as I read around “left” reactions to the war I find that some are focused not on such solidarity but on rather alienated discourses of great power politics, some of which masquerade as “anti-imperialism”. Usually we have a pro-forma declaration that Putin’s aggression is “criminal”, but then a rather abstracted discussion of whether it is nevertheless understandable in some way. Perhaps, even, the supposedly supreme strategists in the White House and Pentagon are those truly responsible and have sought to provoke or ensnare Putin into a disastrous war. Milder versions of this thesis abound, shared across a wider gamut of politics, asking whether NATO expansion was a mistake. Well maybe, though to be honest I lack the capacity to run the counterfactuals in my head and work out how history would have run if this or that decision had been taken differently in nineteen-ninety something. I suspect that most of those writing glib pieces of grand strategy from a “left” perspective also lack that capacity, but somehow the urge to play toy soldiers takes over anyway. In any case, none of these strategic calculations could justify maiming a single child, let alone the unburied bodies on the streets of Mariupol.
Perhaps the owl of Minerva will get to tell us what the underlying explanations and calculation were, if we all get to live that long. Of course we have to think about how we got here, but our first thought has to be with the displaced and the murdered and with those who today resist displacement and murder and not with how it all fits in to our grand theoretical schemas.
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