The War in Ukraine Puts America’s Problems in Perspective
Heartbroken over what the Russian regime is currently doing to the nation of Ukraine, I can’t help finding myself thinking also of ways we’re taught to think about ourselves as a nation. Perhaps strangely, while I find myself sifting through the grim news of recent days, looking for signs of hope for Ukraine’s future, I also think of hope as it applies to matters here at home.
Today, with the grand conflagrations of the first and second world wars so distant in time, it’s easy to think of war as something unnatural, antique. Though the militaries of the United States and its allies just left Afghanistan, and armed conflicts persist around the globe, a Westerner, especially, may still spontaneously imagine war as something from a history book, or in black-and-white photos, as something typical of another era. And for Americans, as something that happens away from our shores, “over there.”
We might think that only the ancients thought of war as an expected condition and that peace, as a default, was not as intuitive as it would later become. Wars big and small were so endemic to medieval Europe, for example, that peace was often what seemed peculiar. It’s not an accident that the word “peace” traces back to Latin’s “pax” to refer to making an agreement, a pact: The idea of peace was once processed not as a steady state as much as something achieved by reaching an accord.
But today, in addition to the immediate horrors — the death and destruction — of Russia’s offensive, we’re confronted by the notion that war, the violent incursion into and potential occupation of a neighboring nation, is perhaps still seen by President Vladimir Putin of Russia as something unexceptional, a normal state, just one among many tools of statecraft to be, foreseeably, employed. He gives no indication that he considers what he is doing to be a reluctant last-ditch strategy upending the natural status quo ante. To him, rather, it is naked aggression, barely requiring justification and seemingly meant to satisfy his lust for territory and to redress what he senses as geopolitical humiliation after the end of the Cold War.
If it suits him, in other words, war is normal — peace may be nice, but sometimes it must make way for war, even before desperation makes war a last resort. And here survives that medieval frame of mind, under which one did not even think of the state of war as a tragic anomaly, “a thing,” as we might put it today.
As such, an eye-opening thought one might have in watching events unfold in Ukraine is that this story puts a check on an American tendency to overdo the self-criticism inherent to our experiment. We hear from some who teach that the entire business has gone off the rails, or that the effort was perhaps even mistaken at its beginnings. This perspective extends from the acid (and influential) condemnation of America’s trajectory in the work of the late historian Howard Zinn, who wrote, in his book “A People’s History of the United States,” that “there is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States,” to those, more recently, who seem to say that the very essence of America has been its enslavement and abuse of Black people: Last week on “The View,” The Nation’s Elie Mystal pronounced that our Constitution is “kind of trash,” written by “white people who were willing to make deals with slavers and colonists.” Few can miss a guiding sense among many of our writerly class that any intelligent take on America will come with a gloomy, disenchanted, condemnatory shake of the head.
There is a histrionic element to that view, and few things point it up more than watching what can happen under other conditions, to people who experience life just as vividly as we do and yet must undergo the depredations of a society that truly has fallen to pieces. Imagine what the average Ukrainian would say at this moment if hearing someone in America portray it as a tragedy that some truckers have been circling the Washington, D.C., Beltway to protest Covid vaccine mandates, or that a popular podcaster has uttered the N-word when talking about it?
On that last subject, for example, it’s easy to bemoan the eclipse of free speech in America, what with cancellations, from the left, in the name of social justice and book banning from the right. One might even refer to these things rhetorically, and more expressively, as “defenestrations.” And while I would certainly defend this rhetorical language, let’s face it: In Russia, the very concept of free speech is, at least in practice, an abstraction, bitterly argued for by dissidents as a necessary innovation, not referred to as a reminder of an established value (enshrined, by the way, in the aforementioned “trash” Constitution). Figures such as Aleksei Navalny and Alexander Litvinenko have understood the perils in doing so. As far as defenestration, it is not even unheard-of in Russia for dissident journalists and lawyers to be reported, quite improbably, to have fallen from windows to their deaths.
Too, it’s worth remembering that not so long ago, the United States invaded and occupied Iraq. And though that doesn’t, in any way, excuse Putin’s war, or the propaganda he offered to justify it, the threat we were told Iraq posed to the world was a mirage, not entirely unlike Putin’s claim now that Ukraine poses a threat to Russia. Two decades later, it is reasonable to surmise that Americans learned a lesson from the debacle that the Iraq war and its endless consequences, such as the rise of the Islamic State, have been. It’s hard to imagine a future American president of any party heedlessly dragging this country into another quagmire based on such flimsy pretenses. One might not put something like that past former President Donald Trump, but he was, in this, exceptional, leaving many struck by his lack of circumspection or commitment to norms. In Russia, Putin has been the norm for nearly a quarter century.
This shambling behemoth of a national experiment called America slowly, and in spite of itself, learns. We’ve come to understand our own, at times, hubris. We’ve learned that who’s in charge makes a difference. We will continue to make mistakes: I have always cherished a theme in the musical “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, underlining that America is an experiment ever in rehearsal. Maybe now, with what we’re witnessing, we’ll learn to put our own domestic woes into perspective — the problems that seem to consume us might seem less onerous in comparison to Ukrainians living in makeshift bomb shelters and civilians picking up rifles to defend against a hostile neighbor.
Our main concern right now must, of course, be for the Ukrainians suffering the destruction of their nation. However, this tragedy also gives Americans a reminder of how easily the critic becomes the Cassandra. America may be a mess in many ways, but a look at the headlines lately shows us what a mess really can be. Some might decide that for all our missteps and, yes, even catastrophes, our rehearsal is going, at least, fairly well.
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John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He hosts the podcast “Lexicon Valley” and is the author, most recently, of “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”
