Murc’s Law as a school of international relations

Jeffrey Sachs has apparently gone the full Greenwald, and decided to let Chotiner interview him about his tankie views about Putin’s unprovoked imperialist aggression:

I’m a little confused when you talk about 2008, because the full-scale invasion of Ukraine didn’t start until 2022, fourteen years later, and Ukraine was no closer to getting into NATO.

In 2008, at the NATO summit in Bucharest, NATO said that it would enlarge to include Ukraine and Georgia. The decision was made by NATO. It was a very contentious meeting, because most of the Europeans objected, but the United States pushed it through. And this led, in my view, to the war in Georgia very soon afterward. I think that was Russia’s message to Georgia: you’re not going to join NATO. And that was a message for Ukraine as well.

Ukraine was already in a battle in which the United States was heavily participating, between a divided country, east and west divisions, pro- and anti-NATO divisions, and so forth. In 2005, Viktor Yushchenko became President; he [later] called for Ukraine to join NATO. This created the big tensions that led to 2008. And then Yushchenko was defeated and Yanukovych came in saying we should have neutrality. And that, I believe, was viewed as an affront to the U.S. policymakers who were intent on NATO enlargement. In late 2013, when protests against Yanukovych broke out, the U.S. took the occasion to play extremely actively in this and in ways that were rather direct, let us say—paying a lot of money to those who were leading this so-called movement and helping to finance what became a coup.

So you think what happened in 2014 was a coup?

It was a coup, of course. It was an unconstitutional seizure of power when very violent groups, well armed, stormed the government buildings in February, 2014. [Protesters, angered by Yanukovych’s rejection of a trade agreement with the European Union, were killed by security forces after trying to occupy parts of Kyiv; afterward, Yanukovych was isolated politically and fled to Russia with the assistance of the Kremlin. I asked Sachs over e-mail for a source for his claim about the role played by the U.S. He responded, “It is public knowledge that the National Endowment for Democracy and US NGOs spent heavily in Ukraine to support the Maidan. I have first-hand knowledge of that spending.” The N.E.D. told The New Yorker that it provides funding to civil-society groups but “does not provide funding to support protests.”]

Let me just go back to 2008. I understand what happened at the Bucharest summit. My point is that fourteen years later Ukraine was no closer to actually joining NATO.

That’s not correct. That’s not correct, Isaac. At all. The fact of the matter is that, after the overthrow of Yanukovych, a series of governments in both Ukraine and the U.S. have heavily armed Ukraine, heavily modernized Ukraine’s Army, poured in many billions of dollars of armaments, and this is what made it possible for Ukraine to resist the Russian invasion in February, 2022.

“If Ukraine wasn’t about to join NATO it wouldn’t have defended itself, so Putin had no choice but to invade” is a hell of a take.

His other core position is that al-Assad and Putin are fundamentally men of peace, and any bad actions taken on their part are the result of the United States unilaterally stopping peace agreements they totally wanted to reach:

Wait, sorry, Bashar al-Assad was willing to make peace, but the U.S. would not let him, essentially?

The U.S. insisted that Bashar al-Assad must go for there to be peace. The other participants in the negotiation said that a political process could end this, but not starting on the first day with U.S.-backed regime change. [When asked in an e-mail whether he had a source for the claim that the U.S. was the lone country opposing a peace agreement, Sachs told The New Yorker, “I have first-hand knowledge of the US blocking the peace agreement in Syria from the highest international sources.”]

When it comes to Ukraine, what is so horrifying for me is that this war, even considering the multiple facts I’ve laid out that were the predicate to this war, could have been avoided at the end of 2021. President Putin put on the table three demands: no NATO enlargement, Crimea remaining part of Russia, and the Minsk II agreements being implemented. The United States refused.

Do you still think, in hindsight, that Putin was being sincere here?

I think that one could have created an enforceable agreement around those points.

And how is this for an argument from authority:

What have you made of Putin’s rhetoric in the last year that he’s the new Peter the Great, that Ukraine is part of a Greater Russia, the Russian imperial perspective that he’s put forward as one cause of the war, one of the driving forces of it for him, in his own words?

Yeah, I think your interview with John Mearsheimer covers that well, so I’ll just leave it there. I think it’s accurately described there.

Don’t judge Putin by what he does, or says, but by an irrefutable presumption that he wants peace and any action he takes to the contrary is solely a product of decisions made by the United States. It’s an ethos, I guess.