Homeland

JACKSON LEARS IN THE London Review of Books is one of those authors who I generally will click on instantly, stopping what I'm doing to read. His most recent article The Righteous Community is predictably very good, and you should read it immediately. Except. Except.

The legacy of the war on terror ‘flourishes in America’s refusal to see the world as something other than a battlefield’, he writes. This aggressive stance promoted the eastward expansion of Nato, provoking Putin’s actions in Ukraine. As in the war on terror, the US was determined to take the offensive against the alleged aggressors – the Russians – who, despite their pretensions to civilisation, were in the popular imagination barbarians too. As Beck writes, ‘during the first two years of the [Ukraine] war, America’s response has been to escalate the conflict at every opportunity.’

This is almost entirely wrong in every clause of every sentence: NATO's eastward expansion, as with that of the EU, has been driven by Eastern European and Baltic countries---and now Scandinavian ones too---acting as their own agents and preferring a European rather than Russian political future. American response to the 2022 invasion under Biden, instead of being escalatory, was at every stage reactive to Russian nuclear posturing; arms shipments (rockets, tanks, long-range missiles) that the Ukrainians asked to buy were delayed against supposed red lines which, year by year, have proved imaginary. American response to the 2014 annexation of Crimea under Obama was even more obliging.

There is a certain critical American exceptionism that can only see the rest of the world reflected in American perfidy, as though every other country only ever acted because of the actions of Americans. Vladimir Putin needed no provocation to want to dominate what he has seen as former Russia, and he has always been clear that Russia's war is about Ukraine, not NATO. There is one country that can end the war in Ukraine tomorrow: it's Russia. But back to Lears:

Those of us who seek to conceive an end to endless war must somehow learn to challenge embedded American fixations and fantasies, as well as habits of mind and heart.

The most pervasive American fixation and fantasy is the one that keeps the United States on a special, exceptional, pedestal.