03.03 | a brain dump about ukraine
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
✉️ letter #29
What a difference a couple hours makes in the world, right? Last Wednesday night the only thing I was particularly concerned about was ensuring that I had anything to write about in this newsletter. And then by nighttime Thursday, I was keeping company a friend who was trying not to anxiety spiral over what was happening to his home country Ukraine.
We’re now a week into this terrible no good thing and the best news to come out of it was that Russia apparently didn’t really have all its cards together when it decided to invade, and Ukraine actually happened to have competent leadership.
That - competent leadership - is a rare sight in this world right now, so I'm assuming that’s probably why so many people in America have latched onto Volodomir Zelenskyy memes. How can you not root for a guy who was on Dancing with the Stars and is now mounting such a passionate, coherent defense of his own country?
...And thousands of miles away, the surprisingly robust Ukrainian response has also been a little bit of relief to people who really don't want a China-Taiwan conflict to rise up.
I guess I'll explain.
Recently, a surprising number of people have asked my opinion on what's China's deal with this whole fiasco. I don't really feel like I'm entitled to have an expert take on it, but scrolling through Twitter makes me feel like I have at least a better understanding than many people with much fewer qualms sharing half-baked thoughts...
So, emboldened by them, here's what I think/know:
Ever since Putin showed up at the Olympics, maybe even before then, China watchers have been speculating on how China would or would not support Russia’s very obvious intentions to "absorb" Ukraine.
My company’s Editor-in-Chief predicted that the invasion would occur and that a lackluster Western response would then give China hawks more squawk about “taking back” Taiwan… but ultimately the status quo - this weird peacetime “war” where nobody does anything except talk - would remain.
I don’t think I was that optimistic.
I think that if the Russian invasion had gone well for Russia, if tanks had rolled into Kyiv and met no resistance and the only thing NATO allied countries had done was its regular rollout of economic sanctions… well, I don’t think China would have only "talked."
I don’t think they would have kickstarted a giant military exercise either, but there definitely would have been enough movement to make the whole world incredibly uneasy.
But to everyone's surprise, over the last week, Ukraine launched a spirited defense against what looks like a very internally confused initial roll in by Russia. What people were expecting to be a "shock and awe" offensive has now turned into many days of mishaps, almost all on the Russian side.
The subsequent resounding international support, the SWIFT sanctions, the freezing of Russian assets and reserves, and the pull out of global businesses has bolstered somewhat the theory that it is in fact possible to dampen a war through access to money, rather than with soldiers.
Which is something that China believes already, having made economic diplomacy its main carrying card for the last decade. In fact, China is most definitely very baffled that Russia did what it did.
This very excellent Stimson report goes into detail about Chinese geo-political philosophy and is well worth a read - but I’ll try to TL;DR summarize:
Because China is China, it figured that the pressure of the THREAT of invasion - of just having tanks at the border ostensibly ready to cause havoc - would have given Russia enough bargaining power to get what it wanted from the world.
China assumed that what Russia wanted was for Ukraine to not enter NATO, which is what China also wanted. When you don’t care about conquest so much as defending your own positioning in a multipolar world, jumping into a country with both feet when you already have the upper hand looks like the dumbest thing anyone can do.
So when Russia did jump (and subsequent stumble), China was taken by surprise. They so believed the "war" would stay at "threaten until Ukraine caves" level, that the CCP hadn't even bothered to evacuate their own people out of Kyiv beforehand. Now, China is in a lose-lose situation, in which it can’t tell off Russia (it still wants a non-NATO-dominated world), but it also was never for a war with Ukraine.
And how badly the Russian "act of choice" is going for Russia diplomatically and economically and in expending lives/resources, has - it's a little uncomfortable to admit - been a little bit of a relief for anybody who kinda feels that the best way to manage the China-Taiwan paradox is to make it inconvenient to think about.
I don't think a China-Taiwan conflict, if it did happen, would look anything like the current situation in Ukraine. Obviously, for one, a land war between one big country (Russia population: 144 million) and one small country (Ukraine's population: 44 million) is really different from the largest country in the world making a move on an island.
But I have no doubt that China was going to use Ukraine to justify something. And now it's getting way too hard to spin. Which is one terrible thing to be thankful for out of a situation that nobody good could have ever wanted to happen.
One other thing I feel like I've got to say on the matter:
The amount of Zelenskyy memes in America have me feeling a little queasy, like the public here is prematurely congratulating a country on their victory just because the President didn’t die in the first day like everyone expected him to.
He’s still out there, in danger and fighting. And Russia is stepping up its attacks against Ukraine’s major cities every day. And Russia still has way more firepower, plus a couple of nukes that no one can be absolutely sure Putin won’t use (if he doesn't decide instead that he'll just cause nuclear accidents by attacking power plants).
There is just so much that’s still not settled and very real lives that are being lost as this continues on. It looks like it will continue on for a while and be very devastating to both sides.
So maybe it’s just me, but it just feels weird to like, gush about how Volodymyr Zelenskyy was the voice of Ukraine’s Paddington Bear while he’s still getting shelled.
If you DO want to learn more about Zelenskyy outside of memes and the "wow he was a comedian!" discourse, I recommend the New Yorker's very detailed profile from 2019, during the Trump impeachment hearings.
I can't believe it was three years ago that Ukraine was in the news as the incredibly confused country trying to figure out what the hell Giuliani was doing visiting it.
🌱 the ethical ideas newsreel
- So Biden gave a very decent State of the Union address, I thought, detailing a lot of what America will do (and won't do) with this "war of choice." I'm going to shift gears a little bit and highlight his climate change proposals, which include 4000 infrastructure upgrade projects and clean energy tax breaks.
- Black History Month is technically over, but if you don't actually only keep your (and your young family's) reading of Black History stuff to February, this Bookshop.org list has a great selection of great books specifically geared towards children.
- The author of the Good and Cheap cookbook, which was available free on the internet and was downloaded 15 million times, is now out with a new cookbook: Good Enough, for when you're tired as hell and making something delicious needs to be self care.
- Speaking of self care, here's an interesting tip that I might try: drawing a tight spiral every morning (spiraling out lol) and annotating feelings & thoughts onto that spiral to relieve anxiety.
- American painter Wayne Thiebaud passed away late last year. This piece, about him and his words about finding excitement as an artist, really resonates right now:
Isn’t this what we’re all seeking as painters or writers or musicians or other makers-of-things—to strike a vein of work that we can’t leave alone, and where we can shed our inhibitions and find “charm and freedom” in the work?
Of course, so often that streak of charm and freedom seems to arrive only after a long period of feeling terribly stuck. In Thiebaud’s case, he decided to become a painter in 1946, at age 26, after several years working as a freelance cartoonist, illustrator, and layout designer—but he didn’t have his breakthrough with the pie paintings until 1960, fourteen years later. Maybe that’s part of the feeling of giddiness that comes across when you look at them. Thiebaud’s gallerist said that there’s “a real joy of painting, a joy of life in his work.” Joy, yes, but also relief. Those pies have the feeling of someone finding his subject matter and being delighted—at last—to dig in.
The pies, by the way:
🎵 song of my week
Unsurprisingly considering what's going on in the world, I'm in an introspective mood this week. And so here's an introspective song from one of my favorite bands.
✨enjoying: one final piece of pop culture fun
So since the week has been such a blur, it took me a while to think if there was anything I actually experienced pop culture-wise that was a little slice of heaven. And I realized there was one thing I obsessively checked for this week...
Because I always obsessively check for it.
That's Seth Meyers' Late Night Show Corrections. It's a Youtube-only thing that he started during the pandemic, which has turned into a random part of the internet with its own mythology, including a masochistic design team, a feud with a certain knitter, and hundreds of jackals.
I find it an absolute delight. One blessed person has put all the videos in order of when they aired so that you can now see the last year of this saga unfold week by week.
Did you enjoy it?
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