Washington needs to ramp up its moral campaign against Putin’s Russia. So far President Biden and other Western leaders have appropriately expressed their moral outrage and supported Ukraine’s valiant efforts to maintain its sovereignty and territorial integrity. Outside of Russia, probably China, and a few other forlorn dictatorships such as Eritrea, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky personifies moral righteousness -- on behalf of his embattled people.
As the war has destroyed large swaths of Ukraine, including major cities, driven Ukrainians toward starvation, and compelled a full ten percent of its population to flee (and more to be internally displaced), so the titanic struggle for moral supremacy in this theater of combat and in the minds of the planet’s peoples has been won. Putin, thoroughly portrayed as amoral, sociopathic, and uncommonly isolated from all but courtiers, is now seen and exposed as a wildly greedy and unprincipled neo-Stalinist. He admitted decades ago to being a “hooligan” in school, and an out-and-out “thug” ever since.
Washington needs now more than ever not so much to personalize the West’s antagonism to narcissistic leadership in non-democratic countries but to emphasize in its dealings with the rest of the world that the globe is engaged in a titanic battle against immorality and grand corruption. Yes, fighting Russia in Ukraine has critical security dimensions. It has important consequences for energy dependence. Most of all, battling Putin is necessary to undergird the world’s need for increased respect for national integrity; no matter how weak, states should be secure within their borders. Furthermore, helping Ukraine defend itself elevates the paradigm favoring peaceful settlement of all interstate disputes, respect for the rule of law, and norms against wanton attacks on civilians above the craven personal predilections of individual suzerain-pretenders.
Washington and Western capitals should use every arrow in their rhetorical quiver to underline the moral importance of Ukraine’s existential struggle. Ukraine truly is the place where humankind’s moral outcome may well be decided. Good, as in the great Russian novels, needs to triumph over evil, and that is the frame in which the war must now be pictured so as further to isolate Putin and Putin’s designs on Ukraine, and also to broaden the global support base for Ukraine.
India, the world’s largest so-called democracy should – on moral grounds – be effortlessly fixed in Ukraine’s corner. Instead, pushing morality aside for the economic gains that can come from discounted petroleum and continued assured access to military equipment, India is madly equivocating in favor of neutrality. That is, the modern India that originated in 1947 as a non-aligned moral force has become cash driven. It knows better. The various American envoys who recently traveled to New Delhi and will doubtless visit there frequently (India is a member of the Quad alliance, along with Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the U. S.) should attempt to bring India back to its moral origins.
Similarly, a host of African nations temporized when condemnation of Russia’s invasion was discussed in the United Nations on March 2. Some parrotted the Russian propaganda that the United States precipitated the war in Ukraine. Others may conceivably believe Putin’s disinformation about what Russia really is or is not doing to Ukraine. But the African nations, by origin and rhetoric all committed to anti-colonialism, should now be helped to view the invasion as a colonial reassertion. By definition and by common consensus, colonial rule was and is odious. Africans suffered and then gained freedom. Ukraine, which emerged sovereign from the rubble of the Soviet Union, refuses to be re-colonized. Colonial rule was immoral. So is Putin’s invasion.
Spreading word of the immorality of the invasion of Ukraine may help erode sympathy for Putin and overcome the fear that supporting Ukraine will deprive African nations of Russian arms and military assistance by mercenaries. Like India, there are hardware considerations that influence diplomatic decisions. But morality should rightfully triumph.
Of the African nations that supported Russia when the UN General Assembly voted to condemn its invasion of Ukraine, twenty-three of the fifty-four states in the African Union either abstained or failed to vote. (Eritrea, an enduring dictatorial state along the Red Sea, backed Russia outright.) The abstainers included states with liberation era ties to the Soviet Union and memories of Cold War rivalries that marginalized the African freedom struggle. Three countries – the Central African Republic, Mali, and Sudan – abstained in order emphasize their current ties to Russia’s military outreach and security support for their regimes by Russia’s mercenary Wagner Group (as discussed in an earlier post in this newsletter). The leaders of those three states depend personally on Moscow to stay in power.
Another set of countries benefit from supplies of Russian armaments and political assistance. Most are themselves autocracies, so what Russia is doing in Ukraine may not seem alarming. Those entities led by Putin emulators include Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Madagascar, Mozambique, South Sudan, and Uganda. Zimbabwe is a special authoritarian polity with heavy kleptocratic overtones that has long welcomed Russian military materiel and Russian intelligence support. The leaders of all of these corrupt countries furthermore have little interest in furthering democratic outcomes.
Namibia and South Africa are two additional special cases. Their abstentions in the UN may be explained by their ties to the Soviet Union during the anti-colonial struggle, but South Africa’s current president was schooled in South Africa and led the internal, not the guerilla, freedom struggle. Namibia’s president was educated in the United States.
Both the last two are moral men, as is the president of Senegal, another country that abstained. Hence, it behooves the West to make a justifiably strong moral case that will transform the abstainers into antagonists of Putin. Moreover, coming out in their own countries for good over evil will uplift African leaders in the eyes of their peoples, and help themselves as well as further isolate Putin.
Needless to say, at the UN, Africa’s democracies backed the West. They already understood the good v evil equation. Now is the time for all of the rest of Africa to join those who earlier understood that President Biden’s enunciation of morality was authentic. There was and is evil, and there is a good that deserves on behalf of humanity to be victorious in the ongoing battle for our civilization.
More on Monday.
Bob – Near the end of this edition, you write
“ at the UN, Africa’s democracies backed the West. They already understood the good v evil equation.”
Parse this statement. It says good and evil are equal (they are part of an *equation*).
These days, “equation” is one of the most misused words in English. In a (perpetually, I fear) forthcoming essay, I argue that “equation” has, outside math and science, become an all-purpose, fill-in-the-blank noun.