I’d always sort of assumed that what matters is facts on the ground, and that governments do what they do with fairly little input from the public, but the surprise, both with Israel/Gaza and Ukraine, is of very high-ranking people discussing the extent to which foreign policy objectives depend on public will. As Der Spiegel puts it in a similarly downbeat analysis of the Ukraine War, “Ukraine’s most important partner [the United States] is running out of a vital resource: attention.”
My sense — and this is the theme, I guess, of this post — is the need for Americans to think of themselves in different terms from how we have been accustomed. We like to believe that we are this innocent, sort of happy-go-lucky republic, that we are basically acted-upon rather than acting. That’s just not the reality and hasn’t been for nearly a century. We are an empire and our mode of empire is to work through proxy states to whom we supply money and military equipment.
I am saying these things not at all pejoratively. There is no shame in being an empire (many nations aspire to it). What drives the rest of the world crazy about the United States — and what undermines the United States’ own efficacy — is its hypocrisy, its unwillingness to simply acknowledge and come to terms with what it is. The exercise of imperial power can actually do a great deal of good — the Ukrainians, for instance, are beyond grateful - but the United States’ schizophrenia about its own power (a schizophrenia that is, unfortunately, to a great extent rooted in the democratic system) mean that our allies can never exactly entirely count on us and a wily, malevolent actor like Putin believes that he can simply wait it out.
This week, I read three very long, detailed pieces on the Ukraine War: a Washington Post assessment of the counter-offensive; a Spiegel account of the current state of the war; and a surprisingly revealing interview for The Economist with Ukraine’s commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny.
All are equally depressing. Der Spiegel commits to the toxic word “stalemate,” contending that Russia’s recent offensive in Avdiika “could become symbolic of the future: a war that has bogged down and could last for years.” Zaluzhny turns out to be a surprisingly philosophical four-star general, with references ranging from the Tang Dynasty to classic texts of trench warfare. His view simply is that a World War I-style technological impasse has taken place. The Russians have built such intense defensive fortifications — trenches and mines buttressed by drones — that they are nearly impregnable. “There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough,” he says, and calls for some technological advance in the art of war (which, in this case, means AI) that could break the stalemate. “We need to look for this solution [technological advance], we need to find this gunpowder, quickly master it and use it for a speedy victory. Because sooner or later we are going to find that we simply don’t have enough people to fight,” Zaluzhny says.
The Washington Post piece is a long, fractious recounting of how American and Ukrainian officials, in the period of the counter-offensive, came, basically, to Zaluzhny’s conclusions. The piece — “Miscalculations, Divisions Marked Offensive Planning by US, Ukraine” — promises more red meat than it delivers. The U.S. perspective was that the Ukrainians got gun-shy at the moment of launching the counter-offensive: “it seemed to the Americans that Kyiv, gung-ho during the war games and the training, had abruptly slowed down”; while the Ukrainians held that weapons shipped by the Western allies often arrived broken or less-than-battle-ready. But the bigger problem was, simply, about the realities of attritional war — the Russians dug in and Ukraine lacking any sort of tactical advantage (whether air superiority or a technological edge) needed to achieve a breakthrough. As CIA Director William Burns put it (U.S. intelligence had always been more pessimistic than their Defense Department counterparts), “Your heart is in it. But our broader intelligence assessment was that this was going to be a really tough slog.”
The failure of the counter-offensive didn’t, I think, surprise most people who had been watching the Ukraine War since its outbreak. The late 2022 breakthrough was a lucky stroke, and Russian defenses had improved since then. Now, it gets grim and awful — and probably will for a very long time. Putin gets enough domestic dividends from the war that he’s unlikely to back down. Ukraine can’t back down — even if they do get pushed onto the defensive, as at Aviidika. And the U.S. finds itself facing a kind of existential challenge to its whole way of being. The question is whether we have the staying power to support an ally. The answer to that says a tremendous amount about who we are as a nation. But, as the foot-dragging by the Senate Republicans indicates, the answer may not at all be what we would wish for.
THREE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS VISIT CONGRESS
There is something to be said for this idea that American university campuses are a kind of battlefront of the Gaza War — certainly, Israeli newspapers are obsessed with stories of anti-Semitism by American college students.
But the congressional testimony of three university presidents this week — culminating in the resignation of UPenn president Liz Magill, and with Harvard president Claudine Gay next in the line of fire — strikes me as not really being about that.
For me, the best way to understand what’s been happening on American universities (and in American civic life in general) is through narratives of revolution and counter-revolution. The progressive revolution had been brewing for years, but, after Donald Trump’s election, there was a concerted effort to remake the liberal institutional sphere according to progressive values. That movement — carried out through immense pressure generated over social media, most famously in #MeToo and #Black Lives Matter — emphasized a utopian vision of how institutions could achieve a better world, post-racism, post-harassment, perfectly inclusive, and with all possible forms of threatening or bullying speech excised.
The problems with that movement became apparent to many liberals around 2020-2021 — that it seemed to reflect a world of super-polite, bright-eyed automatons as opposed to the fractious world most of us live in; and that it forwent any normal review process for those who diverged from the guiding worldview.
And, in the last few years, the counter-revolution has been proceeding apace — in, let’s say, Joe Kahn’s tenure at The New York Times; in the Depp-Heard trial with its disregard of the freshly-sanctified principle of #MeToo; and, now, in a really stunning event, a Trump-y Republican congresswoman bringing down the head of an Ivy League university and with more university presidents in jeopardy.
The challenge for the three university presidents wasn’t so much the stand that they took in Congress — if they had fairly imposed a strong free speech platform in their tenures, there wouldn’t have been any problem with their lumping calls for “genocide” in with it — it was the hypocrisy of their positions. American universities — through their DEI Revolutionary Guard — had committed themselves to the intense scrutiny of “microaggressions,” of virtually any speech that made students uncomfortable, whether it was a federal judge who had argued against the constitutionality of same-sex marriage, an invited speaker who had criticized affirmative action, a professor who showed Laurence Oliver’s Othello in class, a religious studies professor who showed a piece of medieval art (made by devout Muslims) that depicted the Prophet Mohammed. For university presidents to suddenly remember their free speech roots at the moment of a call for the “genocide” of the Jewish people is the height of hypocrisy — and is recognized as such by everybody across the American political spectrum (everybody, that is, outside the echo chamber of the universities).
It really is very interesting to watch the fall of Liz Magill happening in real time. In the now-viral video of her congressional testimony, Magill looks the picture of beatific smugness turning on her microphone, flanked by her colleagues, as she answers a none-too-subtle question from a famously intemperate congresswoman. Days later, in her hostage video of an apology to the Penn community, Magill looks and sounds very different. She had had time to reflect after the massive outcry following her congressional performance — “how much damage to our reputation are we willing to accept?” the chair of Wharton wrote to trustees — and, now, the umbrella of the safety-first apparatus seemed to apply to a hypothetical call for genocide. “It is threatening — deeply so. In my view it would be harassment or intimidation,” Magill said of calls for genocide. And, in some of her final words as president, continued, “I am committed to a safe, secure, and supportive environment so all members of our community can thrive.”
That’s a fitting epitaph to the progressive revolution (b.2017, d.2023). Magill seemed to want to double-down on the safety-first approach — after all, it was allowing genocide to slip in there along with acts of hostility like misgendering that had gotten her into trouble — and it seems not to have occurred to her that the problem was that she was simultaneously serving two completely different paradigms. Either colleges are places for students to grow into adults, with a challenging and sometimes bruising conversation protected by free speech principles; or colleges are a protected space where students are unfailingly kind to one another and any form of individual harassment, whether it’s a black-face historical movie or a misgendering, is out of bounds.
You can have one principle or another, and it was amazing how quickly the divided sensibility of the modern university collapsed under Stefanik’s questioning.
Magill and Gay seemed to draw all the wrong conclusions. Magill wanted a new review policy “to get this right.” Gay said, “When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret.” I’ve been on my high horse recently about freedom of speech, and, to me, this episode is a perfect illustration of what I’ve been arguing. As David French puts it in the New York Times, “If Harvard, M.I.T. and Penn had chosen to model their policies after the First Amendment, many of the presidents’ controversial answers would be largely correct.” The problem was that the schools, over the last half-decade or decade chose censorship and, as French writes, “Censorship helped put these presidents in their predicament, and censorship will not help them escape.”
I don’t really understand why the liberal/progressive institutional heads think they can come up with some better system than free speech — Magill, in her video, seemed to place a great deal of hope in a university provost named John Jackson. Simply put, no committee-concocted speech policy is going to be able to handle all eventualities — let alone create the discomfort-frei utopia that the progressives have been dreaming of. Just stick to free speech. In the long run, it saves a lot of headaches.
GOODBYE HENRY, GOODBYE INNOCENCE
All in all, it seems like the perfect moment for Henry Kissinger to insert himself in the news-cycle one last time. There’s something about Kissinger that’s more confusing to people than just about any other public figure. As Nick Kristof wrote, with a bit of an assist from Charles Dickens, “Henry Kissinger was the wisest of American foreign policy leaders and the most oblivious, the most farsighted and the most myopic, the one with the greatest legacy — and the one we should most study to learn what not to do.”
Having not lived through Kissinger’s period in power, I’m not, I have to say, quite as fascinated by him as everybody else seems to be. What he is supposed to stand for is the American Century — America’s turn from innocence to a brutal realpolitik that resulted in millions of deaths around the world. And everything about him, his accent, his womanizing, his sense of humor, is recast in parable form — either, depending on whom you talk to, as America’s growing-up or fall from innocence.
My basic sense — which runs through this post — is that, as Americans, we tend to be very naive about the intractable realities of power. As Joseph S. Nye writes in an unrelated piece, “Americans have long seen their country as morally exceptional.” But why? Why should we? Why should we be morally exceptional as one nation among many — let alone as an imperial power? And, in the back-and-forth takes on Kissinger’s death there is, above all, a desire to assess Kissinger from the perspective of moral worth: “There will be no debate about whether Henry Kissinger lived a consequential life,” wrote Kevin Williamson in The Dispatch. “There will be a great deal of debate about whether he lived a good one.” But — again — I don’t know why that would be the criteria. It’s like asking whether some Roman procurator was a ‘good’ person or not; and those weren’t the terms that Kissinger saw himself in.
Power has a logic of its own, and Kissinger was more matter-of-fact about embracing that logic than most others were. He was dealing in scales of millions of lives and he probably did ultimately save many, many lives with his China and Middle Eastern policies even as there can be no possible forgiveness, ever, for Cambodia, East Pakistan, Timor. In making those sorts of decisions, Kissinger — although he casts a certain aura — isn’t unique. He was a statesman and he served power. As Ben Rhodes writes in the most interesting Kissinger encomium I’ve come across: “In many ways, he was as much a creation of the American national security state as its author.”
In evaluating Kissinger, the ever-absorbing biographical details don’t really tell us that much. What does it matter that he was Jewish; that he had a Bavarian accent; that he once worked at Harvard; that he had a disproportionate amount of good press for a functionary; that he slept his way around the cocktail circuit? As some of the more cutting obituaries have noted, Kissinger often was less than his myth. In The Nation, Greg Grandin calls him “a preening paranoid, tacking between ruthlessness and sycophancy to advance his career.” Seymour Hersh, who wrote a classic book on Kissinger, recalls a meeting with Kissinger, when Kissinger was shamelessly trying to curry favorable coverage, and thinking, “Is this it? Is this all he’s got?”
The challenge with Kissinger seems to be that we just can’t get it through our heads that we are an empire, that we are subject to laws of power that are basically unchanged from the time of Julius Caesar or of Sargon the Great, and that the domain of morality maps very imperfectly onto the domain of empire. So, condemn Kissinger; or be outraged by the condemnation. The point really is that it’s time to get beyond the cult of innocence and to try to see ourselves in the hall of mirrors we’ve created. As Rhodes puts it, “Kissinger exemplified the gap between the story that America, the superpower, tells and the way that we can act in the world.” That’s not a recipe for cynicism — in what Rhodes calls “a foreign policy drained of concern for the human beings left in its wake,” Kissinger was really pushing things — but it is a call for maturity: there’s an understanding that America is a great power and, in the way of great powers, will throw its weight around; but also that that exercise of power takes an almost unimaginable moral toll, that the psychological burden of it is borne by the servants of power, and that that toll is never lessened, never absolved after however many thousands of Kissinger quips, however many attempts to make it seem like a lighter thing than what it is.
Four bangers in a single post! I don't know how you do it man!
To follow your throughline, I'll note my personal thoughts on academics — the two fields I can't grok are economics and foreign affairs. In econ everything is counter intuitive, and in international relations all options are bad.
As for the university presidents, as someone who is shocked by the state of campus, I'm enjoying the schadenfreude like a good b-list action flick. BUT it comes with a worry, "hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue" so their firing(s) make me worried that this will lead to more regulated speech. Then again, maybe we have to start by cleaning out the Augean Stables.
"The Progressive Revolution (2017-2023)". Some future history student has an MA thesis ready to go thanks to you!