World

The fog of war doesn’t just apply to generals, sergeants, and privates. It applies to strategists and outside observers, including the best-informed journalists on the ground. All are swamped by a confusing barrage of information, some accurate, some not, none of it complete or definitive. That’s why, after over a month of fighting in Ukraine, it helps to step back, consider the basic outcomes, and try to project what will happen next. Remember, though, the “fog of war” applies to these assessments, too. First, let’s clear away Russian misinformation. The Kremlin’s recent claim that their main goal was never to seize Kyiv but always to take eastern Ukraine is simply false.

Some commentators have already noted the strange homology between Russia’s evocation of “secret bioweapon labs” in Ukraine and the US evocation of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, which in both cases were used to justify military attack. It’s not that the US was unsure if Saddam had WMDs; they positively knew he did not have them, which is why they risked a ground offensive in Iraq, rather than sticking to air bombing. The nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction perfectly fulfill the role of a “MacGuffin” in Alfred Hitchcock’s films. A MacGuffin is “an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance,” per Merriam-Webster.

While most Americans believe that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is morally wrong, there is in some corners a pervasive sense of annoyance with the conflict. The real enemy, some say, is China, and they believe that America should not focus on the last vestiges of 20th-century conflicts at the expense of losing focus on those of the 21st. They see NATO and the rest of the Cold War infrastructure as representative of a dying world. Instead of propping up this order, they argue, America should be hard at work building a new order to take on China. The goal of a new American-led, anti-China world order is a necessary one. The currently existing old order is ill-fitted to combat China, which indeed will be America’s main 21st-century enemy.

A fracture of the international right may seem minor given everything that is going on right now. But it is worth loitering over. Because in recent years an interesting divide has grown among conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. On one side are the Cold War warriors and their successors, who have continued to view Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a strategic threat. Meanwhile, a new generation has arrived at a different view. While the West has deranged itself with assaults on its own history, on biology and much more, an assortment of conservatives has come to see Putin as some kind of counterweight. A bulwark — even an admirable corrective — to the madness of our own societies.

On a nondescript bridge in the northeastern Hungarian town of Záhony, the European Union ends and the war begins. Even amid the turmoil in Ukraine, the local border crossing is strangely quiescent. The flood of cars from the early days of the war has slowed to a trickle, and big eighteen-wheelers continue to cross over from Hungary into Ukraine. There are only two signs that something is amiss: a small notice on the door of the nearby Penny Market asking customers to help Ukrainian refugees, and a massive billboard of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s stern face, promising voters that he will keep Hungary safe and peaceful.

Now would seem to be an excellent time for the Pulitzer Committee to withdraw the award it bestowed on Walter Duranty in 1932 for his reporting on events in the Soviet Union. I know I am far from the first to call on the Pulitzer Committee to withdraw the award. I know as well that the Pulitzer Committee responded to one such call in 2003 by declaring that it could find no “clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception” in Duranty’s 1931 reports from the Soviet Union published in the New York Times in 1931. Those thirteen reports on which the original award was based, admits the Pulitzer statement, amount to work that “measured by today's standards for foreign reporting, falls seriously short.” And time has moved on, etc., etc.

The amount of disinformation coming out of Ukraine is unsurpassed in modern history. Unlike the glory days when outlets like CNN sent knowledgeable reporters into combat zones looking for actual information, today most mainstream media coverage is based on borrowed social media video, or just made up. The problem with the former, social media video, is that it lacks context. Here's eight seconds of a tank blowing up. Where was it shot? When? Was the explosion caused by a mine, a missile, or something internal to the tank? Is it Russian or Ukrainian (the tank and the missile)? In most cases, the media outlet has no idea of the answers. Even if they stumble onto the basic who-what-where, the exploding tank video is devoid of context.

Liberal internationalists, neoconservatives and NeverTrumpers are having the time of their lives these days, ridiculing anyone on the political right who has ever said a good thing about Vladimir Putin. Those “Putin groupies” as a Wall Street Journal columnist described them, include former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and, of course, Trump himself. Trump described Putin as a “genius” and said he was a better president than Barack Obama — and he isn’t the only American president to compliment the Russian leader. President George W. Bush said about Putin, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.