Serbia, Crimea, Gaza

OK, so have y’all been reading stuff, over the last few weeks, about how our great nation needs to get involved in the Crimea now or earlier, to avoid being dragged in later, with analogies to the start of World War I a hundred years ago this month? I have, and I can’t immediately lay my hands on them so you’ll just have to trust me. Anyway, it all seemed to me to be utterly absurd. Isn’t the obvious response that it would have been much better for everybody except Serbia to just let the Austrio-Hungarian aggression stand? I mean: Instead of Russia “protecting” the Serbs, it just makes a lot of belligerent mouth noises and shakes its czarry fists, and then pretty much shrugs and says fuck it, no Greater Slavonia for us. And too bad for Serbs (I guess; not like their independence was all that exciting anyway for the average Serb) but I have to think that would be a price Europe ought to have been willing to pay to avoid the trenches, not to mention Gallipoli.

I mean, sure, if you are writing alternate history, it’s easier to send someone back in time to save the Archduke, and we’ve all read stories where that happens and the war takes place anyway. It was an Inevitable Conflict, brought about by the forces far greater than the events of the summer of 1914. On the other hand, not every Inevitable Conflict actually occurs: the USSR never invaded Western Europe, and India/Pakistan have not gone nuclear. Had the Russians not declared war in 1914, it is plausible that something would have happened in the next six or twelve months that would have made the actual World War not go, as we say now, viral. A successful Bolshevik-style revolution almost anywhere in Europe. A weaker Germany, or a stronger France. Premature fracturing of the Ottoman Empire could have led to a perfectly splendid war with Russia that might not have spread to the rest of the Powers. Who knows?

What is clear (oh, and by the way I recommend the Guardian's Global Guide to the First World War as a fascinating bit of on-line historicojournalism) is that the United States standing up to Austria-Hungary in the late summer of 1914 is a terrible idea. More of the powers drawing lines in the sand would only have hastened the spread of the war—hastened, likely enough, the entry of Ottoman Empire on the Central side, but perhaps also driven coutries that were early neutrals into opposing American officiousness. More to the point, there was no reason on earth for the Central Powers to believe that the United States would back up mouth-noises with troops, or that if it did, that the mighty empires of the Central Powers would not easily withstand what military force the US could possibly bring to bear, halfway around the world, at unimaginable expense of blood and treasure. Looking back, of course, we can see what did happen, although we should probably still be astounded that it worked. In advance, though—the US couldn’t even smuggle arms to the US without losses that were on a scale unimaginable to Europeans.

YHB connected this with something that isn’t about the Crimea at all, though, but about Gaza: an article by Gershom Gorenberg over at Tapped called This Is Your Brain on War: A Dispatch From Jerusalem. I think he perhaps goes too far in suggesting that ’right-wing’ brains function differently, or even are more susceptible to certain fallacies, but his general point is well-taken, about the different ways that the various sides in that conflict have difficulty perceiving the universe even remotely like other factions do, and the troubles that arise when those sides act as if all the other factions do perceive the same universe.

To apply this to the Crimea: there are things that are self-evident to the government of the Ukraine, to the government of Russia, to the official oppositions of both countries, to the military leaders of both countries, to the militant separatists of both countries, to the mild separatists of both countries, to the NATO powers, to the American pundits and politicians and proles—there are things that are self-evident to each of those groups that are incomprehensible to the others, often to the point that the others consider statements by the first to be nothing but deliberate lies. There are also deliberate lies! There are people who believe those deliberate lies! And those lies, too, when believed, make some things self-evident and others incomprehensible.

All of which is leading up to a point that is obvious, I hope, in day-to-day interactions, but seems somehow less so in foreign policy. The trouble with any plan of the sort If we do this, they will have to do that is that it realio trulio must encompass what we do if they don’t do that. Because they don’t have to. That doesn’t just apply to military adventurism: if we provide overpowering incentives for them to do what we want, they still might not do it, because the incentives that seem self-evidently overpowering to us may not look that way to them. This is true if you are dealing with a tenant, or a dictator, or an in-law, or a student, or a vendor.

Does that mean that negotiations are always impossible? Clearly not, if YHB has gone to the trouble of phrasing it as a rhetorical question. No, one techniques of negotiation is to find out what universe the other side (or sides) perceives, as much as it is possible to do, and to then predict how the other side will respond to various incentives, blandishments and threats not based on how you think they should respond, but how they think they should respond. Very different things.

Which is to say: all that stuff I said up there about what Russia could have done, and how Austria-Hungary might have responded? It’s all bullshit. And the bullshit of it should only serve to remind me that all the diplomats of the time believed bullshit that was even more obviously bullshit than mine is now. And that, of course, the pundits right now believe even wilder bullshit than that.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.