The New Neo

I’m going to respond to this recent comment, not in order to especially pick on its author, but because I think it’s an example of the type of thought process and the sorts of analogies we see quite a bit lately, and it represents an opportunity for me to discuss some background to the Ukraine war.

First, the comment. I’ve made some small corrections for grammar/spelling. Then I take it point by point with the commenter’s remarks in italics and my reactions following:

I am sure a righteous democracy like America would be perfectly fine and a good sport about it if a scenario ever arose that Russian/Chinese propaganda had successfully convinced a majority of Californians to demand to secede from America; join forces with Russia, China, and Iran, and have a Russian military base built in Silicon Valley pointing missiles at what is left of America, right? I am very sure America would not take military action to neutralize this threat and just honor Californians’ wish in this factional scenario peacefully.

(1) a righteous democracy like America…
A great many Americans no longer think that America is especially righteous – particularly since this administration but certainly for much of the 21st Century. Nevertheless, its foundational ideals – to which it’s not living up – are among the best or perhaps the best in the world.

(2) that Russian/Chinese propaganda had successfully convinced a majority of Californians to demand to secede from America…
At this point, I’m not at all sure that most Americans would care if California left the Union. The thing is, there also is no clear mechanism by which a state can secede other than armed revolt. The Supreme Court has actually ruled on that:

Some have argued for secession as a constitutional right and others as from a natural right of revolution. In Texas v. White (1869), the Supreme Court ruled unilateral secession unconstitutional, while commenting that revolution or consent of the states could lead to a successful secession.

And so it is possible that if California wished to secede and there was “consent of the states” to that secession, it would happen without all that much fuss. But of course, the comment isn’t just talking about a simple secession; it’s talking about a state that has seceded subsequently becoming an enemy country with an enemy missile base. In addition, because the commenter is apparently trying to make an analogy of California seceding from the US with Ukraine abandoning its former unity with Russia, let’s take a look at the huge differences in the processes involved.

The history of Ukraine is lengthy and I can’t possibly cover it in detail here. But for example, in the 15th and 16th centuries, Poland, Poland-Lithuania, and the Crimean Khanate were in charge there at different times. Then, after a war between Russia and Poland in the mid-17th Century, the eastern part of Ukraine came under Russian rule. This sort of back-and-forth was very common in eastern Europe as well as other parts of the world.

Close to the beginning of the 19th Century, Ukraine was under Russian and Austrian rule for about a hundred years until the Russian Revolution in 1917, when Ukraine became an independent country for a few years. Then Russia (the Bolsheviks) attacked again, and won the war. After that the Ukraine was part of the USSR. Note that this annexation was not voluntary (except that home-grown Ukrainian Bolsheviks supported it and became the new leaders). It was the result of both a civil war and a Russian Communist takeover by force.

At first, Ukrainians in the USSR were allowed to speak and teach in their own language. But then:

Policy in the 1930s turned to Russification. In 1932 and 1933, millions of people, mostly peasants, in Ukraine starved to death in a devastating famine, known as Holodomor. It is estimated by Encyclopædia Britannica that 6 to 8 million people died from hunger in the Soviet Union during this period, of whom 4 to 5 million were Ukrainians.

That famine was real, but its terrible effects were exacerbated greatly by the policies of the USSR in Ukraine.

That’s not really similar to California’s relationship with the US. Not even close. The analogy is mind-bogglingly poor, but I’ve seen it or its equivalent all over the right side of the blogosphere lately.

There’s more:

During World War II the Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought for Ukrainian independence against both Germany and the Soviet Union. In 1945 the Ukrainian SSR became one of the founding members of the United Nations.

So there’s been a long and highly-motivated struggle for Ukrainian independence from Russia when it was the larger entity the USSR:

After the death of Stalin in 1953, the Ukrainian Khrushchev as head of the Communist Party of Soviet Union enabled a Ukrainian revival, and in 1954 the republic expanded to the south with the transfer of Crimea from Russia. Nevertheless, political repressions against poets, historians and other intellectuals continued, as in all other parts of the USSR.

Ukraine became independent again when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.

The USSR dissolved in 1991. Repeat: it dissolved. I imagine that if the USA were also to dissolve (not so far-fetched a notion these days), California might indeed decide to become an independent country. But till then, there’s really zero analogy to anything in Ukrainian and Russian history.

(3) Now back to the comment:

…join forces with Russia, China, and Iran, and have a Russian military base built in Silicon Valley pointing missiles at what is left of America…

There is no NATO military base in Ukraine pointing missiles at Russia. Nor are the nations of Europe who form NATO analogous in their rhetoric or their behavior to the aforementioned countries – especially Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism all over the world, and a country whose leaders continue to chant “Death to America!”

But setting all that aside, let’s imagine that Ukraine does join NATO someday and does acquire such a base. Unlike California – which is nowhere nearby its hypothesized nuclear partners Russia, China, or Iran, Ukraine is already just about as close geographically to some NATO countries as it is to Russia. Russia is on Ukraine’s eastern border and the NATO countries of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania constitute Ukraine’s border on the west and south. As for Russia, it already has two NATO nations on its borders, Latvia and Estonia. Finland (threatened recently by Putin and not a NATO nation) also has a border with Russia, but it’s more northerly.

There are already missile defense systems run by NATO in Romania with one under construction; there are none in Estonia and Latvia, those NATO states that border Russia. The one in Romania has been operational for almost six years, and as far as I know there have been no incidents involving it.

The new Aegis Ashore ballistic missile defence system at Deveselu Airbase in Romania is a land-based version of the Aegis-class ships in Spain. It offers an advanced, permanent capability to detect and intercept ballistic missile threats.

After years of construction, the Aegis Ashore facility in Romania was declared operational in May 2016. A similar site is under construction in Redzikowo, Poland.

In response to the growing threat posed by the proliferation of ballistic missiles, NATO Allies, decided in 2010 that the Alliance will develop a missile defence capability to protect all NATO European populations and territory against missile attacks.

This is what’s already in place, if Ukraine joined NATO it would bring the possibility of such a system only a very small bit closer to Russia. I believe that one of the reasons Putin has decided to strike before Ukraine might be joining NATO is that NATO membership would pledge other NATO nations to Ukraine’s defense if Russia attacked it. Putin has long wanted to reclaim the lost Ukraine for Russia, and he feared that time was running out.

Here was NATO’s policy on the use of nuclear weapons during the Cold War years:

After a great deal of debate in the 1960s, in December 1967 the alliance adopted a new nuclear strategy in MC 14/3 known as “flexible response.” NATO formally abandoned the strategy of massive retaliation (which had actually been dropped by the Eisenhower administration before the end of its term) and committed the alliance to respond to any aggression, short of general nuclear attack, at the level of force — conventional or nuclear — at which it was initiated. The alliance retained the option, however, to use nuclear weapons first if its initial response to a conventional attack did not prove adequate to containing the aggressor, and to deliberately escalate to general nuclear war, if necessary.

While adoption of the flexible response policy allowed the alliance to avoid a policy of prompt and mutual suicide (as many of NATO’s tactical nuclear weapons would have detonated on alliance territory), NATO still continued to rely on the first use of nuclear weapons to deter or counter a major conventional assault.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO reduced its force and changed its policy:

In early 1991, after the withdrawal and destruction of its INF systems and the voluntary retirement of about 2,400 excess tactical nuclear weapons, NATO’s European-based nuclear arsenal stood at approximately 4,000 tactical warheads. Then, in September of that year, in the aftermath of the failed coup in Moscow, President Bush announced a major unilateral withdrawal of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons worldwide. Gorbachev announced reciprocal Soviet withdrawals the following month. All U.S. ground-based and sea-based tactical weapons were affected, leaving only several hundred (around 400) air-delivered gravity bombs in NATO’s European-based nuclear arsenal by the end of the decade. (France and Britain subsequently decided to phase out their own tactical nuclear weapons.)…

…[NATO’s] 1991 concept noted that “the fundamental purpose of the nuclear forces of the Allies is political: to preserve peace and prevent coercion and any kind of war.” It stated specifically that “the circumstances in which any use of nuclear weapons might have to be contemplated by [NATO] are…remote.” The allies “can therefore significantly reduce their sub-strategic nuclear forces.”

It was only after that change that NATO began to expand eastward:

The new member-states — the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland — all sought protection under NATO’s nuclear umbrella without pressing for actual nuclear deployments on their territories…

Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, for example, stated in April 1997 that he could “perceive no security requirement for stationing nuclear weapons on Polish territory.” In the end, the NATO allies explicitly stated in the May 1997 so-called Founding Act that “they have no intention, no plan and no reason to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of new members…..

…[T]he current understanding [is] that the use of nuclear weapons [by NATO] would be considered only in “extremely remote” circumstances…

This was written in the late 1990s, when as far as I can tell Russia was seen as a failed empire with no designs on its neighbors.

NATO still reserves the right of “first use” of nuclear weapons in the event of chemical warfare or a large-scale invasion. Significantly, Russia has a “first use” policy as well.

The point is that NATO has never used nuclear weapons, nor has any other country except the US against Japan to end WWII. However, if you are Putin and are planning offensive attacks to take over a NATO country (if Ukraine became a NATO country, for example, or if Russia wanted to get back some of the previous Soviet satellites that hate its guts, such as Poland which is already a NATO member), you would be upset about the mere possibility of NATO putting nuclear weapons in Ukraine even – or maybe especially – for defensive use or as deterrent.

Again, under the supposedly analogous scenario postulated in the blog comment about California, it seems logical to assume that the reason Russia, China, or Iran would put a nuclear facility in California would be for offensive reasons. California has no proximity to Russia, China, or Iran, nor does any portion of the US have such proximity (except Alaska is near far far northeastern Russia).

(5) I’ll dispense with dealing with the last sentence in the blog comment I quoted – I am very sure America would not take military action to neutralize this threat and just honor Californians’ wish in this factional scenario peacefully – because I think any attempted analogy with Ukraine has been sufficiently critiqued.

A few more things: on the 25th of February, about a week ago, NATO did the following [emphasis mine]:

NATO, for the first time in its history, is activating its NATO Response Force (NRF) in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine…

The leaders stressed the moves “are and remain preventive, proportionate and non-escalatory.”

These are conventional NATO troops, not nuclear weaponry. In contrast, on February 27th Putin put his nuclear forces on “high alert”.

Also, the announcement of NATO’s Response Force activation was one day after a threat Putin made:

In a Feb. 24 speech, Putin warned that any interference in the attacks would lead to “consequences you have [never] seen,” AP reported.

The implication is a threat of either nuclear attack or some other catastrophic type of attack such as chemical or biological warfare, or perhaps cyber or electrical grid attacks. As I’ve written before, whether Putin’s threat is serious or not is unknown.