Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, Ukraine . . .

Where will this series end? What comes next? Already an announcer on YouTube speculates that Moldova, which is not a NATO member, will be next.

What comes after that? Will Putin try to re-establish the Warsaw Pact and the Iron Curtain by force? Will he try to retake the Baltics, risking nuclear war with the West?

There are differences among victims, of course. Chechnya lies in the Caucasus region, where Russia has been fighting a low-level war with Islamic peoples for two centuries. Georgia wasn’t battered much because it didn’t offer much resistance; it mostly knuckled under.

Syria was the worst case, at least so far. With Assad’s blessing, and at his urging, Russia has turned Syria into a land of graves and rubble. An estimated 400,000 to 606,000 Syrians have been killed, with 6.8 million made external migrants, and 6.7 million internally displaced—in all more than half of Syria’s pre-war population. This is Vladimir Grozny’s version of “peace”: the peace of the grave.

Syria was a “special case” because it proved a breeding ground for terrorists. So even the West tacitly agreed to participate in the mayhem. Will Ukraine fare a bit better because it’s mostly Christian and white, and because its people are historically Russians’ “brothers”? We’re about to find out.

But the indiscriminate bombing of non-military targets in Ukraine’s cities already suggests a return to form: a brutal, well-established modus operandi. Bomb and terrorize civilians and get much of the population to flee. Make rubble of cities and historical sites if you have to. Once there is no one left with the will or courage to fight, install a pliant strongman as leader. Arrest, jail and/or kill anyone who resists, and be sure the strongman does the same.

This is the new imperialism, discovered by the Nazis but “perfected” in the twenty-first century by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Vladimir Grozny.

Putin today is not the same man who, years ago, spoke before the German Bundestag, in fluent German, about a peaceful trading zone from the Atlantic to the Urals. He’s not the same man who, without hesitation, once named “poverty in Russia” as the most shameful thing in his realm. Already he has wrought immense destitution and human suffering in and around his battered vassal states. And as near-global sanctions begin to bite in this new war of his, the Russian people will feel some destitution, too.

Whatever he may have been decades ago, Putin has become a monster. (That’s why he’s a poster boy for term limits.) He revels in personal dominance. He’s circulated a clip of him throwing judo experts. If you look closely, you can see that he moves like what he is: an old man of seventy. The stunt would be laughable if he were not the leader of a nation with a world-destroying arsenal of nuclear weapons and a recent record of repeated, brutal, unrelenting conquest. This is precisely the result that Boris Yeltsin hoped to avoid when he picked Putin as his successor. (For a glimpse at Yeltsin's now-failed aspirations, watch this speech he gave before the US Congress in 1992; for a representative short clip, set the timer at 5:00 for the Russian and 6:36 for the English translation.)

In mathematics, an infinite series can lead to a discrete, stable result. In human affairs, there can be no end to the misery. If this possibly infinite series of brutal imperial conquests continues, the pain and suffering will only get worse. There is no end to this series but what people of good will can impose with their own courage, patience and endurance.

While we Americans were embroiled in our bloodiest war ever—the one to free our slaves—English philosophers were developing a simple rule for our species. Let’s try to maximize human happiness. Later the formula became seeking the greatest good for the greatest number. That principle, less than 160 years old, marked the height of the Western Enlightenment. With it came the greatest flowering of science, art, human freedom and human happiness in our species’ recorded history.

The Enlightenment had a corollary, implicit in the preamble to our Constitution. The purpose of government is “promot[ing] the general welfare” of the people: their health, education, fairly paid and productive labor, and their general “pursuit of happiness.” Its goal is not imposing a rigid abstract system—any abstract system, whether Communism, socialism, or “limited government” that replaces a single strongman like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Putin with an untouchable class of self-focused oligarchs. Pursuing the people’s happiness has no neat, abstract general solution; it’s a practical affair that requires constant, devoted attention and ingenuity, day by day.

Now the Enlightenment is under siege, not just by Russia, but worldwide. I’m comfortably in retirement, although far from a rich man. In the last two years, I’ve spent more than enough to buy a good car on political causes to beat back strongmen at home and abroad. I’ll continue to do so. And I’d be proud to pay more in taxes to help people who are suffering from high oil and gas prices, to subsidize their buying or renting electric cars and/or switching to electric heating, and/or to build massive LNG terminals to ship our fracked gas to Europe, and so keep Germany and the rest of the EU warm in winter and committed to resisting brutality.

In the last century, our own “Greatest Generation” fought to keep the Enlightenment’s flame burning. They fought in a war that killed half a million of them and fifty million worldwide. They, their loved ones and the whole world paid a big price for waiting and temporizing.

So this time we must heed the lessons of the past. This time, we must stop the infinite series at Ukraine, while we still can do so without a wider war. This time, we must pay the much smaller price of completely boycotting Russian fossil fuels. We and Europe must not buy or use a drop of Russian oil or a cubic meter of Russian gas until Russian forces leave Ukraine.

Will there be economic pain? Of course. But the pain will only get worse if we wait. It may shift from economic pain to the real, physical pain of a wider war and devastation. There is no gain in waiting to confront bullies.

Although cut short by his assassination, JFK’s presidency was one of our most significant ever. He urged us to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” He faced the very same foe, in its Soviet guise, under threat of nuclear Armageddon. About a year later, he personally paid the ultimate price.

Today, all we have to do is forego the use of Russian fossil fuels, which are helping ruin our climate and are running out anyway. And those of us who can afford to do so can help alleviate the economic pain of those who can’t. The alternative is to let Vladimir Grozny win and risk a new Dark Age of bald, imperial brutality. Such a Dark Age would relegate smaller countries to a future of cluster bombs and small nukes, and our overheating Earth to the law of the jungle.

Endnote: Killing Two Birds with One Stone

In one respect, Russia’s naked, unprovoked aggression in Ukraine might be a blessing in disguise. It might motivate our species, especially our own country, to decarbonize more quickly.

As I re-read my post above, the depth of my genuine emotion surprised me. The urge to confront Putin by boycotting Russian oil and gas completely came from deep within.

But then it hit me: the markets for oil and gas are global. In order to confront Putin’s aggression, we have to cut down on our use of oil and gas from whatever source. If we don’t, our continuing purchases will just help raise global demand and therefore the prices that Russia gets for its fossil fuels.

It’s an odd thing about our species. We are far more eager to fight a human enemy than to solve an abstract but real problem that threatens our happiness and even our survival. I guess that’s in our DNA.

But in this case we can kill two birds with one stone. We can resist Putin’s war of aggression economically, at the same time as we put our transition to carbon-free energy into high gear.

This dual purpose also works politically. Republicans have resisted energy transformation obstinately. But they are also looking for ways to belittle President Biden’s response to Putin’s aggression. Now, when boycotting Russian oil and gas seems the best means of responding without putting our own troops at risk (or extending NATO), they have little choice but to get on board, too.

Or at least that’s the logic of the situation. We can best fight Putin’s aggression in Ukraine by putting our own energy transformation on steroids, and so can Europe. And it all makes good long-term sense, because oil and (at least in the US) gas are going to run out in a few decades anyway.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Permalink to this post