SOME USEFUL THOUGHTS ON UKRAINE AND RUSSIA FROM JOSHUA TREVIÑO. I think this is paywalled, but here’s the meat:
Russian defeat in Ukraine is one thing, and very much in the American interest, but it does not follow from this that the strident maximalism of the dedicated anti-Russians is at all an obvious good. To pick one example, have a look at this piece from “queer Ukrainian journalist” Maksym Eristavi, arguing for a fully “[p]artitioned, disarmed, and decolonized Russia” as the sole plausible and desirable strategic endstate for the war.
This is definitionally extremist, but not particularly unusual — and many of the people endorsing it are adjacent to the American center-left “thought leadership” crowd who reliably end up publishing at The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and so on. It gains purchase for a couple of reasons. One is the the thesis advanced by Richard Hanania that their views on Russia are almost entirely a subset and product of their views on sexual politics. This is probably correct. The other is simple ignorance, amplified by a pervasive inability to think about strategic affairs in any coherent manner.
The reality is that a maximalist end to the war — defined in Eristavi’s terms — is profoundly undesirable to the United States. We’ve been in this situation before, which is not to say we’ve learned from it: it was American insistence that guaranteed the dissolution of the old Habsburg realms after 1918, which is almost universally regarded in retrospect as a long-term strategic error. Fostering the collapse of a unifying state in east-central Europe meant that region’s transformation into a generator of far worse catastrophes than imagined at that collapse. The same would be true of a partitioned Russia, which would effectively see the Eurasian steppe returned to the status quo ante of more than four centuries past — not just a periodic mechanism of erupting violence, but also likely prey to a powerful China. This seems opaque to those whose historical horizons extend perhaps twenty minutes into the past, but the course of human events is insensible to that deficiency.
As we’ve mentioned here at Armas many times, the post-1991 rollback of Russia’s western frontier by nearly three centuries was a great victory, no less than what that polity earned, and deserves to be defended. But we cannot lose sight of the big picture. There will be a Russia when all this is done — and it will look mostly like the Russia we have now. There is no loss in it, and it is not a thing to be regretted. The talk of “partition” now is fantastical and deranged, yes, but its danger is not in the threat that it might happen. It won’t. The danger is in the threat that a Western policymaker might think it will — and act as if it were so.
Well, of course, it also raises the stakes for Putin, et al., and makes some catastrophic action on their part far more likely.
Drastically weakening Russian, and displaying to China that the West and its allies aren’t the pushovers some of its generals have been claiming, is worthwhile. Turning a substantial portion of the planet’s dry-land surface into a bunch of warring failed states is not.
