RANKING AMERICA: WE'RE NUMBER 40!

 What makes America exceptional is its belief in its exceptionalism.  We chant “We’re number 1” as if incantations are self-validating.  But among rich countries, the United States ranked 40^th on childcare, according to a June 2021 UNICEF report.  Among 72 industrialized countries, the United States ranks 35^th in mathematics.  Perish reality.

 

New Mexico does not tout its exceptionalism: best not to.  In healthcare, the state frequently ranks 50^th.  Although New Mexicans think well of their schools and teachers, the public school system usually ranks 50^th.  Although the Las Cruces school board mantra is “It’s All about the Kids,” students struggle to achieve mediocrity—that is, 50%—on proficiency tests of basics in reading and mathematics.  Perish reality.

 

Readers of my blogs going back over a dozen years will recognize that I have cited this figure many times.  No doubt, they are as bored by it as I am.  But boredom should not obscure the fact that leaders in Las Cruces and Santa Fe have shown themselves indifferent to educational mediocrity—of course, the teachers are as mediocre as the students—or incapable of improving public education.  What counts for them is the employment and enrichment of teachers, not the education of students.

 

What is exceptional about America is that its people deny the reality of prevailing conditions.  The foregoing and similar numbers in country-wide health care, childcare, other social services, public education, public safety, and income equality make a joke of the first words of the Constitution “We the People” and the central words of the Pledge of Allegiance “one nation.”  America does little enough for its people and what it does depends on the many “identity” nations to which its people belong.

 

Thus arises the question—why?  The answer is that many Americans, mostly white Christian Republicans spend much of their emotional and mental energies on meddling in the lives of others.  They work to make others be like them or live like them—or else.  Thus, say, the Republican legislation to abuse members of the LGBTQ community; the Constitution may define them as American citizens, but, in many Christians’ opinion, they are second-class citizens.  So, instead of addressing the challenges confronting America, mostly white Christian Republicans expend their energies and talents in culture wars.  The Jackson confirmation hearings revealed that Republicans are roused to unsettle “settled law” in four areas of asymmetric culture-war aggression:

 

They oppose abortion.  So they should not have one, not legislate against abortion.  Pro-choice advocates do not urge legislation requiring pregnant women to have an abortion.  (They could: what about laws requiring women to have abortions if fetuses have birth defects requiring long-term remediation at public expense?)

 

They oppose contraception.  So they should not use contraceptive devices or medications, not legislate against them.  Pro-contraception advocates do not urge legislation requiring men or women to use such devices or medications.

 

They oppose same-sex marriage.  So they should marry someone of the opposite sex, not legislate against it.  Same-sex-marriage advocates do not urge legislation requiring men to marry men or women to marry women.

 

They oppose interracial marriage.  So they should marry someone of their race.  Interracial-marriage advocates did not urge legislation requiring people of one race to marry someone of another race.  (Jail for Ginny and Clarence?)

 

Three points about this opposition to “settled law.”  One, it trashes stare decisis; it is, strictly speaking, the antithesis of conservatism; and it destabilizes the legal system.  Two, legislation against any or all of these practices solves no national problem.  Three, truce can be achieved if everyone would agree to let others be free to make private personal choices for themselves.  One version of the Golden Rule urges such respect for others: do not unto others as you would not have them do unto you.

 

Republicans talk the game of individual freedom and personal responsibility but are compulsively hypocritical in opposing both freedom and responsibility.  Their legislation proposed or passed to enforce behavior in what are properly personal life-style decisions are the antithesis of both freedom and responsibility.

 

But Americans so much love to meddle in matters irrelevant to their lives as they live them that they do not realize or accept that Republican leaders use these culture-war items to rile them up and to distract them from their determined efforts to eviscerate programs in health, social services, and education which affect their wellbeing.  Although the GOP refuses to disclose its agenda for the 2022 elections, it has not changed its traditional positions.  Its core commitments remain: out-source to the states, reduce, or eliminate Medicaid and Medicare; privatize Social Security or let it go bankrupt; cut federal funding for medical research; and reduce federal spending on education.

 

Racism motivates and underlies almost all Republican domestic (and some foreign) policies.  Republicans refuse to admit discriminatory past practices and their enduring after-effects, which have left minorities disadvantaged and disproportionately reliant on public services.  Thus, their furious resistance to Critical Race Theory for exposing the facts to Americans.  The almost all-white Republican Party views those services as race-oriented transfers of money or other resources from whites to blacks.  The Party does not care that many more whites than blacks are beneficiaries of the same services.  In their crabbed mindset and stingy morality, Republicans believe that it is better to have no programs than to have programs which benefit blacks despite also benefiting larger numbers of whites.  Just such thinking led southern communities to close whites-only municipal swimming pools rather than open them to blacks as required by the Civil Rights Law of 1964.  Plainly, Republicans prioritize “them,” not “We the People.”

 

Democrats want to fund beneficial public services; Republicans want to fund the military.  The result is likely to be the traditional compromise which underfunds social services and overfunds the military.  The result: America is likely to slide lower in the rankings.  We might end up aspiring to be 40^th.

UKRAINE: HOW TO WIN THE PEACE AFTER WINNING THE WAR

     On Wednesday, 16 March, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken declared that the sanctions against Russia would last until it was no longer possible for it to launch another such attack against an adjoining country.  That statement is either grandiose political rhetoric or a manifesto for change, not just in Russia’s regime, but in its political culture and military capabilities. 

In an NPR interview, Blinken “insisted that U.S. sanctions against Russia are ‘not designed to be permanent,’ and that they could ‘go away’ if Russia should change its behavior.  But he said any Russian pullback would have to be, ‘in effect, irreversible,’ so that ‘this can't happen again, that Russia won't pick up and do exactly what it's doing in a year or two years or three years’.”

 

As stated, the declaration is right as a matter of policy but wrong by implied practice.  Russia has attacked Ukraine with tanks, artillery, rockets, drones, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and jets, and has threatened to use weapons of mass destruction like chemical weapons and nuclear bombs.  Unless its conventional military weaponry is reduced to the minimum to protect borders and preserve order, and its WMD arsenals eliminated, Russia will be able to resume such an attack on any bordering state the day after it withdraws from Ukraine.  Unless its military capability is thus radically diminished, “irreversibility” is an impossibility and a temporary postponement a palliative.  The policy is right, its demands daunting.

 

For the past few centuries, Russia has been imperialistic because it is paranoiac.  Its paranoia goes back to the Tatar and Mongol invasions from eastern and central Asia in medieval and renaissance times.  In modern times, the invasions of Napoleonic France and Hitler Germany from western Europe have reinforced Russia’s traditional fears of brutal attacks.  As the dominant member of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Russia installed friendly governments in the occupied countries of eastern Europe throughout the Cold War to provide a buffer on its western border.  After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, constituent Soviet states established their independent countries and governments.  Within a decade, Putin ascended to power in 2000 and has worked to expand Russia’s authority or boundaries to these adjacent states; Ukraine is merely the latest such effort.  Since paranoia knows no bounds, Russia’s paranoia seeks protection, its efforts manifest in its imperialistic tendencies to expand its boundaries, thereby to increase protection from real or imagined foreign invasions.

 

Nothing that any country or group of countries can do can soon or significantly reform Russia’s political culture based on its paranoia.  Putin’s defeat in Ukraine, whether by military eviction or political erosion, will establish an opportunity to revise the current international order in Europe and much of the world.  That opportunity requires a resolve for which NATO countries are not known, not to waste Ukrainian sacrifice and heroism, and the triumph of democracy in eastern Europe on a short-term pause in hostilities  By now, NATO countries should realize that short-term peace with Russia would be no more than a prelude to another war with Russia.

 

The end of war in Ukraine enables its reconstruction and requires the reconstitution of Russia.  Presently, a third-world country with nuclear weapons, Russia must rebuild itself as a third-world country without them.  Much of the impetus to rebuild must come from sustained sanctions.  Just as sanctions are playing a large role in Russia’s defeat, so they should be maintained to ensure that Russia’s economy remains too impoverished to support a large role in international affairs, whether military, political, or economic, for the foreseeable future.  Sanctions should impose such high domestic costs on Russia that it cannot afford to attack neighboring countries or continue to occupy previously seized territories.

 

To achieve this goal, NATO’s objectives should be to degrade Russia’s military capabilities, to enable the emergence of new Russian leadership to establish a non-totalitarian government, and thereby to disarm its imperialistic, paranoiac impulses.  Until these objectives are reached, sanctions in all their rigor should continue.  The price of lifting them should be the prior, complete elimination of strategic offensive weapons and weapon systems—missiles, drones, bombers, and submarines—; the elimination of nuclear munitions, chemical stockpiles, their delivery systems, and related production and storage facilities; and the implementation of an unfettered NATO inspection regime.  All lifted sanctions should have a snap-back mechanism for violations.

 

The issue is whether NATO wants to win the battle for Ukraine but lose the war for peace—or not.  To make Russia’s withdrawal from Ukraine “irreversible” and not merely to postpone renewed Russian aggression there or elsewhere for “a year or two years or three years” requires a collective determination to prevent Russia from re-arming and to keep it disarmed.  Otherwise, history will repeat itself.  NATO will repeat the mistakes of the Allies after World War I which allowed Germany, resentful and revengeful after defeat, to re-arm—with World War II the result.  If it repeats those mistakes, NATO will face an even more belligerent, better prepared, and more determined Russia.  That likelihood means one thing: NATO can win the war, cannot win the peace, and will risk World War III.

BANISH RUSSIA AS A BARBARIC PARIAH

Years ago, my sister-in-law, knowing that I was curious about the Russian steppes, gave me Eric Newby’s The Big Red Train Ride (1977) for Christmas.  By the time I finished it, I understood two things about Russia.  First, its centuries-long history of hostilities has understandably made it psycho-socially insecure, paranoid, and, to compensate, repressive within its borders and aggressive and imperialistic beyond them.  Second, this combination of traits has, with the exception of great music, great novels, and grandiose architecture, left the country with nothing which could otherwise be called a civilization or a civilized way of or outlook on life.  The result: Russia as a whole operates like a collection of barbarians, brutal to themselves, brutal to others, who fight among themselves as much as with others.  Only when attacked do they coalesce.

Ukraine has been a recent showcase of the brutality of Russian barbarism.  In the early 1930s, when Stalin sought to enforce collective farming and suppress Ukrainian nationalism, his efforts resulted in the direct deaths of 3 to 3.5 million people (omitting a decline of a half million in births), or about 13% of the population.  Today, in his aggressive, imperialistic attack on Ukraine, Putin is attacking its civilian population with traditional indifference to human life.  To win, especially in the face of stiff resistance, Russia will adopt a no-holds-barred, scorched-earth approach to suppress the population and conquer territory.  It will terrorize civilians to create millions of refugees to burden NATO countries with a humanitarian crisis draining resources, damaging economies, creating ethnic frictions, and promoting political instability.  This conclusion is certain; just as Russia does not care about its own people, it does not care about other people.

Putin’s method of warfare reflects the abysmal ethics of Russia and its people.  The corruption, cronyism, and coerciveness of Putin’s government builds on the corruption, cronyism, and coerciveness of previous governments.  Russia lacks political ideals and a political philosophy to guide its government in domestic or foreign affairs.  Government is ruled by men, not law.  Which means that dishonesty is endemic in its way of life.  The Russian constitution, modeled on Western constitutions, is a lie because it means what those in power, through its courts, say it means.  Russia’s signature on a treaty is a lie in waiting until Russia finds it advantageous to ignore it.  When Putin repeatedly asserted that he intended no aggression against Ukraine, he was not, and knew he was not, telling the truth.  He cared more about buying time for the West to splinter about whether to believe him or not and whether to organize against a possible incursion than about personal honesty and how his political dishonesty might affect future diplomacy.

Such dishonesty has been a fixture of Russian international and national conduct especially since the end of World War II.  Russia (also the USSR, which it dominated) has proven untrustworthy in its international obligations.  Russia has kept none of its post-World War II commitments in Eastern Europe.  Instead of ending the occupation of its liberated countries, Russia installed communist governments and suppressed revolts (1953 East German uprising, 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and 1968 Prague Spring).  It invaded Afghanistan and fought (1979-1989) to support a communist government under attack from nationalist fighters opposed to it.  Not for nothing did Reagan adopt the policy of trusting but verifying.  Only the demise of the USSR in December 1991 enabled the countries of Eastern Europe to reclaim their independence.  Those countries which joined NATO wanted their membership to protect their independence.  Ukraine’s interest in joining NATO reflects the same desire.  Putin is trying to reverse the break-up of the Russian empire, and Ukraine is his first aggressive effort to do so.  With Ukraine behind him, he will try elsewhere, most likely the Baltic states: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia.

The question is what U.S. policy should be.  I assume that Russia prevails in Ukraine, that it kills thousands, wounds or maims many thousands more, creates millions of refugees, and commits war crimes in the process, in violation of treaties which it has signed.  I also assume that the U.S. will establish a unified policy with NATO (and EU) members, which, to this end, should admit Finland, Sweden, and a Ukraine government-in-exile as members.  The U.S. policy should be the policy of the West.

The West should declare Russia a pariah nation and sever or work to sever all ties—military, political, economic, and cultural—with Russia.  It should isolate Russia by detaching itself from all means of Russian influence.  The West’s policies and practices should work to neutralize Russia as a country with the power to threaten other countries.

If Russia wants to build more nuclear weapons, let it.  NATO countries do not need to engage in an arms race.  They already have enough nuclear weapons either to deter Russia or to destroy whatever and as much as it wants.  It needs only to keep pace with technological advances in weaponry.  The West should adopt a strategy of resisting  Russian aggression, whether in overt military action or covert cyberattacks, in kind.

The West, with others as necessary, should oust Russia from all international organizations: the United Nations, the G-8, etc.  The West should restrict or terminate all communications and transportation, end all commercial and financial relationships, discontinue all cultural and educational exchanges.  It should maintain economic sanctions indefinitely, and liquidate all Russian assets in the West and use them to fund humanitarian aid to Ukrainian refugees.  The West should multiply its efforts to reduce its need for fossil fuels and thereby end dependence on Russian gas and petroleum.  This isolation should be achieved as rapidly as feasible and maintained indefinitely, without regard for Russian assurances, promises, or even changes of policies.  Russia must change by adopting a different way of life and establishing it throughout.  But it will not, so it must be constrained by the isolation of its pariah status to reconstitute itself as a civilized country.