Putin's war

Russian President Vladimir Putin, now a rogue leader and a singular menace to international security, sees Ukraine as having fallen under malign sway of the West and the CIA. To the extent that he had a credible pretext for invading and occupying Ukraine, it was that NATO has encroached on Russia’s traditional sphere of influence. But in fact, Washington’s most consequential involvement in Kyiv’s affairs to date has been Donald Trump’s intervention in them, and it was pro-Russian.

Republicans have criticized President Joe Biden for not doing more to arm the Ukrainians, yet fail to recognize that crucial US support was withheld years ago: they voted not to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial in the Senate, proceedings that the House of Representatives had precipitated over Trump’s making US assistance to Ukraine conditional on political favors. That observation barely scratches the surface of Republican hypocrisy on this front, but recounting the Trump administration’s corrosive relationship with Ukraine is not the vindictive resurrection of old talking points. Rather, it is essential to reckoning with his domestically and strategically calamitous presidency. Trump must be held accountable for weakening the US-led international, rules-based order, undermining US deterrence of a hostile and predatory Russia, and setting up Ukraine for Putin’s brutal and geopolitically ominous invasion.

Trump’s instrumental use of Ukraine for personal political advantage began with the government that preceded Volodymyr Zelensky’s, that of Petro Poroshenko, who was president from 2014 to 2019. Like Zelensky, Poroshenko saw US support as essential to shoring up Ukraine’s national security in light of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and fomenting of a separatist rebellion in the Donbas region. Trump himself evinced no special affection for Ukraine and placed no particular value on its independence, refusing when he was the Republican nominee in 2016 to condemn Moscow over its annexation of Crimea. His campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had advised the monumentally corrupt Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who advocated that his country distance itself from the West and align more closely Russia. In late 2016, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, signaled to Russia’s ambassador that the Trump administration would take a conciliatory approach to economic sanctions imposed by Obama—then a leading objective for President Putin.

Although the Trump campaign had required Manafort to resign in August 2016 after it was revealed—in part, by the investigative work of a Ukrainian journalist—that he had taken $12.7 million in secret cash payments from Yanukovych and his backers, the dismissal was a matter of appearance rather than principle. Convicted in 2017 on multiple charges related to his dealings with Yanukovych as a result of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of 2016 Russian election interference, Manafort continued to advise Trump informally, including on Ukrainian matters, through his lawyers. (In this, Manafort was apparently angling for an implicit presidential pardon, which he eventually got. Likewise, while Flynn was compelled to resign as national security adviser after only three weeks on the job over lying about his pre-inauguration contacts with Russian officials for which he, too, was indicted, Trump pardoned him as well.)

Precisely because of the pro-Russian tilt of crucial members of Trump’s inner circle, Poroshenko felt compelled to be of great service to Trump. In 2017, to address energy shortages, Ukraine bought coal from US producers, nourishing the fossil fuel–based economy that Trump championed, and cultivated deeper business ties with the United States, making deals with American firms to buy locomotives and fuel for Ukrainian nuclear plants. Meanwhile, the former federal prosecutor and pro-Trump Republican politician Rudy Giuliani became a private consultant on crime for the city of Kyiv and on emergency services for the city of Kharkiv. Trump appointed him a cyber security adviser to the US government in 2017, and then, in 2018, retained him as his personal lawyer. Giuliani was well placed to secure special access to Poroshenko “as a friend of Trump,” according to Poroshenko’s foreign policy adviser, and the two presidents discussed defending Ukraine against Russian aggression.

Despite its pro-Western stance and ostensibly reformist agenda, Poroshenko’s government was dogged by accusations of the corruption that had plagued Ukraine during its post-Soviet oligarchic era. There had, in particular, been a history of politicized judicial actions: criminal investigations and prosecutions that served power, not the rule of law. That tradition seemed to be continuing when, in April 2018, Yuriy Lutsenko, Poroshenko’s prosecutor general, froze cases in Ukraine pertinent to the Mueller investigation, including one that traced the money paid by Ukrainian political figures to Manafort. At Manafort’s urging, Giuliani also enjoined Lutsenko to investigate Serhiy Leshchenko, the Ukrainian journalist who had first exposed Manafort’s involvement with Yanukovych—who may yet figure in Putin’s plans for Ukraine—and Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American political consultant who had worked for the Democratic National Committee and who, they believed, was also involved with surfacing the story. Giuliani appeared on Fox News retailing the unfounded notion that the “black ledger” detailing Yanukovych’s payments to Manafort was a fabrication.

Giuliani was also attempting to make Hunter Biden’s business activities in Ukraine appear nefarious, and he persuaded Lutsenko to look into them, as well as into the equally baseless allegation that Joe Biden had tried to thwart investigations of his son’s dealings. Also in April 2018, having reversed an Obama-era ban on arms exports to Ukraine, the US finally did, after considerable delay, approve the sale of 210 Javelin anti-tank missiles and thirty-five launching units. But while Congress considered Russian provocations such as the Russian coast guard’s attack on Ukrainian vessels in the Kerch Strait in November 2018 to be dangerous escalations, the White House itself typically minimized them.

National security had ranked relatively low among Ukrainian voters’ concerns. In a November 2018 public opinion poll jointly conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, the Razumkov Center, and the Rating Group, the Russian threat placed ninth among the problems facing the country, well behind economic stagnation and large-scale emigration. Given Poroshenko’s emphasis on national security, the Kerch Strait incident should have given him a considerable bump. But his apparent tolerance for corruption, and for persecution of those who opposed it, appeared to outweigh these factors. The effect of Trump’s machinations, in manipulating Ukraine’s legal system for political ends, can hardly have helped this negative perception of Poroshenko’s administration. The November 2018 poll also measured support for possible candidates in the upcoming 2019 election: former prime minister Yuliya Tymoshenko came first with 21 percent, followed by Zelensky—who had not yet announced his candidacy and would eventually win with 73 percent of the vote—at 11 percent, and then by Poroshenko with 10 percent. Poroshenko also had highest negative ratings: almost half of voters said that they would definitely not vote for him.

The deleterious impact of Trump’s interference on the electability of a strongly anti-Russian candidate may have changed Putin’s strategic calculus about invading Ukraine. Initially, as a candidate, Zelensky did not appear as anti-Russian as Poroshenko and, as a former TV comedian who was not a career politician, he looked to be a less formidable adversary. He had grown up speaking Russian and, as a celebrity entertainer, had spoken out against a proposed Ukrainian government ban on Russian artists.

Zelensky’s big win turned on his populist anti-corruption and anti-establishment platform. While most voters construed that stance as opposition to any return to the oligarchic, pro-Russian old guard, his campaign rhetoric was not stridently anti-Russian. He simply called for resolving Ukraine’s conflict with Russia in Donbas through dialogue with Putin.

As president, Zelensky did try to deliver on both planks of his platform—seeking to disempower oligarchs and stamp out corruption, while promoting national unity between the Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking populations and seeking a political solution in Donbas. Only when Russia began its military buildup near Ukraine’s border in early 2021 did Zelensky ask NATO to expedite Ukraine’s membership. Even as a Russian invasion appeared imminent last month, Zelensky downplayed prospects of war and counseled calm. Since Russia invaded Ukraine and started the war, of course, he has confirmed his credentials as a defiant, indeed heroic, Ukrainian patriot beyond doubt. Putin, like the rest of the world, underestimated Zelensky.

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Well before Zelensky became president, Ukraine’s national security had been for the Trump administration a matter for political bartering rather than considered US foreign policy. In fact, Zelensky’s landslide victory in the Ukrainian election in April 2019 threw a wrench into Trump’s efforts, insofar as Zelensky was an unknown quantity likely to be less malleable than Poroshenko had been. Even Poroshenko’s appointee as prosecutor general, Lutsenko, had a hard time finding dirt that would stick to the Bidens, stating publicly in May 2019 that they had done nothing illegal in Ukraine. Indeed, while Hunter Biden may have passively accepted the benefits of connections and name recognition in accepting a seat on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian oil and gas company, and Joe Biden did actively oppose corruption in Ukraine, there was no evidence that either son or father did anything illicit.

That same month, Trump removed US ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, a distinguished career diplomat, who had championed anti-corruption Ukrainian reformers and thus impeded Giuliani’s attempts on Trump’s behalf to inveigle the Ukrainian government into investigating the Bidens. Lutsenko had paved the way for Yovanovitch’s ouster by targeting her with false allegations of corrupt interference, which the US State Department described as “an outright fabrication.” Zelensky, in contrast, quickly indicated that he was not planning to keep Lutsenko on and did indeed dismiss him in August that year.

Concerned that Ukraine’s new government would drop all efforts to taint the Bidens, Trump tried to extort Zelensky in the now-famous phone call of July 25, 2019, in which he pressured the Ukrainian president to publicly announce an investigation into Hunter Biden in exchange for the United States’ release of $400 million in congressionally authorized foreign assistance and a White House meeting with Zelensky. The withheld aid included military assets to reinforce Ukraine’s ability to resist Russian depredations that had begun in 2014 with Russia’s paramilitary infiltration of Ukraine and complete annexation of Crimea. Trump also importuned Zelensky to receive Giuliani in Kyiv.

Trump suggested to Zelensky that the source of foreign interference in the 2016 US presidential election was not Russia but Ukraine, reflecting a baseless White House narrative according to which the Democratic National Committee, Democratic donors, and Ukrainian officials had colluded to defeat Trump in 2016, and asked him to expose a phantom server supposedly owned by CrowdStrike, a California-based cyber security firm that the Hillary Clinton campaign had hired to examine the hacking of its emails. Russian misinformation had convinced Trump—as well as many viewers of Fox News and several Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee—that the server was located in Ukraine.

In the phone conversation with Zelensky, Trump was dismissive about any notion of Russian interference—as he had been publicly a year earlier in his notorious joint press conference in Helsinki with Putin. Although the then-recently released Mueller Report did not establish any criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian hackers to promote Trump and discredit Clinton, it did find that the campaign knew about and “welcomed” Russians’ work in its favor. Trump labeled the investigation “nonsense” and Mueller himself “incompetent.” Although Zelensky was calculatedly ingratiating toward Trump on the call, in substance he deflected Trump’s entreaties and did not to commit to any specific action. Nor did he undertake any. Trump did not release the aid until September 11, only after the delay had become public and a whistleblower report had set in motion Trump’s first impeachment.

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Coupled with Trump’s consistent denigration of NATO and lack of interest in European security, the phone call reflected something even more sobering than the “transactional” approach to foreign policy for which some Beltway pundits had rather euphemistically credited Trump. It revealed to the Ukrainian president that Trump was willing to subordinate Ukraine’s security to his own domestic political ambitions and to manipulate Ukraine’s governance to advance them. Beyond that, it indicated that Trump did not consider Putin’s revanchism in Eastern Europe a significant US concern. And it demonstrated that Trump had eviscerated the interagency process managed by the National Security Council for implementing US foreign policy; that decades-old practice, designed to safeguard vital national interests, was jettisoned in favor of an autocratic approach that allowed the kind of “drug deal,” to adopt then-national security adviser John Bolton’s apt metaphor, that Trump tried to pull off with Ukraine.

Although Trump was acquitted in the 2019 impeachment, thanks to party line voting, he was politically constrained thereafter from interfering with American assistance to Ukraine. No doubt aware of his increased leverage, Zelensky sought a greater level of support—and got it: the US pledged $680 million in foreign assistance to Ukraine in fiscal year 2020, the most since 1994. Of that, military aid increased by the highest amount, $200 million, to a total of $284 million. For fiscal year 2021, Congress funded the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, through which the incoming Biden administration immediately provided a $125 million military aid package. As the full-scale Russian military threat to Ukraine has intensified, US aid, including thousands of Javelins and hundreds of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, has been flowing robustly. None of this, however, has been enough to offset Trump’s signal to Putin that Ukraine was an expendable pawn.

More broadly, Trump’s derogation of America’s standing appears to have degraded its power to deter military aggression. Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko told New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg that pro-Western reformers in Ukraine had seen the United States as a “a perfect democracy functioning very well,” with an admirable system of checks and balances, only to see that image “crumbling” under Trump. The integrity of American governance is central to American power, and Trump’s drug deal comprehensively debased it.

Democracy is fragile, as President Biden recognized in his inaugural address. He has expressed faith that the United States can regain the global respect, trust, and influence it has enjoyed for generations by virtue of its political example—a crucial component of its soft power—but only if it cleans up its own political house, which Trump tried to burn down on January 6, 2021.

It is worth noting, in this connection, that the House Select Committee’s mandate for investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol extends to exploring “malign foreign influence” and, by implication, the potential exploitation of American political chaos by the United States’ geopolitical rivals. It’s true that Russia and Ukraine face an inexorable security dilemma, and that strategic tension between them is practically inevitable. At the same time, there seems little doubt that Putin factored in America’s deep political divisions and distractedness, in large part Trump’s legacy, to his decision to intervene in Ukraine. Even as Russian tanks rolled in, Trump continued to extol Putin’s “genius” and “savvy.” As Bolton himself put it, in an interview with Vice News earlier this month, Trump, by creating an “unnatural environment” in US–Ukraine relations centered on the Bidens’ illusory transgressions and election conspiracy theories, made it “that much easier for Putin” to invade Ukraine.

Russia’s recklessness has shattered the Ukrainians’ world, disrupted international security, and ratcheted up strategic instability in Europe. But it has also reinvigorated NATO’s cohesion and focus, galvanized transatlantic relations and resolve, and united most of the world against illiberal autocracy. Musings that it has, at a single stroke, rejuvenated the US-led liberal order—under pressure ever since the Iraq War and further degraded during Trump’s subversive presidency—are gross exaggerations. To enable that order to take firm hold again, especially in the current period of great-power rivalry, the United States must reaffirm its commitment to promoting liberal democracy. Stalwart support for Western-leaning democracies is mandatory, if calibrated by the need to discourage escalation and wider war. In Ukraine’s case, the question remains: How much support is the right amount?

The more they attack them no matter how right they are the more the electorate feels the need to defend a failing human like them!

I guess around the 80s and 90s, it became noticeable.

One reason American political discourse has sunk to its present dismal level is that few students in either K-12 or college take basic courses that teach them to analyze political rhetoric critically and engage in it intelligently themselves. Unfortunately, the discipline that has the most potential for teaching this subject, my own of English composition, has not been widely identified with the mission but has been reduced to the common conception of those who, on meeting an English professor, groan, “Oh oh, I better watch my grammar.”

Worse yet, composition itself has become yet another victim of partisan polarization and invective, as conservative culture warriors have turned their guns against college writing courses as hotbeds of liberal bias. One of the better-informed conservative critics, Heather MacDonald, wrote several years ago in the National Interest:

The only thing composition teachers are not talking and writing about these days is how to teach students to compose clear, logical prose . . . . Composition has abandoned correctness because grammatical errors signify the author is politically engaged.

Snarky charges like MacDonald’s contain a grain of truth and raise valid questions about the ill-defined identity of college writing courses, though such charges tend to be overblown and simplistic. Her last sentence may be true of some crude-minded teachers, but a more sensible notion is that intellectual engagement in debating current political and social issues is a more mature aim for student writers than just grammatical correctness — although the two can and should be taught together.

I do agree that many students at most American colleges have not learned how to write clearly and coherently, or for that matter to read at the level of liberal education or serious journalism — one consequence of which, I argue, is widespread political illiteracy. Politics aside, though, this problem stems largely from inadequate instruction in K-12 education, even in privileged schools, back to what used to be called “Grammar School,” as well as from the frequent failure of other academic disciplines to foster good student (or faculty!) writing.

Support for this point came from the surprising source of Jacques Derrida, the late French guru of arcane deconstructionist theory, who in an interview in the Journal of Advanced Composition disapproved of his ideas being applied to basic levels of education and affirmed that instruction in clear, correct writing in all academic fields was standard practice in European K-12 and college education, eliminating the need for college writing courses altogether.

To clarify one source of confusion here, the main divisions in modern college English are literature, composition, and creative writing (which I won’t discuss here). Both literature and composition are taught at different undergraduate levels, with the lower levels typically being general education-and-breadth requirements for students in majors other than English. One reason to clarify this point is that when conservatives ridicule literature or composition courses with outlandish-sounding titles or heavily political content, they often neglect to verify whether these courses are basic ones required for GE&B or, as is more often the case, upper-division electives mainly for English majors. Such courses are still fair game for criticism, but many critics are too quick to assume that students are forced into them. Criticism is also best undertaken on an informed, individual course basis, not through hearsay evidence and cherry-picked generalizations. In my judgment, fair evaluation of such courses reveals about the same range from worthless to superb as in any other segment of the curriculum.

Another source of confusion about college composition, largely within the discipline itself, is the nationwide failure to articulate a clear sequence of writing courses and what each should address, from Basic Writing (the course formerly known as Remedial Writing or “Bonehead English”), to First-Year Writing (the course formerly known as Freshman English), typically an inadequate, one-term catch-all, to more advanced courses in critical thinking (also known as informal logic), argumentative rhetoric, and evaluating research resources and other informational reading.

Ideally, required college study in English should begin with these “advanced” topics, which provide a vital introduction to all further college education and to critical citizenship beyond college. This could only come about through vastly increasing opportunity in college preparation for students of all socioeconomic or cultural backgrounds, but we have been going in the opposite direction, in which budget cuts for K-12 and soaring college tuition are destroying such opportunity.

I pose a dilemma in all earnestness to conservatives and liberals alike: If K-12 schools have failed to prepare students for college-level reading and writing, should it be the responsibility of English Ph.D’s to teach at a grammar-school level or to uphold the standards of higher education? One wholly misbegotten way out of this dilemma has been staffing of introductory writing courses not by professors but by grad students and adjuncts in assembly-line multiversities who are often under-paid, under-prepared, and over-worked, with no guaranteed continuity of employment and with no consistent guidelines for course goals. (Many small liberal arts colleges do have a tradition of professors teaching composition, integrated with academic study, as it should be.)

This pernicious trend has been compounded by decades of budget cuts for public higher education, which almost always are applied to reducing funds for teaching at the lower levels of instruction like first-year- composition, not the higher ones of specialized scholarship and research, let alone that of the lavishly paid administrators who dictate where cuts will fall.

In historical perspective, our current model of college composition only developed in the twentieth century. Prior to that, going back to ancient Greece and Rome, study of composition was incorporated into the discipline of rhetoric (sometimes called “Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy”), centered in study of reasoning, argumentation, and debate—preeminently about politics. In an important article, “From Rhetoric to Composition: The Teaching of Writing in America to 1900,” educational historian Michael Halloran affirmed that the goal of the rhetorical curriculum was “to address students as political beings, as members of a body politic in which they have a responsibility to form judgments and influence the judgment of others on public issues.” Halloran cites a list of questions provided by professors for student debate in the leading colleges at the time of the Revolution, such as, “Is an absolute and arbitrary monarchy contrary to right reason?” That and similarly loaded questions must have provoked Royalist conservatives to scream about left-wing faculty bias.

So if we are to restore argumentative rhetoric to its traditional place in English studies, shouldn’t we foster clear and logical (as well as grammatical) prose in students’ writing about political controversies and teach them to criticize abuses of clear language or logic by politicians and the media? If students expressing their political opinions in papers or class discussion display factual ignorance, lack of evidence, illogical or prejudiced reasoning, shouldn’t they be corrected — in the sense of logical and factual, not political, correctness? (A common instance of illogical causal analysis is white students’ papers that blame blacks solely for their current problems of poverty and crime, in ignorance of the unbroken historical chain of evasion of responsibility by white society from slavery to the present.)

In sum, politics has a perfectly legitimate role in college writing courses, not through excluding complementary study of grammar and clear, logical prose, or through being imposed in a one-sided manner by doctrinaire teachers (which does too often occur), but as the subject of even-handed rhetorical study and debate. TheCommon Core State Standards in 2010 (which were otherwise flawed in many ways) bravely gave primacy to instruction to “demonstrate the cogent reasoning and use of evidence that is essential to . . . responsible citizenship in a democratic republic.” No discipline is better suited, and positioned in required courses, to fulfill that mission than composition.

Faulty reasoning of course occurs on both the political (and student) left and right, although in my three decades teaching in conservative locales, it was most blatant in students parroting conservative dogmas from Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter. I regularly assigned Limbaugh’s books as subjects for fact-checking and study of coherent reasoning; even most hardcore “dittoheads” quickly learned to look elsewhere for substantial conservative sources. I cherished those conservative students who based their views on serious study and were able to engage with liberal ideas on a reasoned level; many of them said in anonymous evaluations that my course was one of their favorites because I challenged them—as well as liberals–to support and refine their views against opposing ones and graded them “up” for skill in doing so.

However, some conservatives were unable or unwilling to submit their beliefs to extensive contrast with opposing viewpoints, and just interpreted my insistence that they do so as imposition of “liberal PC.” Such responses have led me to wonder how many of the complaints trumpeted by conservatives about faculty bias might stem from students (or their parents or political pundits) who simply do not understand the traditional, Socratic mission of college education and of humanistic philosophy, to submit dogmatic beliefs and cultural assumptions to critical questioning. Many conservative organizations have forthrightly opposed education that asks students to question parental, religious, and other authority. Many liberals can be equally dogmatic in practice, and should be called on this inconsistency.

1. What is the author's vantagepoint, in terms of social class, wealth, oc-
cupation, ethnic group, political ideology, educational level, age, gen-
der, etc.? Is that vantagepoint apt to color her/his attitudes on the issue
under discussion? Does she/he have anything personally to gain from the
position she/he is arguing for, any conflicts of interest or other reasons
for special pleading?

2. What organized financial, political, ethnic, or other interests are back-
ing the advocated position? Who stands to profit financially, politically,
or otherwise from it?

3. Once you have determined the author's vantagepoint and/or the special
interests being favored, look for signs of ethnocentrism, rationalization
or wishful thinking, sentimentality, and other blocks to clear thinking,
as well as the rhetorical fallacies of onesidedness, selective vision, or a
double standard.

4. Look for the following semantic patterns reflecting the biases in No. 3:
a. Playing up: (1) arguments favorableto his/her side,
(2) arguments unfavorableto the other side.
b. Playing down (or suppressing altogether):
(1) arguments unfavorableto her/his side,
(2) arguments favorableto the other side.
c. Applying "clean" words (ones with positive connotations) to her/his
side.
Applying "dirty" words (ones with negative connotations) to the
other.
d. Assuming that the representatives of his/her side are trustworthy,
truthful, and have no selfish motives, while assuming the opposite of
the other side.

5. If you don't find strong signs of the above biases, that's a pretty good
indication that the argument is a credible one.

6. If there is a large amount of one-sided rhetoric and semantic bias, that's
a pretty good sign that the writer is not a very credible source. How-
ever, finding signs of the above biases does not in itself prove that the
writer's arguments are fallacious. Don't fall into the ad hominem("to the
man") fallacy-evading the issue by attacking the characterof the writer
or speaker without refuting the substance of the argument itself. What
the writer says may or may not be factual, regardless of the semantic
biases. The point is not to let yourself be swayed by words alone, espe-
cially when you are inclined to wishful thinking on one side of the sub-
ject yourself. When you find these biases in other writers, or in yourself,
that is a sign that you need to be extra careful to check the facts out with
a variety of other sources and to find out what the arguments are on the
other side of the issue.