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This commentary will explore the creation of new relationships between deterrence, infectious disease, and public health to reduce the threat of biological terrorism and increase international security. Examining the global spread of re-emerging infectious disease, such as the re-emergence of polio from northern Nigeria, offers a novel case study for thinking about how to deter potential bioterrorists who seek to use infectious disease. Polio outbreaks have more directly affected the developing world compared to the US or other nations with robust public health sectors. This example suggests that a bioterrorist attack would also be more devastating for developing countries in low-resource settings compared to the western world. Credibly, communicating this may offer a new approach to deterring bioterrorism by foreign actors. Although a robust public health sector has long been noted to reduce the vulnerability to a bioterrorism attack, actively promoting the strength of US public health can also serve as a powerful deterrent in its own right. The issue of terrorist groups utilizing biological weapons against other states is a mounting concern, yet little deterrence research in the field of political science addresses methods of dealing with the threat of bioterrorism. Thus, creating new conversations among the life sciences, public health, and political science can lead to new perspectives on deterring bioterrorism.

The issue of bioterrorism deterrence, if addressed, has been often added or subsumed under the auspices of deterrence strategies associated with nuclear weapons. In the second half of the twentieth century, nuclear deterrence dominated geopolitics and national security strategies. At its height, the threat of mutually assured destruction (MAD) existed in which both superpowers possessed arsenals with second-strike capabilities, i.e., the ability to respond to a first nuclear strike on land via use of nearly undetectable submarine-launched ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads.

Several weapons of mass destruction have been developed in various countries, like nuclear bombs, chemical weapons, and biological agents. The concept of using infection as a weapon is one of the most dangerous things to cause terrorism [1]. Terrorists can get control of these weapons and can create havoc. A number of countries in the 20th century have been affected by various bio-attacks [2]. Bioterrorism is defined as the deliberate dissemination of biological agents to cause illness or death among humans, animals or plants [3]. These bio-agents include viruses, bacteria, fungi, and toxic chemicals [4] [Table 1). These agents can be found in nature but can also be intentionally mutated to increase their death or disease capability. Some agents (e.g., chickenpox) are communicable and can spread from one person to another via air, water, food, touch etc., while some (e.g., anthrax) are non-communicable [5]. In addition, many of these bioagents are modified to make them more deadly by combining them with other chemicals and are then disseminated in the population [6]. Bioterrorism is the most common choice for terrorists as they are easy and inexpensive to obtain; moreover, these agents are hard to detect [7]. The threats of bioterrorism are frequently developing due to fast-growing technological skills and increasingly rapid growth in molecular biological sciences and biotechnology. The rapid proliferation of transnational terrorist organizations and their access to funding, equipment and expertise to produce biological weapons is another important factor that adds to the complexity of the situation. Therefore, a bioterrorism threat must be identified and handled in order to reduce adverse health effects and avoid fatality [8,9]. Although bio-crimes are restricted relative to other crimes, these actions raise concerns about how forensic evidence can be used in criminal proceedings to ascertain the source of microorganisms used as weapons. Bob Stevens, an American Media employee, was diagnosed with systemic anthrax on October 4, 2001. The report of this diagnosis sparked concerns that the disease resulted from an act of clandestine bioterrorism [10]. This Anthrax letter attack has brought a new reality to the world and made people more aware of a global bioterrorism risk. Moreover, the incident illustrated that the U.S was inexperienced in describing the biological facts of that case. In turn, a strong forensic capacity was developed to investigate bioterrorism and bio-crime [11]. Microbial forensics can be considered a scientific discipline for examining evidence from bioterrorism, bio-crime or illegal release of microorganisms/toxins for purposes of attribution. Besides the traditional role to prosecute crimes, law enforcement is now enhancing it to address the growing threat in the area of bio-crime and bioterrorism [12].

History of bioterrorism

I’ve lived through disease outbreaks, and in the previous chapter I showed just how unprepared we are to face a widespread pandemic of flu or another new pathogen like SARS. But a deliberate outbreak caused by an engineered pathogen would be far worse. We would face the same agonizing decisions that must be made during a natural pandemic: whether to ban travel from affected regions, how to keep overburdened hospitals working as the rolls of the sick grew, how to accelerate the development and distribution of vaccines and drugs. To that dire list add the terror that would spread once it became clear that the death and disease in our midst was not the random work of nature, but a deliberate act of malice. We’re scared of disease outbreaks and we’re scared of terrorism—put them together and you have a formula for chaos.

As deadly and as disruptive as a conventional bioterror incident would be, an attack that employed existing pathogens could only spread so far, limited by the same laws of evolution that circumscribe natural disease outbreaks. But a virus engineered in a lab to break those laws could spread faster and kill quicker than anything that would emerge out of nature. It can be designed to evade medical countermeasures, frustrating doctors’ attempts to diagnose cases and treat patients. If health officials manage to stamp out the outbreak, it could be reintroduced into the public again and again. It could, with the right mix of genetic traits, even wipe us off the planet, making engineered viruses a genuine existential threat.

Several epidemics, such as the Black Death and the Spanish flu, have threatened human life throughout history; however, it is unclear if humans will remain safe from the sudden and fast spread of epidemic diseases. Moreover, the transmission characteristics of epidemics remain undiscovered. In this study, we present the results of an epidemic simulation experiment revealing the relationship between epidemic parameters and pandemic risk. To analyze the time-dependent risk and impact of epidemics, we considered two parameters for infectious diseases: the recovery time from infection and the transmission rate of the disease. Based on the epidemic simulation, we identified two important aspects of human safety with regard to the threat of a pandemic. First, humans should be safe if the fatality rate is below 100%. Second, even when the fatality rate is 100%, humans would be safe if the average degree of human social networks is below a threshold value. Nevertheless, certain diseases can potentially infect all nodes in the human social networks, and these diseases cause a pandemic when the average degree is larger than the threshold value. These results indicated that certain infectious diseases lead to human extinction and can be prevented by minimizing human contact.

1. Introduction

Diseases have been called “our deadliest enemy,” often posing a greater danger than combat. A century ago, the 1918 influenza pandemic infected one-third of the world’s population, killing one in fifty people.7 Twice as many people died from that pandemic as were slaughtered in combat in World War I. Over the full twentieth century, infectious diseases—what some scientists dubbed the “oldie moldies”—killed twenty times as many US citizens as wars.8

Yet the twentieth century also marked a turning point in the war against disease. In 1900, infectious diseases were the leading killers in the United States, with pneumonia, influenza, tuberculosis, and gastrointestinal infections ranking as the top causes of death.9 By the start of the twenty-first century, following a hundred years of advances in vaccines, antibiotics, and sanitation, infectious diseases were not among the top five causes of death in the United States. Only in the poorest nations were people more likely to die from infectious disease than anything else. From 1970 to 2016, worldwide mortality from infectious diseases dropped from fifteen million (35 percent of all deaths) to eight million (15 percent of all deaths).10 Consequently, people began to think of public health less as a matter of collective action, and more as a function of personal decisions such as diet and exercise.

A looming “great pandemic” could be 50 times more deadly than coronavirus, top scientists warned today.

Latest figures show 223,906 people in the UK who died had Covid-19 on their death certificates.

(March 23, 2023) Ready or Not 2023: Protecting the Public’s Health from Diseases, Disasters, and Bioterrorism measures states’ readiness to respond to a spectrum of health emergencies and to provide ongoing public health services. The report gives federal and state health officials and policymakers actionable data and recommends policies to improve the nation’s emergency preparedness at a time when health emergencies are increasing. During 2022, the U.S. surpassed 1 million deaths due to COVID-19 and saw decreasing rates of routine vaccinations and increasing prevalence of health misinformation. In addition, the past year was the eighth consecutive year the U.S. experienced 10 or more billion-dollar weather-related disasters.

The report tiers states and the District of Columbia into three performance levels for health emergency preparedness: high, middle, and low. This year’s report placed 19 states and DC in the high-performance tier, 16 states in the middle performance tier, and 15 states in the low performance tier.

(Nick, , 12-7)

On the topic of lip service, what do you think of land acknowledgements? I recently came across one on the website of Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet subsidiary that’s spending $900 million to build a “smart city” on the Toronto waterfront. Here’s what I think about land acknowledgements. I ride a bike to work. Imagine I wake up one day and my bike is gone. I’m late for work. Maybe I’m going to get fired and I won’t be able to feed my family, but I’m shit out of luck. And then some guy rolls by on my bike and is like, “Hey. I want to acknowledge that I’m riding your bike. I know it’s really bad that I stole it, but I hope we can work towards reconciliation.” And then he cruises away on my bike! I guess it’s not that land acknowledgements shouldn’t happen, but they just make me think, “Uh, okay. Great.” But this kind of gesture isn’t limited to land acknowledgements. People often use the language of decolonization when they’re not actually talking about giving back our land. What they’re actually talking about is indigenization. That’s an inclusion framework: let’s include Indigenous people in their own dispossession. Let’s have more Indigenous clergy! Let’s have more Indigenous people in the police, in the military, in the forces that occupy our land!

(Megan, (Oglala Lakota) is an activist, writer, and college admissions professional. She is currently the Associate Director for Enrollment Management at The 7th Gen Summer Program and the Wizipan Program, a university program in South Dakota designed to help Native students succeed in higher education, , August)

While postsecondary institutions are increasingly recognizing Indigenous peoples, there are performative aspects of land acknowledgements to critically examine. These statements often perpetuate an erasure of Indigenous communities because they acknowledge the historic dispossession but do not accept them as modern-day participants. Many Native students attend institutions that occupy their territorial homelands; land that was and is culturally, spiritually, and emotionally theirs. Their oral traditions, medicines, and ways of knowing are connected to place. Land acknowledgements admit the existence of truth but fail to live up to the reality that those Indigenous peoples whose lands their institutions are built on are still here. They provide a fleeting feeling of satisfaction for admitting guilt for the taking of the land, but it is only that: a momentary feeling, experienced only by students who know their own histories of dispossession.

(Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University. His research interests and writings cover Philosophy of Law, Social and Political Philosophy, Marxism, and African and Africana Philosophy. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 57, Spindel Supplement (2019), 135–159)

When I said above that they assume that no amount of fluency in the acquired tongues would suffice to domesticate them, it is one manifestation of the attitude that affirms an essential lack of fit between, in the present case, multiparty democracy and so-called traditional African statecraft. I would like to suggest that contentions like Wiredu’s yield the persistent but wrong-headed search by African scholars for African equivalents of “democracy,” “rule of law,” “modernity,” “knowledge,” and so on. It is as if these concepts are so foreign that it does not matter what level of fluency we attain in the foreign languages, we can never domesticate them absent our thinking them in our own languages. These are problematic claims. This is where, I am afraid, proponents of decolonization have substituted a new wall for the ones that decolonization was crafted to tear down. This wall discourages interest in, much less engagement with, African discourses respecting many of the foreign ideas that have made their appearance in and impacted African life and thought over time. Because of the insistence on decolonization, Africa’s long history with the core tenets of modernity dating back to Napoleon Bonaparte’s arrival in Egypt in December 1798 commands no attention from our contemporary philosophers. The many African contributions to the discourse of civilization going back to our participation in the Mediterranean civilizations of antiquity are increasingly lost in the vapid references to “precolonial Africa.” Many now think there is nothing to be found there, and what they must do is to look for “African stuff” which is understood as not having anything to do with whatever smacks of the colonial legacy. This needs to be reversed both for theoretical and practical purposes. Political philosophical discussion in contemporary Africa is not just lacking critical engagement with political philosophy of foreign provenance; there is evidence that there is simply no engagement beyond the ritual denunciation of the colonial provenance of liberal representative democracy and its pertinent ideas and the need to find practices of African provenance or be more attuned to African history and culture. This is happening at precisely the time that Africa needs some serious education about the philosophical foundations of the entire system of governance—some form of liberal representative democracy and associated ideas like the rule of law and the dominance of rights discourse—that characterize much of the African continent outside of Eswatini, which has the last absolute monarchy in the world. Whether it is in Morocco or Egypt, Guinea Bissau or South Africa, the cry is the same: the discourse of rights, freedom, governance by consent, and inviolate human dignity. It is very difficult if not impossible to operate successfully systems wherein the underlying philosophical foundations are not part of our intellectual orientation. Abiola Irele puts it well: Our present experience of alienation stems directly from our historical encounter with Europe, and from our continuing relationship with a civilization that, in its present form, was forged in that continent, and which therefore, holds out a special interest for us. We cannot ignore the fact that the transforming values of contact with this civilization have produced the present context of our collective life, if we are to get a mental handle upon the process of transition in which we are involved. The very tensions and conditions of stress of this process would have been beneficial if they helped to concentrate our minds both wonderfully and intensely upon the nature of our alienation.34 Decolonizing theorists make it easy for scholars to not engage this literature at all and, in so doing, elide the contributions of African thinkers to the domestication of these ideas going back to the nineteenth century, especially in West and North Africa. The efforts of African thinkers to domesticate foreign ideas suffer from disinterest from the proponents of decolonization. Many African thinkers have critically engaged both foreign and indigenous ideas in trying to think through the best form of government for human efflorescence in the African context. Unfortunately, so thick is the wall that, to continue with the example of politics, many of our decolonization theorists would be hard put to name any serious political philosophers outside of Nkrumah, Fanon, Cabral, and Nyerere at any time beyond the present. And they hardly ever engage even those in their complexity. And these are the darlings that are often trotted out as theorists of decolonization. Of course, no one thinks of engaging the robust defense of liberal democracy by Obafemi Awolowo or Abiola Irele’s “In Praise of Alienation” or Paulin Hountondji on liberal individualism in our time.35 Most frightening of all, because Africans can only be resisters or victims of modernity—the dominant motif in the decolonization domain—we are unable to come to terms with the philosophical genius of African thinkers who disdain the cant of decolonizing and find it worth their while, after critical evaluation to be sure, to appropriate the core tenets of modernity as fundaments of their own thinking both in politics and in moral philosophy. This is as it should be because, again, in Irele’s words: We must not forget, too, that African labor and resources went into the building of the material prosperity of the West. In many ways, therefore, we have a claim upon Western civilization, as well as a considerable stake in it, as the instrument for the necessary transformation of our world. It is in our interest to make good that claim, to adopt strategies that will make our stake in that civilization pay handsome dividends. We cannot do this if we continue to be burdened by the complexes implanted in us under colonialism, and which are only intensified by cultural nationalism. If the Japanese had been deterred by the insults constantly hurled at them by the Europeans during the last century, they would not have been where they are today: as we all know, the yellow peril has become with time the yellow paradigm.36 But because of a penchant for nativism buoyed by a crude conflation of colonialism with modernity, we ignore Irele’s wisdom. We are not able to engage the eminently modern appropriations of a Fanon, a Cabral, or a Fatima Mernissi, a Saad Eddin Ibrahim, or Abdulai An-Naim.37 When Nelson Mandela put his triers on their back heels at his treason trial, he was not channeling some “traditional” legal philosophy nor did Martin Luther King Jr., in his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Insofar as we do not see beyond a superficial understanding of the many possible responses Africans have had to colonization across time and space, we are not able to have a robust representation of ethical debates in the African world, for example, between Senghor and Soyinka on the ethics of reconciliation.38 Much of the debate about politics and its exigencies in contemporary Africa unfolds almost innocently of theory and of the philosophical foundations of the institutions of representative government, impartial judiciary, rule of law and separation of powers that we seek to install in our various countries. Thus, it often seems as if our political operatives are building without proficiency in the discourses that structure our institutions. Scholars and practitioners alike are literally operating with significant knowledge deficits. Africa cannot afford to continue to proceed the way it has done so far in building modern institutions without deeper knowledge of the philosophical templates from which those institutions and practices were forged. We should stop shooting darts in the dark when it comes to redeeming the promise of modernity for our citizens. At a time when Africans are prosecuting their second struggle for freedom, it is a disservice to them to keep reinforcing this wall obscuring the full spectrum of African engagements with colonialism and its aftermath. A genuine commitment to human liberation cannot afford anything less.3

(Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University. His research interests and writings cover Philosophy of Law, Social and Political Philosophy, Marxism, and African and Africana Philosophy. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 57, Spindel Supplement (2019), 135–159)

There are significant differences between Ngũgĩ’s and Wiredu’s tones and recommendations, respectively. For Wiredu, there are no ideological issues involved. The simple fact is that African philosophers labor under the weight of assumptions traceable to “foreign philosophical traditions.” What is not clear is why this is a significant problem. For it to be so, it must be the case that the operation of these superimposed “foreign categories of thought on African thought systems” blocks us from certain significant insights into the perennial problems of philosophy occurrent in African thought systems or distorts them such that we are hampered in our search for answers to those problems or, at the extreme, led to such outcomes that are detrimental to our lives. Ngũgĩ was more forcible in this respect. I do not see the same vehemence in Wiredu. Wiredu does not claim that these foreign-derived frameworks alienate us from our names, our history, or our language. But both share the belief that those frameworks do terrible things to our language. For Wiredu, in thinking about our problems, we end up deploying solutions that we have not critically examined. Finally, for both, what makes these frameworks problematic is owed, in part, to their colonial provenance. With reference to the linguistic situation, Wiredu asserts that “By definition, the fundamental concepts of philosophy are the most fundamental categories of human thought. But the particular modes of thought that yield these concepts may reflect the specifics of the culture, environment and even the accidental idiosyncrasies of the people concerned.”16 This leaves us vulnerable to carrying other peoples’ baggage insofar as we are enslaved to the concepts their linguistic and other cultural conventions foster. One cannot overemphasize the importance of heeding Wiredu’s wisdom in this respect. For example, many have argued that the reason for the repeated failure of liberal representative democracy to take root in Africa is, in part, the alienness of its package of ideas, institutions, practices, and processes. We shall have more to say about this presently. Wiredu would later canvass what he calls “no-party, consensus democracy” as an option that is more in tune with African temperaments and memory.17 To avoid untoward outcomes, “the simple recipe for decolonization for the African is: Try to think them [concepts like reality, being, meaning, freedom, etc.] through in your own African language and, on the basis of the results, review the intelligibility of the associated problems or the plausibility of the apparent solutions that have tempted you when you have pondered them in some metropolitan language.”18 Wiredu’s simple injunction—think through in your own African language—is teeming with assumptions that are not always, or for the most part, plausible. Let us explore this passage. Wiredu assumes that his audience is bilingual, minimally speaking—possessed of an African language and a colonially-imposed one, say, English. But given how the scenario is designed, the colonial language is the primary language, the one that triggers thought and in which thought is originally formulated. This is where the problem begins. The thinker here is supposed to “think through in her own language” the relevant concepts. Why wait to be prompted in the colonial language? Why not proceed to think through the concepts in your primary African language in exactly the way, I believe, that a Chinese or Portuguese thinker will do in similar situations? The answer, of course, pace Ngũgĩ and Wiredu, is that we have separated ourselves from “belief in our languages” and embraced instead the colonial ones. If this is true, then it is problematic to assume that those who have been thus separated from their languages could summon, without more, the requisite facility and grounding in those languages of the recondite thinking that we associate with philosophy and other advanced modes of intellection. If what I say is plausible, then Wiredu’s facile recommendation is neither easy to indulge nor likely to be productive of exactly the kinds of insights that theoretical explorations are designed to elicit. This is where we must begin to acknowledge the sad fact that where recondite intellectual activity is concerned, many African scholars are not bilingual in the relevant sense. Our languages are already afflicted with a severe case of fossilization that continues to elude our attention. Few of us can think in “our own African languages” deep thought respecting many of those concepts in Wiredu’s list. No whit of this affliction is removed by our repeated declamations to decolonize our intellectual production. Yes, we deploy our languages for colloquial, quotidian purposes. This deceptively makes us think that our facility at this level and versatility in everyday exchanges amount to an easy shifting of gears from here to theoretical or philosophical discourse. It takes only a little bit of attention to realize that this is a mistaken assumption. The upshot is that there is little, if any, autochthonous recondite intellection in many of our original languages, especially where research and knowledge production presented by our tertiary institutions are concerned. What we have mostly is equivalence-ism where many labor to find equivalents in our original languages for the concepts that we encounter in the metalanguages furnished by the colonial languages. To limit myself to the Yorùbá that I know intimately, the original work being done at a higher level takes place in Sociology, Art History, Language and Literature, and Linguistics.19 It may not be what Wiredu intended but it is what dominates much writing in academic and professional African philosophy. Words are routinely yanked out of their semantic and hermeneutic contexts and made to stand as equivalents for concepts derived from elsewhere. There hardly is any effort at sustained analyses wholly or even mostly in our original language. To the extent that this is the case, the promise of decolonization in the sphere of language may have been oversold.

(Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University. His research interests and writings cover Philosophy of Law, Social and Political Philosophy, Marxism, and African and Africana Philosophy. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 57, Spindel Supplement (2019), 135–159)

I need to be very specific in this context because, as I argue, much confusion is occasioned by what I see as unfounded generalizations about the nature of colonialism and an effacing of its specific configuration in even different parts of Africa.5 It suffices to say here that even in a country like Senegal where French colonialism unfolded in two distinct phases—assimilation and association—one can see the differential fruits born of those phases. The differences were deeper still in areas of settler colonialism. No, I have not looked it up, but I would love to see what decolonizing philosophy would look like if it resonates at all for Afrikaner philosophy in South Africa. Similar questions can be raised for Zanzibari philosophy or Hausa philosophy and its iterations in Islam-dominated countries in Africa. What am I hinting at? This: it is all too easy for us to talk about decolonizing philosophy when we take Africa to be our primary referent. But, once we begin to dispel certain assumptions that inform our current discourses, things begin to look rather complicated. Given that much of the focus has turned on language and political philosophy, I elect to ask questions of these two areas in the present discussion. In sum, I shall be arguing that when viewed from the impact of what has been called “the need for conceptual decolonization in African philosophy,” it may have some very problematic, even if unintended, consequences. These consequences are traceable to the very conception of the problem I have just hinted at. First, it may strike some as odd to point out that when it comes to its cultural iterations within which the discourse we examine here falls, the very concept of decolonization is beset with significant muddles. Even among its sophisticated proponents, one hardly is ever clear as to what, ultimately, a fully decolonized—assuming that were possible— philosophy would look like. Here, one finds as many iterations of decolonization as there are thinkers promoting it. Certainly, we cannot go fully into this tendency to muddle in this discussion. My hope is that bringing this to our attention might cool our ardor at throwing it out as a panacea for what we feel ails our discourse in philosophy and culture at large. Second, in the matter of language, as articulated by both Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Kwasi Wiredu, they may be raising or have raised unrealistic expectations regarding what can and/or ought to be done. Third, a trope that emerged to break down the walls that had been erected by Eurocentrism around the very ideas of philosophy may have become a new wall that obscures much more than it discloses. Fourth, the dominant conception of colonialism in the discourse of decolonization is somewhat stilted and does not really take seriously the complexity and historicity of the concept and, this is key, the differential paths of modernity and colonialism in Africa. Finally, I would like to argue that, in the discourse, we play fast and loose with—when we are not pointedly ignoring—the intellectual contributions of thinkers in ex-colonies and their reaction and relation to, and engagement with, the legacy of colonialism and modernity. (139-40)

(Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University. His research interests and writings cover Philosophy of Law, Social and Political Philosophy, Marxism, and African and Africana Philosophy. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 57, Spindel Supplement (2019), 135–159)

Given what I just said, why then do I think that the decolonization trope in philosophy is due for a rethinking, maybe even abandonment? The answer is very simple. The ubiquity of the idea of decolonization in all areas of thought, from literature, linguistics, and philosophy to politics, economics, sociology, psychology, and, lately, medicine, indicates to me either that the trope packs an explanatory and analytical punch like no other or it has simply lost its way and become a catch-all idea that many deploy not so much as a tool to aid understanding but a marker of being with it or a paean to some shady authenticity.1 No, I am not going to be able to develop this attack fully in this essay. My hope is that I make enough sense to persuade others that maybe we need to take a closer look at the idea. I limit myself to African philosophy, and I refrain completely from any discussion of decoloniality and associated discourse. The original concern of decolonization came from the struggle for independence from colonialism. The idea was that independence would mean the departure from Africa’s shores of colonial rule and all that pertained to it when it came to how life is led in the erstwhile colonies. The key phrase here is “all that pertained to it.” What are the boundaries of this specification? The two dominant aspects of colonialism that come to mind here are politics and economics. In politics, colonialism was typified by denying the colonized the modern philosophical ground of political legitimacy that insists that no one ought to obey the rule of any government to which she has not consented. Decolonization in politics would then mean that the colonized would no longer chafe under the rule of governments, especially by colonialists, to which they have not consented.2 In economics, control over the levers of economic power that had been under the authority of the colonizer is supposed to revert to Africans after colonialism. Other areas of life—culture, writ large—are supposed to be marked by the deployment of African agency in determining the issue of how life and thought are to be organized. In short, self-determination is supposed to inflect life in ways that are exactly contradictory to what colonization evinced. What matters here is that people, as individuals and groups, get to author the respective scripts of their individual and collective lives, a prerogative that was denied them under colonial rule. A key problem suggests itself. We cannot always be sure how this expression of agency might unfold. Self-determination, individual and collective, cannot be decreed to unfold or be deployed in only one predetermined way. The key difference between being under colonialism and being from it is that the colonized will is coerced and bent in one, and it is free and self-actuating in the other. So, when we see what appear to be colonial survivals, we should ask whether they are still sustained by the previous coercion or inertia or choice-making by the ex-colonized. We shall presently explore the implications of this factor for the discourse of decolonization. What this means is that if we were to see structures and patterns of life and thought that once characterized the colonial situation occurring in the postliberation period, we need to investigate the causal antecedents before we adjudge such occurrences to be instances of the failure of decolonization. That is, there may be phenomena in the postindependence period that mimic similar ones in the colonial period, we cannot automatically assume that they have the same pedigree. If some turn out to have the same pedigree, we need further evidence to determine that the same causal agents that were responsible for them in the colonial situation have remained operative in the decolonized setting. Such would be instances of failure to decolonize. And if these were indeed failures, we would need to determine whether the will of the newly free is still being bent by the same forces that ruled the roost while colonialism prevailed. We would also need to rule out inertia, the exercise of the will in the service of choices that negate freedom or clear preferences for certain ideas and arrangements, even if they had colonial origins, on the part of the ex-colonized. Unfortunately, we do not often exercise these cautions in much of the discourse of decolonization. Yet, exercise them we must if we are to come up with sophisticated accounts of how life and thought have unfolded or ought to unfold once formal colonialism was removed. Part of the case that I make in this essay concerns the ease with which the decolonizing trope is deployed without deep attention to the complexity of the issues involved. (137-8)

(Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University. His research interests and writings cover Philosophy of Law, Social and Political Philosophy, Marxism, and African and Africana Philosophy. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 57, Spindel Supplement (2019), 135–159)

There are assumptions here that I will not be able to hash out. We know that imperialism is a global phenomenon. It is not the case that the outcome described by Ngũgĩ is by any means the only or even the dominant one in every instance. For instance, I think it would be a stretch to say that what Ngũgĩ describes captures the experience of Indians with British colonialism—a variant of which generated the outcome in Ngũgĩ’s account—nor that of the Vietnamese with French colonialism. And British colonialism did not extirpate Afrikaans or alienate its speakers in South Africa or make Afrikaners unenthusiastic about their culture. We may require additional reasons to explain this particular outcome in many parts of Africa beyond the power of imperialism to assert its will. The discourse of decolonization tends to obscure this interrogation. When we shall have decolonized our literature and philosophy and other areas of thought, what would things look like? Put differently, what goal do we have in view, and how would the world look were we to attain a decolonized discourse in philosophy?12 Frantz Fanon was very clear about what decolonization will look like in its aftermath. So was Cabral. I limit myself to Fanon. According to him, colonization and decolonization do not form a continuum such that we can affirm of them the kind of dialectical relations that subsist between moments of a whole. They are mutually exclusive, and when we move from one to the other, there is an annihilation of the previous state, not a sublation of it. In the specific colonial situation such as obtained between the colonized and colonizer in much of Africa, the colonized were nonpersons; they were consigned to a “zone of nonbeing.” To become decolonized means vacating this zone, not amending or ameliorating being in it; it must be ended, period. For this to happen, the colonizer qua colonizer, too, simultaneously must become a nonbeing. That is, if we apply this to discourse, living, and making sense of the world, if any piece of colonization were to remain in the aftermath of decolonization, that would be an indication that the latter had not occurred. Put differently, if, say, philosophy was to be an integral part of colonization, we cannot claim to decolonize while retaining philosophy. If we use this as our metric, then any aspects of life that have anything to do with the colonizer must be extirpated. This is why it is crucial that we not be careless in attributing more to colonialism than can be supported by the historical record. For illustration, if modernity were part and parcel of colonialism, it is clear that a decolonized society would have no truck with it. Where this is concerned, we either separate the two as I think we should, or they both go down together and the ex-colonized’s relationship with it would be forever conflicted, if not impossible. But we know that this is problematic if not implausible. It would require that we take an extremely narrow and monistic view of life under colonialism and attribute every artifact that we can point to in the colonial situation to colonialism. Given this implausible scenario, we need to be more modest and more specific in identifying the inventory of colonization and its appurtenances. We may then need to take a more expansive view of the plural forms of life under colonization. We must separate changes under colonialism that were constitutive of colonization and those that were incidental to it, those that unfolded under the direction of colonizers and were designed to reinforce the nonbeing of the colonized, and those that were driven by the autonomous—yes, autonomous—will of the colonized, however much the colonizer pretended that the colonized were incapable of choice-making. We must strive to elicit the clear provenance of certain ideas that may have been inducted into the colonial situation but were not necessarily inherent to it. This is where I, for instance, insist that we not conflate modernity and colonialism.

(Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University. His research interests and writings cover Philosophy of Law, Social and Political Philosophy, Marxism, and African and Africana Philosophy. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 57, Spindel Supplement (2019), 135–159)

Colonialism, the common anchor, for both Ngũgĩ’s and Wiredu’s respective cases for decolonization is problematic. There is a near absolutization of the concept in the literature such that little, if any, care is taken to accommodate the complexity and historicity of the concept or the differential paths that colonialism and modernity traversed in different parts of the continent, not to talk of the other parts of the world, especially Latin America, where decolonization talk has issued a whole new theory designated as “decolonial theory.”21 What is problematic about it is not easy to see. Here it is. Decolonization, as Fanon points out, is a negation. The affirmation is colonialism/colonization. The central significance that is given to colonialism in our framing of discourse about Africa’s phenomena from history to politics, from philosophy to religion, from literary theory to education, is not justified by the historical evidence nor by the differential experience of colonialism in different parts of the continent nor the different forms of colonialism that abound in the continent.22 It was the late doyen of African historians, J. F. Ade Ajayi, who, in 1969, inaugurated a debate among historians on this matter by arguing that colonialism was a mere “episode” in African history and that the continuing talk of it having enacted severe breaks—an epochal break, as it were—in African history and experience is not justified by the evidence. He argued that African history is to be noted more for its continuities and less for discontinuities attributable to colonialism.23 For example, about the story I told at the beginning of this discussion, in spite of the colonial borders foisted on our minds and spaces, Yorùbá culture and its usages on either side of the border have persisted, and the narratives that supply their agglutinating element continue to mark life and thought, including but not limited to indigenous modes of governance, rules of succession, grounds of legitimacy, and so on, even though Yorùbá are now Nigerians and Béninois(e), respectively. Furthermore, the connection between colonialism and continuity was not a noble one. Ajayi made the historical case and I offered a philosophical explication of the continuity that colonial authorities imposed on colonized Africans against the normal evolution of social formations and the clamor of the colonized to enact changes in their lives, institutions, and practices as they saw fit. I styled it “sociocryonics.”24 If what I just said is true, then to turn colonialism into the singular or even the most salient element in explaining social phenomena in the African world cannot be plausible, adequate, or correct. Here, I hope, is an apt analogy. Moorish rule in the Iberian Peninsula and much of present-day France lasted for over 700 years. Does anyone periodize the history of Spain or Portugal according to that long history of colonial rule? Or do we wish to deny that it was an instance of colonialism? Meanwhile, nowhere in Africa, except South Africa, did European colonialism last for up to 100 years. Yet, we periodize African history with colonialism as its singular pole. That cannot be right. I do not need multiple examples. But it is instructive that South Korea, instead of using Japanese colonialism as a significant or defining element in its history, treats it as a mere unfortunate interlude and maintains a periodization regime that is indigenous to its dynastic history, religious, and intellectual movements. Neither does India periodize its history by prioritizing British colonialism even though it lasted longer there and had a much more lasting impact— chieftaincy is no longer part of India’s governance, for instance—on Indian life and thought. I would like to suggest that our preoccupation with decolonizing is inseparable from our placing colonialism as the singular pole for plotting the grids of understanding and narrating African life and thought. Our past— designated “precolonial”—is understood in terms determined by it and our future—postcolonial—is tied to our obsession with leaving it behind. How we expect to do the latter while privileging it in periodizing our history and characterizing our discourses beats me.

(Max, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-31/max-hastings-u-s-universities-declare-war-on-military-history)

The world applauds the scientists who have created vaccines to deliver humanity from Covid-19. One certainty about our future: There will be no funding shortfall for medical research into pandemics. Now, notice a contradiction. War is also a curse, responsible for untold deaths. Humans should do everything possible to mitigate it. And even if scientists cannot promise a vaccine, the obvious place to start working against future conflicts is by researching the causes and courses of past ones. Yet in centers of learning across North America, the study of the past in general, and of wars in particular, is in spectacular eclipse. History now accounts for a smaller share of undergraduate degrees than at any time since 1950. Whereas in 1970, 6% of American male and 5% of female students were history majors, the respective percentages are now less than 2% and less than 1%, respectively. Fredrik Logevall, a distinguished Harvard historian and author of seminal works on Vietnam, along with a new biography of John F. Kennedy, remarked to me on the strangeness of this, given that the U.S. is overwhelmingly the most powerful, biggest-spending military nation on earth. “How this came to be and what it has meant for America and the world is surely of surpassing historical importance,” he said. “Yet it’s not at the forefront of research among academic historians in this country.” The revulsion from war history may derive not so much from students’ unwillingness to explore the violent past, but from academics’ reluctance to teach, or even allow their universities to host, such courses. Some dub the subject “warnography,” and the aversion can extend to the study of international relations. Less than half of all history departments now employ a diplomatic historian, against 85% in 1975. As for war, as elderly scholars retire from posts in which they have studied it, many are not replaced: the roles are redefined. An eminent historian recently told me of a young man majoring in science at Harvard who wanted to take humanities on history, including the U.S. Civil War. He was offered only one course — which addressed the history of humans and their pets. Paul Kennedy of Yale, author of one of the best-selling history books of all time, “The Rise and Fall of The Great Powers,” is among many historians who deplore what is, or rather is not, going on. He observed to me that while some public universities, such as Ohio State and Kansas State, have strong program in the history of war, “It’s in the elite universities that the subject has gone.” “Can you imagine Chicago, or Berkeley, or Princeton having War Studies departments?” he asked. “Military history is the most noxious of the ‘dead white male’ subjects, and there’s also a great falling away in the teaching of diplomatic, colonial and European political history.” Kennedy notes that war studies are highly popular with students, alumni and donors, “but the sticking point is with the faculty — where perhaps only a small group are openly hostile, but a larger group don’t think the area is important enough.” Harvard offers few history courses that principally address the great wars of modern times. Many faculties are prioritizing such subjects as culture, race and ethnicity. Margaret MacMillan, of the University of Toronto and Oxford, observes that war is one of the great cataclysmic events, alongside revolution, famine and financial collapse, that can change history. As the author of the bestseller “Peacemakers,” an epochal study of the 1919 Versailles conference, she has written about the decline in university courses on conflict: “Our horror at the phenomenon itself has affected the willingness to treat it as a serious subject for scholarship. An interest in war is somehow conflated with approval for it.” Mindless mudslingers have attacked her as a war-lover for making the observation — commonplace among scholars of the subject — that conflicts can bring scientific or social benefits to mankind. Tami Davis Biddle, a professor at the U.S. Army War College, has written, “Unfortunately, many in the academic community assume that military history is simply about powerful men — mainly white men —fighting each other and/or oppressing vulnerable groups.” Universities excuse themselves for shunning history by citing the need to address contemporary subjects such as as emotions, food and climate change. Some also urge that students believe they can better serve their own interests — and justify tuition costs — by choosing vocational majors that will enhance their employability. Yet Logevall’s Vietnam is one of the most popular history courses at Harvard. History sells prodigiously in the world’s bookstores. I have produced a dozen works about conflict, and my harshest critic would struggle to claim that these reflect an enthusiasm for it. I often quote a Norwegian World War II Resistance hero, who wrote in 1948, “Although wars bring adventures that stir the heart, the true nature of war is composed of innumerable personal tragedies and sacrifices, wholly evil and not redeemed by glory.” Those words do not represent an argument for pacifism. Our societies must be willing, when necessary, to defend themselves in arms. But our respective presidents and prime ministers might less readily adopt kinetic solutions — start shooting — if they possessed a better understanding of the implications. Before resorting to force, governments, as well as military commanders, should always ask: “What are our objectives? And are they attainable?” Again and again — in recent memory, in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya — those questions were neither properly asked nor answered, with consequences we know. Governments succumb to what I call gesture strategy. Part of the trouble lies with the military, sometimes over-eager to demonstrate “the utility of force,” or rather, to justify their stupendous budgets. More often, however, blame lies with politicians ignorant of the difficulties of leveraging F-35s, cruise missiles, drone aircraft and combat infantry to produce a desired political outcome. It is extraordinary that so many major U.S. universities renounce, for instance, study of the Indochina experience, which might assist a new generation not to do it again. Marine General Walt Boomer, a distinguished Vietnam vet, said to me five years ago, when I was researching that war: “It bothers me that we didn’t learn a lot. If we had, we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq.” Biddle has written: “The U.S. military does not send itself to war. Choices about war and peace are made by civilians — civilians who, increasingly, have no historical or analytical frameworks to guide them. They know little or nothing about the requirements of the Just War tradition … the logistical, geographical and physical demands of modern military operations.” Former British Prime Minister David Cameron is not a stupid man. But he might have made less of a mess of U.K. foreign policy had he accepted the advice of some people who understood both war and the Muslim world better than his ill-informed Downing Street clique. In 2011, the chief of the British defense staff, General Sir David Richards, begged Cameron not to drag the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into Libya. But the prime minister, in the spirit of a boy scout, wished to do a good deed in a wicked world by promoting the overthrow of President Moammar Al Qaddafi. The rest — the Western intervention and the murderous chaos that has persisted ever since — are, alas, matters of record. It would be absurd to pretend that study of the past is a guarantee against repeating its mistakes. But the world has cause to be grateful that in 1962, JFK read Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August,” about the outbreak of World War I. Kennedy thus went into the Cuban Missile Crisis conscious of the peril that a local flare-up — as in the Balkans in 1914 — could precipitate a global catastrophe. The Oxford professor Sir Michael Howard, who died in 2019, was my close friend and mentor over 50 years, the wisest human being I have ever known. In the 1950s, he created the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London, which prospers to this day. Even more important, he was among the founders in 1958 of the International Institute of Strategic Studies. The IISS came about because some brilliant intellectuals, on both sides of the Atlantic, were fearful of the peril of war. They dismissed the feasibility or even desirability of unilateral abandonment of nuclear weapons. Rather, they sought to promote understanding, among NATO and Warsaw Pact members alike, that nuclear conflict must be ruled out, because its consequences could not conceivably advantage even a supposed victor. Howard describes in his memoirs his own first visit to the U.S. in the spring of 1960, “as a missionary on behalf of the Institute.” He found Washington “a military capital” with “almost more uniforms on the street than I remembered in wartime London”: There was an electric excitement in the air that I found terrifying. This, I thought, was what Europe must have been like before 1914 … This seemed a people who, in spite of the Second World War and Korea, had not really experienced war, and who found the prospect an invigorating challenge. It was in just such an atmosphere, I thought, that wars began.” Howard became even more alarmed after attending a lecture on nuclear warfighting given by Herman Kahn at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. Some RANDSmen whom he met were debating how long it might take Los Angeles to get back to “normal” after a nuclear attack. It was in this climate that Howard and like-minded academics promoted debate, in Europe and America, about responsible strategy and defense. Today, almost everyone who knows Cold War history recognizes that all the talking — international conferences, seminars, formal dialogues — played a significant role in averting a nuclear showdown. Not for nothing is the IISS Journal, then as now, entitled Survival. To those who knew Michael Howard or read his writing, it would be fantastic to suggest that because he devoted his life to the study of conflict and international relations, he thus spread the pollution of war, or advanced a doctrine of force. By implication, however, such is now the conviction of many great North American institutions of learning. A few years ago, a history department in the Canadian Maritime provinces was offered a fully funded chair in naval history — and rejected it. Paul Kennedy told me recently that he is amazed by the lack of interest in naval affairs at U.S. universities, “since we are by far the greatest naval power in the world, and the global naval scene is heating up enormously.” Many, indeed most, academic institutions across the continent are infected with an intellectual virus that causes them to reject study of subjects that seem to some faculty members distasteful. This represents a betrayal of the principles of curiosity, rigor and courage that must underpin all worthwhile scholarship. MacMillan demands: “Do we really want citizens who have no knowledge of how our values, political and economic structures came into being? Do we ever want another president at the head of the most powerful country in the world, such as Donald Trump, who asserted that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in response to terrorist attacks, and was right to be there?” In Britain, by comparison, history continues to thrive. About the same number of students embark on first degrees in the subject as take law. Post-graduate studies are especially popular. Some 30 institutions offer War Studies programs. On the European continent, those at Stockholm and Leiden Universities are particularly respected. The problem — we might even call it the repugnance — appears an explicitly North American phenomenon. North America’s great universities should be ashamed of their pusillanimity. War is no more likely to quit our planet than are pandemics. The academics who spurn its study are playing ostriches. Their heads look no more elegant, buried in the sand.

(Damon, senior correspondent, , 3-22)

I've been a harsh critic of U.S. foreign policy, and especially of analysts who favor the aggressive use of military force in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, for a long time now. But Russia's invasion of Ukraine is different. For the first time in two decades, I find myself allied with neoconservatives and liberal internationalist hawks. Not on everything — and especially not with those who favor imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, which I think would quickly and recklessly precipitate a war between NATO and Russia. But on much else, I now stand shoulder to shoulder with many of the same people with whom I've passionately disagreed since the early days of the War on Terror. Have they changed or have I? The answer, I think, is that neither of us have. What's changed is the character of our antagonist. What worked during the Cold War once again fits the situation in which we find ourselves, whereas that same approach was terribly ill-suited to the enemy we faced during the years following 9/11. It's important to understand this difference and what it tells us about the challenges that likely await us over the coming months and years. I came to political self-awareness during the 1980s and was quite supportive of President Ronald Reagan's reintensification of the Cold War. That isn't to say I was a full-spectrum teenaged hawk. I've never considered the Vietnam War anything other than a colossal blunder and tended to think many of our military interventions in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s were counterproductive. But Reagan's sharp increases in defense spending, deployment of missiles to Europe, and rhetorical confrontation with the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union seemed reasonable to me at the time. The Cold War was broadly continuous with the conclusion of the Second World War. That meant the United States needed to guarantee the security of a militarily obliterated Western Europe and Japan, both of which quickly faced powerful geopolitical threats — the former from the Soviet Union, and the latter from both the USSR and (within a few years) China. With both communist countries animated by an expansionist ideology dedicated to the destruction of the political and economic order of what became known as "the free world," conflict was inevitable and vigilance backed up by the threat of military force essential. On the basis of these strategic assumptions, there was plenty of room for disagreement about tactics. Did fighting on the side of South Korea against totalitarian North Korea make sense? How about risking nuclear war over the deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba? Or defending the government in Saigon against Ho Chi Minh's communist guerrilla movement in Vietnam? Or using the CIA to help foment a coup against the elected government of socialist Salvador Allende in Chile? And so forth. The judgment call could vary in particular cases. But the underlying principle remained intact: Communist regimes were adversaries that posed a serious geostrategic threat to the United States and its allies around the globe. That threat vanished with the fall of the Iron Curtain and then collapse of the Soviet Union. What followed was a decade of low-stakes global police work — the first Gulf War and ongoing effort to enforce UN resolutions against Iraq's Saddam Hussein, a belated NATO intervention to stop bloodletting in the Balkans, and halfhearted attempts to respond to the rise of global terrorism. With 9/11, the terrorism that had been considered a nuisance through the 1990s instantly transformed into what felt like an existential threat to civilization itself. This gave renewed focus to American foreign policy, which now aimed at stamping out terrorism around the world. President George W. Bush described the distinctive character of this new War on Terror in an address to Congress nine days after the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked: "Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest." I strongly supported this approach to fighting groups that aspired to execute attacks like those undertaken on Sept. 11, 2001 — along with our invasion of Afghanistan later that fall. The Taliban government had allowed Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda to use the country as a staging ground for the attacks. When they refused to hand over the terrorists, we had to try and capture them ourselves and ensure the country would never again offer such groups a safe haven. But beyond that? I assumed we would mainly be focusing on substate actors within countries, not invading and occupying countries themselves. To do the latter would be to make a category error — to forget that our opponents were subnational groups, not nations. Precisely that slippage appeared within a matter of months. In Bush's 2002 State of the Union address, the president spoke of an "Axis of Evil" in the world that consisted of countries (Iraq, Iran, and North Korea), not terrorist groups. Now, instead of merely going after Al Qaeda and similar groups with a combination of intelligence gathering, surveillance, surgical military strikes, police investigations, and regulatory reforms designed to disrupt terrorist networks and financing, we would be toppling governments that supposedly posed too much of a threat and helping to transform them into liberal democracies. This would supposedly eliminate adversaries, deprive terrorists of state support, and even create new allies in the battle against Islamic extremism. In each case, invading and deposing the bad guy's government proved to be a cakewalk, accomplished in a matter of days or a few short weeks. But in each case, that initial victory proved to be the easy part, which should have surprised no one. Breaking things is always easier than building them — and, it turns out, nothing is more challenging in politics than building a functional and stable liberal-democratic government from scratch. It was my discomfort with the ambition to do precisely this that kept me a critic of hawkish foreign policy on down through President Biden's poorly executed withdrawal from Afghanistan this past summer after nearly 20 years. Yet, here I am just a few months later, favoring a strong response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That includes strong support for the crippling sanctions the West has imposed on Russia as well as for the weapons systems we have made available to Ukraine in their struggle with a formidable adversary. Why the change? Because, even aside from the fact of Russia's centrality to both the Cold War and the current crisis, the Ukraine invasion marks a return to a world primarily dominated by competition and hostility among states. Such a world resembles the Cold War, but also the world that preceded the Cold War. In that kind of world, the old rules of statecraft apply. Russia is the clear aggressor at the moment. Its actions are a serious threat to the countries of NATO, with which we are treaty allies. That means we have a serious stake in the outcome of the conflict. If Russia is permitted to prevail at minimal cost, NATO will be threatened next. At the same time, Russia is a nuclear armed power, which makes our involvement much riskier than it would otherwise be. Hence our debates over how, and how much, to help Ukraine. Should we impose a no-fly zone? Or facilitate the transfer of MiG fighter jets from Poland to the Ukrainian military? And what about other weapons systems and forms of involvement? As it was during the Cold War, I tend to be more restrained than many — hence my strong opposition to imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine. But even many hawks agree with me on this. Others, meanwhile, are less concerned about such a potentially catastrophic series of events. I think these latter analysts are wrong, sometimes dangerously so, but the disagreement is nothing like the one that divided us for much of the past 20 years. As it was during the Cold War, we agree once again on strategy and principle while departing mainly on prudential judgment about tactics.

(Anne, sw, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/ukraine-russia-kyiv-putin-bluff/621145/, 1-3)

A sense of unreality underlies all of these conversations. This moment is “strange—very, very strange,” Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defense minister, told me. For people in his country, the Russian threat is both dire and entirely unsurprising. Zagorodnyuk noted, as everybody in Kyiv does, that Russia already invaded Ukraine in early 2014. The Russians already occupy Crimea, which is Ukrainian territory. Fake “separatists,” supplied with Russian weapons, already control a small piece of eastern Ukraine, where they continue to fight the Ukrainian army, every day of every week. Some 14,000 people, including both soldiers and civilians, have already died in a conflict that continues only because the Russian government wants it to continue. Before I even broached the subject of whether Ukraine’s armed forces were ready for a new offensive, Andriy Yermak, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, reminded me: “We are in a state of constant military preparedness now for eight years.” Precisely because the Ukrainians are permanently under attack from Russia, it is usually the Ukrainians who shout loudest and call for international attention when the fighting escalates, or when the Russian army conducts massive military exercises along their borders, as it did last spring. But not this time. This time, the alarm bells are ringing louder in Washington than in Kyiv. Secretary of State Antony Blinken began warning European allies about a possible new Russian invasion of Ukraine several weeks ago, and rumors of genuinely terrible things to come are flying around other Western capitals too. An invasion of Kyiv. An occupation of the country. The warnings seem to be based not just on the operational intelligence that many have seen—ominous photographs of military equipment and personnel accumulating around Ukraine’s borders—but on strategic intelligence, insights into the thinking of Kremlin insiders, which U.S. officials are allegedly showing their allies. The alarm bells are also ringing because of the public behavior of Russian diplomats and officials, including President Vladimir Putin, who have spent the past couple of weeks accusing the United States and its allies of nonexistent aggression, such as imaginary plans to use chemical weapons against Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine. In fact, the sole aggressor in the region is Russia. Russian troops occupy not only parts of Ukraine but also parts of Georgia and Moldova; Russian “advisers”—latter-day Soviet commissars—now prop up a violent dictator in Belarus and may be about to annex that country too. Russian propaganda organs regularly issue violent threats. On New Year’s Eve, the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti tweeted a prediction: “Russia will destroy Ukraine within 10 minutes.” Yet Russia insists on declaring that it fears NATO, a defensive alliance that mostly still exists, in 2022, because so many Europeans fear Russia. Putin has kept up this victim act for so many years that it has become banal; even many Russian experts now accept this performance as normal. But even if he believes it himself—even if he thinks that a handful of American soldiers rotating in and out of Poland pose some kind of physical threat to Moscow—that doesn’t mean the rest of the world has to accommodate his paranoia. It’s as if an American president repeatedly demanded that Canadian troops withdraw to the Arctic Circle on the grounds that their presence near Detroit constituted an unacceptable threat, and the rest of the world murmured agreement. In truth, the only logical explanation for this nonsensical posturing is that it is designed to justify a totally unprovoked invasion of Ukraine—or the Baltic states, or who knows where else—sometime in the future, and that’s why it has people worried. Read: Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is backfiring In kyiv, the novelty of this moment has produced, among the people I spoke with, two schools of thought. The skeptical school essentially thinks this whole situation might be a huge bluff: The Russians have deliberately set out to “scare the Americans,” perhaps even by leaking jazzed-up versions of Kremlin debates, in order to create pressure on Ukraine to change its constitution as the Russians would like, or to put Putin at the center of international attention, or to reestablish a Russian sphere of influence inside old Soviet borders. If this deliberately organized panic is a game, the skeptics say, the Russians have chalked up some wins. President Joe Biden has now twice held one-on-one conversations with Putin. A whole series of new Russian-American, Russian-NATO, and Russian-European security talks are scheduled for January. The tone of the diplomatic conversation around Ukraine has changed too. No longer are negotiators focused on the actual crisis in eastern Ukraine. Instead, the focus is on the Russian-American and Russian-NATO relationships. So far, the U.S. has not yet given Putin anything else. Crucially, Biden and other senior administration officials have repeated several times an old Polish phrase, “nothing about us without us,” often used in the region. It means that decisions about Ukraine will not be made above the heads of Ukrainians. This is the only legitimate response to Putin’s threats, many of which are intended to achieve the opposite: get the U.S. to cut the Ukrainians out of the loop. Members of a more pessimistic school of thought can also see that the saber-rattling has been carefully planned. But they fear that it reflects a genuine change: Perhaps Putin has finally decided to realize his long-standing dream of removing Ukraine from the map. Back in 2008, the Russian president told leaders gathered at a NATO summit that Ukraine is “not a state.” Last summer, he published a long essay arguing, among other things, that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people.” He then sent that essay to every soldier in the Russian army. Putin’s interest in invading, occupying, dividing, or otherwise destroying Ukraine—a country that has no nuclear weapons and could not invade Russia—is not strategic. It is emotional. The collapse of the Soviet Union was, in his words, “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” An expanded Russian occupation of Ukrainian territory might, in his view, help right that wrong. Putin’s interest is also ideological. Every year, Ukraine becomes more confident, more united, more European. Every year, Ukraine inches a little bit closer to democracy and prosperity. What if it gets there? The idea of a flourishing, democratic Ukraine right on Russia’s doorstep is, for Putin, personally intolerable. Just as Ukrainian independence once seemed to Stalin to be a dire threat to his Bolshevik regime, so too would a successful modern Ukraine pose too great a challenge to Putin’s autocratic, sclerotic, kleptocratic, and ever more brutal political system. What if Russians start envying their Ukrainian neighbors? What if they decide they want a system like that too? What the pessimists in Kyiv fear is this scenario: If Putin believes that Ukraine must be destroyed sooner or later; if he believes that historical wrongs must be righted; even if he just wants to gain back some of the popularity he has lost to COVID, corruption, and a poor economy, then he might have reasons to think that this is a good moment to do it. The Russians can see that the U.S. is divided, that Europe is exhausted by the pandemic and in need of Russian gas, that nobody is interested in new military adventures. They can also see that pro-Russian political forces in Ukraine are slowly losing ground, that Ukraine continues to invest in its military, and that others are doing so too. Despite one very notable setback in Kyiv’s relationship with Washington—President Donald Trump tried to use military aid as a tool to blackmail Zelensky, and got impeached for it—the U.S. has continued to give Ukraine training and military assistance, including $450 million of defensive weapons this year. None of this would enable Ukraine to attack Russia, but it might help Ukrainians defend themselves. The Russians know this, and they could be calculating accordingly. One Russian analyst, Vladimir Frolov, notes that the costs of an invasion are steadily rising—because of Ukrainian economic growth, national consolidation, and military investment—and suggests that the price could rise more in the future, which is why Moscow should act now. The Ukrainians are also thinking about that price, because they want to make it even higher: This is a subject about which both schools of thought in Kyiv agree. They know their country doesn’t have much of a navy or an air force, and it doesn’t have the most advanced anti-aircraft defenses either. But Ukraine has taken steps toward the creation of a territorial-defense force, run by the professional military but open to civilian volunteers. Small groups of enthusiasts, including recent veterans of the eastern conflict, have already formed their own training units. According to a survey conducted last spring, about 30 percent of Ukrainians (and 46 percent of men) say that they are willing to join an armed battle if an invasion occurs. In an interview in the Polish press, the former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko spelled it out clearly: Ukraine wants to ensure that “every city and every home becomes a fortress. And that thousands of coffins are sent back to Russia.” The Ukrainian army itself is also prepared to split into smaller units, less easily targeted by advanced weapons. This might not stop a Russian bombing campaign, but that isn’t the point. The point is to make anyone considering a longer-term occupation think twice. As Zagorodnyuk noted, even the most fanatical Russian military planner must realize that once an invasion begins, events will spin out of control: “You don’t know how many people you are going to lose, how quickly you’re going to advance,” he said. “And you will certainly have trouble keeping control of anything you have invaded.” But here is where a second gap emerges between Kyiv and Washington, as well as a second reason why this moment is so “very, very strange.” The Ukrainians, in the government and in the opposition, have no difficulty understanding that their conflict with Russia will involve violence, because it already does. Americans and Europeans, meanwhile, desperately want a solution involving nothing more than diplomacy and sanctions. On some level, Biden seems to understand that this might not be possible. He has publicly promised to reinforce Ukraine militarily in the event of an invasion, and also says he will move more arms and equipment into the eastern NATO states. Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister, told me that although he is grateful for this promise, it does raise a question: “If Washington sees the threat is imminent, then the best time to give us more military support to reinforce our armed forces is now, not after the invasion begins.” In fact, the best time to give Ukraine more significant military support would have been eight years ago. Or five years ago. Or three years ago. If the U.S. had done so, then there would be a lesser threat, or no threat, of Russian invasion now, because Putin would calculate the risks differently. But Americans didn’t step in, because President Barack Obama never took Russia seriously, because Trump was on Putin’s side in the global contest between autocracy and democracy, and because Democrats and Republicans alike have had other things to think about since Biden took office. As a nation, the U.S. has also started to forget the most important strategic lesson of the Cold War: Deterrence works. The idea that you invest in weapons in order to create peace has always sounded paradoxical, but decades of stability in Europe, thanks to both the creation of NATO in the 1950s and the expansion of NATO in the 1990s, prove this to be true. If you share a land mass with a bully, then make sure you are well armed enough to keep him at a safe distance. Seen from Kyiv, the Western attitude toward Russia also looks incredibly naive. Since the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, Americans and Europeans have constantly been surprised by Russia, by Russian aggression, by Russian territorial ambitions, by Russian interference in our own political systems, by Russian attempts to destroy our alliances. But although Putin varies his tactics, his longer-term goals have been very clear for a very long time. He might use disinformation one year, gas-pipeline blackmail another, bribery or violence the next, but the endgame is always the same: reinforce his autocracy, undermine democracies—all democracies—and push Russian political influence as far as it will go. Break up NATO. Destroy the European Union. Remove American influence from Europe and everywhere else, forever.

(Stephen M, Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/19/ukraine-russia-nato-crisis-liberal-illusions/, 1-19)

The situation in Ukraine is bad and getting worse. Russia is poised to invade and demanding airtight guarantees that NATO will never, ever expand farther to the east. Negotiations do not appear to be succeeding, and the United States and its NATO allies are beginning to contemplate how they will make Russia pay should it press forward with an invasion. A real war is now a distinct possibility, which would have far-reaching consequences for everyone involved, especially Ukraine’s citizens. The great tragedy is this entire affair was avoidable. Had the United States and its European allies not succumbed to hubris, wishful thinking, and liberal idealism and relied instead on realism’s core insights, the present crisis would not have occurred. Indeed, Russia would probably never have seized Crimea, and Ukraine would be safer today. The world is paying a high price for relying on a flawed theory of world politics. At the most basic level, realism begins with the recognition that wars occur because there is no agency or central authority that can protect states from one another and stop them from fighting if they choose to do so. Given that war is always a possibility, states compete for power and sometimes use force to try to make themselves more secure or gain other advantages. There is no way states can know for certain what others may do in the future, which makes them reluctant to trust one another and encourages them to hedge against the possibility that another powerful state may try to harm them at some point down the road. Liberalism sees world politics differently. Instead of seeing all great powers as facing more or less the same problem—the need to be secure in a world where war is always possible—liberalism maintains that what states do is driven mostly by their internal characteristics and the nature of the connections among them. It divides the world into “good states” (those that embody liberal values) and “bad states” (pretty much everyone else) and maintains that conflicts arise primarily from the aggressive impulses of autocrats, dictators, and other illiberal leaders. For liberals, the solution is to topple tyrants and spread democracy, markets, and institutions based on the belief that democracies don’t fight one another, especially when they are bound together by trade, investment, and an agreed-on set of rules. After the Cold War, Western elites concluded that realism was no longer relevant and liberal ideals should guide foreign-policy conduct. As the Harvard University professor Stanley Hoffmann told Thomas Friedman of the New York Times in 1993, realism is “utter nonsense today.” U.S. and European officials believed that liberal democracy, open markets, the rule of law, and other liberal values were spreading like wildfire and a global liberal order lay within reach. They assumed, as then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton put it in 1992, that “the cynical calculus of pure power politics” had no place in the modern world and an emerging liberal order would yield many decades of democratic peace. Instead of competing for power and security, the world’s nations would concentrate on getting rich in an increasingly open, harmonious, rules-based liberal order, one shaped and guarded by the benevolent power of the United States. Had this rosy vision been accurate, spreading democracy and extending U.S. security guarantees into Russia’s traditional sphere of influence would have posed few risks. But that outcome was unlikely, as any good realist could have told you. Indeed, opponents of enlargement were quick to warn that Russia would inevitably regard NATO enlargement as a threat and going ahead with it would poison relations with Moscow. That is why several prominent U.S. experts—including diplomat George Kennan, author Michael Mandelbaum, and former defense secretary William Perry—opposed enlargement from the start. Then-Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were initially opposed for the same reasons, though both later shifted their positions and joined the pro-enlargement bandwagon. Proponents of expansion won the debate by claiming it would help consolidate the new democracies in Eastern and Central Europe and create a “vast zone of peace” across all of Europe. In their view, it didn’t matter that some of NATO’s new members were of little or no military value to the alliance and might be hard to defend because peace would be so robust and enduring that any pledge to protect those new allies would never have to be honored. Moreover, they insisted that NATO’s benign intentions were self-evident and it would be easy to persuade Moscow not to worry as NATO crept closer to the Russian border. This view was naive in the extreme, for the key issue was not what NATO’s intentions may have been in reality. What really mattered, of course, was what Russia’s leaders thought they were or might be in the future. Even if Russian leaders could have been convinced that NATO had no malign intentions, they could never be sure this would always be the case. Although Moscow had little choice but to acquiesce to the admission of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into NATO, Russian concerns grew as enlargement continued. It didn’t help that enlargement was at odds with U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s verbal assurance to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990 that if Germany were allowed to reunify within NATO then the alliance would not move “one inch eastward”—a pledge Gorbachev foolishly failed to codify in writing. (Baker and others dispute this characterization, and Baker has denied that he made any formal pledges.) Russia’s doubts increased when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003—a decision that showed a certain willful disregard for international law—and even more after the Obama administration exceeded the authority of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 and helped oust Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi in 2011. Russia had abstained on the resolution—which authorized protecting civilians but not regime change—and former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates later commented that “the Russians felt they had been played for suckers.” These and other incidents help explain why Moscow is now insisting on written guarantees. Had U.S. policymakers reflected on their own country’s history and geographic sensitivities, they would have understood how enlargement appeared to their Russian counterparts. As journalist Peter Beinart recently noted, the United States has repeatedly declared the Western Hemisphere to be off-limits to other great powers and has threatened or used force on numerous occasions to make that declaration stick. During the Cold War, for example, the Reagan administration was so alarmed by the revolution in Nicaragua (a country whose population was smaller than New York City’s) that it organized a rebel army to overthrow the ruling socialist Sandinistas. If Americans could worry that much about a tiny country like Nicaragua, why was it so hard to understand why Russia might have some serious misgivings about the steady movement of the world’s mightiest alliance toward its borders? Realism explains why great powers tend to be extremely sensitive to the security environment in their immediate neighborhoods, but the liberal architects of enlargement simply could not grasp this. It was a monumental failure of empathy with profound strategic consequences. Compounding the error is NATO’s repeated insistence that enlargement is an open-ended process and any country meeting the membership criteria is eligible to join. That’s not quite what the NATO treaty says, by the way; Article 10 merely states: “The Parties may, by unanimous agreement, invite any other European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area to accede to this Treaty.” The key word here is “may”—no nation has the right to join NATO and certainly not if its entrance would make other members less secure. Details aside, shouting this goal from the rooftops was foolhardy and unnecessary. Any military alliance can incorporate new members if the existing parties agree to do so, and NATO had done just that on several occasions. But openly proclaiming an active and unlimited commitment to moving eastward was bound to further heighten Russian fears. The next misstep was the Bush administration’s decision to nominate Georgia and Ukraine for NATO membership at the 2008 Bucharest Summit. Former U.S. National Security Council official Fiona Hill recently revealed that the U.S. intelligence community opposed this step but then-U.S. President George W. Bush ignored its objections for reasons that have never been fully explained. The timing of the move was especially odd because neither Ukraine nor Georgia was close to meeting the criteria for membership in 2008 and other NATO members opposed including them. The result was an uneasy, British-brokered compromise where NATO declared that both states would eventually join but did not say when. As political scientist Samuel Charap correctly stated: “[T]his declaration was the worst of all worlds. It provided no increased security to Ukraine and Georgia, but reinforced Moscow’s view that NATO was set on incorporating them.” No wonder former U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder described the 2008 decision as NATO’s “cardinal sin.” The next round came in 2013 and 2014. With Ukraine’s economy staggering, then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych encouraged a bidding war between the European Union and Russia for economic help. His subsequent decision to reject an accession agreement negotiated with the EU and accept a more lucrative offer from Russia triggered the Euromaidan protests that ultimately led to his ousting. U.S. officials tilted visibly in favor of the protesters and participated actively in the effort to pick Yanukovych’s successor, thereby lending credence to Russian fears that this was a Western-sponsored color revolution. Remarkably, officials in Europe and the United States never seemed to have asked themselves whether Russia might object to this outcome or what it might do to derail it. As a result, they were blindsided when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the seizure of Crimea and backed Russian-speaking separatist movements in Ukraine’s eastern provinces, plunging the country into a frozen conflict that persists to this day. It is commonplace in the West to defend NATO expansion and blame the Ukraine crisis solely on Putin. The Russian leader deserves no sympathy, as his repressive domestic policies, obvious corruption, repeated lying, and murderous campaigns against Russian exiles who pose no danger to his regime make abundantly clear. Russia has also trampled on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which provided security assurances to Ukraine in exchange for its relinquishing the nuclear arsenal it inherited from the Soviet Union. These and other actions have raised legitimate concerns about Russian intentions, and the illegal seizure of Crimea has turned Ukrainian and European opinion sharply against Moscow. If Russia has obvious reasons to worry about NATO enlargement, its neighbors have ample reason to worry about Russia as well. But Putin is not solely responsible for the ongoing crisis over Ukraine, and moral outrage over his actions or character is not a strategy. Nor are more and tougher sanctions likely to cause him to surrender to Western demands. Unpleasant as it may be, the United States and its allies need to recognize that Ukraine’s geopolitical alignment is a vital interest for Russia—one it is willing to use force to defend—and this is not because Putin happens to be a ruthless autocrat with a nostalgic fondness for the old Soviet past. Great powers are never indifferent to the geostrategic forces arrayed on their borders, and Russia would care deeply about Ukraine’s political alignment even if someone else were in charge. U.S. and European unwillingness to accept this basic reality is a major reason the world is in this mess today.

(Daniel, interviewed by BRANKO MARCETIC, , 7-6)

BRANKO MARCETIC What are the aspects of realism we on the Left can learn from or adopt, to navigate this anarchic world order? DANIEL BESSNER It’s a simple insight, which is that power is the fundamental currency of international relations. At its base, in a Marxist sense, international relations is about power. Take the UN. Why doesn’t the UN work? Because of the Security Council. What does the Security Council reflect? The actual power distribution, or at least as it was in 1945 — now it’s essentially the United States, its two little buddies Britain and France, and Russia and China. And the reason those states have veto power over most of the things that the UN could do is because it reflects power relationships. I think that sometimes on the Left, we tend to overemphasize ideology or we tend to overemphasize other factors, when really power is the fundamental feature of international exchange. It interacts, I would say, with the capitalist political economy in interesting ways. One lacuna that we have on the Left is that we don’t have a great understanding about how these two spheres interact. Oftentimes we reduce things to the political economy when we’re talking at the international level, and we don’t take power — and by this term, I really just mean military power, the power to kill — into account. To fully understand the system, I think they have to go together, and realism provides probably the best mainstream place to start when one is trying to think in large macro terms about international relations.