( Nariman El-Mofty / AP Photo )
Gideon Rose, distinguished fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, the former editor of Foreign Affairs and author of How Wars End (Simon & Schuster, 2010), explains why he thinks there are similarities between Russia's invasion in Ukraine and much of U.S. foreign policy and wars over the past few decades.
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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. As you've been hearing on the news yesterday and today, perhaps the greatest moral horror of Putin's atrocity filled war in Ukraine has been revealed in the city of Bucha. As videos have emerged of civilian corpses, many with their hands tied behind their backs, indicating execution style killings and as reports are documenting 150 to 300 bodies discovered now in mass graves. Those victims having sometimes been shot in the backs of their heads and the body sometimes partially burned. This is all leading to new pressure to help Ukraine more militarily as well as economically and to not make territorial compromises, so it doesn't look like these kinds of war crimes bring results. President Biden yesterday said this. You'll hear helicopter noise and wind in the background, but I think you can make out the words.
President Biden: You may remember I got criticized for calling Putin a war criminal. Well, the truth of the matter, we saw what happened in Bucha. He is a war criminal. We have to gather the information, we have to continue to provide Ukraine with the weapons they need to continue the fight, and we have to gather all the detail, so this could be- actually have a war crimes trial. This guy is brutal, and what's happening in Bucha is outrageous.
Brian Lehrer: Outrageous, no doubt, but what does that mean the US or other countries should do? US military intervention often makes things worse. There's a fascinating article in Foreign Affairs magazine right now by its former editor Gideon Rose, who is also author of the excellent book, How Wars End. Maybe you heard him on the media this weekend. He says, "Even as atrocities of civilians mount, Putin has failed to accomplish his main goals in Ukraine for reasons very similar to why the US failed as badly as it did in its major wars of recent decades in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Vietnam." The article is called, The Irony of Ukraine: We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us. Gideon, thanks for coming on to discuss the moral questions raised by Bucha, but in the context of the big picture. Welcome back to WNYC.
Gideon Rose: Thanks, Brian. Always good to be here.
Brian Lehrer: You start the article by saying a consensus has been forming about why Russia has failed to achieve its goals in Ukraine. What goals are you referring to and what's that consensus as to why? Would you lay it out for us?
Gideon Rose: Well, the initial consensus among Western analysts on the war is that Putin thought that he could easily invade and take Ukraine, conquer it, put in a puppet government and create a fait accompli, that essentially would bring Ukraine back into the Russian fold and allow him to move forward in the world untrammeled and with an even greater and restored Russian Empire. Unfortunately, his troops-- From his perspective, things didn't go according to plan. The troops were not met as liberators, but as invaders. The Ukrainians didn't collapse, but put up a strong resistance. Zelensky didn't flee, but rallied his troops. The West didn't cower, but rather came together and supported Ukraine and Europe flipped its position.
Now Russia's plan A, a quick, immediate war that would be successful and redound to its credit went by the wayside in the first week or two. Then they turned to the Russian plan B, which was to stand back and shell things and hope that by being more brutal and attacking civilian morale you could achieve the same goals, but with crushing the enemy spirit rather than simply taking it away from them. That has managed to fail in the last couple of weeks as well. Now you have a situation in which there is no plan C really and Russia is improvising as it is going forward.
It seems that their latest plan is to try to retrench from the goal of taking all of Ukraine and concentrate on just parts of the east and then say, "Well, that was all we wanted all along." At this point right now, since their initial goals are being frustrated, everybody is trying to figure out what's going to happen next and how the war is going to end. The reason this relates to the US is it's not entirely dissimilar, however different the moral calculus, however different the motives, to the situation the United States found itself in Vietnam from the late 1960s on, and in Iraq and Afghanistan from the mid-2000s on. In the sense that Russia knows its made a mistake and now the question is what happens next and how does it get out.
Brian Lehrer: Talk more about that parallel to the United States, because you liken the Ukrainians today to the North Vietnamese communists, our enemy in the Vietnam War or to the Taliban, our enemy in Afghanistan, of course, but we see them as bad guys and the Ukrainians as good guys. What's the parallel?
Gideon Rose: Americans tend to- not just Americans- to see themselves as the good guys and see war as an arena primarily of morality, and that is a key part of it. What's going on in Ukraine is awful, but it is also a strategic situation which has certain common features with other strategic situations and the logic imposes itself on the belligerents. It has a lot in common with other wars. For example, it's a limited war in the nuclear age. It's highly unlikely to escalate to the nuclear level, because both superpowers know that they shouldn't actually do that and there have been a lot of wars in which they kept fighting at the conventional level. It's also a situation in which the Russians are playing the role of the outside invading conqueror in what is essentially a imperial or colonial war.
Although we don't think of ourselves as doing that, because we think of ourselves as backing good causes and friendly democrats in various places, we've often been in a structurally similar situation. We took over from the French in Vietnam, for example. Even though we didn't want to keep the colony the way they did, we were on the same functional position in fighting a nationalist resistance. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, we were the external power trying to conquer and pacify the country and ultimately being unable to do so. This idea of us being on the attacker side in the past, it should give us insights into what Russia is thinking strategically at least and it should give us insights into how to fight the war, because we're in the position now of let's say Iran when the United States was in Iraq, of Pakistan when the United States was in Afghanistan, of the Ho Chi Min Trail, China and Russia when the United States was stuck in Vietnam. We are now helping the Ukrainians resist the invasion of the Russians and make any occupation a non-starter.
Brian Lehrer: Another parallel that you draw is between the US in this war, and Iran in the Iraq War, and Pakistan in the Afghanistan War. Of course, in those cases the US was seen as the big imperial power that Russia is seen as now. In what ways are we like Iran with respect to Iraq or Pakistan with respect to Afghanistan?
Gideon Rose: We're helping the Ukrainians resist. We're not the direct belligerent in this war. It's obviously Russia and Ukraine, but we are aiding Ukraine across the border, providing supplies, helping the resistance. That is the kind of thing that the Iranians did when we were in Iraq, providing help to the militias. It's the kind of thing that the Pakistanis did in helping the Taliban and providing safe haven and sanctuaries. We have been bedeviled by sanctuaries in foreign countries next to the insurgencies we've been fighting for half a century. Now we're in that role supplying a proto-insurgency and for right now the resistance in the West for Ukraine. That means what we're essentially trying to do is play defense and exhaust the attacking conquering power. That's a different role than playing offense and being the one controlling the operation.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, your questions welcome about the war in Ukraine as seen through the eyes of the US recent war failures. 212-433-WNYC for Gideon Rose from the Council on Foreign Relations and their publication, Foreign Affairs magazine. 212-433-9692. In light of that history, but also in light of the atrocities being revealed in the city of Bucha now that Russian troops have withdrawn from there, allowing video cameras in to see the horrors that they left behind, what do you think the US or any other country should do more or differently than we've been doing to date? 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. Maybe you heard Gideon Rose on the media on Sunday as I did, nd I wanted to ask him a lot more questions. That's why we invited him on today, and maybe you did too. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer. Gideon, I've been thinking about a very similar set of questions. It's made me wary of any pressure that may be coming for the US to get more involved, at least militarily, because US involvement even on theoretically humanitarian grounds often makes things worse, not better. In fact, I recently had Ambassador William Taylor on the show, he is the former US ambassador to Ukraine who also fought in Vietnam, represented the US in the Iraq reconstruction effort also in Afghanistan, and also to the failed Arab Spring democracy movement countries, including Syria and Egypt. Of course, he was a witness in the Trump-Ukraine impeachment, William Taylor. I asked him, "Why does it seem like almost every major US military action since World War II seems to end in failure?" I said this was not to blame him as a diplomat, but to question the policies of presidents of both parties, who he has served. Listen to part of his answer.
Ambassador Williams Taylor: We, in some cases, came in thought that we had a better idea or that we had some suggestions or recommendations for some of these governments that may or may not have been applicable to their societies, their culture. We should recognize that, and we should support the values that we do. I have no doubt, and I make no apology for supporting the values of democratic governments, of open governments, of a market economy. No question that those are the right things, certainly for the United States. If those same values and those same mechanisms and those same forms of government are applicable to other governments and other peoples, which I'm sure they are, it's up to those governments and those peoples to adopt them. They are in the best position to decide how to do that. Most people do want to be able to elect their own governments. Most people do want to have a market economy where they can make decisions. Most people do want to be able to have a rule of law rather than the rule of individuals, and they know how to get there. In most cases, they know how to get there.
Brian Lehrer: Ambassador Williams Taylor, here last month. Any reactions to that based on your own long expertise covering US foreign policy?
Gideon Rose: He is a great guy, and I think he's quite absolutely right. Basically, a lot of the commentary on the Ukraine War has focused on unique case-specific factors, the complex history of the region, the complex psychology of Putin, Zelensky charismatic leadership. It's all seemed very new and it's all seemed very risky, and no one- and unpredictable. In fact, the war is taking on some quite familiar characteristics. Those characteristics are inherent in the strategic logic of the situation, not the characteristics of the belligerents. That's why I'd caution also against thinking that, "Oh, we always do the wrong thing." No, we were in certain situations where the United States did the wrong thing, but there are other wars during this era,which did not go as awfully as people think or remember.
The Korean war, for example, ultimately pushed back an advance, established a status quo ante, and has held secure peace, and allowed South Korea to make the most extraordinary rise in modern history over the last seven decades. War can be a useful geopolitical tool, but you have to approach it in a sensible way. What we should take from this is the Russians, like we in the past, failed to think carefully about how to end all this. In terms of how we react to the moral atrocities at Bucha, how we will look at what's happening in the conflict. What we should be trying to do is think about the end game that we want to see, and how we get there. Rather than react viscerally or emotionally, even when there's extraordinary cause to, the US government's actions should be based on what does it want to see happen next, and how do we get there.
Brian Lehrer: 212-433-WNYC. Paula in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Gideon Rose. Hello, Paula.
Paula: Oh, hello. I keep hearing since really almost the beginning of this invasion that we're sending military support. We're sending it, we're sending it, sending it. Then never seems to arrive and Zelensky keeps asking for it. What's actually going on? Why can't we just tell Russia that we're going to-- Why can't we hitch or connect more sanctions to them leaving the sky? Which would be a very straightforward way of saying stop sending your planes into the sky, because that's going to just entail more and more and more sanctions, and just make that connection instead of being so afraid of doing anything, which is, I suppose, okay.
Brian Lehrer: Gideon.
Gideon Rose: I think it's a great question. I think the way I would answer that would go back to the late 1940s. US policymakers in the late 1940s faced a question nobody had ever faced before in the entire history of the world, which is what do you do with weapons that can destroy the planet? It turned out, and in the past wars had always been the way you solve problems in international relations. That's what you did when the differences got too big between the major powers. You ended up fighting a war, the war decided things, and then you had a new era. The wars that decided things kept getting more and more dangerous, more and more total. They culminated in the horrors of World War II. Then that culminated in our dropping the bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroying entire cities with a single blast.
Now in the wake of that war, the big question on everybody's mind was, what's going to happen next? Is there going to be war? Is it going to be as destructive as the past or is there going to be complete peace? Are we dead or red? When the North Koreans invaded the South, all this was put to the test in 1950. What happened in the Korean War was that the nuclear powers basically decided, tacitly agreeing through their actions, on a code of conduct for limited war in the nuclear age. That was, no nuclear power attacks another nuclear power's territory, no nuclear power attacks another nuclear power's regime, and you can fight the conventional fight to the utmost, but you keep clear boundaries geographically and in terms of ends, and in terms of some kinds of means on the fighting. This notion of a limited war was in opposition to the total war that had just happened.
Ever since, whether it was Korea or Vietnam or the Gulf or Iraq or Afghanistan-them, Afghanistan-us or Ukraine now, we followed these rules. The reason you don't have a no fly zone, the reason that policymakers have been shying away from that, so scared, is because what they're trying to do is achieve their goals on both sides in Ukraine. The Russians are trying to conquer. We're trying to help block the conquering, but to do so without producing a new total war. That means establishing clear fire breaks between the action in Ukraine, and a general conflict that would bring in the nuclear powers on both sides. The way you do this is by avoiding direct contact between the forces by limiting the war to the Ukrainian theater of operations, and crucially by not necessarily calling into question the existence of a nuclear regime.
This is why Biden's ad-lib the other day about Putin having to go was so bad, because essentially, if you have a nuclear rat and he's cornered, you want to leave that nuclear rat a bolt hole. You want to leave a way out, because what we want now is for the Russians to withdraw. That means putting enough pressure and enough frustration on them in Ukraine and enough penalties with sanctions and elsewhere that it hurts them and makes them decide to walk out. Not so much pressure that they feel desperate, possibly even desperate enough to escalate to using nuclear weapons.
Brian Lehrer: Bruce in New Brunswick, you're on WYNC with Gideon Rose from the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of How Wars End. Hi, Bruce,
Bruce: How are you guys?
Gideon Rose: Great. Thanks.
Bruce: How are you guys?
Brian Lehrer: We're doing all right. Under the circumstances, what you got for us, Bruce?
Bruce: Yes. The circumstances are crazy. I actually just got out of Ukraine on the 26th, and it's a bad situation. My main call is there's a lot of aid that people are going to Ukraine, we have an aid site, but in the framework that you're talking, most people have never lived in Ukraine. Most people have never lived in Moscow. Don't speak the language, don't know the cultures of both regions. When they're talking about aid or they're talking about military actions, it's always from that American framework, which is different. Now in Odessa, you have people waiting for aid, they're not getting that aid. There's different ways where aid needs to get into the country, but because people don't live there and don't know, people aren't getting aid., That needs to change. You do have groups that are working to get aid there, and you have aid where you have sites online where you can give direct to the military, but the people actually need money now. We have people in a hotel right now with staff and families, and the food is running out. They're not getting aid that's coming. I'm raising money trying to get money from everyone for them. That was just my point.
Brian Lehrer: Well, what do you think, given your experience there? People should know about how to get the aid in or how to get the people out.
Bruce: Yes, but the problem is-- I taught in Ukraine too. I'm a former lawyer, so I taught in a law school. A lot of my students now are reporters with Ukraine. It's information, and then this thing that's going on out the war, there's information warfare. You need to know the correct channels, the correct people to get the correct information. That's the problem. I have military calling me directly when they need certain equipment. Now, they're sending money from Ukraine here to get that. Now, because I've been there, now we're making arrangements for me to get it there, so I know they're going to get it. Where it's not going to be someplace sitting, and they're not going to see that.
Brian Lehrer: What's your connection to Ukraine, if you're free to say?
Bruce: I went to Ukraine years ago. I was in a revolution in 2014 with Maidan too, and Odesa. It was a little different then. Now I have a daughter. I have family there, I have property there, do business there, and I'm African-American. When you see the stuff on the news and they talk about the discrimination crossing the borders into Poland, to Romania, in Moldova or even in Ukraine, that stuff is true.
In this case, we're now even trying to raise money where I have issues with African-Americans or people of color say, "No, we're not going to give, because of the discrimination." This situation is bigger, people are dying, I said even the same people you don't want to help, they have mixed Ukrainian families. Guess what? They need money too when they get in Poland or when they get in Germany or when they get in Romania to survive. It's a tough situation.
What the gentleman said as far as the mindset and the political-- Even Putin himself. I lived in Moscow. I know in Moscow, you could protest all day, that doesn't change nothing. Life goes on, people disappear, but most Americans don't know that or Ukraine, because he never been there or they visit for a week or two on vacation. That's not knowing anything about a country. How to live there, speak the language, know the people working, et cetera.
Brian Lehrer: What do you think about the US participating militarily in a no-fly zone?
Brian: Honestly, my opinion in 2014, because we were living there, we're going through the discrimination. My opinion back then was US shouldn't get tax money, the US should do nothing. That was my opinion then, but now the whole situation is different. It wasn't like then. People are dying. Going to get my daughter, I almost didn't make it back here alive. Her city was surrounded by Russian troops.
The no-fly zone is tricky, because you're putting yourself into a situation where we're talking about nuclear powers, and if we're dragged into another war, I look at it like, "Now we're dragged into another war." We stop it with Ukraine. Now American lives are dying, our economy is already bad. Things get worse for us, then who's going to help America? Then we look back to Ukraine and Ukraine is like, "Well, okay, thank you, but there's nothing we can do for you."
We do have to be strategic about it. I wanted them to do the sanctions right away as far as with the oil, but also from being politically mature, understanding the ramifications, what that does to Russia, throughout the global economy, but most Americans don't understand their situation. They just want things now. Even most Ukrainians want it now and I understand that situation, because I was going to [unintelligible 00:24:02] too, but in this situation, it can't happen like that.
Brian Lehrer: First, thank you so much for your call. Please call us again. What an interesting call, Gideon. At the end, he also laid out that tension again with his connections to the area, including the 2014 revolution there. He wants help for the people of Ukraine now, but at the same time, he's wary of getting over-involved in a way that's going to not work out for the better in the long run.
Gideon Rose: I agree. Here's another by the way, here's another parallel as I was listening to him. We were shocked-- There's a lot of recrimination now about how could we not predict this? How come we didn't do more stuff to deter Putin beforehand, et cetera. There were legitimate reasons for thinking Russia wouldn't do something like this. Those reasons were wrong, but again, it's not the first time it's happened. Six months before the Korean War started, Dean Acheson essentially ruled out a war on the Korean peninsula, because it wasn't really in our interest.
When the North Koreans attacked, the Truman administration realized, actually, this is so significant we have to respond. In 1990, American officials didn't think Saddam Hussein would take all of Kuwait and they gave conflicting- not so much yellow lights, but essentially not a giant strong deterrent, because they never imagined he would do what he did. When Saddam invaded Kuwait, it changed our opinion of what he was, just like the North Korean invasion changed our opinion of the dangers in Korea.
Putin's aggression has been so beyond the bounds of what was expected, so reckless, that it has not just produced the reaction that it has, but it has helped change our view of him. Rather than recriminations about the past, we can all see what's going on now and the question is, where do you go from here? How do you, on the one hand, make it clear that he cannot gain from this behavior significantly?
You have to fight enough to have a status quo ante settlements or at least a stalemate of some kind with very minimal territorial gains so that this is understood to be something you can't get away with doing. At the same time, you have to essentially make that a voluntary choice on the Russian side. You can't compel them to do it. You can hope that you can persuade them to walk away. We need to make sure that we keep the fire breaks in place to keep the conflict limited. It's a delicate balancing act.
I think the Biden administration has done pretty well with this when they keep their mouth shut. They've weaponized truth in the information war by releasing good information, getting the American government to strange new respect for its honesty and credibility. Whenever they're showing what the Russians are doing, that has been very successful. When the administration has tried to make big broad announcements and emotional rhetoric, it's gotten itself into trouble.
Brian Lehrer: In a minute, we'll take some more phone calls for Gideon Rose, whose article in Foreign Affairs is called the Irony of Ukraine: We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us. I don't know how many people anymore remember the old Pogo cartoons that you take that line from, "We have met the enemy, and it is us,", but that's the subtitle of the article. One of the things that really interests me that you do, and you would just starting to get at it, but I'm going to ask you to go further, is proposed not rubbing Putin's nose in his moral depravity, even though he is so morally depraved, as a path to ending the bloodshed. We'll do that right after the break. We'll take more calls for Gideon rose at 212-433-WNYC or you can ask him a question twee @BrianLehrer. Stay tuned.
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Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Gideon Rose from Foreign Affairs magazine and the Council on Foreign Relations, which publishes Foreign Affairs magazine, and he's author of the book How Wars End. Before the segment ends. I'm going to ask you, Gideon, how you think this war will end, but he's also got his article in Foreign Affairs, Now the Irony of Ukraine: We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us, which puts what Russia is doing right now and the ways it is failing primarily to meet its main war aim of just taking over Ukraine to failures of the US in its major wars of recent decades.
As the follow-up to what you were saying, just before the break, Gideon I said I wanted to ask you more about that, and you propose not rubbing Putin's nose in his moral depravity, to allow him space to leave and say face, which is a way to stop the bloodshed. You wrote that and you said that on the media this weekend before Bucha was revealed. Is it any different today?
Gideon Rose: I don't think so. The fact is that however heinous what we're seeing is, the war itself is heinous and it doesn't necessarily change our strategic take on the situation, which means that we're going to have to make a compromise piece, just like Russia and Putin is. This war ends in one of two ways. Either something- a settlement resembling a status quo ante on the ground, in which the Russians pull back and we lift the sanctions and you have some agreed way to go back to at least what you had before or what's called a frozen conflict in which you have a stalemate that continues to simmer like you had in Ukraine before, but in which the Russians have been pushed significantly further back and they keep some territory and then lock on. Basically, what you want now is you want to push the Russians back and convince them that they cannot win the war on the ground, but you're wanting to affect their psychology so that they voluntarily change course and pull back. If you ask yourself, basic human psychology, if your know what you have to do, being yelled at, being anathematized, being attacked doesn't make it easier.
Putin is going through what Elisabeth Kübler-Ross talked about as the five stages of grief about his original war plans, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. We want to try to help Putin and help Russia go through the stages of grief as quickly as possible. We stayed in Vietnam for more than a decade. We stayed in Iraq for nearly a decade. We stayed in Afghanistan for two decades. We want Putin to leave Ukraine much more quickly than we left the failed Imperial wars that we joined. To do that, we need to put ourselves in his shoes, however distasteful that may be, and essentially think, "How can we ease his way out."
Here the Russian control over the information environment at home is actually useful. It's bad for a whole number of things, including Western democracy and human rights, but it's actually good for war termination. Because if Putin, even while actually beaten can manage to craft himself a victory for himself at home, that might make it easier for him to withdraw and accept defeat, which is what we actually want.
Brian Lehrer: A really interesting-looking call is coming in. Let me take one now. Beth in Princeton, you're on WNYC with Gideon Rose. Hi, Beth.
Beth: Hi, thanks for taking my call. I'm very curious about the Zelensky strategy of asking daily for a couple of weeks, at least, for no fly zone. Did he think he was going to get that ever or was that a PR strategy for his country and also a negotiation tactic?
Brian Lehrer: Interesting question, Gideon.
Gideon Rose: In the fall of Afghanistan when the Ashraf Ghani government collapsed, and the leader bugged out in the middle of the night. We saw the worst-case scenario of what happens when your client falls apart under pressure. In Ukraine with Zelenskys' charismatic resistance, we're literally seeing the exact opposite. The best-case scenario of when your local ally stays in place and responds and rises to the occasion rather than pulling away.
The plan that Zelensky is playing is a weak hand, obviously. He's playing it incredibly well. He's obviously made himself one of the major leaders of our time, even from such an embattled position, but the role of the client in this situation is also a pretty standard role. It's to ask for as much as you can from the great power, because this may be an optional war for Putin, it may be an optional war for the United States. It is not optional for Zelensky. For Zelensky, it's a total existential war and he is desperate to get whatever help he can. His strategy is to ask and ask and ask, browbeat, play up anything that can happen, and hope that he can leverage his charisma and his appeals to get more help.
The question is, at what point? The only thing we need to be careful of is whenever we have a charismatic small ally that we feel emotionally bound to, whether it's Taiwan, whether it's Israel, whether it's, in this case, Ukraine, there is a tendency to assume that the interests of Washington or the United States are unanimous and identical with the interests of the local client and that's not necessarily the case. As much as we are on the Ukrainian side, and as much as we need to punish and contain Russia, we need to be careful to recognize that US interests and the interest of the Zelensky government are overlapping in some situations, but not identical.
Brian Lehrer: Here's some tweets coming in. One listener writes, "Listening to you now talk about how we should not rub Putin's nose and his depravity. I'm disgusted hearing this. Enough coddling." Another asks, "Does Mr. Rose know if and how much opposition media the Russian people get exposed to anything respected or powerful?" Related to that somebody else writes, that's not it. Sorry, I had it. These tweets keep coming in and then they disappear from my screen. Oh, here it is. "Can the US break into the Russian communication system and tell them the truth? Russian mothers have to know sons are dying."
Gideon Rose: Can the US break into the Russian information system and tell them the truth? I see the Brian Lehrer show, as an attempt to break into the US information system and tell Americans the truth. We don't seem to be doing a particularly good job at that.
Brian Lehrer: No, you're coddling.
Gideon Rose: No, I think it's very serious. One of the things we need to be very careful about is in the heat of war, not to lose sight of how things look to other people, and how we ourselves have seen. The United States is posing as this great avatar of democracy and freedom of the press and sanity and rationality and goodness. In this case, that's certainly true. Compared to the other side of this war, all that is completely correct. From the rest of the world's perspective, America has not always been this innocent, is still deeply flawed in many respects, commits mass atrocities itself, but then always excuses them as, "Oh, it was a mistake," or, "Oh, it was collateral damage."
It's not that Russia isn't committing atrocities in Ukraine, it absolutely is, but other countries look at us and go, "You guys are hypocritical, because you kill civilians whenever it benefits you, you just don't like to acknowledge it that way. You categorize it differently. You talk about it and you minimize it. Now you Americans are taking the opportunity to make a big deal of Russia stuff for political reasons, not moral reasons." That's why you need to be very careful. What is going on is embedded in a strategic context and we need to be careful to link our feelings and our passions to ultimately a policy that will help achieve the least bad outcome at the end of the day.
Brian Lehrer: Here's another one criticizing what you said about finding a way to let Putin make it seem like he's walking away from this war voluntarily. Writer says, "The problem with your guest not wanting to name Putin accurately as a war criminal, it is necessary to call him what he is. These days if you don't name it, it allows the "Other side" to have a say and muddy the waters. Haven't we learned this with the 2016 campaign?" You could respond to that in context of the 2016 campaign and both sidesism and false equivalency in the discourse in the United States. Also, maybe the fact that we got a few tweets like this now, are an indication that people don't want to hear pragmatic diplomacy solutions right now when the moral atrocities being committed are just so great.
Gideon Rose: The fact is that this war is only going to end when the Russian leadership makes a conscious choice to withdraw and retrench or the Ukrainian government collapses and we move to some insurgency in which we continue the fighting, but from underneath. If you think of it in this perspective, then the question becomes, how do you get the Russians to do that? Now, clearly frustrating their actions on the ground is a crucial part of that. We should be giving all the aid and all the conventional military help we can, short of the nuclear firebreak and short of getting our forces directly involved, and frustrating their operations. Even that doesn't necessarily mean they will immediately withdraw.
We were frustrated in Vietnam for years, we were frustrated in Iraq for years, we were frustrated in Afghanistan for years, they were frustrated in Afghanistan for years. Something has to happen after the frustration to get you to accept it and walk away. That is a psychological question on the other side and if you ask yourself, does humiliation help you give in to accept the reality? That when you know you've done something wrong, does it help to basically anathematize you in public or does that make you resist even what you know you should do just to screw the other guy who's yelling at you? Essentially, we shouldn't write checks that we can't cash with our words and we should keep our goals to practical specific goals, pushing Russia back and out and use our actions in a coordinated strategy to try to achieve that.
Brian Lehrer: Josh in Brooklyn wants to question your comparison between the US in Vietnam and Russia here in Ukraine. Josh, you're on WNYC with Gideon Rose from Foreign Affairs. Hi.
Josh: Hi. Yes, I just wanted to disagree with your guest's comparison to previous American interventions, especially Vietnam. I think there are two issues. One is that whether or not it was misguided, Vietnam was an ideological war. The US was fighting against Communism and what they thought was the domino theory. The other big difference is the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a one-man war. If it wasn't for Putin, there would be no war there. It's not a war of a nation against the nation. It's a war of one psychopath trying to build an empire. I'll take the answer off the top. Thank you.
Brian Lehrer: Thank you for your question.
Gideon Rose: I agree with both of those points, but the first one, although there are lots of differences between the wars and lots of differences between the motivations involved, I don't think it changes the strategic calculus. For example, the French were trying to protect a colony in Vietnam, we were trying to stop the spread of communism. Both of us bumped up against the problems of maintaining an outside government in a country that had a nationalist resistance that didn't want us there. With regard to Putin himself, as the war has run into trouble, yes, he dominates the regime, but the greater discontent around him and the loss of Russian capabilities is creating a context in which his thinking might change.
If you ask yourself about how many people in the US were actually involved in the launching of the Iraq war in 2003, it was more than George W. Bush, but it wasn't all that many more, and it certainly wasn't a mass popular or democratic movement with a clear plan of action for the end. The notion of a small group of people having wishful thoughts about what might happen and launching a war without really figuring out what will happen if their initial plans don't work is something that in its broad outlines we should be familiar with. That's why I say we should look at the enemy and see it's at least some of our own self in the reflective mirror.
Brian Lehrer: One comment on Twitter says you're emphasizing past US war atrocities too much. One tweet says you're not emphasizing them enough. We'll close with this tweet, which if that last caller didn't like the comparison with the Vietnam War, a few tweets and I'll read one of them to get your reaction, doesn't like you holding up the US involvement in the Korean War after World War II as a military success or positive. This tweet says, "Gideon Rose saying some troubling things about the Korean War, calling it a Useful geopolitical tool," ignores the massive civilian death toll and the generations-long wounds inflicted upon a population and diaspora." What do you say to that tweeter who I gather is a CUNY professor in that field.
Gideon Rose: War is a terrible event, but it has to be judged against other possible terrible events. When the North Korean forces invaded South Korea in 1950, there were only a few options. Essentially, if we had not fought in Korea to help South Korea, then the North would've taken over and all of the Peninsula would've been like the prison camp that is North Korea for the last 70 years. By the same token, there were a lot of calls to widen the Korean War when we started to get the upper hand when we managed to beat off the invasion and get the momentum back and march up the peninsula.
There was a whole lot of enthusiasm for taking the fight to the enemy and not stopping where it started, but actually going and taking North Korea and liberating North Korea, rolling back communism. That turned out to be a disaster, because it provoked Chinese intervention, and we ended up after several years in Korea agreeing that the best way to deal with this horrible situation of two different ideological camps with different geopolitical goals in the world that had nuclear weapons on both sides was to go to a status quo ante and let the domestic forces of the systems compete economically and politically, but not have the military conflict in Korea be the flashpoint.
That's what we want to have now. We're going to be in conflict with Russia, Russia is going to be in conflict with us. The question is, how do you stop the fighting in Ukraine, stop the carnage, be able to repatriate some of the civilians, but in a way that leads to a more stable situation going forward?
Brian Lehrer: Well, maybe there's a future segment and you and Grace Chow coming on and having a dialogue about how to view the Korean War in historical perspective. For now, we leave that there. Gideon Rose's article in Foreign Affairs is called The Irony of Ukraine: We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us. Thank you so much for discussing it with us.
Gideon Rose: Thank you.
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