It is remarkable that Vladimir Putin, the Russian despot, calls the West (that is, Western values and individuals living in rich and more or less free countries) “decadent,” while his intentional attacks on civilians in Ukraine are reminiscent of the barbarians of former ages of mankind. Is it necessary to mention that barbarians have not been only the Germanic tribes that invaded Europe in the first millennium of our era? And that barbarians also appeared in the not-so-distant past.
Bertrand de Jouvenel, the French political scientist author of the quasi-libertarian book On Power, noted how the bombing of civilian populations in WWII was a return to barbarism. Two excerpts:
In this war everyone—workmen, peasants, and women alike—is in the fight, and in consequence everything, the factory, the harvest, even the dwelling-house, has turned target. As a result the enemy to be fought has been all flesh that is and all soil, and the bombing plane has striven to consummate the utter destruction of them all.
[Original French:] Puisque tout, et l’ouvrier, et le moissonneur, et la femme, concourt à la lutte, tout, l’usine, la récolte, la maison est devenue cible, l’adversaire a traité en ennemi tout ce qui est chair et terre, a poursuivi au moyen de l’aviation un total anéantissement.We are ending where the savages began. We have found again the lost arts of starving non-combatants, burning hovels, and leading away the vanquished into slavery. Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: we are our own Huns.
[Original French:] Nous finissons par où les sauvages commencent, nous redécouvrons l’art perdu d’affamer les non-combattants, de brûler les huttes et d’amener les vaincus en esclavage. Qu’avons-nous besoin d’invasions barbares ? Nous sommes nos propres Huns.
The book preceded Hiroshima and Nagasaki by five months. Jouvenel hadn’t seen anything yet. I have long thought that On Power was a persuasive indictment of the modern state which, under the excuse of democracy, has accumulated powers that no absolute monarch could dream of (see my Econlib review of On Power). This is not false and is illustrated by barbarians such as Putin. But it must be qualified by the realization that technology has changed the production function of war and that the clear distinction that Jouvenel saw between combatants and civilians has been blurred. The war in Ukraine provided another demonstration of that.
More precisely, two factors must be considered. First, the expansion of “infrastructure,” from water works, to electrical grids and telecommunications networks, combined with the technology of weapons (missiles and drones) capable of hitting these widely used services from far away, has dramatically reduced the cost of taking civilians hostage. Apartment buildings are also easy targets. In a disturbing sense, civilians have become much more valuable targets, especially for an immoral and barbarian attacker.
There is a second sense in which civilians have become combatants willy-nilly. As we saw in Ukraine, any citizen (or resident) of an invaded territory who is “armed” with a cellphone represents a very effective resistant and an imminent threat. Invading soldier have taken notice. It’s a simple, but of course very risky, task to inform one’s government of the positions of invading forces. It’s also risky for those who don’t do it and merely hold a cellphone in their hands. The invaders become terrorists, and even more easily if they already have barbarian tastes.
We may like to imagine the state as a simple protection agency on the Pinkerton model, and claim that it would be immoral for a thief, besides trying to neutralize the security agents, to shoot a customer of theirs. The reality however seems to be that, in an invaded country, everybody is deemed the signatory of a “social contract.” It is as if, on the model of Sparta, any citizen has become an enlisted soldier. Everybody is automatically conscripted. Can any future war be anything else than total?
READER COMMENTS
Craig
Dec 3 2022 at 1:10pm
“First, the expansion of “infrastructure,” from water works, to electrical grids and telecommunications networks,”
https://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1203/4.5.htm
“The United States targeted electrical power distribution facilities, but not generation facilities, throughout Iraq, according to a senior CENTCOM official. He told Human Rights Watch that instead of using explosive ordnance, the majority of the attacks were carried out with carbon fiber bombs designed to incapacitate temporarily rather than to destroy.100 Nevertheless, some of the attacks on electrical power distribution facilities in Iraq are likely to have a serious and long-term detrimental impact on the civilian population”
“combined with the technology of weapons (missiles and drones) capable of hitting these widely used services from far away”
Well, now the weapons exist that can hit these targets with relative precision whereas in conflicts like WW2 the bombers could hit targets far, far away but with nothing nearly as much precision.
“There is a second sense in which civilians have become combatants willy-nilly. As we saw in Ukraine, any citizen (or resident) of an invaded territory who is “armed” with a cellphone represents a very effective resistant and an imminent threat. Invading soldier have taken notice. It’s a simple, but of course very risky, task to inform one’s government of the positions of invading forces. It’s also risky for those who don’t do it and merely hold a cellphone in their hands. The invaders become terrorists, and even more easily if they already have barbarian tastes.”
It would also be risky for the invaders not to do anything about it either, particularly with the existence of very precise munitions.
In WW2 towards the end of the war there was an instance where Hitler Youth, not even afforded a Volksturm armband, were utilized to spot Allied units and to report back to some German military unit who at that time probably wasn’t going to be able to do anything about it anyway. The US Army captured them, out of uniform, and there’s a macabre video on youtube of their firing squad executions in June 1945 with a quarry as a backdrop for the bullets, a month after the war. They weren’t executed for reconnaissance, they were executed for being out of uniform — being a spy. Nevertheless had a sniper seen them engaged in reconnaissance, that sniper could’ve engaged them as combatants for the mere act of reconnaissance.
The doctrine of executing combatants, essentially treating them as unlawful combatants, as opposed to lawful combatants, not wearing uniforms dates at least as far back as the francs-tireurs during the Franco-Prussian War and even in things like the Lieber Code during the Civil War.
More modern thoughts on the topic now tend to distinguish between un-uniformed spies who belong to the nation’s uniformed military and un-uniformed civilians indigenous to a region spontaneously taking part in hostilities. So the result now tends to be that the latter tend to be considered lawful combatants to the extent they engage in hostilities.
To apply this thought to what you write above the civilian cell-phone spotters what’s really the issue is whether or not they’re crossing the line from non-combatant to combatant because if they cross the line to combatant then they become a legitimate military target.
The problem with cell phones is they are obviously ubiquitous among civilians and have obvious uses for non-combatants. Nevertheless at this point if you’re a civilian carrying a cell phone and the Russians see you, you’re on notice they might think you’re engaged in reconnaissance.
Ultimately the Russians and Ukrainians are compelled by geography to live next to one another. While Putin’s invasion is an unjustified escalation of a pre-existing conflict dating back to 2014, and in a sense with roots going back centuries, both sides need to find the basis to de-escalate the conflict.
I feel the basis for de-escalation must necessarily take account of the indigenous population’s desire. Ultimately any discussion these days of even suggesting that the Ukraine should cede territory to Russia is met with extreme vitriol, the bottom line is that the people in the Crimea and in the eastern half of the Donbass, the areas controlled by the Russian separatists prior to Putin’s invasion have little desire to be part of the Ukraine.
Status quo ante bellum, hold neutral party plebiscites.
#americafirst #outofnato #f-europe #f-ukraine #f-russia #f-em-all
Not our war, its not our problem. $100bn plus for this is outrageous.
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 3 2022 at 2:03pm
Craig: Except for your last couple of paragraphs (I contend that it’s better to stop an imperial tyrant in Ukraine instead of on American soil), I don’t think that your reflections contradict anything I said in my post. Not that I am looking for disapproval more than approval!
David Henderson
Dec 3 2022 at 2:37pm
You write:
In the extreme (and awful) case that Putin took all of Ukraine, how would that lead to his invading the U.S.? I can’t think of a plausible scenario where that would happen.
Jim Glass
Dec 3 2022 at 4:19pm
In the extreme (and awful) case that Putin took all of Ukraine, how would that lead to his invading the U.S.? I can’t think of a plausible scenario where that would happen.
Of course not. But then, Hitler had zero chance of ever invading the USA. (At the height of their power the Germans never were even close to just getting across the English Channel.)
In retrospect, what was the best point in time when we should have acted to stop him?
Craig
Dec 3 2022 at 4:31pm
In retrospect, the British and French should’ve invaded Germany with vigor while substantial percentage of the German army was still invading Poland. Instead they opted for sitzkrieg — the French did launch a minor invasion of Germany. Once May 1940 rolled around, the combined Anglo-French army was a match for Germany, in fact the Allied forces actually outnumbered the Germans. The Germans won the Battle of France because of an unexpected thrust though the Ardennes.
john hare
Dec 3 2022 at 5:50pm
For stopping Germany, the best time would have been at Munich. The Check army with its’ fortifications and army intact would have been beyond the capability of a Germany fighting on two or possibly three (Poland) fronts. Instead they had to fight a Germany partially equipped with Check arms that they got for free.
There may or may not be valid parallels in Ukraine.
Craig
Dec 3 2022 at 6:29pm
Indeed, John, of course the French could intervene even earlier when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland.
Brandon
Dec 3 2022 at 8:36pm
Craig and John:
You didn’t answer Jim’s question. I’ll ask it again:
“In retrospect, what was the best point in time when [the United States] should have acted to stop him?“
Craig
Dec 3 2022 at 11:12pm
@Brandon
Perhaps the CIA should have sent a castration team to take out Hitler’s father’s family jewels?
Naturally there are limits to ‘what if” inquiries.
‘In retrospect’ — so does that mean that the US has foresight in 1939 about the Final Solution before it happened? Or is it acting only on the crimes committed up until that point because frankly if its the latter you’d be hard pressed to place the British and French EMPIRES on a pedestal over Germany at that particular point in time. If one is Jewish perhaps one has an issue with this, but note the Finns sides with the Germans against the Soviets and I’m an American but of Irish descent (Irish people individually joined the British Army, but the Republic of Ireland did not intervene or otherwise join the Allies and of course many with Irish ancestry aren’t exactly pro-British).
You could say that the US could send 3 armored divisions and ONLY 3 armored divisions that would be placed right in the Ardennes and history turns out completely differently as a result, no?
My point is that prior to the Battle of France there is NO reason for the US to even consider intervening EXCEPT given that we know subsequent events. After, we see Lend-Lease and the US actually does slowly intervene because with France knocked out and prior to Barbarossa, now there’s a situation that warrants some attention that the British and French aren’t able to deal with.
Now let’s apply that to today and the situation in the Ukraine and I’d suggest there’s nothing happening in the Ukraine that NATO, without the US, isn’t capable of handling.
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 3 2022 at 6:55pm
Dear David: Incentives.
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 3 2022 at 9:08pm
David: In practice, the Russian tyrant would be incentivized (its probabilistic cost would be reduced) to invade Poland or Lithuania or Sweden or Moldovia or… If it is Poland or Lithuania, we don’t have to follow up the chain of incentives in profiting from the defenseless of the victims or the mute reactions of its allies. In that case, Section 5 of NATO would be immediately invoked, and the war would rapidly come to US shores (if only via the sky).
Craig
Dec 3 2022 at 9:18pm
But the problem there, Professor is that Russia is not a match for NATO, or NATO without the US, by ANY measure, even if we overlook their obvious military incompetence and assume competence. Population, GDP, jets, bombers men, artillery, tanks, naval vessels, you name it.
Frankly, its not even close.
Jim Glass
Dec 3 2022 at 10:56pm
Dear David: Incentives … the Russian tyrant would be incentivized (its probabilistic cost would be reduced) to invade Poland or Lithuania or Sweden … Section 5 of NATO would be immediately invoked, and the war would rapidly come to US shores (if only via the sky).
Perhaps, plausible, but solemn international security promises last only until they don’t. Ask the Czechs circa 1938.
Say this winter is cold, the western European peacenik side of NATO waffles, Putin senses weakness and starts pounding the table saying “nukes, nukes, nukes”. So the western peacenik side goes, “we must avert the terrible risk of nuclear war, end all the horrible killing, save us some spending, and get our homes comfy warm”, and so forces a “compromise” where Putin keeps what he’s got.
Now NATO breaks up, or near to it. Poland, the Baltics and Finland are furious, because they know Russia best from hard experience, and know they just gave Putin a winning hand. The west-side Europeans get peeved at their fury, say “Chill out, peace in our time!” and go their own way.
A year later, Putin goes, “I’m taking the Baltics and teaching the Finns a lesson, like Stalin did. Nukes, nukes, nukes, I’m not bluffing!”
Would a US President really risk a nuclear war, with the US public supporting him, over Latvia? Finland? After not over Ukraine?
It’s hard for me to believe. But if he doesn’t, what next? Putin surely will repeat what works. And now with the west broken and selfishly cowardly, how much does China decide to take? Where does the line finally get drawn? And if it does finally get drawn for real, but the other side doesn’t believe it because our side blinked so often … “BOOM!”
Sometimes there is no no-risk scenario. That’s why Putin must lose in Ukraine now and be visibly seen by all to lose. Yes, there is risk in it. There’s much more risk in any scenario where he gets any kind of visible win.
Maniel
Dec 3 2022 at 3:40pm
Bonjour Pierre,
Tyranny is as old as humanity, but it’s painful to witness, let alone fall victim to.
In the case at hand, the bully is Russia, a big, militarized country; the victim is a much smaller one. In the west, we root for the underdog and have shown a willingness to fight to the last Ukrainian. We support them with some of the weapons we have on hand. The Russian tyrant was happy to fight to the last Russian but relearned the fact that not all Russians shared that view. However, how he achieves his objective, either domination or destruction of Ukraine, is only a detail to him. At the moment, he is in his comfort zone, destroying Ukraine from a distance while seemingly safe from retaliation.
We in the west are happy to congratulate the Ukrainian Army and ourselves for their resourcefulness and our aid. Unfortunately, we are missing the point. Putin will not stop until he reaches his objective. Not only that; the autocrats are unifying, sensing blood in the water.
What now? The elephant in the room is the threat of nuclear war. It is the shield over Russians and Russian cities. The question for the west is whether we are willing to allow the Ukrainian Army to take the conventional war to the Russian homeland. If we do, we may be in for some very tense times where we may need to make crystal clear that the first use of nuclear weapons can never be an option; in my view, if we don’t do that now, we’ll be tested again soon. If we continue to insist that this war must be fought only on Ukrainian soil, I fear for those Ukrainians still alive and for future victim countries around the world.
Craig
Dec 3 2022 at 4:58pm
“we may need to make crystal clear that the first use of nuclear weapons can never be an option”
How? Threatening MAD? They’ll probably use gas first, but if they lob one nuke? There’s likely going to be a general panic.
This is a border war at this point and fortunately still a ‘limited war’
You’re proposing escalation by proposing that the theater of active combat be enlarged. If that happens, don’t be surprised if even more escalations happen.
So right now the Russians want to keep the newly annexed regions, the Ukrainians want 1991.
Split the baby on the basis that the areas that don’t want to be part of Russia should remain with the Ukraine and the areas that don’t want to be part of the Ukraine should remain with Russia.
Let’s not forget that there was a preexisting conflict where the DPR/LPR have been fighting and losing thousands of people because they didn’t want to be part of the Ukraine.
And the people of the Crimea? They don’t want to be in the Ukraine either.
So the concept of ‘Ukrainian territorial integrity’ — you’re willing to threaten MAD over that?
Jim Glass
Dec 4 2022 at 2:03pm
A perk of getting old is one gains perspective. I was in third grade during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the school held bomb shelter drills in its basement cafeteria — which was built into the side of a hill and had a glass wall. That’s when I first heard the joke, ‘put you head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.’ Every moment of my life I had countless Soviet nukes aimed at me on trigger alert. When as the world’s worst student of Russian language I visited the Kremlin I thought “Hey, American nukes are aimed at me now!” It was funny.
For all those 40 years and before, nobody ever used a nuke. Not during conflicts much more dangerous than Ukraine today: Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Middle East wars (Israel has nukes and US defcon went up once), Soviet-China 1969 border war (close!), India-Pakistan-China shooting at each other, all had nukes. None used. (There’s reasons why. Lots!) So people my age are “nuke-panic immunized”.
But people who became aware of politics after 1990, say under age 45 today, have no immunity. Putin plays them saying “nukes! nukes! I’m not bluffing!” and they get scared. It plays all over the media. It’s part of his basic strategy (for many years) of dividing and undermining the west politically.
Putin’s my age. He’s well documented as a risk-averse, procrastinating, ultra-Covid-personal-coward, “survivor”, who has no interest at all in committing suicide for any reason, dying for any cause. When he says “nukes! nukes!” the best response is to go “Yeah, yeah, again, noted” and move on.
Craig
Dec 6 2022 at 9:41am
Peace be with them.
Craig
Dec 3 2022 at 4:15pm
“I contend that it’s better to stop an imperial tyrant in Ukraine instead of on American soil.”
This is an excellent segue to burden sharing. What about Canadian soil? Or better yet German soil? In fact that is exactly who SHOULD stop them, the GERMANS, maybe Army Group South can fight for a good cause this time around. Let them send $500bn to Kiev. After all its better to stop the Russians on the Dnieper than the Vistula or the Oder I suppose.
Of course naturally the burdens of collective defense surely must place a peculiar burden on American taxpayers, I presume?
As I have often complained of taxation amounting in total to more than half my income in blue states like NJ and still, in FL/TN, to the single largest expense I face, it should be noted that a material percentage of that expense goes to defense/VA.
Just doing some back of the envelope math on that one can extrapolate how much somebody paid in taxes, the amount that went to defense, and I might add the amount that went to defense over and above that paid by the likes of Germans and Canadians and throw the money into the $SPDR.
$100 in 1990 is $2147 today. This is high 7 figures.
The opportunity cost of this stuff is just absolutely enormous.
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 3 2022 at 8:44pm
Craig: People are often surprised to learn what proportion of total taxes (all levels of government, but excluding social insurance) goes to national defense: it is 15% in 2021. But it is only 8% of total government expenditures. (NIPA, tables 3.1, 3.6, 3.7)
Craig
Dec 3 2022 at 10:48pm
Does that include the VA? I think they paid out the last Union widow sometime in the 1950s.
Because the VA is the consequence of war.
I just did a quick calculation. $100 per year, every year, from 1990-2020 would be $20,048.16 in 2020 invested in the S&P 500.
$5000 per year, every year gets you to slightly over a million, just goes to show how small the number is for defense taxes to really add up over time.
Mactoul
Dec 3 2022 at 9:07pm
Putin is far from unique in his barbarism. There is Saudi war on Yemen, supported by US, which had taken quite a civilian toll.
And still continuing Syrian war which US prolonged by arming AQ-adjacent jihadis. Going as far as becoming AQ airforce in Obama’s time.
All this in addition American bombing of Serbia and Iraq.
Jim Glass
Dec 3 2022 at 11:49pm
The elephant in the room is the threat of nuclear war.
At the start of the war, when the staggering corruption of the Russian military was becoming evident, I saw a story about a Russian colonel in charge of a tank park who committed suicide when called upon to deliver the tanks. Only one of the scores under his command was functional. He’d pocketed years of maintenance money to buy a yacht, summer house, girl friends, whatever.
I thought: Makes sense, he never expected those tanks to ever be used. The best corruption opportunity is getting paid to maintain something that will never be used. All you have to do is share the money with whoever is auditing you, if anyone.
So I started wondering, hmmm, I wonder what is the best, biggest-budget possible example of something that absorbs a huge amount of maintenance money but which you are sure will never be used … Yikes!
Then I started looking around the Internet to see if I could find anyone else who had the same idea. After about a month I found just one, a scientist who described the great amount of delicate maintenance nukes require, then looked at USA budget data showing we spend $10 million per nuke per year.
And asked: “Looking at the pathetic way their army is running, do you really think they are spending $10 million per year on extremely technical maintenance per nuke, times 1000+ active nukes, times 30 years? I doubt it. That’s a lot of super-yachts”.
Let’s hope we never find out.
Jim Glass
Dec 6 2022 at 11:09pm
“War is hell. You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it. Those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.” — a famous US general.
I’m sure we agree about that, but the rest I read here confuses me. History gives me a much more optimistic – well, less pessimistic — take on this…
Is the claim being made that we’ve gone backwards with this violence to civilians? If so, when were the past good times, when the ‘lost arts’ were actually lost and civilians weren’t sucked into war like this?
During World War I? With up to 13 million civilians dead, Armenian genocide? Napoleonic wars, three million civilians dead, Moscow burned and looted by everybody? The genteel US Civil War, with the citizens of Vicksburg living in caves and eating rats? Georgia looted en masse amid Sherman’s March after the burning of Atlanta?
That’s never changed a whit. What has changed — as proved by that quote! — is that we now are much more appalled by these horrors than ever before. The very concern here about “infrastructure” and rules for civilian combatants is a sign of how much more peace-oriented and life-valuing we’ve all become today. That’s going forward. Good for us!
The word “genocide” didn’t even exist before 1944 because the act was the norm. The Romans famously sacked Carthage, massacred the population of ~400,000, flattened the city, and literally or figuratively sowed salt in the ground to wipe it off the map forever. The story was retold admiringly for the next 2,000 years, without anyone ever objecting “Genocide!” (or “Infrastructure!”). Because it was simply war, very well done.
Not as to killing, it sure hasn’t.
Genghis Khan killed ~40 million people, 10% of the world population. (Albeit with an upside! “removing nearly 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere.”) He had no “state” at all, was a self-employed entrepreneur, started his own business among the nomads.
The stateless mercenaries of Hannibal at Cannae killed 40,000 – 60,000 Roman soldiers, by hand, in one day. That ranks with the Nagasaki bomb, and by NATO estimates is more than the total dead on either side of the Ukraine war in the 9+ months to date. (Possibly as much as both sides combined!)
The Bible told the tribe of chosen people to leave no defeated enemies alive behind them but to enslave, rape or exterminate all. (Sound tactics in the anarchic world.) I could go on and on with no-state examples. And even earlier the world was much more violent. See the facts…
Our World In Data: Visual History of Decreasing War and Violence – non-state societies vs state societies, slides #2 and #5. The “pre-state” lines are looonnng … while the “state” lines are tiny, get tinier by century, and “20th Century wars and genocides” is so teensy one can barely see it squinting.
Or read the academic journal analysis…
… amid the great decline in inter-state wars since 1500.
Thank you, “the state”!
So let’s be realistic. The human race has from its very start been a hoard of tribal anarchic mass murderers, on a very slow road to improvement.
Don’t damn ourselves and our era for being the least bad, most peace-desiring and life-respecting generation yet.
“Believing the old days were better is a terrible illness” — Jean Shepherd
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 7 2022 at 12:19pm
Jim: Some of your interrogations are valid, and perhaps is your optimism too. However, your historical perspective is truncated and reading Jouvenel’s On Power (an easy, non-technical book) would help you fill in the gaps. There is nearly a millennium and a half of history between the sack of Rome and the birth of the modern state and it’s flourishing in the 18th century; and that’s when civilian population were little affected by inter-European wars. It is true that using “the state” for pre-modern political power is misleading, which is why I wrote “the modern state.” Finally, note that during the 20th century, states killed about 175,000,000 of their own citizens, excluding interstate wars (see Rudolph Rummel’s work and his not-so-well-maintained site at the University of Hawaii). After you read On Power, see also my (incomplete) critique at Econlib, linked to in my post above.
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 7 2022 at 12:25pm
Note also what I say of the nation-state (the modern state) in my post “In Defense of the Nation-State“:
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