Pranav—Kotkin on Russia, Ukraine, Trump and more
Steve Kotkin, by all accounts, is a living legend. I'm not nearly well read enough to tell you why, but from the two-and-a-half podcasts I've heard of his, he sure seems to get the Soviet world better than anyone else I've heard.
That world is now dead, in that the Soviet system has collapsed. It's also very much alive --- those parts of the world still exist, and they still live under the shadow of the Soviet Union. One of those, of course, is Ukraine. It spent the last three years fighting that shadow, in the form of Russia, only to be stabbed in the back by its richest and most powerful ally.
How do you understand any of what's happening? The New Yorker explored this question over an interview with Kotkin --- and that interview's my entry for one thing I learned today.
He begins with an idea that I can't agree more with: of how politics, so often, is a clash between competing fantasies. Soviet Russia was once a fantasy of the American left. Modern Russia is a fantasy of the American right. Neither fantasy is true. Both, arguably, are compelling:
... once upon a time, the left had a view of Russia, which was that Stalin ... was forging a new world, a new world of abundance and social justice and peace, that the Soviet Union was the future. The left was all in ... on this fantasy of the Soviet Union as the future, while everybody was either starving or being murdered...
Now we have a fantasy Russia on the right: that Russia is about traditional values, that Russia is defending Western civilization, that Russia is the future, that Russia is our friend. And this fantasy is complete rubbish, if we can use a technical term. We went from a fantasy on the left to a fantasy on the right about Russia. I don’t share either fantasy ... I don’t like these fantasies, but those fantasies are big drivers of a lot of our politics.
I daresay these aren't the only political fantasies that exist. This is perhaps why the horseshoe theory of politics really makes sense. Political ideologies are often skin-deep, beneath which, the only question is how fuckin' delulu you are.
Kotkin then makes an argument that I had not considered before, but I intuitively agree with. And it's that Trump, for all his long list of faults, basically laid bare a lot of obvious but impolite truths. Specifically, he called Europe's bluff. In the Biden era, America was scrambling to whatever it could to save Ukraine's hide, while much of Europe basically sat and blew hot air up each others' hindquarters. And then:
The Europeans have not sent a single soldier to the front during the war, and they’re fighting over whether they’re going to send any soldiers, even if there’s a peace deal, an armistice. Poland, which is Ukraine’s biggest backer, has refused to agree to promise to send peacekeepers after the fighting stops, let alone during the fighting. So Europe, God bless, is playing charades.
Absolutely true! Europe is playing charades.
And it could be even worse. If this is true, it's quite damning:
... by the way, when we asked our European allies: if there were a conflict in the Indo-Pacific involving the U.S. and China, would they come to our aid? Their answer was maybe, maybe not. That was under Biden, Mr. Transatlanticist. And so the Europeans are not all in with us over Taiwan or the Indo-Pacific, but, hey, we have to be all in with the Europeans over Ukraine or over other vulnerable areas.
There's a basic supply-demand mismatch problem in global politics. Everyone wants America to subsidise their rivalries. They want the might of the United States to fight their local big bad guy. But there's only so much America to go around. America can, at current capacity, fight one major war in one key theatre. And the simple truth is: there are too many damn bad guys, and America's allies are twiddling their thumbs in complacency. I think we get this, here, in India. We briefly entertained the fantasy that America would storm in and drive China away, if the temperature went too high. Only, we seemed to realise fairly early that everyone from Lithuania to Taiwan had dibs on the United States over us.
None of which is to say Russia is smarter:
Russian grand strategy for, I don’t know, three centuries has been the following: West decline! Have the West implode and collapse, and then we’ll survive. That’s Russian grand strategy. Things are bad in Russia. They’re horrible in Russia, but, hey, if the West implodes—if the West defeats itself, if the West is undermining its own policies and strengths—then Russia will be O.K.
Anyway, let's get back to Russia and Ukraine. Both have lost tens of thousands of people, cities have been levelled, ecosystems have been destroyed. And despite that, in territorial terms, they're both exactly where they were a couple of years ago. There’s now a ceasefire, but by all accounts, they’re still sending drones after each other, so who knows how certain this peace is?
The war, let's be honest, has ground to a bloody stalemate. Does this ever end?
Kotkin thinks there are two possibilities. Ukraine's best case scenario is one where the war doesn't end, but is suspended in a state of frozen animosity, much like the two Koreas. In its worst case scenario, Ukraine gets knee-capped and is forced to capitulate to any demands Putin throws its way.
What isn't an option, sadly, is outright victory. That requires a very different set of circumstances:
... authoritarian regimes can fail at everything, and they often do, but they survive as long as they succeed at one thing: the suppression of political alternatives. If political alternatives—viable political alternatives—appear, either on the domestic scene, in the media space that’s infiltrated, or in exile, the regimes can get destabilized, because a lot of people would like to see a different future for Russia.
There's a large class of people that Kotkin calls "internal defectors". These are people that think Russia is on a bad path, not because of their moral compunctions around Russia violating Ukraine's sovereignty, but because it is an over-militarised, poorly governed mess that has staked too much on the ego of its tyrant, instead of investing its precious resources in Russia's own future. Right now, this group of people does not have any political alternative to latch on to, and so they stay mum. See also: preference falsification.
That's tragic, but also hopeful. If these people flip, the landscape might suddenly look very different.
Where is America on all this? Kotkin has a rather charitable view of Trump:
Trump plays good cop with all your strongmen and faux strongmen, and he then has his staff play bad cop with them; and he plays bad cop with all of our allies, our treaty allies, and he has his staff play good cop with them.
And when it comes to Trump's relationship with Putin, he says:
Putin thought Trump was going to deliver everything to Russia in his first term, and Trump was much harder on Russia than Obama was.
Is that actually true? I haven't the slightest clue.
Fascinating interview all around.
Bhuvan - Rebalacing the economy
Tooze says that The United States under Trump is trying to rebalance the economy from services to industry. He doesn't say it out loud but he is also ostensibly trying to rebalance the economy from capital to labor. There is no example in the history of the world of a large economy like the United States pulling this off. Even the New Deal couldn't alter the composition of the US economy much.
The share of industry in the US economy prior to the New Deal was about 40% and remained the same until 1960s even after it. The composition of the economy only changed after the 1960s due to technological changes and globalization with the rise of Japan, South Korea etc.
Ahmari disagrees and references Alexander Hamilton's policies that were explicit designed to protect the nascent American industry. Hamilton and other in his footsteps had three prongs to protect American manufacturing from the onslaught of the British:
- Tariffs
- Infrastructure development
- Strong banks
Here's a quote that stood out to me:
In 1721, the British Board of Trade declared that, quote, "the colonies, lacking their own manufacturers, will always remain dependent on Great Britain."
So, knowing that, the Hamiltonians said: No. We're going to protect our nascent industries with tariffs— not just to shield them, but also to maintain a base of trained, competent industrial workers in the country.
But it wasn’t just about tariffs—and this is where I think the "Trumpian" approach gets it wrong. Hamilton also established a national bank, which ensured a steady and disciplined flow of credit. The idea was that the financial system should serve the real economy. In other words, finance shouldn't exist for its own sake.
That's why, for much of the country’s early history, banking wasn’t nearly as important as it is today. Wall Street now plays this overbearing role in the economy—but the Hamiltonians worked to prevent that.
And when we say “canal,” we mean infrastructure. Today that might mean something different— well, actually, no. Apparently, today it still means “canal,” since we're about to take over Panama.
But seriously—I don’t know if you realize this, but you may have just stumbled into, if I may, the sequel to Hamilton.
I’m talking Hamilton 2: The Economic Foundation. Maybe not a rap opera… but still.
The things that matter
Perhaps, the part that stood out to the liberal and progressive in me, conflating a glorified and ideal for an imagined future. Whenever economic policy is rooted in a perverse yearning for an imagined and sanitized past, how can something good happen even by accident?
Let’s say we really want more competence in chip manufacturing—fine, absolutely, go for it. You can invest in that.But that shouldn't be confused with a broader vision for society or the economy as a whole—let alone seen as a fix for the situation of the American middle class.
And yet, that's exactly how it's often packaged and sold in American politics today.Sure, there's a national security case for diversifying the supply of memory chips and processors.But in my view, that doesn’t add up to a real social vision.Which is why I brought up the Mar-a-Lago and facelift analogy—because it's not real.
It’s cosmetic.So, you either go down that path, or you go with the "tonal toy," hard-hat economy kind of vision—which Joe Biden was clearly drawn to. He loved being photographed in a manufacturing plant,no matter how rundown, no matter how 1980s it felt. He just wanted to be there.
Both of these are kinds of visions, yes—but they’re really just projections of the past into the future.And I don’t think they’re helpful. In fact, they’re misleading when it comes to what would actually improve the lives of the American working class.What would help? Health care. Child care.Those are the kinds of things that could actually impact tens of millions of people.
That's it for today. If you liked this, give us a shout by tagging us on Twitter.