If we can tolerate 9,000 Covid deaths a day, what are we prepared to stomach in Ukraine?
(Originally published Feb. 2 in “What in the World“) Russian President Vladimir Putin says the U.S. and NATO ignored his security concerns in their responses to his demands. While he has denied intending to invade, amassing troops around Ukraine signals that intention. Putin has used this tactic to drive the West to the table, demanding that it guarantee not to add Ukraine to the growing list of former Soviet satellites in NATO—and withdraw some of its forces from those. Refusal ostensibly provides him with a pretext to create by force the security he has demanded the West provide.
Why try to roll back the tide now? Putin has wisely discerned that he’s in a much stronger position. Not only is the West weakened by the pandemic, but NATO is riven by political differences between its key members—France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, each of which is in turn struggling with domestic political divisions that render its own foreign policy apparatus weak. Conversely, Russia’s military is no longer the 90-pound weakling it was when NATO was in full expansion mode, as both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have now detailed.
The U.S. and its allies continue to brace for the invasion Putin says he isn’t planning. Washington has sent a top cybersecurity official to NATO headquarters in Brussels (capital, incidentally, of the developed nation with the second highest per-capital Covid death toll, Belgium) to help ward off what the U.S. predicts will be a Russian cyberattack on Ukraine ahead of invasion. The official, deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology Anne Neuberger, comes a day late and a gigabyte short: Ukraine said Russia started a cyber-offensive against Kyiv in mid-January.
Former Portuguese Secretary of State for European Affairs Bruno Maçaes argues convincingly for Time that Putin may not be planning for a full-scale invasion,but rather something far short of that—a U.S.-style punitive strike aimed at further weakening Ukraine and installing a pro-Moscow government. He may also aim to catalyze the eventual cession of Russian-speaking areas in the East. As University of Chicago political science Professor John Mearsheimer pointed out years ago, Putin already understands what U.S. President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson have been warning more recently: that an attempt to invade Ukraine and seize territory and control it would pull Russia into another deadly quagmire.
Putin can’t afford to back down from Ukraine without achieving either Western concessions or a military victory. The question is whether Maçaes is correct in equating a Russian victory in Ukraine as an end to European security and restoring Russia’s ability to menace its neighbors at will. As this newsletter has remarked before, Ukraine isn’t yet a member of NATO, and is probably more closely identified in Putin’s mind and indeed in collective Russian memory as vital to the country’s security. Indeed, aside from the Baltic states which are already part of NATO and Moldova which remains a Russian client (it even has troops there on the Ukrainian border), Ukraine is only former Soviet republic left in Eastern Europe. If it joined NATO, it would represent a massive shift in the balance of power between Russia and the West.
Maçaes uses this threat to argue that, since Washington is eager to pivot its focus to containing China’s growing power in Asia, that it needs to encourage Europe to take over its own defense, becoming a superpower in its own right. As Maçaes writes:
We no longer live in the old liberal order where rules must be enforced and violators punished. We live in a new order where power must be balanced with power.
Maçaes may be correct that Russia sees this standoff not simply as a contest for control of Ukraine, but as part of a broader goal by Putin to reestablish Russia’s Soviet-era stature. The question is whether Putin truly sees Ukraine as a stepping-stone to regaining control over the former Eastern bloc. If he does, it would be dangerous to yield to his concerns in Ukraine. If he doesn’t, or if that goal is now beyond his reach, then it seems sensible to find a compromise on Ukraine, even if as Maçaes suggests, that constitutes “a grand bargain with Moscow whereby the two powers divide Europe among themselves.” If he’s right that we live in a world of 19th-century realpolitik, then formalizing the status quo might be the optimal outcome for both sides.
Not only has the U.S. contributed more bodies to the pandemic than any other nation, it’s contributed more per-capita than most developed nations. Yesterday I noted that Eastern Europe and South American nations have lost relatively more people. Today, the New York Times pointed out the obverse: that most developed nations have lost relatively fewer.
Yet the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has once again issued warnings against travel to a long list of countries where Covid isn’t spreading as fast as it is in the U.S. Indeed, Americans would arguably be better off fleeing the U.S. to any one of the countries the CDC listed: Anguilla, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, French Guiana, Kosovo, Mexico, Moldova, Paraguay, the Philippines, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Singapore.
The pandemic is only expanding: Omicron has already produced more infections in its 10 weeks in the population than its preceding strains did in all of 2020, the World Health Organization has noted. And it is already being supplanted by an improved, more contagious, version of itself—BA.2, or “stealth Omicron.”
And it’s likely to get worse as long as countries like Denmark, where BA.2 was first identified, continue to lift restrictions even as the death toll climbs. The problem with this surrender strategy is that it relies on the hopeful belief that Covid has become “endemic” and that we can “live with the virus.” The problem with this notion is that an endemic disease can range from as mild as the flu to as severe as the pandemic is now. Anything worse than flu-like rates is too much. The world is at present losing 9,000 people a day to Covid; 2,000 of those are in the U.S., representing a roughly 10% increase in pre-pandemic daily mortality.
Is that something we should live with?
