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... other than negotiating Peace between them.

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NATO to blame for the Russo-Ukrainian war

A year after Russia's all-out attack against its neighbor on February 24 2022, volumes trying to explain the conflict to the public 
begin to accumulate on my bookshelf. Think-tankers, political scientists and journalists have been at the forefront.

Historians, used to slow-burning research projects, have so far been absent from this developing historiography of the war. This is 
beginning to change, and it is only appropriate that the lead is taken by one of the most accomplished English-language historians 
of Ukraine, Harvard University's Serhii Plokhy.

Plokhy, who grew up in Zaporizhzhia and began his academic career in Dnipropetrovsk (both in Ukraine), keeps his outrage about 
Russia's aggression on a tight leash. There are no polemics in this book. The historian lets the facts speak.

Interpretation is provided mostly in the form of narrative. This restraint is remarkable: his sister still lives in Ukraine and a 
cousin died defending Bakhmut.

Plokhy prefers "Russo-Ukrainian war" to alternatives like "Russia's war against Ukraine". While the latter expression is well 
suited to emphasising Russia's culpability in this war, the former stresses that Ukraine is not just a victim of Russia, but its 
equal.

The confrontation between these two countries has its own history. After the 1991 breakdown of the Soviet Union - in which they had 
formed two of the largest republics - Russia and Ukraine drifted apart. Russia moved further and further towards authoritarianism 
at home and imperialism abroad. Ukraine did the opposite. This parting of paths is one aspect of the historical background to this 
war.

Partially, this divergence was the result of the different position of each country vis-à-vis the Soviet legacy, as Plokhy 
explains:

In the eyes of the Russian public and a good part of the elite the fall of the USSR as a superpower and empire was a loss for 
Russia, the Ukrainian elite and much of the public considered it a gain for their country.

Decolonisation looks different if you are part of the metropole (Russia) or one of the colonies (Ukraine). In the first case, 
nostalgia for past greatness easily inspires revanchism - seeking to aggressively recover lost territory. In the second case, the 
fall of empire opens up the vision for a better future.

But there were domestic forces too. They encouraged Ukraine's recurrent democratic corrections, whenever one strongman or another 
tried to move the country towards autocracy. Here, Plokhy turns perceived wisdom on its head.

In the three decades since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the fragmentation of Ukraine's political system has been 
frequently decried. Too many parties; a country split historically and culturally into various regions. Russians and Russian 
speakers as significant minorities, particularly in the east and the south of the country, as well as Crimea (where they 
constituted a majority). And a political class competing for power based on regional networks and voter blocks.

In Plokhy's summary, "Ukraine was divided by history, culture, and the political orientations and instincts of its people as the 
Russian Federation never was." Those who imagine a modern democratic nation in 19th-century terms - as a culturally, linguistically 
and politically united entity - stress all these factors as sources of instability.

Plokhy instead reminds us diversity is good for democracy:

Compromise emerged as the only viable way for the elites to sort out their differences and accommodate one another's interests The 
country's regional and cultural diversity, inherited from its long history of rule by foreign empires and states, contributed 
enormously to the political pluralism of Ukrainian society.

Ukrainians in Kyiv, marking the 31st anniversary of their independence from the Soviet Union. Sergey Dolzhenkoi/EPA

Thus, where in the more united Russia, democracy died in lockstep with the resurgence of imperial dreams, in Ukraine attempts to 
move towards presidential autocracy were foiled again and again - most dramatically in the revolutions of 2004-05 (the Orange 
Revolution) and 2013-14 (the Revolution of Dignity).

The further from 1991 we move, the further the rift between an increasingly autocratic and neo-imperialist Russia and a democratic 
Ukraine, orienting itself away from the old imperial metropole and towards Europe and the Atlantic. The current war is one result 
of this rift: Russia tried to reassert its dominance and Ukraine resisted subjugation by the old imperial overlord. The Russo-
Ukrainian war is a delayed war of Soviet succession.

While it is not entirely clear from Plokhy's account why this war broke out when it did, his narrative demolishes the popular 
notion that somehow NATO was to blame. At least, not in the way this thesis is usually understood.

Ukraine did not become vulnerable because NATO embraced it and thereby threatened Russia - which, like a toddler deprived of a 
favourite toy, was obliged to lash out. Rather, it was the opposite.

First, Ukraine, which had inherited a good part of the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal, was pushed by the United States (doing 
Russia's bidding) to return its stockpile to Russia.

In exchange, it received economic aid and the beautiful words of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994: Russia, the United Kingdom and 
the US would respect Ukraine's territorial integrity, independence and sovereignty - and refrain from using military force or 
economic coercion against the country. These promises, of course, turned out to be worthless.

Would Ukraine have been better off holding onto its nukes? Maybe, but such a judgement is complicated by the fact, stressed by 
political scientist Andreas Umland, that most of these weapons "were not deployable, since the launch codes remained in Moscow and 
Ukraine had no technology to guide its inherited rockets".

Meanwhile, Ukraine received desperately needed economic aid and established itself as a good global citizen in exchange for its 
nuclear arsenal. At the same time, Ukraine might have been able eventually to solve the technical problems that hindered its use of 
the nukes and hence become a formidable regional military power.

With 15% of the Soviet arsenal, Ukraine had 'more atomic weapons than the United Kingdom, France, and China combined", writes 
Umland. "Even if Ukraine had retained and made operational only a fraction of these weapons, today it would be a much-feared 
nuclear power." Would Russia have dared to attack such a country? Unlikely.
Ukraine had 15% of the Soviet nuclear arsenal before the US pushed it to return its stockpile to Russia.

Having given up its nuclear shield, Ukraine tried to follow the lead of other countries in the post-Soviet space that successfully 
found protection under the umbrella of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Plokhy's account of the crucial Bucharest 
summit in 2008 provides an important corrective to popular narratives, promoted by Moscow's relentless disinformation campaign.

In Bucharest, NATO considered Ukraine's and Georgia's applications for a membership action plan, a roadmap to full membership. 
Although supported by the US and Eastern European member states, they were turned down after pressure from Russia, which made its 
unhappiness known publicly.

To soften the blow of the "concession to their former master" and hide the embarrassing victory of Russia over the US, NATO 
asserted that both countries did have the right to eventually join the alliance.

This "non-decision", Plokhy explains, was "the worst possible outcome of the summit: their applications had been postponed 
indefinitely", leaving Ukraine and Georgia "with no protection from the alliance that they had publicly stated they wanted to join. 
While Russia would not dare to attack NATO, it could easily attack its aspirants, and it did so."

When Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014 and helped unleash a proxy war in Donbas in the east of the country, Ukraine had to 
face its aggressive neighbour alone. Plokhy's account of both the annexation of Crimea and the mobilisation of separatists in 
Donbas eschews shades of grey.

While journalists present at the time depict a complex interaction between the Russian state, nationalist freelancers and local 
actors (in particular in Donbas), Plokhy tells the story as completely determined by the puppetmasters in Moscow: "the Russian 
intelligence services organized a push for independence from below." Future historians will have to sort out the evidence here, 
once more sources become available.

The result for Ukraine's defensive position was ambiguous. On the one hand, there was the ongoing war in Donbas; even at times of 
supposed ceasefire, Ukrainian servicemen died every year in intermittent exchanges of fire. The war pushed any potential NATO 
membership even further into the unknown future; the alliance was unwilling to even consider it while a hot war with Russia was 
going on.

On the other hand, however, Russia's aggression did help arm and train Ukraine, which built a formidable, if still inadequately 
armed, army. When all-out war came in 2022, Ukraine was in a much stronger position to defend itself, particularly once NATO and 
the European Union overcame their reluctance to adequately support one of the few democracies in the former Soviet space.

Nevertheless, the counterfactual argument remains: had NATO put Ukraine on an actual path to membership in 2008, would Russia have 
attacked in 2014 or 2022? Probably not, Plokhy's narrative suggests.

While Plokhy's surefooted interpretation of the genesis of this war will help dispel misconceptions, his detailed reconstruction of 
its first ten months provides important groundwork for a future historical appraisal of this war.

Critics who dismiss the bulk of the book as "just a competent assemblage of press cuttings" completely miss how crucial such work 
is. Without a chronological narrative of this war, more analytical work is impossible.

There will be a time to use more diaries, memoirs, interviews and archival materials for a fuller reckoning with what happened. But 
Plokhy has already made a convincing start here, drawing extensively on witnesses who shared their experiences on social media.

After covering both the origins and the first ten months of the war, the book ends on a semi-optimistic note: Ukraine might not be 
able to recover all its territories, but it will prevail. Russia will not win this war. The afterword moves beyond a putative 
Ukrainian victory and towards speculation about the war's impact.

The Russo-Ukrainian war, Plokhy argues, marks the end of the unipolar world that had come into being after the collapse of the 
Soviet Union. Putin had hoped for multipolarity, with several great powers asserting their spheres of influence. However, what the 
historian sees emerging instead is a new confrontation between East and West.

The war buried Russia's hopes of becoming a new global center It exposed weaknesses not only in Russia's clearly overrated and 
overpromoted army but also in its economic potential.

Its destiny is as a junior partner to Beijing, the new leader of the anti-Western world. Meanwhile, "the West has been rebuilding 
its Cold War alliance, now strengthened by new members in eastern Europe, the Baltics and Scandinavia". And "Ukraine emerges on the 
map as a new Cold War Germany, its territories divided not just between two countries, but two global spheres and economic blocks".

Future historians will judge whether Plokhy's vision was correct. Ukraine has not won the war yet, after all. And all kinds of 
nightmare scenarios, including nuclear war, might still play out.

Whatever happens, historians will draw on this book when assessing the history of this war. Alongside journalists such as Anna 
Arutunyan, Luke Harding and Owen Matthews, Plokhy has provided an invaluable first draft of a history of this war.

Together with Serhy Yekelchyk's earlier exposé of the historical background of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, Plokhy's book should 
be on the reading list of anyone trying to understand this war and its consequences.

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"Trump Derangement Syndrome" Is a Real Mental Condition

All you need to know about "Trump Derangement Syndrome," or TDS.

"Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is a mental condition in which a person has been driven effectively insane due to their dislike 
of Donald Trump, to the point at which they will abandon all logic and reason."

Justin Raimondo, the editorial director of Antiwar.com, wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times in 2016 that broke TDS down into 
three distinct phases or stages:

"In the first stage of the disease, victims lose all sense of proportion. The president-elect's every tweet provokes a firestorm, 
as if 140 characters were all it took to change the world."

"The mid-level stages of TDS have a profound effect on the victim's vocabulary: Sufferers speak a distinctive language consisting 
solely of hyperbole."

"As TDS progresses, the afflicted lose the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality."

The Point here is simple: TDS is, in the eyes of its adherents, the knee-jerk opposition from liberals to anything and everything 
Trump does. If Trump announced he was donating every dollar he's ever made, TDS sufferers would suggest he was up to something 
nefarious, according to the logic of TDS. There's nothing - not. one. thing. - that Trump could do or say that would be received 
positively by TDSers.

The history of Trump Derangement Syndrome actually goes back to the early 2000s - a time when the idea of Trump as president was a 
punch line for late-night comics and nothing more.

Wikipedia traces its roots to "Bush Derangement Syndrome" - a term first coined by the late conservative columnist Charles 
Krauthammer back in 2003. The condition, as Krauthammer defined it, was "the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in 
reaction to the policies, the presidency - nay - the very existence of George W. Bush."