The Ukraine War Is Undigestible Matter in the Gut of the Discourse

If news happens and it doesn't fit anyone's framework for identity-formation, is it even news?

Photo: Chris Jordan (Wikimedia Commons, via U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters)

A lot of catchy news stories arrive more or less predigested. You can take some feed of information about an event—tweeted pictures of signs at a protest, for instance—and turn that event into a story that produces as little cognitive dissonance as possible and satisfies your partisan audience. “Top 10 most anti-science signs at the anti-science rally,” or, “Top 10 funniest and most heroic signs from anti-mask patriots.” You get the idea.

Not all news is partisan. If an elephant plays the violin or whatever, that’s news whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or an ISIS member. But when it comes to the churn of constant geopolitical news, charged-up political people are a big part of your audience, because they’re addicts, and normal people are playing with their kids and enjoying their lives, so they consume news sparingly. I’m not breaking new ground by saying any of this: what makes a story a story is usually partisan valence these days. And a story with no partisan valence, like COVID, gets one pretty quickly, otherwise we wouldn’t know how to talk about it. 

So where does the ongoing horror in Ukraine fit into all this now that it’s not a breaking story, but an ongoing story that US news junkies are binging on, despite sometimes admittedly not knowing why, and non-news-junkies are most likely back to ignoring?

I don’t know! As far as I can tell, Ukraine is currently a lego brick in the gut of the discourse, because all the enzymes and secretions that usually form an informational bolus into a nice, comfortable info-turd, aren’t finding purchase. People are trying to turn this into something you can post about on Instagram, but social media posts about the need to “Stand with Ukraine” feel unusually meaningless and despair-inducing. Bars are pouring out their vodka to protest Russia. LOL, I guess?!

But if you’re reading hard news stories, or livetweets from people on the ground in Ukraine, that’s a big doomscroll into the hell web or whatever people say. And the more Americans learn about it, the less we feel ready to turn the information into fodder for identity formation. Instead, it just stubbornly holds its shape: the shape of a big, catastrophic war of aggression whose outcome we can’t really predict or change. 

I’ll stop acting like I speak for everyone in America now, and use some “I” statements: I had a hard time processing this war in the months leading up to it, and then most of all in the days leading up to it, because I felt so obtuse for not realizing it would really happen. US intelligence agencies had been feeding story after story to the legacy media suggesting it was on the verge of happening, and I kept reading the stories (I read the A-section of the dead-tree New York Times every day), and still dismissing them. 

I, for one, was quietly wrong about Russia invading Ukraine, which, while not as good as being right, is a much better way to be than noisily wrong, like a lot of the policy analysts and podcasters I pay attention to. The American Prestige podcast, for instance, posted a brief explainer not quite two weeks ago kinda making the US withdrawal of diplomats from the region seem melodramatic, and saying that Putin was just beating his chest in order to get his anti-NATO demands heard (which, OK, he was, but with the benefit of hindsight we now know he was also preparing to invade). Then they posted two more short explainers getting increasingly doubtful about that first one, and then finally, they posted un update in which they reluctantly acknowledged that the US intelligence community had been more or less right all along. 

But the weirdness of the breakout of war goes way beyond the fact that anti-imperialist, left-leaning news analysts thought Putin was bluffing. The US state media, and its foreign policy “blob”—the very people most likely to credulously read all that accurate US intelligence saying Putin did not appear to be bluffing, were also saying Putin was bluffing. For instance, Leon Aron, a Russia analyst for the American Enterprise Institute told VOA (which is the US government’s proprietary news publication) about seven weeks ago: “Putin is not going to invade Ukraine at this time. He's playing to his domestic audience. And all of this is a part of the game that Putin is playing, and I think will continue to play at least until his elections in 2024.”

Sam Greene, Director of the Russia Institute at King's College London, later tweeted in a post-mortem Twitter thread about his own wrongness, that “analysts of Russian domestic politics thought war was possible, but unlikely,” while, “Military analysts generally looked at the scale of forces arrayed against Ukraine and said this was too big to signal anything but war.” So I guess we should have been listening to the military guys? Like I said: pretty hard to digest. But it gets harder.

It felt like what was being sold to me was US intervention. My only way of digesting all the anonymously-sourced stories in The New York Times during the lead-up to this war was to be dismissive, because I regarded them as brutal and hawkish. It was as if by squawking “Putin is going to start a war! Putin is going to start a war!” US intelligence agencies—and the legacy media organizations they feed information to—were actively gunning for Putin, and potentially kicking off a world war that would have been the US’s fault. And in their hearts, maybe the war guys did want to strike first against Putin, but regardless of what they wanted, they had the cold hard facts right. 

This seems to have been Tucker Carlson’s interpretation of the lead-up to this war too. In the segment that’s now infamous because of the part where he rattled off a list of right wing culture war sins to highlight how Putin hadn’t committed any of them (“Does he eat dogs?”), Tucker sounded like he was interpreting the reports about Putin’s intentions a little like I was, though he imbued that reading of events with his signature America-first flair. “For months, the White House has told us that if we're real Americans, that if we love this country, and aren't traitors—Quislings!—then we will wholeheartedly support jumping with both feet into a highly complicated conflict in an obscure part of Eastern Europe where we have no national interests,” Carlson said rather astonishingly on Wednesday, right as the war was pretty obviously kicking off without direct help from the Biden-led military, and certainly without brainwashed New York Times readers conducting any pro-war marches in Times Square.

So there was a subplot in the Ukraine discourse for a few hours about how Tucker Carlson loves Putin, and sides with him against Ukraine. He now quite clearly says he doesn’t approve of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, saying “I don’t think anybody approves of what Putin did yesterday,” which is probably overstating things a bit, but there you have it: Tucker Carlson, for his part, doesn’t think the invasion of Ukraine was good. So at least there’s that.

This seems to have been one of the early stabs at turning this war into something our media can process: a mostly fruitless attempt to find and shame the Putin supporters among us. 

David Broder, writing in Jacobin, wants everyone to know that the left also doesn’t support Putin. This isn’t just because people like me had been in an uneasy state of agreement with Tucker Carlson for several months about this topic. We had also been looking askance at Ukrainian militias during the lead-up to this war, and noticing that a few of them looked a little Nazi-ish, what with their unabashed love of Hitler. But, Broder points out, Putin “was not driven to invade by Western threat or by a small but militant far-right minority in Ukraine.” Instead, he points out (quite rightly in my opinion), that NATO’s irresponsible post-Cold War expansion has gifted Russian hawks with rhetorical firepower, and that Russia echoes the US when it makes claims that its ugly and tragic invasion is actually a kindhearted police action in defense of benighted minorities. 

The nuanced argument he’s making is that Putin is responding to some of our bad policies, with policies that mimic some of our other bad policies. This is arguably whataboutism, but I submit that it’s not cheap whataboutism, just like it’s not cheap when people point out other conflicts going on right now. After all, we’re not intervening in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, and we’re certainly not stopping our allies, Saudi Arabia and Israel from carrying out their ongoing military actions in Yemen and Syria respectively. As Nabih Bulos, Middle East bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times put it in a tweet, compared to wars in the Middle East, “the difference in the level of empathy and attention compared to what you see regarding the war in Ukraine really gives one pause.”

Is it the whiteness of the Ukrainians that makes this conflict seem to be so much more urgent? Quite possibly! But until the sociological data arrives saying that’s the takeaway—that our reaction to this war is racist—there’s  a separate, but related observation to be made here, and it’s an uncomfortable one: the Tigray-Ethiopia War*, and to a larger degree the conflicts between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and also the conflicts between Israel and all of its many adversaries, are all wars being conducted with the tacit approval of the US, while the Russia-Ukraine war is happening in spite of loud condemnation and sanctions. That doesn’t change anything about these morally. In fact, the Yemen War with it’s mind-boggling bodycount—377,000 at last count—is clearly the greater atrocity (so far). But it does hint at the long-term significance of this war vis-a-vis US policy: the end of Pax Americana, and all that that implies.

Again, I don’t think I’m breaking any new ground when I say the Ukraine war is making the US look like its ability to project strength has been diminished—Republicans have been more than happy to zing Biden for weakly walking away from a press scrum after finishing a briefing, rather than, I guess, strongly walking into it? It’s just that given the way the US uses its strength, “weakness” isn’t necessarily a vice. If you saw your bodybuilder friend, and last week they looked all pimply and vascular and swollen because they were juiced to the gills on steroids, and now their muscles had atrophied a bit now that they have some healthier habits, would you say “aw man, you look weak”? We are, at long last, not the country getting itself into ill-advised military adventures. As Emma Ashford of The Atlantic Council wrote in a New York Times editorial, “The war now unfolding in Europe marks an end to that era, showing Americans — and the world — that U.S. power is not absolute.” 

I don’t expect America to take this well. Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation was on Fox News on Friday perhaps calling for war, but more overtly calling for the precious strength that Biden apparently lacks:

"I think Biden simply doesn't believe in a powerful projection of American might and power. Biden is a quintessentially European Union-style politician who believes in endless negotiations and multilateral solutions... He's not someone who believes in the projection of hard power, and that's a fatal mistake to make when you are confronting both Beijing and Moscow because it just sends a message of weakness rather than strength.”

In contrast, Biden’s predecessor has, naturally, claimed that this wouldn’t have happened while he was president (he said the same thing about the Kabul airport attack), and he might be right about this one. I find it plausible that Putin wouldn’t have invaded while Trump was president, not because Trump is “strong,” but because he mused all the time about pulling the US out of NATO, which would have given Putin what he wanted. But forming a coherent Ukraine policy that contrasts with Biden’s is a tough square for Republicans to circle, as Politico’s Andrew Desiderio, Tara Palmeri And Meridith Mcgraw have already pointed out.  

Republican congressman Paul Gosar has said that talk of war with Ukraine has been a distraction from “dangerous drugs and violent crime” in his home district in Arizona. Republican campaign operatives working on the 2022 midterms told Axios they’re worried about alienating voters if they cook up talking points that make it sound like the US is getting into a war in Ukraine. So the Republicans do want Biden to be regarded as fucking this up, but it seems they don’t want to get involved. 

On Tuesday, while it was becoming obvious that war was inevitable, Trump vaguely praised Putin for how smart he is, even going so far as to use the word “genius.” Everyone left of center clutched their pearls about this extremely predictable utterance from Trump. But it hints at what the MAGA movement’s ultimate position on this might be. Steve Bannon, for his part, is going all on on how cool Putin is, even if he stops short of praising his war. “We don’t have any interest — no one in the Trump movement has any interest at all in the Russian-speaking provinces of eastern Ukraine. Zero,” Bannon said in the Politico story. On his own internet show, War Room, he talked up Putin for being anti-woke. If all Republicans start wearing red “Putin rules,” hats to trigger the libs 2016-style, the roadmap to one potentially coherent strategy against Biden comes into focus. That of course assumes that the Republicans need their strategy to be coherent.

In the meantime, the rest of America has to figure out how to fit this unappealing new information into our lives as the war digs in for the long haul. On top of the mounting heartache you get from any news story with a bodycount that just climbs and climbs, as this one’s will, the war news is going to be especially rife with painful cognitive dissonance if, as Douglas London suggests in Foreign Affairs, there’s a prolonged insurgency phase. Reading London’s article, all sorts of ghosts and goblins from America’s recent past come popping out. This paragraph by London is exceptionally haunted:

“Many a great power has waged war against a weaker one, only to get bogged down as a result of its failure to have a well-considered end game. This lack of foresight has been especially palpable in troubled occupations. It was one thing for the United States to invade Vietnam in 1965, Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003; likewise for the Soviet Union to enter Afghanistan in 1979. It was an altogether more difficult task to persevere in those countries in the face of stubborn insurgencies.”

So as this insurgency phase ramps up, it seems like America’s failed War on Terror playbook is going to be rubbed in our faces, while we, I guess, laugh, because those stumbles and pratfalls are someone else’s nightmare? Sounds pretty unpleasant. And then there’s the whole idea of actually aiding the insurgency, which starts to make me queasy pretty quickly: Hey, maybe we can even arm the insurgents ourselves, so they can better fight Russia, like we did a few decades ago in—oh God—Afghanistan. But this will be different then the arming of the Mujahideen giving rise to the Taliban. After all, it’s not like the militias going up against Russia now have a lot of extremist zealots who might turn those weapons on their own people if they eventually do manage to seize control… Etc, etc…

The one vaguely happy thread I’ve noticed in all this is that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is becoming a folk hero here in the US. I have to admit, his decision to stay in Kiev, amid some of the most intense urban warfare in recent history, is brave. And the fact that he’s the Ukrainian Jon Stewart gives the whole thing a certain surreal coolness. There’s no doubt in my mind the propaganda value of this guy’s insane valor is immense. He was sort of a black box in terms of policy before all this, but being around during Russia’s invasion is sort of like a comedically heightened way to fulfill his over-arching campaign promises about opposing Russia. 

But I worry about people pinning their hopes on Ukraine’s ability to literally fend off the whole Russian military on the field of battle. From where I’m sitting, Zelenskyy is taking a ballsy and admirable bet. He’s putting all his chips on glory—he could be the Ukrainian George Washington if this works—while all the while knowing he’s, well, probably toast. Sorry.

In the meantime, I’m getting Kony 2012 vibes from the Americans posting stuff like this:

ZelenskyyHive 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @Shvm_07

Last thing Russia sees before trying to enter the Ukranian parliament:

If Russia does decapitate the Ukrainian government and install their own, they don’t need to form a stable, long-term pro-Russia regime in Ukraine to make it feel, to most of us in America’s ever-shrinking sphere of influence, like the bad guys have won, at least for a while. If that happens, the positivity lords who got invested in Ukraine winning are going to feel all depressed, and say things like “Aw man, I haven’t felt this bad since Thanos got the last infinity stone!” and get themselves in internet trouble.

When the wreckage of the twin towers was still smoking, Hunter S. Thompson famously wrote a prescient ESPN column, describing America’s coming descent into jingoism. “The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives,” he wrote.

Well, Pax Americana—if it ever existed—is what’s slowly being reduced to bloody rubble on America’s screens this time. I don’t have Hunter S. Thompson’s prescience about what’s going to happen next, and, if he were still alive, I suspect he wouldn’t either.

*OK, Biden has gently nudged the Ethiopian president toward a ceasefire, but he certainly hasn’t sanctioned him. For now, we’ve only sanctioned Eritreans for sticking their noses in. And no, I’m not calling for sanctions on Ethiopia. This is just a compare-and-contrast exercise.